The views expressed in this guest post do not necessarily reflect those of Pumpkin Person.
Executive Front Brain
Jordan Peterson calls the frontal lobe the programmer of the brain. I call it the central coordinator. What it does is finds errors in a linear sequence of sensory-motor commands. Reflex is where you automatically get away or purge oneself. Instinct is a primal pattern recognition. The frontal lobes actually monitor all conditions. It brings them into one central planner. This is why IQ tests work. We pay attention to input and the feedback we get from the output and combine them into one representation of go no go motor signals. Time-relevant and space-relevant relations are calculated in the production of algorithms that can be used in the future. The executive function creates plans for achieving certain outcomes and these outcomes are the result of what has worked and what has not worked. Again this is the “monitoring” of which algorithms produce what results and arranging them in a hierarchical system of protocols to make it to the goal.
The more algorithms that can be combined and tested at the same time is what IQ tests are “measuring”. And the brain remembers all combinations that work and do not and in all possible configurations of them. Crystilized memory then is the pattern recognition of all memorized algorithms to solve a problem. This is muscle memory, perception, and language. A world model is built on how all things in the world act. And IQ is the total of memorized algorithms and the total of new algorithms that can be generated to solve novel problems. Long-term memory is retrieval and short term is sensory recall.
Metacognition is the assessment of errors in our model in real-time via intuition i.e. the collective recognition of mismatch algorithms in the system through clustering: Categorical selection of the taxonomy of contextual relevance for each algorithm in relation to other algorithms. This means we distribute everything we know holographically. All processes are stored everywhere in the brain. But eventually, the wheat is sifted from the chaff. Each idea we have is put in relation to all other ideas. Then we fill in the missing spots, the sparse distributions of statistical gaps.
There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. – NASA
I believe that the human mind was built by two rather opposing selection pressures. 1) cold climate which selects for bigger brains, either directly because of thermoregulation, or indirectly because it takes intelligence to survive the cold, and 2) self-domestication which selects for smaller brains either directly by shrinking the aggressive part of the brain, or indirectly by shrinking the body in general.
For the vast majority of our prehistory, climate related pressure to have bigger brains overpowered domestication pressure to have smaller brains. Only in the last 3000 years when both the ice age ended and civilization began did we see a reverse of this trend. And while most of our declining brain size can be explained by the poor living conditions of humans when they stopped hunting and gathering, even in the developed World, our brains are still somewhat smaller than they were at the end of Last Glacial Maximum.
Because civilization came to East Asian before it came to Europe before it came to sub-Saharan Africa, we’d expect black Africans to have the biggest (least domesticated) brains, followed by whites, followed by East Asians. But at least within the United States, we see the exact opposite pattern. In a stratified sample of 6,325 military personnel measured in the 1980s, Rushton found East Asian Americans averaged 1416 cc, white Americans averaged 1380 cc, and African Americans averaged 1,359 cc.
This tells us that the extreme cold that East Americans experienced in Northern Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum, was so powerful, that not even several thousand years more domestication could shrink their brains to White levels (note: commenter Mug of Pee has gathered data showing worldwide, whites have bigger brains than East Asians but he is comparing different studies unlike the Rushton study that compared the races in a single apples to apples study).
Meanwhile South Asian Indians, despite being more intelligent than Aficans, have perhaps the smallest brains of any large ethnic group. This is a combination of small body size (they mated with Andaman island types) lack of exposure to the ice age, and the fact that human civilization started in Southern Asia making them even more domesticated than East Asians (I realize civilization did not specifically start in India but those who started civilization would later migrate to India and those who remained in the Near East would be undomesticated by Islam). Even James Watson noted that Indians tend to be servile. This is part of the reason they were brought to Africa by the Europeans to work on the railways (the less domesticated Native Africans refused to work)
One of the reasons the correlation between IQ and brain size is not stronger is the smartest members of a macro-race figured out how to create civilization which ironically shrunk their brains but not necessarily their intelligence. And so we have the paradox of the undomesticated Mongolians being bigger brained than the more intelligent Japanese.
