The Weekly Weird #17

Trouble at the IQ Corral, the Mother of All (Data) Breaches, litter alliteration, Murthy v. Missouri, Scotland poops on speech

Welcome once again as we tiptoe through the tulips of totalitarianism!

Many thanks to our new subscribers and followers for seeking us out.

Episode 109 with Emily Finley is out now, in which we discuss her book, The Ideology of Democratism, and explore her ideas on undemocratic democracy.

Also, we have cause to celebrate this week, as 1984 Today! has been listed in the Top 20 on FeedSpot’s Top 100 Dystopian Podcasts. Shout-out to the founder of FeedSpot, Anuj, for his lovely email notifying me. Thank you for including us!

Well, let us tarry not. Away we go…

Trouble At The IQ Corral

Despite everyone knowing that smart people go to college and therefore people who have college degrees are smarter than people without them, everyone is wrong.

A meta-analysis study of IQ scores from 1939 to 2022, called “Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average”, came up with a conclusion that infuriated the smarties in their ivory towers. The study was accepted for publication in Frontiers in Psychology, a premier academic journal.

The results showed that undergraduates’ IQs have steadily fallen from roughly 119 to a mean of 102 today — just slightly above the population average of 100. In short, undergraduates are now no more intelligent on average than members of the general population.

In good news for anyone who’s been baffled by the requirement of a bachelor’s or master’s degree for an entry level job:

“Universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards,” the researchers wrote. This means “employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees.”

The researchers put their findings partly down to the massive increase in college admissions, i.e. that if the make-up of university students more closely resembles the general public, then the IQ of those students will also more closely resemble the general public. More on this later.

While undergraduates have been getting dumber, the general public has been getting smarter(ish).

In 1984, James Flynn published a paper showing that Americans’ IQs had risen by about three points per decade over the prior 46 years — an increase that Flynn found was not attributable to recalibrations of IQ tests, which are performed roughly every 15 years.

That was in 1984, though. Recent research has found that in the past twenty years, the American public has been killing off brain cells at a rate of knots.

From Popular Mechanics:

The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. The data showed drops in logic and vocabulary (known as verbal reasoning), visual problem solving and analogies (known as matrix reasoning), and computational and mathematical abilities (known as letter and number series).

But this isn’t the punchline of this particular hot tamale.

Funny story: The research paper that found that people with college degrees were merely of average IQ had its publication rescinded by a professor with a college degree who objected to the tone of the paper.

Specialty Chief Editor Eddy Davelaar “overrode the three peer reviewers who approved the paper and even his own handling editor.”

He wrote that the use of the word "merely" in reference to college students' just-above-average IQ was "demeaning." He also noted that the authors' critiques of other scientists' works "could have been packaged more sensitively." He also called unfounded the authors' opinion that the widening participation policies of universities were the cause of undergraduates' falling IQs.

Bob Uttl, one of the authors of the paper, was understandably miffed at having publication denied because he and his fellow scientists were right in the wrong way. He wrote a detailed rebuttal of Davelaar’s critiques, to which no response was forthcoming beyond a promise to reconsider the paper if the issues with it were fixed.

One interesting aside in Uttl’s rebuttal was:

The decision [not to publish the paper] was triggered by “several posts” on X that were “flagged” for Frontiers by unknown persons…

The social media execution of their paper (which had not been published and so could not have been read by anyone complaining about it), while used as an excuse, did not come with that pesky thing some people call “evidence.”

Despite repeated requests, we were not provided with the “several posts” nor the identity of the posters. Frontiers continues to keep that information in secrecy. We were not even given any opportunity to respond to any concerns that those flagged posts may or may not have raised.

Uttl lays out his beef with Davelaar in no uncertain terms:

In our opinion and as detailed below, Dr. Davelaar did not even read our article as his numerous criticisms of it have no basis in reality, are false, and misrepresent facts.

Uttl also has a detailed chronology of the whole affair on his website.

