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Monthly Archives: May 2016

The IQ of Precious

31 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by in dark dramas, ethnicity

≈ 151 Comments

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.

 

 

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Is there a secret black underclass?

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 95 Comments

Commenter Mikey Blayze wrote:

Hey Pumpkin? Are you 100% sure there is no secret super low IQ black under class? Because im here to tell you there is -.- You have obviously never seen just how degenerate the inner city is from first hand experience. I spent a great deal of my young adult hood traveling to the inner city from my suburban home, usually for excitement and easy women and I can tell you there is a large group of blacks that have IQ of 75 , possibly lower.The IQ of the homeless is 85. They form groups, a social heirarchy, and co-ordinate together to make what little money they can. I have seen this for myself. I swear on my life there are at least hundreds if not thousands of adult inner city black males that survive solely on robbery and theft and their females survive of the meager financial support from the male activities. Tell me Pumpkin, What would the IQ be of someone who could only think of theft or robbery to make money. Theres a large amount of blacks that get away with this behavior constantly because in the inner city theres little to no police enforcement. The inner city is essentialy a modern day African Savannah. Its called a concrete jungle for a reason. Please do more research on a plausible theory before dismissing it.

I do agree that there are subpopulations of U.S. blacks with IQs below 75.  For example scholar Arthur Jensen discovered an entire school district in rural Georgia where the average IQ of late adolescents was about 70.  The question was whether these secret subpopulations are large enough to drag the national black IQ average down to 78, instead of the mean of 85 that is typically reported.

One reason for my skepticism is that tests like the Wechsler scales attempt to get extremely representative samples.  For example, the 1995 U.S. census reported that 18% of college age blacks had less than a high school diploma (about one fifth); meanwhile 21%  of college age blacks  in the 1995 norming of the Wechsler adult IQ test also had less than a high school diploma (also about one fifth).  Such careful matching of demographic variables gives me confidence that Wechsler norms are valid.

On the other hand, there is enormous IQ variation even among people with the same education, and this is especially true of blacks, so just because the Wechsler scales fully sampled low education blacks, does not mean they fully sampled low IQ blacks.

Scholars Rushton and Jensen wrote:

It is widely known among test developers that although samples are carefully drawn to create a nationally representative sample for the entire population, they are not chosen to get an accurate estimate for subgroups such as Blacks. The most disadvantaged elements in poorer schools in inner cities are rarely, if ever, included.

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Thus I decided to take Mikey Blayze’s advice and do more research.  Although there are probably few if any studies on the IQs of poor inner city blacks, I did find a paper on the prison population in the Southern United States.  The paper reported that the white prisoners averaged IQ 87.66 on the WAIS-R, while the black prisoners averaged 78.47.

However because the WAIS-R was normed in 1978 and the prisoners were apparently tested in 1987, we should probably deduct 2.7 points for inflated norms (the Flynn effect), which reduces the IQs to 84.96 and 75.77 respectively.

It should also be noted that WAIS-R IQs are reported with reference to the entire U.S. population, not just the white population, which averaged IQ 101.4  SD = 14.65 on U.S. norms.  Compared to the national white mean and SD, white prisoners were -1.12 SD and black prisoners were -1.75 SD, corresponding to IQs of 83 and 74 respectively, using white norms.  Since the black inner city tends to have very high incarceration rates, the IQ 74 of black prisoners might be representative of the black underclass.

This is a bit higher than the rural Georgia black teens who averaged IQ 70.  On the other hand, a study of almost all black homeless people in Milwaukee showed an average IQ of 80 (white norms).  Averaging black prisoners in the South (IQ 74) with mostly black homeless in Milwaukee (IQ 80) with black teens in rural Georgia (IQ 70) probably gives a reasonable estimate of the IQ of the black underclass, and that estimate is 75 (white norms).

If the black underclass average IQ 75, it makes sense that the average U.S. black is about IQ 85 (white norms) and that the Wechsler samples are probably correct despite probably not sampling inner city blacks.

