Tag Archives: drugs

The Ramifications of a Scientific Study That Purports That High IQ is Linked to Drug Use

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There was an article reported today on CNN’s site, discussing a recent scientific study in which high levels of IQ are linked to the propensity to use drugs. Immediately, the people who have responded have started making the usual faulty scientific connections, such as “that proves it! Using drugs leads to a higher IQ!” One responder, named JeffinIL, states specifically, “I never realized I went to high school with so many geniuses.” As usual, someone took the conclusions and then tried to return the conclusions to the hypothesis, essentially trying to create the cause from effect, rather than what the study itself said, that cause led to effect.

Okay, right off the start, I have to make a few comments on faulty reporting, which is leading (and will lead) to bad conclusions.

1. The data was collected in 1970 and just recently analyzed. This is not a RECENT study by any stretch of the imagination, even though the article attempts to make exactly that claim in the second paragraph: “A new British study finds….” 1970 was over 40 years ago. The people studied back then are now reaching latter stages of adulthood, which means that their “habits” and the findings are relevant to a group of people who are now in their 50s and 60s, not children as the study claims to connect.

2. The “high” score for IQ was registered as between 107 and 158. Not really that high when it comes to what people refer to as “high” IQ scores.

3. IQ has never been an acceptable gauge of someone’s actual intelligence. There’s a reason that IQ scores are rarely used anywhere other than in comparison studies in which people try to use them to inflate their attributes. People generally don’t take IQ scores to begin with, and those who do often take them numerous times to try to “game” the system. Other people learn logic skills that help them “beat” the IQ test, and mostly, the scores are considered fringe on the levels of acceptable science.

4. The study makes inferences that may or may not be contributing factors. While the only claim the study makes is that people with higher IQs report higher levels of using drugs in later years, there is no actual connection to drug use AT THE TIME of the IQ test, so there’s no way to know how much more education a person may or may not have had since having an IQ test. Socioeconomic factors were mentioned, but weren’t really discussed at length.

5. The study (and the author of the article) make a lot of guesses as part of the study, indicating that maybe people were “bored”, and thus turned to drugs because their higher IQ put them in a bored state of mind in comparison to other people with lower IQs who might not be as bored because, I guess, they don’t have as much to think about with their lower IQs. I mean, that’s the inference of that statement, but I’m just guessing based on the lack of information contained in the article itself. Seriously, anyone can do that kind of logical exercise, even people with low IQs like me.

The worst part of this study is that the way it is reported means a whole bunch of people are now going to be “armed” with faulty logic as trivial information they store away. When someone is at a party and someone offers him or her cocaine, rather than think, “no, that stuff might be dangerous”, in the back of someone’s mind is going to be the thought, “well, I did read this one study once that told me that people who take drugs are more likely to have higher IQs, so it might actually be to my benefit.”

It doesn’t take a genius to see that one coming.

Recap of the News and a treatise on quantum mechanics in movies

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It’s time for a little recap of the news, Duane style. There were just too many little things going on that I didn’t want to write a bunch of different posts rather than just do the whole thing at once.

1. Charlie Sheen. It seems his second performance (in Chicago) was a lot better than his first one in Detroit. Let’s see if he can manage to pull it off with a majority of his shows or if the one in Chicago was a fluke. What I have found fascinating about this whole story is how many people feel it necessary to comment about how stupid people are for wasting lots of money for a concert ticket to watch a “train wreck”. You know, as much as I agree with the sentiment, it’s their money, and if that’s what they want to do with it, who cares? It’s not like everyone else doesn’t waste money on stupid things as well. Some people pay outrageous amounts of money on porn, some on shoes, some on video games, others on Apple products. So let them. The only ones I found to be most relevant in their condemnations were the people who paid money to see him and were seriously disappointed. It should be interesting to see how this whole thing plays out over time.

2. Libya. Most people who know me also know I’m not a real fan of war. Since leaving government service, I’ve become more of a peaceful individual, and the idea of starting wars for any reason bothers me. Anyway, the situation in Libya is interesting in that it’s not just about war. It’s about choosing sides. For decades, we treated Gaddafi as the enemy, and then during the War on Terror, we started treating him as an ally. And the second that a revolution started in his country, we took sides against him. But at the same time, we also realized that we still want and need oil, plus the help of Libya against future terrorists is also a necessity, so if he isn’t removed from power, there’s going to be a very interesting dilemma our country has to face in the future. Do we go back to treating him friendly, or do we forever treat him as an enemy, knowing that he’ll probably start fostering terrorism used against us. Add to the fact that the rebels are now possibly targeting civilians in order to fight Gaddafi, and you have one of those situations the US is so good at getting itself into. We’re really good at doing the “right thing” but what we’re not really good at doing is knowing when to stop or even how, especially when the “right thing” is no longer the good thing. We stopped potential civilian casualties, and now we’re in the situation where we have to decide whether or not to back the rebels rather than just protect civilians. Like I said, we’re not historically very good at making choices like these.

