Tag Archives: Bill Gates

Bill Gates & Executive Functioning

25 Monday Nov 2019

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Like many of the greatest minds in STEM, Bill Gates has been accused of having a touch of autism by armchair psychologists. Others argue he is simply a nerd.

While some argue that nerdiness is a mild form of autim, others, like LOTB, argue that the two concepts are distinct.

I have not done enough research to have a strong opinion either way, but a key deficit in autism involves executive functioning.

What is executive functioning?

Executive functions (collectively referred to as executive function and cognitive control) are a set of cognitive processes that are necessary for the cognitive control of behavior: selecting and successfully monitoring behaviors that facilitate the attainment of chosen goals. Executive functions include basic cognitive processes such as attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Higher order executive functions require the simultaneous use of multiple basic executive functions and include planning and fluid intelligence (e.g., reasoning and problem solving)

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions (2019-11-24)

What does any of this have to do with Bill Gates? My subjective impression is that Gates is relatively weak at EF. Perhaps not compared to the average person, but certainly compared to his super IQ matched peers. In support of this impression are three (admittedly weak) pieces of evidence.

1) He sucked at petals around the rose

If you’ve never heard of this game please check it out and record how many dice rolls it takes you to get six consecutive correct scores.

Then compare your performance to Gates’s.

This game strikes me as very similar to the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (a common measure of EF) in that it requires you to infer a rule based on repeated feedback. I infered the rule simply from the name of the game even before any feedback.

In Gates’s defense, he thought the game was called “pedal around the roses”, so this may explain his poor score.

2) He can’t control his hands

Anyone who has watched Gates in interviews knows how erratically his hands move around when he talks. I’m no neurologist, but this strikes me as an inability to inhibit certain responses, a lack of cognitive control or self-monitoring, and poor communication between the left and right brain. I tend to overuse my hands when I talk too so I see a bit of myself in Gates but I was insecure enough about it to stop.

I also have a problem where whenever I wave to someone, I also say “hi” even though they’re often too far away to hear me. I think this relates to the huge gap between my verbal (left-brain) and performance (right-brain) IQs. In extreme cases this can lead to unbuttoning your shirt with your left hand while simultaneously buttoning it up with your right-hand, thus never getting undressed.

3) He’s not that articulate

Despite the fact that Bill Gates’s verbal SAT score equates to a spectacular verbal IQ of 157, he’s not an especially impressive impromptu speaker. As commenter ” caffeine withdrawals” noted, he’s clearly above average, but not much more than that.

A professor of linguistics informed me that based on factor analysis, linguistic ability is actually three different abilities: vocabulary, working memory, and executive functioning. We know from Gates’s sky high verbal and math SAT scores that he’s likely extremely high in the first two, so only the third factor could be dragging down his speaking skills.

How does EF affect speaking skills? EF is all about planning and if you can’t plan your sentences and paragraphs in real lime, they wont be especially succinct. EF also relates to fluency because a certain amount of flexibility is needed to find the right word to express a given thought. People who perseverate too much on one word, or one type of word, will not be smooth talkers.

Interesting interview with Bill Gates

17 Sunday Nov 2019

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I enjoyed the below interview with Bill Gates by NY Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin.

The interview begins with Sorkin praising Gates as “the most consequential individual of our generation”. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it was refreshing to see Gates fully accepting praise of that magnitude without even feigning humility.

Aside from the erratic hand gestures and awkward foot tapping (which may be involuntary ticks), Gates showed good social IQ. He got laughs from the audience when he said people at bars feel comfortable talking to him so “I try to stay away”. When mocking other billionaires’ obsession with space travel, Gates admitted he’s read a lot of sci fi, but “not as much as them”: Audience laughter.

It was also interesting the way a super high IQ billionaire like Gates looks down on investment billionaires for engaging in zero sum parasitic behavior. Just as in every day life, criminals tend to be less intelligent than productive citizens, it could be that even among the smartest billionaires, (i.e. those that made their wealth in math related fields), the most productive math billionaires are smarter than the psychopathic math billionaires.

Gates’s thinly veiled criticism of Elizabeth Warrens wealth tax was also interesting. Warren wants people to pay 2% a year on every dollar of net worth over $50 million and 6% a year on every dollar over $1 billion. According to Warren’s wealth tax calculator, Gates would have to pay $6.4 billion a year on his $107.4 billion fortune (as of today). That really adds up over the decades and if she wins the nomination, a lot of rich folks will go absolutely ballistic.

