I recently used an adapter to hook up my Apple ipad to my huge screen TV and watched Apple TV’s Defending Jacob. Fantastic show! About a district-attorney investigating the brutal murder of a 14-year-old kid, only to discover that his own 14-year-old son Jacob is the lead suspect. It’s about the conflicting emotions a family feels when a loved one is accused of something horrific, and that trauma being all the more acute in today’s age of cancel culture and twitter mobs. Great plot and great performances by the three leads! Riveting!
I especially enjoyed the part where they take Jacob to see a forensic psychologist who assesses his propensity for violence with DNA testing and psychometrics. She administers a psychopathy test to see how he reacts to images of violence . I’ve never taken a psychopathy test but my mother seems like the least psychopathic person I’ve ever known if this is what they’re like. She is disturbed by even the mildest images of suffering.
Jacob is also given an IQ test and found to be unusually bright. Like the woman who intelligence tested me as a kid, Jacob’s examiner is of South Asian ancestry but unlike the woman who tested me, she is cold and detached and is fully Westernized in her clothing and speaking style.
Jacob’s the kind of kid who you would never know was brilliant unless he took an IQ test. A lot of white kids are like that. I went to school with a red-headed freckled faced guy named Troy who got bad marks in school and never had anything interesting to say. Then one day the Indian woman who had tested me knocked on the classroom door and asked to see him. Knowing she had come to the school to give him the WISC-R I later asked him about it. “It was easy as all hell” was all he could say. The examiner would later meet with his parents to discuss why someone so bright was doing so poorly in school.
Over the weekend I watched this HBO documentary written and directed by Alex Gibney. The film documents the career of Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis who studied murderers. Lewis is one of those older female professionals who comes across as a bit ditzy despite being objectively very intelligent (Yale psychiatrist). One thing I love about older versions of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IQ tests is that no matter how ditzy an older woman seems, if they say intelligent things (as she does), they’ll do well on the WAIS, because unlike the verbal SAT, the Wechsler verbal subtests give you all the time in the World to express your thoughts. They’ll even do okay on the subtests measuring brute speed like Digit Symbol, because as slow as they move, they are compared to their own age group who is even slower.
Like David Wechsler himself, Lewis was part of the great wave of 20th century New York Jews who revolutionized the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Her mother was obsessed with anti-Semites and understanding how anyone could be as evil as Hitler helped inspire Lewis’s work with serial killers. Like Wechsler, she worked at the legendary Bellevue Hospital.
Lewis became controversial for two reasons: 1) she didn’t believe in the concept of “evil” (which made her hated by the less educated part of society like commenter “Mug of Pee” who believes in the concept). Instead she found that the most bizarre grotesque murderers had brain lesions and endured unspeakable sexual abuse as kids, and 2) she believed in multiple personality disorders (which made her hated by many academic elites). During the documentary, Lewis at times would show inappropriate affect, like giggling when describing a serial killer who would fall asleep after killing women, only to wake up and think “oops I did it again”.
One problem with Lewis’s work is that like so many, she seems to assume being abused in childhood is the cause of later violence, when in reality both the early abuse and later violence could both be the products of violent genes inherited from parents. Perhaps she’s considered this possibility and rebutted it, but it would have been nice to see more clips of Lewis responding to critiques of her ideas.
Lewis notes a contradiction in the legal system which asks jurors to punish criminals more harshly if their crimes are depraved, yet show mercy if the criminal himself has been a victim. It is precisely the most depraved criminals, who according to Lewis, who were the most abused and the most neurologically impaired!
No more off-topic comments will published with the possible exception of comments that might be off-topic for the particular article, yet still relevant to the blog as a whole. The off-topic experiment has been tried and failed. It attracts low grade people.
Written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine, Black Bear is an abstract funny art-house movie that my co-workers and I watched over the weekend. It is extremely challenging, requiring above average verbal IQ, an above average social IQ, and an above average IQ. In addition to these three cognitive requirements, you also need to be upper class. Sadly, there are many people in the comment section who are culturally and neurologically incapable of enjoying such high-art. The idea of commenters Mug of Pee or Philospher watching this movie is just ridiculous.
