Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

I've long noticed that the focus of a gaze, the a propos of a smirk, can distinguish the aware and open-minded from the fools and the fanatical. Just peek at random people in the street, compare to pictures of random researchers on the Internet, or to pictures of random religious fanatics also on the net. There's a lot you can tell -- or maybe you can't, but then odds are a lot of people could tell you can't.

Several friends recently shared their similar experience with me. And so, in the spirit of HotOrNot, I eventually bought DEFTORDAFT.COM. The idea would be to rate people by intelligence according to published pictures. Is there a business plan? Not quite yet. Maybe I could just be diversification for the hotornot site. Or maybe we could link to a geek-oriented dating site such as OkCupid? We could also provide a captcha system in the spirit of HotCaptcha that recognizes people intelligent enough to differentiate the deft from the daft.

I suspect the data processing will be more complex than for HotOrNot, since a sense for sexual attraction is more uniformly shared than a sense for intellectual discrimination. Although even HotOrNot could probably classify people in clusters according to their aesthetic tastes. Because DeftOrDaft will judge the intelligence of the viewer as well as the viewee, we'll probably have to resort to pre-calibrated samples, such as people with known IQs or SATs, or from colleges with known SAT averages; and we'll probably have to use Bayesian analysis techniques such as used by LikeBetter. So, interesting stuff going on behind the scenes...

Ideas are cheap. This one is free. Wanna join with the expensive part: actually building the site?

Even though the topic is actively censored by the intellectual terrorists who control the intelligentsia with their political correctness, it is a fact confirmed by everyone's experience as well as by repeated scientific experiments that there is a measurable discrepancy between the distribution of general intelligence among men and women. IQ as measured in either sex leads to a normal distribution of intelligence along a bell curve, but the standard deviation of IQ amongst males is noticably larger, and the average of IQ amongst males is higher.

Now, I have a rational explanation for both statistics that does not depend on any significant difference distribution of genetic abilities at birth, except for one essential trait: that males in general have a tendency to be more reckless than females.

What does this difference in risk-aversion have to do with the distribution of intelligence, will you ask? Everything! Because more risks means more selection, both internal and external.

Ben once wrote that One good Husband is worth two good Wives; for the scarcer things are, the more they're valued. Well, then by the same token, one intelligent woman is worth a lot of intelligent men.

Since I'm processing the backlog of my blog notes, here's one piece about a topic that has been at the center of several scandals this year yet surprisingly little open public discussions: genetic differences amongst human beings.