[PLEASE PLACE ALL OFF-TOPIC COMMENTS IN THE MOST RECENT OPEN THREAD.  THEY WILL NOT BE POSTED IN THIS THREAD]

A famous 1975 study by Samuel S. Janus  published in THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS claimed professional comedians have an incredibly high average IQ of 138 (U.S. norms).  Critics argue that IQ tests just measure narrow upper class book smarts, but if that’s true, we shouldn’t expect creative socially brilliant people from mostly working class backgrounds to average higher scores than 99.5% of America.  But it is it true?  In the section below, Janus explains how the participants were selected:

In the next section Janus describes the test results:

So something doesn’t add up here.  Janus claims the comics ranged form IQ 115 to 160+ but then states “the vocabulary subtest was utilized” and doesn’t mention any other subtests anywhere in the paper.  So were the IQs based entirely on the Vocab test?  But the vocab test doesn’t give an IQ, it gives a scaled score.  Scaled scores are like IQs except instead of having a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, they’re scaled to have a mean of 10 and an SD of 3.  Of course you can convert scaled scores to IQ equivalents by multiplying by 5 and adding 50, but the highest scaled scores you can get on the WAIS vocabulary subtest was 19, which equates to IQ 145, so how the hell did any comic in the sample score 160+ if only that subtest was used?

Sadly, I think what might have happened is that instead of converting the scaled score to an IQ equivalent, Janus prorated, which you should never do from just one subtest.  In other words since he gave only one subtest, he multiplied the score on that one subtest by 11, to estimate what the comics would have scored if all 11 WAIS subtests had been given and then converted this estimated sum of scaled scores to Full-scale IQ using the table in the manual.

But scoring perfect on all 11 subtests is much more rare than scoring perfect on just one, and thus equates to a much higher IQ, so by assuming the Vocabulary subtest could represent all 11 subtests, it looks like he wildly overestimated the IQs of the brightest comics.  My guess is that if he had followed the correct procedure (converting Vocab scaled score to IQ equivalent) he would have obtained an average IQ of maybe 127 or so (I’d need the 1955 WAIS manual to know for sure) and that’s before we deduct points for the Flynn effect; though research showing a Flynn effect for Vocabulary is inconsistent.

Bottom line: professional nationally famous U.S. comedians probably average IQs no higher than the mid 120s, which while very high, is nowhere near the genius level this study led us to believe.

This is not surprising, because there are two types of funny people.  Some people are funny because they’re smart.  And some people are funny because they’re NOT smart, and being the class clown is a way of compensating for the fact that they’re dumb.  By acting like school is one big joke, they shield themselves from the humiliation of bad grades:

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[WARNING:  THIS ARTICLE IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT OF THE OLD SAT AS AN IQ TEST, IT SIMPLY EXPLAINS WHAT YOUR IQ ON THE OLD SAT WOULD BE IF THE SAT WERE AN IQ TEST.  THE LINE BETWEEN IQ AND ACHIEVEMENT TESTS IS PARTLY SEMANTIC]

Many high IQ societies accept specific scores from the pre-1995 SAT for admission, as if all SATs taken before the infamous recentering in April 1995 had the same meaning.  And yet Mensa, which only accepts the smartest 2% of Americans on a given “intelligence test” makes a curious distinction.  Prior to 9/30/1974, you needed an SAT score of 1300 to get into Mensa, yet from 9/30/1974 to 1/31/1994, you needed a score of 1250.

Well, that’s odd I thought, since all SAT scores from the early 1940s to 1994 are supposedly scaled to reflect the same level of skill, why did it suddenly become 50 SAT points easier to be in the top 2% in 1974?  And if such an abrupt change can occur in 1974, why assume stability every year before and since?  It didn’t make any sense.

And I wasn’t the only one who was wondering.  Rodrigo de la Jara, owner of iqcomparisonsite.com, writes:

If someone knows why they have 1300 for scores before 1974, please send an email to enlighten me.

