Commenter Pill (aka Philosopher) lacks social IQ. He thinks that bashing another guy’s head with a beer bottle impresses women (seriously).

When he first said this years ago, I told him that such behavior would actually scare women, and former commenter Afro (who I disagreed with on many topics), but who was quite experienced with women, concurred.

But because of low social IQ, Pill simply ignored our advice, thinking he knew better.

So I decided to do a bit of research and found a study where male students from the University of South Florida were asked to estimate how aggressively the ideal man (as judged by women) would react to different scenarios.

Participants completed questionnaires alone or in small groups. The first part of this questionnaire asked participants to read three scenarios involving interpersonal conflicts between men, intended to present a variety of conflicts. In the version of the questionnaire given to men, participants were asked to imagine themselves as the victims in the confrontations. In the female version, women were asked to imagine themselves as observers of the altercations between the men. This allowed us to compare how men thought women would react to male aggression with women’s actual reactions. In the first scenario, a man gets bumped at a party and the man who bumps him calls him an ‘‘asshole.” In the second scenario a man and his girlfriend are repeatedly harassed while attending a
football game (female respondents were asked to imagine themselves as the girlfriend in this scenario). The third scenario described a couple at a mall food court whose seats are stolen, who
then get insulted when they try to reclaim them (women were again asked to imagine themselves as the girlfriend).

Following each scenario, men were asked … what a woman would think the ideal man should do.
For each question, respondents chose one of six behavioral responses that ranged from non-aggressive to progressively more aggressive: … 1.21 = Walk away without responding/Ignore it,
1.79 = Laugh it off, 3.79 = Make a verbal retort, 4.43 = Get in the guy’s
face without making physical contact, 5.04 = Push the guy,
6.00 = Punch the guy

men predicted that women would like more aggressive responses than women themselves reported preferring (men’s guesses about women = 3.47 [1.01]…women’s own responses = 2.65

Notice that punching the guy is a level 6 on the aggression scale, but pill thinks the most attractive response is smashing a guy’s head in with beer bottle which would be like a level 8. So Pill’s estimate is 4.49 SD higher than the average man’s which is already too high. But because university of South Florida men are likely somewhat above average in social intelligence, the true figure might be 4 SD on a more representative sample.

Of course there’s a lot more to social intelligence than judging appropriate levels of aggression so it’s unlikely that Pill’s overall social IQ is anywhere near as low as this study suggests.

It’s also unlikely Pill will be convinced his answer is wrong and instead will think a woman’s true response to male aggression can’t be measured by such an artificial study involving hypothetical scenarios. Indeed he will likely rationalize by thinking the study itself, and those of us who cite it, are socially unintelligent.

For generations, scientists have scoffed at the idea of God as a silly superstition, and yet if you ask these same scientists whether they believe in life on other planets, many would say something like “of course, when you consider the sheer numbers of habitable planets in the universe, the odds of alien life is extremely high”.

But you can’t calculate odds just from knowing the denominator; you also need to know the numerator, and so far we have only one example of life emerging from nothing (biogenesis): Earth. And until we find a second example of biogenesis, we don’t know if it’s a once in a solar system event, or a once in a galaxy event, or even a once in a universe event.

Scientists will say life began early in Earth’s existence, so this suggests it’s a common event. But the mere fact that Earth has intelligent life means it must have started early enough for our complex minds to have evolved, so the fact that life started early on Earth is just another way of saying complex life exists on Earth. Still tells us nothing about the probability of complex or even simple life existing anywhere else.

Since we have no way of knowing whether the denominator is small enough to make alien life probable, and it’s only one of two possibilities, there’s a 50% chance of alien life.

Thus agnosticism is the only intelligent answer to the question of life on other planets.

What about God? We have no way of knowing whether whatever events caused the universe did so intentionally, so perhaps there’s also a 50% chance of God existing.

So even though belief in life on other planets is considered way more rational than belief in God, both are equally probable. And yet, people who believe in alien life are almost certainly more intelligent on average. Probably because alien belief is generally arrived at through reasoning while theism is arrived at through faith.

In part 1 of this series I described an extremely important study where 35 children of varying degrees of Australoid ancestry, adopted into ordinary white homes in Adelaide, South Australia, were intelligence tested. One of the tests used was called “Conservation of Quantity” and is based on Jean Piaget’s theory that the human mind develops through stages. For example, very young children and very retarded adults, think that if you dump a cup of tea into a tall and skinny glass, causing the water to stretch out, you suddenly have more tea. They may also think that if you take some cookie dough and flatten into a really big circle, you suddenly have more cookie. Or they may think that if you take 4 pennies, and spread them apart on the table so they take up more space, you suddenly have more pennies.

