[NOTE FROM PUMPKIN PERSON: PLEASE PLACE ALL OFF-TOPIC COMMENTS HERE.  THEY WILL NOT BE POSTED IN THIS THREAD]

Commenter gregorwayne wrote:

If I may make a request, I would love to see you estimate the IQ of Saul Kripke.

Saul Kripke is often considered one of the smartest people on Earth and the greatest living philosopher.   To estimate Kripke’s IQ, I decided to take a historiometric approach, analyzing his biography for evidence of verbal IQ, followed by math IQ.  These two estimates were then combined into a composite IQ estimate.

Historiometric estimate of Kripke’s verbal IQ

Kripke’s bio shows  much evidence of extreme verbal IQ.  According to his Wikipedia article:

Kripke was labelled a prodigy, having taught himself Ancient Hebrew by the age of six, read the complete works of Shakespeare by nine, and mastered the works of Descartes…before finishing elementary school

Some of these achievements are so specialized that it’s hard to compare his abilities to the common man, so I decided to focus on his mastery of Shakespeare, since that’s a common benchmark. A yougov poll in the UK found that about 94% of adults had experienced Shakespeare in some form (i.e. reading a play, seeing a film, being taught it in school) and of these, 58% claimed to understand it.  This implies 55% of the UK adult population understands Shakespeare.

Perhaps a higher percentage could have understood him if given exposure.  On the other hand, perhaps some claiming to understand him are not being honest.  Both sources of error likely cancel out, thus the ability to understand Shakespeare implies an adult verbal IQ in the top 55% of the British distribution, implying an IQ of 98+ (British norms).  It’s worth noting that Britain was 87% white as of 2011, so British norms are more or less synonymous with U.S. white norms.

Having read the complete works of Shakespeare by age nine, Kripke at age nine was as capable as an adult with a verbal IQ of 98.  Since adult mental age is defined as 16, an adult with a verbal IQ of 98 has a mental age 98% as high as 16, so 15.68.  A nine-year-old with a verbal mental age of 15.68 has a verbal ratio IQ of 174, which translates into a deviation IQ of 155 (sigma 15).

This number should be increased by 4 points because verbal IQ, as measured by the WISC Vocabulary test, has been increasing by 4 IQ points over the last half century, so any measure of Kripke’s verbal functioning at age nine that relies on modern data (the recent yougov poll) will be 4 points too low.  Thus Kripke’s verbal IQ is 159.

Historiometric estimate of Kripke’s math IQ

According to Wikipedia, Kripke:

 mastered…complex mathematical problems before finishing elementary school.^[7][8] He wrote his first completeness theorem in modal logic at the age of 17, and had it published a year later. After graduating from high school in 1958, Kripke attended Harvard University and graduated summa cum laude obtaining a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. During his sophomore year at Harvard, Kripke taught a graduate-level logic course at nearby MIT.

According to The New York Times

Mr. Kripke, a rabbi’s son, grew up in Omaha, and by all accounts was a true prodigy, so brilliant and precocious that the so-called prodigies of today are by comparison mere shadows flickering on the wall of our collective cave. In the fourth grade he discovered algebra, which he later said he could have invented on his own, and by the end of grammar school he had mastered geometry and calculus… While still a teenager he wrote a series of papers that eventually transformed the study of modal logic. One of them, or so the legend goes, earned a letter from the math department at Harvard, which hoped he would apply for a job until he wrote back and declined, explaining, “My mother said that I should finish high school and go to college first.”

A lot of these achievements depend on more than just raw math IQ, but interest and motivation as well.  Thus, I decided to focus just on when Kripke “discovered algebra” because this is probably the closest datum we have to a developmental milestone. You either grasp the concept or you don’t.

