I enjoyed the interview below. I wonder what IQ is required to understand his CTMU. Some argue that communication breaks down when IQ differences exceed 2 standard deviations (SD) so assuming Chris is around +5.9 SD (at least on his second Mega Test attempt) one might expect +3.9 SD to be the threshold but that sounds too high.

I do remember one freakishly high IQ person a couple decades ago who kept a very low profile and claimed people 2 SD above Langan’s level (impossible on the Mega Test) realized the flaws in his theory. This person aggressively lashed out at Langan by saying something like CTMU can’t disprove the unreal’s real: “You can’t deny it and your theory is WRONG!”. Of course this critic could have been the one who was wrong.

One might wonder how a man like Ron Hoeflin (who had very little income or power) was able to create a test that measured one in a million level U.S. intelligence. After all , wouldn’t you need to administer a test to several million Americans to reliably estimate how well a one a million mind would perform?

But the clever Hoeflin found a shortcut called equipercentile equating, and when I first heard about it a couple decades ago, it blew my mind. Hoeflin didnt need to give the Mega Test to millions of people because millions of people had already taken the SAT, so all Hoeflin had to do was ask people who took his Mega Test to reveal their SAT scores. Assuming they didn’t lie or selectively report, it was simply a matter of equating the distribution of Mega scores with the distribution of SAT scores and then equating a one in a million SAT score (perfect 1600 pre-1995) with its counterpart in the Mega score distribution.

The Prometheus MC Report explained it as follows:

If one assumes that raw scores on the Mega and the SAT are monotonically related to mental ability, i. e., that a higher raw score on either test correlates with higher mental ability, then there is some function z₁(n) that relates raw scores on the Mega to standard intelligence scores z and there is some function z₂(m) that relates raw scores on the SAT to standard scores z, where z = (IQ-100)/16. It is plausible to assume that the joint probability distribution of z₁ and z₂ is just the bivariate normal distribution p(z₁,z₂,r) for some correlation r. This function is symmetric in z₁ and z₂. Thus, for any random sample for which raw scores exist for both the SAT and Mega, if we have n scores with z₁ > 4, then we would expect n scores with z₂ > 4. These would not generally be the same n individuals in each case. Thus, if we know the 1-in-30,000 cutoff on the SAT (raw score=1560), and if there are N people in the sample of people taking both the SAT and the Mega scoring at this level or higher on the SAT, then counting down the highest N Mega scores from the sample would give a reasonable estimate of the 4-sigma cutoff on the Mega (raw score=36). Ron Hoeflin showed that, if you do this for several different cutoffs, then the resulting Mega normalization is linear over a range of scores including 36. This linearity feature seems to be standard on IQ tests over their range of applicability.

We are aware that there are difficulties in this argument (e.g., with respect to self-reporting of SAT scores, nonrandomness of sampling, small sample sizes, and mathematically allowed but “unphysical” test scores associated with ceiling effects).

To this day I have no idea what “unphysical” test scores are by they sound fascinating!

In my opinion equipercentile equating only works if (1) both tests being paired are more or less equally correlated with g (or some other factor(s)), and (2) the people in your sample were not selected by one of the tests being equated. So if your sample were Harvard undergrads, you wouldn’t want to equate Mega scores with SAT scores because the undergrads were selected by the SAT and thus would be expected to regress to the mean on any other test they take. Much better to equate their LSAT scores to their Mega scores.

Equipercentile equating the PATMA & the WAIS

I noticed that at least six commenters had reported both their PATMA and WAIS scores.  The first two columns of table 1 rank the commenters by their PATMA scores.  The second two rank them by their WAIS scores.  This side by side ranking allows us to equate PATMA scores with their WAIS equivalent.  In some cases commenters took a version of the WAIS over a decade after its norms were published so scores might be inflated by a few points because of the Flynn effect.  

