One of the problems with studying the controversial subject of race and IQ is we do not have reliable data on the racial IQ distributions of very many races.  Richard Lynn’s 2006 book made a major contribution to the field, but analyzing hundreds of studies was too ambitious a task for a single 76-year-old man and inevitably the research was criticized for biased selection of data and clerical errors.    Another problem was that different races sometimes took very different tests under wildly different circumstances and living conditions, ranging from modern industrialized society to pre-literate hunter-gathering.

To sidestep these problems, I decided to compare all races on the same type of tests (literacy and numeracy) under similar conditions (as students attending modern schools).  Although achievement tests are not technically IQ tests, they correlate better with IQ tests than some of the actual IQ tests used by Lynn (i.e. Mazes, Draw a Person) and because they are only taken by people with similar schooling, some of the culture bias inherit in all paper and pencil tests is removed.  They also have the advantage of being given to huge and representative samples.

The first major data set is the NAEP mass testing of U.S. 12th graders (above), known as the nation’s report card.  Since an IQ of 100 is by definition whatever score the average U.S. white obtains, a reading, math, and combined score score of 297, 162, and 459 are all equal to IQ 100.  Since I already estimated that U.S. black 12th graders in recent years score an IQ equivalent of 90, 86, and 87 in reading, math, and combined respectively, simple linear extrapolation allows us to infer the IQ equivalents of all the above demographic groups:

The scores of Asian Americans are probably dragged down a bit by the inclusion of Southeast Asians, Pacific Islanders and people with language difficulties.  I suspect if the Asian sample was limited to second generation Northeast Asian Americans, the mean combined IQ would be 105.  Some might argue that Asian scores are inflated by selected migration and a culture of studying.  While the latter might be true, the former is unlikely given the spectacular academic performance of Northeast Asians in their home countries.

The scores of American Indians/Alaskas natives are probably dragged down by fetal alcohol syndrome and extreme cultural deprivation.  Just as African Americans saw their IQs as measured by achievement tests increase from 80 in the 1970s to 87 today, I suspect indigenous Americans are also 7 points below their genetic potential and may have the genetic potential to average 98.

The scores of African Americans are probably slightly inflated by white admixture and I suspect the scores of unmixed descendants of black American slaves would average about 83.  On the other hand if slaves were drawn primarily from the lower end of the African IQ distribution, the scores of African Americans may be deflated relative to the potential of the global black population.

Ashkenazi Jews

Jewish Americans are not included here but previous large scale research suggests a verbal IQ of 109, a math IQ of 113, and thus a combined IQ of 112 on measures of reading and math.  Ashkenazi Jews have an anomalously high IQ for a Caucasoid race, but they are such a tiny percentage of the population that I suspect the highest IQs in the World all belong to peoples of Northeast Asian ancestry.

Australian aboriginals

Data from PISA studies show indigenous Australians score 0.87 SD below non-indigenous Australians on reading tests, suggesting a reading IQ of 87.

Meanwhile they score 0.9 SD below on math, suggesting a math IQ of 86.

This suggests a combined IQ of 85.  However like indigenous Americans, I suspect that Australian aboriginals are like U.S. blacks in the 1970s (scoring at least 7 IQ points below their potential on achievement tests) so I estimate their potential IQ to be 92.

However I also estimate that indigenous Australians are 43% white at the genetic level, and correcting for this reduces the potential IQ of full-blooded Australoids to 86.

Dark Caucasoids

Data from PISA studies suggest dark caucasoids in Turkey average about 87, but like indigenous peoples, the Arab world is probably about 7 points below their full potential given that less than half of the Turkish population finishes high school, so I suspect they have the genetic potential to be IQ 93.

Zack O’Malley Greenburg (a blogger for Forbes magazine) has an article proclaiming Beyoncé and Jay Z a billion dollar couple (hat-tip to commenter Afrosapiens):

Beyoncé, 35, has amassed a personal fortune of $350 million. The total for Jay Z, 47, has soared to $810 million per last week’s ranking of hip-hop’s richest acts (he trails No. 1 Diddy by just $10 million). That brings the couple to a combined net worth of $1.16 billion and counting.

