US adults score below average on worldwide test

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by arauca, Oct 8, 2013.

  1. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

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    Two countries. Not sure why that's relevant though...
     
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  3. WillNever Valued Senior Member

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    Why is this surprising? Millions of our children are the spawn of uneducated, illiterate illegal aliens. Of course they're going to come out dumber.
     
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  5. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Again we have 80% of our population in service sector jobs. Cashiers, truck drivers, counter clerics, these the are the most common jobs in america now (including Canada), they are also the ones being "enhanced" in efficiency by automated check out lines, automated trucks, online purchases. In the future do you expect plumbing, construction, forestry, etc to replace that? See the question is not is there opening for trade jobs, the question is there enough trade jobs? I would guess that even if we took a few percentage points off that 80% and move it to trade jobs we would very quickly saturate the trade job market with qualified and trained applicants, trade unions would no longer be able to compete against the overload and ability for customers to get cheaper deals from competition between trade workers, the jobs would quickly become nearly as shitty as service sector jobs in income, so people would still be wasting years in a education that would give them less and less returns in income no matter if that education is a trade school or in a college as it presently is.

    Again people look at Japan, sure they are highly educated, but their economy is stagnate, they have massive debt, more then any other country per GDP%, deflation, negative population growth. Education is not the cause or even the answer to the economic problems we face: there simply will not be enough PhD positions, or specialist jobs to power the economy.
     
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  7. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Definition of a prejudice.


    prej·u·dice (prj-ds)
    n.
    1.
    a. An adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts.
    b. A preconceived preference or idea.
    2. The act or state of holding unreasonable preconceived judgments or convictions. See Synonyms at predilection.
    3. Irrational suspicion or hatred of a particular group, race, or religion.
    4. Detriment or injury caused to a person by the preconceived, unfavorable conviction of another or others.
    tr.v. prej·u·diced, prej·u·dic·ing, prej·u·dic·es
    1. To cause (someone) to judge prematurely and irrationally. See Synonyms at bias.
    2. To affect injuriously or detrimentally by a judgment or an act.
    [Middle English, from Old French, from Latin praeidicium : prae-, pre- + idicium, judgment (from idex, idic-, judge; see deik- in Indo-European roots).]

    See report on how children of immigrants do better in school:
    http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/im...ultural-tools-succeed-study/story?id=17284688
     
  8. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    If America is at the bottom, it's probably because the test is irrelevant.
     
  9. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    "—Americans scored toward the bottom in the category of problem solving in a technology rich environment. The top five scores in the areas were from Japan, Finland, Australia, Sweden and Norway, while the U.S. score was on par with England, Estonia, Ireland and Poland."

    Problem solving in a technology rich environment. Isn't that what computers are for?
     
  10. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Some people are dragging the score down.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    "That's irreverent, I mean illelephant. Did somebody say Nukular?"
     
    Last edited: Nov 13, 2013
  11. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    Hmmm. I suspected Americans were a bit slow.
     
  12. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    He was better than Jimmie Carter.
     
  13. Gage Registered Senior Member

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    So part of what your saying is tough to argue against. Machines will undoubtedly replace service sector jobs just like they are in manufacturing now. Sure trade jobs could pick up a little bit of the slack but wages will just go down making the tradeoff worthless.And ya obviously birth rates will have to decrease at some point, but that's a product of education...
    But here is where I believe your wrong. Jobs of the future are going to have to be research and information based. Not only because that's simply all that is left but because your going to have an economy based on designing, creating, and researching the gadgets of tomorrow. Eventually we are going to get to point where all this research and designing (of whatever could be software, microchips, spacecraft, etc) is going to be extremely difficult and require more and more minds to advance further. And education is going to play a major role in that transformation. And I'm willing to bet Japan will be far ahead of the U.S. in next 50 years because of their investment in their education system.
     
