Orton's Arm

As bad as the situation is already, this could easily make it worse.

Your criticism of my approach is 100% justified. I let myself get distracted by the dead end of driving quality, which was a mistake. Thanks for calling me on that.

No, I'm not contradicting myself. I suggest you go back and reread the relevant posts.

To me the article is more scary than funny. If Bill Gates, for example, chose to buy this woman's books, think of the leverage he could exert on our government.

You think you understand what I'm saying, but you don't. Let me put it to you this way: you've got two separate phenomena at work, both of which often get labeled "regression toward the mean." For clarity, I'll call phenomenon A the test/retest effect, and phenomenon B regression toward mediocrity. I honestly think you've come to understand the test/retest effect. If you select people on the basis of test scores, and if there's an element of chance involved in determining those scores, the people you selected will have scores that overstate their true distance from the mean. The test/retest effect will always be relevant if you're studying the intelligence of smart people's children. Because the parents were selected on the basis of their test scores, those scores overstate their true distance from the population's mean. Even if the children are just as smart as their parents, their test scores will be closer to the population mean. Then there's regression toward mediocrity--children actually being closer to the population's mean than their parents. Insofar as the narrow-sense heritability of a trait is less than 1; you can expect regression toward mediocrity. Unlike the test/retest effect, regression toward mediocrity involves real movement toward the population's mean, and not merely the appearance of such movement. Suppose you notice that parents with high I.Q. scores have children with somewhat less impressive scores. At least some of that movement will be due to the test/retest effect. And you have to account for that effect before attributing the rest of the movement to regression toward mediocrity.

September 11 is largely a result of internal weakness. If we'd set out to have an immigration policy that's more favorable to this country, we wouldn't be absorbing the Third World's population surplus. And the terrorists who committed September 11 would never have been allowed to immigrate to America. September 11 would never have happened. The most logical response to September 11 would have been to secure the Southern border, and to reform American immigration policy (esp. with respect to the Middle East). Also, we should have expelled those who were here illegally. However, the security risk apparently wasn't high enough to cause us to take any of these measures. But apparently, the danger level was high enough to justify sending American soldiers off to fight and die. And it's a tragedy whenever a standing government considers the death of its own soldiers a smaller price to pay than the enforcement of existing immigration law. Our government's priorities are no longer aligned with our national interests. And that's another sign of internal weakness.

Hey Wacka, This discussion has taken place before. I've categorically refused to announce the name of my alma mater, because Tom, his wife Ramius, and their puppies would immediately begin deriding it. While I'm sure that worse things have happened to my alma mater than that, I see nothing positive (from the school's perspective) that would offset that very small bit of negativity. Nor do I feel that the Toms or Ramiuses of this board have done anything in particular to have earned that particular bit of information. I'd rather be the butt of McDonald's jokes myself, than have my alma mater subjected to the same kind of unthinking, stupid derision to which Tom and Ramius subject everything else.

Is it physically painful to be as stupid as you are? Or are you just too stupid to experience the neurological sensation known as pain? The rusty gears in your head literally squeak when they turn. And if your head's not squeaking right now, it means you're not thinking. And if a rusty old squeak has never emerged from your head, then neither has any particular thought. Of course you don't understand what I'm saying, you nitwit! It would require at least a 5th grade reading level to understand my earlier posts, and we all know that's well beyond your very limited means. I wrote that the aging process reduces raw driving ability. Of course, that one sailed right over your stupid little head. I also wrote that older drivers compensate for this by staying within their own limitations. Your response to that was to gape and drool at the keyboard. I wrote that the drivers who were turning the roads into a game of Russian roulette were generally young or middle aged drivers. You responded by trying to shove a sandwich into your rectum; thinking it was your mouth. You really are a stupid loser.

You've gone over to the Dark Side! Tom and Ramius welcome you with open arms. You've succumbed to the temptation to make the vague, baseless accusation, in a way which pretends its underlying truth must be so obvious that anyone can see it. But there can be only two Sith: a pupil and a master. If your conversion to the Dark Side is complete, Tom will ask you to kill Ramius; to give him a more apt pupil. And Ramius may ask you to kill Tom, so that he can become the master.

Yours was a most annoying post. In what way was James supposedly ignorant about hand gun legislation? What information is he supposedly overlooking? Which parts of his post allegedly display ignorance? You don't answer any of these questions, yet you ask us to completely discount everything James has written on the subject. Others can do as they please, but I refuse to give serious consideration to any of your accusations until such time as you deign to make them more specific. Maybe you do know as much about gun control legislation as you say you do. Maybe you could be making a useful contribution to this thread. But so far, nothing you've written has been productive, or could possibly help anyone better understand gun control legislation.

