GOD DAMN so that was how you take tests!! WTF no wonder I didn’t get into the Good Colleges.

Tests are a frigging scam. You shouldn’t be allowed to go onto the next question till you finish the prior.. and if you advance you shouldn’t get to go back.

“Curiously, in the third century BC the purebred Mexican Indians invented writing and an exponential-positional number system, and made extraordinarily accurate astronomical observations.”

It’s an even stronger point than it might appear. Any ancient advance made in the Americas had to be the work of the locals – there was no one else to learn it from. Whereas in the Old World you can never exclude copying.

Did China import its Bronze Age from further west? Who knows, but it’s not impossible. Did subSaharan Africa import the idea of agriculture from, say, Egypt? Scholars think not, but it must be impossible to rule out. We know the Greek alphabet was imported from the Levant, that “Arabic” numerals were imported from India, and so on. How about all the imports – of things or, especially, ideas – that we don’t know about? Heavens, the whole basis of the most advanced and successful civilisation there’s ever been – that of NW Europe – was imported.

Fred, having done a 360 from claiming that aboriginals are geniuses a while back, has written a fine column, but missed a few salient facts here….In fact, the correlation between average IQ in a country and GdP/capita is an unbelievably high .70….The exceptions, like Qatar, are sitting on a mound of hydrocarbons being produced by Westerners, who pay royalties.When the hydrocarbons run out, it will be back to raising goats, and negligible GDP….Some of the things that puzzle him are doubtless small sample sizes, and the fact that small minorities of whites and asians actually do all the brain work in many countries in South America….Still, it’s progress!

I don’t put much faith in these cross-country comparisons of IQ versus national achievement. OTOH I’m a firm adherent of a weaker form of equality-racism*. There are profound differences in the mental characteristics of different races at the group level. An obvious example is the difference in average IQ score, average impulse control, and average propensity towards violent behavior between groups primarily comprising persons of European ancestry versus groups primarily comprising persons of sub-Saharan African ancestry. These differences alone suggest that two groups, one of European ancestry and another of sub-Saharan African, will not get along well together and are probably best served by different political systems. Furthermore, the by-now, well-established existence of such differences suggest that there may be other just as important but as yet unstudied differences tending to the same conclusion.

*Equality-racism might be defined as the belief that although no race is inherently superior to another nor destined to rule over another, different races may perform at varying average levels of proficiency in various important areas of endeavor, there is a strong genetic component to such differences, and as a result groups with different racial compositions likely will prosper best under different political systems, and more than likely will not get along or prosper equally within one given political system.

As I suppose others did, I learned the technique for acing tests. Run through all the questions rapidly, picking the low-hanging fruit, putting a tick mark by those questions not instantly obvious. Run through again, answering those of the tick-markeds susceptible to a minute’s thought, double tick-marking the really difficult ones. Then to the really hard ones and finally, with an eye on the clock and knowing how the tests are scored, eliminate one or two answers on the remaining ones and guess.
People who don’t know this, and try to go straight through, may not even finish.

Now I find out that trick! I always went straight through. And finished well before the allotted time. I never studied or otherwise prepared for those tests. I just thought of them as games and enjoyed playing them.
Incidentally, about Columbia, Luke Ford has an interesting interview with Michael Fumento about his experiences in Columbia that somewhat contradicts your depiction.
I’ll add another item to your race or culture v IQ puzzle: Japan.
Before Meiji, the wheel was known but little used compared to Europe, and by Western standards the country was mired in backwardness.
But within a generation or so, Japanese were inventing everything from mosquito coils to seismographs, and in another generation or so going from once having been helpless as the British navy bombarded their cities to humiliating the British in battle in the air, on land and at sea, and being instrumental in destroying their empire.
Then, in another generation or so, they were pacifists making Hondas, hentai and Hello Kitties.
Same people, same culture, same race, same genes…same IQ?

Years back, Marilyn vos Savant had a quiz column in which a question was: “Two bugs in a jar reproduce, doubling their number every minute. The jar is full in an hour. How long does it take to half fill the jar?”

I will speculate, subject to correction, that to anyone who has worked with computers, at least at the register level, the answer is obvious on inspection. I will further speculate that those of equal intelligence, including mathematical ability, but graduates of liberal arts, will have more trouble with it. The nature of a base-two exponential expansion is probably not obvious to someone who has never seen one.

Isn’t this kind of a bad/confusing question?

There could be two answers to this question, in my opinion, depending how one reads/interprets it.

Firstly, are only the two original bugs doubling their number every minute (2 bugs every minute) or are the two newly-born bugs and subsequent off-spring maturing immediately and starting to reproduce and doubling their number as well? Or do the two original bugs produce double the offspring/eggs every minute they produced the minute prior, e.g., 2, 4, 8, 16… , which would lead to the question how and why they can suddenly produce more offspring/eggs than previously? Logically, in order to exponentially produce more eggs/offspring, the two original bugs would probably have to expand in body size as well, right, which could further/additionally fill the jar (is this accounted for in the question?), or are they just some kind of magic bugs, that can conjure up exponentially more eggs/offspring out of thin air every new minute, while they stay the same body size?

In the first scenario it would take 30 minutes to half fill the jar, in the second and third scenario it would take 59 minutes to half fill the jar, right?

I think a more clear question would leave out a specific number of original bugs, to indicate that this is an exponential doubling expansion question, not just a simple doubling expansion question, to avoid confusion: Bugs in a jar reproduce, doubling their number every minute. The jar is full in an hour. How long does it take to half fill the jar?

What was Marilyn vos Savant’s correct answer?

If you hold printed piece of paper up to a mirror, facing the mirror, you are holding it backwards in relation to yourself. The mirror shows you holding the paper backwards so the text is running in the opposite direction (reversed). If you turn the paper upside down facing the mirror, the mirror will show you holding the the paper backwards AND upside down.

Hold the paper up to the light facing away from you and you will see the letters run backwards because you are holding it backwards.

Environment plays a large part in IQ. Lead poisoning was especially bad in Rome due to lead plates, pots and pipes.

They wouldn’t listen to the fact that I was a genius

The man say, “We got all that we can use.”

Now I got them steadily depressin’, low down mind messin’

Working at the car wash blues

Video Link

The first scenario you present is extraordinarily strained, and the difference between the second and the third has no bearing on what is purely a mathematical problem. Starting with “The number of bugs in a jar doubles every minute” would probably have been clearer, though. Still, one can raise questions as to the size of the bugs, etc.

59 min. You work backwards and completely ignore the initial number of bugs.

If they double every minute, the jar was half-full 1 minute before the end.

only white Mexicans could have done it. …

…something must have drastically lowered the intelligence of those white purebred Indians. What?

genocide

I’m not impugning the intelligence or anything else of the proud South American Amerindians, but white people were known to have lived down there centuries ago, and appear to have been all but wiped out.

Just like the Viking settlements in N. America. Or whatever happened to Kennewick Man, although just like with queen Nefertiti

there’s a frantic scramble to pretend that Kennewick Man wasn’t Caucasian, even tho it’s obvious that he was.

just Google ‘Peruvian mummies red hair’. Although even with this, there is a manic agenda to debunk white people in ancient lands, because it might upset the narrative of ‘evil whitey’ who owes and owes and owes and owes. And if you’re on the receiving end of that largess, (everybody but white men), then you’d be well motivated to debunk anything that makes whitey look like anything but a genocidal, enslaving monster who owes, and owes and owes and owes and owes and ….

A nation is supposed to be a sanctuary for its people from foreign hordes, but the idea of ‘sanctuary’ is used by globalists to enable invasive colonization.

For example, Hillary, a National Merit Finalist, scored higher than 99.5 percent of Illinois and can reliably be suspected of being bright. Some groups are obviously smarter than other groups.

Proof that intelligence is no guarantee for decency, morality, and integrity.
Hillary is a stupid, stupid person despite her smarts.

Colombians are said to have an IQ of 84. They run a modern country with all the credentials of airlines, telecommunications and the like…
American blacks are said to be at IQ 85. Being more intelligent than Colombians, they should certainly be able to run modern countries–unless maybe their one IQ point difference runs backwards…

Fred Fred Cabbage Head…

If all Colombians were of the same race, and if that is their IQ average, we shouldn’t expect much from them.
But Colombia is diverse. Its institutions and economics are dominated by whites with IQ of 100. So, even if Colombia has a lot of dummies, it has enough higher-IQ people to run things.

Imagine two nations.

One nation is of one race whose IQ is 85.

Another nation’s IQ average is also 85, but it’s of two races. One race has an average IQ of 100 while another has an IQ of 70. So, it averages out to 85. But the second nation does better because it has a race of smart people even if it also has a race of dumb people.

The reason why Latin America is semi-modern is because it has enough white people who are smarter than other races.

Another thing that complicates matters is temperament, especially in relation to other races.

If a bunch of blacks have IQ of 85 and if a bunch of Meso-Americans have an IQ of 85, the chances are the latter will have better chance at creating and running semi-decent semi-modern societies. Why? The latter people are less aggressive, crazy, and out-of-control.
Problem with blacks is they be flipping out all the time.

This is why Americans prefer Gomez to Shaquelle when it comes to most jobs. Meso-Americans, being less wild and crazy, are better at getting the job done. It’s like the movie STAND AND DELIVER. If you train the Mexers right, they can do stuff.
But it’s difficult to train Negroes because they are wild and crazy. They be flipping.

Worse, blacks are more muscular, and they know they can whup yo’ ass. And black culture is predicated on blacks being thugs and mofos and such. Indeed, pop culture encourages such, and as blacks see how white folks worship badass Negro athletes, they feel even more emboldened to act like Muhammad Ali and such jivers.

If blacks were wild and aggressive but all built like Gary Coleman, there’d be some hope in calming them down. If Negroes got out of hand, you can kick their butts, and they’d get the message. But as Negroes are more muscular AND more aggressive, it’s a lost cause.

The main problem with blacks isn’t intelligence. It is muscle and aggression, but this isn’t discussed much if at all. That is the real failing.

