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):
Pumpkin Person 
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
The power of Christ compels you peepee.
The power of Christ compels you.
http://www.timeout.com/london/film/best-horror-films#tab_panel_10
great minds think alike!
reminds one of this:
WAIT FOR IT!
that’s Lawrence Olivier as the in extremis and Jeremy Irons as the moustachioed naif.
THE TRUTH.
dear FUCKING GOD what a FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT WORDPRSS IS.
one wrong stroke and everything you’ve typed is deleted.
it’s interesting…
when i typed “prole trans-sexual canadian satanist” into google it came up with this:
Insterestng artcle about hajnal line https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/community-vs-communism/
Hey Pumpkin Person,
This is sort of unrelated, but I just wanted to check, what does a large (20+points) deviation between one’s WAIS score, with an even distribution between verbal and non verbal. and one’s Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices score mean?
It’s hard to say without knowing how high or low the scores were and without knowing the actual subtest scores on the WAIS.
But generally speaking, and in my humble unprofessional opinion, the verbal scale mostly measures general intelligence + verbal talent + acquired knowledge, while the non-verbal scale generally measures general intelligence + spatial talent.
By contrast the Raven generally measures general intelligence + abstract reasoning.
So I would say the large gap suggests abstract reasoning is an outlier ability
Pumpkin, can you re-explain “abstract reasoning”? I would assume abstract reasoning would have something to do with analogical reasoning or maybe mathematics. Or maybe even something like Similarities on Wechsler (which I sucked at).
What does Raven’s have to do with “abstract reasoning”? It seems just like the other spatial tests, like Picture Completion.
It’s wierd to speak of abstract reasoning as a specific talent like verbal reasoning or spatial reasoning because for decades it was implied that abstract reasoning is general intelligence itself or a least extremely g loaded
However the latest version of the WISC treats matrix reasoning (a shorter raven ripoff)& figure weights as a separate domain from verbal reasoning, spatial, working memory & processing
I personally call this domain abstract reasoning; for want of a better term perhaps. The WISC refers to it as fluid reasoning but i would consider spatial, working memory & processing speed pretty fluid too
Similarities is thought to measure verbal abstract reasoning & is perhaps the most fluid verbal reasoning test
But yes, abstract reasoning, in my opinion is analogical conceptual reasoning & the raven was designed as a culture reduced analogy test in non-verbal form
Or maybe even something like Similarities on Wechsler (which I sucked at).
But yes, abstract reasoning, in my opinion is analogical conceptual reasoning & the raven was designed as a culture reduced analogy test in non-verbal form
That’s why I was saying your IQ would probably be below 120 (113?) if IQ tests were a pure mesure of intelligence. Do you get my point now ? If you look at your WAIS IV subtest scores you should find a very strong (i.e. much more important than what an average 120 IQ individual would find) correlation between the culture-loading of the subtest and the subtest score itself.
Something in your personality probably caused you to have a much higher general knowledge than what your intelligence might have suggested.
Glad to have you back !
Yotta, your theory is not the only possible explanation for his unique profile
It might be that he does better on knowledge tests because he has a very good long term memory. Long term memory is very important part of intelligence that should be given weight
I already thought about that, but the fact that ruhkukah have an average working memory make this theory much less respectful of Occam’s razor than the one I exposed in my previous comments.
But I’m not an expert in neurology, and I don’t know if people can have a relatively bad working memory while having a great long term memory. May be it’s possible, but I have no idea how this can happen.
Have you any example of cases in which people have a huge difference between their “working memory IQ” and their “long term memory IQ” ?
There’s not a lot of research on long term memory since it’s hard to measure so i don’t have specific examples, but the ability to absorb & retrieve information in long term
memory is possibly different from the ability to manipulate information in short term memory
I favorised the personality traits thesis because ruhkukah always knew a lot about HBD, he reads and comments on a lot of blogs. Even someone with a very good long term memory couldn’t have acculumated as much precise knowledges as he did.
For example, someone with an excellent long term memory who is regularly reading 3 HBD blogs couldn’t write ruhkukah’s comments, it clearly appears to me that ruhkukah don’t statisfy himself by regularly reading a few HBD blogs without seeking beyond.
