A reader sent me the following email:
In the article: ‘Do you need to be genius to be genius’ you said
greatness is not an exclusively property of 120+ IQ people. I think it
is. All the great people in the world have 120 or more. Even
subjective iq measurements of those among them whose IQ scores arent
known, have come out to 120 + iq…
I can think of many examples of eminent people who scored below 120 on an IQ type test:
JFK tested at 119
Bill Cosby’s SAT score equated to IQ 84 (though as a child he aced a formal IQ test)
JD Salinger scored IQ 104
Howard Stern’s SAT scores equated to IQ 115
Muhammad Ali’s army test score equated to IQ 85
Condoleeza Rice was told she wasn’t college material based on her PSAT scores (though she aced an IQ test as a toddler)
Rudy Giuliani’s 1073 SAT score likely equated to IQ 119 in his day
The problem is, any time you cite these, people immediately call the IQ score into question. The score is dismissed because the person was tested during childhood, or the test did not measure the cognitive domains the person excels in, or the person wasn’t trying or had a learning disability preventing him from understanding the instructions etc.
In some cases these explanations are valid, but if no amount of evidence can convince you that an accomplished person doesn’t have a 120+ IQ, then your view is unfalsifiable and thus unscientific.
There are four main reasons people think all accomplished people have 120+ IQs:
They don’t realize how high IQ 120 is
An IQ of 120+ means you’re smarter than 90% of (white) Americans your age. A young adult who is taller than 90% of white Americans his age is 6’1″+ which is considered a very respectable height and yet an equally rare IQ is considered chopped liver.
They don’t appreciate IQ inflation
Because people take many IQ tests that often give wildly different scores and then cherry-pick their best scores, an IQ below 120 sounds low to them. Also, because there are so many elite colleges and high IQ societies accepting scores from so many different tests, it feels like there are so many communities with average IQs above 140, when in reality, many of these groups would regress to the 120s if given a test not used to select them. Part of what admission tests select for is scoring higher on the admission test than you score on other intelligence tests.
They overvalue intelligence
Intelligence might be the single most important trait, but it’s dwarfed by the totality of other traits. IQ is probably no more important to most types of success than height is to fighting ability. On average the best boxers in the world will be well above six feet, but occasionally men of average height will dominate (i.e. Mike Tyson). Even in fields where height is overwhelmingly important (i.e. basketball), you’ll find the occasional super-short guy (“Muggsy” Bogues), so even at the top of fields as IQ loaded as science, I’d expect a few not-smart people.
They don’t appreciate the bivariate normal distribution
Everyone knows that a super failure can have a super high IQ, but so many deny that a super achiever can have a super low IQ. But the correlation between IQ and achievement is only meaningful if you believe in the bivariate normal distribution which means that for every high IQ person who is low on achievement, there must be a high achievement person who is low in IQ.
Of course these statistical models are just abstractions that are never perfectly observed in nature so things are not quite as symmetrical as the graph implies, but they’re pretty good approximations.
People have no trouble accepting that height can dramatically overpredict weight and weight can dramatically overpredict height, yet when it comes to IQ and achievement, they think only the former can greatly overpredict the latter and not vice versa.
Pumpkin Person 
This is actually a good article.
Puppy
Stole the words right out of my mouth. Indeed a pretty good article. There’s a lot of misconceptions about IQ, typically coming from the statistically illiterate.
Just one clarification, though pp touched on this a little bit I feel it is important to address as it is likely what a lot of people sense is somewhat problematic about IQ and test taking in general.
Consider Muhammad Ali, everyone accepts that he was a pretty witty guy. Some might even say that his IQ result is entirely bogus. I’m one of them, especially if you consider the fact that he was a draft dissident. He was actually a fairly bright student though it seems it was discovered later on in life that he had dyslexia. In any case IMO had he chosen a different profession(a few less blows to the head that likely stripped him of a standard deviation or two) he probably would have scored well above 100.
I agree with PP’s article and general perspective but we also need to exercise good judgement with these things. Everything does not hang by a single test. People have bad days, bad weeks or years even. I personally believe in IQ testing but the margin for error is high IMO. One can probably score a full SD below their actual potential in less than ideal conditions. I’ve seen super bright people freeze under some conditions and look like complete dummies. Of course most people understand what tests are all about and generally gear themselves up to giving it their best but every now and then things do not go their way. This does not all of a sudden throw testing in disrepute though, over 90% of people likely score within a few points of their actual true score. So there is obviously value and validity in IQ testing.