However in order to officially be declared a billionaire by Forbes (and make their international billionaire list), you typically need an individual net worth of at least $1 billion as they’ve explained in the past:

We list individual fortunes, rather than those shared among large multigenerational families such as the Rothschilds or Du Ponts. In some cases, like that of Indian newcomers Sudhir and Samir Mehta, we list siblings together if we don’t know how they split their fortune. In these cases we require the net worth to be an average of $1 billion apiece. When we garner new information on how fortunes are shared, we split up families. Example: Taiwan’s Tsai brothers, who were listed together with a $3.3 billion fortune in 2008. The trio returns to the rankings this year with three individual listings after falling off in 2009. We include wealth held by a spouse and children (marking the entry “& family”) but not wealth of other kin.

With a net worth of $810 million Jay Z could become the first hip hop billionaire but sadly, because of racism, every time blacks cross a milestone, the milestone becomes devalued.  So when a black person moves into a nice neighbourhood, the neighbourhood is no longer considered nice.  When a black family moved into the White House, the status of the Presidency sunk so low that a “pussy grabbing” reality TV star with funny hair could get elected.

Subconsciously the racist attitude is, if a black person achieved it, how impressive can it be?

When I was a kid (I’m now in my 30s) being a billionaire was considered the most exclusive thing in the World, and part of the reason it was so exclusive was because no black had ever achieved that much wealth (with the possible exception of  Mobutu, the Congolese despot and Sani Abacha the Nigerian military leader, whose wealth was so hidden that not even Forbes could confirm it).

After negotiating the most lucrative deal in TV history, in 1995 Oprah overtook Bill Cosby as the only African American wealthy enough to rank among the 400 richest Americans.  At the time her net worth was $340 million and Forbes predicted she would one day become the first black to make their international billionaire list.

Because you only need several hundred million to make the Forbes 400 in the mid 1990s, it was much less exclusive than Forbes international billionaire list, but today being a billionaire is no longer enough to be one of the 400 richest Americans.

Every autumn when Forbes released their annual ranking of the 400 richest Americans, I would bike to the local corner store and buy a copy, hoping that would be the year when Oprah hit ten figures.

1996: $415 million

1997: $550 million

1998:  $675 million

1999: $725 million

2000: $800 million

The reason I wanted so badly for Oprah to become a billionaire was that I had estimated, based on Oprah’s little known hat-size, that she was arguabley the biggest brained black on Earth (excluding pathological cases), so how perfect would it be if the World’s biggest brained black used her smarts to become the World’s first black billionaire.

  Given my fascination with race, intelligence and Darwinism, the stars were lining up so perfectly, and I just had to wait a few more years for it to come to fruition.

Then in 2001, the unthinkable happened.

I had biked to the corner store like I did every autumn to pick up the latest Forbes 400, and suddenly there was this black face staring back at me.

“Please tell me that’s a really bad picture of Oprah” I remembered thinking

As I got closer, I was forced to confront the truth.  Another black, Bob Johnson, had came out of nowhere and robbed Oprah of her status as “first black billionaire”.  For someone who had just spent the last half decade waiting for Oprah to become the first black billionaire, this was devastating.

And what made it all the more shocking was there was no warning.  Johnson hadn’t even qualified for the Forbes 400 in any previous year, and now suddenly he had leapfrogged over Oprah’s 2001 net worth of $900 million to amass a fortune worth $1.3 billion.

Apparently Viacom had stunned the media industry by paying over $2 billion for Black Entertainment Television and since Johnson owned 63%, he became a billionaire overnight.

So the World’s biggest brained black never did become the World’s first black billionaire as I had so desperately wanted, but a few years later I was able to salvage my theory.

If you can’t be the first, be the ONLY

By 2004, not only was Oprah a billionaire, but Bob Johnson’s wife Sheila divorced him, taking a huge chunk of his fortune with her.  As a result Johnson lost his billionaire status, and for three straight years, Oprah towered as the World’s ONLY black billionaire (excluding Saudi Arabian Blarab billionaire Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Ali Al-Amoudi and Canadian Blasian billionaire Michael Lee-Chin who are both arguably mostly non-black at the genetic level)

Since then, the billionaire club has become a lot less exclusive and there are now three black billionaires in America alone, though with a net worth hovering around $3 billion, Oprah remains the richest black in the developed World.

Interesting autism quiz here.

The thing that bothered me about it is how arbitrary the questions are.  Unlike IQ tests, where there’s a somewhat objective way of knowing whether an item is good or not (g factor loading) there doesn’t seem to be much of a science behind autism research.