In summary:

A meta-analysis shows that IQs among undergraduates in 2022 represent a 17-point drop on IQs among undergraduates in 1939. This is not because the individuals at universities are dumber, it is because more people are going to university, and on average, the public has an IQ of 100, which is now more or less the average IQ of an undergraduate student. It therefore stands to reason that a higher rate of admission accepting a broader cross-section of society has led to university cohorts more accurately representing the general public, including by the measure of average IQ. Therefore, employers hiring graduates are, on balance, no longer hiring people who have a higher IQ than someone who didn’t attend or graduate from university.

Unsurprisingly, a professor at a university took exception to these findings and decided they were, essentially, too mean to publish. Ew, people with degrees being like the normies? Gross.

The Mother Of All (Data) Breaches

In another reassuring story for a rapidly digitising world, CyberNews has coverage of what it is calling “a supermassive Mother of all Breaches.”

The supermassive leak contains data from numerous previous breaches, comprising an astounding 12 terabytes of information, spanning over a mind-boggling 26 billion records. The leak, which contains LinkedIn, Twitter, Weibo, Tencent, and other platforms’ user data, is almost certainly the largest ever discovered.

Leak-Lookup apparently had a “firewall misconfiguration” that led to a mass plundering of user data. They initially announced on X that they were “confident that no registered user information was accessed,” but then added:

Initial access was gained sometime around the start of December, due to a misconfigured server allowing IPv6 access to our "hot" cluster. More updates to follow.

No updates followed.

One X user spoke for all concerned with charming directness.

Why indeed, Ms Bailey, why indeed.

The irony appears to be that the data was harvested from a data leak search engine provider, compiled from previous data breaches, yet somehow ended up containing previously unreleased information and getting hacked all over again.

CyberNews continues:

The MOAB contains 26 billion records over 3,800 folders, with each folder corresponding to a separate data breach. While this doesn’t mean that the difference between the two automatically translates to previously unpublished data, billions of new records point to a very high probability, the MOAB contains never seen before information.

The list of brands (and their users) affected by the breach is staggering.

MySpace still exists. Who knew?

Increasing the digital anxiety, CyberNews goes on:

The leak also includes records of various government organizations in the US, Brazil, Germany, Philippines, Turkey, and other countries.

According to the team, the consumer impact of the supermassive MOAB could be unprecedented. Since many people reuse usernames and passwords, malicious actors could embark on a tsunami of credential-stuffing attacks.

ClickArmor put up a LinkedIn post with a helpful guide on what to do if you’re one of the lucky many to be affected by the catastrophic cybersecurity failure.

Litter Alliteration

Someone over at BBC News had fun writing a headline two days ago: AI camera system caught litter louts in Loughborough.

I suppose it beats “picking your feet in Poughkeepsie.”

Anyway, LitterCam.ai is a thing.

Roping in a bystander for a brief burst of opinion-having, ITV’s news crew extract a typical nugget of “I’m not [insert bad thing here], but…”

I’m not into Big Brother, with cameras everywhere and everything. However, litter is wrong, it is not nice, and you should be caught out for it, so yeah, I have no problem with that.

Murder is wrong too, and also it is not nice, so I guess I better get ready for my government-issue surveillance suppository to make sure I don’t do it. After all, how else will we be safe?

Murthy v. Missouri

The United States Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, formerly known as Missouri v. Biden, the (potentially) landmark case in which the government’s attempts to silence critics of its COVID policies online during the pandemic is being challenged on First Amendment grounds.

The network of quasi-governmental, non-governmental, and actually governmental institutions and organisations that effected the flagging and removal of speech online during the pandemic through back-channels and portals at social media companies has been dubbed the Censorship-Industrial Complex by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and their colleagues who broke the Twitter Files stories that brought this to light.

For those not conversant in the implications of the First Amendment, the short version of the controversy here is that the US government is forbidden from limiting the protected speech of private citizens, or inducing/coercing private organisations not bound by the First Amendment into doing what the government cannot. It is the latter aspect that yields the most pressing question before the court in this case:

Did the federal government’s request that private social media companies take steps to prevent the dissemination of purported misinformation transform those companies’ content-moderation decisions into state action and thus violate users’ First Amendment rights?

“Purported misinformation” is a bit loaded, since facts don’t become untrue just because the government doesn’t like them. As formulated by the sci-fi author Philip K. Dick:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

The outlook is not rosy for fans of the First Amendment.