Sheldon Adelson promotes his ethnic genetic interests

24 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by in ethnic genetic interests

≈ 68 Comments

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Billionaire Sheldon Adelson has recently announced his plans to pour an astonishing $100 million of his own hard earned money into Donald Trump’s campaign and is arranging a trip for Trump to visit Israel before the convention.  From a genetic perspective, this is a very adaptive move by Adelson because this will put even more pressure on Trump to support Israel and Israel contains millions of copies of Adelson’s genes, so what’s good for Israel is good for Adelson’s genetic fitness.

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This is also great news for Trump because the U.S. media, which influences elections, is largely Jewish and this increases Trump’s pro-Israel credentials.  Further, because Trump’s benefactor is pro-Israel, the media will not call Trump out on his hypocrisy in taking money after mocking other candidates for doing the same.

However Trump’s white nationalist supporters like David Duke will not be happy about this, but what are they going to do?  Vote for Hillary?  She too is supported by pro-Israel billionaires like Haim Saban, indeed most of the influential pro-Israel Americans prefer Hillary,  Adelson is the exception.  Because Ashkenazi Americans are 13 IQ points smarter than the rest of America, they have brilliantly adapted the situation to their advantage so that no matter who gets elected, Israel will be a huge priority.

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Most people think the rich are only motivated by financial interests and they want you to think that, but it’s impossible to make sense of the World without understanding ethnic genetic interests.

There was a time in Western countries, up until about the 19th century, when the rich were more genetically fit because they had more surviving offspring.  That’s no longer noticeably the case, but increasing the rich are more genetically fit because they are able to help their race.  It’s mostly Jews who are smart enough to do this, but in rare cases, even blacks can do the same.  For example our very own Afrosapiens does so on a very small scale by arguing tirelessly in favour of his people on this blog and others, but the freakishly big brained Oprah has the genius to do so on a HUGE scale. She was influential enough to elect America’s first black president, who obtained life saving health care for millions of working blacks and gave the black race unprecedented levels of dignity and respect around the World:

Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey

According to two economists, Oprah’s endorsement netted Obama a million votes in the 2008 Democratic primary, thus playing the decisive role

Meanwhile Oprah pours her own hard earned money into sending African American men to college and building schools for the best and brightest black girls in Africa.

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How much of the black-white IQ gap can be explained by brain size?

24 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 51 Comments

Commenter Afrosapiens wrote:

First thing, contrary to what HBDers want us to believe, these cranial capacity gaps are extremely small. Too small to explain a one SD gap in IQ or “g”.

First of all, racial differences in brain size are not that small.  The most high quality data ever obtained on black-white brain size differences in the U.S. was a 1980 study of autopsied brains at the Case-Western Reserve University’s Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio.  The purpose of the study was to obtain norms for black and white brain weight so that when an autopsy is performed, one could determine if the brain weight was abnormal since this can tell you a lot about the cause of death.

Now one problem with this data is that the sample varies in age from 25 to age 80. This is not a problem for comparing the mean brain of blacks and whites because both groups died at a mean age of 60, however having such a wide range of ages likely greatly inflated the standard deviation and thus minimize racial differences expressed in SD units.  Since I don’t know the brain weight standard deviations for same age groups,  I decided to convert autopsied brain weight (estimated at age 25) to in vivo volume (following Rushton 1997) and use the standard deviations of Caucasian enlisted army men and women (91 cm3 and 90cm3 respectively, see table 1 of Rushton’s data ) since skull measurements, especially in young adults are much less age sensitive than brain weights in mixed-age adults. To make this conversion, one must first divide by 1.09 because brain weight increases by 9% post-mortem so the in-vivo weight is 9% lower.  Then, converting brain weight to brain volume is simply a matter of multiplying by 1.036.

group n height(cm) brain weight (g) sd of brain weight (g) brain weight height adjusted (g) estimated brain weight at age 25 (g) estimated in-vivobrain volume at age 25 (cm3) cranial capacity sd taken from rushton’s data-set (cm3 )
white males 413 175 1392 130 1392 1570 1492 91
black males 228 173 1286 138 1290 1375 1307
white females 395 162 1252 125 1252 1339 1273 90
black females 222 162 1158 119 1158 1291 1227

The data seems to indicate that the average white male has an age 25 in-vivo brain size that is 185 cm3 bigger than the average black male. A difference of 2.03 SD.

