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Now that we have some British politicians talking about IQ it seems the right time to rush out a summary I was slowly preparing about the lives and achievements of different intelligence bands. Please accept this as a general overview, subject to revision, to which more illustrative details and precise boundaries will be added at a later date.
Tribe 1 “High Risk”
These are the least able 5% of the population. In a town of 10,000 persons these would constitute 500 citizens. Learning is slow, so all intellectual achievements take a fair bit of time. Since all lifespans are finite, and for this group lifespans are shorter than average, many skills are effectively out of reach because it is very unlikely that they will ever be learnt. Of course, some learning always takes place, because everyone can learn, but in their case the pace must be slow, the materials simple, and the steps carefully supervised.
Lifespans are more than 21% shorter than average, and they are more than 50% more likely to be suffering psychological difficulties than average. They are most at risk of all health problems, and all the problems of life.
These people are “high risk” because they make unforced errors and because they are at risk of being exploited by the unscrupulous. They are less likely to follow rules (perhaps they cannot see the point of them) or to delay gratification, and more often than average to wind up in trouble. They have high levels of credulity, tend to believe in god and magic and coincidence and miracles. Vocabularies are relatively mall, not much above the functional basics of the language. As a rule of thumb, if you understand the 3000 most frequent English words then you will understand 95% of the words in common use. If you understand 5000 words (and their close variants) you get 99.9% word coverage in ordinary language. Computations are restricted to simple operations, mostly addition and subtraction.
They can sign their name and add up the total of bank deposit entries. They can do basic concrete tasks. In terms of reading and entertainments they like stories, picture magazines, music with strong melodies and rhythms, and broad comedy. (Later we can get into the details about what entertainments and materials are favoured). Employment opportunities, which would have been plentiful in simpler agrarian societies, are now far more limited, tenuous, and precarious. Modern life has become very demanding, and simple physical labour no longer adds much value. Their wages will be low, and in kinder and wealthier societies they are likely to be receiving social benefits. The armed services will not recruit them. They have frequent periods without paid work. They will have no effective savings.
There is little about their appearance which would indicate limited intellectual power, and their social conversation is usually in line with basic social niceties. It would take more somewhat more extensive conversations to reveal shortcomings. They can use mobile phones and drive cars, though they would have difficulty with the driving theory exam. They would also crash about three times more often than average. They are very recognisably our cousins, much more like us than not. In IQ terms they are 75 and below.
Tribe 2 “Uphill Battle”
These are the next 20% of the population in terms of ability. They would be 2,000 citizens in the town of 10,000 inhabitants. Learning is somewhat faster, and achievements are of better quality. Learning varies from the slow pace, simple materials and careful supervision already mentioned previously, to very explicit, hands-on training. They tend to credulity, belief in god and superstition. They can locate the intersection of two streets on a map, identify two features in a newspaper sports story, perhaps calculate the total cost of purchases listed in a catalogue, and draw inferences from two identifiable facts and deal with some distractors.
Vocabularies are somewhat larger, computation includes some multiplication and division. In terms of reading they will enjoy a little more depth in terms of content. Employment opportunities include simple assembly and packaging tasks, food preparation, assistant roles in caring professions. They can use some checklists, and procedural guides. The armed services will probably not recruit them, because many of them will take too long to train.
They have a 21% lower survival up to age 76 (Whalley&Deary 2001). They have about a 50% greater risk of hospitalization for schizophrenia, mood disorder, and alcohol-related disorders (Gale et al. 2010) and for personality disorders (Moran et al. 2009) with more self-reported psychological distress (Gale et al. 2009) and with a greater risk of vascular dementia (McGurn et al. 2008).
They will probably have fast lifestyles, with restricted planning and savings. They have more accidents than average, probably twice as many motor vehicle accidents than average. In IQ terms they are between 75 and 90.
Tribe 3 “Keeping Up”
These are the middle 50% of the population. They are the “average” the “man in street” the person with “common sense”. By definition, this is what most people are like. In our town of 10,000 they would constitute a massive 5,000 persons. The town would be built round them, their abilities, their needs, and their frailties. In the way that clothes are mass produced for average sizes and fashions, the town would be made to their taste. The money would follow them. Films, TV, books, magazines, and newspapers are written for them.
Learning is mostly mastery learning, hands on. The brighter ones learn from written materials plus experience. They can deal with tasks which require the integration of multiple pieces of information from one or more documents, which themselves may be complex and contain much irrelevant information. However, the matches they are asked to search for tend to be literal, and the correct information in the test material is not located near incorrect material, where it would be too confusing.
They are almost always able to calculate the total costs of purchases from an order form; write a brief letter explaining an error made on a credit card bill; and using a calculator, work out what the discount would be on a bill if paid within 10 days; enter information into a car maintenance record; and perhaps be able to state in writing the argument made in lengthy newspaper article. Vocabularies are in the 17,000 to 21,000 range, with older people in the upper part of the range.
They may believe in god, have some superstitions, be fooled by some coincidences, have difficulty in calculating some odds, but are usually adept at using rules of thumb and avoiding confidence tricks and deceptions. They know that magic depends on tricks, even if they cannot explain them. Their understanding of science will be basic and subject to omissions. They can catch out brighter people in errors, and tend to be pragmatic, with little theory. However, they may believe that day and night are due to the earth going round the sun.
They occupy the middle range occupations, in what used to be clerical trades, and sales jobs of all descriptions. Likely jobs are Police officer, nurse, trainer, and when the job was still available in the economy, machinist. They will delay gratification to some extent, and have some savings. Incredibly, in modern welfare states they would only just be net contributors in tax terms, but would mostly get benefits in almost equal proportion to their tax contributions.
As you would expect, motor vehicle accidents are at the average rate. In IQ terms they are between 90 and 110.
Tribe 4 “Out Ahead”
These are the fortunate next 20% of the population. Prospects look better. Learning can now take place in the college format, with lectures and reading lists and set work, though this needs to be well structured and frequently tested. In the brighter part of the range students will gather and infer their own information. They can deal with tasks which require more inferences, multiple-feature matches, integration and synthesis from complex passages or documents, and the use of multiple sequential operations. They could use a bus schedule to determine the appropriate bus for a given set of circumstances; using an eligibility pamphlet, they are able to calculate the yearly amount a couple would receive in basic supplementary security income; and perhaps be able to use a table comparing credit cards to identify the two categories used and to write down two differences between them. Vocabularies are very roughly in the 20,000 to 30,000 range, depending on age.
Their entertainments include more content and complexity. They read about politics, science, history, at least at newspaper level.
Occupations like manager, teacher and accountant are achieved. They would be net contributors to modern welfare states, probably equivalent to supporting an extra household, and very probably have some savings of their own. Motor vehicle accidents are at the average rate. In IQ terms they are between 110 and 125.
Tribe 5 ”Yours to Lose”
These are the top 5%. If you are fortunate enough to be in this category, the world is your oyster, unless you blow it by getting drunk, or by imagining that you are so bright that no further work is required, or you go off the rails into being some sort of clever fool, due to some personality difficulty.
Learning will be based on gathering and inferring own information. There may be lectures, but these are optional, with less frequent feedback on results, and more autonomy in learning. Learners are expected to search for faults in what they are taught.
They can deal with tasks which require the application of specialised background knowledge, dis-embedding the features of a problem from a text, and drawing high-level inferences from highly complex text with multiple distractors. They can almost certainly do the previous credit card comparison task; they can summarise from a given text two ways in which lawyers may challenge prospective jurors; and, using a calculator, determine the total cost of carpet to cover a room, given the dimensions of the room and the cost per square yard of carpeting. (There you are, at the apotheosis of intellect. You can challenge a juror and carpet a room). Their occupations will include the professions, the sciences and, with experience and application, the top posts in business and government. Entertainments will include most artistic and literary endevours, and theories will be seen as interesting in themselves. Vocabularies are in the 30,000 to 42,000 range, which is probably as high as you can go without using lots of technical terms. In modern welfare states they would be high net contributors, very probably supporting two or even three households in addition to their own, and have property and savings. In IQ terms they are 125 and above.
Five tribes are all you need
And that, dear folks, is it. In a representative sample of people there is a fivefold difference in learning speed, and in intellectual power. Five tribes of humanity are all you need know about. These are the facts, when you come to brass tacks, with which all civilizations must grapple, making whatever choices are required to deal with these natural differences. You can let wages find their own level, or regulate them, or tax them and distribute benefits. If you direct the brightest to the hardest tasks you will solve problems quickly. If you prevent them from doing those tasks progress will be slower. Societies sometimes trust people bright people, sometimes resent and ignore them. Genocides are frequently targeted on them, particularly because they are minorities who generate wealth and exercise social power and influence, and have prestige.
So, good night, and thanks.
Now that most people have gone away to read lighter material, we can get to the strong stuff, offered to you in a discreet brown paper envelope. Readers of this blog will know that the top 5% doesn’t really amount to much. For example (and now we can do big numbers, being the clever sort of persons we are) being in the top 5% means that in 10,000 persons you would have to share this accolade with 500 other people. Hardly an exclusive club. Some of them would have odd ideas and a thoroughly improper understanding of moderately complicated concepts. Some of them will fail to understand sampling theory, simple statistics, structured equation modelling and factor analysis for a start, and many of them will be subject to foolish delusions and be mired down with considerable ignorance. It was said of an Oxbridge professor that he was overheard chastising his ten year old son thus: “No, no, no, my child! You have totally misunderstood the Medieval Papacy”. People can be a disappointment.
We must draw some distinctions so as to refine this top 5% lump of common or garden intellects into more closely graded achievements. Therefore, within the top 5% we can find two smaller categories. The final category has quite a range to it, if observed closely, but 7 is as far as most of us can count.
Bright the top 1% (100 in 10,000) They are the upper half of the brightest students at the most prestigious universities. They get better degrees, solve more problems, and gain the respect of those for whom the same tasks take lots of time to complete. They are more likely to get doctorates in hard subjects, more likely to publish, more likely to obtain patents and to own businesses.
Vocabularies are in the 35,000 to 42,000 range and most intellectual tasks are within their grasp, although they have many techniques to learn, particularly in maths and science. However, one should not get too precious about being “bright”. The United Kingdom has 650,000 such persons, most of them walking about unsupervised. In IQ terms they are 135. You can call anyone above IQ 130 the Two Sigmas, because they are two standard deviations above the mean.
Eminent (or Scary Bright) the top 0.01% (1 in 10,000) There would be one such person in our town. The town’s progress might depend on whether they are able to contribute their ideas and see them implemented. More likely, they will leave town and search out other eminent people just for the fun of exchanging ideas. Their vocabularies will be above 40,000 words. They are unlikely to believe in gods or superstitions, and can calculate coincidences. (Dick Feynman used to begin his lectures by saying: “As I parked my car today I noticed that the licence plate of the car in front of me was 79346229. What’s the chance of that?”). They may be seen as unconventional, and can be difficult to understand. In IQ terms they are 155. Call them the Three Sigmas.
When such eminent intellects leave town, they soon learn that they are not that bright. After all, even the United Kingdom has 6,500 of them, and they soon work out which the really bright ones are. So, for really interesting minds, we are looking at those who, in open competition, tested on very hard subjects, can show other scary bright people that they are closer to 1 in a million. In IQ terms this would be 160, but it would be simpler to say that they are well above conventional testing limits. Call them the Four Sigmas.
Think of Bertrand Russell going up to Cambridge University and finding very few intelligent people there, but later observing that every conversation with John Maynard Keynes was exhausting, and noting he always came away feeling defeated. Or consider John Von Neumann, (from Steve Hsu’s very good account) who made fundamental contributions in mathematics, physics, nuclear weapons research, computer architecture, game theory and automata, and also had formidable powers of mental calculation and a photographic memory. Laureate Eugene Wigner who knew Planck, Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein ranked von Neumann the highest in intellect, and the aforementioned luminaries did not question this judgement. A little uncharitably, Enrico Fermi said to Herb Anderson, with whom he ran the first ever nuclear reaction: “You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me”. Laureate Hans Bethe, whom I revere, went so far as to say: “I always thought Von Neumann’s brain indicated that he was from another species, an evolution beyond man”.
