Vim is a way more competent editor than nano. If you spend a lot of time editing files via ssh, vim is amazing. And when you get bitten by it, you’re infected. ;-)

Hah! So true!

Kubuntu uses snaps as default and I’ve had some trouble with that. My dad is using Kubuntu and there are problems with how programs communicate. Mint is probably a better choice.

I used the example to illustrate a point. The tests have a target population that they are constructed for. This is also the reason as to why modern people score really high on old tests, because they are not the target population. The thing is, people aren’t very different, neither across cultures nor across time. We should expect the average person of today to be just as intelligent as the average person of 1924, but they score differently in the test. It’s almost as if the test doesn’t measure intelligence at all! If the tests actually measured intelligence, they wouldn’t need to be specifically designed for a certain population.

When an IQ-test is designed, a number of assumptions are made, e.g., normal distribution, that an underlying factor is well described by the battery of questions and that this underlying factor is the best thing that can explain the variation seen. All these assumptions are debatable at best. I mean, it’s just factor analysis, and all the assumptions of that statistical method applies.

If you’re measuring heart rate, breathing and sweating, I guess you could use a polygraph. If you want to measure a potential cognitive decline in a single person, you can have them do several of these tests to see if there’s a trend. There is nothing pseudoscientific about using these methods in this way. The pseudoscience comes in when we’re trying to tie the results to truthfulness in the case of the polygraph or intelligence in the case of the IQ test. Or even worse, when trying to compare two individuals from their results.

No, studies on IQ have shown that the test design often assume something about the population taking the test. If you produce a test for British students in secondary school and give it to miners in Zimbabwe, then the miners will probably achieve way lower scores than is it expected. This is because the students are more used to taking tests. IQ tests have been used in this way to promote racist ideas, when the real problem is the methodology behind IQ tests.

There’s a whole book about this, “the mismeasure of man”, by Stephen Jay Gould.

Sure, but I guess that it’s just a small part in a battery of tests to evaluate the effects of an injury. I mean, it does measure something, even if it’s just the ability to sit for a test.

At university, I had a lecturer who took this one step further. Instead of a power point, he used a word document that he read word by word.