About Polly Unsaturate

A lady of leisure. Working interferes with my hobbies, so I dont do it.

Fun stuff, with spurious attribution

Posted on Sun, 20 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

This blog is getting too po-faced for my taste, so here’s some entertainment:

It is claimed that scientology sacred documents were hacked by the /i/nsurgency, a splinter group of anonymous.
I have no idea how legit this is. (OK, not at all, I suspect) I am pretty sure it is parody but that’s probably because I have some residual faith in human intelligence.
There is fantastic new bit of tech called the “VIRTUSPHERE- a new locomotion technology for immersing in virtual reality”
It looks like this:

Please Hera, let it not just be vapourware or Photoshop parody….
The Islamicists is an incredibly funny blog about being a member of an extremist Islamist group.A few caveats:
I think you have to be a UK national to understand most of the references. Abu- Tesco-bin-Bakery, al- Tizer and refences to Irn Bru and kilts will be over your head otherwise. You also need to know a fair bit about either or both of non-centre political movements and Islamic rules. Even then, you have to set out a couple of hours to read the WHOLE blog, because it’s set out in a deliberately Dickensian-style installment format. Though it gets a bit weaker towards the very end.You might suspect it’s not really written by a Muslim because of the blatant piss-taking, but it convinced me.

McCann sketch

Posted on Sun, 20 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The newspaper shop displayed dozens of front pages showing what seemed to be a huge sketch of more malevolent George Harrison (ca 1970) . No, I finally realised it looked like an IRA hunger striker (same era.).

I looked more closely. My bad. The sketch clearly doesn’t show Posh & Becks, Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. It’s a UK tabloid. Ergo, it must have to do with the Madeleine McCann story. What a surprise! So it does.

This week’s McCann coverage has risen slightly above even its normal Alpine level. (IMAO. I have no statistics.) There have been stories about a planned film about the McCanns, denial of said film, suggestions that Madeleine has had eye surgery or got contact lenses to disguise her unusual eye. And so on.

However, the crime sketch-artist story is just pushing the envelope of preposterousness (No, I don’t know what “pushing the envelope” means either. I’m just using it to annoy, really.)

In the News of the World version, the most repellent themes of the media extravaganza are so perfectly expressed that the story deserves its own personalised ~~kicking~~ rant.

Some quotes from the NOW article:

A British woman who came face to face with the suspected Maddie McCann kidnapper revealed last night: “He made my blood run cold and gave me the creeps.”…
She said: “He was wandering about on the beach alone even though it was pouring down with rain. There wasn’t another soul about. …..
She added: “This man was very unpleasant and creepy. I’d put his age at 38 to 45. He was very scruffy and had a 70s-style black Mexican moustache. He wasn’t Portuguese—I think he was North African, either Tunisian or Moroccan.” (Source: News of the World)

Let’s temporarily ignore the fact that these “creepy man” sightings took place before the McCanns were even in the resort. And that it’s really hard to see why a sketch of something observed ten months ago can constitute new evidence.

Instead, consider some of the assumptions inside this guff.

A woman from the UK can see into the souls of complete strangers on a brief sighting. (I also tend to act as if I can do this. I have even run out of local market on the grounds people looked so horrible. I put this down to projection and prejudice.)
She can memorise individual details so well that a man seen in the rain can be instantly recognised days later, months later. She even claims that she can recall them today. (I stand shamed. I can barely remember enough details about people I’ve known all my life to give a sketch artist a decent start.)
An attempted doorstep fraud instantly implies that the perpetrator is a kidnapper.(I usually just say “No, I definitely haven’t had a recent accident at work” or “No, I definitely haven’t welcomed Jesus Christ into my life.” I will now start saying “I believe you kidnapped Madeleine McCann and I claim my £500”)
A sketch based on the memory of a nine-months-ago glimpse of said doorstep beggar constitutes evidence that would be seriously investigated were it not for the Clouseau-style incompetence of Johnny Foreigner’s police. (I plan to go to my local police station and inform them that the sketch chap is the missing Lord Lucan. As they are British rather than Euro Police, I assume they will cancel all overtime and set up a task force to follow up my lead.)

I could go on for pages. What really offends me is the innate prejudices that just ooze through this piece. It says: A North African is, by definition, creepy.

Mrs Cooper, a community healthcare co-ordinator from Newark, Notts, added: “In my job I have to assess people and make a judgement. My judgement is that this man was very suspicious and could have been the kidnapper everyone is searching for.

