When Dr. Oz first announced he wanted to be a senator from Pennsylvania, many people wondered whether Oprah would support him since it was Oprah who made him famous and created his talk show.
But Oprah created his show so that she could rake in millions a year in syndication after retiring her own show in 2011, not so he could parlay that fame into a political career, and certainly not as a Republican.
For months Oprah stayed quiet, probably because it looked like Oz was destined to lose anyway. However because of a stroke, Oz’s Democratic opponent John Fetterman struggled in the debate while the slick polished Oz recently pulled ahead in the polls.
But then in act of incredible intelligence and moral character, Oprah decided to oppose the very man she created, and side with the stroke victims fighting for working Americans to have a decent living wage.
To quote Barbara Walters “nobody does the right thing all the time, but Oprah does the right thing more often than anyone else.”
Fetterman went on ABC’s The View the next day to celebrate the endorsement.
Meanwhile Michael Moore went on MSBC to explain why Dr. Oz is the wrong man for the job.
So I saw this movie a couple weeks ago and Halloween Eve is the right time to write about it. The film takes place four years after the events of Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills (2021) which were direct sequels to Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) and took place on the same night. All the other Halloween films have been ignored.
The film begins with the familiar trope of a babysitter and a kid alone on Halloween but in an unusual twist, for the first time the babysitter is a guy. That was my first clue this would be the most unpredictable Halloween film I’ve seen in a while. They are watching John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing on TV, just like in the original Halloween, babysitters watched the original 1951 version. I wont ruin the movie by telling you what happens next except to warn you that this is not your typical Halloween film and fans who are expecting one are often very disappointed…
The film then jumps ahead to October 2022, and Jamie Lee Curtis is back in familiar role as Laurie Strode except it now appears that the people in the town hate her, especially the black ones. LOL! Because Laurie spent 40 years warning the town that Michael was the boogeyman and would return to kill again, they somehow blame her for his killing spree. One black lady accuses her of “taunting a man with brain damage!”
Speaking of brain damage, I’m so fascinated by Myers’s IQ. In the original sequels he was Laurie Strode’s secret brother but since that brilliant idea has been rebooted out of existence, he loses the genetic IQ boost of having such a smart sister. Thus he is simply a 65-year-old white guy with zero years of schooling (since he was locked up from age 6 to 61, escaping for a couple days at 21).
Census data reports one in a 1000 U.S. whites in this age group have zero education, which means the median education is one in 2000 level. If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and education, he’d be 50 points below the white mean, but since the correlation (controlled for age) is 0.7, his expected IQ is 0.7(50) = 35 points below the white mean, or 65 (white norms) or 68 (U.S. norms).
Educable (mild) Retardation.
If that prediction is true it would be illegal to execute him in 30 states, though not in Illinois where the Halloween films take place. And what test could he have taken? He hasn’t spoken a word in nearly 60 years so verbal tests are out of the question. He’s been catatonic for most of those 60 years so performance tests would be hard to. You could give him the Raven Progressive Matrices but that probably requires too much motivation and understanding of rows and columns which unschooled folks don’t have. The recent culture reduced test I made would be perfect. He need only point to form simple concepts.
Many Halloween fans would strongly disagree with me that he is dumb, citing the fact that he could drive a car without lessons, disappear and kill many, but in my view, these savant like acts of animal cunning do not necessarily prove he had higher thought.
To quote his late Doctor, Sam Loomis:
I met him 15 years ago. I was told there was nothing left: no reason, no conscious, no understanding, in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong…
When Forbes first began listing the 400 richest Americans in 1982, they counted only 13 billionaires. This Fall they counted so many, 300 U.S. billionaires were considered too poor to make the Forbes 400, meaning 700 in total. That’s probably an underestimate since billionaires have probably become too frequent for one magazine to count, but we’ll go with it.
Typically, Forbes reports that about 2/3rds of America’s super rich are self-made so let’s say 462 self-made U.S. billionaires. And I estimate about 93% are white males, so that’s about 430 white male self-made billionaires in America.
I estimate there are 232 million Americans old enough to be billionaires (the combined population of the Silent Generation to Generation Y, inclusive), and of these 67 million are white males. Thus becoming a self-made billionaire is about a one in 156,000 level achievement for white men, and the median white self-made billionaire is around the one in 312,000 level among white male self-made wealth. That’s equivalent to a normalized Z score of +4.53.
