Many people wonder about my fascination with IQ and where it came from. For example commenter Afrosapiens wrote the following to me:
First thing, I kind of appreciate you, you don’t pretend having universal and omniscient eyes and you are quite honest with respect to the extent of your knowledge of the world.
However, when I read about your fascination for IQ, how amazing this number appears to you with its ability to “predict” various life outcomes, you sound to me as someone who just met god. A world that was mysterious and obscure to you suddenly became limpid and self-evident thanks to IQ and genes (or rather heritability) much like god and the holy spirit are in other belief systems.
I think there’s some truth to that. I think most humans have a need for some kind of simple explanation to bring order to the World. For most people it might be religion or spirituality; for others it might be Marxism or libertarianism, and for me it happens to be IQ and HBD.
For me, discovering IQ was kind of like discovering something mystical. I remember as child seeing an East Indian woman reading palms and tarot cards in the middle of an urban street, and so growing up, I had associated Indian women with fortune telling. So when I was told by my teacher that I was going to have my IQ tested by an Indian woman who was coming from far, far away to my school, just to test me, I was both fascinated and terrified. For this test would tell my future; prophesize my biological destiny.
But first a teacher at my school had to give me an IQ test. Her test consisted mostly of general knowledge, arithmetic, and vocabulary. This was just a warm-up test, to see if I was worthy of taking the school board’s official test, that the Indian woman would give. The teacher explained that she’s not qualified to give the board’s test, which is extremely expensive to have administered, so first I had to take this warm-up test to see if there was just cause to take the board’s test. The board’s test was much much more accurate, the teacher explained. The board’s test was much more interactive and involved.
“I don’t want to take the board’s test,” I replied. “I’m scared”
The teacher explained that sometimes kindergarten kids are scared when they take the board’s test because the Indian woman who administers it dressed in very exotic colorful saris, but that the Indian woman was a pro who would put them right at ease.
My parents had to come in for several meetings to discuss the possibility of taking the board’s test and all the implications. My father did not want me tested, but my mother did. They had to sign many documents as did the school administrator and school board officials. There were so many kids on the waiting list to take this test that I had to wait many months.
Day after day, I waited in fear for the Indian woman to come and test me.
Days turned into weeks.
Weeks turned into months.
Months turned into a summer vacation and the start of a new school year at a new school.
And then one cold autumn day during seventh grade French class, there was a knock on the classroom door…
I followed the Indian woman down a long dark deserted hallway, to the school resource room. And then to a tiny room within the resource room with nothing in it but a circular table and two chairs.
“We’re going to play some games,” she explained…
What followed, were the two most fascinating hours of my life, as the Indian woman would reach into her fluorescent pink envelope and obtain a wide range of items. Cartoon panels of black people engaged in everyday activities:
“Put these in order so that the story makes sense!” she said smiling, as she pushed the stop clock.
When I completed the task, she would reach into the envelope for even more cartoon panels of black people.
“Since you’re doing so well, put ALL THESE in order so that the story makes sense!”
She would later reach in to her envelope for a handful of blocks and dropped them on the table.
“Using these blocks, make this design” she said, pointing to a picture of some abstract shape.
After I successfully completed several designs, she reached into her envelope for even more blocks:
“since you’re doing so well, using ALL THESE blocks, make THIS design.”
I had never seen anything like those blocks. It was the purest measure of intelligence I could imagine. Uncontaminated by schooling or prior knowledge, pure unadulterated novel problem solving..or at least that’s how it seemed to my twelve-year-old mind.
I remembered thinking, how can this endless stream of blocks, puzzles and picture all be coming out of that skinny little envelope she’s holding? It was like Oscar the Grouch pulling swimming pools and trucks out of his garbage can. It felt like magic.
At one point she asked me to put four cardboard pieces together to make a certain animal, and her very old clock start ticking, but instead of numbers of the clock, there were intelligence levels: Very superior, Superior, High Average, Average, Low Average, Borderline, Educable (mild) retardation, Trainable (moderate) retardation.