 

The mean verbal and math SAT scores, if ALL U.S. 17-year-olds had taken the old SAT

To determine how the old SAT maps to IQ I realized I couldn’t rely on high IQ society cut-offs.  I need to look at the primary data.  Now the first place to look was at a series of secret studies the college board did in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.  These studies gave an abbreviated version of the SAT to a nationally representative sample of high school juniors.  Because very few Americans drop out of high school before their junior year, a sample of juniors came close to representing ALL American teens, and then scores were statistically adjusted to show how virtually ALL American teens would average had they taken the SAT at 17. The results were as follows (note, these scores are a lot lower than the actual mean SAT scores of people who take the SAT, because they also include all the American teens who usually don’t):

 

The verbal and math standard deviations if ALL U.S. 17-year-olds had taken the old SAT

 Once I knew the mean SAT scores if ALL American teens had taken the SAT at 17 in each of the above years, I needed to know the standard deviations.   Although I knew the actual SDs for 1974, I don’t know them for other years, so for consistency, I decided to use estimated SDs.

According to the book The Bell Curve, since the 1960s, virtually every single American teen who would have scored 700+ on either section of the SAT, actually did take the SAT (and as Ron Hoeflin has argued, whatever shortfall there’d be would be roughly balanced by brilliant foreign test takers).  This makes sense because academic ability is correlated with taking the SAT, so the higher the academic ability, the higher the odds of taking the SAT, until at some point, the odds likely approach 100%.

Thus if 1% of all American 17-year-olds both took the SAT and scored 700+ on one of the subscales, then we know that even if 100% of all U.S. 17-year-olds had taken the SAT, still only 1% would have scored 700+ on that sub-scale.  By using this logic, it was possible to construct a graph showing what percentage of ALL U.S. 17-year-olds were capable of scoring 700+ on each sub-scale, each year:

 

 

What the above graph seems to show is that in 1966, a verbal score of 700+ put you in about the top 0.75% of all U.S. 17-year-olds, in 1974 it put you around the top 0.28%, in 1983 about the top 0.28% and in 1994 about the top 0.31%.

Similarly, scoring 700+ on math put you around the top 1.25% in 1966, the top 0.82% in 1974, the top 0.94% in 1983, and the top 1.52% in 1994.

Using the above percentages for each year, I determined how many SDs above the U.S. verbal or math SAT mean (for ALL 17-year-olds) a 700 score would be on a normal curve, and then divided the difference between 700 and each year’s mean (table I) by that number of SDs, to obtain the estimated SD. Because table I did not have a mean national score for 1994, I assumed the same means as 1983 for both verbal and math.  This gave the following stats:

 

Calculating verbal and math IQ equivalents from the old SAT

Armed with the stats in chart III, it’s very easy for people who took the pre-recentered SAT to convert their subscale scores into IQ equivalents.  Simply locate the means and SDs from the year closest to when you took the PRE-RECENTERED SAT, and apply the following formulas:

Formula I

Verbal IQ equivalent (U.S. norms)  = (verbal SAT – mean verbal SAT/verbal SD)(15) + 100

Formula II

Math IQ equivalent (U.S. norms) =  (math SAT – mean math SAT/math SD)(15) + 100

 

Calculating the mean and SD of the COMBINED SAT if all U.S. 17-year-olds had taken the test

Now how do we convert combined pre-recentered SATs (verbal + math) into IQ equivalents.  Well it’s easy enough to estimate the theoretical mean pre-recentered SAT for each year by adding the verbal mean to the math mean.  But estimating the standard deviation for each year is trickier because we don’t know the frequency for very high combined scores for each year, like we do for sub-scale scores (see Chart II).  However we do know it for the mid 1980s. In 1984,  23,141 people scored 1330+ on the combined SAT.  Of course most American teens never write the SAT, so we’ll never know precisely how many could have scored 1330+, but Hoeflin argued that virtually 100% of teens capable of scoring extremely high on the SAT did so, and whatever shortfall there might be was negated by bright foreign test-takers.

Thus, a score of 1330+ is not merely the 23,141 best among nearly one million SAT takers that year, but the best among ALL 3,521,000 Americans who were 17 in 1984.  In other words, 1330 put you in the top 0.66% of all U.S. 17-year-olds which on the normal curve, is +2.47 SD.  We know from adding the mean verbal and math for 1983 in Chart I, that if all American 17-year-olds had taken the SAT in 1983, the mean COMBINED score would have been 787, and if 1330 is +2.47 SD if all 17-year-olds had taken it, then the SD would have been:

(1330 – 787)/2.47 = 220

But how do we determine the SD for the combined old SAT for other years?  Well since we know the estimated means and SD of the subscales, then Formula III is useful for calculating the composite SD (from page 779 of the book The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray):

Formula III

r is the correlation between the two tests that make up the composite and σ is the standard deviation of the two tests.