Meanwhile the average white female has an age 25 in-vivo brain size that is 46 cm3 bigger than the average black female.  A difference of 0.51 SD.

Averaging across sexes, white brains are 1.27 SD larger than black brains.  Assuming about a 0.35 within race correlation between IQ and brain size in adults, then racial differences in brain size can arguably explain 0.35(1.27 SD) = 0.44 SD or 7 IQ points.  So virtually half of the 15 point black-white IQ gap is arguably explained by racial differences in brain size.

Further, if racial differences in brain size are just a by-product of selection for intelligence, rather than directly selected for, then one could even argue that genetic IQ differences should be much greater than brain size differences since the latter were just a side-effect of selection, not the primary target.

Of course there are many other biological properties that affect IQ besides overall size such as nerve cell myelination, brain glucose metabolism, number of brain folds, etc, and I don’t know much about how the races differ on these traits, if at all.  It’s even possible that some of these traits greatly favour blacks.

It also remains possible that racial differences in brain size are entirely environmental in origin, particularly if one believes that black mothers provide worse prenatal environments.  Comparing the brain sizes of mulattos with white mothers to mulattoes with black mothers could resolve this question since both would presumably be racial identical but only the latter would have black prenatal environments.

 

Why did black IQ hit record lows during WWII?

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 58 Comments

Although the vast majority of studies suggest that the black-white IQ gap has been about 15 points for the last 100 years, a major outlier in the data was the mass testing that occurred during WWII where the black-white IQ gap jumped to a record high of 22 points.  On a scale where U.S. whites average 100, U.S. blacks averaged a disastrous 78, instead of the more typical 85 they’ve been average since WWI.

Charles Murray’s theory

This mysterious outlier has inspired two very different theories.  Scholar Charles Murray argued that black IQ only became 85 after WWII, and that in the first half of the 20th century it was 78 because of the abysmal environment blacks suffered during that era.  He dismissed the IQ of 85 found in WWI as sampling error, arguing that WWI excluded many of the 70% of African Americans who lived in the rural South and had little or no schooling.  Why rural Southern blacks would be excluded is a question Murray ignores.

Rushton and Jensen’s theory

Piggybacking on Murray’s theory, scholars J.P. Rushton and Arthur Jensen came up with a terrifying theory.  They agreed with Murray that the black IQ might have been 78 during the first half of the 20th century, however unlike Murray, they didn’t stop there.  They argued that the black IQ might still be 78, and that low IQ blacks are still being excluding from studies because today they live deep in the inner city where professional testing seldom takes place.  The WWII testing was perhaps the most representative sample of U.S. blacks ever tested so it was the rare case where the low IQ segment was included.

Although I love the idea of a secret black underclass that is so dysfunctional, psychologists are afraid to test them, I don’t think this is the case.  For starters, this underclass would probably need to have an average IQ around 70 to drag the entire black average down from 85 to 78 and I don’t think such a low IQ black underclass exists in the U.S..  Even homeless blacks average IQs around 80, and the homeless seem like the lowest of the low.

Secondly, the sampling done by the WAIS-IV is far too meticulous to have overestimated the black IQ to such a large degree.  The blacks they include in their norms must have the same distribution of education and occupational status as blacks in the U.S. census, so it’s very hard to see how a large class of super low IQ blacks could be systematically excluded.

