Category Archives: IQ

The Plight of the Super Genius

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I came across this posted on Maggie’s Farm the other day.

The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133.  It then falls about 1/3 by 140.  By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%!  In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.  This benefits neither the excluded group nor society in general. For society, it is a horrendous waste of a very valuable resource.  For the high IQ person it is a personal tragedy commonly resulting in unrealized social, educational and productive potential.

I think the facts presented in the article are open to debate, but they do correspond with my own observations. The most obvious example is Rick Rosner, who has some of the highest test scores ever recorded. He’s also a bit of a wacko. I’ve known a few 1% IQ’s who struggled to make good use of their IQ. Even those who did “mainstream” often did poorly compared to their less savvy coevals.

The two best examples of the latter are John Sununu and Chuck Schumer. Sununu tested into Mega Society and Schumer hit a perfect score on his SAT back in the 60’s when it was still a real test. Sununu had some success in politics, but his prickly personality was a problem. Schumer, of course, is known as the most unpleasant human on earth.

I suppose, in the case of Schumer and Sununu, it can be argued that their unpleasant demeanor was overcome by their high IQ’s. Chuck Schumer’s position is entirely dependent on his ability to push through sophisticated legislation allowing the financial sector to loot the economy. You have to be a smart guy to do that well so being a raging dickhead probably counts for little.

Still, at the extreme right side of the curve, we see a lot of eccentrics who prefer to be outside the conventional career paths. This is probably why we say there is a fine line between genius and insanity. These folksy observations persist for a reason and that reason is they have a kernel of truth. High IQ people tend to be weirdos.

What applies to productive environments also applies to social environments and even personal relationships.  Theoretically, after Hollingworth, a person’s social relationships should be limited to people with R16IQs within 30 points of their own.  For the 100 IQ person, this will include about 94% of the population and consequently it is not an issue.  However, for the 150 R16IQ (140 D15IQ), social relationships are limited to 120-180 R16IQ people which represents just a little over 10% of the population.  The 165 R16IQ (150D15IQ) person will be limited to people with 135+ R16IQs (130 D15IQ).  This comprises just 2% of the population.   By 182 R16IQ (160 D15IQ) the problem becomes critical with social relationships limited to those with R16IQs over 152 (142 D15IQ) which comprises just 0.25% of the population.

For the readers on the left side of the curve, not you of course, those other guys, let me explain what this means. Humans tend to associate with people like themselves. This does not just apply to IQ, by the way. This does not mean we associate with people identical to us. It means the more alike, the more we hold in common, which is the basis for relationships.

Take, for example, a typical working class Irish guy from a Boston neighborhood. He will easily socialize with people in his neighborhood and other working class guys from other Boston neighborhoods. The further you get from his natural environment, however, the less he will have in common with people from other states, countries, etc. There comes a point where socializing becomes impossible. It’s why dropping Bantu warriors into Lewiston Maine is a very stupid idea.

In IQ, a similar relationship between distance and commonality exists. If you have a 100 IQ, you will be roughly as smart as 90% of the people you will encounter on a daily basis. That means you will be able to understand most of the same things and not understand most of the same things. That last bit is vital. Ignorance is bliss, especially when shared with friends.

The further you move to the right on the curve, the smaller the population pool of people in your intelligence range. That means most of the people you meet will not know what you know and will probably never know it. Worse yet, the vast majority don’t think like you think. That’s not always appreciated.

Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above 145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different thinking emerges.  By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn’t just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally different intellectual processes.  David Wechsler, D. K. Simonton, et alia, have observed the same thing.

Since intimate social relationships are predicated upon mutual understanding, this draws a kind of ‘line in the sand’ at 140-150 D15IQ that appears to separate humans into two distinct groups.  This may truncate the 30 point limit for those between 150 and 160 D15IQ people.  Even when 150+ D15IQ people learn to function in the mainstream society, they will always be considered, and will feel, in some way ‘different’.  Grady Towers explored this in depth in his article, ‘The Outsiders’.  This is of mild interest to the group within which the 150+ D15IQ person is embedded but it is moderately to profoundly important to the high IQ individual who will feel an often profound sense of isolation.

It has often been observed that 150+ D15IQ people are loners.  Also, Loius Termann found that children at this IQ level were emotionally maladjusted in about 40% of the cases.  However from the above one cannot help but wonder if this results from the children being constantly thrust into ‘no-win’ social situations and never given the opportunity to hone their social skills among their intellectual peers.

