Trump’s test scores have been in the news a lot lately. It started over a year ago when Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen told congress that he threatened Trump’s university Fordham not to release his SAT scores (which is illegal anyway). An official from Fordham confirmed this.
More recently, Trump’s niece Mary Trump has said that when Trump transferred to the University of Pennsylvania he hired a boy named Joe Shapiro to take his SATs for him. The White House denies this.
More recently still, Trump has been bragging about acing the Montreal Cognitive Assment (MOCA) during a screening for dementia.
Trump may sound like an idiot to most liberals but remember that IQ is scored on an age based curve and many people in their 70s can barely string together a sentence, so the mere fact that he can argue with the press in a fast and entertaining way should put him comfortably above IQ 100 (the population mean). But how much much above 100?
Trump claims to have scored 30 out of 30 on the MOCA but given Trump’s history of exaggerating personal accomplishments (net worth, TV ratings, etc) that’s highly suspect. His doctor confirmed that, but when it comes to presidential politics, even medical reports can’t be trusted.
But assuming he’s being truthful, I emailed Dr. Ziad Nasreddine (the test’s creator) to ask what percentage of non-demented elderly people score perfect on this test. He replied “10% of normals score 30/30”.
Of course the MOCA does not call itself an IQ test, but aside from the brief administration time, incredibly low ceiling and bias towards memory items, it’s content is virtually indistinguishable from one. It includes general knowledge “What’s today’s date?”, picture vocabulary “identify pictures of common animals”, spatial reasoning “draw a cube”, arithmetic “count backwards from a 100 in multiples of 7”, short-term memory “repeat words”, and verbal abstract reasoning “state how common objects are alike”.
Still, I wouldn’t recommend using this as an IQ test in above average populations. A Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist could have a verbal and mathematical IQ in the stratosphere, but because they lack the spatial IQ to draw a clock at a given time, they’d end up with a score lower than Trump’s.
On the WAIS-IV, if an elderly person scores in the top 10% of the “healthy population”, they’re assigned an IQ of 119, however by excluding the demented from the norms, I’ve long felt the WAIS-IV underestimates elderly IQs. IQ is supposed to reflect your cognitive rank within the range of cognitively normal variation so it makes sense to exclude people with gross chromosomal abnormalities (i.e. Downs syndrome) from the norms, but dementia is arguably just the low end of normal elderly cognitive variation.
Research suggests 13.9% of Americans aged 71+ have dementia, so about 86.1% do not. So if Trump scored in the top 10% of the non-demented, that puts him in the top 8.6% of the general population which equates to an IQ of 120.
That sounds quite plausible. On a scale where (white) Americans average about IQ 100, U.S. presidents average IQs of 130, but the heart of Trump’s base (Birthers) probably average IQ 90. So just as Trump’s base averages about 10 IQ points lower than (white) voters, Trump himself is likely 10 points lower than U.S. presidents.
Some might argue that if Trump hit the test’s ceiling, he could in theory be much higher than 120. This is somewhat unlikely given that Trump failed to correctly multiply 17 by 6 (something half of North Americans in his age group at the time can do). If 17 times 6 were added to the MOCA, Trump’s score might be 30/31 instead of 30/30.
Either way he’s going to lose the election lol. Time to do some posts on the future President Biden.
I think with more income equality we can see cognitive enhancements of any sort being implemented in the future. Regardless ecological catastrophe is going to destroy civilization and lead to unprecedented levels of societal deterioration. Partially thanks to Trump setting us back significantly in terms of environmental protection and preservation.
and this is still the way people act at the level of the nuclear family and it’s still considered a virtue.
when the family becomes the tribe then [redacted by pp, July 25, 2020] is inevitable.
and it’s way worse than that, because the nation state becomes the family is a precondition and a sine qua non for the nation state becomes a place where poor people aren’t hated, becomes a place where everyone’s potential is realized.
the world is lucky iceland is an island and not a lot bigger.
