After weeks of incredible busyness at work, it feels so good to be on vacation…all by myself…packed up and moved to a huge suburban home for the week, with nothing behind it but trees, darkness, and the moon.

Tonight I will have a quality dinner, followed by delicious homemade hot chocolate made from actual chocolate bars with homemade whip cream as I watch a horror film on a huge screen TV.  One commenter claims this is “prole” but he lacked the sophistication to realize it’s only prole if you see the wires.  A floating TV is very elegant.

Tomorrow I will get up early, put on a warm winter jacket and sip strong tea as I sit on the outdoor deck watching the unique Northern Canadian sun rise with the most glorious shades of pink and orange.

And then I will walk the streets enjoying all the Christmas festivities, the magnificent Christmas trees wrapped in lights,  and all the huge pure white statues of virgin Marry on every Church lawn.  No one has more Christmas spirit than small town Canadians.

I told certain readers that I would be estimating the IQ of various people, such as Clark Ashton Smith and Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov..and I will do so, but more research is needed.  For now, a simple post about teachers.

It has long been believed that school teachers are good judges of the intelligence of their students, especially if you averaged the IQ estimate made by every teacher you ever had.

Because the heritability of intelligence is thought to double from childhood to adulthood, the older I got, the smarter my teachers thought I was, with a few major exceptions.

In nursery school my teachers probably thought I was dumb because I was a major behavior problem.  I would scream and yell when forced to attend school, and once there, would be sent to the corner.  The other four year olds asked why I was sent there and I would scream at them not to talk about me.  As a result it was recommended that I not attend a French immersion school, and was confined to monolingual education.

In the sixth grade, my teacher took me aside and said something like “the bad news is you’re failing…the good news is, I thinker you’re brighter than 90% of the class.”  For some strange reason, he thought I was the best writer he had ever seen, and told the class he wished he could write as well as me.  I probably was a good writer for an 11-year-old, but did not progress much since then, partly because I seldom read anything other than blogs.  One day when all the students left the class he predicted “One day you’re going to return to this school and say to me, I’m a lot more successful than you are, and far more people know who I am than know who you are, but thank you for believing in me.”

Despite this praise, this teacher became unhinged when I joined the chess team and became the #1 chess player in the entire school, because he felt chess was such a prestigious game that only good students should be on the chess team, let alone number one.  I didn’t deserve the title but refused to give it up.  When better chess players challenged me, I would mysteriously vanish, or I would drag the game out so long that the lunch break would be over before they could defeat me.  However when I represented our school in chess tournaments against other schools, my luck would run out.

In the 9th grade my English teacher worshiped the ground I walked on, giving me not only 100% on assignments, but in one case OVER 100% on a book report for George Orwell’s 1984 which I didn’t even read.  However my science teacher thought I was stupid.  Making matters worse, there were special resource classes where students could get extra help.  I didn’t need any extra help so I stopped attending, causing harassment from one of my classmates who thought I had become uppity.  One day this classmate confronted me in science class asking if I thought I was better than the resource students.  This lead to a massive physical confrontation in the science class, and the resource teacher, who had went around the school praising both the other boy and I, was furious at both of us for damaging her reputation as a judge of character.  I decided to change schools.

At the next school there was a female principal who told me I was one of the cleverest boys she had ever seen.  She had probably seen thousands and thousands of boys in her long career, so she probably thought I was a one in a thousand intellect (IQ 147).  My English teacher at this school told me I could really go places, and my chemistry teacher told me that intelligence is the ability to adapt.

The next year I went to an alternative high school filled with misfits and ne‘er–do–wells.  I became best friends with a very black student with a tested IQ of only 70 and everywhere we went, store clerks would follow him around like he was a criminal.  When we went to Subway, a clerk told him to smile for the camera before he robbed the place.  I saw firsthand how real racism could be, but he also brought it on himself, changing his subway order so many times he was banned from going there.

At this alternative school, I had an English teacher who I immediately realized what a white-East Asian hybrid and she confirmed to me that she was.  She was incredibly bright, even inventing a new word:  etiquettical, which means related to good etiquette.  She was wise: when a classmate and I got into a heated debate over which direction North was, she said, “not all battles are worth going to war over.”  It’s a lesson I never forget.

“You’re bright!” she told me.  “You’re VERY BRIGHT!  But you’re not brilliant, you know.”  I asked her how she knew whether I was bright, very bright or brilliant, and she said she could tell from the way I write.  Although the only writing she had seen of mine was a short story inspired by a provocative Picture Arangement item on the ancient Wechsler–Bellevue Intelligence Scale.