Defenders of the wealth tax insist the rich would still get richer because simply putting all your money in the S&P 500 increases wealth by 9.8% a year on average, but if it were that simple, why do so many rich people fall off the Forbes 400 every year? Indeed of the 400 richest Americans in 1982, only two still rank among the 400 richest today.

The fact is few billionaires are liquid enough to put most of their fortune in the S&P 500. Their fortunes are typically stocks in the companies they built and selling them would cause them to lose value.

It seems unfair to tax people just because they are rich. If there must be a wealth tax, Warren should tax people with a high ratio of wealth to lifetime taxes already paid. So someone who has only paid $100 k in cumulative taxes, yet has a net worth of $1 million should perhaps be forced to pay a wealth tax, but someone worth $1 billion who has already paid $500 million in taxes, should not.

Better yet, skip the wealth tax and simply increase the estate tax and capital gains taxes as Gates suggests.

More data on Bill Gates’s social IQ

17 Sunday Nov 2019

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For years this blog has has discussed Gates’s spectacular verbal and math IQ. But what about other parts of his intelligence?

Evidence of Gate’s social IQ can be gleaned from his performance at poker (a game involving bluffing and reading people). The late Paul Allen writes:

I spent more time with Bill at Currier House before his nightly Poker games with the local cardsharps. He was getting some costly lessons in bluffing; he’d win three hundred dollars one night and lose six hundred the next. As Bill dropped thousands that fall, he kept telling me, “I’m getting better”. I knew what he was thinking: I’m smarter than those guys.

From pages 71-72 of Idea Man by Paul Allen

Were the other players letting Gates win the first night so he would bet double the next night, or was he legitimately winning only half as often as he lost? Let’s assume the latter, in which case was likely a worse poker player than 2/3rds of the Harvard poker club.

On an abbreviated version of the WAIS-R, a sample of 86 Harvard students averaged IQ 128. Commenters Swank and pumpkinhead have argued this is an underestimate because the sample may not have been representative. On the other hand the WAIS-R norms were 25 years old, so the Flynn effect predicts IQ 128 would have been an overestimate. Error in both directions likely cancels each-other out, making 128 perhaps a plausible estimate.

Now if we assume Poker skill (like other measures of Theory of Mind) only correlates 0.43 with conventional measures of IQ, the Harvard poker club like averaged 28(0.43) + 100 = 112 in Poker IQ, and if Gates was worse than 2/3rds of them, his “Poker IQ” was likely only 107 (assuming similar practice, or assuming all had enough practice to reach diminishing returns).

So now we have two very rough estimates of Gates’s social IQ. “Fashion IQ” was 84 and “poker IQ” was 107. Both measures are of highly questionable validity, so unlikely correlate more than 0.5, thus a composite measure of his social IQ might be very crudely estimated at 95 which is extremely low compared to his his verbal and math IQ, but only slightly below the U.S. mean of 100.

Fashion as a proxy for social IQ: Best & worst dressed billionaires

10 Sunday Nov 2019

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Commenter Philosopher often mocks Bill Gates and other math Geniuses for lacking social IQ, recently stating:

Whenever I see gates in that pink sweater for big interviews i laugh as well. It reminds me of Terry Tao wearing that jumper on Colbert’s show. These people are missing a part of their brain.

This got me thinking: Is our choice of clothing a measure of intelligence? At first glance it sounds silly, but the granddaddy of IQ testing himself, Alfred Binet, included aesthetic judgment on his test, famously asking children to pick the prettiest face from each of three pairs.

This requires the same aesthetic judgement as picking what clothes look best on you. An important part of social cognition.

In 2015 Gates ranked as the 13th worst dressed billionaire on the planet. Of the 562 U.S. billionaires, Gates was the 9th worst dressed. This implies he’s in the bottom 1.6% of billionaire fashion, or 2.13 standard deviations below the billionaire mean.

