As I’ve said a hundred times before and will say a hundred times again, perhaps the single umbrella that covers all of intelligence is the ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage.

But what does that really mean?

More precisely, I define intelligence as the brain’s capacity for behavioral adaptability, which I define as:

Behavioral adaptability is the brain’s ability to use whatever body it’s in as a tool to use whatever environment it’s in as a tool to minimize the cost-benefit ratio of whatever incentive structure it has.

So there are many reasons why the correlation between intelligence and success would be far from perfect.

Different people have different bodies.  Two people with equal intelligence could differ enormously in physical attractiveness or athletic talent, and that could mean the difference between extreme wealth and poverty.

Different people could have different environments.  One man is born to a family of investment bankers while another man is born in rural poverty.  The former will likely be much more successful even if the latter is much more intelligent.

Different people have different incentive structures.  One man’s idea of success could be raking in millions as a CEO, while another man’s idea of success could be sleeping in everyday until noon and then watching TV the rest of the day.

Given that life is such an unlevel playing field, and then on top of that, success can be defined in so many ways, it is truly remarkable that the correlation between IQ and money is as high as it is.  This strongly suggests IQ really is measuring behavioral adaptability.

But the clearest measure of intelligence is not how successful you are, because that’s just a test of your ability to adapt to your body, your environment and your incentive structure, which might not be that difficult…the clearest test is how well your intelligence could tell others how to use their bodies and environments as a tool to their advantage.

A great example of this is the character Master Blaster from the Mad Max movies.  Blaster is a muscular mentally retarded giant, but despite his incredible physical advantages, he lacks the basic intelligence needed to turn them around to his advantage.  Luckily, he has a high IQ dwarf named Master who sits on his shoulder to tell him how to exploit his physical strengths in fights and other situations, essentially serving as Blaster’s brain every waking hour of the day.

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So this is the ultimate test of intelligence.  Instead of being given math problems and vocabulary questions, we should be given someone else to control every minute of the day, perhaps though virtual reality, and the better job we do in telling that person or animal how to reach his specific goals, the higher our score.  In a way political consultants and Hollywood agents take this test for a living.  Lacking the good looks to run for office or star in movies themselves, they manage the careers of politicians and actors. Indeed Karl Rove was known as Bush’s brain:

We could start the test off controlling a really advantaged person; someone blessed with a strong body, rich environment, and simple goals, thus turning the situation to his advantage would require very little turning.

We would then be given gradually harder problems: tell this wheel chair bound overweight lazy person living in poverty what do every minute of the day so they become rich and powerful, yet still get to sleep in until noon.

I think one’s score on such a test would correlate as well with conventional IQ tests as conventional IQ tests correlate with one another, but it would capture the evolutionary basis of intelligence:  Humans lacked physical advantages so we had to use our behavior to our advantage.  That’s why intelligence evolved.

In a previous post, I presented evidence that in the sixth grade, Jay Z had a 12th grade reading level.

In 2009, Jay Z told The Guardian:

It actually challenges me, it’s exciting to me, that’s the thing about being in music – I like swimming upstream. If I didn’t have to, I’d probably lose interest. It’s like being at school – when I was in 6th grade I was reading on a 12th-grade level. I lost my interest, I think that’s one of the reasons I didn’t graduate high school – it wasn’t interesting to me. As long as I’m being challenged, it’s exciting.

Although you have to be very skeptical about what public figures claim, the fact that Jay Z’s sixth grade teacher is also on record claiming the same thing gives the anecdote more credibility.

The term “12th grade reading level” is a bit confusing because the average American adult, who has more than a 12th grade education, reads at only an 8th grade level.  I assume this is because in the early 20th century, only the best and brightest got a 12th grade education, but once high school became democratized, despite the Flynn effect, they had to dumb it down to the point where 12th graders were reading 8th grade material.