It may seem that a lot of people intuitively understand the flaws in IQ testing and like to push back against IQ absolutists. On the flip side there’s also a lot of dummies that reject IQ tests all together(classic sour grapes types) and well, they’re just dummies.
i love having sex with black men at truck stops too.
I dont think you need 120 to be a president. George Bush seemed a lot less than 120. Same with Reagan. I assume trump must be if he cant multiply simple numbers in his head. Apparently Harry Truman wasn’t particularly bright either.
Im surprised Salinger is 104. The Catcher in the Rye is a pretty mature book whose main character strikes me as above average in intelligence.
I read some of his short stories and they weren’t as impressive. I can’t remember anything notable about them.
We should set up a book club on here. We can like a group of middle aged females i.e. Oprah’s target audience. What kinds of books does Oprah recommend?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprah's_Book_Club
This is the list of oprahs recommendations. Notice how the IQ level of the typical reader shoots up in the last year of oprahs book club. She goes from recommending a lot of Bill Cosby and other black autobiographical gay crap to pretty heavy stuff like Cormac McCarthy and Anne Kerinina.
It makes me think she wasn’t picking the books especially in the last year. Or she had a new source of advice on what to read. Nobody goes intellectually from reading Bill Cosby to Tolstoy. She must have picked up a list of ‘the greatest ever novels’. Thats where Dickens, Faulkner and all that come in. What a hack.
Oh actually the heavy hitters are spread out over her last 6 years. My bad. And she still has time (audacity?) to recommend a nigerian short story writer in her last year writing stories about himself.
She picked Freedom by Franzen. In the wikipedia article it says its considered one of the ‘Great American Novels’. What?!! It was definitely not that noteworthy. It was actually a bit boring in places and really contrived to fit the democrat vs Republican social stereotypes. It was like something a 15 year old would come up with. For example the husband is a hardcore environmentalist who hangs out with a minority woman while the son in a total jerkoff pigheaded idiot who joins the army. No prizes for guessing what their affiliations were, (or Franzen’s).
Puppy should write a novel. It can’t be any worse than what the blacks write on Oprahs recommended list. Puppy could call it – ‘The story of a Canadian IQ blogger who went out one day to buy a book for a good price’. That would have the same intellectual heft and hue as many of Oprahs selections.
I kind of find it darkly funny to read the titles of the books by black authors. Its definitely something Steve Sailer would appreciate if I ever told him my view on black ‘literature’.
Jonathan Franzen felt conflicted about his book The Corrections being chosen as a book club selection. After the announcement was made, he expressed distaste with being in the company of other Oprah’s Book Club authors, saying in an interview that Winfrey had “picked some good books, but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe , myself, even though I think she’s really smart and she’s really fighting the good fight.”[15] Franzen added that his novel was a “hard book for that audience.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Thats EXACTLY my reaction and i live in a basement. Some of the crap on Oprahs list makes the other authors look bad by affiliation. I would be angry too. Its good that shes encouraging reading, but not Bill fucking Cosby. Hahahaha.
The Cosby books don’t count. She was recommending those for parents to buy for their children. And she was trying to encourage daytime TV viewers to read so she had to pick a lot of easy books that Franzen eschews. If you really want to judge Oprah’s literary tastes, read Toni Morrison. She was so impressed with the novel Beloved she spent a decade trying to make it into a movie.
Ok, but is a one point difference really that significant? Second of all, what is a high IQ? Third of all, wouldn’t SAT scores be inflated by practice- you can study for it and increase your score massively- Is think the first few SAT practice tests you take are most indicative of IQ. Also, wouldn’t you think that a 110 IQ theoretical Astrophysicist in the big leagues is still smart- even though the IQ score is lower (110 IQ could get you in the “brains club”, especially if you have a verbal or nonverbal IQ over 115)?
Also, what if you SAT score (not practiced for) is higher (or lower) than you IQ? Would that be an error interval thing? Or, to get an accurate picture- would you have to average them both, with the Ravens?
Where are the scientists in this? Did Francis Crick really have a 115 IQ?