Now, watch some fool say ‘white are tougher and stronger than blacks’ because some Swedish lughead pulled a tractor.

A riddle.
For several years in a row teacher was giving students the following exam problem.
–
“Given on a plane a right-angle triangle with hypotenuse of length L=10 (e.g. inch).
The height drawn from right angle to the said hypotenuse has length h=6(inch.)
What is the area of that triangle ?”
–
All those years students made the teacher happy by writing
Area = L * h /2 =30 (square inch.)
At some year a smart student came, who was unable to solve the problem above.
–
Question (riddle): what was the matter with that student ?

Does a strange looking Asian kid with a goofy smile sitting at a desk and holding a pencil spring to everyone’s mind anytime the subject of human intelligence arises?

Colombians are said to have an IQ of 84. They run a modern country with all the credentials of airlines, telecommunications and the like.

The Colombians with the 84 IQ’s aren’t flying the jumbo jets and running the telecom industry no more than our 84-85 IQ people are. Colombia does have a segment of its population who are predominantly Spanish or of other European ethnic stocks and that’s who’s running its industries. There just aren’t enough of them or Colombia might actually be a first world nation.

If blacks were wild and aggressive but all built like Gary Coleman, there’d be some hope in calming them down

Whatchu talkin bout Priss? There’d be even more hope if they were all the size of Webster.

As far as I know the hypotenuse is neither the length nor the height of a rectangle or a square, so 30 square inches can’t be the area of that triangle.

I think the answer should be ~24 square inches.

Maybe I did not understand the question properly? Is this a riddle or some sort of trick question?

The smart student was probably able to solve the problem above, but it probably did not make the teacher happy, since the student probably gave the correct answer, instead of the wrong answer of 30 square inches as the area of the right-angled triangle.

Please, solve the riddle. Thank you.

The problem is unsolvable because the figure described doesn’t exist. A right triangle with a hypotenuse of 10 would have sides of 6 and 8, per the Pythagorean Theorem. Now the altitude, or height, of a triangle is the length of a line drawn from one vertex which intersects the opposite side perpendicularly. Obviously you cannot draw a line from the right angle that intersects the hypotenuse perpendicularly with length 6, when one of the other sides is also length 6. This geometrical figure cannot exist in a plane.

Since the triangle is a right triangle, its area can equivalently be found by taking half the product of the lengths of the other two sides. This area is maximized when the triangle is isosceles with both legs of length 5*sqrt(2) , and equals 25 in^2 in this case. This is strictly less than the area given by the hypotenuse and height, a contradiction, so the triangle cannot exist.

Blacks are wild and crazy, and some of them are physically fit. The media and sports do play a role in their aggressive ways. But what makes them dangerous is their poor connection of actions versus consequences. They simply don’t care and that makes them very unpredictable. A black will literally flip out and sacrifice their freedom, family and employment (if they are employed) over a minor slight such as a perceived dirty look.

@Intelligent Design @FKA Max @ Anonymous
I disagree a bit with your explanation. There are many more rectangular triangles with hypothenuse 10 – e.g. the one where both sides are of length sqrt(50). However, Thales’ theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales%27_theorem ) states that all rectangular corners lie on a circle which centers at the midpoint of the hypotenuse and has radius of half length of the hypothenuse, which is 5 in our case. So the maximum hight of the triangle is 5 (which can be easily seen by drawing a picture – or by use of the illustrations in the wikeipedia article about Thales’ theorem). So the maximum area of such a triangle is 10*5/2=25

A right triangle with a hypotenuse of 10 would have sides of 6 and 8

But not all such right triangles would. The (or a) correct approach here is first to show that the maximum altitude is obtained by assuming the triangle is 45-45-90, but since this maximum altitude is 5, a fortiori no altitude of length 6 can exist.

Thank you very much for your feedback!

A right triangle with a hypotenuse of 10 would have sides of 6 and 8, per the Pythagorean Theorem.

Yes, and the height drawn from right angle to the said hypotenuse would be 4.8 inches, not 6 inches.

What threw me for a loop, was this part:

The height drawn from right angle to the said hypotenuse has length h=6(inch.)
What is the area of that triangle ?”
–
All those years students made the teacher happy by writing
Area = L * h /2 =30 (square inch.)

I thought, maybe he meant one of the sides was 6 inches — which it is when the hypotenuse is 10 inches, as you pointed out — instead of the height drawn from right angle to the said hypotenuse, but then the 30-square-inch area for the triangle would be wrong, which I pointed out, e.g. Area = (L (8) * h (6)) /2 =24 (square inch.)

Why would the teacher be happy about his students completely butchering and misunderstanding the problem/question to be solved?!

Interesting in this context, per Mr. Thompson:

The other interpretation is that, far from being a test of rationality, whatever that is, the Linda Question is tricky, and teaches you more about the specific question form than about general human thinking processes. Question forms are interesting, and should be studied, particularly by those writing instruction manuals, government advice brochures, and examination questions. Confusing people is easy. Writing clearly and honestly is more difficult.

– https://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-tricky-question-of-rationality/

Reply to FKA Max.
Resolution of the riddle:
Draw the “hypotenuse” of length 10 and find midpoint, which is at the distance 5 from each end. Take a compass with one leg at the said midpoint, and draw the circle of radius 5.
Potential right-angle vertices of right-angle triangle (locus of) are all located on that circle: it is a well-known property in geometry on the plane. It means the maximum value of h ( height towards hypotenuse 10) is only 5. It means that
{a right-angle triangle with hypotenuse L=10 and height h=6 towards it} can not exist.
Student could not solve the problem, since the question was about the area of the figure, which can not exist.
–
Intelligent Dasein is almost correct; triangle described in the problem does not exist. Reasons for non-existence were described incorrectly by Intelligent Dasein. If in conditions of the problem h were prescribed e.g. h = 5. 0271828, still such object can not exist. But h =4.98 would be OK.
–
“The Math of Love Triangles – feat. Rachel Bloom – “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”

Video Link

I’m going to hammer on the Scientific American question a bit because there is some psychological trickery going on here.

“why does a mirror reverse letters from left to right but not from top to bottom”

This involves what Scott Adams would call thinking past the sale. By hiding an assertion in the form of a question, the reader is led to believe that, as a matter of settled fact, the mirror does indeed reverse letters from left to right, but it then moves on to ask the real question why not top to bottom?

The question implies that the mirror is the active agent in reversing the text and the second part “bumps” you brain past this incongruity by getting you to focus on the “why not top to bottom?”

As I explained above, the reversal occurs when YOU reverse the paper, not the mirror. This is due to the anisotropic nature of text reflected around the X axis. The other bit, but not from top to bottom, implies that you did not turn the paper upside down–a reflection around the Y axis.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/129433801521/thinking-past-the-sale-trump-persuasion-series

With all of the massive die-off from non-native diseases, wars/massacres/genocides involving Europeans and native elites outbreeding with the conquerors, it’s almost impossible to calculate what the IQ of the elites was in pre-Columbian Central and South America. There could’ve been something similar to the situation found in the upper castes in India or with Ashkenazi Jews. I would guesstimate the IQ around 95-100.

All we know for certain is that 5000 years ago, “Indians” in South America achieved a level of civilization that Sub-Saharan Africans didn’t really match until 1500AD, if then. Let’s not even talk about the Australoids.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/caral.shtml

An old favorite problem, though in this case one might question whether 60 doublings are possible at all. That means there are 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bugs in the jar at t=60. Rather a lot.

(I assume we start with a single bug, which could be considered unrealistic too, so the jar might even be more crowded than that.)

Lead poisoning was especially bad in Rome due to lead plates, pots and pipes.

This is relevant here too because I have heard that one of the explanations for lack of academic performance among American blacks is because, as kids, they played around in soil contaminated with dust from the lead paint used copiously on those old downtown homes.

As a possible point of further interest I’ll also mention that, as a child growing up in England, I used to get thrupence for each stair-rod I sanded (and those Victorian houses had very old paint indeed). As well, all interior plumbing was of lead – we were told in chemistry class “never drink from the hot water tap because lead becomes more soluble with increasing temperature”. However, these days even the solder used to join copper pipes can contain no lead.

I better shut up about what we used to do with mercury when the teacher wasn’t looking and I’ll not comment on what all this has done to my personal IQ.

Colombians are said to have an IQ of 84.

Social inequality may increase assortative mating via social [or psycho-cognitive/cultural] classes as well, vaguely speaking, intelligence.

Now, countries. Equatorial Guineans are said to have a mean IQ of 59. In the absence of demonstration to the contrary, I am perfectly happy to believe that they are not very bright. (The CIA Factbook puts literacy there at 95%. You figure it out.) However, the distribution being symmetrical, more than half of them have an IQ under 60. This is in the realm of serious retardation. A substantial fraction would be below 45. Is this plausible? How can they remember to find their way home at night?

It’s based on ”eurocentric view” as well ”IQ-centric view”. If they don’t behave as ”delayed” so they are not, and if they really score very lower in IQ tests, so this mean that in this cases, IQ ”delayed range” is not working to reflect ”delayed”.

It’s always that problem, to put abstraction over real things, real beings.

Non-human living beings score very lower in IQ tests, namely primates, who are tested, fundamentally via non-verbal tests/child, and they are not delayed. Maybe some human populations because they have preserved ancient phenotypes, is in the half-path between first humans and current/”modern” humans, as well their intelligence levels, in the case of IQ, COGNITIVE levels.

I think hunter gatherers tend to have lower intelligence variation, because natural environments pressure beings to varies less specially via intra-levels, in the same species or sub-species, even this variation exist, but in lower intensity.

Curiously, in the third century BC the purebred Mexican Indians invented writing and an exponential-positional number system, and made extraordinarily accurate astronomical observations. This would seem peculiar in the mildly retarded, but perhaps these were really smart mildly retarded Indians. Now, in the past, any time I have suggested that Mexicans might have done anything requiring intelligence, I have been assured by commenters that only white Mexicans could have done it. All right, I concede the possibility that only white really smart mildly retarded purebred Indians invented writing. What else could explain it?.

