Tags
Anthony Burgess, fire, fluid vs crystallized, IQ, nuclear weapons, paleolithic, Quest for Fire, vocabulary, war
With all the talk in the news about a potential war, it’s a good time to ask what war was like 80,000 years ago, as brilliantly depicted by one of my all time favorite movies, Quest for Fire (1980)
There were no guns so people (and I use that term loosely) would stab with spears, throw rocks or simply wrestle. Instead of dropping bombs on cities, people would try to drop boulders on folks on sitting around a camp fire by pushing it off of an above cliff.
The tribes in Quest for Fire can be divided into three main levels. 1) those smart enough to make fire (potential IQ around 80),
2) those smart enough to maintain fire but not smart enough to make it (potential IQ around 70),
and 3) those not smart enough to make or maintain it so they must steal it from more advanced tribes (potential IQ around 50).
Today every human population has mastered fire so we no longer fight wars over that, and instead (as Lion of the Blogosphere has implied) the World is divided into countries smart enough to make nuclear weapons (potential IQ around 100), countries smart enough to maintain nuclear weapons (potential IQ around 90) and countries smart enough to do neither (potential IQ around 80).
Quest for Fire as a culture fair test of fluid verbal IQ?
Another interesting feature of this film is that it could serve as a rare example of a of verbal IQ test that is both culture reduced and fluid (as opposed to crystallized). Since most of the dialogue is from no-known language ( a new language based on Indo-European roots was specifically created by Anthony Burgess ), high SES people can’t rely on their fancy education and must infer definitions on the spot.
If one scores much higher on an English vocabulary test than they do on a test like this, it implies either they were educated beyond their ability and/or cognitive decline (since their fluid verbal IQ was presumably good in the past to have acquired high crystallized verbal IQ).
Just from watching the above clip, readers can test themselves by defining the words “wogaboo” “dominyai” and “Ka Ka Ka”.
Pumpkin Person 
Puppy was actually cast in this movie along with afro.
We enjoyed acting with your mother.
Puppy my mother wasnt in the movie you silly Billy.
Too bad. Could have saved costume & makeup a lot of time.
what are the odds oprah will reveal herself to be the 12th imam?
wogaboo = enemy
dominyai = share/give
ka ka ka = ??? (Never heard it uttered)(I’m guessing it’s an exclamatory thing)
Wogaboo (partial credit)
Dominyai (full credit)
Is Wogaboo a specific type of enemy, as in the enemy tribe in question?
That’s my interpretation.
Is (2) Ron Perlman?
Yes
I know you’ve talked about this a little bit, but could you do a post on IQ and media preferences (particularly movies and TV shows, but maybe even music too??)
I could certainly try. It might require some research though.
And maybe even talk about comic books too, and maybe other generes like horror. I am not sure how you estimate the IQs of the audiences that watch/enjoy different genres.
Homo erectus invented fire over 1 million years before anatomically correct humans showed up/evolved. Pumpkins blog put Homo erectus at IQ(50).
https://pumpkinperson.com/2018/03/03/brain-size-iq-in-homo-erectus/
Erectus used fire but we don’t know if they could make it
Some doubt even Neanderthals could make it
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/the-first-fire/515427/
Puppy stop backtracking. The brilliant anime has caught the master out at his own game.
we want mossiach now! we don’t want to wait!
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=we+want+mossiach+now&t=lm&ia=videos&iax=videos&iai=Oc44P-4F6OM
It’s spelled Moshiach.
“Another interesting feature of this film is that it could serve as a rare example of a of verbal IQ test that is both culture reduced and fluid (as opposed to crystallized). Since most of the dialogue is from no-known language ( a new language based on Indo-European roots was specifically created by Anthony Burgess ), high SES people can’t rely on their fancy education and must infer definitions on the spot”.
Wouldn’t the linguistics Olympiad be an example of this?
it certainly requires high verbal fluid, but it may require high crystallized too. Hard to tell when the problems are that hard
Pumpkin, how does one know if their Arithmetic score reflects their working memory or math IQ?