Pumpkin Person’s Theory

So how do we explain why blacks scored IQ 78 in the mass testing in WWII but have averaged 85 before and since.  My theory is that it’s because the WWII testing was not an official IQ test like the Army Alpha or the WAIS, but a test of crystallized academic knowledge like the SAT.  I believe these tests are especially sensitive to the cultural environment so in the first half of the 20th century, when blacks attended segregated schools, they were especially penalized on a test calling for academic knowledge, especially one like the Army General Classification Test which emphasizes mechanical knowledge (since blacks tend to do worst on spatial tasks).  Bill Cosby, the high IQ centimillionaire who got a combined SAT of only 500, is an example of how even very bright blacks from that era performed disastrously on achievement tests.

“I had never studied,” joked Cosby. “Anything!”

Despite his abysmal SATs, Cosby attended a school for the gifted.

“You’re very smart,” folks would say.

“YES I AM!” Cosby would shout.

“Well do you know anything?”

“NO I DON’T” Cosby replied.

So I agree with Murray that blacks performed worse on mental tests in the first half of the 20th century, but unlike Murray, I believe this was only true of achievement tests like the SAT, AGCT and ASVAB.  On actual IQ tests, blacks have performed consistently at about 85 for the last 100 years.

This is yet another example of how ACTUAL IQ tests are superior measures of innate ability compared to achievement tests.

Friday the 13th: The most influential horror film of the last 50 years?

13 Friday May 2016

Posted by in horror

≈ 53 Comments

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Today is Friday the 13th, so I thought I would blog about the 1980 film Friday the 13th, not to be confused with the vastly inferior remake by the same name released in 2009.  Friday the 13th was arguabley the most influential horror film of the last half century.  Not only did it spawn an entire franchise and the most iconic villain in horror history (Jason), but it popularized and revolutionized the slasher film genre. Some would say John Carpenter’s 1978 classic Halloween was more influential, and indeed Halloween created the template and narrative structure that F13 would follow, but F13 took the genre to a whole new level of creative graphic violence.

Both Halloween and F13 benefited from being pioneers in their industry, and when you’re first, you get to pick the best.  So of all the notable calendar days on which to set a slasher film, Halloween is the best.  But while Halloween got the best chronological setting (Fall), F13 got the best location setting (the woods).  The film oozes with atmosphere, with the camera occasionally showing the full moon in the sky.

What made the original F13 so incredibly brilliant was how organic it was.  In a genre littered with contrived storylines, and ad hoc just-so plot devises, there was absolutely nothing contrived about this film.  The killer’s motives flows naturally, logically from the setting.  In other words, if you had to think logically about who would be motivated to kill off a bunch of camp counselors at a summer camp, you might imagine a killer like the one in this film.

Despite the killer being logical, there is fascinating irony in the killer’s identity, and then there’s a twist at the end that flows oh so naturally from the killer’s motive and the most brilliant segue to a sequel I have ever seen.  And what a sequel it is.  I strongly recommend watching both Friday the 13th (1980) and its direct sequel Friday the 13th part 2 (1981) in one evening.  For in the sequel, the iconic Jason emerges as the killer, and remains the killer for virtually the rest of the franchise.

Jason is a mentally retarded man who lives in the woods.  Some say he drowned as a child and came back from the dead.  Others say he never really drowned at all, but survived as a kind of feral child grown up.  This ambiguity is one of my favorite things about this franchise.  For the first several F13 movies, it’s up to the viewer whether Jason is human or whether he’s a supernatural undead villain.  Though by part 6, he clearly becomes the latter.

I actually think Jason’s much much scarier in the early films, when he’s arguably a real man.  Some say a real person would not just live like an animal in the woods, it makes no sense, but that’s the point: He’s mentally retarded, so it makes perfect sense that his behavior would make no sense.

When I was a little kid (I’m now in my 30s), they would show the first two Friday the 13th movies on TV all the time on Friday the 13th late at night, and when I was about 9, I waited  until my parents went to bed, snuck downstairs and watched the original F13.  For my generation, these films have great nostalgic value, not just because they played a part in our childhood, but because they are throwbacks to a simpler time.  Before the internet, before the “war on terror”, before NAFTA.