So, we might accept her character assessment expertise as valid, if this man was applying for a home careworker. However, I would even dispute this. Given that looking a bit unkempt and walking in the rain – Arrgh, that would often describe me – make her so instantly suspicious that I fear for her clients. If her employer provides “diversity awareness training,” maybe they should consider whether a refresher course is not overdue.

But what she is basiically saying, echoed by the McCann industry, the News of the World and uncritically reported even on the BBC site – “There was a potential Muslim there. A poor and probably criminal Muslim. You need look no further.”

The preposterous detective investigations, carried out on behalf of the McCanns, are determined to put the focus on Morocco and Algeria. You can’t really blame them for not wanting to pass up on the opportunity for exotic holidays on expenses.

Whenever a tourist spots a blonde Berber child (far from rare) anywhere in North Africa, they are identified as Madeleine.

Oddly, the idea that hair colour iis immutable seems to have penetrated the discourse. The People talks about disguising the child’s eye feature. But none of the media has thought for a moment how insanely simple it is to change blonde hair in a certain style to brown, black or red hair in a different style…. Dying, perms, hair cutting.. The UK now has many times more hairdressers than independent greengrocers. Surely someone has made the connection.

The iconic newspaper-selling power of the McCann story rests partly on the stereotypical “little blonde girl” image? This image is increasingly contrasted with alien enemies: the non-English speaking Portuguese police force and menacing exotic North Africans.

The coverage expresses the inherent xenophobia and outright racism of sections of the UK population much more blatantly than a dozen Big-Brother-spats.

If you can read Portuguese, Spanish and/or French – or at least use Babelfish – the continental European press has a much wider and more sceptical coverage of aspects of the story, including many points about the financing of the McCann campaign that would never get on to UK websites or into UK papers.

Google this

Posted on Sat, 19 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

A University professor has made a successful bid for media coverage of a standard lecture by insulting Google. Google is “white bread for the mind”, according to Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Brighton, arguing that teachers should equip students with skills to process Internet information.

(She teaches Media Studies. Isn’t that supposed to be HER job?)

She believes that easy access to information has dulled students’ sense of curiosity and is stifling debate. She claims that many undergraduates arrive at university unable to discriminate between anecdotal and unsubstantiated material posted on the internet. ……
We can no longer assume that students arrive at university, knowing what to read and knowing what standards are required of the material that they do read.”

“knowing what to read?” Well what should you read? What your teachers have told you?

Whole chunks of all education operate through teachers implicitly saying “Learn these facts. Because I say so.” Few teachers reward a challenging response from their students. “Challenging” has even become a euphemism for “irritating, dangerous, pain in the arse” in teacher- and social worker-speak.

The Internet opens up access to new potential information sources. Lots of teachers don’t like this precisely because their models of how to evaluate information are derived from accepting what they read in textbooks.

It’s not Google that panics University teachers. Anyone who can get any relevant information out of Google nowadays is probably already the best in their classes. It’s really Wikipedia. that annoys Universities Oh yes, here it is, in the Prof’s speech.

“Students live in an age of information, but what they lack is correct information. They turn to Wikipedia unquestioningly for information. Why wouldn’t they – it’s there,” she said.

Yes, indeed why wouldn’t they? It’s more factually correct than standard encyclopedias. It’s totally accessible. That’s what disturbs some teachers. (Including, I assume the Prof, unless she really is serious about teaching critical thinking….. In which case, Go Prof! Go Prof! etc)

Many are training their students for an imaginary academic career, as it would have been thirty years ago. They feel that students are workshy unless they put in the physical effort to search in libraries, pay large sums for course books and compete with other students for access to obscure library journals. Are these activities assumed to be “educational” by their very nature, just because the lecturers had to do them when they were students? Now, we have instant access to material from all over the world. Finding it quickly, judging its value and how it relates to other bits of information are the skills we need now.

Shouldn’t teachers reward students more for showing “thinking and questioning” skills than for proving they’ve read the text books and memorised a set of “facts”?

Accepted and memorised knowledge is crucial in some topics at some levels. (You can’t come up with alternate versions of the laws of thermodynamics or invent your own French word for ‘pen’) It is completely misguided in other subjects.

Inability to evaluate information isn’t just a problem for University students or for Internet sources. We are all pretty bad at it.