As noted in my last article, using the 0.16 correlation between IQ and net worth gives absurd results, it’s much better to think of self-made billionaires as people with super high permanent incomes. Among white men, the correlation between IQ and permanent income is 0.45, thus the expected IQ of a self-made white billionaire (0.45)(4.53 SD above white male mean) = 2.04 SD above the white male mean.
On a scale where all Americans have a mean IQ of 100 with an SD of 15, the white male mean and SD is 101 and 15.6 respectively, thus 2.04 SD above the white male mean equals IQ 132 (U.S. norms).
Even though this analysis was based only on white males, white males are about 93% of all U.S. self-made billionaires so it’s a good estimate of U.S. self-made billionaires in general. Even if you think the 7% of billionaires who are not white males would drag the average down, you have to keep in mind that a huge percentage of the “white” men are actually Ashkenazi which might drag the average up.
Anecdotal evidence
Further confirmation that the average IQ of U.S. self-made billionaires is around 130 comes from anecdotal evidence. The highest self-reported (old) SAT scores of any self-made billionaire are 1590 to 1600 (Bill Gates and Paul Allen) which equates to an IQ of about 170 on the pre-1995 scale and it’s difficult to imaging any elite being smarter than Bill Gates. The lowest self-reported SAT score of any gazillionaire is 500 (Bill Cosby) which equated to an IQ of 83. However my research shows that prior to the 1980s, black Americans scored 1.5 SD below whites on tests of reading and math, instead of the much more validated 1 SD gap on official IQ tests observed since WWI. Adjusting for this brings Cosby to about IQ 90.
Of course Cosby was technically never a billionaire, but he was worth $340 million in 1994 which is likely equivalent (in percentile rank) to being a billionaire in 2022.
Thus it seems reasonable to assume the IQs of U.S. self-made billionaires range from 90 to 170, and the mid-point of this range is 130, just as predicted from linear regression.
Oprah
Based on her reading and math skills at age eight, I estimate Oprah has an IQ of 140. About 10 points higher than even the average self-made billionaire. This makes sense because unlike most self-made billionaires who come from an upper class background, Oprah overcame poverty, classism, weightism, colorism, and sexism to become the most worshipped billionaire on the planet, and thus needed to be more adaptable.
More importantly, while most self-made billionaires scored super high only on life’s IQ test (money), Oprah scored at the one in a million level on both life’s IQ test (money), and neurology’s IQ test (1884 cc brain size).
Scoring at the one in a million level on the two most Darwinian IQ tests (money AND brain size) shows much more intelligence than scoring Mega level on just one, hence she’s 10 points above even her self-made billionaire white male peers.
You can tell just from looking at her she’s the smarter than even most white self-made billionaires and was destined to spend decades of her life on the Forbes 400. As Donald Trump noted, nobody has more “it factor” than Oprah.
Elon Musk
It is interesting to ask what Elon Musk’s IQ because in recent years, he overtook Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the World (at least on paper). Of the 67 million white American men old enough to be billionaires, Musk is number one suggesting his permanent income has a normalized Z score of +5.53 and given the 0.45 correlation between IQ and permanent income among white men, a white male IQ Z score of 0.45(5.53) = 2.49 is expected. Given that white men have a mean of 101 and an SD of 15.6, this equates to IQ 140.
Of course this prediction tells us little about Musk’s IQ, but tells us a lot about the mean IQ of people who have been the richest American. When I think back at others who have held that title, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Sam Walton, Musk seems around the middle of the pack so 140 is plausible. His math IQ is probably above 150 but his verbal IQ seems below 120. Kind of the opposite of Oprah.
Knowing the average IQ of rich folks is important because money is one of the most obvious and important signs of intelligence and adaptability, so for IQ to have validity and relevance, rich people should score high.
And yet the correlation between IQ and networth is only 0.16 (Zagorsky 2007).
In his book, The Millionaire Mind, Thomas Stanley interviewed hundreds of millionaires and asked them about their SAT scores and grades.
