Arguably the greatest horror movie of all time. Certainly in the top five. One reason is the heroine (Alice) just looks like the girl next door. I could really relate to the film for that reason; she reminded me of the young adults on my street that I was always tagging along with. I saw the film in the 4th grade. It was on TV at around 1 am and I waited for my parents to go to sleep and snuck downstairs to watch.

Sadly, one of the fans of the film became obsessed with the actress who played Alice and started stalking her just as Jason stalked her at the start of the sequel. She was so wierded out by the experience that she didn’t act in another movie for 29 years by which point I doubt anyone would have wanted her because she was no longer young and relevant. Can you imagine, being the heroine of the most influential horror film of the last half-century and then throwing your whole career away and all because some demented fan?

Imagine the career she might have had if that stalker hadn’t ruined it. And it probably wasn’t just her career that it ruined but her relationship with men. Hopefully he went to jail for a long time.

But at least her youth and beauty will forever be preserved in perhaps the greatest horror movie of all time.

And yet she always thanks us fans for getting her through the trauma by showering her with love and support.

Way back in the 1980s, Rushton had a hunch that evolution is progress and some populations are more advanced than others, with newer forms of life being more developed than than those that emerged early.

One characteristic of Mongoloid populations is a spatial ability is more developed than verbal ability. We even see this in incipient Mongoloid groups like Native Americans despite them having a totally different culture from Northeast Asians and being separated from them for 30,000 years. Richard Lynn argued that the spatial demands of surviving ice age Northern Siberia were so extreme that the left hemisphere of the Mongoloid brain (the seat of language) was invaded and forced to take on more spatial processing. And yet full Mongoloids, like tonight’s Jeopardy! champ, often have so much overall intelligence than even verbal IQ is sky high.

Because cold adapted populations tend to score higher than tropical populations on IQ tests, it can be inferred that human intellect reached its pinnacle after we left the tropics. But correlation does not equal causation. Some folks think that because civilization began outside the tropics, that explains why the tropics fell behind and that somehow before civilization, cold adapted peoples were no smarter than warm adapted people. After all, IQ was useless in the stone age right?

WRONG!

Arthur Jensen notes that “On non-verbal reasoning tests given in the first grade, before schooling could have much impact,” Native American “children exceeded the mean score of blacks by the equivalent of 14 IQ points.” Jensen claimed they also score higher on achievement tests from first to twelfth grade, and this DESPITE Native Americans ranking as far below Blacks in socio-economic status as Blacks rank below Whites.

Did you hear that? DID YOU HEAR THAT AMERICA? As Oprah would say.

When I read that today I thought Jensen must be mistaken. Hate to say it but the majority of Native Americans I’ve met were homeless, drunk, barely coherent and missing teeth. I can’t imagine a more environmentally deprived community in a First World country and yet these people outscore black Americans by 14 points on performance IQ (at least in early childhood).

I decided to look for more recent research since Jensen’s book was from 1981. I found a 1996 paper in which 28 American Indian school-aged children ranging in age from 6 years
to 17 years (from a random sample of 30 selected from students participating in a community program through the Division of Indian Work in Minneapolis, Minnesota) were given the WISC-III. Their verbal, performance and full-scale IQs were 90.5, 102.3, and 97.4 (U.S. norms) respectively.

To put that in perspective, in the WISC-III standardization, the corresponding scores were 103.6, 102.9, and 103.5 for Whites and 90.8, 88.5, and 88.6 for Blacks.

It should be noted that the American Indians were tested in 1994 and the WISC-III standardization occurred in 1989 so at most we could reduce the American Indians to 90, 100.3 and 95.9. Also, the Native Americans were a bit atypical in that they were from an urban as opposed to reservation environment, but this should make the comparison more fair.

If we assume that on a scale where Americans have an SD of 15, White Americans have an SD of 14.5, then on a scale where the White American mean and SD is set at 100 and 15 respectively, Native Americans scored 86, 97 and 92 and Black Americans scored 87, 85 and 85.

It should also be noted that Black Americans average about 25% white genetically so their scores might be reduced to 83, 80 and 80 if unmixed.

The 17 point gap in Performance IQ between Native Americans and unmixed Blacks can not at all be explained by environment so it must be genetic but it can’t at all be explained by selection pressures related to civilization, since most Native Americans didn’t have any. Maybe it’s genetic drift, but most likely it’s selection pressures related to cold winters and that explains why the Performance IQ gap is quadruple the verbal one. Cold winters require require visuo-spatial motor abilities to sew, hunt, make tools, make shelter, build fire, make clothes etc. This also explains why men tend to outperform women especially on spatial tasks (men did the hunting, women did the child rearing).