Sadly, these films also probably appeal to white nationalists because they are some of the last vestiges of white middle class America.  Is there anything more white than summer camp or Jason’s iconic hockey mask (a sport with virtually no blacks)?  Sadly, the original F13 did not have a single non-white character.

Not one.

It thus seems symbolic that in various sequels, Jason has resembled both a hooded KKK member and a skin head (see pictures below).  Indeed Jason had the same low IQ mentality in that just as a racist might hate all blacks because of bad experiences with a few blacks, Jason hates (and kills) all camp counselors because of the actions of just one.  Such overgeneralization is a major sign of low IQ because  the ability to correctly generalize is one of the most g loaded abilities, and it’s one of the reasons vocabulary is one of the most g loaded skills.  If you overgeneralize, it’s hard to learn words because you might mistakenly think the word “father” refers to all men, or that the word “bird” refers to anything that can fly, including airplanes.

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Jason with the Ku Klux Klan look

 

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Jason with the skinhead look

Low IQ towns

12 Thursday May 2016

Posted by in horror, Low IQ

≈ 3 Comments

One of the most terrifying legacies of the Clinton administration is free trade.  Major companies realized that they don’t have to pay Americans liveable wages to do unskilled work, they can just migrate to Third World countries and find workers who will do the same job for much less pay.  As a result, small towns with lots of low skill workers are being economically devastated, first because there are no longer jobs for those with lower IQs, but second, when the economy tanks, almost everyone with higher IQ leaves, draining the towns of their human capital.  In extreme cases, you can end up with an entire American town where the average IQ is in in the mentally retarded range.

This is kind of what happens in the 2006 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre-The Beginning.  In that film, a small Texas town is devastated when the local meat plant is condemned and everyone with an IQ above 70 leaves the town, leaving only Leatherface and his family.

Texas Town dies, screams the headline of the local paper.

Leatherface is a Trainable (moderately) Retarded man (I estimate his IQ to be in the 40s), whose only talent is cutting meat.  If you watch the terrifying start of the film (the entire movie is on youtube below), you’ll see that Leatherface is in denial that the meat plant he works at has closed.  He keeps violently chopping meat, long after the other employees go home.

“Tell that oversized retard to go home” screams management at his assistant.  The assistant nervously and gently tries to convince Leatherface it’s time to leave.  When Leatherface ignores him, he panics and calls Leatherface a dumb animal.

After Leatherface kills the assistant, he goes up to management’s office.  Management informs Leatherface that him and his family are the only ones stupid enough to still be in that town.

You can watch the entire movie for free below, but do not watch if you are under 21, and I highly recommend watching on a big screen TV (not your computer).

 

 

Trainable (moderate) Retardation on trial

11 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by in Low IQ

≈ 40 Comments

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1992 mug shot after being charged with killing infant son

In a heartbreaking case, a functionally illiterate man named Jay Procopio was arrested in 1992 for causing the death of his infant son.  The man simply wanted the baby to stop crying and the best solution he could think of was to throw him on the floor which killed him.

Tragically, this underscores that intelligence is the mental ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage.  The situation was to his disadvantage (crying baby), but instead of turning it around to his advantage by soothing and comforting the baby into silence, he killed the baby he loved and spent decades in jail. So what started as a small passing disadvantage (crying baby) turned into a lifelong disadvantage on an epic scale: the opposite of adaptive behavior.

Of course it’s possible that a high IQ person, even an extremely high IQ person, could have done the same thing.  One could imagine someone with an IQ of 150 who was so enraged by the sound of a crying baby, he could not resist the impulse to react violently, but in that case, it would be an example not of maladaptive behavior per se, but of an adaptive response to incredibly maladaptive emotions (uncontrollable rage).