This interview with Arthur Jensen is pretty interesting, and is proof either Feynman or Crick had an IQ significantly higher than what’s rumored. The test subject is unlikely to be Shockley cause he’d already scored below 130 on two occasions:
“I have had personal encounters with three Nobelists in
science, including Feynman, who attended a lecture I gave at
Cal Tech and later discussed it with me. He, like the other two
Nobelists I’ve known (Francis Crick and William Shockley),
not only came across as extremely sharp, especially in
mathematical reasoning, but they were also rather obsessive
about making sure they thoroughly understood the topic
under immediate discussion. They at times transformed my
verbal statements into graphical or mathematical forms and
relationships. Two of these men knew each other very well
and often discussed problems with each other. Each thought
the other was very smart. I got a chance to test one of these
Nobelists with Terman’s Concept Mastery Test, which was
developed to test the Terman gifted group as adults, and he
obtained an exceptionally high score even compared to the
Terman group all with IQ>139 and a mean of 152. “
Page 4-5:
Click to access Discussions%20of%20Genius%20-%20Interview%20with%20Arthur%20Jensen.pdf
I’ve never accepted this ridiculous notion that Feynman’s IQ was only 125. Many have refuted this idea since but I think this notion has prevailed and in some instances pushed as a way to instill hope in average or just above average people, that they too could be geniuses if they wanted or worked hard enough at it. Feynman probably played along knowing that this was for the greater good, though someone as accomplished as him probably couldn’t care too much about some “IQ score”.
Wow they just put someone in jail for 3 years in relation to the russia hacking underwear crap [redacted by pp, dec 12, 2018]. Jesus. How can people act like any of it is serious.
[redacted by pp, dec 12, 2018]
what i look like…
can’t find a picture. too big.
i have the john holmes of heads.
maybe…
but still small…
maybe…
peepee imagines gates would become some kind of chief in the savage world.
she forgets that infectious disease is the biggest enemy of the savage, and so a dumb person with a strong immune system is more FIT than gates.
It’s plausible that if you cloned Gates and had him raised 70 kya via time travel, he would have invented the bow and arrow, killed all the men, leaving the women no one else to mate with, making Gates our Y chromosome Adam 🙂
my reaction………What the fuck how the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? How in the fuck? What the fuck!? Etc.
bill gates:
mugabe:
Hahahaha, I really like Trump even more now.
it’s funny how there was me and this guy called “pat maloney” who needed hats (for the school play) and helmets (for football) ordered, because the school didn’t have our size, but there were two guys smarter than us who had average size heads.
interesting series by a gay mexican on youtube. “why it’s almost impossible to…”
the answer to why it’s almost impossible to throw a 110 mph pitch is that if you did you’d likely tear the ligaments in your elbow.
and that’s FAKE NEWS.
ryan and feller threw 110+ once or twice.
watch it here: https://www3.watchfree.ac/movie-fastball-2016-watch-free-putlocker.html.
Anatoly Pisarenko
Dan Severn
that’s it. otherwise you’re a fag.
of course straight white women are 100% irrational.
sean connery is their paridigmatic sexy man, yet they’re grossed out by this picture:
from the perspective of someone who has actually lifted weights…
connery’s arms are SUPER wimpy.
…paradigmatic sexy man…
BUT!
connery is tall and has a VERY good voice.
the voice is the most under-rated of human traits.
any ideas on how I can “look” more criminal in terms of dress. it turns out the top 10% most psychopathic males father 30% of the entire population ( at least in Sweden) and im trying to replicate their success with the ladies.
” it turns out the top 10% most psychopathic males father 30% of the entire population ( at least in Sweden) ”
Wait wtf? source??
I also read that virtually all serial killers receive love letters. it just shows that women cant help but be attracted to the most dominant hyper aggressive males possible. Im thinking of a strategy. I guess when it comes to chicks I should roleplay as a hitman or some government agent. Keep the charade going. Of course once they get pregnant shit gets real but that’s fine, that was the whole point anyway.
” it just shows that women cant help but be attracted to the most dominant hyper aggressive males possible.”.
that conclusion sounds wierd. If there were as many male dominatrix fans as there were serial killers, theyd be swimming in females since there would be an large disparancy in numbers between the compatible females cuasing an extreme ratio. I would expect the same effect to be prescent in serial killers.
Women like what the media and associates show them, but a little rougher (as having it rough in public would be obsene).
Thinking Mouse you have to understand who women like and who they actually get pregnant by are two completely different groups of men. Women ovulate for less than 24 hours 1 time every month. Meaning over 99% of the time they are attracted to something completely different than when it comes time to conceive a baby. Ergo most fathers are inevitably not fatherhood material due to the fact that over 99% of the time women are not interested in men with great genes. Imagine only being attracted to your favorite porn star a single day out of the month and the rest of the time she is undesirable. Any way the data shows in western society there is a Hierarchy of reproductive success. Criminals that evade law enforcement have the most children, followed by financially successful non criminals, followed by incarcerated and repeat offender criminals (guys who get caught), and finally financially unsuccessful non criminal offending males at the very bottom.
as you can see nice guys finish last https://imgur.com/a/XHOBjgz
I think that ovulation thing is psychology bullshit. Still, give me the source for the psychopath breeding thing.
