Posted by _a9 12/21/2025
Flock does this well in terms of bios spinlock releases, whereas a secure measure is stress-testing network traffic.
the fact that these majority do accept the distraction points to lack of intelligence and discipline in critical thinking and future planning. The populous has half the blame - not just those who do these manufacturing of distractions.
There is a tonne of civic action against Flock, specifically, in the works, in many cases with successful results.
“If (people are) worried about privacy, a license plate reader is the dumbest way to do surveillance. You have a cell phone. A cell phone knows your exact location at all times,” he said. “If you don’t trust law enforcement to do their job, that’s actually what you’re concerned about, and I’m not going to help people get over that.”
Just means I have to have a Faraday bag alongside my polesaw and high-powered laser. I can compete with your shitty outdated Android SoM and a shitty Raspberry Pi webcam in an enclosure.
Datapoint: one.
Not much I can do about that over here in the coastal Northeast.
said without an ounce irony as the proverbial rug is yanked right out from under your feet
I'm still offended though.
Fucking a lot of smart people in Mass., Vermont, Conn., New York, Maryland, DC.
Smart people, as measured by educational attainment, live in the NE coastal states and exceptionally stupid people (by the same metric) live in the South and Midwest. As a guy from Iowa, I was offended, but humbled by the reality of the numbers.
A Carnegie Mellon study found that people with PhDs were more likely than any other educational attainment level to be against the Covid-19 vaccine: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v... (page 17)
Gallup polls during the Vietnam War found that higher-educated Americans were more likely to be pro-war while the most anti-war group were those with only a grade school education: https://afterthewarproject.org/files/original/3e5e5a47a15203... (page 19 of the PDF, page 38 of the document)
The average does tend to vary from state to state. It actually is a bit lower in the southern and midwestern states, but only by a few points.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-...
People tend to believe without questioning it that there are geographical/regional surveys of "IQ". But have you ever been compelled to take an IQ test as part of a survey like that? I've never heard of that happening. In fact: those kinds of surveys do not exist.
Scholars have from time to time thrown their careers away by trying to get better numbers, inevitably some group doesn't like the outcome and they become embroiled in endless debate while their career implodes. For example, the major sources cited in The Bell Curve have had their titles stripped and been hounded to the ends of the earth.
All these years later people are still specifically authoring papers to debunk their work.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
We will never see real numbers. This, or other things like it, are literally the best it will ever get unless someone sacrifices their career, and maybe their own safety, to gather better data.
The people who actually are (/were) hounded are people like Richard Lynn, the godfather of "average IQ by country" data sets. That's because their data sets are fraudulent; not in a subtle way, but very directly: for instance, data for Sub-Saharan African countries are taken in many cases exclusively from mental health facilities, the only places IQ tests are done in any significant numbers in those places.
> It's a fertile field and people are coming at it from multiple angles
One of these things must not be 100% accurate. Do you know of any real dataset thats based on actual testing? I can't find one for the life of me. I've looked.
If someone just... tested people we would have numbers. They aren't. Its been 30 years since the bell curve and our data is no better now than it was then as far as I can find.
There must be some reason for that discrepency.
*EDIT* To clarify, I don't think Lynn was right, and even if he was he was an asshole. I'm just annoyed that nobody followed up and did it properly.
It does not follow from the intractability of that problem that nobody's doing intelligence or behavioral genetics research. Plenty are, which is why there are front page stories on HN about the "missing heritability" issue.
Again, I think it's interesting that the notion of these data sets don't flunk more people's sanity checks, because most of us have no recollection of ever being asked to take an IQ test. I sure haven't. A mass testing regime none of us have ever heard of, apparently run in secret, is generating global IQ rankings? That doesn't sound weird to you?
Yes, that would be less accurate than a test administered in office by a professional, but it would also be more accurate than basing it on educational attainment or standardized tests intended for other purposes.
With a little effort the tests true purposes could easily be disguised. These very clever researchers know this, they just won't.
Thats also a fair theory to explain the lack of real data. Given the frequency with which I've had similar conversations it feels off to me, but that may just be my bias.
It certainly seems to be a very interesting problem to researchers. Thirty years later it is still cited frequently enough that Elsevier is having to hunt and destroy papers that cite it.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/10/elsevier-rev...
The data discussed in the Guardian article you cited there is fraudulent. They're hunting it down because it's bad data. It's exactly the same impulse as the Data Colada and Retraction Watch people, which is celebrated on HN. But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it.
I'm not mad the ox was gored, just that nobody replaced it after they were done sacrificing it. Bad science deserves to die, but in my mind it should always be replaced with better science. Not just left as an empty gap.
> Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about.
I wish I could find it. Neither Google, Kagi, ChatGPT, or Gemini could point me towards anything relevant. They just keep spitting out the old discredited hogwash. Maybe that's more a failing of the search engines than of the science though.
Either way, I appreciate the conversation. It's a topic that fascinates me, even if it isn't particularly relevant to my own life. I hope you have, or are actively having, a great holiday!
These are, like, high-profile names, but of course there are many dozens more people actually doing work in these fields.
* no money was exchanged just some guarantees to not disclose their client and remove tweets.