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One of the most extreme cases from the annals of IQ research is Isabelle:
Isabelle was discovered living in a darkened room with her deaf-mute mother as her only contact.
When Isabelle was discovered she was almost seven years old and had no sense of language.
She had been deprived of learning how to speak because of her mother being both deaf and mute.
As a result, when authorities found her they believed that she was also deaf and mute like her mother, because she could only make noises.
This was proven wrong when she started to speak after receiving intense training.
When Isabelle was initially tested, at almost seven years old, her mental age concluded to be at about 19 months old.
Within two months of being trained, Isabelle was putting together logical sentences.
Within a year she was already learning how to read.
While her IQ score was extremely low when she was found; at almost nine years old she was completely caught up with her peers and had a normal IQ.
The case is fascinating because when Isabelle was tested in 1938, being almost seven, she likely had a far bigger brain than the average 19 month old, yet scored the same as the average 19 month old.
Commenter Race Realist argues that IQ tests measure exposure to the culture, and he’s partly right because Isabelle’s lack of culture caused her development to be extremely delayed.
But what’s interesting is that it takes the average baby 19 months of culture to acquire the same level of skill that Isabelle acquired almost instantly. This shows that IQ tests are not merely measuring cultural exposure, but the brain’s physical development, and being almost seven, Isabelle likely had a much bigger and more complex brain than the average baby. Having the physical brain of a seven-year-old, Isabelle was able to learn in a few months what the smalled brained average baby learns in 19 months, and in just 2 years she had acquired 7.5 years of childhood intellectual development.
Once she had caught up to her chronological peers at age 9, her progress became completely average because her neurological development no longer exceeded her intellectual development.
She graduated from high school an average student.
The question is was Isaebelle ever less intelligent than her chronological peers, or was the test simply culturally biased against a girl who had no language or culture for the first 6.5 years of life? One wonders if on a more culture fair test, like the one the crow below is taking, she would have had an average IQ from the moment she was discovered.
Of course it’s worth noting that Isabelle was discovered young. Not all cases of extreme deprivation end so well:
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I was listening to an autism lecture by the great Simon Baron-Cohen and around the 49 minute mark, someone in the audience asks what Simon thinks of the research showing autism is a slow life history strategy while schizophrenia is a fast life history strategy. Simon is unfamiliar with the research but agrees it sounds plausible.
I’ve come across some fascinating research showing that autism is more common in higher social classes and schizophrenia is more common in lower social classes. In my opinion, this is because the higher social classes tend to be more nerdy (K selected) and the lower social classes tend to be more cool (r selected). The higher classes are nerdy in that they are more educated, more monogamous, more scrawny, and less sexually active. By contrast, the lower classes are “cool” because they are more blue collar, more muscular, more likely to get arrested, more into sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
Of course I’m not the first to speculate that autism might be linked to slow life history. There was a 2001 web page arguing that autism may have been inherited from Neanderthals:
Under harsh conditions it’s advantageous to mature and grow slower. This means individuals can survive on fewer resources. A consequence of slower maturing is longer life. Jack Cuozzo shows that Neanderthals matured slower than us, and probably got older. Autistic children often develop according to another slower scheme than other children, and may continue to develop into their 30s. 105106 It is also believed that a key factor in ADHD might be slower mental maturation. 107 Similar findings exists for schizophrenia
However this article did not make my point (made by Simon’s questioner) that schizophrenics have fast life histories, instead arguing they have slow life histories. And I’ve never believed that autism was inherited from Neanderthals, though I have speculated it might partly be an evolutionary adaptation to extreme cold. It may also be an adaptation to civilization as Philosopher has argued.
Commenters like Race Realist are constantly arguing IQ tests are pseudoscience, but as Jordan Peterson cleverly noted, if you reject IQ, then you have to reject all of psychology, because IQ is the best validated construct psychologists have ever come up with.