Over 589 people have now taken the TAVIS and these have a mean and standard deviation of 9.84 and 2.63 respectively.

When the sample increased to 604, I decided to rank the items by order of difficulty (hat-tip to Kiwi-Anon who suggested this could be easily done in Excel):

At least 48 TAVIS takers reported taking the Wechsler intelligence scales in the U.S. or Canada within the last 10 years (excluding people who reported scores outside the valid score range). This subgroup had a mean TAVIS score of 10.48 (SD = 2.44) and a mean self-reported Wechsler score of 129.92 (SD = 17.61). When I arranged the 48 TAVIS scores from lowest to highest and placed them beside the 48 Wechsler scores ranked lowest to highest, I got the following equivalencies.

TAVIS 7 = Wechsler IQ 100

TAVIS 8 = Wechsler IQ 105

TAVIS 9 = Wechsler IQ 121

TAVIS 10 = Wechsler IQ 125

TAVIS 11 = Wechsler IQ 141

TAVIS 12 = Wechsler IQ 146

TAVIS 13 = Wechsler IQ 151

TAVIS 14 = Wechsler IQ 154

TAVIS 18 = Wechsler IQ 159

Correlation between TAVIS and self-reported Wechsler IQ: +0.04

The correlation with the Wechsler was disappointingly low, but keep in mind that the Mega Test also had an incredibly low correlation with the self-reported Wechsler so this doesn’t necessarily invalidate the test.

Of the dozens of people who took the KAMIKAZE, at least 14 have self-reported math SAT scores. Some people took the KAMIKAZE before an answer key problem with the Dice item was corrected and so, for the purpose of the norming, I corrected the scores of those who were unfairly penalized so the norming would reflect the corrected version of the test.

I also deducted a point from those who were unfairly boosted by a brief scoring error (when I added a research question for comments, this added a point to everyone taking the test until I quickly spotted the problem & corrected it). With these corrections in mind, here is the raw data:

In my first norming, I converted all math SAT scores to the pre-1995 scale and then converted to IQ equivalents using 1980s norms but that seemed to produce inflated results, especially at the low end. This time I converted math SATs to IQ equivalents directly, using estimated means and SDs for the time period.

To get IQ equivalencies for the KAMIKAZE, KAMIKAZE scores and math IQ equivalents were both ranked from highest to lowest and equivalent ranks were equated:

The mean and standard deviation of the KAMIKAZE in this sample is 7.9 and 3.8 respectively while the mean and standard deviation for SAT derived math IQ is 134 and about 11. The relationship between raw scores and IQ looks fairly linear, so one can probably just use the following equation:

IQ (U.S. norms) = (KAMIKAZE score)(2.79) + 111

If this extends to the extrne a score of 0 would put you around the level of the average American university grad. A perfect score of 17 out of 17 would put you just below Prometheus level.

One red flag is the correlation between KAMIKAZE scores and math SATs is 0.0005. Technically this calls into question the whole logic of using math SATs to norm KAMIKAZE scores. However the correlation jumps to 0.43 when I remove everyone who took the old (pre-1995) SAT from the sample. This makes sense because old SAT people have the highest SAT derived math IQ scores because they took the test back when it had as huge ceiling, and yet because these people are now oldish, cognitive decline impairs their KAMIKAZE scores.

To adjust for age, I would advise readers to give themselves a bonus of 0.17 IQ points for every year over 30.

Next, I ranked the items in order of difficulty based on the percent of this norming sample to pass them.

Of the dozens of people who have taken the KAMIKAZE, there were 8 who self-reported math SAT scores. These were:

The correlation between KAMIKAZE scores and the SAT derived math IQs was a moderate 0.39 which isn’t terrible considering how restricted the range of ability is. Even the lowest scoring person in the sample (Loaded?) scored in the genius range.

When I placed KAMIKAZE scores and math IQs in rank order, I got the following equivalencies:

Using this same sample of 8, I arranged the items in order of difficulty based on how many of them passed each one.

Last week commenter Kiwi-Anon left me the following message about the KAMIKAZE which you can take here.

