Commenter Mikey Blayze writes:
The movie Precious is a perfect visual representation of the black underclass
Precious is an unbelievably heartbreaking film about a person named Precious who has every disadvantage one can have in America: She’s black, female, incredibly dark skinned, incredibly overweight, illiterate, dirt poor, physically abused, sexually abused, pregnant with her second baby, fathered by her father; The first baby has Down’s Syndrome! And that’s just the first 20 minutes of the movie!
But other than that, Precious is not so different from other teenaged girls. She has a crush on her math teacher, she dreams of having a light skinned boyfriend with nice hair, but first she wants to be in one of those BET videos.
So what is her IQ?
At the start of the film we are told she is 16 years old and reads at a grade 2.8 level. Since people typically read several grades below their completed grade level, the average kid probably wouldn’t read at grade 2.8 level until grade 5.8 (about age 10.8), so at age 16, Precious had a reading age of 10.8 implying an IQ of 68 on the old age ratio scale 10.8/16 = 0.68.
This makes sense because according to scholar Richard Lynn, the average IQ of the darkest skinned African Americans like Precious is 80 (white norms), but because Precious is also extremely overweight, and weight/height ratio is negatively correlated with IQ at about -0.22, Precious would be expected to be below this level. Indeed I estimate Precious to be 2.5 standard deviations above the mean of her age in weight/height ratio, so we might very crudely estimate her IQ to be 2.5 SD (-0.22) = -0.55 SD (roughly -8 IQ points) from what one might expect based on race and color alone. This reduces her IQ to 72 which is very similar to the 68 IQ as measured by her reading level. Both numbers round to 70.
It seems simple regression works, even on fictional characters created by writers who know nothing about psychometrics or statistics, and probably don’t even believe in IQ!
However watching the film, one gets the sense from her subtle sense of humour that Precious is smart despite her illiteracy, which is almost understandable given the abysmal quality of the inner-city schools she attends.
In an especially adorable scene, Precious complains about being an “insect victim”, only to have a white student tell her that insects are bugs; what Precious meant to say was “incest victim.”
“What are you a scientist now?” says Precious sarcastically.
Once Precious leaves these ghetto schools and attends an alternative high school (which I also attended as a teenager; I’m now in my thirties) we see her reading level blossoms to a grade 7.8 level in about a year, thanks to the support of a loving teacher. The national average for American adults is 8th grade level, so this implies Precious now has an IQ around 100!
Although this film is fictional, cases like this are not that uncommon. For example boxer Mike Tyson was considered borderline mentally retarded because of his low reading level, but under the tutoring of his boxing coach, his reading improved by about three grade levels in three months. Such anecdotes underscore the pitfalls of using academic SAT type measures to estimate IQs.
First of all, I cringe at the distinction he makes between social intelligence and cognitive intelligence. Intelligence, by definition, is a cognitive property of the brain so the term “cognitive intelligence” is redundant in my opinion, and the idea that “social intelligence” is non-cognitive is thus oxymoronic.
That’s not to deny that there are non-cognitive mental traits that enhance one’s social success, but factor analysis would objectively classify these as personality traits, not cognitive functions, and thus should not be included in any subset of abilities called “social intelligence”.
It’s strange how so many people distinguish social intelligence from cognitive abilities, and yet no such separation is made for mathematical, verbal, or spatial abilities. The implication is that social intelligence, is not actually intelligence, but just personality traits. But in fact, measures of social intelligence are included in some of the oldest, most traditional classical measures of IQ: the Picture Arrangement and Comprehension subtests both gauge social comprehension and were included in the original Wechsler intelligence scales dating back to the 1930s, and some of the test items had their roots in WWI IQ testing and the original Binet scale.
Not only does social intelligence have the deepest of roots in 20th century IQ testing, but as another commenter noted, the majority of anthropologists and biologists believe that the cognitive ability to navigate complex social situations is what caused brain size to triple in 4 million years of human evolution!
So if social reasoning is such a major part of human intelligence, does that mean I was wrong to estimate Ted Cruz’s IQ as 20 points higher than Donald Trump’s?
Not necessarily. It’s possible that Cruz overall cognition is much higher than Trump’s, even while his social cognition is lower.
It’s also possible that Trump had certain non-cognitive personality traits that the general public liked, making him seem more socially intelligent than he actually is. Being likeable and being socially intelligent are not the same thing.
It’s also possible that Trump is simply much better looking than Ted Cruz and thus didn’t need social IQ to beat him. One could argue that it was Cruz who showed incredible social IQ to have gone as far as he did, given his appearance.
Perhaps the most important factor in Trump’s victory is the fact that unlike all the other candidates (except for my hero Bernie Sanders), Trump was not owned by special interests funding his campaign. This was a huge advantage because it allowed him to speak directly to what the people wanted instead of pandering to what his donors wanted.
Having said all that, Trump has definitely demonstrated social intelligence, and overall intelligence. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed there are no second acts in American life, but Trump has proven adaptable to have three successful acts:
real-estate tycoon
reality TV star
republican candidate
But Trump’s political victory will prove to be a hollow one if he can’t beat Hillary in a general election. It’s one thing to win a Party nomination by running to an ideological extreme, but the real test of his intelligence will be whether he can adapt his campaigning style to the broader electorate.
It’s going to be tough to win with his sky high unpopularity among Hispanics. I don’t see how he wins them over without backtracking on his tough stance against immigration, and doing so will alienate his white base. One wild card is blacks. If he can convince them that they are hurt even more by illegal immigration than whites are, given that blacks and illegal immigrants compete for the same jobs, and blacks are sometimes ethnically cleansed from neighborhoods by illegal immigrants, he might be able to chip away at Hillary’s huge monopoly with black voters.
Another unexpected area where Trump might be able to put Hillary on the defensive is her controversial Iraq war vote in 2002 which cost her the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in 2008. That vote has always haunted Hillary in Democratic primaries, but she’d never thought she’d have to worry about it while running against a Republican. But unlike most other Republicans, Trump is not puppet for the neocons, and is on record opposing the Iraq war, almost from the jump.