The Glade 4.0

Vocabulary is a good predictor of intelligence.

An interesting project would be to parse through large bodies of text written by people of various intelligence measurements (disregarding any arguments about their validity) and assign some kind of score to each word based on how "smart" it is. Then create some kind of Bayesian text analyzer that uses the word database to predict the IQ of the author of a sample of text. I wonder if you could eventually tune it to be highly accurate?

I wouldn't be surprised if someone has actually done this. I did a little googling, but everything that turned up involving Bayesian analysis and intelligence prediction had to do with military intelligence (which is also kind of interesting).

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Actually the ignore list works better.

Vocabulary is a good predictor of it, but using too many archaic words in place of simpler ones makes the writing less incomprehensible.

You must have forgotten about the Great White Phosphorous debate.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Um, what? You mean less comprehensible, yes?

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Making a point by example?

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Typo...

While acknowledging I'm not real expert on intelligence metrics, I'm curious as to why you think vocabulary has anything to do with it? Vocabulary is knowledge, not comprehension or deduction. Seems to be a parallel measurement.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Which to me reads as an endorsement for a public option. It maintains low prices for a life need - health care. More reason for me to support a simple expansion of medicare to all people, and an elimination of the health insurance industry. Which, by the way, is not on the docket for the current round of health care reform.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Let's see, a new poster takes the time to make a lengthy, reasoned, rational response to a question asked, and this is the
response you give. Please just go away. Your arrogance, narcissism and closed mindedness disgust me.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

That new poster framed medicare, a public insurance option that is fantastically popular with the people who use it, in a somewhat monstrous light. I felt it was unfair, and inaccurate to describe practices with medicare that are no different than private companies. She did not provide context for her horror story, and I could certainly find stories of success to counter it. People are overwhelmingly satisfied with their medicare.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

She provided an illustration of how Medicare works based on her 20 years of experience in the field. Anything else, you've projected onto her post because of your inability to comprehend what people write.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Yes, so like Khross she used her credibility to try and make a dishonest point, or at least a point that was lacking a significant amount of context. Appeals to your own authority are still a logical fallacy, especially on the internet.

You guys are blowing the word "misleading" way the hell out of proportion. All of you should know that if I'm going to accuse someone of lying, I'll just up and do it.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I don't really know much about it, either, I just know that total vocabulary size correlates very well with general IQ -- practically better than anything else that we can measure, in fact. So do SAT scores, That's not terribly surprising given that half of the SAT is essentially a vocabulary test. Why this is true is not exactly understood. There are probably several partial explanations.

1) Generally speaking, intelligent people read more. They have larger vocabularies simply because they've been exposed to a larger written corpus.

2) Vocabulary isn't strictly a function of knowledge and memory. Words represent ideas, so knowing a word entails understanding the idea that it represents. As words become increasingly more esoteric and nuanced in their meaning, they become more difficult to learn and use correctly.

3) Similarly, in synonym-laden languages, much of the process of learning vocabulary is differential. Take words like: hate, anger, rage, spite, malice, strife. The ideas are all related, but they have different (sometimes only slightly different) meanings or connotations. When you first learn what a word like "malice" means, you probably learn it in terms of the simpler words you already know. It's like spite, but different. The learning process thus involves relationships between ideas, and your ability to compare and contrast them.

4) Vocabulary has structure. Think of all the Greek and Latin prefixes, suffixes, and other component elements of English vocabulary. Learning a larger number of words is easier if you can see this underlying structure and how words relate to one another structurally (ex. pathetic, pathos, sympathetic, pathological, etc.)

5) It may be that the ability to retain and access information may not be entirely unrelated to measurable intelligence in the first place.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

You were saying?


You don't understand the difference between an appeal to authority and first-hand expert testimony. She offered her analysis of the situation based on her own relevant experiences and knowledge, nothing more.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Please learn what an "Appeal to Authority" logical fallacy is before you look even more ignorant.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Not possible.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I'm sorry that these folks don't think you can handle yourself, SG. I didn't think my post constituted an attack on *you*, however, I did feel your post *was* misleading. I didn't call you any names, I didn't attack your intelligence or question your history or motives. I simply called it like I saw it.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Point by point, demonstrate what was misleading about her post.

Demonstrate that Medicare isn't going to go bankrupt in 8 years.

Demonstrate the cost relationship between Medicare reimbursement and any given CPT code so that you can prove that CMS pays a workable fee, as you claim.

Hell, for that matter, calculate any given CPT code's reimbursement for any given ZIP code. If you can't do that, you really shouldn't be acting as though you're an authority on Medicare reimbursement, considering you're referring to methodologies at least 10 years out of date.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Relying on one's own knowledge is not an appeal to authority or logical fallacy. Being in the field for 20 years gives her knowledge you don't have. You're simply making the assertion that private insurance is no different from Medicare in this regard and you have NO knowledge on it, nor have you cited anything other than YOUR own authority. The only one being dishonest is you; you've demonstrated no dishonesty on SGs part whatsoever.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yes, but using one's own position of authority combined with nothing more than an anecdote is *not* a compelling argument, and the use of authority to try and make an anecdote more credible is misleading to one's audience.

SG knows darn well that private insurance companies, through PPO networks, not only force patients to use specific providers, but control what those doctors can charge for their services. The doctors write off the difference between the fee schedule they receive and the price they charge.

Private insurance companies often have standards of care that run counter to what a doctor might want. And if the procedure isn't going to be paid for, it's not likely to be performed.

In other words, private companies make life and death choices for their insureds. The force their insureds to use specific doctors. They reduce choice and freedom for the people they insure. Because of the nature of health care, and it's necessity to our lives, they can use their position to control our choices.

I want a choice that's public. I want a non profit health care insurance provider that is not worried about stockholders, but instead worried about voters.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

So it comes down to what has been said since the get go- this "reform" is nothing but political pandering to ensure a voting bloc. Thank you for finally admitting that.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

This is foolish. Doctors basically will end up a quarter million in debt, make less money, with no less risk of getting sued for millions of dollars, which, keeps their malpractice insurance premiums at insane levels.

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The Dude abides.

Monty, from what I understand you teach fencing at a college. In my experience, college employees receive discounts on tuition. I know several professors who periodically take random classes for shits and giggles because they can do it for free or for a very low cost. I myself am taking a class this semester that cost me $100. I'm not even a professor.

Use your employee discount to enroll in an English class.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Hi guys, I'm a long time lurker and first time poster.

I greatly enjoy the discussions on these political issues as I can gain some points of perspective that I hadn't previously considered. The only caveat that I can see to these discussions is the focus on criticism without the presentation of possible solutions to the problems at hand (that is before they devolve into philosophical intelligence measuring and Monty bashing).

Thus my question is (especially to those that have intimate knowledge or experience in the respective fields) what would be the best resolution to the issue at hand? If the public option won't garner the price regulations that are required to maintain the program in the long run without overcoming private insurance and if medicare/medicaid will be bankrupt in ~8 years, what would be a sustainable solution?

/discuss

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"Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes."
- George Soros