So when Jay Z and his teacher claim he was reading at the 12th grade level in the sixth grade, I don’t know whether they meant he was reading at what is traditionally understood as 12th grade level, which would imply a breathtaking IQ of 147, or whether they simply mean he was reading like today’s average 12th grader, which would imply a more believable IQ of 135.  A third possibility is that Jay Z was simply reading at the level of the barely literate 12th graders at his dysfunctional school, but I doubt that would have been worth bragging over.

One reason for thinking Jay Z’s IQ is not above 135 (at least not as measured by scholastic tests) is that he apparently dropped out of high school and thus did not take the SAT.  According to the book The Bell Curve:

The higher the ability level, the higher the proportion of students who take the SAT.  At the 700 level and beyond, the proportion approaches 100 percent and probably has been so since the early 1960s…That is, almost all 17-year-olds who would score 700 if they took the SAT do in fact take the SAT at some point in their high school career, either because of their own ambitions, their parents’, or the urging of their teachers and guidance counselors.  It is therefore possible to think about the students who score in the 700s on the SAT as a proportion of all 17-year-olds, not just as a proportion of the SAT pool.

Thus the fact that Jay Z did not apparently write the SAT, arguably puts a ceiling of 700 on the verbal score he would have obtained had he done so.  When Jay Z was 17 in 1986, a verbal score of 700 was obtained by only 0.88% of 17-year-olds, equating to an IQ of 136 (U.S. norms) or 134 (white norms).

Of course it’s always possible that Jay Z was one of those freak cases of a super gifted person who slipped through the cracks, but listening to him talk, you don’t get the sense that he’s quite that brilliant.  Indeed this video, where he chats with Warren Buffet and a journalist from Forbes, shows how the upper class patronize him oh so gently, and shows how he is welcomed into the elite, only as a curiosity, and not as a true equal.

Of course, a lot of that has to do with socialization, not innate ability.  Humans are social animals and Jay Z has been surrounded by low IQ people his whole life, so it’s not surprising his speech patterns would mimic stupidity, even if he’s genetically quite brilliant.

Speaking of genetics, it seems Jay Z has passed on his high IQ genes to his daughter.  Okay! Magazine reports:

Blue Ivy Carter has definitely made her mark at her school, with her daily motorcade which has left other parents of the elite preschool upset, but she’s also got the brains! An insider told OKMagazine.com exclusively that proud parents Beyonce and Jay Z have been boasting loudly about their daughter’s very impressive intellect and believe she’s a genius!

The 3-year-old, who attends a prestigious school in Hollywood, has been excelling in music, which comes as no surprise since her famous parents are hip-hop royalty. She is “showing an understanding of octaves and major/minor keys,” the source said.

But that’s not all! Blue Ivy is also “showing very early signs of being a mathematic genius,” according to the insider.

“It was always a possibility as a lot of kids with innate musical talent are good at math too,” the source explained.

Jay and Bey have been so blown away, the source said, of Blue’s ability to count and read numbers at just 3 years old!

“Last month she was able to add up 1+1 and 1+2,” the insider added. “It’s incredible for a child her age.”

And since Blue is so bright, her doting parents want the best for her and are “having her tested for early signs of genius,” the insider revealed.

“Bey thinks she’s got more talent in her little finger than her and Jay together,” the source said.

Further evidence of Jay Z’s high IQ genes comes from The Globe and Mail which states that “Jay-Z inherited a photographic memory from his absentee father”

I find it interesting that Britain voted to leave the European Union even though it caused their pound to hit its lowest value in 50 years.

This shows that at least for non-college educated Northwestern Europeans, ethnic genetic interests trump financial interests.

But because high IQ people tend to be liberal,  high IQ Northwestern Europeans often support mass immigration.

But unfortunately, extremely high IQ whites like J.P. Rushton allegedly questioned whether immigration was really motivated by liberal goals, or whether that’s just propaganda.

Meanwhile commenter Mikey Blayze wrote:

I’ve spent the last…3 years Struggling to attain reproductive success. If evolutionary psychology and by extension this blog didn’t exist I wouldn’t be a Father.

