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.
I was struck by the perfect acceptance of these numbers even though they made no sense. IQists simply do not question IQ. I pointed out the obvious conclusion, that if Mexicans could run the infrastructure of modern nations, decent if not spectacular universities, and so on, then so, on the basis of IQ, could blacks—none of which they in fact do, or have done.
When I pointed this out, there came the IQist shuck-and-jive: Well, black IQ you see was actually a bit lower, 83 or maybe even 81, and maybe the Mexicans were as much as 89 or even 90, etc. That is, IQ varies with the argument being made. (For the record, Mexicans have been promoted from 87 to 90, IQ being remarkably fluid.)
Photo: Cartagena, Colombia. Do you really believe that this city was designed and built by people with a mean IQ of 84? That is six points below Mexicans, and below American blacks? As a matter of logic, it follows that if people of IQ 84 can design, build, and operate a city with all the credentials of modernity, so can a population of IQ 85. It’s either both can, or neither can, or something is wrong with the purported IQs. For what it’s worth, my wife and I recently spent a month traveling widely in the country. No sign of stupidity.
Meanwhile, it turns out that, heh, the Irish IQ has risen 13 points to 100, exactly what one would expect of a white European nation. (It is sometimes put at 93, arrived at by averaging the 86 and the 100, horrible methodology since if two tests differed so much, then one or both must be nonsense.) For that matter, one reads that Argentine scores rose 22 points between 1964 and 1998. Meanwhile Jewish scores and academic achievement in America, astonishingly high a couple of generations back, have fallen precipitately. Since genetics cannot explain rapid changes in IQ, we conclude that a thirteen-point (or 22 point) change can be entirely due to non-genetic effects—diet, culture, ineffective tests, what have you.
This is furiously denied in IQist circles. The reason, in my judgement, is that thirteen points is exactly the purported gap between Mexicans and US whites insisted upon by IQists. These, often rabidly anti-immigration, do not want to admit any possibility that the immigrants might not be suitably stupid. Why they want immigrants to their country to be moronic is not clear.
Photo: Uxmal, Yucatan, built by baffled Maya Indians with a mean IQ of 83. This is two points below borderline retarded. They also also invented writing, done perhaps three times on the planet, and had a fully functional, positional, base-20 number system complete with zero. The borderline retarded characteristically invent number systems. It’s how you know they are retarded.
The IQ edifice is often chaotic and contradictory. For example, Science: “A new study the journal Intelligence from researchers in Europe claims that the average IQ in Western nations dropped by a staggering 13 points over the past century.” The suggested explanation is that smart women have fewer children, de-braining the gene pool.
So IQ is down by about a standard deviation. On the other hand, it is up a standard deviation. There is the Flynn effect in which IQ scores have risen three points per decade for a long time. (Because IQ is normalized to 100, the rise isn’t obvious.) This means that in the fifty years since I graduated from high school in 1964, IQ has risen fifteen points, a standard deviation and exactly the amount said to separate blacks and whites. This is a huge difference. If IQ measured intelligence, we would be in the midst of an intellectual explosion. We are not. If the Flynn effect applies to blacks, they should now be as smart as whites were in 1964. You know, when the Saturn V was being designed.
The question of variation in intelligence over historical time, usually attributed to some evolutionary process, is murky. Everything is posited, little demonstrated. However, I suggest that anyone reading the Greeks of 2500 years ago–Plato, Xenophon come to mind–or the Romans–Juvenal, Ovid, Ulpian and Papinian–will recognize minds as good as any deployed today.
Mexico, God knows when but maybe in 1900. It is the Mexico of IQist fantasy.
Fifteen-year-olds, a few years ago, probably genetically indistinguishable from the foregoing. First-generation middle-class. One a Mensa shoe-in if she applied. None of them white, not from rich families. Do you really, really think that perfect health, eleven years of schooling, and exposure to the internet do not give them an advantage in IQ over illiterate unhealthy peasants?
