Congrats, Tucson! We’re apparently in the top 100 for the smartest cities in the United States — and unsurprisingly, we’re beating Phoenix (suck it, losers!).
Unfortunately, our 68th place ranking isn’t anything to crow about, in my opinion. Considering that we live in a city full of mostly-competent college students, tech geeks, engineers and all-around intelligent people, how the hell are we scoring so poorly? (And yes, I’ll ignore your jokes about city council members.)
Well, for one, it seems that we’re not all doing our part by taking the tests on Lumosity.com, who put the list together based on the people using their training games.
From Lumosity’s blog:
Traditional smartest cities rankings often use indirect measures—college education being the most common—to extrapolate intelligence. While there is value to this well-worn metric, most of us can agree that not only are degrees unequal across institutions and eras, but college degrees aren’t the final word on intelligence. Here in Lumosity’s local San Francisco metro area, for example, we rub elbows with college dropouts Mark Zuckerburg and Steve Wozniak—sound familiar?
So instead of college degrees, Lumosity concentrated on a new measure of intelligence: Brain Performance Index, or BPI. Generated as a number, BPI is a snapshot of a person’s cognitive abilities at the precise moment they complete a Lumosity exercise. What’s more, BPI is calculated based on data from 400 million global gameplays, making it an incredibly rich source of information available only to Lumosity. Because BPI is a more direct measure—and a potentially more accurate portrayal of actual cognitive ability—Lumosity scientists compared over 1,000,000 initial overall BPI scores to compile a ranked list of the smartest cities in America.
So, in an attempt to help raise our bell curve (and also because I like clicking things and getting points for it!) I signed up for this “Lumosity” doo-hickey, where my “BPI” was gauged using only three training games. That’s opposed to the five games that full users get, because I’m too cheap a bastard to purchase the $15-per-month package that would tell me whether or not I was smarter than the average 25-year-old dork.
When I got there, I threw myself right into the fire of the games, doing fairly well (I thought) on a speed-memorization game, kicking ass at a pattern-recognition game, and doing well on a game that involved flashes of birds and numbers to gauge my attention — or to subliminally implant Audubon Society propaganda into my mind.
My BPI scores, based on this game: 158 in Speed, 522 in Memory and 365 in Attention. Now, what does that mean?
I have no idea.
Because I didn’t pay for my membership, I have no clue. After all, Lumosity is providing a service where they gamify intelligence and allow you to compare yourself against other people in order to feel better about yourself — or, if you’re terrible at first, to improve at the games and then feel better about yourself, because you got used to a game and now you’re better at it than other people!
In other words, Lumosity’s scheme smells like bullshit. Sure, it’s fun bullshit, and it’s cheaper than training your reflexes by playing Call of Duty for hours on end, but it’s all still a game — and for that matter, a game that they want you to pay $15 a month for.
Take solace in the fact that you didn’t throw your money out the window to prove that you’re better than other people in other parts of the country, Tucson. Hell, reward yourself with a beer! Might as well kill off some of those hard-working brain cells — call it an early retirement, maybe.
This article appears in Aug 8-14, 2013.
David, I read your article, went to the Lumosity site … And concur that it is a trick costing money to prove you are or are not smart. Somewhat counterintuitive? As to Tucson itself, having lived there on & off for three years it is my observation that it is not one of the smartest place I’ve lived! Most ASU students come & leave quickly. Your super-conservative state is a national beacon for low intelligence. Poor public schools, off-the-chart racial intolerance and, I won’t even begin on your governor & state legislature! However, the sunshine is pleasant.
I checked out Lumosity a few weeks ago. They definitely have a bait and switch come-on. You get lured in by their (prolific) advertising, but then discover that you have to $ubscribe to get to the goodies.
The thing that turned me off the most is that the data they collect from you is made available to thousands of neuroscientists, psychiatrists and no doubt marketeers from all around the globe. Their privacy policy says that your data is mostly disconnected from your identity unless, of course, it is requested by the government.
Danger! Danger!
Do you really want your performance on intelligence tests, psychological, neurological and behavioral trainings available to the government?
The robustly healthy, paranoid, part of my intelligence cannot disregard the possibility that Lumosity has been set up to collect the information that the government isn’t getting from the other trails we leave (internet, phone records, etc). Even if it’s not the feds, it’s a nice set-up for them (or anyone who can hack it) to get an in-depth profile for each of it’s mass of subscribers.
Think about it before you get sucked-in.
@dannyjean
If you check the voting records for Tucson, you will find that it isn’t “our state”, not our governor, and not our legislature.
Tucson is the Arizona home of many progressive organizations: They are fighting racial intolerance and discrimination; they are providing world disaster relief; they are on the front lines of the fight for the preservation of environment and wildlife. Our university has international level rankings in several of it’s colleges and has spawned a large number of businesses here that use local graduate talent.
We have a number of nationally top ranked schools, but we suffer under a state school superintendent and state attorney general (yes, we didn’t elect them) who have repressed our progressive education initiatives.
We are 10 degrees cooler than Phoenix in any heat-spell because we have long been aware of the urban island effect and have been planting trees for 20 some years now. Tucson has also promoted low to no-water landscaping and is a leader in water conservation. You can see the stars at night in Tucson and it’s no accident, but another successful local initiative.