The quiz also seems to assume autism is a continuous variable like height, weight, or IQ, such that everyone in the World can be ranked in order from least autistic to most autistic, but perhaps autism doesn’t work that way.  Maybe it’s a discrete variable, like Down syndrome: you either have an extra chromosome or you don’t.  Ok, Down syndrome’s not that black or white, but close.

Suppose we had no blood test for Down syndrome, but instead it was like autism and we had to rely on questionnaires that had questions like:

Are you short?

Do you have trouble learning?

Do you have slanted eyes?

Do you have a large tongue?

Are you stocky?

If such a test had enough items, the results would form a nice bell curve, and we could easily deceive ourselves into thinking that as many as 20% of humanity had a mild form of Down syndrome.  I fear something like that might be the case when certain commenters on this blog go around labeling anyone who’s a bit nerdy or socially awkward as autistic.

Of course autism might be the extreme end of the normal spectrum as I’ve argued in the past but we must be careful we don’t fall for the  reification fallacy:  Assuming that whatever receives a name or can be scored by a quiz, must have an objective reality.

Of course Stephen Jay Gould famously argued (incorrectly in my opinion) that IQ was an example of the reification error.

A few years ago I blogged that schizophrenic traits evolved to cope with tropical environments and autism evolved to cope with cold environments.  My theory was based on research showing schizophrenia and autism to be at opposite extremes of the neurological continuum as well as research claiming tropical folks evolved to have high birth rates at the expense of survival rates while Northerners evolved to have high survival rates at the expense of birth rates.

Since schizophrenia was stereotyped as a black disease and the allegedly super-cold adapted East Asians were stereotyped as socially awkward nerds,  I began to think that up to a point, the overdeveloped social brain of schizophrenia might be useful for having high birth rates because you can attract numerous sex partners,  while the underdeveloped social brain of autism might be useful in the cold where you need to focus on making tools, clothes, fire  and shelter; not picking up women.

Of course an alternative argument is that you need to be more social in the cold because surviving the novel challenges of cold winters requires team work, but the idea of cold climates selecting for autistic type traits and warm climates selecting for schizophrenic type traits, seemed to better explain race differences, at least if you believe the stereotypes.

However a commenter on this blog named “Philosopher” considers this one of the dumbest theories he ever heard and I suspect it’s because he views autistics (or as Philosopher calls them “autists”) as such pathetic creatures that he’s sickened by my claims that they have any kind of survival value,  and is appalled at the idea of them being naturally selected at a “high” stage of evolution when humans finally left the tropics.

Philosopher is also furious that certain heroes of mine like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who Philosopher considers autistic, are two of the richest people in the World, so he’s convinced himself they’re brainwashed suckers who give their money to Africans instead of advancing their own ethnic genetic interests.  Bob Rubin and Steve Schwarzmann are far more powerful, Philospher gushed.

Now if Philosopher really wants to trash autistics, he could just call autism a disease, and not something that was selected for at all, but that’s letting them off too easy.  Philosopher instead compares autistics to breeds of dogs who were deliberately selected by their masters to be obedient little robots who could be easily manipulated.

In a comment so horrifying I am only now revealing a brief excerpt, he wrote:

Pumpkin can’t tell the difference between selected for and selected by.

The reason East asians look similar, have low [testosterone], are more autist and more conservative in persuasion are:

1. The are selected for by Master, much like thoroughbred racehorse owners.
2. They are selected by their environment which is controlled by….1 (see above).

Of course Philosopher has no evidence of this, but he views wanting evidence as an autistic trait, and not something a self-described socially intelligent intuitive schizophrenic like Philosopher needs to bother with.

Philospher’s views remind me of a theory proposed by a Chinese scientist Dr. Bruce Lahn (famous for ground-breaking discoveries about the selection of brain genes).

In a 2006 Wall Street Journal article, scientist Henry Harpending claimed  Lahn wanted to co-author a behavioral genetics article for Scientific American about why “Chinese are boring.”

“I think that Bruce doesn’t understand political correctness,” said Harpending.

Lahn wondered whether China’s imperial times selected against rebellious people.

Although HBDers deny that they believe some races are superior to others, their critics claim that they do, and in this case, the critics are correct.  J.P. Rushton argued that there was an Oriental > White > Black hierarchy partly caused by the time period when each of the three races branched off the main trunk of the human evolutionary tree: Negroids branched off first and thus were considered genetically primitive, while Mongoloids branched off last and were deemed new and improved.