Formula III requires you to know the correlation between the two subscales.  Herrnstein and Murray claim that for the entire SAT population, the correlation between SAT verbal and SAT math is 0.67 however we’re interested in the correlation if ALL American young adults had taken the old SAT, not just the SAT population.

However since we just estimated that the SD of the combined SAT if all 17-year-olds took the SAT in 1983 would have been 220, and since we know from Chart III that the 1983 verbal and math SDs if all 17-year-olds had taken the SAT would have been 116 and 124 respectively, then we can deduce what value of r would cause Formula III to equal the known combined SD of 220.  That value is 0.68 (virtually the same as in the SAT population)*

Now that we know the correlation between the verbal and math SAT if all U.S. 17-year-olds had taken the SAT would have been 0.68 in 1983, and if we assume that correlation held from the 1960s to the 1990s, using the sub-scale SDs in chart III, we can apply Formula III to determine the combined SDs for each year, and of course the combined mean for each year is just  the sum of the verbal and math means in chart III.

 

 

Calculating full-scale IQ equivalents from the old SAT

Armed with the stats in Chart IV, it’s very easy for people who took the pre-recenetered SAT to convert their COMBINED scores into IQ equivalents.  Simply locate the means and SDs from the year closest to when you took the PRE-RECENTERED SAT, and apply the following formula:

Formula IV

Full-scale IQ equivalent (U.S. norms)  = (combined SAT – mean combined SAT/combined SD)(15) + 100

*Note: the IQ equivalent of SAT scores above 1550 or so will be underestimated by this formula because of ceiling bumping.  See below for how to convert stratospheric scores.

Was Mensa wrong?

Based on chart IV, it seems Mensa is too conservative when it insists on SAT scores of 1300 prior to 9/30/1974 and scores of 1250 for those who took it from 9/30/1974 to 1/31/1994.  Instead it seems that the Mensa level (top 2% or + 2 SD above the U.S. mean) is likely achieved by scores of 1250 for those who took the SAT close to 1966, and 1216 for those who took it closer to 1974.  For those who took the pre-recentered SAT closer to 1983 or 1994, it seems Mensa level was achieved by scores of 1227 and 1249 respectively.

Of course all of my numbers assume a normal distribution which is never perfectly the case, and it’s also possible that the 0.68 correlation between verbal and math I found if all 17-year-olds took the SAT in 1983 could not be generalized to other years, so perhaps I’m wrong and Mensa is right.

And in Mensa’s defense, they were probably erring on the conservative side (better to turn away some Mensa level scores, than accept non-Mensa level scores).  But it would be nice to know how they arrived at their numbers because it’s obviously way too simplistic to have only two Mensa cut-offs (one before and one after 9/30/74) for all the decades the pre-re centered SAT was used, given the fluctuations that occurred from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Extreme SAT scores in the mid 1980s

The above conversions were based on the assumption that the SAT would have a roughly normal distribution in the general U.S. population, which is likely true for 99% of Americans but likely false at the extremes.

Below is incredibly rare data of the total number of people in 1984 who scored high on the combined SAT.

 

 

 

We see that of the 3,521,000 Americans born in 1967, roughly 964,739 would grow up to take the SAT at age 17 in 1984.  And of those who did, only 20,443 scored above 1330.  If one assumes, as the great Ron Hoeflin does, that virtually all the top SAT talent took the SAT in 1984 (and whatever shortfall was madeup for by foreign students), then those 20,443 were not just the best of the 964,739 who actually took the SAT, but the best of all 3,521,000 Americans their age.  This equates to the one in 172 level or IQ 138+ (U.S. norms).

Meanwhile, only five of the 3,521,000 U.S. babies born in 1967 would grow up to score 1590+ on the SAT, so 1590+ is one in 704,200 level, or IQ 170+.  However above I claimed that in the mid 1980s, the combined SAT had a mean of 787 and an estimated SD of 220, which means 1590 is “only” +3.65 SD or IQ 155.  Clearly the SAT is not normally distributed at the high extreme, so Z scores start to dramatically underestimate normalized Z scores, and modern IQ scales only care about the latter.

