"Well, I apply it to people who do things without considering possible
consequences. People who pepper distinguished Austrian psychologists in
the pants-seat with turkey-shot, for a starter. Or people who push
buttons to see what'll happen, or turn valves and twiddle with
dial-knobs because they have nothing else to do with their hands. Or
shoot insulators off power lines to see if they can hit them. People who
don't know it's loaded. People who think warning signs are purely
ornamental. People who play practical jokes. People who--"
"I know what you mean. Just day-before-yesterday, I saw a woman toss a
cocktail into an electric heater. She didn't want to drink it, and she
thought it would just go up in steam. The result was slightly
spectacular."
"Next time, she won't do that. She'll probably throw her drink into a
lead-ladle, if there's one around. Well, on a statistical basis, I'd
judge that I have three or four such dud rounds among this new gang I've
hired. I want you to put the finger on them, so I can bounce them before
they blow the whole plant up, which could happen quite easily."
"That," Doris Rives said, "is not going to be as easy as it sounds.
Ordinary intelligence-testing won't be enough. The woman I was speaking
of has an I.Q. well inside the meaning of normal intelligence. She just
doesn't use it."
"Sure." Melroy got a thick folder out of his desk and handed it across.
"Heydenreich thought of that, too. He got this up for me, about five
years ago. The intelligence test is based on the new French Surete test
for mentally deficient criminals. Then there's a memory test, and tests
for judgment and discrimination, semantic reactions, temperamental and
emotional makeup, and general mental attitude."
She took the folder and leafed through it. "Yes, I see. I always liked
this Surete test. And this memory test is a honey--'One hen, two ducks,
three squawking geese, four corpulent porpoises, five Limerick oysters,
six pairs of Don Alfonso tweezers....' I'd like to see some of these
memory-course boys trying to make visual images of six pairs of Don
Alfonso tweezers. And I'm going to make a copy of this word-association
list. It's really a semantic reaction test; Korzybski would have loved
it. And, of course, our old friend, the Rorschach Ink-Blots. I've always
harbored the impious suspicion that you can prove almost anything you
want to with that. But these question-suggestions for personal interview
are really crafty. Did Heydenreich get them up himself?"
"Yes. And we have stacks and stacks of printed forms for the written
portion of the test, and big cards to summarize each subject on. And we
have a disk-recorder to use in the oral tests. There'll have to be a
pretty complete record of each test, in case--"
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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