It’s been so very, very long since I’ve been out for an evening of drinking and I can’t wait.  Although I personally believe alcohol has a devastating effect on cognitive ability, I love the feeling of getting drunk in a social environment full of music.

After years of struggling for recognition in local plays and obscure TV and radio commercials, I’ve finally got a part in an independent Canadian film.  It will be interesting to see if anyone recognizes me.

In the past I blogged about the seminal moment in my childhood when I was tested on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), an experience that launched my lifelong love affair with IQ.

And what an odyssey it’s been.

Despite getting only a social science degree from an average Canadian university, I’ve had the best education in the World. I grew up corresponding with members of the Triple Nine Society, the Prometheus society, the Mega society. Some of the greatest minds in the World would send me emails, explaining their philosophy on life.

By my early twenties, I knew more than my university professors.

And now in my 30s, I look back at where it all began: When I took the WISC at age 12.

I spent all of this Sunday morning and afternoon rummaging through boxes at my parent’s house and my grandmother’s house. It was a treasure trove of childhood report cards (I got HORRIBLE grades), old photographs, and long forgotten mother’s day gifts created with my own hands, horror scripts I had written, drawings I had made… My whole childhood reduced to half a dozen cardboard boxes.

And then I found it.

Folded in half.

My childhood WISC results:

I haven’t seen these results in over twenty years.

The subtest scores vary a lot, but I’m very happy with the overall score. Not nearly as high as I used to tell my Promethean friends to fit in, but much higher than the most top bloggers, who probably average around IQ 120.

Seeing these results…

Holding them in my hand…

It was like going back in time over twenty years to the day that launched my life’s work and made me the man I am today.

I was flooded with uncontrollable emotion.

It was so intense.

I wanted to speak to that shy troubled depressed 12-year-old boy I once was and say:

You’re going to be okay

No matter how gloomy and dark the future looks now, your time will come.

You’re never going to be a psychometrician like you want to be, but, by the time you’re in your thirties, you’re going to acquire special skills that are in high demand in both our government and our economy and that will be your ticket to the life you’ve always wanted.

Just hang in there a little longer

I wanted to post something about love in honor of Valentine’s Day.  Long time readers know that I have long had a fiancée  and we had plans to marry in 2016.  Tragically, our relationship has ended, but as my hero, the late New York Times columnist David Carr observed, all good things must come to an end, and when they do, you can either be bitter that they ended, or grateful that you ever had them at all.

I’m getting drunk again tonight. Haven’t had a chance to go drinking since August. Except this time…I’m going alone. All by myself. No friends…no coworkers…no fiancée.

Nothing better than going to a bar, all by yourself, but I don’t recommend it because it’s incredibly dangerous.

About to head out into the utter darkness of this cool autumn Canadian night. I’m a bit scared to be honest. I should be.

It’s going to be a long walk and a bus ride to the bar I want to go to…far away from neighbors and friends. Or maybe I’ll take a taxi. Can’t wait for self-driving cars, so I can bring my car when I want to drink.

It’s thanksgiving weekend here in Canada so it will be interesting to see what kind of interesting characters are out drinking instead of spending time with family…and what deep dark secrets they will tell me after we’ve both had one too many drinks.

I’m just finishing off a post about Putin’s IQ, but I wanted to briefly mention that one of my blog posts has qualified for one of HBD Chick’s legendary linkfests, which are a collection of generally recent HBD related links that the fabulous HBD Chick deems worthy. Being cited in one of her linkfests is an important rite of passage; a sign that one have arrived.

This is a huge honor, because whenever commenter Santoculto wanted to belittle me, he would say “I never once see you on HBD Chick’s linkfests”. Well, now you do, Santoculto. Now you do.

HBD Chick and I are kind of at opposite ends of the HBD spectrum. I tend to focus more on IQ, she tends to focus more on other behavioral traits. I tend to focus on ancient evolution, she tends to focus more on very recent evolution.

To find out more about HBD Chick, I strongly recommend reading this interview she gave.

A recent poll found that of the subset of my readers who are 1) American, and 2) old enough to be done school, an astonishing 38% have attended elite U.S. colleges. This is not something I’m proud of because as a Canadian, I’m very much opposed to America’s Ivy League caste system, however statistically it’s interesting because according to scholar Jonathan Wai, people who attended elite schools are likely in the top 1% of U.S. cognitive ability (IQ 133+), at least on college admission tests.

