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Monthly Archives: December 2014

The impressive intelligence of African immigrants

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 189 Comments

Barack Obama senior, who obtained a Harvard economics A.M. is an extreme example of the higher intelligence of immigrants from Africa

http://www.appletree.com/Barack_Hussein_Obama_2%5B/caption%5D

Recently it was brought to my attention by commenter “Swanknasty” that black populations in Britain are scoring quite well on IQ tests. I assume Swanknasty learned about this issue from the Occidentalist blog

I believe the above chart can be found here. On non-verbal reasoning (presumably the most culture reduced test) British whites scored 101.3 (standard deviation (SD) = 14.3) and British black Africans scored 94.1. For consistency, race scholar Richard Lynn calculates all IQs in reference to British whites, defined as having a mean of 100, and an SD of 15, so with reference to the British white distribution, British black Africans would have a mean IQ of 92:

100 – [(101.3 – 94.1)/14.3](15)

An IQ of 92 is quite high for population of African immigrants because scientist Richard Lynn estimated the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans to be 67. However Lynn believes that bad environment (i.e. malnutrition) depresses the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africa by 13 points, and that they actually have a genetic IQ of 80; a bit lower than the IQ of 85 Lynn found for African Americans, who Lynn felt got a 5 point IQ boost from their white admixture.

So if the average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa is 67, and if their genetic IQ is 80, why do Africans in Britain score 92?

Extreme selection for education

It’s important to understand just how highly selected African immigrants in Britain are. While only one in a 100 children in South Africa grow up to graduate from college, an astonishing 40% of Britain’s Africans have college degrees. This suggests that Africans who migrate to Britain are 2.07 SD more educated than the average sub-Saharan.

On page 291, of The g Factor, scientist Arthur Jensen writes: “In general, the number of years of education, for example, is correlated .60 to .70 with IQ.” Given that immigrants from Africa are +2.07 SD more educated than the general sub-Saharan population, and assuming IQ and education also correlate 0.65 in sub-Saharan Africa, simple regression predicts that immigrants from Africa will have IQs 0.65(2.07 SD) = 1.35 SD above the sub-Saharan mean. Assuming sub-Saharan Africans have a mean IQ of 67 and an SD of 15, this would give Africans immigrants in Britain a theoretical IQ of 87 just based on education alone.

Immigrants from Africa are way more prosperous than most sub-Saharan Africans

Africans who migrate to Britain are not just way more educated than the average African, they are also much, much richer, just by virtue of the fact that they have moved to Britain. As of 2008, 50% of sub-Saharan Africa lives on no more than a $1.25 a day. By contrast, only about one in 22,000 people in the UK live in comparable levels of poverty. Thus, simply by virtue of migrating to Britain, African immigrants are likely an astonishing +3.93 SD richer than the general sub-Saharan population (on average). According to Jensen, the correlation between IQ and income is 0.4. Assuming this applies in sub-Saharan Africa, we would expect those Africans adaptable enough to migrate to a place as rich as Britain to have an IQ of 0.4(3.93 SD) = +1.57 SD above the sub-Saharan mean of 67. In other words, an IQ of 91 would be expected, just based on income alone (assuming their incomes are typical of the British population as a whole).

But African immigrants are not just educated and rich; they’re BOTH!

Based on education alone, African immigrants in Britain should have a mean IQ of 87. Based on income alone, they should have a mean IQ of 91. But the fact that they are multi-talented enough to acquire both education and income implies they might be smarter still. How much smarter? In order to answer that question, we must apply a technique called multiple regression first taught to me by a member of Prometheus. Since we know the correlation between IQ and education is 0.65, and the correlation between IQ and income is 0.4, and assuming the correlation between education and income is also about 0.4, the following standardized regression formula can be built which estimates the predictive value of education and income, independent of one another.

