Continuing my brief series on the Nova Scotia man declared legally incompetent by his parents, I found a heartbreaking CBC radio interview with his mother.

The mother claims her son’s functional skills are at the level of a 10 or 12 year-old, which is consistent with his self-reported IQ score (on The Fifth Estate) of 69.  Adult mental age is 16+ so an adult with the mind of an 11-year-old would be developing at 69% (11/16) of the normal rate (the age ratio method works well from IQ 70 to 130, but begins giving absurd results beyond those limits).

The interviewer plays the audio of the son making his case, and many people across the province are rallying behind the son, and feel, based on listening to his interviews, that he is competent enough to live independently.

The mother explains that his disabilities are very complex, and people shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s fine, just because he seems fine.  This shows that a complex involved in-depth IQ test like the Wechsler (assuming the son took that) can detect disabilities that can not be observed from subjective impressions.

The interviewer argues that he held down jobs, has a girlfriend, and even has kids, but the mother counters that only one of his kids (with more than one female) has been confirmed to be his.  The others are question marks.  Further, when he worked, the mother claims the money was not even going to him, but to a Third Party.

The mother explains that it’s no longer the 1970s, when it was safe for someone like her son to be integrated into the community.  Today there are too many people who will exploit someone like him.

The son’s lawyer also gave an interview with CBC Radio that I listened to.

Meanwhile I found another CBC interview with the son himself, who is heartened by all the support he’s been getting from the public.  He seems to show a large vocabulary when it comes to words related to his specific case, making reference to “cognitive assessment” and “archaic law”.  The only signs of disability is that he speaks a bit slowly and differently and struggles twice to pronounce the word “aspect”.

It’s a tricky situation because I think his parents are very good people who mean well, but at the same time, when they assume all his “friends” are just exploiting him, it can be quite condescending.

I’m reminded of when I was in the 10th grade, a popular classmate and I went to a “bush bash” on Friday night, and I kindly offered to bring a bottle of vodka that I had surreptitiously obtained.  The following Monday, another popular classmate took me aside and said “don’t let people use you like that.”  Although this student meant well, I was offended that he assumed I was just being used for my bottle of vodka and couldn’t possibly have been invited to the elite bush bash on my merits.

Sometimes it can be hard to help someone without subtly insulting them in the process, making it hard for the help to be accepted.  I think that’s part of the dynamic here.

Below is a heartbreaking video about a Canadian man diagnosed with Trainable (moderate) Retardation as a child (usually considered IQ 35-40 to 50-55), though he later obtains an IQ of 69, which is the upper end of Educable (mild) Retardation.  I think this is a classic example of regression to the mean.  The correlation between childhood and adult IQ (measured on the same test) is about 0.73, so someone who scores 45 points below 100 as a kid, might be expected to score only  45(0.73) = 33 points below 100 as an adult (and vice versa), though because the retarded are often segregated (this guy was pulled out of school very young), you might not expect any upward regression,  but rather, what Jensen called a cumulative deficit effect, where the IQ of low IQ kids get lower and lower as they get older.

What struck me while watching the video is how normal he seems.  His mother seems smart so he doesn’t seem to have familial retardation, yet he has no physical abnormalities, so his retardation doesn’t seem organic either.  Perhaps something went wrong prenatally.

He just strikes me as they typical Nova Scotia guy I’d see getting drunk at local bars when I traveled to the Maritimes.  In fact he’s more articulate than most.  Perhaps his retardation is concentrated in Performance IQ, which would make sense if it was caused by prenatal problems.  The only real sign of low IQ is the very small head circumference which I would guess to be 21.5″ around, but that doesn’t seem uncommon in rural Canadian towns.

His girlfriend strikes me as having a towering IQ of 110, probably typical for a Canadian university grad, but well above average for a Canadian college grad (in Canada we separate the two)

He and his girlfriend got an apartment and had kids, but his mother would have none of it, and he was confined to an institution.  But he broke free, and started challenging the very law that declared him incompetent.

