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Tag Archives: IQ

Polygenic IQ scores

15 Tuesday Oct 2019

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Commenter “Some Guy” had some questions about polygenic scores for me. His questions are in block quotes with my answers directly below each one.

How good do you think polygenic scores will have to get before they start getting used on an individual level? Like within how many SDs of the true IQ/g/educational achievement?

If one’s polygenic score is extreme enough, it doesn’t have to be very accurate at all to give useful information. For example, let’s say you have several embryos to choose from and one has a polygenic education score of +5 SD. Even though such scores only predict 12% of the variance, because +5 SD is so extreme, you can be about 97% confident that embryo will grow up to be more educated than the average person (assuming he or she is raised in a society similar to the one from which the stats were derived).

One problem with polygenic scores is they don’t seem translate well from one culture to another, suggesting they’re more correlative than causal.

The uses I can think of is to identify children with high potential from poor backgrounds, or as an environmentally unbiased entrance “exam” for schools etc.

What I would like to see them be used for is to estimate the IQs of historical Geniuses like Albert Einstein and to estimate the IQs of ancient human populations. For example Richard Klein believes there was a major genetic change in human cognition that occurred about 50 kya that allowed us to suddenly spread from Africa, replace the Neanderthals, colonize the globe and create representational art. If we compared the polygenic scores of humans both before and after the upper Paleolitic revolution, we could test this idea. Similarly Gregory Clark believes rapid genetic evolution in Europe allowed the industrial revolution.

I would also love to see polygenic IQ scores for the Neanderthals, assuming they would be meaningful in a group that culturally and genomically distinct.

What sort of PGS-IQ correlation would result in polygenic scores that are say within 1 SD of the true IQ? I know you often calculate standard errors from correlations, mind sharing the formula/method?

Within 1 SD with degree of certainty? If you mean with 95% certainty, you would need a correlation of 0.85+ which I doubt will ever be achieved. Even the correlation between two different IQ tests is seldom that high.

The method is to square the correlation to get the percentage of the variance explained, and then subtract that value from 1 to see what percentage is left unexplained.

So for example a PGS that correlated 0.85 with IQ explains 72% of the IQ variance, thus leaving 28% unexplained.

The variance is defined as the standard deviation squared, so since the IQ standard deviation is set at 15, the variance is 225, and 28% of 225 is 63.

The square root of 63 is 7.9 which is what the standard deviation would be if everyone had the same PGS. This is also known as the standard error of the estimate. Now in a bell curve, 95% fall within 1.96 of the mean, so multiplying 7.9 by 1.96 tells us that 95% of say the UK, will have IQs within 15.5 points of the PGS prediction.

So if you have a PGS of +2 SD that correlates 0.85 with IQ, your IQ will likely be 0.85(2) = +1.7 or IQ 126, with a 95% confidence interval of 111 to 142. But of course we’re nowhere near seeing a 0.85 correlation.

To get the general public to really trust polygenic scores for IQ, I’d guess the accuracy would have to be within 5 points of the true score. Within 10 points would lead to people who actually differ by 20 points regularly ending up with the same polygenic score. Since 20 points tend to be the difference between leaders and followers, such errors would be highly noticeable.

I think if they achieved a correlation of 0.7 with IQ they’d be considered credible (especially if the predictive power was maintained across oceans and generations). That’s the correlation between different IQ type tests with each-other and these are routinely used to decide issues as important as who gets into an elite college, who gets excluded from the military, who gets diagnosed as disabled or gifted, and who gets sentenced to death by the courts.

By the way, what do you think about this argument against people who consider intelligence entirely environmental: If that really was the case, then disadvantaged people would NEVER be smarter than people with good backgrounds. So why even bother giving people from poor backgrounds a chance? 100% environmentalism leads to un-egalitarian conclusions, and is easily disproven by the existence of smart disadvantage people.

It’s prima facie absurd, but it wouldn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that we shouldn’t give deprived people a chance. On the contrary it might lead to the conclusion that changing IQ is simply a matter of changing environments.

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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.

