Another item to add to my regret list: Never experiencing New York city. I did go there when I was eight-years-old (saw a Broadway play Jelly’s Last Jam) but I never experienced it as an adult or even as a teenager. What I remember about NYC was the cold windiness, unbelievable traffic and huge multi-level book stores.

NYC will always have a special place in my heart because it’s the home of the ancient Wechsler Bellevue intelligence scale (which went on to spawn both the WAIS and the WISC series). For David Wechsler, NYC was America and indeed only New Yorkers were included in the test norms of his original scale (though demographically weighted to reflected the country as a whole). You can still see that New York sense of humor in the cartoons the test asks you to arrange and the general knowledge and social judgments it elicits. When I think of American intelligence, I think of New York and there’s no better place to take the WAIS.

But recently New York’s epitaph was written in a brilliant essay called “NYC is dead forever” by hedge-fund manager James Altucher. So powerful was this essay that if NYC was not already dead, this essay killed it. Here, Glenn Beck reads its haunting words :

However Jerry Seinfeld was having none of it, and blasted Atucher for his doom and gloom.

Deviation IQ is defined as one’s Z score (relative to the American or white population) on an intelligence test multiplied by usually 15 and added to 100. Z score = (raw score) – (average raw score)/(standard deviation of raw scores).

Occasionally Z scores will be normalized, so instead of being calculated from the above formula, they’re assigned based on percentiles. So if the top 1% of the population scored X and the normal curve says the top 1% has a Z score of +2.33, X will be assigned a Z score of +2.33 regardless of how many actual standard deviations it is above average.

However not all tests need to be normalized. Some should in theory form a very normal curve on their own. Does anyone know which two of the following tests need to be normalized?:

TEST A

A general knowledge test where the author thinks up general knowledge questions ranging in difficulty from very easy to very hard.

TEST B

A general knowledge test where you have to name the faces of the 100 most important people in history as chosen by Michael Hart’s famous book The 100.

TEST C

A spatial test where the author buys a bunch of jig-saw puzzles from the toy store, and your raw score is the number of puzzles you could put together in under 1 minute each.

TEST D

A spatial test where the author buys one jig-saw puzzle from the toy store and your score is simply how many seconds it takes you to solve it (the lower the better)

TEST E

A spatial test where the author buys one jig-saw puzzle from the toy store and your score is the number of pieces you can fit together in one minute.

TEST F

A memory test where your score is the greatest number of syllables in a sentence you can repeat after one hearing.

If we exclude the 10 known fake votes in the poll of self-reported PATMA scores, 145 people have thus far obtained the following scores:

10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,9,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,8,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,7,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6,5,5,5,4,4,3

If you copy and paste this data into this wonderful standard deviation calculator, you get a mean of 7.9 and an SD of 1.4

This distribution forms a gorgeous bell curve though it’s truncated because the test is too easy for about the top tenth of my readership:

On a scale where Nothern American whites average 100 with an standard deviation of 15, my readers are known to average about 126 with an SD around 16. Given this info, there are two ways to convert PATMA scores to IQ.

Method 1: Assign each PATMA score its normalized Z score based on its percentile rank among blog readers and multiply said Z score by 16 and add 126.

Method 2: Calculate the actual Z score of each PATMA score (among blog readers) using the observed mean and SD of PATMA scores (7.9 and 1.4 respectively) and multiply said Z score by 16 and add 126.

PATMA score	frequency among PP readers	percentile rank among PP readers	IQ (method 1)	IQ (method 2)
10	19	93.45	150	150
9	34	75.17	137	139
8	37	50.69	126	127
7	33	26.6	116	116
6	16	9.66	105	104
5	3	3.08	96	93
4	2	1.38	91	81
3	1	0.69	87	70
2	0			59
1	0			47
0	0			36

Method 1 is clearly better. Are any of my readers intelligent enough to understand why?

Trump’s highly intelligent older sister was recently caught on tape blasting her younger brother. The 83-year-old federal judge is horrified at her younger brother’s behavior as President:

For me details, watch below video:

My earliest memory is being in a crib, looking up at the ceiling, and being overwhelmed with claustrophobia. I also remember other things, like riding my toy truck into a crater in the middle of the road.

But do I really remember events from several decades ago, or do I just remember remembering? At age four you remember what happened at age two, but at age six, do you still remember what happened at age two or rather do you remember the much more recent remembering of what happened at age two. So by the time you’re in your thirties thinking you remember your toddler years, you’re just remembering a remembering of a remembering etc. Perhaps each memory of an event is like a xerox copy of the last time you remembered that event and so the quality decays each time and perhaps you only have so much time to remember the event (or remember its memory) before it’s lost forever.