IQ = 0.58(education) + 0.17(income)

So African immigrants in Britain, being +2.07 SD above sub-Saharans in education, and +3.93 SD in income, would have an expected IQ of:

IQ = 0.58(2.07 SD) + 0.17(3.93 SD)
IQ = 1.2 SD + 0.67 SD
IQ = 1.87 SD

In other words, based on their education and income together, we should expect African immigrants in Britain to be 1.87 SD smarter than the general sub-Saharan population, or roughly IQ 95.

How smart would their kids be?

If two typical African immigrants (IQ 95) in Britain had kids with one another, the mid-parent IQ (i.e. the average IQ of the two parents) would be 95. According to scientist Steve Hsu, the mid-parent-child IQ correlation is 0.6, so the children of two African immigrants would be only 60% as cognitively extreme as their parents on average. If African immigrants are 28 points smarter than sub-Saharan Africans on average, the IQ of their kids should be 28(0.6) = 17 points above the sub-Saharan African average. Thus 67 + 17 = 84

But if the children of these African immigrants are not born and conceived in sub-Saharan Africa, but in Britain which has much better nutrition and living standards, their IQs should be 13 points higher than they would have been in Africa. Thus:

84 + 13 = 97

Thus the children of Britain’s African immigrants should average somewhere between 84 and 97, depending on whether they’re first, second, or third generation.

Now if an African immigrant (IQ 95) mates with a white (IQ 100), the African parent would be 28 points smarter than his race, and the white parent’s IQ would 0 points smarter than her race, so on average, they are 14 points smarter than their race. Thus the IQ of their mullato kids would be 14(0.6)= 8 points smarter than the mulatto mean. The mean white has an IQ of 100 and the mean African has an IQ of 67. But as mentioned, the African IQ of 67 is depressed by malnutrition and black Africa’s genetic IQ is likely 80, so averaging this with the white mean of 100 gives 90 as the genetic mean of mulattoes. So the children of African immigrants who mate with whites would have an IQ of:

90 + 8 = 98

[caption width="3598" align="alignnone"] British actress & Cambridge grad Thandie Newton is an example of a brilliant mulatto who’s black half is an immigrant from Africa

Are African IQs really depressed by 13 points?

Some readers may dispute the idea that African IQs are depressed by 13 points, especially at the high end from which immigrants come. As noted above, the estimate is based on the fact that African Americans (without white admixture) have an IQ around 80 according to Lynn (13 points higher than the IQ of 67 Lynn finds in black Africa). The notion that black Africans have phenotypes nearly 1 SD below the phenotypes they would have had if born in the developed world is consistent with the fact that West Africans are several inches shorter than African Americans, as blogger Steve Sailer brilliantly noted many years ago.

But are elite Africans also nearly 1 SD below their genetic potential or does sub-optimum nutrition only impair the left half of the curve? I would argue that the effect is roughly similar across virtually the entire distribution. For example President Obama is roughly average height for a living American president and yet he towers over African leaders:

U.S. President Barack Obama (bottom row, C) waits to depart with other leaders after a family photo for the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit at the U.S. State Department in Washington, August 6, 2014. (Larry Downing/Courtesy Reuters)

This demonstrates that even Africa’s elite suffers from sub-optimal nutrition and are thus significantly shorter than elites in the developed world. Furthermore, in the 19th century, British phenotypes were significantly depressed by malnutrition, and this extended to the upper classes.  British scientist Francis Galton collected height data on various occupations and found that males aged 26+ of the Professional occupation (which was very elite in those days) averaged 67.91 inches tall (see table 10 in HBD Chick’s blog post) which is well below the average of young white men today and probably even more below the average if compared to today’s elite young white men.  This is strong evidence that in malnourished societies, all social classes are afflicted.