However as the mind matures, we suddenly understand this is nonsense. Substances conserve their amount regardless of the form they take. What makes this a great intelligence test is that very few of us are ever taught conservation, but at a certain age we just get it, like the kid in this quick video.

An interesting question is do we get it because life experience teaches us, or do we get it because of the physical maturation of the brain? I suspect a toddler could play with water everyday for a year and never grasp conservation, but an adult, who was raised with no exposure to liquid (he drank only from a straw from a lidded cup and thus never saw it) or any other malleable substance, would immediately grasp it, simply because his brain was neurologically developed.

I don’t know the exact questions the kids in the study were asked but the results can be crudely inferred from the below graph. I may have to revise some of these numbers since reading from a graph is not an exact science, but it seems that at age eight, 87% of white kids tested in Canberra, Australia in 1969, grasped quantity conservation but only about 18% of Australian aboriginals tested the same year at Hermannsburg mission did. Assuming both groups formed a bell curve with similar variance, that suggests the Australoid bell curve is 2.07 standard deviations to the left of the white one.

At age nine, it seems 97% of white kids grasp quantity conservation, but only 38% of Australoids do, however among the Adelaide sample (largely hybridized Australoids adopted by whites), about 72% do. From these data, it seems the white > Australoid gap is 2.2 SD, while the white > mixed Australoids raised by whites gap is 1.3 SD. At age 10, there’s no data for the mixed race adopted Australoids, but only 27% of the traditional Australoids do while 97% of whites do, suggesting a gap of 2.47 SD.

At age seven, 67% of the whites grasped quantity conservation while 50% of the part-white Australoids adopted by whites did, suggesting a gap of 0.47 SD. The percentage of traditional Australoids who grasped it this young is too small to measure.

Averaging the data, the whites scored 2.25 SD higher than traditional Australoids, and 0.89 SD above the part-white Australoids raised by whites.

However the paper notes, “Canberra children, forming the comparison group for conservation of quantity, tend to come from relatively high-socioeconomic levels of the population”. By contrast the paper noted that the adopted part-white Australoids were raised by typical whites and I assume, the traditional Australoids were raised by typical Australoids.

In 2016, about 36% of the Canberra population (age 15+) had a Bachelor Degree level education or higher, compared to 22% for Australia as a whole. While I don’t have stats from circa 1970, assuming its education rank has been stable, the average Canberra adult was about 0.47 SD above the average Australian, and given about a 0.7 correlation between IQ and education, about 0.47(0.7) = 0.33 SD smarter than the average Australian, and given the 0.5 correlation between the IQs of parents and their kids, the children were likely 0.33(0.5) = 0.16 SD smarter than the average Australian (white kid).

So because Canberra kids were used as the white sample, we need to reduce their scores by 0.16 SD to adjust for their above average IQs. Thus the true white > traditional Australoid IQ gap becomes 2.09 SD (31 IQ points) and the true white > part-white & raised white Australoid gap becomes 0.73 SD (11 IQ points).

The IQ of Australoids raised by whites is an estimate of the genetic IQ of Australian aboriginals, and as mentioned, they score 11 points below whites. However because these had only 58% Australoid ancestry (on average) the expected IQ of an unmixed Australoid raised by whites would be 11/0.58 = 19 points below the white mean, or IQ 81.

Conclusion

On a scale where white Australians average IQ 100 (SD = 15) on a test of quantity conservation, the average unmixed Australian aboriginal likely scored about IQ 69 (1.9 percentile of the white distribution). However if raised in the same environment as whites, their IQ increases to 81, suggesting about 61% of the white > Australoid IQ gap is genetic. The effect of adoption at near infancy from a traditional fringe dwelling Australoid family into an average white family is to raise IQ by 12 points which is actually a lot considering how culture-fair conservation tests are thought to be (by some).

But perhaps not this one. The paper states: “the subject has to be able to justify his conclusions with fairly sophisticated explanations. Those children demonstrating conservation but unable to justify it receive a lower classification than those who can justify it”

Still, the effect of adoption is much less on this test than it was on the Picture Vocabulary test discussed in part one, so it’s a relatively culture fair test.

Pumpkin Person rating: 8 out of 10

I just stumbled upon this movie on netflix last night and I think my readers might enjoy it as much as I did. The film begins 50 years ago, when a class of young children are drawing pictures of the future to be placed into a time capsule to be opened by kids at the school 50 years later. All the kids are following these instructions except for the one little girl who suggested this idea in the first place. Instead of drawing a picture of the future, she is rapidly filling her page with “meaningless” numbers like some kind of autistic schizophrenic.