3. Source Code. I saw this movie over the weekend, and I really enjoyed it. I’ve been hearing mixed reviews from others, however. Most of the established review sites have liked it, but the people who haven’t seen it seem to be interested in criticizing it, which is somewhat bizarre if you think about it. One of the biggest criticisms has also come from people who have seen it, and it (SPOILER ALERT…don’t read further if you’re interested in seeing this movie) has to do with the ending of the movie. And I’m finding that kind of funny because I think the criticism comes from people not realizing exactly what happened at the end. I keep hearing critics say, “the cheezy ending which didn’t make any logical sense” or how they believe that there was too much suspension of disbelief that was required to make that leap at the end. Well, what I want to add to this is that I think they didn’t understand what happened. It wasn’t a cheezy ending for the main character to make the choice he did. What really happened was he understood what was going on, but the scientist didn’t. The scientist thought he invented a process (the source code) to take someone through another individual’s mind and relive the last moments of his life. He argued the significant point that kind of gave away the ending, IF YOU KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT QUANTUM MECHANICS. The movie created a Shroedinger effect, in that what was really going on (and the main character realized it in his own uneducated way) was not a reliving of last moments of life, but a jump into another reality, kind of the “is the cat dead or alive” effect of Shroedinger. When he asked to save the people on the train and sent out an email message to the woman behind the camera, he realized that he was saving another reality, not his own. He understood that the people on the train were dead in his own reality, but he wanted to save another reality this time, and that’s the one he managed to continue living in. Yes, it’s highly complex, but if you followed the quantum mechanics, it actually made some sense. Anyway, spoiler done.

4. Obama announced his reelection. Really? That came out of nowhere.

5. The Budget and Shutting down of the government. Hope it doesn’t happen. But this is what happens when you give people too much power, too much responsibility and no ramifications if they don’t get the job done. To them, it’s all about winning this ideological battle and has nothing to do with actual service. All of them were elected to serve their country, but in reality they’re doing what they do best, serving themselves. The only people who will suffer will be “the people” as the politicians will all get paid regardless of what they do. Always remember that when they do what they do, or even more importantly, don’t do what they do.

6. Anti-teacher sentiment in America. I’ve really never seen it this bad. For ridiculous reasons, the right has decided that the way to clean up government is to go on the warpath against teachers, pretty much trying to use teachers as their scapegoat of everything that’s wrong in America. For years now, the problem has been education, but teachers aren’t the problem; they’ve been the ones trying to solve the problem. Unfortunately, no one seems to really be interested in dealing with the actual problems, like poverty, hunger, apathy and violence. Because governments have been spending money like it’s going out of style, somehow the teachers have been seen as the ones responsible, even though they don’t make those decisions but politicians do. So, of course, because politicians can’t blame themselves, they’re going after the people they can blame. Economically, the system cannot maintain itself as it has, but that’s not the fault of teachers; that’s the fault of the budget people who have been playing the “kick the can down the road” game for decades now. Well, we’re running out of road, so obviously now that it comes time to make tough decisions, we’re proving we elected people who have never made good decisions to begin with and expecting them to come up with proper solutions. How more broken can the system be than that?

7. The War on Drugs. I know it hasn’t been in the news lately, but actually it has. It’s in the news every day, even though we see it as other stories. We’ve been fighting this “war” for decades now, and we’re not winning. Instead, what we’ve done is create a criminal society where addicts are now perceived as criminals and added to our prison system population instead of treated. Then we ruin their lives, making it impossible for them to ever properly rejoin communities, thus falling back into irresponsible behavior. We have also created a criminal element of people who prey on other people. By allowing this behavior to continue, we have also pushed back race relations a hundred years, where we have one group of people attacking another group of people, where the only things that separate them are color of their skin, because other distinctive characterizations are more difficult to ascertain. In some cities, like Denver, we have race riots being fought, and they happen under the noses of the rest of the country, which prefers to be completely oblivious to this type of behavior, using pretense as a process of filter. Where we need leadership to fix this, we have people who gain political prominence and power by fueling this behavior, and we all lose. I’m just saying.

That’s all for today. Stay well, and don’t eat the yellow snow. It doesn’t taste like bananas.

No End to the Misery that is the City of Detroit

Economics, Politics, , , , , , , , ,

On Sunday, in Detroit, a man walked into a police station and opened fire, injuring four officers before being killed by the rest of the officers who returned fire. As of the next day, there has been no motive, explanation or even bizarre justification for his actions, other than he was some guy who walked in off the street and decided to pursue “suicide by cop.” Since then, there have been all sorts of commentaries, ranging from the expected to the outrageous. But what hasn’t been discussed at length is how much this should have been expected. I mean, no one expects these things, and when they should, they rarely do.