Race Realist argues that IQ tests are based on circular logic because tests are constructed so that people considered smart score well. While that’s partly true, we’re now at the point where IQ tests can be constructed by wholly objective criteria such as the degree to which test items correlate with the general intelligence factor (g) derived from a factor analysis of a large battery of tests.
If Race Realist thinks IQ tests are circular and pseudoscientific, what does he think of AQ questionnaires (Autism Quotient measures)? These tests have questions like “do you like numbers?” and then report that math majors are more autistic. This seems much more circular to me than IQ tests .
I think the best way to study autism is to avoid the questionnaires and instead just look at the most extreme cases (like Rain Man) than everyone in every culture could immediately agree is autistic. If autism is truly linked to STEM talent (as Simon Baron-Cohen argues) or slow life history (as I’ve argued), it should be evident in the non-autistic siblings and parents of people like Rain Man who would regress to a milder (sub-clinical) variant of the condition. On the other hand, if Rain Man’s relatives are just as likely to be bartenders as engineers, then autism is simply a disorder, and not a pathological extreme of normal (adaptive) variation.
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A few random thoughts:
Where’s the bartender?
The other night I walked into a bar and there was no bartender in site to serve me. Then a slightly overweight blond young woman stood up to go to the ladies room.
“I thought you were the bartender,” I told her, “cause you stood up just as I entered, I thought you were gona get me a drink”
“And I’m blonde too” she added with a laugh.
At the time I thought she meant blonds are sexy and thus more likely to get hired as bartender, so was flattered that I thought she was the bartender.
Then the actual bartender appeared: She was a 300 lb blond woman…
Friday the 13th
So Friday was Friday the 13th so naturally I went out to celebrate. But sadly a lot of men seem to get off on being very abusive to women. I saw a drunk white guy being abusive towards an arctic woman. He had told her she had no choice but to stay at his apartment because no one else wanted her and then took her iphone and through it in the snow.
A bunch of us were watching from the window inside the bar, debating what to do, when finally I said “I’ll go talk to him.”
“No don’t do that” warned a co-worker. “He’s psycho”
“I smiled,” and like Mrs Voorhees from the original Friday the 13th, I replied, “I’m not afraid.”
When I went out there, I asked the arctic woman, “Is he bothering you?”
When she said “yes” I decided to pull the Dr. Huxtable father-figure shtick, even though he was only about five years younger than me (that’s how drunk I was).
“Son, I think you have a problem,” I told him gently, not wanting to anger someone so aggressive. “And you need to talk someone about it. Maybe talk to a friend or councillor of some kind. And if none of them that works, you can always come here,” I said, referring to the bar.
Another Jordan Peterson video
Talks about how there are no jobs for people below 85 IQ and claims even a lot of lawyers will be out of work soon.
Most interesting thing he says is that people below IQ 80 take tens of hours to learn how to do a job most of his psychology students could learn in 10 minutes. This is consistent with the theory once proposed by a member of Prometheus that complex learning/problem solving speed doubles every 5 or 10 IQ points.
On the other hand, why does research show that total vocabulary is normally distributed? High verbal IQ people don’t have vocabs orders of magnitude greater than low verbal IQ people. Maybe there just aren’t enough common words for such a pattern to emerge?
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For years scientists in psychology and neurology have been pushing two rather contradictory ideas:
Psychologists: Intelligence is like height. Very stable and genetic, especially after puberty. Aside from pathological cases like organic dementia or brain damage, the IQ you have in youth, you pretty much die with. Even when low IQ kids are given the most extreme cultural enrichment imaginable, their real world intelligence doesn’t improve. See comments in below videos from Jordan Peterson:
Neurologists: Intelligence is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes. The brain is marvellously plastic. Every time you learn a new skill you alter the chemical and physical structure of the brain. It’s even possible to largely recover from brain damage. See video below with Lara Boyd:
How can both be these views be true?
I think overall intelligence (what IQ tests try to measure) is almost as hard to change as height, but all the specific parts of intelligence (mental arithmetic, sense of direction, understanding irony) are like muscles that can be exercised.
