Ves

I don’t think this debunks IQ so much as it debunks learning that your IQ is some number and then deciding to never try learning anything because you feel its worthless to try. I do think it’s wise to be honest about the realistic paths you can take in life given your capacities (IQ being one type of capacity). You just shouldn’t decide to never learn anything because you (incorrectly) assume its impossible for you to do so.

Sorry, I meant you can practice the SAT to increase your score. That‘s all that really matters for the colleges :-).

I think it is correct that SAT scores are fairly correlated with IQ. You can practice to increase your score, though. When Leo said that SAT scores dont affect how fulfilling your life is, I think he meant that this is independent of IQ. Meaning that you should refocus your goals to have the best/most fulfilling life you can and not stress over how low your IQ is. I doubt its below average anyway, if you made it through a high-school education and did decently. You might as well pick any other attribute you have that isn't in the top 1% of the population and stress about that.

I have some advice, maybe. I spent high school playing video games and didn’t decide I wanted to go to college until I was 19 or so. I went to community college for math while working part time, saved a lot of money, then transferred into one of the best universities for pure mathematics in the US (probably top 15). So: all hope is not lost if you really want to go to a good college. This option is probably better, too. Now, this only worked out because I made a 4.0 in community college, and I am not sure this is possible for everyone, particularly in math. It does require some innate talent. You should be able to do well enough, though, even if you don’t get into a top university. Just do as well as you can and apply to transfer later. You shouldn’t have FOMO; the events will happen to you too, just later. Though, I still feel the way you do, sometimes. I think I want to go into academia, and there are insanely cracked people that learn an unreal amount of (say) modern algebraic geometry as a high schooler. One in particular I saw is teaching a course in K theory as an undergraduate, while also taking a ton of graduate classes every semester. There are always better people to compare yourself to. Each of us can only do the work we can do, though. I am sure you can continue on in community college, make friends, transfer into a university, and have a similar experience.

I think it's really going to depend on how much time you want to put into learning math. I'm fairly confident that, with enough time, you could learn enough math such that the exam isn't very difficult for you. This may require relearning a lot of basic math from scratch. I say this as somebody with a publication in pure math. However, given that you hate math, this may not be the best path forward; Leo's path may be a better alternative. I think the cost of his approach is that any time you do encounter math in your degree, it's always going to be fairly confusing and painful. For a psych degree, you probably won't need to endure too much, so I think this is a valid tradeoff to make. I think my only remaining worry is that the "memorize and grind through" approach may end up being more work in the long run, but it's hard to say. Deeply learning a lot of math concepts takes a lot of time as well.

Well, in some sense, getting a full-time job to do some math-related work for an arbitrary company already feels like selling my life. I will avoid working overtime, though, considering I already don't want to work full-time.

This is probably what I'll end up doing. I do want to start some sort of business or independent venture of my own at some point, though. It's just hard to know 1) specifically what I should do, as well as 2) when to do it. I have an idea in my mind of creating youtube content. Perhaps I can do that on the side, even if I have a job. It probably makes the most sense at this point to work a job with good pay for awhile, and acquire a lot of capital/financial independence.

I guess that's the thing. At one point, I did have a grand passion. I spent all of my time for several years doing pure math and became pretty good at it as a result. Good enough to publish as an undergrad, at least. Now that I realize how much of my life would be eaten up by struggling to comprehend increasingly meaningless complex abstractions if I go into academia, I am less interested in it. Thus, the passion has collapsed, but there is nothing left in its wake and so I feel sort of directionless. Of course, I am still going to college so it's not as if I am actually directionless, yet. I just don't know what comes next and I have no grander vision like I used to. Maybe you're right. I think it's reasonably expensive though. I've slowly depleted my savings over the years of going to college because math at university is so difficult that I can only work 15 hours a week—just enough to pay my bills. I'll keep this in mind for the future, though.

You have a good point, I think. Especially if I can do a work-from-home type job, which are increasingly more common. However, I feel a strong internal sense to start something on my own as well. It’s just hard to know whether I should attempt to do it now, or whether I should work until I’m, say, near 30 first.

