Michael Regilio
speaker
2,071 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 12 Jul
Michael Regilio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, it's crazy to think that you could be on the Supreme Court of the United States and be that imbecilic, I believe would be the correct term. Yeah, I guess IQ isn't everything. Also, the test questions themselves were deeply flawed. Some of the questions on the Yerkes test, for example, are pretty subjective, arguably more about knowledge of culture rather than intelligence.
Here's an example straight from the Army Alpha. Test 8, Form 7, Question 31. The author of The Raven is Stevenson, Kipling, Hawthorne, or Poe?
Sure. Why not? Aren't you curious if you'd been an officer or a private? Poe? I don't know, man. Actually, you got it.
Okay, how about this? Number 32. Spare is a term used in bowling, football, tennis, or hockey.
I'm OK with it. But perhaps, as you can see, knowing what a spare is and who wrote The Raven shouldn't exactly qualify you as being intelligent or not.
If I'm being honest, it's because the Simpsons did a bit on Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven in one of their famous Halloween episodes.
In 1917, I would not have gotten that question correct, I can assure you. Look, the fact of the matter is maybe you've read hundreds of other worthwhile poems from countless other authors, just didn't come across Poe. Or maybe you're a mathematical genius who stayed away from poetry altogether.
But now there are other questions on the Army Alpha test that are less like determining the number of blocks in a stack or what comes next in a pattern. And these types of questions are far more along the lines of the kind of questions you find on modern IQ tests.
Everyone wants to think of themselves as smart. It's human nature. And if you're convinced that certain tests are going to tell you how smart you are, you might just go ahead and take those tests to find out. In fact, I have a friend who was quite fond of dropping into conversations that he had a 145 IQ according to one of those online tests.
Yeah, and one day after having heard him drop the 145 brag into a conversation for like the 90th time, I said, you know what, I'm going to ask some follow-up questions. Turns out he had to take the exact same test eight times before he achieved this high score. And he was looking up answers in between tests.
The dude just likes to think of himself as smart, even if he doesn't realize that admitting you took the same IQ test eight times to get your score makes you sound not smart.
I will say that I'm old enough that coming across the information as to the average size of one's wang was hard to come by when I was a kid. Couldn't Google it.
So I've been told. Okay, and look, the fact of the matter is your nerves are going to affect how you take the test. Your environment, your mood, all these things are going to factor in. Imagine being a soldier in 1917 and being stuffed into an exam room and knowing that how you score on this test is going to determine if you're an officer or if you're in the trenches.
Yeah. And World War I, according to the movies I've seen, particularly brutal. Oof. And these Army Alpha and Alpha Beta tests devised by Yerkes, and Yerkes went off with the data from these Army tests. He got charts in there with what professions scored what number, and then based on different scores, what professions are best suited for certain people.
I can't say I saw that particular movie, but you're absolutely right. This is a tricky idea. On the one hand, maybe you can test people for a certain level of intelligence, and maybe some people are better suited for certain jobs than others. On the other hand, how is one test made up of a series of questions going to accurately give you that information?
Yeah. I mean, as far as determining what somebody is going to do with the rest of their life. When I was in high school, I think they did take the test and I skipped that day. And that tells you all you need to know. Yeah. They were like, don't worry about it. You missed the test like every other test. But we didn't need to give you the test. We have an idea anyway.
I like to joke that, hey, my life might not have turned out the way I thought it would, but it is a little bit comforting to know that my life did turn out the way everybody else thought it would.
So anyway, after World War One, the U.S. government got into these IQ tests and what they purported to mean. They started using the dubious results in all kinds of shady ways. One can even argue that the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 was influenced by these tests. The Immigration Restriction Act severely limited immigration into this country for people from Asia while favoring Europeans.
Surprise, surprise.
We're talking about America here. So, yeah, let's just go with racism. You could also argue that the whole field of psychology was validated at the time by Yerkes tests and how much the army dug it.
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