This also explains why East Asians, despite being slightly more intelligent than whites, do not rule the World. Domestication keeps them humble.
This article owes a great debt to commenter Melo/Ericthonius for doing preliminary research on these brain size trends.
The above chart shows seven points in time.
Point one: The ancestors of modern humans split off from the apes about eight million years ago (the late Miocene epoch) in Sub-Saharan Africa and probably had brains around 400 cc, similar to those of the chimpanzees today with whom we share 99.8% of our matching DNA.
Point two: By the mid Paleolitihic, the first indisputable Homo Sapiens had evolved around 195,000 years ago in Sub-Saharan Africa. and during the Middle Paleolithic, these averaged brains of around 1452 cc. What caused the explosion in brain size since the late Miocene is unclear but scientists have proposed many ideas:
Leaving the trees played a major role, as any time an animal must adapt to a new environment, brain size tends to increase, especially in an environment as dangerous as the African Savannah. Further, the adoption of bipedalism freed the hands to create tools which made intelligence more useful and perhaps thus selected for. In addition, the earth was cooling so even in the tropics, brains needed to be bigger, either because of thermoregulation, or to be smart enough to survive the cold. Finally, a constantly changing climate may have selected for adaptability according to Rick Potts. None of these ideas are mutually exclusive and I highly suspect all were involved, in addition to other selection factors I have not mentioned.
Point three: By the early Upper Paleolithic the brain appears to have increased to 1494 cc. This corresponds to the great Out of Africa migration. But was this great migration the product or the cause of this brain size increase. My guess is it was the product, because expanding to new environments, requires novel problem solving and thus more brain mass. In addition, colder climates may select for bigger brains independently of intelligence because a big brain is more spherical (Allen’s rule) and as commenter Mug of Pee has noted, cold climates select for large bodies in general. Consistent with an increase in intelligence, this was also the time when behavioral modernity is thought to have emerged, as evidenced by more advanced tools and the first true art:
Point four: By the late Upper Paleolithic, the average brain size of our species mysteriously collapses to 1441 cc. Of course one shouldn’t over-interpret this as the DeSilva brain size database is not huge so sampling error is always possible. But taking the data at face value, one possibility is selection pressures relaxed after the Neanderthals went extinct 40,000 years ago, leaving our species with less competition.
A more provocative explanation suggested by sites like Göbekli Tepe and scholars like Graham Hancock is that civilization may have started much earlier than thought, perhaps even as early as the late Paleolithic. If so this might explain the declining brain size because civilization selects for smaller bodies (and thus smaller brains) since civilized people are less physically violent, and also may domesticate people which shrinks the brain by decreasing the part of the brain that feels fear. It’s unclear if this affects intelligence since part of fear is also caused by being smart enough to recognize danger. It’s also possible civilization decreases intelligence by creating a welfare state for the least intelligent to reproduce. Not only that, but civilization brings many humans and domesticated animals in close contact, thus causing pandemics which shrink the brain below its genetic potential.
Point Five: By the early Holocene brain size bounces back, bigger than ever at 1506 cc. It seems that if there was an early civilization, it was washed away by the rising sea levels caused by the ending ice age melting the polar ice caps (giving rise to fairy tales like Noah’s Ark). Only the smartest would have been able to survive and make the transition from civilized back to hunter-gatherer. In addition, shortly before the ice age ended, humans experienced the last glacial maximum and these freakishly cold temperatures would have selected for more brain size, either directly, via Allen’s/Bergmann’s rule, or indirectly, via intelligence required.
Point Six: By classical antiquity, the first indisputable civilizations have emerged causing brain size to crash again to 1372 cc for all the reasons stated above.
Point Seven: By modern times the process of brain size decline continues, hitting a species low of 1297 cc, however the developed World sees an exception to this trend where better nutrition, sanitation and pandemic mitigating vaccines causes brain size to bounce back up to 1418 cc in America. The recovery of our Paleolithic potential combined with the accumulation of culture causes the greatest renaissance in human history: the space age, the computer revolution, the genetic revolution, and soon artificial intelligence. IQ scores rise by at least 1 point a decade from before WWII to the early 21st century.
