When Ron Hoeflin set out to to measure the smartest one in a million level he had a major advantage that he was smart enough to exploit. Every year (at the time), about 3.5 million Americans become old enough to take the SAT and virtually 100% of the smartest people actually do, thus the 3 to 4 people who scored perfect on the SAT each year were one in a million level minds. This allowed him to norm his own high ceiling test because he noticed that a 43+ on the Mega Test was about as rare among Mega Test takers as was a 1600 on the SAT.
But what if instead of trying to make a super high ceiling test, he was trying to make a super low ceiling test, to recruit the dumbest one in a million (normalized deviation IQ below 30). This test would have items like “say DaDa”.
One problem with norming this test is there’s no anchor test that’s taken by all dumb Americans the way the SAT is taken by all smart Americans. So how would you find the dumbest Americans? It used to be all severely disabled minds were institutionalized so you could just go to all the institutions in America and ask to test the lowest functioning young adults there (controlling for age is important). Of course there wouldn’t be a perfect correlation between who they considered the dumbest and who actually scored the lowest, so you’d have to test perhaps the entire bottom half of every institution to make sure you tested all the dumbest minds (not counting people who are in a coma since they’re arguably untestable, not stupid per se).
If I were as rich as Elon Musk, I might spend a few billion trying to find the dumbest people in America but then I’d be harassed by people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who would accuse me of being cruel and use it as a another excuse to tax my wealth and the twitter mob would be on their side.
It would be interesting to see if you could actually pin down the dumbest one in a million or if even the easiest test imaginable would have too many people scoring zero.
Pumpkin Person 
Stupidity probably stabilizes after a certain point. life decisions can be good or bad for anyone despite whatever intelligence they may have.
With the very lowest I.Q.’s, you wouldn’t be able to elicit any kind of coherent response or convey any information, other than perhaps reflex to non-cognitive stimuli. One of my cousins has that due to brain damage. He just sits in a wheelchair and is about as responsive as Terri Schiavo was, but is nominally alive
I wonder how rare such extreme cognitive impairment is.
It’s a sad case. He sank into a pool when he was like 18 months old and wasn’t found until he’d nearly drowned. It’s been about 10 years now, and his parents still occasionally update their Facebook page about it with messages about how it’s God’s will and they’re still waiting on the Lord to heal their baby. I guess nobody has the heart to tell them that they’re deluding themselves and, short of a great leap forward in medical technology, that child is never going to be anything approaching normal. I certainly don’t.
A quick google search returned that about 15,000-40,000 people in the USA are in a persistent vegetative state. If true, then no fewer than about 1 in 22,000 people have an effective intelligence of 0, not to be confused with a statistical I.Q. of 0, which just means a score -20/3 of a standard deviation below whatever the mean is. There are probably people who aren’t in a persistent vegetative state, yet have zero measurable intelligence; but, contrapositively, there are probably people who have been misdiagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state when they really have locked-in syndrome. (O father who art in Heaven, deliver me from evil.)
I think between 1/10,000 and 1/30,000 of the adult Western population is a reasonable guess at the incidence of ‘unmeasurably low’ intelligence.
I wonder if the people who believe in healing eventually realize that it is lord’s will for it to have happened like this and turn into stoics.
“old enough to take the SAT and virtually 100% of the smartest people actually do, thus the 3 to 4 people who scored perfect on the SAT each year were one in a million level minds. ”
What if the smartest people tend to take the test younger and thus score sub-perfect?
Great question. Ron Hoeflin assumed that virtually 100% of the smartest 17-year-olds took the SAT & whatever shortfall there might be is roughly filled by high SAT foreign test takers
I see. Could he have used SAT equivalents to extend norms on a normal IQ test instead of making his own? Or at those IQ levels would normal IQ test items just end up measuring processing speed?
a lot of people lie about their intelligence tbh. most people are far dumber than they let on for obvious reasons.
Apes do not have speech but have cognitive abilities fine enough to be noticed. An IQ 30 person would be twice as smart with speech they would not be incapable just limited. A 3-year-old intellect.
Teffy, you should start your own blog. I’m sure you could say interesting things
I appreciate that, G. I may at some point, but my personality is probably more suited for an auxiliary role.
How is “say Dada” a valid IQ test item? What is it testing? Hearing? Whether or not one can speak on command? How is that related to IQ? What’s the theory behind it? How does one create valid IQ test items and then how does one validate the test?
Any item that can be objectively graded based on a clear standard of proficiency is a valid IQ item, as long as it does not have its largest factor loading on physical or sensory abilities when factor analyzed in the test taking population.
One creates a valid IQ test by thinking up as many different kinds of such items as possible, administering them to the test’s target demographic and then factor analyzing all the items to show they load on a common factor (g) and then perhaps eliminating the items with the weakest g loadings, to maximize validity..
So saying “Dada” would be an objectively graced, valid item on the basis of saying the word correctly and incorrectly?
IQ items are chosen on the basis of whether or not the normal distribution is created; Jensen discusses this in Bias in Mental Testing and The g Factor. This means that the desires of the test constructors can be used to create the test that they want by way of item analysis and selection. That isn’t any evidence for “validity” and the evidence used to “validate” IQ tests is by seeing whether or not they correlate with older tests, like the Stanford-Binet, as Anastasie and Richardson note.
So saying “Dada” would be an objectively graced, valid item on the basis of saying the word correctly and incorrectly?
Correct
IQ items are chosen on the basis of whether or not the normal distribution is created; Jensen discusses this in Bias in Mental Testing and The g Factor.
Well they try to choose items that feel evenly graded from easy to hard, but this will only produce a normalish distribution if the distribution is indeed normalish. In any case it doesn’t matter what shape the distribution turns out to be because scores are often assigned percentiles and then given the IQ that percentile corresponds to on a normal curve.
This means that the desires of the test constructors can be used to create the test that they want by way of item analysis and selection.
Creating a normal distribution is not particularly important because all that determines is the size of the IQ gaps that separate people and makes it easier for people to equate IQ scores with percentile rank. But it’s the rank itself that matters and that would remain regardless of the shape of the distribution. If they wanted they could make the distribution wildly non-normal, like money, where the highest people are thousands of times higher than the median, but it still wouldn’t change the rank order.
That isn’t any evidence for “validity” and the evidence used to “validate” IQ tests is by seeing whether or not they correlate with older tests, like the Stanford-Binet, as Anastasie and Richardson note.
Well most psychologists were not interest in theoretical questions, they just wanted a test that could predict school grades and since Binet had a proven record of doing so, that was the standard by which other tests were judged, but after a century of research, we now know the theory behind why the tests worked and that theory is g.
At some point down the line, the test-takers will be unable to respond to verbal commands. Ignoring comatose patients, they probably make up more than 1 in a million people.
the real robert rubin who controls the world:
///
Mr. Piss you and Pill are virtue signaling psychopaths just like the rest of the white race. nothing to offer no intent on finding REAL truth just their misconceptions of reality.
have fun burning in Hell if you believe in it. 🙂
i forgive you Mug but its fuck Pill 4eva