Monthly Archives: January 2015

Dominating Ivy Leaguers

31 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in Ivy League

≈ 56 Comments

I recently saw the new movie Gone Girl staring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike (spoiler alert). One of the characters is a Harvard grad who creates a fake identity as a working class person. While hanging out with working class friends, she accidentally drops a huge stash of cash on the ground, exposing the fact that she is much richer than she has been pretending to be. A little later, the two working class friends (a man and woman) show up at the Harvard grad’s apartment. They force their way in and start turning over furniture until they find all her cash and leave with it. The Harvard grad threatens to call the police, but one of the “friends” say something like “Lady, you’re hiding. I don’t what from, and I don’t care, but you ain’t calling no police.”

It was an interesting scene, because the Harvard grad had been placed at the top of society, artificially, by high SAT scores and the Ivy League caste system, but by making a dumb mistake in the real world (failing to hide her money) she was dominated by the Darwinian law of the jungle (might is right). In the end, nature always wins.

In reminded me of an episode of The Sopranos where Carmela (the wife of mobster Tony Soprano) wants to get their daughter into an elite school. She turns to a neighbor (who has a sister who works as a professor at the elite college) to ask if her sister can pull some strings. The neighbor dodges the question by saying something like “with your daughters great grades and SAT score, she doesn’t need my sister’s help getting in.” But Carmela explains that these days, elite colleges are so competitive that high grades and high test scores are not enough.

So reluctantly, the neighbor phones her professor sister to try to get her to write a letter of recommendation for Carmela’s daughter. Absolutely not, responds the professor, explaining that it’s a prestigious college so they can’t have the children of gangsters crawling around the campus. When the neighbor explains to Carmela that her sister can’t write the letter, Carmela is nonplussed.

Carmela decides to visit the professor at her office, bringing lazania as a gift. She introduces herself and asks if the professor can write the letter. The professor makes up some excuse about having to write a letter for some other worthy student. Carmela says the solution is simple, just explain to that student that you can’t write the letter for him. The professor explains that she can’t.

“I don’t think you understand,” says Carmela ominously. “I want you to write that letter”

“Are you threatening me?” asks the professor trembling.

“Who’s threatening? I brought you some lazania,” Carmela replies.

Being smart enough to take the hint and realize you don’t fuck with a mobster’s wife, the terrified professor panics and writes the letter as fast as she can and Carmela’s daughter is accepted into the school post haste. It was interesting, because you think of Tony Soprano as being the tough one in the family, but you can see that his wife has a little of the mobster toughness in her too, but is more subtle about it, and uses it to advance more feminine goals (getting their kid into a good college).

It’s interesting that the despite needing a letter of recommendation, the Soprano daughter was academically qualified to attend the elite school. She probably inherited high IQ genes from Tony Soprona who in one episode stated that his IQ is 136. I remembered thinking this is quite high because although mobsters are rich (a sign of high IQ), they’re also violent criminals with typically low education (both signs of low IQ), so on balance, their IQs should be above average, but nothing special. John Gotti for example had an IQ of 110. But then Tony Soprano seems to have a huge cranium.

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Are IQ and income correlated among people with identical degrees?

30 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in Ivy League

≈ 155 Comments

Even though it makes perfect sense that IQ and money would be positively correlated, the idea has encountered enormous resistance, even among some people who believe intelligence tests are excellent measures of innate intelligence. There are several reasons for this backlash:

1) Intelligence and income are two of the most highly valued traits, so suggesting a correlation between the two can be taken quite personally given the enormous income inequality in America. It’s bad enough that income helps determine our quality of life and social status, but to have it reflect our intellect too seems unfair and makes people very jealous.

2) As income inequality continues to grow, so too does resentment for the super-rich, especially in a bad economy. People would prefer to demonize rich people for being greedy and unethical than credit them for being smart.