I finally bit the bullet and made good progress on work I’d been putting off. Feels really good.
One of my resolutions is to structure my life a bit more. I think I scored like 5 standard deviations below avg on Simon Baron-Cohen’s systematizing quotient test.
Partisan politics are a good example of Phil’s theory that people are hard-wired to be in cults. Ironically, Jon Stewart’s “this is a comedy show and partisan hacks are ruining America” shtick probably turned more people into partisan hacks than CNN ever did.
I think the dissident right needs to be wary of lazy universalist thinking if it wants to influence public opinion more.
It’s fine to be anti-war, but responding to the recent assassination with 100-IQ takes about how “we need to stay out of the middle east, therefore this is irredeemably bad” is a real missed opportunity.
Also, don’t forget One Million B.C.
Complexity of a language is a great indicator of the intelligence of a group of people for sure. The inception of complex words into the English language can tell us the creativity/intelligence of a group of people at a specific time in human history.
“Quest of Fire” is a great movie, so is “10000 BC” (2008). I’ve always had a fascination with prehistory out of all the possible time periods that ever existed, with my 6th grade teacher, my first introduction to history mentioning that history is recorded and everything before that is prehistory. Don’t know if this is an outdated concept now but could possibly be.
War has always been brutal and with the use of drones and other high-tech devices, it’ll be deadlier, though possibly not as gruesome.
Pumpkin, on the similarities subtest, do most bilinguals clearly know the definitions of all the words presented?
Picture Concepts is a wonderful new subtest that measures similar skills as similarities but without words. I’ve noticed bilinguals do better on it than on Similarities
Wouldn’t Matrix Reasoning also technically be a nonverbal Similarities?
Yes but not as much.
I can’t post your other comment for obvious reasons.
Rahul you should read this book. It’s very old but it will answer many of your questions and more:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-09607-000
Pumpkin, the fact that my similarities problems are coming from expression and knowledge type issues, can I at least assume my reasoning is above average, since if I add all the expression and knowledge stuff back my similarities score would be above average, and for most people, variance in similarities score is due to reasoning (i’m guessing knowledge and expression issues only affect the extremes).
Pumpkin, can Matrix Reasoning make up for a lower score in similarities, when it comes to things such as writing a philosophy.
The LSAT is definitely biased in favor of hyper-rational Aspergers types. The kinds of people who think in if-then statements and keep tabs on the uses of “will,” “might,” and “probably” in all of the stimuli.
For like 25% of the questions in the reasoning and comp sections, the best 2 answer choices are practically identical. The only thing that separates them is a single thing in one of them that isn’t literally true, although most people would read it as such.
I’ve been stuck in the low 170s since I started taking practice tests, and it’s pretty much only because of that. Very frustrating.
Maybe discerning the difference between the 2 immediately is in fact “intelligent.” Not in a useful way, though. Even as a lawyer.
Yeah I think VIQ questions at the highest level have a problem of having answers that are plauisble but might not be ‘correct’.
One of the important aspects of mastering any standardized test is learning to quickly predict which answers are likely incorrect, and then narrowing down from there. As you stated, on the LSAT there is usually there’s only two (or three) plausible answers, and then you whittle down from there by looking for the answer with conditional statements in wrong order, or is too extreme, or refers to an entity that is some type of false equivalent.
There basically seems to be two broad categories of verbal IQ: general knowledge/vocabulary, and the type of logic-verbal intelligence measured by the LSAT, particularly in the Logic Games and certain types of Logical Reasoning. The correlation between the two is far from perfect.
Philosopher
So much of per talked about Iranians having high iqs, and I’ve seen some sources imply that northern middle easterners have high iqs, but on the other hand Lebanon and turkey are slightly below Mexico and Peru (80+% non-whites in poor socio-economic status) in pisa scoring. What average iq would you guess for turkey/Iran/Syria?
