Image found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#/media/File:Adolf_Hitler-1933.jpg

Commenter “Otto von Bismark” asked me to estimate Hitler’s IQ, and with Halloween only days away, it makes sense to examine one of history’s most terrifying boogeymen.

STATISTICAL PREDICTION

The most salient fact about Hitler was his historical influence.  Indeed when Time magazine named the most influential person of the 20th century, many felt that the title objectively belonged to Hitler, but because Hitler’s influence was so destructive and evil, the title was instead given to Albert Einstein for being the preeminent scientist in a century dominated by science.

But at the very least, Hitler was likely the most influential white gentile of the 20th century.  Roughly 8.7 billion people lived some time during the 20th century.  Assuming roughly 14% of them were white gentiles, then Hitler was the most influential out of 1.22 billion.  Thus, when it comes to influence, Hitler had a normalized Z score of +6.

The next most salient fact about Hitler was that he was a criminal.  Had he not committed suicide, he would have been hung for war crimes.  Criminals tend to come from less successful backgrounds than non-criminals, for example only a quarter of American men are as low income as the median criminal, suggesting criminals average a normalized Z score of -0.66 on measures of money and probably influence.  Thus, if relative to white gentilesn Hitler had a normalized Z score of +6 when it comes to historical influence,  the normalized Z score was likely +6.66 with respect to criminal white gentiles.

Thus, if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and influence, Hitler’s IQ would be 6.66 standard deviations above the average white criminal.  However the correlation between IQ and measures of worldly “success” appears to be about 0.4. This is the figure scholar Arthur Jensen (1998) gives for the correlation between IQ and income, and there’s probably a similar correlation between IQ and other measures of worldly success like power and influence, since elite politicians and top CEOs seem to be cognitively similar to billionaires.

Assuming a 0.4 correlation between IQ and influence, Hitler’s expected IQ would be 0.4(6.66) = 2.66 standard deviations above the average criminal.  Assuming white criminals average IQs around 90 with a standard deviation of 15, that would put Hitler’s expected IQ at 130.

Of course, the standard error around this estimate is quite large, so one needs independent verification from other methods.

HISTORIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

The most popular official IQ tests are the Wechsler intelligence scales which have traditionally been divided into a verbal scale (i.e. the ability to solve problems with words), and performance IQ (i.e. the ability to solve problems by manipulating objects), both of which were combined into a full-scale IQ, which was a measure of overall intelligence.  For Hitler, there is some evidence for his ability in both domains.

Hitler’s verbal IQ

Perhaps the best estimate of Hitler’s verbal IQ can be gleaned from his book Mein Kampf.  According to an internet commenter named “Thierry Etienne Joseph Rotty“, Hitler was an awful writer, though of course this is relative.  Rotty writes:

…Although he came up with the idea of writing Mein Kampf, most of the actual writing and typing was done by Rudolf Hess. When you look at the original pages you’ll see the version as dictated by Hitler, and then the re-writing Hess to make to make some sort of coherent sentences out of it. About half had to be re-written.

It should be noted that Rudolf Hess was one of 21 tried Nazi leaders who was administered a German version of the Wechsler-Bellevue.  Although his score on the verbal section seems unreported, his full-scale IQ was 120, and typically on the Wechsler scales, the verbal IQ correlates 0.92-0.95 with the full-scale IQ.  Thus if we assume that Hess had a verbal IQ of around 120, this puts a ceiling on Hitler’s likely verbal IQ, since Hess was the more competent writer, and writing skill is probably a good proxy for verbal IQ among amateurs.

Although Hitler’s verbal IQ was likely not above 120, we also have very good reason to assume it was not below 120.  On page 58 of the book  The Young Hitler I Knew: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Childhood Friend by  August Kubizek, it states:

From school sources there is abundant authentic material describing his school performance.  In primary school he was always near the top of the class.  He learned quickly and made good progress without much effort.

Anyone in an ordinary white school, who does better  than 90% of his classmates without much effort, must have a verbal IQ higher than 90% of whites (an IQ of 120 is often defined as the 90 percentile among whites in Western countries).

Since we have good reason to believe Hitler’s verbal IQ was neither above nor below 120, we can estimate it to be exactly 120.

Hitler’s Performance IQ

Probably the best estimate of Hitler’s performance IQ can be made from his drawings.  Although drawing ability is only moderately correlated with general intelligence, Flourcence L Goodenough felt the correlation was good enough to publish the Draw-a-Man IQ test in 1926.  Circa 1960 the test was revised and renormed by Dale Harris.  Using the 1963 manual, I found that this drawing, reportedly by a 19-year-old Hitler, obtained a score of 49 out of 73 points.

