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~ The psychology of horror

Pumpkin Person

Monthly Archives: October 2015

High class horror for Halloween

31 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in horror

≈ 55 Comments

Commenter who goes by the pseudonames World Mustache Champion, Jorge Videla, Robert Mugabe etc wrote:

there’s only one horror movie worth watching.
all others are shit for prole retards.
of course 2001 and Dr Strangelove and Apocalypse Now might be classed as horrors by some…but i wouldn’t.
it was nominated for best picture before i was born.
it was re-released a few years ago (in theatres) and i went to see it.
that was The Exorcist.
peepee needs an exorcism.
the same director made the best picture winner The French Connection…a movie i hated when i was younger but loved when i was older

An excellent short clone of The Exorcist is Tales from the Darkside Season 2 Episode 9 The Trouble with Mary Jane:

It is true that the The Exorcist is one of the horror films that appeals to the higher social classes (though not exclusively so). Other relatively higher class horror includes:

Frankenstein (1931)

Psycho (1960)

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Carrie (1976)

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Halloween (1978)

The Shining (1980)

Creepshow (1982)

Beloved (1998)

The Dark Hours (2005): I personally crowned this the greatest Canadian horror film of all time.

Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

The Strangers (2008)

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Estimating the IQ of Tommy Jarvis

30 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in horror

≈ 52 Comments

With Halloween only hours away, I want to mention one of the smartest heroes in the history of slasher films:  Tommy Jarvis from Friday the 13th parts four, five and six.  If intelligence is the mental ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage, then you’d expect the sole survivor(s) of a slasher film, the one who turns the table on the killer and defeats him, to have a high IQ.

In the typical 1980s slasher film, you have about ten middle class, Midwesternish teenagers all being stalked by a killer and one sole survivor.  Assuming the sole survivor has the highest IQ in a group of 10 middle class whites, then we might (very crudely) say it takes an IQ of 120 (90 percentile) to survive the typical slasher film.

According to scholar Charles Murray, it takes an IQ of 120 to handle genuine college material.   So you can kind of think of surviving a slasher film as passing the SAT.  Both are the most terrifying test a teenager takes, and if you fail badly enough on either, you’re not getting into a good college.

The character of Tommy Jarvis, introduced in Friday the 13th The Final Chapter, not only survived a slasher massacre, but he killed the film’s hockey masked antagonist Jason.  And he did all this, despite being only 12.  So Tommy Jarvis is kind of like one of those super gifted kids who takes the SAT before high school and comes out with an IQ equivalent of 120.    But since the normal age for taking the SAT (or surviving a slasher film) is about 17, you must add bonus points for each year below the adult “mental age” of 16+.  Since 16/12 = 1.33, and 1.33 multiplied by an IQ of 120 is 160, Tommy gets an age ratio IQ of 160.

However because mental chronological development is not entirely linear (especially at the extremes) age ratio IQs give inflated IQs.  For example scholar Vernon Sare estimated that one in 1,170 (white) children have age ratio IQs of 160.  Thus, converting ratio scores to the modern normalized deviation IQ, young Jarvis clocks in at 147.

Of course one could argue that surviving a slasher film is a very poor measure of IQ because there are so many other variables involved (luck, courage, stress management, physical speed, coordination and endurance).  Further, the correlation between IQ and life span is only about 0.2, suggesting there’s a lot more to survival than just IQ.

Of course, the correlation between IQ and survival might be higher in the very controlled situation of a slasher film where split second decisions determine success, as opposed to real life, where one might die because of a disease or plane crash they have no control over or because of an addiction they can’t resist.

Perhaps a better measure of the correlation between IQ and survival success is the 0.4 correlation between IQ and income, since historically, acquiring resources meant survival.  Thus, if Tommy Jarvis has an IQ 47 points above the white mean of 100 when it comes to the slasher film’s Darwinian test of intelligence, he likely  47(0.4) = 19 points above average on an official IQ test (IQ 119).

The following clip shows how even though the killer Jason has the advantage of being vastly bigger and stronger than Tommy, Tommy has the adaptability (with some help from his big sis) to turn the situation around to his advantage (the essence of intelligence):

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An excellent horror video

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in horror

≈ 20 Comments

To get into the Halloween spirit, I’ve embedded one of my favorite horror shorts of all time below. It is Tales from the Darkside Season 2 Episode 20 A Choice of Dreams. I strongly advise you all to watch this short film some time before Halloween (you have almost a whole week. And watch it BEFORE YOU READ THE COMMENTS).

I often reference my high school chemistry teacher who taught me what intelligence really is: The cognitive ability to adapt–to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage. Some people don’t like that definition, because it reminds them more of an evil opportunist getting rich than a brilliant scientist doing truly genius work.

But as the Bible says, For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Thus, the opportunist who sells his soul to get rich has not really adapted the situation to his advantage to any huge degree. He either had no morals to burden him, and thus had an easy situation to adapt to, or his material pleasures are negated by the psychic pain of having ruined the lives of others.

