I’ve long argued that the original Michael Myers character (as conceived by John Carpenter, not to be confused with the Michael Myers of the Rob Zombie films) had an IQ around 90.
My logic is simple. The average IQ of white Americans with zero years of completed education is likely 72 (borderline intelligence), yet the average IQ of white siblings of the National merit finalists is 119 (Bright Normal intelligence). Someone who belongs to both these groups has a statistically expected IQ of 91 (white norms).
Carpenter’s Myers arguably belongs to both groups. He has zero years of completed education because he’s confined to a mental hospital at age six, where he spends the next 15 years just sitting in a room, staring at a wall, never speaking or moving.
And yet in Halloween II (1981) we learn that he’s the brother of heroine Laurie Strode. We’re never told that Strode is a national merit finalist, but it’s likely she is. She studies chemistry, is able to correctly answer her teacher’s question about fate despite not paying attention, and is always babysitting because guys think she’s too smart to date. Add to that the fact that she’s played by Jamie Lee Curtis who is half Ashkenazi Jewish (a high IQ group), though it’s unlikely Strode is genetically Jewish since she’s supposed to be a Midwestern girl next door type, and these tend to be WASPs.
However David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018) is a direct sequel to the original Halloween (1978) and ignores Halloween II (1981) and all the other sequels, which means Myers is no longer related Strode, and thus no longer shares her IQ DNA. Thus he goes from being a zero education sibling of a National merit finalist, to just a guy with zero education, and as stated above, these average IQ 72.
Even though the film writers likely gave no thought to Myer’s IQ or what his relationship to Strode implies for it, it’s interesting how ignoring all the sequels not only lowers Myers’s likely IQ, but also causes his body count to drop precipitously (which is exactly what you’d expect since low IQ people are less competent at achieving all goals, even evil ones).
In Halloween II (1981), Myers was able to continue and more than double his killing spree after escaping from the mental hospital at age 21, but now that Halloween II (1981) is no longer canon, Myers’s night of terror ended early, and he was returned to the mental hospital after killing only four people, and killed no one since until he was 61. It seems like without Strode’s high IQ DNA, Myers is a far less prolific killer who shows none of the technical savvy he showed in the now defunct sequels such as inserting an I.V. drip into a nurse’s vein and draining of her blood.
Not only does this new timeline rob Myers of 19 IQ points, it also robs him of his autism. When Myers had the bizarre sister obsession, I argued he showed classic autism, but with the sister plot removed from the story, he’s a more run-of-the-mill serial killer, but with an extremely low IQ. Indeed you can tell from the grunting, whaling, and inefficient behavior in the classic closet scene in the original Halloween, that Myers was mentally disabled, while high IQ Strode was adaptable enough to turn the situation to her advantage (the ultimate measure of intelligence).
Pumpkin Person 
Pumpkin, please correct me about your 119 figure if I didn’t guess well, cause you didn’t explain :
If there are 7500 finalists out of 4M (don’t know if the figure is’ the same for 2 episodes), they would have an average IQ of 146.5 with a correlation of 1, and 130 with a correlation of 0.65. For any two white siblings, the average difference is 11 points in IQ (it’s not the average IQ difference among siblings in general which would be more like 2 points) versus 15/17 for unrelated people in the same race. Thus 119.
I’ve read that only 0.5% of the general U.S. population is capable of scoring high enough on the PSAT to be a national merit finalist. If you treat the PSAT as an IQ test, that equates to IQ 138+ (U.S. norms) or 137 (white norms, in Laurie Strode’s day). Since biological sibling correlate 0.5 in IQ, the expected IQ of her sibling would be 0.5(137 – 100) + 100 = 119
I did not regress Laurie’s IQ for the imperfect correlation between PSAT & IQ, because IQ itself is imperfectly correlated with IQ (different actual IQ tests give different results) and because I’m assuming she’d score high on the PSAT because she’s smart, I’m not assuming she’s smart because she scored high on the PSAT. Only in cases where the only reason a score is known is because someone scored high (i.e. harvard students) or low (class for slow learners) does it make sense to regress imho, because only in those cases is the known score a likely outlier.
I don’t know why so few people become national merit finalists according to your stats. Maybe I’ve been misinformed or maybe there are a lot of people who could have been finalists but never took the PSAT since it’s not as important as the SAT.
1)
1.5m participants
50k selected nationally
16K selected by states demi-finalists
15k finalists nation wide
8k medalists
So the average would be 1 in 1000 if you medal and 1 in 500 if you take semi-finalist. So 146.5 or 143.
2) as you ve got only 2 people in your sample, the average difference in IQ among 2 siblings, wich is 11 points would probably more accurate than using the correlation of 0.5 . But as both are very rough estimates because of the sample size, it’s good enough.
3) I would regress at 0.65 because I doubt the SAT + the rest of the process are perfectly correlated with IQ.
At the end, it’s OK 😉
Greg Cochran seems to think it’s a one in 200 level achievement (IQ 138 if the PSAT were an IQ test) but perhaps he’s mistaken too. I’ll have to research it more.
Okay, I found this source:
Each year, about 1.6 million students take the PSAT. Of the juniors who take the exam, about 16,000 earn scores that qualify them as Semifinalists (that’s around 1%). This group is narrowed down to 15,000, who become Finalists. Of this group, about 7,500 are awarded scholarships of $2,500 a year (that can be renewed each year you’re in college).
So to become a semifinalist you need to score in the top 16,000 (top 1% of 1.6 million). If we assume that everyone who would score very high actually takes the test, then that’s top 16,000 out of all 4 million U.S. 15 year-olds, so one in 250 level (IQ 138).
So I should have said semi-finalist, not finalist, although once you reach the semi-finalist level, it’s no longer about PSAT scores I don’t think, but other criteria like grades.
Yes Pumpkin. Still one point : unless you assume she is the dumbest of the semi-finalists, you have to take the average of the group (the 8000th out of 4 000 000) So it’s 1 out of 500 (and not 250).
It’s like if you select the half brightest of the population and choose a random person in this group, the estimated IQ would be 1 in 4 (110) even if the threshold is 1 in 2 (100).
Yes, being a national merit semi-finalist implies you scored at least one in 250 level, but the average national merit semi-finalist would be well above the minimum on the PSAT. I should have been more precise, because I do see the Laurie Strode character as only narrowly making the cut-off. One reason is that every time she subdues the killer, she tosses the knife away assuming he is dead. I could understand her making this mistake once, but twice in the same night shows a lack of brilliance.
That’s fine. I haven’t seen it because I am not into horror movies. I ve seen the last Lars Von Trier though but I see it as a movie about art.
The [redacted by pp, nov 13, 2018} has some interesting comments:
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-disparities-public-school-funding