The film is about Gabe (played by Christopher Abbott from HBO’s Girls) and Blair (Sarah Gadon), a couple in their thirties who despite having low income, are snobs because they are aspiring artists. But they live in a beautiful lake house in the Adirondack Mountains where they rent out a guest cabin to supplement their low incomes, and to allow them to meet artists (who are the only people they will rent to). They end up renting the cabin to Allison (Aubrey Plaza from Parks and Recreation ) , a thirty-something film maker. Allison senses that Blair is threatened by her sexiness and high IQ so she complements Blair on her looks and pretends to not know what solipsistic means, despite having attended Wellesley College on a scholarship.
As the tension between the three main characters builds over a long dinner, the film suddenly reinvents itself completely and everything is the opposite of what is was before. Can’t say much more than that without ruining the twist, though sadly, the twist will fly over the head of 90% of Americans.
What makes this film work is the gorgeous secluded setting, the strong performances by the three leads, and above all, the witty dialogue. Levine has a great sense of humor and a good understanding of marital conflict and hipster culture. Watch preview below:
When I was a toddler one of my favorite books that my mother would read to me was Lamont the Lonely Monster, about a monster that was very sad because no one would be his friend. As an innocent four-year-old I would say “I’ll be your friend Lamont”.
Perhaps writer and director Jacob Chase was also inspired by that book because his new movie Come Play is about a children’s book about “Larry” the lonely, monster. In the story Larry is made fun of because he is different, being super tall, thin and pale, and Larry is just looking for a friend. In the film an autistic child named Oliver (who also has no friends) discovers the story on his ipad.
But things take a terrifying turn when Larry actually comes to visit Oliver.
I watched this over the weekend and it’s one of the best horror movies I have ever seen. The idea of turning the lonely monster storybook so many of us grew up with into something sinister was brilliant, and the film’s ending is poignant. Watch preview below:
The Flynn effect is generally assumed to be 3 points a decade, at least on the Wechsler administered in the U.S.. However my own research in getting a modern sample of young adults in 2008 to 2019 to take the 1937 Wechsler, found they only scored 7 points higher than 1937 norms, suggesting a gain of only 1 point per decade. Of course my sample size was only 17 people so maybe the results will change if I get more data, but then I discovered something interesting.
In the UK, the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices shows a Flynn effect of several points a decade in adults, but only about 1 point a decade in kids (the same as I found for adults on the Wechsler).
Richard Lynn once noted that the Raven Flynn effect is much larger in adults than in kids, a difference he attributed to schooling. Because the generation gaps in schooling are much larger in adults than in kids, schooling contributes to the adult Raven Flynn effect but not the children one, with the latter being a genuine rise in intelligence caused by prenatal nutrition, while the former is mostly spurious.
How does schooling affect a test as culture reduced as the Raven? Lynn argued that it was a disguised a math test that required addition, subtraction and distribution. I don’t buy it. The Flynn effect is supposed to be a fluid test so by definition it shouldn’t require much knowledge. Also, if the adult Raven Flynn effect were driven by learning arithmetic, why didn’t my research find an adult Flynn effect on the Wechsler Arithmetic subtest (in fact I found a negative Flynn effect on that subtest).
Instead I suspect schooling’s impact on the Raven is motivational, not cognitive. Because the Raven is not a fun like the subtests on the original Wechsler, only those who stay in school tend to have the confidence, interest and intellectual discipline to try their best. Those who drop out of school early (specifically the Roma in Serbia) complained that the test was giving them a headache.
Years ago I administered a version of the Raven to a woman in a bar who credited the test with her then passing her exam to attend college (because the Raven made her focus). I also once administered the WAIS-III Matrix Reasoning test (a Raven rip-off added to newer versions of the Wechsler) to a male relative, but he hurried through each item and scored the equivalent of IQ 120. When a female relative scored 135 he demanded to take the test again. This time he agonized over each item, studying the patterns for many minutes, and clocked in at 130.