I think the loner aspect is due as much to boredom with other people as anything else. Human interaction is an exchange of value. If one side is simply too stupid to value the other side, they will get bored. The super-genius will also get bored or simply prefer to interact with a machine or book.

In some respects, a 1% IQ is like being seven feet tall. There’s some value at the fringes, but otherwise it has no value and can be a burden. There’s a low demand for seven footers and to most people it is a little weird being around a freakish giant. A 1% IQ is not in much demand and most people don’t like being around Wile E. Coyote for long, unless the genius is also blessed with a high agreeableness and extroversion.

IQ Science Versus The Left

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Steve Sailer has a post up on IQ that hits on a favorite theme. One of the things I have always found amusing about the HBD world is their naivete about the people in charge. This is a common problem on the Right and is found a little with the handful of thoughtful Progressives. They think that being right is enough. That eventually, the rightness of their science has to prevail over the oogily-boogily of the Standard Social Science Model.

Unless and until IQ science, HBD or even plain old evolution, becomes useful to the prevailing ideology, it will remain in an intellectual backwater. That’s too hard to accept so they often fall back on the myth of Galileo. That is, Galileo triumphed over the Catholic Church because his science was irrefutable.

The trouble with that, in addition to being untrue, is that the prevailing ideology of today is not as generous in spirit as the Catholic Church.The Church leaders in the Middle Ages were not anti-science. They were responsible for rescuing much of the knowledge from antiquity so that science could blossom. No, they were concerned about the orderly working of society, the faith of the people being a big part, the part concerning the Church. Fumbling through it was their responsibility and their burden.

The reigning ideology of today is a different animal. Cultural Marxism shares much more in common with Islam, in this regard. It’s Islam without an afterlife. The faithful, instead of living in bliss after death, can live happily in this life. Similarly, the unfaithful, the heretics and the blasphemers, will suffer in this life. What completes the circle are the ideological enforcers, sorting the chosen from the damned. Guess who fills that role.

Science really does not fit into this ideology. Egalitarianism, however, fits quite nicely. Everyone is equal and therefore unequal outcomes means someone is benefiting at the expense of another. That can be proof that the one is pious while the other a heretic. That also keeps everyone doubling down on the one true faith in an effort to reach the utopian end point, where all that is left are those in perfect equality.

It also is a never ending source of dragons to slay. Inequality is caused by someone. If it is not the impiety of the less, then it must be the impiety of the superior. Attacking that inequity becomes a holy cause. Egalitarianism, therefore, takes up the slack that the super natural used to handle in the olden thymes.

The other problem is that the people will never accept the implicit determinism of HBD and IQ science. No one wants to believe they were decanted as a ‘Gamma’, ‘Delta’ or ‘Epsilon’ so they will never believe it. If we started using IQ tests to sort school children into appropriate tracks, there would be riots. SWPL-ville mothers would demand some way to game the system so their little flower can be at least a beta.

The narcotic of egalitarianism is more potent than science. It’s not so strong down here at the bottom of the social order. Here. reality is simply too vibrant to deny. In the plusher suburbs of the middle-class, that’s not the case. They get to ape the mannerisms and ideas of the managerial elite and believe that one day their little angel will something better than them.

In fairness, believing nonsense has not been a deterrent to material progress. Perhaps one day the people in charge will be of another ideological persuasion that embraces IQ science and biological realism. I will not see it in my lifetime. Instead, crime thinkers like Steve Sailer will be forced to slave away in the mines at the edges of society.

That’s probably the natural order.

Modern Horoscopes

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I always get a kick out of these things because they are mostly bullshit. If you go through the questions, they tell you the combination of famous people you most resemble. None of the famous people are monsters or evil. The idea is to flatter the user, not horrify them. Still, I’d be tempted to have results that said the user had a brain like Hitler or Jack the Ripper, but I’d be a terrible astrologer. Here is my result:

Leonardo of Arc
You have an active imagination and free-spirited side, which means you dream big, believe anything can happen, and are open to new experiences that might present opportunities to learn and explore. You get these traits from Leonardo da Vinci, the genius artist, inventor and mathematician whose talent is still considered to be one of the greatest in the world.

But you’re also very disciplined, and have a strong work ethic that grounds your personality and gives all your big dreams and ideas the fuel to become reality. You get these traits from Joan of Arc, the bold, fearless French heroine who was also canonized as a Catholic saint.