Very socially stratified society, seems, may create over-isolated reproductive elites, creating a abrupt discontinuity between them and the populace. As elites tend to be always a tiny fraction of population, when this group start to have less kids or even will becoming over-homozygotized this can result in increase of severe mental disorders among them [erratic, irrational leaders] as well natural biological self-extinction. This may explain why, seems, ”we” no have any considerable vestige of this elites.

She have higher COGÑITIVE skills + bitchyness

Apparently you meant to say
2^60 = approx = 1.153*10^18 ;
indeed,
2^60==[2^10]^6=[1024]^6=[(1+0.024)^6]*{10^(3*6)}
(1.024)^6 = approx = 1+0.024*6 +… = 1.144
(first term of Newton’s binomial formula).

Thank you for your input!

There are many more rectangular triangles with hypotenuse 10

Basically an infinite number of rectangular triangles could have a hypotenuse 10 as long as they are Isosceles triangles http://www.dummies.com/education/math/geometry/classifying-three-types-of-triangles/ , if I understand correctly, right?

“A nation is supposed to be a sanctuary for its people from foreign hordes, but the idea of ‘sanctuary’ is used by globalists to enable invasive colonization.”

Nations are created by “foreign hordes”.

Colonization was perfected by Europeans, who invaded due to their globalist designs.

Also, seems perfectly possible you have a population ”with” avg IQ around 90’s if and or specially they were more conformistic as seems common among macro-mongolid branch, being governed by elites.

If society already reached the civilization level so it’s very likely that there is some strong selective pressure for more higher intelligence.

I doubt avg IQ of pre-colombians was higher than 100, if they were tested. Avg IQ around 80’s also seems less possible to be, based on minimum level required to sustain a complex/”technological” society, ~85, i kick they ”had” a avg IQ around 90’s, nobody ask why. Kicks usually no have explanations.

There is only one isosceles right-angle triangle with hypotenuse of length L:
the one with edges a = b (isoceles !!!): b=a=L/sqrt(2) = 0.707 *L.

I have forgotten the label “Thales”, even if I had ever knew this label.
But that is the good resolution of the riddle.
Hello, exmath econprof !
For General Entertainment.
*
Rather general question on re spatial and visualization component of IQ.
*
Mentally rotating objects in 2-D and 3-D is a sub-set of transformations of 2-D and of 3-D spaces, namely, the transformations which do not change the sign of orientation. In the case of linear transformations those are the transformations x’=A*x with det(A) > 0.
*
Is anything known about mental transformations with det(A) < 0,
i.e. the ones which include reflection in a mirror ?
Reflection by a still surface of water in a lake
is something pre-historic people and even animals could be exposed to !
This also should cover the mental processes for octopuses.
Translations on the Moebius strip definitely can change the sign of orientation.
It is better to say that the sign of orientation
can not be defined on Moebius strip in the first place.
Is mental play with Moebius strip a part of IQ ?

Sorry,

scratch that thought/comment of mine.

Isosceles triangles don’t have a hypotenuse, they have legs and a base.

There are many more rectangular triangles with hypothenuse 10 – e.g. the one where both sides are of length sqrt(50).

So, can you have an infinite number of almost right angle triangles if the legs of the Isosceles triangle are the square root of the base squared divided by 2?

E.g. base of 12 squared 144 divided by 2 equals 72 square root of 72 circa 8.48…

A right triangle with “hypotenuse” 12 where both sides are of lenght sqrt(72).

So, are there only two possibilities for a right angle triangle with hypotenuse/base 10 to be a right angle triangle, namely with either the sides/legs being the square root of 50 or the two sides being 8 and 6?

Thank you.

Take note Fred already wrote a very similar post…

Wow!

you cowardly POS

permanently banned me from your articles I see

what a gutless and pathetic loser

don’t worry, I wouldn’t grace your articles from now on if you paid me

ps, what did you think would happen when I discovered your sniveling cowardice, eh?

you should have petitioned Mr. Unz to have me banned from the entire site if you didn’t want to be called out for it (your cowardice ; )

Yes but the size of the jar was (likely purposely left) unknown. It could be the universe’s most galactic jar.

What is, dear FKA Max, your definition of

almost right angle triangle

? I have never heard about such notion in Mathematics.

“… a 360…”

180?

It is like poking a wasp’s nest when you are eleven. I am a bad person.

O, comeonnow Fred! I’ve been reading you almost from the beginning (I think you had just 4 columns posted on your site, IIRC) and you underestimate yourself. You’re not bad, you’re downright evil! You’ve expended much effort to reach the pinnacle of $PLC’s ordure. You have endured, and succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.

Label the legs of the right triangle x and y. Then for any length of the leg x in the range (0,10), by the Pythagorean formula, the y leg must be of length sqrt(100-x^2). There are infinitely many such pairs of valid lengths.

Geez.

“Moreover, when you substract countries with (1) oil windfalls and (2) a history of central planning, the correlation rises to an amazing r=0.92.”

That isn’t even a strawman statement.

Oil windfalls is self-explanatory. But history of central planning? And you’ve done calculations to find the correlation coefficient?

What list did you use? I don’t really see one. Is it a current list, or historical? And how exactly was “history of central planning” determined? Since you’ve gotten a figure using – Math!, it came from somewhere right?

Anyway my guess is that you were trying for one of those biting, sarcastic comments. You know, replace Razib Khan as the enfant terrible (and compete with Cochran on one of his drive-by poop shooters).

But it takes talent. And sometimes subtlety. You could probably study Fred’s writings if you want some pointers, but you need to up your game. Actually we have the language issue, but Russians kind of suck at this kind of thing (it’s probably genetic you know).

And here is another point: Who the hell are you anyway? One day I come to Unz and see you as a regular poster. Sometimes you have interesting stuff, sometimes not.

Think I saw you mention on one of your posts you were still in high school circa 2005/2006?

What are your bona fides? Why should I take anything you say more authoritatively than Fred (with whom I disagree quite often)?

Well? What’s your educational background? How are you taking a walk-about in Russia right now? Family money? Blogging that good?

If you are a pedigreed academic, why aren’t you at a faculty spot right now?

Help us to know you better. Who are you exactly? Never heard of you before Unz picked you up. Please tell me you aren’t another semi-autistic that peppers everything with references to the Hyborian Age?

After all, you are a strapping lad of what 27, 28? And in your judgement you are qualified to state Fred doesn’t know squat about genetics, or intelligence, or history.

So how did that happen again?

Anyway, Fred is a big boy, and he has to suffer the outrageous slings and arrows like every other man who puts opinion and thought to paper (well you know).

But I got his back against you chief. I have assabiyah with the sons of Virginia. So I’ll gladly crawl down your Russian throat (though Russians seem like great people), rip your internal organs to shreds, then emerge from your chest cavity like a scene from Aliens. Well for as long as Unz himself or his designated admin people put up with it (he’s gotta have IP logging, so no “IhateAnatoly” handles).

Jeeze.

Okay, so these three guys go on a hunting trip together. They check into the hunting lodge, and the desk clerk says the room they want is $30 per night (this is a very old riddle). They each fork over a $10 bill and follow the bellhop to the room.

When the bellhop gets back to the front desk, the clerk tells him, “Darn, that room is only $25 a night. Here’s a $5 bill — go refund those guys upstairs.”

On the way up the stairs, it occurs to the bellhop that it might get complicated to split a $5 bill three ways. So, he takes $3 in ones out of his wallet, knocks on the door, tells the hunters the room is $27 a night, and gives each a dollar bill, keeping $2 for himself.

The bellhop is back at the desk. The hunters each paid $9 for the room, that’s $27. The bellhop has two dollars. $27 + $2 for the bellhop makes $29.

But, each hunter gave the desk clerk $10, making $30 total. What happened to the other dollar?

I think if you read some scholarly research into Rome’s lead problem, you’ll learn that it isn’t very likely to have been important to the decline of the civilization.

Lead acetate has a sweet taste, called lead-sugar. Leave a kid alone in a room full of old paint chips and he’s likely to eat them. Seems black kids get this opportunity more frequently. But how the loss of IQ is estimated I don’t know. Likely by comparing the IQ’s of affected children to that of the population at large, resulting in an overestimation of the impact of lead poisoning on IQ.

What is, dear FKA Max, your definition of almost right angle triangle?

If one has a triangle with base/hypotenuse 10 and legs/sides square root 50 and halfed the base/hypotenuse of said triangle one would have two triangles with two sides being 5 and square root of 50, right?, because otherwise one would not have two right angles at the halfed hypotenuse/base of the triangle, right?

So, the height of the base/hypotenuse 10 and legs/sides square root 50 triangle, would also have to be square root 50, right?, to maintain the right angle, while simultaneously maintaining the two new bases/hypotenuses of 5 of the two newly-created triangles, right?

So the angles of these two triangles from the halfing of the 10 inch base/hypotenuse would not be exactly 90-45-45, but approaching 90-approaching 45- approaching 45, right?

This would be my definition of an almost-right-angle triangle, but I probably did not define it very clearly, maybe it should rather be referred to as an almost-90-45-45 triangle? Is there a special/specific name for such a triangle?

I hope I was able to describe this triangle scenario more clearly and coherently, this time.

Thank you very much for your and everyone else’s feedback and input on my questions. It is highly appreciated!

Correction:

So, the height of the base/hypotenuse 10 and legs/sides square root 50 triangle, would also have to be *5*, right?, to maintain the right angle, while simultaneously maintaining the two new bases/hypotenuses of *square root 50* of the two newly-created triangles, right?

With the ability of modern analysis to detect lead and mercury at extremely low levels you get sensation headlines such as “DEADLY MERCURY FOUND IN FISH OIL CAPSULES” – with the fact that it was parts per billion not mentioned – and the politicians are jumping. Sure, we are now over-reacting in our response to toxic threat but it’s not all bad: for example, vinyl chloride (quite low levels cause liver cancer) is no longer used a a hairspray propellant and bicycle repair kits don’t now contain benzene (can cause leukemia) as a rubber solvent. Still, and all, I lived through some pretty dodgy exposures – and look at me: look at you too, I bet!