3) Even people with limited education can get rich. This is very upsetting to people who are not rich despite attending the best schools or obtaining advanced degrees. They were told that the were superior to less educated people and are deeply invested in the Ivy League caste system, so to see some high school dropout who mispronounces words make a hundred times more money than they do, generates enormous rage. The rage can only be placated by telling themselves that the gazillionaire, despite his financial superiority, is intellectually inferior; genetically inferior. Thus the correlation between IQ and income must be denied, or at least dismissed as a statistical artifact with no direct causal implications.

4) Many of the most valuable people in history were not especially rich. Suggesting money reflects income is upsetting to the fans of such people. Although many of us understand that correlations are general trends that often don’t say much about specific individuals, when the subject is as sensitive as IQ and money, emotion trumps rationality, making it easier to just dismiss the correlation outright.

It’s interesting to observe the cognitive dissonance that occurs when you show people evidence that IQ in fact enjoys a robust positive correlation with income (+0.4).  Their first instinct is to say “well maybe low IQ predicts poverty, but there’s no evidence that high IQ causes above average income.”  This rationalization is win-win for the typical liberal, because it allows them to feel smarter than all the minimal wage Republicans working at Walmart without feeling dumber than the rich who they despise.

What happens when you cite evidence showing the IQ-income correlation is more or less linear through virtually the full range of IQs and virtually the full range of incomes?  Then the excuse becomes, correlation does not equal direct causation.  In other words, IQ causes education, and education causes income, but IQ does not cause income directly.  This excuse is a win-win for the Marxist Ivy League types because it allows them to feel smarter than less educated folks no matter how rich the latter are.  For they didn’t make the money the “correct” way; by going through the Ivy League gate keepers.

Such thinking helps to preserve the Ivy League caste system that elitists love because it stigmatizes the high incomes of non-Ivy League graduates as being a result of only luck, hard work, and sociopathic opportunism and denies the “free market” credit for rewarding talent.  Rather it is the Ivy League that rewards talent, and the “free market” only rewards talent to the extent it rewards Ivy League grads.  Thus anyone who gets rich or powerful without jumping through Ivy League hoops gets stigmatized as an enemy of meritocracy who must be destroyed.

Claiming that the IQ-income correlation is entirely mediated by education is also used by anti-HBD folks to deny IQ tests measure real world intelligence.   Instead, IQ tests are dismissed as only measuring narrow test taking skills that are useful for getting a degree, but it is the degree or the test scores that are rewarded by the “free market”, not the real world intelligent behavior of high IQ people. But what does the research show?  Scholar Ruth Berkowitz looked into the correlation between LSAT scores (a proxy for IQ) and income among lawyers.  She writes:

The regression results show that, across the top 50 schools, LSAT scores are significantly related to starting salary, even when controlling for the cost of living in the school’s location. One point on the LSAT is worth over $2,600 on the new scale…Of course, each point on the LSAT is not equal in terms of its effects on starting salary. At the high end of the scale, one point is worth much more than it is worth on the lower end of the scale. Without controlling for any other variables, a one point increase on the new scale on the LSAT (or a 1% increase at the mean) leads to a salary increase of $3,080 (8.5%) for the top 50 schools whereas a one point increase leads to only a $1,812 (6.2%) increase for all 177 schools combined… Similarly, moving up along percentiles on the LSAT distribution brings higher returns at the high end.

So among people with law degrees, LSAT scores and future incomes are substantially correlated.  But of course, not all law degrees are equal.  Do LSAT scores predict income among lawyers who attend the same law school?  The answer is yes:

The regression results for the individual data show that there is a significant (at the 5% level), albeit a smaller relationship between LSAT scores and starting salaries than there is for the cross-school model. Among the students in one school, one point on the LSAT is worth only about one-seventh of what it is worth in the cross-school model. These results indicate that six-sevenths of the variance is being used up in the screening effects of the school. Law schools have the ability to put more energy into screening students than do law firms. Law firms assume that in general, students attend the highest quality school into which they were admitted. Therefore, the true effect of one point on the LSAT is greater than can be measured within one school. However, in terms of lifetime income, the spread is still a significant difference even within one school. A student with a higher LSAT score, should, on average, make more money than a student who scored lower and attended the same law school. Between schools, the spread is larger. If a student scored in the top 5% on her LSAT and went to a top 5% school, she would be earning a higher salary, on average, than if she attended a lower ranking school.