[redacted by pp, July 25, 2020]
among non silly countries/city states, east pakistan is the most densely populated.
these global warming casandras who never talk about too many people and the destruction of forests and species are FAKE!
even if global warming is real…there’s more than enough time for people to adapt to higher sea levels and the rest…it won’t make “organized human existence” impossible…chomsky is an example of how really old men become women.
Due to the urban heat island effect + some AGW since the late ’70s, most major US cities have warmed 5+ degrees F since the 19th C. Minneapolis is 10 degrees warmer.
No one has noticed. What’s another 5?
i think peepee doesn’t appreciate the contradiction between valuing the family and universal morality.
if you thought “it’s my chirren or this stranger’s chirren, then it’s gonna be my chirren” then you might be a redneck, i mean nazi.
nazism and genghis khan -ism are radicalizations of family values, but this morality used to be the norm, because the tribe was the family, the individual was dependent on his tribe and thus fighting for his tribe was self-defense, fighting for himself.
an example of “radicalization” is in the gospels. jesus “radicalizes” two of the commandments. “thou shalt not kill” becomes “thou shalt not even ever get angry”, and “thou shalt not commit adultery” becomes the roman catholic view of marriage, one and done.
and contrary to evopsych and the cw, most men just want one woman forever and aren’t just interested in sex. sex is boring.
Baby Boomers are certainly at fault for their sins. Most psychopathic generation in recent history.
Their sins will follow us for generations. Their outlook on life will have unprecedented consequences the like of which the world has never known.
the like of which the world has never known.
115-120 sounds right. Same for Biden.
Biden actually used to be an accomplished speaker during his Senate days. His speech in favor of the 94 crime bill was very good.
Way too based for Current Year YouTube. AFAICT it has been memoryholed.
Wait here it is
“Trump may sound like an idiot to most liberals but remember that IQ is scored on an age based curve and many people in their 70s can barely string together a sentence, so the mere fact that he can argue with the press in a fast and entertaining way should put him comfortably above IQ 100 (the population mean)”.
Listen to his interviews from the 80’s. He was quicker, sure, but he still had that stilted disjointed way of speaking — of just spitting out words like a caveman without really connecting them in a clever grammatical way. This has gotten much worse in recent years, to the point now where his tweets are just monosyllabic grunts. He doesn’t sound like a smart guy; he never did.
only retards talk like they’re reading a book.
elliptical speech is a sign of intelligence, and trump’s speech is the most elliptical there is.
but you’re right.
the ability to improv perfectly grammatical sentences takes some brain power, but at the same time the ability to omit what will be understood in context takes more.
but these two may be distinct abilities. that is, trump may be unable to sound like a textbook even if he wanted to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(linguistics)
according to the linguistic research of Dr. Susan Kemper (iiuc), verbal ability is actually 3 different abilities: vocabulary, grammatical complexity, and idea density. Trump might be good at the third but he seems to lack the first two.
It’s not elliptical speech. He’s just incapable of forming a sentence.
If the only two adjectives/adverbs you know are “tremendous” and “big-ly”, you might be a retard. That’s why his speaking style is so easily mocked and parodied by every talkshow host in the country. It’s also why his inbred, barely literate, hills-have-eyes base relate with him so much: “he jist seys waht am finkin; he tells it lahk it is, y’all”.
hills have eyes base LMAO! I’m gona use that.
My mental arithmetic is piss-poor. I would never want my intelligence to be determined by that.
Right now I think Trump is a buffoon, so he’s definitely not the 150 IQ, 4D chess, chaos agent of 2016.
Maybe you are too used to calculators. I used to be much better at mental math before being introduced to calculators around grade 10/11.
math is empirical too. just like physics in a way. that is, with computers, various conjectures in number theory specifically, can be tested out to 10^18 or whatever, and then the mathematician can ax his own self, “why be dat?” and then he can try to prove that dat be dat way coz be like necessary n sheeeeet.
if you visit africa you don’t see many pro athletes or even pro athletes manque.
there is this small subpopulation of west africans who are super muscular.
and this small population of east africans who can run your pants off.
there’s even a name for them, the westies.
the easties are named “kalenjin”.
rr should know.
WtF where are all my comments?
they were off-topic garbage