Detroit is one of those cities that ends up on practically every bad list that gets reported about cities in the United States. Literacy is lowest, crime is highest, murder is highest, corruption is constant, racism is everywhere (from expected racism to reverse racism), gang activity is amongst the highest in the nation, and the city is pretty much a cesspool and an example of what should not be done with a city if you want to achieve some sense of normality and progress.

The former mayor of the city is in jail, as are numerous members of its former governments. Crime is so out of control that people don’t even think about moving there; it’s on the lowest of the low lists for people moving to a city. Whenever a television show has something to do with Detroit, it’s almost always a gritty police procedural where people die, cops are on the edge, and there’s lots of gang violence. I have yet to see Meg Ryan looking for love in Detroit, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see some random hood beating the crap out of a suspect with a baseball bat because “dat’s how we do tings in da Troit!”

What’s interesting is that Detroit is one of those cities where if government really cared, it could actually use the city as a petri dish of improving urban despair all over the country. Other than Washington, D.C., and maybe parts of Los Angeles and New York, Detroit has pretty much everything going wrong for it so that a concentrated effort might actually make a very significant difference.

But no one seems to care about places like Detroit, except for the people who live in Detroit, and for some reason they don’t seem to matter. If you follow the politics of a place like Detroit, you notice that quite a few of the people running for office all run on the same types of platforms, about improving Detroit so people can be proud of it. But then a few years down the line, people throw those bums out because it turns out they weren’t interested in helping the city, but in helping themselves, usually to the coffers and whatever they can lay their hands on before they’re either caught or voted out of office. Even when they’re caught, quite often the masses will rally around the culprit, somehow claiming that going after a public official the people elected is wrong, that even though the person is corrupt and stole millions of dollars, he’s “their” thief, so the government should leave him or her alone. It’s often enough to cause one’s head to spin continuously at the ridiculousness involved.

Detroit is very much becoming one of those Mexican provinces where government has collapsed, and the drug gangs have taken over. The police are fighting a never-ending battle to regain control of the city, but like a proud parent, they just refused to believe that they’re really not in control. It would not surprise me to discover the culprit in this current case is some drug dealer who felt slighted by the police, and this is his way of striking back, or that he’s some trigger man for a drug gang that has decided to send a message to the cops.

Or he’s some delusional man who decided life wasn’t worth it, and suicide by cop was the easiest way out. Either way, there are problems in Detroit that need some serious attention. Unfortunately, the experts IN Detroit are obviously not the ones who are capable of handling the problem. They’ve been doing the same things over and over, hoping for different results (the Internet definition of insanity).

I used to drive through Detroit a couple of times a month, and it’s like entering a different world when you do. You go from the nice, grassy landscape, and then the journey on the freeway turns into dirtied concrete, and you realize that this is not a place that has any respect for itself. And why should it? It’s just getting worse and worse.

What’s going to happen over the next few days, and possibly weeks, is locals will point their fingers at what they’ve always pointed their fingers at, blaming unions, gangs, politicians, big government, little government, the auto industry, drugs, guns, overzealous police, underzealous police, and they’ll come up with the same conclusions they always do. But in the end, they’ll do nothing, hoping it was an anomaly that will never happen again.

Until it happens again, and then some reporter will start off a story with some ridiculousness like: “They never believed it could happen here.”

How Do You Fix the Problems of Race in America?

Economics, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m going to talk about a subject that no one wants to talk about, mainly because to do so automatically causes the person talking about it to be perceived as either a racist or clueless.

I was watching an science fiction show from the BBC (British Broadcasting Channel), and something kept striking me as odd, but I really couldn’t put my finger on it. The show was about some frumpy woman reporter who solves science fiction mysteries with a couple of neighborhood kids, which happen to be about three or four high school youths who bounce back and forth as to which ones are the main characters at any one time. One of the main characters of the kids is a young black man, who plays one of the centered character’s best friends. As I continued watching this show, it started to remind me of a previous season of Doctor Who (the new ones broadcast over the last few years), and I realized that there had been a central black male character who played an off and on love interest for the main female partner of the Doctor. It was when I thought about these two characters that I started to realize what was wrong. It took only a few American shows on television for me to realize exactly what that was.

Let me explain by first pointing out what is so significant about these two black characters on both of these shows: Not once was I ever reminded that they were actually black. The parts they were playing could have been played by anyone of pretty much any race or ethnicity. They fit in so well with the fictional dynamic that I started to think that perhaps they were creating some kind of weird fantasy in Great Britain. And then I started to understand that these characters represented something even more fascinating: They didn’t have to “act” black in order to be black. They were accepted no differently than any other character on their respective shows.

