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Rise of the midwits

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By scooby

 LLNL and the rise of the Midwit? Is this an issue?


Have we created this over educated society over this last 50 or 60 years.
We've gone from five percent of the population in the '50s having a BA, to nearly 50 percent of the population having one.
...You also get more people that have master's degrees and more people that have doctorates.

Having a doctorate was seen as a sign that you are part of the intellectual elite. (it still does, and that's the problem).

Imagine if the average iq of a person that had a doctorate was reduced from 135, all the way down to 115?
Imagine if a doctorate became something that was associated with being a midwit.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Math and verbal GRE and SAT scores are correlated to IQ and are a factor in admission, also statistics have been available on these scores. The answer would depend on the university and the department, and when the degree was granted, it is something you could probably research if you are interested.

12/06/2023 9:28 AM
Anonymous said…
Wouldn't it be the case, that with the high cost of living in the Bay Area, and the difficulty in filling positions, that Livermore is actually forced to hire some people who are overqualified? Or is that more of a problem in New Mexico?

This would contradict the claim you are making, although I would admit it would also lead to the hiring of poorly qualified people.
12/06/2023 10:49 AM
Anonymous said…
“Imagine if the average iq of a person that had a doctorate was reduced from 135, all the way down to 115?”

And imagine the 115 IQ midwit doctorate was also an open loop bully with an EQ of 45?
12/06/2023 1:20 PM
Anonymous said…
As you know by the way, chatbots score much higher than 135, already; although of course, the tests are designed to characterize human and not machine intelligence.

https://bgr.com/tech/chatgpt-took-an-iq-test-and-its-score-was-sky-high/

They are so far, of course, unable to understand higher-level concepts including mathematics, and lack the ability to plan and carry out projects in a useful manner, but those things are being worked on. For example, Google's Gemini project, the rumors about Q* from OpenAI, etc.

Of course, there have also been recent efforts to enable simple models that can run on an ordinary PC, to carry out reasoning despite having lower verbal fluency and IQ:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/orca-2-teaching-small-language-models-how-to-reason/

https://www.secondstate.io/articles/orca-2-13b/
12/06/2023 5:21 PM
Anonymous said…
Herds of MBA degrees with a mixture of CRT and DEI thrown in.
We used to think that it was the revenge of the C students prowling the halls of the DOE and NNSA were the problem.

We have met the enemy, and it is us.
12/06/2023 10:41 PM
Anonymous said…
"Math and verbal GRE and SAT scores are correlated to IQ and are a factor in admission, also statistics have been available on these scores. The answer would depend on the university and the department, and when the degree was granted, it is something you could probably research if you are interested.


12/06/2023 9:28 AM"

Seems about right, Harvard, MIT and so on keep the numbers up but you have more and more people getting degrees from lower ranked places. LANL use to have 30% of the their postdocs from the top 10 schools back in 2000, since it is maybe 5-3% or less, a 10 fold drop.
12/07/2023 11:34 AM
Anonymous said…
People with genuine brains are being managed (not led) by MBAs, lawyers, clergy, politicians, and journalism majors. This sad state was easily and correctly predicted in the 80s. So it has been since Galileo.
12/08/2023 12:55 PM
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