Thus, for extremely high SAT scores obtained in the mid 1980s, please use table V and not formula IV:

Table V:

 

1984 sat	iq equivalent(u.s. norms) based on normalized Z scores (sd 15)
1600	170+
1590	170
1580	164
1570	163
1560	161
1550	159
1540	157
1530	156
1520	154
1510	153
1500	152
1490	150
1480	150
1470	148
1460	147
1450	146
1440	146
1430	145
1420	144
1410	143
1400	142
1390	141
1380	141
1370	140
1360	139
1350	139
1340	138
1330	137

What if you scored extremely high on the old SAT in the 1990s, 1970s, or 1960s?

No precise solution is possible for these people until I get more data, but my tentative advice is to map your scores to the mid 1980s distribution and then use table V.  For example, Bill Gates took the SAT circa 1973 and reportedly scored 1590.  According to table III, 1590 was +3.68 SD in the mid 1970s, since the mean and estimated SD were 770 and 223 respectively .  But in the mid 1980s, the mean and estimated SD were 787 and 220 respectively, so +3.68 SD would be 1597 which converts to an IQ of 170+ according to table V.

By contrast Chuck Schumer reportedly scored a perfect 1600 in the mid-1960s (though Steve Sailer is skeptical) which would put him at +3.43 SD according to table III.  +3.43 equals 1542 in the mid 1980s according to table III, and that equates to IQ 157 in table V.

I am not suggesting that a 1600 in the mid-1960s reflects the same level of academic skill as 1542 in the mid-1980s, (the college board worked very hard to keep old SAT scores equal over the decades) but they may reflect the same percentile, relative to the general U.S. population of 17-year-olds, assuming the shape of the distribution stayed roughly constant, and the correlation between verbal and math did too.  Because IQ is never an absolute measure of intelligence, only a measure of where one ranks compared to his age mates in a specific population (typically the general population of the U.S. or U.K. or just the white populations thereof)

*in a previous article I estimated a 0.36 general population correlation between verbal and math by estimating the combined SD from a freakishly high point on the curve, but now that I have more data,  I prefer to do the calculations from a less extreme percentile given the ceiling bumping that distorts the SAT distribution at the extremes.

Please place all off-topic comments for the week here.

Some random thoughts:

Black national merit scholar G-man mentioned some claims by Jordan Peterson (why is everyone suddenly talking about him?) about the uselessness of people below 83 IQ (below 80 is what he means, since that’s about the 10th percentile below which you can’t qualify for the military).

The fact that the armed forces, despite its desperate need for recruits, would turn away the bottom 10% of the IQ distribution is a testament to the incredible validity of IQ.  If IQ were merely measuring social class, why would a low score make you completely useless during times of war?

The man interviewing Peterson suggests that with enough education and training, low IQ people could eventually become adaptable creative problem solvers, but Peterson is having none of it, saying the research is crystal clear.

I also saw this interesting discussion about slavery:

 

As a little kid I believed whites just walked into Africa and started catching blacks in traps, much like humans do to animals.  Believing blacks were dehumanized in this way, makes it easy for people to believe in HBD.

However as I got older I read that in most cases blacks were sold into slavery.  Many blacks deny this because it makes them culpable in their own victimization, however other blacks prefer to believe they were sold by their own people, than to believe their people were dominated by white people.  Because it’s such a sensitive issue, it’s hard to know who to believe.

It would be interesting to also look at the Arab slave trade.  J.P. Rushton constantly cited hyper-influential Bernard Lewis as the central authority on Arab-black relations in antiquity, however Lewis is very pro-Israel so I don’t know how objective he can be about Arabs, given how emotional both sides get.

I also saw this interesting video by Jesse Lee Peterson about Hillary’s recent visit to India. Not only did she make controversial comments there, but according to Peterson, she kept losing her physical balance.  I hope she’s okay.

It’s easy to say she should just retire and enjoy her grandkids, but when you’re entire identity (FOR DECADES) has been people claiming you’ll be the first woman president, and then to come so close to achieving that dream twice (only to have it snatched away both times) is traumatic.  The moral of the story is NEVER allow yourself to get too psychologically invested in events you can’t control.  It will ruin your life:

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Been watching Netflix’s fantastic series Dear White People which depicts racial tensions at a fictional Ivy League college.  Although the show is trying to portray the black characters as super smart, in a weird way it’s causing me to believe more in Rushton’s theory and I think it’s because all the black male actors on the show have small heads (or maybe the fact that the sides of their head are shaved causes their heads to appear small compared to their white counterparts).

