Tag: IQ

Numbers Still Matter

Guest Post by The Zman

A general assumption, even by the biology deniers, is that China will eventually surpass the West, because China is full of smart people. There’s no questioning the underlying assumption, as China always comes out at or near the top in IQ studies. This replicates in the United States, where East Asians are dominating admissions for elite preparatory schools and colleges. Pretty much everyone agrees this is mostly due to the fact that Asians are smart people, who also work hard and value education.

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How Dumb Have We Become? Chinese Students Are 4 Grade Levels Ahead Of US Students In Math

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

How in the world is America supposed to remain “the greatest country on Earth” when other nations are absolutely running circles around us when it comes to education? As you will see below, one survey found that 15-year-old students in China are almost four full grade levels ahead of 15-year-old students in the United States in mathematics. This is one of the most damning indictments of our education system that I have ever come across, and it is yet another clear indication that what we are doing is simply not working. Our children are not being given the tools that they need to compete in our modern society, and we have only ourselves to blame.

Perhaps you are thinking that the survey must be flawed somehow.

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IQ. Do UQ? A Sojourn Among the True Believers

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Writing about intelligence is splendid fun if you like watching dogfights among towering vanities. (This assumes that vanities can tower, though I’m not sure how dogs come into it.)

On one side you have the politically correct protectors of Appropriate Values. These secretly believe that blacks are less intelligent than whites and live in terror that genetics will shortly prove it. This is why they call genetics “pseudoscience.” Which it isn’t.

On the other side you have the cultists of IQ. These are bright white guys who conflate the results of IQ tests with intelligence, a fit which is imperfect. Their political aim is to show that whites, especially IQists, are brighter than blacks and Hispanics and pretty much everybody else, except East Asians who have higher IQs than white guys. Admitting the superiority of the Asians is the political price of showing the inferiority of everyone else.

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IQ MATTERS

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Intelligence If Any: Its Care and Feeding

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Today, fun with genetics, specifically genetic determination of intelligence and behavior. In doing this we will seek to annoy as many people as possible. (This column prides itself on being an equal-opportunity irritant.) First, reference to amusing contradictions in IQ theory as offered by IQists and such as the Human Biodiversity Movement (hbd).

Let’s start with Colombia, since I know the country reasonably well. Colombians are said to have a mean IQ of 84. This is quite dim, below hamsters but better than turnips. Yet they run airlines, telecommunications, and all the things one associates with modern cities. How is this?

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Idiocracy Looms? Study Suggests IQ Scores Are Falling Due To Social Media, Central Banks

Via ZeroHedge

A new study, published Monday by Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by almost 3 percentage points each decade for those born between 1962 to 1975 – but then saw a steady decline among those born after 1975.

The earlier rise in IQ scores follows the so-called “Flynn effect” – a term for the long-term increase in intelligence levels that occurred during the 20th century, arguably the result of better access to education – according to Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive ageing at the University of Edinburgh whose research explores IQ scores and intelligence and who was not involved in the new study.

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On the so-called “Jewish Question”

Guest Post by Jordan Peterson

The players of identity politics on the far right continue ever-so-pathologically to beat the anti-Semitic drum, pointing to the over-representation of Jews in positions of authority, competence and influence (including revolutionary movements). I’m called upon–sometimes publicly, sometimes on social media platforms–to comment on such matters, and criticized when I hesitate to do so (although God only knows why I would hesitate ?

So let’s take apart the far-right claims:

First, psychologically speaking: why do the reactionary conspiracy theorists even bother? This is a straightforward matter. If you’re misguided enough to play identity politics, whether on the left or the right, then you require a victim (in the right-wing case, European culture or some variant) and a perpetrator (Jews). Otherwise you can’t play the game (a YouTube video I made explicating the rules can be found here). Once you determine to play, however, you benefit in a number of ways.