50 years later a little boy is given this page when the time capsule is dug out of the ground and he shows it to his dad (played by Nicolas Cage), an atheist MIT professor who I estimate has an IQ above 150. Dad notices that part of the sequence says 200109112996 which he infers is the date of the 9/11 attacks, followed by the number of deaths. From there he infers that the page predicted every major tragedy of the last 50 years, and its final prediction is the end of the World. Can he save himself and his loved ones before it’s too late?

In 1970 a most remarkable study was done. 35 Australian Aboriginal kids (57% female) raised by white families in Adelaide, South Australia since they were 1.5-years-old (on average), were intelligence tested. The kids ranged in age from five to 14 and ranged in ancestry from 100% Australoid to only 13% Australoid (about 58% on average). Unlike the Minnesota transracial adoption study where the adoptive parents were college educated, the “socio-economic status of the adopting families exhibited no obvious characteristics: they appeared to be representative of a wide cross-section of the South Australian population.”

This is good because it lets us see how a different race would score if reared in the typical white environment.

One of the tests given was the highly g loaded Peabody Picture Vocabulary test where the examiner says a word, and the subject points to one of several pictures that best represents that word. Below we see a chart comparing the mixed race adopted Adelaide Australoids to both white norms (standard scores from the test manual) and presumably unmixed and non-adopted Australoids tested at Hermannsburg Mission.

The chart above suggests that unmixed, unadopted Australoids at age nine, 10, and 11 would have obtained raw scores on the PPVT (form A) of 37, 42, and 42. Using table 2 below I equate these to IQs of 44, 51, and 45, respectively (U.S. white norms). If these IQs sound absurdly low, keep in mind this is a vocabulary test and many of the unmixed unadopted Australoids perhaps did not speak English as their primary language.

Meanwhile at ages five, nine, 10 and 11, the mixed adopted Australoids have raw scores of about 44, 63, 65 and 95, corresponding to IQs of 88, 86, 85 and 118.

On average the mixed adopted Australoids probably averaged verbal IQs of 94 (6 points below the white mean of the U.S., the U.K. and Australia) and considering they’re only 58% Australoid on average, unmixed adopted Australoids would likely have scored 90 (6 points below white mean/0.58 = 10 points below the white mean).

Conclusion

When raised in their own communities, unmixed Australoids seem to average about IQ 47 on English Picture Vocabulary (3.53 standard deviations below the white mean). But when raised in white homes they likely average IQ 90 (0.66 SD below the white mean). Thus this racial gap appears at most, only 19% genetic.

Challenges

Were the norms from the original PPVT valid for English speaking communities in 1970 Australia?

Given that the original PPVT was normed on several thousand white kids in and around Nashville, Tennessee in 1959, one might question its validity in 1970 Australia. A 1972 paper by L. J. Taylor , P. R. De Lacey & B. Nurcombe specifically set out to answer this question. They tested 60 Australian kids (mostly using form B) from age 4 to 10. Aside from age 4 where they included a lot of mixed Australoids in the sample, the average IQ at every age ranged from 91 to 112 or about 104 on average. So if anything the 1959 white norms from Nashville were perhaps 4 points too generous for Australians in the early 1970s, though even this slight inflation might be explained by the fact that the study translated three words on the test from American English to Australian English.

Did the IQs of the mixed race adopted kids decline in adulthood?

There was no follow-up study so we don’t how the adopted kids would have scored in adulthood, but in the Minnesota transracial adoption study, the IQs of adopted kids dropped between five to 13 points from age seven to 17. This drop was likely exaggerated by old norms in an at least one of the test sessions (and poor attempts to correct for the Flynn Effect), but to the extent that it was real, it was likely caused by the adoptive parents being upper-middle class. By contrast, in this study, the adoptive parents were more representative of the white population so the adoptees enjoyed the same environment as the average white kid, not benefitting from an upper class IQ boost that quickly fades.

[Update December 12, 2021: Thanks to a correction from an alert reader, some numbers in this article were substantially revised]

I was watching youtuber Tim Pool host leading members of new conservative media at his trailer (that’s not a joke, it really was his trailer, though maybe it’s an ironic trailer since he must have money).