Every time you exercise a part of your brain, that region gets bigger, just like every time you exercise a muscle, that muscle gets bigger. One difference is, muscles are outside the skeleton, so they have room to expand indefinitely, but the brain is inside the skeleton, so its expansion is limited by cranial capacity.
Thus, the only way to make a part of the brain bigger is to make another part smaller. So while you’re exercising your arithmetic IQ, your sense of direction IQ is slowly atrophying. Start exercising your sense of direction IQ and your arithmetic IQ decays.
So while very specific parts of intelligence can be greatly improved, overall intelligence is limited by the size of the cranium and many other very finite resources. So when you get a university degree, learn a new instrument, or acquire a new language, you haven’t actually made yourself much smarter overall, you’ve just reallocated cognitive resources from one ability to another.
So when low IQ children are adopted into extremely enriched environments, their IQs do shoot up but it doesn’t much translate into real world intelligent behavior, because all they have done is invested all their brain power in abilities measured by the test, but they haven’t actually increased the amount of brain power, so when new learning challenges inevitably show up, they’re right back to where they were before the intervention.
Arthur Jensen referred to such IQ gains as “hollow with respect to g”, the general factor of intelligence. He found for example that adoption into the upper class would improve the IQs of children from lower class homes, but the degree of improvement was uncorrelated with the g loadings of the specific tests. It was hollow with respect to g, and he predicted that high IQ upper class adopted kids would not do as well in later life as their equally high IQ non-adopted siblings, because the former high IQ was hollow, while the latter was flowing with genetic g.
On the other hand, James Flynn argued g was irrelevant, citing the example of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) where IQ is obviously impaired with real world effects, but the degree of impairment is unrelated to g. However I’d argue FAS is a pathological case, and thus not relevant to normal biological functioning.
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Black national merit finalist GondwanaMan mentioned a study correlating pupil size with IQ but since it was too off-topic to in the previous thread, I thought I’d mention it here.
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Black national merit finalist GondwanaMan writes:
From what I understand from friends who live there, there was a time in Boston that no black person dare go into certain Italian and Irish neighborhoods. Bill Russell called it the most racist city in the country.
Director Spike Lee did an interesting job depicting black-Italian relations in his films Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever. This scene from the latter film depicts the fury of an Italian father discovering his daughter is dating a black guy:
Of course this is fictional and folks were more racist in the 1990s, so who knows how many Italian fathers would really act like that today. And would he have gone so ballistic if his daughter were dating a Jew, an Arab, an East Asian, a South Asian? I don’t think so. Blacks were in a separate category from other non-whites, at least back then, and perhaps through most of history.
Below is scene from a show commenter RR and I both like, The Sopranos. Tony’s daughter brings home an African American, and even though he’s very white looking and highly educated, Tony is having none of it:
Of course I don’t want to give the impression that only Italians are guilty of this. Sadly, many Arabs, South Asians, Jews and East Asians also go ballistic when their daughters or sisters date blacks, and in rare cases Muslim girls can be murdered by their fathers for doing so.
Upper-class WASPs were often more subtle. Instead of getting violent, they would often just pay the black boy to stay away from their daughter.
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Last week the rebooted Roseanne show drew 18 million U.S. viewers; an incredible achievement in our fragmented media age. I’m not surprised as the original show ended while it was still good, and so many people are nostalgic for the 20th century (before the internet, fear of terrorism and neocon wars dominated American life)
The original Roseanne show ran from 1988 to 1997. One of the reasons the show worked was the chemistry between Roseanne Barr (her character is Roseanne Conner) and her TV husband Dan Conner (played by John Goodman). They made a great couple because even though Roseanne was a big woman, Goodman was such a big guy he made her look small.
John Goodman and Roseanne on the original Roseanne show
It was hard for Roseanne to land a sitcom because TV execs didn’t think anyone wanted to watch a fat woman on TV, but then someone must have noticed that the then overweight Oprah was setting record ratings on daytime TV, and decided to take a chance on Roseanne.
