I am a one percenter. By that I mean I have an IQ in the top 1%, according to the people who claim to know these things. I have a Mensa card and everything. Mensa is a two percent society, by the way. I joined only to prove a point. I mention it not to brag, but to Make it clear where I’m coming from on this. Unlike most people with an interest in IQ and HBD, I don’t think IQ is determinative on an individual basis. Often, it is as meaningless as eye color in how a person turns out. Other factors like sanity, focus, ambition, dumb luck and circumstance count for a lot more than raw IQ.

One of my obsessions is belief and why people believe the things they believe, often in the face of evidence to the contrary. This post on Unz the other day got me thinking about it. Noam Chomsky was a great linguist. I use the past tense as no one in the field pays any attention to him anymore. There’s also some question as to whether he was all that brilliant when people did pay attention to him. That’s not why they stopped listening to him. The reason people stopped listening to him is he is a nut.

Chomsky is a Stalinist, or at least he was a Stalinist. His article is mostly an apologia for the Soviets and their conduct during the Cold War, The rest is an indictment of US foreign policy. Like every other old Red, Chomsky is a reactionary. Anything against Soviet communism must be evil. Everything else flows from it. The fact that he can excuse the mass murder committed by the Soviets is just another example of the man’s madness. Chomsky is a brilliant lunatic.

It is easy to excuse it because of the politics. The madness of the progressive faith has excused a lot of monstrous things so it is easy to blame one for the other. We’ve all known very nice people who go off the rails as soon as the discussion turns to the political. My former attorney was a great lawyer and a brilliant guy until you mentioned Republicans.

But, smart people often believe in crazy stuff. Rick Rosner is a good example. The guy may be the smartest man on earth. He has had a nice career in TV, but nothing a guy with an average IQ could not achieve. Rick also believes in magic fairy dust and living forever. All of those supplements he takes are junk. That whole racket is exactly that, a racket. Most of the stuff you can buy at GNC is just filler material with no health benefits whatsoever.

He’s not alone in the wacky supplement/live forever club. Ray Kurzweil is another brilliant guy sucking down hundreds of pills a day in the belief he will live forever. I don’t think there’s much reason to doubt that Kerweil is a brilliant guy and a wildly successful guy. He’s also as mad as a hatter. He may think popping 150 pills keeps him young, but he looks old to me.

I’ve always thought IQ testing is popular because it is possible. We can create puzzles to test people’s problem solving skills that control for education, language and culture. Problem solving and pattern matching are important skills, but not the only skills. In many areas of life, those skills are not very important. Politics and government are two obvious examples.

It’s hard to measure things like social awareness, charisma, guile and scheming. The Big Five Personality tests seem to do a decent job measuring some of this, but I can make the results come out anyway I like with a little focus. I did this one as if I was Obama and then I did it pretending to be what I imagined TR would be like. I nailed TR and was Carter the first time when I did Obama. I did the test a third time and nailed Obama.

You can’t game IQ tests that way. The crappier ones are easy to fool, but that’s true of all inferior products. The Big Five tests have a lot of study and brainpower behind them and they are not good for much of anything, other than discussing third parties. That’s why I suspect psychometricians are drawn to IQ. If you can measure something it must be important. That’s the logic, leastways.

The funny thing about this topic is people have known all of this for a very long time. It is why morality has always been so important to human societies. A moral person is not a threat, even if they are not the smartest guy in the room. An average IQ president who has a sound belief system is going to cause less mischief than a super-smart guy who is a moral nullity. Clinton is a great example of the latter.