Commenter Gypsy recently told me:

I recently discovered through the UK Govt that the number of students achieveing A*A*A or better, the typical grades required for an offer from Oxford or Cambrige, is 12,843, assuming a perfect correlation between IQ and Educational achievement the minimum IQ at Cambridge would be 132, given that there are around 738,757 17 year olds in the UK which I’m using as a proxy for 18 year olds and a ratio of 12,843 to 738,757 produces a rarity of 1/58. Interesting information, what do you speculate the average is before and after accounting for the imperfect relationship of IQ and Education?

If one in 58 UK teens achieves A*A*A or better, then this implies that the median teen who obtains A*A*A or better is at the one in 116 level in academic achievement.  If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and GCSE in the UK, we’d expect the median IQ of these academic superstars to be 36 points above the UK mean of 100 (white norms), but since the correlation is actually about 0.7, their expected average IQ would be 0.7(36) points above 100, or IQ 125.

It’s interesting that the expected median IQ at Oxford/Cambridge is roughly the same as at Harvard, even though the latter school is much more selective.  A likely reason for this is that academic selection in the UK is more meritocratic despite being less competitive.  It’s also possible that GCSE qualifications used in the UK are more comprehensive than SAT scores used in the US and thus a better proxy for IQ.

I know of no data on actual IQ scores for students at elite UK universities but there is some data on the faculty at Cambridge circa 1967, as reported by Grady Towers.

Towers wrote:

One of the most outstanding groups of men that I was able to find was that of the faculty of the University of Cambridge. (Nature, 1967, 213, 442) These scores represent the Full Scale WAIS IQs of 148 faculty members in a variety of disciplines from one of the most distinguished Universities in the world.

The WAIS has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15…

“The scores range from 110 to 141 with a mean of 126.5 and a standard deviation of 6.3 points. All the scores fall within three standard deviations of the mean. The distribution of the scores in terms of Wechsler’s classification show that all the scientists obtained scores above the seventieth percentile rank for the general population — 35.2 per cent are classified as “very superior”, 51.3 per cent as “superior”, and 13.5 per cent as “bright normal”. Approximate percentages of these three groups in a general population sample are 2.2, 6.7, and 16.1 respectively.”

It’s important to note however that the WAIS was normed on white Americans circa 1953.5 and the Cambridge data was published in 1967.  Given that James Flynn estimates that Wechsler IQ norms become deflated at a rate of 0.3 points per year (I suspect it’s less),  this suggests the WAIS may have overestimated the average IQ of Cambridge faculty by as much as 4.05 points, so their actual mean IQ was 122.45 (white norms) which is still pretty close to the IQ 125 I expect of Cambridge students today.

Commenter “Mug of Pee” has long claimed that the U.S. has one of the dumbest elites in the developed World because compared to other countries, U.S. elite schools select students based less on exam scores, and more on subjective and arbitrary criteria.  While it’s certainly true that the correlation between IQ and academic success in the U.S. has been declining in recent decades, I think this is balanced by the fact that America’s Ivy League has become increasingly competitive.

Schools like Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge educate future leaders so an IQ of 125 is a good estimate not just of the students at these schools, but for the elites of Western countries in general.

About one year ago, I estimated Dr. Ben Carson’s IQ.  The estimate was controversial because I began by calculating that the best neurosurgeon in America would have an absolutely breathtaking IQ of 148 (white norms), but since Carson was black, I deducted 15 points, and because he was a Republican, I deducted another seven points, bringing him down to 126, which is still smarter than 96% of America, but nowhere near the towering 148 his fans would have preferred.

Carson fans were understandably upset that he was being penalized for his race and politics, when his actual accomplishments alone indicated IQ 148, but I was merely trying to be statistically realistic.  For whatever reason, IQs of 148+ are rare among conservatives (not to be confused with the alt-right) and incredibly rare among black Americans, and since these two groups seldom overlap, anyone unlikely enough to fall in both had virtually no chance of being 148+, no matter how spectacular his accomplishments.

Carson’s SAT scores almost perfectly matched my IQ prediction

Now what’s fascinating is that at the time I estimated Carson’s IQ, I had no idea his SAT scores (a proxy for IQ) were on all the public record.  This was only recently brought to my attention by black national merit finalist Gondwana Man.

