Recently commenter Tez asked me to comment on his IQ. The email was very long so today I only have time to comment on the first half, where he lists all the evidence of low IQ (in part 2 he lists all the evidence of high IQ). Below is from his email.

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Hello, Pumpkin Person.

I hope this correspondence finds you well. I don’t want to bore you with unnecessary details, so I’ll merely skim the surface of what I think is relevant biographical data.

Low IQ stuff:

1. I am currently obese. According to Jayman’s great article on the subject, obesity is more heritable than most people think and in my estimation, is indicative of inferior genes. Not so much metabolic genes that make someone directly obese so much as genes that lead to habits resulting in obesity. Personally, I have long observed a correlation between obesity and low IQ, even before I discovered the HBD sphere. With that said, my clinical depression is what drives my overeating and there are times when it wanes and so too does my weight. I have been in absolutely fantastic shape in the past, which suggests I am not simply a walking mound of genetic waste. However, I currently need to lose 70 lb.
2. My paternal grandmother was a mildly autistic thirteen year old girl who was raped by a pedophile while working the front desk at the family business, a brothel. She thus became pregnant with my father, who inherited his father’s genetic predilection towards antisocial behavior. My father was a violent psychopath who took great joy in in beating my pregnant mother and raping my brother and sister. I tend to think empathy and IQ are correlated, though I also suspect my father was a high IQ outlier. After being expelled from Harvard for destroying a science exhibit while high on acid, he went on to study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and had perfect grades before either dropping out or being expelled. His plan was to become a priest, probably because it would have afforded him unlimited access to altar boys. I suspect he only began dating my mother because he saw she was a single mom and realized he could rape her son. Once he knocked her up with the pregnancy that became my sister, my father pursued higher paying work as a photographer. Following my parents’ separation, he spent the final 27 years of his life successfully evading child support collectors and was apparently working as an elementary school teacher at the time of his death (again, for obvious reasons).
3. My family was homeless for six months after my mother finally took the kids and ran. Following this, we spent fifteen years on welfare. Obviously this says nothing great about my genetic stock. I have observed first hand that members of the underclass generally deserve every negative stereotype surrounding them. They–or should I say we–are on average genetically inferior to members of higher socioeconomic classes. With that said, the majority of the middle to upper-middle class do not impress me and I tend to think my achievements would outstrip theirs had I been born into a similarly comfortable setting.
4. I have large gaps in my primary education. As a consequence of having whatever slum we inhabited condemned by the board of health every two years, my family moved from town to town constantly. Thus I attended two elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools. Some of these schools were okay, most were awful. My ninth grade math teacher, for instance, was a heroin addict who would pass out twenty minutes into the typical class after handing out busy work assignment. Consequently, I learned nothing from her and was always an entire year behind my grade level on math, which really hurt when I was strong-armed into AP math classes I was ill equipped for. Eventually I simply gave up on math, and from there, school as a whole.
5. I was raised by a single mother who was an eighth grade drop out. My mother had a rift with her abusive overachiever father and, it seems to me, basically wasted her life to spite him. Being raised by someone with borderline contempt for academic achievement may have rubbed off on me. On that note:
6. I was an extremely unmotivated high school student. I hated school and unsuccessfully attempted to drop out. After being court ordered to attend a residential school for problem kids, I did the absolute minimum amount of work to squeak by. I never studied and rarely did homework. I somehow ended up in AP classes despite my vehement protests; I greatly would have preferred staying in low tier classes alongside my slacker friends. I refused to waste a single moment of my free time in high school studying for tests; I have no idea how I managed passing grades, let alone a 4.0 GPA senior year. I was a terrible student who didn’t deserve his high marks–lazy, undisciplined and intellectually aloof. This might sound like a humble-brag but I see it as the opposite. Whatever latent intellectual potential I possessed went to waste due to coming from an underclass family that didn’t prioritize education, whether through culture, genetic inferiority, or both.
7. I am a college drop out. Following high school, I spent an aimless year as a NEET before applying to several colleges—after missing the application deadlines. I was completely clueless about how to apply to college; deadlines, financial aid, all of that. Stupidly, I checked the ethnic background boxes for both white and Asian, not realizing the anti-Asian prejudice of admission committees. Eventually I attended the only school that accepted me, a non-prestigious state university (CSULA, 47.8% acceptance rate) that was not legally allowed to factor in the race of applicants. I majored in Film before dropping out after sophomore year with a 3.9 GPA, having spent all semesters on the dean’s list. High grades are nice but it was dumb of me to major in something as frivolous as film and being a college drop out also correlates with low IQ. After leaving school in my early 20s, I gave up on college for a while. Now I am in my mid 30s and determined to finish my undergraduate degree in a STEM field within the next five years. My long term goal is to get into an Applied Physics PhD program and do scientific research exploring my ideas for alternative energy sources.
8. I am the third and youngest child. I have long associated birth order with IQ. The limited research into the subject seems to support my anecdotal observation. My mother was also 38 years old when she had me, which increases my odds of having some kind of autism greatly. Despite this, I score quite low for both autistic and schizophrenic traits.
9. My mother suffered eleven miscarriages in her life, which her doctor insisted was nature’s way of telling her she came from inferior genetic stock and that she should not attempt to reproduce. It seems a fairly heartless thing to say to a grieving woman but I don’t entirely disagree with the logic.
10. I am unemployed, and have been for more than fifteen years. If you want to get technical, I am more aptly described as a welfare cheat. I receive SSI disability payments monthly and live in government subsidized housing while supplementing my income by illegally playing poker on the internet. I stay on SSI because it grants me free housing in an extremely nice neighborhood (Mitt Romney used to live here), free money and unlimited free healthcare. I do plan on getting off of SSI soon, maybe if I can get my novel published. This is certainly a mixed bag of variables. I believe gaming the system shows the ability to adapt to your circumstances and thrive but it also doesn’t in any way show the ability to swim against the tide, i.e. rise through Nietzschean force of will through the traditional ivy league caste system associated with western excellence (something my father almost managed to do despite beginning in poverty).
11. I am fairly callous at times. Given my premise that IQ corresponds with empathy, I don’t think it says anything great about me that I am bored to tears by people whining about first world problems. I do feel empathy for people suffering in third world conditions and occasionally donate to charitywater.orgHelp bring clean and safe water to every person on the planet | charity: watercharity: water is a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing countries. 100% of public donations go to water projects.charitywater.org. I’m also not sure if I am callous so much as callused. Having survived homelessness, extreme poverty and familial dysfunction, I am not terribly moved by people kvetching about minor problems.

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I don’t pay too much attention to all the family background stuff. There’s enough error in trying to guess one’s IQ from one’s own traits and biography. Trying to do so from one’s ancestors life story is more trouble than it’s worth.

Perhaps the most important thing he said here is that he’s been unemployed for 15 years. In the book The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray claim that 57% of chronic welfare recipients were in the bottom 20% of intelligence. This obviously means that (as of 1994), the 57th percentile of the chronic welfare distribution was IQ 87 (U.S. norms), compared to IQ 103 (the 57th percentile of general U.S. population). Assuming similar variance, this implies the entire distribution of chronically unemployed folks is 16 points to the left, suggesting the average IQ of this group is 84 (U.S. norms) (IQ 81 U.S. white norms) which is also what I’ve seen for homeless people.

But Tez obviously does not have an IQ of 81. Just the fact that he could write such a long and organized email suggests he’s way off in the top 1% of chronic unemployeds, and indeed one would have to be, to correspond with the likes of me.

In part 2 we’ll review the evidence of high IQ.