So Victorian adults would have probably scored around IQ 65 on the Raven, but as kids they probably would have scored around 90. The IQ 90 should be considered a valid measure of their intelligence and makes perfect sense because as Jensen noted, the real component of the Flynn effect is likely caused by the 20th century rise in brain size and predictable from the brain size-IQ correlation. Don’t know the average brain size of Victorians but they were 1.68 SD shorter (11 cm). Assuming their brains were 1.68 SD smaller, and assuming IQ and brain size correlate at least 0.32, we should expect them to have been about 0.32(1.68 SD) = 8 IQ points less intelligent.
Richard Lynn also noted that the Flynn effect being larger on Wechsler Performance IQ than Wechsler verbal IQ is consistent with the nutrition theory because a study of identical twins found that the one born with a smaller head (presumably because of prenatal malnutrition) scored lower on the Wechsler at age 15, but only on the Performance subtests. But this was before the Wechsler added the Raven rip-off on which the malnourished twins would have likely showed some IQ impairment, but not as much as found on hard-core Performance tests. The Raven functions more like a measure of Wechsler full-scale IQ because you can either see the solution (Performance IQ) or talk your way to it logically (Verbal IQ).
Sadly it’s now being confirmed by many media outlets that James Flynn did indeed die this month. Flynn was a New Zealand IQ researcher (a cognitive archeologist really) best known for discovering the Flynn effect (the phenomenon by which IQ scores become inflated at a rate of about 3 IQ points a decade). Some have quibbled over the effect being named for him since others had noted it in the past, but these previous discoveries were largely local or one-time events that were quickly forgotten. Flynn established it as a consistent, predictable worldwide phenomenon that was so important, IQ scores had to be adjusted for it and tests required frequent re-norming. Had he not pushed the issue, most measured IQs would probably still be many points too high, thus distorting not only individual diagnosis, but the results of massive studies, and many prison inmates would be wrongly sentenced to death because their IQs were above 70 (making them criminally responsible).
Most of Flynn’s research focused on successive standardizations of the Wechsler intelligence scales where a sample of people would be tested twice on both the newly normed version and the previous version to make sure there was a high correlation. It was consistently noted that IQs would always be a little higher on the newer version. For example scores on the 1954 WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) were about 3 points higher than on the 1937 Wechsler. It was later found that scores on the 1978 WAIS were about 7 points higher than on the 1954 WAIS. Scores on the 1995 WAIS were about 3 points higher than on the 1978 WAIS. Finally, scores on the 2006 WAIS were about 3 points higher than on the 1995 WAIS.
Before Flynn’s discovery in the 1980s, such gains were just dismissed as tests becoming outdated and requiring new items and were generally too small to be considered significant. But Flynn’s genius was to add the gains of successive test normings to argue that a massive increase had occurred. For example, if you add up all the Wechsler adult gains from 1937 to 2006, you get 16 points (the same as the infamous black-white IQ gap within the United States). Since no one believed the IQ gains are genetic, Flynn used them to argue we shouldn’t believe racial IQ gaps are either.
For years I suspected that Flynn’s method of adding up gains from successive test normings was overestimating the Flynn effect and in 2008 I decided to prove it. I asked for the original 1937 Wechsler for Christmas (known as the ancient WBI) and gathered random strangers to take it. Of course this was a very time consuming project and I soon got distracted. In 2019 I became obsessed with completing the project and truth be told, one of the reasons I got obsessive was that being in his mid 80s, I worried Flynn would die before I could tell him about the research (one of my biggest regrets was Arthur Jensen dying before I could ask him my biggest questions). I did not know Flynn, but he was always kind enough to reply the few times I had sent him an email. By December 2019 I had a sample size of 17 people and as usual, Flynn was kind enough to reply to my emails.
Of course 17 people was not enough and I had really hoped to share with him the results of a much larger data-set but sadly the coronavirus made it too dangerous to get data in 2020, and now Flynn is gone.
Commenter antjuanfinch runs a web site where one can take IQ tests that are fun and well programmed (though the norms may need revising). In the real World, antjuanfinch is a twenty-something African American who despite growing up in poverty with mentally ill parents, ended up at the most prestigious university on the planet: Harvard.