  14. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Here where I think you have not really thought through the true horror of this: what if we can make machines that can design, create and research? Evolving algorithms for inventing things have already been used to make patents We already use computers to do more and more of the work of designing things, for example most microchips and circuit boards today are autocircuiting by a computer program. Whole laboratory are already being automated

    If japan high test scores could be converted into mass employment in IT design, creation and research, they would not be in a 20+ year long economic stagnation, for they have had such exceptional scores for decades now. The USA unlike japan is a massive brain suck: intelligent people from all over the world come the USA for higher education and many stay to build their careers, for example Shuji Nakamura left japan to finalize his invention of the Blue LED and get his PhD and then sue his old Japanese company from the USA for proper reward for his invention. This brain suck may make up and then some the problem of USA large native population of imbeciles, morons and rednecks. Japan on the other hand is a highly xenophobic society with virtually no immigration policy other then temp workers, as a result they have labor shortages in many fields and would need millions of immigrants in the near future to make up for their population decline and need for nurses for their increasingly aged population... unless robots can fill those jobs.
     
  15. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    That is not setting a high bar though, is it?
     
  16. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No way. Backward Baby Bush was the stupidest man to ever occupy the White House. Watch one of his speeches or interviews when he was governor of Texas and you'll see a different, more intelligent man. He was a victim of pre-senile dementia but his handlers and the Republican Party leaders did not want that known.

    Bill Clinton had been a successful, popular president: a pot-smokin', draft-dodgin', free-lovin', rockin'-and-rollin', minority-lovin' hippie--an intellectually-oriented Rhodes Scholar who actually understood economics and tried to reduce the national debt unlike Reagan and Bush I--the first Baby Boomer president--finally one of us was in the White House. The G.O.P. knew they had to present someone with a name-recognition factor in order to beat Clinton's VP Al Gore, who was quite popular in his own right. They had to dress up Bush to get people to vote Republican, and worry about the consequences of putting a genuine moron in the White House later.

    Like every presidential candidate since John Kennedy, Bush chose a man nobody liked for his vice-president, discouraging potential assassins. This also discouraged doctors and the dozens of people in the know from urging him to resign, or simply declaring him unfit for office. The words "President Cheney" scared the crap out of every American and all of the nation's allies. But after his term was over, physicians came out of the woodwork, saying they saw the symptoms of pre-senile dementia soon after the election--but they too had been afraid to say anything about it, for the same reason. Can you imagine President Cheney responding to 9/11??? He would probably have found a way to get us into a war with China--a country that had as little to do with 9/11 as Iraq did.

    I had no respect for Carter as a President, but IQ was not his weakness. He was simply an outsider to Washington and had no idea how to get anything done. He won the election because Daddy Bush was almost as dumb as his son; if Roseanne Barr had run in that election instead of 2012 even she might have beat Bush

    Carter confidently hired his old buddy Zbigniew Brzezinski to be his National Security Advisor. But despite his credentials, Brzezinksi did not understand the Middle East--the chessboard upon which the USA and USSR were playing their chess game called the "Cold War" in which the hapless people who lived there were the pawns. On his advice Carter created the militia which eventually took over Afghanistan and became the Taliban. We're still paying the price for that blunder.

    Nonetheless Carter has become perhaps our most beloved ex-president and is doing some magnificent work in reducing epidemics in Africa.

    There's no question that Bush II is stupider than Carter, probably stupider than anyone any of us knows personally. His presidency was an unmitigated disaster (from the longest war our country has ever fought to the economic crash caused by his approval of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco) and we'll be recovering from it for decades--if we're lucky.
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Uh, no, he wasn't. Not even close.
    It's a bar a surprising number of Presidents would have a hard time clearing - Carter didn't screw up much, and he did open up China among his several accomplishments.

    Outside of not firing Paul Volcker as soon as he saw what the guy was up to, allowing Reagan's backers to negotiate with the Iranians in an election year, screwing up the wheat trade for political reasons, and canceling the Olympics for American athletes to avoid propaganda benefits for the Soviets, he seems to have done a pretty good job. And other than Volcker, none of those mistakes hurt the country much (except for enabling Reagan's election, which granted was a serious damage).
     
  18. Gage Registered Senior Member

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    I just don't see computers replacing human engineers and all the creativity that the human mind fosters. At least not for a very very long time. Or maybe I'm just more optimistic.
     
