Word: meaninglessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Medical students enjoy an enviable position. They have all finished their pre-med training and its fabled cut-throat competition, to reach a plateau where, barring failure, they are assured internships and M.D.s. Any attempt to rank them at this level is meaningless; it only introduces the unnatural and ugly clamor for grades...
...hard to tell whether Middle South is really trying to increase its percentage of black employees. Instead of trying to explain the EEOC figures, Middle South has sent its subsidiaries a meaningless three-sentence statement--"minority employment is expanding," It said--and instructed the three utilities to clam up on the issue. This kind of superficial response makes Middle South look bad. If they really were trying to recruit blacks, wouldn't they jump at the chance to tell reporters about...
...genetic component will be widely circulated, mostly believed, often quoted, and in due course, almost certainly published. If the incompetence or falsity of such a statement comes to light, those who embraced it will simply turn to the next document purporting to show the I.Q. to be meaningless, immoral, culturally biased, capitalist, racist, etc. For many people, these episodes appear to generate no cumulative skepticism about the criticism. If you possess a thoughtful cast of mind, you should be piqued by this curious phenomenon, for it is a rare specimen of emotion submerging reason, of wish outweighing fact. Later...
...featured an article by a Dr. Clemens E. Benda, who was said to be an international authority on mental retardation and child development. He argued that I.Q. tests do not really measure intelligence because intelligence is not "linear;" that I.Q. scores are not fixed throughout life and are anyway meaningless for adults, and, furthermore, that many "enormous contributions" have been made by people who did poorly on I.Q. tests. He claimed to have found "embarrassing" misinformation in my writings; he said that the genetics of human intelligence is not scientifically established; he dismissed out of hand the biologically and socially...
...Could this be Stanford University, where Lewis Terman was when he developed the "Stanford-Binet"? Wexler? Could this be David Wechsler, developer of the Wechsler-Bellevue, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and other modern tests? (Note, incidentally, that this Wechsler has not heard that the testing of adults is meaningless.) Reading that sentence, I thought for a moment that the entire piece was a prank, but this is neither the time nor the topic for April Fools'. I quickly realized that the sentence was just another manifestation of the first principle of this controversy. Dr. Benda could have included Charles...