[The following is a guest post by Illuminaticatblog and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person]
Some say intelligence cannot be measured because all we can know are the behaviors people do and not what is actually happening. So intelligence is just a word or label.
The concept of in-telling is the fact that we tell ourselves what is happening. We understand, we know and we confirm this to ourselves. But what do we know? It is about what we have as an inclination to associate one thing with another. To group and to divide. This is abstract and concrete. It is in relation to ourselves and things with other things. “(Patterns)” in perception and decisions.
Calling intelligence only abstract means that behaviors, as assumed to correlate with a general factor, and this (g), is what opponents of intelligence call a reification. Making an idea a real thing which is just an abstraction. But where do behaviors come from? First, we have a goal in mind for what it is we are doing. And what we do is in accordance with how we think things work.
If we can figure out how best to achieve a goal we do that approach. But it is the case that we must self-monitor what we do to fix mistakes. If we fail we must understand why and try again. IQ tests have only one right answer. But in life what we do either works or does not work and there are many ways to do things.
A procedure is a specific way of completing a task under given circumstances. It’s called rote memorization. It is what in the economy we are trained for so as to get things done. But being able to memorize a task is not the full picture of intelligence. What needs to be done is to come up with procedures for things that have not been done yet. This is where experimentation comes in. We find out how all the little steps work and then combine them into the big view to get to the goal. We then evaluate the big procedure to tell us what is the best way.
The best way to do something is not always apparent and that is why we have the concept of multiple intelligence. But this is just a way of categorizing skillsets. It is not the main skillset producer. People become specialized in what they do solving problems in certain areas. But whether someone gets good is a matter of the central coordinator that amalgamates patterns to do tasks. This means certain people can learn to do many skills instead of a few.
In short: We combine patterns to do big tasks. People can combine many things more than others but then it is about the goal they choose that matters. This evaluation is separate from what they are capable of doing in full. Because multiple ways of doing things exist. But sometimes the way to get something done requires understanding the situation and executing a plan.
So behavior is not reification it is task specific. What is the goal? Did I do it? What went wrong? This is in effect about big vs little goals. Task-specific goals only measure one’s coordination at a small scale. On a big scale, we combine tasks. Which takes a new coordination effort. David defeated Goliath with a single stone.
The Thief and the Cobbler
Cobboler defeats the entire One Eye war machine with a single tac
I enjoyed the below video with Richard Feynman. I’ve never been a huge Feynman fan, mostly because after being interested in IQ for decades, I’ve grown tired of all the people gushing over how brilliant he is and how he couldn’t possibly have an IQ of “only 125”; he must be lying or playing a clever trick on the World, because clearly he’s the poster boy for genius.
Having said that, I do agree that his IQ is higher than 125 but not because the test wasn’t valid. Rather it is because my guess is he took the Otis IQ test and this was a bit of an anomaly in that it had a standard deviation of only 10. Thus his 125 would have translated into a 138 on the Wechsler or 143 on the old Stanford Binet (which had a mean of 102 and SD of 16.4).
But it’s interesting that he’s so open about what sounded like a sub-brilliant score. Just as the richest people can afford to dress like slobs because everyone knows they have money, brilliant people can afford to admit they under performed on an IQ test because everyone knows they’re smart. It becomes a status symbol. A hilarious example of this was Bill Cosby telling David Letterman that he scored 500 (out of 1600) on the old SAT. Did he score 500 on reading and on math? Yes, he quipped.
Cosby’s confession was all the more impressive because, sadly, people expect black people to test low, but Cosby’s great wealth and quick wit made him so conspicuously intelligent that he had nothing to fear. White America would just say “we all know Cosby is BRILLIANT; obviously he just had a bad day”
Chat GPT 4 recently took the SAT and scored 710 verbal and 690 math, for a combined score of 1400. This equates to a verbal IQ of 126, a math IQ of 126 and a full-scale IQ of 124 respectively (U.S. norms). If we took this score at face value we would have to believe that Chat GPT 4 is smarter than 95% of Americans, and roughly as intelligent as the average PhD, medical doctor or lawyer.