Sorry, Fred, I am digressing – thanks for the piece, as usual, it got a lot of reaction.

Well, I guess we could engage some of Fred’s observations or the general thrust of his critique and questioning. The fact that he leaves the door open to discussion puts him ahead of most journalists.

There is a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, by Douglas Hofstadter. I read it some time ago. It deals with some of the issues Fred raises in this column. What is intelligence? What is consciousness? Where are these things located? How do they arise or come into existence?

In response to confusion over the book’s theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that Gödel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships of mathematics, art, and music, but rather about how cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms. At one point in the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.

. . . .

Gödel, Escher, Bach won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the National Book Award for Science.

It’s something of a tomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

Last line should read, “It’s something of a tome.”

Not tomb.

I hope I was able to describe this triangle scenario more clearly and coherently, this time.

Wow. You seem to have no clue. A pristine mind untouched by grammar school geometry lessons. Pascal wasn’t either but he figured out all Euclid geometry by himself when his father took all math books away from him. But you ain’t no Pascal.

How are you taking a walk-about in Russia right now? Family money? Blogging that good?

Perhaps you should ask first who pays the salaries of Murrays, Jensens, Lynns and Cochrans. Is Karlin their evangelist to bring the gospel of IQ cult to Russians? Poor Russians.

Not tomb.

Perhaps “tomb” is not entirely inaccurate. Godel Escher Bach is a bit over-hyped, coming during the “Age of Aquarius” phase of California-America, amid a great deal of hoopla over vision, extent, mind, grand unified theory, and so forth.

Romans may have had problems with lead in their environment but it wasn’t a problem they had from the water supply. It is important to keep water from contacting metallic lead. But most water available in most palaces is mildly alkaline and forms an impervious film in the center of a lead pipe which keeps the water from leaching lead from pipe material.

Darnell Earley the appointed Flint administrator was under pressure form the governor’s office to lower costs. So he ordered them to use water from the Flint River. Flint River water is mildly acidic and soon began to release lead into the water supply.

You’ve essentially told me nothing. Where did that graph come from? Who made it? You?

So you plotted points on a graph of GDP versus averages of scores taken by high school students (your “human capital”).

A little simplistic.

And your point about directed economies is again simplistic. You lump nations like the US and Canada in with nations like Japan (of MITI fame).

The Soviet Union never matched Japan’s command economy. And you have nations that aren’t very organized at anything. A real case could be made for including most slavic and central asian nations in this regard; them being communist was like herding cats.

As compared to nations with a long history of centralized decision making like China, Germany, the Ottomans (ok, I’d have to pull my history books out on that one, but they had bureaucracy from hell). Basically you lump all former communist countries into one box, and all never communist countries into another, without informing yourself about how they actually worked.

Now I notice you answered none of my questions about yourself.

1) What is your background? Include college attended, degrees obtained, and field of study.
2) How old are you?
3) Specify why you know more than Fred concerning genetics and human intelligence. His background is pretty well known, he makes no secret that his knowledge of these matters comes from personal reading and experience.

But what do you have? I mean you have to have a doctorate or something right? They don’t let just anyone be the voice of god.

Oh, and the Hyborian Age thing was a comparison to Razib Khan. Take a gander at his old topics. A bit obtuse maybe, but I thought it an obvious comparison to make.

Neo-Nazi spam makes me a coward, then I guess I am.

😉

no argument here

I’ve watched Fred and all the rest of the writers here get spammed and trolled and suffer such fools and vitriol as to kill a dead raccoon and then some.

the way you defeat your ideological opponents is with cogent and sound arguments, or if that’s unavailable, you just ignore them, like all the other adult-like writers and commenters here and elsewhere. Only a vapid loser bans people he doesn’t agree with because their arguments are more refined and carry more weight and judgment than he’s fit to counter, and so like all cowards, he seeks succor in ‘safe spaces’ free from the hurtful truths that he’d rather pretend are not there.

You’re like Lucky Larry who calls security if someone asks him an inconvenient question.

Or CNN when the turn off the video feed when a journalist tells too much truth.

It’s actually rather funny in a way, and I confess I’m amused by it, as it’s nothing less than hard proof that my rhetorical shiv was reaching the tender bits, and revealing for all the world to see the feeble underbelly of fallacy and delusion.

But fear not, you always have your safe space to crawl back into

Anatoly’s haven from ‘Neo-Nazis’:

where you can ban people who say things that are ‘mean and hurtful’ (too true) for your tender and delicate sensibilities

Let’s say they are moderate 1 gram bugs. Then their weight after an hour is 1.16e15 kilos, which is far less than even Pluto.

Earth mass appears to be 5.97e24 kg, more than a billion times greater. So the bugs would need about 30 minutes more to be the same mass. Then 20 minutes more to be the same mass as the Sun (abut 2e30 kg.) Then another half hour and our bugs are the mass of the Milky Way.

But you ain’t no Pascal.

You got that right!

I can still positively contribute to humanity, the world, etc. in my own unique way, though, even if I am not a genius, right? Or should just I just give up, throw in the towel, and discontinue all my work, studying, learning, and research? I would be highly interested in your feedback, on how you think I should live my life, knowing for certain that I am not a genius!

Chris Langan highlights

Video Link

But you ain’t no Pascal.

LOL. And you ain’t no Andy Rooney.

LOL! Very, very big jar! You think Europe’s got immigrant problems…let me tell ya!

The sides of the triangle have lengths 6, 8, and 10 (inches), by the Pythagorean theorem. The area of the triangle is 6 x 8 / 2 = 24 sq. inches.

One could argue that ‘height’ is a poor choice of term, but in the context of a school math question, it seems pretty clear.

$27 + $2 for the bellhop makes $29

It’s 25 +2.

The clerk is left with 25$ and the bellhop has 2$. Nothing is missing.

Moreover, when you substract countries with (1) oil windfalls and (2) a history of central planning, the correlation rises to an amazing r=0.92.

We can explain an outlier by questioning the ordinate value or the abscissa value. In case of Russia maybe there is something wrong with the abscissa while the ordinate is where it suppose to be. And if we subtracted oil and gas revenues from Russia’s GDP it would be right where Botswana is and then by scaling abscissa value down to circa 75 Russia would be right on the curve and the correlation would even be higher that r=0.92. Is it possible that Russians are cheating on IQ test?

The clerk is left with 25$ and the bellhop has 2$. Nothing is missing.

Of course. And the hunters each have one dollar of the original $30. Notice how there’s no interference from semantic objections? 😉

Posted out of weariness … like any of us gives a good goddamn how many goddamn bugs there are in the jar, or whether or not triangles exist.

Mama mia. Stop already.

I went over my comment again, and I think it mostly consists of Disordered Thoughts.

Nevertheless, I have learned a lot of new and interesting things during this wild ride through the wilderness of my mind; I had never heard of hyperbolic geometry before, for example:

Triangles with these angles are the only possible right triangles that are also isosceles triangles in Euclidean geometry. However, in spherical geometry and hyperbolic geometry, there are infinitely many different shapes of right isosceles triangles.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_right_triangle#45.C2.B0.E2.80.9345.C2.B0.E2.80.9390.C2.B0_triangle

Also not everything is lost and there may yet be hope for mathematically-handicapped/challenged folks like myself. One might still amount to something in life, if this list of accomplished human beings, who disliked/struggled with math, is to be believed:

6 Famous Scientists and Inventors Who Struggled With Math
http://mentalfloss.com/article/69251/6-famous-scientists-and-inventors-who-struggled-math

Darwin came down with some serious math envy. As a collegiate student, he loathed the subject. “I attempted mathematics,” reads Darwin’s autobiography, “… but I got on very slowly.” The affluent young naturalist went so far as to invite a tutor to join him at his summer home in 1828. After a few frustrating weeks, Darwin dismissed the man.

“The work was repugnant to me,” he wrote, “chiefly from my not being able to see any meaning in the early steps in algebra. This impatience was very foolish, and in after years I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principals of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.”

There is also this very interesting piece on Benjamin Franklin and math, that I found:

Did Ben Franklin Add Up?
Sure Ben Franklin was smart, but was he any good at math? Weekend Edition’s math guy Keith Devlin read a book on the topic and reveals the answer
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18045610

Prof. DEVLIN: Yeah. There’s one or two examples of that one. Certainly, Franklin, he wrote an article in – let’s see, I made a note of it here – in 1751 called Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries. And that was really one of the first ever works in what we now call demographics, using mathematical techniques to look at how populations grow and how people move and how societies develop.

In fact, Franklin was the first person who speculated that populations probably increase exponentially. Now, we always associated that with Thomas Malthus, who was the one that demonstrated that. But, in fact, Malthus had already read Franklin’s work and cited it when he did his work.

Can Geniuses Suck at Math? Of Course They Can
https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/can-geniuses-suck-at-math-of-course-they-can/

Another interesting paper:

An Evolutionary Perspective on Learning Disability in Mathematics Geary (2007) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4439404/

Much of modern day mathematics is biologically secondary in the sense that this knowledge is of recent historical origin and does not emerge without formal schooling, sometimes many years of schooling.

Finally this insightful and provocative article:

Should Math Really Be A Required Subject?
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/argument-against-algebra

So why are we so into algebra? Baker points out that many of today’s math requirements are relics of the Cold War. In 1950, only 25 percent of students in the U.S. were taking algebra. The Soviet Union, by contrast, was churning out mathematicians, partially because compared to lab sciences, teaching math is cheap–pen and paper are the only required materials. And so, seeing the influx of young mathematicians in Russia, Congress passed 1958’s National Defense Education Act, re-upping the American math curriculum requirements, and, in turn, creating a lot of unhappy students who, as they struggle through required math course after required math course, become discouraged and learn to hate school.

Same culture? Really? Hello Kitty is the same culture as pre-Meiji era Japan?

I hope one shining day hbd crowds and surrounds will finally start to look to the world and to their own ego and conclude that genius and “learning disabilities” tend to be very close if not causal. Usually those who are very very very good in some stuff may be very bad in others. The compensation law have evidently its exceptions but it’s a real thing.

