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Iceland is close to eliminating Down syndrome births due to widespread prenatal screening tests and nearly 100% of women choosing an abortion in the case of a positive test for Down syndrome:
With the rise of prenatal screening tests across Europe and the United States, the number of babies born with Down syndrome has significantly decreased, but few countries have come as close to eradicating Down syndrome births as Iceland.
Since prenatal screening tests were introduced in Iceland in the early 2000s, the vast majority of women -- close to 100 percent -- who received a positive test for Down syndrome terminated their pregnancy.
While the tests are optional, the government states that all expectant mothers must be informed about availability of screening tests, which reveal the likelihood of a child being born with Down syndrome. Around 80 to 85 percent of pregnant women choose to take the prenatal screening test, according to Landspitali University Hospital in Reykjavik.
[...] Other countries aren't lagging too far behind in Down syndrome termination rates. According to the most recent data available, the United States has an estimated termination rate for Down syndrome [open, DOI: 10.1002/pd.2910] [DX] of 67 percent (1995-2011); in France it's 77 percent (2015); and Denmark, 98 percent (2015). The law in Iceland permits abortion after 16 weeks if the fetus has a deformity -- and Down syndrome is included in this category.
The Prenatal Diagnosis link in the summary was replaced with a working version.
National Review has a counterpoint opinion piece about the CBSN article. Snopes has a page debunking inaccurate headlines about the article.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:32PM (24 children)
Various people here using the word "burden" to describe Down's Syndrome. Yes, there are a lot of medical complications. Yes, they often need more care (sometimes a LOT more care). Yes, there may be many jobs that they simply won't ever be able to gain the skills to do. However the idea that DS folk can't contribute at all is erroneous. Plenty of Downs Syndrome people hold down jobs and their employers consistently report that those staff members tend to be more honest, more punctual and take less sick leave than "normal" employees.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:53PM (9 children)
Yup, they're generally extremely good at doing the work that's largely been or soon will be automated. If you don't mind putting a little extra effort in though they can do the simple, repetitive, non-automatible jobs like QA at the local Wrangler factory. They're also champs at pushing a broom and emptying trash all day.
The above is not me shitting on them. That's full on sincerity. I couldn't do that type of job myself for more than a couple weeks or I'd go bat-shit from the monotony. ADHD along with intelligence has its up sides but it has some serious drawbacks as well.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:20PM (7 children)
Cafeteria dishwasher/server at a former employer. Nicest guy ever, and he loved his job because at his level that kind of work was satisfying for him.
It does bring up certain political / economic issues WRT automation, soon there aren't going to be many non-automated jobs left for people with an IQ over 80 or so. We'll never see IQ 150 people sweeping floors there's too many IQ 80 people to say nothing of all the IQ 100 people.
The powers that be seem to have the "solution" to the problem of demographic replacement, at least so far.
(Score: 3, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:41PM (3 children)
Yeah, I was swapping bodily fluids with a chick sitting at around 85 a couple years back. It was kinda refreshing. She was horribly wrong all the time but you never had to go through any mental gymnastics to figure out why she thought that way; it was always for the most obvious reason, without any nuance involved. The only thing about her that really got on my nerves was her penchant for watching reality TV. The big ole titties made up for that though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @05:05PM
An extreme lack of intelligence is a bit of boner-killer for me. Airheadedness and obliviousness are tolerable if they aren't too talkative, but very low intelligence seems to trigger a disgust response in me.
I remember trying to give a girl directions to my place:
Me: Where are you coming from?
Rocks for brains: I don't know. We've stopped somewhere
Me: Where are you?
Waste of oxygen: We're next to a white truck.
Me: What street are you on?
Would try to put out a fire with gasoline, since it's wet: I'm not sure, but we're next to a big white truck.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Thursday August 17 2017, @06:13PM (1 child)
Is Ethanol-fueled your sock-puppet account?