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The IQ of the man who started it all: Arthur Jensen

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 260 Comments

The modern IQ debate was launched by an essay scholar Arthur Jensen wrote in 1969 called ” How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” where Jensen argued that IQ is mostly determined by genes & that cultural & environmental improvement will do little to improve the test scores of low IQ kids

It was the liberal 1960s & Jensen’s pessimistic views were the last thing America wanted to hear.  Despite being a pro-civil rights liberal, a Gandhi fanatic, and a talented musician, Jensen was labeled a racist & became the boogeyman of academia.  Protesters attacked his classes so aggressively that he was offered campus bodyguards.  Entire generations of academics built careers opposing Jensenism; arguing that there is no such thing as g (general intelligence), that all races are equally smart & that intelligence is not genetic

Throughout decades of persecution, Jensen kept his cool & would calmly and cogently rip his critics to shreds in hundreds of scholarly papers.  The man who launched the IQ debate would dominate it until the day he died, leaving the field still scrambling to find a worthy successor.

How could one man have such a huge intellectual impact on American society, launching a debate that would rage for nearly half a century?  What would be the IQ of such a significant groundbreaking scholar?

Reporter Dan Seligman asked Jensen that very question.  It turned out the best approximation of Jensen’s IQ came from the Terman Concept Mastery test where Jensen scored around the level of the most highly educated gifted people in scholar Lewis Terman’s famous study of the gifted.  When reporter Seligman searched through Terman’s data to find out how smart Terman’s most educated gifted subjects were, he discovered a truly astonishing figure: 156; which would make Jensen almost certainly smarter than anyone who has ever posted on this blog, or any other blog you’re likely to read soon.

To understand just how astonishing an IQ of 156 is consider the average American has an IQ of 100, the average college grad has an IQ of 113, and students at the world’s best university (Harvard) average IQ 130.  Further, an IQ of 156 would likely make Jensen smarter than any president in American history.

This “possibly helps to explain why Jensen has been such a dominant figure in the IQ debate,” Seligman wrote.

Roadside (2013): More horror for the holidays

27 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

Just watched a fabulous little movie called Roadside about a newlywed couple driving down a dark snowy woodsy road on Christmas Eve on their way to some relatives.  When the man makes the mistake of getting out of the car, he hears a demented voice from deep inside the forest. claiming to have a gun & he will shoot if the couple dares to leave.  So the couple pretty much is stuck there all night on the road, forced to either freeze to death, or risk being shot by the madman if they drive off

IMDB only rates this 4.5/10, but I enjoyed it.  Normally i don’t like guns in horror & other horror fans feel the same; horror villains are supposed to be slashers not shooters.

In Halloween IV (1988), there’s a seen where the killer (Michael Myers) sits on a chair with a rifle pretending to be the sherrif.  When a young woman approaches, Myers gets up with the rifle in hand.  Legend has it that movie audiences booed because they were so disappointed Michael would kill his victim with gun.  But then boos turned to cheers when instead of shooting the woman, he rammed the rifle through her body & using it to nail her to the wall

I have a theory for why horror fans prefer stabbings, slashings & impailings to shootings. Our love for horror is our way of coping with fears that evolved tens of thousands of years ago.  In those days, genetically superior mongoloids had not yet evolved to teach the world how to make guns, so we feared the Stone Age violence of being stabbed, slashed or clubbed to death.  Villains like Jason from the Friday the 13th movies or Myers from Halloween are like relics of the primitive killers who used to haunt our distant ancestors.

That’s also why slashers in these films are often mentally retarded & kill in the woods; because 100,000 years ago, most humans were mentally retarded & lived in the forest

Today mostly those who are middle class or beyond watch horror & most horror is written & cast for a middle class white suburban audience.  It is those who feel safe who most crave the adrenelen rush of being scared…as long as it’s from the comfort & presumed safety of their cozy suburban homes

Silent Night Deadly Night (1984): A horror classic

23 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in horror

≈ 74 Comments

With Christmas eve only hours away, now is the perfect time to blog about one of my absolute favorite movies of all time: Silent Night Deadly Night.  And it occurs to me that this Christmas season marks the 30th anniversary of this horror masterpiece.

