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U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

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Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#151

Post by nindalf »

Magridal wrote: post #145
Gud wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine I met while serving in Afghanistan, He was working for the Department of Agriculture, trying to get the Afghan farmers to grow saffron instead of poppy. He was a professor in agronomy and would help his students back home in the US with their assignments. He had signed up for the US army and ended up serving in the Special Forces in Vietnam for 2 years. He dropped out of school when he was 13. In my…

You are making an assumption that a person dropping out of school at 13 in the ~1960s would have the same education level as someone dropping out of school at 13 today, let alone that the conditions and circumstances one would find themselves in having dropped out are equivalent to the 1960s. Frankly, especially with the crumbling and cracking discipline, order, and hierarchy in the U.S. military now, you are also ma…

Two things. I didn’t say anything about school in the 1960s. I only said, they used they’ve used the IQ test for about a century to good effect. When they abandoned it for expediency, the results were tragic. That’s why they’ll stick to the IQ test, correct or not.

You’re saying that the US military has issues and it may well have. I’m no expert on that. But I still believe that a person who has dropped out of high school has a lot to offer society. It seems like the US military is coming around to the same line of thinking, as long as the person passes the IQ test. I think that’s a reasonable compromise.

The program might fail but if we never try then we’ll never know.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#152

Post by TylerE »

PeterStuer wrote: post #143
klipklop wrote: post #24

A bit of sensationalism going on. They still have to pass a standardize test that mostly proves they have an IQ suitable for military service. There are people that could be a great soldier/servicemember that didn’t make it through high school. Some will flourish under a military environment that failed out of high school. I don’t really like people assuming somebody that didn’t graduate high school are somehow infer…

Back in the day my country still had obligatory military service for the oldest male child of the family. Everyone had to do this. IQ tests were used to sort people coming in. The military does not only need highly functioning autonomous operators. There were many more menial positions in cleaning, catering, hauling and warm body canon fodder than there were scouts or special forces. I guess these days many of those…

> warm body canon fodder

Man, your Army Band really takes their Bach to the extreme.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#153

Post by paganel »

petre wrote: post #73
hayst4ck wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neutrality is support for might makes right. Choosing to be neutral is to say that the strongest party should win. Not being prepared to be violent makes you harmless. Having the capacity for violence and choosing not to use it makes you peaceful. If you speak softly, but don't carry a big stick, then you are just speaking softly. Might might not make right, but it determines who gets to make the rules.

Then you get something like the KPA (North Korean army): not very good at fighting wars but quite good at construction work. In order to have a capable military, it needs to fight wars. Hence all the countries joining the US in Afghanistan to achieve valuable on the field training. What use is a big stick, other than intimidation, when you just carry it around, not knowing how to actually use it? Future recruits will…

The drone thing is just a fantasy some of us nerds like to tell ourselves, I've seen it in some reddit subs, too.

As per North Korea, they were able to come up with 1 million artillery shells for their friends the Russians, while the West couldn't do the same for their friends the Ukrainians [1], I'd say that North Korea got the better of the West here.

[1] https://unn.ua/en/news/it-seems-that-north-korea-is-a-more-e...

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#154

Post by nindalf »

Magridal wrote: post #146
dmurray wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

85 IQ really isn't that low. It's one standard deviation below average, so about 16% of people are below that. In your average high school class of 30 people, the 4 stupidest would be rejected by the military on these grounds (assume the bottom 1/31 have such severe developmental difficulties they can't even attend a normal high school). Doesn't that seem like quite a high bar?

You’re overlooking a hidden pernicious effect, that IQ is a relative measure that does not identify a declining trend very effectively, i.e., any identified decline in IQ is both a momentary and transient indicator as the norm, i.e., 100 IQ, integrated; and the 100 IQ norm also does not say anything about the overall relative state to any other previous state. In other words, this is how we end up with Idiocracy wher…

IQ hasn’t declined though. The Flynn effect means that the median IQ has gone up steadily every decade since they started measuring. It’s unclear why. Maybe better nutrition, better schooling, less leaded petrol - hard to tell.

So an 85 IQ person today is substantially more intelligent than an 85 IQ person in the Vietnam war. That said, the modern infantry man’s job is more complex. I would postulate that the job’s complexity has grown to keep pace with the Flynn effect.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#155

Post by paganel »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #68
huytersd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a good sign for a country that depends on its military to maintain a hegemony. It’s also not like our “enemies” are reducing their armies or anything.

human wave is not the game. The Ukraine-Russia war has shown us how important the technology is. The whole war is fighting with drones to detect and kill enemies.

> The whole war is fighting with drones to detect and kill enemies.

This is a very wrong take.