Alright, I’ve just finished my final draft. I added some floor extension items that I know a mathematically challenged kid I tutor can solve, so hopefully everybody should be able to get at least one correct. I think 6-7 correct should be about average among normal people. Looking over the test again, the ceiling is probably not as high as I originally thought, but should still be high enough for this blog – there will probably be a few stray Feynmans who breeze through it, but most won’t hit the ceiling. BTW, it’s probably a good idea to separate out both people who have a math/physics background and people with math competition experience with a demographic questionnaire. Let me know if any of the questions are ambiguous or if any of my answers seem wrong (I have checked them, but I am very sleep deprived right now so there’s a chance I made a mistake). Feel free to rearrange the questions into whatever you feel is a better order of difficulty (they are already loosely in such an order), and of course, you don’t have to keep the silly name for the test. You may want to try the test for yourself to see if my time limit seems right; I want fairly smart people to have at least 9 minutes for the last 3 questions.

Here’s the test, hopefully it meets your criteria:

The Kiwi-Anon Mathematical Intelligence, Knowledge, And Zeal Examination (K.A.M.I.K.A.Z.E.) (hey, acronyms aren’t my strong suit!)

[update 2022-04-15: an earlier version of this article reported the number of people who had passed each item on the TAVIS. This data was based on the response summary. However thanks to an anomaly spotted by commenter kiwianon, I did more research and it now appears that summary reported everyone who answered the question, and not just those who did so correctly]

As of today, there have been 746 responses to the TAVIS. Of these, 625 answered at least one item. This is not to imply that even the easiest item was too tough for 121 people, since many respondents did not properly start the test or did not bother taking it, and of those who took it, some likely took it multiple times strategically answering only one question as part of an attempt to infer answers.

A score of only 14 out of 24 puts you around the one in 4,000 level or even one in 42,000 level, depending on which (if any) of my three normings you believe. Not a single person (out of 625) has scored above 19.

When a test’s ceiling is so much higher than it’s hardest item (which hopefully wont be the case here), it’s sometimes a sign of low reliability. On a perfectly reliable test, the percent of people answering the hardest item perfectly matches the percent of people with a perfect score .

Digging through the hundreds of TAVIS test submissions, I have slowly found 10 TAVIS takers with self-reported SAT scores (old scale; pre-April 1995). I’m sure there are many more, but this is a start:

Old SATs were converted to IQ using this article. 45-year-olds were assumed to have taken the old SAT in the mid 1990s, 55-year olds in the mid 1980s etc.

The correlation between TAVIS and old SAT scores was a disappointing 0.04. The person with the highest SAT score (1560) got the lowest TAVIS score (7). But given the small sample size, this needn’t alarm us, and indeed if we eliminate that one anomalous person, the correlation jumps to 0.60.

If we put TAVIS scores and IQ equivalents in order from highest to lowest and place them side by side, we get the following preliminary IQ equivalents:

TAVIS 14 = IQ 161

TAVIS 13 = IQ 154

TAVIS 12 = IQ 143

TAVIS 11 = IQ 139

TAVIS 10 = IQ 131

TAVIS 9 = IQ 117

TAVIS 8 = ?

TAVIS 7 = IQ 109

Pumpkin Person rating: 8.5 out of 10

I love movies about a pair of upper middle class couples in their 30s isolated in remote, beautiful cozy location. I started watching this movie with the sister of my mother’s friend. The sister went to bed early, saying the film was “too slow”.

But I love slow movies. I love horror films but I’ve realized it’s not the horror part I love about them. I love all the parts leading up to the horror. The long drive to the secluded location. The excitement of the characters about the fun weekend they have to look forward to. The scenes where the characters step out on the deck overlooking a cliff, overlooking an ocean and say “isn’t it beautiful?”

Usually the horror starts the night the characters get to the location, but in this film, they apparently arrived on a Friday afternoon, and the horror didn’t start until Saturday night so they had time to go for a walk on the isolated beach, get drunk, make out in the jacuzzi, go for a hike etc.

The film is about two white brothers and their girlfriends (wives?). One brother has a high IQ and works in an academic profession while the other brother had spent time in jail for fighting and lacks general knowledge (implies humans were alive near dinosaur times). But the lower IQ brother has a high IQ Middle Eastern girlfriend who also happens to be the high IQ brother’s work partner. The low IQ brother fears his high IQ wife might leave him for a smarter guy, but he never suspects that smarter guy might be his own brother.

When the Middle Eastern girlfriends tries to rent their vacation destination she is declined, only to find her lower IQ white boyfriend is able to rent it an hour later raising questions about racism, but that’s the least of their problems as they discover someone is videotaping their showers and trying to kill them.

This film was directed and co-written by Dave Franco (the younger brother of James Franco) who cast his wife as the high IQ brother’s wife. Well worth watching on Amazon Prime.