Tag Archives: social IQ

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.

Test your social IQ

07 Thursday Nov 2019

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Below is a Theory of Mind test used in actual autism research. The test consists of six scenarios, each of which is followed by a question or two. Please watch the video only once and as you do, write down the answer to the questions as quickly as you can. Post your answers in the comment section. I will not publish your answers to avoid compromising the test, but if you post a SEPARATE comment asking how you did, I will publish that, and respond to it with your score.

Each of the six items is scored on a scale of 2, 1 or 0, for a maximum score of 12.

A published study of 163 autistic adults who averaged normal Wechsler IQs found they averaged 9.1 on this test (SD = 2.4) while the non-autistic control group (n = 80) averaged 10.4 (SD = 1.5). This shows that when you control for IQ, people diagnosed with autism have an average social IQ of 87 and that a score of 9.1 on this test, equates to a social IQ of 100.

Autism in the HBD community

17 Friday Oct 2014

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For years I’ve seen speculation on HBD blogs (usually in the comment section), that a lot of HBD people are a little autistic. I believe this speculation is correct, but nobody to my knowledge has articulated why, probably because it’s so obvious; but here’s my explanation:

Autism is a phenotype defined by low social IQ and obsessive interests (especially mathematical ones). People with low social IQ are more likely to explore HBD because they don’t understand how politically incorrect certain parts of it are. In addition, autistics tend to treat other people like objects, or like animals, and HBD requires you to study human populations like they’re rats in a field, rather then thinking of humans as divine creature’s created in God’s image, and thus divorced from the laws of nature. In many ways autism is the opposite of schizophrenia, and since hyper-mentalizing schizophrenics tend to be very much in-touch with God, and other imaginary members of the spirit world, autistics tend to be very atheistic, and thus, huge believers in Darwin (to the point that they hyper-apply his theories to humans).

In addition, HBD requires a lot of math and statistics, so having an autistic obsession with numbers is very helpful.

Of course, not all (or even most) HBD people are autistic, but because many of them are, it becomes a vicious circle: Autistics are drawn to HBD because they don’t fully grasp it’s taboo nature, but HBD remains extremely taboo because the autistic HBD folks lack the social IQ to know how to market it.