But is giving an IQ test to Chat GPT a valid exercise or a huge category error?
I typed the question “is char gpt intelligent?” into youtube hoping to find some cogent arguments. One philosopher said that although chat gpt can write in many genres, it is not intelligent because these genres are all made by humans. But by that logic the greatest human writers are not intelligent either since they seldom created their own genre.
I found a rabbi who said chat gpt lacked human intelligence because it has no free will. It just does what it’s programmed to do. But humans just do what we’re programmed to do too. Yes we humans do what we want, but what we want is determined by genetic and environmental factors we did not intend so we have no more agency than chat gpt does, we’re just dumb enough to think we do.
Finally I discovered a genetically superior youtube personality and he provided clarity (see video below). Basically, the human mind spends its first 5 years in unstructured learning, where we listen to our parents talk and then try to understand the language by noting patterns. We then spend the next 12 years in school where we get supervised learning with formal feedback (exam scores, grades) and only then are we ready to take the SAT at age 17.
Now Chat GPT is similar in that it had an unsupervised period of 6 months where it pretty much read the entire internet, looking for verbal patterns. Then it spent a year getting formal training in the form of feedback from judges who told it whether its answers were right or wrong.
Now you might think a full-scale IQ of 124 underestimates chat GPT because it took the SAT after 1.5 years of total learning while Americans take it after 17 years of learning. Maybe we need to multiply 124 by 17/1.5 which gives Chat GPT an IQ of 1,405!
Not so fast! Because the amount of learning chat GPT was exposed to in those 1.5 years far exceeds what humans are exposed to. For starters, during the informal period, Chat GPT was likely exposed to something around 630 billion words! By contrast during the informal period (before school) the average American hears about 169,520 words. A ratio of 3.72 million to one!
So let’s divide that 1,405 IQ by 3.72 million which gives an IQ close to zero. And that’s before we divide for the fact that ChatGPT had thousands and thousands of trainers during its formal period while the average human only has one teacher at a time during his school years.
It may seem extreme to say a technology as revolutionary as ChateGPT has an IQ of zero and we may never know the true figure until we get a really apple to apples comparison. Put a completely untrained ChatGPT into the cranium of a robotic baby raised by middle class parents and have it programmed to learn based on positive human feedback just like real babies do. When it gets older, give it the robotic body of a larger child and have it attend school just like real kids do, and at age 17 take the SAT.
Sadly, if forced to learn like humans do, Chat GPT would likely be placed in a class for the mentally retarded, and never even be given a chance to take the SAT.
This article was originally published in March 2016 and is being republished because a reader inquired about Rosie’s brain size.
In honor of St. Patrick’s Week, I decided to post about Irish American comic Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie is one of the most successful talk show hosts in history. At it’s peak, The Rosie O’Donnell show, which ran from 1996 to 2002, was second only to Oprah in the ratings, and when she returned to TV in 2006 as co-host of The View, she single-handedly put that show on the map. Since then, she briefly did a show on Satellite radio and briefly hosted a cable show on The Oprah Winfrey network: OWN. So what is her IQ?
$100 million dollars
Thanks to her incredibley successful talk show in the 1990s, Rosie is worth about $100 million dollars. In another post I cited data suggesting the average self-made U.S. decamillionaire has an IQ of 118 (U.S. norms) and the average self-made U.S. billionaire has an IQ of 133. I do not have any actual data on the IQs of self-made centimillionaires, but we might guess it’s roughly half-way between: IQ 126. The next question is whether Rosie is likely smarter or dumber than the average self-made centimillionaire.
Pumpkin Head
When Rosie appeared on TV, her head would look very big. This caused her former arch nemesis, shock jock Howard Stern to viciously ridicule her for being a “pumpkin head”. One day I saw Rosie come out on her show and ask the audience if anyone had a bigger head than her. One person stood up and shocked the crowd by announcing their head circumfernce was an astonishing 24″. Rosie said hers was 24.5″ and that unless your head is bigger, don’t mention it. 24.5″ is an astonishing five standard deviations above the mean for U.S. baby boomer women. Little did Rosie know that Oprah, the one talk show host she couldn’t beat in the ratings, has an even bigger head. It’s unlikely either women are aware of the link between intelligence and head size, as this is dismissed as 19th century pseudoscience, at best.