I don’t doubt that he has a curious personality that actively seeks knowledge and this might inflate his scores on more knowledge saturated tests, but non-cognitive factors always contaminate test scores. For example ruhkukah has a tendency to panic under pressure and this might artificially lower his score on timed tests. Someone might have slow hands and that might lower their score on performance IQ tests etc. The beauty of a test like the WAIS-IV is that it measures intelligence in so many different ways that many of these idiosyncrasies cancel out and the overall score correlates 0.9 with general intelligence. The SAT on the other hand, has much less diversity of item content, so the final score’s g loading is only 0.8
But having said that, there is evidence that ruhkukah has an unusually good long-term memory. For example, on LOTB’ blog, people were discussing all the pseudoname’s Videla uses and he just rattled a bunch them off from memory, saying:
Jorge Videla, Rafael, Trujillo, First Ypres, Robert Mugabe, Duke of Leinster, krupp sphere, what else?
https://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2015/09/07/sock-puppetry/
In a post where I mentioned a young hip hip hair style and attitude Oprah adopted in the mid 1990s, ruhkukah seemed to remember, even though he was incredibly young at the time:
Hahaah, I was young at the time but I almost feel like I remember when she did that. Oprah would be on when I came home from school.
https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/09/06/only-ashkenazi-jews-were-smart-enough-to-compete-with-oprah/#comments
Further, in this another thread, he talks in specific details about the movie The Ring, despite the fact he was only 12-13 and found the movie uninteresting:
I remember watching the Ring when I was 12 or 13 and being thoroughly underwhelmed, even though people were hailing it as the start of a new wave of “subtle and thoughtful” horror films. I remember laughing at a few parts, like when the horse fell of the ship when the mother was going somewhere off the coast of Washington State (the details are vague now since I haven’t seen it a long time).
https://pumpkinperson.com/2015/10/31/high-class-horror-for-halloween/#comments
LOL, I think it’s pretty awesome that people are analyzing me this much!
That’s why I was saying your IQ would probably be below 120 (113?) if IQ tests were a pure mesure of intelligence. Do you get my point now ? If you look at your WAIS IV subtest scores you should find a very strong (i.e. much more important than what an average 120 IQ individual would find) correlation between the culture-loading of the subtest and the subtest score itself.
Maybe. When I said I sucked on Similarities, I didn’t mean it in an absolute sense, just relative to my 19/19 on Vocabulary and Information. I did well on some of the non-cultural tests too, like Arithmetic (14/19) and Matrix Reasoning (can’t remember my score right now, probably a 13). So I do well on both cultural and non-cultural tests, just for whatever reason I sucked at Similarities (relatively).
But as has been mentioned here and at Dr. James Thompson’s website in several posts and at least once on Scott Barry Kaufman’s site (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-heritability-of-intelligence-not-what-you-think/) cultural tests have a higher heritability and g-loading than non-cultural ones, so my high scores on Vocabulary and Information should, if anything, be a strong argument for IQ 120. Although this higher heritability may reflect personality/non-cognitive factors that are also highly heritable (like curiosity, a desire to read constantly, conscientiousness), it seems likely that the other, non-cultural tests are also susceptible to certain non-cognitive factors that may boost or hurt a person’s score. For instance, a person with an innate tendency towards nervousness or inattention will probably score artificially low on processing speed, or may see more variability on this section.
With IQ tests, whether cultural or non-cultural, there’s gonna be some personality factors involved, no doubt. But that doesn’t reduce the validity of IQ tests; if anything, it increases it.
And long-term and short-term/working memory are located in distinct parts of the brain, I believe. So it’s perfectly possible to be extremely high on one and relatively low in the other, as is the case with me. Remembering facts that are loaded with context and related information is very different than remembering decontextualized symbols (whether auditory or visual) for a short period time and then immediately forgetting them when they’re no longer needed.
I’d also like to point out that I recently found Otis-Lennon scores from a test I took at age 6. Scored a 120 on that also. And I believe the Otis-Lennon is predominantly Matrix Reasoning and other visual type questions.
With IQ tests, whether cultural or non-cultural, there’s gonna be some personality factors involved, no doubt. But that doesn’t reduce the validity of IQ tests; if anything, it increases it.
It increases the PREDICTIVE validity but it decreases the CONSTRUCT validity
You should do Ta-Nehisi Coates for Halloween. 😈
LOL! There are several writers people want me to discuss including him, but to prepare, I must first do a post about IQ and writing talent in general which I will do soon.
Very excited to see this. I’ve always wondered about IQ and writing ability.
PP: What is the IQ of the Space Jockey-life form in Prometheus, who created the Alien, and was later killed by his (their) own creation? According to legend, they created humans who shared the same DNA, but envied us, because we surpassed them in achievements, and they wanted us dead.
Happy Proleween!
Good question. I haven’t even that movie, but now that you mention it, I may check it out. Sounds fascinating, although I generally prefer my horror more down to earth.
All horror films are scary, but Alien and Prometheus are exceptionally scary, because they are cold, broody, with slow momentum, which then builds up. It’s like hot scary (action packed horror like Friday the 13th) vs cold scary (this is scarier).