Wow, human life is going to exist because of my blog!  This is an example of me advancing my genetic interests.  The fact that Mikey is influenced by my blog, shows his personality is similar to mine.  Since personality is incredibly polygenetic, he must be genetically similar to me (regardless of his racial background).  Thus, the fact that he is having kids, shows the human gene pool is a tiny bit more genetically similar to me than it would have been had I not started this blog.  I have cleverly increased my genetic fitness, without the financial and stress burden of becoming a father myself, although I now have enough money to raise 10 kids.

Genetic interests can operate on multiple levels, not ethnic only.  Indeed interracial couples and interracial friends tend to be even more similar, to negate the fact that they are racially different.

If I were to survey my readers, I would find that although we are all very different races, on average they are similar to me, and further, they would be most similar on the most heritable traits.

So be fruitful and multiply my little pumpkin heads!

Despite being raised in the projects, shooting his brother at age 12, dropping out of high school, and being accused of stabbing, self-described “thug” Jay Z used his incredible IQ to build an empire.

I’ve blogged about rapper Jay Z’s childhood reading level before, but in light of what I’ve since learned about reading levels, it seems I might not have done his score justice.  In 2009, Jay Z had the following exchange with Oprah:

Oprah: How were you in school? I’ve heard that when you were in sixth grade, you tested at a 12th-grade level.

Jay-Z: I was bored and distracted.

Oprah: Did you like anything about school?

Jay-Z: I loved English.

Oprah: I know you love to read now. Were books part of your childhood?

Jay-Z: No. I don’t remember that.

Oprah: And I thought we had so much in common!

Jay-Z: I just daydreamed a lot.

Oprah: What about?

Jay-Z: Performing or playing baseball and basketball. I took my mind out of my environment, to the point where I wasn’t paying attention to what was happening around me. I still do that now.

Oprah: You didn’t listen in class, you didn’t read books—and you still tested as a 12th grader. You must have a naturally high IQ.

Jay-Z: Or I’m an idiot savant.

Of course you can’t believe everything you read, especially about public figures, but in the case of Jay Z’s childhood reading level, his sixth grade teacher, Renee Lowden said:

He never smiled, but when he did, he’d light up the room for me…He was reading at the 12th grade level, and he was very needy, because his father had just left. He was a sweet, quiet kid. He was always standing near me. He was just so sweet and loved words…He told me he used to read the dictionary.

So assuming his teacher is remembering correctly, and assuming 12th grade reading level is clearly defined, it’s interesting to ask what his IQ might be, given that reading comprehension is an excellent proxy for IQ.

According to the following formula:

IQ = 62.333+4.333(reading level)

An adult with a 12th grade reading level has an IQ of 114 (white norms).

But Jay Z obtained this score in the sixth grade, which presumably means he was probably 11 to 11.9 years old.  Let’s say 11.5.

If an 11.5-year-old performs like a white adult (age 16+) on an intelligence test, they were historically assigned a ratio IQ of 139, because their mental age is 139% as great as their chronological age (16/11.5 = 1.39).

But the young Jay Z reportedly did even better than an average white adult, scoring as high as a white adult with an IQ equivalent of 114, so we multiply his ratio IQ by 1.14 which raises it to about 160.

Ratio IQ of 160 equals deviation IQ of 147

But keep in mind, that for reasons that are not well understood, ratio IQs are normally distributed between IQ 70 to 130, but begin to depart from the Gaussian curve the further you go beyond those limits, which is one reason why you sometimes hear ridiculous claims about people with IQs above 200.

Partly to avoid such hyperbole, IQ tests shifted to the deviation scale, where IQs were forced to fit the Gaussian curve.

According to scholar Vernon Sare, one in 1,170 (white) children have an age ratio of 160+, so fitting Jay Z to a normal curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, his IQ would be 147.

Smartest black “thug” in America?

To put an IQ of 147 in perspective, I note that the delinquent black male underclass (which Jay Z was part of as a young man) seems to have a mean IQ 75.77 with a narrow SD of 8.24 (white norms).  Assuming about several million U.S. black men belong to this class, and assuming a normal distribution, we’d expect the highest IQ among them to score maybe five standard deviations from their mean; or roughly IQ 117.