Joan of Arc was probably a schizophrenic. She had “visions” and heard voices. There’s some speculation that she faked it and was some sort of a con-artist, but grifters don’t take their con so far that they get burned at the stake. Modern feminists have made her a heroine of their cause so that’s probably why the site used her in its rotation. I took the test a few more times and got different results each time so they may be using a random personality generator.

The IQ crowd puts a lot of stock in these sorts of profiles. The Big Five personality traits are the gold standard. You can take the self-exam here if you’re interested. I’ve given a lot of these types of exams in the past and I know a lot of companies that use them for management development. The military academies used to administer them, but I don’t know if that is still the case. At the academies, testing for leadership is of obvious value so they do a lot of it.

There’s a lot of good science behind it, but I’m not 100% sold. The reason I’ve always been a bit skeptical is I’ve taken these things and it is not hard to figure out the point of the questions. I’ve been able to game the test to get the result I wanted so I’m sure more devious minded people can do it with no problem. Then there is the fact people tend to lie on self-assessments. That said, I’ve been tested a lot so I’m probably not a great example. I also like reverse engineering these tests so I probably notice the patterns more readily that others.

Regardless, the Internet says I’m an artistic schizophrenic or a highly disciplined French heroine.

The Germ Theory of Stupid

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The evolutionary biologist Greg Cochran suggested that homosexuality may be the result of an unknown pathogen. The idea that pathogens could be the root cause of things like heart disease and insanity has been kicking around for a while. Like a lot of speculative science, there’s no money in it until someone finds something concrete and then there’s the politics There’s funding available for genetic research. There’s no money for locating the gay germ.

This may change things.

A virus that infects human brains and makes us more stupid has been discovered, according to scientists in the US.

The algae virus, never before observed in healthy people, was found to affect cognitive functions including visual processing and spatial awareness.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska stumbled upon the discovery when they were undertaking an unrelated study into throat microbes.

Surprisingly, the researchers found DNA in the throats of healthy individuals that matched the DNA of a virus known to infect green algae.

Dr Robert Yolken, a virologist who led the original study, said: “This is a striking example showing that the ‘innocuous’ microorganisms we carry can affect behaviour and cognition.

“Many physiological differences between person A and person B are encoded in the set of genes each inherits from parents, yet some of these differences are fuelled by the various microorganisms we harbour and the way they interact with our genes.”

Of the 90 participants in the study, 40 tested positive for the algae virus. Those who tested positive performed worse on tests designed to measure the speed and accuracy of visual processing. They also achieved lower scores in tasks designed to measure attention.

Humans’ bodies contain trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi. Most are harmless, but the findings of this research show that there some microbes can have a detrimental impact on cognitive functions, while leaving individuals healthy.

The study’s findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I like how 40 of 90 tested positive for stupidism. At first blush is seems like a blow to the IQ uber alles guys because we have a pretty solid example of environmental factors altering IQ. That would support the argument that improved environment (no stupid germs) will improve IQ. It also means that maybe the Flynn Effect is just the result of better hygiene, not better school. Just as better food supplied results in taller humans, better hygiene results in smarter humans. That would, of course, support many of the claims from the HBD crowd regarding IQ.

I would be curious about the race of the participants. If it turned out that the 40 were all from a certain place I think I would blow a funny fuse.

We Be Stoopiderer

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One of the amusing parts of following the Ferguson riots was watching TV people turn themselves into pretzels avoiding the obvious. You’re simply not allowed to notice vast swaths of reality. When it comes to race, you could find yourself living in Steve Sailer’s basement if you slip and notice something. That makes reporting on human activity nearly impossible. This story is a good example.

Technology may be getting smarter, but humans are getting dumber, scientists have warned.

Evidence suggests that the IQs of people in the UK, Denmark and Australia have declined in the last decade.  Opinion is divided as to whether the trend is long-term, but some researchers believe that humans have already reached intellectual peak.

An IQ test used to determine whether Danish men are fit to serve in the military has revealed scores have fallen by 1.5 points since 1998. And standard tests issued in the UK and Australia echo the results, according to journalist Bob Holmes, writing in New Scientist.