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @07:27PM
Would not be surprised, but uzzy maintains he only uses the one account and never posts as AC. Then again he's been caught spinning half-truths, outright lies, and generally can't be trusted as a self-described troll so YMMV.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:39PM (2 children)
Hey, mine's 145 according to that chart that matches up your GRE and SAT scores with IQ (and note I studied for neither of those) and one of my jobs entails plenty of mopping, sweeping, etc. No one is "too intelligent" for that kind of work. You take what you can get in this economy.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 17 2017, @08:03PM
A lot of places get into the "overqualified" thing to refuse hiring, so you're lucky, in a weird situation perhaps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @09:13PM
What's even more wrong is that people even take IQ seriously in the first place, and especially so for people who are otherwise really dismissive (rightly, I think) of the social sciences.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @05:22PM
I've found those that routinely proclaim their high level of intelligence are really just middling performers. Smart enough to know some stuff, too dumb to realize their own limitations. Good luck with your shitty worldviews and obnoxious personality.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by VLM on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:13PM (13 children)
Its politically sensitive discussion because the average IQ of the entire African country of Equatorial Guinea is 59. Fifty Nine. Average for an entire country. And their economy and politics and history reflect about what you'd expect to result from an average IQ 59 country.
Meanwhile some google about downs syndrome indicates "39.4% are in the mild intellectual disability range of 50-70, and 1% in the borderline intellectual function range of 70-80"
So "many" but not quite "most" downs syndrome victims are none the less smarter than the average Equatorial Guinea citizen. Think about that in the context of "hold down jobs" and all that. Or think about it in the context of immigration policy. If we birth IQ 59 kids we kill them or institutionalize them, but we must accept as many immigrants at IQ 59 as possible and nothing says political holiness like public support of those people...
This leads to a lot of political tension... in the west we execute white children for being "too stupid" and that's extremely socially acceptable by progressives on many levels, yet 40% of the dead white kids would be smarter than an entire country in Africa where its supposedly unjust to colonize and civilize them because there's no human biological differences and they're just like us (LOL).
So are there, or are there not, human biological differences, when many genetically impaired members of group A none the less test higher on measures of human performance than the average member of group B? If its right and just to genocide and institutionalize members of group A who operate at a slightly higher level of human performance than group B, why not ... have their superiors "guide" members of group B?
The tragedy of the end of imperialism is the argument against was its inappropriate to treat IQ 100 humans like livestock without noting that its at least as inappropriate to treat IQ 60 humans like IQ 100 humans. You wouldn't shut down the programs and group homes and toss the downs syndrome kids onto the streets to fend for themselves in a hard world, but its supposedly moral to do even worse to lower performing groups in the name of anti-imperialism. With painful human toll you could easily predict. Legacy neo- right wingers were sometimes savaged for supposedly tossing inferior locals onto the streets to fend for themselves. But note that left wingers have done worse to entire countries in Africa in the name of anti-imperialism that don't have the brain horsepower required to fend for themselves....
Its interesting to think we celebrate the genocide and institutionalization of a local subgroup that's higher performing than entire countries in Africa... EIther downs syndrome kids should be killed AND we should re-colonize and take over Africa like China is currently doing, or we shouldn't be genociding downs syndrome kids because there's no such thing as human biological differences and imperialism is wrong etc.
Usually anti-abortion doesn't "go together" with anti-imperialism which makes this ever so fun to watch. The tension is fun to watch.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:42PM (12 children)
IQ is a crappy measure of intelligence, which pretty much invalidates everything you've just written. Sorry to knock down your lovely wall of text.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:41PM (2 children)
The amazing thing about guys like him is they try to keep their complete sociopathy under wraps, but when they say shit like this, it becomes so clear how completely psycho they are in part because they *don't* realize how psycho it is to say shit like that in print on a public forum. It's not so much what they say as why and where they say it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:49PM (1 child)
I thought he was going to propose that the US should fund for and raise down syndrome babies until maturity, and then let them take over that country and replace those people that aren't very good at westernized cultural IQ tests due to not having much more than their own culture to go by.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 17 2017, @06:00PM
Pssh, this is VLM we're talking about. The only reason he isn't going around goose-stepping and Sieg-Heil-ing is because he knows he'd get fired, beaten up, and jailed in not necessarily that order if he did. Look at the guy's post history; he'd be out there marching with the neo-Nazis if he weren't such a limp-wristed cuck (am I doin' that right)?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 17 2017, @05:52PM (4 children)
According to some quick Google research that claim is an estimate because there's no actual IQ data on Guinea. On top of that, the methodology used to make that estimate isn't even disclosed.
