cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/51328301
The Culture Committee of the Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday approved an amendment to Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara’s “informed consent” bill, extending the current ban on sex education from kindergartens and primary schools to middle schools (ages 11 to 14).
Not Italy, just the Meloni government. Italian people are fed up with her.
This is true for nearly all cases of government critique. However, it’s also true that any country/nation electing a certain government is at least partially responsible for their actions. Naturally, we can argue about the degree, since it is not clear how open and effective elections are.
Apart from that, we generally say “[country] x does [thing y]” and not “[this specific government] consisting of [parties a, b and c], from [country x] does [thing y]” for simplicity. Most people only really care about their own country, its neighbors and the three superpowers. It’s not exactly easy remembering several political parties, various individual politicians, and what they all say and do from 193+ countries.
40% of Italians still like her according to polls…
50% of people are below average intelligence.
(Yeah, yeah, the implied conclusion is fallacious reasoning, but it’s still funny.)
I was thinking about this the other day, and due to the bell curve, 68% of people are average intelligence, with only 16% being below (or above) average. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, because a lot more than 16% of the population is making pretty poor choices.
I’m sure cognitive scientists had good reasons for that somewhat arbitrarily defined band of the bell-curve when they gave it the name “average intelligence” but it’s pretty clear that the joke isn’t using that definition.
First, if there’s a good reason, it isn’t arbitrary. Second, at an elementary level, data points that are within a standard deviation of each other are statistically similar. There are obviously variances and edge cases, but it does reinforce the point I was making, which is that expected behavior for someone at 115 IQ and someone at 100 IQ are more or less the same (and may be the same person who did or didn’t have a good night’s sleep).
As you point out, intelligence is fuzzy and dependent on many factors. Which is why a straight line hard cut-off above and below the mean of a distribution seems pretty arbitrary to me, even if it is based upon a particularly useful way of delineating variance from a mean.
If you take out the malicious, you’re left with only the dumb ones.