Of course many people who attend these schools did not score in the top 1% and many people who attended poor schools, did score in the top 1%, however Wai’s logic is that exceptions in both directions cancel out, so if 38% of my readers attended these schools, then 38% likely have IQs of 133+, assuming of course that the subset of readers who are American and old enough to have graduated from college and professional school are representative of my readers as whole.

Assuming the IQs of my readers are normally distributed with a standard deviation of 15, then this implies the average reader has an IQ of 129. On a scale where white Americans have a mean IQ of 100 (SD = 15) and all Americans have a mean of 96 (SD = 15.8), and white Americans PhDs have a mean IQ of 123, it is quite incredible that my readers might have a mean IQ of 129: roughly two standard deviations above the U.S. white mean.

Although even two standard deviations above the mean is really not enough to understand the concepts I discuss on this blog, as evidenced by the fact that only one person (out of thousands of very high IQ people) has obtained the pumpkin person degree in heritability (though another person almost got the degree, but failed to adequately prepare). I have found that even people who are three standard deviations above the mean in IQ lack the subtlety to think flexibly about very basic statistical concepts.

There are roughly 13 regular commenters on this blog that I will list in alphabetical order:

Afrosapiens
Animekitty
Blayze
bucephalus
Cale
Carl Churchill
fallingsnow
grey enlightenment
Jorge Videla/Mugabe/duke of leinster/First Ypres
Judah-sphere
JS
Santoculto
Swank

Based on the theoretical IQ distribution of my blog readers, we would expect these 13 to have the following IQs (though we can’t be sure which IQ goes with which person):

150 (Very Brilliant)
145
140 (Brilliant)
137
134
131 (Extremely Bright)
128
125
122 (Very Bright)
118
113 (Bright)
108
103 (Average range)

I’ve been getting a lot of new traffic on my blog, and after investigating where it was coming from, I was honored to discover that a major blogger named ANATOLY KARLIN has added me to their blogroll. I am listed in the Top IQ/HBD Thinkers section along side such luminaries as Steve Sailer, JayMan, HBD chick and Steve Hsu.

The blogroll finds a way to make each of us HBD bloggers feel special. Emil Kirkegaard is listed as “possibly the highest IQ IQ-blogger”. Dr. James Thomson is listed as “the most comprehensive IQ-blogger”. I’m listed as “possibly the most entertaining IQ-blogger” though perhaps they’re talking about my commenters, not me. Steve Sailer is listed as “our Lord, the King of the HBDsphere”. JayMan is listed as “Black-Asian American proving HBD with maps and stats”.

I don’t know if I believe JayMan has significant Asian blood. JayMan was probably told by his parents, who were told by their parents that somewhere in the family history there is Asian blood, but often people are mistaken about such matters.

Even when African Americans really do have Asian or white blood, folks just don’t want to hear it. Tiger Woods once said he was Cablinasian (Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian) and the black community went absolutely ballistic, yelling “Tiger YOU ARE BLACK! Period! End of story! None of this Cablinasian shit!”

Blacks learn early that they need to keep quiet about any non-black ancestry that they have, because blacks get very angry, and tragically, other races get very angry too when a black claims to be related to them. So kudos to JayMan for breaking the taboo.

Many people wonder about my fascination with IQ and where it came from.  For example commenter Afrosapiens  wrote the following to me:

First thing, I kind of appreciate you, you don’t pretend having universal and omniscient eyes and you are quite honest with respect to the extent of your knowledge of the world.

However, when I read about your fascination for IQ, how amazing this number appears to you with its ability to “predict” various life outcomes, you sound to me as someone who just met god. A world that was mysterious and obscure to you suddenly became limpid and self-evident thanks to IQ and genes (or rather heritability) much like god and the holy spirit are in other belief systems.

I think there’s some truth to that.  I think most humans have a need for some kind of simple explanation to bring order to the World.  For most people it might be religion or spirituality; for others it might be Marxism or libertarianism, and for me it happens to be IQ and HBD.

For me, discovering IQ was kind of like discovering something mystical.  I remember as child seeing an East Indian woman reading palms and tarot cards in the middle of an urban street, and so growing up, I had associated Indian women with fortune telling.  So when I was told by my teacher that I was going to have my IQ tested by an Indian woman who was coming from far, far away to my school, just to test me, I was both fascinated and terrified.  For this test would tell my future; prophesize my biological destiny.

But first a teacher at my school had to give me an IQ test.  Her test consisted mostly of general knowledge, arithmetic, and vocabulary.  This was just a warm-up test, to see if I was worthy of taking the school board’s official test, that the Indian woman would give.  The teacher explained that she’s not qualified to give the board’s test, which is extremely expensive to have administered, so first I had to take this warm-up test to see if there was just cause to take the board’s test.   The board’s test was much much more accurate, the teacher explained.  The board’s test was much more interactive and involved.

