Commenter Teffec recently posted a list of verbal IQ questions in the comment section. I thought his questions had potential so rather than releasing them into the comment section, I decided to make them into a formal test. All the questions were written by Teffec (unless like the great David Wechsler, he stole many of his test items), though I suggested he add some easier items and I’m the creative genius behind the test’s name 🙂

There are 24 questions (all verbal analogies) that start off super easy but become progressively much harder. The test requires a mix of abstract reasoning, general knowledge and vocabulary and should be a pretty good proxy for verbal IQ, which in turn is an excellent proxy for overall IQ. Don’t google the answers (not even to check spelling), not that doing so would help much and I did make sure the test accepted a few misspelled answers.

You can take the test here.

It only lets you take the test once so give it your best!

I gave it a 10 minute time limit so don’t perseverate too long on any one item. After the test is done you’ll be asked to anonymously provide a bit of personal info just to help me norm the test, but this is optional. It will give you your raw score either way.

Let us know how you scored in the anonymous poll below:

UPDATE 2022-03-20

To the person who got 12 right at 6:24 am, consider your score to be 13. You failed item 4 because of a misspelling but I updated the scoring to now accept that misspelling because it’s not supposed to be a spelling test.

If people are wondering why it reports scores out of 27 when there are only 24 items, it’s because of the few personal questions after the quiz is done. These are not counted in the scoring since they’re not part of the test, so consider your score out of 24.

Someone gave the cutest answer to item #5. I feel sorry for that person; not because they’re stupid, but because the test is clearly culturally biased against them. Perhaps where ever they live, that is the right answer.

The latest Alexa ratings are in and Greg Cochran’s West Hunt blog ranks 2,421,019 in the entire World! It seems Pumpkin Person is now the only solo HBD blogger who cracks the prestigious top one million.

Survival of the fittest.

To quote Daniel Seligman, “people who are the top in American life, are probably there because they’re more intelligent than the rest of us”.

I am at the top both metaphorically and literally. After returning from my cottage, I stepped out on to my balcony with a cup of cocoa, enjoying a bird’s eye view of two provinces. It was mighty cold, but the setting sun was so beautiful and my hot chocolate kept me warm.

When Ron Hoeflin set out to to measure the smartest one in a million level he had a major advantage that he was smart enough to exploit. Every year (at the time), about 3.5 million Americans become old enough to take the SAT and virtually 100% of the smartest people actually do, thus the 3 to 4 people who scored perfect on the SAT each year were one in a million level minds. This allowed him to norm his own high ceiling test because he noticed that a 43+ on the Mega Test was about as rare among Mega Test takers as was a 1600 on the SAT.

But what if instead of trying to make a super high ceiling test, he was trying to make a super low ceiling test, to recruit the dumbest one in a million (normalized deviation IQ below 30). This test would have items like “say DaDa”.

One problem with norming this test is there’s no anchor test that’s taken by all dumb Americans the way the SAT is taken by all smart Americans. So how would you find the dumbest Americans? It used to be all severely disabled minds were institutionalized so you could just go to all the institutions in America and ask to test the lowest functioning young adults there (controlling for age is important). Of course there wouldn’t be a perfect correlation between who they considered the dumbest and who actually scored the lowest, so you’d have to test perhaps the entire bottom half of every institution to make sure you tested all the dumbest minds (not counting people who are in a coma since they’re arguably untestable, not stupid per se).

If I were as rich as Elon Musk, I might spend a few billion trying to find the dumbest people in America but then I’d be harassed by people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who would accuse me of being cruel and use it as a another excuse to tax my wealth and the twitter mob would be on their side.

It would be interesting to see if you could actually pin down the dumbest one in a million or if even the easiest test imaginable would have too many people scoring zero.

One of the guests on tonight’s Jeopardy! said he’s the only person he knows to score perfect on all three high school college boards: The SAT, ACT, and the PSAT. He now works as an SAT coach.

Sadly, this did not translate into Jeopardy success as he finished double Jeopardy with negative 2400 and was removed the stage, while two women duked it out in Final Jeopardy.