For general purposes, five tribes suffice. For interesting stuff, seven tribes is the better account and even then, at the higher levels, pay close attention to the order of precedence within eminent minds. For society what matters is the ease of communication between intelligence bands, the speed with which such minds can be identified and engaged in difficult tasks, and the social relations between those who differ in this important characteristic, whilst sharing so much else.Disclaimer. The above results are largely from the US and the results are mostly from the 1993 data on National Literacy with some later findings, and my main source has been Linda Gottfredson’s papers on this subject. For simplicity of exposition, I have conformed to the requirements of the current research apartheid, in which group differences between genetic groups are not reported. More recent US results include recent immigrants, and so the results may be unfair to them (not yet integrated), and by implication, to the locals as well (overall results dragged down). Results are less good for African Americans. Prof Linda Gottfredson is updating all these findings, and I will let you know when her next version is out. The account above is mostly based on white people in the USA. It would be suitable for Britain and the former British colonies which, wherever they are in the world, seem to have retained their Greenwich Mean IQ of 100. Neither the heat of the tropics nor vast spaces of the prairies or the outback, nor even far flung golf clubs and Gilbert and Sullivan societies have dented their intellect. Curious what insults the human brain can survive.
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Professor Thompson,
Thanks for this very helpful blogpost.
I have one question about this line:
"In terms of reading and entertainments they like stories, picture magazines, music with strong melodies and rhythms, and broad comedy"
—-
Could you elaborate?
What does aesthetic sensitivity have to do with cognitive ability?
I'm not sure there is any connection at all.
In Part 2, perhaps the variations in fertility between the tribes could be discussed, with implications for future societal functioning and prosperity.
Thanks for this; it is just what I've been looking for recently, particularly for middle-class friends who have remained in a resolutely middle-class bubble their entire lives and are not capable of imagining what life is like outside the insular world of average-to-high IQs. That insularity is a far bigger social problem than is widely recognized, I think.
It is good also to see some indications of hard data in the key area of educability, which outside of the military does not seem to have been sufficiently studied. It would be good to do/find more research on what persons at more finely graded levels of IQ can learn (plus rates of learning and support needed) given reasonably optimal tuition for rigorous, g-loaded subjects such as Maths.
This will have to wait for the next version. Aesthetic tastes vary, and there is now data looking at Facebook "likes" and educational achievements, which allows a rough and ready estimate of intelligence according to what sort of materials, TV shows, films and so on people enjoy. The latest version of National Literacy has more detail on reading habits. I have already posted on some of the literature reading studies.. You have to be able to understand insights and arguments before you can enjoy them. For example, "xkcd" makes me laugh out loud, but I can see that many people would find it boring, or somewhat obscure. Rindermann and I mentioned this in one of our papers, looking at the sorts of museums and exhibitions parents visited with their children, and looking at the intellectual content of the descriptions and explanations offered. So, in answer, aesthetic sensitivity is predicated on a pretty high level of cognitive ability.
Yes, there is lots more we can add, but we will start by giving far more details about the sorts of tasks that can be done, and the materials which people search out and feel comfortable with. So much to do!
"nor even far flung golf clubs and Gilbert and Sullivan societies have dented their intellect": well, there is the counteracting effect of Caledonian Societies and Burns' Clubs.
Tribe 5 and higher were pretty much the people who went to university when I did.
If you want a good overview of how psychological traits overlap and are related (or not), get Spent by Geoffrey Miller. It gives a quick, but good overview of modern personality psychology (among other things). And it is so insightful and entertaining that you'll want to read it again and again, at least once a year. Yes, really.
To quote a relevant part:
"It also seems likely that music preferences reveal general intelligence. Conventional top 40 radio stations, pop music and easy listening music are designed to maximize sales by appealing to the center of the bell curve. Alternative music and classical music basically connote higher-intelligence music – difficult listening music – which appeals to a smaller, but more discerning market segment. It tends to be more complex with regard to melodic structure and scale, timbral richness and variety, rhythmic intricacy and variety, and lyrical vocabulary and allusiveness. This musical complexity requires more from the listener's auditory perception, attention and short-term memory so listeners of lower intelligence find it overwhelming, stressful and weird. So higher intelligence can be displayed with some reliability through a stated preference for music by Bartók and Björk, rather than Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hannah Montana."
I know you deliberately avoided it, but the proportions given here only work if the mean IQ of the population in question is 100. Since most human populations (even those in Europe) have a mean significantly lower than that, the proportions will be shifted accordingly.
Great exposition of the nature of people at different levels of smarts!
Imitative people who rise to the top, with hardly any talent haven't been mentioned.
As a layman, I have a few questions.
How does the within-group variation in correlated outcomes compare within the between-group variation? Is, for instance, the range of outcomes for people within any of these IQ- groups quite wide and evenly distributed it or is it a fairly steep bell curve?
Is the within-group variation more pronounced for the highest-IQ groups than the lower? For instance, it is a bit of a cliche that the highest-IQ groups include a noticeably large number of individuals who really don't get the most out of life at all e.g. http://bit.ly/1cie9z9
145 IQ is about 99.9th percentile; 160 is about 99.997 (1 in thirty thousand).You don't get to Unimaginable Genius levels until you hit 170ish.
Above 3 sigma, put away the IQ instrument and re-base on the group judgement of the brightest available minds.
Yes, a more complicated version, which I certainly intend to write one day, looks at globalisation from a skills perspective.If global IQ is in the 90 to 94 range, and everyone can compete freely, then below IQ 90 the prospects for employment don't look good. There will be millions of productive people above IQ 90 clamouring for opportunities, and providing low cost services and goods. China looks like taking the lead in this regard. Then all the arrangements we have constructed on a national basis are put under stress. If we buy our goods from abroad, and then buy our services from abroad, then everywhere ends up being abroad, and we have to reconfigure ourselves in global terms, though quite how that will work out with national legislatures I do not know.
Is there any published evidence on this?
Thanks. Press reports notwithstanding, bright people tend to do well, live longer, and avoid trouble. There may be a ghoulish fascination with "genius ends up as a drunk vagrant" stories, but if you look at long term population studies, the bright are blessed with brains and health. Have a look at Prof Ian Deary's work on this, which I often post about.
"You don't get to Unimaginable Genius levels until you hit 170ish." I've always considered such statements to be utter tosh. All the UGs who made Western Civilisation preceded IQ tests, so we don't know. Unless more Newtons, Shakespeares, Gausses, Mozarts, and Rembrandts come along, we'll never know.
My guess is that I'd be very surprised if Darwin had an IQ of 170, but he might be one of the most civilisation-changing of geniuses. Perhaps Luther is another example. I do wish people who see the potential usefulness of the concept of IQ would stop being silly about it.
"Vocabularies are relatively mall"
Relatively speaking…
Good stuff. I look forward to the promised updates and refinements.
Just a few thoughts:
1. You might want to mention that your bottom 5% does not include people who are considered outside normality (I think "developmentally delayed" is currently the preferred term). For what it's worth, I have a relative who's on the border between the bottom of the bottom 5% and abnormal — she can use a *simple* cell phone, following repeated training; can drive short, familiar routes; has a job doing very simple, repetitive assembly; can't count change; can't read an analog clock. She doesn't look abnormal and is able to act appropriately and say conventional things in most social situations. She's fascinating to observe — and can be frustrating as hell to live with.
2. Since you're attaching IQs to the tribes, it might make sense to scale up the numbers, so that the whole scheme will seem less Procrustean. Working from a total of 1 million would not be confusing to most readers, I should think. Or I suppose you could say that the town is perfectly representative of the population identified in the disclaimer.
3. The observations on likelihood of belief in god strike me as somewhat Euro-centric (or perhaps academy-centric). To be anecdotal, in the world I inhabit (consisting mostly of carriage-trade lawyers in an eastern U.S. city), religious participation seems to be surprisingly high, and I don't think more than a few percent of it is entirely pro forma.
Slightly off topic but important:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115787/rising-iq-scores-dont-mean-greater-intelligence?a&utm_campaign=tnr-daily-newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=11307225
you are right to pick me up on this, absolutely speaking. I need more vocabulary data. some of the newer internet stuff is biased to the high end. The newer NALS study has better particulars.
A million is a big number to most people, though I accept it is small to an American lawyer! If you look at Gigerenzer on risk communication, then 1000 is the best number. Initially I wanted to do it that way, but compromised at 10,000 so as to get in the later, rarer tribes of intellect. You are right that I implicitly left developmentally delayed children out of this calculation. This becomes a somewhat technical issue, because the frequency of such children varies in different groups, but my point was to show that a very normal looking person can have great difficulty with some mental tasks, and as we tend to congregate with people of like ability, this is often partly invisible to us. Please check my calculations on the PISA post!
Sorry, I forgot to respond on the religion issue. Perhaps best, in America, to measure the belief in superstitions, magic, spooky coincidence etc rather than formal religion.
Mensa say their membership is wide.
Adolf Hitler? I can't find any published evidence, but he was supposed to have a low IQ and was manipulative and imitative of other successful regimes?
"somewhat Euro-centric (or perhaps academy-centric)": maybe, but might it apply to Chinese and Japanese too?
Thanks for the response — I will give them a look!
It might–I honestly don't know. With respect to educated Europeans, my sense is that they tend to assume, innocently but incorrectly, that educated Americans share their level of areligiosity.
For purportedly Christian people, elderly Americans seem to be surprisingly glad to suffer very unpleasant circumstances in exchange for lengthening their lives by a week or two. It's not what I'd expect from people who ought to be happy to meet their Maker.
I agree with this. However, I was using "genius" in the sense of "really smart".
@ dearieme: ouch! — we're not all religious here in the US — some of us are ex-religious 🙂
Remember that what IQ measures — "g" — is the underlying correlate of various mental abilities. It is not the abilities themselves.
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. I do believe in gods. Their names are Mozart, Stravinsky, Bach, among others. I read Edward Gibbon for leisure. I dropped out of college from boredom, ennui and Weltschmertz after two years.
Am I a fool?
You are making comparisons between personality and IQ scores, quite hard and linear manner. It is always very important to make clear which are (at first) statistical averages. This means you will have a majority of people who are in this range and that will tend to present at least more than half the personality traits and social, cultural and cognitive development. But perhaps just as important, also have people with only one or two traits-core, will be in this range (especially IQ scores).
In addition, there are large internal variations within these cognitive-social groups. I believe that the first two tribes, in fact, there should be a tendency for homogeneous cognitive landscape (and a timid growth to variability of personality). But the highest for human achievement will be more complex and diverse will are their cognitive portfolios.
I recently read the work of Ruthsatz on the characteristics of 8 children prodigies. Surprisingly to many, found a large variation in the individual scores of the children studied, 108 to 147. Two people identified as child prodigies (that means 8 people were analyzed who were identified as gifted during their respective childhoods ) obtained total average iq of 108 and 111 respectively. Another finding of the study was that they all had scores very high working memory, 99% percentile. Two people were diagnosed with autism and that all the prodigies had high scores for the AQ test.
It makes sense that higher levels for human achievement should be to the presence of biological structure type ''twice exceptional'', where a disability is compensated by an unusual advantage. The highest levels for human achievement or not always for what I suspect, in most cases, will not fit for the highest levels of intelligence, whether IQ tests really are the only and best means to capture this trait.
In my opinion, most creative geniuses tend to have asymmetric cognitive characteristics, that is to say, are actually very good in some components, along with poor or medium in others. This imbalance acts as a reinforcement for the intellectual obsession in the areas where they are best.
The fewer things a person is good and the more she is good at one thing, depending on your level of intelligence (in this case, we are talking about cognitive style, technical, mixed or intellectual, symmetric or asymmetric, etc.), it will tend to more specialized and thus be closer to the transcendence of the accumulation of acquired knowledge to the creation of knowledge itself.
The various types of geniuses are all related to both autism and with savant syndrome, presenting many things in common. These people, in fact, are outliers, are different species from the rest of humanity and may not even be compared with the average joey.
Gottlieb
The correction is more than a little necessary. I used to be president of the Prometheus Society, and there were plenty of religious people aboard. A smaller percentage than among the rest of the population, but still considerable. Your phrasing would suggest that a religious person with an IQ above 145 was unusual. That is simply not so.
Perhaps I am over-reading based on what others have written over the years, but it seems that there is some disappointment and annoyance that there are so many people of high-IQ who are believers, as if it should not be that way, and doesn't fit the preferred pattern. In support of that theory I report that I have a fair bit of contact with the developmentally disabled, and they don't tend to believe in much of anything. So I am suspecting that you are missing the other end as well.
The 7 categories you report have value, but the attempt to generalise obscures a great deal. There are more exceptions than your choice of language would suggest.
I am reporting a general trend, to which there will be many exceptions, as is always the case with general trends. Certainly, very bright believers of my acquaintance get irritated by the presumption that they are foolish to be theists. A general observation is just that. It is an observation, not a prohibition. You can have a very bright believer like Newton (whose theology a close school friend of mine who is a priest spent time studying at Cambridge) and still have a general negative correlation between intelligence and religious belief.
Wonderful post. I very much enjoyed reading it, especially the later sections about the sixth and seventh tribes. I have one question regarding the tribes in general and the IQ levels you gave regarding them.
Is it possible for a person to have abilities of a tribe above the one their own IQ level would place them? I have converted my SAT scores into IQ scores and, depending on the method used, have come out with scores ranging from 103-110.
Despite that, none of the tasks presented in the description of the abilities of tribe 5 (those with IQ 125) sound very difficult to me. To add a bit more information to this post, I tested my estimated vocabulary size and found it to be around 30,400 words (which also fits that category and which will probably go up in the future, since I am only 19 now).
I do not believe I am actually as intelligent as someone with an IQ of 125, so I am wondering if the distribution of IQ between verbal and visual-spatial intelligence can make a difference. My IQ is heavily skewed towards the verbal end and I scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal section of the SAT. My scores on the math section were much less impressive though; I scored in the 56th percentile there.
Feel free to ignore this comment if you wish; it does not add anything particularly constructive to your post. I am simply curious if the verbal/visual-spatial IQ difference can affect it at all.
Of course one can be much stronger on some abilities than others. General intelligence is a general finding. My description of tribes is a broad brush approach. You could check out your own pattern by trying a variety of intelligence tests, some of which are online. I cannot vouch for them but http://www.testq.com/career/quizzes/121 is an example. Or, if you are really interested, contact a careers center and see what they can offer. The Woodcock Johnson has many fans, and has good employment data behind it. Anyway, you may be someone who has a very big difference between different types of mental skill, and you can either work round that, or practice more in your weaker areas. Most people seem to do the former. Simply knowing something about your pattern of skills is useful in going about your life.
''… You could check out your own pattern by trying a variety of intelligence tests, some of which are online…''
On-line iq tests??
Did intelligence tests online, most of them are not fakes or incompletes?
Well, I've done several test iq online and have found some patterns. No more, my total average for all of them was around 110. Taking into account that most of them are in English and many are timed, I would think that this result was below that I believe can run. Like CuriosAnon, my forte is verbal intelligence… and creativity (recently became engaged me to write poetry as well as some text content of political journalism and I did not do badly in any of these functions). My weakness is math, which I'm almost speechless. As my narcissistic and obsessive curiosity did not seem to end, I decided to calculate my school performance and surprisingly found great similarity in relation to the results in intelligence tests online.
With respect to intellectual tribes, I do not know which one I could fit in, because by the accumulation of evidence and self-perceptions I concluded that I might be called'' within the autism spectrum.'' As a teenager I was misdiagnosed as bipolar by a incompetent psychologist. However, since that time, I never saw myself as a manic-depressive and thus avoided the medication anti-depressants she recommended me.
My verbal IQ can not be too high, because it also measures the mathematical ability or some components that it requires the ability to interpret problems. However, you can not be average. So what I estimated around 120-130. My introverted personality, autistic-style obsessive and brainiac increases the perception of people and my own perception of my intelligence. However, I'm almost always weak in technical skills.
Have my nonverbal intelligence I have no idea how it could be. If this can be represented here as the ability in geometry, so I'm definitely not good. For starters, I have great difficulty in measuring or estimating distances, weights, measures in general.
So when I see the idea that there is a centralizing factor that says
if you are good in a function, it will be equally good in other roles, regardless of their level of intelligence
This does not seem to work for me.
Gottlieb
It was a spelling correction, not a criticism of your sample size.
IQ ≠ g
I find the characterisations interesting because when I think about myself and people I have met I'd say that for the most part everyone has the cultural characteristics of groups 4 and 5 (no doubt this is a feature of being middle class in general) – yet the outcomes and I suspect actual intelligences vary a lot more than that. I also wonder how rate of development plays into all this, I was one of those people who tested very high as a child but became average as I approached adulthood, yet my experience of being ahead as a child has had a profound effect on my interests (mostly more "intellectual" in nature) and tastes as well as how I relate to others, yet in terms of outcomes I am a terrible failure compared to the expectations placed upon me, although as a female I have an out because even today men settle more easily into the role of breadwinner.
I am the opposite case, and then not, too. I was on the left side of the developmental curve, and I barely kept up with my same-age peers as a child — though admittedly, and we didn't know this then, but I was/am ADHD.
But then at age 16 — as far as ability to recall information, notice patterns, synthesize original theories and use abstract concepts, et cet — I rocketed past all my friends who had been the smart ones for all our childhoods. I am easily in the upper half of Tribe 5, but still pretty damn dysfunctional. I have a bachelor's and a master's degree, one from an elite university, but I haven't been able to do anything with them, and have given up trying.
Perhaps that will turn out to be a godsend, as I have recently gained the focus to write a novel. Focus is just a wee bit uncommon for me, but I'd always been able to focus when it came to good literature.
I very much understand the whole 'being a disappointment' thing. You're right about men wanting to be the breadwinners. We're horrific beings, really, totally not evolved for the all-important APPROPRIATE behavior —- that virtue of which there is no superior!
Sorry to all the English for saying "godsend". I know that word is offensive to your national religion, Atheism. I am well aware there is no-God (pizza be upon him), and the English are His Chosen People.
"Vocabularies are relatively mall"
I didn't manage to find 'mall – adjective' in a dictionary!
I think that small was intended. Thanks for pointing it out, but I will leave it as a historical curiosity.
Given a normally-distributed population with mean 100 & stdev 15, 130 IQs are 1 in 44 & 145 IQs are 1 in 741. See Excel:
=1/(1-NORM.DIST(130,100,15,TRUE))
=1/(1-NORM.DIST(145,100,15,TRUE))
Similarly, given this distribution the top 1% of the top 1% (1 in 10,000) are not >145, but rather >156 IQ.
I wonder how intelligent he thinks himself to be.
"What does aesthetic sensitivity have to do with cognitive ability?
I'm not sure there is any connection at all."
Of course there is a connection.
Person A: Favourite director: Woody Allen
Favourite musical artist: Leonard Cohen
Favourite poet: Yeats.
Person B: Michael Bay and Snoop Dogg, thinks poetry is old fashioned and boring.
Can you guess who is more intelligent?
Plus it is not really a matter of aesthetic sensitivity in the sense of appreciation of beauty. That's framing it wrong. Some forms of entertainment are more intellectually stimulating and will appeal more to the intelligent.
Or perhaps: some films/songs etc are more intelligent in their content and took more intelligence to make…perhaps these things will impress and stimulate those that are more intelligent.
Mr. Thompson,
What do you make of this?
In my explorations of the research literature, in my conversations with scientists, in my visits to schools and workplaces, I have found so much exciting evidence that while we think of intelligence as a global trait—a person either is “smart,” or isn’t—in fact, all intelligence is local.
It is profoundly influenced by factors like how much sleep we’ve been getting, how anxious we feel, how focused our attention is, how interested in the subject we are, how effectively we’re using our technological tools, how much factual knowledge we possess, whether we feel a sense of belonging, and much else: all factors that we can shape, for ourselves and others, once we understand their role in evoking intelligence.
http://anniemurphypaul.com/2014/10/getting-closer-to-brilliant/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=getting-closer-to-brilliant
Not much. Feel-good journalism. However, if papers are quoted, I will have a (quick) look at them.
Every day you hear or read many new English words. You also find them in your dictionary when you are translating from your own language. You can’t possibly learn all these new words, so your first problem is to decide which ones to concentrate on. https://vocabmonk.com helps you to learn new words and enhance your vocabulary by providing personalized sessions to the individuals.
Give a shot..!!
Yeah. His calculations were wildly off, which made his narratives odd.
Fix the errors in your post, please.
It's really annoying seeing the statistical inaccuracies.
An IQ of 145 is 1 in 741.
Your Eminent category should actually state an IQ of 155-156. That is 1 in 10,000.
Your write-up is overdone and mostly off the top of your head.
I guess you think that high-IQ individuals need an occasional near astrology report.
GTFO.
Thank you, yes, will fix.
You found it enjoyable?
That's because you like astrology reports.
1 in 1 million is an IQ of 171. I would suggest that you use the following site for later references: http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx
These numbers can be deduced by knowing that the SD is 15 and that the mean is 100. I'm guessing you're being careless and lazy.
I have two questions:
1) Is the human ability to use syntax based on innate mental structures or is syntactic speech the function of intelligence and interaction with other humans?
2) Is it true that syntax is what human levels of intelligence are mostly about?
Hitler rose in an extreme environment that favored his talents. A quote from Robert Lindner is germane "It is a characteristic of all movements and crusades that the psychopathic element rises to the top." Yes, I know, Hitler was not a psychopath, he was a malignant narcissist – same thing, only different.
The disorder of Germany created by the Versailles Treaty and the collapse of the 1920's speculative bubble called for a movement towards greater order. Hitler clawed his way to the front of that movement.
A system under stress reacts in a direction to relieve the stress (Le Chatelier, loosely).
another fred
Why above 3 and not above 2 or 1? Weren't the greatest achievers passed over by the Terman studies?
In my opinion, most creative geniuses tend to have asymmetric cognitive characteristics, that is to say, are actually very good in some components, along with poor or medium in others. This imbalance acts as a reinforcement for the intellectual obsession in the areas where they are best."
This is a very deep, and agreeable notation.
However, the 5-tribes subdivision leaves out whom we may judge "geniuses", as it does "developmentally delayed" people at the other end of the spectrum.
It is of course not true that "The various types of geniuses are all related to both autism and with savant syndrome"; while it is obvious that psychic issues and creativity are correlated (perhaps "mental disease" is how societies label the fruits of creativity or imagination that seem to threaten their foundational conventions the most, by the way. Foucault's History of Insanity is certainly enlightening in this respect).
http://michaelwferguson.blogspot.com/p/the-inappropriately-excluded-by-michael.html
Leave discussion of affirmative action beneficiaries like OBama and Hilldog for another blog post.
I came across a puzzle on the internet. When I guessed the right answer I was offered the opportunity to take a free IQ test. To my surprise my score was 149 which puts me in the top 1%. I was however old and experienced enough to know I am not the smartest person even in my group of associates. Maybe there are accurate IQ tests but I can’t help but wonder just how reliable these written tests can be. Can everything about a person’s abilities be determined by a single number?
There might be some goatherd who never attended school but happens to have an agile mind and photographic memory, etc., etc.
It seems to me that with the increase in marriages between college educated people of progressively more similar socio-economic backgrounds we should expect a big increase in very high iq people. Why would we expect the distribution to stay the same when breeding patterns haven’t. Just the tendency of people with college degrees to marry creates a huge pool with average iq of 115 or so.
I’d expect the opposite to be true as well where people with little education and low iqs will breed children with an especially low chance of high iq. People are self-segregating more than ever so increases at the extremes should be expected shouldn’t they?
The one question intelligence test: do you like classical music?
Video Link
It could be so if simple genetic factors had a strong role in determining who’d end up with a very high IQ. But apparently it’s not.
An interesting post. Some minor points:
1. “Employment opportunities, which would have been plentiful in simpler agrarian societies, are now far more limited, tenuous, and precarious. Modern life has become very demanding, and simple physical labour no longer adds much value.” WRONG. Simple jobs – janitor, etc. – are as much in demand as ever. In fact, oddly enough, these are the jobs that are hardest to automate! The reason they pay little today is because we have deliberately flooded the marketplace with refugees from the overpopulated third world. Let the demand for janitors be high, and the supply low, and their wages will be high. That’s why janitors in Japan and Switzerland make more money than engineers in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
2. Never forget that at the top end, they can also be fragile and subject to madness or depression etc. There is always a trade-off….
3. You suggest that societal progress depends on high IQ individuals. In part, sure, but it is not the main factor. In the 19th century, there must have been more potential Einsteins in China than in the entire United States – but starving in the mud, so what? Sure, much depends on whether the intelligence of a high IQ individual can be put into effective application, but this depends not just on the political structure of a society, but its demographics. When everyone has more kids than they can afford to support, and everyone is crushed into a state of miserable chronic malnutrition, and there is no spare capital or resources to work with, well, the occasional high IQ individual can have no effect.
“The 7 Tribes of Intellect” was a real “grabber” for me, and a fine intro to the work of Prof. Thompson and his colleagues. I’d like to think a laminated copy ought to be distributed in the States to every teacher, guidance counselor, school administrator, and school board member. Maybe something like this already exists, I don’t know.
I’m biased of course. I believe more educational resources ought to be devoted to those who would benefit most from them, and fewer educational resources ought to be devoted to those who would benefit most from entering the work force as manual or commercial workers.
But remember folks, especially if you’re only an Alpha minus, that Richard Feynman, perhaps the greatest American theoretical physicist of the 20th Century, had an IQ of only 124, assigning him to Professor Thompson’s Fourth Tribe among whom “Occupations like manager, teacher and accountant are achieved.” LOL.
Then there were the Nobel laureates in physics, Shockley and Alvarez, neither of whom made the cut for Terman’s study of gifted children.
So your best bet, really, is to make sure never to take an IQ test, then some low-browed IQ-ist won’t be able to place you in their Fascist hierarchy and you will be able to find your own level according to your particular unique set of talents, interests, and opportunities and the effort you apply to whatever it is that you set out to achieve.
But remember folks, especially if you’re only an Alpha minus, that Richard Feynman, perhaps the greatest American theoretical physicist of the 20th Century, had an IQ of only 124, assigning him to Professor Thompson’s Fourth Tribe among whom “Occupations like manager, teacher and accountant are achieved.” LOL. Feynman sure was some teacher.
Then there were the Nobel laureates in physics, Shockley and Alvarez, neither of whom made the cut for Terman’s study of gifted children.
So your best bet, really, is to make sure never to take an IQ test, then some low-browed IQ-ist won’t be able to place you in their Fascistic uni-dimensional system of classification. Instead, you will be able to find your own level according to your particular and unique set of talents, interests, and opportunities and the effort you apply to whatever it is that you set out to achieve.
Or, to quote the motto of the Royal Air Force: per ardua ad astra, which roughly translated means: “don’t let the psychometric bastards tie you down.”
Indeed! The Von Neumann type of mind is fetishized by some on here. Not to downplay his extraordinary achievements in deductive reason, but I suspect the likes of Darwin – cognitively slower perhaps, but with a more ‘open’ and ’empirical’ type of intelligence are necessary for civilizational progress. Others in that category might be Max Weber, Gibbon, Ruskin, and the like. Not to mention the great imaginative intellects. No offense to Von Neumann but I wouldn’t much want to read his sonnets, his prose fiction, or even his efforts to say something interesting about a movie.
Your essays are interesting, always.
But the old pastoralists, musing beneath the starlit skies, skies unpolluted and clear may have reflected
https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/9-11.htm
It is odd to be one of the very very bright ones.
I never really found my place in the world. Gave up on it all and tried to navigate a path that made sense.
In most senses of the word, I’m a failure.
reading this article brought a small tear to me eye. No one ever ‘put me to use’ – well, not outside of the occasional conman who just took my input and ran off to make riches.
Comfortable watching the world burn.
Thanks for your comment. One of the extraordinary but sad things about intelligence testing is that you find bright people who, for one reason or another, never had much chance to put their abilities to use. There were many women in this category, at least when I was doing lots of testing in the 1970s, and seeing people who were then in their sixties, so would have been making career choices, or marriages, in the 1920s, when women were kept out of career paths.
Waste of talent is bad for the individuals, and bad for society.
Nothing instills dread in a smart person like knowing that they are not the smartest.
Hard to remember exactly what it was, but my friend was trying to explain some probability theory to me. I asked him, “what’s the use of this principle?” He replied, “what do you mean ‘what’s the use?’ It’s not inherently useful, it’s just interesting.” It’s little ego-battering moments like that that really put the anxiety into mortal Being.
Nobody tells you that even if you find a comprehensive meaning to life, it won’t necessarily soothe your angst. Intellectua–scientific exploration–provides a special kind of Chaos, where traditional principles lose most of their significance, falling away to reveal a broad machinic universe where the highest goal is complete understanding of its movement.
At least I won’t be wiped out yet. I’m smart enough to last for a few more generations. At the very least, when I go, it won’t be long after that the smartest ones go too. Everything has a time, yes? The timeless principle of cycling Chaos and Order won’t ever go away. It is written into the fabric of our universe, which–current theory prevailing–predicts will collapse back in on itself.
1. “god” (with a lower case “g”) is NOT a single thing. That is, you can believe in “a god” or you can believe in “gods”, but what YOU clearly mean is “belief in God (singular) the Almighty”. Screwing this up just makes you look as dumb (or insulting) as you probably are.
2. NO ONE has ever told my what my IQ is, when I was in 2nd Grade, we took a Standardized Test, and I apparently scored “off the scale”. I was/am “scary smart”. The closest I’ve ever come to finding out my IQ was when I had to take an IQ for one of jobs, and the company told me, apparently with some fear, that I was “smarter than 85% of the MANAGERS in the US”…
3. You have COMPLETELY skipped the connection (or more often disconnection) between raw mental horsepower and personal organization and fitting into groups. REALLY smart people tend to get pushed off into corners because being RIGHT is more important to them than being “political”. I gave up a LONG time ago trying to keep track of the number of times that I gave a boss-fella the right answer and he (or she) ignored it. In almost all business (and social) situations, there are things that have been predetermined to be “true” or “right”. Coming up with the “wrong” answer shows you’re not a Team Player. Being a Team Player is WAY more important than be technically right.
This was COMPLETELY discussed by Charles Murray in the various versions of his “Bell Curve”, which go back to the 1970s.
The SIGNIFICANCE of the Bell Curve on American society is that different ethnic groups (e.g., Indo-Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans) have MARKEDLY different IQ curves. NOTHING can be done to CHANGE that.
But if you’re interested in what segmentation of IQ MEANS, read Charles Murray. This guy is crap.
On the notion of some that brilliant people have little interest in religious matters:
“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God,” Ramanujan, who I think may have been the brightest person ever (after Christ, Moses, Isaiah, Apostles Paul and John).
I have been a member of two high IQ societies. One is the well-known Mensa, the other is the less well known TNS. I dropped out of both, because they confirmed my experience that even the most brilliant humans are stupid. I include myself. We are a pathetic species. We know a few things, and we can do a few things. A few of us know more and can do more intellectually than the rest. But we are still at the zero level of civilization. Will we ever make it to level one?
If we survive, we may yet reach the technological singularity discussed by some futurists. Unfortunately, this may be accompanied by an even greater concentration of wealth and power than we have already. High IQ does not guarantee a person is benevolent. On the other hand, it can make a person a more effective liar, cheater, and thief.
Bertrand Russell was once asked if he was ever sorry he was so intelligent. Doesn’t it cause unhappiness? I like his reply. He said no, he wishes he was even more intelligent than he is. I am smart enough to know I am stupid, compared to the intelligence I need to advance to the next level. Hence my interest in artificial intelligence.
Regarding IQ, I think the old classification is still useful. Here is one version from a website. I would like to know an authoritative reference.
The first three groups are considered retarded.
Idiots (0-24)
Imbeciles (25-49)
Morons (50-69)
Normal (70-129)
Gifted (130+)
I see a high IQ as a necessary but not sufficient condition for great achievement in mathematics and science. Some people are better at using the intelligence they have been given. Perhaps Feynman is an example. If it is true that his IQ was a few points under 130, so what? He had all the intelligence he needed to make great achievements. People should not worry if they are five points less than someone else. The question is what are you doing with your intelligence.
The global IQ problem is very serious indeed. It is easily explained. But free discussion of this problem is banned in academia and in the mainstream media. I recommend the late J. Philippe Rushton’s work for anyone who is interested in the correlation between race and IQ, from an evolutionary perspective.
Thank you so much for this. It has really helped me with a tricky situation I have got into. The whole issue of how a Tribe 2 person behaves was previously outside my experience, and easily mistaken for a cultural difference or emotional game playing. Your secondary characteristics are also suprisingly accurate, so I will recognise this immediately if I meet this situation again.
Just ignore all the conceited idiots in the comments, trying to put this area down. I would bet that like the Nancy Pelosis of this world, they live in their own self-serving, pompous little bubble and never try to interact with and help people in tribe 2, so they can blissfully ignore the realities of that situation.
I’ve seen Lynyrd Skynyrd and Miles Davis in concert. Enjoyed both. What tribe am I?
This post should be permanently top posted for reference. Excellent stuff.
US literacy rates are dropping, and some people excel at taking those IQ tests but are worthless outside of the academic environment. There is a club, MENSA, for people who can jut about melt steel using just their brain waves, buck-sixty and on up there, Isaac Asimov, R.I.P., was once asked to join, he kissed it off and pronounced MENSA an intellectual ego massage parlor pretty much.
The world is a big place with a lot of people and a lot of problems, just here in america we have supply and logistics problems, energy production and distribution problems, food production, provision of irrigation water, sewer nd water treatment, garbage removal, etc. Some pretty bright people keeping the lights on and preventing us from choking to death and wallowing in our own filth. The rest of us are stuck with what we’re born with, maybe education helps, maybe it doesn’t. Our modern K12 system, now ‘woke’, and badly corrupt, is a failed institution. No one is apparently smart enough to fix it. Maybe AI will take it over…
I have to myself that the claims about John Von Neumann and his fellow “Martians” a group of Hungarian-born men, all of whom without exception were Jewish, are exaggerated and amount, in essence, to mutual propaganda, not dissimilar in nature or intent to the claims that Jewish serial plagiarist Albert Einstein was the greatest physicist the world has ever seen, if not the greatest genius of any kind.
Here’s an IQ test as simple as it is reliable: Do you take (((them))) at their word? If so, yours is not very high.
James, I hope you are on for more now that some commenters have rediscovered this thread.
Someone very dear to me had an appalling father who may well have been a Six Sigma who seems to have blown £10,000 while idling his way through Cambridge in the 30s which meant he had to turn himself into a consulting physician who coached others for the membership and fellowship exams before marrying friend’s mother whose money was almost too well secured in trust so he left for prettier women and the alcohol which eventually killed him (if it is right that he took to the drink as shop’s surgeon on the North Atlantic in WW2 to quell his sea sickness maybe he had some excuse). His deserted wife supported herself and their two children as a teacher and proprietor of a little boarding school in a quite large 19th century country house in England. She told me she could teach any child to read but was having problems with her somewhat dyslexic daughter**. This would have been the late 1940s. So she had her IQ measured, twice by my recollection. and each time about 173. She has always had a very quick mind and I would discover that she had seen far more in a play and guessed the villain in an Agatha Christie novel well before I did although I had a more a more accurate memory, honed no doubt by being pedantic with my very bright mother’s flights of fancy. My IQ was measured at 147 in Australia at about age 10 and it was interesting to discover how much quicker I was than others when, twice, I jumped a form and could catch up and come top in a term (before getting slack). It was the future professors and judges in those forms whose IQs had been measured, as I discovered by chance, in the high 130s who noticed and remembered my mental speed (also, and I may try out my neurological theory about this on you) a marked tendency to think up non standard ideas and solutions to problems – without much follow through to book or achievement. So…. .my question is whether the first mentioned lady’s IQ was really a couple of SDs above mine (presumably Stanford Binet or Wechsler) or was likely to h
ave been a Cattell IQ with SD 24. Her mother’s school was in Kent in say 1949.
In the school records I came across there was a boy 6 months younger than me whose IQ had been measured at 184 and 137 which has remained with me as a warning not to be a crude IQ worshipper, even before I learned of the Flynn Effect. He did become a physics Don at Oxford before topping a Law school and becoming a leading QC, especially in IP.
I manage to raise a laugh from clever girls when I tell them how I said to a young friend that I was all in favour of the new breed of female CEOs but that looking at what good they had for for the world in 2080 one would probably say they would face done more,if, like their equally bright great grandmothers, they had had 10 children . “Same goes for the blokes” said my younger friend. Girls laugh. But it’s true and one reason I think the White Nstionalists are dopes lamenting a future (and indeed present) that was never destined to eventuate. My smartest young blood relations have Ashkenazi and Japanese genes to keep up the IQs!
Must finish but I hope we can continue. You will find, possibly in an email, my recollection of giving lunch for Eysenck and Jensen when they were shouted down by academic oiks in Melbourne.
** almost ambidextrous, and dextrously so , BTW, and, in one of her latterday displays of talent, no trouble spelling botanical names correctly.
Aren’t your 75-90, even more 90-110 and 110-125 Tribes too wide? True that the effort part of IQ plus effort can count a lot, as can chance and personality but may I suggest that and ask you to factor in the threshold effect that surely, e.g. requires an IQ of 125+ to be a physics professor (myths about Feynman aside), and La Griffe du Lion’s “smart fraction” – basically above about 105 I think. Steve Sailer should be able to put you on to La Griffe .
I have just looked at a much more recent article about African IQ in which, or its thread, reference is made to Agghan and US soldiers inter alia, and I see too little hard thinking which would, to start with, question the validity of the testing, the significance of the of the position of those tested on what might be called the Flynn Curve, etc.
My particular contribution here arises from discovering the fact of widespread caste in Africa (prompted by a surprisingly attractive young Nigerian woman telling me she was Igbo and that “yes’, Igbo did have a reputation for being smarter than other Nigerians and “yes”, Igbo did have a caste system. I was shocked then to find how completely my H-bd egroup friends over the years showed ignorance of the prevalence of caste and lack of interest in it. It may help explain Kwasi Karteng’s having the best academic record of any UK minister for yonks snd it promises the thought too that if you were a typical slave owner in Africa the ones you would choose first to sell to the foreign slave traders would be the stroppy and the dim.
Mind you what might indicate that there was some modest return of enhnced genomes from Eurasia? Neanderthal genes might only show that there were early Neanderthals in Africa or ???
It seems to me that a very important part of past human evolution, features the deep deep intrigue surrounding human sexual selection. To try to be as succinct as possible about it, …… the intrigue is built upon the following elements:
1) In this human realm (i.e. – reality as experienced by humans) we see that multicellular life tends to favor reproduction by way of sexual selection featuring a binary polar-sexual-parity (i.e. – this ‘parity’ is revealed in a variety of ways, … for instance the strong tendency towards sexually reproducing species to feature the same approximate numbers of offspring of each sex, ….. but this parity is apparent at all levels of the sexual binary polarity).
2) One other such level of binary polar-sexual parity that can be observed within the human species, is that the species is sexually arranged so that parity is brought forward, across both sexes, with respect to coding/nurturing the next generation. The sexes coalesce around a similar cognitive mean ‘g’ factor, yet the more nurturing sex, females, show less variety around this trait ….. there is more species-genomic-coding-exploration within the male sex generally, and especially within this ‘g’ factor trait, rendering more male dummies and more males geniuses vis-a-vis females.
3) This difference in trait-variance-curves between sexes has, in of itself, been sexually selected for. The sex more critical to offspring survivability by way of the nurturing aspect, is the sex that is more-so selecting traits in the other sex. The female of the human species has selected for greater male variance around cognitive aptitudes, ….. yet the lower male cognitive aptitude leg is generally of little use to females or her offspring, ….. suggesting that the precise traits women are sexually selecting for are disturbances in protein expression within nervous tissue that can potentially lead to either outsized outcome (dummies or geniuses), on occasion. Now here is what is interesting. When one examines how women operate this sexual selection, it becomes apparent that the trait that women are selecting for is dominance. Dominance as defined as dominance within male social hierarchies as betrayed by social tells that women can read. Women are reading the winner within these male dominance hierarchies, as the men that other men defer to (often without males consciously realizing this deferral themselves). Men compete for this dominance by way of worldview competence. Those whose worldview outlook leads to competence, are then men that other men tend to admire and defer to (often without even consciously realizing). The worldviews more closely aligned with reality are the ones that are much more likely, in the longer run, to lead to competence. And that is where enhanced intelligence enters the picture. What I am saying is that by way of sexual selection in the human species, the females have selected for dominant men as betrayed by social tells within male dominance hierarchies, … which for humans, with our capacity for abstract language and symbolism, will be the men whose worldviews, as guided by better innate intelligence, so as to deliver a worldview more closely aligned with reality, so as to deliver better personal competence, which is something that males compete over, which as such, lead to the social tells (sometimes only subconsciously realized by the males) within the male dominance hierarchy, which females are keenly aware of.
4) Because women are sexually selecting by way of social tells around worldview-competency-dominance within male dominance hierarchies, ….. they are fooled when a genius arrives on the scene for which the other men cannot grok such individual’s worldview and therefore cannot defer to him. Then a funny thing happens. The regular alpha males (the men women are usually selecting for within these dominance hierarchy contests), still being in the game (i.e. – they got the social tells on their side unlike the misunderstood genius) will steal some of the worldview ideas of the misunderstood genius, where it is clear such worldview magically leads to some precious competence, proffer it as their own worldview snippet, so as to continue to moisten female nether regions. The genius usually, could care less, because by this point such genius, being so misunderstood his whole life, has taken himself out of the sexual attraction game, because it was always stacked against him since day one. This is pretty much the underlying human impetus towards capitalism.
5) So, if everything turns out nice like as outlined in #4 above, everybody benefits from this sexual selection dynamic except the misunderstood genius men, who generally, get a raw deal (what feels like Clown World). And this weird dynamic has supercharged the breath and scope of humanity. It is the story of the western tradition. All because of the dictates of female sexual selection. Quite astounding when you really think about it.
Very good questions with respect to potential underlying source of ‘g’ factor … 1) is it due to the introduction of sytnax? Or 2), is the syntax that emerges from all human languages, more-so basic to reality? Personally, I tend to think it is #2 (but with the proviso that what is known as ‘reality’, for humans, will always be relative to the human condition, …..maybe the best way to illustrate this point about the relativity of the human condition, is to take the stance that reality is infinite, yet clearly, individual humans are not, …. rendering all our judgements with respect to ‘reality’ as relative to the dictates of the human condition). When viewing the syntax phenomena from this perspective, (i.e. – entertaining the premise that reality is infinite), the first order of business, is to render a worldview description that deals with the metaphysical subjective/objective dichotomy that results from the condition of ‘finite beings immersed in the infinite’, … akin to a ‘finite precipitate of the infinite’ (to be more poetic about it), … a contradiction in logical terms, yet there it is, …. what does seem to be the human condition (at least all the major spiritual movements across cultures agree that ‘God’, aka as ‘reality’ by some, is infinite).
Now, I do have some experience struggling with this ‘first order of business’, …. this human need to reconcile the metaphysical subjective/objective dichotomy that results from worldviews incorporating the existence of the infinite (I became hyper focused with almost uncontrollable obsession on this deep issue, during the summer at the age of 12, and nearly drove myself insane, for about two months there, before I luckily reemerged intact, I am pretty sure, from that unrelenting worldview nightmare, …. forced to consider the possibility that ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are the same precise thing, …. a nightmare scenario of utter soul-crushing loneliness, and a premise I was ultimately able to logically reject, but surprisingly, by not a wide margin). But how is it that we can know anything about the infinite (even about its existence) as finite beings? Yet we do (see Georg Cantor’s work). Therefore I posit this: This deep conundrum of the ‘metaphysical subjective/objective dichotomy that results from worldviews incorporating the existence of the infinite’ is basic to reality, and said core ‘reality-conundrum’ informs Darwinian themes, implying that the human species has been shaped by evolution towards an interface with this deep reality conundrum.
So, …. I am hereby suggesting that human syntax is dependent upon the underlying reality-contingencies (albeit with the proviso that this ‘reality’ is relative to the human condition), inclusive of the most basic ‘reality-contingency’, which is this subjective/objective dichotomy that necessarily logically emerges once one considers that reality may indeed be infinite. I am suggesting that, once human syntax is disassembled and examined, … one will find that the most basic rules of this syntax, emerge from this ‘metaphysical subjective/objective dichotomy’ conundrum.
Bottom line: If we indeed are immersed in the infinite, and also, if indeed it is true that, as finite beings, this reality as experienced by humans will always be relative, … then it logically follows that though reality for humans is full of constraints (the profuse limitations of the finite), … it is also completely, potentially, open-ended. I think that, at basic level, human syntax informs as to precisely that claim. I have no expertise in linguistics, and so I am suggesting all thus as sort of a polymathic discussion, ….. however I think it would be well warranted for the linguists to re-examine human syntax with the vein of inquiry I am suggesting here.
I was at school with Roger Luckhurst, since 2020 the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth Century Studies at Birkbeck College, London.
He would doodle versions of the Lynyrd Skynyrd logo across his exercise books ad nauseam, yet he is definitely in tribe 6+.
“Father Strittmatter recalled that even after receiving the last rites, von Neumann did not receive much peace or comfort from it, as he remained terrified of death and unable to accept his circumstances.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
Hard to believe that such a great intellect could not make peace with death. If his was the greatest mind of our time, then we are intellectial midgets in comparison to Socrates.
What about religion?
Generally speaking different religions have been used for at least the last millenium to enthuse young people to die for smarter people’s profit. With no reward except an imaginary one.
Lotsa people weren’t born stupid, they just grew up that way, quelling their natural intelligence just to survive.
Dutton points out that a creative genius has to be both high IQ and low Agreeableness (a trait in the OCEAN personality classification system, https://www.britannica.com/science/five-factor-model-of-personality ). Otherwise, the person simply confirms the existing intellectual structure.
Revision of the existing intellectual structure have not been tolerated since the end of the World War era. At one point, ~1975 I received a letter from the head of AAAS that castigated me personally for my ambition to perform original work. The man apparently felt deeply about this, as the letter was written in almost hysterical terms. This was in the era of shutdown of industrial laboratories and the seizure of the Biosphere 2 project. ( https://www.history.com/news/biosphere-2-spaceship-earth ).
Threatening to constructively change intellectual things is simply not tolerated in today’s West. In fact, the intellectual base of industrial society is vanishing along with its physical base of capital and resources.
Overgeneralizations i see.
I probably like ‘strong’ melodies and rhythms, whatever they are. But I know more than 5,000 words.
Not much new here, but mildly interesting. This site is a very weird mix of somewhat worthwhile stuff like this, actually innovative and quite interesting stuff from people like Sailer and Derbyshire, lunatic stuff from howling crackpots, and then absolute rock-bottom dreck from the likes of Anglin.
Biden?
That’s probably an American exception. Consider in the World, Chinese believe in philosophy not in god, us West Asians believe in religion and Africans in magic and superstition
Yes it is delightful because the rewards are unexpected. Andrew’anal anglin gives you the bass that better lets you apreciate the highs. my favorite author here is ron unz
The article links IQ with wealth and income. While there is obviously some correlation, there is a lot more that goes into whether someone is rich or not and there are plenty of people who are not very smart who are nevertheless rich and vice versa.
Many smart individuals tend to put too much emphasis on intelligence, almost treating it like a divine quality that alone determines someone’s worthiness for leadership or power. They often overlook the impact of moral failings, personal biases, emotional motivations, prejudices, and grudges on their decisions.
For instance, Von Neumann, despite his brilliance, advocated for extreme measures like preemptive nuclear warfare, justifying the taking of millions of lives on supposed rational grounds. When the Soviets were on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons Von Neumann said something like, “if we can nuke them today, why wait till tomorrow?” Rationalizing and abstracting such decisions by appealing to a supposed greater good can detach one from the immense human suffering involved—uber intelligent people seem to be prone to this.
Similarly, some intelligent people dismiss the concept of God based on simplistic definitions and interpretations, disregarding deeper philosophical and scientific considerations. They may overlook the nuanced understanding of God in Platonic philosophy or theories like Integrated Information Theory, which suggest complex interactions between intelligence, consciousness, and natural phenomena.
Figures like Michael Levin and early quantum mechanics pioneers appreciated these complexities. They took consciousness and Platonic concepts like eminence seriously. They took seriously both eminent and emergent phenomenon and perceived the inseparability and continuity of physics with intelligence, collective intelligence, agents, biology and mind.
In contrast, thinkers like Bertrand Russell, despite their intelligence, held reductive views that limited their understanding of these matters, leading to oversimplified and biased conclusions often expressed in emotional polemics.
The IQ of the United States in general is supplemented by middle-class immigrants, so I think IQ is a secondary issue.
I think the core problem is that there is something wrong with education in America, as you can see from a second-generation idiot like Blinken.
Basic education in America is too simple.
And lack of comprehensive cultivation of knowledge.
By contrast, I had to take calculus in high school… And there are million of people who do better than me.
A man like Blinken can no longer serve as even a common public servant in our country.
Our civil service exam is very strict…
Actually a lot of peoples being in East Asia, West Asia, Africa, Europa, America are united and believe in one god (and many in his aspects) respectively money.
Back at the origin (and now) different races approached different to God: east asians and indians had let’s say a more spiritual way and west asians and europeans a more religious way. Blacks only felt in magic and superstitions but that doesn’t imply that they do not belive in God. Similarly the asian races believe in God (and not in ” philosophy”) only that their understanding of the divine is different form us.
It is quite curios to say that West Asians believe in religion when religion is only a ladder ( etymological religions comes form religare “to bind fast”) to God.
The fact that the top 5% are “a” minority doesn’t mean they are “a minority” in the modern political sense that is precisely the historic genocide-targeting sense. Genocides are never targeted at them for the simple reason that anyone sufficiently below them to be en-masse isn’t particularly capable at picking them out even before the fact.
So, why the need to conflate the top 5% with an actual minority group who are often singled out and who actually have slightly below average intelligence — paired with above average communication skills as a specialty?
Let’s go a bit deeper into the point that the the word “genocide” was invented by a “Polish” “minority” individual at the end of WWII in order to punish a host population for daring to reprise and exit the financial parasitism long-leveraged against it by said “minority”. “Genocide” is an intentionally vague term invented as the name for a brand new war crime — that was simply the essence of war itself. You didn’t see anyone at all executed for executing Dresden’s actual and intentional unprovoked firebomb-genocide of civilians, did you? Who/whom has always been the deciding factor for the word’s applicability.
As for your “Eminent”, bothering to calculate such impressive probabilities as what you describe as coincidences is more of a “bright but OCD” task than anything of the seventh “tribe”, whom have sufficiently estimated without focusing unless the precision here distinctly matters.
For society, ability to communicate between bands or widely across them matters very little. One primary matter is the general societal distribution of IQ. Frankly, if you have a job only one in 10,000 people or less can do, unless it involves either a pure information service or a wide distribution network, society is not going to benefit.
Some other primary matters for societies are morality, fidelity, and discipline. It doesn’t matter so much if the lower ranks understand what are, to them, functionally magic rituals.
So long as they are sufficiently loyal to the sources of the processes, and detailed and diligent in their employment, more of society can benefit whether or not what is really going on can be communicated to them.
The morality part largely just keeps the stupid people from ripping the world apart to scrap the copper wires for lulz and a box of cookies, and the “stupid” people here often include essentially everyone below the “eminent” category, and some of the seventh too. Stupidity is high-frequency, it diffuses rapidly into even more stupidity and disorder instead of penetrating to where its prisoners could profitably apply.
In stark contrast to the comparatively low-IQ stereotype, Atheism practically vanishes above proximally 140 IQ, as do the compensative-geniuses that so well parallele Autistic traits. Read above. Read above again. Now read the next paragraph above again. In this small and apparently grey reality-space, Atheism is rising in direct correlative proportion to decline in general societal intelligence. Your choice as to which is among the causally-connected factors of the other or if they’re, practically, more subtly entangled, the terminal results are the same regardless.
Finally, the longer-standing a coherent tradition, the more likely it was instituted by particular ancient eminences, or potentially by, shall we say, “strange attractors”. Complex things don’t stay together by themselves, and the ocean of our ignorance is stygian and incomparably titanic in ratio to the infinitesimal sections of the known, even for the most exemplary luminaries, let alone most everyone else.
It turns out, ancient languages are hard to understand well, even for the enlightenment sophisticates, let alone the vulgar and churlish. When those threads start to snap between linguistic drift and stupidity… well, romance wasn’t built in a day, or in an aeon.
C.S. Lewis, in the Space Trilogy, talked about angels in charge of each planet, and how great and vast they were that the Romans mistook them as Gods. Your gods are even smaller.
It is possible that ‘fool’ means ‘spiritually retarded’ so if you look at the ten trillion galaxies, and see no Being so far beyond you that the difference between you and an ant is smaller, then perhaps you are as you ask.
And before you dodge off to ‘but He would not care for us’, consider that King David marvelled at God’s condescension thousands of years ago so your ‘insight’ is not much. Now consider that almost certainly the NSA is recording our conversation to add to each of our files (I think you and I can agree on that at least, and that they are bastards), would not God have better computers than the NSA?
By Asian races, I take it you mean East Asian and primarily Chinese/Confucian.
This is illustrative of the Confucian attitude towards God/gods:
季路问事鬼神。子曰：“未能事人，焉能事鬼？”曰：“敢问死。”曰：“未知生，焉知死？” Disciple Ji asks,”How should we serve the gods and ghosts?” Confucius says,”We don’t know how to serve the living well. How should we know how to serve the gods and ghosts.” Disciple Ji,”May I ask about death then?” Confucius,”We don’t know how to live our lives well. How should we know death?” Confucius also said, “敬鬼神而遠之 ” “Respect the gods and ghosts but stay far from away them.”
Dear me, where to start. Ten children? The world IS radically under-populated I suppose, and there is Mars to populate, of course. And 2080??!! In your dreams Ooze. We’ll be lucky, or not, to make 2050. What IQ does it take to destroy your one and only home in an orgy of insatiable greed?
And I thought that I was a boring pedant.
Unfortunately, Britain and its former colonies haven’t retained their “Greenwich Mean IQ of 100”. Global IQs are indeed based on the British mean, but that British mean is changing over time.
Genetic IQ has been studied (by Woodley of Menie, Professor Edward Dutton et al) and has been shown to be declining for at least a century and a half in the West (IMO, for probably more than two centuries).
The West’s Industrial Revolution enabled humanity to lower youth mortality from its usual 50% to less than 5% (<1% in the West), and consequently there was an enormous rise in the number of people, which most take to be a unalloyed good thing. But one of the effects was that the poorer-quality half of the population went from having fewer descendants than the better-quality half to having more descendants.
So society went from improving to deteriorating. And the smartest families weren't immune from this.
The still-onward march of science and technology continues to make life easier for most, and is thus keeping things together for now, but that march is faltering, both in terms of scientific advancement per capita since at least the late 1800s as well as in terms of absolute speed of sci-tech progress since perhaps around the middle of last century.
Western IQ test scores rose for nearly all of last century due mostly to artifacts of the IQ tests which are a combined measure, measuring mostly basic genetic intelligence but also a smaller element of superficial, IQ-test skills, which are increased by more years of schooling and the more complex, modern environments.
IQ test scores started to stagnate or fall a little in the West around the mid 1990s (and this was not due to mass immigration from the naturally less intelligent third-world, as that effect wasn't big enough by a long way).
That means that the small environmental effect on IQ test scores had topped out, and the long-term decline in genetic intelligence was finally starting to show through, late by perhaps around a couple of centuries.
Intelligence correlates positively with nearly all good traits and negatively with nearly all bad ones, so we're becoming less intelligent and more venal as time goes on.
It's reasonably common for old people to complain about the younger generation – "Kids today!". Like most stereotypes, it's true. We of a newer generation are worse than them, just as they are worse than those who have gone before them.
Confucius talked about the impossibility of knowing God. Confucius didn’t had knowledge of any revelation. From what he grasped back then, his stance was right.
Also Confucius sad “Heaven means to be one with God”.
Don’t forget that Chinese race means also Taoism. In fact, Confucianism is the exoteric aspect of Taoism, the two are in a relation of complementarily.
How said it Lao Tzu?:“It is the way of heaven to take where there is too much in order to give where there is not enough.” or the very probably glimpse of intuition (even if most limited and rather distorted) about Holy Trinity “The Tao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things.”
In fact Tao Te Chin is one of the most spiritually scripture of the world, I put it second to Bible.
Video Link
Tribes 6 and 7…. This is the kind of bilge you get from a midwit trying to write about people who are significantly more intelligent than himself.
The very high IQ are atheists?
He’s obviously never talked to many physicists. They ALL can see that they are exploring someone else’s design. The book “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” goes into this. Although they’re not in agreement about which theology is correct, they are ALL in agreement that their is some sort of superior, omniscient intellect which controls all physics?
How do they know this? For the simple reason that snexperimenter’s state of mind can have an effect on experimental outcome…. With automated machinery activating the experimental mechanisms, and digital readout instruments recording the results: literally zero opportunity for the experimenter to change performance of the experiment or to vary the interpretation of instrument read-out due to mood or opinion.
The VHIQ are noted for being VERY logical. And there is literally nothing more ILLOGICAL than atheism.
Many of us have seen things for which there is no explanation other than supernatural ones. The VHIQ tend to actually trust their own observations of such events, and draw the LOGICAL conclusion regarding the existence of immaterial entities and beings.
This doesn’t even scratch the mere existence of the universe without a deity to create it in the first place, OUT OF NOTHING MORE THAN WILLING IT INTO EXISTENCE, as if making a wish, but with complete knowledge that it’s not a wish, but a command.
The fact that the top 5% are “a” minority doesn’t mean they are “a minority” in the modern political sense that is precisely the historic genocide-targeting sense. Genocides are never targeted at them for the simple reason that anyone sufficiently below them to be en-masse isn’t particularly capable at picking them out even before the fact.
(a) It is difficult to impossible to communicate abstractions across a 1 or more Standard Deviation IQ gap. Clarey points out that this leaves the “7th tribe” in what amounts to an “Idiocracy” situation — unable to communicate beyond “Here’s 5 bucks, I want to buy this soda.”, and thus condemned by the society around him or her.
Which solves the “identification” problem that you outline. The heuristic inside organizations is that “The manager will not OK the project unless the management understands the project”. Given managers as they exist, that means “7th tribe” will not have their projects approved. Nor will those of the 6th or the 5th. In current organizations, neither will the 4th.