The correlation between IQ and sex adjusted head circumference is about 0.21. If the average self-made centimillionaire has an IQ that is 1.73 standard deviations (SD) above the U.S. mean, then, to over-simplify, we might crudely expect them to have sex adjusted crania that is 1.73 SD(0.21) = 0.36 SD above the U.S. average. That makes Rosie’s crania about 4.64 SD bigger even than the average self-made centimillionaire.
Assuming the 0.21 correlation between IQ and sex-adjusted head size holds among centimillionaires (and it should, given that the full IQ variance surprisingly seems to exist within economic classes), then we’d expect Rosie’s IQ to be 4.64(0.21) = 0.97 SD higher than the average than the average self-made centimillionaire’s. In other words, we’d expect Rosie’s IQ to be about 140 (in both U.S. norms and U.S. white norms).
Is an IQ of 140 plausble?
An IQ of about 140 is extremely high, making Rosie potentially smarter than 99.5% of U.S. whites. Many people would argue that Rosie can’t be that smart since she believes in 9/11 conspiracy theories and turns to actress Suzanne Somers for medical advice. However I heard “American’s smartest man” Chris Langan in an interview express suspicion about 9/11. Further, conservatism is a sign of low IQ, and there’s nothing less conservative than questioning the official story of 9/11 or being distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry. Indeed Rosie is so unconservative that she infamously called Americans terrorists
Rosie, like Oprah and perhaps even Donald Trump, turned against the Iraq war before it began, but Rosie is so unconservative that rather than being proud of her enormous wealth, like Donald Trump and even Oprah, she told Oprah financia guru Suze Orman that she’s embarassed by it.
Rosie vs Trump
Speaking of Trump, Rosie famously made fun of him in 2006 when she was co-host of The View. Rosie’s tirade inspired screams of laughter from the crowd, and when Hillary Clinton appeared as a guest on the show in the next segment, she commented on how funny Rosie was. Trump and Hillary were still friendly at the time, so Trump must have been furious that he could be mocked so successfully on an afternoon lady’s talk show. Indeed Trump was so shell-shocked by Rosie’s attack that he spent weeks calling Rosie a fat low IQ pig loser on every show that would listen.
At the time I was very disappointed in Trump, who I generally like, because I expect a billionaire to behave with more class, and to be smart and secure enough to ignore such taunts, but instead Trump took the bait, diminishing himself while giving Rosie more ratings.
Indeed, Rosie and Obama were perhaps the only two people to get the better of Trump in the exchange of public insults. Obama did so by mocking a red-faced Trump to his face at the White House correspondence dinner, but the difference is, Obama had the best comic writers in America writing his material, while Rosie did it off the cuff. So even though I think Trump is very bright, it’s possible Rosie is 15 IQ points higher.
Indeed it seems Trump still isn’t over Rosie’s attack, as evidenced by him recently losing the Iowa Republican Primary arguably because he didn’t want to debate there, because he was still mad at moderator Megyn Kelly for asking him about Rosie.
On the other hand, Rosie is now a has-been, and Trump is almost the President of the United States.
Other evidence
Further evidence that Rosie has a high IQ is that she appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy and won, which shows an ability to absorb information, and retrieve it rapidly. On her show she was famous for knowing the lyrics of almost every song that came up. I also recall her once boasting about doing well on a game show called Win Lose or Draw, where you draw a picture and others must guess what you’re drawing. This game requires lateral thinking.
On the other hand, I recall Rosie once saying she did not take Advanced Placement classes while in high school and I also seem to recall her saying she got a combined score (verbal + math) in the 700s on the old SAT (way below average for a college bound teen), but she also said it was because she was trying to cheat off a friend, but it didn’t work because the friend had a different copy of the SAT. She has said that growing up, she was great at Geomrtry but bad at Algebra. But academic tests don’t suit Rosie. She’d be better off taking a more holistic intelligence test like the Wechsler, preferabley an older version (adjusted for the Flynn effect) that included fun tests like [redacted by pp, 2023-04-04].