This over saturation on IQ and scholastic outcomes made hbd repetitive and stubborn to continue to search for the truth regardless if it will hurt their egos or not. Maybe because most them lacks that “semantic upper hand”.

Really!!!!!!!!!!!!!

初心忘るべからず ! ケー ケー !!

I just couldn’t get this riddle out of my mind/head, and I like happy endings and realism, so in order to give me some much needed peace of mind and to create a more plausible and more-probably-based-in-reality type of scenario, I would like and decided to re-write and transform this riddle into a story with a happy ending.

———-

For several years in a row a teacher was giving students the following exam problem.
–
“An isosceles triangle has a base of length L=10 (e.g. inch). and a height of h=6(inch.).

What is the area of that triangle ?”
–
All those years students made the teacher happy by writing
Area = ((L/2) * h) = 30 (square inch.)

One year a smart student with hardly any formal education joined the class, and everyone was wondering if he could keep up with the rest of the students, due to this paucity of formal education, but he was able to solve the problem above, and everyone was very impressed with him, which made the smart student feel happy and relieved, and made the teacher and especially the parents of the smart student with very little formal education feel even happier and even more relieved.

Everyone was very, very happy and they lived happily ever after.

The End.

I would like to re-write this riddle into a story with a happy ending as well, where the three hunters are not being stolen from/shortchanged.

———————–

Okay, so these three guys go on a hunting trip together. They check into the hunting lodge, and the desk clerk says the room they want is $30 per night. They each fork over a $10 bill and follow the bellhop to the room.

When the bellhop gets back to the front desk, the clerk tells him, “Darn, that room is only $25 a night. Here’s a $5 bill — go refund those guys upstairs.”

On the way up the stairs, it occurs to the bellhop, who is a utilitarian and hobby game theorist, that it might get complicated to split a $5 bill three ways. So, he goes back down into the lobby and tells the desk clerk, that it is complicated to split $5 three ways, but that they/the hotel could give the three guys back $1 bill each plus one of the water bottles each that are being sold in the hotel lobby for 70 cents each. He tells the desk clerk, that the hotel could make some extra money that way and at the same time provide an extra courtesy to the three hunters. The desk clerk agress to the proposition. The utalitarian and hobby game theorist bellhop goes back upstairs and knocks on the door, tells the hunters the room is $25 a night, and gives each a dollar bill, and tells them that the hotel still owes them $2 and that it is complicated to split this amount three ways. He tells the three hunters that he brought them each a bottle of water valued at 70 cents from down in the lobby and asks them if they would like to take the water bottles as payment for the remaining $2 or if they preferred he go back downstairs and get them each 70 cents in 2 quarters and 2 dimes instead. The three hunters without hesitation opt for the water bottles as payment, since they are all parched after a long road trip, and thank the bellhop for his thoughfulness, the hotel’s honesty and the great service.

The bellhop returns to the lobby and tells the desk clerk, that the three hunters accepted the three water bottles as an alternative payment for the remaining $2 and that they were happy to have gotten some money back and that they appreciated the desk clerk’s honesty and attention to detail.

This is a win-win scenario for everyone involved. The bellhop likely will have greater job security, because his superior, the desk clerk, is impressed how he handled the situation and made the hotel some extra money. The three hunters will likely be returning guests to the hotel because they are impressed by and appreciate the attentive service of the hotel employees, and they might even bring their friends and family on their next trip, or leave a positive review for the hotel online. All this leads to greater customer satisfaction, which means greater job security for both the desk clerk and the bellhop. It is a triple-win scenario.

If the bellhop had kept/stolen/pocketed the $2 and the hotel and/or the guests would have found out about it, he would have very probably been fired, the three hunters, being upset that their trust had been abused/betrayed, would probably hesitate to return to the same hotel on their next trip(s) and might even leave a negative review about the hotel online and tell their friends and families not to patronize the hotel anymore, which could in the long term even endanger the desk clerk’s secure job. This would have been a triple-lose scenario.

How did he make the hotel extra money? The way I see it, he lost the hotel $0.10 (not that anyone would care, of course).

This would have been a triple-lose scenario.

FKA Max, I feel certain you’re a nice guy. Also, I sense that your purpose in writing that long-winded bloviation was similar to my own motivation in satirically presenting an alternative story of math-puzzle irrelevancy. Now, true, my motivation was to observe that Fred Reed was twitting the resident twits, but what the hell, those who get the point get the point, and those who don’t, don’t.

In my imaginary scenario the hotel is buying bottled water bulk at 20 cents per bottle, so the hotel made $1.50 minus $0.10=$1.40, but you can choose a different profit margin, e.g. the hotel buys bottled water bulk at a price of 50 cents per bottle so their profit margin per bottle is 20 cents, so the utilitarian and hobby game theorist bellhop made the hotel an extra $0.60 minus the $0.10=$0.50.

In the $1.40 scenario the bellhop would have helped the hotel make an additional 5.6% profit on the $25 room.

In the $0.50 scenario the bellhop would have helped the hotel make an additional 2% profit on the $25 room.

But, you are correct, if the hotel were to sell the water at cost it would have been a $0.10/0.4% loss to the hotel.

Thank you very much for your kind and generous estimation of me, sir.

those who get the point get the point, and those who don’t, don’t.

I see it the following way; undecideds can be a critical mass, and make all the difference in the world when it comes to reaching certain important societal, political, etc. tipping points. We don’t know how many undecideds read the Unz Review and haven’t yet made up their minds on these important issues.

Thanks very much, again.

The Invisible Undecided Voter
Both reporters and models missed the importance of undecided and third-party voters.

Just the opposite was true in 2016, and Clinton’s lead was considerably more fragile than it appeared from national polls. Not only was she underperforming in the Electoral College because of the way her demographic coalition was configured (see the first article in this series for more about that) but a much larger number of voters — about 13 percent on Election Day and as many as 20 percent at earlier stages of the campaign — were either undecided or said they planned to vote for third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Those undecided voters made Clinton’s lead much less safe and they broke strongly toward Donald Trump at the end of the race. Trump won voters who decided in the last week of the campaign by a 59-30 margin in Wisconsin, 55-38 in Florida, 54-37 in Pennsylvania and 50-39 in Michigan, according to exit polls, which was enough to flip the outcome of those four states and their 75 combined electoral votes.

– http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-invisible-undecided-voter/

Every economist, every billionaire and everyone in the mainstream media (and everyone quoted in it as an authority) agree with you Fred.

were either undecided or said they planned to vote for third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Those undecided voters made Clinton’s lead much less safe and they broke strongly toward Donald Trump at the end of the race.

I am calling BS. These people were always for Trump but didn’t want to say that to pollsters. The media was on a giant disinformation and shaming campaign to get people who hated Hillary to stay home by making them think that wasting your time voting for Trump wasn’t going to matter and, by the way, you would only show yourself to be a moron when you later had to admit you voted for Trump.

My take on the election was that it was always known by both the Democrats and Republicans that it was closer than the media let on. Chuck Todd admitted after the elction that in the midwest states that Trump squeeked out that there were plenty of “Hillary for Prison” signs all around town. Todd said it wasn’t broadcast for PC reasons. BS, it was because the media and the Democrats knew that there were a lot of voters who would vote for Trump just to keep Hillary out of the White House if only they thought it would matter. The Democrats also knew that every time Hillary went to states like that, her poll numbers in those states dropped. That is why she didn’t go to Wisconsin. She knew she was sitting on a knife’s edge and the real strategy was to allow the media to discourage Trump fence sitters.

The reason why Obama was surveiling the Trump campaign was to see if the people in the Trump team also knew how really close to winning they were. The made up Russian crap was just a cover to go after the Trump team. Once they lost and it was possible thet their illegal activity woul come to light, they had to play up the Russian meddling story.

Thank you very much for your feedback and input.

I came across a fascinating article in Forbes, today. It is so fascinating to me, because it almost to a T describes how I operate in and navigate this reality. Personally, I never felt I was particularly “ (academically) intelligent”, but I always felt that I had above-average intuition/sensitivity, but I never relied just on this intuition alone. I also love to study new subjects and learn new things about how this reality — and the people in it — operates, etc. I read the daily newspaper every morning before school, for example, starting from when I was about 7 years young/old. I would get up 45 minutes earlier than I needed to, just so I could read the newspaper every morning before school, and I am not a morning person.

What I use my “intuition” primarily for is to distinguish between what information and subjects are worth delving into and which subjects are not of utmost importance. Maybe another aspect of intelligence is the ability to be able to prioritize and select for quality rather than quantity? Interestingly, mathematics never sparked my interest and set off a positive response/resonance with my intuition, with the exception of game theory. But even game theory I practice mostly on an intuitive, psychological level rather than on a mathematical level. Human beings are just too complicated and their behavior too complex and unpredictable as to be fully captured/explained by/through mathematics, in my opinion, i.e. Keynes’ “Animal Spirits”.

Intuition Is The Highest Form Of Intelligence
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucekasanoff/2017/02/21/intuition-is-the-highest-form-of-intelligence/#3730accf3860

Let me put this a bit simpler. If all you do is sit in a chair and trust your intuition, you are not exercising much intelligence. But if you take a deep dive into a subject and study numerous possibilities, you are exercising intelligence when your gut instinct tells you what is – and isn’t – important.

In some respects, intuition could be thought of as a clear understanding of collective intelligence.
[…]
You might say that I’m a believer in the power of disciplined intuition. Do your legwork, use your brain, share logical arguments, and I’ll trust and respect your intuitive powers. But if you merely sit in your hammock and ask me to trust your intuition, I’ll quickly be out the door without saying goodbye.

I say this from personal experience; the more research I do, the better my intuition works.