Table 1

Name	PATMA score	WAIS IQ	Name
Ganzir	10	150+	Teffec P
Teffec P	10	150	Ganzir
Dexter	9	141	Billy
Billy	8	133	Dexter
Gman	7	120	Gman
Illuminaticat	6	112	Illuminaticat

 

Although the sample size is small,  preliminary data suggests an absurdly high correlation between the two tests (r = 0.94!).  Indeed the line of best fit predicts:

Expected WAIS IQ = 9.025(PATMA score) + 59.125

Instead if we graph the data by score of equivalent rank (rather than scores made by the same person) it seems the PATMA has an incredibly linear relationship to IQ (r = 0.9975) expressed by the equation:

WAIS IQ Equivalent = 9.625(PATMA score) + 54.125:

 

Note the subtle distinction between formulas.  The first is telling us the expected WAIS IQ of someone with a given PATMA score.  The second is telling us what WAIS IQ you’d get if you performed as well or as poorly on the WAIS as you did on the PATMA.

Notice that only two people in this extremely bright sample scored a perfect 10 on the PATMA and only two people also scored 150+ on the WAIS (incidentally the same two people).  This suggests a perfect 10 on the PATMA equates to about a 150 IQ (+3.33 SD) however this is a conservative estimate because Teffec P suspects his PATMA score might have benefited from reading this blog (teaching to the test) and his WAIS score was likely suppressed by ceiling bumping (his median scaled score was the highest possible scaled score and much higher than his mean scaled score).  Correcting for this suggests that on a ceiling-free WAIS he would have scored 164.  So if his PATMA score is too high and his WAIS score is too low, than we get a very different equivalents:

Table 2

Name	PATMA score	WAIS IQ	Name
Ganzir	10	164	Teffec P
Dexter	9	150	Ganzir
Teffec P	8	141	Billy
Billy	8	133	Dexter
Gman	7	120	Gman
Illuminaticat	6	112	Illuminaticat

However for now I’ll stick to the flawed but real data in table 1 rather than the speculation that is table 2.

Recently my readers and I took the quick and enjoyable Verbal (Gc) Test developed by Antjuan Finch. Finch provides the following norms for his test:

I polled my readers on how they did on this quiz

I converted these results into percentiles and then normalized Z scores, but because my readers are far smarter and more variable than the general U.S. population (mean 100, SD 15) the Z scores were multiplied by an SD of 19 and added to a mean of 129 (U.S. norms). Despite adding the Z scores to such a high mean, my IQ equivalents were still much lower Finch’s:

30 = 78 percentile (among PP readers) = IQ 144

29 = 48 percentile = IQ 128

28 = 34 percentile = IQ 121 (Very Bright)

27 = 25 percentile = IQ 116

26 = 20 percentile = IQ 113

25 = 16 percentile = IQ 110 (Bright)

24 = 14 percentile = IQ 109

23 = 13 percentile = IQ 107

22 = 9 percentile = IQ 104

21 = 6 percentile = IQ 100 (U.S. average)

19 to 20 = 5 percentile = IQ 97

18 = 3 percentile = IQ 94

So there’s a quick online verbal IQ test supposedly by a Harvard student who once commented on this blog.

I decided to take a look just to see what type of computer program was used to create it, and before I knew it the the test was timing me. Well I better take it now I thought, since I’ve already seen a couple questions but I was annoyed to have been caught off guard by the immediate timer.

Once I started reading the questions I thought “Oh easy peasy! Like Oprah doing long division in the fourth grade.”

I was surprised by how well I did because although my childhood verbal IQ was a superior 120, it was much, much lower than my non-verbal IQ (partly because my general knowledge was mediocre). On the other hand, as an adult I scored in the 99.9 percentile on a test of written expression and perhaps this test gets at that specific part of verbal ability since it’s all about choosing the right word to complete the sentence.

The test has only 30 questions to be completed in 15 minutes, and remember, it starts timing you as soon as you start. If you think you are ready, press this link and then share your score in the anonymous poll.

[Note from PP, Nov 14, 2020: The following is a guest post by commenter “illuminaticatblog” and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person]

I have several problems at once. Autism, psychosis, emotional neglect. They all mash up into some schizoid temperament. The reason I act the way I do is that I am trying to keep stable from all this chaos I need under control.

autists are literalists, they take in what everything is as-is.
schizos read into noise things that are not there.
schizos see intentions/hidden meanings in it all

Schizoids take the hidden meaning literally not personally. They analyze it rather than believe it. They do not think the psychosis is real. That is the difference between the schizoid and schizophrenic. Analysis is not the same as logic. Logic alone does not evaluate in order to organize. This is the difference between the schizoid and the autist.