For the first time on the test, I stumbled. I put the pieces together and it looked like an animal, but it looked really demented and elongated. I knew it was not the right solution.
I was terrified that if I didn’t complete the puzzle before the red hand on the clock ticked all the way down to the Trainable Mentally Retarded level, I would be forced to leave the school, and attend a special school for the TMR, rotting away in an old abandoned field down the road. The educable mentally retarded were only forced to attend a special class but could still stay within the school, but the trainable, they had to attend a special school miles away.
And then suddenly, the correct solution dawned on me, long before the time ran out.
After that, she quizzed me on vocabulary, general knowledge, arithmetic, common sense judgement, word association, etc. After the stress of racing against the clock, it all seemed nice and relaxing.
“How did I do on the test?” I asked.
“You did extremely well,” she said with a smile. “You’re a star, and that’s where I want to see you. Shining.”
When I was 22
http://math.wikia.com/wiki/User:Gjeremy
When I was 26
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-FpDB8lKCGXQkxBQ2FnM19ZS0E/view?usp=sharing
This year:
What the fuck?
ANIMEKITTY IS AN EXTREMELY WEIRD PERSON.
Yes …. but what score did you obtain on this IQ test ?
130? 135? 140? 145? 150?
WHY DIDNT YOU ANSWER ? …..ARE YOU A LIER JUST LIKE AFROSPIENS ?
If you pass an iq test the psychologist give you a FUCKING NUMBER at the end or several days later.
No she didn’t give me a number, she gave me a chart. I can estimate the number from the chart, but I’m actually trying to find the whole chart so i can post it. It’s very interesting since it showed my functioning in nearly dozen cognitive abilities
Pumpkin Person, you admit to the fact that your approach of race and racial differences is mystical so I must suppose that you’re not pretending to do serious scientific-like work.
If I were a criminal and I were french I would choose you for being my LAWYER.
I don’t specialize in criminal cases.
Pumpkin Person, you admit to the fact that your approach of race and racial differences is mystical so I must suppose that you’re not pretending to do serious scientific-like work.
Of course not! Would a serious scientist choose a silly name like “pumpkin person” for his blog? I’m just an amateur who tries to be objective, but obviously, I’m just as influenced by bias and emotion as everyone else.
But the larger point is that none of us; not even Nobel Prize winning scientists are completely free of mystical emotions. Listen to some of the World’s greatest astronomers as they speak with almost religious zeal about the awe and wonder they have for the universe.
But the people I admire most are those with the self-awareness and integrity to admit their biases. Those are the people I’m most likely to trust.
So you think I have bias ?
PUMPKIN PERSON.
WHAT is your RACE ???????
ARE you a NORTHERN OR A SOUTHERN european ??????
You were 12 and NOW you are ?????
31? 32? 33? 34? 35? 36?
I notice that by reading the comment section of this blog we learn MORE about SOME REGULAR COMMENTARS than about PUMPKIN PERSON.
[pumpkinperson redacted the rest of this comment on Aug 22, 2015]
Lion is from the state of Georgia if my memory’s good.
Ok, it was just a speculation of mine.
I apologize.
That was the only speculation in this comment.
Thanks to add precision to my work !
DARWIN, are you a child or a young teenager ?
I have 12 years old so I dont know in which category you would put me.
I have an IQ of 155+ btw
Pumpkin is my dad btw thats why I am crazy about intelligence because did talk about this all the time thats why my mother commited suicide. Now, he is with a stupid bitch and he doesnt recognize me as his son.
Lol, so sad !
Wow, you’re a real creeper, man. Are you keeping a dossier of everybody on here?
At this point you could pretty easily find out my real identity. Maybe I’ll disappear for a while and reinvent myself…
Lol, you’re doing like santoculto ? The guy has not shown up ever since I exposed some bits of his identity when he tried to lie.
