TLM3101 posted:

Oh boy! Glennbeckistan 2.0!

Seriously, though? Hey, JRod! Look at that! They're going to try out your ideas in real life! We get to see the realworld, practical consequences of your ideology! You should be absolutely elated! Right?

Or are you going to preemptively disavow this as not a *true* Libertarian experiment right off the bat?

Elephant Ambush posted:

If it fails (it will fail) he'll just say they didn't do it right or that some vague entity caused it to fail by violating NAP or some poo poo. In his mind libertopia cannot fail it can only be failed.

Karia posted:

Anyone who thinks cars are great needs to work in modern automotive manufacturing. It's utterly terrifying. I set up a production machining line which makes oil pump cover plates for a car you have definitely heard of. I'm not proud. It's the worst thing I've ever done. We spent months setting up a production line and making it bullet proof so that the fuckwits who run the company could hire 12 temps for 24/7 production and make 1.5 million parts per year. One person picks up blanks out of a box and puts them on the inbound conveyor, the other person takes parts off the outbound conveyor and puts them into another box. They burn through temps: it's terrible, mind-numbing work that they would automate in a hot second if they could figure out how to stop the blanks sticking together from residual oil.

And they're not even good at it. More than a year later, they couldn't figure out how to grind the blanks to consistent thickness. There was a machined feature with a tolerance we couldn't hit because of internal stresses in the part left from previous operations. When we told them, they just waved their hands and said that the customer would change the print and open up the tolerance. Then they didn't bother asking the customer, so three months later when we were finally ready to turn the line on it got shut straight back down immediately when the request was refused. We (the machining people) had to tell them how to fix their process. These people are a well-regarded, industry leading manufacturer that make critical, safety related parts that are in your car, right now.

Don't worry, though: they weren't the first company to make these parts. The previous supplier got dumped because not only were they shipping 30% scrap to the customer, but even worse, they couldn't keep up with the higher production requirements. Another install I worked on went so poorly that the car company (let's just say it starts with a T) had to execute the line in the contract which states that if production hasn't started by X date, then they send in their engineers and do it themselves. Our customer tried to throw us under the bus and say that the delay was our fault. The car company took one look and said "no, the machining folks are the only ones here who have their poo poo together."

Mass manufacturing is a horrific, dehumanizing nightmare, whose ghoulishnish is exceeded only by its incompetence.

polymathy posted:

So what is your point exactly? That we shouldn't manufacture cars?

polymathy posted:

The point is that there are a ton of entry level jobs in a complex economy that are undesirable. Almost all of us spend some time taking these jobs, until we've gained enough experience to move up into more desirable positions or save enough to strike out on our own as entrepreneurs.

DEEP STATE PLOT posted:

lmfao @ still thinking iq is a meaningful measurement and not an elitist, and indeed racist, tool used to otherize people whose iq doesn't stack up

polymathy posted:

If intelligence doesn't differ between people then there would be no reason for the SATs to exist and no reason to have any qualifications for admission to college whatsoever.

SpaceSDoorGunner posted:

Somfin posted:

He won't watch this lol

But everyone else should, someone talking about a 310 IQ doesn't know a single goddamn thing

polymathy posted:

The point is that there are a ton of entry level jobs in a complex economy that are undesirable. Almost all of us spend some time taking these jobs, until we've gained enough experience to move up into more desirable positions or save enough to strike out on our own as entrepreneurs.

polymathy posted:

So what is your point exactly? That we shouldn't manufacture cars?

polymathy posted:

There are many, many jobs that are not particularly desirable but are necessary for a functioning society. You can certainly argue that workers who take such jobs ought to be treated well, paid fairly and so forth and we can have a discussion about that. But

polymathy posted:

Yes, Tesla having an IQ of 310 is pretty unlikely. However, I think a fair estimate is that Tesla's IQ was somewhere between 160 and 200 given what we know about his accomplishments and the verified IQ scores of his contemporaries.