But here’s a more relevant question for me, something I’m very interested in. You said whites had a unique interest in fantasy, and I wonder why? I’ve kinda seen that too. If you compare iranain and European architecture, you see that non-whites have a more repetitive and consistent style, as well as a lower level of diversity in their messages. In Iran it’s all about heaven, and they dont have these abstract diverse shapes with their myriad of subconscious understandingd, but just focus on simple unconscious elegance like traditional flower ornaments, symmetrical shapes with stuff sticking in and out, and colour contrast. Please give a detailed awnser!
As a child, Farrow skipped several grades in school and took courses with the Center for Talented Youth. He attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and later transferred to Bard College for a B.A. in philosophy, and became the youngest graduate of that institution at age 15. In 2009, he received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School, and was later admitted to the New York Bar.
no adoption study on goyim raised by jews or jews by goyim.
ronan farrow = goy raised by jews = smarter than the average jew by quite a bit.
David Brock is a Jew adopted by goyim & even as a teenager, could out-argue his adopted dad, at least according to his book
david brock is also a psychopathic gay midget.
like ronan farrow’s husband.
and how do you know brock didn’t make up his jewiness like hitchens and milo?
Hitchens was a pathological sadomasochist. Pathetic and evil.
not all of them look like people from 80,000 years ago. Skhul and Qafzeh hominins would look quite different, so would Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens Sapiens of the time when compared to the third, well lets call him/her ‘apeface’.
Since it is set in Europe, about 80,000 years ago, one would mostly expect to find Neanderthals and maybe some Neanderthal-Sapiens Sapiens hybrids that didn’t contribute to later Sapiens Sapiens (probably wiped out by Neanderthals) instead of the Erectus-like third specimen.
In reality the Neanderthal tribe would have been shorter, more muscular & lower/shorter headed.
Anatomically modern humans were more robust & less advanced than portrayed in the film
Speaking of prehistoric depictions, there are plenty on donsmaps.com. What do you think about those ones? Are they accurate or not in your opinion?
is Jagmeet Singh the bernie or corbyn of canada? or does he just want all punjabis to be let into canada?
Both
but bernie and corbyn aren’t open borders fanatics.
so this confirms that canada actually has no authentic left political parties.
[redacted by pp, Jan 12, 2020]
Bernie wants the same thing here. They make great democratic socialists. And he knows he’ll never have to deal with them.
an authentic democratic socialist would be for very restrictive immigration laws.
there’s probably a name for this misleading argument (lie) made so often by fox news types.
they say, “these socialists want open borders. that’s not what the people want. therefore socialism is bad” even though that’s what the people want more of.
it’s divide and conquer.
a candidate with bernie’s domestic policies and trump’s campaign immigration policies would win the presidency easily and a party with such policies would win a super majority in the congress.
identity politics = capital…the exact opposite of socialism.
but 99% of the 99% are too dumb to notice they’re being brainwashed. “false consciousness” isn’t just a masturbation machine in egypt.
as long as the 99% is fooled deliberately by the 1% it isn’t free.
No true Scotsman.
Twenty years ago you’d have been right. It was nation-specific and focused on workers’ rights. But the movement now explicitly co-prioritizes shelling out money to people in “less fortunate” parts of the world. Vote for any self-declared socialist politician in the developed world and you get the full package.
The rest of your analysis is spot-on. Retarded GOP operatives do use modern-day socialism’s internationalist ambitions as a way to discredit things that’d actually help (and ordinarily be popular among) most Americans. And this is wrong.
Pumpkin, if a case is not mentioned in the interpretation guide for WAIS, can you assume it’s probably due to a rare case?
Hi PP, I have some questions, I wish you could answer them since you are supposedly a racial realist.
read that 3 scientists – Watson, Venter, and Kim – sequenced their genomes and compared them. Watson and Venter are white and Kim is Asian, but Watson actually shared more alleles with Kim than he did with Venter. If whites are sometimes more genetically similar to non-whites than they are to members of their own race, how does that reconcile with race realism?