As traditional media collapses, opinion makers are increasingly emerging in youtube and podcasts, with Joe Rogan and Tim Pool being two of the most successful examples. (Ok, Rogan’s not really a conservative but liberals don’t like him)

It was interesting to see so many of them in one room since they’re each used to monopolizing their own shows. Of course everyone has to kiss Joe Rogan’s ass since he’s the king of this new genre so they all want to be invited on his show. Alex Jones was the biggest Rogan ass kisser.

It was fun seeing the big husky robust Jones get verbally kicked around by the thin and short Ashkenazi Michael Malice. A good example of the negative correlation between IQ and weight/height ratio. It was also nice knowing that Pool, despite being a Trump supporter, is smart and unbiased enough to know Biden won the election.

But their thought process is so strange. On the one hand they keep complaining about the corporate media (who Malice calls the enemy of the people-did we learn nothing from the Holocaust?) but then say covid lockdowns are all part of this communist conspiracy to reduce income inequality by driving everyone into poverty. ThAtTH MAKkeS SEnTH. Nothing corporate elites want more than communism. Oh well, I guess we should be grateful they don’t believe in QAnon like their boomer counterparts.

You can watch the full episode below if you have two and a half hours to kill:

The great Gordon Lightfoot turned 83 today! Roughly the same age as the Wechsler IQ scales, especially the beloved ancient WBI. Which is fitting since it was the Wechsler scales that taught me who this Canadian treasure is. One should never discuss items on IQ tests but this item is no longer used, and was only ever used in Canada…

Immediately after taking the WISC-R at age 12, I became obsessed with owning these tests. But I was just a 12-year-old kid, and even if I had the huge amount of money needed to buy it, I didn’t have a graduate degree in psychology so it couldn’t be sold to me.

So I went to a payphone and just started phoning every psychologist, pretending to be a woman (I was too young to pretend to be a man) telling them they were under inspection to make sure they were following proper testing protocol and to pretend I was a patient they were administering the test to (so I could make sure they were doing it right). These poor psychologists would spend an hour on the phone administering the test to me in as I rapidly wrote down each item.

The problem was, my general knowledge has always been way below my overall IQ (I scored at the 75th percentile at age 12 among 12-year-olds when officially tested), but now I was pretending to be a grown-ass woman taking the ADULT Wechsler Information subtest. I flew through the first few questions without any difficulty, but then she asks “Who is Gordon Lightfoot?”

“A lumberjack,” I stupidly replied. And that was the beginning of my downward spiral on the WAIS-R Information subtest (I got a scaled score of 7 which was probably high for a 12-year-old but below average for the adult I was pretending to be). The country’s psychometric field is run by dimwits the psychologist must have thought.

It turns out the actual question concerned a famous jazz musician (who I did know) but since they were administering the test in Canada, they arbitrarily substituted Gordon Lightfoot.

That night I asked my mom if she knew who Gordon Lightfoot was: “OF COURSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” she screamed.

A few years later I administered the entire WAIS-R to my 9th grade English teacher who I adored because she gave me the highest mark in the school’s history on my book report of George Orwell’s 1984 (despite me never reading the book). When I asked her “Who was Gordon Lightfoot?” her elderly smile lit up the room as she got out of the chair and danced, saying “Gordon Lightfoot is the most wonderful Canadian folk singer!” It was great to see that a woman with such a high opinion of my book report score so high on the WAIS-R.

Sadly, in 2019 I met a super scrawny short guy who told me Lightfoot was a POS. Normally I have the highest respect for scrawny people, but this guy just looked like he had AIDS (no offense). Apparently he was working as a cook when Lightfoot ordered some food and as a huge fan, the restaurant at which he worked approached the singer and said “a member of our staff is such a huge fan of yours and he would just be so honored to meet you” and outwalked this lowly young cook who looked like he had AIDS.

Apparently Lightfoot was nonplused and a bit annoyed, so the cook was obviously devastated. But then I’d be annoyed too if I were just trying to enjoy dinner and I was introduced to some freak whose only relevance was that he was a fan of my music, like everyone else in Canada!

And what great music it is!

