There’s a reason why most anti-social, violent behavior is carried out by people in the lowest IQ groups. Low IQ means you can’t appreciate or predict consequences. It means you don’t know how to create mechanisms to keep impulsivity in check or that you don’t even know why it’s necessary to do that. It means you can’t comprehend the perspective of other people or figure out that it exists and that it’s different from yours.
Low IQ means experiencing a constant, daily, grinding frustration because people around you keep saying and doing things that you just don’t understand. If you ever traveled to a foreign country where you don’t speak the language, that’s how a low-IQ person feels always. Like you are in a group where everybody understands the in joke except for you. Living like this eats up so much energy that very little is left to control the already very weak system of checks over one’s impulsivity.
A low IQ is not anybody’s fault exactly like one’s height or eye color aren’t. It’s not a moral flaw. It’s a physical reality and denying it doesn’t help. It’s not kind to pretend that people don’t exist who under no circumstances will be able to perform the cognitive operations that we carry out without noticing.
The only real kindness is to recognize that this is real, it’s not anybody’s fault, and we need to help low-IQ people to handle their largest problem which is impulsivity. There are many completely physical factors that weaken impulse control. Processed food, sugary beverages, light pollution, certain types of medications, disordered living. Interestingly, people who have pretty excellent impulse control avoid all of this on their own initiative.
The saccharine pieties of the quoted tweet are completely counterproductive. Because we collectively refuse to accept the physiological reality of intelligence, we make things a lot worse than they need to be. Think about the students who have been told their whole lives that you can only flunk out of college if you don’t try hard enough. They try their hardest and still have absolutely no idea what the textbook is saying. They end up feeling terrible when this whole time they had as much change of understanding the textbook as I have of reaching the top shelf of my kitchen cabinet without climbing on a chair. These are people who get into debt to acquire an education they will never be able to complete. We are defrauding them. I recently saw the statistics for people with college debt and no degree. It should be criminal to do this to people.
Clarissa's Blog 
The premise of this tweet is so retarded I don’t even know where to begin. Who’s “throwing out” certifiable musical geniuses by administering IQ tests in the first place? Is this how musical talent is evaluated? Does the New York Philharmonic evaluate candidates by giving them IQ tests? Does the Iowa writers’ workshop?
This kareem guy was born to get dunked on by people on twitter. I think he knows that too and has pivoted to posting engagement bait for money.
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Very retarded. IQ doesn’t measure athletic ability. It doesn’t measure height or blood pressure. These are different criteria. Their difference doesn’t invalidate any of them.
One has got to wonder about the IQ of people who dislike IQ tests for not measuring things other than IQ.
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It doesn’t measure musical talent, but doesn’t IQ correlate pretty well with IQ?
-ethyl
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hoi. Musical ability. Correlates with IQ. I think. Fingers frozen this morning.
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Depends on the music, I guess. There are many a rapper who produce excellent raps but do not seem particularly gifted intellectually. Or pop artists who create very memorable jingles but can’t spell it’s or its correctly to save their lives.
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Literally my kids, after playing with a radio for one afternoon:
“What do you call that stuff that’s not music, but is mostly just people swearing, and a beat, and sometimes little pieces of something that sounds kind of like music?”
Rap, kiddos. That’s called rap.
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Probably OT but I’ve been encouraging my kid to play with the new priest’s daughter who’s a year younger. After 15 minutes of playing, my kid adamantly refused to have anything to do with her. I called her for an hour to tell me why and she finally revealed that the 8-year-old used a large number of VERY BAD WORDS, MOMMY. I wondered how a priest’s daughter can possibly develop such a vocabulary until the kid whipped out a smartphone.
There’s nowhere to hide from this.
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“I recently saw the statistics for people with college debt and no degree. It should be criminal to do this to people.”
Agree, we were streamed as we entered high school, some kids never learned about compound interest—and I do consider that criminal negligence.
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Compound interest is a great example because the overwhelming majority of people are very unable to understand the concept or care about it.
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