So before controlling for what law school one attended, each point on the LSAT is worth $2,600, however among lawyers who attended the same law school, each LSAT point is worth only one seventh of that, so I assume $371 per year.  So, let’s say we have two lawyers who attended the exact same law school, John and Ted.  Let’s assume John got an LSAT score of 180 (equivalent to 152 on the IQ scale) and Ted got a score of 150 (equivalent to 111 on the IQ scale). This would predict an income difference of $11,130 dollars a year, or nearly half a million dollars over a 40 year career.  So in the typical case, there starting salaries would probably look something like this:

Same law school:

Ted LSAT IQ equivalent 111:  $70,000 starting salary, life time earnings over $2.8 million

John LSAT equivalent IQ 152: $81,130 staring salary, life time earnings over $3.2 million

Now a nearly half million difference is huge, but it might seem kind of small considering the two men differ by 41 IQ points.  However they only differ by 41 IQ points on the LSAT. Assuming the law school both men attended was average, if they were retested on the WAIS-IV, their IQs would regress to the mean IQ of lawyers nationally (IQ 125).  Because of a statistical phenomenon known as range restriction, among lawyers, especially lawyers at the same law school, the LSAT probably only correlates about 0.3 with scores on the WAIS-IV.  For example I found only a correlation of about 0.3 between self-reported LSAT scores and self-reported SAT scores, and others have a found a similar correlation between LSAT scores and Bar exam scores. A 0.3 correlation means that even though John was 41 IQ points smarter than Ted on the LSAT, he would likely be only 41(0.3) = 12 IQ points smarter than Ted on the WAIS-IV.

So the bottom line is that if you took the highest LSAT student and the lowest LSAT student at every law school, their WAIS-IV IQs would probably only differ by about a dozen points, and yet their life time earnings would differ by nearly half a million in today’s dollars. So even among people with identical schooling, even small differences in IQ are associated with huge differences in money:

Same law school:

Ted WAIS-IV IQ 121:  $70,000 starting salary, life time earnings over $2.8 million

John WAIS-IV IQ 133: $81,130 staring salary, life time earnings over $3.2 million

Of course it should be noted that while a 12 point IQ gap is associated with a half million difference among people who attended the same school, the same 12 point IQ gap would be associated with a $3.1 million life time earning difference when schooling is not controlled:

Different law schools:

Ted WAIS-IV IQ 121:  $70,000 starting salary, life time earnings over $2.8 million

John WAIS-IV IQ 133: $147,910 staring salary, life time earnings over $5.9 million

So while people like the Lion of the Blogosphere correctly assert that where you attend college is vastly more important to your income than how smart you are, being smart is still quite important in its own right.

Now in full disclosure, I should point out that another study found virtually no correlation between standardized test scores and income among graduates of the same business school.  Ronald Yeaple of authoritative Forbes magazine reports:

Our survey of hundreds of MBA alumni found no correlation between an individual’s GMAT score and that person’s post-MBA success as measured by starting salary and pay over the first five years after graduation. In this study of individual graduates, the R-square = 0.0007, which means that there was no correlation between GMAT scores and post-MBA earnings. Similar studies in the past gave the same result. Based on this research, the GMAT appears to have no power for predicting an individual prospective MBA student’s future career success. Some of the most successful managers in our study had below-average GMAT scores, and vice versa.