Yes, the sun is wonderful in the winter and Tucson has many famous visitors, and residents. But they aren’t here just for the sun. They are also here for the outstanding restaurants, arts, multicultural events, and for the unique Sonoran Desert preserved around us.
So, who cares what Lumosity thinks of our intelligence ..obviously we are brillant!
@Dannyjean,
Some of it must have rubbed off, as we have very few ASU students coming and going. On the other hand, Phoenix and Tempe make up for that by not having a lot of UofA students coming and going either.
@DannyJean: Forgive me for piling on, but you might not want to conflate Tucson with the rest of the state — Baja Arizona has as separate a cultural identity from Maricopa as San Francsico does from L.A.
Racial intolerance? Sunshine, I recommend you check out Tucson Meet Yourself sometime.
I can’t argue regarding public schools in this state, even as a product of one (perhaps that’s why I can’t argue — I WASN’T LEARNED HOW) but the number of kids who come out of that system as drooling idiots is far lower than one would suspect for a system that’s budget is drained so often one wouldn’t be surprised if state legislators considered bloodletting to be a legitimate medical technique.
Also, as has been pointed out, ASU is about 112 miles up the I-10.
I’ll agree with you about the weather though. Fairly pleasant most of the time.
Have you seen all the people waiting at the bus stops around town wearing black? Here is my take: If you have to walk, take the bus, sleep in the park, whatever, do not wear black in Tucson during the hot months.
It makes you look dumb. Dumb and hot.
@Gandalf the White
We drive a black car 😀
Black blocks the most sun. Can millions of Bedouins be wrong?
You are partially right Corduval, about the Bedouins, but wrong about your car.
Bedouins, Tuareg and other nomadic desert people do stay cooler wearing black but it is not just the color that does it;
1. The black clothing lets less UV radiation reach the skin (minor effect)
2. Black clothing absorbs both the solar heat and the heat from your body. Bad? Not if it is windy as numerous studies have shown that the wind will pull away that radiation faster than the clothing absorbs it, but the clothing has to be loose fitting.
3. There is also an effect where heat rises. If the clothing is loose, better a robe, this will pull up cooler air from the bottom and provide a natural cooling mechanism.
4. The material content matters as well. I don’t think a black vinyl robe would work too well.
Loose white robes are hotter than loose black robes; with animals loose white fur/feathers are warmer than loose black fur/feathers part of the reason why most of the animals in the arctic are white, as well as for predation/camouflage reasons.
Does this apply to your car? No. Does this apply to the people wearing black western style clothing in the middle of the summer? No. However, it would be interesting to see a study comparing how long it takes a white car vs a black car to cool down while driving with the windows down…..
For what its worth, a decade ago Tucson had a higher percentage of it’s population with at least a bachelor degree than Phoenix had. Now? Phoenix beats us by close to two percentage points (that’s a lot of educated people when you look at their population numbers!). Phoenix is the 10th fastest growing city in the nation when it comes to growth rate of residents with bachelor degrees. Tucson does not even make the top 50. Tucson is not even in the top 100 in the nation in percentage of population with at least an associates degree. Arizona as a whole has a higher percentage of people holding bachelor degrees than Tucson does. Close to 20% of Tucson resident do not even have a high school diploma, again worse than the state average.
This does not appear to be a very intelligent city and the US Census Bureau statistics seem to suggest it is not getting much better. Phoenix? They managed to have a huge expansion of their bachelor degree holding population (over 40% increase!) over the last decade, all while having an equally huge general population growth rate of near 10.8%. What this suggests is that Phoenix found a way to attract a lot of highly educated people into the city over the last decade. Tucson? We had a nice population growth rate of 7.8%ish but we grew our number of bachelor degree holders by less than 14%. This seems to suggest that we have room to improve when it comes to attracting intelligent, educated people.
The real story? What exactly has Phoenix done to make such a dramatic turn around and attract so many educated people? If we believe the statistics about education and it’s relationship to salary, then all those educated people equal a larger tax base and better services for everyone in the area. I guess it is no coincidence that Phoenix has dramatically changed over the last decade in a multitude of ways and has become a vibrant metropolis.
On another note Phoenix has a poverty rate of 17.4% and Tucson is at 20.4%, the national average is 15%. The lowest poverty rate among metropolitan areas? 11% Washington DC area. I guess it pays to be the Capitol, whether here in AZ or of our nation…..
About the car ..it’s hotter than hell (requiring gloves to get into it after it’s been parked in the sun). But we drive it because ..so what if it’s hot? Like the dude at the bus stop who wears black, we like black. There’s cool, and then there’s cool. We also get points for accepting the heat ..and raising the ante.
I can’t dispute the numbers you have presented in comparing Tucson to Phoenix, but I don’t think the numbers make Phoenix any better than Tucson as a place to live. Even with our higher poverty rate I think Tucson is a far better place to be poor than Phoenix. Despite our recent inferiority in education, I think that Tucson has made far better decisions than Phoenix in regards to maintaining it’s live-ability. Of course Arizona currently sucks on so many levels that it’s a hard case to make any place here look good from the outside. The Great Recession and the goonies in our state legislature have taken a toll that will take years to correct. I see it getting better tho ..incrementally.
The rest is me just being a seasoned optimist. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.