The film below is about a rich mobster who got rich using some intelligence (his IQ is probably an above average score of 110) and a lot of evil (probably a psychopath). He is smart enough to adapt to a life of crime, but it takes a scientist with an IQ of probably above 170 to figure out away for him to adapt the situation to his advantage for all of eternity, which is infinitely more advantageous than a mere lifetime of wealth. And yet, the best and truest line of the video, is “never underestimate the power of money, kid”.

So defining intelligence as the ability to adapt is perfect, because not only did intelligence evolve to enable us to adapt, but both a common sense understanding of intelligence (if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?), and an academic image of intelligence (breakthroughs in science) are all about goal-directed adaptive advantageous behavior. As my chemistry teacher so eloquently explained, it’s the single umbrella that covers all of intelligence.

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HBD deniers vs HBD moderates vs HBD extremists

25 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in ethnicity

≈ 57 Comments

It seems that scientists and bloggers in the fields of evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics and anthropology can be divided into three camps: HBD deniers, HBD moderates, and HBD extremists.

HBD deniers: These are people who believe that intelligence and other mental traits did evolve in humans, but it generally took hundreds of thousands of years for significant changes to occur, thus while different species within the genus homo may differ genetically in intelligence and other mental traits, there are no (or few) such significant differences between races. Most scientists are HBD deniers, at least publicly.

HBD moderates: These are people who believe that intelligence and other mental traits did evolve in humans, but it generally took tens of thousands of years for significant changes to occur, thus while different races within the species homo may differ genetically in intelligence and other mental traits, there are no (or few) such significant differences between ethnic groups within races. People like J.P. Rushton, Arthur Jensen, Michael Hart and Richard Lynn are probably mostly in the HBD moderate camp, since they often link population differences in behavior to ancient long lasting forces like exposure to the ice age, and feel it took 50,000 to 110,000 years for the 15-20 point black-white IQ gap to evolve. HBD moderates get attacked by HBD deniers for focusing on racial differences instead of the less controversial ethnic differences, and they get attacked by HBD extremists for ignoring all the recent evolution the extremists assert.

HBD extremists: These are people who believe that intelligence and other mental traits did evolve in humans, and it took only thousands or even hundreds of years for significant changes to occur, thus even very similar ethnic groups within the same race show large genetic differences. An example of this view is the book The 10,000 year explosion which argued that a 10+ point IQ gap between Ashkenazi Jews and the Caucasoid gentiles they split off of, evolved in only 800 years! Most of the HBD blogosphere would fall in the HBD extremist camp, regardless of whether they focus on intelligence, or other behavioral traits.

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Big brained Oprah triples the value of Weight Watchers stock; could make $100 million in 36 hours

21 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in Oprah

≈ 27 Comments

Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey

As humans evolved from apes, brain size nearly tripled in just the last 4 million years, from 500 cm3 in Australopithecenes to 800 cm3 in Homo habilis to 1000 cm3 in Homo erectus to about 1350 cm3 in modern Homo sapiens (higher in the developed world where nutrition is good), as evolution selected for intelligence…the cognitive ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in, and turn it around to your advantage. Since humans lacked the adaptive strength, speed, claws, and fur of other animals, we needed large brains to use behavior in an adaptive advantageous way.

With a cranial capacity of perhaps 2,029 cm3, Oprah has just adapted her situation to her advantage, by buying a 10% share in Weight Watchers, and watching the stock roughly triple in a few days, making her potentially $100 million richer in only 36 hours.

This type of power been dubbed the Oprah effect, and was part of the reason Time magazine crowned Oprah the most influential woman on the planet. When she famously vowed to never eat another burger, beef prices plummeted, when she endorsed a work of literature, it zoomed up the best seller list, when she plucked Dr. Phil out of obscurity, he became America’s top psychologist, and when she endorsed Barack Obama, he became the first black president of the United States.

It’s one thing for Oprah to have influence over the overweight soccer moms that watched her hugely successful daytime talk show that ran from 1986-2011, but now she seems to have parlayed her influence into even Wall-street clout, even though Oprah’s touchy-feely new age spirituality is the last thing cynical young white male Wall-street traders would be swayed by.

But they respect her money and power. People respect success, even when it comes in a form they don’t respect.

Meanwhile authoritative Forbes magazine just released their 2015 list of the 400 richest Americans, and you now need an astonishing $1.7 billion just to make last place. It used to be that the billionaire club was much more exclusive than the Forbes 400, but these days, being a billionaire is no longer rich enough for the Forbes 400.

With a net-worth of $3 billion (before the Weight Watchers investment), Oprah is still the only multi-billionaire black in North American history, but she’s no longer the only black on the Forbes 400. She’s been joined by private equity titan Robert Smith who has $2.5 billion.


