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Monthly Archives: September 2019

Looks like the Gestalt IQ test was more accurate than I thought

28 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 140 Comments

Y’all remember this test from back in April 2017?

It turns out it might have been more accurate than I thought. On page 221-222 of Bias in Mental Testing, Jensen describes the most comprehensive factor analysis ever done.

Hakstian and Cattell (1974) administered 57 ability tests to 343 adults averaging 23.7 years of age. The tests are extremely diverse and probably constitute the most complete samplings of the domain of cognitive tests to be found in the entire literature. Each of the fifty-seven tests was homogeneous in content so as to be highly representative of a particular primary mental ability. It would be hard to imagine a much greater variety of tests than the fifty-seven tests included in this battery. Hakstian and Cattell factor analyzed the battery, which yielded nineteen significant interpretable primary factors that were rotated to oblique simple structures , that is, the primary factors were intercorrelated. Each of the primary factors is represented by three similar tests.

I have factor analyzed the matrix of intercorrelations among the nineteen primary factors. The results are shown in table 6.14. (The factors resulting from a factor analysis of oblique primary factors are called second-order factors.)

Now for the really interesting part:

The highest g loadings are found on speed of closure (0.77) and inductive reasoning (0.72). Speed of closure involves the ability to complete a gestalt when parts of the stimulus are missing. Time needed for recognition of mutilated words is a measure of this ability. It involves a kind of perceptual inference, of mentally filling in the gaps or “seeing” the relationships among the parts to form a recognizable or familiar whole.

So there you have it: the most g loaded type of test ever discovered are Gestalt.

Not only is the Gestalt test incredibly g loaded, but it’s very culture reduced.

Ironically it was commenter Mug of Pee who selected the items on the Gestalt test I used to test people here and yet the same Mug of Pee states: ” you have to give up on g or give up on the idea of culture reduced tests.”

While it’s true that culture reduced tests are often less g loaded than culture loaded tests, Gestalt is a massive exception. It’s this test that should be used for cross-cultural research, not the Raven Progressive Matrices.

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IQ in sub-Saharan Africa

26 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 92 Comments

The following chart shows the results of the WISC-IV (UK version) given to several small samples of South African children (circa 2013):

Black Africa’s Wechsler full-scale IQ

Of the six demographic groups tested, the one most representative of black Africa would likely be disadvantaged black Xhosa speakers (DBXS) and these had an average full-scale IQ of 77.08 (UK norms).

However this number is likely an overestimate because the UK WISC-IV was nine years old at the time this study was published. Although I believe the Flynn effect is overestimated because of the kaufman effect and other methodological problems, Weiss et al., 2015 were able to sidestep these issues and show that at least from the 2000s to the 2010s, WISC-IV IQ increased by 0.31 points per year in the U.S.. Assuming UK norms became inflated at the same rate, DBXS have an adjusted IQ of 74.

Of course I realize the absurdity of using a sample of just 12 kids to represent all of black Africa, but it’s so rare to get a non-elite sample of black Africans taking a test as indepth as the Wechsler that I have little choice.

Black African Matrix IQ

Because the verbal subtests of the Wechsler require cultural knowledge that many black Africans have not been exposed to, people might think they would do better on a culture reduced test like the Raven Progressive Matrices. Richard Lynn however cited a series of studies showing black Africans did even worse on the Raven, averaging an IQ no better than 70.

However Wicherts et al,, 2009 accused Lynn of cherry-picking studies and argued that the true average Raven IQ of black Africa was 80. It is therefore interesting to note that on the matrix reasoning subtest of the WISC-IV, DBXS averaged an IQ equivalent of 83 (79 after adjusting for the Flynn effect).

Does this mean Wicherts et al. were right and Lynn was wrong? Probably not. The matrix reasoning subtest on the Wechsler has a test-retest reliability of around 0.66, while the Raven’s might be as high as 0.95. Taking the square root of these values tells us that matrix reasoning correlates 0.81 with true score while the Raven correlates 0.975.