Recently, antjuanfinch was mysertiously offered a chance to take the WAIS-IV (4th edition of the Wechsler adult intelligence scale) for free and in the age of covid, this was taken on-line. atjuanfinch self-reported his scaled scores on each of the subtests which I posted below, along with index scores and full-scale IQ I calculated from the manual (which in some cases differed slightly from what atjuanfinch reported).
It should be noted that the scaled scores are expressed on a scale where the U.S. mean for each age group is 10 (SD 3) and the index scores/full-scale IQ use a scale where the U.S. mean for each age group is 100 (SD 15). Thus to convert the scaled scores to IQ equivalents, simply multiply by 5 and add 50. In the third column, scores are adjusted for the fact that the WAIS-IV norms were 16-years-old at the time of testing and these norms (at least in the short-term) tend to become inflated by the equivalent of a few IQ points a decade though this might be an over-correction since the Flynn effect may have stagnated or even reversed in recent years. We’ll have a better idea when the WAIS-V is released.
scores before Flynn effect adjustments
adjusted for the Flynn effect
Vocabulary (word knowledge)
19
17.73
Similarities (verbal abstraction & thought organization)
19
18.11
Information (long-term memory & environmental awareness)
12
11.36
Matrices (visual pattern recognition)
16
15.24
Visual Puzzles (spatial reasoning)
14
13.62
Figure Weights (quantitative comparison)
15
14.24
Digit Span (rote memory & attention)
14
13.62
Letter number sequencing (mental math)
14
13.62
Coding (rapid eye-hand coordination)
11
10.75
Symbol Search (visual scanning)
14
13.75
Verbal comprehension index
141
134
Perceptual Reasoning index
129
125
Working Memory index
122
119
Processing speed index
114
114
Full-scale IQ
135
130
Adjustments for Flynn effect were made using page 240 of Are We Getting SMARTER? by James Flynn. I assumed that the rate of change that occurred between the norming of the WAIS-III (1995) and the WAIS-IV (2006) has continued to 2020. Flynn had no data for Visual Puzzles, Figure Weights, Symbol Search or Letter-number sequencing so rates for Block Design, Matrix Reasoning, Coding & Digit Span were assumed for each of those subtests respectively.
The results show that atjuanfinch is a man of very superior intelligence. His full-scale IQ of 130 exceeds that of 98% of Americans his age and is even above of the average of his fellow students at the World’s most prestigious university.
Comparison with Billy
It is interesting to compare his WAIS-IV scores to those of Billy, another brilliant black commenter on this blog. To better illustrate the comparison, I used the five index scores of the WISC-V (most recent Wechsler for children) rather than the four-factor model used by the most recent adult Wechsler.
Table 2
Billy
antjuanfinch
verbal crystallized
145+
134
spatial
118
118
non-verbal conceptual
140
128
working memory
125
119
processing speed
111
114
It is interesting how both of these men have the same profile: verbal crystallized > non-verbal conceptual > working memory > spatial > processing speed. Coincidence? Both these men are brilliant blacks and brilliant folks by definition are high in g (general intelligence factor) and thus tend to do best on the most g loaded indexes. Verbal and conceptual tests tend to be the most g loaded, while processing speed is the least g loaded so smart people tend to be unexceptional there. Processing speed is also a problem for those who are neuro-atypical which is common among this blog’s commenters though there’s no evidence these two commenters are in that camp.
In addition, blacks tend to do better on verbal as opposed to spatial tests, perhaps because their ancestors never left the tropics so there was less natural selection for the spatially demanding skills needed to survive ice age winters (building shelter, sewing tight figure hugging clothes, making fire, hunting mammoths). A similar cognitive difference evolved between the sexes, with men doing hunting and today scoring better on spatial tests.
antjuanfinch’s mother
It’s interesting that atjuanfinch reports his mother’s IQ as being 102. Given the 0.45 parent-offspring IQ correlation, and the fact that the average African American has a WAIS-IV IQ of 87.7, we’d expect atjuanfinch’s mother to have an IQ of:
[atjuanfinch’s IQ – (U.S. black mean)](parent-off spring correlation) + black mean[130 – 87.7](0.45) + 87.7
42.3(0.45) + 87.7
107 (only 5 points from the score atjuanfinch reported).
Pumpkin Person 