According to Carson’s autobiography Gifted Hands, he scored in the low ninetieth percentile on the SAT. This combined with his other accomplishments caused most of the top colleges in the country to contact him with offers and inducements.

About 85% of Americans in Carson’s cohort graduated high school, and only about 32% of those grads took the SAT, which means only about 27% of American 17-year-olds in Carson’s day took the SAT, but it’s thought that virtually 100% of those who would score high on the SAT took it, and whatever shortfall there would have been would have been roughly balanced by bright foreign students.

So Carson’s score in the top 10% of the SAT population suggests he scored in the top 2.7% of all American 17-year-olds of his day, equating to an IQ of 129 (U.S. norms) or 128 (white norms).  In other words, my estimate of IQ 126 (white norms) missed his actual test score by only 2 points.

The smartest out of HALF A MILLION students

Although some people might not consider an IQ equivalent of 128 to be all that great,  Carson’s SAT score was reportedly the highest in the Detroit public school district in 20 years.

How impressive is it to have the highest SAT score in the Detroit public school system in 20 years?

About half a million kids entered Kindergarten in the Detroit Board of Education (see table 1 of the book The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907-81) from 1936 to 1956, and generally only the brightest of these made it all the way to high school graduation and of those who would graduate, only the brightest of those likely wrote the SAT from 1948 to 1968.  Assuming roughly 100% of the top talent in the Detroit public schools actually wrote the SAT, Carson was the best out of 500,000, suggesting his 128 IQ was an astonishing 4.6 standard deviations above the mean of Detroit public school kids.  Assuming the standard deviation of Detroit public school kids is about 15, this suggests their average IQ (as measured by scholastic tests) was about 60.

How could the average IQ have been that low?

On a scale where White Americans average IQ 100, Black Americans have long averaged about IQ 85, but scholar Arthur Jensen found that in the worst school districts they averaged only 70 by the teenaged years.  Then when you factor in that on scholastic type tests, in those days blacks scored about 8 points lower than on formal IQ tests which are more culture fair, the black kids in Detroit should have been averaging about 60.  In Carson’s day the Detroit school system was roughly 55% black but the remaining 45% of non-blacks probably didn’t score much better, since these were the whites too disadvantaged to partake in the massive white flight out of Detroit in the 1960s.

What does an urban U.S. school with an average IQ of 60 look like?  It may have looked like this:

Adding 9 points to Carson’s IQ

Although today blacks score as well on scholastic type tests as they do on official IQ tests, in the 1970s, and almost certainly earlier, they scored about 9 points lower on scholastic tests as mentioned above, presumably because such tests assume academic knowledge that blacks were deprived of in those days.

Thus, since Carson’s took the SAT in 1968 and was raised in a black home, his 128 IQ should be boosted to IQ 137 to adjust for the deflated scores scholastic tests used to give black kids.  One could even argue that Carson deserves an extra adjustment because even the less biased official IQ tests may have been biased against blacks who attended the worst school districts.

What makes Carson’s IQ even more impressive is that Carson is famous for being a World-class brain surgeon, and yet he obtained his IQ on the SAT, a test that doesn’t even measure visual-motor intelligence.  This demonstrates the valdity of g (general intelligence): the fact that all cognitive abilities are positively correlated because they all load on g, so g loaded tests can predict intelligent behavior even in domains superficially quite different from the content of the test.

It’s also worth noting that as a teenager, Carson also obtained the highest score in his city on the ROTC exam.

In 1993, The New York Times reported:

On the verbal test, the average scores of black students rose to 353 this year, up 1 point from last year and 21 points from 1976. In comparison, the average score of white students was 444 this year, up 2 from last year and down 7 points from 1976.

I estimate that if all American 17-year-olds (not just the college-bound elite) had taken the SAT in the mid 1970s and mid 1990s, the verbal SAT would have had a mean of 368 (SD = 119) and 376 (SD = 119) respectively.

From here we can deduce that the mean verbal IQ (U.S. norms) of college bound blacks (as measured by the SAT) increased from 95 in the mid 1970s to 97 in the mid 1990s.  By contrast, the mean verbal IQ of college bound whites dropped from 110 to 109 over the same period.