In 2012, The New York Times reported:

To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school… Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.   Shirley Bagwell, a longtime Tennessee teacher, warns that “to expect all students to master algebra will cause more students to drop out.” For those who stay in school, there are often “exit exams,” almost all of which contain an algebra component. In Oklahoma, 33 percent failed to pass last year, as did 35 percent in West Virginia

So it sounds like as of 2012, only 75% of American young adults completed high school, and of those who did, only 2/3rds grasped algebra.  This roughly implies only 50% of all American young adults can do algebra, which means grasping algebra requires an adult math IQ of 100 (U.S. norms), or 97 (U.S. white norms).  Since adult mental age is defined as 16, then adult IQ 97 implies a mental age that is 97% of 16 or 15.52.  Since Kripke had discovered algebra in fourth grade (when he was presumably nine), a math ratio IQ of 172 (15.52/9=1.72) is implied.  This equates to a math deviation IQ of 154 (sigma 15).

We should probably add about 10 points because Kripke’s precocity was achieved before 1950, and the Flynn effect has raised math related abilities by 2 (Arithmetic) to 16 (Block Design) IQ points from 1947 to 2001. Thus Kripke’s deviation math IQ might be 164.

Composite IQ

Given an estimated verbal IQ of 159 and an estimated math IQ of 164, and given a 0.67 correlation between verbal and math talent in the general population, Kripke’s estimated composite IQ is 168 (white norms).   Only one in 344,000 white Americans have an IQ this high or higher.

The comment section of future articles will be moderated more strictly to keep the conversations on-topic.

Going forward, all off-topic discussions should take place in this thread and future open threads.

[Note from Pumpkin Person, feb 22, 2018: The following is a guest article by Race Realist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person.  Out of respect for the author, please try to keep all comments on-topic.  I understand conversations naturally evolve but at least start on topic] 

Commenter Tvrtko writes:

P.P. what would be Marx’s IQ? I’d like to know what you estimate is the intelligence of the Left’s main deity.

On Michael Hart’s list of the 100 most influential people of all time, Marx is the second highest ranked Ashkenazi Jewish academic behind only Albert Einstein.

How exceptional does that make him?   To answer that question, we need to know how many Ashkenazi Jews have ever lived.  If you believe Greg Cochran et al (and some of you don’t), biological Ashkenazi Jews as we know them today did not full emerge until about 1700.

About 20 billion people have lived since 1650.  If we conservatively assume based on current demographics, that Ashkenazim are only 0.14% of all humans in this era,  then 28 million Ashkenazi Jews have ever lived, and Marx being the second only to Einstein, would be at the one in 14 million level in scholarly success.

If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and scholarly success, this would put Marx’s IQ about 79 points above the average Ashkenazim, but since the correlation was about 0.7 in national samples (though it’s shrunk in recent decades), and assuming roughly the same correlation and variance in Ashkenazim, this implies an IQ that is 0.7(79) = 55 points higher than the average Ashkenazim, and since Ashkenazim average about 110 (when the white mean is set at 100) an IQ of 165 is implied (95% confidence interval 144 to 186).

However because Ashkenazim come from an intellectual culture, they likely over-perform their true ability on IQ tests to some degree, so I’d round Marx down to 160; which is still absurdly high (only one in 30,000 whites score this high).

Tvrtko correctly describes Marx as a deity of the left which is ironic because he was arguably alt-right.  Unlike the right who hate the poor (including blacks) and the left who hate the rich (including Jews), Marx like many alt-righters has been accused of  hating both.

Even though Marx is considered the poster body for political correctness (cultural Marxism), he was anything but, and while like most leftists, regarded the rich as parasitic, he also viewed many members of the underclass this way too, referring to them as the lumpenproletariat though it’s unclear if this was an attack on their class, or their lack of class consciousness.  If it’s the former, it’s a right-wing view, but if Marx was merely calling certain members of the underclass “class traitors”, he’s a typical leftist.

The brilliant Bruno writes:

Chomsky has much more than 125 and a huge creativity ability. In linguistics theory, he is a master . Like Gärdenfors or Davidson for semantics. And Stalnaker for syntax .

This reminds me that I promised I would do an article on Noam Chomsky’s IQ.

