Fitzroyalty

Hyperlocal news about Melbourne's first suburb: Fitzroy 3065

Archive for the category: Intelligence

just a blogger

3 February 2012 | 30 Comments

According to Wikipedia, journalism is ‘the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion’. The definition describes a behaviour, a process, a method. It matters not who undertakes this behaviour.

The act of engaging in journalism occurs regardless of whether individual journalists are paid to perform journalism or do it on an unpaid voluntary basis. It happens regardless of whether they are employed by corporations or organisations or work for themselves.…

neurotypical

29 March 2011 | 11 Comments

A previous long-term romantic partner, who is a clinical psychologist, used to jokingly diagnose me with being on the lower end of the Autism spectrum, as she thought aspects of my behaviour were consistent with Asperger’s syndrome.

You’re mistaken, I would respond. I’m a genius (or at least I have an exceptional IQ). The two share some characteristics, but also have some significant differences. This conversation happened long ago but it came rushing back to me recently when I watched the video embedded below, which I found via Twitter courtesy of Jayne.…

gatekeepers vs anarchists

21 February 2011 | 5 Comments

Writing recently on the ABC website, journalist Jonathan Holmes gave a terrific summary of the differences between old (analogue print and broadcast) media and new (digital online) media and their corresponding protagonists.

He described traditionally trained journalists as ‘the priesthood of communications in the analogue age’ and contrasted them with Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, who he describes as ‘a child of the digital age and a journalistic anarchist’.

Traditional journalists are mostly morons who have been trained to communicate to morons, and many of them have excessive and unrealistic perceptions of their importance and abilities.…

sex, free will and personal responsibility

28 May 2009 | 11 Comments

I’ve been following the football group sex news with detached bemusement. I have no moral issue with consensual group sex, and am bored by the petty moralising that the media is indulging in. Safe, sane and consensual sex can take many forms. I am primarily interested in whether the parties involved are sane and whether their behaviour is consensual.

Physical experiences like sex can have great emotional power. It is common for people to consent to behaviour that others define as exploitative, humiliating, degrading or dangerous.…

a beginner’s guide to cause and effect

10 January 2009 | Comments Off

According to a UK study discussed in a Guardian article, “the children of young, poorly educated mothers are more likely to face health and educational problems before they start school“. The article states that:

Children whose parents have no qualifications are a year behind in their vocabulary by the time they start school. At five, boys are on average two months behind their female classmates, a gap which will widen at every step of their education.

…

the ANZ bank – an anti customer service case study

5 January 2009 | 35 Comments

I recently received a letter from the ANZ bank telling me that my term deposit was about to mature. It noted that my instructions were to have the principal sum and interest paid into my main account. It then went on to say that if they did not hear from me they would automatically reinvest the money for another term. WTF? This logical contradiction annoyed and concerned me. Anyone so stupid as to write this nonsense could not be trusted to manage my money.…

homeless in Fitzroy

22 December 2008 | 4 Comments

A recent survey conducted by the city of Melbourne reported in the Age found that over 100 homeless people were sleeping on the streets of the CBD area (including Fitzroy) on a winter night, and that a quarter of those were sleeping in Fitzroy. Only 3% slept in Carlton and Parkville.

social issues politics intelligence fitzroy

This is no commentary on the comparative quality of the food in restaurant bins in Carlton and Fitzroy. It has far more to do with the history of Fitzroy and its background as an area that drew in many poor families in the nineteenth century, establishing it as an area with significant low income public housing tenants throughout the twentieth century.…

managing the underclass

26 July 2008 | 1 Comment

Update 27 July 2008: I’d been working on this post for about a month, and the very day I published it the Australian newspaper ran a major story covering many of the same topics and ideas, although it fails to acknowledge the role of intelligence in the social problems it discusses.

What is western society to do with the surplus humans that form the underclass? This conservative US article predicts living standards in first world countries will fall in the future based on the premise that western nations waste too much money supporting surplus humans in or from the third world.…

modern world skills

8 February 2008 | Comments Off

According to a January 2008 article in the Australian, about half the Australian population lacks the literacy and analytical skills required to function effectively in the modern world, and in particular the information economy. Sounds exactly like what I said in the value of education in December 2007.

The article suggests that the cause of this intellectual capacity problem is the collapse of standards in the public education system. I think this is unfair; it places too much emphasis on individual people, whether or not they attended public schools, and too little on society.…