You could pretend to be pumpkin person. And his corrupt and evil reputation will work with any women, but especially canadian women.
Thinking Mouse I don’t give a damn what you think, and you can go look it it up your damn self. You have fingers and thumbs use them.
Apparently Nobel prize winner Vernon Smith only has an IQ of 130. Surprising…
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/12/life-experimental-economics-volume-vernon-smith.html
1) 2% is quite high. If it were height, it would tower at 77 inches (6 ft 4.77 inches).
2) He did experimental economist. Not theory. And he is Asperger wich helps with obsessive data collection and patterns recognition
Yes autistic traits are definitely helpful. Just not full blown autism
Mikey what happens if you fail to impregnate anyone? Will you then pay for a mail order bride or some surrogate mothers? You can actually buy surrogates from third world countries very easily.
You could change your gender and impregnate yourself?
I have a 2 year old daughter Pumpkin wrote a whole post about it.https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/06/25/brexit-ethnic-genetic-interests/
Meanwhile commenter Mikey Blayze wrote:
“I’ve spent the last…3 years Struggling to attain reproductive success. If evolutionary psychology and by extension this blog didn’t exist I wouldn’t be a Father.”
Wow, human life is going to exist because of my blog! This is an example of me advancing my genetic interests. The fact that Mikey is influenced by my blog, shows his personality is similar to mine. Since personality is incredibly polygenetic, he must be genetically similar to me (regardless of his racial background). Thus, the fact that he is having kids, shows the human gene pool is a tiny bit more genetically similar to me than it would have been had I not started this blog. I have cleverly increased my genetic fitness, without the financial and stress burden of becoming a father myself, although I now have enough money to raise 10 kids.
Genetic interests can operate on multiple levels, not ethnic only. Indeed interracial couples and interracial friends tend to be even more similar, to negate the fact that they are racially different.
If I were to survey my readers, I would find that although we are all very different races, on average they are similar to me, and further, they would be most similar on the most heritable traits.
So be fruitful and multiply my little pumpkin heads!
apparently im the only one taking his advice.
I didnt take PPs advice but i think i am similar to PP. I felt i never wanted to have kids when i grow up, even since i was a kid. After i entered my teens i started feeling that the world is not worth bringing kids into.
Puppy was going heavy on the booze that day he wrote that.
Its not worth bringing children into your instincts are in fact correct. However regardless it is your kind heart that’s holding you back from reproductive success. For you I will link the criminal studies.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513814000774
read the full paper not just the abstract. The top 10% of psychopathic males at least in Sweden father 30% of the entire population. There is also more than 1 study on the subject, compound your research.
I don’t have much of a conscience so me bringing in more children into the world is a cold hearted thing I am fully fine with doing.
Criminality likelihood as been decoded down to the genetic level. Have 2 copies of 1 gene while normal people have 1 boom psychopath. its why The most extreme psychopaths have the most reproductive success yet most of us are not psychopaths. Another factor is the mutations for our moms to have criminal genes is not being selected for, because it would never lead to them birthing more children. As we know two tall parents =tall children. 1 psychopath plus 1 empath gives a mixed bag.
Also as automation continues to replace every job that can be done by human hands. Expect criminals to become more intelligent as more and more high IQ men, regardless of social class are kicked out of the work force.
We already have cyber criminals that rob your bitcoins, and steal your identity. Also street level drug dealers that accept debit and credit cards. attach a reader to the smartphone and swipe, simple. This stuff is already happening.
Expect it to increase exponentially. maybe not in my lifetime but definitely in my daughters, cyber gangs committing cyber warfare with civilians and others commonly will be a reality. I also suspect the first fully automated “trap house” will be invented. Where a automated machine cooks the crack, the home is outfitted with a security system. A machine delivers the dosage thru the slit in the door. Customers swipe their cards instead of using cash. The house is fortified to deter break ins. I am estimating a fully automated trap house would cost about $15,000 dollars just for the prototype. The return profits would be more than enough to justify that 1 time cost.
Looks like the french arent as retarded as we thought and have realised they elected an establishment puppet. How they collectively failed the iq test of that election might not matter. As dear puppy is fond of saying. Iq is about adapting to your mistakes.
