I’ve been a huge fan of this woman since she LOUDLY OPPOSED the Afghanistan War BEFORE IT BEGAN. Not only do I support her dovish foreign policy, but I agree with her support for unions. This may come as surprise for a free market capitalist, but if employers can organize and form a unified negotiating block (which is what a corporation is) logic dictates that workers can do the same. To suggest otherwise promotes supply/demand asymmetry which violates the free market.

And even though I believe the U.S. black-white IQ gap is at least 100% genetic, I support Marianne’s call for slavery reparations. Being smarter than another race does not give you the moral right to enslave them, and if Germans gave reparations to Jews over the Holocaust, why shouldn’t America give reparations to the descendants of American slaves? However one could argue that reparations have largely already been paid in the form of affirmative action and other social programs, so we would need a team of economists to do the math. However I believe that even if white Americans gave 100% of their wealth to black Americans, within a few generations, whites would once again be richer because HBD.

I strongly disagree with Marianne on a wealth tax for people worth over $50 million, not because I think the rich deserve all the money they have, but rather because once you own something, you should not have to pay taxes on it. This also applies to property tax which I also oppose.

The way to get the rich to pay their fair share is to tax capital gains and inherited wealth the same way you tax earned income and to strengthen unions so that corporations can’t get so rich in the first place.

Despite being Negroid in skin color, even the blackest Indians are often 100% Caucasoid in facial structure and hair texture

Popular stereoypes, as well as psychometric and historical data, had left me with the impression that South Asians were more intelligent than sub-Saharans. For starters, South Asians had left Africa. had created an arguably independent civilization and were part of the Caucasoid race. In addition, immigrants from India are overachievers in North America.

So imagine my surprise when I started noticing that Indians appear to have smaller brains than sub-Saharans. At first I didn’t notice this because HBDers like Rushton and Lynn would lump South Asians in with Caucasoids or Middle Easterners respectively, or just ignore them completely.

However an excellent data-set analyzed by Rushton showed that North Indian and South Indian men averaged 1305 cm³ and 1237 cm³ respectively. Splitting the difference, this suggests an Indian man mean of 1271 cm³. By contrast, West African men averaged 1339 cm³!

Of course given the extreme levels of malnutrition in 20th century India, the brain sizes are likely well below their genetic potential, however the same might be said for sub-Saharans.

Invoking notions of evolutionary progress, Rushton argued that sub-Saharans were the least advanced race because humans evolved in Africa, with non-African Sapiens emerging later in evolution. If so we’d expect Indians, who are arguably Caucasoid, to have bigger brains than sub-Saharans, but the opposite is the case. Was this another flaw in Rushton’s theory or could the paradox be solved?

Body Size

When I was in high school, an extremely muscular Indian classmate was dismayed that everyone thought he was black. I explained to him that it was because his physique fit the stereotype of black explosive strength and not the nerdy Indian stereotype the school had come to embrace.

Indeed, despite living in the developed World, a New Zealand study found Indian men were a colossal 1.94 standard deviations (SDs) smaller than White men as measured by fat-free body weight. To put that in perspective, the height gap was 1.16 SD and the overall weight gap was only 0.48 SD.

Source: Rush, E. C., Freitas, I., & Plank, L. D. (2009). Body size, body composition and fat distribution: comparative analysis of European, Maori, Pacific Island and Asian Indian adults. British Journal of Nutrition, 102(04), 632. doi:10.1017/s0007114508207221

Meanwhile, another study found black American men are 0.13 standard deviations heavier on lean mass than are white American men, but because black Americans are only about 75% sub-Saharan genetically, we should probably correct this figure for white admixture (0.13 SD/0.75) which increases it to 0.17 SD.

Source: Lean mass, muscle strength, and physical function in a diverse population of men: a population-based cross-sectional study by Andre Araujo et al .

Although fat-free mass (FFM) and lean mass (LM) are not quite the same thing and were not measured the same way in both studies, and although neither study directly compared blacks to Indians, by adding the Indian-white gap in FFM (1.94 SD) to the black-white gap in LM (0.17 SD), we should get at least a rough proxy of the Indian-black gap on measures of intrinsic size and that gap is 2.11 SD.

Now at least among soldiers of the same rank, the correlation (within race and sex) between cranial capacity and weight is 0.41 (Rushton 1992). Assuming the same within race correlation between cranial capacity and intrinsic weight (solders have low fat) among men in the civilian population, then a 2.11 SD gap in intrinsic weight predicts a 0.41(2.11 SD) = 0.87 SD gap in brain size. Since the within race SD for men’s cranial capacity is about 91 cm³, at least among enlisted soldiers (Rushton, 1992; inferred from standard error) then this predicts a brain size gap of 0.87(91 cm³) = 79 cm³.

In other words, if the average man in India (brain size = 1271 cm³ ) had as much intrinsic mass as the average West African man (brain size = 1339 cm³) his brain would increase by 79 cm³, making it 1350 cm³.

Paradox resolved!

The following interview with UFO whistle blower David Grusch is really interesting:

But is he telling the truth? Is the U.S. really in possession of air travel vehicles created by non-human intelligence?

But if so why are we only finding out about it now? The U.S. government has been supposedly covering up UFOs since the 1940s so why only now are mainstream sources like the New York Times taking it seriously? Could it be because powerful people are desperate to distract us from the Epstein case and the only conspiracy theory big enough to do so is UFOs?

But let’s suppose a non-human intelligence really has made contact. Is it more likely that these are aliens, or as Dr. Michael P. Masters has proposed, they are our descendants traveling back in time to visit us? What’s more likely: That in the future our lineage evolves into time travelers that come back and visit us, or that a humanoid creature independently evolved on another planet and master space travel advanced enough to visit us?

If it’s the latter, this validates the views of Rushton because 1) If humanoid creatures evolved independently on at least one other planet, it shows evolution is arguably progressive, 2) assuming the popular grey alien image is correct, super intelligent life resembles Orientals, who Rushton deemed superior, and 3) if America had access to UFO technology since the 1940s, it explains why East Asians, fell behind technologically, despite being superior.

I think I’m the first person on the planet to have noticed that Jason from the Friday the 13th movies and Donald Trump have virtually the same birthday. Jason was born June 13, 1946 and Trump was born June 14, 1946. Indeed if Jason was born right before midnight, and Trump was born right after midnight, they could be twins born from the same pregnancy.

Perhaps in the next Friday the 13th movie, Jason could be Trump’s Vice President as he returns to the White House, but when a jury sends Trump to jail, Jason takes over as President and decides to nuke everyone since all he knows how to do is kill.

One of the best writers of all time, the great Cormac McCarthy passed away last night at the age of 89. Known for verbally painting a dystopian image of the American landscape, he saved almost all his words for the page, and granted virtually no interviews. A rare exception came when he gave his very first interview to Oprah in 2007.

The interview was a huge coup for Oprah, especially after literary snob Jonathan Franzen had publicly worried that her book club was too feminine, schmaltzy and middlebrow. So to have such a prestigious male writer accept the book club with pride, made Franzen look like a total poser. And even better, The Road, with its male leading characters and apocalyptic story bereft of hope and inspiration was a decidely off-brand pick for Oprah; the opposite of a stereotypical Oprah book, a way of telling the World, her club can not be pigeon-holed.

But getting the famously reclusive author to agree to an interview would be no easy task. Knowing his first impulse would be to say “no” Oprah instructed him to not answer right away. “I’ll call you back in 24 hours”. Oprah knew that in those 24 hours, other people would clue him in to what a huge opportunity it was and how crazy he’d be to turn her down. More specifically, there had been people like McCarthy’s publisher who had sacrificed for him for years and selling a lot of books on Oprah was a rare chance to pay the publisher back.

So when Oprah phoned back, McCarthy said yes. Far too shrewd to risk letting him change his mind, the second Oprah got the green light she flew to the research institute where McCarthy liked to hang around and filmed the interview right then and there.

In this article, I discuss Terence Tao’s scores on the old (much more difficult) SAT.

Verbal score

According to this source , at age 8.8, Terence Tao scored 290 on the verbal section of the pre-1995 SAT(hat-tip to commenter Tenn for finding this data since my google searches for Tao’s verbal SATs turned up nothing) .

If all American 17-year-olds took the old SAT in the 1980s (not just the college-bound elite) the mean verbal score would have been 375.8 and the standard deviation (SD) would be 102.

Thus Tao scored 0.84 standard deviations below the average American-17-year-olds.  But given that he was only 8.83, he deserves a huge age bonus.

On the WISC-R Vocabulary subtest (the subtest most similar to the verbal SAT), an 8.8-year-old who scores about 0.84 SD below American 16.8-year-olds (16 to 25 percentile), is actually about 2.17 SD above the mean for his own age (98-99 percentile), implying a verbal IQ of 133 (U.S. norms) or 132 (white norms).

Math score

The New York Times magazine reports:

By the spring of 1985, with a 9-year-old Tao splitting time between high school and nearby Flinders University, Billy and Grace took him on a three-week American tour to seek advice from top mathematicians and education experts. On the Baltimore campus of Johns Hopkins, they met with Julian Stanley, a Georgia-­born psychologist who founded the Center for Talented Youth there. Tao was one of the most talented math students Stanley ever tested — at 8 years old, Tao scored a 760 on the math portion of the SAT — but Stanley urged the couple to keep taking things slow and give their son’s emotional and social skills time to develop.

If all American 17-year-olds took the old SAT in the 1980s (not just the college-bound elite) the mean math score would have been 411.5 and the standard deviation (SD) would have been 109.

