The tragic death of comic writer Stan Lee (no relation to Vernita Lee who also died this month) has been overshadowed by an unfortunate blog post by Bill Maher:
The guy who created Spider-Man and the Hulk has died, and America is in mourning. Deep, deep mourning for a man who inspired millions to, I don’t know, watch a movie, I guess. Someone on Reddit posted, “I’m so incredibly grateful I lived in a world that included Stan Lee.” Personally, I’m grateful I lived in a world that included oxygen and trees, but to each his own. Now, I have nothing against comic books – I read them now and then when I was a kid and I was all out of Hardy Boys. But the assumption everyone had back then, both the adults and the kids, was that comics were for kids, and when you grew up you moved on to big-boy books without the pictures.
But then twenty years or so ago, something happened – adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature. And because America has over 4,500 colleges – which means we need more professors than we have smart people – some dumb people got to be professors by writing theses with titles like Otherness and Heterodoxy in the Silver Surfer. And now when adults are forced to do grown-up things like buy auto insurance, they call it “adulting,” and act like it’s some giant struggle.
I’m not saying we’ve necessarily gotten stupider. The average Joe is smarter in a lot of ways than he was in, say, the 1940s, when a big night out was a Three Stooges short and a Carmen Miranda musical. The problem is, we’re using our smarts on stupid stuff. I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to suggest that Donald Trump could only get elected in a country that thinks comic books are important.
Superhero fans fave reacted harshly to Maher’s attack:
This week, the world was rocked by the tragic news that Miss Vernita Lee had passed away at the age of 83. Though best known as the mother of Oprah, Miss Lee was a hardworking productive woman in her own right, who added real value working as a domestic, and making people’s homes clean and beautiful.
Born in 1935, Lee grew up poor in rural Kosciusko Mississippi, where she had been raised by her mother Miss Hattie Mae who had only a few years of schooling and her father Mr. Earless Lee who had so little schooling, he could not write his own name.
Lee herself would not complete high school, finding herself an unwed teenage mother to Oprah. Despite this adversity, Lee took charge of her life by packing up and moving to Milwaukee in the 1950s. She was part of the great migration of blacks going North, seeking a better life, and would later send for six-year-old Oprah, who lived with Lee (on and off) until the age of fourteen. She had four children (though two have passed on), one of whom (Oprah) would grow up to be the World’s only black billionaire (from 2004 to 2007) and the World’s most influential woman.
A reader going by the name of Aint Tellin sent me the following email:
Hello again,
I’ve been watching a number of videos by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, one of which he stated his IQ. He claimed to have had it tested at one point and that it was “in excess of 150” (although he couldn’t give an exact number). One thing struck me, however. In the same video he mentioned his GRE scores (old GRE) which he listed scoring in the 99th percentile verbally, but only 70th percentile quantitatively.
If I’m not mistaken—although I often am—this would give him a total GRE score somewhere above 1330. While impressive, this only suggests a full-scale IQ around 137. While I have no doubt he’s extremely smart, I believe he only listed his verbal IQ and not his full-scale IQ. I’d like to get your thoughts on this.
Below is a link to the aforementioned video:
When asked by a reader what his IQ is, Peterson replies “it’s less than it used to be because it declines as you age”
Actually professional IQ tests like the Wechsler are normed for age, so the average old adult and the average young adult by definition have an IQ of 100. However Peterson’s correct that the actually number of items correctly answered (raw scores) decline after the 20s, but IQ itself is age controlled. Maybe Peterson knows all this and is just oversimplifying for the short attention spans on youtube.
I do love what he says about physical exercise staving off cognitive decline though. In another video he attributes this to the fact that the brain uses tons of oxygen. Perhaps our resident health expert RR could look into this.
Moving on, he mentions that he had his IQ tested at one point (why?, when? by who? what test?) and that it was in excess of 150. My guess is he probably took the WAIS-R while getting his PhD in clinical psychology circa 1990, perhaps as part of the training to administer the test. If so, the test norms were probably about 12 years old, and assuming James Flynn is right about Wechsler norms inflating at a rate of 0.3 points per year, we may need to deduct 3.6 points (meaning his IQ was in excess of 146 (U.S. norms)).
But that’s speculation on top of speculation. Let’s turn to his GRE scores.
GRE Verbal
He mentions that his GRE verbal was in the 99th percentile (which would be at least 2.33 standard deviations (SDs) above the GRE population if we assume their distribution was roughly normal). Assuming he took the test circa 1984 (when he got his BA), that would have equated to a score of 778+.