The most pessimistic explanation as to why humans seem to be becoming less intelligent is that we have effectively reached our intellectual peak. Between the 1930s and 1980s, the average IQ score in the US rose by three points and in post-war Japan and Denmark, test scores also increased significantly – a trend known as the ‘Flynn effect’.

This increase in intelligence was due to improved nutrition and living conditions – as well as better education – says James Flynn of the University of Otago, after whom the effect is named.

Now some experts believe we are starting to see the end of the Flynn effect in developed countries – and that IQ scores are not just levelling out, but declining.

Scientists including Dr Flynn think better education can reverse the trend and point out the perceived decline could just be a blip. However, other scientists are not so optimistic.

Some believe the Flynn effect has masked a decline in the genetic basis for intelligence, so that while more people have been reaching their full potential, that potential itself has been declining.

Some have even contentiously said this could be because educated people are deciding to have fewer children, so that subsequent generations are largely made up of less intelligent people.

Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster, calculated the decline in humans’ genetic potential.

He used data on average IQs around the world in 1950 and 2000 to discover that our collective intelligence has dropped by one IQ point.

Dr Lynn predicts that if this trend continues, we could lose another 1.3 IQ points by 2050.

Michael Woodley, of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, claims people’s reactions are slower than in Victorian times, and has linked it to a decline in our genetic potential.

It has previously been claimed that quick-witted people have fast reactions and Dr Woodley’s study showed people’s reaction times have slowed over the century – the equivalent to one IQ point per decade.

Jan te Nijenhuis, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, says Westerners have lost an average of 14 IQ points since the Victoria Era.

He believes this is due to more intelligent women have fewer children than those who are less clever,The Huffington Post reported.

Dr Woodley and others think humans will gradually become less and less intelligent.

But Dr Flynn says if the decline in IQ scores is the end of the Flynn effect, scores should stabilise.

He thinks that even if humans do become more stupid, better healthcare and technology will mean that all people will have fewer children and the ‘problem’ will regulate itself.

The study referenced in the story does not appear to adjust for race. Logically, if you increase the number of people from low IQ populations, average IQ will fall, so the population explosion in Africa  probably accounts for most of it. But, you’re not allowed to point out that Arabs, for example, like marrying their cousins, which lowers IQ over a few generations. Britain is now 4% Arab and those Arabs account for a third of the genetic defects.

That said, maybe there is an adjustment for race in the study, but buried in such a way as to make is hard to notice. The researcher in question does not seem to be hobbled by political correctness, so who knows. We could be getting dumber and the dumb are out-breeding the smart. Both claims would be easy to accept, based on observation of Western societies and immigration.

Average is Over

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George Bush was relentlessly mocked for saying he wanted the schools to ensure that every kid is above average. It was a stupid thing to say, but people understood what he meant by it. The stupid part is thinking schools can fix what nature has crafted between the ears of school children. No one likes to hear that of course. Then again, maybe Bush was right and everyone can be above average. Most of us think we’re above average, according to this story in the National Journal.

Forget being smarter than a fifth-grader. Most Americans think they’re smarter than everyone else in the country.

Fifty-five percent of Americans think that they are smarter than the average American, according to a new survey by YouGov, a research organization that uses online polling. In other words, as YouGov cleverly points out, the average American thinks that he or she is smarter than the average American.

A humble 34 percent of citizens say they are about as smart as everyone else, while a dispirited 4 percent say they are less intelligent than most people.

Men (24 percent) are more likely than women (15 percent) to say they are “much more intelligent” than the average American. White people are more likely to say the same than Hispanic and black people.

So, this many smart people must mean that, on the whole, the United States ranks pretty high in intelligence, right?

Not quite. According to the survey, just 44 percent of Americans say that Americans are “averagely intelligent.” People who make less than $40,000 a year are much more likely to say that their fellow Americans are intelligent, while those who make more than $100,000 are far more likely to say that Americans are unintelligent.

The results are not surprising. Western cultures have a habit of inflating their self-worth, past research has shown. The most competent individuals also tend to underestimate their ability, while incompetent people overestimate it. Not out of arrogance, but of ignorance—the worst performers often don’t get negative feedback. In this survey, 28 percent of high school graduates say they are “slightly more intelligent” than average, while just 1 percent of people with doctoral degrees say they are “much less intelligent.”

The second sentence in the last paragraph is interesting. “Western cultures have a habit of inflating their self-worth, past research has shown.” No actual study is noted, so it’s probably not true. That and how people respond to self-assessment surveys is an area of some debate. The respondent could very well be reacting to the questioner in a culturally biased way. In Japan understatement is a valued social good while in America, boasting is valued. What the respondent actually thinks is unknowable.