  19. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Sure maybe, it does not matter though. Fact is most people can't be engineers and scientist and inventors, nor could an economy run on that as its primary workforce. Imagine that all the grunts that assemble cellphones got educations to make and design their own cellphones, could everyone then buy 100 cellphones to keep all these new cellphone companies afloat? If everyone was an engineer designing new apps and widgets then everyone would need to buy up all of these things in mass so that everyone could make a livable wage, Right now such people represent less then 1% of the work force, so if all things are equal, buying of new devices and software services would need to increase 10 times just to have 10% of the population as software programs and hardware designers. Our economy though is not and can not grow to meet such a ludicrous demand, if we were still growing at 3% a year it would take 80 years to increase our demand by 10 times, but we are only growing now by 1-2% and will have to stop growing altogether as physical limits or resources and how much people can demand are reached.
     
  20. Gage Registered Senior Member

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    I was picturing massive corporations with growing demands for engineers/ scientist because of the technological challenges. For example a mining company wanting to mine an asteroid. Not hundreds of people with PhD's selling homemade rhinestone cellphones..

    Like I said it's tough to argue against with what your saying as the world's population is growing at an unsustainable rate. There will likely be higher average rates of unemployment in the future, not just because every person can't be an engineer but because there's simply not enough resources on earth. Something will have to give. I just can't fathom a future your painting where there is simply no work to be done and no consumer demand. I mean if machines really do take over both the service and manufacturing sectors then something will have to give. Even the robots have to pay their electric bill.. No?
     
  21. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Well first Asteroid mining autonomously is going to require some pretty strong AI, Second it will be many decades until that is actually profitable. Third a terrestrial mine requires thousands of people, an asteroid mine would likely require several fold less, or else it going to have no economic value at all.

    World population growth has been slowing, developed nations have very low birth rates, some already have negative birthrates, if this holds true then overpopulation will thankfully not be our problem, we will have the resource technically to feed, cloth, shelter and power everyone, but that lack of population growth will help cause complete economic stagnation, economic growth can't happen if everyone satiated and there aren't more peopled demanding more things at the ever exponential rates we have built our civilization on for the last 200 years. We will require totally new kinds of economic models and social systems in order to function as a civilization under stagnate economic growth, a big problem, not as big as overpopuation and everyone having to eat soylent green, but still fucking big problem.

    That an open question, for example if we had a population of 10 billion each taking in 100 Mwh/yr that would be equal to 0.0416% of the earth surface in sunlight energy, so it would not be unfeasible to sustain a population of that size on over twice the average developed countries energy usage today, on solar power alone, let along augmented by other energy sources! The only question is can we build that much sustainable power in time before other sources dry up or get too expensive. As it we have consumed most of the light oil and are now resorting to more expensive and polluting shale oil.

    Well technically robots have already taken over manufacturing in developed world, the US manufacturing sector makes more products and money today then every before yet hire only 9% of the labor force and dropping from its all time high of 45%. Also robots need a faction of the energy people need, robots need no food, a gallon of clean water a day, no exact temperature control, no waste management, heck they don't even need lighting. More so if machines continue to advance and resources do become physically limited we may have an exterminism future on our hands in which the masses are wiped out by kill-bots owned by the rich.
     
  22. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    The USA is likely to have suffered from standardization of education. It is the nature of government run (or highly regulated) activities to be One Size Fits All.

    Some people have problems in a typical classroom environment, but do well in other learning contexts. I discovered this in the 1950's when I was given the job of teaching programming to employees of companies who bought computers from the company I worked for. Due to need, any one who wanted to try programming was given a chance at it. In that era there were no computer science courses in either high school or college.

    In classes I taught, there were high school dropouts as well as college graduates. Due to large classes, it was necessary to create groups to cooperate on writing programs assigned as part of the learning process (I could not monitor and help individuals due to the size of the classes).

    The creation of groups turned out to be successful (luck, not foresight on my part). Several individuals who did poorly in school (including some who were high school dropouts) did very well as members of a cooperating team & turned out to be successful programmers.

    My father was born in the 1870's & was a nationally known engineer by circa 1900. He started out as an apprentice tool & dye maker in his grandfather's company. As a teenager (in the 1940's) I discovered that many successful members of the Philadelphia Engineer's Club had been apprentices to my father, rather than being college graduates.
     
  23. kwhilborn Banned Banned

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    I was expecting "Way way below average", but I guess "below average" sums them up fair enough.
     

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