So, I'd put a big [CITATION NEEDED] tag on the claim that "the average IQ of the entire African country of Equatorial Guinea is 59."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 17 2017, @08:17PM (3 children)
https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country/gq-equatorial-guinea [iq-research.info]
I suppose you could argue that the work done by Professors Lynn and Vanhanen isn't "actual" because it provided a result that's not politically acceptable, kind of like some interpretations of global warming. There are "IQ Skeptics" and so forth although the science seems pretty settled. Most of the claims its invalid data tend to be pretty fluffy and political. Some of it is outright trolling by people imitating global warming denialism, which is pretty funny.
It seems unlikely, fundamentally. Its a simple individual test. Not quite as complicated as detecting gravitational waves or mapping their genomes or whatever. It would be like claiming there is no data at all on blood groups. Thats a good analogy in that its harder than height/weight but simpler and faster and cheaper than a full clinical blood chemistry workup.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 17 2017, @09:21PM (1 child)
What data set did they use? How many Guineans were actually tested? If they didn't test actual Guineans, what methodology did they use for the estimate? You answered none of those questions.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday August 19 2017, @02:02PM
The classic debate derailing tactic of reddit style "citation needed" until political opposition disappears. Not playing that, sorry.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 18 2017, @04:22AM
Can't find it again offhand but I recall hearing, from a meticulous source, that because of all the nay-saying about IQ, researchers have made such a point of large data sets that the total data from IQ testing now exceeds that for all other social sciences combined, AND for large chunks of biological science (brain research and the like). Data sets commonly exceed 500,000 individuals.
Also, turns out there's a very reliable way to determine IQ without any sort of cognitive-ability test: twitch reflexes (the correlation is something like .8, so very high). Seems what IQ really measures is the speed of your synapses, which is basically .... processing power.
But I guess the idea that some CPUs families are faster than others is too hard for some folks.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 17 2017, @08:22PM (3 children)
Um, no.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @09:23PM (1 child)
Brilliant response. We don't even understand intelligence, yet you think we have a way to accurately measure it? IQ can be correlated with several things (like school performance), but we have no idea how much those things relate to one's intellect because we don't even have close to a full understanding of the human mind. The original purpose of IQ was not even to measure intelligence. The evidence is just not there.
IQ also comes from the bowels of the social sciences, which are not exactly known for being rigorous. I strongly suspect you are otherwise dismissive of the social sciences, which would make your position here all the more laughable. Stop picking and choosing which aspects of the social sciences you want to believe and start being intellectually honest. If you actually cared about high quality, rigorous science, you would be as skeptical of IQ as I am.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday August 19 2017, @02:17PM
Yet for so many applications its not needed, just find a very high correlation coeff between successful economies and "G-factor" or "IQ" or whatever you want to call it, then use that as a model to predict which country will be more successful after a war, Somalia or Japan?
The Wright brothers did pretty well at engineering usable culturally impactful airplane despite horribly inferior computational fluid dynamics, turbine blade metallurgy, etc.
Its the classic "perfect is the enemy of good enough" that is often run into with engineering. Vacuum tubes not being the ideal hardware implementation for a computer does not prove that ancient vacuum tube computers never existed and were not practically useful in modeling the real world. It just means something even better at it eventually did/will come along, and be chill when the state of the art progresses as expected.
The existence of a predictive intelligence model is not disproven by slight imperfection.
Maybe a physics analogy... we know newtonian gravity is wrong in the decimal places and weird places. Yet that doesn't somehow prove there is no way to predict if an apple will fall downward or upward out of a tree. We can reliably predict using a mathematical model of reasonable correlation what will happen when that apple detaches from the tree. You can rant all you want about relativistic effects on a 200 mph falling coconut or the heisenberg uncertainty principle as relates to the momentum and position of a falling coconut proving that newtonian gravitation theory is wrong wrong wrong ... but for sake of personal safety, don't do that ranting while standing under a coconut tree, directly under a loose ripe coconut, on a windy day, that can't possibly end well no matter how "wrong" Newton was.
Agreed AC you do make good point. But a math model that seems to work when applied to make predictions earns respect. The more screwing around naval gazing imaginative stuff "they" do, the more a reliably accurate prediction engineering-grade math model should be publicly appreciated as an example of doing the right thing.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday August 17 2017, @11:06PM
How about "crappy in some cases, therefore not great"?
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx [apa.org]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex