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Monthly Archives: August 2020

When should we normalize tests?

28 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 123 Comments

Deviation IQ is defined as one’s Z score (relative to the American or white population) on an intelligence test multiplied by usually 15 and added to 100. Z score = (raw score) – (average raw score)/(standard deviation of raw scores).

Occasionally Z scores will be normalized, so instead of being calculated from the above formula, they’re assigned based on percentiles. So if the top 1% of the population scored X and the normal curve says the top 1% has a Z score of +2.33, X will be assigned a Z score of +2.33 regardless of how many actual standard deviations it is above average.

However not all tests need to be normalized. Some should in theory form a very normal curve on their own. Does anyone know which two of the following tests need to be normalized?:

TEST A

A general knowledge test where the author thinks up general knowledge questions ranging in difficulty from very easy to very hard.

TEST B

A general knowledge test where you have to name the faces of the 100 most important people in history as chosen by Michael Hart’s famous book The 100.

TEST C

A spatial test where the author buys a bunch of jig-saw puzzles from the toy store, and your raw score is the number of puzzles you could put together in under 1 minute each.

TEST D

A spatial test where the author buys one jig-saw puzzle from the toy store and your score is simply how many seconds it takes you to solve it (the lower the better)

TEST E

A spatial test where the author buys one jig-saw puzzle from the toy store and your score is the number of pieces you can fit together in one minute.

TEST F

A memory test where your score is the greatest number of syllables in a sentence you can repeat after one hearing.

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Update on PATMA norms

27 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 99 Comments

If we exclude the 10 known fake votes in the poll of self-reported PATMA scores, 145 people have thus far obtained the following scores:

10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,5,5,5,4,4,3

If you copy and paste this data into this wonderful standard deviation calculator, you get a mean of 7.9 and an SD of 1.4

This distribution forms a gorgeous bell curve though it’s truncated because the test is too easy for about the top tenth of my readership:

On a scale where Nothern American whites average 100 with an standard deviation of 15, my readers are known to average about 126 with an SD around 16. Given this info, there are two ways to convert PATMA scores to IQ.

Method 1: Assign each PATMA score its normalized Z score based on its percentile rank among blog readers and multiply said Z score by 16 and add 126.

Method 2: Calculate the actual Z score of each PATMA score (among blog readers) using the observed mean and SD of PATMA scores (7.9 and 1.4 respectively) and multiply said Z score by 16 and add 126.

PATMA score frequency among PP readers percentile rank among PP readers IQ (method 1) IQ (method 2)
10 19 93.45 150 150
9 34 75.17 137 139
8 37 50.69 126 127
7 33 26.6 116 116
6 16 9.66 105 104
5 3 3.08 96 93
4 2 1.38 91 81
3 1 0.69 87 70
2 0     59
1 0     47
0 0     36

Method 1 is clearly better. Are any of my readers intelligent enough to understand why?

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Trump blasted by intelligent older sister

26 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 51 Comments

Trump’s highly intelligent older sister was recently caught on tape blasting her younger brother. The 83-year-old federal judge is horrified at her younger brother’s behavior as President:

For me details, watch below video:

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Long-term memory

26 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 23 Comments

My earliest memory is being in a crib, looking up at the ceiling, and being overwhelmed with claustrophobia. I also remember other things, like riding my toy truck into a crater in the middle of the road.

But do I really remember events from several decades ago, or do I just remember remembering? At age four you remember what happened at age two, but at age six, do you still remember what happened at age two or rather do you remember the much more recent remembering of what happened at age two. So by the time you’re in your thirties thinking you remember your toddler years, you’re just remembering a remembering of a remembering etc. Perhaps each memory of an event is like a xerox copy of the last time you remembered that event and so the quality decays each time and perhaps you only have so much time to remember the event (or remember its memory) before it’s lost forever.

Did I just come up with a new theory of long-term memory that will revolutionize cognitive science? Doubt it. Someone else probably though of it first.

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Which IQ matters?

24 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 120 Comments

When one talks about height and how it relates to success in life or various sports, one almost always means peak height: How tall one was in early adulthood. But when talk about IQ and success in life, do we mean toddler IQ, childhood IQ, adolescent IQ, young adult IQ, middle age IQ, old age IQ or some composite of all of them?

Of course the correlation between IQ at different ages is very high, but part of the reason it is so high is that being a smart child helps you score high as an adult because vocabulary words acquired in childhood might still give you an edge on an adult IQ test. Culture reduced tests (i.e. Gestalt) allow us to measure IQ independently of past learning so perhaps these are best for distinguishing between childhood and adult IQ, but a huge part of intelligence is the ability to learn from the past.

Consider long-term memory. Does it make sense to distinguish between one’s long-term memory in childhood vs old age, since old people remember childhood events? Who has a better long-term memory? The 90-year-old who can remember what she did at age ten but can’t remember what she did at age 89, or vice versa?