Naw, I’m staying around.
I just found the original Minnesota Transracial Adoption study and once again, I’m gonna expose a new HBD lie.
IQ of adoptive fathers: 121.7 (first measurment) 117.1 (ten years later)
IQ of adoptive mothers: 118.2 (first measurment) 113.6 (ten years later)
IQ of biological offsprings: 116.4 (first measurment) 109.4 (ten years later)
IQ of mixed-race (Black/white) adoptees: 109.5 (first measurment) 98.5 (ten years later)
IQ of black adoptees: 95.4 (first measurment) 89.4 (ten years later)
IQ of black and mixed-race adopted early: 110.8 (first measurment) 91.7 (ten years later)
IQ of black and mixed-race adopted late: 96.5 (first measurment) 91.7 (ten years later)
IQ of White adptees: 117.6 (first measurment) 105.6 (ten years later)
IQ of Asian/Indian adoptees: 101.3 (first measurment) 96.2 (ten years later)
The decreases observed at the second measurment are due to changing norms.
I redacted the stats “Darwin” cited about you from his post and placed your original demographic comment from which he quoted most of his stats in moderation.
Although I think it would be extremely hard for anyone to identify you from that info (LOTB has revealed much personal info: ethnicity, precise age, precise location, occupation, school attended, where he grew up, yet remains anonymous).
And even if you were exposed, you’ve conducted yourself with such dignity and class that you have nothing to hide.
Non-black HBDers must fear the stigma of being misinterpreted as racist, but a black HBDer, particularly one who writes as objectively as you do, would be mostly seen as a very honest unbiased straight shooter. If anything, your colleagues might even admire you if they knew about your secret life, though they wouldn’t say so out loud.
Still, it’s wise to err on the side of discretion.
The decreases observed at the second measurment are due to changing norms.
The study has been corrected for that
So you mean everybody got dumber ?
Hey pumpkin, I gave you a lot to comment on lately and you didn’t answer any of the maps neither did you give your explanation of Lynn’s study that claims to have found the genetic process involved in group differences in intelligence.
What the Minnesota transracial adoption study’s authors respond to Lynn after his paper “Some reinterpretations of the Minnesota transracial adoption study”:
“The etiology of racial differences in intelligence and achievement is one of the most heated areas of social science research. In this article, we respond to criticisms by Levin and Lynn of our 1992 follow-up study of IQ and achievement in a simple of transracial adoptees and their families, in particular to their assertion that our results provide strong support for a genetic etiology underlying racial differences in measured intelligence. In that follow-up, as well as in publications from the original study (Scarr & Weinberg, 1976, 1977), we argued for beneficial effects on transracial adoptees’ IQs and achievements due to being raised in white, upper-middle-class homes.
In this article, we address a number of issues raised in Levin’s and Lynn’s critiques, including the magnitude of adoptee racial-group differences in IQ and achievement, the inclusion of white and Asian/Indian adoptee groups in such analyses, the confounding of important early environmental influences with race differences, the confusion of within-group and between-group influences on IQ, the regional U.S. differences in African-American norms for IQ and achievement, the effects of renormed IQ tests on adoptee group differences, and the nature of the available evidence regarding a genetic hypothesis for racial differences in intelligence. We argue that, contrary to Levin’s and Lynn’s assertions, results from the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study provide little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement.”
That’s the abstract, I couldn’t get the whole paper.
Thanks Pumpkin! I need to be way more careful in the future.
Afrosapiens, I gave my opinion on the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study here:
https://pumpkinperson.com/2014/10/25/adoption-genetics-iq/
Not sure what else there is to say on the subject.
Hey pumpkin, I gave you a lot to comment on lately and you didn’t answer any of the maps neither did you give your explanation of Lynn’s study that claims to have found the genetic process involved in group differences in intelligence.
A lot of the maps you cited are ambiguous and from non-academic sources, while HBDers like Rushton and Lynn have often cited peer reviewed academic journals.