The explanation for this is probably that a lot of rich people use their influence to get their unqualified children into business schools they don’t qualify for, and then those same dumb trust fund babies are given a high paying job in the family business they’re also not qualified for, and delegate their responsibilities to higher IQ employees.  But in a field like law, where you actually have to interpret contracts and argue cases, it’s much harder for dumb rich kids to earn high incomes.

The perfect measure of intelligence?

25 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 78 Comments

As I’ve discussed, my views on intelligence have been strongly influenced by a science teacher I had when I was young who felt that while intelligence has many different parts (memory,  pattern recognition etc), the single umbrella that covers all of intelligence is the mental ability to adapt; to take whatever situation you’re in, and turn it around to your advantage.

However this definition is vague, and open to many different interpretations.  Of course most abstract concepts have vague ambiguous definitions; what makes them scientific is measurement.  Once you can measure something, you can simply define it in terms of how it’s measured.  This is known as operational definition; the typical example being defining weight as the number that appears when you stand on a scale.  Indeed, a psychologist infamously defined intelligence as whatever intelligence tests test.

While I do believe IQ tests measure many of the most important parts of intelligence, and do measure the ability to adapt to many kinds of challenges,  they are still too simplistic and narrow to capture an entity as vast and multifaceted as intelligence.  I don’t think it’s even scientifically possible to measure intelligence as my science teacher defined it.

But if it were possible; here’s what I imagine the test would look like:  Life.  The perfect test of intelligence is just the way you live life.  But here’s the catch.  Not your life only.  Intelligence is how well you could live everyone’s life.  And everything’s life. Everywhere in the world. In every world that life can exist.

So here’s how the test would work.  A scientist would bring me into a lab and say “Pumpkin Person; you’ve had a moderately successful life as an IQ obsessed man living in modern Canada; now we want to see how successful your life would be as a beautiful sociopathic extroverted cheerful girl born to billionaire parents.  Don’t worry, you get to keep all your cognitive abilities, but you’ll have a totally different body, social background, and location, and totally different drives, personality, motives, and emotions.  This will tell us how well your intelligence functions under totally different circumstances”

After 80 years living as a sociopathic rich girl, I die, but return to get my test results.

“You did quite well,” the scientist tell me.  “You lived 78 years of pure pleasure (physically and emotionally) and only 2 years of pain and suffering; a net score of 76. You  really turned that situation to your advantage.”

“Well it wasn’t hard to turn it to my advantage,” I reply.  “I had every advantage already.  I was rich and beautiful, and since I was a sociopath, I didn’t even feel guilty about it.  And on top of that, I had the type of personality that feels happy, even when terrible things happen, which they didn’t.  Life was pure pleasure, no pain.”

“Yes,” the scientist replies. “Most people find that life pretty easy to adapt to.  Let’s see how well you can adapt  to another life.  Computer, randomly generate a new life out of the data base of all lives ever lived anywhere in the universe.”

In my next life I am a snake slithering around.  I have no hands so my spatial IQ is useless for making tools.  I can’t speak and there’s no one to speak to, so my verbal IQ is largely useless too.  I have a strong sense of smell and use this to guide me to food, but my human intelligence did not evolve to make sense of smells so this sense is almost useless to me.  I starve to death almost immediately.  I was not able to adapt to that life, but the scientist informs me that most humans suck even worse at that subtest, so my score was still relatively high.

After several dozen lives as creatures in other galaxies, I get to be a modern First World human on Eath again.  But this time, I’m born a genetically morbidly obese man suffering from genetic depression who is addicted to constantly eating junk food, and who dreams of being a sprinter in the Olympics and is obsessed with having sex with supermodels.  I drop dead of a heart attack at age 30.

“You weren’t able to adapt that life to your advantage,” the scientist informs me.  “You only lived 30 years, and only a total of one year of that time was pleasure (the combined time you spent eating pizza).  The rest were pain and suffering.  A net score of NEGATIVE 29.”