The plot: A little boy named Billy is taken by his parents to visit his grandfather in the mental hospital.  The grandfather is catatonic and seems to have lost the ability to speak, but when Billy’s parents leave him alone with the grandfather, he suddenly comes alive to warn Billy that Christmas eve is the scariest night of the year and to watch out for Santa:

In an amazing coincidence, that night Billy witnesses both parents killed by a man dressed as Santa, an experience that traumatizes him for life.

Growing up in an orphanage, he is severely punished for any behavior seen as naughty.

When Billy turns 18, he gets a job in a small toy store, and when the guy who dresses up as Santa on Christmas eve calls in sick, Billy is pressured into taking his place.  Being forced to dress up as the man he thinks killed his parents is too much.  Billy snaps, and begins roaming the town with an ax, dressed as Santa, looking for naughty people to punish.

This film was extremely controversial when it first came out, and was actually pulled from theaters, only to resurface years later on video.  As a kid I remember waiting for everyone in my family to go to sleep on Christmas eve, and then sneaking downstairs to watch it in a dark room lit only by the multicoloured glow of the Christmas tree.  It was the ultimate forbidden fruit; the film they tried to BAN:

And yet with its haunting music, small town atmosphere, nostalgic feel, and childlike story, it captures the Christmas spirit better than any movie I have ever seen.  And horror has always been part of the Christmas tradition, going all the way back to Charles Dickens.

And there is HBD in this movie.  Although the film plays up the idea that Billy’s psychosis was caused by his incredibly traumatic childhood, the fact that he grows up to be just like the demented grandfather he hardly knew, speaks to the power of genes.

This winter season, wait for an especially cold and snowy night, make a thick cup of homemade real hot chocolate, and watch this movie.  The original 1984 classic, not the horrible 2012 remake, that follows a completely different story-line.

Are some populations more evolved than others?

21 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 216 Comments

Although HBD claims some human populations are more intelligent and well behaved than others, this is usually explained in terms of evolutionary adaptations to different environments.  Very rarely does HBD ever claim that some populations are more evolved than others.  Of course this is not surprising.  The very idea of some extant life forms being more evolved than others is considered pseudoscience by the likes of biologist Stephen Jay Gould and his millions of followers.

It used to be argued that the oldest population was the most evolved.  Before the days of evolutionary theory it was argued that Europeans were the first humans, made in God’s image, and as they migrated in different directions, they began to degrade into other races.

Once evolutionary theory became accepted, there was Carleton Coon’s theory which seemed to imply that Europeans were the oldest modern humans and thus the most evolved, while other populations were behind the curve.  Of course this assumed that different races all made the leap to humanity in different places, a theory that has since been replaced by the single origin model which argues that modern humans all evolved in one place (sub-Saharan Africa) 200,000 years ago, and only after leaving Africa 70,000 years ago did they split into different races.

Of course this allowed Afrocentric types like Louis Farakhan to argue that since the first modern humans were Africans, they are the parents of other races, and other races must respect their parents.  However scholar J.P. Rushton flipped this argument on its head by arguing that the earlier a race split off the main trunk of the human evolutionary tree, the less advanced it was, arguing that Negroids were the oldest race, Mongoloids were the youngest race, and Caucasoids were intermediate. Rushton based his theory on the idea of evolutionary progress which I’ve blogged about in-depth.  However when I personally asked Rushton about this splitting off date theory (which I thought was absolutely fascinating) he seemed ambivalent, noting that his colleagues felt it made no evolutionary sense.  I tried to argue that it was very logical, but not wanting to belabor the point, I dropped the subject.