We don’t know much how GRE scores equate to IQ, because GREs are normed on aspiring PhDs while IQ is normed on the general U.S. population. One way to bridge the gap is to convert GRE scores into SAT equivalents, since in rare studies, SATs were taken by the general U.S. population.
A sample of 22,923 people took both the GRE and SAT before 1990. In this sample, GRE verbal 778 is +2.49 SD (see chart I).
chart I
To find the verbal SAT equivalent of GRE V 778, we must ask what SAT verbal score is +2.49 with respect to this elite sample. The answer is 780.
So how does that equate to the IQ scale? We know from a special study, that if all American 17-year-olds had taken the SAT in the 1980s, instead of just the college-bound elite, the average verbal score would have been 376 (SD = 102) (see the The Bell Curve, page 694, note 32). Since by definition, the general U.S. population has an IQ of 100 with an SD of 15, we can infer 376 = IQ 100, and 102 = 15 IQ points.
By this logic, a verbal SAT of 780+ would have equated to an IQ of 159+!
One problem with this method is that it assumes SAT scores are normally distributed at the extremes.
An alternative approach is to look at chart II which equates a GRE V and SAT V of 778+ and 780+ respectively, to IQs 149+ and 156+ respectively.
Chart II (found in the Prometheus MC Reoprt, where it was attributed to Kjeld Hvatum’s “Letter to Ron Hoeflin” and Ron’s response, In-Genius, # 15, August 1990
Averaging all three estimates gives Peterson a verbal IQ of 155+. This would put Peterson above the one in 8000 level, compared to Americans of his era.
GRE Quant
Peterson claims to have scored in the 70th to 75th percentile on the quant section of the GRE or roughly +0.6 SD above the GRE population if the distribution was normal. Circa 1984, this equated to a score of 624.
Now if I convert this quant score into an old SAT equivalent, the same way I did for the verbal, I get 600.
In The Bell Curve they note that if all American 17-year-olds had taken the math SAT in the mid 1980s, the average score (IQ 100) would have been 411 and about the top 0.96% (IQ 135) would have scored 700+. If we assume a straight line between these data points, a math score of 600 equates to IQ 123.
If so roughly one in 16 Americans of his era are at least as good at the type of math measured by the GRE.
Composite score
Since Peterson’s GRE V and GRE Q equated to old verbal and math SATs of 780+ and 600 respectively, his combined GRE (V + Q) equated to a combined old SAT score of 1380+, which equated to an IQ of about 141+ in Peterson’s day (one in 319 level).
It should be noted however that tests like the GRE and SAT do not market themselves as IQ tests and are designed to predict academic performance, not the general intelligence factor per se. They also test a narrower and more academic range of brain functions than the Wechsler intelligence scales.
I found a very educational documentary about Ayn Rand who was arguably the most influential woman in the World before she died. Although I’m not a fan, I find influential women fascinating, and her impact is all the more interesting because she never held political office, didn’t have great wealth or fame, and did not ride the coattails of a prominent husband or father. She was entirely self-made, and unlike many women who use their beauty to get ahead, Rand looked like a witch. Hers was the power of ideas, so it’s fitting that the documentary aired on Ideas on CBC radio.
You can listen to part one here and part two here.
But sadly I suspect she was a neocon, or at least would have become one had she lived another 20 years.
“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.
“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”
Watch out Donald Trump. She’s coming after your base.
I was listening to Ideas on CBC radio the other night and there was a good discussion with Christopher Hedges that I think a lot of my readers might like (Stephen Pinker is briefly discussed). Here’s a summary from their web site:
Christopher Hedges believes that the American empire is ending. Cities are dying, their infrastructure crumbling, the middle and working classes gutted, and income disparity more extreme than ever. The problem, he argues, is systemic: “Capitalist oligarchs, meanwhile, hoard huge sums of wealth — $7.6 trillion stashed in overseas tax havens — exacted as tribute from those they dominate, indebt, and impoverish.”
Although he disavows Marxism, Hedges believes the diagnosis Marx offered in the mid-nineteenth century is correct. “Marx warned that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction”, he asserts. While Marx did not know when that day would come, he did foresee how it would unfold over time: “Capitalism would in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claimed to defend.” One of those values and traditions was that free markets would mean more individual freedoms and increased social harmony. Yet we are witnessing the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. and around the world. For Hedges, this trend is not simply alarming; it was predictable.
A member of a super high IQ society once stated that the Rubik’s cube would make a good measure of extremely high IQ if no one had ever seen it before. If only cube inventor Ernő Rubik had cared as much about psychometrics as he cared about making money, instead of releasing the cube as a mass market game for billions of kids to play with, it could have been a top secret subtest on a professionally administered IQ test, only witnessed by psychologists and those exceptional individuals referred for individual testing.
