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When I first got online the average user’s IQ was no joke north of 120. Now of course it’s around 100. Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a sub
by User23 3y ago
When I first got online the average user’s IQ was no joke north of 120. Now of course it’s around 100.
Someone needs to come up with a pithy term for how a subpopulation’s average value for any attribute approaches the population’s average value for same as the subpopulation’s size approaches that of the population. It’s conceptually a simple, even trivial, notion, but it’s cumbersome to talk about.
That’s also why undergraduate degrees are no longer a particularly good signal. And I expect if it were easier to talk about many more cases would become apparent.
- butterNaN 3y agoIQ is a bad measure of the thing you're trying to quantificate here
- tacitusarc 3y agoSeems like the law of small numbers to me.
- theresistor 3y agoRegression to the mean
- Retric 3y agoUndergraduate degrees are becoming a stronger signal just not in the same way. It’s even more obvious with high school degrees. Most people cross that threshold, so the people who didn’t now represent a usual group of under achievers. The threshold is far below what FAANG’s are looking for, but requiring a HS/collage degree can effectively presort applicants for jobs with lower thresholds. Unfortunately, such methods consistently exclude many worthwhile applicants from a wide range of jobs the same way asking for a criminal background check. But that then sets up a stronger feedback loop as people have stronger incentives to cross that threshold.
- fingerlocks 3y agoParadoxically, if you have an undergraduate degree but don’t have a high school degree, it can be even stronger signal than having both. “I actually dropped out of high school and went straight to college.”, sounds impressive. Of course you have to omit the part about taking a gap year and being a community college transfer student.
- cdogl 3y agoI can’t even imagine being asked about this part of my life in a career context. I’m 35 and for the better part of a decade I’ve just been asked about my previous roles. Seems like most organisations simply couldn’t care less where I’ve come from. Maybe it’s an Australian cultural thing.
- shaftoe 3y agoNo, this is pretty typical (I'm American). The only time people who are more than a few years into their career are asked about degrees (and grades) in an interview is at very bureaucratic organizations or when being interviewed by someone themselves barely out of school who lacks awareness.
- cdogl 3y agoThanks for the clarification. > is at very bureaucratic organizations Seeing as this career is a golden ticket with a guaranteed job for life if you’re half competent, I’d spin the complaints from some about these practices around: if an organisation is so detached from the realities of commercial software delivery and what makes a good hire that they’re asking about high school or your degree (and you do have experience), you’ve just received a boon of you all the information you needed. They’re not worth your time and don’t have their eyes on the ball. I’d just be thankful to have dodged a bullet!
- antonjs 3y agoI'm assuming it's a typo but "collage degree" is great as either a baseline inapplicable bachelor's for a tech job or a cynical view of the value a high school diploma. Thinking about it I bet someone somewhere has a MA focusing on collage and produces incredible art, so no hard feelings here.
- lovich 3y agoIsn’t that just Eternal September? At least in the internet
- Jensson 3y agoSmartphones was the final nail, after that close to 100% of young adults are active online participants. The good thing is that things aren't getting worse at least, all the idiots are already online.
- sneak 3y agoOnly about half the humans are on the internet.
- ebcode 3y agoThen there's still hope!
- dredmorbius 3y agoYou're telling us it's going to get worse then?
- eastbound 3y agoBut OKCupid joining the race to the bottom was a choice. They decided to drop the high-IQ / literary customers. They could have remained as the high-end of dating. 90% of men don’t enjoy using Tinder, and for women it’s just a utility service when being bachelor.
- intelVISA 3y agoAll the idiots already were, unless bikeshedding category theory in IRC while m$ and friends pulled the rug under general computing was The Thinking Man's Choice.
- checkyoursudo 3y agoCheck out the Flynn Effect. It is possible that all of us online idiots and the cohorts coming after are getting stupider every generation. I wouldn't be so hasty with the "things aren't getting worse" part just yet. It could get much worse!
- jeffreygoesto 3y agoJust imagine how high it must have been when there were only hundreds of users? =;-} Bitnet Relay in 1992 had some, not even all universities connected and I know of marriages that originated in the IRL(!) relay parties. We actually drove across Europe to meet our online friends.
- wauter 3y agoI hereby submit “regression to the population mean”.
- cto_of_antifa 3y ago[dead]
- tsss 3y agoLaw of large numbers?
- addcommitpush 3y agoChebyshev's inequality: > for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean. Specifically, no more than 1/k^2 of the distribution's values can be k or more standard deviations away from the mean. IQ is (if I recall correctly) normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15. So for a distance of 1.3... standard deviation (i.e. a distance of 20), you can't have more than 1/1.3...^2 = 56.25% of the population so far from the mean (below 80 or above 120), or 28.125% _above_ 120.
- mtVessel 3y agoRegression to the mean?