An excellent point on repair versus replace, and the dangers of the nerd snipe for people of all intellectual levels.
PhilosophiCat: I live in a country where 80ish is roughly the average national IQ. Let me tell you what it’s like.
I think this is incredibly sloppy reasoning by the author of the tweet and anyone who takes it at face value. It’s one thing to think IQ is not so culturally biased to be entirely fake. It’s a different thing entirely to believe some guy on the internet who lives in some country and attributes particular aspects of their culture which are counterintuitively related to intelligence to the national IQ. This would probably be difficult to study and require lots of controls even for actual scientists, but this tweet has no controls at all. Has this person ever been to countries that have different national IQ but similar per-capita GDP? Similar national IQ but different culture? Do they notice that e.g. professors and their families don’t like tinkering or prefer replacing things? If they have, they didn’t tell us.
I think this is incredibly sloppy reasoning by the author of the tweet and anyone who takes it at face value. It’s one thing to think IQ is not so culturally biased to be entirely fake. It’s a different thing entirely to believe some guy on the internet who lives in some country and attributes particular aspects of their culture which are counterintuitively related to intelligence to the national IQ. This would probably be difficult to study and require lots of controls even for actual scientists, but this tweet has no controls at all. Has this person ever been to countries that have different national IQ but similar per-capita GDP? Similar national IQ but different culture? Do they notice that e.g. professors and their families don’t like tinkering or prefer replacing things? If they have, they didn’t tell us.