Robert Mugabe’s IQ

02 Wednesday Oct 2019

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photo taken July 1, 1984. ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

Several people have asked me to estimate the IQ of late Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

According to the latest research by Richard Lynn and David Becker, the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africa is 69 however I would argue that if the data is limited to the most culture reduced tests (and I don’t mean the Raven, which is deceptively culturally loaded), it would be about 80 (UK norms/white norms). It’s important to use the most culturally reduced tests when comparing populations separated by time or space, otherwise you get ridiculous results like average IQ increasing by 7 points a decade as happened in Holland on the Raven test.

80 is 20 points the white mean of 100. If black Africans average 20 points below white populations on truly culture reduced tests, then perhaps their leaders average 20 points below the white leaders of mostly white countries.

Publicly available data suggests U.S. presidents have an average IQ of 130 (with an SD of only 12 compared to the national white SD set at 15), so let’s say black African leaders have an average IQ of 110 (SD also 12).

However Mugabe was not just any black African leader. He was exceptionally well educated, even by the standards of World leaders.

To compare Mugabe’s education to other African leaders of his generation, I found a list of the oldest presidents in Africa and tried to determine how many degrees each had. Excluding non-black leaders, the 8 oldest held the following number of degrees:

Paul Biya 4, Manuel Pinto da Costa 0?, Alpha Condé 2?, Arthur Peter Mutharika 2, Hage Geingob 3, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo 0?, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa 2?, Alassane Ouattara 3.

The mean is 2 with a standard deviation of 1.41

So with an astonishing seven university degrees Mugabe is 3.55 SD more educated than even a group as elite as African presidents

In sub-Saharan Africa, the correlation between culture-reduced IQ and education appears to be 0.52, but in a group as homogeneous as African presidents, it would likely be lower. What is needed is the IQ vs education correlation among a specific occupation (African Presidents).

On page 345 of his book Bias in Mental Testing, Arthur Jensen shows the partial correlation between IQ and education, that is the correlation holding occupation constant. This correlation is listed as 0.27 to 0.42 (see below). Let’s split the difference and say 0.35 and assume the same correlation in Africa..

Assuming Mugabe is 3.55 SD more educated than the average African president, the partial correlation predicts his IQ would be 0.35(3.55 SD) = 1.24 SD higher than the average African presidents.

Assuming African presidents have a mean IQ of 110 with an SD of 12 (see above), this would put his expected IQ at 125 (higher than 95% of white America).

All we can say with 95% certainty is that his IQ would be anywhere from 103 to 147. One reason for thinking he’s in the upper end of this range is that he was a Marxist, and left-wing politics are positively correlated with IQ (at least if you control for race and income).

Whatever his IQ, it would have likely been substantially higher had he been born and raised in the United States, where First World nutrition would have allowed his brain size to reach its genomic potential.

One caveat to the above analysis: usually education is measured by highest degree obtained, not number of degrees. How this might affect the correlation with IQ is unclear.

A cross-cultural study of university students

02 Wednesday Oct 2019

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A 2015 paper by Kate Cockcroft et al., compares the scores of 349 British middle class university undergrads to 107 lower class black South African undergrads on the WAIS-III (UK edition).

The results were as follows:

The UK students averaged a full-scale IQ of 106.95 (UK norms) while the South Africans averaged IQ 93.27. However because this study was published 18 years after the UK WAIS-III was published, we should adjust for the Flynn effect.

The single best source on recent Wechsler Flynn effects is Weiss et al., 2015  which found that full-scale IQ has been increasing by 0.31 points per year, at least in U.S. children. If we assume it’s the same for UK adults, then the UK students have an adjusted IQ of 101 and the South African students have an adjusted IQ of 88.

What’s more interesting to me is how they did on the culture reduced tests since that’s the more fair comparison.

 
Test: Digit Span scaled score Flynn adjusted Digit Span  scaled score Flynn adjusted Digit Span IQ equivalent Block Design scaled score Flynn adjusted Block Design scaled score Flynn adjusted Block Design IQ equivalent Compoite IQ based on adjusted scores on both tests
UK undergrads 9.5 9.32 97 10.66 9.76 99 98
Black South African undergrads 9.35 9.17 96 8.67 7.77 89 91

So on a composite score of the most culture reduced spatial & non-spatial test (Block Design & Digit Span), Black South African undergrads average IQ 91. This is 11 points higher than the average Black South African seems to score on the same culture reduced tests.