The following year I attended yet another school where all the most brilliant and most stupid students in the school board were sent.  My law teacher was a raging antisemite who would rant everyday about how much he hated Jewish humor.  He hated me too.  When I would make a point he said “No! FUCK!!!!”  but whenever his favorite student (who had a freakishly huge head measured at 24.5 inches) would make a point he would yell “HELLO!  THIS KIND OF THING MAKES SENSE!!!”

There was another girl in the class he hated too and she got into a heated debate with him over what a yellow traffic light means.  She was saying it meant “slow down” while he insisted it meant “stop if you can do so safely.”   Finally he turned to her and said “would you quit telling me the law you uneducated bitch.”

There was another student in the class who looked a bit gay, and everyday the law teacher would say to this student “My God you look gay, today”

Later my girlfriend at the time stopped attending the class because he had said terrible things about several students behind their back including me.  What had he said, I wanted to know.  She wouldn’t tell me.

“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” she said.

But I kept pestering her. “HE SAID YOU’RE A FUCKING IDIOT WHO SHOULDN’T BE IN HIS CLASS,” she finally screamed.  “NOW DID YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW THAT????!!!!”

It was hard to hear, but it’s good to know what people really think about you.  For some mysterious reason, antisemites tend to think I’m stupid.

In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test.  One page 8-9 he writes:

When the test ended, after about ninety minutes, I went over my answers with [examiner] Stern and watched him convert them into an IQ score.  Actually, you walk away with three scores: one covering the overall verbal portion of the test (where I did quite well), one covering the performance tests (where the results were mediocre), and a weighted average that becomes your IQ.  Being still coy,  I decline to state the number on the bottom line…

I was able to determine Seligman’s scores (adjusted for old norms) on three of the six verbal subtests, and three of the five performance subtests.  By taking the sum of the three verbal scaled scores and prorating, I was able to roughly estimate Seligman’s sum of scaled scores on all six verbal subtests.  Similarly, by taking Seligman’s sum of scaled scores on three of the five performance subtests and prorating,  I was able to roughly estimate Seligman’s sum of scaled scores on all five Performance subtests.  Then by adding the prorated verbal sum to the prorated performance sum, I was able to roughly estimate Seligman’s sum of scaled scores on all 11 subtests:

Information 15 (age adjusted 15)
Similarities (unknown)
Arithmetic (unknown)
Vocabulary 16.65 (age adjusted 16.65)
Comprehension (unknown)
Digit Span 15.94 (age adjusted 17.94)

Sum of three known verbal unadjusted scaled scores: 47.59
Estimated sum of all six verbal unadjusted scaled scores: 95.18

Picture Completion: 5.8 (age adjusted 7.8)
Picture Arrangement (unknown)
Block Design 9.59 (age adjusted 12.59)
Object Assembly (unknown)
Digit Symbol 8.22 (age adjusted 11.29)

Sum of three known performance unadjusted scaled scores: 23.61
Estimated sum of all five performance unadjusted scaled scores: 39.35

Estimated sum of all 11 unadjusted scaled scores: 134.53

Using the WAIS-R manual, I was able to determine the verbal IQ, performance IQ, and full-scale IQ of 55-64 years with an unadjusted sum of scales scores of 95.18, 39.35, and 134.53, respectively. They are:

Verbal IQ: 146
Perfomance IQ: 100
Full-scale IQ: 128

Of course all of these figures are in U.S. norms which is what the Wechsler scales have used for the last several decades. In U.S. white norms (which the scales originally used and are still used in the technical literature), the corresponding figures are 146, 98, and 127 respectively. But it’s probably best to err on the high side because on page 9 Seligman writes:

…I discovered with some annoyance that the WAIS data are not extensive enough to make possible a precise fit for sixty-four-year-olds. It seems that in calculating my IQ score he had to think of me as belonging to the whole cohort aged fifty-five to sixty-four. This means I was being compared with sharp-witted folks in their fifties, whereas if I had taken the test six months later, after my sixty-fifth birthday, I would have been normed against dotards ranging up to sixty-nine–and my IQ would have been five points higher. I may go back for a replay.

Of course just as being the oldest in a younger cohort underestimated his IQ, being the youngest in an older cohort would overestimate IQ, so maybe split the difference and give him an extra 3 IQ points.

