Category Archives: IQ

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.

Science at the Gate

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The 21st century is going to look a lot like the 17th century in that the organizing faith will be under constant assault from new thinking. In 1500, the ruling and intellectual elites of the western world believed in God and accepted the Church. By 1550, the Church was under assault as the Protestant Reformation spread through central Europe. The prevailing orthodoxy was under assault on all sides.

Fifty years later the schism within the Church was challenging the prevailing secular order in Europe. The Thirty Years War was kicked off in 1618 and by the end of the century, the world was an entirely different place. The jostling between the people of Europe was no longer about Christendom. It was about nationalism. More important, Christianity was no longer the organizing faith of western societies.

The Enlightenment swept away the old religion and offered up a range of secular replacements. Various forms of socialism, like Marxism, Fabian socialism and Bolshevism, were more than political or economic movements. They may have started with the material, but they ended with the spiritual. They became civic religions that would attempt to fill the role of the Church. Politics would become the public ceremony for the new religion. This is especially true of liberal democracy.

If you look around, the firm belief in the malleability of man is all around you. Test prep courses and materials promise to improve your scores on IQ tests. Americans are bankrupting themselves in pursuit of education. Billions are spent on health regimes that promise to make fat people thin and ugly people attractive. Behavior modification is so deeply ingrained in our culture we hardly notice it.

Economics, the closest thing we have to witchcraft in America, is entirely based on the belief you can make people do anything with the right incentives. The military is putting women in combat units, despite the obvious physical and psychological problems. Disparity of outcomes between races and the sexes are proof of bad behavior, not natural differences in talent. Mentioning black crime, of course, is as heretical as claiming, in 15th century France, that the Pope was a Jew.

All of this depends on a fundamental denial of science. Jacobinism, the mother culture of every left-wing movement, is a rejection of nature and therefore a rejection of science. Later movements bolted on science here and there as a marketing ploy, but the Left is by its nature, anti-science. It has to be. If you allow that some parts of the human animal are beyond the reach of social planners, you open up the possibility that large parts of humanity cannot be altered by social structure.

If the debate shifts from what should be done to what can be done, then the debate about what ought to be done changes as well. In a world where humans are infinitely malleable, what ought to be done is limitless. In a world where humans are the product of the mating decisions of their ancestors, what ought to be done is bounded by the limits of the human condition. Trying for make college scholars out of low-IQ people with poor impulse control becomes as immoral as torturing the mentally ill.

Science is slowly undermining the claims of these secular religions. On the one hand, we have evolutionary biology, which is telling us immutable truth about humanity. On the other hand, we have genetics, which is making a steady assault on the tenets of Standard Social Science Model. This piece in the Telegraph tells us that science may have found a gene that determines intelligence. We know these genes exist. The question is how many and how much each one influence the general intelligence.

They found that, on average, teenagers carrying a particular gene variant had a thinner cortex in the left cerebral hemisphere, particularly in the frontal and temporal lobes, and performed less well on tests for intellectual ability.

The genetic variation affects the expression of the NPTN gene, which encodes a protein acting at neuronal synapses and therefore affects how brain cells communicate.

Their findings suggest that some differences in intellectual abilities can result from the decreased function of the NPTN gene in particular regions of the left brain hemisphere.

Although the genetic variation identified in this study only accounts for an estimated 0.5 per cent of the total variation in intelligence.

However, the findings may have important implications for the understanding of biological mechanisms underlying several psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism, where impaired cognitive ability is a key feature of the disorder.

To sensible people, this may not sound ground breaking, but it is the sort of ripple that knocks over buildings down the line. If IQ is a matter of genetics, IQ tests can no longer be dismissed. Similarly, as behavior is linked to specific proteins, or the lack of them, whole swaths of social science fall into the category of witchcraft. If humans are not infinitely malleable, then 300 years of political theory goes out the window. At some point, there is the Galileo moment, when the old faith no longer has meaning.

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The Genius Cat Lady

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This is one of those sites that is so full of nuttiness it almost feels like satire, but it is completely serious. Obviously, a site calling itself “Brain Pickings” should be brimming with sarcasm, but this one is brimming with unintentional comedy. For starters the blogger describes the site as “a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” There is a better than even chance that Maria Popova is going to end up living with 50 cats. It juts has that sort of vibe, based on the first impression.

The “about” section is a bit sad. Anytime you see someone claiming to be in “search for meaning” you just know they are acquainted with the psychiatric industry. Women seem to use that expression a lot and almost always they are single, childless and full of feminist nuttiness. Women with kids and a husband have all the meaning they need. They don’t have blogs where they talk about their feelings and pretend to be free spirits. Perhaps there are exceptions, but that’s the general rule.

Anyway, The post is about someone called Angela Duckworth, who appears to have been given a MacArthur genius grant for telling people things that are mostly false. Her claim to genius status is a new book explaining  how “self-control and grit — the relentless work ethic of sustaining your commitments toward a long-term goal — impact success.”  While that is largely true, you are born with these qualities, or not born with them in the case of people who lack those qualities.

