Further Thoughts on IQ

(waning, I got up 4 hours early today.)

So as I was saying, withing the “normal” (average) range of IQ, most people who have the same number probably have about the same level of competency. But for outliers at the bottom end, it makes a difference how their low IQ came about, whether through natural genetic variation, or an unfortunate accident. A person’s level of impairment has a lot to do with their deviation from the IQ they should have been and the society at large–thus, a person who is naturally at 70IQ and comes from a society where they are average–where everyone is about 70–is perfectly functional, whereas a person who was supposed to have a 100 IQ but got dropped on their head and suffered brain damage is not going to be very functional.

An IQ below 80 is somewhere between borderline and severely impaired in the US; about 8 or 9% of people score below 80. About 2.5% score as severely impaired, below 70. People with IQs under 70 can’t be executed, and can only reach, at max, the intellectual level of a 12 yr old.* People below 60 have severe impairments and may never be able to live alone.

*Still putting them well ahead of the smartest apes–to be honest, people blathering on about how apes and dolphins are “as smart as humans” kind of get on my nerves.

And yet, many successful societies have survived without any ability to read or numbers beyond 3. These folks tend to score badly on IQ tests, but they survive just fine in their own societies, and I assume they are very happy with their lives the way they are. When people say that people in society Foo have average IQs around Bar, this is not the same as saying they are severely disabled–it’s a different kind of low IQ.

One thing I wonder about: let’s say someone was supposed to have an IQ of 140, due to genetics, but an accident interfered–say, they got dropped on their head–and they lost 40 IQ points. If they’d started at 100, they’d drop down to 60, which is pretty darn impaired. But they’ve only dropped to 100.

I assume that, even though they would test as “normal” on an IQ test, the loss of 40 IQ points would result in severe life impairment of some sort. I don’t know if the DSM/other ways of diagnosing people with disabilities could pick up on such people at all, or maybe they’d end up with some random diagnosis due to however the condition manifests. I also wonder how such a person would compare to someone who is just naturally low-IQ–would they have a better chance of thriving in a society that’s not as IQ-demanding? Or would they be just as dysfunctional there? Or would they have enough wits left about them to make up for the damage they’d suffered, and do fine in life?

One thing I suspect: growing up would be hell for them. Their siblings (assuming their 140 IQ parents manage to have any other kids,) would pursue advanced degrees and become doctors, lawyers, finance bros, or professors. Their parents probably are professors. Their parents would be pushing them to take advanced maths in elementary school (“Your brother could work with negative numbers when he was 4!) when they struggle with fractions, and they’d feel like shit for consistently being dumber than everyone around them. Their parents would shove them into remedial classes, because “average” looks suspiciously like “dumb a rock” when you’re really smart, and then force them to go to college whether they belong there or not.

Of course, this is what our society tries to do to everyone, under the assumption that enough… pre-k? tutoring? organic food? Sesame Street?… can turn anyone into a math professor.

Two Kinds of Dumb

The impression one gets from briefly skimming anything on IQ is that two people with the same IQ are (supposed to be) about equally smart. And within the normal range of IQs, for a roughly homogenous population, this is basically true.

But for those at the bottom of the IQ range, this is not true–because there are two ways to be dumb.

This is, obviously, an oversimplification. There are probably 7.2 billion ways to be dumb. But bear with me; I think the oversimplification is justified for the sake of conversation.

Some people have very low IQs because something bad happened to them–they were dropped on their heads as babies, ate a chunk of lead, or have an extra copy of chromosome 21. In these sorts of cases, had the accident not occurred, the individual would have been smarter. Their genetic potential, as it were, is not realized, and–with the exception of accidents affecting genetics–if they had kids, their kids would not share their low IQ, but reflect their parents’ genetic IQ.

The second kind of low IQ happens just because a person happened to have parents who weren’t very bright. There is a great range in people’s natures, IQs included, and some folk are on the low end. Just as Gnon made some people with 140 IQs, so Gnon made some people with 60. There is nothing wrong with these people, per se. They tend to be perfectly functional, at least in a society of other people like themselves–they just don’t score very well on IQ tests and tend not to get degrees in math.

People who have suffered some form of traumatic brain injury tend not to be very functional. They lose all kinds of functional brain processing stuff, not just the ability to predict which way the arrow is going to be rotated next. By contrast, people who are just not genetically blessed with smarts have built entire cultures.

To clarify, and use an extreme example, let’s think back to our most ancient ancestors. Since we can’t talk to them, let’s look at our cousins, the other great apes.

Koko the Gorilla can use about 1,000 signs and understands about 2,000 human words. Kanzi, a bonobo who can play Pacman, make stone tools, and cook his own dinner, understands about 3,000 words and 348 symbols. Both Kanzi and Koko are probably on the highly intelligent end for their species, because you don’t hear all that much about all of their classmates whom scientists have also been trying to teach to talk.

According to different websites on child development, a 2 year old human typically uses about 150-300 words; a 3 year old uses about 900-1000 words; a four year old uses 4,000-6,000 words.

As a general rule of thumb, human children, like great apes, understand more than they can say. So let’s say that Koko and Kanzi are about as smart as a human somewhere between 2 and 4 years old.

Now consider what would happen if you let your 3 year old (or someone else’s three year old if you don’t have one of your own) lose in the jungle: they’d die. Quickly. A three year old sucks at making omelets, their flint-knapping leaves much to be desired, and most of them aren’t even very good at Pacman. They’re also really bad at climbing trees and still need help opening their bananas, and they don’t really understand why they should avoid lions.

Bonobos and gorillas, by contrast, survive just fine in the jungle, so long as humans don’t shoot them.

A grown human with the intellect of a 4 yr old would not be functional, in human society or gorilla society. A gorilla with the language abilities of a 4 yr old human is a very smart and completely functional-in-gorilla-society gorilla. A gorilla is not dumb; a gorilla is exactly as smart as it is supposed to be.

Since the age when our ancestors diverged from the other primates, our species has been marked by increasing brain capacity and, presumably, intelligence. We’ve gone from doing one-to-one correspondence on our fingers to calculus and diff eq. Which means that a great many human societies have fallen somewhere in between–societies where the average person could count to ten; societies where the average person could do basic arithmetic; societies where the average person can do some abstract thought, but not a ton. Each society has its own level of organization and particular environment, requiring different mental toolkits.

But within our own society, we are not identical; we are not clones. So some of us are smart and some are dumb. But a person who is naturally dumb is generally more functional than someone who suffered some accident; there are different kinds of low IQ.

The Uncanny Valley of Intelligence

So thinking about this IQ-range business, I suspect there is some range where a person is just close enough to sometimes be sometimes in your range, and sometimes out of it, which renders them confusing and therefore annoying. Like, if they concentrate or have studied a particular subject, they can be as good at it–or better–as you are. But on general subjects or when they aren’t particularly concentrating, they say/do (from your POV) a ton of stupid shit. As a result, you have trouble classifying these people as “smart like self” (pretty much everyone believes themselves to be smart,) or “Dumb like not-self”, and our brains probably dislike that confusion.

There is probably also a point below which, as long as the other person isn’t aggressive, we stop trying to fit them into our mental models and just accept them. We might not have great conversations with them, but we also don’t try to discuss quantum with them. Kids are like this; objectively speaking, kids are pretty dumb and we fall all over ourselves when they do something like add 5+6 without fucking up, but teenagers with their “I think I know everything” attitude really piss people off, even thought teens actually do know a lot more than little kids. I don’t think it’s just because people have an evolutionary reason to bond with their own kids, because teenagers are your kids, too, and people probably find their own teenagers more annoying than other people’s kids.

So among my near-relatives, one of them has a condition that affects their brain/cognition, and I just accept them as kinda dumb and don’t stress about it. Another seems to fall into the uncanny valley of dumb and smart, which I find really stressful to be around. (Oh really, you read a study? And you are telling me about it? And oh, yes, you misunderstood the implications. Again. I see. Yes do please keep telling me about it.) Sadly, the just-dumb relative seems to fall in the annoying relative’s uncanny valley, so annoying relative complains to me about how annoying the just-dumb relative is to them.

Intellectual Fluidity

Ruminating on (someone else’s) theory that people can effectively communicate/bond with others who are within about 20 IQ pts of themselves. I’m not sure how 20 was determined, nor would I expect any particular # to hold for everyone, but let’s just run with the general idea.

One of the implications (which is rather obvious anyway, but I like imagining it so I’m sharing it) is that intelligence, like a liquid sloshing around in your brain, may be applied more or less to different problems. We normally call this “concentrating,” but we can also think about it on a long-term basis as getting really good at something through lots of practice.

The amount of liquid sloshing around may be basically fixed, esp. by adulthood, (or slowly decreasing as you age, fuckfuckfuck,) such that given a variety of tasks and normal circumstances, you perform however is normal for you. But given incentive, you can divert mental energies away from their normal tasks to understand or do something harder than normal; this caries a certain cost, as it makes doing other things more difficult, but you can do it. This allows people to communicate with a variety of others, smarter or dumber than themselves, but not infinitely; since the fluid is limited, you have only so much to devote.

