FAO Sceptical ( The EU reincarnation of Mister Q)

Nem and Drac show themselves to be clever gals. Which one is right? I don’t know Why do I not know?

How can I put this?

First, I answered using the camels because the title of the thread addresses me as the EU reincarnation of mister q, so I thought I would imagine what mister q was saying.

Secondly (you can tell I’ve read the Longman Dictionary of English Usage), it shows the bullying nature of your approach when you say I have till 5pm to give the answer. Er, I left the house immediately after reading the question and giving my mister q-like answer to it. I arrived home a short while ago and have been doing various things before even coming to this PC. Are you not aware that people have a different rhythm of life to yours? That people don’t have their attention fixated on jc when you are?

Thirdly,

rudeboy wrote:

As you have seen the question, you have till the close of business today ( 5pm) to show you have a basic grasp of probability and are capable of discussing topics like Brexit from a reasonable basis of intelligence.

Ha ha. Now does that remind me of my teacher at junior school who gave us speed tests and then patrolled the desks checking us out. My eye was on the clock during the whole two minutes, I was too panicked to even begin to grasp the answers, the back of my neck grew very hot and when the teacher started rapping the kids’ knuckles, I finally just froze.

I now have to confess. In my Infant school, when I was in my 8th year, they gave us a test with questions of ascending complexity to test IQ. I got all the questions except two wrong. I got the simplest of questions wrong. It was abysmal. But they decided to put me in the  A form at Junior school because the two questions I solved were the most difficult questions of all, and I was one of very few who solved them.

In junior school, I came a regular 47 out of 48 in my class, did abysmally at the IQ test (I was fixated by the colours of the squares and circles, and couldn’t be bothered to answer the silly questions) I failed the 11 plus, and after a week in a very tough secondary modern school in the A form (there was streaming in medieval times), the teachers called my mam and dad in to tell them I  was an exceptionally unintelligent boy who really belonged in the D form, and that this needed to be broken gently. They were very kind to me when they broke the news.This is all true, my honour

Were you one of these teachers, Crude Boy? In spirit, you seem to be, and I guess I can now expect the worst of judgments

I’ve learned many things since those days.

So the answer is that by the time I got to sentence 2, I’d given up. I stopped reading.

Does that disqualify me? YES, says you, teacher.

Your question shows you to be a guy who loves math questions of a particular sort, probably with a high(ish) IQ, and a good grasp of formal logic. Your temperament has sharpened your sense of logical answers to complex questions of this sort – a good mark of IQ.

Your responses to others here shows a very contemptuous man, with a limited imagination and about as near to zero in EI (Emotional Intelligence) as is possible to get.

When I need to, I’ll do this type of question, but they are not attractive to my type of  mind(very different from your analytical intelligence). I once forced myself to look at the 26 increasingly complex equations which constituted the von Bortiewicz solution to Bohm Bawerkh’s demolition of Marx’s approach to the relationship between value and price. I really wish I hadn’t, as I experienced once again all the fears associated with my junior school-teachers rap on the knuckles, and because I subsequently discovered that the solution was totally inadequate as it was merely an expression of formal logic..

So, the fact that I am not attracted to your statistical question only means that I don’t like these kind of puzzles. I leave them to you, Drac and Nem. Good luck with them, and enjoy.

Secondly, it proves nothing as to anyone’s ability to use this type of intelligence to understand anything beyond this type of logic. you fall into the trap of those economic experts whose elegant mathematical theorems on the working of the market under perfect competition led them to predict that a depression was impossible, and that anyone who was unemployed for a short period of time must be lazy. They had no clue as to what happened when there was  mass outbreak of prolonged laziness int eh 1930s. Similarly the economic mathematicians of the 1950 and 60s predicted that inflation and unemployment were inversely related – that as unemployment rose, inflation fell, and vice versa. Had to be – they even worked out an elegant mathematical theorem called the Phillips Curve. The, when inflation and unemployment went up together and shot off the map, they wer flummoxed. It must be reality that was wrong, not their math. Similarly, with monetarism etc etc etc.

Do you know the relationship between formal and dialectical knowledge? Or the difference between Platonic and Hegelian dialectic? You have 5 minutes to answer this – no googling, now naughty boy, and you’ll get a rap on your knuckles and told that your intelligence is that of a gnat if you don’t give a full answer in your own words.

er, just joking – in the last sentence.

You stick to your puzzles, and when we discuss the EU (I notice that you once posed in your own inimitable manner a point about immigration in the terms of perfect competition of wages being the equilibrium point between the supply of and demand for labour), then discuss it like a responsible adult and not a nasty school teacher

Dan is just an oddball, truly, a predictable oddball having yet another one of his angry Fridays with a stolen online ‘puzzle’ that was never meant to be solved anyway and was just an outlet for him to vent his irrational anger on everyone one else.