...maybe Slashdot could get their help prevent preventing duplicate articles just hours apart?

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

I lack confidence that IQ means or strongly correlates with what you say it does. I know plenty of high IQ people who hyper fixate on their own problem while ignoring everything else around them. (The bookish and distracted professor?)

I read the article differently -- a reminiscing of what they went through as teens learning computers and of how different things are today.

I was programming in the about the same year, though I was younger. I was one of the very few kids who came into my first computer science (early 2000s) class knowing C and C++ (and Perl and Pascal) and having written actual programs in Assembly before.

Even then, the professors were saying don't worry about optimization, compilers are so good now, speeds are improving so rapidly, you have better things to focus on, etc. I actually got points marked off on a test once because I came up with (what I thought was) a nifty loop optimization for solving a problem. It was correct but marked off because of "premature optimization." (I tested it later and my answer was indeed far faster than the model answer.)

Today, almost nobody ever needs to program in asm. Today, almost everybody is programming by gluing bits of often highly optimized (but often not) libraries together. It's how even simple programs can have 50+ dependencies now. Probably for the vast majority of programmers, even those who have been programming for 20+ years, this IS a fascinating look into the past. It reminded me of some of the things friends and I did in highschool! Our highschool had a couple of games that had been developed over multiple years by successive groups of students. One group wrote the initial code, another group pulled the Doom networking code into the project, another one updated that form IPX/SPX to TCP/IP, etc. Not unique, but fun times.

The "Stanford-Binet" test was originally devised for children, but the revisions upon it--that make it the modern IQ test--coming from Stern and Terman in large part, seem to be statistical modifications to do exactly what you're saying it can't. So, even if (your position) the test is not meaningful, the intent was to make a generally comparable measure of intelligence.

You said "IQ was never intended as a general measure of intelligence." The argument I'm making is that it seems as if that was exactly the intent of creating the IQ test.

In response to your other questions:

Unsure, but I would say no in terms of thinking about it as some kind of normalized distribution.

I'm not sure anyone has ever proposed that IQ is the ONLY measure that matters for ALL aspects of life. But, there's very strong evidence that whatever IQ measures has a statistically significant correlation with a number of life outcomes (job performance, income, health, educational performance, etc.).

I heard a lecture years ago where the speaker talked about IQ in terms of mental plasticity / learning flexibility. The example given was being a cashier at McDonalds. This is actually be a fairly mentally taxing job. You have to be able to listen to customers, understand special orders, know the buttons on the register to press to get the desired order in, accept multiple forms of payment, make change from cash, multitask with getting different orders to different customers, etc. Almost anyone can do this job (though as anyone who has been a fastfood customer can attest, some workers ARE better than others!). What impact does IQ have the ability to perform this job? Not a lot. The impact of IQ is in the ability to learn the computer system, learn how to handle new and unexpected order combos, etc--the learning portions.

My own crank theory is that human intelligence almost all boils down to pattern matching on steroids and that genius is pattern matching on a level that most people can't understand (or, differently, recognizing different kinds of patterns from what most people see).

Lewis Terman (Wikipedia):

William Stern (Wikipedia:

It seems that the point of the IQ methodology, added on to preexisting intelligence testing, was intended to come up with a general measure that was comparable across populations. Disagree?

Visually? Zero. That's not how my mind works.

Interesting link/video. Thank you.

I'm an EE, and visualizing things is a really important tool for my work. Circuit diagrams, circuit board layout / routing, how a board fits in an enclosure, transformer design, etc.

That's fine, and no doubt it's powerful, but it doesn't mean there aren't other ways to approach the same kinds of work. I've been doing hardware design for a bit over 50 years now, and have quite a collection of successful original projects, many quite complex. I've been writing software since the early 1970's as well, and again, lots of completed projects in that domain. For some systems, I did both the hardware design and the supporting software.