How aesthetically intelligent is the average billionaire. When it comes to conventional IQ, self-made billionaires recently averaged IQ 133 (U.S. norms), though this number continues to fall as billionaires become more common. Of course only 2/3rds of U.S. billionaires are self-made. Billionaires who inherited their wealth likely average an IQ of 115, given the 0.45 IQ correlation an individual has with his spouse or child. Thus all U.S. billionaires combined likely average IQ 127. Meanwhile, aesthetic judgement has a g loading of 0.6 (see table 6.14) so we might expect them to average 0.6(27) + 100 = 116 in fashion sense.

Thus Gates being 2.13 SD below the average billionaire fashion implies an aesthetic IQ of:

116 – 2.13(15) = 84.

Of course one shouldn’t take these numbers too serious. Gates’s poor dressing might simply reflect a lack of social motivation or a mind with more important things to consider. But if the number is corroborated by other evidence of social obtuseness (i.e. Gates’s distracting hand gestures), it may serve as important proxy.

By contrast in 2005, Oprah was ranked as the third best dressed billionaire on the planet, behind only fashion moguls Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren. She was the second best dressed in America.

In 2005 there were 341 billionaires in America so Oprah’s second place fashion put her near the top 0.5%, or 2.53 SD above the billionaire mean. This implies an aesthetic IQ of:

116 + 2.53(15) = 153.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing Oprah’s overall IQ is higher than Gates’s. Overall Oprah is probably around 140 while Gates could be anywhere from 150 to 170.

But when it comes to abilities related to social IQ, Oprah’s off the charts, as even conservatives admit:

A closer look at Bill Gates’s IQ

13 Sunday Oct 2019

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Bill Gates reportedly scored 1590 on the SAT in the early 1970s (Verbal 790 + Math 800). In a rare study done in 1974, it was estimated that if all American teens took the SAT that year (instead of just the college bound elite) , the verbal mean would be 368 (SD 111) and the math would be 402 (SD 112). Assuming a 0.67 correlation between the two subscales, a combined mean of 770 (SD 203.8) is implied.

Thus Gates’s scores equated to a verbal IQ of 157, a math IQ of 153+, and a combined IQ of 160.

However these numbers assume the SAT was normally distributed, and yet empirical data from the 1980s suggests near perfect scores were much more rare than the normal curve predicts and equated to an IQ of about 170 and if anything they were likely even more rare in the 1970s when fewer people studied for the SAT.

Another reason why these numbers likely underestimate Gates’s IQ is that he hit the ceiling on the math section.

Thus I found the following part of a 2001 article in Time magazine of interest:

“In ninth grade,” Gates recalls over dinner one night, “I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam. That established my independence and taught me I didn’t need to rebel anymore.” By 10th grade he was teaching computers and writing a program that handled class scheduling, which had a secret function that placed him in classes with the right girls.

According to this source, there were 4,097,000 Americans born the same year Gates was.  Some of them would have died before reaching the ninth grade, but these probably would have been made up for by immigrants, so Gates being in the top ten in the nation for his age or grade level, implies he scored in the top one in 409,700.  This equates to a math IQ of 168.

In other words, had the SAT had a higher ceiling in the 1970s, he would have perhaps scored 910 (the equivalent of IQ 168). Add this to his verbal score of 790, and we get a combined score of 1700, which would have equated to a combined IQ of about 170. So even if we assume 1970s SAT scores were normally distributed, Gates still clocks in at IQ 170 as long as we extend the ceiling.

Commenter Bruno has expressed considerable skepticism about Gates having an IQ this high, citing the fact that he was not the top math student at Harvard.

My response is that a) standardized test scores should be given more weight than school grades, and b) Gates spent his teens obsessing over computers so math IQ made him the best programmer at Harvard instead of the best math student per se. The title of best math student probably went to an equally smart person who spent their teens obsessing over math.

The video clips are from the fascinating new Netflix series Inside Bill’s Brain.

It seems Gates has really mellowed out in recent decades, or at least become better at hiding his arrogance. In the below clip you can see him berating his employees and making a bizarre head twirling facial expression as if implying the employee is mentally retarded.

Indeed with an IQ of 170, even the average member of America’s political, economic, and cultural elite (IQ 125 to 135) is literally mentally retarded compared to Gates, which helps explain how he was able to leapfrog over the establishment to become the richest man of the 20th century, with such a stranglehold over the market that it took the U.S. justice department to stop his complete domination.