The show became a huge hit, because seeing a working class family on TV was a novel concept and unlike other sitcoms where everyone was perfect, the Conners were overweight, blue collar, and had kids who dropped out of high school (as did the real Roseanne and her real life kids) .
As two plus sized women from working class backgrounds, both of whom suffered sexual abuse, it was only natural that Roseanne became one of Oprah’s most frequent guests, but the first time they met Oprah thought “Who is this WHACKED woman?”
But then the second time Roseanne appeared on Oprah she was promoting her book, My Life as a Woman, and Oprah was blown away by the insights.
“You are so smart,” Oprah would later tell her circa 1998 “And have been empowering women in ways that we don’t consciously recognize, but all those years when we would not miss one single Roseanne show, what you were really saying is no matter who you are, what your circumstances: YOUR LIFE MATTERS!”
But shortly after that exchange, Roseanne who had for decades loved Oprah, suddenly became hostile. It started when the two women arm wrestled on TV and Roseanne bizarrely thought Oprah cheated.
Things got worse as Oprah started doing shows about new age spirituality, which Roseanne felt had no relevance to working people.
But what really set Roseanne off was when Oprah endorsed Hillary over Obama in the 2007 Democratic primary. Roseanne felt Hillary was better and smarter than Obama and felt Oprah should be supporting an intelligent woman over a flashy man.
And then when Obama bailed out wall street bankers who had looted the U.S. treasury, Roseanne went absolutely ballistic on her blog, calling Obama a black man owned by white bankers, and stating: “NOW I WANT TO SEE THAT DAMN BIRTH CERTIFICATE!!!!!!!!!!!”
During Oprah’s final season in 2011, she invited Roseanne back on her show to clear the air:
When Roseanne later visited Oprah’s cable network OWN she remarked “I like that everyone here’s a woman. That way you don’t have to deal with any ASSHOLES!”
In the years since, Roseanne’s politics have changed a lot: she went from loving Hillary to hating her, from hating Israel to loving it, and she’s become a huge Trump supporter, even making her TV character Roseanne Conner a hard-core Trump supporter too (much to the horror of her many liberal fans). Naturally Trump called to congratulate her on the show’s success.
There are entire working class towns where you have to drive miles before finding a single person who didn’t vote Trump, so it makes sense that Roseanne Conner, as the iconic working class white, would be a Trump supporter too.
It must have been sad for Hillary to not only have lost the presidency to Trump, but to have a working class feminist hero like Roseanne celebrate Trump’s win on the highest rated sitcom in years.
But so many working class white women would scream “LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP!” whenever Trump mentioned Hillary at his rallies. Perhaps on the rebooted Roseanne sitcom they will have an episode where the Conners are watching TV and Hillary comes on, and Roseanne and Dan chant “LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP!”
While such a scene would add dark realism, it would ailienate Hillary fans, and many are already angry enough about Roseanne’s Trump support.
Early Years
As a working class Jewish girl surrounded by Mormons in Salt Lake City, Utah, Roseanne Barr felt like an outsider growing up. She also claimed she was abused at home:
My mother abused me from the time I was an infant until I was six or seven years old… She did lots of lurid things. She hurt me psychologically and physically…My father molested me until I left home at age 17. He constantly put his hands all over me. He forced me to sit on his lap, to cuddle with him, to play with his penis in the bathtub. He did grotesque and disgusting things: He used to chase me with his excrement and try to put it on my head. He’d lie on the floor playing with himself. It was the most disgusting thing you can ever imagine.
At 16, she was hit by a car and suffered traumatic brain injury. Her behavior changed so drastically she spent time in a mental hospital.
But it was while working as a waitress that Roseanne finally found her calling. Customers were amused by her witty comebacks and as her fan base grew, she was encouraged to try stand up comedy, which eventually led to a sitcom.
So what is her IQ?
I’m not aware of Roseanne ever taking an IQ test, and little is known about how she did in school. Her speaking style doesn’t sound very intelligent but that could reflect her working class roots or be feigned to fit her working class persona.