Although this may be a paraphrase of his thoughts on the subject, Albert Einstein has been widely quoted as saying, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

This intuitive ability also enabled me to “intuit” that Donald Trump had a good chance at becoming president. When I first received the intuition/hunches that he could be the next president, my mind and intellect were initially skeptical, but I nevertheless gathered all the information I could find about him, etc., and it mostly confirmed my intuition. For example, I found out about, through my research, things like the following (my emphasis), which I was not aware of before:

And his ascendance is owed almost entirely to Mitchell’s tireless “unskewing” of polls throughout last year’s campaign. For every piece of data showing Clinton with a lead, Mitchell pointed out why it was hogwash, insisting that pollsters were oversampling Democrats and overlooking enthusiasm among Trump supporters.

– http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/24/media/bill-mitchell-cpac/index.html

There are some really good comments on that Forbes article as well, one reads as follows:

Alastair Dryburgh 4 months ago

Very surprised that “intuition has never been titled as a form of intelligence”

As a form of intelligence I’d rate it very high, but not the highest. That position I would reserve for self-awareness.

I think this also applies to your comment, in the sense that, in my experience, many highly intelligent people like for example people in the media or academia (who are overwhelmingly liberals) lack intuition, but even more so self-awareness it seems, which could explain why they did not take Trump seriously, etc.

Liberals are actually smarter than conservatives! Quite a bit smarter. And the more liberal you are, the smarter you. And the more conservative you are, the dumber you are. It’s a linear curve.

– https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2017/06/25/repost-average-iqs-of-liberals-versus-conservatives-with-references/

This fact/reality could actually be another argument against the over-reliance on IQ test scores as an indicator of all-around intelligence, in my opinion.

I personally have a soft spot for the Christopher Langan for example, but even with him I have noticed, that he seems to lack some self-awareness. The same character trait/flaw, even more strongly expressed than in Christopher Langan, I noticed in Marilyn vos Savant, Rick Rosner, etc. There seems to be a trade-off when it comes to extremely high IQ test scores and a person’s level of self-awareness. Many of these people live in their own little bubbles and are so wrapped up in their own projects, etc., that they don’t seem to be able to tap into and properly gauge the mood and intent of the collective consciousness/intelligence. Something is being lost in translation or does not fully compute in their super-brains in this regard. I don’t know what it could be, and also this is just my own personal observation, and I could be biased here and be the one lacking self-awareness…

In any event, my intuition has been indicating to me, that Donald Trump will likely only be a one-term president, but I have not fully researched and looked into it so far, since his term just started and much could change in the coming months and years. Everything is always in flux and the future is not written in stone. I have been a supporter and pretty vocal defender of his, but, as I said, my intuitive hunches have been telling me, that he will likely only be a one-term president.

What is your personal take and intuition on this and him? Do you believe he will be a one- or a two-term president?

What is your personal take and intuition on this and him? Do you believe he will be a one- or a two-term president?

My intuition tells me that Trump’s grasp of geopolitics and economics, and the policy decisions that must be made regarding the same, are about the equivalent of a 13 year-old girl’s. He truly seems to have no idea what he’s doing. This is somewhat perplexing given that, after following his campaign closely and listening to his many interviews going back to the ’80s, I can safely say that he’s anything but dumb. He has a very deep and subtle intellect which can pick up on trends in the present moment that very few others can sense. How to explain this disparity? I personally am of the belief that he has an angel, a capricious muse which guides him and whispers into his ear when the time is right. I firmly state without any trace of irony or hyperbole that his campaign was divinely inspired. But because we have no idea when his muse will strike again, he’s bound to leave his supporters exasperated and furious at his uninspired hamfistedness.

I fear you are right he will be a one-termer. He’s just too easygoing now. What we really need is a Joseph Stalin to mercilessly crush the life out of the Deep State, and Trump just isn’t going to be that guy.

I’d like to recommend a book to you if you’re interested, which might bridge the gap between your intuitive understanding and the world of mathematics. It’s called Mathematical Mysteries, by Calvin Clawson. A very delightful exploration of mathematics for the layman and I think you’ll find it enjoyable.

He is going back on a lot of promises like ending DACA, softening on work visas, and our stupid foreign wars. The one thing going for him is that we know he will get us a good Supreme Court nominee. He CANNOT fix our healthcare system, nobody can just like you cannot fix Social Security.

The Democrats will likely overplay their hand against the presumed Trump weakness and nominate somebody who will make Hillary look good.

Trump could change direction. He needs to be reminded why he was elected. I wish Americans would flood their Congressmen and whitehouse.gov with calm respectful messages reminding Trump why what he promised to do should be done – regardless of Trump’s “heart” or any other irrelevant nonsense he might spew about changing his mind. Trump does seem to respond to people calling him out on his unwillingness to make good on his promises.

At this point I don’t know whether he will get his second term, only that we will likely be even worse screwed than if Hillary won if he doesn’t get it. So I have to be optimistic and say he will.

Thank you most kindly for the book recommendation.

Hearing voices or listening to angels/muses can be a double-edged sword, since maybe not all the voices trying to get through are angelic voices, but in reality are the whisperings of demons, who are disguising themselves as angels trying to lead a person astray:

I thought of the voices as … something a little different from aliens. I thought of them more like angels … It’s really my subconscious talking, it was really that … I know that now. John Forbes Nash Jr

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better. John Forbes Nash Jr

Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for his work in game theory—an event that became the redemption scene in the 2001 biopic about Nash, A Beautiful Mind. He also won the Abel Prize that celebrated Nash’s accomplishments in geometry, which Mikhail Gromov, another Abel Prize winner, described as “incomparably greater than what he has done in economics, by many orders of magnitude.” – http://hearingvoicescymru.org/john-forbes-nash-voice-hearer-mathematician-and-nobel-prize-winner-killed-in-car-crash/

The consequence of rejecting the voices is ultimately not hearing the voices. You’re really talking to yourself is what the voices are, but it’s also parallel to a dream. In a dream it’s typical not to be rational.

I had some philosophical ideas that were involved. I found myself thinking in political terms, but then I found myself able to criticize this thinking – – that it wasn’t very valuable to think in political terms. Even now, I sometimes have a new realization that it can be not so good to think in political terms about some of the current issues. One can leave that to others.

So in rejecting some of the political ideas, that had a relation to the voices, so I could think of a voice maybe as presenting what was analogous to a political argument, and then I could say, I don’t want to listen to that” – https://www.hearing-voices.org/about-voices/famous-people/

Somebody suggested that I was a prodigy. Another time it was suggested that I should be called “bug brains,” because I had ideas, but they were sort of buggy or not perfectly sound… To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity. And to some extent, people who are insane are non-conformists… – https://www.bustle.com/articles/85470-11-thought-provoking-john-nash-quotes-that-are-as-offbeat-wonderful-as-he-was

I agree with you that Trump’s campaign for the presidency was divinely guided and inspired, and I am and will remain immensely grateful to him that he followed and answered his/that divine calling — at least for that particular period and a limited amount of time — whatever happens or he does in the future. To phrase it in Christopher Langan’s terms, Trump (at least temporarily) fulfilled his “purpose” in life and attained “a state of grace”:

Human beings are such subsystems. The “purpose” of their lives, and the “meaning” of their existences, is therefore to self-actualize in a way consistent with global Self-actualization or teleology…i.e., in a way that maximizes global utility, including the utility of their fellow subsystems. Their existential justification is to help the universe, AKA God, express its nature in a positive and Self-beneficial way.

If they do so, then their “souls”, or relationships to the overall System (“God”), attain a state of grace and partake of Systemic timelessness (“life eternal”). If, on the other hand, they do not – if they give themselves over to habitual selfishness at the expense of others and the future of their species – then they are teleologically devalued and must repair their connections with the System in order to remain a viable part of it. And if they do even worse, intentionally scarring the teleological ledger with a massive net loss of global utility, then unless they pursue redemption with such sincerity that their intense desire for forgiveness literally purges their souls, they face spiritual interdiction for the sake of teleological integrity. – http://megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/Archive.html#Self-Awareness

This paper might be of interest to you as well. Thanks so much, again, for your great comment and your tremendous kindness!

“A Vehicle of Symbols and Nothing More”
George Romanes, Theory of Mind, Information, and Samuel Butler

Donald R Forsdyke
Queen’s University, Canada
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1406/1406.1391.pdf

And that complex ‘factory-installed’ behaviors (instincts) can be accounted for on the basis
of the information content of gametes alone is also hard to believe. Outsourcing to a
parallel extracorporeal racial memory – a ‘collective unconscious’ (Jung,1959) –that could
be tapped into during neural development, is no less hard to believe. Yet, failing the emergence of other explanations, both these arguments-from-incredulity deserve a place at the table of responsible neuroscientific discourse. While the critical ‘crossroads neuroscience has reached’
is gaining recognition, a multimillion dollar ‘brain initiative’ (Yuste and Church, 2014) may err if too narrowly focused on that wonderful organ.
[…]
Conclusions
Inspired by Darwin andwell versed in the classic languages, mathematics, philosophy and
theology, Victorians such as Clifford, Romanes, and Butler, seem to have been better able
to think broadly onbiological problems –see the big picture –than many, detail-laden, later
scientists and philosophers. The information concept entered biology with Hering and Butler,
and passed by way of Semon and Schrödingerto illuminate the emergent discipline of
molecular biology (1945-1966). Romanes was able to extrapolate Clifford’s ToM hypothesis
from individual humans to their societies–a ‘stepping stone’to mind in the universe. The relationship, if any, of this higher order of subjectivity (‘world eject’) to that of individuals,
was clouded by his persisting theological concerns.
However, recent reports of normal memory, and even advanced intellect,in rare individuals with greatly reduced brain volume, would be consistent with an accessible extracorporeal
long-term memory that might be part of such a higher subjectivity. Whether of external or internal origin, mentalese-information-flows (‘thoughts’) interact to generate the ‘meanings’
that, when we are awake, exist asinformation-flows in our conscious and unconscious minds
and, when we are asleep, exist as information-flows in our unconscious minds (Majorek, 2012;
Mashoura and Alkire, 2013).

Cornpone Nonsense | The Z Blog

Nice rebuttal. A bit hostile but maybe there’s some history with Fred Reed’s writing I’m not aware of.