The genetic study you cited is not by Lynn. As for your larger point about genetic variants associated with IQ not being found, the current thinking is that constructing haplotypes using adjacent SNPs recovers much of the missing heritability:
http://infoproc.blogspot.ca/2015/07/haplosnps-and-missing-heritability.html
First of all, you must know that no academic discipline is intersted in sexual behaviors across the world. The studies that led to the maps of sexual behavior and penis size were ordered by the condom brand Durex who used this statistics to adjust its worldwide and nation-specific marketing strategy. Then the maps were made public by the Business Insider. So these statistic are reliable, they translate a reality and were used for a practical marketing purpose. And it just happens that Durex has interest in knowing that the Chinese are one of the most sexually active population, that Icelanders are the most precocious and that Nigerians are the most sexually satisfied of their potential customers.
For the statistics of breast size, I just couldn’t find the very source but the map was featured in a serious German newspaper and same as condoms, knowing breast sizes in different countries is useful for marketing strategy of bra manufacturers and sellers.
The map of brain capacity was from an academic study of the 1970’s, I found it on JayMan’s blog.
So my maps no less scientific than the Pioneer Fund’s, Lynn even used Durex’s penis size map.
The genetic study I cited is by Lynn, and is one example of the Pioneer fund’s usual scientific parasitism. What he did was just reinterpretating and making unscientific extrapolations about one serious genetic study made by other scientists who ironically were kind of disappointed by their findings and came to the conclusion that the search of common variants for intelligence might be elusive. And grouping alleles in haplogroups may be a good thing to rationalize research but the action of each variant will need to be proven and replicated otherwise, the results will remain the same and the the reality of genetic diversity will still probably favor Africans as it does with height.
.
Still wikipedia
“There are a number of points to consider when interpreting heritability:
-Heritability measures the proportion of variation in a trait that can be attributed to genes, and not the proportion of a trait caused by genes. Thus, if the environment relevant to a given trait changes in a way that affects all members of the population equally, the mean value of the trait will change without any change in its heritability (because the variation or differences among individuals in the population will stay the same). This has evidently happened for height: the heritability of stature is high, but average heights continue to increase.[9] Thus, even in developed nations, a high heritability of a trait does not necessarily mean that average group differences are due to genes.[9][16] Some have gone further, and used height as an example in order to argue that “even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability.”[17]
-A common error is to assume that a heritability figure is necessarily unchangeable. The value of heritability can change if the impact of environment (or of genes) in the population is substantially altered.[9] If the environmental variation encountered by different individuals increases, then the heritability figure would decrease. On the other hand, if everyone had the same environment, then heritability would be 100%. The population in developing nations often has more diverse environments than in developed nations.[citation needed] This would mean that heritability figures would be lower in developing nations. Another example is phenylketonuria which previously caused mental retardation for everyone who had this genetic disorder and thus had a heritability of 100%. Today, this can be prevented by following a modified diet, resulting in a lowered heritability.
-A high heritability of a trait does not mean that environmental effects such as learning are not involved. Vocabulary size, for example, is very substantially heritable (and highly correlated with general intelligence) although every word in an individual’s vocabulary is learned. In a society in which plenty of words are available in everyone’s environment, especially for individuals who are motivated to seek them out, the number of words that individuals actually learn depends to a considerable extent on their genetic predispositions and thus heritability is high.[9]
-Since heritability increases during childhood and adolescence, and even increases greatly between 16–20 years of age and adulthood, one should be cautious drawing conclusions regarding the role of genetics and environment from studies where the participants are not followed until they are adults. Furthermore, there may be differences regarding the effects on the g-factor and on non-g factors, with g possibly being harder to affect and environmental interventions disproportionately affecting non-g factors.[18]”
The multiple reasons why the genes of IQ, and especially the genes of group differences in average IQ will never be found.