One particular primetime TV series that was cold scary, was the original V, aired during the 1980s. Anyone old enough to remember, was the storyline about these repulsive space reptilians who disguised themselves as affable human nazis coming to promote peace and goodwill, where they eventually revealed their true agenda. They were rounding up humans into concentration camps, then induced them into a coma, and then cargo shipped them back to their spaceships to be systematically processed as food. Many people had loved ones missing, because these aliens kidnapped them to be eaten.
I had a brilliant friend with an IQ around 149 on the Raven (though perhaps the norms were outdated) who had little use for most of the horror films I liked but LOVED the Alien movies
I’ve long been interested in how media & aesthethic preferences correlate with IQ.
Alien is in the sci-fi realm. If cerebral types watch any horror, it will be that of science fiction horror – and it’s usually sinister lifeforms from outer space. The scariness from sci-fi is more appealing, because the story line usually reflects realism coming from STEM topics, where as regular horror is more like black magic. Regular horror is usually more prolish, and geared towards lower IQ individuals. Furthermore, sci-fi horror is more covert, hidden, usually of slower momentum, with a build up of suspense.
I think the original V series had a great story line, despite the outdated special effects, if one watches it today. Aliens disguised themselves as friendly humanoids with an evil intent of eating you might seem very stupid in today’s pop culture, but during the 80s, the concept was very scary for its time. It was also cool, because the aliens disguised themselves that is reflective of the current pop culture. The 80s was known for the big puffy hair and large sunglasses. The reptilian invaders were sensitive to Earth’s sunlight and had to wear dark glasses during the day. The entire series demonstrated very good creativity and aesthetics. It also featured Robert Englund as a good alien, before becoming his signature Freddy in Nightmare on Elm St. And this is speaking of tv shows, not mainstream movies. It is amazing how reruns of this show were eventually removed from regular television, because the scenes were too explicit for most viewers who didn’t expect to watch a scary series on prime time tv.
Hey Pumpkin person,
Thanks for the comments on the existence of abstract reasoning as an outlier. Since you have so graciously outline the components of what this term consists of, could I ask, what does it mean in terms of my general intelligence- in short, what effect would such an outlying abstract reasoning component be expected to have someone’s expression of intelligence within ones environment. I’m sorry if if this question seems a bit too much…
I don’t think your fascinating question has been researched, but my guess is that someone with an outlier abstract score would be unusually good or bad at using Occam’s razor and drawing simple elegant parsimonious explanations about the world around him. He would be unusually good or bad at conceiving theories
Hey Pumpkin Person,
so basically….This person, based on an extreme outlying component of his intelligence, will have manifest itself, owing to uncertainty, will be extremely effective or ineffective at theorizing(Which I presume is the main manifestation of g)?
Also, the person can be both good and bad at theorizing, depending on the rest of his intelligence, particularly to do with the senses. In autistic children, this manifestation of g values, via Raven’s Matrices, being well beyond predictions based on WISC scores seems to be common. Perhaps, the appearance of such a phenomenon is linked to the autistic traits, and can thus be considered a competent of ASD. As such, it is quite possible that your prediction does already manifest itself, based on the prevalence of Autistic traits among academics, particularly mathematicians and theorists, which is counterbalanced by the poor theory of the mind that manifests itself in such individuals with ASD. Though of course the assumption here is that Such a phenomenon is something which manifests itself as part of ASD…
In any case, a simple Google search would tell, you, as I have come to believe, that individuals with ASD, particularly asperger’s tend to show the phenomenon as earlier outlined. Of course, this is something which is very much limited to those with high IQ, but even without it, there appears to be significant deviations between Raven’s and WISC.
https://scholar.google.com.sg/scholar?q=raven%27s+matrices+Aspergers&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1
It would be interesting to compare the autistic traits of academics, their WAIS and their Raven’s scores in one study to avoid differing samples.
I do hope I haven’t been too repetitive in this stream of consciousness. Thanks for taking the time to indulge my curiosity.
I’d like to see your estimate for Axl Rose’s IQ.
Not sure of a source right now but Izzy has said he first got talking to Axl after helping defend him when he was getting beaten up for getting the highest IQ test score in the school. Also he was getting straight A’s until he dropped out of high school because he decided they weren’t teaching him anything he wanted to know.
Most people who have known him for any length of time, even the ones who don’t like him, have also said he comes across as very intelligent.
http://www.velvetrevolverforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=29990.0
Axl Rose grew up as Bill Bailey, the son of L. Stephen and Sharon Bailey. He was the local juvenile delinquent in Lafayette, Indiana, and was arrested, by his count, “over 20 times,” serving as long as three months in jail and representing himself at trials ” ’cause I didn’t trust the public defenders for shit.” A psychiatrist who noted Bailey’s high IQ decided that his behavior was evidence of psychosis.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/the-hard-truth-about-guns-n-roses-19881117?page=3