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Converting PATMA scores to IQ

20 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 131 Comments

I’m very gratified by the huge response to the PATMA. This test is dear to my heart because it’s the first program I ever executed online. I had to learn both Python and HTML (“Oh Easy Peasy; like doing long division in the 4th grade” as Oprah would say).

Speaking of what Oprah would say, there’s an entire generation that still programs in Quick Basic, and they just need to die:

Now here are the results of the poll of self-reported PATMA scores.

If we remove the ten fake scores of 10 added by commenter “Mug of Pee”, then perhaps 127 real votes give the following percentages.

10 = 14%

9 = 24%

8 = 24%

7 = 23%

6 = 11%

5 = 2%

3 = 1%

From here we get the following percentiles with their respective normalized Z scores:

10 = 86 (+1.07)

9 = 61 (+0.27)

8 = 37 (-0.33)

7 = 14 (-1.07)

6 = 3 (-1.87)

5 = 1 (-2.33)

4 = 1 (-2.33)

Based on previous research on a Gestalt test normed on the general white population, my readers have the following IQ distribution:

As you can see, an IQ of 137 puts you in the top 26% of my readers (+0.66 SD) while an IQ of 106 puts you at the 10th percentile (-1.27 SD). From here we can guestimate that on a scale where whites have a mean IQ of 100 with an SD of 15, my readers have a mean IQ of 126 with an SD of 16.

Thus, to convert PATMA scores to IQ, we multiply the normalized Z scores by 16 and add 126.

PATMA 10 = IQ 143 (very brilliant)

PATMA 9 = IQ 130 (brilliant)

PATMA 8 = IQ 121 (very bright)

PATMA 7 = IQ 109 (bright)

PATMA 6 = IQ 96 (U.S. average)

PATMA 5 = IQ 89 (dull)

PATMA 4 = IQ 89 (dull)

Of course these numbers are all very tentative and more research is needed.

[update aug 20, 2020: an earlier version of this article overestimated the IQ variability of my readers by giving too much weight to low outlier scores on the Gestalt test. Helpful feedback from commenter Rahul caused me to revise the numbers]

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The Democratic convention

19 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 23 Comments

Been watching the Democratic convention on CNN this week and I agree with the CNN pundits that they did an excellent job considering covid precluded the large crowds and excitement that normally accompany such events.

There was an intimacy of seeing Dr. Jill Biden talking alone in a classroom about her husband and it was touching when old Joe creeped out of the corner to embrace her. Biden is the perfect person to steal the older working class white racist vote from Trump because he looks and sounds like an old white working class racist himself, yet by picking a woman of color as his running mate, he gets the minority vote to boot!

Thought Michelle Obama did a good job with her speech last night and it must be killing Barack that CNN keeps calling him the second best speaker in his family. Barack loves to praise Michelle himself (“she’s much better than I am”) but only because he gets the virtue signaling points of praising a black and a woman while resting assured that no one will believe it. But to hear it from the white and Jewish elites at CNN who really do believe it…oh that must have been painful.

When you’re half-white like Obama, you grow up thinking you’re special. He deliberately chose to get a black wife for political convenience but I doubt he ever saw her as even remotely his equal so to watch her eclipse him in star power has been tough, and we saw a glimpse of his jealousy when he was quoted as saying he wrote his book himself (a reference to the fact that Michelle’s huge best-selling memoir was ghost written).

Even better than Michelle’s speech was Bill Clinton’s. Despite being a weak elderly shadow of his former self, Clinton nailed Trump’s failure to take responsibility with one powerful line: “The buck never stops there”.

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No more personal attacks against other commenters in the comment section

17 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 15 Comments

Moving forward, comments that make personal attacks against other commenters will have the insults redacted or simply not be published at all. Thank you for your cooperation.

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The 3 main divisions in the human species

15 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 56 Comments

There are many cranio-facial traits that separate us Humans from Neanderthals such as our spherical crania and small tucked in face. Just as skull dimensions can be used to divide the Homo genus into different species, they can also be used to divide our species into different races. In a landmark analysis called Cranial Cluster 28 Groups, Harvard anthropologist William W. Howells found that the many skull dimensions of 28 diverse human populations all fit nicely and neatly into just three categories which have historically been known as Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid. In Howell’s tree Negroids would include Africans, Andaman Islanders, and Australoids. Caucasoids would include Caucaoids (duh!) and Amerindians and Mongoloids would include Japanese, Asian, Ainu, Guam, Eskimos and Polynesians:

The above dendrogram should not be confused with a family tree because the cranial distance between populations does not necessarily reflect the time since their ancestors diverged (though there’d be a correlation).

For example Africans and Andaman islanders have virtually no cranial distance even though they have enormous chronological distance (70,000 years since they last shared an ancestral population).

Many people think of races as huge families so they would object to grouping populations that don’t share recent ancestry. However my attitude has always been, it’s not how recently you share a common ancestor, it’s how much of a common ancestor you share.