In the second and final chapter of this series, we review evidence that commenter Tez has high IQ. From his email:

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1. My mother and I are the only obese people in our extended family, and we both used to be quite thin. The general trend of genetic stock is fairly promising on my mother’s side of the family tree, where almost everyone is thin, or at least was thin prior to middle age. My father’s family history is mysterious but he was rail thin and very tall, suggesting high IQ. Also, I was in great shape for most of my life. I gained 50 lb in the past 6 years during a prolonged depressive spell, then gained another 20 lb during lockdown.
2. My childhood IQ was 139. I don’t know what the intelligence scale of the test was. I suspect it was Wechsler but 139 is high by any standard, particularly for an underclass kid. Incidentally, I was forced to take an IQ test by my kindergarten teacher. She assumed I was retarded after I failed a simple busy work assignment to draw a mode of transportation (airplane, bike, car, etc.) Possessing a creative spark, I drew an enormous catapult with a passenger seat for a parachute equipped traveler. Tangentially, I tend to agree with your theory that childhood IQ scores are more reliable, although I am obviously biased by my own high score.
3. I learned to speak at a very young age and was speaking in complete sentences before my second birthday. At the age of one, I apparently told my mother I intended to learn how to potty train myself as it would spare her the trouble of teaching me. I have no memory of this conversation but see no reason for my mother to lie about it.
4. I am 6’5″. That is tall for any ethnic group but extremely tall for someone who is part Japanese. My mother is tall for a half Scottish, half Japanese woman at 5’8″ and my father was a 6’2″ French Canadian. Interestingly, everyone on both sides of my family has scoliosis, including my mother who has double scoliosis, meaning her spine is shaped like the letter S. Even in her 70s, I suspect she’d be well over 6’0″ if she could straighten herself out. I would probably be 6’8″ or so if I could straighten out my back but I’m already too tall for comfort.
5. I have an enormous skull, with a head circumference of 25.5″ or 64.77cm. Whether or not this evinces a superior brain is up for debate.
6. I am extremely pale, even adjusting for ethnic background. People have always made comments about my paleness, which I find insulting and inappropriate. In any case, my great paleness suggests to me that my ancestors all lived in very selective environments.
7. My maternal (Japanese) grandfather was highly intelligent, long lived and the direct descendant of nobility. My mother’s father was an MIT educated electrical engineer who worked alongside Albert Einstein on various projects for the Department of Defense. My grandfather definitely knew Einstein as evidenced by his photo of them working together in a lab. What I am less sure of is my grandfather’s claim to have corrected several of Einstein’s equations. After leaving the DoD, my grandfather worked for NASA monitoring sounds from outer space. He eventually died at the age of 95. The cause of death was pneumonia, which he could have treated but instead he simply chose to die. He seemed to follow Einstein’s sentiment that it was inelegant to fight the inevitable. For all I know, Einstein picked up that sentiment from my grandfather. The Japanese are fairly stoic about facing death, particularly those descended from samurai stock. In any case, although he was 95 at the time of his death, he could have lived even longer and that suggests excellent genes.
8. My great grandmother was said to be one of the tallest women in Japan. She wasn’t tall by contemporary western standards but as a woman in the 19th century, standing 5’6″ made her a veritable giantess. She was also the daughter of samurai.
9. My maternal grandmother was supposedly highly intelligent. Personally, she always struck me as a first class idiot and religious fanatic. She also appeared to be an untreated schizophrenic but her measured IQ score was 150. She died at the age of 84 from heart failure. I suspect she could have lived another ten years had she spent less time praying and more time exercising. She was rail thin but that seemed to be more from living on a low calorie diet.
10. My mother’s childhood IQ score was 158. I don’t know what test she took, however, and in general, am not convinced my mother is all that bright. I suspect the lion’s share of intelligence related genes went to her younger sister, who got two masters degrees, climbed the corporate ladder and married a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet.
11. Even though he was eventually expelled, my father was smart enough to attend Harvard. Simply getting accepted is fairly impressive in light of his white trash upbringing. It’s interesting to note that when he attended, the acceptance rate was closer to twenty percent than its current rate of three percent despite the student body remaining the same size. This is because Harvard spends millions of dollars annually tricking high school seniors with no chance of admission into applying simply so Harvard can sate its elitist need for exclusivity by denying more applicants. Thus Harvard, with its ultra low acceptance rate, can maintain its spot among the ranks of US News’ top colleges in America. Elitism for the sake of elitism; how typical of the ivy league caste system.
12. Despite putting no effort into it, my SAT score was a respectable 1220 out of a possible 1600. I can’t stress enough how little I actually cared about school growing up. I certainly had no intentions of attending college. My plan as a teenager was to become a comic book artist, possibly after attending cartooning course at a trade school like the Kubert School in New Jersey. My teachers and guidance counselor kept hounding me to take the SAT, so I took it to get them off my back. I treated it like an eye exam, walking in off the street with zero prep and going through the motions. It literally never occurred to me to study given that I had never studied for a test in my life. In spite of this haphazard approach and a piecemeal education, I did quite well. Also, family income correlates perfectly with SAT score and adjusted for my family income bracket–less than 20k a year–I scored off the charts.
13. People frequently comment that they are impressed if not astonished by my intelligence. Personally, I take this as something of a back handed compliment as I believe it evinces a prejudice against hulking giants. I look like a 6’5″ Ron Livingston with the physique of James Gandolfini–broad shouldered with a block shaped torso. People expect you to be dumb when you’re built like an NFL lineman. Conversely, people online who have no idea what I look like frequently compliment my intelligence. Of course, in so doing, they are merely comparing me to the average internet pleb, which isn’t saying much. Still, it is worth noting that my college classmates revered me as a literary demigod and constantly requested my guidance overseeing their term papers.
14. I suspect I have fairly high emotional intelligence, if that is truly a thing. Despite constantly moving around from school to school, I was always very popular and in some cases had what can only be described as a cult like following of adoring vassals. People tended to hang on my every word when I would hold court on various subjects of interest. I completely took this for granted when I was younger. Only recently have I appreciated this was remarkable adjusted for circumstances. My third grade teacher kept telling my mother, “Your son has such amazing charisma for his age. He could be president one day.” I don’t entirely agree but politics don’t interest me in any case.
15. I have a borderline eidetic memory, for whatever that is worth. I didn’t realize this was a gift until I was in my early 20s. Naively, I assumed everyone remembers things with near crystal clarity. How wrong I was.
16. I am a fairly talented artist, particularly by the standards of an autodidact. I am also a competent video editor, photoshop enthusiast, essayist and writer of short stories. Currently I am working on a novel set in Afghanistan.