On the math test, the average score of black students rose to 388 this year, up 3 points from last year and up 34 points from 1976. In comparison, the average score of white students was 494, up 3 points from last year and up 1 point from 1976.

I estimate that if all American 17-year-olds (not just the college-bound elite) had taken the SAT in the mid 1970s and mid 1990s, the math SAT would have had a mean of 402 (SD = 124) and 411 (SD = 133) respectively.

From here we can deduce that the mean math IQ (U.S. norms) of college bound blacks (as measured by the SAT) increased from 94 in the mid 1970s to 97 in the mid 1990s.  By contrast, the mean math IQ of college bound whites dropped from 111 to 109 over the same period.

From the article it can be deduced that the combined score (verbal + math) of college bound blacks increased from 686 in the mid 1970s to 741 in the mid 1990s.  By contrast, the combined score for college bound whites dropped from 941 in the mid 1970s to 938 in the mid 1990s.

I estimate that if all American 17-year-olds (not just the college-bound elite) had taken the SAT in the mid 1970s and mid 1990s, the combined SAT would have had a mean of 770 (SD = 200) and 787 (SD = 208) respectively.

From here we can deduce that the mean full-scale IQ (U.S. norms) of college bound blacks (as measured by the SAT) increased from 94 in the mid 1970s to 97 in the mid 1990s.  By contrast, the mean math IQ of college bound whites dropped from 113 to 111 over the same period.

So the bottom line is that among college-bound 17-year-olds, the black-white IQ gap (as measured by the SAT) shrunk from 19 points to 14 points as measured by U.S. norms, or 20 points to 14 points as measured by U.S. white norms.

This is the same story as told by the NAEP, which showed an even more dramatic reduction of the black-white IQ gap in the general U.S. population (not the college bound elite).  However no such reduction was observed on the Wechsler intelligence scales where the black-white gap has remained 15 points from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Tentative conclusion: scholastic tests gave biased measures of black IQ at least until the mid 1970s, but by the mid 1990s, they gave results commensurate with official IQ tests like the Wechsler.  Black Americans who use the scholastic tests to estimate their IQs should add 5-10 points if said tests were taken before 1975 or so.

A few years ago I came up with the theory that East Asians, despite being arguably the smartest and most evolved of the macro-races, are also arguably the most autistic.  Thus you might expect them to be easily manipulated by the U.S. media into increasing immigration, as so many European countries have been.

My fellow celeb Steve Sailer (Hi Steve!) has an article about the pressure Japan is coming under to accept more immigrants,  however so far I doubt they’re falling for it.

It seems big brained East Asians really are highly evolved, in that they not only have the book smarts to ace the SAT, but street smarts to not fall for the immigration con.  It seems you need a big brain to make room for both book smarts and street smarts.  Or maybe it’s not cognitive superiority that allows East Asians to eschew immigration, but moral inferiority ( a lack of emotional empathy?).

But sadly, I worry that their superior intelligence will cause North Korea to become a nuclear threat to the Western North America since I have family on the West Coast.

In his controversial book Race, Evolution and Behavior, J.P. Rushton cites neoconservative Bernard Lewis, arguably the most influential person of the early 21st century, when describing black-Arab historical relations:

Lewis (1990) examined Arabic relations to blacks with whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1,000 years.  Although the Koran stated there were no superior or inferior races, and therefore no bar to interracial marriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded.  Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks.  The Ethiopians were the most respected, the “Zanj” (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with Nubians occupying an intermediate position.

It makes sense that East/Horn Africans would be the most respected because they are the most Caucasoid looking, as well as very gracile.  Because of race mixing, about 40% of Ethiopian ancestry comes not from black Africa, but from West Asia, but I have to wonder, what came first: the Caucasoid admixture or the Caucasoid appearance which caused Caucasoids to respect them enough to mix?

This group of Ethiopian boys, despite having black skin and Negroid hair, are extremely Caucasoid in their facial skeletal traits:

Is this because they have 40% Caucasoid ancestry from the Middle East, or is it possible these boys are pure black, and incipient Caucasoid traits are actually indigenous to East Africa?   Could unmixed Ethiopians be the “missing link” as proto-Negroids evolved into proto-Caucasoids?