Blacks & the police

One especially poignant episode occurred when the police crashed a house party and pulled a gun on a small headed but super smart black guy.  The black guy was not a nerd and does extremely well with the ladies, but his extremely high IQ was revealed by him dominating a tipsy trivia contest.  What should have been a great night for him turned dark when he told the white character who was throwing the party not to say the N word, even though it was part of the lyrics to a song by a black artist that the black students were singing along to.

This led to the high IQ black getting upset and part of the racism the show was depicting was that a black guy can’t even get upset without some white panicking and calling the cops, who humiliated the black guy by demanding he show his school ID card to prove he was a student (something the white boys he was fighting did not have to do, even though they were much less qualified to attend the school from an IQ perspective).

And yes I realize shows like this are largely propaganda (or brainwashing as Philosopher would say), but it’s well written nonetheless.

Light skinned privilege

Another interesting subplot is the tension between a light skinned black girl (who wears her hair natural and is politically radical) and her dark skinned friend (who straightens her hair and acts like a white sorority girl).  I’ve long noticed that a lot of the most liberal (pro-black) blacks tend to be light skinned, and I’ve wondered if this was because of higher IQ (which is correlated with liberalism) or because they’re trying to prove their blackness.  But the show raised a third possibility: light skinned privilege.  They have the luxury of being politically provocative because they’re less threatening to whites.

Many whites scoff at the idea of white privilege and Steve Sailer has gone as far as to suggest that being black is an advantage in 21st century America.  It’s easy to see why Steve would think this when so many of the most powerful Americans are black (Oprah, Obama, Colin Powell, Condi Rice).  But a closer examination reveals something more interesting: with the exception of the dark skinned Oprah, all of these powerful black Americans are at least half white on the genetic level.  I suspect that if you separate light skinned blacks from regular blacks, there’s no net advantage to being black in America.  Yes blacks are more likely to get good jobs (controlling for IQ) but they’re more likely to be unemployed, in jail and in poverty (controlling for IQ).

Whatever benefits come from affirmative action and tokenism are likely cancelled out by racism (yes, it still exists), so being black is a wash (neither good nor bad), unless you’re a light skinned black where you get the benefits of affirmative action without having to deal with much racism.

Race vs social class

This is not to deny that black Americans (both dark and light) are oppressed in America, but they are currently oppressed because of class, not because of race (though race is what historically caused their class).  Descendants of slaves are the lowest social class in America because they were denied the ability to build financial and cultural capital for centuries.

Some blacks feel Obama was able to become the first black president because he enjoyed all the benefits of affirmative action, without the stigma of looking black or the cost of coming from America’s slave class (on the contrary, his pedigree was upper class)

 

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In order to convert the new GRE to IQ equivalents, we must first know the means and standard deviations of the Americans who take the GRE.  Commenter George kindly provided that information:

The ETS publishes the “GRE Worldwide Test Taker Report” periodically. The report for test takers between 2013-2016…shows a US mean/SD of 152.7/7.6 for Verbal and 150.2/7.8 for Quantitative

Next, we’d like to know the mean and SD of the composite score (V+Q).

The mean can be determined simply by adding the mean V and mean Q, which gives 302.9.  To get the SD of the composite, we must know the correlation between these subscales.  Among the subset of people who took the old GRE after also taking the SAT, the correlation was 0.56.  If we assume the correlation is the same for all GRE takers, and also for new GRE takers, then we can apply the following formula to get the SD of new GRE V + Q composite:

r is the correlation between the two tests that make up the composite and σ is the standard deviation of the two tests.

So let’s get out our calculators:

Composite SD = SQUARE ROOT OF: 7.6(7.6) + 7.8(7.8) + 2(0.56)(7.6)(7.8)

Composite SD = SQUARE ROOT OF: 57.76 + 60.84 + 66.39

Composite SD = SQUARE ROOT OF: 184.99

Composite SD = 13.6

Now that we know the mean and SD for the verbal, quantitative and composite scores we can convert them to the IQ scale (where the U.S. mean and SD are defined as 100 and 15 respectively).  The problem is U.S. GRE takers are an academic elite, and thus have a different IQ distribution from the general U.S. population.  How different?  I’m no longer comfortable answering that without doing a bit more research, so we’ll save that for part 2.