“One theoretical possibility” said Rushton “is that evolution is progressive, and some populations are more advanced than others.”

The notion of progress seems to imply superiority.

But if the evolution of racial differences was as progressive as Rushton implies, we might not only expect “more advanced” races to be smarter, but more beautiful too.  This might even be true of plants where the highly evolved angiosperms are much more beautiful than the primitive slime molds.

I just had a mental image of all the people who think they understand evolution pulling their hair out at how ridiculous this sounds.

Here’s some 2014 data from OkCupid where people were asked to rate various race/gender combinations by how good looking they are.

The percentages show how attractive different demographics consider each other.  For example Asian women rate Asian men +24% and rate black men -27% meaning they think Asian guys are 24% more attractive than the average guy, but consider black guys 24% less attractive than the average guy.  However black men do much better with black women, who consider them 23% more attractive than average.  Unfortunately black men don’t return the favour, ranking black women only 1% more attractive than the average women, while ranking Asian women 2% more attractive.

Averaging across demographics. Asian women are considered the most attractive by men in general, with a mean rating of +7.5%, followed by Latinas (I LOVE Latinas) who average 4.25%, followed by whites who average +1.75%, and lastly blacks who average -13.75%.  Sadly, these rankings confirm Rushton’s Oriental > white > black hierarchy.

However when it comes to men, whites are on top averaging +10.75, followed by Latinos +0.25%, followed by Asians -3.75% and lastly blacks -7%.

So why do Asians dominate among women but not among men?  If you believe in Rushton’s controversial theory, you might speculate  that women like a guy who is little more primitive than she is because primitive men are more muscular and aggressive and thus better protectors, but if he’s too much more primitive, women get scared and disgusted.

From this controversial perspective, women are willing to date guys who are one step below them on the evolutionary ladder, but not two.

Meanwhile, men don’t need to worry about being protected, so if they date outside their group, they just go for the best women they can find, and if you believe Rushton’s model, the best are East Asians.

Man from the primitive Wogaboo tribe

Man from the caveaman tribe

Woman from the most advanced tribe in Quest for Fire

I am reminded of my favorite love story Quest for Fire.  In that film, depicting humanity 80,000 years ago, a member of the advanced modern human tribe of East Africans (bottom right  in the above picture) had a crush on a caveman (top right), because he was just primitive enough to be more masculine than the scrawny guys in her highly evolved tribe, but she would have been terrified by the super manly Wogaboo man (left) from the most primitive tribe.

The World’s 72 best looking women as voted on by the internet at worldsmostbeautifuls.com:

The World’s 72 best looking men as voted on by the internet:

Racial break down

According to the not very accurate pie chart below, whites are only 16% of all humans, and yet they are 46% of the most beautiful women and 50% of the most attractive men. From here we can assign white women a beauty score of 288, meaning they produce 288% as many gorgeous people as expected for their population size, while white men have a beauty score of 313.

Below are rough beauty scores for all race and gender groups:

White men 313

White women 288

East Asian men: 112

Southeast Asian women: 100

East Asian women: 72

Dark Caucasoid women: 72

Dark Caucasoid men: 72

Latino women: 13

Black women: 7

Latino men: 0

Southeast Asian men: 0

Black men: 0

Here’s an interesting video by a female HBDer named Tara McCarthy interviewing a self-described 160 IQ Jamaican:

I don’t doubt that the Jamaican is extremely bright, judging from the speed and fluency of his answers, the wisdom and open-mindedness of his opinions, and the nature of his career (computer programming in Japan) but only one in 30,000 Americans by definition have a deviation IQ of 160+ (U.S. norms), which is 159+ (white norms), on any given test.

In theory, only about one in 2.5 million black Americans should have an IQ this high, and the odds are even less in his birth country of Jamaica which has worse nutrition and less white admixture (which is relevant if you’re an HBDer), although the Gaussian curve is a statistical abstraction seldom perfectly observed in nature.  Non-pathological Americans as a whole are forced to perfectly fit the Gaussian curve by IQ test designers, but subgroups like blacks and whites might depart from it at the extremes, depending on the nature of the test.

