this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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And Finally...
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Every day I manage to be surprised at how mind-bogglingly stupid conservatives are.
Well, surprised but also not surprised at all.
I don't know that I'd include El Paso in the Texas conservative category you're probably thinking of. It's much closer in culture, demographics, and geography to a mixture of Mexico and New Mexico, both of which it borders.
It's a classic small-c economically conservative community, prone to embrace these superficial fixes rather than doing anything that might cost money.
Maybe it's got a lot of Blue Dog Democrats but it seems to be left leaning.
Think about this for a second:
Take all the stupid shit you've done and said in your life. For argument's sake let's say you are absolutely average in terms of stupidity. That means 50% of people are more stupid than you.
And now imagine that again, but with your capacity for noticing your own stupidity. Obviously there's stuff you've missed. 50% of people will have a lower capacity to notice their own stupidity.
I think it's safe to say that the distribution is a bell curve. That means 50% of people are sort of average. But 25% will be significantly below that and 10% of the total will be severely stupid.
Safe to say stupidity is a powerful force in this world.
Then we are not talking even yet about mental disorders. Iirc schizophrenia has an occurrence of roughly 2%, and so does psychopathy. Of course not all people with shizo are unable to manage it, and not all psychos are evil. But it's still a lot of people!
And before anyone barges in saying "that's not how averages work", first of all you mean the, uh, mean – both the mean and the median are averages.
Second, intelligence probably follows a distribution that's reasonably close to Gaussian (at least on a smaller scale) just like more or less literally all biological variables do. And I don't mean IQ, but the general idea that cognitive performance – however the hell you define it – is going to vary from person to person and it's going to approximately follow a Gaussian curve. The upshot of this is that the median is probably very close to the mean.
Thanks for expanding on that. Can you say something about the difference between a bell curve and a gaussian curve?
Oh there's no difference, "bell curve" is just a more colloquial term for a normal distribution. "Normal distribution", "Gaussian distribution / curve" and "bell curve" all mean the same thing.
Wouldn't be math if there wasn't 736 different names for the same thing 😆
Oh sorry, I quick read over the first sentence and missed it. Long day yesterday!