If these boys are mixed, why is their skin so dark?  Normally hybrids are not 100% Negroid in skin colour and 100% Caucasoid in facial traits, they’re in between Caucasoids and Negroids on both traits.

An alternative theory is that they are mixed and that they are descended from hybrids, but the hybrids were then selected for skin as dark as other Africans’ to survive the sub-Saharan sun.

I think it’s absolutely fascinating that the World’s first black decabillionaire, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Ali Al–Amoudi,  was not technically black at all, but a Semitic looking man with an Ethiopian mother and Arab father.

In addition the first black to become the most powerful person on Earth, was the son of an East African father and white mother.

It seems even in modern times, blacks from East Africa achieve the most wealth, power and status, especially if they’re hybridized.

Three years ago when I started HBD blogging I was nobody, a mere celebrity gossiping oddball, with a geeky interest in statistics.

Today I am a celebrity myself.

As of this moment in time, I am almost certainly the #1 blogger in the HBD-o-spere as readership spiked nearly 1000% in one night:

It seems marvellously symbolic that the new king of the HBD-o-sphere has an absolutely breathtaking IQ.  After adjusting for old norms, my childhood score on the WISC-R is a dizzying 135, making almost certainly the smartest blogger in the HBD-o-sphere, with the possible exception of Robert Lindsay, Hsu, the Lion, and of course the man who paved the way for us all: Steve Sailer.

To quote my late hero, Forbes magazine journalist Daniel Seligman:

The connection between IQ and achievement has one positive implication.  People who are at the top in American life, are probably there because they’re more intelligent than the rest of us, which is doubtless the way most of us think it should be.

Sadly GondwanaMan  might be right about an impending race war.  David Duke was one the scene claiming Trump needs to keep his promise to take America back.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if Trump was challenged from the right in a 2020 Republican primary?

JayMan’s hero HBD Chick claims that Northwest Europeans are uniquely immune to tribal behavior because of a lack of cousin marriage, which is a clever theory, but it’s important to note that political correctness and racial diversity have only been Western values for the last several decades and already we see things reverting backwards.

Meanwhile Trump took a lot of heat for not denouncing Duke’s endorsement:

And judging from Duke’s rare appearnaces in the MSM, he’s a very aggressive debater:

Having conquered the fields of television (#1 talk show for virtually 25 straight years), movies (Oscar nomination plus hit films like The Butler), politics (played the decisive role in electing the first black president), and literature (dictated the New York Times bestseller list for over a decade), the richest black and most worshipped woman in American history, has now used her estimated 2,029 cm³ brain to figure out how to adapt to the Wall Street.  Is there no environment she can’t adapt to?

Tomi Kilgore of Marketwatch writes:

Meet the new queen of Wall Street—Oprah Winfrey could make eight times her original investment, and lost some weight, in less than two years since buying shares in Weight Watchers International Inc.

Shares of the weight management company WTW, +0.82%  rocketed 25.1% in active trade to $41.39, the highest close since Aug. 1, 2013, after the company reported better-than-expected second-quarter profit and sales, and raised its earnings outlook for the year. Trading volume exceeded 9.9 million shares, compared with the full-day average of about 1.2 million shares.

The stock has now nearly quadrupled this year, and has rocketed 510% since Oprah took about a 10% stake in the company 22 months ago. In comparison, shares of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRK.B, -0.58%  have climbed 34.5% in 22 months, while the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.13%  has gained 21.8%.

All this success has people talking President Oprah in 2020, especially with polls showing she would crush her fan Donald Trump in a head to head match.

“She’s popular, she’s brilliant. She’s someone very special”, Trump told Larry King back in 1999, when he floated the idea of running for President as an Independent with Oprah as his running mate.

Although Oprah has consistently stated that she will NEVER run for public office, that hasn’t stopped people like Michael Moore from trying desperately to draft her as recently as last week:

Worshipped by the Michael Moore left for triumphing over racism, sexism,  classism, weightism, poverty, and sexual abuse, without sacrificing her integrity, and by the Ayn Rand right for being the greatest example of a self-made rags to riches capatilist superhero to actually exist, Oprah occupies a deep place in the American psyche.