I get that there are best-fit genetic clusters and that most people fall into geographic categories when we let computers do the work, but it seems like those triangle diagrams above should look a lot noisier. I mean, Watson, Venter, and Kim were just random scientists who decided to study themselves. They didn’t cherry-pick some weird Asian-like white person.
Is it just a kind of lewontin fallacy since they didn’t look enough locis?
Looking at the Autosomal phylogenic tree, you can see the clear group differentiation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2752128/?report=classic
I am making a video about racial realism and this is the only argument that I cannot answer, it would be helpful if you give an explanation of this, if you can of course.
given the song and the movie based on the book An Indecent Proposal this is a pretty common fantasy of men.
but (at least in my case) not to sex them. just to clear oneself of the charge of being a “creep”.
in school the girls liked me…a lot.
including the girls i liked.
the barrier was i was much poorer than them (even though much higher class and not that poor) so i pretended like i wasn’t interested.
i remember NPR’s songs of the century or something and robert siegel doing the intro just as i was driving across the brooklyn bridge in a rental because actuarial interviews.
the saddest documentary ever made was about “street kids” in seattle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetwise_(1984_film)
and the term “skid row” is from a neighborhood of seattle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_row
what do bill gates and jeff bezos and gary leon ridgway and ted bundy and mr hands and twin peaks have in common?
Yet another dismantling of the CWT. PP should write a response to this.
https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2020/1/12/ethnographic-evidence-conflicts-with-the-cold-winters-hypothesis
Pumpkin, these are my school transcripts.
I wish to know what you think of them.
I do not know if I took the official SAT but did get a hight score none the less.
For Pumpkinperson and Pumpkinhead
https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2020/1/12/ethnographic-evidence-conflicts-with-the-cold-winters-hypothesis
hahaha great minds think alike, friend.
Indeed.
But fools seldom differ.
Poor melo..
Melo when do you think PP will disavow the CWT? Or do you think he’s too married to the idea to ever disavow it?
Pumpkin isn’t dumb. He’s just too invested in his pet theories to actually contribute to the field.
That’s honestly my biggest gripe with HBDers. They only create ad hoc after ad hoc instead of actually refining their theories. It’s not like there is no good science present, it’s just they don’t know how to sift through what is bullshit and what isn’t because they’re more worried about their political ideology than actual science.
CWT is actually one of the best examples of it. I’ve debunked it left and right since I started commenting but its proponents simply hand wave it with intuitive “feel good” statements.
Pumpkin is one of those people who tries and over-simplifies everything. He doesn’t like the messy complexity that is inherent of biological systems. The point of science isn’t to make the most parsimonious explanation its to make the most accurate explanation.
Don’t both Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons?
They do. They’re currently in my backyard since I’m an honorary delegate for both countries.
I’m not really into visual art and am no art critic but Rembrandts pictures really are the work of a master. Theres just something about the detail he gets in his portraits and hes able to kind of make some of subjects quite mystical or evocative.
I feel the same way about Signac. At his best, he was better than anyone imo.
https://www.paul-signac.org/the-complete-works.html
One of my biggest gripes with scientists, lawyers, and other professionals is that they write in needlessly technical ways. This applies to a lot of nerds, too.,
I’ve tried to read like 10 “string theory for dummies” articles and all of them were utterly incomprehensible. What’s so hard about putting that stuff in layman’s terms? I have no problem doing it with relatively complex financial/gambling concepts.
I was watching g a video of this autistic person explaining how he had trained himself to be better socially. He sort of spoke like Bill Gates. Staccato. I’m pretty certain Mark Zuckerberg has also been trained because his body movements look put on. Anyway imagine having the sensibility of a 12 year old for ever and ever. That’s what autism is even if you somehow gave them social intelligence. They would still make decisions and opinions of a 12 year old.
It’d probably be pretty liberating. I think it’d give you the mindset of “Once we develop [insert random buzzword-laden invention here] all of humanity’s problems will be solved.” I kinda see this with Gates when he talks about climate change.