Matt Taibbi

of Racket News, watching the proceedings at the Supreme Court, was so frustrated by what he heard that he wrote that he “needed a bite-stick by the end of the hearing.”

Things kicked off badly when Justice Jackson told the Solicitor General for Louisiana:

…my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government…

As Taibbi points out in his article, this is an incredible statement from a Supreme Court Justice, since the entire purpose of the First Amendment is “hamstringing the government” in its attempts to curb freedom of speech and of the press.

Further confusion from the bench was on show when questions were asked about whether the behaviour of the government during the pandemic didn’t just correspond to similar behaviour years back when the government would ask a paper to kill a story because of national security.

Taibbi explains the reason this is an apples-to-oranges comparison:

What’s happening now is a wide-scale partnership agreement between intelligence/enforcement agencies and media distributors, not media outlets themselves. Unlike the Pentagon Papers case, the government here has gone over the heads of the press, creating an Avengers-like “Protector Initiative” in which content can be bounced or de-amplified without involving the source of the speech in the discussion.

Brian Fletcher, Deputy Solicitor General, made an argument about standing that may prove problematic for the claimants:

Respondents don’t have standing at all because they have not shown an imminent threat that the government will cause a platform to moderate their posts in particular.

So he’s arguing that if the government is pressing social media companies to limit certain types of speech but not targeting specific individuals (or targeting them in a way that can’t be proved), individuals cannot lodge a First Amendment complaint because they can’t prove a harm to them personally.

It is worth remembering, and repeating whenever possible: Plenty of the online speech that the government tried (and often succeeded) in silencing was true.

Despite the framing of the issue as a question of the government being able to respond to an extraordinary emergency without being hobbled by the pesky First Amendment, in order to protect its citizens against lies that would make them unsafe, the events as they happened tell a different story. The government used its power, its connections, and the threat of punishment, to force companies to silence speech that was factually accurate but contradicted its policies or corrected its errors.

In definitely unconnected news, the AI-generated image for this week’s Weird was going to be a Supreme Court with clowns as judges, but that prompt was rejected as violating their content moderation policy.

Scotland Poops On Speech

Hell’s-a-poopin’ up north in Scotland, where the much-maligned Hate Crime and Public Order Act passed 82-32 in the Scottish Parliament last week. In a delightful twist seemingly scripted specifically for the Weird, the law comes into force on April 1st, also known as April Fools’ Day. Sadly, it’s unlikely that the creation and passage of the notoriously broad and punitive new law will suddenly be declared an elaborate prank and repealed.

Humza Yousaf, the First Minister of Scotland, who stands fully behind the law, was the justice secretary who “shepherded the Hate Crime bill through the Scottish Parliament,” as per BBC News.

In February 2021, Yousaf posted on his X account:

We all want to ensure freedom of speech, including the freedom to disagree robustly with any policy, is protected. We also agree that this is not mutually exclusive to protecting the rights of people to be free from hatred.

Once the new law comes into force in April, he’ll have the opportunity to test that mutual exclusivity. So far, the prognosis is not good.

After the successful vote, he stated:

Parliament has sent a strong and clear message to victims, perpetrators, communities and to wider society that offences motivated by prejudice will be treated seriously and will not be tolerated.

According to Police Scotland, a hate crime is “any crime which is understood by the victim or any other person as being motivated, wholly or partly by malice or ill will towards a social group.” If what is “understood by the victim” is what matters, how can there ever be any question about whether something is hate or not? There’s no need for a crime, all you need is a victim.

As per The Spectator:

This draconian thought crime applies even in the privacy of your own home. The ‘dwelling defence’ in the old 1986 Public Order Act, which exonerates people living under the same roof from prosecution, has been dispensed with…

In short, dinner conversation at home could draw an accusation of hate crime, and by definition the accusation means a crime was committed since the contentious statement was “understood by the victim” to be hateful.

The Spectator again:

The Scottish Police Federation, an organisation not perhaps known for defending freedom of speech, has warned that the law would ‘paralyse freedom of expression for individuals and organisations by threatening prosecution for the mere expression of opinion’. The First Minister, Humza Yousaf, insisted that this was scaremongering and no one could be prosecuted for what they think. However, it is clear that what they say can and will be prosecuted if the ‘victims’ perceive what they think and say to be discriminatory.