For a fairly accurate portrayal of what a “High IQ” means in today’s society, see: Aaron Clarey, Curse of the High IQ, 2016. Clarey uses demotic language, and so can be easily understood, and easily dismissed by the Left. Taking trivia as a reason to dismiss an argument or report is a standard error today.
(b) Any engineering requires a very high IQ. Technician work does not. People cannot see the difference because higher education no longer educates engineers, it educates technicians who are obsolete in 5 years.
(c) As for “if you have a job only one in 10,000 people or less can do” then it is often very important to the bulk of the population. That’s why industrial labs were important when the projects of the 1 in 10,000 were accepted by management (e.g. Shockley ), and why we have stagnation now. I’ve seen this in practice several times.
So high IQ types are socially isolated, and are not permitted to use their capabilities, so are isolated and relatively poor. This accounts for the higher mortality that Clearly reports.
Musk and Jobs etc. are obvious exceptions to these rules, but their very success makes one think that there are other projects for 7th tribe people that are not undertaken. If 7th tribe can do what Musk etc. did, then why are these things being supressed?
As I’ve experienced matters, the US Federal government, hence the West, has enforced stagnation (actually, “stasis”, a stalemated civil war, is more accurate) by shutting down research. In my academic experience, Jewish academics are worst in this regard, but Italian university administrators (under the impression that they are Cosa Nostra) are second worst. Today’s institutions, most private and all governmental, are utterly non-functional, with officials trying to get through their current job by lying to their superiors. That’s why the Left’s strategy of “Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers”, as Tom Wolf wrote back in the 60s, is so successful.
In short, high IQ people are actively purged from organizations. Cleary points this out — note that his case studies are all self employed and largely untrained.
OTH
Your remarks on Atheism and how little humans know seem correct to me. The concepts necessary to understand both are simply beyond 1st through 4th tribe.
Just some scattered thoughts on this topic:
1. IQ and similar cognitive tests don’t correlate perfectly. It’s my understanding that the best tests have intercorrelations in the neighborhood of 0.7. The higher you score on one test, the less likely you are to score equally high on a different test (regression to the mean). Thus, you might be in “Tribe 7” according to one test, but in “Tribe 6” or even “Tribe 5” according to another.
Less commonly, this can work in the other direction. For example, it’s been accurately noted that Richard Feynmann scored in the 120s on a school IQ test. It’s very possible that he would have scored much higher on a different test.
2. For those unfamiliar with the distinction between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence, it’s worth becoming acquainted with these concepts. They are two broad but fairly distinct dimensions of cognitive ability. Briefly, crystallized intelligence consists of acquired mental skills, while fluid intelligence is the ability to solve truly novel problems. Research supports the distinction even at the neuroanatomical level, and these two aspects of intelligence have different trajectories over the lifespan (fluid tends to decline beyond middle age, while crystallized can increase until old age).
Many standardized tests emphasize crystallized intelligence over fluid by focusing on items involving vocabulary, math skills, etc. But a few tests, such as Raven’s Progression Matrices, attempt to tap into fluid intelligence exclusively.
Again using the example of Feynmann, I suspect he was more gifted with respect to fluid intelligence than crystallized. He undoubtedly possessed a great capacity for divergent thinking as well, which leads to the next point.
3. Few if any IQ tests attempt to measure the capacity for divergent thinking, perhaps because it’s difficult to quantify reliably. Yet I suspect this cognitive ability is just as important as “conventional” intelligence (i.e., high IQ) to the development of groundbreaking intellectual achievements.
I recently noted on another thread that it’s not unheard-of for an exceptional gifted child to graduate from college at a ridiculously young age, making headline news, but then never again achieve anything of note. Such individuals may be perfectly successful in their careers as professors, engineers, doctors, or whatever; but they rarely seem to live up to the incredible expectations: fantastic new inventions, brilliant scientific theories, etc.
I suspect that the missing link is the ability to think outside the box. Those who do end up produce mankind’s most amazing intellectual products likely possess not only IQs that are sufficiently high, but also a great deal of imagination — the ability to generate completely novel ideas.
4. Success in school and beyond depends a lot on intelligence, but work ethic is also critical.
I did enjoy this a little. Must say i met some incredibly dumb yet educated people. Inverse is equally true. Those who suffer most are the ones who have to work with people struggling to string a sentence. The next ones down would be those forced to watch the westerners continue to labour under convictions of being the only ones… I am both of these, sadly. So, a message to my western born friends – we are moving toward the spirit, but it is never going to be in a machine
Fair enough, but let me ask you this: do these physicists, who are exploring the maker’s design, believe this maker to be the god of the bible who doesn’t want us to eat pork and work on Saturdays?
It is a pity that most of the Western understanding of our culture is wrong, especially your so-called discourse about God.If you understand from a religious mindset, you will only get further and further away from the right answer.
I suggest you learn Chinese first and then understand what we philosophers mean in the Chinese context.
We are pragmatists.
By Western definition, we don’t trust God in the strict sense, we only trust ourselves.
It’s almost impossible to fully translate “天人合一” in the English context…
As for your understanding of the 道德经, you must not start from the perspective of the Trinity, the correct translation should be:
Dao is unique in that it contains Yin and Yang（阴阳二气）, which intersect to form an even state in which all things arise. All things move from Yin to Yang, and a new harmonious body is formed in the interaction of Yin and Yang . What people hate most is “孤（An honorific title for an emperor）”, “寡（An honorific title for an emperor）”, “不毂（An honorific title for an emperor）”, but the maharaja（emperor） used these words to call himself.
So everything that either detracts from it increases; Or add to it and subtract from it. As they taught me, so I teach others. A violent man dies without a cause. I take that as a tenet of teaching.
What he wants to express more is that all things are born equally, and the more you stress that your status is nobler than others, the more others will hate you.
Those who try to do so can easily die.
I thought this was slapdash. IQ data on the professions shows that both lawyers and doctors contain members whose IQ is as low as 110. I can testify there are members of both groups whose IQs are almost certainly lower. Emile Kierkegaard argues that IQs in the range of 160 or higher don’t really exist. I tend to agree.
The “genocides” don’t really exist. The notion of talented groups being genocided is twentieth century mythology which should be obvious to any regular readers of this website.
All the people mentioned in the last group, seventh tribe, are Judaized persons self praising. Fermi’s wife was Jewish. They never mention figures such as John Bardeen who won two Nobel Prizes in physics, or William Shockley who also started Silicon Valley and a brilliant IQ pioneer. Or Frederick Sanger who won two Nobel prizes in chemistry.
I would like to know, what are the strongest correlates of IQ? How can one get a good estimate of his IQ bracket?
Another ALL cretin that needs brainless hyperbole to push his loony prejudices. Oh, and it’s ‘commands’ is it-the pathetic pathopsychological projection is so Yankee Doodle.
Good God-the Bible is SO ‘spiritual’. All those Holy Genocides, all that butchery down to ‘…the last suckling babe’ and even the animals, crops and blades of grass. All those interminable genealogies, the invented histories, the hideous punishments for minor infractions etc. Give me any book of Zen koans or Daoist subtlety any day.
‘Surprisingly attractive’??!! Ooze, your LNP roots are showing.
Your description of Yin and Yang is eternal recurrence, a heresy that caused a moribund culture that had to be destroyed by fire.
“This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
We can infer Christianity travelled to China in the Tang Dynasty via the Nestorians, at the latest, and sublimated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi%27an_Stele
I suggest you don’t argue with a Chinese like me about the interpretation of Chinese.
Your scholars have already made a large number of translation errors in our literature.
You go further and further into the wrong literature.
All religions are to us like a bunch of clowns performing in a circus.
We’re not stupid like westerner.
As for your so-called nestorianism, it was banned not long after it was introduced into our country.
By the way, you don’t even know the timeline… The Tang Dynasty is at least 1000 years behind the yin-yang theory.
Why do people only make these sorts of comments in regards to IQ and not in regards to any kind of physical sport? No one ever says “That Olympic runner only won the Gold because he had a good breakfast. Winning Olympic medals is no evidence that he is actually an athlete who can run faster than most.”
It’s not for nothing the Chinese emperors identified with the dragon.
I’m a complete midwit but I find high brow dissident podcasts to be nice background noise.
Because many of these people seems believe mind is a metaphysical entity.
I am not a westerner. I am not sure were did you saw my “so-called discourse”.
It’s a good advice to learn chinese first, but not quite practically for me.
I didn’t assumed that you, Chinese, have a religious view. Or that you are not pragmatic. See also the post 105.
The quotes you mentioned doesn’t contradict at all “The Tao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things.”
Being a native speaker, please explain me what do you think is the meaning. Or, what is you opinion about “Heaven means to be one with God”.
“We only trust ourselves.” since XX century? or form more old days?
Then, what’s the aim of ancestor worship if you only trust yourself?
It’s simple… The direct translation of “天人合一” is the unity of man and nature.
It’s kind of like I became God, and everything in the world became one with me.
“We only trust ourselves” probably start as the beginning of civilization.
When there was a great flood, we overcame our suffering by dredging the river, not by relying on the gods.
As for ancestor worship, it is also very simple.
Our ancestors represent our history, we record it, we remember it, and it gives us momentum to move forward.
Seems quite clear what you say.
Although, statue of Guan Yu (in Jingzhou)? Why was build in 2016 by a declared materialistic state and the pragmatic people (for millennia!!) found necessary to make acts of veneration? Ok, I understand, history is history, we are all dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants etc. but why to make adoration gesture?
It’s the same with ancestor worship. I don’t see (and maybe I am wrong) so “very simple”. One is to have a link of gratitude for your grand grand x(N) fathers and other to worship them. Remembrance is not the same with awe. After all, nobody burn incense in front of a history book sitting on an altar 🙂
I am not contradicting your statement about pragmatism ( I am convince that is true) but because of the aforementioned this attribute cannot be alone. I see there must be another features who have nothing to do with practicality (and above material world) which define you as people.
On the other hand, that what it means? How do you interpret?
The Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the ten thousand things.
.道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物
(I find it these chinese characters for english translation. I suppose is the literal correct translation.)
You can think of the universe as having two states, Yin and Yang.
This Yin and Yang are philosophically abstract concepts.
All things are born in the third state of existence in which Yin and Yang merge.
So the words here are all philosophical abstractions, and you can even understand the simple explanation that the universe gave rise to everything.
Or as I have come to classify people
Double-wit, smart and high functioning, always learning
Wit, average intelligence
Half-wit, functioning
And
Quarter-wit, special needs
How would you rate Jean Michel Jarre’s music, or Vangelis, Pink Floyd. !?
When speaking of those in his highest intellectual echelon, the author says, “They are unlikely to believe in gods or superstitions”
Atheists are typically morons who have been taken in by the rantings of malevolent Jews (such as Karl Marx). Another contingent consists of spiritually unwell individuals permanently angry at having being born. In any case, there is nothing genius-like about atheism. Indeed, it’s a form of mental laziness since a self-creating cosmos is an absurdity.
A ‘human’ non-sequitur pontificating-delicious! The universe is eternal ergo not ‘created’ at all.
Maybe not. I can’t recount all of my experience but my thought is that, in the world we have today, college graduate (bachelor’s degree only) is the bottom of a trough. You need to have some post-bac education, and if you don’t have that, you will be more functional intellectually without any degree whatsoever.
That the United States Supreme Court, in the name of civil rights, meddled in the issue of what the value of a college degree was supposed be in the employment market didn’t help. At one time, bachelor’s degree was deemed to represent an educational level and the holder of a bachelor’s degree was deemed to be qualified for many jobs and careers, but the bachelor’s since had been reduced to the level of a vocational certificate.
Market forces may be part of the issue with so many more people holding four-year degrees, but I think the legal situation is still the biggest part of it. College dropouts, high school grads and people with only a little community college credit, and even non-high school grads are hired for all sorts of jobs and none of them have a major. Why is a bachelor’s degree holder judged solely by their academic major? I know there are possible arguments, but all of them are pretty thin of you ask me.