I’ve been reading a lot of celeb gossip lately. It seems like the royal family dont like Meghan markle and see her as an outsider unlike prince william wife. Could it be because of her race? Yes but not in the way people think. In this case it is because her race is indicative of her lack of class. Remember Meghan has already been married once to some bro producer guy. Her american background doesn’t do her favours.
King Edward left the royal family to be with an american but when prince Charles dumped diana for camilla parker nothing happened.
Anyways the person with the most fucked up life is prince andrew who most people believe is a paedophile.
It’s funny how a black chick comes along and nearly single-handedly destroys the royal family’s reputation.
So basically you’re not allowed message senior citi leadership internally.
I was going to message michael Gorman and ask him to pick a more left wing presidential candidate. Buttigieg and Biden are BORING
Michael Forman
How do you think people like Froman decide the Dem primaries? Orchestrating media propaganda?
Froman literally emailed obama his cabinet. Choices which obama fulfilled.
Of x
Course fromans mentor is robert Rubin who seems to be a pretty powerful person based on what I’ve worked out
I hope Michael Froman picks mel gibson to be in the president’s cabinet. That would be great for america. Mel gibson knows more about how to make america great again than 99% of the people there.
I have to say giving all your money to africa because you’ve been brainwashed must be the dumbest thing anyone has ever done. He could give everyone in the world $16 or build a library or hospital or something. But instead he hones in on the black people. The orc people.
If Bill Gates wasnt so nerdy I’d question his sanity.
So research states that anti psychotic cause a shrinkage of the brain 0.2g more than usual aging but with no cognitive effects after 10 years. What is happening puppy. You said brain size is iq. And now the study is saying people can have smaller brains and still be as smart.
What’s clear is that all things equal you should probably go off them because this is just 1 study and the timeframe is 10 years. Bit of a gamble.
The correlation between brain size & IQ is only around 0.3 so brain size would need to decrease a full SD (100 g?) over and above normal ageing (since IQ tests are age normed) before you saw even 0.3 of an SD decrease in IQ (i.e. 5 points) & even that modest amount of decline would be masked by the increased sanity the drug confers
it’s more than that.
brain atrophy doesn’t mean death of neurons.
i know this because alcohol, even moderate consumption, causes brain atrophy in terms of volume, but rarely actually kills brain cells. that’s a myth.
it’s not clear that alcohol per se is a neurotoxin.
but alcoholism is often associated with vitamin b-1 deficiency, beriberi, which CAN kill brain cells.
and severe alcohol withdrawal can kill brain cells via something called “excitotoxicity”.
It’s a bit strange they never thought to cast someone like evan o dorney in an alien movie.
it happened again. the new drunk girl at the liquor store told “oh my God you look just like john cleese. blah blah blah.”
i said, “that’s odd considering i’m 7/8ths tamil dalit and 1/8th andaman pygmy.”
?i said, “i’m shorter than him.”
i’m also way fatter.
does everyone get this you look like stuff?
the list i can remember is:
andrew mccarthy, john cleese, william hurt, James Van Der Beek
the one person i’ve seen (but up close not so much) i thought was my doppelganger was christoph metzelder.
of course but metzelder and cleese are 2″, 3″ taller than me, but sitting down i’m 2″ taller than them.
so there!
so replace with light blue eyes and slightly blond-er hair and that’s me.
is the secret of joe rogan’s success the mafia?
pill’s saying “aesthetics don’t lie” is another way of saying…
“good looking” isn’t just “good looking”.
the good brain vs the good body…
these two should be a little correlated.
Yes, just like how good looks correlate with athleticism—even in women.
The best athlete in every sport is almost always better-looking than average.
Most female athletes look masculine tho.
Pumpkin, do monolingual Hispanics who speak only English have a lower verbal than performance IQ? I saw a chart which said that high SES Hispanics didn’t have any discrepancy between verbal and performance iq.
Pumpkin, what explains high ses bilinguals not having a viq piq discrepancy? Is it just English speaking?
Either that or less Amerindian ancestry
How well does the vocab subtest correlate to actual size of vocabulary?
Very well