“That life was hard to adapt to,” I explain, “because my constant desire for food made me way too fat to achieve my desire for super models an athletic success.  The only time I felt pleasure was when I was eating.  Perhaps had I eaten even more pizza, my score would have been a lot higher.  I would have died sooner, but at least I would have enjoyed my short time on Earth.  In the end, what else is there?”

The scientist takes the total of my scores on each life and converts it into an IQ equivalent.

Is intelligence the mental ability to adapt?

24 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 62 Comments

Intelligence is hard to define. We think of it as one thing, but it has so many different parts: verbal ability, spatial ability, memory, pattern recognition, logic, social judgement, artistic ability, lateral thinking, intuition, musical ability…the list goes on and on. Some scholars, like Howard Gardner, famously argue that there’s not one intelligence, but many.

But as a teacher once told me, if you want a single umbrella to cover ALL of intelligence, then it’s the ability to adapt; to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage. That’s really what intelligence is, he asserted. I like this definition because it integrates all the different parts of intelligence into a coherent system. It also has common sense appeal. If you turn a situation to your advantage (negotiate a good business deal) people will praise you for being clever. If you turn a situation to your disadvantage (drive your new car into a tree) people will immediately call you an idiot.

We even have sayings like “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” and “a fool and his money are soon parted.” These sayings make the point that smart people turn life to their advantage; dump people do the opposite. Further, if a scientist invents a cure for a disease or some new technology, he has provided a great advantage to all of humanity and it praised as a major genius.

Finally, brain size roughly tripled in the last 4 million years of human evolution, so intelligence was clearly an adaptive advantage in even the evolutionary sense of the term.

The ability to adapt situations to our advantage is why humans are considered the most intelligent animal. Despite having so many disadvantages (we lack fur, strength, speed, claws, sharp teeth, wings) we were able to adapt the world to our advantage. We didn’t have fur, so we created fur coats. We didn’t have claws, so we created knives. We couldn’t run fast, so we created cars. We didn’t have wings, so we invented airplanes etc. We were able to use plants to our advantage (agriculture) and animals to our advantage (domestication) and subdue and capture animals like gorillas who are many times our size and strength.

So despite being such a weak disadvantaged animal, our freakishly large brains allowed us to become the most powerful and prosperous animal on the planet.

However there are problems with the above definition of intelligence. For one, if you define intelligence as “turning situations to your advantage” it sounds like you’re saying sociopathic opportunists are intelligent and martyrs are stupid. As comic Bill Maher recently said “to cowards, courage always looks like stupidity.”

My rebuttal to this criticism is that if you’re a good person, then being selfish is not to your advantage, because, to quote the Bible “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” The problem is unless you know what motivates another person, it’s sometimes hard to judge whether their behavior is adaptive or maladaptive. The cost/benefit analysis would vary from person to person making this definition abstract and subjective.

Another problem with this definition (as commenter “Swanknasti” stated) is that in biology, the term adaptive specifically means advancing your genes, while in the context of defining intelligence, adaptive behavior is probably behavior that advances your goals. The two definitions are related though, because we evolved feelings (fear, hunger, love, tribalism, jealousy, etc) that motivate us to pursue goals that advance our survival and the survival of our family and race, but many smart people lack these primitive motivations causing their behavior to appear maladaptive to a biologist.

A third problem with this definition, as commenter “godslayer” pointed out is that a lot of unintelligent animals (i.e. cockroaches) are highly adaptive so it seems wrong to equate intelligence with adaptability. While cockroaches are well adapted physically, they lack a mental ability to adapt their behavior.