 

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I have great respect for Svante Pääbo for all the brilliant work he’s done on ancient DNA, even ranking him as the 47th most influential living human of all time. By sequencing the DNA of Neanderthals and comparing it with our own, Pääbo hopes to discover whatever small genetic changes occurred in the final stages of evolution that allowed modern humans to dominate the globe in ways Neanderthals never did.  Studying the difference between Neanderthals and modern humans is especially focused because we separated from them only several hundred thousand years ago, unlike chimps who we separated from several million years ago.

The differences between Neanderthals and modern humans could seem huge to most people.  When you look historically at how sub-Saharan Africans were considered subhuman, and they separated from non-Africans merely tens of thousands of years ago, imagine how stigmatized Neanderthals would have been.

Genetically the difference between Neanderthals and modern humans is about ten times greater than the difference between blacks and whites, but about ten times smaller than the difference between modern humans and chimps.  I wonder what a racist white slave master would have thought if a Neanderthal had walked on to his plantation.  Would he instantly recognize from appearance that his black slave was far more related to him than the Neanderthal since the former two both share similar height, build, cranium shape and faces, or would he have felt a greater kinship with Neanderthals because they both have white skin?

Pääbo argues that the genetic differences between modern humans and Neanderthals may explain why modern humans went to the moon while Neanderthals were confined to the cave.

However a woman in the audience at his talk makes the exact same point I would make if I’m ever lucky enough to attend one of Pääbo’s talks:  Almost all the truly revolutionary achievements of modern humans were made after Neanderthals went extinct 40,000 years ago.  Before 40,0000 years ago, our species wasn’t even making representational art, let alone computers and rockets. 

So why does  Pääbo (like Steve Hsu) assume we’re much smarter (or at least better at sharing knowledge), when Neanderthals (almost) kept up with us when they were alive?  The woman states that if Neanderthals had been the surviving species, maybe they’d be building satellites today.

Pääbo replied by saying that Neanderthals had three or four hundred thousand years to do it but didn’t, while modern humans had a hundred thousand years or even less yet actually did it.

See the 1:03:09 mark of the below video:

What are you talking about Pääbo?????!!!!!

According to Wikipedia (as of March 21, 2018), Neanderthals existed from 250 kya to 40 kya, while Homo sapiens existed from 300 kya to today.  By my math, that means Neanderthals had only 210,000 years to create advanced culture while we’ve had 300,000 years.

Maybe Wikipedia is wildly wrong, as these numbers can vary a lot based on how you classify and date fossils, but why does Pääbo think our species (or whatever term he prefers) is only 100,000 years old?  Perhaps like Richard Klein and Noam Chomsky, he thinks there’s a big genetic difference between behaviorally modern humans and the merely anatomically modern ones who preceded them?

But if you define the start of our species (a term Pääbo strongly avoids) as the moment our culture accelerated, then by definition we’re going to look like fast learners.  It would be like me staring confused at an exam for 3 hours, and in the last 4 minutes, I suddenly understand and answer all 10 questions at once.  Did I suddenly get smart in the last 4 minutes, or did the hours of thought preceding it just make my last 4 minutes seem especially smart?  The Neanderthals never got their last 4 minutes because they went extinct, so we don’t know if they would have been late bloomers just like we were.

 

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On the eve of 15th anniversary of the Iraq war it’s worth remembering that Oprah and her mentor Donahue did more to warn America against the Iraq war than virtually anyone in America.

Although Oprah’s brilliant Iraq war record is slightly tarnished by a pro-war show she did in Oct 2002, in the final months leading up to war, her show was perhaps the loudest voice against it, anywhere in America:

Oprah’s mentor Phil Donahue also deserves great credit for getting fired from his cable TV gig for his Iraq war opposition, which gives you a sense of how hard it was to oppose the Iraq war before it began:

 

This is an open thread for the week March 18 to March 24.  Feel free to discuss all off-topic comments here.

So the World’s biggest brained woman was making the talk show rounds, promoting her new movie A Wrinkle in Time where she plays a good witch.  The movie is directed by Ava Duvernay,  the first black woman to direct a nine figure movie.  Oprah absolutely adores the smaller brained Ava:

Oprah’s appearance on James Corden’s show was odd, but I was impressed by Oprah knowing the exact materials her bathtub was carved out of when Cordon pursued this odd line of questioning.  Cordon’s big head was dwarfed by Winfrey’s.