Unless their similar morphologies evolved independently, Africans and Andaman Islanders clearly share the Negroid phenotype which thus must have pre-dated the ancient African exodus 70,000 years ago.

The White supremacists hate this because they want to claim blacks only left Africa in chains. The Afro-centrists love this because they want to believe blacks were a pioneers who spread as far as Australia.

White supremacists cite DNA to argue that Africans and Australoids are among the most genetically distant populations on the planet, so how dare African take credit for colonizing Australia, but what they don’t understand is that much of our DNA has no impact on our phenotype and serves only as a molecular clock. Any accomplished race will by definition divide into distantly related families because colonizing distant lands for long periods of time is the very definition of evolutionary success, as long as those distantly related families genetically preserve the phenotype of their common ancestor. If we only defined taxa by DNA similarity, then by definition there would be no successful races or species because as soon as you existed or dispersed long enough, neutral DNA (a mere measure of time) would redefine you as a new taxa.

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IQ of Kamala Harris vs Barack Obama

14 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 79 Comments

Commenter Hail asked me to estimate Kamala Harris’s IQ and given her similarity to Barack Obama, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit his IQ to boot. Both are late boomer Afro-multiracial second generation immigrant lawyers from elite backgrounds who grew up to be the first non-whites on a major presidential ticket.

African Americans are 12.7% of the population, but about 10% of them do not have enough sub-Saharan ancestry (>50%) to technically qualify as black. Thus 1.27% of Americans are Afro-multiracial.

Assuming 1.27% of America’s 76 million baby boomers (some are dead) are also Afro-multiracials, that’s 965 thousand people. Now assuming the average U.S. Afro-multiracial has an IQ of 93 (half-way between the U.S. white and black means of 100 and 85 respectively; most U.S. Afro-multiracials are hybridized whites) with a standard deviation (SD) of 15, if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and power, we’d expect the two most powerful U.S. Afro-multiracials ever (Obama and if elected Harris) to have IQs 71 and 69 points above the Afro-multiracial average. But since the correlation between IQ and power is only about 0.37, their expected IQs would only be about 37% as extreme, so 26 points above the Afro-multircial mean which would put them at 119.

But it’s unlikely both Obama and Harris have the statistically expected IQ of the most powerful African Americans. To add more precision to our estimate, let’s compare their education levels to other U.S. Afro-multiracials who’ve enjoyed comparable power:

  • Colin Powell City College of New York (BS) George Washington University (MBA)
  • Condi Rice University of Denver (BA, PhD) University of Notre Dame (MA)
  • Susan Rice Stanford University (BA) New College, Oxford (MPhil, DPhil)  Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, honored her dissertation as the UK’s most distinguished in international relations. 
  • Valerie Jarrett Stanford University (BA) University of Michigan (JD)
  • Eric Holder Columbia University (BA, JD)
  • Cory Booker Stanford University (BA, MA) The Queen’s College, Oxford (MA) Yale University (JD)

Obama’s education ( Columbia University (BA) a Harvard University (JD)  magna cum laude ) would put him at or slightly above all six members of our control group so let’s say his education is at the top one in seven level compared to other Afro-multiracial super elites. Assuming Afro-multiracial super elites have an SD of 13.94 (since they’re selected for power which correlates 0.37 with IQ, their SD would be slightly less than the typical 15), if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and education, we’d expect Obama’s IQ to be about 15 points above the Afro-multiracial super-elite mean of 119.

But in fact the correlation is much lower than perfect. In the general U.S. population (and presumably within U.S. racial groups), the correlation between IQ and education is 0.57, but to estimate the correlation among Afro-multiracial super-elites, we need to know the correlation holding power constant. Assuming a 0.37 correlation between IQ and power and a 0.5 correlation between education and power, the partial correlation between IQ and education is 0.48.

Thus, instead of being 15 IQ points smarter than the average 119 IQ Afro-multiracial super-elite, Obama would be (0.48)15 = 7 points smarter, or IQ 126.

This seems a little low for Obama given that his LSATs might have been in the 94th to 98th percentile of LSAT takers (who themselves tend to be in the top percentiles of the general population). On the other hand, Obama was a very uneven debater, and a former “CIA” guy claims that Chinese spies found Obama’s childhood IQ (as measured by the WISC) to have been 128 (somewhat lower when you adjust for old norms), so perhaps 126 is spot-on. Indeed back in 2009, Steve Sailer estimated Obama’s IQ to be 125.

What about Harris? Her education (Howard University (BA)
University of California, Hastings (JD)) puts her near the bottom of our above control group of six Afro-multiracial super-elites (17th percentile). If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and education, we’d expect her to be 13 points dumber than this group’s 119 average, but given the partial correlation of 0.48, we might guess she’s (0.48)13 points dumber, so IQ 113. This may seem a little low given her Brahman heritage on her mother’s side, but it’s consistent with estimates in the blog’s comment section and consistent with her debate performance where she came out strong with her rehearsed take-down of Joe Biden, but couldn’t adapt when ambushed by Tulsi Gabbard.

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