In 1992, a doctor evaluated Procopio and concluded that although he was “defective”, he was competent to stand trial, but in 2014, he was tested at Bridgewater state hospital and clocked in at IQ 47.  Even this figure might be an overestimate because he was likely tested on the WAIS-IV which was normed in 2006, suggesting his IQ should probably be reduced to 45.  In addition, the WAIS-IV was normed on all Americans, and thus gives higher scores than traditional tests normed on only whites. Converting to white norms would reduce his IQ from 45 to 40.  And even this might be an overestimate because the WAIS-IV suffers from floor bumping which is when people with extremely low ability can not score as low as they should because there are not enough easy items on the test.

Only one in 30,000 biologically normal whites has an IQ of 40 or lower. An IQ of 40 is at the bottom end of the Trainable (moderate) Retardation level (IQ 30-49) which is one step below the Educable (mild) Retardation level (IQ 50 – 69).  Historically, the former were called “imbeciles” and the latter were called “morons”). Tests like the Wechsler do not even pretend to measure below 30-49.  People below 30 are sometimes labelled with Totally Dependent (severe) Retardation, and were historically known as “idiots”.

Assuming Procopio really does have an IQ of 40, and was not, somehow, feigning less ability to avoid culpability, it is interesting that he was able to start a family with not, one, but two kids (one of whom was killed).

Assuming his retardation is familial, and not organinc, the expected IQ of the offspring of an IQ 40 father is 0.45(40 – 100) + 100 = 73, and if one believes the HBD narrative that family environment becomes irrelevant by adulthood, the same IQ is expected regardless of whether the father raises the baby or not. Although tragically in this case, Procopio allegedly shook his daughter when she was a baby causing bleeding on the brain, and this may be the kind family environmental trauma that lasts a lifetime.

Mother’s Day (1980)

08 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in horror

≈ 1 Comment

Pumpkin Person rating: 8/10

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In honor of Mother’s Day, I though I would blog about the horror film Mother’s Day released in 1980, not to be confused with the uninspired 2010 remake by the same name.   The film is about a demented old lady who lives in a shack in the woods with her two mentally retarded sons, who brutalize unsuspecting campers to their mother’s delight.

The expected IQ of the mother of an IQ 60 son would be 82, but the expected IQ of a mother with two IQ 60 sons would be 76.  This of course assumes the sons’ retardation is familial and non-organic, which it was.  If the sons’ retardation was organic, she could could have three retarded sons in a row and her expected IQ would stay 100.

My hero Roger Ebert famously gave this film zero stars, condemning it’s vile sadism.  But today Mother’s Day is a cult classic.  A hidden gem.

I haven’t seen this movie since I was about 11 years old (I’m now in my 30s) but I remember it fondly and want to watch it again.

It is more than a horror film.  It’s also a poignant story about friendship.  The film starts three women who bonded in college and reunite years later and go camping in the woods and remember the good old days over the camp fire.  It is these women who are eventually stalked by the film’s villains.

You can watch this film on YouTube here, or the you can watch it in French here however please don’t watch it on your computer screen.  This film deserves to be watched on a big screen TV, so if you’re adaptable enough to do so, hook up your internet connection to your television before watching.

And please do not watch this film if you are under 21 because there is brutal violence, nudity, and sexually explicit content.

Mother’s Day is old school 80s horror at its best.

Vintage horror.

They don’t make horror like this anymore, and couldn’t if they tried.

Watch it with your mother. 🙂

 

 

Donald Trump & the concept of social intelligence

08 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 82 Comments

Commenter faigmel said:

YOU HAVE INDICATED THAT ADAPTABILITY IS THE MEASURE OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE. I AGREE . LOOD AT OSS AND SOE EXECUTIVE AGENTS IN OCCUPIED FRANCE DURING WORLD WAR TWO. YOU ALSO ESTIMATED DONALD TRUMP’S IQ AT ABOUT 125, TED CRUZ IQ ESTIMATED AT APPROXIMATELY 145. .NOW THAT TRUMP HAS BEATEN A FIELD OF SEVENTEEN CANDIDATES, IT APPEARS THAT SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE HAS “TRUMPED” COGNITIVE INTELLIGENCE.

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.