Category: Greg Cochran

A Little Self Love

I’m fairly certain I’m the youngest blogger of Human BioDiversity out there. Conservatively, I’m going to name the several HBD bloggers that I’m aware of and make an IQ comparison based on these norms.

  • Audacious Epigone
  • Steve Hsu
  • Greg Cochran 
  • Pumpkinperson
  • Lion of the Blogosphere
  • Jayman 
  • Steve Sailer 
  • Robert Lindsay 
  • Razib Khan

That’s all I can really name off the top of my head. Assuming the average IQ of this group is 135(really, a conservative estimate,) and assuming an eighteen point disparity between myself and the average, my IQ should lie around the 153 mark. Assuming I’m smarter than all of them by virtue of my youth, that is.  This is obviously a massive extrapolation, but assuming perfect correlations would be the case.

The reality is I’m pretty sure my IQ is in the ballpark of 120. I’m not especially great at math, but I can hold my own verbally. 

The Website Demographics of Various Bloggers 

Amazon’s Alexa has some pretty interesting statistics. I’m particularly interested in the demographics of different bloggers. Some bloggers report the self-reported IQ of their readers. For example, Razib posted a graph indicating the highest density IQ of his blog hovers somewhere around the 137 mark.

 

This is especially interesting because on a Gaussian curve IQ’s that high appear only once in a pool of 147 people. I wouldn’t be surprised if some high IQ societies didn’t quite approach that mark, although they are obviously more exclusive. A pending question is how esoteric does a blog need to be to achieve the highest ratio of IQ to quantity of readers. For example, could a blog that has 1,000 daily readers maintain a 130+ IQ? Obviously, the larger a blog grows, the more diluted it becomes. I’m assuming the best ratio would be derived from an esoteric physics blog. Since not all bloggers report their readers’ IQ, formal education as a proxy helps. Without further adue, here are the demographics of some notable bloggers.

Greg Cochran’s WestHunter:

Pumpkinperson


The Unz Review 

Steve Sailer’s iSteve

The Audacious Epigone

Robert Lindsay 

Some points of interest:

  • I’m a bit surprised about the low frequency of doctorates among Audacious Epigone’s readership. His diction and extensive use of graphs to synthesize data is up there among the anonymous bloggers. Only Jayman is as deliberate, as far as I’m aware of. 
  • The Unz Review’s reader constituency is comprised of far more doctorates than the New York Times. But the Review is far smaller, so the readership is largely self-selected.
  • Im not too familiar with Robert’s work, but he’s the first mainstream HBD blogger I’ve interacted with, so hats off to you. Hope you’re reading this.
  • Genetics and Anthropology are more esoteric than IQ, and Cochran is a fantastic writer. I’m not surprised, then, that Cochran has the highest proportion of readers with doctorates along with Robert Lindsay and Sailer. He also has the highest proportion of at-work readers, likely due to the actual science that can be referenced off of his site. 

The Big Three

Here, I list three people that have been very influential for me, and hopefully society at large. I don’t necessarily believe that’s the case. But that’s besides the point; I want to propagate their content beyond its intellectual niche (though I suppose my own blog will fill that same cranny.)

 

Stephen Hsu: A physics professor at Michigan State Univerity that has a keen interest in genomics. Has developed algorithms for BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute) and aided them in searching for genes that are associated with intelligence. Very insightful, though not quite as verbose in comparison to other Human BioDiversity bloggers. Though, he compensates with his command of mathematics; this unfortunately isn’t digested as easily. 

Razib Khan: UC Berkeley genomics student on leave, former columnist for the Unz Review. Khan’s mastery of history and the English language coupled with his genomics forte leaves a repository of content I’ve only briefly viewed, due only to  sheer riot. He is a very intriguing character due to his involvement in publications commonly associated with the alt-right (this does not reflect my own views on their work) and his stint as a columnist for the New York times followed by his firing within the same day. The concoction of quality and quantity displayed on his blog in my opinion isn’t approached by any other on this list. 

Greg Cochran: Adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, with formal training in optical physics. Greg’s brusque demeanor is intellectually attractive, as it follows with a no-bullshit approach to academic discourse. His blog’s format is clean and also reflective of this crisp approach.

Steve’s blog: infoproc.blogspot.com

Razib’s blog: razib.com/wordpress

Greg’s blog: westhunt.wordpress.com