Actually there is a subtest on the Wechsler intelligence scales involving blocks that measures the same type of spatial reasoning that the cube measures, though at a lower level of difficulty. The day I took that test was the day I fell in love with the Wechsler, because for the first time in my life I was taking a standardized test that I felt was measuring real intelligence as opposed to acquired knowledge and skill.
The distinction between tests measuring intelligence and those measuring knowledge have a lot of different names in psychology: Aptitude vs achievement, fluid vs crystalized, culture reduced vs culture loaded.
However the distinction is far less clear than we’d like. Crystalized Knowledge achievement tests like vocabulary often turn out to be more heritable than so-called culture reduced fluid aptitude tests which is ironic, given that the former seems more removed from the underlying physiology. So-called culture reduced tests like the Raven Progressive Matrices often show the biggest improvements as countries complete the industrial revolution; something you wouldn’t expect if these tests measured abilities unaffected by culture.
The Raven fails as a culture reduced test in my opinion, because although the content includes little knowledge and language, understanding the instructions and being motivated and confident enough to concentrate on such abstract patterns is culturally loaded.
The Rubik’s cube and other more hands on pure performance tests are different. They are considered fun, interesting and understandable by virtually all cultures. Even if you went back in time 40,000 years, you could probably interest a Neanderthal in doing the Rubik’s cube. He might get frustrated after he failed to make progress after a couple minutes though, which is why time limits of about 2 minutes are essential for culture reduced testing.
Of course virtually no human in history would have been smart enough to solve the whole Rubik’s cube on first try in just two minutes, but many could have solved at least one side so partial credit would be given if it were an IQ test.
But even though I think the Rubik’s cube would have made a great high level culture reduced spatial IQ test, there are many brilliant people who would do poorly on culture reduced tests because they excel on the very abilities so related to culture and intelligence itself: language, concepts, abstractions.
And while a culture reduced test of vocabulary is a contradiction in terms, I am working on a culture reduced test that measures the abstract conceptual ability of language, without requiring the person to know a single word. Of course the Raven tried to measure conceptual ability but failed as a culture reduced test because it requires certain cultural habits, but I’m hoping my test will not fall into the same trap.
Everyone get out a piece of blank paper, a pen, and a stop watch.
In two minutes, write down as many of the most important people in the history of the World you can think of. Make sure to name the most important people you can think of from all of world history. Don’t worry about spelling or neatness, as long as the person’s name is recognizable, it counts.
GO!
When the two minutes elapses, check to see how many of the people on your list made historian Michael Hart’s famous list. Give yourself 1 point for each name on your list that made Hart’s list. Maximum score 100.
Don’t read the comments until you’ve taken the test as people might discuss names.
Please test your knowledge of famous people by trying to name as many of these 25 numbered famous people as you can (answers below). Only last names count. Each correctly named last earns 1 point (even if you don’t know the first name). If person has more than one last name, use the better known one.
An interesting quote I discovered about the old math SAT:
Although the normative reports for the PSAT and the SAT do not indicate the number of boys and girls earning the highest scores on these tests, Dorans and Livingston (1987) reported the number of very high scores earned by boys and girls on the SAT-Mathematics for all English-speaking examinees tested in June 1981 and May 1982. When the examinees from the two test administrations were combined, 96% of 99 scores of 800 (the highest possible scaled score), 90% of 433 scores in the 780-790 range, 81% of 1479 scores between 750 and 770, and 56% of 3,768 scores of 600 were earned by boys.
Thus, the degree of male overrepresentation was directly related to the level of SAT-Math performance. However, the population of adolescents was not examined. Different percentages might be found for the subset of high-ability youths who did not take the SAT. But given the high correlation found between ability and SAT completion, it is doubtful that there were enough unrepresented youths to bias the reported percentages.
If 96% of 800 math SAT people were male, it’s interesting to ask what an 800 math SAT score equated to on the IQ scale in the 1980s. The New York Timesstates:
Out of about 1.5 million students who took the S.A.T. in 1982-83, 749 got a perfect score on the math section, according to the Educational Testing Service.
According to Ron Hoeflin, during the 1980s, roughly one third of American 18-year-olds had taken the SAT and virtually all of the top talent had, so a perfect math score was not just the 749 best out of the 1.5 million who took the test, but the best out of all 4.5 million in that age group, and thus equates to the one in 6000 level, or math IQ 154+ (U.S. norms)
Although I think the math SAT measures only one kind of math IQ. Women are perhaps better at more intuitive math like statistics.