I find it interesting that she’s a Jewish high school dropout, because Jews appear to be about 0.66 standard deviations more educated than non-Jewish Americans. So while a high school dropout in Roseanne’s day was about -0.66 SD less educated than the average American (normalizing the education distribution), a Jewish high school dropout was 1.32 standard deviations less educated.
If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and education among U.S. Jews, you’d expect Roseanne’s IQ to be about 20 points below the Jewish mean of 110, but since the correlation is 0.57, we’d expect it to be around 0.57(20) = 11 points below 110, so 99.
On the other hand, Roseanne is rumoured to be worth around $80 million thanks to the success of her sitcom. That puts her lifetime earnings way above the 99.9 percentile for her generation (self-made low decamillionaire), but way below the 99.99993 percentile (self-made billionaire). Normalizing the distribution of self-made money, she’s somewhere between +3.1 SD and +4.8 SD. Splitting the difference, let’s say +3.95 SD. However because the typical U.S. Jew is about +0.73 SD on a normalized income curve, we might subtract 0.73 SD to very crudely guess how Roseanne compares to U.S. Jews. She’s perhaps about +3.22 SD.
If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and lifetime earnings, we’d expect Roseanne to be 48 IQ points above the average IQ 110 U.S. Jew, but since the correlation is about 0.48, we’d expect her to be 0.48(48) = 23 points higher, predicting a 133 IQ.
So who is the true Roseanne? The average woman implied by her education, or the genius implied by her income. One can only guess, but a brilliant Promethean long ago told me that when using two or more variables to predict a third, I should use multiple regression. Since education and income correlate 0.57 and 0.48 with IQ respectively, and about 0.44 with each other, the predictive power of education and income (independent of each other) are 0.42 and 0.3 respectively. Thus:
Roseanne’s IQ = 0.42(education) + 0.3(life time income)
Roseanne’s IQ =0.42(-0.66 SD from the Jewish mean) + 0.3(+3.2 SD from the Jewish mean)
Roseanne’s IQ = -0.28 SD + 0.96 SD from the Jewish mean
Roseanne’s IQ = +0.68 SD from the Jewish mean
On a scale where white Americans average 100 with an SD of 15, Jews average about 110 and probably also have an SD of 15, and so if Roseanne is +0.68 SD, that would put her at:
0.68(15) + 110 = 120
Of course this doesn’t tell us Roseanne’s IQ. At best it tells us the average IQ of Jewish high school dropouts who amassed an $80 million fortune. However even within such a narrowly defined demographic, there’s enormous variation (or would be if the demographic were large).
Notes:
According to a 2016 Pew poll, 44% of U.S. Jewish households earned $100 K+ a year, compared to 19% for the general U.S. population. Normalizing the income distribution, that’s a difference of 0.73 standard deviations.
Only 2% of Jews are high school dropouts, compared to 10% of all U.S. adults. Normalizing the education distribution, that implies Jews are 0.66 SD more educated than the average American, however dropping out was more common in all demographics during Roseanne’s youth
Please place all off-topic comments for week April 1 to April 7 here.
Meanwhile here’s a lecture by Jordan Peterson on Marxism:
I don’t think high IQ Mrs Garrett from the Facts of Life would have liked this lecture
Now that the weather is warming up, I am rocking me a tight fluorescent green Facts of Life T-shirt, with blue jeans, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. I was so scared I’d be the laughing stock of the local honky tonk if I put the FOL shirt on, but instead I was invited to sit with a table full of drunk bridesmaids, who all thought it was so adorable they bought me shots:
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HBD chick recently tweeted about a New York Times article on race by Harvard geneticist David Reich. The theme of the article is that it’s finally time to admit HBD is true. This is a very big deal coming from a scientist at the World’s top university and published in the World’s most influential news source. Here are some selected quotes from Reich with the HBD acceptance bolded by me:
…when a teacher looks around a classroom of students of diverse “races,” she or he shouldn’t see them as members of fundamentally different groups of people. “Race” has trivial predictive power about an individual person’s biological capabilities. Even if there are slight average differences among groups of humans, individuals from any group are capable of excelling in any realm….