The Nuisance Segment

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There is a theory called The Smart Fraction Theory. The very short version of it is that every human society has a distribution of IQ’s ranging from retarded to genius. Some populations have a high number of people, relative to human populations as a whole, with above average and better IQ’s. At the other end, some societies have a relatively low number of above average and better IQ’s. The former groups have rocketed ahead while the latter groups have lagged behind.

There’s a lot more to it, a lot more, but that’s a useful shorthand. The point being is the smart fraction exerts upward pressure on society. The larger and more capable that fraction, the better able they are to drag the whole of society upward. If the fraction is too small, you get Zimbabwe or Detroit. The smart fraction, unable to lift the whole of society, sets themselves up as a ruling elite, plundering what they can from society. It is why all the money in the world will not change the character of these societies.

There’s another fraction, one that is at the heart of what ails the West. That’s the nuisance segment. For example, I was at my favorite lunch place the other day. It is a fancy SWPL grocery store with a cafe of sorts. The cafe is mostly a big buffet, but buffets are working class so they splash the word “cafe” all over the place and stock the bar with weird stuff from foreign lands. The most popular food is the typical American stuff, but the sushi and Indian food makes everyone feel better.

Anyway, there’s not a ton of room for people to navigate the serving areas. Inevitably, there will be a few mothers with baby carriages mucking up the works. A few vibrant people will be there with grocery carriages jamming up the walkways. As a result the store has had to rearrange the place a few times to try and get ahead of the nuisance segment. They have been mostly successful, but the cost of these idiots is inevitably spread to the rest of us.

On every product in your house, you will find a warning label. On the shampoo bottle I have in my hand, there are two paragraphs explaining what not to do with it. No one expects the stupid to read these labels, of course. Someone dumb enough to drink shampoo or shove the bottle up their arse is not going to read the warning label. It is just to inoculate the company from the inevitable. The direct cost of litigation is 2% in America. The cost in warning labels is equal that or more. The stupid cost us at least 5% of GDP a year in direct costs.

That’s not the end of it. The regulatory bureaucracy which is the direct result of the nuisance fraction is enormous. So far Obama has added 12,000 pages of regulations to the quarter million or so already on the books. The exact number and nature of Federal crimes has now reached the point where it cannot be counted.  We are perilously close to the point where it is just assumed that everything is a violation of the law. In such a land, there are no laws. The people inevitably respond accordingly.

Reading first millennium history, one thing that jumps out is the high cost of being foolish. This was especially true of the elites. King Peada was murdered by his wife because he foolishly thought his connection with Oswiu, through his marriage to his daughter Alchflaed, would protect him. History of this period is full of examples where small mistakes in judgment resulted in death, often gruesome death. The nitwits pushing a cart through the buffet line never would have made it to adulthood in that era.

Fear of a White Planet

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The word “alarm” is supposed to imply concern and even fear. You can be alarmed about a child molester moving into town. You can be alarmed about your kid hanging out with the potheads. One is not typically alarmed about gettting a bonus at Christmastime. Words have meaning and their use says a lot of about what’s on the writer’s mind. No one is alarmed about something they welcome. Alarm is supposed to imply fear and dread of something unwanted.

In this story from National Journal, the headline is, “Tech Pipeline Is Alarmingly White” with a subhead of “No African-Americans, Hispanics or girls took the AP computer science exam in some states, meaning a majority of The Next America has little familiarity with tech.” Presumably, the publication thinks too many white people, however that is defined, is a bad thing. After all, one cannot be alarmed by too much good news. Something must be done!

The pipeline of students who will be tomorrow’s tech leaders is alarmingly vanilla.

According to a new analysis of test-takers, not a single girl, African-American or Hispanic student took the computer science Advanced Placement test in Mississippi or Montana last year. More than a third of the population in Mississippi is black.

In other words, a hugely disproportionate bunch of white guys took the test.

The lack of diversity is disconcerting because computer science is an industry hurting for qualified workers. That’s not to say that a student must take AP computer science to pursue a computer science career, but it’s an indicator of which young people have a degree of familiarity with the field. Tech companies have long lamented that they’ve had to look outside the domestic pool of students to find employees. Encouraging largely untapped demographics—girls, African-Americans and Hispanics—in high school to enter the field would only help.