What this means is that if the true score IQ of black Africans on this type of test is 31 points below the UK mean set at 100, they’ll score 31(0.975) = 30 points lower on the Raven, but only 31(0.81) = 25 points lower on the matrix reasoning subtest. The observed subtest score of 79 is not far from this prediction.

How would black Africans score on a truly culture reduced test?

The Raven is often described as a culture reduced test, however given the huge Flynn effect it has shown in some countries, many people are skeptical. One source of cultural bias might be exposure to columns and rows in school and media.

In my opinion, the most culture fair “verbal” subtest on the Wechsler is Digit Span and the most culture fair performance subtest is Block Design. Unlike Matrix reasoning, Block Design is a concrete task that is considered fun, and its fast pace makes it less dependent on culturally acquired values like persistence, cognitive confidence and intellectual discipline.

Thus, it’s interesting to note that after Flynn effect adjustments, DBXS averaged IQ 86 on Digit Span and IQ 80 on Block Design. Given the moderate correlation between these subtests, that works out to a composite IQ of about 80 which I take as a rough estimate for the real intelligence of black Africa.

Note, real intelligence should not be confused with genomic intelligence. Rather, real intelligence refers to a valid measure of the cognitive phenotype, but in the case of black Africans, the genotype is likely higher since even scores on the most culturally reduced tests can be depressed by sub-optimum nutrition and disease.

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Who captured African slaves?

22 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 112 Comments

Tags

HBD, Henry Louis Gates Jr, John Thornton, Linda Heywood, reperations, slavery

I remember being a child when I first learned how black people came to the Americas. Before then I had just assumed they were immigrants like other visible minorities but to be told they were brought as slaves was too much for a child’s brain to process. I had never even heard of one group of people enslaving another, even in fiction, let alone in reality. WHAT?

I remember being disturbed by this for months as a child, but learning this fact really paved the way for me to believe in HBD. If slavery could be true, then HBD was likely true too; indeed one would seem to lead to the other.

For how else could one race of people have been so advanced they could just march on to a foreign continent and drag millions of the natives kicking and screaming to the New World as slaves?

However as I got older, a more nuanced picture of slavery emerged.

In 2010, Henry Louis Gates Jr wrote the following in The New York Times:

The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike….

….For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”

But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.

Gates is trying to make it sound like many African Americans are in denial about the role Africans played in slavery, but perhaps it’s Gates who is in denial and thus projecting onto his co-ethnics. You see, for Gates to admit that white people just marched into Africa and simply kidnapped native Africans by the millions is to grant the white man a level of utter superiority that Gates simply can not live with, so instead he pushes a narrative that slavery was somehow a business exchange among equals.

Perhaps Gates would rather believe his own people sold his ancestors out than believe his own people were so utterly dominated by another people. Meanwhile white academics, eager to absolve their own ancestral guilt over slavery, are more than happy to push Gates’s narrative, which also fits the anti-HBD narrative of the elite.

Ironically the issue of who captured African slaves could make for strange bedfellows, with HBDers and reparation advocates both arguing that it was the white man, and black professors & white republicans arguing Africans sold themselves.

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HBD & slavery

19 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 262 Comments

Because intelligence can be defined as the ability to adapt situations to your advantage, it’s only natural to expect smart populations to exploit less smart populations. In the extreme case this is known as slavery. For example, humans are smarter than animals and thus enslave horses, camels and other beasts of burden.

Thus if HBD is true, we should expect that among humans, high IQ races turn lower IQ races into beasts of burden, and indeed this has been a major theme of history. Caucasoids enslaved blacks, and among blacks, the Bantu enslaved the lower IQ pygmies. Meanwhile among Caucasoids, the high IQ Ashkenazim have arguably enslaved whites to the extent that they have tricked them into fighting Israel’s enemies for them in the Middle East.

There are exceptions though. Whites have higher IQs than Arabs yet Arabs enslaved whites. East Asians have higher IQs than whites, yet whites have never been enslaved by East Asians.

Aside from our enormous brains, it’s our ability to enslave other animals that most shows the supremacy of human intelligence. Thus among humans we should find that on average, big brained races are smarter than small brained races and that slave master races are smarter than slave races.