As of 2013, only 16% of South Africa’s black young adults were attending higher education (compared to about 55% of whites, 47% of Indians and 14% of Coloureds). Thus, simply attending university puts one in the top 16% of this demographic, with the median South African university student being in the top 8%. If there were a perfect correlation between IQ and education, the median South African black university student would have an IQ 21 points higher than the average black South African. In reality his IQ is only 11 points higher, suggesting a correlation of 0.52 (at least on the most culture reduced tests).

This is similar to the 0.57 correlation between IQ and education observed in the United States.

IQ, board games & test construction

31 Saturday Aug 2019

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IQ tests are considered valid because they have both construct validity and predictive validity. They have construct validity because a statistical technique called factor analysis proves that all mental tests are influenced by a general factor dubbed g, and that IQ tests load high in g. They have predictive validity because IQ tests better predict important life outcomes like education, income and occupational status than any other single measurable trait.

However IQ skeptics like our very own Race Realist (RR) argue that this validity is just an artifact of test construction. In other words, all IQ tests correlate with g, not because they measure a factor common to all mental abilities, but rather because only tests that are positively correlated are included in test batteries.

Similarly, he’d argue that IQ tests predict success in school and life, not because high IQ people learn faster, make wiser life choices and are more productive, but rather because only test items that good students did well on were included in the tests.

There’s some truth to RR’s view. Tests of general knowledge only became used in IQ tests after WWI testing found them to correlate highly with the total score of other subtests. In addition, David Wechsler would present potential test items to people of “known intelligence” and primarily those items that discriminated well between people with known Binet IQs of different levels were included. A question about a non-Christain religion was included in the general knowledge subtest after Wechsler found it to distinguish those Americans with superior from average IQs.

Given that IQ tests owe at least a small part of their validity to test construction, it’s interesting to ask whether IQ tests would still have the same construct and predictive validity if we remove the selective bias in picking subtests and test items.

What is needed is a random sample of mental abilities, not one pre-selected by psychologists. The closest thing we have to such a sample are board games. Thus, instead of the 10 subtests Wechsler arbitrarily chose for his original scale, we could simply pick the 10 “most popular” board games of all time:

  1. chess
  2. checkers
  3. Backgammon
  4. Scrabble
  5. Monopoly
  6. Clue
  7. Othello
  8. Trivial Pursuit
  9. Pictionary
  10. Risk

An ideal study would be to take 2000 random teenagers with very little experience playing any of these games, and send them to a summer camp where all they did was play these 10 games everyday (though no special strategies would be taught), culminating in a tournament where all 2000 were ranked on each game, and then given an overall ranking that reflected their combined performance across all ten games. This combined ranking would be converted into full-scale IQ, such that the best overall player (out of 2000) would be assigned a full-scale IQ of 150 and the worst would be assigned a full-scale IQ of 50.

If there really is a g factor, we should expect that while some people are great at chess but terrible at Pictionary, in general people who are good or bad at one game would be good or bad at any other.

Further, if g has predictive validity, we should find that 30 years later, those with the highest full-scale IQs would have more education, more prestigious occupations, and higher incomes (even after controlling for family background) than those who performed poorly.

Can the Wechsler Flynn effect be 100% explained by nutrition?

19 Monday Aug 2019

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In March 2016, I wrote the following:

I decided to look at an excellent study that Lynn had cited.  In this study you had 14 pairs of identical twins (one born undernourished, the co-twin born well nourished as measured by birth weight; twin pairs were raised in the same homes).  At an average age of 13, they had their head circumferences measured and were given the WISC IQ test.

The heavier twins had crania that were 0.64 cm bigger than their undernourished co-twin.  At age 13, the within sex standard deviation for head circumference appears to be 1.31 cm, so that’s a difference of 0.49 standard deviations.

When it came to verbal IQ, the well-noursihed twins and the undernourished twins had the exact same average IQ.  And when I saw the exact same average IQ, I mean the exact same average IQ: 98.29 vs 98.29 (unadjusted for old norms)

However when it came to performance IQ, the well nourished twins scored 7.07 IQ points higher than their undernourished co-twins.  That’s a difference of 0.47 standard deviations, virtually identical to the 0.49 standard deviation difference in head circumferences.