Police Scotland also want you to know how to control your ungood feelings, which is why they want you to meet the Hate Monster, “feeding aff they emotions…till he’s weighing ye doon.”

I agree with the description of hateful behaviour in the video. It’s a useful way of understanding how people make themselves feel big by making others feel small. It’s not all there is to prejudice or hatred, but it’s definitely part of the picture. I just don’t think this cartoon should have anything to do with policing, unless it’s teaching officers not to go power-mad. Show it at induction days for incoming customer service staff. Use it to help school children deal with their anger. Have it on a loop at football matches. Just don’t make it the law.

According to The Spectator and other critics, the new law “makes ‘stirring up hatred’ a criminal offence punishable by 7 years in jail.” “Stirring up hatred” may sound like the name of a neo-Nazi cooking show, but it’s an eerie echo of the Chinese law against “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Even the vice-chair of the All China Lawyers Association said the Chinese law’s “legal ambiguity breeds room for selective law enforcement, damages the public's legal interests and undermines judicial credibility.” Scotland’s response? Hold my Irn Bru.

Scotland’s Victims Minister Siobhian Brown said the following about the introduction of the new hate crime law:

While we respect everyone’s right to freedom of expression, nobody in our society should live in fear or be made to feel like they don’t belong…

As a human being wanting others to live happily and healthily and to permit me to do the same, of course I agree with that statement as a principle, as a goal for us all as a society. But as a law? Is it even possible, let alone practical, to achieve that through legislation? Is anyone ever really “made to feel” anything? How can that be policed?

Well, from BBC News:

Police Scotland has pledged to investigate every hate crime complaint it receives, even though last week the force said it would no longer investigate every "low level" crime in Scotland, including some cases of theft.

Police Scotland have, according to the BBC, taken a dragnet approach to hate crimes, including the exhortation to potential claimants: “If something happens and you are not sure if it is a crime, please remember, if it feels wrong, report it and let us help.”

That all-aboard approach on hate crime contrasts with their push to save labour, resources, and money by only investigating certain crimes if they have certain types of evidence readily to hand.

The police in Scotland will also be working with ‘third party associations’ who are permitted to report hate crimes on behalf of the actual claimant, even if that person wishes to remain anonymous:

Third party reporting centres could be housing associations, victim support offices and voluntary groups. Staff have been trained to recognise hate crimes and help a victim or witness to submit a report to the police.

Third party reports can be made without giving your name. However, that might affect how much investigation we can do.

Examples of registered third party reporting centres include “a mushroom farm in East Lothian and Luke and Jack's sex shop in Glasgow.” Seems legit.

“I’ll have a bottle of lube, the latest issue of Mayfair, and also, I want to report a microaggression.”

Besides the free speech implications and the foggy nature of the concept of hate itself, the need to apply a law even-handedly, without being selective in its interpretation or playing favourites in its enforcement, runs counter to the structure of the law itself.

As Jim Spence wrote in The Courier:

Scotland is about to become two-tier society where some folk are given protection by the law from some kinds of hate crimes, while others will simply have to suck up abuse.

Women, for example, were stunned to learn that they don’t qualify as protected under the law and therefore will need the benefit of an additional piece of legislation specifically covering “misogyny,” to be delivered by the Scottish Parliament, you know, whenever.

As per the BBC:

Controversially, the protected characteristics in the act do not include sex itself, an omission criticised by some feminist groups.

"This new law leaves women unprotected from hate crime," the Scottish National Party MP Joanna Cherry KC told [the BBC].

One benefit of the law is that it “abolishes the offence of blasphemy which has not been prosecuted in Scotland for more than 175 years.” Quick question, though: What happens if a newspaper or satirist in Scotland publishes a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, like Jyllands Posten or Charlie Hebdo did? Is that blasphemy and therefore not a crime, or is it a hate crime against a religion, which is a protected characteristic?

Fun times ahead for Scotland. Four out of five poops. 💩💩💩💩

Outro music is pedal-to-the-metal Moroccan punk from Taqbir, with Sma3.

Stay sane, friends.