School students need to be specifically encouraged to dispute the sources and content of information, including the books they have been told to read. Training people to accept authority without questioning it encourages people to accept the words of ministers, priests, imams, kool-aid distributors, politicians, press, television, Fox news, gossip magazines, Answers in Genesis, Holy Books x,y & z, psychic detectives, fake nutritionists, fake childcare experts, wifi-cure salespeople and a bazillion other sources of bullcrap.

Ghost Busters

Posted on Sat, 19 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The Pope is setting up crack exorcism squads to deal with the growing problem of demonic possession, ac Ruth Gledhill. He wants every parish to have its own exorcism expert. Maybe they can combine the job with the other newly-created role of person who prays to rid the church of paedophiles otherwise the Catholic Church’s parish wages bill may go through the roof.

Some priests have long been quite keen to take the Pope’s advice and follow Bill Murray’s example, according to the Independent in 2000.

We’ve never been busier, says official church exorcist

The Inquisition was just a warm-up then?

Apparently, the Chief Exorcist blamed New Age crackpottery for the rise in demonic possession caes. I assume the exorcism rites are based on traditional “Set a thief to catch a thief” principle, so I will forbear from mentioning the equally traditional pots and kettles.

Let’s hope that the Christian churches draw back before following the example of Matthew Arnold, self appointed Witchfinder General. A recent Discovery channel TV programme (well I saw it recently) discussed some of the marvels of witch-finding that he achieved. He got very wealthy, very quickly, as a result of being so good at detecting people in league withe devil.

Torture was illegal, so Hopkins and his colleagues used other methods to encourage their suspects to confess. They were made to sit on a stool for 24 hours or more with no sleep, while ‘watchers’ observed in case their ‘imps’ appeared. With serious sleep deprivation is it any wonder that women confessed to consorting with the devil? Ducking was another favourite way of testing a witch. If she drowned she was innocent, if she lived she was guilty and then hanged.

Hmm, some modern governments are really quite attentive students of history then.

Death by chocolate

Posted on Wed, 16 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The UK population spent £8 million pounds on chocolate fountains, last year.

You didn’t misread that. The Guardian says so, anyway, on the basis of a report by GfK Marketing Services (Guardian G2 print, page 10. Cant be bothered to look online for a reference sorry. You’ll have to take my word for it. It is obviously deeply spurious, but for the purposes of a rant, I am going to treat it as if it were fact.)

Could a kitchen gadget scream “pre-revolutionary French aristocracy” more loudly than that?

Rephrasing an old quotation (that I am too idle to reference right now) “A kitchen chocolate fountain is the universe’s way of telling you that you have WAY WAY too much money.”

Plus I would add “And if you have bought one, please cull yourself now, for the good of the species’ gene pool ……”

Another rambling rant

Posted on Tue, 15 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The Internet is obviously trying to become art rather than a sentient being (pace Kurzweil). It has taken to subverting preconceived notions of what it is. Mainly, so far it is just managing to refuse to be what you expect it to (like Firestats disintegration on this blog, the ongoing refusal of the Atheist Blogroll to notice more than 1 in 5 posts, Technorati’s deciding that links from the blogroll don’t provide authority – all topics already done to death here.)

But today, I noticed WordPress has started redefining what it puts in its list of “recent blog posts that link here” and listing posts that don’t link here. But are worth linking to. (And should have been read before, my bad.). Go figure….

Archeoastronomy has a really good post on Post-modernist Scepticism, sparked by another post – Happy Jihad on postmodernist “thought.” HJHop believes the humanities can be rescued from postmodernist bull. I would hope this is possible.

Has anyone ever tried to read Baudrillard ffs? Your head spins as you try to reconcile the fact that words from the dictionary are joined together using familiar syntax with the equally obvious fact that you can’t extract any meaning from the sentences.

The opposite side of the cultural studies coin is Umberto Eco, who has written brilliant deconstructions of things like wrestling as well as a novel that managed to be accessible at the same time as deeply thought-provoking on a dozen levels. (Name of The Rose.)

I think I am trying to say that I don’t know what post-modernism is in the humanities. As Alun pointed out, it’s a concept that only works in the visual arts, where modernism is a recognisable style. And even in the visual arts, it’s not exactly easy to identify, as the sort of pastiche we associate with post-modernism can just as validly be seen as a recent variant of modernism.

And it really does fall to bits in the humanities, if, as Alun suggests, it’s largely a matter of dumping the Enlightenment project and seeing pretty well nigh everything as culturally valid.

