The Fallacy of High IQ Techies

I’m fully aware that social science can be understood as the summation of correlations, trends, and proxies. In this respect, almost every stereotype has some fundamental truth to it (although this is self evident as I knew this even before I was familiarized with the social sciences.) But some trends and the causes behind them aren’t fully obvious to me. One of the most prominent might be the ostensible stereotype of intelligence and information technology. For relative outliers, like those that far surpass my own prowess and understand programming in depth, I understand this stereotype. But for the average layman with quick typing ability and command of basic computer functions, I do not understand it. At my school, it seems that most people cannot equal my own typing speed. Assuming a normal distribution, I’m not surprised- I’ve passed 100 WPM on brief ten second trials. On longer sixty second trials, I regularly hit the 98th percentile. This is in spite of the fact that those that care to measure their typing proficiency are above average for the general population, if only slightly, and statistically speaking there will be some hackers/cheaters the tilt the distribution to the right. This is mediated a bit considering that my generation/cohort is also more adept with computers than the general population.

Still, many peers seem to be impressed with my typing speed, along with my general speed and prowess with browsing the web. Personally, I know there are many STEM inclined individuals that have better command of basic functions, but I guess I hold up pretty well. My point is really that these functions are rudimentary at best. I’m not some programming wiz that’s synthesizing Java and C++ to rapidly sift through search results. And I don’t know why some of what I do is so difficult for people of otherwise average intelligence.

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. 

Meanwhile, on Some Remote Farm

Chris Langan, popularized for his performance on the Mega IQ test, ostensibly the smartest man in the United States, is revered on a false pretense. This is interesting because a plurality of comments on a YouTube video where he is interviewed indicate that most people don’t believe IQ tests are representative of intelligence. This nothing new; however, though they aren’t aware of it, they aren’t exactly wrong. Though IQ tests are obviously the best metric available and for the most part capture the defining aspects of intelligence, the test Langan took in particular falls somewhere short of painting an accurate picture of his cognitive abilities (at least relative to the general population.)

The Mega Test at face value is highly g loaded, with the assessment partitioned into verbal analogies and visio-spatial problems. But I’m not arguing against that. I am, however, vehemently contending that the test has been normed sufficiently to produce a full range of scores and a distribution that mirrors the Gaussian curve found in the general population.

Given that the test is open source and has no time constraints, I doubt the validity of his score. Nothing on his Quora page indicates profound intelligence, either. Though he seems to embrace real science more now; this hasn’t always been the case, evidence by his CTMU.

At least he’s a solid writer.

• https://www.quora.com/profile/Chris-Langan

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (For Ethnic Europeans in the United States)

Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, wrote a book in 2011 titled Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Not incidentally, Caplan is also keenly aware of IQ and its valid, predictive properties.

See here: “I’m an IQ realist, all the way.  IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence.”  A massive body of research confirms that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success.  Contrary to critics, IQ tests are not culturally biased; they fairly measure genuine group differences in intelligence.”

I respect him far more for daring to even address the topic of intelligence, despite how crucical it is to an academic discipline like economics, where financial success is predicated on selection for talent (for the vast majority of jobs, cognitive ability is being selected.) Stultifying political correctness plagues our universities, though economics is perhaps the most conservative field- and this isn’t saying much, with the proportion of liberals narrowly edging out the conservatives (I read this somewhere on Razib’s page, I think.) Also, the individual institution matters as well; the proportion of conservatives or merely tolerance for right wing views could be above the mean. At any rate, this signifies intellectual honesty to some tangible degree.

Still, some maneuvering has to occur if he is to balance his political views with his knowledge regarding IQ. What follows as a corollary from IQ as an independent property is mean differences among different populations. Caplan understands this. He’ll never explicitly say it, because at the end of the day he’s affiliated with a university and there is a political threshold that even the most ape-shit reactionary can’t cross when one is affiliated with higher learning in the United States.

A brief overview of notable populations in the United States and their associated IQ scores:

1. Ashkenazi Jews: 112
2. East Asians: 104
3. Gentile Whites: 100
4. Hispanics: 95
5. African Americans: 85

Hispanics are rapidly growing as a population in the United States and they reproduce far more quickly than Whites do. This is uncontroversial. However, the associated effects of lower intelligence, but not exclusively lower intelligence, is the lack of assimilation and its political implications.

Caplan is an anarcho-capitalist. Essentially, anarcho-capitalism is the political philosophy of society with no government, steered solely through voluntary transactions. I harbor many sympatheties for anarcho-capitalism. I’m libertarian, and I advocate for the most freedom that is palpable in society. But it is difficult to reconcile IQ literature with a notable tenet of anarcho capitalism; namely, open borders. With Caplan’s book, I feel he is attempting to ameliorate the relatively sterile white population into reproducing more to counteract the rapidly growing Hispanic population. Now, I know even with a white majority in the United States we have nothing remotely close to anarcho-capitalist society. But we have rights. We have a constitution. And we have significantly more liberty than any other country on Earth. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but Caplan likely feels the mass immigration of Hispanics could potentially spark a reverse trend in the state of our liberty. One need only look at the many failed socialist Latin American states for evidence of this.

