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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Two things happened. First, the intellectual equivalent of gas-station louts merged online with Race Realists. The louts had no interest in human biodiversity except insofar as it could be used to establish the inferiority of groups they didn’t like. These included all non-whites. When various Asian peoples proved awkwardly to be smarter than whites, the louts said, well, OK, but they can’t innovate.

Overlapping the louts and Race Realists in a complex Venn diagrams were ideological, and therefore slightly pathological, conservatives with their characteristic tribal hostility toward anyone different and nearby.

Second, the respectable Race Realists, under constant criticism as racists, frauds, and pseudoscientists–which they were not–became as rigidly ideological as their opponents. Herd-think settled in. Surprisingly, scientists proved as susceptible to herd-think as everyone else, and equally unaware of it. The whole cluster could no longer examine its ideas or tolerate questions.

Their chief beliefs are that everything came about through Darwinian evolution, probably to include sunspots, that everything is genetic in origin (presumably including their politics, a thought they overlook), and that IQ tests provide an infallible measure of intelligence.

These views came to constitute as hermetic a bubble as anything the Catholic Church or Communist Party ever came up with. And so, like their enemies the mental defectives with the placards, they fell into simply shouting down doubters as a form of CDA (Cognitive Dissonance Avoidance).

They became wonderfully like their enemies. In 1925, in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, fundamentalist Christians tried to prevent the mention of evolution in the public schools. Recently in in court in Philadelphia, the evolutionists successfully outlawed the mention of Christian doctrine in the public schools. The psychologies were identical. Curiously, both faiths were tripartite. The Christians had Father, Son, and Holy, Ghost, and the opposition had Darwin,  IQ, and Genetics.

Their thinking, well, wasn’t. If you argued to a physicist that the acceleration of gravity changed with the seasons, he would either ignore you or ask for evidence. He would not endeavor to have you fired or hounded in the literature. These things have happened to those doubting the sanctity of Darwin.

Permit me to give a few examples of Cognitive Dissonance Avoidance in the IQ racket . I will try to maintain the somber pretentiousness expected in such matters, but I apologize in advance in case I fall off the wagon.

Let us start here:

IQ 83. Meso-American Indians, more specifically purebred Mexican Indians, are said to have a mean IQ of 83. This is observationally plausible. Today they seem intellectually dormant.

IQ 84. Colombia, mean  IQ 84, runs modern cities, airlines, telecommunications, and other trappings of modernity.

IQ 85. American blacks. They are thought in the hbd world to be unable to do things that Colombians do routinely, yet they have a higher IQ than Colombians..

IQ 86. Ireland was long said by IQists to have this intelligence, odd in a white European nation, but was later promoted to 100, with some authorities averaging the two to get 93.

It seems curious that such similar IQs would produce such disparate results.

Then we have this datum on the Meso-American Indians:

By around 300 BCE, these Indians had invented both writing and a positional-exponential number system complete with zero, probably the best in the world at the time. As linguists universally acknowledge, their writing  was  real writing, not proto-writing or funny scratches on bark. Writing has been invented perhaps three times in human history. Further, they did this with a quite small population.

Anybody but an IQist would think this remarkable and worthy of thought. Smart then, dumb now.Why and how did this happen? What mechanism can account for it? Is something wrong with the paradigm?

From the foregoing observations we conclude:

(1) A mean IQ of 83 is sufficient to invent writing and exponential-positional number systems.

This is not a theorem but an observation. They did it, so they must have been able to do it. The only ways to avoid this conclusion are either to accept that something is wrong with the numbers–an IQist would rather submit to bastinado–or to to posit powerful evolutionary pressures favoring stupidity following 1521, the last year when these two systems were widely used.

The latter expedient carries a whiff of desperation. Perhaps someone will explain this rush toward enstupidation. (Preferably without appealing to presumed evolutionary pressures not subject to measurement or even detection acting upon genes of presumed but unestablished existence to produce presumed results not correlatable with the selective pressures. This is science?)

Now, if a particular mean IQ is sufficient to do certain things, then a higher mean IQ must perforce be sufficient to do those same things. Thus we have:

(2) American blacks, mean IQ 85, are intelligent enough to invent writing and exponential-positional number systems.

The IQist position, that the Indians are stupid (as perhaps they are) leads to fascination conclusions.  We have:

Either (a) inventing sophisticated number systems does not require mathematical talent, or (b) mathematical talent does not require much intelligence.

Which?

Since, as established above, American blacks are capable of epochal mathematical leaps forward, their failure to make such leaps in the United States must be due to something other than low intelligence. Among the possibilities are culture, discrimination, racism, white privilege, transphobia, fat shaming, institutional racism, Islamophobia, low expectations, poverty. and something about LGBT.

Thus we see that IQ theory confirms the claims of Social Justice Warriors, a surprising but scientifically derived result.

But at this point I must retract my suggestion that the genetically determined Meso-American IQ cannot have fallen sharply. Observation demonstrates the contrary. Here we have a side-by-side comparison of mean IQs of nations, the first measured in taken in 2002 and and the second in 2006. One sees rapid changes in IQ over these four years. (The cognoscenti of IQ will attribute sudden rises of BMFE, Burst Mode Flynn Effect, but this is a very technical matter.)

For example, Peru has fallen from 90 to 85, and Mexico has risen from 87 to 90. I find the case of Mexico particularly of note since I live there–here. With its genetically determined IQ rising at three points every four years, it follows that in the next century it may rise by 75 points unless something is done to halt this ominous trend.

We conclude:

A nation’s mean IQ can rise or fall by at least five points in four years.

This seems peculiar behavior for a genetically determined quantity. The most probable explanation is very rapid Punctuated Equilibrium, which we in psychometry refer to as an FGL (Frantic Genetic Lunge). Another explanation, which we will carefully avoid, is that IQ varies semi-independently of intelligence, and thus is an unreliable measure.

Perish forfend.

Next: There is said to be a positive correlation between a country’s mean IQ and its degree of economic prosperity. This is plausible and we will here accept it as true. Confirmatory examples abound: The Japanese are highly intelligent and highly prosperous; Equatorial Guineans are highly not intelligent and highly not prosperous. QED.

Thus:

Since IQ correlates positively with national prosperity, then, as prosperity rises, so must IQ.

Because genetic IQ cannot increase so rapidly in even the most lubricious of nations, we would almost have to suspect that prosperity raises IQ, not the other way around. Or else that IQ is only sometimes and unpredictably linked to intelligence. Both of these being unacceptable results, we will ignore them. CDA.