But I return to it now, by noting a genetic linkage tree geneticist Cavalli Sforza published:

A genetic tree created from page 119 of L.L. Cavalli-Sforza's book "The Great Human Diasporas"

A genetic tree created from page 119 of L.L. Cavalli-Sforza’s book “The Great Human Diasporas”

Now Sforza is very politically correct and would never imply any kind of racial hierarchy, but when you look at his tree above, and compare it with brain size data of various populations in the chart below, a striking pattern emerges.  Sub-Saharan African populations branch off the genetic tree after just one split, and have a brain size of about 1275 cc (1270 cc for Bushmen, 1280 cc for other sub-Saharans).  Australoids branch off the tree after three splits and have a brain size of 1225 cc.  Pacific Islanders (1317 cc), Southeast Asians (1332 cc), American Indians (1366 cc), whites (1369 cc), and non-white Caucaoids (1293 cc) all branch off the tree after four splits and all have bigger brains than less branched populations.  Lastly, the biggest brains on Earth belong to East Asians (1416 cc) and Arctic people (1443 cc) and these branch off after five splits (more than any other populations).  Coincidence?    Although there are exceptions (australoids having smaller brains than Africans, despite doing more branching), there appears to be an extremely strong correlation (roughly +0.9) between the amount of branching in a population’s evolutionary history, and how large its mean brain size is.  A similar correlation would probably exist between the mean IQ of each population and the degree of branching, but since Lynn’s IQ data is so controversial, I focused on the brain size data instead.

Table from Richard Lynn's book "Race Differences in Intelligence"

Table from Richard Lynn’s book “Race Differences in Intelligence”

 

Of course much depends on how the populations are classified.   Sforza divided humans into nine genetic clusters.  Using a different number of clusters you might get different results, but it is interesting that the classification scheme that Sforza considered reasonable, caused the degree of branching to correlate so well with brain size, even though Sforza himself rejects racial theories.  Of course it should be noted that these brain sizes have not been adjusted for nutrition, and such adjustments would probably decrease the brain size differences between first world and third world peoples substantially, though I believe the rank order of brain sizes would remain.

When doing this type of analysis, it’s important to compare life forms with the same level of taxonomic specificity.  So you compare races within the same species, species within the same genus etc

IQ and hysteria

21 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 72 Comments

There’s a section in the book The g Factor by Arthur Jensen, where positive and negative correlates of g (general intelligence) are listed.  Among the positive correlates are variables like education, height, income, social skills, supermarket shopping ability, talking speed, emotional sensitivity and sports participation in university.  Among the negative correlates listed were smoking, alcoholism, crime, impulsivity, dogmatism, racial prejudice, weight/height ratio, and hysteria.  When I saw that hysteria was negatively correlated with IQ, I was reminded of a movie they used to repeat on TV every couple years when I was young, and that I have been trying my whole life to hunt down.  Finally I found a clip of it on Youtube; it’s called Special People.

The film is about mental retardation, and as a kid I found it mesmerizing.  I estimate the characters (who seem to be largely played by themselves) have what is sometimes known as “Educable (mild) Retardation” (IQ 50ish to 70) which is one level up from “Trainable (moderate) Retardation” (IQ 40ish to 50ish).  The educable are more likely to have what Jensen called familial retardation (biologically normal low IQ) while the trainable are more likely to have organic retardation (biologically abnormal low IQ), though both types of retardation are found at both levels; the main difference is that familial retardates look normal and tend to come from low IQ families  while organic retardates look unusual and can come from any family.

Back to hysteria.  At around 10 minutes into the below video, one of the disabled characters goes absolutely ballistic.  In sharp contrast, the highest IQ people I have ever known have been generally very calm and composed, even under pressure:

 

 

 

Correlation between IQ and income no higher in the U.S. than in other countries

20 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by in income

≈ 44 Comments

I had once stated in the comment section of this blog that the correlation between IQ and income was higher in the U.S. than in the rest of the developed world. I had based this claim on various studies I’ve seen reported, but on page 103 of this book, it states that a meta-analysis showed the IQ-income correlation is no higher in the U.S..

I would have expected the IQ-income correlation to be higher in the U.S. because the U.S. is a country where you can get ridiculously rich. Understanding the value of money more fully, I would have expected high IQ Americans to be more motivated to pursue it, considering there was so much more to be made and that this would have increased the correlation between ability and income, but the studies fail to confirm this theory (though I doubt business income is well captured by such studies). I also would have expected the generous social safety nets in other developed countries to have disincentived a lot of smart people from working hard, making the IQ-income correlation lower in other developed countries.