So it seems that Richard Lynn was half-right.  Brain size gains caused by  prenatal nutrition do perfectly parallel IQ gains caused by nutrition, but only when it comes to Performance IQ.  Prenatal nutrition seems to have virtually zero impact on Verbal IQ, though given the small sample size (only 14 twin pairs), these conclusions are tentative.

It’s amazing how well this study of identical twins perfectly parallels the difference between North American young adults in the 21st century vs circa WWII.

21st century North American young white adults are to their circa WWII counterparts as well nourished identical twins are to their less nourished co-twin in that their head circumference and Wechsler Performance IQs are both about half an SD larger, while their verbal IQs are about the same.

Because humans are cultural creatures, I believe the brain evolved to prioritize verbal ability during times of malnutrition (which as Lynn noted, includes disease since disease prevents the body from using nutrients), so when sub-optimum nutrition shrinks the brain, mostly spatial IQ suffers, and then when prosperity returns you get a genuine Flynn effect, but it’s 100% concentrated in spatial ability. Spatial ability is a luxury of the well fed.

One might wonder why, with all the increasing education and media, I did not find any verbal Flynn effect on the Wechsler. It’s likely that 21st century education gave us an unfair advantage on verbal tests especially Similarities, but this advantage was negated by the fact that a test created in the 1930s was biased against us (especially in tests of specific knowledge). In other words, two conflicting cultural biases cancelled each other out, thus exposing our true verbal intelligence as unchanged since WWII.

North American IQ: circa 1937 to circa 2014

17 Saturday Aug 2019

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The Flynn effect, popularized by James Flynn, refers to the fact that IQ tests supposedly get easier with time. Although by definition the average IQ of American or British (white) people is always 100, the older the IQ test, the easier it is to score 100. Thus to keep the average at 100, tests like the Wechsler must be renormed every 10 years or so, otherwise the average IQ would increase by about 3 points per decade.

Although scholars continue to debate whether the Flynn effect reflects a genuine increase in intelligence (perhaps caused by prenatal nutrition or mental stimulation) or just greater test sophistication caused by modernity, there’s been remarkably little skepticism about the existence of the Flynn effect itself.

Malcolm Gladwell writes:

If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.

While few people believe our grandparents were genuinely mentally retarded, it’s taken for granted that they would have scored in the mentally retarded range by today’s standards.

But is this true? I began having doubts over a decade ago when I examined the items on the first Wechsler intelligence scale ever made: the ancient WBI (Wechsler Bellevue intelligence scale). Meticulously normed on New Yorkers in the 1930s, this test remains far and away the most comprehensive look we have at early 20th century white North American intelligence, and while some of the subtests looked easy by today’s standards, others, especially vocabulary, looked harder.

The Kaufman effect

What also struck me was how little instruction, probing or coaching people got when taking the ancient WBI, compared to its modern descendant the WAIS-IV. This matters a lot because the way the Flynn effect is calculated on the Wechsler is by giving a new sample of people both the newest Wechsler and its immediate predecessor, in random order to cancel out practice effects, and then seeing which version they score higher on. If they average 3 points lower on the WAIS-IV normed in 2006 than on the WAIS-III normed in 1995, it’s assumed IQ increased by 3 points in 11 years.

The problem with this method (as Alan Kaufman may have discovered before me) is that the subset of the sample that took the newer version first has a huge advantage on the older version compared to the norming sample of the older test (over and above the practice effect which is controlled for), because the norming sample of the older test was never given coaching and probing.

Statistical artifact

A Promethean once said maybe the Flynn effect is just a statistical artifact of some kind. He never told me what he meant, but it got me thinking:

One problem with how the Flynn Effect is calculated on the Wechsler is that it’s assumed that gains over time can be added. For example it’s assumed that you can add the supposed 7.8 IQ gain from WAIS normings 1953.5 -1978 to the 4.2 IQ gain from normings 1978 – 1995 to the 3.7 IQ gain from normings 1995-2006, for a grand total of 15.7 IQ points from normings 1953.5 – 2006.