But godslayer exposes the need to be more precise in how intelligence is defined. Perhaps the most precise definition of intelligence was offered by scientist Arthur Jensen who wrote (emphasis mine):

“The term ‘intelligence,’ then, would apply only to the whole class of processes or operating principles of the nervous system that make possible the behavioral functions that mediate the organism’s adaptation to its environment, such as stimulus apprehension, perception, attention, discrimination, stimulus generalization, learning, learning-set acquisition, remembering, thinking (e.g., seeing relationships), and problem solving

Even though Jensen seemed to agree that intelligence was about adaptation, he wanted psychologists to stop using the word “intelligence”, writing:

I find it pointless to talk about intraspecies individual differences in “intelligence” as I have defined it. …the word ‘intelligence’ in this broad generic sense causes confusion in discussing individual differences in humans, as I hypothesize that all biologically normal humans possess the same intelligence in the sense in which I have defined it, but they show quantitative differences in these functions, which are best described behaviorally in terms of independent latent variables, or factors.

Other scientists that emphasized adaptability when defining intelligence include Stephen Hawking who said “intelligence is the ability to adapt to change” and scholar Robert Sternberg defined intelligence as “the ability to adapt to the environment, or modify the environment, or seek out and create new environments.”

Along similar lines, scholar David Wechsler said “intelligence is the capacity to understand the world and the resourcefulness to cope with its challenges.”

Abstract reasoning

Not all scientists emphasize adaptability when defining intelligence. Some emphasize abstract reasoning. But these are related. Abstract is the opposite of specific, which means if you can reason on a very abstract level, you can adapt to a wide range of environments instead of only one specific type. A major difference between humans and other animals is that animals have instinct which is useful in specific environments while intelligence is general enough to adapt to almost any situation.

Is natural selection still operating on human intelligence?

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 92 Comments

When I was young, I had a high school biology teacher tell the class that natural selection continued to operate on human intelligence. I found this comment surprising because even as a teenager (and even before) I was well aware that IQ experts had long warned that low IQ people were out-breeding high IQ people and that this would have a dysgenic effect. But I had great respect for this biology teacher because the year before he was my chemistry teacher and provided me with a paradigm shifting definition of intelligence, so I waited for the other students to leave and asked him what the hell he meant.

He went on to explain that while people might be getting genetically dumber in First World countries, the overall species was getting smarter because in some Third World countries, even though the birth rates were incredibly high, the death rates were even higher, and eventually the populations of First World countries would exceed the populations of Third World countries.

It was an argument many people would consider racist and evil; and yet, liberal icon Charles Darwin said much the same:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [that is, the ones which allegedly look like people] … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [Aboriginal] and the gorilla

And then comedienne Joan Rivers said something similar.

All of these comments are very hurtful to my readers, but nature is “evil”. Humans are part of nature and are “evil” too. So when animals and humans have intelligence, natural selection means the smart will prey on the less smart. Survival of the fittest.

According to scientist Richard Lynn, the least intelligent races are the bushmen and the pygmies. Bushmen are arguably the first people to branch off the human evolutionary tree; a population that emerged before the invention of the vowel. Is it a coincidence that their population has tragically sunk so low that they risk going extinct? Intelligence is the mental ability to adapt. I’m sure I have some despicable evil sociopathic readers who couldn’t care less if the bushmen go extinct, but if it can happen to them, it can eventually happen to your people too.

No one can predict the future, but if HBD turns out to be scientifically correct, one especially dark scenario is that high IQ races and high IQ ethnic groups are slowly going to replace lower IQ populations through competition for resources, climate change, war, interracial gang violence, geopolitical strategizing, and cultural manipulation. The lower IQ ethnic groups will likely go extinct first, followed by higher IQ ethnic groups, until only the absolute highest IQ ethnic groups are left, and they’ll have to compete for what’s left of the planet.

If this happens, my great great grand-kids and the great great grand-kids of most of my readers will sadly not be among the survivors.

High IQ media elites are VERY manipulative

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 46 Comments

Iconic blogger Steve Sailer has a post up about how The New York Times is saying that France’s secularism helped cause the recent terrorist attacks. A commenter on Sailer’s blog named “Jefferson” writes:

Since when did The New York Times have a problem with secularism ? When did secularism become a bad thing in their eyes ? Isn’t everybody at The New York Times suppose to be Liberal Atheists who hate all forms of organized religion ? Oh I forgot the only religion they really hate is Christianity.