Drawing found here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1260274/Hitlers-GCSE-art-sketches-sale.html

Of the 73 items on the Draw-a-man IQ test, I found the above drawing flunks items 10,12-15,27,38-43,50,52-53,55-62,and 69.  However items 55-59 all involved clothing.  These were irrelevant to Hitler’s drawing because his picture was for art school where they evaluate your ability to draw nudes.  Secondly, items 39-43 involved feet, and Hitler’s drawing does not extend to the feet.

Thus if it’s permissible to exclude the ten items that were not applicable to Hitler’s drawing, his prorated score becomes 57 out of 73.  According to circa 1960 unsmoothed norms published by Harris (1963, pg 102), U.S. boys and girls combined (age 15 which is roughly adult level for such tests) had a mean score of 45.5 out of 73 (SD = 10.19).  Thus Hitler’s prorated score of 57 would equate to an IQ of 117 (U.S. norms) or 116 (U.S. white norms for that era).

However Hitler made his drawing circa 1908 which is roughly 52 years before the above norms were obtained.  According to scholar Richard Lynn (2006), performance on this test has been rising by the equivalent of 3 points per decade which means norms from around 1960 would give results 16 points too low for a drawing made around 1908.  Since IQ by definition reflects your test performance compared to Western whites of your age and birth cohort, we must add 16 points, bringing Hitler’s performance IQ to 133.

Hitler’s full-scale IQ

Above I estimated Hitler’s verbal IQ to be 120 and his Performance IQ to be 133.  Had Hitler lived long enough to have been one of the 21 Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg, he would have been administered a German version of the Wechsler-Bellevue intelligence scale.  I don’t know much about the German version, but on the American version, someone who is around the age Hitler would have been had he been tested, with a verbal IQ of 120 and a Performance IQ of 133 would have a full-scale IQ of 130.  This is exactly the same as the 130 I statistically predicted at the start of this post, based simply on Hitler being both a criminal and the most influential white gentile of his century.

It’s also similar to what blogger Anatoly Karlin had predicted based just on the average IQ of the Nazi leaders who actually were tested.

An IQ of 130 implies one is smarter than 98% of Western whites of one’s same age and birth cohort.

How would Hitler score compared to people today?

I must once again emphasize that IQs are calculated relative to a mean defined as 100 in the Western (white) population of the same age and time period.  If we could travel back in time to World War II and give Hitler the most current Wechsler adult IQ test (the WAIS-IV normed circa 2008), he likely would score 111 (using U.S. white norms) (19 points lower than the 130 he would obtain on a test given in his own time).  This phenomenon, known as the Flynn effect, is partly because people today have the advantage of more schooling than was typical of Hitler’s day, and schooling seems to artificially prop up scores on IQ tests without actually increasing real intelligence.  Thus when you give people from past generations a modern IQ test, they score lower by modern standards because the modern tests would be biased against them.

If we went back in time and gave Hitler only those WAIS-IV subtests that are not much impacted by schooling and obtained a prorated score based on this culture reduced part of the test, he would likely score 117.  Higher than the 111 he would score on a biased test, but still not as high as the 130 he would have likely scored on a test normed on his own generation.

The reason he would have scored lower on a modern test, even after the schooling biased tests are removed, is that in my opinion, as much as 66% of the Flynn effect reflects a genuine biological increase in real intelligence caused by better nutrition (including disease reduction) increasing the size and complexity of the brain over the 20th century, analogous to secular gains in height.

Alternative claims

Not everyone would necessarily agree with my conclusion that Hitler had an IQ of 130. Popular high IQ society writer Grady Towers felt Hitler’s IQ was likely among the very highest of the Nazi leaders (i.e. IQ 143) because otherwise those wolves would have torn him apart.  On the other hand, this source claims Hitler couldn’t be a mailman because he flunked an intelligence test because “his mental capacity suffered after he was gassed in the war”.  When it comes to a historical figure as controversial as Hitler, people say all sorts of things so it’s hard separating fact from fiction.

[Update: Nov 3/2015–For a followup discussion on Hitler’s IQ, check out Anatoly Karlin’s recent post on the topic.]

On Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton was condemned by one of her opponents for the bad judgement she showed in supporting the Iraq war, arguably the worst decision in American history.

However Hillary used her extremely high IQ to adapt the situation to her advantage. She stated that she and anti-Iraq war Obama had debated that issue countless times when they were both running for president 8 years ago, and that Obama ended up trusting her judgement enough to make her Secretary of State. The audience cheered.

However in my humble opinion, President Obama made her Secretary of State, not because he values her judgement, but because he needed to unite the Democratic Party after a bitter Primary battle, and because he’s scared to death of her. Ever hear the saying “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”? That perfectly describes his relationship with Hillary.