Oprah also appeared on Ellen

Ellen even came to Oprah’s defense when she was attacked on twitter by the president

So high is Oprah’s status that she’s considered a viable presidential candidate despite zero politically experience.

 

Oprah will almost certainly never run for president, but she enjoyed the attention of so many people thinking she’d win.  And while Oprah recently claimed she doesn’t know enough to be president and her critics dismiss her as an overrated vapid celeb, I estimate she’d be the most intelligent President since Bill Clinton.

Indeed when Oprah was a teenager attending a working class high school in Nashville Tennessee, she won so many public speaking contests that she was invited to the white house to meet Nixon.  Nixon secretly believed the “Negro” was genetically less intelligent, but not even Nixon could know that this particular young girl had a cranium that dwarfed his own, and with a lot of luck and hard work, would become (at her peak) the World’s richest black and most influential woman.

 

 

 

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Lion of the Blogosphere writes:

There’s a study publixhed in Molecular Psychiatry.

The only major newspaper to write an article about it is The Telegraph and their paywall prevents me from reading what they have to say about it.

Currently, genetic testing can only reveals 7% of intelligence differences between people but I’m sure as research and methods in genetic sequencing and computer analysis improve, that will eventually become a much higher percent. And then we will also finally have proof that blacks are less intelligent than whites because of genes, and not discrimination or poverty.

I took a look at the study he’s citing and found a few relevant quotes:

Using our meta-analytic dataset on intelligence we carried out polygenic prediction into UK Biobank subsamples following their removal from the meta-analysis. Between 3.64 and 6.84% of phenotypic intelligence (as measured by the VNR Test in UK Biobank) could be predicted (Supplementary Table 10); the upper limit is an improvement of ~43% on the largest reported estimate to date, of 4.8%

So if I understand correctly, it sounds like 7% is the upper limit of some kind of margin of error, but seeing as the lower limit is still around 4%, the single best estimate remains around 5%.  However taking the square root of 5% tells us that genomic predictions correlate 0.22 with IQ, which is a weak (though not terrible) correlation.

However the good news for behavioral genetics is that the IQ test used in this study (the verbal-numerical reasoning test, abbreviated VNR) sounds shockingly bad:

The VNR test consists of 13 items, 6 verbal and 7 numerical questions, all of which are multiple choice. An individual’s verbal numerical reasoning score was measured by summing the number of correct responses given within a 2 minute time period.

Tests with only 13 items (scored right or wrong) almost never have high loadings on g (the general intelligence factor) because the reliability is too low.  My educated guess is that the VNR has a g loading of only 0.65.  Dividing the polygenetic predictive power (0.22) by the estimated g loading of the VNR (0.65), gives 0.34, which is a reasonable estimate of the genomic correlation with a hypothetically perfect measure of g.

A 0.34 correlation is still only moderate, but even modest correlations add up, because by the logic of regression, for every 1 standard deviation increase in the genomic score, general intelligence should increase 0.34 standard deviations on average (5 IQ points).  This is not trivial.  And I agree with Lion that predictive power will increase dramatically as the technology advances.

Of course none of this tells us anything about black-white IQ differences unless the races have been found to differ significantly on these genomic scores.

But of course as commenter Mug of Pee points out, all these predictions are in Western countries so the genotype-phenotype correlation could just be a local phenomenon and not reflect a truly independent genetic effect.  We have no idea whether these genomic scores would predict IQ in societies with radically different environments.

[PLEASE PLACE ALL OFF-TOPIC COMMENTS HERE.  THEY WILL NOT BE POSTED IN THIS THREAD]

Many people do not understand how Oprah became so rich.  The confusion is understandable because I don’t think any other popular TV star has ever been officially declared a billionaire by Forbes (though Merv Griffin and Bill Cosby both made the Forbes 400).  According to Forbes, almost all of Oprah’s wealth was made from her syndicated talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show which ran from 1986 to 2011.  That wealth can be largely explained by four things: 1) ownership, 2) syndication, 3) longevity, and 4) timing

OWNERSHIP

When Oprah first came to Chicago to take over a failing morning talk show, her agent was very popular and people would tell Oprah what a great guy he was.

This is where social IQ is extremely important to getting rich, because Oprah asked herself, why would three separate network people go out of their way to tell her how great her agent is?  Oprah shrewdly realized that if the agent was really advancing her interests, he wouldn’t be so popular with her network bosses, so she fired him.