But that’s not happening, at least successfully, right now.

There are 11 states where not a single African-American took the test, and eight states where no Hispanics sat for the exam.

We’re not talking here about people who passed or didn’t pass, either. We’re talking about people who simply took the test, which means African-Americans, Hispanics and girls aren’t enrolling in AP computer science classes in the first place.

Of the approximately 30,000 students who took the exam in 2013, only around 20 percent were female, according to the analysis, and a tiny 3 percent were African-American. Just 8 percent were Hispanic.

Notice the magically thinking. It is not about passing or failing the AP exam. It is about taking the exam. There’s an assumption that passing the exam is just a matter of joining the process and ticking the right boxes. If you dump more blacks into the AP courses, then they will just pass and become smart STEM people. The possibility that this is not possible is never considered. Of course, biology can’t possibly be the reason.

One reason there are so few students enrolling in the class and taking the test is that AP computer science courses are more common in suburban and private schools, Barbara Ericson, a senior research scientist with Georgia Tech who compiled the data, told the blog Education Week, and those schools tend to be less diverse than urban and public schools.

Another potential reason is that there are so few women, African-American and Hispanic instructors teaching computer science and so few working in the computer science field. Students are more likely to pursue a course of study if they have mentors with similar backgrounds to emulate.

College Board, which oversees the AP tests, has made diversity a priority in recent months, but clearly, there’s still a long way to go. And diversifying the pool of students taking the exam will require more than a push from College Board. Families, schools and community organizations will also play a crucial role in encouraging and guiding more girls and minority students toward computer science.

It is tempting to assume that the people making these claims know they are speaking nonsense, but that’s probably not the case. They really do believe in the blank slate and egalitarianism. The possibility of biology preventing their preferred outcome is just never considered, because that’s not a possibility. It’s like blaming Big Foot of leprechauns fo the problem. As usual, Steve Sailer was all over it and has some handy numbers.

Here are the pass rates (3 out of 5 or higher, equivalent to a C or better in a college 101-level intro course):

All test takers: 67%
Males: 68%
Females: 62%
Blacks: 36%
Black males: 38%
Black females: 27%
Hispanics: 45%
Hispanic Males: 49%
Hispanic Females: 31%
Whites: 66%
White Males: NA
White Females: NA
Asians: 70%
Asian Males: NA
Asian Females: NA

America has spent roughly a trillion dollars since the 1960’s on trying to fix the race gap is income, education, crime and so on. It’s hard to know, as the accounting for some of it is impossible to figure. How does one cost the affirmative action or laws against private discrimination? Still a trillion is a good figure. Yet, the gaps in all of these areas have no changed much. When it comes to education gaps, the data is overwhelming that environment plays no role in the overall outcomes. It’s biology.

That said, one cannot help but think that the real driver of stories like this is not the denial of biological reality. The real issue is a hatred of white people. Whether it is self-loathing or ethnocentric forces that flow under the surface of society, maybe a combination of both, the ruling class culture is shaped by a general hatred of normal white people. That’s why the headline writer is alarmed at the white people in tech.

Why Are Jews Liberal?

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If you read Destructive Generation, something that leaps off the page is the fact that Jews are wildly over-represented in radical politics. Just looking at the Weathermen, about half the founding members were Jews. Huey Newton and the Black Panthers were largely brought to life and sustained by Jews in California. Of course, communism in America was very Jewish. You don’t have to be Kevin McDonald to notice that Jews have an outsized influence on American radicalism.

Even accounting for the fact Horowitz may have highlighted the Jews he knew in the movement, it is impossible not to conclude that Jews were way over represented in radical politics.  When one percent of the population is 30% of anything, that’s a clue. It’s not just the number. In Horowitz’s telling, Jews more often than not played the defining role in these radical movements. After all, Barak Obama would still be fixing parking tickets in Chicago without the Jewish radicals.

If you put “why are Jews liberal” into search engine out comes this list of links. When you get 12 million links, it must be an oft-pondered query. It is not as popular as that figure would suggest. Change “liberal’ to “midget” and you get 47 million hits. Make of that what you will, but the fact remains that Jews are over-represented in radical politics and lots of people are curious about it. That’s why it turns up with millions of links when you search the topic. people are curious about it.