—–
One of the implications of this theory is that some people have a much easier time making friends/communicating than others. An average person, IQ 100, can effectively befriend people from 80-120, which constitutes the majority of the population. Someone with a 140 IQ, by contrast, can only effectively befriend people between 120 and 160, a very small % of the population.

A reasonable critique is that this may just be excuse-making on the part of people who are bad at socializing and have over-inflated views of themselves. And I am sure this is sometimes the case. But I also suspect there is something to the theory. Speaking as someone who is probably reasonably intelligent, I know that I don’t really fit in with or make friends with normal people. Not out of any sort of malice or purposeful dislike; not because I sit around thinking about how terrible and beneath me those other people are (intelligence is generally only something that occurs to me in retrospect). If anything, I’ve devoted a fair amount of energy to developing normal socializing skills, like looking at faces and asking questions and making conversation on normal topics. But this does not make these conversations interesting. It is generally with disappointment that I realize that someone who I thought might be interesting uses a lot of bad logic and has a bunch of bad ideas that are entirely predictable based on their class/age/tribal affiliations.

But I don’t think I am just a disagreeable jerkface; there are a few people whom I like quite a bit (actually, I think I generally like people better than they like me; my spouse says I am too optimistic about people I meet.) I feel fairly comfortable on blogs devoted to science and reason, and generally in communities that tend to attract fairly high-IQ people.

Autism Exists Because Math is a Recently Evolved Ability

This is a theory.

We know mathematics is a recently evolved ability–all human groups can talk and compose stories, (even groups without written language,) but many groups do not even have words for numbers over three.

Out of the 200,000 years or so that anatomically modern humans have been around, no one bothered to invent written numbers until about 6,000 years ago; algebra didn’t really take off until about 1,000 years ago; calculus was invented about 400 years ago.

The ability to do any kind of abstract mathematics beyond the four basic operations is most likely a very newly acquired human skill–selection for higher math ability would have been virtually impossible prior to the invention of math, after all.

The thing about newly acquired skills is that evolution tends not to have worked out all of the kinks, yet. Things your ancestors have done consistently (including your parents) for the last 100,000 years will probably involve some decent genetic code. Things your ancestors did for millions of years will involve even better code. Things humans have been doing for only 400 years will probably involve some very kludgey code that might have some shitty side effects. Avoiding malaria comes immediately to mind–sickle cell anemia might help you avoid malaria, but it’s a pretty crappy adaptation overall. By contrast, animals have had circulatory systems for a long time; the code that builds circulatory systems is pretty solid.

Since math is a recently acquired skill, we’d expect at least some of the genes that makes people better at math to be a little, well, wonky.

It is probably no coincidence that people with extremely high math abilities have a reputation for being total weirdos, while people with very high verbal abilities–say, published authors–are regarded as pretty normal.

There are a few obvious ways to make people better at a particular task. You could take some neural real estate away from other tasks and assign it to the one you want. We know we can do this “environmentally,” (Phantom Limb Syndrome appears to be caused by the missing limb’s brain area being re-purposed for other tasks, such that when you do those other tasks, your brain simultaneously registers the activity as information coming from the limb); it seems reasonable that some sort of coding could do it genetically. Alternatively, you could increase neural speed or density or something. Or perhaps the overall size of the brain.

Each of these possibilities could also have some negative side effects–bigger brains kill mothers; re-purposing mental real estate could leave you unable to do some other function, like fine-motor control or talking.

Autism appears to basically do some set of these things (it seems to increase neural density, at least.) People with a small amount of autistic traits end up better at math than they would be otherwise. People with too many, though, suffer negative side effects–like struggling with verbal tasks. (It’s no particular surprise that autistic people tend to come from families with high math ability.) Autism is probably another mental trait that makes sense in a Sickle Cell Anemia sense.

Genetic Aristotelian Moderation

I suspect a lot of genetic traits (being that many involve the complex interaction of many different genes) are such that having a little bit of the trait is advantageous, but having too much (or conversely, too little) is negative.

A few obvious examples:

Aggression: too much, and you go to jail. Historically, prison conditions were awful enough in the West that this likely exerted an upper bound on the population’s criminality by eliminating violent people from the gene pool.

But too little, and you get taken advantage of. You can’t compete in job interviews, get promoted, make friends, or ask people out on dates. Aggressive people take your stuff, and you can’t protect against them.