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College Graduate IQ In Freefall

Hat tip Gayle

Via Confessions of a College Professor

One of the weird things about higher education is how the smart people are fleeing it. Now, that’s at the grad school level, and I noticed it seemed to start just about the time I was done with graduate school: my most talented friends were getting their Ph.D.s, seeing what higher education had to offer, and decided an academic career was a terrible idea. They headed to the “real world” never to do anything for education or research. It takes brilliance and character to conceive “the four years spent getting a Ph.D. was a waste, and I need to do something different,” and walk away from all that hard work. I acknowledge my error here.

That’s my anecdotal evidence regarding the really smart people (although I’m not alone in seeing it), but what of the rank and file college student? What’s been happening there? A helpful chart answers the question:

It may only seem like a few points every decade, but in terms of statistics, there’s much to be said about this chart.

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Fun with IQ: Deep Thought

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Once upon a time in America the ruling dwarves, mostly psychologists, sociologists, academics, and suchlike riffraff, held that all people were equal in everything, that men and women were identical, as were all races, ethnic groups, and cultures. Criticizing any of this could, and did, lead to firing, ostracism, and having to suffer crowds of mental defectives waving placards.

Resistance arose, the resisters calling themselves Race Realists or adherents of the Human-Biodiversity movement, HBD. These were brave people who tried to deal in observation, measurement, and reality–at first. They noticed that groups who were supposed to be equal weren’t. Actually, most people had probably noticed the same things, these being obvious, but the Race Realists actually said so. A great wrath fell upon them.

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GIGO and the Intelligence of Countries: Disordered Thoughts

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Apologies to the reader. Perhaps I wax tedious. But the question of intelligence is both interesting to me and great fun as talking about it puts commenters in an uproar. It is like poking a wasp’s nest when you are eleven. I am a bad person.

Clearing the underbrush: Obviously intelligence is largely genetic–if it were cultural in origin, all the little boys who grew up in Isaac Newton’s neighborhood would have been towering mathematical geniuses–and obviously the various tests of intellectual function have, at least among testees of similar background, considerable relation to intelligence. Some individuals have more of it than others. For example, Hillary, a National Merit Finalist, scored higher than 99.5 percent of Illinois and can reliably be suspected of being bright. Some groups are obviously smarter than other groups. Mensans and Nobelists are smarter than sociologists. Of course, so are acorns.

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Bring Back Smoking

Guest Post by The Zman

Are we getting stupider?

This is hard to know as we don’t have IQ exams from further back than last century. We have some ways to approximate IQ going back into the mists of time, but those will always get bogged down by debates over methods.Then you have the flat earth types who argue that IQ is not a real thing or that there are multiple forms of intelligence. Just sticking with the good data we have for the last 100 years or so, it does appear that the West is getting dumber. By how much and and how fast is the debate.

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The Right Side of the Left

Guest Post by The Zman

This post from NRO’s Mona Charen is a good example of how the distance between the Buckley Conservatives and the Progressives has narrowed to the point where it is hard to see any light between them.

The headline was numbingly familiar: “For Blacks, College is Not An Equalizer.” The op-ed in the Washington Post by Ray Boshara explored what he called a “troubling paradox,” namely that so many well-educated black Americans “feel so economically insecure.” It’s a startling fact, Boshara continued, “that blacks with college degrees have lost wealth over the past generation.” White college graduates “saw their wealth soar by 86 percent” between 1992 and 2013, while black college graduates experienced a loss of 55 percent over the same period. I made a little bet with myself as I read the piece: “Two-to-one he doesn’t talk about family structure.”

It’s funny, but the little bet I made with myself while reading it was “A bazillion to one says she dares not mention IQ.” I won that bet, of course, because the subject of intelligence is now a forbidden topic with the so-called conservatives. The subject of group intelligence, or even group differences, causes these people to faint. They have fully internalized the magic of the blank slate so therefore biology is ruled out of any discussion of human behavior or quantifiable group differences. Magic is always the go to move.