“I don’t want to take the board’s test,” I replied.  “I’m scared”

The teacher explained that sometimes kindergarten kids are scared when they take the board’s test because the Indian woman who administers it dressed in very exotic colorful saris, but that the Indian woman was a pro who would put them right at ease.

My parents had to come in for several meetings to discuss the possibility of taking the board’s test and all the implications.  My father did not want me tested, but my mother did.  They had to sign many documents as did the school administrator and school board officials.  There were so many kids on the waiting list to take this test that I had to wait many months.

Day after day, I waited in fear for the Indian woman to come and test me.

Days turned into weeks.

Weeks turned into months.

Months turned into a summer vacation and the start of a new school year at a new school.

And then one cold autumn day during seventh grade French class, there was a knock on the classroom door…

I followed the Indian woman down a long dark deserted hallway, to the school resource room.  And then to a tiny room within the resource room with nothing in it but a circular table and two chairs.

“We’re going to play some games,” she explained…

What followed, were the two most fascinating hours of my life, as the Indian woman would reach into her fluorescent pink envelope and obtain a wide range of items.  Cartoon panels of black people engaged in everyday activities:

“Put these in order so that the story makes sense!” she said smiling, as she pushed the stop clock.

When I completed the task, she would reach into the envelope for even more cartoon panels of black people.

“Since you’re doing so well, put ALL THESE in order so that the story makes sense!”

She would later reach in to her envelope for a handful of blocks and dropped them on the table.

“Using these blocks, make this design” she said, pointing to a picture of some abstract shape.

After I successfully completed several designs, she reached into her envelope for even more blocks:

“since you’re doing so well, using ALL THESE blocks, make THIS design.”

I had never seen anything like those blocks.  It was the purest measure of intelligence I could imagine.  Uncontaminated by schooling or prior knowledge, pure unadulterated novel problem solving..or at least that’s how it seemed to my twelve-year-old mind.

I remembered thinking, how can this endless stream of blocks, puzzles and picture all be coming out of that skinny little envelope she’s holding?   It was like Oscar the Grouch pulling swimming pools and trucks out of his garbage can.  It felt like magic.

At one point she asked me to put four cardboard pieces together to make a certain animal, and her very old clock start ticking, but instead of numbers of the clock, there were intelligence levels: Very superior, Superior, High Average, Average, Low Average, Borderline, Educable (mild) retardation, Trainable (moderate) retardation.

For the first time on the test, I stumbled.  I put the pieces together and it looked like an animal, but it looked really demented and elongated.  I knew it was not the right solution.

I was terrified that if I didn’t complete the puzzle before the red hand on the clock ticked all the way down to the Trainable Mentally Retarded level, I would be forced to leave the school, and attend a special school for the TMR, rotting away in an old abandoned field down the road.  The educable mentally retarded were only forced to attend a special class but could still stay within the school, but the trainable, they had to attend a special school miles away.

And then suddenly, the correct solution dawned on me, long before the time ran out.

After that, she quizzed me on vocabulary, general knowledge, arithmetic, common sense judgement, word association, etc.  After the stress of racing against the clock, it all seemed nice and relaxing.

“How did I do on the test?” I asked.

“You did extremely well,” she said with a smile.  “You’re a star, and that’s where I want to see you.  Shining.”

I woke up this morning to discover my readership had soared to the highest level in the history of this blog. Puzzled by the sudden explosion in traffic, I looked at the list of daily referrals to my blog and quickly realized that the traffic was coming from none other than the man who had virtually invented HBD blogging: Steve Sailer. It seems I have made Steve Sailer’s prestigious blog roll along side such luminaries as elite physicist turned geneticist turned Obama BFF Steve Hsu.

Sailer not only virtually pioneered HBD blogging, and had the courage and integrity to use his real name at a time when doing so was more difficult, but he’s been dominating the field ever since. As the power of the internet continues to grow, so too does Sailer’s historical legacy as a man who broke down taboos and paved the way for open intelligent discussion about behavioral genetics.

But Sailer is so much more than a talented and influential blogger. He is a scholar who has made valuable contributions to the field of HBD, a film critic with a unique perspective, and a journalist who exposed important lies that fooled the best and brightest in media. He is cited by eminent scientists and even presidential candidates are asked to respond to his blog.

I am honored to make the blog roll of a man who is not only brilliant and influential, but who paved the way for us all.