Other relevant info:

Miscellaneous labels I identify with: Atheist, secularist, transhumanist, INTJ, politically liberal (voted Green Party in past two elections), unmarried, no kids, night owl, teetotaler, art and music lover.

Hobbies: I hate sports with the intensity of a thousand suns. I love strategy games like chess and Magic: The Gathering, both of which I have played at a ranked competitive level. I play poker semi-professionally and have done well for myself. My musical taste is eclectic; I like almost everything but hate country and most rap music. I love film and was dumb enough to major in it back when I still fantasized about a career as a director. Sam Harris is my favorite living non-fiction writer, though I also have a lot of respect for conservative intellectuals like Thomas Sowell who challenge liberal conventions. I was a fan of Chomsky in my early 20s but now cringe at his overly simplistic world view, which appears to be motivated in part by ethnic genetic interests. I don’t watch a lot of TV but I love Bill Maher and occasionally enjoy Rachel Maddow. Norm MacDonald was my favorite comedian and I’m heartbroken by his passing.

One other random fact: I am only attracted to women with brown skin, dark hair and brown eyes. I seem to be attracted to my total opposite given that I am pale skinned, green eyed and prematurely white haired (I dye it black). I don’t know if this attraction towards brown skinned women says anything about my IQ. I interpret it as nature attempting to give my unborn offspring a chance at enduring the unforgiving summers global warming has thrust upon us.

Well, hopefully you are still awake after reading all of that, generously assuming you read any of it.

If you have any follow up questions, let me know.

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Tez has provided an enormous amount of information so I’m just going to simplify by focusing on the most salient.

BIODEMOGRAPHICS

As I mentioned in part 1, the average IQ of a chronically American is 81 (U.S. white norms). Average IQ of a 6’5″ quarter Japanese White American Millennial man is 111. Average IQ of a white American Millennial man with a 25.5″ head circumference is 116.

What is the average IQ of someone with all three characteristics? To answer that question, we do not simply average the three averages because the traits are imperfectly correlated. The actual expected IQ of such a person is 92 (U.S. white norms). The reason it’s so low is chronic unemployment is a much more powerful IQ predictor than physical traits like height and head size, especially since the latter are substantially correlated and thus add little information independent of one another.

With his slight Mongoloid tilt, colossal physique, and chronic unemployment I am picturing a dim-witted giant, like Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I find it fascinating that Tez wrote “People expect you to be dumb when you’re built like an NFL lineman” but I’m wondering if his height adds, or subtracts from the impression of stupidity.

PSYCHOMETRICS

And yet Tez scored 1220 on the re-centered SAT which at the time he likely took it (early 2000s), equated to an IQ of 123 (U.S. norms); about 121 (U.S. white norms). And if anything this is an underestimate given Tez’s poor schooling (although quality of schooling tends to correlate with genetic quality).

So bio-demographics underestimated Tez’s IQ by roughly 2 standard deviations! I guess this is expected given the huge standard error on predictions based on IQ correlates as crude as employment, height and head size, but error might be especially large for someone like Tez, who has come from such an unusual background. It may also have been a mistake to use chronic unemployment as a predictor when he admits to working “under the table” especially if he makes a lot of money doing so.