I suppose we can blame the cheese-eating surrender-monkeys for a lot of the postmodernist crap. (Sorry to any pragmatic French people. Just joking) Claude Levi-Strauss produced some beautiful social anthropology (with a few glaring misunderstandings) but his attempts at deconstruction turned out to be too seductive a model for a lot of French writers.

English speakers tend to expect not to understand French thought but to admire its intellectualism, to the point of assuming that it must be superior to our own earthbound efforts (Think Sartre compared to Bertrand Russell, as mid-20th century philosophers.) When you see the dog’s breakfast that some English-speaking writers can make when they stray into the realm of cultural interpretation, you can indeed see why.

In case you are wondering what the point of this post is (as am I) I think it’s to suggest that you read the Archaeoastronomy and HJHop posts. Plus, I am putting forward Umberto Eco as (sometimes) a model of what a sceptical and non-shallow humanities sensibility might look like. (With a nod to Levi-Strauss and a hat-tip to some British cultural studies writers – Stuart Hall, Mary Douglas, for instance) And the Wire, of course. Always the Wire.

Oh, the humanity.

We are suckers

Posted on Mon, 14 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

People enjoy wine more if they believe it costs more, according to a California Institute of Technology experiment that was widely reported today. The BBC put this politely as having shown that people enjoyed the supposedly more expensive wine more.

This wasn’t just due to people pretending to have a more sophisticated palate, either, as it was observed on brain scans that “pleasure centres” in the brain were more activated.

If the pop science reports are right, this was a very elegant experiment, so simple and easy to repeat, but suggesting so many wider avenues for investigation beyond the taste of wines..

It’s an illuminating reminder that so many of our pleasures are experienced only because of the value that others put on things. There is no simple nature-culture divide. We perceive what other people have allowed us to perceive. We value things that we are led to see as valuable – obviously making us suckers for advertising, as well as eager consumers of a whole range of cultural fables and moral values. Social values are somehow integrated into our biology.

Brands for the eater of souls

Posted on Sun, 13 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Libby Purvis pointed out in the Times religion blog that baptising kids to get into a specific school isn’t the irrelevant ritual that many parents imagine it to be.

OK, obviously it is an irrelevant ritual. But it’s a big deal to the Catholic Church. The Vatican page that Libby Purvis linked to is a mite chilling. It makes a lot of contradictory claims. The unbaptised have to go straight to hell without collecting their free pass. Except, if they are really small, Jesus will probably feel sorry for them….

Otherwise, the unbaptised can basically only go straight to heaven if they die doing some noble Christian work. This is called the “Baptism of Blood.” It sounds so much like a Goth band that I want to learn to play the guitar right now, just so that I can put the name on a street poster, in dripping red letters on black…..

I am getting a strong whiff of the abbattoir in “god’s purpose” for humanity, the thing that religious folk keep banging on about. Fresh meat seems to be the answer. You can’t have baptism removed. It’s like a cattle-brand n your soul.

Some soul eater needs to know if you count in heaven as the spiritual equivalent of “halal” or “kosher”. What with the Baptism of Blood image, as well. And believers being the Churches “flock.” Didn’t Jesus claim to be a Fisher of men? These are pretty blatant admissions of an agricultural purpose for humanity, methinks.

The National Secular Society produces a de-baptism certificate that you can download. It appears that you can get declared not a Catholic but you can’t undo the historical fact of having been baptised. The Church of England (Episcopalian?) is also unwilling to strike names from its register of baptisms, on the evidence of a letter from Chris Taylor.

I emailed the diocese where I was dunked many years ago asking if I could be struck from the record as I have always thought it to be a load of old rubbish and said that if my parents had given me the choice of going through some sort of black magic voodoo ceremony performed by a probable child abuser in a dress I would, even at the age of 6 months, have said thanks but no thanks. I received a reply telling me that there was nothing that I could do about it.

Well, if your destiny is being earmarked for some spiritual being’s special dinner on 6th November 2058, once you are on the menu, you’ve had it…

Rewarding hypocrisy

Posted on Sat, 12 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Which is worse – a hypocritical “faith” or a sincere but demented one? The world is obviously more at risk from the real millenarian rapture-ready Christians and devout jihadists. So hypocrisy must be less dangerous to humanity.

All the same, I can’t resist a cynical shudder at the story, on BBC television and in the press, e.g. the UK Daily Mail, that parents are baptising more and more kids to get them into “good” Catholic schools.

Parents hoping to ensure places in oversubscribed Catholic schools are behind a surge in “late” baptisms into the Church in England and Wales, it was claimed today.
Baptisms of children aged between one and 13 years old made up 5.4 per cent of total entry into the church in 1958 but this figure had risen to nearly a third, or 30.3 per cent, in 2005, according to a report by an independent research body. (from the Daily Mail)

The BBC report says

Children are being baptised several years after birth to boost chances of getting into Roman Catholic schools, research has suggested

This shows both parents and the RC Church to be deeply cynical. Much more cynical than the sceptical atheists who hold to naive humanist values about telling the truth….

These parents miraculously regained their faith at the exact same time that they were looking for a local school for their offspring? Are they happy for their kids to grow up learning by example that hypocrisy is GOOD, if it gets you what you want.

(This may be turn out to be a bit of a Faustian deal for some parents. Exposing your kids to being taught by an organisation that has long been riddled with paedophiles seems like a pretty stupid choice to me.)

The Catholic Church is quite happy with face value adherence. It can buy any number of nominal believers with schools that produce reasonably good GCSE results and have a lower level of shootings and stabbings.

D’oh. Sorry, a bit of an error there. As it happens the Church doesn’t have to buy the believers by funding its schools with its own money. It gets its school funding from the state…..

As it turns out, the state is the organisation that is swelling the ranks of nominal Catholics by mysteriously continuing to choose to fund religiously based schools. Does the state want to bring about loads of Catholic conversions?

Someone explain to me again why this is a reasonable spend of public money.

We don’t hate you, RITA

Posted on Thu, 10 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

I was well ready for a good bit of comical idiocy, after a dull workday (in which the PC clock seemed to prove that the time was passing so slowly as to have gone into reverse.)

A new comment on TW’s post Who’s lying – Corbett or God? seemed promising. It was full of threats to pray for us and claimed to be from

The founder of your much hated RITA

Duh? Do I even know a Rita? Surely I’d remember that I did if I really hated them? I click the url that comes with the comment.ink. No such website. Google RITA, nothing remotely rapture-related on page 1.

Bah. Have to read comment carefully to spot that RITA means “rapture in the air”. Put the full phrase in and to find mention of RITA.

One linkin the Google page is to the Prophecy student blog. I’m not sure if this is by the poster or just a link to admired text from another site, but it says

“IN FOUR WEEKS YOU’LL BE WITH ME IN HEAVEN”

Four weeks from when?

Monday, September 10, 2007

Have I died and gone to heaven, then? Blimey. It’s just like the crappy old earth was.

I found quotes from “Rapture in the Air” on Armageddon Online. However, these have got to have been put there by someone for a laugh, so I guess this doesn’t count. Otherwise pages of googling and no result.

HTF am I supposed to work up a decent level of hatred on this slim basis? I can’t even manage mild dislike yet.

America, you are getting really scary

Posted on Tue, 8 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Stop it now. You were doing so well with your legal system actually starting to work and your advisers starting to tell the truth, and then you just have to go and spoil it, don’t you? You are getting really scary. I really don’t want to be Raptured. Most of the people on this planet don’t. Maybe that’s just us.

These items were on the BBC today:

(Minor insanity) Huckabee saying that Gitmo is too luxurious. Hmm. I would hate to see the neighbourhood that you live in, Huckabee. Even round where I live, which is often seen as a bit rough, waterboarding is not yet considered an everyday occurrence.

Bizarrely, Huckabee (the name invites so many parodies that I’ll resist the challenge) said that the Gitmo prisoners were mollycoddled, considering their crimes. Well, the prisoners in Gitmo haven’t actually been convicted of crimes. They certainly haven’t been tried and found guilty of anything. Isn’t that the whole point of Gitmo? If there was any valid evidence against the prisoners under national and international law it would have been used to convict them. The US, being inconveniently hamstrung by national and international law, delierately stuck this abhorrence on a place that it can represent as beyond any normal constraints.

(Major insanity) American warships supposedly threatened by a suicide attack by Iranian speedboats? Argh. Argh. Arch. Must I keep saying “Argh” until more appropriate words come into my head? I know think that all <strike>non-Yanks</strike> Iranians are dumber than a box of Twinkies but, hey, c’mon, dudes. Surely, by the beard of Loki, the US voters aren’t going to swallow this bull excrement. Your faithful allies are never going to fall for the same trick twice.

Iran is a state that you claim (directly in the face of your own intel) is almost a nuclear power. You expect us to believe that it is ready to declares war on the most powerful country in the world by ramming warships with speedboats. (For a start, we all know the torpedo has been invented. )

This WMD stuff and imminent-attack-danger Pearl Harbour stuff doesn’t work anymore. The Iranian nuclear threat didn’t work. You characterised last year’s captured Brit sailors and marines as “spineless” for refusing to act in a mad gung-ho way that would have started a war with Iran. You don’t have a blank cheque that lets you draw on the support of your allies and the compliance of the UN for ever.

Get over it. Just accept that you have to pay more for your oil…

The power of prayer

Posted on Mon, 7 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

The Pope made an apparently unprecedented call on Catholics to pray for ever to get rid of paedophile priests.

Wow. That looks as if it will be about as effective as the Church’s previous efforts then….. Seeing as prayer is so useful to regrow limbs, for iinstance.

It appears that the praying will be a job. Every parish is supposed to appoint someone. What a wierd role that would be.

Advertising Spam

Posted on Sun, 6 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

A very funny post about Treet (a Spam-alike product) on Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes moved me to investigate the “food” product Spam.

Short of being 4 weeks into a global catastrophe that wiped out all other foodstocks except canned meat, the actual substance will never pass my lips. But the high-kitsch Spam site is fantastic. It seems to be online just to mock its own product. It even tells you about a Spam Museum. The look and feel is totally consistent: “John Walters collaborates with Disney.”

(I will definitely look more sympathetically at unwanted emails from now on. )

HJHOP’s canned meat extrusion product of choice doesn’t even try for retro art status. I couldn’t find a Treet website, let alone a minor kitsch masterpiece. I did find a Wikipedia entry.

While very popular, Treet does not have SPAM’s cult following.

How good is that? A cult following for something that compares unfavourably with the cheapest dog food.

Come on, Treet. Must try harder. If Spam can get there, what’s wrong with you? You started out on the wrong foot with a brand name that makes it look as if you were too lazy to proofread the copyright application. Your produce seems to be potted meat product for people too dumb to spell a short word. (I guess the Beatles got away with it, though.)

Look at Nice biscuits. They blatantly aren’t. They went down the same route as you, but they didn’t make that crucial spelling error. Learn from their example.

Getting smarter and smarter every day

Posted on Sun, 6 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

Despite the evidence of the senses, there is a claim that intelligence is increasing. What? Well IQ scores are supposed to be increasing. A thought-provoking blog on Comment-is-Free discusses this idea and refers to a recent book by Flynn who identified what is called the Flynn effect.

There is much discussion on Wikipedia and elsewhere about possible reasons for the effect, some of them very plausible – such as Flynn’s own argument that rises have taken place only in the area of hypothetical thinking and reflect technological development. This is very interesting (the effect of cultural change on cognitive skills.)

I just doubt if IQ scores can really provide evidence that people are getting smarter,

IQ? The whole concept has a historically-based whiff of spuriousness (unjustified claims of cultural-neutrality, invention of the evidence, use to justify racist and sexist ideas, basis for divisive forms of educational selection, etc.) This spuriousness can’t be dispelled by adding in even more dubious extra “intelligences” to console those who score badly on the main tests.

All the same, used by scientists, with regards to the fact that the scores follow a mean distribution curve, they can tell us things about how able people are at showing specific skills. The main skill required is knowing how to pass them. There is nothing wrong with a test that works like this. The waters just get muddied by us all assuming that they reflect anything else than performance on a narrow set of indicator questions, when these are presented in a particular way.

Like crosswords. Cryptic crosswords defeated me, as a child, until someone explained that you just need to get used to the ways of thinking needed to do them. With knowledge of a few simple rules and a certain level of aptitude for making verbal associations, they become easy. Did I get cleverer in the short time between having no idea how to do crosswords and actually getting great pleasure from the works of Aruacaria? Far from it.

IQ tests are devised by humans. Are the people who sets them all geniuses? They must have superhuman IQs. They know ALL the answers. Who are these gods amongst us? They even possess the keys to knowing what intelligence is. Or, at least, if we think IQ really measures “intelligence”, we must take it that these really are the cleverest people on the planet.

They are academics. No surprises that IQ tests seem to work best as predictors of how someone will perform in a formal academic setting, then. As I said earlier, this would be fine, if we just stopped there and didn’t assume the tests can tell us about “intelligence” itself.

Pop science has helped to spread the idea that IQ tests measure intelligence. Helen Joyce, who wrote the CIF post, said:

The Flynn effect throws up some startling paradoxes. If, as seems to be the case, the average person from 1900 would score around 70 on a modern-day IQ test – which would put them on track for a diagnosis of mental retardation….

Wait a minute. IQ scores get standardised round 100. The distribution of scores follows a bell-shaped curve. The average score in 1900 would be, wait for it,…. 100.

Were IQ tests even invented in 1900? Not according to Wikipedia.

The term “IQ,” a translation of the German Intelligenz-Quotient, was coined by the German psychologist William Stern in 1912 as a proposed method of scoring early modern children’s intelligence tests such as those developed by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in the early 20th Century.

The first Binet test was produced in 1905. Hmm. In 1900, no one had seen an IQ test because there wasn’t one.

Is this pop-science idea the outcome of some deranged thought experiment, in which we have to imagine both the IQ performance of dead people and a variation in the whole way of working the scores out?

The attempt to look at changes in IQ scores over time can have some comical results.

Neisser estimates that if you extrapolate beyond the data, which shows a 21 point gain between 1952 and 1982, an even larger gain of 35 IQ points can be argued, however Arthur Jensen warns that extrapolating beyond the data leads to results such as an IQ of -1000 for Aristotle (even assuming he would have scored 200 in his day

There are ways to compare scores over time, if you use actual tests and record the results. These should all show a mean of 100 though, so it’s only changes in the shape of distribution curve that would have any explanatory value and these changes are likely to be limited.

Getting people of different ages to do the same tests comes up against the possible effects of changes in the brain over time. In any case, the academic basis of the test questions would depress the scores of older people who were educated in different topics and were not practised in academic thinking.

Getting younger people to do both old and new tests then comparing the scores would tell us more about the part that general social levels of knowledge play in the tests than it would about the intelligence of the test subjects. In any case, surely the scores on the old tests would have to be normalised to 100, so we’d still only be able to spot changes in the bell-shape…….?

1930s research done by Luria, a Soviet-era psychologist, was quoted by Flynn. Central Asian peasants’ answers to “IQ” type questions designed to identify their thinking processes supposedly showed Luria that they thought practically rather than hypothetically. Read the extract on CIF and the image of a peasant (at the time when Stalin was hammering the agrarian sector) stonewalling a potential government spy just leaps out at you. White bear/black bear? 🙂

It certainly does show a much higher level of practical intelligence than Luria seems aware. Practical political intelligence. Plus a fair amount of hidden hypothetical reasoning. Rather than some mentally bound peasant incapacity to think beyond the present, as Luria seemed to imply.

Almost ironically, it seems that Luria learned some lessons about the value of adopting “practical” thought processes pretty quickly. He soon had to make some drastic career changes to avoid Stalin’s attentions. Post-war, he tried to get back into neuro-surgery but

“His plans were interrupted for several years when he was removed from the Institute of Neurosurgery during a period of particularly virulent anti-semitic repression.”

My point here is that Luria was obviously hugely more academically skilled than the central Asian peasant. so he assumed that his thought processes were somehow more advanced. He didn’t credit the peasants with the same capacities for critical thinking as himself because his own social/cultural biases limited his interpretations of the evidence. We all do it, including the interpretors of IQ tests.

Too long for a comment

Posted on Sat, 5 January, 2008 by Polly Unsaturate

This post is really a reply to an unfeasibly large comment (ref is to Viz, for UK readers) but it grew unfeasibly large itself, so I thought it would have to grow up to be a post

“Rafael” is sadly neither a Mutant Ninja Turtle nor a Renaissance painter. Even more sadly, it’s not one of the supreme beings from the obscure CU_T pantheon to which Black Sun Journal often refers.

He/she is some sort of Christian who posts incomprehensible and unreadable comments. This blog got two from him/her today. I can only assume the words get copied and pasted from some central store, which is by definition a waste of hard disk space. The comments don’t relate to the posts, at least as far as I can see.

(To be honest, I just assume that s/he is mentally ill, but I decided to try to treat the comment seriously, because I feel guilty about dismissing someone just because they aren’t clever or rational. OK, I couldn’t stop some sarcasm seeping in but nobody’s perfect right.)

Rafael

I am impressed that your comments achieve the length of shortish novellas.