Did I just come up with a new theory of long-term memory that will revolutionize cognitive science? Doubt it. Someone else probably though of it first.

When one talks about height and how it relates to success in life or various sports, one almost always means peak height: How tall one was in early adulthood. But when talk about IQ and success in life, do we mean toddler IQ, childhood IQ, adolescent IQ, young adult IQ, middle age IQ, old age IQ or some composite of all of them?

Of course the correlation between IQ at different ages is very high, but part of the reason it is so high is that being a smart child helps you score high as an adult because vocabulary words acquired in childhood might still give you an edge on an adult IQ test. Culture reduced tests (i.e. Gestalt) allow us to measure IQ independently of past learning so perhaps these are best for distinguishing between childhood and adult IQ, but a huge part of intelligence is the ability to learn from the past.

Consider long-term memory. Does it make sense to distinguish between one’s long-term memory in childhood vs old age, since old people remember childhood events? Who has a better long-term memory? The 90-year-old who can remember what she did at age ten but can’t remember what she did at age 89, or vice versa?

I’m very gratified by the huge response to the PATMA. This test is dear to my heart because it’s the first program I ever executed online. I had to learn both Python and HTML (“Oh Easy Peasy; like doing long division in the 4th grade” as Oprah would say).

Speaking of what Oprah would say, there’s an entire generation that still programs in Quick Basic, and they just need to die:

Now here are the results of the poll of self-reported PATMA scores.

If we remove the ten fake scores of 10 added by commenter “Mug of Pee”, then perhaps 127 real votes give the following percentages.

10 = 14%

9 = 24%

8 = 24%

7 = 23%

6 = 11%

5 = 2%

3 = 1%

From here we get the following percentiles with their respective normalized Z scores:

10 = 86 (+1.07)

9 = 61 (+0.27)

8 = 37 (-0.33)

7 = 14 (-1.07)

6 = 3 (-1.87)

5 = 1 (-2.33)

4 = 1 (-2.33)

Based on previous research on a Gestalt test normed on the general white population, my readers have the following IQ distribution:

As you can see, an IQ of 137 puts you in the top 26% of my readers (+0.66 SD) while an IQ of 106 puts you at the 10th percentile (-1.27 SD). From here we can guestimate that on a scale where whites have a mean IQ of 100 with an SD of 15, my readers have a mean IQ of 126 with an SD of 16.

Thus, to convert PATMA scores to IQ, we multiply the normalized Z scores by 16 and add 126.

PATMA 10 = IQ 143 (very brilliant)

PATMA 9 = IQ 130 (brilliant)

PATMA 8 = IQ 121 (very bright)

PATMA 7 = IQ 109 (bright)

PATMA 6 = IQ 96 (U.S. average)

PATMA 5 = IQ 89 (dull)

PATMA 4 = IQ 89 (dull)

Of course these numbers are all very tentative and more research is needed.

[update aug 20, 2020: an earlier version of this article overestimated the IQ variability of my readers by giving too much weight to low outlier scores on the Gestalt test. Helpful feedback from commenter Rahul caused me to revise the numbers]

Been watching the Democratic convention on CNN this week and I agree with the CNN pundits that they did an excellent job considering covid precluded the large crowds and excitement that normally accompany such events.

There was an intimacy of seeing Dr. Jill Biden talking alone in a classroom about her husband and it was touching when old Joe creeped out of the corner to embrace her. Biden is the perfect person to steal the older working class white racist vote from Trump because he looks and sounds like an old white working class racist himself, yet by picking a woman of color as his running mate, he gets the minority vote to boot!

Thought Michelle Obama did a good job with her speech last night and it must be killing Barack that CNN keeps calling him the second best speaker in his family. Barack loves to praise Michelle himself (“she’s much better than I am”) but only because he gets the virtue signaling points of praising a black and a woman while resting assured that no one will believe it. But to hear it from the white and Jewish elites at CNN who really do believe it…oh that must have been painful.

When you’re half-white like Obama, you grow up thinking you’re special. He deliberately chose to get a black wife for political convenience but I doubt he ever saw her as even remotely his equal so to watch her eclipse him in star power has been tough, and we saw a glimpse of his jealousy when he was quoted as saying he wrote his book himself (a reference to the fact that Michelle’s huge best-selling memoir was ghost written).

Even better than Michelle’s speech was Bill Clinton’s. Despite being a weak elderly shadow of his former self, Clinton nailed Trump’s failure to take responsibility with one powerful line: “The buck never stops there”.

Moving forward, comments that make personal attacks against other commenters will have the insults redacted or simply not be published at all. Thank you for your cooperation.