Basically, instead of forming one strong argument, Fred threw in twenty half-baked question marks. None of them are very convincing but the volume is there. The jar example, for instance, can be solved by anyone who understands what “time”, “empty”, “half” and “full” means. Having experience with mathematical “nature of a base-two exponential expansion” is irrelevant. If you’ve ever seen a glass half-full, you’re god to go.

The only argument that feels somewhat interesting is increasing IQ through practice. That’s a feeling, though, and I’m assuming many people have tried it and failed. I’m new to this so I’d appreciate if someone can provide a good link or two.

Logic says “no”. “Special” schools are not promising any IQ gains upon graduation as far as I know. They simply tone down the curriculum. Any reliable +5 IQ program would quickly spread around the World and make someone a billionaire overnight, surely.

Who cares what this so-called “Z-Man” says? This blogger is a non-entity and cannot even remotely compare to Mr Reed

Curiously, in the third century BC the purebred Mexican Indians invented writing

Maybe the Maya they were Tamil colonists. They were a seafaring trading colonizing people like the Phoenicians and they thrived in tropical latitudes.

India: Tamil diaspora: Why there are large chunk of Tamil population all over the World?

Their temple style is similar with a series of stacked smaller layers with a building at the top.

Tiruvannamalai Temple
maya-temple-jaguar

Black people of West African origin are certainly a handful, but even if they were weedier they would still be a problem. Somalians males are scrawnier than most white guys yet that doesn’t stop them flippin out on a regular basis.

Fred’s right. Since the test has no sequential imperative, the smart way is to race through the easies, marking the thinkers, then return, if time allows, to do the thinkers. Done.
I was offered Mensa membership at 11 after doing those stupid tests. Like Groucho I refused to join a club that would accept me.
As for “native” Mexicans, who designed & built the observatory at Chichen Itza, the pyramids at Teothiuacan and other marvels of Central America? That took intelligence & great knowledge.

We should also consider IQ and choking.

It’s like stage fright. Some musicians can write music but can’t perform cuz of stage fright.

It could be some people are smart on their own but freeze or choke when working with others or under pressure.

Maybe some groups are more likely to choke while others are more likely to joke.

Funny, I was teaching a kid some trig recently, using Pythagoras’s theorem of the 3,4,5 right angle triangle to calculate the height of a tree in his garden. So the triangle here is a 3,4,5 so the base must 8, and area half the base times the height – 8×6/2=24. The tree we calculated at about 45 ft.
Oh, the teacher was smug (and stupid), a problem my whole school life.

But are the new tests the same as the earlier tests?

In some comment here I read that Richard Feynman had an IQ of 127.
If true, no better proof that IQ has little to do with intelligence.
Of the accused in Neurenberg, Goering had the highest IQ.
He made a mess of both the German Air Force and of German war production.
Speer, with a far lower IQ, did much better.
IQ is NOT intelligence, IQ is just IQ, the outcome of an arbitrary test.

“It’s an even stronger point than it might appear. Any ancient advance made in the Americas had to be the work of the locals – there was no one else to learn it from. Whereas in the Old World you can never exclude copying.”

You forgot the possibility that space aliens, time travellers or undocumented Europeans showed up to impart that knowledge, that it thrived for a while, but then the cultures dumbed down back into the jungles. Kind of like the history of western civilisation as we are observing it play out in its end-game. BTW, the meso-American cultures all seem to have tales of light-skinned beings showing up at one time or another, and the Spaniards were welcomed in many cases as them returning.

What, did you choose all “c” answers, or work out a nice pattern of responses?

He’s also a faggot. Listen to his interview on the 2 Kevins. Extreme case of gay-voice.

He blogs because he likes to write. It’s oh, so cathartic for him to type out these little vignettes that drift down like snow into an alpine valley. Isn’t it pretty, these softly fallen words? How could anyone dispute with the Z-blogger? He’s just an inoffensive chap who likes to use his “reason,” after all. See how reasonable he is! So self-effacing, so smartly wan. So much more the man about town than the crude and illiterate Fred Reed.

In fact, this douchebag is a thoroughgoing mediocrity. He parrots a poorly understood version of the already weak modernist sauce of materialism. He is the very definition of a useful idiot, doing the enemy’s work while the enemy laughs at his incompetence. He thinks he’s tacking into the wind when really he is nothing but the most impish drifter on the dismal tide.

Getting back to some of Fred’s questions, concerning the distribution of intelligence within a given country or between different countries:

Consider for example the ancien régime in France and more generally in Europe., where you had various royal families intermarrying between countries so that the IQ difference between High Lord and peasant inside the country would have been much greater than the difference between the average IQ of one nation state and another.

Some of what Fred is dealing with here involves abstract thinking vs practical thinking. The ability to deal with abstract concepts requires considerable practice as well as aptitude. IQ is not enough, the culture and political system has to value or encourage intellectual development.

Another thing to consider is migration. America used to brain-drain the rest of the world as people came to the US to get educated and stayed to get rich. I suppose it is still happening. The joke here is that people with high IQ get the hell out of Dog Patch USA (or Bolivia ) and go where the action is.

It is not only people that migrate. Ideas, technology, language, customs, art, religions all migrate as well.

So there are lots of things to consider here. What Fred is dealing with (and conflating) is the concept of High Culture vs Low Culture and high IQ vs low IQ of the general population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight

The map is not the terrain.

Read more attentively

$1.99 + $3.99 S&H
It is evident that it was Feynman’s prank.

IQ basically measures ” abstract attention ” and ” instinctive expansion capacity ”.

Those who have greater ‘natural familiarity’ with abstractions of all kinds are more likely to score higher on the tests.

What are abstractions *

Primarily, everything that is not directly related to ourselves, or to the immediate.

We have from the most basic levels of abstractions: language for example, and especially as a communication function in everyday life. Then from there the abstractions become cumulative and even more uprooted from ourselves. Two examples: verbal abstractions. Know where Germany is, a little about its history, about the Berlin Wall, and you live in South America. Mathematical or spatial abstractions: the ability to rotate a geometric object. Although all the abstractions are consisting or have their origins in the immediate and / or the most primordial concrete things and its perceptions by living beings.

IQ measures what we do not have much control, what our memories internalize. I did not have any control to learn a language during my early childhood, and little control when I learned to read and write. In fact we do not know if ”we” just started to study writing and reading a few years later, from what is usually requested, ”we” had not learned faster because our brains would have already developed more, and become more apt to learn, and Even during childhood, which is a time when we start to complete/fill our heads with what I call ”de-novo instincts” or commands, the instincts we don’t born with, but we have certain capacity to internalize or to expand at certain levels.

”Abstract attention” also is not on our control, well, in the end, our levels and possibilities are on our control.

Pay attention to abstractions… to be positively reciprocal
Use ”internalized ‘de-novo instincts’ or ‘commands’ ” to solve ”IQ-like problems”, namely those that are of ”abstract nature”… it’s what IQ tests, in my novel-view, measure, compare and rank.

I live in the rural Midwest and was shocked during the last election to see 2 Pro-Hillary road signs locally. I got the chance to ask owners of the sign properties why. One turned out to be a Democratic Party local leader who said he was under pressure from headquarters to put out the sign. The other sign property owner was an almost 90 little old lady who said her dad always voted democrat so she did too. I asked her, “You do know that Hillary is likely a deceiving, murderous, pyshopath”? She replied that she always voted democrat and wasn’t going to vote Republican. In general though, the intensity of the silent absolute hate for Hillary was palpable here. By the way, does anyone really believe that the deep state didn’t have millions and millions of fraudulent votes cast for their candidate? Hillary didn’t win because the psychopaths running the deep state knew that the deception was too great not to be then revealed. They would have had to lay down their losing hand.

Fail to understand what you’re saying.
My personal expirience in life is that IQ has a limited meaning.
As intelligence has never been defined one cannot measure it.
This is not to say that IQ has no meaning, but in my view it is just a test.

True of course is that abstract thinking is difficult.
When computers replaced punch card machines, many who operated the punch card machines were unable to work with computers.
Economics is something that also requires abstract thinking, IT is the same, therefore IT companies hire anyone who seems to be able to do the job, and fire them is they have proved to be unable.

Varoufakis is of the opinion that since 1970 macro economics has not been taught anywhere.
He may be right, I’m an economist, studied in the 60ties, when in the Netherlands standards were deteriorating.
Macro economics seems to have been replaced by the market religion, that brought us the derivates disaster.
I knew quite well that there is no such thing as a guaranteed minimum value.
As soon as someone is able to make gold synthetically the price of gold will drop to the production cost level.

Among Dutch politicians there are in my opinion two intelligent persons, the rest is mediocre, or are simply failures, politics seems to be the profession where one can blunder without consequence.
A stupid policy is continued until anyone sees it is stupid, but never those who initiated the policy are fired.

IQ is NOT intelligence

Please, stop. Quit while you’re behind.

Goering’s cat died at the crucial moment and he was always more interested in poetry vs tank design.

International tests PISA, TIMSS etc., they are all biased, towards western ‘culture’. Do you really believe that elementary school kids from Canada for example are better in mathematics than eastern europeans, former comunist countries? The bias is that anything that resembles mathematics is deliberately removed from those tests, in favour of ‘logical problem solving’. For Pete’s sake, in Cnada, geometry is not thaugt at all, even in high school.

I know this for I live in Canada and have two kids now of university age, and the place where I work has a little bit to do with generateing ans scoring of PISA and TIMSS. I finished a technical univeristy in an eastern country more than 30 years ago. That puts me in decent position to compare the schooling systems and how much math kids receive at what age and how much of that they retain by the university. One kid is at U of Toronto, engineering svhool, ant the othre one is in USA, Cambridge, near Boston, Massacushets (not the same as British Cambridge, but if you Google it, it is at leat comaparable to the British one…), and yes, a technical field.