But one of the commenters here has long argued that elites outside North America are more selected for IQ because the colleges recruit more based on test scores than on other criteria. This argument is ironic because while other countries do test for academic knowledge acquired in school, the college system in the U.S. is unique in that it uses the SAT, which was specifically intended as an IQ test according to a FRONTLINE article:

The design of the SAT was based on the IQ test (see historical timeline) The French psychologist Alfred Binet created the first test of intelligence in 1905. It was to be used to identify slow learners so that teachers could give them special attention. This test would later be known as the IQ test–IQ standing for “intelligence quotient,” or the ratio of mental to physical age.

Because the SAT was devised as a tool to identify talented students from underprivileged backgrounds, it was thought of as a test that would measure an innate ability referred to as “aptitude,” rather than abilities that these students might have developed through school.

“When these tests were originally developed,” said Harvard social policy professor Christopher Jencks, “people really believed that if they did the job right they would be able to measure this sort of underlying, biological potential. And they often called it aptitude, sometimes they called it genes, sometimes intelligence.”

You would expect the country that deliberately tried to recruit their elites using an IQ test to have a higher correlation between IQ and income than other countries that simply tested students on how much they learned in high school, but since how much you learn in high school is largely determined by your IQ, colleges in other countries probably did a good job screening for IQ in spite of themselves.

This demonstrates that societies end up selecting their elites for IQ whether they intend to or not. Even a society that was actively hostile to IQ, would still need elites with important skills to run their institutions, and since important skills are highly correlated with IQ, it’s almost impossible to recruit useful skills without also recruiting IQ.

Indeed the fact that brain size roughly tripled as apes evolved into people shows that nature itself was selecting for intelligence, millions of years before tests or even schools were invented.

Smart people tend to get to the top naturally.

It’s interesting that now that IQ testing is controversial, the college board wants to deny that the SAT is an IQ test. The frontline article reports:

According to the College Board, the SAT now does not measure any innate ability. Wayne Camara, Director of the Office of research at the College Board told FRONTLINE that the SAT measures “developed reasoning,” which he described as the skills that students develop not only in school but also outside of school. He pointed out, for example, that students who read a lot, both in and out of school, are more likely to do well on the SAT and in college. The College Board says that the best way to prepare for the SAT is to read a lot and to take rigorous academic courses.

Elite colleges get to have their cake and eat it too. They are benefiting from a test format created by IQ researchers in recruiting high quality students, yet maintaining their liberal street cred by denying IQ. But if they really believe the SAT is only measuring developed skills, then they should use tests that directly measure academic knowledge like other countries do. But they don’t, perhaps because deep down, they believe the SAT is a better measure of IQ than tests used in other countries, even though tests used in other countries still measure IQ despite not being designed for that purpose. But since the SAT is a more efficient measure of IQ, they are able to give test scores less weight, which allows elite colleges to give more weight to subjective criteria while still keeping the average IQ of their students high.

Are Indians Asian?

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 372 Comments

Many years ago i overheard a Canadian of Indian ancestry say “technically Indians are white people”.  Interestingly,  the person who was most angered by this comment was not one of the white people, but a Chinese ancestry guy who stood up in anger to yell “WHAT??!!!”.

“Well, Caucasian,” the Indian clarified,  but this just made the Chinese guy angrier.

Although Indians are not white, they are often classified as caucasoid and it’s almost as if the Chinese guy was jealous

But no need to be jealous because Northeast Asians are even whiter than whites in the sense that whiteness is a cold climate phenotype & Northeast Asians branched off caucasoids to adapt to an even colder climate.  That’s why Asians don’t benefit from the affirmative action that benefits non-white minorities & in fact are openly discriminated against,  because intuitively liberals must understand that they are even whiter than white people.  Or maybe a better way of saying it is they are the opposite of black people, while whites are merely not black.