From getting jobs to getting mates to not being mugged, a little bit of aggression is clearly a good thing.

Intelligence: High IQ is tremendously mal-adaptive in modern society. (This may always have been true.) The upper end of the IQ curve basically does not have children. (On both micro and macro levels.) I’m not prepared to say whether this is a bug or a feature.

But, low IQ appears to also maladaptive. This was certainly true historically in the West, where extremely high death rates and intense resource competition left the dumber members of society with few surviving offspring. Dumb people just have trouble accomplishing the things necessary for raising lots of children.

Somewhat above average IQ appears to be the most adaptive, at least in the present and possibly historically.

Height: Really tall men have health problems and die young. Really short men are considered undateable and so don’t have children. So the pressure is to be tall, but not too tall.

(Speculatively) Depression: Too much depression, and you commit suicide. Not enough, and you’re a happy-go-lucky person who drops out of school and punches people. Just enough, and you work hard, stay true to your spouse, don’t get into fights, and manage to do all of the boring stuff required by Western society. (Note: this could have changed in the past hundred years.)

Sickle Cell Anemia: I don’t think I need to explain this one.

(Also speculative) Tay Sach’s: Tay Sach’s is a horrible neurological disease that shows up in populations with evidence of very high recent pressure to increase IQ, such as Ashkenazim (one of the worlds’ highest IQ groups) and Quebecois. There is therefore speculation that in its heterozygous form, Tay Sach’s may enhance neural development, instead of killing you hideously.

Increased gender dimorphism = lower IQ?

The short version of this is if you could measure the relative gender dimorphism of people–say, by comparing siblings–and compare that to their IQ, I wager the more androgynous people would come out smarter.

This began with Jayman’s Pioneer Hypothesis, which basically posits that frontier or pioneer environments will select for a certain suite of traits like aggressiveness and early menarche–that is, traits that allow them to quickly take over and fill up the land.

Based on this initial theory, I hypothesized that East Germany was settled later than West Germany–which turns out to be actually true. I was pretty stoked about that.

Anyway, earlier menarche => lower IQ, (I’m pretty sure this is well-documented) as shortening childhood = shortening the period of time your brain has to develop.

Raising the age of menarche gives your brain more time to develop. In environments where family formation has historically been difficult, ie, very densely populated areas with little free land available where people might have to wait for their relatives to die before they can get their own farm, have likely evolved people who hit menarche later (after all, there’s no need for early menarche in such an environment. See also: cave fish losing pigment because it’s not useful.) The opposite side of this coin is later menopause, but since these folks have lower fertility overall, I don’t think that’s a big factor.

Anyway, later menarche => more time for brains to develop => higher IQ.

I suppose the speculative part here is that late menarche populations are more androgynous and early menarche populations are less androgynous. This probably wouldn’t hold for all populations, but anecdotal experience with Americans seems consistent–eg, MIT students seem highly androgynous, while dumb people from elsewhere seem much more dimorphic. Actually, many of the extremely high-IQ people I’ve known have been trans*, as opposed to none of the dumb ones. Among dumb people, it seems perfectly normal for women to socialize in all-female groups, especially for activities like shopping and discussing celebrity gossip, while men find it normal to socialize in all-male groups, especially for activities like watching other grown men play keep-away (sports), drinking beer, and playing poker. (To be fair, though, I don’t have a lot of first-hand experience in the world of the dumb.)

Historically pioneer and historically densely settled populations probably end up with different notions of what is “normal” dimorphism, leading to lots of disputes as each side claims that their experiences are normal, and not realizing that the other sides’ experiences are normal for them, too.

Why I am not a White Nationalist

I am an IQ Nationalist. You might also call me a Euro-Exceptionalist.

I don’t care where you come from or what you look like, so long as you’re smart and we get along.

In his SMART FRACTION THEORY OF IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS  and  SMART FRACTION THEORY II: WHY ASIANS LAG  La Griffe du Lion asserts that, “In market economies, per capita GDP is directly proportional to the population fraction with verbal IQ equal to or greater than 106.”

White IQs average around 100, maybe a little more–meaning that half or more of whites are below this threshold. With IQs around 110 to 115, the average Ashkenazi easily outclasses the average goy. Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese IQs are roughly on par with whites–immigrants from these countries tend to come almost exclusively from the upper end of the IQ range. Some Indian castes have selected heavily for intelligence, with impressive results.

Smart people make the world a good place. They gave us vaccines, refrigeration, computers, airplanes, and massive quantities of food. I want to live in a world full of smart people.