This would make sense if he were talking about an absolute scale like height, but is problematic when talking about a sliding scale like IQ. For example, suppose the raw number of questions correctly answered in 1953.5 was 20 with an SD of 2. By 1953.5 standards, 20 = IQ 100 and every 2 points = 15 IQ points above or below 100. Now suppose in 1978, people averaged 22 with an SD of 1. That’s a gain of 15 IQ points by 1953.5 standards. Now suppose in 1995 people average 23 with an SD of 2. That’s a gain of 15 IQ points by 1978 standards. Adding the two gains together implies a 30 point gain from 1953.5 to 1995, but by both 1953 and 1993 standards, the difference is only 23 points.

Changing content

Another problem with studying the Flynn effect is the content of tests like the Wechsler is constantly changing. This is especially problematic when studying long-term trends in general knowledge and vocabulary. If words that are obscure in the 1950s become popular in the 1970s, then people in the 1970s will score high on the 1950s vocabulary test. Meanwhile the 1970s vocabulary test may contain words that don’t become popular until the 1990s, Thus adding the vocabulary gains from the 1950s to the 1970s to the gains from the 1970s to the 1990s, might give the false impression that people in the 1990s will do especially well on a 1950s vocabulary test, when in reality, many words from the 1950s may have peaked in the 1970s and are even more obscure in the 1990s than they were in the 1950s.

An ambitious study

Given the Kaufman effect, the statistical artifact, and changing content, I realized the only way to truly understand the Flynn effect is to take the oldest quality IQ test I could find and replicate its original norming on a modern sample.

In 2008 I made it my mission to replicate Wechsler’s 1935-1938 norming of the very first Wechsler scale. Ideally I should have flown to New York where Wechsler had normed his original scale, but if Wechsler could use white New Yorkers as representative of all of white America (WWI IQ tests showed white New Yorkers matched the national white average), I could use white Ontarians as representative of all of white North America (indeed white Americans and white Canadians have virtually the same IQs). The target age group was 20-34 because this was the reference age group Wechsler had used to norm his subtests.

It took over a decade but I was gradually able to arrange for 15 randomly selected white young adults to take the one hour test. They were non-staff recruited from about half a dozen fast food locations in lower to upper middle class urban and suburban Ontario. The final sample was not perfectly representative of white North America (they were a bit less educated and much less female) and testing conditions were not optimum (environments were sometimes noisy, at least one person had a few beers before testing; another was literally falling asleep during the test) and 15 people is way to small a sample to draw statistically significant conclusions about 11 different subtests. One man with a conspicuously low score was removed from the sample because he had suffered a stroke.

Nonetheless, the below table shows how whites tested in 2008 to 2019 compared to Wechsler’s 1935-1938 sample, with the last column showing the expected scores of the 21st century sample, extrapolating gains James Flynn calculated from 1953.5 to 2006 (see page 240 of his book Are We Getting SMARTER?) to the current study: circa 1937 to circa 2013.5.

Note: the 11 subtests were scaled to have a mean of 10 and an SD of 3 in the original young adult norming sample, while the verbal, performance and full-scale IQs were scaled to have a mean of 100 and an SD of 15. Note also that vocabulary is alternate test, not used to calculate either verbal or full-scale IQ on the WBI. One third of my sample did not take Digit Symbol so for these, Performance and full-scale IQs were calculated via prorating.

 
Test: Nationally representative sample of young white adults (NY, 1935 to 1938) Randomish sample of young white adults (2008 to 2019, ON, Canada) Expected WBI scores in 2008-2019 based on Flynn’s calculated rate of increase
Information (general knowledge test) 10 (SD 3) 8.07 ( SD 2.6) 12.3
Similarites (verbal abstract reasoning) 10 (SD 3) 12.93 (SD 2.94) 15.54
Arithmetic (mental math) 10 (SD 3)

7.2 (SD 3.78)

(this subtest contained a unit conversion item that seemed biased against Canadians)

 11.02
Vocabulary 10 (SD 3) 8.73 (SD 2.6) 14.95
Comprehension (Common sense & social judgement) 10 (SD 3) 9.33 (SD 3.2) 13.93
Digit Span (attention & rote memory) 10 (SD 3) 9.47 (SD 2.23) 11.46 
Picture Completion (visual alertness) 10 (SD 3) 10.47 (SD 3.16) 14.52
Picture Arrangement (social interpretation) 10 (SD 3) 9.8 (SD 2.54) 13.35
Block Design (spatial organization) 10 (SD 3) 12.53 (SD 3.07) 12.91
Object Assembly (spatial integration) 10 (SD 3) 11.47 (SD 1.77) 14.06
Digit Symbol (Rapid eye-hand coordination) 10 (SD 3)