Then in the IQ brew there is the occasional intrusion of common sense. (Not much of it, I grant.) A country whose purported IQ seems to me to fail the test of common sense is India, mean IQ 81. Here we have a billion people averaging well below borderline-retarded. Say again? Anyone even vaguely familiar with the intellectual, artistic, and musical history of India is going to think, “What are you guys smoking?”
There immediately springs to everyone’s mind that Indian kids dominate the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The IQist response is that only the smartest Indian kids come to the US. Perhaps, but the smartest American kids are already here, aren’t they? And since the kids got their visas based on the brains of their parents, shouldn’t they be regressing to the (dismal) mean?
Photo: 2015 co-champions.
I would have to believe real hard to believe that the large number of incandescently smart Indians who litter Silicon Valley, who in my tech-reporting days I found all over engineering departments and Bell Labs and the like, spring from sub-retarded stock. Yes, I know the IQist explanation, that they are genetically-selected Brahmans, said to have a mean IQ of 96, the rest of the country being wretchedly stupid. Well, maybe. Like so much in IQist thought, it relies on genes posited but not identified, acted upon by selective pressures assumed but not quantifiable, to produce assumed effects that cannot be correlated with the pressures. If that isn’t rock-solid, I can’t imagine what could be.
Having spent twelve years in Mexico, I can see no difference in intelligence between Mexicans and Americans. Nor when I lived in Taiwan, Vietnam, or Thailand. This raises the question: How great would the difference have to be to be noticeable? Clearly, greater than thirteen points (OK, now reduced, sometimes, to ten points), since that is the Mexi-American gap measured by IQists. The response will be that I am reasonably intelligent and so spend my time with the reasonably intelligent, but that is equally true in the US, and of course I am in frequent contact with ordinary citizens.
As a sort of by-guess-and-by-God way of getting around this, I have compared Americans and Mexicans in trades I know well in the US–medicine, journalism, etc–and still can see no difference.
A final question, and I will go for breakfast. What mean IQ is thought necessary to run the infrastructure of modernity? I don’t know, but I would like to. A modern country requires a lot of intelligence—different degrees of it, but nonetheless a lot. Stupid bank clerks can’t handle currency transactions internationally (SWIFT codes, intermediary banks, exchange rates, and complex regulations). The stupid cannot repair ATMs or avionics or run computerized auto-repair or internet services. At what mean IQ, going down the scale, does a country simply become incapable of producing enough smart people to keep functioning? In a country with a mean IQ of 84, fewer than one in six have an IQ of 100 or better. Is that enough? You tell me.
Eggs over, bacon on the side…
I keep hoping that “this” is the week Fred’s going to break out and really have something worthwhile to write about. But IMO, “this” is not the week and I’ve sadly come to the conclusion that Fred’s just an ordinary, retired expat with way too much time on his hands.
Your remarks disparaging attempts to quantify IQ are good but I’m sure you do agree that individual IQ’s matter a lot in a persons life and academics and collectively as for races and nations. IQ Tests measure mental achievement and are used to estimate future ability. A little like measuring an athletes high-jump ability and then postulating how far they might be able to broad jump. Sure, a person who has never jumped before will make progress with training but jumping ability is inherited and the max progress might be 15% or so. Likewise, better diet etc and academic training can get a low scoring IQ person up but there will still be a personal limit just as a high-jumper has a personal limit. In the case of groups, the highest IQ would set the upward limit and the quantity of high IQs would reflect the gross output. The liberal policy of placing low IQ students with high IQ students and requiring the teacher to make up for the difference is plain ass stupid.
A whole lot of blah blah.
#1. IQ isn’t equal to intelligence. It is an ESTIMATION of intelligence. And a rather crude one at that.
#2. Some races, black cough cough, really are stupid on average. While I know a few intelligent black doctors, they are the exception, not the rule. I have been to 12 countries, and the blacks are always poor, dimwitted, and with high crime rates among other things.
Who says it was the Indians of Colombia who designed Cartagena? I’d bet it was whites – even if they have Spanish surnames.
IW–you nailed it. A simple perusal on several website searches uncovers the history of Cartagena, Columbia and it is as you suspected.
