So as we march towards the end of the PAIS (Pumpkin’s Adult Intelligence Scale) we now have a subtest called sequence addition (aka Coordination). To register you need only provide a first and last name (real or fake).

I have a hobby of trying to guess IQs from a person’s most salient bio-demographic cognitive correlates (head size, money, religion etc) and commenter Teffec suggested I do this for the late great Charlie Kirk given his impressive height and influence. But influence is a bit amorphous so I decided to use his impressive occupation and height instead.

Although reports vary, according to Grok, Charlie Kirk is most commonly listed as 6’3.5″ which according to Grok, would make him 2.23 standard deviations above the average for American men of his generation (99th percentile). To put this in perspective, I had Grok list the 10 most successful talk show hosts of all time and provide their heights as Z scores relative to Americans of their sex and generation and the mean was 0.856 with an SD of 0.9. So relative to other elite talk show hosts, Kirk’s age and sex adjusted height is +1.7 SD (95th percentile).

Now in unrestricted samples the correlation between IQ and height is 0.25, but because talk show hosts show less cognitive variance than Americans as a whole, the expected correlation would be only 0.18.

Thus Kirk’s expected IQ =

(correlation between IQ and height among elite talk hosts)(IQ SD of elite talk hosts) + (mean IQ of elite talk hosts)

(0.18)(10.71) + 125

127 (U.S. norms) 125 (U.S. white norms) (smarter than 96% of his generation and a bit smarter than the average super successful talk show host)

The standard error of the estimate is about 10.

Psychometric confirmation

I could find no publicly available data on how Kirk scored on the SAT/ACT but I may have found something about as good, which is hours of Kirk debating students at the most elite UK schools. After watching Kirk take questions from many young people at Cambridge and Oxford, I found five scenarios that were actual debates where there was a clear winner. Of these five, Kirk won three and lost two suggesting he’s smarter than 60% of Oxford/Cambridge students. Since we know these students have an average IQ of 120 (UK norms); 122 (U.S. norms) suggesting Kirk has a mean IQ in the mid 120s in my humble opinion.

Thus the biodemographic prediction is confirmed by actual psychometric performance on a highly g loaded mental task (debating in real time on diverse subject matters) that can be objectively graded by what Jensen would call a clear standard of proficiency.

The most interesting debate was with the medical student who challenged Kirk’s opposition to abortion. I think Kirk was right to argue that life begins at conception because that’s the only point in development where there is a discrete non-arbitrary separation between life and non-life. Everything after that is just a perfect continuum that can’t be objectively subdivided. However his weak point was failing to adequately explain what it is about life that makes it morally sacrosanct. Nonetheless despite the cheers for his opponent, I think Kirk convinced a lot of rational conservatives that abortion should be opposed, not for moral reasons where his arguments made no sense, but to avoid demographic replacement.

Commenter Teffec asked me to estimate the IQ of Charlie Kirk and I think the best way to do that is to first estimate the IQ of elite talk show hosts in general, since Kirk clearly falls into that category with several million subscribers on YouTube, even before his tragic death.

When Time magazine asked Meredith Vieira her SAT scores she replied 1300s which would equate to an IQ of around 136 in her day (U.S. norms). Although once part of a very famous talk show (The View), I don’t consider her an elite talk show host since The View is an ensemble, so only one or two of them needs to be talented for the show to work.

Joe Rogan posted a certificate on Instagram from the Brain Metrics Initiative showing his IQ was 127 which sounds about right. Smart enough to be the most successful podcaster in the World with a lot of thoughtful political views, but still dumb enough to be short and stumpy and somewhat gullible (or at least pretends to be since pseudoscience sells). Not sure how accurate the BMI test is but I seem to recall Rogan saying he never took the SAT which means he would have scored below an equivalent of IQ 135 had he taken it because Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray along with Ron Hoeflin have argued that everyone who would have scored extremely high on the SAT, actually took the test (probably less true in recent years thanks to the ACT).

Meghan Kelly told Howard Stern she scored at the 85th percentile on the SAT which equates to about the 95th percentile if all Americans took it which equates to an IQ of about 125 which sounds about right. She’s bright, very bright, but not brilliant. It’s unclear whether she meant the verbal, math, or combined score.

Howard Stern claims to have scored 900 on the SAT which in his day equated to an IQ of about 110. I used to add bonus points since he attended a ghetto school but the famous Coleman report in the 1960s found school quality contributed very little to standardized test scores at least in Howard’s day. Many people would consider this a huge underestimate given Stern’s wit, humour, fluency and incisive interviewing style. It’s also way less than you’d expect from his most salient biodemographics. On the other hand, the hosts of Quite Frankly: A Howard Stern Podcast are constantly calling him a dumbass with an IQ of 79 so subjective impressions at both extremes tend to cancel out.

The average of all four of these people is 125 (U.S. norms) with a standard deviation (adjusted for degrees of freedom) of only 10.79, compared to the general U.S. population set at 100 (SD = 15). The ratio of their squared SD divided by America’s squared SD implies only 52% of the variation in IQ remains once you control for occupation, leaving 48% explained. The square root of 48% implies a potent 0.7 correlation between occupation and IQ, thus corroborating much previous research (Jensen 1998).

Of course self-reported data, especially from famous people should be treated with great caution as there is selection bias in who chooses to disclose their test scores, which test scores they choose to disclose, not to mention outright lying. On the other hand, using Jonathan Wai’s method of counting the percentage who attended elite schools, I had previously estimated that in 1994, the 11 top talk show hosts in U.S. television syndication had a mean IQ of 133 (U.S. norms) so there’s no reason to think ascertainment bias or selective disclosure inflated the average IQ in my admittedly tiny sample.