Until more in-depth testing occurs, I will adopt 121 as the best measure of Tez’s IQ.

Recently commenter Tez asked me to comment on his IQ. The email was very long so today I only have time to comment on the first half, where he lists all the evidence of low IQ (in part 2 he lists all the evidence of high IQ). Below is from his email.

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Hello, Pumpkin Person.

I hope this correspondence finds you well. I don’t want to bore you with unnecessary details, so I’ll merely skim the surface of what I think is relevant biographical data.

Low IQ stuff:

1. I am currently obese. According to Jayman’s great article on the subject, obesity is more heritable than most people think and in my estimation, is indicative of inferior genes. Not so much metabolic genes that make someone directly obese so much as genes that lead to habits resulting in obesity. Personally, I have long observed a correlation between obesity and low IQ, even before I discovered the HBD sphere. With that said, my clinical depression is what drives my overeating and there are times when it wanes and so too does my weight. I have been in absolutely fantastic shape in the past, which suggests I am not simply a walking mound of genetic waste. However, I currently need to lose 70 lb.
2. My paternal grandmother was a mildly autistic thirteen year old girl who was raped by a pedophile while working the front desk at the family business, a brothel. She thus became pregnant with my father, who inherited his father’s genetic predilection towards antisocial behavior. My father was a violent psychopath who took great joy in in beating my pregnant mother and raping my brother and sister. I tend to think empathy and IQ are correlated, though I also suspect my father was a high IQ outlier. After being expelled from Harvard for destroying a science exhibit while high on acid, he went on to study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and had perfect grades before either dropping out or being expelled. His plan was to become a priest, probably because it would have afforded him unlimited access to altar boys. I suspect he only began dating my mother because he saw she was a single mom and realized he could rape her son. Once he knocked her up with the pregnancy that became my sister, my father pursued higher paying work as a photographer. Following my parents’ separation, he spent the final 27 years of his life successfully evading child support collectors and was apparently working as an elementary school teacher at the time of his death (again, for obvious reasons).
3. My family was homeless for six months after my mother finally took the kids and ran. Following this, we spent fifteen years on welfare. Obviously this says nothing great about my genetic stock. I have observed first hand that members of the underclass generally deserve every negative stereotype surrounding them. They–or should I say we–are on average genetically inferior to members of higher socioeconomic classes. With that said, the majority of the middle to upper-middle class do not impress me and I tend to think my achievements would outstrip theirs had I been born into a similarly comfortable setting.
4. I have large gaps in my primary education. As a consequence of having whatever slum we inhabited condemned by the board of health every two years, my family moved from town to town constantly. Thus I attended two elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools. Some of these schools were okay, most were awful. My ninth grade math teacher, for instance, was a heroin addict who would pass out twenty minutes into the typical class after handing out busy work assignment. Consequently, I learned nothing from her and was always an entire year behind my grade level on math, which really hurt when I was strong-armed into AP math classes I was ill equipped for. Eventually I simply gave up on math, and from there, school as a whole.
5. I was raised by a single mother who was an eighth grade drop out. My mother had a rift with her abusive overachiever father and, it seems to me, basically wasted her life to spite him. Being raised by someone with borderline contempt for academic achievement may have rubbed off on me. On that note:
6. I was an extremely unmotivated high school student. I hated school and unsuccessfully attempted to drop out. After being court ordered to attend a residential school for problem kids, I did the absolute minimum amount of work to squeak by. I never studied and rarely did homework. I somehow ended up in AP classes despite my vehement protests; I greatly would have preferred staying in low tier classes alongside my slacker friends. I refused to waste a single moment of my free time in high school studying for tests; I have no idea how I managed passing grades, let alone a 4.0 GPA senior year. I was a terrible student who didn’t deserve his high marks–lazy, undisciplined and intellectually aloof. This might sound like a humble-brag but I see it as the opposite. Whatever latent intellectual potential I possessed went to waste due to coming from an underclass family that didn’t prioritize education, whether through culture, genetic inferiority, or both.
7. I am a college drop out. Following high school, I spent an aimless year as a NEET before applying to several colleges—after missing the application deadlines. I was completely clueless about how to apply to college; deadlines, financial aid, all of that. Stupidly, I checked the ethnic background boxes for both white and Asian, not realizing the anti-Asian prejudice of admission committees. Eventually I attended the only school that accepted me, a non-prestigious state university (CSULA, 47.8% acceptance rate) that was not legally allowed to factor in the race of applicants. I majored in Film before dropping out after sophomore year with a 3.9 GPA, having spent all semesters on the dean’s list. High grades are nice but it was dumb of me to major in something as frivolous as film and being a college drop out also correlates with low IQ. After leaving school in my early 20s, I gave up on college for a while. Now I am in my mid 30s and determined to finish my undergraduate degree in a STEM field within the next five years. My long term goal is to get into an Applied Physics PhD program and do scientific research exploring my ideas for alternative energy sources.
8. I am the third and youngest child. I have long associated birth order with IQ. The limited research into the subject seems to support my anecdotal observation. My mother was also 38 years old when she had me, which increases my odds of having some kind of autism greatly. Despite this, I score quite low for both autistic and schizophrenic traits.
9. My mother suffered eleven miscarriages in her life, which her doctor insisted was nature’s way of telling her she came from inferior genetic stock and that she should not attempt to reproduce. It seems a fairly heartless thing to say to a grieving woman but I don’t entirely disagree with the logic.
10. I am unemployed, and have been for more than fifteen years. If you want to get technical, I am more aptly described as a welfare cheat. I receive SSI disability payments monthly and live in government subsidized housing while supplementing my income by illegally playing poker on the internet. I stay on SSI because it grants me free housing in an extremely nice neighborhood (Mitt Romney used to live here), free money and unlimited free healthcare. I do plan on getting off of SSI soon, maybe if I can get my novel published. This is certainly a mixed bag of variables. I believe gaming the system shows the ability to adapt to your circumstances and thrive but it also doesn’t in any way show the ability to swim against the tide, i.e. rise through Nietzschean force of will through the traditional ivy league caste system associated with western excellence (something my father almost managed to do despite beginning in poverty).
11. I am fairly callous at times. Given my premise that IQ corresponds with empathy, I don’t think it says anything great about me that I am bored to tears by people whining about first world problems. I do feel empathy for people suffering in third world conditions and occasionally donate to charitywater.orgHelp bring clean and safe water to every person on the planet | charity: watercharity: water is a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing countries. 100% of public donations go to water projects.charitywater.org. I’m also not sure if I am callous so much as callused. Having survived homelessness, extreme poverty and familial dysfunction, I am not terribly moved by people kvetching about minor problems.