In my opinion Hillary has been scheming to be President of the United States since she was a teenager, but coming of age in the 1960s, she realized there was too much sexism to get elected on her own merits, so the plan became to marry an Ivy League ambitious charismatic man who could take her to the white house, and then to parlay her First Lady gig into a political career of her own.

The lifelong plan was working brilliantly: she was the most admired woman in America and far and away the front runner to be president in 2008, and then out of nowhere came a young unknown inexperienced, arguably unqualified man named Barack Obama to derail decades and decades of brilliant planning and execution.

And adding insult to injury, he was black. For in the eyes of many white liberals, blacks should be so grateful for all they (the white liberals) have supposedly done for them. Indeed when Bill Clinton saw this black man ripping the nomination for President away from his wife, he reportedly said: “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags.” In the eyes of many white liberals of Hillary’s generation, blacks should worship at the feet of white liberals, but they should never ever challenge them as equals.

It was enough to make Hillary cry, literally, as mocked in this infamous video:

And then in a last minute act of seeming desperation too horrific to even describe, she lashed out in the following way:

But Hillary was far too shrewd to be seen acting like a sore loser for long. She feigned joy over the election of the first black president and happily joined his cabinet, knowing that an alliance with Obama was the only way she could win back the black support she needed to make a second run for the presidency.

But in my opinion, inside she was seething with a rage that this man, this black man, had robbed her of her lifelong dream she was within striking distance of achieving, and President Obama knows it. In fact, I believe part of the reason he made her Secretary of State was to keep an eye on her and try to control her.

And as we approach Halloween, President Obama must be living in utter terror. For Hillary Clinton is now once again on the verge of making her lifelong dream of being president a reality, only if she finally gets there this time, she will not, in my opinion, forgive or forget the one man who snatched the dream away from her the first time, when she was still young enough to enjoy it, and made her waste eight years of her life as a scandal plagued Secretary of State.

I suspect President Obama is trying desperately to get Joe Biden to jump into the race and challenge Hillary, because if Hillary wins, she’ll be not only the most powerful woman on the planet, but the most powerful human on the planet…and she’ll be hungry for revenge against one man: President Obama. And she’ll have four to eight long years to take her revenge, again and again. With an extremely high IQ, and the entire power of the presidency behind her, there’s no telling all the creative ways she’ll dream up to make his life miserable.

And if Bill Clinton’s alleged rape victim Juantia Broaddrick is to be believed, Hillary Clinton is a woman who knows how to play hardball:

Height and basketball success are examples of two variables that are known to possessively correlate, but what exactly is the correlation in the general adult U.S. male population? Recently a list was created of the 30 greatest white American basketball players of all time (the top 25, plus 5 honorable mentions). From this list of 30, I identified the 23 who are living, and obtained their listed heights and weights from Wikipedia:

As of 2015, there are about 72 million non-Hispanic white males, age 25 or older, in America, according to U.S. census projections. That means the median man on the above list (rank 12) is about one in six million when it comes to basketball performance. That equates to a normalized basketball Z score of +5.13.

The average listed height of the 23 greatest living white American basketball players is 200.61 cm (standard deviation = 8.37). That’s equivalent to about 6’7″ but it could be misleading because blogger Steve Sailer (perhaps the best journalist in America) notes that heights can be listed with or without shoes on. The average listed weight is 209 lbs (standard deviation = 22.09).

By contrast, the average non-Hispanic white American (age 20 or older) has a height of 177.2 cm (standard deviation = 6.44). That means, the average man on the above list has a height Z score of +3.57.

Now recall what we learned from my previous post: assuming a bivariate normal distribution, the correlation between two variables expressed as Z scores is equal to the slope of the regression line when the variables are plotted in a scatter plot.

So if we plotted height Z scores of every white man in America (age 25 or older) on the Y axis and their normalized basketball Z scores on the X axis, then the regression line would have to have a slope of 0.7 to correctly predict that white men with a median normalized basketball Z score of 5.13, have an average height Z score of 3.57:

Regression slope = 3.57/5.13 = 0.7 = correlation of 0.7

A correlation of 0.7 is very similar to the correlation between IQ and academic success in the general U.S. population. Thus NBA players are to height as Nobel prize winning academics are to IQ. Just as NBA players average heights that are three to four standard deviations above the mean, some evidence suggests Nobel level academics average IQs that are three to four standard deviations above the mean (IQ 145 to IQ 160).

And just as there some NBA players who are extremely short, we should not be surprised to find some Nobel level academics are less than brilliant, or even stupid. Yet it seems that every single time an eminent academic claims to have an IQ below 150, let alone below 90, people assume either the test was wrong or that person must have been joking. And yet statistically, we should expect such cases to exist.

NBA player Muggsy Bogues (right) has a listed height of 160 cm (5’3″)