However billionaire David Rubenstein wisely asks “Why be President when you can be Oprah?” stating:

Oprah is higher than being president of the United States. … I mean she can do anything she wants. Nobody criticizes her and she is a terrific person.

Billionaire David Rubenstein

Reminds me of the time when Oprah asked Sting: “Is there anything better than being a rock star?”

His reply: “Being Oprah”

The audience roared with cheers:

The DSM-V definition of autism is as follows:

A. Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, as manifested by the following, currently or by history (examples are illustrative, not exhaustive, see text):

1. Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions.
2. Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, ranging, for example, from poorly integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures; to a total lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication.
3. Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships, ranging, for example, from difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts; to difficulties in sharing imaginative paly or in making friends; to absence of interest in peers.

B. Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities, as manifested by at least two of the following, currently or by history (examples are illustrative, not exhaustive; see text):

1. Stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech (e.g., simple motor stereotypies, lining up toys or flipping objects, echolalia, idiosyncratic phrases).
2. Insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns or verbal nonverbal behavior (e.g., extreme distress at small changes, difficulties with transitions, rigid thinking patterns, greeting rituals, need to take same route or eat food every day).
3. Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g, strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or perseverative interest).
4. Hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input or unusual interests in sensory aspects of the environment (e.g., apparent indifference to pain/temperature, adverse response to specific sounds or textures, excessive smelling or touching of objects, visual fascination with lights or movement).

C. Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period (but may not become fully manifest until social demands exceed limited capacities, or may be masked by learned strategies in later life).

D. Symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning.

E. These disturbances are not better explained by intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder) or global developmental delay. Intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder frequently co-occur; to make comorbid diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability, social communication should be below that expected for general developmental level.

NOTE: Individuals with a well-established DSM-IV diagnosis of autistic disorder, Asperger’s disorder, or pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified should be given the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Individuals who have marked deficits in social communication, but whose symptoms do not otherwise meet criteria for autism spectrum disorder, should be evaluated for social (pragmatic) communication disorder.

So to try to simplify this, autism is basically the combination of poor social skills and repetitive behavior.  But why are these two core conditions lumped together instead of treated as two separate disorders?  Is this just reification or is there a scientific explanation?  I heard one professor suggest it’s because for reasons that are not understood,  they occur together far more often than would be expected by chance, but they need to figure out why.  Is one causing the other or is there a third variable causing both?  And are these two traits correlated in the general population, or just in the clinical population?

Are autistics qualitatively different from neurotypicals or are they just the extreme end of normal variation?  If it’s the latter, what’s the opposite of autism?  Some scientists say it’s schizophrenia, but that’s not a perfect fit.  In theory, the opposite of autistics should be extremely socially skilled people whose behavior is extremely non-repetitive.

For as long as I remember, Einstein has been the poster boy for Genius.  “It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure that out” was a common expression, and Time magazine named Einstein the most influential person of the 20th century, calling him the preeminent scientist in a century dominated by science, and largely crediting him with all the scientific developments that followed his ground-breaking theories.

Not being a hardcore intellectual (my interests are psychometrics and evolution, not super brainy stuff like physics) I never quite understood what the big deal about Einstein was because it was so abstract, but most people above 150 IQ seem to worship him, while the pseudo-intellectual crowd (IQ 120-150) all worshipped Marx and Chomsky (every student at the university I attended would start their sentences with “from a Marxist perspective”).

One thing I did find odd about Einstein though is despite his reputation as the greatest Genius to ever live,  he was anything but a precocious todler (he learned to talk late) and his brain size at autopsy was somewhat small.

The two most Darwinian correlates of intelligence are brain size and income so I tend to admire people who symbolize these correlation (i.e. Bill Gates using his 170 IQ to become the World’s richest man, or Chris Langan’s stratospheric brain size making him “America’s smartest man”).  Einstein was always a thorn in my side because every time I mentioned my beloved brain-size IQ correlation, someone would cite Einstein’s smallish brain as evidence against it.  Of course a single individual proves little, but symbolically, Einstein’s lack of brain mass was devastating.

Thus I was intrigued to hear about a video claiming Einstein plagerized his theory and was not the super genius the media built him up to be.  Of course the person trashing Einstein might have an extremist political agenda for discrediting Einstein,  so keep that in mind when listening to the interview: