Riffing again off a comment thread from a recent post on verbal intelligence by race and political orientation, average Wordsum scores among Democrats, independents, and Republicans by self-described political orientation follow. Wordsum is a ten-question vocabulary test with results that correlate with IQ at .71–quite rigorous for the social sciences, but of course not perfect.... Read More

Apropos a discussion in a recent comment thread regarding political orientation, race, and intelligence, let's take a look at what the GSS offers us. We'll use the Wordsum test. Wordsum is a ten-question vocabulary test with results that correlate with IQ at .71--quite rigorous for the social sciences, but of course not perfect. For one... Read More

The following graph shows net support for toughening (easing) the legal requirements for obtaining a divorce in the US over the past decade by intelligence bucket as measured by the Wordsum vocabulary test. To avoid racial confounding and language fluency issues, the analysis is restricted to non-Hispanic whites born in the US. Values are calculated... Read More

In 2018, the GSS introduced a question concerning how often respondents perceived other people acting as though they, the respondents, were "not smart". The following graph shows the percentages who answered either "almost every day" or "at least once a week", by selected demographics. IQ buckets are derived from Wordsum scores: Empirically assessing the validity... Read More

The year 2016 was one of cultural upheaval, the full significance of which will become fully apparent only with the passing of time. Since the late seventies, the GSS has regularly asked about the reasons for black underachievement in "jobs, income, and housing" (correctly assessing it to be a relevant question to be put included... Read More

Vox Day, falsely accused of asserting that "intelligence determines virtue", denies it. Jordan Peterson recently denied the same in a podcast with Stefan Molyneux. Assuming we're talking about the contemporary conception of virtue as ethical behavior (as opposed to the latin virtus, which is closer to what we'd refer to today valor or courage) are... Read More

Expounding on the average perceived differences in intelligence between blacks and whites, the following graph shows the mean score on a 7-point scale asking respondents separately if blacks and if whites "tend to be unintelligent or tend to be intelligent"--the higher the score the more intelligent members of each race are perceived to be--by selected... Read More

Since 2000 the GSS has asked respondents, broken down by race, if whites and if blacks "tend to be unintelligent or tend to be intelligent", with answers on a 7-point scale, the higher the score the more intelligent the group is perceived to be. Because both questions have been paired every year they've been asked,... Read More

Searching for data on the relationship between wealth and intelligence almost inextricably leads to a study by a guy out of Ohio State saying that there isn't one. He used the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), the same one Murray and Herrnstein used for The Bell Curve. It's not my intention to cast aspersions... Read More

Some immediate questions and observations about the BuzzFeed article alleging Trump's "deep ties" to Russia follow. - The dossier reports that Trump was offered several sweetheart real estate deals inside Russia but elected not to capitalize on any of them: This is excerpted verbatim. Notice how clunky the sentence above is. The supposed source is... Read More

Way back when, an intellectual giant of our time--nay, THE intellectual giant of our time--kindly described a post I'd put together as "an elegant little regression analysis". It would become standard fare for this audacious amateur, and should continue to be to this day. In that spirit, then, a few correlations with the percentage of... Read More

A few months ago, Jayman put up a post entitled Idiocracy Can Wait?. He found what I'd found, and with a lot more evidence marshaled in the affirmative than I had assembled. Namely, past performance does not necessarily predict future results. We reactionary curmudgeons often presume that things are deteriorating. The rot in our popular... Read More

Heartiste does a little shadowboxing in the cognitive stratification ring: As he correctly asserts, it's likely not as dire a situation as many on the dissident right who haven't looked at the relevant data assume. Rather than accentuating the putative dysgenic problem, as he insinuates the GSS does, though, survey data actually attenuate it. The... Read More

Here's a crass comic that captures what I had assumed to be a fairly widely held sentiment. What is in it for a member of the Selfie generation to inflict upon himself a life-changing imposition like becoming responsible for another well-being of another human being? It's such a drag: There is a silent majority here,... Read More

As a frequent user of the GSS, I spend a lot of time looking at Wordsum scores. For those unfamiliar with the Wordsum test, it is a simple, 10 question definitional vocabulary test in which respondents earn one point for each word correctly identified from a multiple choice listing of potential synonyms (to see the... Read More

Prior to the release of the 2010 GSS data set, finding questions on the perceived danger of nuclear power generation required going back as far as the early nineties. In response to a commenter, I attempted just that. Now, more contemporary responses are available, albeit still prior to the Japanese tsunami.Responses are on a 5-point... Read More

Work by Britain's Medical Research Council (similar to the NIH in the US) provides more support for the assertion that intelligence is good for your health: This is further evidence that libertarians like Bryan Kaplan and Megan McArdle are off the mark when they argue that an uber-intelligent society would be an inefficient and unpleasant... Read More

In the comments of the previous post, a reader asserts a common perception (or misperception, apparently) concerning green luddites: The GSS asked a couple of questions concerning the potential dangers of nuclear power generation--one about those posed to a respondent's family, the other posed to the environment in general--in 1993 and again in 1994. Responses... Read More

++Addition++Steve Sailer makes note, calling out the inclusion of the question on astronomy out (and rightly so, as in reviewing the items chosen, it appears the least obviously commonsensical of the entire field) and waxing on the relationship between vocabulary and intelligence more generally.---Bruce G. Charlton, academic and editor in chief of the journal Medical... Read More

Razib has previously wondered whether or not GNXP readers ever become bored:The post struck me as a reminder of how different the relationship with time is for those with an insatiable need for cognition compared to those who are intellectually incurious. For the former, it's in perpetually short supply. For the latter, time often cannot... Read More

++Addition++As I interpret it, a comment by Case essentially conceptualizes the different perceptions in intelligence as self-serving bias. High IQ people attribute their intelligence to personal behaviors like a high need for cognition, hard work, copious studying, openness to new ideas, etc (never mind that these things are all correlated with IQ to begin with).... Read More

++Addition++Dr. Bruce G. Charlton points to a paper by Prokosch, Yeo, and Miller showing that body symmetry measurements correlate with scores on three of four g-loaded tests on a study of 78 men, the strongest relationship (r=.39) being with Ravens Matrices. To my relief, hair recession in the temple regions was not one of the... Read More

After looking at what the GSS had to say about hunting and finding that it is, among whites, an activity exhibiting a moderately negative association with intelligence, it was suggested that the Wordsum vocabulary test used as an IQ proxy makes those with greater (lesser) verbal intelligence relative to mathematical and visuo-spatial abilities appear more... Read More

++Addition++Agnostic has a couple of related posts up. He finds the same regarding hunting, in addition to looking at involvement in sports by intelligence.---Half Sigma marshalls quite the stack of circumstantial evidence that Sarah Palin is of modest intelligence. One of several reasons he gives for presuming she is at best narrowly on the right... Read More