As late as the 1500’s the country’s residents were primarily still living in mud and stick homes.
With colonialization from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe they started progressing with advances in simple amenities and architecture–( water purification, plumbing, stable agriculture etc). The Catholic Church played a large role with funds and teaching rudimentary skills.
Of note, currently the 8 biggest companies? SAB Miller, Argos, DOW Chemical, BASF Columbia, DuPont, Dole, CEMEX and the National Oil Refinery ( although built by British Petroleum)…so much for advanced civilization created by Columbians……
Agree with RHS and General above.
IQ is a useful but ROUGH measure, and a lot of its intended use is to measure childhood development, not adult intelligence.
Moreover, the shape of the curve is enormously important. White IQs average only around 100, but the curve of white IQ extends farther to the right than any other, so with a large white population you get a useful number of true geniuses – pick your IQ cutoff for that, but you won’t find 200-IQ people in any color but white. The Chinese, Japanese and Ashkenazi Jews have higher average IQs, but don’t produce significant numbers of geniuses (except for a single, now closed window in time from roughly 1870-1950 when there were disproportionately large numbers of Jewish geniuses – ironically many of them not pure Ashkenazi!).
What does this mean? Well, it means that your central and south American societies might have poor average IQ, but a distribution with enough smarter people to design and manage the construction of those urban centers, without meaning that the average is wrong.
Moreover, a countrywide average does not necessarily represent the average IQ of its urban inhabitants, and that in turn will certainly not represent the average IQ of its professional and managerial class urbanites.
What is plain to see is that two racial groups have not achieved the level of intelligence found widely in the more obviously civilized groups, and appear to have distributions where the smartest outliers still aren’t all that smart.
Not the first time that Fred uses the ability to run airports and telecom and big cities to make his point.
Bullshit.
There’s a huge difference between implementing and using existing technology and inventing it. Any chimp can use an iphone. But only few are capable of developing the technology behind it.
Fred, all that Padre Kino has clouded your thinking.
All the serious inventions / mechanical / electrical, drugs, engineering, writings, laws, universities, medicine, all by white men.
End of story.
Average IQ is the average -usually median, not arithmetic- of all the people in the given population, sometimes that is close to the population’s highs and lows and sometimes it is not.
There are very high IQ Mexicans or Indians and there are very low ones. You can have a median IQ of, say, 100 with a spread running from 60 to 140 or you can have a median IQ of 100 with a spread running from 95 to 105.
The groups with the highest spread are more likely to produce excellence than the groups with the very narrow spread since the highest spread includes the ones that can really achieve excellence and the lowest includes mostly only the ones that are prone to mediocrity.
There are many other factors than just IQ that determine success of either an individual or an entire population, but IQ us a reasonably fair general predictor of which will be one or the other. Populations with higher average IQ’s tend to far outperform populations with low average IQ’s.
As for yourself as an individual, YMMV.
There is such a thing as “cultural IQ”. Take two simple examples.
A) Very high IQ people are in charge of everything. They direct and design more intelligent systems and put the rest of the people to work in a more intelligent manner. The result is amazing architecture and well functioning markets. Educational and political systems thrive and flourish.
B) Low IQ nepotists and strongmen have risen up through the power ranks. These people are good at seizing power but they are not smart enough to manage people effectively. Buildings crumble. Markets break. Education fails. The high IQ members of society realize that their society is led by asshats so they emigrate or simply do not contribute. They are unable to contribute to the intellectual growth of their society because doing so would lead to repression. Or they are simply so propagandized that their intelligence is wasted. (To use an old programmer’s axiom: Garbage in, garbage out.)
Note that in both Group A and Group B, you can have large numbers of very high IQ people, but in Group B they simply are not contributing.
Take a look at a globe and try to classify each country into group A or B. The main reason general IQ matters is because the smarter the people are, on average, the more likely it is that they will put smart people in charge. Smart people put smart people in charge. Dumb people put dumb people in charge. This is a generality. Obviously, smart people often do put dumb people in charge. There are cultural mechanisms that help lean one way or another. Northern/Western European cultures have many mechanisms that lean towards helping to put smart people in charge, so they more often end up in Group A. Latin american and middle eastern cultures have many mechanisms that lean towards helping to put stupid people in charge and so they more often end up in Group B.