Another commenter named “Nathanwartooth” writes:

The NYT has officially lost their minds. They are arguing for women wearing full face veils in schools and for the French government to embrace Islam.

They aren’t liberal. They are anti white and anti Christian. That’s the only thing that explains this.

I agree with Nathanwartooth that America’s media elite is anti-Christain, however what I suspect is that they are also anti-Muslim. This may seem like a strange thing to say since they are constantly defending Islam and promoting immigration, and the conventional wisdom in conservative circles is that “liberal” elite is pro-Muslim.

But since we know the media elite is smart, we must assume they know what they’re doing, and thus we must judge their motives not by what they say, but by the consequences of their actions. The best way to create a backlash against Muslim is to constantly write stories worrying about a backlash against Muslim because this (1) gives people the idea, and (2) makes people angry that the media is “protecting” Muslims. In fact, the media is only pretending to protect Muslims, while deliberately creating more Islamophobia, thus cleverly getting street cred for being “good liberals” while promoting their true neoconservative agenda.

If you hate both Christians and Muslims, the smart thing to do is encourage as much Muslim immigration as you can into Christian nations, encourage Muslims not to assimilate, and call any Christian who objects a racist. This is a very evil but brilliant way of creating a global war between the two populations you hate. Divide and conquer.

The media elite is VERY smart; so smart that virtually no one is smart enough to see what they’re doing.

Does high IQ help explain why Jews are so liberal?

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 55 Comments

A question that has long puzzled thoughtful people is “why are Jews so liberal?” Entire scholarly books have attempted to answer the question. Since 1928, the average Jewish vote for the Democrat in American presidential elections has been an incredible 75%—much greater than that of any other ethno-religious group. So committed to liberal ideals are some American Jews that one even traveled all the way to Sweden and argues for multiculturalism in that country she’s not even from, even as she insists Jewish liberalism is creating more antisemitism in Europe:

So how do we explain such a passionate commitment to liberalism by people like Barbara Lerner Spectre? Like African Americans, Jews are a historically oppressed minority, and historically oppressed minorities vote liberal, however Jews are now an extremely wealthy demographic, and wealthy people tend to become more conservative, so that doesn’t quite explain it.

One possible explanation is IQ. According to research promoted by the prestigious New York Times, Ashkenazi Jews are genetically much smarter than other Americans. High IQ people tend to be more liberal, especially relative to their income levels; I’ve proposed four major reasons why this happens.

Could high IQ be somehow causing Jews to become more liberal? High IQ seems to make people more morally aware, open-minded, and abstract in their thinking; all traits that might increase the odds of embracing liberal ideals. The average Jewish IQ is genetically quite high, and some, like Barbara Lerner Spectre, would be even more intelligent still, and these would be especially liberal.

Of course I’m not suggesting high IQ is the only explanation for Jewish liberalism, or even the most important one, but it is a variable that is typically overlooked.

New evidence may help vindicate Bill Cosby

17 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

In a previous post, I discussed how sad I was to see a great African American icon being dragged through the mud over rape accusations. Now TMZ is reporting evidence that may help vindicate the beloved entertainer.

Bill Cosby has PROOF he was not even at the Playboy Mansion the night one of his accusers claims he sexually assaulted her … so says Cosby’s lawyer.

Legal pit bull Marty Singer tells TMZ … on the date in question — August 9, 2008 — he has flight and telephone records that clearly place Cosby in New York City … 2,500 miles from the Mansion.

Chloe Goins claims Cosby gave her a drink at the Mansion during the Midsummer Night’s Party and the next thing she knew she was naked in a bedroom as Cosby sucked her toes and masturbated…And one more thing … the August 9th party was extensively covered by the media, and photos were published of the various celebs in attendance, including Paris Hilton, Matthew Perry, Jim Belushi, Jason Statham and Bill Maher. There are no pics or mention of Cosby.

