My head canon is that all of this is intentional on Patrick’s part (which reflects my Patrick bias). Alison is being manipulated and Patrick is pulling out all the stops and really playing her like a pipe organ.

Having been a Game Master for nearly 30 years straight, it never fails to amaze me how easily distracted players can be by the shiny and new. I’ve always thought it was a gamer issue, but I’ve come to realize we all have a touch of this in us. The only difference is in the degree to which we can get distracted.

I’ve done far less clever or interesting things in-game as a “well, they’re getting too close, let’s have the bad guy do something to throw them off the scent”, and it damned near always works. And my players have included some very, very intelligent folks (far smarter than I, in fact).

It’s quite possible that this is exactly as it appears. In that case, yeah, I’m in complete agreement – Alison needs to wise up.

When I was quite young, there were basically about three or four variants of IQ tests, all purportedly measuring information retention. The older I get, the more variants there are – the definition of intelligence has expanded to include modes of perception, empathy/emotion, kinesthetics, aesthetics / creativity, and informational manipulation (as opposed to information retention, which is what is usually meant by an “IQ test”.

The history of IQ tests is both fascinating and frustrating – some of the early assumptions were… perhaps not as well thought out as they might have been. The idea that a person’s ability to move their body is directly related to how their brain works isn’t all that intuitive but bears out pretty well, for example.

I tend to “test” well (taking tests doesn’t tense me up), so I tend to score fairly well regardless of the test. It was a bit of a shock for my parents when I was retested at 11 years and they got a whole new slew of results that weren’t tested when I was 6. The portion on pattern recognition and manipulation was new to them and required a school visit. My results were so outside their areas of expertise (math and engineering) that they wanted to make sure they understood the data (which is such a mathematician / engineer response that i makes me smile).

Howard Gardner did a lot of work in expanding how we define intelligence – and there’s still a lot of work being done in expanding and defining what exactly what is meant when they talk about intelligence. There are some serious problems with the work – not the least of which is that it seems mostly to be a linguistics game rather than a practical framework for exploring the idea – and later studies seem to suggest that there isn’t much empirical evidence to back it up (that being very good at one of the 8 or 9 areas also correlates to being highly intelligent in the more traditional information retention measures.
I didn’t get in on this idea until 7 years after this research was published and had pretty much decided that I’d had enough of school I had practically no debt from college and didn’t feel enough fire to rack up more. I did read the book that proposed this framework after college and it was… difficult, I guess. One of those books that leave you realizing how inadequate your education is for the text (i.e. I need a lot more study to even begin fathoming the insights therein).

https://blog.adioma.com/9-types-of-intelligence-infographic/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Gardner

Having spent more than a little time looking into them, my best conclusion is that most of them are less than rigorous from an experimental point of view (even using the limited rigor of psychology). I do think we’re finally getting into a period where we can now effectively gather data as long as we’re willing to completely set aside ethical issues surrounding privacy, approach it from more epidemiological method, and fund that research over a 40 year period.

Not hopeful on any of those points though.

If we’ve got a concern about privacy, that trumps the science until the science can grant the privacy.

There ought to be a way to collect data and keep it private, not only from the general public but also from the subjects – knowing they’re under observation influences their performance, biasing the data. I’m realist enough to understand that’s probably an unrealistic hope at present.

Given those two points, ethical considerations about privacy would negate any possibility of such a study coming to fruition on a scale where the data would be useful (I’m setting aside the problem of who the heck do we trust with developing and conducting the study).

Anne McCaffrey has a conceit in one of her series of novels where an unbreakable security code guards each person’s personal data; only the person can share that data, and any data input remains that person’s property. I remember reading that and thinking, “Hmmm – how in the world would that work?” and then shrugging and moving on with it as a given. So many levels of problems with that.

Ooo, boy. So, like, you know that I hang with a lot of hackers, right? (And have been one, and am one, depending on how you use the term. Certainly, classically.) I mean, for the most part highly placed computer security consultants, and and important core technology infrastructure type people. Oh, and some hackers turned lawyers, and a lot of hacker / activists. Those sorts of hackers. So I maybe have too many opinions on this subject? Also, I spent a bit of time in bioinformatics, which meant I learned a bit about clinical bioinformatics, just because my career can’t make any sense. Run while you can.

Our technical ability to encrypt data, and come up with unique keys or whatever is pretty darned good. There are issues there, but in terms of medical data they’re so drastically far from the most pressing issues.

Things that we know: even just in terms of standard electronic medical records, most hospital computer security is laughably, horribly bad. And you know how there are HIPAA regulations requiring moving towards (or at least highly incentivizing, I don’t know the details) electronic records? Ahaha..! It’s pretty ridiculous. Worse, there are several companies competing for that market, and last I heard not one of them had clue the first. It’s a nightmare, unless you have a reason to hack someone’s records. The biggest thing preventing disaster is that it is such a giant mess. This isn’t a good safe guard, and it doesn’t guard a lot.

This isn’t quite the same as study records, which might be regulated differently. I haven’t had to work under IRB regs, I don’t know – you’re more likely to, really. (Though I seem to recall a particularly large patient records database that was used for clinical research and that I did look at at one point – as a database design consultant – was not impressively secured. Anyway, that was, like a decade ago. And there have been scandals since then!)

Okay, moving on. The next bit has to do with the parts of the data that get used. You might have seen a paper about how frequently there is enough informtion in case studies to narrow it down to an individual with a little Google-fu? Similar techniques have been used by adopted children and children of sperm donors whose biological parents had not expressed interest in contact. Often, data says more than one necessarily is aware of.

I’d express particular concern if the subject of research is high intelligence. Certainly, not everyone with particularly high intelligence ends up in research, by any means! But you start skewing your probabilities, kind of a lot. (And I can tell you from experience how weird and short the social connections in science can be, even when they’re spanning the globe. Like, one of my best friend as a teenager, from Seattle, is married to a man from Cali, who worked on bees. They know a woman, finishing her doctorate in Seattle, who I met through another friend, who also works on bees. She headed out of Switzerland, to the same institute as the girlfriend of our former post-doc (she also works on bees, and is from Arizona). So of course, I’m trying to introduce both of them to a former labmate who now works in the UK, who, these days, works on bees. And this just sticks in my head because hello, I have never worked on bees (though I really like bees). Anyhow, the chances that research subjects would end up meeting their researchers is probably higher than one might imagine. Sure, only some of them, but, like, there will be marriages and shit, too.

Politically I fall pretty firmly on the pro-strong encryption side of things. (But then, I’m also free and open source software girl. Basically, politically in this space I’m more or less a Pirate, I just want to shout at them until they have a workable economic platform. <= I hate being the most conservative person in the room. Though in tech, it doesn't happen that often.) But… well, I'm a supporter of libsec who also studied the political economics of the twentieth century pretty seriously, which leaves me kind of sad and cynical.

I think, also, I misread which parts there you were saying were dubious. Casting shade on traditional IQ tests always cheers me up.