Schizoids do not have conspiracies (synthesis). Analysis categorizes the psychosis patterns. Schizoids have emotional problems. The reason for the analysis is to keep emotionally stable. Instead of or acting out emotionally. Prolonged emotional stress, obsession, trauma lead to complexes. Groups of associations related to a core issue. This happens randomly so in schizophrenics hidden meanings get caught up in the emotions one relates to complexes. Random connections ensue. Schizoids have the least random complexes because they put all emotion into mental organization.

I try not to act on my emotions. I analyze things a huge amount. What makes me different yet the same as a schizoid is that I rationalize more but much less than neurotypicals. Full-blown schizoids rationalize the least of any mental condition but to do this they must suppress emotional attachment to anything irrational. Not emotion itself but what science and philosophy say is irrational. That means rationalizations need emotional temperance instead of embracing them.

I guess that I still rationalize things but have my psychosis almost under control. The random noise seems to have meaning but I am not creating anything from it I am categorizing from it. Simply does this meaning reflect what is actually in reality? What are all the options?

In my magic practices. I’ve seen what happens because of intention. I controlled the hallucinations like in a lucid dream. I accepted the messages that I let guide me. I did what they told me. I wrote it all down and accepted the contract. Then the hallucinations happened. I’ve tried this several times. And it worked twice. This could be considered schizophrenic because it was an episode but this can be induced in non-schizophrenics. Schizos because they see the messages or feel them get them everywhere all the time like being watched. I tapped into that.

It is important to watch your emotions carefully. Like posture, you need to keep them perfectly aligned and not sit down too much. Slouched emotions are not good. This will help with psychosis. And thinking through things.

I love this scene from Friday the 13th 1980 (SPOILER ALERT). Imagine you’re a camp owner just walking in the isolated woods late at night after a rain storm and then someone suddenly flashes into your face a piercingly bright white light. You realize it’s the camp cook who hasn’t worked for you in 23 years.

If Pam had survived she might have been taken to a mental hospital to see if she were fit to stand trial for her killing spree. The original WAIS would have been administered since the WAIS-R was not published until a year after the events of the film.

Perhaps the great David Wechsler himself would have given the test, or at least analyzed the results. Wechsler felt his scale not only provided a reliable IQ, but rich clinical information, so he would have been looking especially hard at Pam’s scores on general knowledge vs verbal abstract reasoning. Usually these two tests correlate highly because it requires verbal inference to accumulate knowledge, but when the former is much higher than the latter, Wechsler suspected schizophrenia.

For example, Wechsler might ask Pam (or commenters Pill & Mug of Pee) “what 3 things do the sun and the moon have in common?” (not an actual item) and instead of giving the 3 correct answers, they would say something bizarre like “they’re both hard to photograph in Boston this time of year”.

Commenter Ainttellin wrote:

Hey PP, random question, whereabouts would you predict the IQ of Ken Jennings (Jeopardy G.O.A.T.) to be. Here’s a clip that blew me away:

James Holzhauer (2nd best) claimed he tested in at 158. Both James and Ken seem to have incredible memories for facts, but aren’t necessarily creative geniuses. It’s an interesting sort of intelligence, which I’d like to get your take on.

Virtually all of the questions of Jeopardy! resemble tests of General Information which been a staple of IQ tests since WWI. So Jennings being arguably the best Jeopardy! player out of all 245 million U.S. adults is like scoring +5.73 standard deviations on an Information test. Given that in Jennings’s age group, the Information subtest on the WAIS-IV IQ test correlates 0.69 with full-scale IQ (after correcting for the fact that said subtest is used to calculate said IQ), we’d expect Jennings’s full-scale IQ to be 0.69(+5.73 SD) = +3.95 SD or IQ 159 (U.S. norms); 95% confidence interval: 137 to 181.

Speaking of Jeopardy!, the show’s long-time Canadian host Alex Trebek passed away several days ago. He will be missed by millions. Here’s rare footage of him talking to Oprah way back in 1984, before her show went national:

Years later I recall some celebrity bragging to Oprah that she was a Jeopardy! question to which Oprah replied, “I was a Jeopardy! category”.