Is there anyone who does not know that successful are blessed with personality traits like determination and a relentless work ethic”? Now, the blank slate people don’t accept that these are innate qualities, for the most part. Instead they think they are the product of environment like good home habits and good schools. There’s money in selling people books about how they can acquire the skills that will make them successful, so it makes sense that people write such books. A genius, however, should know better

Now, Miss Duckworth is not dumb. According to the post, she thought about starting a school to put her theories to the test, but decided the “model did not hold much promise” so she “decided to pursue a PhD program at Penn.” It’s always better to be someone offering novel, untested theories that confirm the deeply held beliefs of the ruling class, than to be the person trying to make those novel ideas work. The former pays better and has little risk, while the latter pays poorly and usually ends in tears.

Another amusing tidbit from the post is this weird way of avoiding the obvious. “She found that the students’ self-discipline scores were far better predictors of their academic performance than their IQ scores.” This is certainly true, but the correlation between IQ and impulse control is high. There’s a very good chance that the kids with poor self-control also happened to be black. They were probably from poor families. It’s hardly a revelation that poor impulse control, low-IQ and poverty are features of black communities.

This is the trouble people often have when thinking about this stuff. The the traits associated with high achieving people tend to be clustered together. That is, there are few high-IQ people with poor impulse control and high time preference. On the other hand, there are people with self-control, but a low-IQ. Intelligence is still the main factor in life outcomes, but self-control can either mitigate or amplify it. A dumb guy with self-control is going further than a average guy who can’t control himself.

A better way of stating it maybe is to think these various traits as forces pushing in either direction on a person. Some push harder, because they have greater value in current society. Intelligence means a lot today, but not as much in the tenth century, at least with regards to life outcomes. The mafia used to say you get further with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word. Today you get further determination and high-IQ than just determination. That’s strangely difficult for modern people to accept.

Religion & IQ

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For as long as I have been alive, the Left has been trying to “prove” they are the smartest kids in the room. One tactic is to attack religion and by extension the religious, who they naturally see as their enemy. This makes some sense, given that Progressivism is nothing but a poorly defined civic religion. Stuff like this is the sort of thing they like to wave around to prove they are super-smart.  I’ll assume the authors of this study are making a good faith effort, but 30-plus years of this act naturally makes me skeptical.

I’m not a particularly religious person so I don’t have a dog in the fight. I just think the Left’s war on Christianity is a lot like what we see in the Arab world. Islam, like all living religions, is intolerant of other religions. After all, if you are sure your faith is correct and others are in error, or worse, an offense to god, then how can you in good conscience tolerate these false religions? The answer is obvious, which is why all religions, with the exception of race-based faiths, always try to dominate other religions through proselytizing or worse.

Of course, Muslims really hate Jews, because Jews put a lot of effort into pitting one Muslim against another, as part of Israel’s survival strategy. American have been taught that Muslims hate Jews because Hitler, but that’s nonsense. Muslims don’t hate Jews on religious grounds or even geopolitical grounds. That’s part of it, but the real issue is that faithful Muslims believe in unity of the faithful. Therefore, they look at Israel’s geopolitical shenanigans as a war on Islam itself. For Muslims, hating Jews is self-defense.

Now, in the case of this study, assuming it is a serious effort at examining the issue, is they start with the assumption religion is strictly about the super natural. Even more specifically, they narrow religion to Christianity. It leaves out secular religions like Marxism and anti-religions like atheism. Both are mass movements that hold the same appeal for adherents. They trade their identity for that of the group. My bet is if we broadened the scope of religion to include secular faiths, the difference in IQ would be trivial.

I’m fond of pointing out that even the most brilliant people subscribe to magical thinking and superstition. Blaise Pascal, the father of probability, computer science and statistics was a heretical Catholic fanatic. Many of the men who worked on the Manhattan Project were religious Jews, as well as Marxists. J. B. S. Haldane was a communist, were many intellectuals of his day. Belief in the worker’s paradise is every bit as wacky as anything the Bible believing Christians can muster. Belief is not just about religion.

That said, Jason Richwine is probably right. Higher IQ could lead to greater skepticism and therefore lower religiosity. The reason is high intelligence often has a strange humbling effect. Once you get outside the normal range, the genuinely gifted can see the limits of human intelligence more clearly, as they tend to be in frustrating fields like math and science. That’s inevitably going to result a great deal of skepticism about everything, not just religion. IQ and skepticism are probably co-dependent cognitive traits.

A caveat to that would be people with an exceptional verbal IQ and average quantitative reasoning. That would explain the high number of Jewish communists, for example. A people bred for solving complex word games as a part of their status system are probably inclined to accept magic as within the domain of possible answers. People with high spatial, could also be an exception. In other words, the empirically minded will probably be the most skeptically minded, and therefore the least religions, with some exceptions.

None of this really matters much. Most people are not so smart as to fall beyond the line between belief and skepticism. That’s certainly true for the hooting fanatics of the Progressive cult, who fall for every nutty fad that springs from egalitarianism and the blank slate. it much more reasonable to believe a Jewish hippy was the son of God, than to think better pre-school is going to solve black crime. The Left still think you can talk people out of mental illness. To be on the Left means the total suspension of disbelief.