At the time the median millionaire was around the top 1% of wealth. If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and wealth, we’d expect they’d have an average IQ of 135 (35 points above the U.S. mean of 100) but given a 0.16 correlation between IQ and wealth, we’d expect they’d average only 0.16(35) + 100 = IQ 106
And yet, after adjusting for self-reporting bias, Stanley estimated they averaged 1100 on their SATs. Stanley argued this was mediocre and proved IQ has little to do with money, however for their era, an 1100 equates to an IQ of 120 (14 points higher than predicted from the IQ-wealth correlation). And while 1100 may sound low compared to the stratospheric SATs of Ivy League students, we must understand that Ivy League students are selected for their score on the SAT and thus regress precipitously to the mean on all other tests. By contrast millionaires are selected by life’s IQ test, and thus regress precipitously to the mean on the SAT. In other words, the SAT overestimates Ivy League students, but correctly estimates millionaires.
But why did the 0.16 correlation underestimate the IQs of millionaires? In my opinion it’s because for most people, net worth is largely a function of how much you spend, and since smart people realize money is useless unless you spend it, a lot of smart people will end up with low net worth, thus driving down the correlation.
However there’s a limit on how much you can spend on yourself, and so the more prosperous you are, the less spending habits correlate with net worth.
To avoid this complication, it’s better to think of millionaires not as people who have a lot of money, but as people who have made a lot of money (or their heirs). This allows us to use the correlation between IQ and income instead of the correlation between IQ and net worth.
The correlation between IQ and income is about 0.30 (Zagorsky 2007) , but increases to almost 0.4 when you look at permanent income (which is most relevant for predicting wealth) and increases to about 0.5 when you look just at white men (the group the vast majority of millionaires belong to). Using these correlations would have made the predicted IQ more accurate.
Imagine if we took 100 randomly selected humans from the Earth today, and a random 100 of our ancestors from 2 million years ago, and placed all 200 on a random part of the Earth 1 million years ago (equally close in time to when both species lived so neither has a home team advantage).
Who would win in the struggle of survival?
Probably modern humans would, but you might say that proves little because we’re only one lineage that just happened to become uniquely adaptable.
Now imagine if we tried the same experiment on a hundred different randomly selected species, ranging in type from insects to reptiles to plants to large mammals.
Would there be a consistent trend for the modern version to outcompete its archaic ancestor, or would it be totally random, or would perhaps the ancestors win in most cases.
Of course such an experiment can not be done, it would prove whether evolution was progressive, random, or regressive.
Kanye West has recently been banned from social media for saying “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” (defcon 3 is what he meant).
In my opinion, among gentiles, anti-Semitism is a sign of schizophrenia while philo-semitism is a sign of autism.
But unlike many black Americans who simplistically blame white supremacy for all their problems, or QAnon Americans who imagine bizarre Satanic cults, West at least is smart enough to know which group really has power in America, however recklessly lumping them all together in a way that incites hatred is reprehensible. Already, a major bank has told West to take his money elsewhere and Adidas is being pressured to drop him as a partner, and Forbes must decide whether he remains a billionaire.
So what is his IQ? He reminds me a lot of commenter Loaded in that his mental illness makes him seem way dumber than he is. Back in October 2018, West claimed to have seen a psychologist and obtained an IQ of 133, which he equated to the 98th percentile (to be precise it’s the 98.6 percentile).
This actually sounds quite plausible. Forbes proclaimed West’s net worth to be $2 billion, crowning him the richest black of his generation. Assuming there are about 8 million blacks in generation X, if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and lifetime earnings, we’d expect West’s IQ to be 77 points above the black American mean of 88 (U.S. norms) (one in 8 million level), but since the correlation is more like 0.5, we’d expect it to be 0.5(77) + 88 = 127 (only 6 points below his self-reported score).
Another reason for thinking West is high IQ is the quality of his lyrics. In 2000 he wrote a song about his professor mother but refused to release it until he could perform on Oprah’s show. After five long years of trying to get on her show, he finally got his wish.
The song contains the following stanza which I thought was quite clever:
My mama told me go to school, get your doctorate Something to fall back on, you could profit with But still supported me when I did the opposite
Sadly, despite his moments of genius, Rushton would have likely considered West to be genetically inferior. Even though Rushton “would imagine that a lot of these black entertainers are very intelligent”, he believed the early time period (200,000 years ago), when Africans branched off the evolutionary tree meant they were cursed with other deficiencies like oversized genitalia, and so even though an individual might contradict the racial stereotype in one area (West has a high IQ), he would likely regress to his racial mean in other areas (West is mentally unstable which Rushton viewed as a primitive trait).
