Login
You're viewing the assemblag.es public feed.
  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Oct 25, 2026, 7:14 PM

    RE: mstdn.social/@DemocracyMatters

    I understand and share the joy of dunking on Trump, but please don’t do it this way:

    - IQ is largely a nonsense metric

    - Given its context and history, using IQ as an insult is playing with eugenicist fire

    - Purporting to quantify “intelligence” at all is wildly problematic (we don’t even have a good definition of the thing we’re measuring here, folks)

    - Purporting to quantify intelligence of someone at a •distance• is even wildly-er problematic

    - Measuring human intelligence with an LLM is so off the problematic charts I don’t even know where to start

    Find a better insult. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel with that guy. (“Like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory” was a pretty damn good one.) And if you (rightly) want to puncture his wild lies about his superintelligence, focus on his •lying• and not his IQ. Please and thank you.

    💬 21🔄 27⭐ 0

Replies

  • 💬 0🔄 1⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 1⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • dasparadoxontomtrottel@mastodontech.de
    Oct 25, 2026, 7:28 PM

    @inthehands despite the fact that IQ is a meaningless construct as you pointed out, yesus, "AI models estimate Trump's IQ at 80-85." using an "AI" model unironical to determine an "IQ" of someone and then using this as a relevant result. thats so stupid.

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • George Bgbargoud@masto.nyc
    Oct 25, 2026, 7:36 PM

    @inthehands

    I like to measure sizes by video chatting with someone, holding up a distorted printed out picture of the object and asking them to estimate it's size. It's slightly more accurate than asking an LLM for an IQ measurement.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻mikej@mastodon.online
    Oct 25, 2026, 7:42 PM

    @inthehands You don't need a number. Dumb is like porn, you know it when you see it. His decisions are consistently unwise and ill-considered. If there is a good way and a bad way to accomplish a task, he will choose the bad way every time.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Miss Annie, Eccentric ☮️ she/her/MissSpiritualAnnie@chattrbx.com
    Oct 25, 2026, 8:25 PM

    @inthehands

    Thank you! I was DEFINED by my IQ as a kid. "There's no excuse for anything less than an A+" crap.

    IQ is WAY overrated because intelligence is only one part of a whole person. I'd rather know if they're kind, compassionate, funny...

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Oct 25, 2026, 9:38 PM

    @SpiritualAnnie
    I’ve spent my life pointedly avoiding ever having taken an IQ test, and am glad I’ve never had that number hanging over my head. What a burden, whether high or low. I hope you’ve escaped it.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Riverchangelingmx@mastodon.social
    Oct 25, 2026, 9:02 PM

    @inthehands Not to mention that if you really feel the need to quantify his various lapses in intelligence, you probably think wasting time is a good thing. All you have to do is watch his actions to know what he idle

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Zalasur 🐸🇺🇦zalasur@mastodon.surazal.net
    Oct 26, 2026, 12:39 AM

    @inthehands I did a whole thread on IQ a couple of years ago. It was originally designed to help increase the country's military readiness. People with higher IQs were generally better soldiers (up to a point) so there was a lot of emphasis on increasing this overall score among the general populace.

    A side effect of this was that some were discovered to have freakishly high IQs based on the standardized scoring. People started chasing the number as the gold standard of "smartness".

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Patch levels matter!kauer@aus.social
    Oct 26, 2026, 1:24 AM

    @inthehands Fair enough. But I think it's OK to call someone stupid or unintelligent as a shorthand for saying they have a general inability to connect dots, find solutions to problems, understand cause and effect etc. Happy to use another word if "stupid" or "unintelligent" is somehow offensive.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Oct 26, 2026, 3:12 AM

    @inthehands @mathieui you didn’t even get to the amazing self-own of “AI models estimate”. even within the frame of eugenicist trash rhetoric this is embarrassing

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • John Smithsmitjo@mastodon.au
    Oct 26, 2026, 4:26 AM

    @inthehands 💯 agree that IQ is rubbish. Trump does appear to be a few sandwiches short of a picnic though.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • BeeCyclingbeecycling@wandering.shop
    Oct 26, 2026, 7:00 AM

    @inthehands Good grief, so it's not even an IQ test taken by the man himself, just what AI "estimates." Oh yeah, that's totally scientific. 🙄

    I don't know what his IQ is, if he ever took a test, and as you say, it's a very dubious metric anyway. I do know he's very stupid, but even "high IQ" people can be very stupid though willful ignorance, through being too narcissistic to ever admit to being wrong or not knowing something, through being closed-minded and having no ideas of their own.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Grumble 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇬🇱grumble209@kolektiva.social
    Oct 26, 2026, 9:07 AM

    @inthehands *"Find a better insult."*

    Trump is a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, serial adulterer, alleged wife beater, and credibly assumed to be either a statutory rapist or a pedophile.

    Trump's health is poor - he's lost his bowel control, wears an exoskeleton, shows signs of marked dementia, and has had 4 or 5 "annual physicals" in the last two years.

    Those aren't even insults - that's reality for Donald Trump and the United States.

    Beyond that, Donald Trump is one stupid motherfucker.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Paul Cantrellinthehands@hachyderm.io
    Oct 26, 2026, 2:27 PM

    @markhburton
    I appreciate it. Son of a (now retired) psychologist here, a school psych for many years, and I’m grateful for the early peek behind the curtain I got because of that: when we were kids, he’d practice the latest Wechsler or whatever on us, then show us how he scored it, then muse with us about what it did and didn’t actually mean. Nothing takes the magical authority out of psychometrics like seeing what goes into the sausage.

    💬 0🔄 1⭐ 0
  • David McMullinmcmullin@musicians.today
    Oct 26, 2026, 3:37 PM

    @inthehands
    I completely agree with your comments here, and would also add: regardless of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of calling them certain names, it’s dangerous to write your political adversaries off as stupid. It makes them feel like less of a threat than they are. “They’re only like that because they’re too dumb to understand.” No—they know what they’re doing, and why and how. It will take more than your supposed innate superiority to stop them.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • ptvirgoptvirgo@mastodon.social
    Oct 26, 2026, 3:58 PM

    @inthehands It looks like you don't want llms deciding what humans are valuable, but argued that only a Nazi would call Trump dumb.

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • ptvirgoptvirgo@mastodon.social
    Oct 26, 2026, 10:26 PM

    @inthehands Dude. That was not an argument. That was an attempt to clarify the gap between what I thought you intended and what was actually coming across. But sure, do the word police thing and then shut people down when they try to understand you.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0