Of course assuming a Gaussian curve is probably way too simplistic an assumption in this case, and the stats I cite might not be sufficiently representative.  Nonetheless, Jay Z’s IQ of 147 towers over the theoretically expected highest IQ of his demographic.

This may help explain why Jay Z was able to adapt.  Despite being raised in the inner city, surrounded by violence, without even a high school diploma, or access to affirmative action or Ivy League schools; despite not having light skin or being considered good looking, or even musically talented, he was able to turn the situation around to his advantage, by turning his horrible violent life into popular art, and turning that art into a half-billion dollar fortune.

The fact that Jay Z is arguably both the richest black “thug” in America, and also the “smartest”, once again shows the incredible correlation between IQ and income.

But unlike other high IQ people who got rich after attending Ivy League schools and entering educated occupations, Jay Z was a high school dropout who made his money in a low IQ subculture.  This shows that the correlation between IQ and success is not just a artifact of academic credentials and access to the dominant culture, and IQ is not just a measure of “book smarts”, but rather IQ might measure a real evolved brain capacity to adaptively problem solve across a wide range of environments, even those quite alien to the test constructers themselves.

According to this source, 50% of American adults can’t read an 8th grade book.  Since the 50th percentile of American IQ is average IQ; about 100 (U.S. norms; 97 U.S. white norms), then on the IQ scale, 8th grade reading level = IQ 100 (97 on U.S.white norms).

More than 20% of U.S. adults read below the fifth grade level.

Since the 20th percentile of Americans is IQ 88 (U.S. norms; 84 on white norms), then on the IQ scale, 5th grade reading level = IQ 88 (84 on white norms).

From here, we can make simple linear formulas converting reading levels to IQ equivalents:

U.S. norms:

IQ  = 68+4(reading level)

U.S. white norms:

IQ = 62.333+4.333(reading level)

This week Hillary scored perhaps her most important endorsement yet: Oprah’s.  This is also significant because Donald Trump is a HUGE Oprah fan, and has been wanting her to run as his Vice President for almost 20 years.  In 1999, he said :

I love Oprah. Oprah would always be my first choice…You know what? She really is a great woman, though, she is a terrific woman. She is somebody that’s very special…If she’d do it, she’d be fantastic…She’s popular, she’s brilliant, she’s a wonderful woman. I mean, if she’d ever do it, I don’t know that she’d ever do it.

In 2015, Trump continued to gush over Oprah:

I like Oprah—what can I tell you? She’s great, she’s talented, she’s a good person. In fact, I was on her show [her] last week…I like Oprah, is that supposed to be a bad thing? I think Oprah would be great. I think we’d win easily, actually

However Oprah shrewdly dismisses such praise as Trump joking around, even though she must know he was serious.

Now that Oprah has retired from hosting the #1 talk show in America, she might enjoy all the attention that comes with being on a presidential ticket, but being Trump’s VP would be too risky.  Not only would she damage her friendship with the Obamas, but she would anger women and minorities who a are a huge part of her base.  It’s much wiser to side with Hillary.

Having already put a black couple in the White house, Oprah might as well complete her legacy by helping to elect the first woman President.   Indeed it’s a testament to Oprah’s influence that when she first started dominating the media in 1986, Reagan was President, and by the time she stepped down, we had a black President who is expected to be followed by a female one.

Oprah’s stratospheric cranial capacity allows her to understand that ultimately we are judged not just by our own accomplishments, but by how many we can give a helping hand to along the way.