Now, if I was to watch something like Law & Order in the US, I’m immediately shown that the one main black character is a street-talking, tough guy who fits a very strong stereotype, which not so ironically was somewhat created and prepetuated by the former hip hop/rap/whatever star who plays that particular character. As I moved from one show to another, it was very rare to find an African-American actor or any ethnically-diverse actor who was not playing to an identity that was substantiated by a whole lot of stereotypes and markers that continue to separate disparate identities from the centralized, white, middle class expectation of what is often construed as mainstream. A few anomalies do come to mind, however, like Tony Stark’s buddy in Iron Man, who represents a military colonel, not played using any obvious stereotyical constraints. Or Morgan Freeman when he plays a scientist or detective. But those are rare exceptions. Instead, I find myself seeing way too many television shows and movies where whenever there’s a call for a person of race, color or ethnicity, the part is usually played to maximum effect by revealing how diverse that individual can possibly be.

It shouldn’t go without saying that such continuous uses of identity might actually be creating serious problems for any type of reconciliation or desires for integration. During the 1960s, there was a huge battle fought for desegregation in the nation’s schools, because smart people realized that separating people by differences was going to continue to make it impossible for this melting pot of ours to ever actually start melting. But something happened that we should have figured on, but we seemed to ignore it once we won our little victory in the courts and on the school steps. We forgot that previous separation might just make it very possible for continued separation once we got people into those schools together. Having been brought up during that period of desegregation, it was not unusual for me to experience large periods of time where I lived with separation in the schools themselves. Blacks sat with blacks, whites sat with whites, and Hispanics stuck with Hispanics. There were a few cross-overs, but there needed to be more, and the institutions themselves did very little effort to actually break down those barriers. Today, they’re institutionalized, and I don’t see them breaking down any time soon.

Part of the problem is that the organizations that were formed to end the separations are now part of the continued separation today. Civil rights leaders of the past, who were instrumental in getting people to rise up and be noticed, are still fighting the same battles today, but instead of pushing for desegregation and cooperation between disparate entities, the fights usually end up being more geared towards future separation and honoring identity rather than melting identity so everyone can be cooperative and as one.

What decades of this behavior have done is set up a paradigm that I don’t think is going to easily be fixed as long as we keep going on with the same MO we’ve been using since day one. Add in socioeconomic problems, and we’re at a point where I don’t think we have any recourse but to try to fix this now or end up at a point where it can never be fixed by peaceful methods. I”m starting to fear we may already be at the saturation point as it is.

A year or so ago, I was attacked and beaten by three young black men who targeted me because I was an easy target. It has been so hard to not see this as a racial thing and to keep from painting every black male I see as a potential attacker. Since that moment, I get nervous and extremely defensive whenever I see a group of young black men walking towards me on the street. It shouldn’t be that way, but it only takes one incident of such impact to cause someone to change his natural way of thinking about things. I still find myself crossing to the other side of the street when I see a group of young black men walking towards me, and that was something I never thought about doing before.

Our society has managed to create an identity marker of race and ethnicity that is continuously perpetuated by our media and entertainment entities. Part of me thinks that by doing so, we’re also telling people of diverse race and ethnicities that it’s okay because it’s expected of them to be like the stereotypes we put forth in these channels. Yet, something tells me that if I was walking along the street in Great Britain and I came across a group of young men of a different race or ethnicity, I’d probably not have the same complications as I do here. And that tells me that we’re doing something seriously wrong here. Whether it’s due to the drug culture we’ve developed that’s tied to a gang mentality, or if it’s just a side effect of the continously divergent class distinction we have in this country where wealthier people are further and further removed from the poor, I’m not sure. But something’s seriously wrong.

Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone is actually working on making things better, but hoping that continuing to do the same things we’ve been doing will somehow improve the general picture. But that’s never going to work. We have a real race problem here in the US, and part of the reason we’re never going to solve it is because no one wants to talk about it. We have this PC spin to everything these days, and the only people talking about race are the ones who are consumed by it, which means we’re going to continue trying to solve gushing chest wounds with band-aids.

So, here are a couple of thoughts.

1. The problem needs to be addressed by everyone, not just by former civil rights leaders or sociologists who think the solution is to have government create more bureaucracy. Everyone needs to be involved in both the planning and the implementation.

2. Poverty needs to be addressed and dealt with. Too many people are struggling to survive, and whenever you have that dynamic, you have people willing to do some unruly things to gain leverage over others.

3. We need serious conversation about the drug war. It has created an element of society that should never be a part of our very foundation. Whether the solution be legalization, even stronger enforcement, or whatever, we need to get everyone involved in tackling this issue. Or it will continue to destroy us.

4. Schools need complete integration. The goal should be the elimination of race, not the celebration of it. Unfortunately, there are too many people tied to the benefits of separation and identification. That one hurdle may never be achieved, which is sad because this is probably the one hurdle that might make the biggest difference.

5. Elmo needs to be involved somehow. He always gets this right.