u/DependentPanic2169

Not just talking about women glazing each other in their insta posts but in general, the huge circlejerk on social media about being a "girl's girl", with all the rhetoric about how women are these beautiful angelic beings whose natural state is forming a divine sisterhood where everyone holds hands and sings kumbaya (I'm sure you've seen all those Tiktoks where women talk about how the world would become a utopia that's all sunshine and rainbows if only men all disappeared), plus the insistence that it's every woman's responsibility to be a girl's girl by essentially being a misandrist who stays loyal to the sisterhood first and foremost (and any girl who deviates from this gets bullied and shamed as a "pickme").

Examples of "girl's girl" behavior I see: never criticizing or calling out other women, only hyping them up regardless of how regarded they're being; always siding with the woman in a conflict (between a male and female) regardless of who's in the wrong; putting female relationships first to the point of letting your friend group control your entire dating life; etc.

However, while being "girl's girls" is indeed how women behave on social media, I'm not sure to what extent that carries to irl, because I've also seen some women claim that it's all fake/performative.

So to what extent to women actually do the whole sisterhood / girl's girl thing irl? Is the online rhetoric real or just performative? Or does this vary a lot by e.g. demographic?

I've had this thought ever since I first saw how IQ tests were scored but wanted to make this post here.

The main argument I've seen for why VCI is a "good index" is that it doesn't just measure your knowledge base but also implicitly measures your verbal reasoning/comprehension ability; the idea is that your verbal intelligence impacts your efficiency at picking up words and deeply understanding their meanings, and vocabulary tests are just a proxy for it. However, this argument seems to have its provenance in literature from multiple decades back, which makes me question how well it actually holds up today (and likewise with the analogous argument being made for general knowledge tests.)

Particularly, the effectiveness of vocabulary/GK tests as proxies for verbal reasoning/comprehension ability should be inversely related to the variance of the population's exposure to vocabulary and information (hence why VCI tests are considered invalid for non-native speakers); and I would argue that in the US, this variance has been significantly increased in the last few decades due to the decline of educational and cultural homogeneity, through two mechanisms:

1. Changes in the education system (general dumbing down + increased specialization): in general, the American public education system has become significantly less rigorous in the past decades for a variety of reasons. In the past students were expected to study a certain "western canon" of literature, philosophy, and art, but nowadays that's entirely been done away with; with regards to general knowledge, even very basic things like geography and spelling are now totally absent from many schools. Moreover, the hypercompetitive nature of college admissions, job search, etc has made it so that students are incentivized to focus on maxxing out a niche very early on (enabled by the internet providing greater accessibility to academic resources), so nowadays you have people publishing research and founding startups in high school but almost no one actually pursuing a rigorous, well-rounded liberal arts education as was the standard in the past.
2. The internet, and demographic shift: the US became remarkably culturally homogenous in the postwar period / latter half of the 1900s, with people generally consuming the same media, literature, entertainment, etc. However, due to the internet and social media, people nowadays are much more self-segregated and not only consume different media/entertainment but even are essentially living in completely different realities. I've seen a ton on discourse on Twitter from adults working with adolescents about how ridiculously culturally illiterate young people are nowadays. Not to mention, demographics: the US went from 90% white / 10% black not too long ago to less than 60% white currently (and <50% among younger generations), which naturally yields a decrease in cultural homogeneity, especially due to the tendency of minorities to establish their own "subcultures" through ethnic enclaves.

Tldr: I highly question the validity of vocabulary and general knowledge to be valid indicators of IQ in the modern day US, due to the remarkable decline in educational and cultural homogeneity, which in turn has led to massive variance in exposure to vocabulary and knowledge.

What are your thoughts on this?

(Finally, inb4 the accusations of cope: VCI is my highest subtest, so no I am not coping.)