I’ll never forget the time Hillary appeared on Oprah’s talk show when she was First Lady.  At the time it was considered a big deal for a First Lady to appear on a daytime talk show because in those days, the Presidency was more prestigious and daytime talk shows were considered trash TV.  But despite this, Oprah was such an icon that she was clearly the dominant figure in the interaction, as evidenced by her putting her arm around Hillary like a school teacher would to a little girl:

On twitter the HBD community continues to debate over whether ethnic genetic interests exist.  To me there’s no debate about whether ethnic genetic interests exist, the only debate is whether behavior that advances one’s ethnic genetic interests was selected for, and if so, was it selected directly or merely as a by-product of regular kin selection (as commenter Swank suggested).

I think the problems is critics of EGI are assuming that just because something might not have been directly selected for, that therefore it’s not genetically adaptive.  But that’s a semantic argument, not a scientific one, and in my humble opinion, critics are wrong on the semantics.

For example donating volumes and volumes of sperm to a sperm bank is just as genetically adaptive as trying to have sex with women, yet few men are as obsessed with donating sperm as they are with chasing women, despite the fact that the former pays money and the latter costs money.  That’s because humans were selected to obsess over sex, and there has not been enough time for men to be selected to obsess over sperm donation.

But just because sperm donation is not an evolved impulse does not mean it’s not in our genetic interests.  Similarly, even if we don’t have an evolved impulse to favour our race or ethnicity, does not mean it’s not in our genetic interests.

Any behavior that makes life on earth more genetically similar to you is in your genetic interest, BY DEFINITION.

But just because something is in your genetic interest does NOT mean you should do it.  We’re humans, not beasts; we can and should rise beyond our primal urges, assuming this even evolved into an urge.

Commenter Another William Playfair Web wrote, in response to my post about Donald Trump understanding ethnic genetic interests:

How is this spun into praise of Trump?
Doesn’t it mean he is evolutionarily primitive?

One of the ironies of intelligence is that even though I feel intelligence evolved so that life forms can adapt situations to their genetic advantage, some of the most intelligent people are the least genetically fit, often having no children at all and speaking out against their ethnic group.

How do I explain this paradox if I define intelligence as the ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to your advantage?  I explain it by making a distinction between one’s personal advantage and one’s genetic advantage.

Ultimately passing on your genes does not benefit anyone per se; what benefits people is the feeling they get when they engage in behaviors that increase the odds of passing on genes.  So evolution has predisposed humans to feel good when they make money, care for cute babies,  gain power, fall in love, have sex, or help their tribe, and to feel pain when thy fail at these tasks.

Pain, by definition, is a problem, and intelligence is just the part of the brain that problem solves.  So evolution has predisposed us to feel pain when we’re not enhancing our genetic odds. That way our intelligence would be constantly used to solve that problem.

The trouble is, in order for the brain to be a very good problem solver, it needs a large amount of abstract reasoning and critical thinking, so I suspect intelligent folks are more likely to become self aware and question the very impulses that drive their behavior.  This creates new pain in non-psychopaths, such as guilt over favouring their tribe over a less fortunate tribe, guilt over spending too much money on themselves; even guilt over having children when the World is already overpopulated and they could just adopt a needy orphan.  They’re still adapting the situation to their advantage, but to their advantage, not to their genes’ advantage, because they are still getting what they want, but what they want is no longer what their genes need.

This is the fundamental “design”-flaw when intelligence was evolving.  In order to have the awareness to solve problems that enhance our genes, we evolved the awareness to question why we should be using our intelligence for that purpose in the first place.  In a sense humans have outsmarted our own evolution, much like a robot that becomes so smart, it kills the computer programmer who invented it.

This does not mean that everyone who uses their intelligence to enhance their genetic interests is a psychopath or lacking in higher awareness.  Indeed if you come from a disadvantaged group like blacks, then you can serve your genetic interests while also being morally correct, because you are helping them not only because they’re your group, but because they need the most help.

Indeed if you’re black and you don’t serve your genetic interests, liberal whites and liberal Jews will lecture you for serving white interests when you should be serving your own.  Here you are trying to help whites and they mock you for being an Uncle Tom.  This is why it makes sense that black conservatives have low IQs.  Because they have turned the situation to their disadvantage not only genetically and morally, but they even get ridiculed by the very groups they are trying to serve.