So now that we know Seligman’s IQ was 128+3 = 131 (U.S. norms) or 130 (U.S. white norms) it is interesting to look back at the guessing game we played before I began this series, to see who came closest.  ruhkukah said 135-140, which for the purpose of this game, I interpret as 137.5.  Konstantin said 138…but neither were as close as jameson who said in the 120s range, which for the purpose of this game, I interpret as 125.  jameson’s argument was that since Seligman writes and talks about intelligence,  he’s probably very intelligent, but not as intelligence as someone who is actually out there doing intelligent things.  Writers and talkers in a given subject are not as talented at that subject as actual doers.

Still, Seligman’s IQ was higher than 98% of white America’s, and higher than most PhDs and Ivy League undergrads, making him an extremely intelligent man.

So who’s the loser in this game?  Sadly, it’s grey enlightenment who estimated Seligman’s IQ to be 150.  grey later revised the figure downward, but once the series began and scores started being revealed, it’s too late to change your guess, but in grey’s defense, he was very close to Seligman’s verbal IQ, and since the game was to guess Seligman’s IQ based only on a sample of Seligman’s writing, his guess made a lot of sense.

In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test.  One page 8, he describes taking the Similarities subtest.  According to the school board I attended as a kid, this test measures:

Verbal abstract reasoning
Ability to generalize, to make inferences and associations.
Reveals level of thinking: descriptive, functional, conceptual

Seligman writes:

The final subtest, Similarities, is a measure of abstract reasoning ability.  It all seemed very easy.  The examiner mentioned two nouns–like say, chicken and pigeon–and the testee responds by saying what they have in common.  (In this made-up example, the answer would be that they’re both birds.)  Nothing to it.

Unfortunately there’s no way to infer Seligman’s score on this subtest from the above paragraph so this test must be excluded when I calculate his IQ.  It’s likely he did very well, but one can find the test very easy without getting full credit on all or even any of the items and partial credits make a big difference

In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test.  One page 8, he describes taking the Digit-Symbol subtest.  According to the school board I attended as a kid, this test measures:

Rapid eye-hand coordination
Grapho-motor speed
Visual fix
Immediate visual memory
Motor control

Seligman writes:

Marching toward the end of the test, we now reached Digit Symbol, a performance test that involved some more memory skills.  What you have to remember this time were visual symbols, so I approached the test with minimal confidence.  You begin by inspecting a table that shows nine simple symbols–a circle, a plus sign, etc–and are told that each represents a digit from 1 through 9.  Then you are shown several rows of digits, arranged in random order.  The object is to draw the appropriate visual symbols in a box under each digit and to complete as many boxes as you can in the allotted ninety seconds.  If you can memorize the symbols as you are doing the exercise, you will of course go much faster, and complete more boxes, than if you had to keep referring back to it; at least I knew I would make a fair number of mistakes if I tried to rely on memory.  It struck me midway through Digit-Symbol, that it would have been nice to know something about the scoring tradeoffs between accuracy and speed.  Possibly I was over concerned about accuracy;  anyway, I ended up with a so-so total of fifty-four symbols.  The subtest is designed to measure attentiveness and quickness, and, not surprisingly, it is tough for us old folks.  Of all the subtests (I later discovered), it shows the greatest age-based decline in raw scores.

According to the WAIS-R manual, Seligman’s raw score of 54/93 equated to a scaled score of 9 in the peak age group (20-34) and a scaled score of 12 in Seligman’s age group (55-64).

But because WAIS-R norms were a decade old when Seligman was tested, and the Flynn effect increased WAIS Digit Symbol scaled scores by 0.71 points a decade from 1978 to 1995 (Flynn, 2012), his scaled scores must be reduced to 8.22 and 11.29 respectively.  An age adjusted scaled score of 11.29 is equivalent to an above average IQ of 106 (U.S. norms; 104 U.S. white norms) on that subtest.

When I was in junior-high school (I’m now in my 30s), all three of my best friends had overall IQs above 100, yet all three were way below average at Digit-Symbol.  While I consider this a poor test of intelligence generally, I think people who score low on it have something wrong their brains that prevents them adapting.  In the sixth-grade I overheard our teacher say of one of my digit-symbol impaired friends that no matter how hard he tried, he was never going to get anywhere in this World.  I strongly suspect another Digit-Symbol impaired friend robbed my house when I was in high school to support a drug habit.  My third Digit-Symbol impaired friend got an advanced degree and a job in the government, but got laid off and last I heard, works in a low status service job at a retail store.  I call it Digit-Symbol destiny:  the curse of Digit-Symbol.