I came here via Vox Day:
https://voxday.net/2024/04/24/the-seventh-tribe/
That “Scary Bright” people don’t believe in God is untrue. There are way too few to being able to measure them much. Further, Vox Day, who also criticized this article, is a Christian, and Chris Langan is a kind of unorthodox one.
However, what is more important is that the view that the world is one’s “oyster” with a sufficient high IQ is simply not true. It is one of those viewpoints that are repeated on end, even though a glimpse into how great men of the past had to live their lives would disprove this. Or the many high IQ people nowadays who are working awful jobs — or work none at all!
One of the best texts I’ve read in this regard is of Nils M. Holm, who is member of the Triple Nine Society, where Thorsten Heitzmann is “regent”. Heitzmann, IQ 150+, tried to finish his dissertation in medicine six times and always lost interest. Nils M Holm published an article in their vidya magazine, called “Where Do The Failed 0.1% Go?”
http://t3x.org/files/vidya_324-325_NH_reprint.pdf
Even better is his unfinished book “Bridging the Gap. The Reconciliation of Intelligence and Culture”:
http://t3x.org/files/gap.pdf
http://t3x.org/files/gap.epub⬇
It disprooves this rather inane notion that our society is somehow functioning _really well_ in this regards, even though everything is breaking apart right now (and has been _FOR DECADES_, though now it’s really crystal clear that this is a mess, a circus society, a Clown World). Why would it be any different? Is Musk a Diesel? Obviously not. Often enough, many high IQ people don’t get along too well. Says Nils M Holm about himself:
“I am one of those guys who are totally uninteresting to industry, because they are experienced and have an opinion. Depending on their motivation, such people are either managing directors or nuts. Those who are striving for money and power are bosses. I am a nut.”
Xah Lee also had to wash dishes in 2014 (I don’t like him much, Holm’s is a sensitive guy too, meaning he may suffer even more). Vox Day also once wrote he cannot work with average people, would rather live in a cave and live on berries and nuts, or in his car eating thunar out of cans and read books downloaded from Gutenbergo.org and so on. Chris Langan was a bouncer and builder or so. There are countless others, and since they aren’t so many anyway — in the Gap, Holm writes that he visited a faculty of psychology and they tested 145+ not even ounce in ten years –, most are more likely to end up like this.
I wholeheartedly disagree! How is it smart to survive if you don’t know why or what for? If I kill myself now because I don’t like my life — which is true –, how am I not smart? Rather, I will be evil given that God, Christ, does exist and so does Hell. Otherwise, I would end my life and wish I were already dead — like Job.
To say that it is perfectly fine to live in a meaningless universe only means that a) the person is a hedonist with psychopathic tendencies b) rather crude and maybe a bit dumb c) is not really a die-hard atheist, still believes in “something”, which means that he has not really thought through what kind of implication it has that everything will vanish. It leads to nihilism and the licence to kill, quite obviously. Either yourself, or others.
This is why Vox Day is correct that atheist morality is satanist morality, citing Crowler: do what thou wilst shall be the whole of the law (he adds something from Maugham regarding the police man around the corner)
But that is it. There is nothing “smart” about living, and you don’t know anyway if you won’t get killed tomorrow. Or maybe you have some kind of illness in five to ten years that kills you, which you never saw coming. Such stuff happens. It is, I think, also a way God works in His mercy to wake people up. However, since we have free will, even then we may reject Him.
I certainly don’t like life, would end mine if I did not fear eternal damnation, and rather think that the atheist who “likes” life and jokes around while the world is such a mess, a blood bath often, I think that such an atheist is the childish one. It is immature. It denies the reality of evil.
And all the Tribes together is resulting in turning the planet into a garbage dump. Everything we touch, in time, becomes garbage.
If you ask me, I would rate Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper highest of all.
N30rebel: “And all the Tribes together is resulting in turning the planet into a garbage dump. Everything we touch, in time, becomes garbage.”
Toward the end of his life, John von Neumann wrote an essay titled “Can we survive technology?” The answer to the question is he had no idea. LOL He says that in the case of the exponentially mounting challenges presented to the planet and to mankind by technological “progress”, we’ll just have to do the best we can.
Thanks a lot, John! One might have expected a better insight from the world’s most intelligent man, one who made so many key contributions to nuclear weapons design, especially considering that it may well happen that it will be nuclear war that ends life on Earth.
This raises the question, did von Neumann know in advance that his work might result in the apocalypse, a destruction of the world in nuclear fire? Did he know, or did it come as a complete surprise even to the world’s smartest man? If he knew, and continued to help with development anyway, then that would make him the very soul of evil, wouldn’t it? Otoh, if he didn’t know, then how smart was he, after all?
James Thompson: “Please accept this as a general overview, subject to revision, to which more illustrative details and precise boundaries will be added at a later date.”
It would be interesting to know the results of any IQ tests actually administered to those mentioned as being “scary smart”. As far as I can see, the author is only guessing about those, estimating their IQs from life accomplishments. But there’s something about trying to reduce genius to a numerical quantity that conceals more than it illuminates, I think. For example, Thompson’s depiction above of von Neumann being much smarter than Einstein — what does that even mean? If he was so much smarter than Einstein, why wasn’t he able to help Einstein out with unified field theory? Further, if “smartness” is actually quantifiable, wouldn’t we expect that someone like von Neumann, so “smart” he’s seemingly from another planet, would be equally “smart” in other areas besides mathematics-related ones? Shouldn’t he have also been a great poet, a great philosopher, and a great playwright, and incidentally a world-renowned chess grandmaster, along with perhaps having written many great symphonies? But in fact, nobody is ever like that. Instead, what we actually see is that even at these higher reaches of intellectual endeavor, there is a distinct granularity. These genius-level adepts are outstanding at certain particular tasks, or a very restricted range of very similar tasks, but are not much better than anyone else at the vast majority of things.
This has a parallel in athletics. I once saw, for example, a Youtube video of a young fellow who weighed only 155 lbs. who was able to bench press 405 lbs. Needless to say, that’s extremely unusual, the physical equivalent of a genius-level performance. But such a guy might not be particularly talented in other lifts, and it might even be the case that the same physiological factors that made him excel at bench press would hold him back in other areas. Would it make any sense or be particularly useful to attribute to him a general athletic “strength” from his excellence in bench press, and assign him a number? It seems doubtful. Just because he can bench press an enormous weight for his size doesn’t mean he could excel at running a marathon, or even make a good sprinter.
If I recall correctly, the lower cutoff for military induction is set by law at 83 IQ. (For one particular demographic this automatically eliminate almost HALF the group.) This limit was set after draft needs during Vietnam forced lowering the standards with horrific results.
link: https://www.amazon.com/McNamaras-Folly-Hamilton-Gregory/dp/1495805484/ref=sr_1_1
Think about that for a moment. The largest, best funded, entity in the world, the group whose basic job is to kill and destroy things, has found that sub-83 workers do more damage to efficiency and battle readiness than any services they can provide. Does anyone think that they can serve a more useful function in a productive, technological society? Is there anything they can be trained for which cannot be done better, cheaper, faster by a machine? Even if there were such jobs around, why should we pretend that they would find those jobs attractive? Hell, we can’t even find one student in a thousand who works to grade level in many Baltimore Public Schools. I would only add that among White, Hispanics, and Asians, the subgroups with that same low range average IQ, act in very similar ways.
I do not see any long term, short term, practical, socially acceptable, solution. Quite simply, and rather sadly, these people have the full range of human desires and emotions, but intellectually they cannot be functional at anything higher than Neolithic tribal society.
IQ is one of my trigger topics.
But I’m reminded of the quote:
I takes a very brave man to be a coward in wartime. ( they shoot refuseniks remember)
Faith and trust and respect on the topic is dispensed controlled authoritative from the least qualified as any incompetant imbecile is less damaging more honest and transparent then a well scripted half wit sycophant.
The entire subject is a NON-SEQUITOR
Ask yourself how much a truly intelligent person would (Need to) engage or participate in this society?
They are autarkic auto-didacts.
You would never even know, had you met one.
Looking at the quality of letters sent in to UR in 2013 points to either the average IQ of the world has gone down since 2013 or the average IQ of contributors to the UR has gone down considerably.
One of the most annoying things about the letters section of almost any article in the UR is that some contributors for some reason are not limited in the number of their contributions like most of us. The people that contribute the most tend to be the most trite and tend to push the same opinions over and over again.
I wish everyone was limited to three letters per day, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Who cares? IQ is nothing but a self-aggrandizing myth. When I observe how humans have devolved, especially the so-called leaders, I see no sign of higher intelligence. As we destroy each other and the habitat and diversity of life on earth we depend upon, we betray any pretense of intelligence. The human being is not a nice animal and will soon go extinct.
I don’t like classical music; I love it! Did I pass the test?
I have met some professors and they are nuts. I will not name them. Last time I got into trouble.
wow!
shitain isn’t sending its best!
from now on james thompson’s blog should be called “notes from an evil retard”.
SAD!
— actual BGI volunteer and mayflower 100% euro-american gentile
You passed the test of “listening to Mozart makes me smart”!
The smartest guy I know listens to techno and the only intellectual interest he has is to memorize place names. His life revolves around alcohol and women. He is an engineer by profession.
The smartest woman I know, my cousin and smarter than this guy, likewise has no intellectual interests beyond her job (doctor), listens to standard pop music and is married with two kids. Her daughters, also exceedingly smart for their age, listen to Taylor Swift.
Her husband, also a doctor, and with Irish ancestors, is also no doubt very intelligent, and he too is lacking any intellectual interests beyond his job. During Covid they were the only family members who wore masks.
It is obvious that you do not have a brain to be “lazy”.
The passed all the required memorization tests, have listened unwaveringly to the “experts” in order to attain their credential and appropriate compensation in their field.
Salary is predicated on the workers lack of knowing what is really going on.
No indication that they can or could THINK.
He understood human behaviour well, as what I gain from his statements i9s something I have told CoVidiots and woke Greenies for the last 5 years is that they need to change their behaviour as they are repeating the same mistakes.
The Collective Waste would rather change the tech than their behaviour.
I think that the people of Tribe 1 are dumber but nicer people. I have noticed that the smarter people are, the more stuck-up, narcissists, self-absorbed and unfriendly that they are. I really don’t like to hang around intellectuals, they think that they have the absolute truths about every thing, you can’t reason with them, intellectuals are very contrarian. While simple people like peasants, poor people and the homeless are more open minded for a revolution
This article doesn’t take into consideration the political system, the economic system of a country, the economic situation of a country. You can have 20 Harvard College Degrees but if you are forced to live in Haiti, Guatemala, Syria, Georgia, Moldova or Argentina you will be poor.
But if you live in USA and you vote for The Green Party or Bernie Sanders you can earn 20 dollars per hour, or if there is a revolutionary change toward the overthrow the oligarchic ruling class you will be even wealthier.
Even Spain (which is labeled as The Haiti of Europe) doesn’t have a good political-economic social system for people to experience mental, economic, social and physical personal progress
USA itself which is supposed to be American Dream (Which doesn’t exist really) it is a hell of poverty for the majority, it is safe to assume that only 20% to 30% of the population of this zionist capitalist country can experience personal progress.
Not the 70% or 80%. In other words, in simple words, 80% of americans are economically oppressed and bound for the floor, tortured and exploited by the 20% to 30%
And this is why i hate middle class so much. The real middle class is an exploiter class, and that class belongs in that 30%, sides with the oligarchic class and both the oligarchic class and the middle class conspire to destroy, to hate, to mutilate and to torture the lower 70% to 80% classes
Like the progressive intellectual Joe Bageant who hated the middle classes. as the main enemy of change
Video Link
We are political animals like Aristotle said and even our intelligence is influenced by politics
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in the 1920s, when women were kept out of career paths.
I refer the Honourable Gentleman to the Law of the Land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Disqualification_(Removal)_Act_1919
I admit that even an enlightened law like that won’t take effect universally and instantly.