Chomsky is arguably the most academically successful Jew of his generation.  In 1992, MIT news reported:

Recent research on citations in three different citation indices show that Professor Chomsky is one of the most cited individuals in works published in the past 20 years.

In fact, his 3,874 citations in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index between 1980 and 1992 make him the most cited living person in that period and the eighth most cited source overrall–just behind famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and just ahead of philosopher Georg Hegel.

Indeed, Professor Chomsky is in illustrious company. The top ten cited sources during the period were: Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, Freud, Chomsky, Hegel and Cicero.

In 2005 he was voted the World’s top public intellectual.

Chomsky is part of the Silent Generation, one of the 58 million Americans born from 1925 to 1945.  In 2013 it was estimated that Jews are 3.3% of U.S. adults, if Jewish is defined as having at least one Jewish parent or being raised Jewish, even if you now have another religion.  Only 55% of this 3.3% is Jewish by religion.

We don’t know how many Americans were Jewish in Chomsky’s day, but in 1957, 3.2% of Americans 14 or older were Jewish by religion, and assuming even back then, Jews by religion were 55% of the Jewish population, then the total Jewish population was 5.8% of America.

Assuming they were also 5.8% of the Silent Generation, and assuming Chomsky is the most academically successful Jew of his generation, that puts him in the top one in 3.4 million level among U.S. Jews in academic success.  If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and academic success, and assuming Jews have the same IQ variance as Whites, this would imply Chomsky’s IQ is 75 points higher than the average U.S. Jew.  Today the correlation between IQ and academic success is only about 0.55, but in the mid-20th century, when Chomsky was coming of age, it was a potent 0.7 and was likely about the same in the Jewish population.

A 0.7 correlation implies that instead of Chomsky being 75 IQ points smarter than the average Jew, as a perfect correlation predicts, he’d be 75(0.7) = 53 points smarter than the average Jew.  On a scale where the white mean is set at IQ 100 (Standard Deviation = 15), U.S. Jews average about 110, making Chomsky’s expected IQ 163, with a 95% confidence interval of 142 to 184.

Why are Ashkenazi IQs so high?  Gregory Cochran, Jason Harding, and Henry Harpending cite sphingolipid diseases in the Ashkenazi gene pool and claim these mutations increase the length and branching of neurons in Ashkenazi brains.  As many as 2% of Israeli Ashkenazim are in high IQ occupations, but an incredible 15% of Israeli Gaucher patients are.  This suggests Gaucher patients are 1 standard deviation above the Israeli Ashkenazi mean in occupational status.  If one assumes Gaucher disease caused these high occupations via increased IQ, then the 0.7 correlation between IQ and occupation implies this disease increased IQ by 1.43 standard deviations (21 points) for occupation to have increased by 0.7(1.43 SD) = 1 SD.

Of course these results need to be replicated in more numerous and diverse samples before any causal inferences are made.

My personal opinion is that yes, Ashkenazim are smarter than whites, but that the gap is inflated by their hyper-intellectual culture, giving them an unfair advantage on IQ tests.  On a truly culture reduced IQ test (that could somehow measure verbal ability without culture bias), I think they’d score 5 points higher than whites, instead of the 10 point advantage they enjoy on conventional tests.  Thus, my best guess is Chomsky’s true IQ is 5 points lower than estimated above: 158, not 163.

Given that Chomsky is now 89, it would be absolutely fascinating to give him a version of the WAIS.  Unlike brilliant young adults who have their IQ scores limited by ceiling bumping, the WAIS-R had an astonishing ceiling of IQ 185 for 70-74 year olds, so just imagine how much ceiling you could get at Chomsky’s age.