….It is likely that a few stereotypes will be validated by findings from genetics — even if it is also certain that a great majority will be disproved…
…The key point is that whatever science finds should not affect the way we behave toward one another. Whatever small average differences across groups might exist (and genetic studies have already made it clear that average differences across populations are much less than those between individuals), we are members of a single species, all of whom must be given every opportunity to flourish in every realm…
…There are clear genetic contributors to many traits, including behavior.
… Present-day human populations, which often but not always are correlated to today’s “race” categories, have in a number of instances been largely isolated from one another for tens of thousands of years. These long separations have provided adequate opportunity for the frequencies of genetic variations to change.
… Genetic variations are likely to affect behavior and cognition just as they affect other traits, even though we know that the average genetic influences on behavior and cognition are strongly affected by upbringing and are likely to be more modest than genetic influences on bodily traits or disease…
…Given that all genetically determined traits differ somewhat among populations, we should expect that there will be differences in the average effects, including in traits like behavior…
…To insist that no meaningful average differences among human populations are possible is harmful. It is perceived as misleading, even patronizing, by the general public. And it encourages people not to trust the honesty of scholars and instead to embrace theories that are not scientifically grounded and often racist.
In short, I think everyone can understand that very modest differences across human population in the genetic influences on behavior and cognition are to be expected. And I think everyone can understand that even if we do not yet have any idea about what the difference are, we do not need to be worried about what we will find because we can already be sure that any differences will be small (far smaller than those among individuals)…
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A famous 1975 study by Samuel S. Janus published in THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS claimed professional comedians have an incredibly high average IQ of 138 (U.S. norms). Critics argue that IQ tests just measure narrow upper class book smarts, but if that’s true, we shouldn’t expect creative socially brilliant people from mostly working class backgrounds to average higher scores than 99.5% of America. But it is it true? In the section below, Janus explains how the participants were selected:
In the next section Janus describes the test results:
So something doesn’t add up here. Janus claims the comics ranged form IQ 115 to 160+ but then states “the vocabulary subtest was utilized” and doesn’t mention any other subtests anywhere in the paper. So were the IQs based entirely on the Vocab test? But the vocab test doesn’t give an IQ, it gives a scaled score. Scaled scores are like IQs except instead of having a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, they’re scaled to have a mean of 10 and an SD of 3. Of course you can convert scaled scores to IQ equivalents by multiplying by 5 and adding 50, but the highest scaled scores you can get on the WAIS vocabulary subtest was 19, which equates to IQ 145, so how the hell did any comic in the sample score 160+ if only that subtest was used?
Sadly, I think what might have happened is that instead of converting the scaled score to an IQ equivalent, Janus prorated, which you should never do from just one subtest. In other words since he gave only one subtest, he multiplied the score on that one subtest by 11, to estimate what the comics would have scored if all 11 WAIS subtests had been given and then converted this estimated sum of scaled scores to Full-scale IQ using the table in the manual.
But scoring perfect on all 11 subtests is much more rare than scoring perfect on just one, and thus equates to a much higher IQ, so by assuming the Vocabulary subtest could represent all 11 subtests, it looks like he wildly overestimated the IQs of the brightest comics. My guess is that if he had followed the correct procedure (converting Vocab scaled score to IQ equivalent) he would have obtained an average IQ of maybe 127 or so (I’d need the 1955 WAIS manual to know for sure) and that’s before we deduct points for the Flynn effect; though research showing a Flynn effect for Vocabulary is inconsistent.
Bottom line: professional nationally famous U.S. comedians probably average IQs no higher than the mid 120s, which while very high, is nowhere near the genius level this study led us to believe.
This is not surprising, because there are two types of funny people. Some people are funny because they’re smart. And some people are funny because they’re NOT smart, and being the class clown is a way of compensating for the fact that they’re dumb. By acting like school is one big joke, they shield themselves from the humiliation of bad grades:
