Apparently many liberals are leaving X for Bluesky so I decided to check it out and the first thing I see is:

First of all, thank you for comparing billionaires to monkeys hording bananas because the reason I’m so fascinated by the rich is they are winners in the very Darwinian struggle for resources that made us human and so this is a metaphor I thought I invented.

But unfortunately Knudsen draws the wrong conclusion. The monkey that horded all the bananas might be wrong from a moral perspective, but it was the monkey that passed on the big brained genes that allowed it to exploit its environment so efficiently and whose lineage would one day give rise to humans. Even if it personally could not eat all the bananas or feed them to its kids and members of its troop, the fact that its banana hording kept other monkeys from eating, and thus breeding, allowed its big brained genes to further monopolize the gene pool and because its even bigger brained descendants did the same, brain size tripled in four million years of evolution.

And of course what makes another rich person like Oprah so fascinating is she LITERALLY has a brain TRIPLE the size of many women and the XXXXX large hat measurements to go with it.

Just as humans are the most physically disadvantaged animal (slow, weak, no fur, no claws, small teeth) we TURNED the situation to our advantage (the definition of intelligence) to become the most powerful and prosperous animal on Earth using, Oprah overcame every disadvantage (poverty, lower class, sexually abused, dark skinned black looking black, female, overweight) to become the first multibillionaire black in American history, and, at her peak, the most worshiped woman ever within the World’s sole super power. Too bad she didn’t use her money and power to flood the Earth with Oprah clones or we could have had four million years of brain size evolution in one generation, though her African school for future leaders are kind of like the clones she never had.

Even Elon hasn’t cloned himself (yet) but he seems obsessed with his genetic legacy nonetheless. He has twelve kids, is determined to get human genes to Mars in case a meteor destroys the Earth, is encouraging other Americans (most of whom resemble him genetically) to become super breeders, is devestared that one of his kids is trans (because fewer grandkids?) and helped elect Donald Trump who vows to deport illegal immigrants (and thus preserve Elon’s gene pool)

Elon is unique in that he is consciously choosing to pass on his genes. The monkey hording the banana is just being greedy, it does not know or care about the evolutionary consequences and neither have the vast majority of humans for the vast majority of history.

I remember an episode of Howard Stern where a young man on Stern’s staff introduced Stern to his 18-year-old girlfriend.

“Take your coat off honey, let’s get a good look at you”.

I remembered thinking, if any other 60-year-old creepy looking man had behaved that way to such a young girl, she’d go running for the hills and he’d be in a World of trouble, but he’s HOWARD STERN so sadly she dutifully obliges because reducing women to pieces of meat is what he’s famous for. Being a pervert made him rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams as millions of men listen breathlessly while driving to work. At his peak Stern was worshiped like a God, especially in the New York area. An entire generation of men grew up laughing and masturbating to the Howard Stern show.

Only in AmeriKKKa was his story possible. A gangly Jewish kid raised in all black neighborhood because his parents, to their credit, were genuine liberals who did not want to be part of white flight when blacks started moving in. He was beat up at school and constantly called a moron by his father.

But this fueled his tireless ambition because somewhere deep within the big brash hyper-confident broadcaster was a little boy desperate for his father’s approval; indeed the reason he went into radio in the first place is his father loved to listen to it and had great respect for the medium.

Years after he became an icon, his father told him he was a genius and that must have meant the World to him.

So what is his IQ?

PART ONE: BIODEMOGRAPHICS

Howard Stern’s IQ is fascinating because despite having a job many would consider dumb and childish (being a vulgar shock jock) he’s extreme on three traits correlated with IQ: race (he’s an Ashkenazi Jew), income (he earned almost 9 figures a year) and height (he’s 6’5″).

Expected IQ of an Ashkenazi multicentimillionaire: About 137

IQ and income are positively correlated and since Ashkenazi Jews enjoy higher IQs than the average American, they should also average more money. In 2014, the median American household net worth was $99,500 but among Jews it was $443,000.

As of 2017, Stern was worth around $450 million according to Forbes. The same year the U.S. had 565 billionaires, and assuming Jews are about 35% of the very richest Americans, that would imply 198 Jewish billionaires. Given about 325 million Americans in 2017, about 69% age 25+, and 2% of them Jewish, that implies that out of the 4.485 million U.S. Jews old enough to be billionaires, 198 actually are, so among Jews, being a billionaire was about a one in 23,000 level achievement.

Jewish household wealth (circa 2014 to 2017)	Natural log of wealth	Rarity in Jewish population	Normalized Z score relative to U.S. Jews
$443,000	13	Median (one in two households)	0
$450 million	19.92
$1 billion	20.72	one in 23,000	+3.93

Assuming a simple linear relationship between natural log of wealth and its normalized Z score, Stern’s wealth can be estimated at a Z score of +3.53 (one in 4,873 Jewish households).

Assuming a 0.45 correlation between IQ and income, based on income alone we’d expect Stern’s IQ to be 0.45(+3.93 SD) = +1.77 SD above the Jewish mean of 110, which would be IQ 137. I realize wealth and income are not the same thing, but once your income far exceeds your spending, self-made wealth is more or less a function of life-time income.

Expected IQ of a 6’5″ Ashkenazi man: About 125

A 2019 study by Danny Zeevi et al measured the heights of Jews recruited from the U.S. and Israel and based on their stats (see S1 Table), Stern would be an astonishing 4 SD above the Jewish male average. Of course it would be more appropriate to compare Stern to only Ashkenazi Jews (especially from the United States) but the vast majority of this sample is Ashkenazi and those from Israel would have similar nutritional status.

Assuming a 0.25 correlation between IQ and within-sex height, a U.S. Ashkenazi man who is +4 SD in height should be (0.25)(+4 SD) = +1 SD above the U.S. Jewish mean IQ of 110 or roughly IQ 125.

Expected IQ of an Ashkenazinwho is BOTH multicentimillionaire AND 6’5″: About 144

As a super high IQ society person taught me long ago, knowing the correlation between predictors allows you to infer their independent predictive power. Given about a 0.13 correlation between height and income, the independent effect of lifetime income and height on expected IQ are 0.4 and 0.22 respectively. Thus Stern’s expected IQ would be:

IQ = 0.4(money) + 0.22(height)

IQ = 0.4( 3.53 SD ) + 0.22(4 SD)

IQ = 1.41 SD + 0.88 SD = 2.29 SD

IQ = 2.29 SD above U.S. Jewish mean

IQ = 2.29(15) +110

IQ = 144 (white norms)

The standard error of our estimate is 13.16 and thus we can be 95% confident Stern is from 118 to 170.

PART TWO: PSYCHOMETRIC CONFIRMATION?

I don’t know how Stern scored on an official IQ test, but he has mentioned on his show that his SAT score was 900. In the early 1970s this would have equated to an IQ of 110 (U.S. norms)(108; white norms) but as I’ve previously noted, prior to the 1980s, blacks underperformed their IQs by 8 points on scholastic tests. Although Stern is Jewish, not black, he did grow up in a black neighborhood and attended a black high school, so if we adjust his score for this 8 points cultural bias, it becomes 116 (white norms).

Although 116 is way above the white mean of 100, and even above the Ashkenazi mean of 110, it is much lower than the 144 IQ expected for a 6’5″ Ashkenazi multicentimillionaire. Indeed it does not even fall within our 95% confidence interval of 118 to 170. What a huge range! And the prediction still missed! This might be because most Ashkenazi men of similar wealth made their fortunes in complex fields like investment banking while Stern made his money as a low brow shock jock, indulging in scatological humor, so while the 95% CI works 95% of the time (in theory), it does not work for flukes like Stern.

So as pollsters discovered in the recent Presidential election, even the most meticulous statistical models have limits when thrown a wild card, and Donald Trump is certainly that. As a stats guy you’d think I’d be mad, but as an IQ blogger I’m ecstatic. Because it means Chat GPT and other artifitial intelligence will never truly replace the human mind. There will always be a role for human intuition and judgement. Machine learning may one day predict the best answer to every question known to man, and every combination of said question, it may never be able to adapt to truly novel situations.