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This is a common predicament.

A piece of information that, if it was made public, would be immensely useful in countless ways for the management of our society, But it might also be exploited by bad people. So it is made private.

And the icing on the cake. We say "it's private because privacy is intrinsically good and a basic human right ". Not, "It's private because we fear bad people".



>would be immensely useful in countless ways for the management of our society,

Such as?

Now, maybe if one person had an IQ of 80 and the other contender had an IQ of 105 it seems like it could be useful in some particular fields. But for the most part you'll run into the "I'm 200 times smarter than you because my IQ is 102 and yours is 101".

And there is no icing on the cake. Privacy is a multipolar topic and there are many pros and cons around it.

We have rights not because they are some intrinsic part of the universe, or inalienable text written by a deity, we have rights because people working together and learning from the past mistakes in history have decided that something better than what was is attainable, and the moment we forget it something worse will take its place.


If all of the IQs in a county went down we might investigate that. There's one.

If we were looking for smart people for a role in whatever. There's another.

If we were rating schools. There's a third.

Gee, my imagination is feeling so stretched.


> If all of the IQs in a county went down we might investigate that. There's one.

The average is always by definition exactly 100, neither higher nor lower.

Also, this data already exists. The folks who make standardized tests collect it to use for translating raw results to standardized scores.

> If we were looking for smart people for a role in whatever. There's another.

This is illegal. There are ways to get the same result that are not illegal, and are actively used.

> If we were rating schools. There's a third.

Schooling doesn't do much to iq.


> > If all of the IQs in a county went down we might investigate that. There's one.

> The average is always by definition exactly 100, neither higher nor lower.

The average for the population that the test is normalized is exactly 100. GP was suggesting that if the averaged dropped in a single locality (specifically county, but I'm generalizing), which is completely possible.


> "It's private because we fear bad people"

I wonder if the thought process even goes that far. Oftentimes, the motive seems more like self-conscious social pressures, e.g., fear of embarrassment.


Or even just fear. A rationalization of anxiety.

A chronic ubiquitous anxiety "rationalized" as a fear of everybody for everybody.

Try posting the question on social media sometime. The answers are interesting.




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