So New York magazine’s Jesse Singal — GamerGate bete noire and one of the central figures in Candace Owens‘ crackpot conspiracy theories — has written a really quite fascinating piece on the history of the alpha male. Or at least on the history of the idea of the alpha male, from its humble origins in primatology to its current obsessional ubiquity amongst pickup artists and Red Pillers and cuck-calling Anime Nazi Trump fans.
So how did Singal’s internet, er, critics attempt to rebut his claim that Americans have become “infatuated with a cartoonish idea of ‘Alpha Males?'”
And then there was this, Tweeted out shortly before New York put up Signal’s piece this morning by someone mad about a different Singal article:
Booplesnoot, I will take that bet.
@ scildfreja et al
Re: IQ
IQ is something that crops up occasionally in English criminal law when it comes to the admissibility of interviews (‘confessions’).
It used to be that there was a rather arbitrary cut off point. An IQ of less than 70 was usually deemed to result in interviews being excluded. The courts did recognise though that this perhaps did not reflect any underlying reality. So someone with low IQ could be very devious and someone with a high IQ particularly suggestible.
So now we tend to go with one of the WAIS III tests, but with addenda giving opinion as to how this might affect the reliability of any admissions. It’s still obviously pretty arbitrary but a bit better than what we had before.
Singal has a reputation for transphobia, just FYI
@Alan,
I have no idea about how appropriate WAIS III and its ilk are in law; I imagine you need some sort of measureable metric and arbitrariness doesn’t matter as much as something that can be uniformly applied. WAIS is just another formulation of IQ test, though, so suffers the same flaws as an intelligence-measuring metric. Frankly, our concept of “intelligence” is so fuzzy that any attempt to quantify it will fail until we get something more precise.
(I’m sort of against putting numbers to intelligence in a general sense, as well – it encourages ranking and hierarchical relationships where none may exist. That’s just me, though)
I’m exploring the possibility of mapping out ones’ concept map of a knowledge domain directly through examining a persons’ behaviours in a learning environment. It’s a tricky pickle, but it would go a long way towards making a better measurement of someones’ learning and knowledge. No more exams, no more assignments, no more worrying about whether your GPA is going to stay above some arbitrary break point. Just study until you know it, in whatever way you find works best. I think it’s a good goal!
Uh…isn’t omega male a GOOD thing in MRA speak?
@Scildfreja
I admittedly don’t know much about IQ tests and agree with the idea that they measure taking an IQ test (probably measure culturally valued patterns of thought not directly relevant to how IQ is used too), shouldn’t tests study the realistic use of the knowledge as well as the presence of the knowledge?
Also is there any effort to factor in differences in how we access knowledge? Or do we not know enough about that yet. (I can see that your proposal seeks to avoid that problem altogether).
*Goes to read about what is known about g factor and anatomy*
@Zatar
Apparently an omega male is the worst kind of male you can be, because reasons.
Hey, totally random, but I ran across this in HuffPost. David might be interested.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/comedian-has-horribly-sexist-reaction-to-woman-who-politely-turned-him-down_us_5739c5f4e4b08f96c1838eb1
Depends what the test is for! IQ is supposed to be looking for the presence of intelligence… but the definition of “intelligence” is so terrible that any attempt to capture it is going to be flawed from the outset. In my opinion!
As it turns out, you can just have the students draw concept maps of what they know and then do statistics on the structure of that map. You get better information than multiple choice questionnaires out of them, no stress of “failing” since there’s no wrong way to do it, and you get a more accurate picture of how the student understands the knowledge domain. Far, far more robust if you ask me.
Problem is – it doesn’t output a nice clean percentage as a result. Administrations and bureaucrats want everything boiled down to a number that they can say “pass” or “fail” to without really understanding the situation. It’s a cultural shift. Hard to accomplish.
There are some efforts to do this in the methods I’m talking about – those methods are a bit over a decade old but aren’t really considered “mainstream”. There’s a *lot* of effort being made to automatically assess written text from learners and the like, but it usually boils down to pattern-matching from an NLP library. When it comes to actually shaking up the core of how we assess knowledge, learning, and intelligence? Not much going on.
Which is why it’s such an exciting area to work in 😀
I’d like to thank you guys for your input 🙂 IQ’s been a question that was bugging me today and you’ve fleshed out my understanding.
Could we do an open thread for the statsy stuff and trade papers sometime?
I’d love to chat about this all day long! Most of my papers and work are unfortunately NDA’d right now :\ Still would be happy to talk about it!
dlouwe:
But I thought that was what Vox Day was calling himself?
@Zatar – no, Vox goes on about Sigma males. Apparently the Sigma is the ‘lone wolf’. To my mind, this sounds just a little bit convenient: the contemporary concept of an Alpha (highly dubious as it may be) is ‘women want to be with him, men want to be him’. It requires the social proof of other guys liking you. Bingo! Sigma male.
@ scildfreja
Precisely.
Of course, uniformity and consistency are laudable aims in a criminal justice system. We try to avoid situations where outcomes depend too much on subjective opinions or interpretations. But imposing generally applicable standards has its own set of problems. It’s a dilemma with no perfect solution.
We used to have a thing called doli incapax. That was a rebuttable presumption that children between certain ages didn’t have the capacity to commit crimes. It was argued that it turned criminal culpability into a bit of a lottery so now the rule is: if you’re under 10 you can’t be criminally responsibility but once you’ve blown out the candles on your birthday cake you can. So you literally change status overnight.