A big continental war like this one in Ukraine is fought with artillery and with enough men capable of holding the territory (already under control or conquered), i.e. the story of WW1 and the WW2 (when it came to the Eastern Front). You don't have that, you lose. Trouble for Ukraine (and for the West supporting Ukraine) is that they're running out of artillery shells and they're running out of Ukrainian men.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#156

Post by ggdG »

jorts wrote: post #38
shipscode wrote: post #35

[flagged]

They vaccinate for all sorts of diseases. Covid is no different. It’s a risk and threat to them being functional as an organization.

> They vaccinate for all sorts of diseases. Covid is no different.

But the covid vaccines ARE different:

Vaccines typically take 10-15 years of research and clinical trials before approval [1].

The covid vaccines OTOH got developed, "tested" and approved within the timespan of less than a year. They literally had to invoke a sci-fi trope ("warp speed") to justify this timetable [2].

> It’s a risk and threat to them being functional as an organization.

The injection poses a bigger threat to them as an organisation than the disease itself: men below 40 are 6 times more likely to get heart damage from the mRNA shot than from the disease [3]. And this for a disease that has a lower IFR than influenza among people younger than 60 [4].

Pre-2020, decades of research into vaccines for (other) coronaviruses only resulted in vaccines that either didn't work at all or led to enhanced disease [5].

After a gain-of-function experiment went south in Wuhan, all that hard-earned wisdom got thrown out of the window (along with the Nuremberg code [6]) for a panicked and rushed vaccination program.

Yes, these vaccines improve the short-term relative outcomes for the elderly, the obese and the sick. About six months after vaccination you still are somewhat protected against symptoms, but are more likely to get infected than the non-vaccinated [7] [8] [9].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/basics/test-approve.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed

[3] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.0...

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9613797/

[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369385/#Sec12t...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code

[7] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2022...

[8] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.14.22282103v...

[9] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#157

Post by nabla9 »

dmurray wrote: post #134
nindalf wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That standardised test administered by the US military has some history. The idea was that folks who were below an 85IQ would be harder to train. During the Vietnam war they tried abandoning the requirement and the results were sad. It cost the military a lot more in remedial training, but the real tragedy is that these folks died at 3 times the rate of people who would have passed the test. They weren’t cut out to b…

85 IQ really isn't that low. It's one standard deviation below average, so about 16% of people are below that. In your average high school class of 30 people, the 4 stupidest would be rejected by the military on these grounds (assume the bottom 1/31 have such severe developmental difficulties they can't even attend a normal high school). Doesn't that seem like quite a high bar?

After the Vietnam war experiment "Project 100,000" (aka McNamara's Morons) the IQ level 80 (9 percentile) became the floor for acceptance in Army. https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1...

About 10% of people are too cognitively challenged to positively contribute in the US Army even in the least mentally challenging roles.

At 80 - 85 IQ level person can typically read basic level. They gradate from schools and comprehend simple texts and sentences but may struggle with more complex language structures, vocabulary, and abstract concepts. People with reading disorders or other disorders should not be confused with low IQ.

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#158

Post by [deleted] »

paganel wrote: post #149
hayst4ck wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neutrality is support for might makes right. Choosing to be neutral is to say that the strongest party should win. Not being prepared to be violent makes you harmless. Having the capacity for violence and choosing not to use it makes you peaceful. If you speak softly, but don't carry a big stick, then you are just speaking softly. Might might not make right, but it determines who gets to make the rules.

> Choosing to be neutral is to say that the strongest party should win. In a war the strongest party also usually wins, so it's totally rational to not incur the opportunity costs of risking one's life by joining a war.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. army drops requirement for high school diploma (2022)

#160

Post by orwin »

Magridal wrote: post #145
Gud wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine I met while serving in Afghanistan, He was working for the Department of Agriculture, trying to get the Afghan farmers to grow saffron instead of poppy. He was a professor in agronomy and would help his students back home in the US with their assignments. He had signed up for the US army and ended up serving in the Special Forces in Vietnam for 2 years. He dropped out of school when he was 13. In my…

You are making an assumption that a person dropping out of school at 13 in the ~1960s would have the same education level as someone dropping out of school at 13 today, let alone that the conditions and circumstances one would find themselves in having dropped out are equivalent to the 1960s. Frankly, especially with the crumbling and cracking discipline, order, and hierarchy in the U.S. military now, you are also ma…

Do you have a source on the 'cracking discipline, order and hierarchy' of the US army? I know a 35 yo French artillery officer (now he's teaching new officers) who has worked with the US military for 15years, last year he told us that the US army is the only western army that didn't stagnate and became better, organization-wise, in the last 15 year.
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