Smart people disagree. Next question: who is smart? Size matters - the wrong way

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Ron Unz, who runs the Unz Review, has been skeptical about us anti-vaxxers.  He got the jabs and thinks that excess mortality is due, if anything, to covid itself.  He recaps his position in this article.

However, in it he writes favorably about Turtles All the Way Down, a book on childhood vaccines that I raved about a couple of months ago.  Follow the link to my video review. He accepts that childhood vaccines may have downsides and that the pharmaceutical industry may be lying to us about them.  He accepts two more premises that have even less widespread support (and which I also believe),  First, AIDS is probably more of a lifestyle than a virus issue and Big Pharma mischaracterized it to make a ton of money.  Second, polio is probably due to something other than a virus.  The virus is just along for the ride, much like the HIV virus with AIDS.

The same people with whom he is arguing, but whom I support wholeheartedly on Covid, like Mike Whitney and Paul Craig Roberts, are mostly, strongly on the other side when it comes to Russia-Ukraine.  They hate everything the US government does.  If Biden supports Ukraine, they line up to support Russia. 

You have to keep an open mind.  I’ll read whatever he writes, but don’t think I’ll change my mind on those topics. 

Unz supports unpopular writers on other topics.  James Thompson writes frequently on the taboo subject of intelligence.  Eddie and I finished our discussions of the geography of the Americas with a discussion about the Eskimos and American Indians.  As we have been talking about the levels of civilization achieved by various American peoples, he ventured that maybe they aren’t as smart as we are.

I asked him what he meant by that.  How do you know how smart somebody is?  He said, by IQ.  I asked him how they measure IQ.  He didn’t exactly know, so we talked about it.  My description isn’t very detailed, but I hope it was good enough for an eleven year old boy.

Intelligence is not something like height or weigh for which there are precise and generally agreed measurement tools.  IQ is measured by presenting somebody with a bunch of questions that can be answered right or wrong. 

The questions have all been tested on a broad, representative sample of the population – tens of thousands of people – to see how they do.  Questions that half the sample can answer correctly discriminate at the average IQ – 100.  If I present fifty such questions to a person, who answers half correctly, I say that the person has an average IQ.  The average IQ of 100 is established using the United States and Great Britain as reference populations.  Mostly.

The bell curve, or Gaussian distribution, is a mathematical construct used to explain probabilities and other such phenomena.  Without going into details on the mathematics, a set of questions for which only one person in six can answer half correctly discriminates at one standard deviation above the average.  That standard deviation has been defined – not discovered, but defined – to be 15 for the reference population above. 

A set of questions so hard that only one in fifty can get half of them right discriminates at an IQ of 130.  One in a thousand – 145.  Beyond that – it is very hard to make up enough questions, and find enough people to test them on, to make an accurate test.  Things get fuzzy beyond about 160.  “Real smart” is good enough.  Ron Unz, Robert Malone and Matthew Crawford are “real smart.”

Something I was never taught, but figured out for myself, is that for big samples the bell curve tracks the binomial expansion.  If you toss 100 coins up in the air, there is a 2/3 chance that between 45 and 55 will come up heads.  There is about a 1% chance of more than 60 coming up heads, and 1 in 1000 for 65 or more. Thus the standard deviation for tossing 100 coins at a time is five.

Not coincidentally, think I, researchers are concluding that human intelligence is a function of thousands of genes. Figuratively speaking, sexual reproduction tosses them in the air. Some of the time a larger number than average come down heads. Of course, to continue the analogy, you have to allow that different parents have different collections of coins to start with.

What does IQ mean?  I showed Eddie James Thompson’s latest post on world IQ.  He was surprised at the range.  Then I searched for maps of per capita GDP per country and performance on the PISA test,  standardized achievement tests given worldwide to fifteen-year-olds.  They map pretty closely. 

Of course there are inconsistencies.  The IQ shown for Ukraine is lower than that for Russia or Belarus.  Last I looked, the figure for Ukraine was based on one test given a couple of decades ago to a few tens of teenagers in Bila Tserkva. In other words, not terribly representative.  The map shows Cambodia being smarter than Thailand or Vietnam.  I’ve been to all three and neither I nor the natives of those countries would agree.  Vietnamese dominated business in Phnom Penh the same way Chinese dominated in Saigon. 

A major problem is that intelligence testing is anathema to academics almost everywhere.  There isn’t much enthusiasm or money available for improving testing.  Thompson does the best he can with the tests that have been given.

Eddie was interested in his own IQ.  I told him I’d find a test on the computer, but that I didn’t want to be involved when he took it.  We then found a practice test on the Wonderlic site and went through a few items together.  He did quite well on the mathematical logic.  He’s been studying that. 

It is a matter of practice. Some of the math problems were similar to one that Eddie just answered in his 6th grade math. Two oil storage tanks together hold 120 tons of oil. The bigger one holds 2/9 more than the smaller one. How many tons does the smaller one hold?

The word problems were tougher.  Are “impeccable” and “infallible” similar in meaning, opposite in meaning, or unrelated?  I thought “unrelated.”  Wonderlic thinks “similar.”  Eddie didn’t know the words. 

We’ve got to broaden his reading.  But for now I’m thrilled that he simply enjoys it.  He and I read Sidewise Stories from the Wayside School four years back.  We are reading it again, this time with Zoriana.  My hope is that Eddie will occasionally take the lead in reading.  The level is appropriate.  He stumbles over a few words but gets the gist.

A century ago, Evolution and Ethics made a big deal about the difference between in-group and out-group ethics.  I often raise the issue in a modern context.  To the Big Pharma and deep state, we peons are the out-group.  They don’t care about us.  Yesterday I found this article that summarizes my point of view very well.  It is not by accident that I live in a homogeneous, connected community in a country with a government too inept to intrude in my life.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the female members of the family interrupt every five minutes as I try to write this piece.  It’s nice to be needed, but….

Graham