Now that I’ve discussed Chomsky’s intelligence, here’s Chomsky discussing Neanderthal intelligence:

Minor corrections were made to this article on Feb 14, 2018

The great Gordon Lightfoot!  Such a beautiful song.  I was honored to be given front row seats when he shocked everyone by showing up to sing it at Canada’s 150th.  I didn’t think he was going to show but like the great Canadian he is, he showed:

The legendary Anne Murray  So innocent! My favorite part of the below video is at the 1:25 mark when the beat picks up and Anne starts walking forward to the beat.  In the U.S. singers have to shake their booty, but all Anne has to do is stand there, because she’s Anne Murray, and that’s enough.  And because she’s so restrained and understated, the mere act of taking a few steps forward is enough to excite the crowd.

The great Celine Dion  In one of the finest moments in TV history, here she is surprising the  Canadian Tenors on Oprah.  French Canadian women are the most beautiful on Earth:

The incredible KD Lang

Commenter JC writes:

Through a purely subjective (and admittedly meaningless) “assessment”, k.d. merits a VQ (Vocal Quotient) of 190 (SD = 16); score assigned on the basis of her supernal performance of the song “Constant Craving”.

I also love her version of “Crying” and the way the audience cheers when she hits the high notes:

The great Burton Cummings Commenter JC also suggested that at his prime, Burton Cummings was in the same vocal league as Lang:

The fabulous Joni Mitchell Black national merit finalist G-man made this great suggestion

Based on feedback from readers, the list was updated on Feb 13, 2018

A reader asked which was the better test.  I once asked J. Philippe Rushton which IQ test he would put more trust in if they gave different results: The Raven or the Wechsler.

“They’re both excellent tests,” he gushed, but the problem with the Wechsler he felt, was that there’s a lot more room for scoring error because the examiner has to time you to the second on certain puzzles, and various verbal questions require subjective scoring, so in a case where the two tests disagreed, Rushton placed his vote with the Raven.

However the Wechsler is probably much more g loaded, and recent editions of the Wechsler include a Matrix reasoning subtest, so now the Raven has been reduced to just another Wechsler test.

The Wechsler probably also has more predictive validity, not just because it’s more g loaded but because it measures non-g abilities that are useful in life like verbal skill, spatial ability, processing speed, memory, and social understanding.

One of the great disappointments for psychometrics was discovering that the Raven was not the culture-fair test so many psychologists had hoped.  In fact it shows some of the largest Flynn effects ever recorded, though this doesn’t necessarily prove it’s the most culturally biased, as the Flynn effect has a biological component (nutrition increasing brain size which might in turn be increasing IQ) and the biggest Raven Flynn Effects were in countries like Holland, where people have been getting taller so rapidly that brain size is likely exploding.

Nonetheless IQ gains of 7 points per decade are unlikely to be entirely caused by exploding brain size so we’re forced to admit the Raven is sensitive to something changing in the culture, and thus is not culture fair.

People think culture bias means the Raven must be measuring some kind of knowledge or skill, but I suspect the culture bias is more subtle.  When Rushton administered the Raven to a bunch of gypsy adults they had shockingly low scores (only IQ 70 on average), far lower than the IQ 85 that had been reported for gypsy children.

My guess is dropping out of school made the gypsies intellectually lazy and so their Raven scores (though not real intelligence) declined rapidly with age, relative to the white reference group, most of whom stayed in school.

Because so many gypsies complained that the test was giving them a headache, it was clear their minds weren’t used to working hard intellectually.  For me the lesson was a true culture reduced test needs to be “fun” like some of the hard-core Performance subtests on the Wechsler, not hard work like the Raven.

The fact that some studies show IQ declining when kids go on summer vacation is more evidence for the intellectual lazy factor.

The other day I was at a bar when a woman confronted me. “You don’t remember me, do you.  Oh how could you, you were just a teenager, but you gave me a test!” she reminded me.

It took me a while but I remembered she was the delinquent older sister of a childhood friend who had had shocked her upper middle class family by running away from home to dabble in drugs and prostitution.  In high school, my friend and I would sneak downtown to stay at her apartment.

“I just wanted to give you a hug” she said sweetly, “because of you I ended up getting my college diploma!”

“What did I do?” I asked puzzled.

