Has it not been fairly common to require police officers to have a bachelor’s degree? Or an associate’s? I think recently that has been relaxed but I’ve lived in places where it was absolutely a requirement.
Police departments are known to avoid hiring people that get high marks in school, under the principle that such individuals will become bored with the job and quit. They literally look for average people with average intelligence: C students.
Now factor in the slow decline of our educational institutions, where grade inflation has systematically diminished the credibility of a degree. I would wager that many C students today would have failed out completely 30 years ago.
In that light, it is not surprising that people are seeing ICE agents behave like brown shirts. No one in power wants those people asking any kind of hard questions about what they are being ordered to do.
I've been called an intellectual snob before, because I tended to look down on people unfairly. I've even been tested (with a real test, not some online crap) as having a fairly high IQ. So I find it interesting that I'm now being accused of thinking too highly of the ~50% of the population with IQ between 85 and 115.
In any case I stand by my assessment. Someone with a 100 IQ is perfectly capable of being a competent, well behaved police officer. And while your article suggests that lethality increases with lower IQs, I do think some of the biggest assholes I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with were legitimately brilliant otherwise. I wouldn't want them given power over others.
> Someone with a 100 IQ is perfectly capable of being a competent, well behaved police officer.
Sure. But, depending on which source you use, 104 or 98.4 is average, and the standard deviation is between 11 and 14. If we use the most generous of those numbers, that would still mean that 21% of the police have an IQ below 93.
And while a policeman with an IQ below 93 might even manage to do most things OK, I submit that the amount of training necessary to get them to understand the limitations of AI is almost certainly much higher than what they have received to date.
