No test measures intelligence. A test only measures you relative to the persons that wrote the test. – loosely quoting Asimov.

2007 is ancient history now. It is an interesting graph that one might correlate with a lack of meritocratic structure in society, but I’m on the low end cause I say this without looking up and reading the study. Pretty pictures evoke emotional blabbering bias and all that.

  • Jax@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    13 hours ago

    How about the gobs and gobs of people who have been fucked over by billionaires?

    Let me phrase it this way: do you think Elon Musk is worth 40000 times the value of the median Tesla worker (2019 numbers by the way, he’s worth more now)? Gates? Bezos? Are they really worth more than the value they extract from their employees?

    No? Great, we agree — there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire.

    • ryannathans@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      4 hours ago

      That’s a different argument. We are talking about whether ethics is a direct factor in income. Billionaires are outliers. In a population study of millions of people, or even a survey of hundreds, billionaires aren’t going to have any bearing on the outcome.

    • Professorozone@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      10 hours ago

      Yeah, agreed.

      Even America’s sweet heart Taylor Swift. She’s a billionaire and her groupies wind up paying $1300 to see a show. Then I heard she’s writing a book. I mean how much do you need? She could be doing world tours for free, subsidizing ticket prices, I don’t know, starting up a competitive company to Ticketmaster.

      Elon Musk levels of income could friggin cure diseases or hunger or something or at least make a huge dent. Think about it. If he liquidated his entire net worth and gave up on his Nazi empire building he could use $490B on a good cause and STILL be a billionaire.

      There was one guy though. I forgot his name. He signed that pact that Warren Buffett created where those who signed, pledged to give away all or most of there wealth. I think like two did it after they died but this one guy gave it all away while he was (is?) alive.

      • ryannathans@aussie.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        4 hours ago

        Billionares would have no bearing whatsoever on the same type of research being discussed. See my other comment.

        • Professorozone@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 hour ago

          Yeah, I disagree with your assessment. You’re acting like oh there are only a few of them, but they control like 90% of the wealth in the world. How many billions of dollars do you think go into a single research topic? I’d also like to point out that it’s uber rich people who also make the decisions. I can’t prove that corporations prefer NOT to have a cure for diseases, because they make more money treating them, but I’m pretty sure IF they do, it ain’t a poor person making that decision.

          • ryannathans@aussie.zone
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 hour ago

            For this research it doesn’t matter how much wealth they control if it’s not even a suburb sized group of people globally who are billionaires, median income for ethical vs inethical groups would probably not move any statistically significant amount