10.8 (SD 2.82)

(note: only 10 of the 15 subjects took this subtest)

 14.66

Verbal IQ

 100 (SD 15) 99.8 (SD 14.46)  
Performance IQ 100 (SD 15) 106.47 (SD 12.11)  
Full-scale IQ 100 (SD 15) 103.4 (SD 13.63) 122

Conclusion

The Flynn effect is dramatically smaller than we’ve been led to believe, at least on tests of specific information that may become obscure over generations. By contrast certain verbal skills (categorizing) and spatial analysis have indeed increased by amounts comparable with Flynn’s research. It’s unclear if these are nutritional gains caused by increasing brain size, neuroplastic gains caused by cultural stimulation, or mere teaching to the test caused by schooling, computers and brain games.

Creepy scene on HBO’s Euphoria

05 Monday Aug 2019

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HBO has already given us the best TV show of all time (six feet under) and the best documentary of all time (Leaving Neverland) and now it strikes again with one of the best teen dramas of all time (Euphoria),.

Teen dramas have really changed a lot since I watched Dawson’s Creek in high school. This is much edgier, much more diverse, and much darker. Unlike the lilly white wholesome Dawson of my generation, the main character on this show Rue, is like a female Melo (see the comment section), a mixed race bad-ass who has sex with whites, dances to rap, and is not afraid to play hardball. She looks like she may have been cast by the show’s executive producer Drake.

Rue’s white drug dealer is very protective of Rue and thinks of her as his baby sister. So when the tall popular white jock blackmails Rue’s best friend, the drug dealer is having none of it. Even though the jock laughs in the drug dealer’s face and calls him “half-a-retard”, you can tell he’s spooked.

We’re so used to seeing the tall popular jock get his way by beating and blackmailing others, that to see this “half-a-retard” threaten him had me cheering from the couch.

Obviously dialogue on these shows is not meant to be over-analyzed or taken too literally, but what exactly is “half-a-retard”? I interpret it as someone who is roughly half way between average (IQ 100) and “retarded” (IQ below 70) intelligence, or someone who would score below 70 on only half the Wechsler scale (i.e. either the verbal half or the non-verbal half, but not both).

You might say the drug-dealer’s IQ is impaired by drugs and not genetically low, but because those with low genetic ability are more likely to end up on drugs, they serve to exaggerate cognitive inequality, while maintaining the genetic rank order. IQ after all is not an absolute score, but a ranking of where one stands compared to others of his generation and as we become adults, the absolute difference between ranks widens while inter-rank mobility remains limited.

Skateboarding, IQ & starting an online business

28 Thursday Mar 2019

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[This article is sponsored by proscootersmart.com. Check out the unbiased reviews of skateboards, scooters, and much more.]

Few sports embody what Howard Gardener called bodily-kinesthetic intelligence quite like skateboarding, where champions seem to defy the laws of gravity. But how smart are the best skateboarders in the conventional sense? How would they score on an actual IQ test?

vice.com describes the negative stereotype:

Skateboarders have never been accused of being the smartest people in the room. They are creative, artistic, and resourceful, but most are high school or home school drop-outs incapable of basic reading comprehension.

Average IQ of the 10 best skaters

While your average skater may have only average intelligence, those who dominate the sport might be quite a bit smarter. The following video ranks the ten best skaters:

Even though skateboarding is a physical skill, it requires far more coordination than most sports, which means the brain is highly involved.

Since the best skaters must be young enough to be physically active, but old enough to have decades of practice, the majority of the most skilled are from Generation X (the 84 million Americans born from the early 1960s to the early 1980s). About 1.7% of U.S. youth are core skaters (defined as people who’ve skated 52+ times per year). Assuming this was the case when generation X was young, roughly 1.4 million Gen Xers were core skaters.

Thus, ranking among the ten best skaters in America is roughly a one in 140,000 level achievement, and the median top ten skater would be at the one in 280,000 level (or roughly 4.5 standard deviations above the mean). And because performance correlates about 0.82 with talent, the top ten skaters likely average 0.82(4.5) = 3.69 standard deviations above average in raw physical coordination. And since physical coordination correlates 0.35 with IQ, they likely average 0.35(3.69) = 1.29 standard deviations above average in IQ.