“Obviously, smart people often do put dumb people in charge. ” Obama.
I would agree with the above, and just add that I think this applies to all people in general. I tend to agree with Fred’s point that humans generally fall (regardless of race) in to the middle of the IQ curve, many outliers on each side for sure. However, cultural IQ is a lot more of a tell. Look at the drug cartels. These are Billion dollar, high stakes (if you disagree with management you get killed, not just fired) multinational corporations. They are literally fighting against entire governments, and they show no sign of slowing down. Most are run by either Mexicans (think El Chapo) or more locally, by black street gangs. I know some scary smart black people (although rare) and I equally know some phenomenally stupid white people (mostly liberals). The huge differences I see between them is their culture. Black culture is one of little impulse control, stupidity accepted as a norm, and failure to take any responsibility for anything. Don’t think for a minute that the blacks that HAVE impulse control are not exploiting this. BTW, that culture is starting to infect the whites and the Hispanics, making them easily as dumb and dangerous.
Why were we “greater” in the 50’s? Because, culturally we did not accept stupidity as readily, forcing those that wanted to accept it to shape up or ship out. The more you allow something, the more it grows, and i don’t think that is biology.
I can see some of Fred’s points, but he is missing some points. He also doesn’t really offer an alternative. IQ may not be perfect, but it does offer a pretty good indication of how a group of people will function(or not function). Not one single black run country or society has even come close to doing what the rest of the world has. Fred is too smart to use the whole ‘colonialism’ excuse for why africa is such a shithole, so is there another explanation?
How many high-IQ folks does a society need to PREVENT low-IQ folks from destroying what they created? Would a six-sigma deviation upwards be enough?
What if a significant number of nominally high-IQ folks are driven by failed ideologies and belief systems (think Harvard, Yale, socialist and communist faculty members) so that they are net destroyers instead of creators and maintainers? How long can advanced systems survive deliberate sabotage by maleducated minds?
I’m afraid we’re about to find out.
Intelligence is important but unless there is a large difference between groups or individuals then self discipline,morals and ethics matter more,at least imho.
Fred is an idiot. Where are the sparkling black built cities? Ummm. They take diamonds and turn them into shit. Detroit springs to mind. All of Zimbabwe. Etc.
Name one black majority city that is not a shithole.
name one majority black COUNTRY that isn’t a shithole. Even more relevant, they can’t even maintain a city or country that was built by others and gradually given to them.
Intelligence isn’t the only thing that determines if a society is successful. Idk remember where I read it, maybe here, but one key concept that has made Western countries more successful is the primacy of the individual. By having individual rights delineated, like the Bill of Rights, for example, it greatly limits the damage that the idiots in government can do. (Compared to non-western countries anyway)
Llpoh says:
January 12, 2017 at 7:47 pm
Fred is an idiot. Where are the sparkling black built cities? Ummm. They take diamonds and turn them into shit. Detroit springs to mind. All of Zimbabwe. Etc.
Name one black majority city that is not a shithole.
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A couple of years ago I was watching Anthony Bourdain eat a goat’s liver ( from inside the goat) with the Masai in Kenya. The Masai were talking about the struggle to keep their culture given the pull modern life has on their young. I was thinking, “what culture?”
Some cultures really should be annihilated. The Aztecs head up this category. Anything Bantu is not far behind.
People of exceptional intelligence rise to the top from any race , racial blend regardless of most conditions they experience ! Of course as children should they be malnourished or deprived of some medical care this will greatly affect development . Now for the naked fact , the Unitied States has bankrupted twisted and made every opportunity to blacks to rise above their inherent poverty stricken existance due to racism and past inhuman treatment . So , what went wrong ? IQ of blacks make them what they are and that explains why every where blacks have control everything turns to shit ! There are grand examples to the contrary but these are exceptions not the norm ! We had a saying in the industrial mechanical field : “You can’t fix stupid”