Smith appears to come from a far higher socio-economic background than Oprah (his father was a PhD, Oprah’s father was a barber and her mother a maid on and off welfare) and unlike Oprah who used to be a bit of a technophobe, Smith was a high tech geek. Forbes writes:

As a junior at Denver’s East High School in the 1970s, Robert F. Smith showed a fascination for the geekiest subject there: Computer science. The transistor held particular wonder for him. This small device, a crucial valve controlling the flow of electrons within a computer, had been invented at Bell Labs. Bell had a nearby office. Maybe he should work at Bell, too.

After securing the number, Smith phoned and inquired about a summer internship. Yes, Bell did have one, he learned, but only college upperclassmen could apply. Smith had straight A’s in math and computer science. Would that count? No, Bell said, it would not. Undaunted by this initial rejection, Smith called back every day for two weeks—HR stopped answering after Day 2—and then cut back on how often he called …to every Monday for five months. Eventually, he was rewarded for his doggedness. After an MIT student didn’t show up in June, Bell called Smith. Could he come in for an interview?

The above anecdote shows that in addition to high IQ, persistence is a hugely important factor in becoming rich. It’s not just about dumb luck, as many people will have us believe. Those who become rich tend to create their own opportunities and then very skillfully exploit them.

I don’t think there’s ever been more than two blacks on the Forbes 400 at any given year, and often there’s only one. Despite being 13.6% of America, blacks are always 0.25% to 0.5% of the Forbes 400, though this may change in the next generation as some of these black billionaires pass on their fortune to children.

Interestingly, America now even has a third black billionaire. Basketball star Michael Jordan is now the third richest African American and recently became the first billionaire athlete in history, but he was not quite rich enough to make the Forbes 400. It is interesting that he recently lashed out at President Obama:

I suspect Jordan, who was at one time perhaps the most worshiped black man in America, resents seeing another black man (Obama), also from Chicago, dethrone him in status by becoming the first black president. Jordan probably subconsciously thinks that as a man of extreme height and athletic talent, he is the one who everyone should worship, and not someone like Obama who Jordan seems to view as an unworthy successor.

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Estimating Hitler’s IQ

18 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 36 Comments

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.]

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Is President Obama terrified of Hillary Clinton?

15 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 69 Comments

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:

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The Myer’s house

15 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in horror

≈ 2 Comments

Recently I was told something interesting by someone on twitter. Not to namedrop but it was HBD chick. Apparently a fan of the Halloween franchise recreated the Myers house from John Carpenter’s original 1978 classic Halloween.

Image from Myers House NC website

HBD Chick jokingly asked if it was my house. I’m a huge Halloween fan but even I wouldn’t go so far as replicating the Myer’s house, although it’s a really cool idea. In fact, I can’t tell if they replicated the house because they’re Halloween fans or if they admired the house for its intrinsic value. It really is quite tasteful in its simple elegance and reminds me a bit of the house I really did live in during early childhood.

Indeed one reason I became such a huge Halloween fan is Carpenter’s original masterpiece reminded me a bit of the kinds of neighborhoods in which I spent my earliest years. One of my most popular posts of all time is about how middle class Michael Myers from the original Halloween series should be diagnosed with autism, while the white trash Michael Myers of Rob Zombie’s controversial remake should be diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Apparently the couple who created this Myers house replica hold a Halloween bash every year. After this post, I wouldn’t be surprised if I get a personal invitation to attend since I just put them on the map. Sorry guys, I have too much on my plate this year, but have a blast!

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The correlation between height and basketball success

13 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 79 Comments

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:

rank name listed height (in cm) listed weight (in lbs)
1. larry bird 206 220
2. jerry west 193 175
3. bob pettit 206 205
4. john havlickek 196 203
5. john stockton 185 175
6. bob cousy 185 175
7. rick barry 201 205
8. dolph schayes 201 195
9. jerry lucas 203 230
10. kevin mchale 208 210
11. david cowens 206 230
12. bill cunningham 201 210
13. bill walton 211 210
14. chris mullin 198 200
15. tom hensohn 201 218
16. mark price 183 170
17. bill laimbeer 211 245
18. tom chambers 208 230
19. cliff hagan 193 210
20. paul westpal 193 195
21. dan issel 206 235
22. jack sickma 211 230
23. kevin love 208 251

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″)

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Getting drunk again

12 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in pumpkinperson

≈ 41 Comments

I’m getting drunk again tonight. Haven’t had a chance to go drinking since August. Except this time…I’m going alone. All by myself. No friends…no coworkers…no fiancée.

Nothing better than going to a bar, all by yourself, but I don’t recommend it because it’s incredibly dangerous.

About to head out into the utter darkness of this cool autumn Canadian night. I’m a bit scared to be honest. I should be.

It’s going to be a long walk and a bus ride to the bar I want to go to…far away from neighbors and friends. Or maybe I’ll take a taxi. Can’t wait for self-driving cars, so I can bring my car when I want to drink.

It’s thanksgiving weekend here in Canada so it will be interesting to see what kind of interesting characters are out drinking instead of spending time with family…and what deep dark secrets they will tell me after we’ve both had one too many drinks.

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