Thus Tao at about age 8.8, scored 3.2 standard deviations above the average U.S. 17-year-old.

I don’t know where this would put him compared to U.S. 8.8 year-olds on the math SAT, but on the WISC-R IQ test, U.S. 8.8 year-olds who score in the top 15% of U.S. 16.67-16.997-year-olds on Arithmetic (the subtest most similar to the math SAT) make the top 0.01% among their own age group.  This suggests an age bonus of about two standard deviations.

Thus Tao, was likely 5.2 standard deviations above the U.S. mean for his age, suggesting a math IQ of 178 (U.S. norms) and also 179 (white norms).

Composite score

Assuming about a 0.67 correlation between verbal and math, the composite IQ of someone with Tao’s cognitive profile is about 161 (U.S. norms); 161 (white norms).

It’s possible I’m underestimating Tao’s IQ because his childhood Raven IQ is arguably even higher than his math IQ and people of East Asian descent often do best at spatial ability which both the SAT and Raven downplay. On the other hand, I could be overestimating his IQ because some math geniuses lack social intelligence and common sense, which is also not especially well measured by the SAT.

Both of these objections likely cancel each other out, leaving 161 as a good proxy for his overall cognition.

[The following is a guest article by illuminaticat; and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person. Please read it then take the survey at the end to share your feedback]

I found the most difficult puzzle I have ever tried.

It gives me a real appreciation of how intelligence works.

Basically, it is that the ability to use a tool requires the ability to deal with many components at once.

How many parts go together. That is you need to understand all parts together at the same time.

My opinion of the ubermensch is satisfactory lower now that I understand Nietzsche viewed it. The ubermensch is just the peak man or woman regarded by society to be superior physically intelligently and morally that is life-affirming not degenerate at all. To me, this sets a low bar. Because anyone will do, to become one. What I am interested in is Geniuses i.e. intelligence. From Age 12 I studied it. I wrote a paper about it in high school for my a.i. project. So moral character and fortitude is nice and all but I have this already, I does not take much. but intelligence is different, The high IQ are super rare. A real Uberman is much higher than Nietzsche’s 145 level set for him. But The Genius, It is like they have a supercomputer in their heads that can understand in the simplest terms what we consider astronomically complicated. It is because they can see things in such simple terms that to them as Einstien said they can explain it to a child.

I was told by a genius on the Kurzweil forum that these people have hard lives because they are as superior to the elite as 135 is to 85. I knew an old woman at work who could not understand what an atom was. I told her they were tiny balls that stick together and we are made of them. This is the way geniuses view everyone in the world almost. Not in a condescending way but as a matter of total isolation. Chris Michael Langan was abused as a child and views all rich people as evil money grabbers.

People believe that Intelligence is not natural but in fact, a very specific way of understanding intelligence is in how we get all the subsystems of the brain to work together. It is called control theory. In the theory were have feedback error-correcting. When we do not understand something the brain generates ideas about what is possibly the case for what we are experiencing. This happens at all levels of a hierarchical structure. The top levels of the hierarchy are actually the emotions because they tell us what is most important. It is then that the details of what happens first and in parallel take place. Without emotions regulating the system, a context cannot be formed in how to deal with the world.

As IQ is not a concrete measure of intelligence many times geniuses are overlooked who do not fit the standard bell curve. Mensa is not the peak. Intelligence regarding the peak is a higher resolution on the object perception. That is not only a quantity exists, but a quality. The brain’s metabolic efficiency allows them to anticipate things before they happen. Reality to them is highly predictable and logical. People may confuse them for psychics. The density and complexity of their brainwave mean they have a deeper sense of reality. And in this people believe we can increase intelligence with metabolic processes. Not only with health and diet (get rid of lead paint) but with super drugs.

The main obstacle is that the neurochemistry of the truly superior genius is highly genetically tuned. You cannot use a trumpet as a flute or a drum as a violin. They just have a complexity in the regulation of emotions that cannot be duplicated at our current technological level. Often it has been suggested that these people are mutants. Their accelerated abilities to hear, taste, touch, smell, and see have an alien-like quality to them. Davinci’s paintings were considered so divine as to not have been created by a human at his time.

In modern times the prevalence of stories where exceptional human beings exist that can see colors that do not exist is actually true. There are people with 4 cones in their retina. They can see 100 million colors compared to the normal 1 million. This is why comparing people at such high levels of intelligence by a deviation becomes ridiculous. Just the number of parts your brain can handle is not the question we should be asking when understanding this category of human beings. We do not know what it is like to understand the world they occupy in their dreams or the ideas of which are inexpressible through any language.

There is a way to quantify intelligence as what number of patterns one recognizes in comparison to others but the true Ubermen have seen and mentalized patterns that have never nor will ever be seen by anyone but them. They have seen things impossible to imagine for anyone but them.

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