Unlike, another black billionaire Oprah, West does not have a huge hat size:
Indeed West’s brain may even be smaller than Donald Trump’s, which means he likely doesn’t have the cognitive reserve to protect his IQ from neurological attacks like the bipolar he claims to have:
Assuming West really did score 133 on an IQ test in 2018, his IQ has likely since declined (at least when unmedicated). In an edited out scene from his recent Tucker Carlson interview, West claimed there were fake children in his home sent to sexualize his own kids. One of these fake kids was the child of a business associate and West knew the child could not be hers because it was so much smarter than her. LOL
I had recently discovered that that people who took both the old GRE and the old SAT (circa 1990) had a verbal old SAT distribution of:
mean: 510.1 (SD = 107.7).
Because the SAT distributions if all 17-year-old Americans had taken the SAT would have been 376 (SD = 102), this implied GRE takers had a mean IQ of 121 (SD = 15.4) (U.S. norms).
Unfortunately this led to ridiculous results like the 95th percentile of the GRE population being at the 99.9 percentile of the general U.S. population. Clearly college admission tests are not normally distributed so we must look at the observed distribution, not the theoretical normal one.
And so I looked at Ron Hoeflin’s Omni sample norming of the Mega Test, where seven Mega Test takers reported scores on the old LSAT.
Then by pairing the Mega and LSAT scores by equal rank in the sample, we get the following equivalencies.
Now to put these numbers in perspective, a 630 was 92nd percentile (among LSAT takers) in 1960 and 725 was the 98th percentile, in 1974 (source: Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, by Robert Bocking Stevens).
From here we might conclude that the 95th percentile of the LSAT population was around 700, which equates to an IQ around 138 (99.5 percentile in the general population). (Note: I’m being 8 IQ points more generous than Mensa, which equates the top 5% of the LSAT population with the top 2% of the U.S. population and thus IQ 130).
This kind of makes sense, because if we assume that roughly 10% of Americans pursue post-grad degrees, and almost 100% of the very brightest do so, then the top 5% of those taking post-grad admission tests should be the top 5%/10 = top 0.5% of Americans as a whole.
Many high IQ societies accept scores from the GRE, LSAT and other graduate school admission tests. For example Mensa, which requires you to be smarter than 98% of Americans (for your age group), will accept you if your LSAT score is higher than 95% of LSAT takers. But how does Mensa know that being smarter than 95% of LSAT takers is equivalent to being smarter than 98% of Americans? I don’t think they do, they just know that since the LSAT population is smarter, one’s percentile among the LSAT population underestimates one’s percentile among Americans, but conservatively assumed the underestimation is small to avoid admitting unqualified people. So to Mensa’s credit, they probably erred on the side of maintaining standards (instead of profits) and rejected LSAT scores below the 95th percentile, even though many of those people likely qualified.
I can’t find much data on the IQ distribution of LSAT takers, but assuming they’re roughly equivalent to GRE takers (both tests are for admission to post-bachelor degree schooling), then the following is relevant:
In a sample of people who took both the GRE and the SAT (circa 1990), the mean GRE and SAT verbal was 510.1 (SD = 107.7) and 518 (SD of 104.7) respectively. Rare norming studies show that if all Americans took the SAT circa 1983, the mean and standard deviation (SD) would have been 376 and 102 respectively, which means that on an IQ scale (mean 100; SD 15) they had a mean verbal IQ of 121 (SD 15.4).
Now assuming the same for the LSAT, the 95th percentile (+1.66 SD) equates to an IQ of:
1.66(15.4) + 121 = 26 + 121 = 147
So when Mensa was screening out anyone with LSAT derived IQ scores below 130, they were also screening out everyone with IQs below 147!
Several years ago, Oprah returned to her old stomping grounds of Baltimore Maryland (where she spent her twenties looking for love in all the wrong places) and was interviewed by a nice blond reporter.
The difference in brain size could not be more stark.
Oprah was there to play the daughter of Henrietta Lacks. In the excellent HBO film, Oprah’s character is informed by a white journalist that the medical community had turned her mother’s miraculous cells (nicknamed Hela cells) into one of the most valued commodities in medicine, and the family didn’t get anything.
I was reminded of Ayn Rand who argued Middle East oil belonged to America because they discovered it and extracted it, so without them it was worthless.
Sadly, I suspect by the same logic she’d feel that Hela cells belong to white people, and not Henrietta Lacks and her heirs.
Pumpkin Person 