Kudzu_Bob

All your answers are here:

http://heartiste.wordpress.com/

No, I don't want to address a question posed in bad faith.

Simply Google "gould" and "fraud" and you will have hours of fascinating reading.

It's the thing that blank slatists say can be improved by a better environment when they're not busy claiming that it can't be measured.

Gould has been exposed as a fraud.

The average IQ produced by natural selection depends on the environment. There is no ideal level of intelligence apart from environment. If the Earth had a uniform climate, terrain, and so on from pole to pole, this presumably would not be the case.

Human personality contains any number of traits that can be measured. To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.

When you say that some of the best hacker and hustlers that you know come from unimpressive backgrounds, does "some" mean "most" or "a few" or "hardly any"?

If a wolf is raised by humans, how much will that improve its IQ score?

A 100 to 115 IQ maxed out on potential will get you very far in life, but not as far as a 130 to 145 IQ maxed out on potential will.

We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years. The literature on this subject is quite extensive.

You should write that up and submit it to Slate. I'm sure that they would publish it.

I guess poor children hear fewer words because they don't watch much television.

And what those not-so-wealthy people need is money for drugs.

Sexbots.

Memory places things in context. We don't even know what we know unless we can remember it.

All your answers reside here: http://heartiste.wordpress.com/

Vidal was the last American. When he died, so did the final traces of the Old Republic.

There's a reason Gore Vidal used to call this country the United States of Amnesia.

But doing evil that good may come of it is so much more emotionally satisfying, wouldn't you agree?

In my opinion a more important effect of this is that the lower class children do not become role models for the other children.

You seem to labor under the misapprehension that this country should be run for the benefit of the people who already live here as well as their posterity. That's just crazy, as all enlightened thinkers know.

Declaring patent trolls to be terrorists and sending them to Gitmo or someplace like that to be tortured until they confess to whatever we want them to confess to would also work, I suppose. It surprises me the reporter didn't mention that option.

I'm confused. If you're saying that Finns do well in school even though nobody forces them to, then they would seem to fit the definition of excellent students to a tee.

Could the secret to Finland's excellent schools be...Finland's excellent students?

I think that that city is too busy trying to keep the white suburbs from seceding, a move that would deprive Atlanta of its tax base, to have time to talk to the likes of me.

I believe that you mean "white flight," not "white plight," but a good catch on your part nonetheless.

Your first statement is an attempt to demonstrate moral superiority and therefore merits no response. Your second statement is misleading, in that it sweeps under the rug how Detroit's descent into poverty mirrored its changing demographics.

You could, of course, attempt to disprove Daniel_Newby's contention that demographics is at the bottom of this. All that you need to do is provide a single counterexample by pointing out an instance--just one will suffice for our purposes--of a city that became richer or that economically speaking at least held its own even as the percentage of blacks comprising its population grew. This seems like a simple enough task.

In other words, one cannot really explain why the Western Roman Empire fell if he cannot account also for how the Eastern Roman Empire managed to last another thousand years.

But I am still left wondering why Pittsburghers not only made different choices than did Detroiters, but made ones that were so vastly superior as to lead to their city's becoming the best town in America even as Detroit transformed itself a post-apocalyptic wasteland whose denizens hunt raccoons for their flesh.