In other words the 10 best skaters in America likely average an IQ of about 120 (smarter than 90% of Americans their age), however the Gaussian curve predicts that in a group of 10 people, the dullest is roughly 20 points below the group’s average and the brightest is roughly 20 points above, and so America’s 10 best skaters likely range from around a normal IQ of 100 to a genius IQ of 140.

Perhaps one of the smartest on the list is Rodney Mullen:

As a child, he used Erector sets to build a complete control center for his room, which used pulleys and strings to allow him to turn on the lights and open the door from the upper bunk of his bed.


High IQ may run in his family: His mother “graduated high school at age 14 and then earned a degree in physics, while also being an accomplished pianist.”

It’s interesting to note that the #1 skater on this list (Tony Hawk) actually took a professionally administered IQ test and scored an incredible 144! Described by the psychologist as a twelve-year-old’s mind in an eight-year-old’s body, Hawk would grow up to build a $140 million empire.

It’s sometimes claimed that high IQ people only get rich because IQ predicts education and it’s the latter that’s rewarded by the market, but Hawk has little formal education and started getting rich while still in high school. He’s an example of a high functioning braining causing money directly, first by having the neurological ability to master a lucrative sport, and secondly, having the mental ability to parlay that talent into a huge brand.

Starting an online business

Of course we can’t all be the next Tony Hawk no matter how high your IQ might be, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make some money off skateboards, or whatever your passion may be. Who would have guessed that a small web site likeproscootersmart.com made a few thousand dollars last year and expects to double that this year.

“I was shopping for a scooter for my son and noticed that a lot of the sites were affiliate sites so I wanted to get in the game,” the owner explained.

“I’ve actually tried many of the products myself because I want to give unbiased reviews of them. Hover boards are the hardest product to ride because everyone wants to ride one but don’t automatically get the concept of how it works.”

For those who want to learn from his business model and start their own affiliate site, his advice is to just jump in because you’ll “never learn unless you try it.” He also notes that education can be overrated since the internet can teach you anything. He advises not giving up because your luck can change, just when you think something’s a lost cause.

As the super high IQ Marilyn Vos Savant once said, failure tends to be a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.

Is the 15 point black-white IQ gap over 15 thousand years old?

20 Wednesday Feb 2019

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It’s common knowledge in psychometrics that U.S. whites average about one standard deviation (15 IQ points) higher than U.S. blacks and have done so since the first mass tests were administered in WWI.

But could the gap extend much further in space and time? Tens of thousands of years further.

At first it sounds absurd: there were no IQ tests 15,000 years ago, and there weren’t any white people. The earliest Europeans had dark skin, and they were largely replaced by Middle Easterners spreading agriculture.

Archaic European

Nonetheless, there were people living in Europe 15,000 years ago and to the degree they resemble today’s Europeans (phenotypically and genetically) they’re a proxy for archaic whites.

Similarly, the oldest lineage in Africa are Bushmen, and to the degree they resemble modern Africans, they’re a proxy for archaic blacks.

The archaic whites left the following rock art over 15,000 years ago.

IQ 74 (1963 US norms)
IQ 144 (1963 U.S. norms)

The archaic blacks left the following rock art, perhaps much more recently.

IQ 74 (1963 U.S. norms)
IQ 118 (1963 U.S. norms)

When I asked readers to rate the two archaic white paintings using the quality scale of the Dale-Harris Draw-A-Man test, the median votes were 3 and 11, giving the archaic whites a mean score of 7.

votes for the first European painting
votes for the second European painting

For archaic blacks, the median votes were 3 and 8, giving archaic blacks a mean score of 5.5.

votes for the first African painting

votes for the second African painting

That’s a difference of 1.5 points. Since the standard deviation for incipient adults (age 15) on the Goodenough-Harris quality scale is 1.7, archaic whites over 15 thousand years ago were already nearly one standard deviation (15 IQ points) higher than archaic blacks living later.

From Children’s Drawings as Measures of Intellectual Maturity by Dale B. Harris

Of course with such a tiny sample size, this conclusion is EXTREMELY tentative and requires far more research.