Of course some slave races are smarter than the very groups who enslaved them (i.e. whites vs their Arab slave masters ), and some smaller brained races are smarter than their bigger brained counterparts (high IQ Ashkenazim vs the big brained white race), however if my race not only enslaved your race, but ALSO has a bigger brain, I guarantee my race is smarter than yours AND that it’s genetic (on average of course).

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Music brings back memories

10 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 341 Comments

Tags

gays, Tori Amos

One of my greatest musical inspirations is Tori Amos. I was introduced to her by a childhood friend of East Asian ancestry and we saw a concert of hers when were like 10 or 12. At the time I was more interested in Tracy Chapman because I played the guitar but seeing Amos in concert was life changing, and inspired me to play the piano like my East Asian friend.

He suspected, based on her facial features, that Amos might be part East Asian which made us like her even more.

What I didn’t know was that he was gay, though my mother suspected. One night when we were teenagers watching TV in the basement, he wanted to watch porn. I had little interest in porn (still don’t) but I enjoy French cinema and this particular porno was French and tastefully done.

But my fiend kept complaining that the male character (who was black) would not take off his speedo.

“Why are you gay?” I finally asked.

“Maybe,” he replied.

He would never quite admit to being gay, instead saying he was bisexual, because sometimes he wanted soft, and other times he wanted hard. But I never saw any sexual interest in females on his part. He had a white girlfriend in high school but he couldn’t stand her, and instead was obsessed with a white preppy guy who attended our school.

After high school we lost touch completely, but I will always be grateful that he introduced me to Tori Amos. I doubt I would have ever heard of her without him. This is one of her best songs:

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One of the most powerful love songs ever recorded

09 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

J. Phillipe Rushton, love songs, soulmate, Tracy Chapman

image found here

To those who have found true love, only to have had it slip away, there’s perhaps no song more powerful than The Promise by Tracy Chapman, about the eternal hope that one day you’ll be reunited with your soulmate.

I sometimes think only black people can produce music this powerful. The rest of humanity lost that ability tens of thousands of years ago, but blacks preserve it because they were the first to branch off the human evolutionary tree, as Rushton noted.

Campbell and Tishkoff (2010) Figure 2. The Recent African Origin model of
modern humans and population substructure in Africa.

So turn off the lights, turn up the volume and let this black woman’s talent take you home to the very soul of our collective humanity that began in Mother Africa.

Although the song seems to be about romantic love, it can also be applied to the love a parent has a child.

Darren Graber on youtube writes:

I’m 44 and I have recently been diagnosed with a stage 2 glioma (brain tumor) and have been told that I have perhaps 1 year left, I think this is the saddest song I’ve ever heard, I love this song so much and want it to be played at my funeral but I worry it will upset my daughter to much, it scares me to think of my daughter on her own and that I won’t be here to comfort and support her and it breaks my heart that I will never see my daughter graduate university or that I won’t be there to walk her down the Isle on her wedding day or meet my grand children, I love you Esmee to the moon and back and am so proud of the beautiful, intelligent and courageous young woman you have become, I know that one day (many many) years from now we will meet again, Esmee those day’s will be truly glorious fore we shall walk hand in hand through the fields of paradise as we listen to a choir of angels having shed the sins and struggles we carried for all those years, god bless you all, please be kind to one another and cherish your loved ones because life is just to short and far to precious to waste on bitterness and hate

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Oprah: the early years

06 Friday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 43 Comments

Tags

1980s, black billionaire, jheri curl, Oprah, Phil Donahue, The Oprah Winfrey Show

Oprah in Baltimore, before moving to Chicago

The video below, from The Oprah Winfrey show 20th anniversary DVD, paints a rare glimpse of Oprah’s talk show roots. In the mid 80s she was hired to host a local morning low budget talk show in Chicago, that was airing in the same time slot (and right down the street) from the great Phil Donahue, who at the time, was the number one (daytime) talk show in the country.

No one in their wildest dreams thought Oprah would ever beat Donahue. For he was the best in the country and she was black (which was considered really bad in the 1980s), female, and overweight.