I might join my countries new nationalist party. Id be a bit concerned they are libertarian on economics. I dont think they are natioanl socialists. I dont mean in the racial belief sense but the policy sense. I debated some loser last year about a flat tax. People like that should be forced to test for autism before veing allowed to vote on other peoples affairs. I would literally rather my life depended on a schizophrenic person than an autistic person to make choices for me. Its funny how legally they can take away your right to vote if youre mad but not if you have autism. So fucking dumb. Many autistic people are also retarded in terms of iq.
mec vannin or plaid cymru?
Are you welsh?? Ive always thought that…
Seems like “name redacted” agrees.
Iq ‘exists ‘. Its not a social construction [redacted by pp, dec 14, 2018]. Just like the height of a tree is not a ‘social construction’. Not unless you want to go into wittgenstein land and say without humans the concept of height (as a relative phenomenon wouldnt exist). However an absolute phenomenon of iq and height both exist. You can assign whatever sumbols or labels you want and they will translate to the same reality. In this sense i believe ina reality. That is, whoever designed all of this designed something which can be empirically verified withon our own system of logic and someone from china and an eskimo with no loteracy will agree on it once a common symbolic system is agreed on. [redacted by pp, dec 14, 2018] should stop reading his foucault. I hate that guy.
This reminds me of colour blondness which is akin to social blindness. I ised to sit beside a guy in my science class in school who had colour blindness to red and green. If 99% of people had that and 1% didnt is that 1% mentally insane to see red and green. No. Red and green exist even if only 1% of the population osnt colour blind. There are a lot of complex reasons behind this assertion. But it may be likened to a vry hogh iq persons opinion vs the guy on the street on a particular technocal matter. I reserve the right to deem phenomenon as ’empirical’ even if we dont have the instruments to measure them accurately. E.g. all that micro physics stuff like quarks which exist theoretically and will soon empirically. What makes a phenomenon open to empiricism or possible empiricism is basically the imagination. Im not joking. If you could imahine a way to do it, why not?
How would i test for a flying spaghetti monster. Some aort of gigantic telescope linked to an ai constantly scanning the skies? I dont know but thete must be a reason we say it doesnt exist based on logic. If logic says it. Then empirics should follow in some way. This is something i need to think more about. I could be mistaken.
My father was red / green blind. I would have liked to test what kind of « daltonian » he was.
You are wrong. Colours are constructed by your brain from reality but the colours you see are not the full spectrum. Some human have tetrachromacy and see 100 million colours instead of the 1 million.
And the object you see doesn’t exist as you see them because it’s your brain that has evolved to distinguish what you can grasp (com-prehension) from the rest. Not to contemplate absolute reality. There is a primate bias. That’s why it’s difficult to build good robots. We don’t know how to make them see the world in the most efficient manner given their knowledge processing power and our limited comprehension of what we do. We are not even able to formalize the rules of vision or language. We don’t even know what is the logical structure of those rules nor how they are implemented in our brain (lato sensu).
There is so much we don’t know ! So many alleged obvious things that aren’t … that’s why we need scientists, philosophers and artists
Are you saying other creatures can see more than a few colours. If so, seeing more than red and green for example, doesn’t make red and green redundant. Your analogy is closer to a man with 3 eyes rather than 2.
no. Colours is a continuum that doesn’t necessarily matches the words each language for colours.
People always tell – I guess it’s true – that Inuits have thirty words for the different colours white snow have.
You can test people by asking them how many coloured segment they see starting from gross differences in the spectrum and then going down until they stop seeing any diferences.
As for cycloped eyes, it would improve multi-dimension vision and the scope of your vision, not colours. Dogs and cats see at 287degrees instead of 180 degrees like humans. And they see better in obscurity. And they track better moving things. But then, they have less colours and contours than humans. And there is extremely large variability among humans.
The inuit might have 30 words for snows colour, but most people would identify snows colour as ‘white’ (in whatever their language is) as would the eskimos themselves in relation to say, the colour of their eyes.
A dog is colour blind so would see white everywhere. He wouldn’t see ‘no colour’. (This is my argument).
Also Im a bit confused. Are you saying colours don’t exist because there is a continuum that exists of the light spectrums that mean colours are seen differently by different creatures (something I didnt know) or are you saying colours like red and green do exist but some creatures can see the tint of the colours better. What Im suggesting is that it doesn’t matter what label you call red or ‘suncrush red’ or ‘desert red’ etc, those colours exist.
Phil you are puppy person.
😉
yes he is
So, would Bill Cosby’s IQ be an average of the Formal IQ test and the SAT?
A composite score, not an average