This is a good example of regression to the mean. Just because you did super well on your college boards, does not mean you’ll do well on a different intelligence test. Of course just appearing on Jeopardy! at all suggests he’s way above average in general knowledge. He also may have been hurt by overconfidence, as he bet everything on a daily double and was penalized for giving several wrong answers when he could have stayed silent.

And not all SAT champs struggle on Jeopardy!. Amy Schneider, one of the best players of all time, claims to have scored a perfect 1600:

Schneider was born in 1979 so likely took the recentered SAT, where 1600 equates to IQ 154 (U.S. norms); 153 (British norms).

I was listening to a podcast where this poker champion smugly noted that computers can beat the best chess players but they can’t beat the best poker players. The subtext seemed to be that chess champions are just robots, while poker requires real intelligence.

But in fact computers can beat poker players one on one, but because poker is usually played with more people does the number of possibilities become too much for a computer to process. But chess can also be played with more than two people. How well would a computer do then?

I suspect that six person chess would be a much better test of intelligence than regular chess, not least because it’s been much less studied, so players would be forced to adapt, instead of relying on over-learned algorithms invented by others. It would also require social intelligence, in that you’d have to infer who might be an ally.

It is interesting to ask what is it about the human mind that it allows it to dominate even the fastest computers and when did this ability evolve? Perhaps there are some problems so complex that we no amount of processing power is enough, so we evolved the capacity for certain shortcuts, and perhaps one of those shortcuts is analogical thinking: This reminds me of that.

It’s interesting that representational art does not appear in the archeological record until 40,000 years ago and this is often thought to be the start of human culture. What makes art significant is it’s the first time we get evidence of humans thinking analogically. A stick man may have little resemblance to a human, yet the sticks at the top are analogous to arms and the sticks at the bottom are analogous to legs. Analogical thinking.

Global news reports:

Romana Didulo, a leading Canadian QAnon figure with an alleged history of encouraging her followers to shoot health-care workers, was taken into custody by the RCMP’s national security team in Victoria, B.C.

Didulo, who often refers to herself as the “Queen of Canada,” said in a YouTube video that the RCMP’s integrated national-security enforcement team (INSET) served her with a search warrant and told her she was being detained under B.C.’s mental health act.

A justice of the peace for the Victoria Court Registry confirmed that an RCMP search warrant was issued on Nov. 27 for an address linked to Didulo.

It is interesting to ask what her IQ is. Even though she calls herself the Queen of Canada, in reality she’s only the Queen of the 73,000 QAnon loons who follow her on Telegram. QAnons are people who believe America (and the World) is run by a group of Satanic pedophiles who run a global child trafficking ring. As of 2001, about 16% of American adults leaned QAnon, though only 5% were hardcore QAnon.

According to PRRI.org only 14% of QAnon Americans have a four-year degree, compared to 32.1% for all Americans age 25+. This suggests a 0.73 standard deviation gap in education. Assuming a comparable gap in IQ would imply 11 points, and probably around 15 points for hardcore QAnon. So if the average American has an IQ around 97 (British norms), hardcore QAnon Americans (and perhaps Canadians) likely average around 80.

Could the Queen of Canada possibly score that low? Another controversial Canadian, the late J. Phillipe Rushton argued Mongoloids were smarter than Caucasoids who were smarter than Blacks, and the Queen of Canada appears, Mongoloid, or at least proto-Mongoloid.

The key word is proto. Because her ancestors crossed the land bridge from Siberia to North America about 25,000 years ago, they had a continent of unexploited prey to themselves and didn’t have to compete with other humans for survival. Thus their evolution may have stopped 25,000 years too early, leaving them 25,000 years behind other Mongoloids.

So even though Mongoloids tend to be smarter than us Caucasoids, proto-Mongoloids may be less intelligent than modern Caucasoids.

Interesting study about a girl with a 54 point gap on the WISC-R’s verbal and performance scale. When tested at 11, her verbal IQ was 96 and her performance IQ was 150! But when re-tested at age 12, her verbal IQ had jumped to 114 and her performance IQ had tumbled to 126, for only a 12 point gap.