WRT schematics and other diagrams, I'm comfortable and effective on a drafting table at putting together complex ones; but, being lazy, I've also written both schematic capture and PCB layout software, including auto-routing and auto-placement. In assembler. :)

I'm a "5" — I can't visualize anything at all. But I can juggle concepts as both words and abstractions just fine, and I find it a comfortable process to realize them as concrete products.

Likely related, I really enjoy photography; it serves as visual memory for me. It's how I can "know" how my mother and father looked, old flames, places, pets, etc. I also take pictures of my hardware projects both under development and at completion. There's definitely a worthy aspect to being able to access that information. Also, some of my most complex software products have been image manipulation systems.

The bottom line is there are definitely multiple highly functional modalities to dealing with most creative tasks.

Completely agree re the 8gb, especially as that is shared between desktop and RAM. However, having used one of the minimal spec M* macbook airs before, it was completely fine for average desktop usage (ie web browser machine, maybe Word/Excel).

The 256gb I don't think matters at all for many people.

In this particular case, all RAM is part of the processor package. So yeah, it's a bit different than adding a few dimm slots.

An embryo is an organism in and of itself. It is alive and it is human in a very scientific sense of the word.

It's not human until it has a functional nervous system with a brain capable of, you know, humanity. Up to that point, it's a clump of cells, not "a human." In fact, short of that level of development, it's no more "a human" than any similarly sized clump of native cells in any person's body.

Humanity does not arise because some muscles contract or a bone develops. Early stage pregnancy does not involve a human. Later on, sure. But to pretend otherwise is anything but scientific.

Likewise, arguing that an early stage pregnancy is an organism is irrelevant; so is a blade of grass. Same for life: grass is alive. These are completely inadequate — in fact, irrelevant — metrics.

Humanity is actually the thing that is reasonable to consider; and if you try to use "humanity" when describing an early stage pregnancy, you are promoting superstition. No functional brain defines that the organism is not capable of humanity. That's a fundamental scientific truth. Consequently, if you claim otherwise, you're either being disingenuous, demonstrating that you have had a completely inadequate science education — or are stupid.

A physical fact? What, exactly, is the physical evidence of people-ness that these embryos lack?

A functional nervous system incorporating a brain capable of, you know, any aspect of humanity.

You're welcome.

All criminal law is the imposition of somebody's morality

Nonsense. A great deal of law is the result of objective determination of harm reduction — the axiom that gives rise to that is that "harm is inherently bad and therefore should be avoided when possible." Not "harm is immoral." Or "harm is un-Christian" (because as we know, Christians have a rich and storied history of causing harm, which path they continue to follow to this day.)

Although I'll grant you that legislating an early stage pregnancy is in any way equivalent to a child is definitely not an objective determination of anything. Because it's bullshit, y'see.

But yes — too much of Christian superstition and Jewish superstition has failed to admit their debt to their actual roots in a myriad of preceding superstitions. Because they're too busy pretending their imaginary friend is real and nothing else matters.

FTFY

Thus the persistence of slavery in almost all societies...
 
...Christianity took a long time to get to a rejection of slavery

Christianity has done no such thing, at least in the USA. To wit (emphasis mine):

13th Amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Where are the majority of Christians rejecting the 13th amendment's direct endorsement of slavery? It's okay, I'll wait. I actually like the sound of crickets.

It's also important to note how Christian morals have generally influenced what is acceptable

It's also important to note how Christianity is (a) pure superstition and (b) hardly the only source of determining and/or resolving "what is acceptable" and (c) a rich source of decidedly dubious positions and associated action:

For instance, crusades are not acceptable; blood libel is not acceptable; burning people at the stake is not acceptable; subjugation of women is not acceptable; brainwashing is not acceptable; inquisitions are not acceptable; pretending superstition trumps science is not acceptable... although, you know, we certainly can look to Christianity for promoting and performing all of these particular exercises in influencing people to think it's okay to go about them. So... yes. Christianity certainly has been influential in these matters. Point to you, Bruce66423.