AntY

Just start with Linux mint and cinnamon or kde desktop environment. You should be good to go with that. Kernels are not something that you usually need to worry about, the default should work fine. If you need to, it’s easy to switch to another kernel by just installing it through the package manager.

I get the feeling, but in my experience it has more to do with the windows UI actual getting worse. When I use Linux, I’m happy to try out different desktop environments and shells, but they have one thing in common: they have designs that are created more thoughtfully.

It’s not just us growing old, it’s the world of technology growing shittier too!

Maybe for now, but there’s fewer and fewer around. In ten-twenty years time it will be hard to find a 90s car with reasonable mileage.

And this is one reason why I hate modern cars. But then again, there’s no alternative, and that sucks.

I used the example to illustrate a point. The tests have a target population that they are constructed for. This is also the reason as to why modern people score really high on old tests, because they are not the target population. The thing is, people aren’t very different, neither across cultures nor across time. We should expect the average person of today to be just as intelligent as the average person of 1924, but they score differently in the test. It’s almost as if the test doesn’t measure intelligence at all! If the tests actually measured intelligence, they wouldn’t need to be specifically designed for a certain population.

When an IQ-test is designed, a number of assumptions are made, e.g., normal distribution, that an underlying factor is well described by the battery of questions and that this underlying factor is the best thing that can explain the variation seen. All these assumptions are debatable at best. I mean, it’s just factor analysis, and all the assumptions of that statistical method applies.

If you’re measuring heart rate, breathing and sweating, I guess you could use a polygraph. If you want to measure a potential cognitive decline in a single person, you can have them do several of these tests to see if there’s a trend. There is nothing pseudoscientific about using these methods in this way. The pseudoscience comes in when we’re trying to tie the results to truthfulness in the case of the polygraph or intelligence in the case of the IQ test. Or even worse, when trying to compare two individuals from their results.

No, studies on IQ have shown that the test design often assume something about the population taking the test. If you produce a test for British students in secondary school and give it to miners in Zimbabwe, then the miners will probably achieve way lower scores than is it expected. This is because the students are more used to taking tests. IQ tests have been used in this way to promote racist ideas, when the real problem is the methodology behind IQ tests.

There’s a whole book about this, “the mismeasure of man”, by Stephen Jay Gould.

Sure, but I guess that it’s just a small part in a battery of tests to evaluate the effects of an injury. I mean, it does measure something, even if it’s just the ability to sit for a test.

This is just Russian propaganda. Ukraine weren’t even close to being considered for NATO membership when the special military intervention was announced. They’ve had a border conflict with Russia since 2014 and therefore they could not join NATO.

Ukraine is defending itself. Zelenskyy said “I need bullets, not a ride” and the west simply helped Ukraine with what they actually needed. It’s completely reasonable that Ukraine can use western aid to strike military targets within Russia that threatens their sovereign territory.

That’s true, but you hardly blame any one else than the Russian government for this three-day special military operation that’s now in its third year. Allowing Ukraine to defend itself is just the right thing to do.