OwlFancier posted:

Furthermore, if unpleasant and difficult jobs are necessary in an economy, why are we supposed to treat them as temporary? After all if somebody has to do them, why do we assume nobody should do them for long? That seems inefficient, because if you have to keep training new people to do the job then they aren't going to be as good at it as someone who has done it for a while. Why do people have to start out doing bad jobs until they can do good jobs? If all the jobs need doing that seems a bit weird? Why wouldn't we invest resources into making the difficult jobs less difficult, or the unpleasant jobs less unpleasant so that we can ensure that these (again, in your own words, necessary) jobs can be done by people who are good at them for as long as possible?

polymathy posted:

Yeah, honestly I'm not going to spent 3 hours watching a YouTube video about The Bell Curve.

We're not talking about race and IQ, or Charles Murray.

The subject at hand is whether or not intelligence differs between individuals. Anyone with any familiarity with the real world understands that intelligence differs wildly between people.

Yes, Tesla having an IQ of 310 is pretty unlikely. However, I think a fair estimate is that Tesla's IQ was somewhere between 160 and 200 given what we know about his accomplishments and the verified IQ scores of his contemporaries.

Perestroika posted:

IQ is of severely limited utility even at the best of times, when you're doing controlled tests and apply them to a very narrow factor. If you're trying Trying to assign IQ to third parties after the fact it is absolutely meaningless and about as accurate as a horoscope.

polymathy posted:

What do you mean by "assign IQ to third parties after the fact"?

IQ tests are imperfect attempts to quantify a real thing, which is human intelligence. Whatever it's deficiencies, it's obvious that intelligence differs substantially between individuals.

Therefore, I am arguing in favor or hierarchies of competence. Democracy, whether in the workplace or outside of it, all suffer from the problem that they elevate the opinion of the less knowledgeable, less competent with the more knowledgeable and more competent.

DarklyDreaming posted:

This kinda demonstrates the main problem with modern capitalism.* If you're not winning you're losing. If you decide you're happy working 40 hours a week on an assembly line, or sweeping floors, or driving a truck from one end of the country to another, you shouldn't have to pursue a managerial position just to keep your kids from starving. Yet that's the assumption built into the modern economy, not that everyone can be the CEO if they just work hard enough, but that everyone should want to start their own business and you're a failure who deserves to be poor if you don't.

*"When did Capitalism become reality?" Is a serious question deserving a serious historian, not an unqualified internet shitposter but for the sake of convenience when I say "Modern Capitalism" I mean "The dominant economic theory of America and Western Europe from 1890 onwards"

Who What Now posted:

Intelligence isn't competence.

SpaceSDoorGunner posted:

Jrod since you decided to split the dumbest finest hair over the civil war thing, I have a new question-

Did you or did you not just read and/or watch a YouTube video that references The Charles Murray book?

polymathy posted:

I've never read The Bell Curve and I consider Charles Murray to be a mixed bag. He's certainly not one of my heroes by any stretch.

OwlFancier posted:

And the reason for that is that military force is necessary to protect the power of the US economy. The US needs to maintain control over as much of the world as possible to ensure favorable access to its resources for its private sector to exploit, and a significant portion of that sector needs the US to maintain a large military because they are involved in supplying it.

OwlFancier posted:

Furthermore, if unpleasant and difficult jobs are necessary in an economy, why are we supposed to treat them as temporary? After all if somebody has to do them, why do we assume nobody should do them for long? That seems inefficient, because if you have to keep training new people to do the job then they aren't going to be as good at it as someone who has done it for a while. Why do people have to start out doing bad jobs until they can do good jobs? If all the jobs need doing that seems a bit weird? Why wouldn't we invest resources into making the difficult jobs less difficult, or the unpleasant jobs less unpleasant so that we can ensure that these (again, in your own words, necessary) jobs can be done by people who are good at them for as long as possible?

Who What Now posted:

Jrod what's your IQ? Whip it out.

polymathy posted:

What do you mean by "assign IQ to third parties after the fact"?