Hi. I'm typing this as a forum post because it would be nice to have some input or wisdom from other people. I'll try to keep it relatively concise, though I fear it might evolve into an oversharing blog post. Some background: I'm 23. I have one semester left in my university studies. My home life didn't exactly set me up for anything—my dad has a traumatic brain injury and my mom has autism. They both work low-level jobs like call centers or at Walmart. I was able to move out at 18, work a lot while going to community college for math, save up a lot of money, then somehow get accepted to the University of Texas (in mathematics); with a full ride, due to the fact that my parents are poor. Moreover, my two roommates and I bought a house together in Austin, immediately before Elon declared he was building his cybertruck factory here (it has since appreciated in value considerably, but the profit will be split between the three of us). Since I began community college at 19, I thought that I wanted to go to graduate school and do my PhD in math. I was able to get into an undergraduate research program (in geometric group theory) last summer, and our preprint has recently been accepted for publication. At this REU, I met a girl and we have since fallen in love. She is a double major in compsci and math and graduates at the same time as me, she has a 6-figures programming job lined up after graduation. We are currently in a long-distance relationship as the REU was deliberately comprised of people from all over the nation. The Uncertainty: As I did more math, it started to get substantially less meaningful to me. It very quickly gets so abstract that you can no longer talk about it with anybody in a meaningful way; during my last semester, in my graduate course, it began to feel highly contrived and disconnected from anything helpful to society. Moreover, during this time in university, I spontaneously developed insomnia for almost two years and got seriously burnt out (it has just recently improved a lot). I no longer want to go to graduate school—it would require 6 more years of my life dedicated to problems that feel ridiculously contrived, followed by a lengthy time trying to climb the academia ladder. From my time at the REU, I learned there are people much younger, smarter, and better than me at math. I would not be a luminary academic or anything. I have a strong internal sense that I could spend six years in a better way. Yet, I have no idea what to do in absence of this, other than planning to move in with my girlfriend as soon as I can (this is where I fully noticed the downside of buying a house with 2 other people: if you want to leave, they have to have an alternative living situation lined up. Regardless, I think it will work out fairly well, and I can be out around this time next year). I really hate the idea of working a desk job. I had a desk job as my first job when I was 18, and it was so miserably depressing that I quit after 6 weeks—it caused my back to constantly hurt from all the sitting and it was generally soulless. This makes all programming jobs very unappealing to me, despite the fact that with half a year of training, I could probably land a pretty good one. Though if I was going to go this route, I would get my masters in Data Science. My girlfriend has offered to simply be the sole breadwinner for us both, as she makes so much, but this idea is very unnerving to me. At the same time, she is an unreasonably good partner, and so it might not actually be so damaging to the relationship (I am highly confident that she means this when she says it). In any case, I could still work a small amount to pay rent, and not be completely dependent on her. This additionally has the advantage of being completely able to focus on my own pursuits (which are, as of yet, undetermined). Uncertainty tl;dr: Basically, I would like to do something that I have some passion for but that doesn't completely abandon my past accomplishments: I should have a BSc in Math with a 4.0 GPA after next semester, a publication, and probably $30k-50k in profit from selling my house. It feels like all industry pursuits for mathematicians are desk jobs in some way. Also, I would have to simply work for a company, which sounds very unappealing to me. Maybe the best option is just to get a high-paying programming job, work it for 5 years and save all of my money, then leave.

Things can be social constructs and still reliant on biological makeup (and I would argue that gender does, though there are some very radical people that argue its SOLELY based on identity — this seems to just completely annihilate the categories of man and woman) For example, race is a social construct, and it is not completely devoid of a biological basis. Another example is “attractive people.” If a society deems high cheekbones, say, as attractive, this this provides some biological basis for the social construct. In general, you shouldn’t take “socially constructed” to mean “arbitrary.”

I guess I am not very surprised about this, but I thought it was interesting that they want to raise the age to starting HRT to 21. Not even 18 is good enough; I assume they want to slowly raise the age until trans people can't exist (or... exist in a worse state that makes conservatives even more uncomfortable?) I live in Texas and am 23 on HRT. Hopefully I can age faster than they can raise it.

I think that it is easy to (having an objective perspective on the matter, not having recently had sex and feeling violated, and having the full wealth of knowledge of SD) make a criticism like, "Your spiral wizardry abilities are bad and youre not effectively communicating to different spiral dynamics levels. Furthermore, the fact that you did not intuitively pick up on this other person's spiral level, despite never learning about this model, and adjust your communication to match it shows that you were really expressing a lower level of development in this moment." It just feels like either too strong or irrelevant of a criticism to make. It's not as if he's trying to maximize other people's understanding of him in order to avoid conflict at all moments of his life. It seems like he was okay with her leaving when she wasn't able to take on his perspective. Should he be obligated to handhold everyone as much as possible, and, if he does not in some cases, he suffers the terrible fate of his part of that interaction being demoted to stage green? This seems to force stage yellow into stage where you have to constantly tailor your words to what you believe the other person's views are.

Currently watching this, and I like mrgirl even more now. His talk about his goal with 'debates' was very yellow-y and enlightening. His views on consent, the subject of the actual talk, are interesting as well. I recently had a complex sort -of-nonconsensual sexual interaction on Halloween (I was the one coerced/pressured in some sense), and it's helpful or interesting for me to think about this through mrgirl's framework. EDIT: Wow, the conversation just got better after the debate talk!! Probably the best I have seen from him so far.

I agree that this does not give a complete picture, but I think it is important to acknowledge and plays a large role. You are not purely an individual, nor are you purely determined by the environment. The two are interrelated and so both places seem like valid areas to make changes in. I do agree that from an individual level, analyzing the problem like this is very disempowering since the solutions are not able to be achieved by you alone. However, forming organizations that bring awareness to these topics and try to bring structural change to the US is an important thing to do, because these things play a huge role. Also, these structural and historical things have to be at least acknowledged on the individual scale because it simply provides more information and a clearer picture as to why you're in the current situation. I don't think I would necessarily agree that the narrative should be more focused on individual choice because individual choice is not a solution that everyone can implement. Moreover, if your goal is to make changes to "Black America", a term that is necessarily a collective grouping of many individuals, it makes sense to examine problems in a collective sense. This means examining histories and structural issues. It feels very odd and ineffective to take a problem that is necessarily collective, even in the phrasing, divide it down to the individual actors, and then try to influence each one of them by giving them general guidelines on how to improve their lives. I'm sure most people have heard these things. It's like, suppose we made two words. One, we work on the systemic issues directly and in the other we say things like, "stop being single mothers. Aren't you aware that this is bad for many reasons? Also, commit less crimes. This is causing many issues as well. You need to take personal action to fix these problems." The former seems to be more effective since we are trying to work on a collective problem. For a single individual, the latter seems to be more effective, as the systemic issues effects on an individual are more pernicious and abstract. I agree that this may happen, however it depends on the black friends that you make. There are black people who follow, say, Candace owens or Jesse Lee Peterson who would be fully on board with the things you say, since it mimics a lot of their talking points. For this reason, I'm not sure I really like the, "make more black friends," solution, because the implication is really something like, "make more black friends that are reasonably close to my current position." And even if you did this, they would likely respond in a similar way to Terell. I think Terell's goal here is to make you more aware of the black experience or develop a higher level of empathy for black people which will inform your views better. I would need to think about this more.