I’ve been getting some interesting emails from a reader who lives in Southern Eastern Ontario. He and his wife decided to move out to the country because they love being close to nature, but there are no PhD parents in the area, so their ten-year-old daughter is attending school with a lot of academically low performers.  He is concerned about how this well affect her development, and so he wants to have her IQ tested to see what he can reasonably expect from her.  Because the school board only does assessments in extreme cases, he has decided to pursue private testing.

My advice to him was to contact someone who routinely administers the WISC-V IQ test.  If the psychologist offers to administer the WISC-IV, WISC-III, WISC-R, or heaven forbid, the original 1949 WISC, they are obviously using obsolete instruments and thus not up to speed.

He contacted one psychologist who appeared competent in giving the WISC-V, but this person was charging an astonishing $1000 to do so!  What an idiot I was to not get into graduate school!  I could have been following my passion for IQ and earning $1000 every time I gave the Wechsler, which is such a fascinating test, I would give it everyday for free!

Although I was happy to see the “free market” has placed so much value on the Wechsler scales, I told the reader $1000 was way too much money just to determine his daughter’s IQ.  He probably already has an intuitive sense of how smart she is just from observing her behavior for the past decade, so getting a precise scientific number is not going to change much.  Indeed, even the most famous IQ proponent. Arthur Jensen, was a huge believer that one’s IQ should not be known by yourself, or authority figures like parents and teachers, except in extreme cases where one is suffering from anxiety about their intelligence.  He felt the best way to determine if you’re capable of succeeding in a given domain is to go out and try.

The reader  asked whether I could suggest cheaper options like online testing.  I replied:

I think online tests are good enough measures of intelligence, but the problem is they are not well normed, and especially not for children, so I can’t recommend any.

I’m not an expert on parenting, but common sense suggests that a sympathetic peer and family environment can make a huge difference. If the schools in your area are not very challenging, I would supplement her education by giving her home assignments, such as insisting she do a book report for you to grade, once a month (or more). Allow her to choose the books herself so she can pursue subjects that interest her and thus develop a love for learning while acquiring knowledge in subjects she is passionate about.

The fact that her classmates have low IQs could even be positive because it will make it easier for her to rise to the top of the class, which will give her great academic confidence. And being forced to relate to duller children could be good for her social skills.

He thanked me for my advice and offered to send me some homemade food (one of the perks of being a celebrity is people are always offering you free stuff). I politely declined and did not hear from him in over a month.

And then the other day he sent me another email. It seems that now the psychologists want his daughter to take an education test in addition to the WISC-V, and that the entire process will cost $2000! They feel the WISC-V alone will not provide enough information.

Can anyone offer him some advice?

A guy named Shaan Patel acquired HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS in scholarship money by scoring perfect on his SAT.  What’s interesting about his case is that he claims that when he first took an SAT practice test, he scored 1760 out of 2400 which on the IQ scale, equates to a score of 120 (U.S. white norms) but after studying hard, he raised his score to a perfect 2400 (IQ 155).  That’s equivalent to going up 35 IQ points!

If his story is true, and assuming he didn’t take the practice SAT at an abnormally young age thus explaining his lower practice score, this suggests the SAT is way too coachable to be considered a good IQ test.  Of course all IQ tests are coachable, but the difference is, official IQ tests are taken cold, because few people have any incentive to get coaching on a private test given by a psychologist for diagnostic reasons.  By contrast, the SAT is supposed to measure coachable skills, but folks like Charles Murray believes that because we have been coached all our lives in reading and math, any additional coaching has diminishing returns and so the SAT functions as a measure of g (general intelligence).

But in Patel’s case, that clearly wasn’t the case.  Perhaps the writing section added in 2005 made the SAT more coachable?  I wonder how much his scores improved when that section is excluded.

Of course, as Charles Murray would argue, anecdotal evidence can be misleading.  For every person who shows such a huge increase, there might be ten others who show almost no increase, or even a decrease.

And even if the SAT is extremely coachable, it could still function as an IQ test if the vast majority of people who take it get similar preparation.

One reason to think the SAT is a valid measure of g is that it’s extremely long (4 hours).  It would be almost impossible to create a comprehensive paper-pencil test that long, on almost any broad subject, that didn’t load substantially on g.