JustJeff88 posted:

What FuckWit also does is that it constantly repeats this fallacy about advancing to a better job later, as if everyone is morally obliged to go through some sort of soul-sucking shite-job purgatory before they can have any personal dignity. You will notice that it fails to mention that somebody will always be going this unpleasant job even if all previous workers move on to something better (they won't). It never has a thought for making a terrible job less terrible, only a vague delusion (read: veiled narrative) that people who work shite jobs will be better for it somehow (they won't) and ascend to better things later (most won't). FuckWit's messianic fable sure sounds a lot like the lies of Capitalism and the Just-World Fallacy, doesn't it?

polymathy posted:

This should be an area that Libertarians and Leftists can agree on. I don't care what the private sector wants in terms of resources, imperialism is immoral. Period. If a business wants access to a natural resource in another country, they better be prepared to pay the market price for that resource or do without it.

I know that Leftists consider imperialism to be a natural extension or necessary adjunct to capitalism. What you need to understand is that Libertarianism isn't necessarily in favor of capitalism and we are absolutely, fundamentally opposed to imperialism.

OwlFancier posted:

If you want to be an ancom, or libsoc, then that is absolutely grand, welcome to the club, but yes, I understand that imperialism, militarism, forcible seizure, control, and protection of resources, is necessary to capitalism and to all forms of private property, private property being necessarily constructed and upheld by the threat of force, because nobody would recognize it voluntarily when it comes to denying people the products of labour.

So you can be "not necessarily in favor of capitalism" and that's lovely, but I vehemently oppose it because I understand how it functions. If you dislike the effects, you must dislike the cause, anything else is either ignorance or dishonesty.

OwlFancier posted:

Even if we accept the idea that there are super smart IQ guys who should be given preferential power over people who are not that, who's gonna decide who they are? Clearly the common plebs can not understand who is and isn't a big brain boy. So all the big brain boys will have to decide among themselves who is suitable to make decisions.

And wouldn't you know it, if you went out and asked the people in charge today whether or not they are the best people for the job, they'd tell you "yes I am"

So how does a supposed "hierarchy of competence" not simply become a political hierarchy? Because the people in charge of deciding what the hierarchy is are the people at the top of it and they're going to make decisions based on whatever they think is best and there is no way to check whether they are right, that's how a hierarchy works. That's literally how you're saying it should work because you explicitly say that people at the top of the hierarchy should be making the decisions over the people who aren't at the top of it.

polymathy posted:

As far as I recall, I've never had a formal IQ test.

Like many others though I have taken the SAT test. I scored 1300. Above average, perhaps gifted, but certainly not genius level.

This would probably translate to an IQ somewhere between 120 and 130.

Karia posted:

FYI: no it (probably) wouldn't. 1300 composite score is in roughly the 86th percentile. The 86th percentile of IQ is 116 (by definition, as has ben discussed previously.) Of course, it would depend on when you took it, but at least over the last few years it's been pretty steady, and I don't care enough to hunt down more data.

https://blog.prepscholar.com/histor...k%20the%20test.

Meanwhile, I got a 32 on the ACT like ten years ago, which is in roughly the ~96th percentile. Since you want to establish a hierarchy of competency, we may as well do it based on our test scores, so that means I'm your boss now.

polymathy posted:

You have to define what you mean by "preferential power over people". As a libertarian, I'm opposed to the initiation of force against anyone.

What I do support is entrepreneurs who have unique and uncommon competence in a particular sphere being able to make decisions about their own company and / or factory without being hamstrung by the democratic decrees of their employees who may not have the knowledge or competence to render such verdicts.

JustJeff88 posted:

I took the GRE and scored top 1% in verbal and top 2% in writing (quantitative was another story). With no humour whatsoever, I wanted to feel proud of myself but I mostly realised that the exam was utterly meaningless.

I'm still proud of how I did on my A-levels which is something that fills me with shame and I would never admit to anyone who knew me personally.