The great David Wechsler talks about a subject who got an IQ equivalent of 50 on Digit-Symbol and was so deviant, that during the testing session, he asked the examiner to have sexual intercourse with him!

David Wechsler was a Digit-Symbol enthusiast, writing in The Measurement and Appraisal of Adult Intelligence (1958):

The Digit Symbol or Substitution Test is one of the oldest and best established of all psychological tests. It is to be found in a large variety of intelligence scales, and its wide popularity is fully merited…The question that remains is whether speed as well as power should be given weight in the evaluation of intelligence. The author’s point of view is that it should…Neurotic and unstable individuals also tend to do rather poorly on the Digit Symbol (as indeed on all other substitution tests). The inferiority of neurotic subjects on tests of this kind was noted as long ago as 1923, by Tendler. Tendler suggested that this was due to some sort of associative inflexibility in the subject, and a tendency toward mental confusion. More obviously neurotic subjects do badly on this test because they have difficulty in concentrating and applying themselves for any length of time and because of their emotional reactivity to any task requiring persistent effort. The poor performance of the neurotic represents a lessened mental efficiency rather than an impairment of intellectual ability.

More recent research suggests that autistics tend to do poorly on this test.  Too bad autism wasn’t talked about in Wechsler’s day; he would have had a field day with it.  The poor performance of autistics might be because the test perhaps measures executive function, or maybe it’s because autistics are obsessively concerned with accuracy which slows them down on this task.

In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test.  One page 7-8, he describes taking the Comprehension subtest, a measure of practical understanding and social judgement:

Next [examiner] Stern brought on a subtest that, I later learned, is called Comprehension.  It gauges your ability to organize information about the world you live in and arrive at some common sense understanding of various social phenomena.  Most of the questions seemed sensible, but I found myself suddenly rebelling against one question on ideological grounds.  The question assumed a need for certain laws bearing on labor relations and asked why they were needed.  My instant answer,  which would have been backed by many eminent economists, was that the laws are not needed and are in fact counterproductive.  Obviously uninterested in debating social policy, Stern cheerfully restated the question so that all you needed to produce was the theory behind the laws.  I got scored correct for the theory (and generally did quite well on Comprehension); however, I found myself still muttering about David Wechsler’s grasp of economics.

There’s a stereotype that libertarians and economists are a bit autistic or aspergoid (conditions where Theory of Mind is impaired, so they can’t understand how other people think).  Libertarians are criticized for not understanding how society, business and incentives really work and economists are criticized for assuming people behave rationally.  Indeed there’s a whole movement called post-autistic economics.

These criticisms could be nonsense, but I find it absolutely fascinating that the Comprehension subtest, which was created long before people talked about autism or aspergers, yet has historically been thought to measure social intelligence, included an item that libertarians and eminent economists would object to.

Unfortunately Seligman’s score on this subtest can not be deduced from the information he provides, so I can not include it when calculating his full-scale IQ.

Despite the belief that IQ tests don’t measure social intelligence, tests of general comprehension are among the oldest and most popular of IQ test items, appearing not only on the original Binet, but on World War I’s Army Alpha and the National Intelligence Tests.  [Update, Nov 22, 2015:  Although David Wechsler claimed that Comprehension items appear on the National Intelligence Tests (pg 80 of The Measurement of Adult Intelligence Third Edition, 1944) commenter “jeanbedelbokassa” informs me that they did not, despite being considered.]

………………………………………………………………………………………………

The test partly measures the ability to understand advantages (i.e. the advantage of certain laws in the example Seligman gave) which fits with my preferred definition of intelligence: The mental ability to adapt situations to your advantage.

In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test.  One page 7, he describes taking the Object Assembly subtest, a measure of spatial organization:

In Object Assembly, you are given a series of odd-shaped cardboard cutouts and asked to fit them together.  Except for not having much of a clue as to what the finished product will look like, you are essentially doing a jigsaw puzzle.  I managed to complete each of the puzzles, but once again my times were not too great.

Unfortunately Seligman is not precise enough for his score on this subtest to be infered, but whatever it was, it would have been inflated by old norms.

In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test.  One page 7, he describes taking the Arithmetic subtest, a measure of working memory and numerical skill:

The subtest called Aritmetic proved to be a breeze and morale restorer.  The questions were what we used to call “problems” in the sixth grade, generally taking this form:  If a car averages forty miles and hour, how far will it average in forty-five minutes?…

Unfortunately Seligman does not give enough specifics for me to unearth his score on this subtest, so it will be excluded when I calculate his IQ.  He goes on to write:

By this time–we were now a little past the one-hour mark –a pattern had emerged.  Although I was not being told my scores on the subtests, it was fairly obvious that I was doing well on the verbal-arithmetic front, not so well when confronted with spatial visual problems.

