Today I Learned

Some police in america get 750. Others are merely elected to sheriff as a political appointment.

edit: This very silly and also somehow serious video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt5I3V5hWkU

You mean a cosmetology license. I dated a college instructor, there's more one needs to know than most would guess. Long story short, there's a lot of chemistry and health training. It's shockingly easy to fuck someone up.

One example she gave me, "You can't use $chemical on old people if their hands look like (whatever I forgot). That's a symptom of (whatever) and their fingernails will fall off." Heysus!

Or, "You can't mix this and that. Makes a wildly exothermic reaction."

And there's no grouping "police" in America. According to the FBI, there are 18,000 police departments. They range from LAPD gang bangers to Mayberry cops.

And have to be bullied out or fired to prevent that, making the police department lose their expensive investment.

There are good cops - they just end up getting bullied out or fired for trying to do the right (and legal) thing

This exactly, if you have intelligent people as police, then maybe they will realize that they are doing more harm than good and want to change things. They might actually have morals and realize that arresting somebody for a crime that has no victim is bullshit.

There are policing organizations that are still very hungry for well-educated and intelligent recruits. In the USA, the FBI and the CIA both have high barriers to entry. The NSA is easily one of the biggest employers of mathematicians in the world. The IRS, the SEC, the FDA, the FCC, the DEA - all happy to hire smart young professionals.

You're not going to get a job as a beat cop, but you're very much in the running for the DA's office as a prosecutor or the state homicide detective's unit. And don't worry, there are plenty of very intelligent people who are also very dependable when it comes to taking a kickback and keeping their mouths shut.

Corrupt systems cannot be changed from within. By their nature they select against honest agents.

Just as a quick example it's common for police to pad their overtime. Now suppose Officer Honest always turns in an accurate timesheet. Officer Honest never makes arrests for bullshit. On paper, Officer Honest is lazy and unproductive compared to their dishonest peers.

Hold on. Can't we all just go back to that time instead?

Yeah I thought it was a mistake when I saw the article date.

I remember reading this on Fark.com

Not sure we should be doing IQ test for Police officers, EQ would be much more important, you'd rather have a slightly less intelligent police officer who tries to relate to you rather than an intelligent quasi sociopath happy to unload their magazine into you at first sign of trouble, wouldn't you?

Pretty sure IQ testing has a racist origin anyway, so let's just leave it behind

Great minds and intelligence are different. Many intelligent people like to do the thing they like to do and not think about other things. The NSA is filled with these people. Other smart people think their way into justifying awful things like von Neumann and Edmond Teller who were both strong proponents of hydrogen bombs.

Please explain.

Maybe he’s a corrupt power hungry sadist despite being blessed with an above average IQ. Maybe it’s the perfect job for him! Look on the bright side!

Or, the getting bored excuse is completely made up bs. Lots of intelligent people dream of having simple jobs where they don't need to exhaust themselves thinking so they'll have some brains left for things they actually care about on their free time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

The short answer is "Yes". Scores rise about 3-pts every decade and the "Q" is adjusted accordingly. That said, modern education and modern intelligence testing aren't independent of one another. It is very possible to train for an IQ test and improve your score (a thing that was originally argued as impossible when these tests were formulated). And - both consciously and unconsciously - we've geared our education system around improvements on standardized exams.

There's also a host of environmental improvements - better nutrition, fewer diseases, less heavy metal poisoning - which all contribute to higher cognition. These latter factors are suggested in no small part thanks to a leveling off of the Flynn Effect in later years, both thanks to marginal declines in all of the above and thanks to the diminishing returns once individuals reach peak performance.

But intelligence testing is also a very sketchy and misunderstood field, with lots of scams surrounding its practical application and enormous stigmas associated with any population that scores "below average".

Much like polygraph testing and dowsing (yes, American police still use dosing rods), its a methodology that police seem to cling to long after it has worn out its usefulness in practical terms.

In general, yes. Average IQ increases by a point or two every few years, so the people who design the tests need to consistently create harder and harder tests to maintain a good baseline.

It’s a large part of why many people say IQ is a bad metric for intelligence; It really just tests your ability to solve problems within the context of your upbringing and life experience. A carpenter or machinist who constantly uses geometry in their day-to-day life will breeze through any geometry-based questions, for instance. And as jobs have become more complex and efficient, people have gotten better at basic problem solving.

Average IQ cannot increase or decrease. The test is calibrated so that 100 is always the average. It's for this reason and many others that comparing historical testing data is difficult.

In the revised version of his book "The mismeasure of man" (about biodeterminism and measurement) Gould was asked why he didn't draw the obvious comparison between IQ and phrenology. His answer was that such a comparison would be unfair... to phrenology. The methods of phrenology were bunk, but it's theory (that different regions of the brain were responsible for different functions) was sound. IQ fails both in methodology and theory.

Just cast LeadBeGone!! on a country, and watch the IQ rise.

Aptitude tests aren't measures of education.

What's your alternative to having cops?