The host of the show has a kind of quiet intelligence and I bet a lot of the dirty old men in the HBD-o-sphere and alt-right are delighted to see a young attractive blue eyed woman embracing and normalizing their views.  Meanwhile liberals are probably shaking in their boots.

[Comment from pumpkin person, May 10, 2017: the following is a guest post from commenter Race Realist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person.  Out of respect for the author, please try to keep all comments on topic, although I realize discussions naturally evolve over time]

Note: This article is high speculation based on the finding that occurred last week of the modification of mastodon bones in Ice Age California. If it is an actual archaeological site, along with being the age it’s purported to be, there are, in my opinion, only two possibilities for who could be responsible: erectus or the Denisova. Though I will cover evidence that Erectus did make it to America between 40-130,000ya, and rule out that Neanderthals are the hominid responsible.

It was discovered last week that there was human activity at an archeological site in San Diego, California, dated to about 130,000 years ago. Researchers discovered pieces of bone and teeth from a mastodon—that looked to have been modified by early humans. This discovery—if it shows that there was a hominid in the Americas 130,000ya—would have us rethink hominin migrations in the ancient past.

The bones and teeth show signs of having been modified by humans with “manual dexterity and experiential knowledge.” The same pattern was discovered in Nebraska and Kansas, where it was ruled out that carnivorous animals were responsible (Holen et al, 2017).

Now, we only have a few pieces of broken bone and some teeth from a mastodon. It is possible that ‘Natives’ dug up the mastodon skull and modified it, but I like to think outside of the box sometimes. When I first read the ScienceDaily article on the matter, the first hominin that popped into my head that could be responsible for this is erectus. But what is the evidence that he could have made it to the Americas that long ago?

Erectus in America

Evidence for erectus in America is scant. We have discovered no erectus skeletons in the Americas, and we only have a few pieces of bone to go off of to guess which hominid did this (and I doubt it was Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, I will explain my reasoning below).

I’ve been documenting on my blog for the past six months that, contrary to popular belief, erectus was not a ‘dumb ape’ and that, in fact, erectus had a lot of modern behaviors. If it turns out to be true that erectus made it to America, that wouldn’t really surprise me.

Erectus territory

Neanderthal territory

I was watching Season#1, episode#3 of Bigfoot files on Netflix and it was really good(youtube embedded below). They were investigating the myth of the Almasty, an alleged sasquatch or Neanderthal type creature thought to roam the deep wilderness of the former Soviet Union.

The show focused on Zana, a legendary wild “ape woman” discovered in the 1850s in the mountainous forests of Ochamchir. Zana was chased down by some local men, beaten to submission, and dragged down to a local village where she was kept as a sex slave for decades and offered up for sex at drunken parties.  Zana was described as an extremely tall (6’6″) and muscular woman covered in thick auburn hair who slept outdoors, could outrun a horse, and swim across the violent Moskva river at high tide.  It is said that she ran around naked like a wild animal until she died in 1890.

Zana had four children including a terrifying son named Khwit who was said to be so animalistic, he could lift an entire table with just his teeth.

Zana’s terrifying son Khwit

As part of the show, Khwit’s tooth along with the saliva of several of Zana’s living descendants were submitted to Oxford professor Bryan Sykes for DNA test while several Almasty enthusiasts who had been obsessing about Zana for decades, anxiously awaited the results.  For it was judgement day for their lifelong fascination.

First the bad news: Zana’s son and other descendants had the same amount of Neanderthal DNA as expected for modern humans in that region.  It was time to put the theory that Zana was a surviving Neanderthal to bed.

Then the surprising news: the DNA of Zana’s son and other descendants indicated that she was 100% sub-Saharan African!  It seemed Zana was just an escaped black slave, and because of the racism of the time period, was described as some kind of wild ape woman.

However upon further examining her son’s skull and the DNA of her descendants, Sykes began to think that Zana was not a modern African at all, but from a relict population who left Africa 100,000 years ago and hid in the Caucasus Mountains.

It’s very rare for a scientist as prestigious as Bryan Sykes to be open-minded enough to apply his considerable skills to such a marginalized and ridiculed area of research and we should all be very grateful.

But no good deed goes unpunished because anytime a scientists says anything provocative, people like science blogger PZ Myers are right there to call them incompetent, and even racist.

