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.