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In Search of the Super Race: The Six-Percent Solution

Guest Post by Fred Reed

U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad team that in 2016 took the world title: members Ankan Bhattacharya, Allen Liu, Ashwin Sah, Michael Kural, Yuan Yao, Junyao Peng, and coach Po-Shen Loh

I have gotten many hundreds of emails–OK, three emails, but I am rounding up–asking me whether there is a super-race. There are different views on this matter, discussion being carried on with the manners of a hockey match. For people who have better things to do than study abnormal psychology, the players are briefly as follows: Something called the Alt-Right that believes the white race to be superior and wants to rid the country of of encroaching dark scum. The Human Biodiversity movement, HBD, more scientific and less surly but picking whites while conceding that yellow are smarter. Finally IQists, who believe that IQ is a reliable measure of genetic intelligence. They too put yellows as more intelligent.

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Free To Not Be Around You

Guest Post by The Zman

Talk to a real estate agent, who deals in mid-sized suburban properties, and they will tell you that the local schools sit atop their client’s list of concerns. A great house in a bad neighborhood usually means bad schools and no one will choose that on purpose. Instead, families will pay extra for a not so nice house in a great neighborhood because that means good schools. You can fix up your house, but you cannot make the local school better, if it is full of misbehaving knuckleheads or headed that way because of the neighborhood.

People instinctively understand a basic truth about education. That is, the quality of product coming in dictates the quality of product coming out. Despite generations of lectures from our betters, we still know that the apple does not fall far from the tree. If the parents are low-IQ losers, the kids are most likely going to be low-IQ losers. The schools are not correcting this. In fact, it is the opposite, because the other old saying about apples is also true. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch.

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Which Side Are You On?

Guest Post by The Zman

Last week Charles Murray went to the Middlebury College to give a talk about his latest book and other subjects. For those unfamiliar with Middlebury College, it is a very preppy private college in New England. It is one of the “Little Ivies” and ranked in the top-10 of national liberal arts colleges. For those unfamiliar with Charles Murray, he is most famous for The Bell Curve, a controversial book 20 years ago that described the mountain of data on IQ and its relevance to social outcomes. He’s also a fixture at the think tank AEI.

I’ve never met Charles Murray or been in the audience for one of his lectures. I’ve seen him on television a few times and he seems like a nice person, but for all I know he could be a monster. I do know he was cravenly dishonest about the last election. Like the rest of the NeverTrump loons, he refused to acknowledge that the election was a choice between two options, not a choice between Trump and the model of perfection. He believed that gave him a free pass to work on behalf of Hillary Clinton, by working against Trump.

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IQ: A Skeptic’s View

Guest Post by Fred Reed

Intelligence is worth talking about because both the reality of intelligence and perceptions regarding intelligence set limits on the possible and influence policy. For example, if the population of India on average really is below borderline retardation, the country can never amount to anything. If Latino immigrants really are as stupid as white nationalists hope, then they will always inhabit an underclass and, through intermarriage, enstupidate the American population. IQists–those who believe that IQ is a reliable measure of intelligence–insist that intelligence is largely genetic, which it obviously is, and that IQ tests reliably measure it. The latter is doubtful.

A bit of history: For years I was on Steve Sailer’s Human-Biodiversity List, now defunct. It focused on IQ and on natural selection with the fervor of snake-handlers in the backwoods of North Carolina. Contradictions in their views were stark in regard to intelligence, which was assumed identical to IQ. In communities of like-thinking enthusiasts, contradictions go unnoticed.

For example, American blacks, the Irish, and Mexicans had IQs accepted by the list as being 85, 86, and 87 respectively—almost identical. It seemed odd to me that identical IQs had produced (a) the on-going academic disaster of American blacks (b) an upper Third World country running the usual infrastructure of telecommunications, medicine, airlines, and so on, and (c) a First World European country. This, though IQist doctrine argued vociferously that IQ correlates closely with achievement. Well, it didn’t.

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