In a scathing attack, Myers calls Sykes’s idea “not only inane, but distressingly racist” and writes:

Look at what he’s claiming. An African woman was enslaved by 19th century racists, and she left some descendants. Sykes has analyzed DNA from people in that region and found evidence of an infusion of West African DNA into the population: you should be feeling zero surprise. A person lived, had children, died, and her descendants carry traces of her genome. That’s basic biology.

But then it goes off the rails. Sykes unquestioningly accepts the accounts of 19th century racists who regarded this woman as an animal to say that the evidence of West African ancestry somehow supports his contention that she was an ‘ape woman’ who was descended from some relic population of a Homo sub-species that had been hiding in the Caucasus Mountains for millennia, giving rise to legends of yetis and bigfoot and other beast-men in the wilderness.

That makes no sense. His own DNA analysis says she was 100 per cent African. You know “African” is not a synonym for “pre-human”, right? But he has written a whole book titled The Nature of the Beast (horrid title that also manages to suggest that an enslaved African woman was less than human), in which he advances this ludicrous theory, and the Times has obligingly fluffed it for him. At least it’ll appeal to all the UKIP voters.

It’s fine if Myers wants to be skeptical about the science, but playing the race card is irresponsible and will have a chilling effect on other scientists wanting to explore such fascinating topics.  Sykes is not implying that an enslaved African was sub-human; the whole point of his theory is that she may not have been a modern African woman at all, but one from 100,000 years ago.

Back in June 2015, Lion of the Blogosphere labelled the Dylann Roof massacre an example of low IQ white-trash beta-male rage and also stated that the primary difference between Roof and fellow spree killer Elliot Rodger is that “Rodger was pretty smart and wrote an excellent autobiography”.  Earlier Lion had pegged Rodger’s IQ at an above average 115-120, so he likely thought Roof was substantially below this.

Thus, when  a recent article claimed Dylann Roof has a 141 IQ.  Lion was predictably skeptical, writing:

I find it highly unlikely. The article, irresponsibly, gives no source for Roof’s alleged high IQ, just some hearsay. What test did he take? When did he take it? No info is given. So it’s probably not true.

Although I too am extremely skeptical of high IQ claims, the fact that Roof’s competency to represent himself in trial was questioned makes it likely that he was in fact evaluated by a psychologist and probably took the latest Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV), just as Ted Kaczynski had taken an earlier version of the Wechsler (WAIS-R) around the time he was on trial.

I started searching the web for evidence that Roof was evaluated for competency, and found  more specifics:

His overall intellectual function was a score of 125, which placed him in the 96th percentile. His verbal compression score was 141, which placed him in the top 99.7th percentile. However, his processing speed was 100, which placed him in the 50th percentile

So 141 was just his score on the verbal comprehension subtests of the WAIS-IV, but because other brain functions like processing speed were much lower (no mention of his scores on working memory and perceptual organization) his overall IQ was 125 (U.S. norms);123 (white norms) [UPDATE May 6, 2017: These scores might be 3 points too high because the WAIS-IV norms were about a decade too old when Roof was tested & thus may give slightly inflated results]

So Lion was right about the 141 IQ being bogus (it was just a sub-score) however Roof’s overall IQ is still higher then Lion’s estimate for Rodgers, who Lion considered smarter.

But why was Roof’s score reported to be 141 in the first place?

Sometimes when one has too big a discrepancy on the subsections of IQ tests, the overall score is considered unreliable so perhaps the psychologist took Roof’s verbal comprehension score of 141 as reflective of his true intelligence, and dismissed the overall score as compromised by his cognitive weaknesses.  However the great David Wechsler would have had none of this.  He felt that all of the subtests on his scales were needed for the fuller appraisal of intelligence, and would not tolerate such cherry-picking.

Elaborating further on Roof’s intelligence, Lion writes:

…his crime shows a sort of stupidity that belies the idea that he’s especially smart. He supposedly wanted to make some sort of dramatic response to black crime, but then why kill a bunch of old church people? He could have at least gone into the ghetto and killed some gangbangers. He has to be pretty stupid not to realize what a dumb idea it was.

While Roof’s overall IQ is much lower than 141, it’s still higher than 96% of America’s.  So why didn’t he realize how dumb his crime was?  The psychologist’s evaluation showed that not only does Roof have a high IQ, but was also possibly autistic.  Autistics tend to lack social cognition, even when their overall IQs are high, so Roof may simply have been too politically obtuse to realize that killing people as sympathetic as churchgoers would not advance his cause.