Of course even if Cosby is vindicated of this particular accusation, it doesn’t prove he’s innocent of the others, but if just one of his accusers is exposed as a liar, it could be a major victory in the court of public opinion.

Three dimensional image of President Obama’s cranium

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

President Obama did a wonderful thing for historians by agreeing to allow a 3D image of his head to be created. My question is, is the model to scale? Is it the exact same size as President’s Obama’s real head?

Obviously, you can’t walk up to a sitting president and put a tape measure around his head, but they might let people put a tape measure around the cranium of President Obama’s likeness. They might even let a devise like this be used, for accurate measures of head width, head length, and head height, allowing historians to measure cranial capacity.

The 3 types of American elites

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 139 Comments

To oversimplify, there are three types of people who rule America. The politically powerful, the intelligentsia, and the rich. They represent three types of power: the ability to win hearts, the ability to win minds, and the ability win wallets.

According to an article promoted by The New York Times, Ashkenazi Jews are genetically more intelligent than other American ethnic groups. Since intelligence can be defined as the cognitive ability to adapt your environment to your advantage, we should expect Ashkenazi Jews to rise to the top of American society, and we should expect lower IQs ethnic groups to be underrepresented among elites, so let’s see if this is the case.

The politically powerful: The politically powerful are probably the least intelligent of the American elites and thus can sometimes be manipulated by the rich and the intelligentsia. Indeed there have been several U.S. presidents who have seemed like puppets for more intelligent advisors behind the scenes.

I define the politically powerful as not just those who have been elected to public office, but rather as anyone who has a large constituency of loyal followers, since virtually any popular American has the ability to be a political force. A good measure of political power is Gallup’s most admired list. A quick perusal of the list reveals, that Ashkenazi Jews are not especially over-represented, but African Americans are. If measured by sheer popularity, African Americans are arguably the most politically powerful group, per capita, in society. I discussed possible reasons for this here.

Blacks have used their political power to achieve certain benefits like affirmative action and a black president. However raw political power is the only type of power African Americans have a lot of; as we will see, they are dramatically underrepresented in the two other types of power.

The intelligentsia: The intelligentsia are those who wield power not by winning the hearts of the masses, but by winning the minds of other elites. They are the columnists for The New York Times, the professor who writes a book that the President of the United States reads before bed, the members of Think Tanks who propose policy, and the intellectuals who provide the white house with expertise.

These elites are not rich or famous and most Americans have never heard of them, but they wield an enormous amount of power behind the scenes because billionaires and presidents turn to them for guidance and read their columns in The New York Times. They also wield power because they largely decide who gets to become rich and powerful in America and who gets to stay that way. If The New York Times decides a certain billionaire, celebrity, or politician is evil, all it takes is a few scathing editorials or exposés that the rest of the media mindlessly parrots, and the elite must resign in scandal. As the saying goes, never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

Because Ashkenazi Jews have high IQs, they are dramatically over-represented among the intelligentsia. Despite beig 2% of America, Ashkenaz Jews are an astonishing 50% of America’s most influential pundits. By contrast, African Americans are 12% of America but only 2% of the 50 most influential pundits. This ethnic distribution suggests that the intelligentsia have very high IQs on average.

The rich: Billionaires wield enormous power in America because politicians are enormously dependent on money to fund their campaigns and fund their endless political advertising. The rich also have the power to buy major newspapers, television networks, internet search engines, and fund universities and thus dramatically dictate which intellectuals get hired as influential members of the intelligentsia. Because getting rich demonstrates intelligence (the ability to adapt your environment to your advantage), the high IQ Ashkenazi Jewish population is 36% of the 400 richest Americans, despite being only 2% of America. By contrast, blacks are only 0.25% of the 400 richest Americans, despite being 12% of America