Chiomara,
Oh my god, I must have missed it the first time you told us about the fire. That’s horrible.
brony, et. al.,
For the subset of these guys who are basically authoritarians, I wonder if their fixation on enemies is a flipside of their hero worship? I’m thinking of the time Dean Esmay accidentally said that he and the MRAs at AVFM were dedicated to a cause, and that cause was. . . Paul Elam. Maybe they assume that because they worship and take orders from Paul and Roosh, we must worship and take orders from Valenti and Sarkeesian.
Scildfreja,
Your work sounds more interesting every time I hear about it. What’s your academic background?
@Alan, that matches what I understand of the legal system pretty well. It’s unfortunate but sort of the best-imperfect-system we can reasonably come up with. I don’t blame you guys for using a set of tests for a metric. Anything else would be unwieldy.
@Orion, computer and information science, with a focus on artificial intelligence and algorithms. This has been dragged into more cognitive science and the study of learning processes with the lab work. It’s led me to digging into neuroanatomy and psychology quite a bit, though I’ve been interested in that stuff for years now. So: Math, stats, databases, that sort of super-boring nonsense. Turns out that it gets super interesting if you keep digging into it! Who knew?
@Orion
God needs Satan
Christ needs the anti-christ
I take a neutral view and try to tie it to good or bad reasoning/logic.
Independent of ultimate questions our brains have the ability to assign the status of “authority” to people and groups of people for reasons and with different kinds of motivation. AND they have the ability to understand that people we oppose also have authorities. There is a symmetry here with logic that flips depending on if the authority is in-group or out-group. What matters is if the reason and logic for the person being an authority is relevant to what the person is an authority over.
It’s also the case that we are emotionally sloppy when it comes to authorities. For example celebrities probably use authority software/hardware, and some people will let celebrities sway their decision making even if the celebrity is not actually an authority on something (or even the opposite of an authority). I think that is why many authorities end up having such shitty character revealing that often a group can function in a conflict sense by just having someone act as an authority.
Now I want to take a bunch of statements about their authority figures and their views of out-group authority figures and identify the symmetry and associated logical pivot points. But I’m going to a mental health support group. Maybe later.
@Scildfreja:
With that set of qualifications… have you read Marvin Minsky’s 1986 book The Society of Mind?
The IQ test was devised for white males by white males. It rewards the kind of thinking skills indoctrinated into white males. I was always pretty good at them. I was in the top 1% as a young kid, and even when I went to college to study electronics (where I was the only girl in the department) I was still getting scores on the Stanford/Binet style test of 136 or 140. I wanted to qualify for Mensa, but it wasn’t long before I realised that it was a bit of a con. Anyone can learn to be good at the tests. You can send off for the test, practice it, then send for a proper, judged one. Mensa just want your monies.
Now I have become completely disinamoured with the whole thing. I haven’t done an IQ test for years.
@Jenora Feuer,
I have not read all of it, unfortunately! It is certainly on my list – I could hardly call myself an information scientist without knowing about Minsky after all! – but his work hasn’t been very close to what I’m working on, so it’s not a top priority. Interestingly, his work is sort of entangled with a lot of AI ideas. Distributed function amongst specialized agents is a very big thing, especially given how the internet works, and that’s a pretty key component to his ideas.
Thank you for reminding me about it, though! I really do need to get myself a copy of it for browsing.
(though, we’ve learned a lot about how the brain works since 1986, so I do wonder how applicable it would still be. Hmm.)
@Imaginary Petal
The quadrant of the Venn diagram where low IQ meets social akwardness meets OCD.
‘Small mind discuss people. Big minds discuss ideas…’ or some such thing.
Obsessing over a specific person is just OCD that lives in the ‘gossip’ range. I am not a licensed therapist, I just obsess over obsessions of people online. It’s my job LOL You are talking about the absolutely easiest people to manipulate on the internet. These people are being programmed by the media, by marketers and by social media butterflies all day long for profit.
I conducted an experiment to harvest data from the people who frequent sites like ‘The Dirty’. These sites are the highest form of brain crack for this demographic. I was amazed that they did everything that I had anticipated in response to my test. And now I have screen grabs that I can use in my presentations, and not re-traumatize other women by using them as examples.
I also had conversations with fans of those ‘revenge porn’ type sites who do not agree with the tactics but seem to enjoy the content. It’s a good foot in the door. I am REALLY interested in how quality of life diminishes with exposure to toxic internet content (consensual, non-consensual, and professional, as in moderator work)
oooh, @Eva Vavoom, care to share about your experiment? Sounds like it was interesting!
@Scildfreja I simply wrote an article about the problematic nature of a site called TagTheSponsor on my main blog puremoan.com. In which a guy defrauds Instagram models out of intimate photos with lies about being a socialite from Dubai. It’s adjacent to revenge porn but rarely discussed because people generally do not care about sex workers or the people who harass them (and it turns out organised harassment of prostitutes is an old tradition going back to the 17th century.)
They did all the things on the list (insult, threaten my family, dox) within 24 hours. They provided me with all the screen shots I need (and have the right to use) for an upcoming presentation on emotional security online (harassment of users using easy tools like Twitter/Facebook is now 50% of the concern of people who were hired to protect computer from hackers). I chose them because when I brought up the problematic nature of the site on Twitter 8 weeks ago I got a very quick ‘shut up you cunt’. So these people cannot be helped and it was easy to jolt them out of their nest and track them on a platform they do now own.
But it’s a very interesting subculture full of people who apparently have no sense of self preservation when it comes to their emotional health.
@Scildfreja
Speaking of Minsky, for recreational reading you might have a look at The Turing Option, a novel he co wrote with Harry Harrison. I’ve not read it in years, but IIRC it was a fun read.
That makes me sorely tempted to change from “Resident Cheeseburger Slut” to “Sigma Female”.
Because nothing makes these shits mad like co-opting their language. Which is also hilarious, because they make sorry attempts at doing it to social justice language all the time.