When most North Americans say Asian,  they mean East Asian, particularly Northeast Asian; they do not mean South Asian.  Yet for some reason, the census classifies Indians as Asian, even though very few Indians have any visible mongoloid ancestry (though Indian Americans perform like mongoloids academically)

Meanwhile the people who Indians are actually racially related to (middle easterners) are not considered Asian by the census (even though the Middle East is mostly in Asia) but are considered white (even though they’re non-European and largely dark skinned )

I do not consider Indians Asian, nor do i condider middle easterners white; i consider both non-white caucasoids

So how did Indians get lumped in with East Asians?  Did East Asians want a non-mongoloid to deracialize the Asian category?  Or did Indians self identify as Asian to get minority status and/or distance themselves from Arabs, who the U.S. media has turned into pariahs

Getting rich off cold winter genes

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Oprah

≈ 111 Comments

With Christmas only days away, what better topic to discuss than Martha Stewart and cold winters. Few people better personify the theory that cold winters selected for high IQ, particularly high spatial IQ, than Northern ancestry Martha Stewart, who Oprah describes as a genius for her domestic inventiveness. While most rich people seem to have earned their fortune through verbal or mathematical talents, Martha Stewart got rich by making things: pies, crafts, clothing, omelettes, soap, furniture etc. “I’m a doer”, she likes to say. If there’s one gazillionaire you’d want to be stranded with on a deserted island, it would be Martha Stewart, because she has the adaptability to actually survive without modern ammenities.

Around the turn of the century, Martha Stewart was adaptable enough to briefly overtake Oprah as the richest self-made woman in America, when she took her company public causing her net worth to skyrocket to billionaire level. I estimate the average American billionaire has an IQ around 130 (98 percentile), but because self-made women are so rare at the highest levels, I estimate that both Oprah and Martha tower with an IQ around 140 (99.5 percentile). Despite having such similar overall ability (in my opinion), the two women have opposite cognitive profiles. Oprah (whose ancestors lived in tropical Africa, where evolution favoured talents that helped in mating success; sexual selection) has, in my opinion, a social IQ > spatial IQ profile while Martha (whose ancestors lived in freezing Northern Europe, where evolution favoured talents that helped in survival; natural selection) has a spatial IQ > social IQ profile, so when Martha would appear on Oprah’s show, it was television at its best, because Martha would provide the practical survival skills, while Oprah would make the hour funny and entertaining. Martha would teach the audience how to make their own soap and insist that each guest in her home gets a fresh bar of soap, causing Oprah to inspire roaring laughter by adlibbing “because you wouldn’t anyone else’s hairs, in your nice homemade soap.”

So while Oprah and Martha would bring different cognitive abilities to the table, one day Oprah’s enormous brain size seemed to allow her the higher level cognitive ability that transcended cognitive abilities themselves: Meta cognition; self-awareness, the ability to mazimize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses, is not well understood, let alone well measured by IQ tests, but it is pivotal to our ability to adapt situations to our advantage (the essence of intelligence) and in some ways is more important to intelligence than all other intellectual abilities combined, including g (general intelligence). This is something I have long believed and I was incredibley impressed to discover that commenter Santoculto had the same understanding. He wrote:

…the self awareness is the bio-cultural differentiation of human beings compared to other animals, its true soul. And I believe that self awareness is therefore the cognitive component hierarchically superior to all others. It is as if our intelligence were divided into several spaceships, where self awareness is the mothership.

How did Oprah display self-awareness? Martha Stewart began showing Oprah a very efficient way to maneuver a bed sheet, and asked Oprah to grap one corner of the bed sheet. Sensing she didn’t have the spatial ability to perform the task competently and not wanting to look foolish in front of millions of TV viewers, Oprah was forced to adapt. Instead of grabbing the corner of the sheet, Oprah spontaneously ran to the audience to grab a Martha Stewart fan. The woman couldn’t believe her good luck, for Oprah was giving her a chance to maneuvre a bed sheet with her hero. Meanwhile Oprah took the woman’s seat in the audience and watched the two of them on the stage. I don’t know if Martha had enough social IQ to understand Oprah’s true motives in bringing the audience member on stage, but she rolled with it, and began instructing the lady to copy all the elaborate complex rapid twists and turns Martha was doing with her corner of the bed sheet. Not having the spatial IQ to keep up, the lady began twisting and turning the sheet in wrong directions causing Martha to scold the lady for screwing up.