Credit: The Audacious Epigone

He doesn’t explicitly say this, but as I said before, Caplan is a university affiliate, so there are intrinsic limitations on what he can publish. Caplan doesn’t need to cater to the white population of society by cat-calling them with a title like the one of this blog post. His readers are primarily white already, by virtue of self selection. Those that read consistently have higher IQ’s on average than those who don’t (this is obviously true intuitively, though I don’t know of any research on it) and those that are familiar with Bryan Caplan are also selected for higher intelligence- he’s a relatively obscure economist, who advocates for a fringe political ideology. Whites account for  >65% of society, and also have a fairly high mean intelligence. 

The counter argument would be that Caplan can’t reasonably expect his book to make a palpable difference in the political tides of the United States with such a limited reader pool. My qualm with this is humans are irrational creatures, and we want to believe our work has an effect beyond what it truly does. For Caplan, this may be the case, as this book isn’t centered primarily on economics and as a result is more accessible to the general population. 

Elucidating some uncompromising data

John tends to fall prey to headlines that perhaps make sense at face value, but do not hold water when you think critically about them. He’s generally perceived as intelligent, but an IQ value of 130 is likely pushing it. I feel more and more that I’m not so intelligent, as far too many people seem to be more intelligent than I am. IQ 130 is significant, and I find more and more I cannot gratuitously hand out that value to every seemingly intelligent person I encounter. The distribution just does not work in that fashion. The only people I’m certain have an IQ at or approaching that level are Jill and Jack. Beyond that, assuming a normal distribution only eleven other people in our graduating class have an IQ that high. But there’s evidence to suggest that the distribution is in fact lower than white norms, given that the student body is predominantly low-income and Hispanic. There are, however, two distinct qualities of our school that may mediate the statistical deficits. Namely, we have a continuation school that absorbs some portion of the lower-achieving students, who do tend to be of lower intelligence. Our standardized test scores, a rough proxy for intelligence, consistently hover around the 75th percentile. This mildly contravenes the intelligence research that pins Hispanic-Americans at a 94 IQ, or the 34.457th percentile. How are we to compromise between these two data sets? Perhaps standardized tests as rough proxy for intelligence are just that- rough. That may be the case, or Hispanics at my school plainly operate at a higher mean intelligence than the national average for their own ethnicity. This doesn’t seem to be the case; as stated before, the school is predominantly lower income: 65.1 percent of the student body qualifies for free or reduced price lunch, and 73.4 percent of the school is Hispanic. Both data points stack neatly upon each other. I tend to believe in the former theory, as it’s been established that SAT scores can be increased a “paltry” 100 points with intensive preparation. But using high precision 2016 SAT data reveals that the difference between a 1100 SAT score and a 1000 SAT score is sixteen percentiles; this maps out neatly to a seventeen percentile difference between Tustin High’s test scores and the state mean. But do better teachers/curriculum really amount to a staggering seventeen percentile disparity? It could be the case, if we view superior teaching as a linear model where the information retained by students is higher on a daily basis, culminating in substantial variation in the aggregate quantity of information retained. Another hypothesis is that even despite Hispanic-Americans in the United States being predominantly low income, the Hispanics at Tustin High school are less deluged by low income families, or those Hispanics that are conventionally labeled as low-income are less so than the Hispanic mean of categorized “low income families.” I don’t have specific numbers on that at the moment, nor am I readily aware for the qualifying income for “free or reduced lunch.” However, if Hispanics at my school are in less poverty than the national average for Hispanic poverty, this indicates slightly higher intelligence. Coupled with better than average teaching, this may conceivably explain the standardized testing results falling at the 75th percentile.

    I like to view society with respect to its ignorance of intelligence and human biodiversity in general as analogous to alchemy. It functions on an algorithm that is intrinsically flawed- and though social progress can be made notwithstanding, it’s destined to find out the  “right” answers only through carving out some road that consciously avoids a large variable. If an alchemist happens upon some experiment using his own methodology that just so happens to be scientifically valid, it does not justify his philosophy for doing so. But the alchemist will treat it as such, and though he labored tirelessly everyday prior to no avail, his scientific finding will galvanize his passion for pseudoscientific malpractice. Or, more mildly: John is catching fish from the sky, and he has brought with him a large net in order to catch the most that his paraphernalia will allow. Josh had the same idea, and he brings with him an equally large net. John positions himself in an area where every minute, one hundred and twenty fish land in his net. Josh, with markedly lower cognitive ability, decides to venture off into an area that leaves him with a far more moderate rate of one fish per minute. As these things happen to be, the fish that land in Josh’s net shouldn’t otherwise be there: the designated area for fish-plummeting is firmly within twenty feet of John’s position, and fish that exit that area do so only because of wind currents. After an hour of menial fish-catching, Josh has devised a method to improve his rate up to two fish per minute! It’s a net increase of 100%, and Josh returns home in a incandescent disposition. John, on the other hand, came home with over 5,000 fish.

12/5/17

    The flaw is obvious, and though Josh made the most of his unfortunate positioning, the fish he collected were some minute percentage of what he conceivably may have caught.

    A simple concept-perhaps this should be relegated to my General Ideas document. Regardless, the reason any video or website’s target demographics become less prevalent the more popular it gets, is because the more attention it attracts, it becomes more likely that a person from a non target demographic stumbles across the information.