All the same, I have to say that ” the monkeys with typewriters” idea clearly has some way to go before it produces the complete works of Shakespeare. Props for trying, anyway..

I have decided to treat you as a human being, on a temporary basis, and actually address some of your points. I am even going to get sickeningly preachy. This annoys the hell out of most people but I guess religious folk must be used to it.

1. THE PURPOSE OF MAN’S EXISTENCE
Who we are? Why are we in this world? Where are we going?

This is a silly question. Your answer is even sillier.

2. GOD’S PLAN God has a plan.

Why do I think this? Can I count the ways? Here’s a few, anyway…

I think it is tragic that people can’t find meaning in life without having to take it secondhand from an old book and/or from an imaginary friend, in whose galactic program they are a minor sub-routine.

It is depressing to see how little value our species attaches to the astonishing facts of the existence of the cosmos or biology or consciousness.

It is baffling that religious people have such a hopelessly degraded view of their own supreme being that they see it as a firm but (un) fair big Sky Daddy.

Even more baffling is that the big Middle-Eastern SkyDaddy – who can supposedly do ANYTHING in the miracles line, somehow chose to communicate with humans only through words that got written down centuries ago. This seems particularly mean to his human subjects, given that literacy wasn’t exactly universal then.

This Supreme Being is even so bizarrely twisted as to set up a whole planet just to play silly games with its human inhabitants. Like creating imaginary fossil records because he knew that, in a few thousand years, his human serfs would come up with scientific theories about them. This, apparently because he was setting humans up for a test to check that they would believe the magic book over the evidence of their rationality… And so on. (I am not saying that you believe this, given that I haven’t read more than the start of your comment, but it’s a common fundy YEC “explanation” for the inconvenient evidence.)

If you can’t see how amazing the real world is and need to follow someone’s words, I am going to quote the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. ” [My emphasis]

I know this is anthropomorphising “life” but it’s poetry, not a holy book, so YOU DON’T HAVE TO BELIEVE IT. It’s a metaphor. It just expresses a feeling that life is its own purpose. (This feeling is generally enough soul-food for those of us who don’t fear/worship BigSkyDaddy.)

If there was a creator entity, it would be so infinitely beyond human comprehension that we could never even begin to imagine it, let alone follow the workings of its “mind” and assume it has some “purpose.” Purpose is a human construct. What “purpose” could an infinite, ubiquitous, all-knowing Being have? It’s everywhere, remember. There’s nothing it can’t do. There being only one of these, it wouldn’t even have its own kind to relate to. Why would it even need any means of communication then? Htf could it even be conscious in any meaningful sense. Our human consciousness develops through interaction. We’d clearly have the advantage over it, there.

If there was a big entity that could control the movement of galaxies and order the behaviour of electrons inside the atom, wtf would we imagine for one minute it was also mad enough to create conscious beings just to get them to say how great it was?

We are nowhere near even knowing what is in the Universe or within ourselves e.g. what is a dimension? what is space? what is matter? what is energy? what is consciousness? where is our consciousness? The only way we can approach these ideas is through the amazing human capacity to think.

Why would we throw away ways of thinking (rationality, science, skepticism) that actually work to develop our understanding the workings of the universe, (i.e. purpose, as conceived in human terms – the only purpose we can conceive of) to go for big skydaddy myths? Especially, when the use of our minds can bring us some of the greatest pleasures in life?

And why would anyone base their morality and belief system on someone’s interpretation of a few old books? I love fairy stories and myths, myself. However, I find it usually helps to be able to distinguish between stories and reality. The average pre-school child can do this quite easily.

If your god existed, it would be truly malevolent, so it’s lucky that it doesn’t, really. It’s still a pity that most of the planet believes in some variant of the evil sky daddy and bases the actions that would be hardest to justify in human moral terms on it.

Like a proper doorstep god-botherer, I am going to suggest that your life is empty and that you can only fill the spiritual void by appreciating your real existence. 🙂

If you would like me to leave you with one of these handy leaflets….

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Why Dont You Blog?

Challenging the Zeitgeist

Author Archives: Polly Unsaturate

About Polly Unsaturate

Fun stuff, with spurious attribution

McCann sketch

Google this

Ghost Busters

Death by chocolate

Another rambling rant

We are suckers

Brands for the eater of souls

Rewarding hypocrisy

We don’t hate you, RITA

America, you are getting really scary

The power of prayer

Advertising Spam

Getting smarter and smarter every day

Too long for a comment

About Polly Unsaturate

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