At that point Oprah stood up from the seat in the audience she had taken and yelled “I’m so glad I didn’t do it” and started dancing around with joy as the audience howled and clapped with laughter. This demonstrates how having the self-awareness to know what her strengths and weaknesses were allowed Oprah to adapt a potentially humiliating situation (failing to correctly maneuver a bed sheet) to her advantage (laughter and applause from the audience).

Conversely, a lack of self-awareness would prove to be Martha Stewart’s Archille’s heel. Oprah once said to Martha “I heard your ex-husband got a court order forbidding you to speak to him. I’ve never heard of such a thing”. That was a kind of punishment, Martha explained. “Was it punishment for being too smart?” Oprah asked.

Men are very threatened by women who are smarter than they are, and Martha’s limitless competence at doing work inside and outside the home and making gazillions of dollars in the process, must have made her husband feel inadequate and inferior. But when Martha became a self-made billionaire, she made the whole world feel inferior, with the smug way she embraced her billions, and the world took its revenge by putting her in jail and causing her fortune to tumble. Had Martha Stewart had the self-awareness to know social IQ was not her strength, and had a publicist coach her on dealing with the public, she might still be a billionaire today (though she remains super rich). But this demonstrates the hierarchical nature of intelligence that Santoculto described. You can be brilliant in virtually every area and have extremely high g (general intelligence), but if you lack the self-awareness to know where your blind spots are, your will fail to adapt situations to your advantage, and you will not be intelligent, in the truest sense.

Of course with the amount of jealousy, resentment and hate directed at successful women, perhaps no amount of intelligence is enough to avoid the traps the world sets for you, and Martha continues to be one of the richest women in America, despite no longer being a billionaire. But competition threatens her business, particularly from TV star Rachael Ray. Despite the fact that Ray has a self-described “huge head” and reportedly scored above 150 on an IQ test, she is of Southern European ancestry so her ancestors were not exposed to the extreme cold that pruned the gene pool of spatial incompetence, and Martha regards ray as unworthy competition:

Sasquatch

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 146 Comments

I saw people on TV saying they believe Bill Cosby is guilty because over 20 women have made accusations.  I have a question for these people.  Do you also believe in the Sasquatch? In the last several decades, some 3500 people (credible people) have claimed to have witnessed him.

Growing up in Canada, the legend of Sasquatch loomed large.  There are towns where you ask a room full of people if they’ve ever seen one of those things and every single hand in the room shoots up.  People even do wonderful immitations of their language (they are said to sound like deaf people)

One reason I’m a huge Sasquatch skeptic is HBD.  Hard to believe a monkey, even a near-human talking monkey, would be smart enough to survive the Canadian winter.  On the other hand, Sasquatch would have fur; physical adaptations compensate for a lack of behavioural adaptability (intelligence).

But it makes sense that an undiscovered ape could exist in Canada;  the country is enormous yet has only the tenth the population of the U.S..  Lots of room to hide, and whites did not live in these parts in large numbers until  very recent centuries.  The komodo draggon was dismissed as a myth until a white man finally saw one just last century.

An extremely high IQ person told me that he suspects that when the white man brought diseases to North America that killed off massive numbers of Native Americans, massive numbers of non-human primates were killed off too.

Legend has it that some Native American women have been raped by Sasquatch for centuries and the hybridized children that result from such rapes can pass for human, but are slow learners.  Sasquatch genes would help explain why Native Americans don’t have especially high IQs despite the fact that scholar J.P. Rushton proclaimed mongoloids the advanced race.

I would be curious to know the correlation between IQ & belief in Sasquatch