Interestingly, despite this massive change in cognitive profile, her full-scale IQ was virtually identical at both times (124 the first time, 122 the second time). This shows the incredible stability of the Wechsler full-scale IQ, even in the face of massive sub-test change. Probably because error in both directions cancels out when you have 10 diverse subtests.

The lesson is, whenever you see someone with a huge verbal-performance gap, it’s probably been exaggerated by error and the true gap is less extreme.

[update 2022-02-09: An earlier version of this article contained flawed logic which has been removed]

[update 2022-02-09: turns out the only flaw in my logic was thinking it was flawed; it appeared flawed but only because it was so subtle]

Many people do not understand why, if IQ is so genetic, the children of high IQ parents, regress to the mean. In fact, I was once told by a commenter on Lion’s blog that if IQ were 100% genetic, no regression to the mean would occur. His logic was we inherit 100% of our genes from our parents, so we should have the exact same genetic IQ as our parents.

But there also might be gene-gene interactions, so some genes might only boost IQ when they’re combined with other genes, so you might inherit only one of these genes from a parent, but without the other, it’s useless.

Back in September I noted that Jewish children in Israel average Raven IQs of about 92 (U.K. norms) but by age 14.5 these increase to 95. Since it’s thought that Jewish IQ increases post-puberty, I take 95 as a good estimate for Israel’s adult Jewish IQ.

Unfortunately the data was not disaggregated by type of Jewish ancestry. An analysis by Hanna David and Richard Lynn found that in Israel, European Jews score about 14 IQ points higher than Oriental Jews though the gap is bigger on verbal tests. For example on the Israeli WISC, the gap was 1.1 standard deviations (SD) (17 IQ points) on verbal IQ but only 0.93 SD on Performance IQ (14 IQ points). It’s unclear what the Raven IQ gap would be more like verbal, performance or full-scale, but let’s split the difference and say 15 points.

Assuming 31.8% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi and they score 15 points higher than the non-Ashkenazi, then what would they need to score for the average IQ of all Israeli Jews to be 95? The answer is 105.

[Update 2022-02-06: Commenter Mug of Pee found a different source claiming 44.2% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi. Applying the same math to this figure put’s the Ashkenazi IQ at 103.]

So it seems at least in Israel and probably Serbia, Ashkenazi Jews have Raven IQs identical to those of East Asians. I can’t find any data on Ashkenazi Raven data in the United States, except for a small group of Ashkenazi prisoners who scored about 19 IQ points higher than the Gentile prisoners.

Just as Ashkenazim score 10 points higher than the average Israeli Jew, there is another group that scores 11 points lower. In his analysis of the Israeli military IQ data, James Flynn noted:

Recall that those not usually tested are predominantly from Orthodox homes of Eastern European origin, and they are known to have a lower IQ profile than the rest of the Jewish population (Judy Goldenberg,
personal communication, 25 April 1993). Should there not be a large IQ gap between the usually tested and the usually not tested? In reply, that is exactly what the projection shows…The IQ gap between the usually tested and the usually not tested is a robust 10·7 points

Not usually tested by the military is what Flynn means. He’s referring to those who escape service through pregnancy or religious devotion. However they likely would be included in the age 14 Israeli Jewish average of IQ 95, I assume.

So to summarize there are three types of Jews in Israel: Ashkenazi IQ 103- 105, Middle eastern IQ 88 -90, and ultra-Orthodox IQ 84 (11 points below the military sample, which since it’s 98% Jewish, presumably scored 95). Of course these groups are not mutually exclusive because Orthodox can be either Ashkenazi or Middle easter though the group Flynn describes is of Eastern European ancestry.

[Update 2022-02-06: I crossed out my estimate for Orthodox IQ because I simply don’t believe they score that low. I may have made a logical error: Just because the people who are usually not tested are primarily Orthodox Jews, doesn’t mean the Orthodox Jews are primarily usually not tested, so I can’t necessarily infer the IQ of one from the other]