Rosie vs Oprah
Overall, I think Rosie, like Oprah, has a genius IQ of around 140. Both women are freakishly extreme on the two most Darwinian correlates of IQ: money and brain size; and both women are examples of how brilliant people with mediocre educations can rise to the top through real world adaptive behavior, drive, personality and luck. Rosie has huge wealth (though not nearly as huge as Oprah’s) and Rosie has a huge head (though not as huge as Oprah’s). You would thus expect Oprah to also have a higher IQ, but because Rosie comes from a much higher IQ race, the two women are probably about the same. Here’s Rosie reflecting on what it was like to compete with Oprah on daytime TV:
There seems to be two kinds of U.S. Presidents: self-made Presidents (those who came from humble or ordinary backgrounds) and legacy Presidents (those who largely inherited their wealth or status from a family member).
The average IQ of Legacy Presidents can be crudely estimated because George W. Bush scored 1206 out of 1600 on the SAT. I estimate that if all American 17-year-olds took the SAT in the 1960s, the mean and standard deviation would have been 760 and 245 respectively, thus putting Bush at +1.82 SD or IQ 127 (U.S. norms).
Similarly, JFK scored 119 on the Otis IQ test however the original Otis appeared to be scaled to have an SD of only about 10, so JFK’s IQ might have been as high as 129 using the 15 sigma scale. Perhaps 128 if we adjust for inflated norms (JFK was tested in the 1930s and the Otis was normed circa 1920).
Averaging across both men gives a mean of about 128.
However since the earliest days of IQ research it’s been known that criminals average IQs 10 points lower than their law abiding peers. Arthur Jensen writes in The g Factor:
The studies show that nearly all forms of antisocial behavior, especially crimes against persons or property and crimes that reflect impulsiveness, physical threat, or violence, are more apt to be committed by persons in the lower half of the IQ distribution. Such persons are, on average, about ten to twelve IQ points below the average IQ of the general population. The more important fact is that the negative correlation between IQ and delinquency exists within families. That is, criminals average about ten IQ points lower than their own full siblings with whom they were reared.
Since the delinquents and their siblings were brought up together in the same family with the very same socioeconomic and cultural background, these environmental background variables cannot explain the independent role of IQ in antisocial behavior.
A large-scale longitudinal study of delinquency showed that among boys, then thirteen years of age, the relationship between delinquency and IQ remains even when social class, race, and test motivation were statistically controlled. An important finding of this study was that the degree of seriousness of self-reported delinquent behaviors is inversely monotonically related to IQ.
When the circumstantial differences in the conditions often claimed as the instigating causes of criminal behavior are fairly uniform and controlled, as among Army recruits living together under highly similar conditions, the same relationship between IQ and delinquency as found in civilian life still exists. Among 1,780 enlisted men in the Army, delinquent behavior serious enough for court-martial conviction showed a (biserial) correlation of .31 with the AFQT, a highly g-loaded test. Other studies conducted in the armed forces show a similar relationship between mental test scores and delinquency.
Thus if Trump gets convicted, one might crudely guess his IQ is 10 points lower than the 128 mean of legacy Presidents, and thus 118. This may help explain why the freakishly big brained college dropout Rosie O’Donnell seemed to look down at him:
It may also explain why according to his lawyer Michael Cohen, he had Cohen “threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.”
On the other hand, another freakishly big brained college dropout, Chris Langan, thinks Trump is smarter than the average Harvard student which he puts at 128 (he was obviously reading my blog):
It may be that his alleged crimes and perhaps low SAT score, was caused by ADD and not mediocre IQ per se. Perhaps he’d do better on the WAIS, especially the older versions that emphasized New York sensibility and social savvy. The other advantage of the WAIS is scores are normed for age.
But it’s interesting to note that Scott Adams estimates Trump’s intelligence is in the top 10% which indicates IQ 120. which is what we’d expect from a “criminal” legacy President