Oprah then went hunting for the toughest agent in town.  She had heard that a Chicago lawyer named Jeffrey Jacobs was a “piranha” and settled on him.  Because Oprah’s ratings were so incredibly high, Jacobs was able to negotiate something better than money: ownership of the show, the production company, and syndication rights.  Because the network was not legally allowed to syndicate Oprah themselves, they agreed to give Oprah the syndication rights on the condition that ABC owned networks get first crack.

SYNDICATION

Social IQ may help you hire the right agent, but at least some math IQ is needed to understand the business.  Oprah’s biographer George Mair writes on page 103 of Oprah Winfrey: The Real Story:

The arithmetic of syndication is not that hard to understand.  Somebody owns a television show and rents it to stations that sell commercials in the show.  If it’s a dramatic show or comedy like Hill Street Blues or Cheers or The Cosby Show or I Love Lucy, it is largely timeless and may run forever.  The only caveat is that you need enough shows “in the can” to go into syndication, because while the show was originally shown once a week, in syndication, such shows are usually shown on independent stations every weekday in the same time slot…Syndicating Oprah is simpler because she does five shows a week…

On page 105-106 Mair writes (as of 1994):

Oprah will appear on approximately two hundred stations each week, which will pay King World between $100,000 and $200,000 per week for five shows.  The figure varies with the size of the audience in each market.  The $200,000 figure is quite high, and that is the amount the ABC station in Los Angeles, KABC-TV, has agreed to pay under the new contract, due to run through the 1994-95 season.  It was forced to pay this amount in the face of strong counterbid from the rival CBS station.  Similar competition occurred in other markets where CBS faced ABC because The Oprah Winfrey Show served as a lead for two long hours of local news.  As noted elsewhere, this programming sequence helps build local news ratings.

If you use the lower figure of $100,000 and multiply it by the approximately two hundred U.S. stations buying Oprah, you see how King World grosses $20 million a week on the Oprah Winfrey Show, against which the production cost of the show runs about $200,000 a week.  Thus, low-cost shows sold to hundreds of stations can make a fortune for the participants and the star.  Even if the program is not as highly rated as the Oprah Winfrey Show, it can make a lot of money, which is why everyone wants to get into the syndicated talk show business.

 

The difference between syndicating a show and running it on a major network is the difference between retail and wholesale.  When TV stations are negotiating how much to pay for a single show (syndication) they will pay a lot more per show than when they are negotiating how much to pay for a whole network of shows, for the same reason you’ll pay a lot more (per movie) to rent individual movies than you’ll pay to stream a whole library of movies on Netflix.  This explains why Leno and Letterman (who were tied to networks) were never in the position to become billionaires.

The Oprah Winfrey Show is hardly the only show to strike syndication gold. Seinfeld reruns have generated  $3.1 billion just from repeating the same 180 shows over and over again, every weekday for 15 years in syndication.  Of this, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David were paid $400 million each (before taxes).  Although Seinfeld is nowhere near a billionaire like Oprah, he actually made more money per episode just from syndication than Oprah ever did and that’s largely because sitcoms are able to rerun far more than talk shows can without losing their appeal.

LONGEVITY

The third key to Oprah’s incredible wealth is her staying power.  In a field where we’re always looking for the next hot thing, remaining the #1 talk show in syndication for virtually 25 straight years was a virtually unparalleled show business achievement.  This allowed the syndication dollars to accumulate year after year, and put Oprah in the position to negotiate increasingly favorable contracts with her distributer King World.  For example, before 1994, King World received 43% of the operating profit from the Oprah Winfrey show.  But when Oprah renegotiated her contract in 1994, their percentage gradually dropped to 25%

TIMING

The fourth key to Oprah’s success was timing.  Her show’s popularity peaked before the rise of cable television and the internet.  Because the audience was much less fragmented in Oprah’s heyday, she was averaging 12 million U.S. viewers per day in the early 1990s, but by the time she ended in 2011 she was averaging six million.  And yet even with six million viewers, she remained far and away the highest rated talk show in syndication.  She was still the biggest fish in the pond, but the pond had shrunk dramatically and she was lucky to have dominated the medium at the peak of its power.  It’s interesting to ask whether we’ll ever see another Oprah, or perhaps the media has become too fragmented for any one personality to achieve such a large and loyal audience for so long.