Norman Podhoretz wrote about this in 2009. Podhoretz repeats the old line, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” It’s one of those classically Jewish gags that seems to acknowledge the truth, but subtly shifts the focus away from it. One the one hand you have bourgeois people, the Episcopalians, and on the other hand you have Puerto Ricans. No has strong feelings about Puerto Ricans nor are they associated with subversion, espionage and communism.

Jewish Radicalism is one of those things that seems to only get attention from anti-Semites, which is a shame. Jews don’t quite fit into the anti-Semitics bucket, as they will support radicals who are anti-Semites. In other words, the radicalism trumps the tribal loyalty. Obama captured 78% of the Jewish vote, despite being mildly anti-Semitic and hanging out with anti-Semites.

Most American Jews sincerely believe that their liberalism, together with their commitment to the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle, stems from the teachings of Judaism and reflects the heritage of “Jewish values.” But if this theory were valid, the Orthodox would be the most liberal sector of the Jewish community. After all, it is they who are most familiar with the Jewish religious tradition and who shape their lives around its commandments.

Yet the Orthodox enclaves are the only Jewish neighborhoods where Republican candidates get any votes to speak of. Even more telling is that on every single cultural issue, the Orthodox oppose the politically correct liberal positions taken by most other American Jews precisely because these positions conflict with Jewish law. To cite just a few examples: Jewish law permits abortion only to protect the life of the mother; it forbids sex between men; and it prohibits suicide (except when the only alternatives are forced conversion or incest).

The upshot is that in virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.

The response to his query and the book that followed was predictable. The NYTimes dragged out an old warhorse to defend the faith, so to speak. First you discredit the man:

Norman Podhoretz loves his people and loves his country, and I salute him for it, since I love the same people and the same country. But this is a dreary book. Its author has a completely axiomatic mind that is quite content to maintain itself in a permanent condition of apocalyptic excitation. His perspective is so settled, so confirmed, that it is a wonder he is not too bored to write.

Then dismiss the argument:

The veracity of everything he believes is so overwhelmingly obvious to him that he no longer troubles to argue for it. Instead there is only bewilderment that others do not see it, too. “Why Are Jews Liberals?” is a document of his bewilderment; and there is a Henry Higgins-­like poignancy to his discovery that his brethren are not more like himself. But the refusal of others to assent to his beliefs is portrayed by Podhoretz not as a principled disagreement that is worthy of respect, but as a human failing. Jews are liberals, he concludes, as a consequence of “willful blindness and denial.” He has a philosophy. They have a psychology.

The long and short of it is we have one person asking the obvious question. Why are Jews liberal? His answer is that liberalism has become the religion of The Tribe. That’s a bit of a tautology, but at least it moves the ball down the field. The alternative theory as seen here, here and in the NYTimes book review is the typical boilerplate we see from the Left every day. “The reason for X is we are the good guys and down in the valley, where the bad people dwell, is Y.”

Podhoretz’s explanation is good for a number of reasons. One is it fits with something we know about liberalism. It is clearly a religion. This political ideology provides the inner measures traditionally considered to be a religious territory, such as ethics, values, symbols, myths and rituals. At the same time, its attachment to the Standard Social Science Model, appeals to those raised in the Talmudic tradition. Instead of divining God’s will from the Torah, liberals divine the will of “science.”

Successful minority groups the world over have one thing in common. That is they attach themselves to the strongest element of the ruling class. Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire, is a good example. He is not Mexican. He is Lebanese. He is also tight with the ruling class. He has to be as he controls 90% of the telephone market. If he does not make sure the guys with guns are well compensated, they may decide Carlos needs some competition. In other words, minorities can be useful to the ruling elite.

The trouble with this theory is Jews have been out front in American culture and politics for generations now. The days of Jewish entertainers, for example, passing themselves off as Italians are long gone. Joe Lieberman was a Vice Presidential candidate 15 years ago and probably kept Gore in the race. Lieberman was a very respected political figure and very publicly Jewish. Modern Jews don’t have to cozy up to the elite for protection, as they are the elite and mostly in control of America.

There are a few other things to consider. Catholics, Episcopalians and Baptists have not followed the same path. Catholics used to be a core Democratic constituency, but that was more class and economics than religion. Plus, when they left their old church, they did not join the new faith. Instead they started voting Republican. Protestants certainly swapped the old religion for the new in many cases. Episcopalians, for example, are mostly way out on the far left these days.