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I don’t pay too much attention to all the family background stuff. There’s enough error in trying to guess one’s IQ from one’s own traits and biography. Trying to do so from one’s ancestors life story is more trouble than it’s worth.

Perhaps the most important thing he said here is that he’s been unemployed for 15 years. In the book The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray claim that 57% of chronic welfare recipients were in the bottom 20% of intelligence. This obviously means that (as of 1994), the 57th percentile of the chronic welfare distribution was IQ 87 (U.S. norms), compared to IQ 103 (the 57th percentile of general U.S. population). Assuming similar variance, this implies the entire distribution of chronically unemployed folks is 16 points to the left, suggesting the average IQ of this group is 84 (U.S. norms) (IQ 81 U.S. white norms) which is also what I’ve seen for homeless people.

But Tez obviously does not have an IQ of 81. Just the fact that he could write such a long and organized email suggests he’s way off in the top 1% of chronic unemployeds, and indeed one would have to be, to correspond with the likes of me.

In part 2 we’ll review the evidence of high IQ.

Halloween V (1989) was the fourth sequel to John Carpenter’s original 1978 classic (not to be confused with Rob Zombies 21st century white trash remakes). I loved this film because it has some of the most intimate scenes between Dr. Loomis (played by the Oscar worthy Donald Pleasence) and Myers. The conversations are one-way of course because Myers doesn’t speak, but that makes them all the more haunting. Interestingly, Loomis makes repeated references to Myers’s rage, in sharp contrast to earlier films where Loomis described him as emotionless. Continuity was never the series’ strong suit.

But the best part comes after they capture Michael. So eerie to see Myers (the literally boogeyman) just sitting in a jail cell like any other common criminal with the police lights illuminating his masked head.

And then out of nowhere, a mysterious man in black enters the police station with a machine gun and blows him the hell out of there.

Who was the mysterious man in black? An obsessive Micheal Myers fan? A Mossad agent?

Nobody knew.

Not even the artsy French guy hired to direct the film knew. He just through it in at the last minute to add some mystery.

It was the first time I’d seen a horror film end with a cliff hanger.

Unfortunately Halloween 6 gave a really convoluted explanation for the Man in Black that ended up ruining the series and leading to reboots. I wish they had just left it to our imagination and ended the original timeline without us ever knowing.