More evidence on the fact that the Chinese are actually a r-selected population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_marriage#Polygamy
I have an IQ of 155+ btw
Wow, that’s impressive and unbelievable !
Correction: in english they say “I am 12 year old.” Having an age is for the French and other Latin peoples.
“I am 12 years old”, sorry.
I am from swiss
Switzerland.
French or Italian ?
French
Pumpkin, why did you suppress Pierre’s comments ?
Yes. This is an English speaking blog. The last thing we need is people talking in different languages.
Then Google translate’s your friend 🙂
I live near Quebec; i understand French. That’s not the point. The point is my target readership is English speaking HBDers.
Yes but unfortunately Pierre does not master English sufficiently and there is almost no French-speaking HBD community. So you could be indulgent and feel proud of the international reach of your blog.
At first I wanted to keep this blog entirely English language-oriented, and I was becoming annoyed by the non-English speakers overrunning the blog, forming sentences like a 2nd grader. But now I realize that a lot of foreigners, particularly those from the Francophone countries and Brazil, have very important contributions to the HBD conversation. So I hope our French friends can join in but maybe they need to be shown how to use Google translate themselves before commenting here.
Of course I agree that there shouldn’t be other languages on here. But if people who speak English as a 2nd language are willing to write in English, that’s fine as long as they can maintain some semblance of grammatical and syntactical correctness.
when I was a young teen I started noticing that there a lot of half-black children in my home town in Germany, all of them with black fathers. But no half-east-indian children, no half-asian children etc. Thats what made me being interested in HBD, long before I knew that there was a term like HBD. Up to day questions related to my initial observation are what interests me most about HBD. I actually think that the differences in physical attractiveness / physical strength / personality is the part of HBD where HBD has really strong theories. Up to today I somehow doubt that there are racial IQ differences, while I am very convinced that IQ differences within populations are largely genetic.
Up to today I somehow doubt that there are racial IQ differences, while I am very convinced that IQ differences within populations are largely genetic.
Much more likely to be the other way around. Differences between races genetic, but differences within races environmental.
Most plausible is that differences between and within races caused by genes.
-People of the same race are more similar by their environment than by their genes
-People of different races are more dissimilar by their environment than by their genes
We must predict that variation observed within people living in a similar environment is more influenced by genetics even though variation in the environment my play an even more important role.
Differences in group averages are due to differences in average environmental conditions. If race had genetic implications for IQ, Overlapping would be low, standard derivations would be narrow and the Flynn effect would never have taken place and of course, common genetic variants clustering with race would have been found now that we can perform GWAS on very large samples.
“Thats what made me being interested in HBD, long before I knew that there was a term like HBD”
I bet you knew HBD by its real name: scientific racism.
Hahaha, I knew Pumpkin was gonna leave out his actual IQ score!
Pumpkin, you should make a survey on what kind of article of your blog people prefer or what subject you treat people prefer. It should be interesting to know why people visit your blog.
Did someone close to you know your interest in HBD or is it a secret ?
Good idea!
So when I was told by my teacher that I was going to have my IQ tested by an Indian woman who was coming from far, far away to my school, just to test me, I was both fascinated and terrified. For this test would tell my future; prophesize my biological destiny.
So you were aware of racial differences in IQ at the time ? If it is the case how old were you the first time you discovered this ?
My understanding at that time was that IQ was genetic or at least innate, but I wasn’t really focused on race differences at the time. As a child I had read all the races had the same intelligence, and I believed that because I grew up in a very liberal home, in a very liberal city, in a very liberal country.
But once I heard Rushton say the races differed in head size, I knew….Because all the evolution books I read growing up judged the intelligence of our ancestors by their cranial capacity, and those with smaller heads had less advanced tools.
So it made sense that even today, the races with smaller heads and less technology were less intelligent.
And then I started noticing racial differences in who was able to work the cash register at the local corner store where I would buy candy, and it just confirmed what Rushton was saying.