“You always used to give me those tests,” she explained, referring to some Raven items I would ask her to solve when I first learned about the test. “So when it came to taking the exam to get into college, I was totally prepared.” (Unlike our universities, Canadian colleges use entrance exams because many applicants are high school dropouts who lack basic skills)

Apparently I had cured her intellectual laziness.

The only Canadian to make my authoritative list of the 100 most influential living people EVER is David Frum.  His intellectual impact on the Bush administration, including coining the term “axis of evil”, landed him the 71st spot on the Living 100.

While I’m thrilled that a Canadian made the list,  I would have much preferred it be the great Jean Chrétien or Celine Dion than the neocon Frum.  Frum’s politics are especially heartbreaking because we Canadians so worship his late mother, liberal icon Barabra Frum.

The great Barbara Frum: 1937 -1992

I remember in the early 2000s seeing David spouting his neocon views on TV, as my grandparents would moan “poor Barabara must be turning in her grave.”

Yet as much as I disagree with David’s politics, the neocons are brilliant and exude a level of sophistication that other conservatives can’t match, and it’s because outside foreign policy, they’re basically liberal intellectuals, and Frum’s Canadian roots give him an added layer of polish.

He’s especially critical of Trump for the damage he feels he’s doing to democratic institutions:

I couldn’t sleep so I listened to a great lecture on youtube by British historian Ian Morris.  He wrote a book a called Why the West Rules–For Now which sounds really good, even though, like Jared Diamond, he explains World history from a non-HBD perspective.  But I think it’s good for HBDers to learn about non-HBD theories because HBD has anomalies that can only be resolved from more holistic views.

Example:  HBDers argue whites, especially Nordics, are smarter than dark Caucasoids, but how then can we explain the fact that civilization started in the Middle East, not Europe?

Well, Morris argues that geography explains everything, but the meaning of geography is constantly changing, so at the dawn of civilization, the Middle East was in one of the “lucky latitudes”.  Morris writes:

Humans may all be much the same, wherever we find them, but the places we find them in are not all the same. Geography is unfair. Human societies have all followed the same sequences of cultural development, but geography has dictated that they have not done so at the same speed. … If we look back nearly 12,000 years to the end of the last spasm of the Ice Age, what we see is that climate, topography, and ecology conspired in these Lucky Latitudes between China and the Mediterranean (and a similar band stretching from Peru to Mexico in the New World) to allow the evolution of unusually large numbers of plants and animals that could be domesticated, vastly increasing humans’ food supply. Because people (wherever we find them) are all much the same, it was in these Lucky Latitudes that humans first domesticated plants and animals. Fuelled by these resources, it was also in the Lucky Latitudes that people went on over the next 10,000 years to create the world’s first cities, states and empires. People in Australia, Siberia, and sub-Saharan Africa stuck with hunting and gathering not because they were lazier, stupider, or better attuned to nature than people in the Lucky Latitudes. Geography had simply endowed their homelands with fewer resources, and domestication therefore took longer. (p. 35)

The Lucky Latitude hypothesis was criticized by historian Michael Hart who argued that sub-Saharan Africa was actually luckier than Mesoamerica, but I do think the Middle East was lucky in the sense that it’s in the middle of where peoples from different regions could trade.

A second anomaly is the dominance of Whites over the last 500 years or so, even though HBD claims East Asians are smarter.  I’ve argued it’s because East Asians are too evolved for their own good, and such advanced social organization weeds the mentally unstable creative types out of the gene pool because their non-conformity is disruptive.

However Morris gives his geographic explanation.  Admitting that East Asians were the first to have the guns and navigational ability to conquer any country on Earth, it seemed unimaginable that whites could ever catch up technologically.  But Morris argues that the East Asian technologies worked to White advantage, because Whites were geographically much better equipped to exploit them, given their ocean proximity to the Americas.