In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test.  One page 6-7, he describes taking the Block Design subtest, a measure of visual analytical reasoning:

Block Design requires you to work with plastic blocks.  Each has two red sides, two white sides, and two sides divided diagonally between red and white.  The examiner first shows you the design pattern, then scrambles the blocks on the table and asks you to assemble them so as to recreate the pattern.  Some of the patterns require you to manipulate nine blocks, some only four.  Anybody, even I, can do the design if given enough time; unfortunately, the time you take is factored into your score.  On the first eight efforts, I did finally manage to replicate the designs, but my times were generally terrible.  On the ninth effort, I gave up in frustration, even though I clearly had eight of the nine blocks in place.

From this description, it seems that Seligman passed all but the ninth item, but got zero bonus points for quick performance, suggesting a raw score of 32/51.  According to the WAIS-R manual, this equated to a scaled score of 10 in the peak age group (20-34) and a scaled score of 13 in Seligman’s age group (55-64).

But because WAIS-R norms were a decade old when Seligman was tested, and the Flynn effect increased WAIS Block Design scaled scores by 0.41 points a decade from 1978 to 1995 (Flynn, 2012), his scaled scores must be reduced to 9.59 and 12.59 respectively.  An age adjusted scaled score of 12.59 is equivalent to an above average IQ of 113 (U.S. norms; 111 U.S. white norms) on that subtest.

The great Jewish New Yorker David Wechsler (founder of the WAIS) thought Block Design (invented by Kohs but adapted to the Wechsler scales) was an excellent measure of general intelligence and it remains the most culture fair IQ subtest I have ever seen.  Sadly, Wechsler found that as he got older, he could no longer perform well on his own Block Design test, causing him to obsessively pester friends with questions about what it truly means to be an intelligent adult.  Had I been one of his friends, I would have said “It means the cognitive ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in, and turn it around to your advantage.”  On the Block Design subtest, one must literally turn the blocks around to adapt them to the desired design.

In his excellent book A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, former Fortune magazine editor Daniel Seligman describes what it’s like to take the WAIS-R IQ test.  One page 5-6, he describes taking the Vocabulary subtest:

…If you have spent your professional life as an editor of a first-rate magazine, you ought to have a pretty good vocabulary, and the WAIS confirms that I do.  The drill in this subtest is as follows.  Your examiner reads off a list of words–thirty-five in my case–and asks you to define them.  If you give a superior answer, going to the heart of the meaning, you get two points; if your answer seems to show only some general understanding of the context in which the word might be used, you get one point; if the answer totally misses the point, you get a goose egg.  I got two points on thirty-three of the definitions and one point twice.  When [examiner] Stern and I sat down after the test and went over the results,  I found myself sadly agreeing that the two one-pointers had in fact reflected somewhat wobbly answers.

Based on the above we can infer that Seligman got a raw score of 68/70 on the Vocabulary subtest.  According to the WAIS-R manual, this equates to a scaled score of 17 in the peak age group (20-34) and also 17 in Seligman’s age group (55-64), equivalent to an IQ of 135 (U.S. norms;  134 U.S. white norms) on this one subtest.

[Update Nov 20/2015: because WAIS-R norms were a decade old when Seligman was tested, and the Flynn effect increased WAIS Vocabulary scaled scores by 0.35 points a decade from 1978 to 1995 (Flynn, 2012), his scaled scores must be reduced to 16.65 (IQ 133, U.S. norms, IQ 132 U.S. white norms).]

On page 6 Seligman writes:

Many people do not quite see why vocabulary should be tested in an exercise that is supposed to be measuring mental ability.  Their objection:  that vocabulary mainly reflects acquired knowledge rather than the ability to learn.  In fact, vocabulary is a pretty good proxy for overall IQ:  if a professional tester had to make do with just one of the subtests, he would probably land on Vocabulary.  The reason it correlates so powerfully with IQ is that you build a vocabulary in a process that requires a lot of reasoning.  In your reading and listening, you are endlessly making inferences about different shades of meaning and the different contexts in which words are used.  A somewhat similar point might be made about the Information subtest (which many people also view as unrelated to intelligence).  You acquire a fund of information not by absorbing data in isolation but by noting the connections between different data.  Both Vocabulary and Information correlate about 0.80 with overall IQ…