How am I contradicting myself? I've written that older drivers can be slow and annoying, but are usually not life-threatening. I've also written that the people I saw who turned roads into a game of Russian roulette weren't older drivers--they were young or middle aged. I'm at a loss to see where you believe the self-contradiction is.

The proper response to your post is thinly veiled contempt.

The people I saw who were creating the most danger on the roads were usually young or middle aged people, yes.

You know something? You really are dumb. And I'm not just saying that. It's true. You're too stupid to understand the concept of averages, you think that 5 + x = 8 is calculus, you didn't understand the test/retest effect even after the Stanford and Duke articles explained it to you, you don't know beans about the concept of an "expected value," and the only way you know how to express your disagreement with anyone is to pretend they're even dumber than you. For you to insult anyone's critical thinking skills is like Jeffery Dahmer raising ethical questions about someone's food preparation techniques. You really are a loser, you know that?

JSP didn't start this thread, so why are you spamming it?

I'm not saying that all your criticism of my posts is based on intellectual dishonesty. A lot of it's based on simply misunderstanding what I've been saying. Or the topics we've been debating. Or both.

Don't worry, I'm not accusing you of intellectual dishonesty. You're too stupid for that to be an issue.

You're even more of a pathetic loser than I'd realized. I have a pretty good imagination, but I never imagined anyone being quite as stupid as you. There are cattle that could out-think you seven times out of ten. Cattle! Do you know how stupid cattle are? Of course not: you're too stupid to know anything.

No. I'm saying that I've lived in areas with lots of elderly people. Their driving was annoying and slow, but not life threatening.

Yeah. Agreeing with what Stanford, Duke, etc., have written about regression toward the mean sure makes me wrong, all right.

You have a stronger case going after the college Republicans than you do going after Ann Coulter. And you're right to say that this isn't 1938. We don't have to worry about being overrun by a hostile foreign army. If today's America is in danger, it's due to internal weakness, and not the strength of external threats.

Wrong, you little moron. I've written that you are stupid. In fact, you're beyond stupid. If there was a way for an I.Q. score to be negative, I'm sure you would have achieved that. I have not written that people from Third World countries are stupid. Some of them are very smart, others are of average intelligence, and there are those who are dim bulbs. But none of them are quite so dim as you. Go back to doing whatever on earth it is you did before you somehow managed to stumble across these discussion boards. Leave intelligent discussions for people who have functioning brains. This means people other than loser morons like yourself.

You don't think I've seen old people driving badly? Ha! I've witnessed a veritable 20 course feast of bad driving. Nearly every variation on that theme you can imagine I've seen. Your 86 year old father-in-law's bad driving can't shock or surprise me. But the bad driving I saw in Florida was mostly because of young or middle aged people. And in the areas populated by elderly people (as opposed to immigrants) the driving was considerably better. The aging process reduces raw driving ability, don't get me wrong. But most elderly people seem to know their own limitations. They may annoy you, they may slow you down, but they usually won't get you killed. The people who made the roads into a game of Russian roulette were not old people.

Welcome to this discussion, Silent Bob. Why you chose this thread is a good question--there are more interesting places you could have chosen. But since you're here anyway, I may as well give you a little background into our debate. Tom, Ramius, and I were arguing about I.Q. test scores. For the purposes of the discussion, I'd defined the term "true score" on an I.Q. test as the average score you'd get if you took the test 1000 times, assuming no learning effect or fatigue effect. You take the test one time to try to measure this true score. You may get lucky and score above your true score, or unlucky and score below it. Tom brought up the concept of dice. I pointed out that if you wanted to make a die roll analogous to the above situation, you'd have to roll a die one time to try to measure the average roll you'd get if you rolled it 1000 times. Unfortunately, neither Tom nor Ramius appear to have understood the analogy. Or more accurately, Tom probably does have at least a rudimentary understanding of the analogy, but makes fun of it anyway. If it's a choice between intellectual honesty on the one hand, and the chance to make fun of me on the other, Tom will go with choice B every time. Ramius doesn't have to deal with that dilemma, because his understanding of these concepts is a lot weaker.

Yeah, that's what I said. I was basing my driving-related comments on my life experience. If you like, I can tell you this: "I noticed that in immigrant-heavy areas, the quality of driving was considerably worse than most other places I'd been. And every time I noticed someone doing something stupid, I ran the offending vehicle off the road. Once it was stopped, I demanded to see proof of citizenship. Based on my penchant for discerning legals from illegals, I concluded that a piece of paper which says, 'you are now a legal U.S. resident or citizen' automatically makes someone a better driver." But a paragraph like that wouldn't be true. I had no way of knowing which immigrants were here legally, and which were here illegally. I simply observed that recent immigrants seemed to bring their home countries' driving styles with them.