Genetics may hold the key. Jews, as known in the West, are not the same Jews as in the Middle East. Most Jews in the West are Ashkenazim, not Sephardim. They have a very different evolutionary arc and they have a different history. It’s not just the issue with you know who. The Jews of central and eastern Europe are different people from the Jews of Italy, Spain and the Middle East. Recent studies suggest Ashkenazim descend from the earliest Europeans.

The majority of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from prehistoric European women, according to study published today (October 8) in Nature Communications. While the Jewish religion began in the Near East, and the Ashkenazi Jews were believed to have origins in the early indigenous tribes of this region, new evidence from mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on exclusively from mother to child, suggests that female ancestors of most modern Ashkenazi Jews converted to Judaism in the north Mediterranean around 2,000 years ago and later in west and central Europe.

The new findings contradict previous assertions that Ashkenazi mitochondrial lineages originated in the Near East, or from mass conversions to Judaism in the Khazar kingdom, an empire in the north Caucasus region between Europe and Asia lasting from the 7th century to the 11th century whose leaders adopted Judaism. “We found that most of the maternal lineages don’t trace to the north Caucasus, which would be a proxy for the Khazarians, or to the Near East, but most of them emanate from Europe,” said coauthor Martin Richards, an archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in the U.K.

Given the state of religion in Europe 2,000 years ago, it is rather amazing that a group of people would elect to become monotheists, much less Jewish. A religion requiring a relatively high degree of literacy and one that comes with a rational legal code is going to make them even more unusual. It is not too much of a reach to think that Ashkenazim are hard wired to believe and to believe a certain way. Those unique traits and a high degree of endogamy meant those traits were reinforced through mating.

This is, in part, the Kevin McDonald argument. He takes it well beyond this point, arguing that Jews are purpose built to undermine white nations. That’s a bit ridiculous from the perspective of science, but a lot of people believe it. Maybe it does not matter, as Jews are wildly over-represented in radicalism. Why that is so is not all that important. Like blacks voting Democrat, what matters is accepting that Jews are never going to be on the side of bourgeois white people.

Not So Smart Fraction

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Raw intelligence is a poor predictor of political success. The HBD people tends to link IQ with everything, even politics, despite the rather obvious fact that many of our politicians are uncommonly stupid. Joe Biden is quite dull. Years of drinking and a few strokes have shaved a dozen points off his IQ. Odds are he would score in the low 20’s on the Wonderlic Test, maybe even high teens. His rather obvious lack of intelligence has not worked against him. He’s going to president one day.

Saying that politicians are dumb is a popular past time, but not all of them are dumb and even the dumb ones can say some smart things. Simply noticing things can be the smartest thing one can do and some of our politicians can notice things. Sarah Palin was hooted down by the Left for her alleged lack of smarts. They mocked here for claiming Russian had designs on parts of the Ukraine.  This story from Breitbart goes into it in light of recent events..

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned that if Senator Barack Obama were elected president, his “indecision” and “moral equivalence” may encourage Russia’s Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.

Palin said then:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine.

In light of recent events in Ukraine and concerns that Russia is getting its troops ready to cross the border into the neighboring nation, nobody seems to be laughing at or dismissing those comments now.

Hounshell wrote then that Palin’s comments were “strange” and “this is an extremely far-fetched scenario.”

“And given how Russia has been able to unsettle Ukraine’s pro-Western government without firing a shot, I don’t see why violence would be necessary to bring Kiev to heel,” Hounshell dismissively wrote.

Palin made her remarks on the stump after Obama’s running mate Joe Biden warned Obama supporters to “gird  your loins” if Obama is elected because international leaders may test or try to take advantage of him.

That’s not to say Palin is very smart. It is a good bet that she is not working math puzzles in her free time. She’s not dumb like Joe Biden. Palin is school teacher smart, while Biden is fork lift driver smart. On the other hand, Biden is politician smart, while Palin is not. One can be left unsupervised while the other may run with scissors if you don’t watch him. You can trust Palin with your kids, while Biden, well, you know.

That’s the thing about politics in a social democracy. it’s not about smarts. Palin could have been the sharpest person in the room, but the Left would still call her dumb, because they need to call her dumb. They would get away with it because she is not good at politics in the way a lunkhead like Joe Biden is good at politics. That’s why democracy is a terrible system. It rewards Joe Biden and punishes Sarah Palin.