“I don’t know another overweight jheri curl person who can say ‘I made it!'” laughs Oprah.

Not only did she make it, but she would go on to become the World’s ONLY black billionaire and the most influential woman on the planet.

Not bad for an overweight jheri curl!

When Oprah first arrived in Chicago she had so little clout she had to bribe strangers on the street to sit in her audience with heat and doughnuts.

My favorite part of the below clip is when she says “We were successful IMMEDIATELY! We were so successful, so quickly, it was STUNNING…”

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Autism vs schizophrenia: gray matter vs white matter

05 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 43 Comments

Tags

autism, brain pruning, gray matter, men.. women, schizophrenia, sex difference, white matter

image found here

cnn.com reports:

Your brain consists of two types of tissue, gray matter and white matter. In your first decade of life, the gray matter grows and expands rapidly as many new synapses, or connections between nerves, are being made. The gray matter grows as you learn and are exposed to new experiences as a child.

Then, as your body prepares for puberty, your brain starts to prune back some of that gray matter and amp up its production of white matter, which allows different parts of the brain to share information better and faster, said Dr. Jess Shatkin, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center….”The brain volume, the total volume, doesn’t really change, but we lose about 1% of gray matter starting around 13 and we gain about 1% of white matter at the same time, and that trade off keeps going,” Shatkin said.

However it seems that in both autism and schizophrenia, this process goes wrong, with autistics ending up with not enough white matter and schizophrenics ending up with not enough gray matter.

Webb MD states:

Researchers say white and gray matter are both necessary for general intelligence, but they perform different functions. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the network or connections between those processing centers.

The lack of white matter might explain why autistics tend to have narrow interests. If white matter allows different brain parts to share information, which is needed for broad interests, those lacking this may be forced to focus on a single topic.

This may also explain why autistics lack social skills. Reading people requires integrating verbal and non-verbal cues and thus using different parts of the brain at once.

Perhaps this research also reveals why autistics tend to come from high IQ families (or at least higher class ones) or why high people often show a dash of autism. Having a lot of gray matter is linked to high IQ, but if your kid inherits only your gray matter genes without the developmental timing to prune that gray to make room for white matter, he might be severely autitsic.

Meanwhile the high white to gray ratio of schizophrenics may help explain their delusions. Sharing information between unrelated brain parts might lead to a lot of creative theories, but if you lack the gray matter to test these theories with logic, you soon could lose contact with reality.

Research into gray and white matter is further evidence of Crespi and Badcock’s theory that autism is the opposite of schizophrenia.

It also supports Simon Barron Cohen’s extreme male brain theory of autism, in that males tend to have higher gray/white matter ratios than females.

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Oprah schooled young woman on the Genius of Toni Morrison

03 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 115 Comments

Tags

Oprah, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Toni Morrison

Sometimes the younger generation of African Americans doesn’t appreciate the Genius of older black icons. They may think these elder icons are overrated.

One young woman attending a taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show had that attitude towards the great Toni Morrison, and Oprah was having none of it. Oprah got in her face like only Oprah can.

Toni Morrison: 1931 to 2019. RIP

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How many cerebral neurons did King Kong have?

03 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

cerebral neurons, encephalization quotient, intelligence, king kong, Suzana Herculano-Houzel

My photo-shopped image of Suzana Herculano-Houzel in King Kong’s hand

According to Brazilian neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel the reason humans are so smart is not because humans have the biggest brains for our body size per se, (highest encephalization quotient) but rather because we have both a big brain and a primate brain. SHH’s theory is that primate brains are especially densely packed with neurons, so even though our brains are small compared to whales and elephants, the primate packing density gives us more cerebral neurons.

Well King Kong has a far bigger brain than humans do, and King Kong is also a primate, so by SHH’s logic, he should be smarter than people. And yet King Kong seemed no smarter than your average gorilla, which makes sense because King Kong’s huge body guarantees it would have a much smaller encephalization quotient than people do.

So while cerebral neuron count might be roughly as accurate as EQ when predicting the intelligence of real life species, it fails when it comes to fiction.

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