So what started out as Europe’s geographic disadvantage (being isolated from the terrestrial trade routes that the Middle East enjoyed), suddenly became a geographic advantage, thanks to Chinese sea navigation technology.   The Atlantic ocean went from being a barrier to a trade superhighway, allowing whites to sell goods to Africa and buy slaves, sell slaves to the Americas, and buy more goods to take back to Europe and sell to Africa, and this feedback loop continued for centuries, creating what he calls the first true market economies.

If Morris is right, no wonder libertarians worship markets, given all they have done for the West.

The need to navigate faster, led to modern science and calculus and Western domination for centuries, Morris claims.

Morris ends the lecture much like J.P. Rushton ended his infamous AAAS lecture back in 1989: By making two important predictions about the course of World history.  1) Like Rushton he predicts East Asians will once again rule the World,  but unlike Rushton he gives (somewhat facetiously) a specific year: 2103.  And 2), he shockingly predicts there will be over FOUR TIMES as much progress in just the next 100 years as has occurred from the ice age until now.  Sounds like a future that would exceed our wildest sci-fi fantasies.

What a great time to be born!

You can watch the full lecture below, or if you don’t have time, the last 20 minutes is the most relevant part:

Snooki and her ex-boyfriend were mocked for their height

Of course nowhere in the study do the scientists use the term “genetically inferior” but here’s what they actually say:

By studying height, a classic polygenic trait, we demonstrate the first human signature of widespread selection on standing variation. We show that frequencies of alleles associated with increased height, both at known loci and genome wide, are systematically elevated in Northern Europeans compared with Southern Europeans (P < 4.3 × 10−4). This pattern mirrors intra-European height differences and is not confounded by ancestry or other ascertainment biases. The systematic frequency differences are consistent with the presence of widespread weak selection (selection coefficients ~10−3–10−5 per allele) rather than genetic drift alone (P < 10−15).

Now you might say genetically short is different from genetically inferior, but when Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein said blacks might average genetically low IQs, here’s the reaction:

• Paul Krugman of The New York Times wrote “…Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.”
• Scholar Shirley Steinberg said “As educators, we cannot imagine a stronger disincentive to our non-White students than to be told that they are genetically inferior to Whites and there is nothing they can do about it.”

Some might say that genetically low IQ implies genetic inferiority because intelligence is such a valued trait.  But height’s an extremely valued trait too.   We metaphorically “look up” to people we admire and “look down” on those we disdain.  “Standing tall” is a metaphor for dignity.  Tall men earn more money, attract more mates, and are far more valued by sperm banks, so if calling blacks “genetically low IQ” is “racist” because it implies “genetic inferiority”, then calling Southern Europeans “genetically short” is racist too.  Indeed I suspect most men would rather boost their height by a couple inches than boost their IQ by 10 points.

More interesting from a scientific perspective is this comment from Steve Hsu:

 If the results on selection hold up this will be clear evidence for differential selection between groups of a quantitative trait (as opposed to lactose or altitude tolerance, which are controlled by small sets of loci). We may soon be able to conclude that there has been enough evolutionary time for selection to work within European populations on a trait that is controlled by hundreds (probably thousands) of loci.

Hsu hits the nail on the head because one of the arguments by HBD skeptics like our very own Afrosapiens is that populations differ primarily on genetically simple traits like skin colour, yet here we have groups as closely related as Northern and Southern Europeans showing genetic differences on a trait influenced by an estimated 10,000 SNPs.

Hsu quotes a blog called Genetic Inference stating:

 Europeans differ systematically in their height, and these differences correlate with latitude. The average Italian is 171cm, whereas the average Swede is a full 4cm taller. Are these differences genetic? Have they been under evolutionary selection in recent human history?

It’s worth noting that a within sex difference of 4 cm equates to about 0.76 standard deviations within developed countries.  An IQ difference of 0.76 SD equals 11 IQ points.  If a 0.76 SD difference between groups as genetically similar as Italians and Swedes might be mostly genetic for a complex trait like height, then how big of a genetic IQ gap might we expect for far more genetically distant human groups?

J.P. Rushton, on group differences