Te graph you are using is bogus. X axis (PISA/TIMSS results) is against what we see in real life. Why aren’t all programmers, engineers and scientists in North America from USA, Canada, England, Louxemburg (!!!) os Spain, since all those countries have better PISA/TIMSS scores than, say, Russia or India, or Armenia? Even for smalle rcountries thigs are up-side down, to favour EU members (Slovenia and Croatia ahead of Serbia?). Bias is also visible at cultural/religious level – Catholic Slovenia and Croatia ahead of Orthodox Bulgaria and Romania, both former eastern countries with russian based educational system?

As far as axis is concerned, the problem is in definition of GDP. In the past, it was “the value of walth created (goods, services, infrastructure)). Nowdays is “amount of money registered in transactions within or without the country”. If two companies in US sue each other, both lawyers count their fees as ‘wealth created’ and both amounts are added up for GDP…

As for correlation, the coefficient r is not the only measure of “goodnes of fit”. If you draw a set of points as a circle, correlation coefficianet will be r=1. In this case, there is too much scatter and too meny outliers on the grapf to make it usable.

In short, GIGO principle. Bad premisses lead to bad conclusions.

Cheer, mate 🙂

Göring’s IQ was the third highest of the accused. The economist Hjalmar Schacht came first.

Among Dutch politicians there are in my opinion two intelligent persons, the rest is mediocre, or are simply failures, politics seems to be the profession where one can blunder without consequence.
A stupid policy is continued until anyone sees it is stupid, but never those who initiated the policy are fired.

Because politics is a show business, as well is ”celebritchy cultism”.

Really bright people at least or specially to govern others are usually incapable to survive in extremely toxic politic landscape.

And all this vague and wrong ideas of ”everyone is the same/is capable” [”everyone is capable to govern well”], ”everyone have free will” and even the given freedom to candidate or not to politics tend to have otherwise of desirable results.

Indeed the ”triunph of will” has been disastrous for humans since a long time, because it’s not uncommon that willing to do something is not considerably correlated with competency.

True of course is that abstract thinking is difficult.

Not necessarily difficult for those WHO BORN with this facilities, this is my main point here.

Economics is something that also requires abstract thinking, IT is the same, therefore IT companies hire anyone who seems to be able to do the job, and fire them is they have proved to be unable.

Nobody want to born with or without required skills to be succesful in given society, this upper-awareness about our essential ”non-freedom of choice”, at least the most important aspects of ourselves, seems extremely important to start to do really efficient and real macro-social justice.

Everything humans have created require at least some drope of abstract thinking. Maybe, only search for food/survive, breath, make sex and interact with sorrounds that don’t need totally abstract/symbolic thinking, even pre-language or patternalized noises seems require some abstract thinking.

I really do not understand much about economics, at least in relation to their more complex theoretical developments.

West Africans have less incentives to work / study for money and reputation, because ceteris paribus in a mixed-race society they will always have more life satisfaction. This is simply because is much more satisfying to hit somebody than to get, and I think there is currently no country in the world where West Africans get more hit by Non West Africans than the other way round. Also West African have the best chances on the partner market. West Africans simply do not need to compensate by studying / working, they get their reproductive success the direct way.

“…small minorities of whites and asians actually do all the brain work in many countries in South America…”

That doesn’t explain the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs, but Fred’s screed also ignores the fact that after those civilizations were gone, intellectual progress stopped until White Europeans showed up to show the natives how it is done.

“Another nation’s IQ average is also 85, but it’s of two races. One race has an average IQ of 100 while another has an IQ of 70. So, it averages out to 85. But the second nation does better because it has a race of smart people even if it also has a race of dumb people.

The reason why Latin America is semi-modern is because it has enough white people who are smarter than other races. ”

I’ll buy that with the further observation that living in the tropics tends to dull the senses of anyone and especially whites (relatively speaking). High altitude offices and air conditioned tierra caliente offices in the tropics make it better for Whitey to run the kingdom.

Agreed.

I’d like to know not only about the relative impact of disease, but the disposition of the nobility and civil service class after the Spanish arrival.

If you truncate the distribution, i.e. select for stupidity you can engineer a populace of morons if you wanted.

The polling industry has been corrupted to exactly the same degree as the media.

The least biased poll, the one that did best in prediction out of the major entities was the LA Times. What differed from other polls was their weighting scheme.

It isn’t open to debate. The polls were wrong in precise alignment with their bias in excessive democratic weight.

Most of you would just love taking Cisco IT Certification Exams- no going forward or back on questions, tight time limits on the tests. Really sucks when you get a question wrong, a later question jogs your memory, and you can’t go back to change a mistake. At least they are really specific in the material being tested.

Intelligence testing, in any case, doesn’t measure drive, energy, or determination (with the possible exception of the drive to prepare for the exams). Not to mention, for instance, massive Asian cheating on SATs, and I suspect a whole lot else. The tests are approaching garbage levels of reliability for a lot of other reasons too. At least on the aforementioned IT exams, you go into a little room, by yourself, no phones (etc.), AND a camera right over your shoulder. That could be the only way to administer exams in the future.

There’s also her decades-long alcoholism, a history of strokes, and a concussion or two, not to mention her Narcissistic Personality Disorder and psychopathy. She might have been sharp way back when, and she’s still capable of prepping for a Presidential “debate”, but all of the above-mentioned debilities can whittle one’s intelligence down to nothing. I’d like to see her take a LSAT now.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2137926-dna-variants-that-are-bad-for-health-may-also-make-you-stupid/

What makes some people smarter than others? A genetic analysis of families in Scotland, UK, hints that brainier people have fewer DNA mutations that impair intelligence and general health, rather than having more genetic variants that make them smarter.

“This is one of the most exciting studies on the genetics of intelligence I’ve seen for a while,” says Steve Stewart-Williams of the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, who was not involved in the work.

One implication is that using gene editing to fix the hundreds of mutations that slightly damage people’s health would make them smarter as well as healthier. “

The Olmec civilization began about 1000 BC which is 3000 years ago not 5000. An interesting thing about the Olmec is that they developed writing many centuries after the start of their civilization. Meso-American civilizations had writing but made much much less use of it than the cultures of the Near East did beginning about the fourth millennium.

Meso-American cultures are extraordinarily interesting. Unfortunately Fred and most of the commentators here seem to be much more interested in scoring shallow rhetorical points than actually learning anything about these remarkable cultures.

Fred, what were the “extraordinarily accurate astronomical observations” made by Amerindians in Mexico (or anywhere else for that matter) in the third century BC? What documentation is available regarding these “observations”?

the only answer is 59 minutes.

Anyone with rudimentary knowledge of computing arrived at the answer before they finished reading the problem.

Something went wrong with modern parenting.

http://www.dailywire.com/news/18022/paradox-canadian-prime-minister-justin-trudeau-michael-qazvini

This comment confuses me. Are you describing your solution of the height of the tree, or of the original problem?

You may also be interested in the work of Julian Jaynes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes See also a website dedicated to his work http://www.julianjaynes.org.

I remember being gob-smacked on first reading of his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind decades ago. Much of it has since been gainsaid, and much remains controversial, but there are some insights into “intelligence and consciousness” that remain compelling.

Success in business or career has little to do with math unless you’re in some profession where it is a requirement.

In most cases mathematical talent just means you’re going to be stuffed in a cube farm in some high tech office complex and you get hang out with dozens of other socially inept and stunted males. Attractive isn’t it?

And I swear, that a lot of them have some degree of autism as well. They just can’t socialize at all, their movements are off or stilted as well.

It’s always been a source of debate among HBD’ers why geeks are viewed as unattractive betas by females despite their superior IQ. I suspect that females notice something wrong with them.

So why are we so into algebra? Baker points out that many of today’s math requireme… Congress passed 1958′s National Defense Education Act, re-upping the American math curriculum requirements, and, in turn, creating a lot of unhappy students who, as they struggle through required math course after required math course, become discouraged and learn to hate school.

It appears we snookered ourselves.

That said, our education system does a fine job making kids hate school and learning.

As for learning Algebra – unless you’re STEM bound you don’t need it. Students not on the STEM track should learn arithmetic, logic, science and call it good. You’ll still be ahead of most people.

Funny thing in STEM you won’t need a lot of that math depending on what specialty you’ve chosen. It’s mostly in the design and test phase is where you find it applied.

Other stupid”alpha”. I know many homos and promiscuous or polly-sexual women who like so called “alpha men”. Now i know “alt right or whatever the subdivision” also worship for that assholes. White men look more and more hopeless, your stupidity and stupid capacity to create more and more divisions among themselves never ends.

One of the reason there are or appear to be less interests on “nerds or geeks” is the unbalanced ratio between nerdies men and women. Because nerdiness tend to be more correlated with higher testosterone in the womb so the ratio is higher for men. Statistically the percent of nerd women for each nerd men is lower and it’s not unusual we have a nerd man who lives most part of his life among “non nerds”.

In other hand a lot of nerd men don’t make effort to become attractive for opposite sex or even have a very mecahnicistic mind in contrast with prevalent mentalistic feminine mind, so many them have lower probability to find their partner easily.

The Euros invaded no one.

In general they moved colonies into mostly empty territory (North America, Australia, Siberia) or where natives swiftly shifted allegiance to get rid of crazed local tyrants (Mexico, India, Africa).

The US made decolonization a condition of entering WWII, and created a UN to teach basic democracy.

People who say algebra is not useful to most people subconsciously rely on algebra to make their arguments seem credible.

Algebra is very useful starting with the store owner who uses it to calculate sums and align inventories in his head (or farmer/homeowner who does the same with recipes, mixtures, or shop projects).

The problem is there is less emphasis on commercial/home/shop math in 6th to 8th grades because of hostility to Capitalism and autonomy, so kids don’t get it. Then again, they’re graduating people from High School who can’t do long addition..

The problem is there is less emphasis on commercial/home/shop math in 6th to 8th grades because of hostility to Capitalism and autonomy, so kids don’t get it.

The phenomenon of “math/test anxiety” seems to be a real thing and have genetic underpinnings:

Maths and maps make you nervous? It could be in your genes
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170221101035.htm

‘Pinpointing specific genes for anxiety could help in identifying children who are most at risk from very early in their lives, and subsequently to intervene and prevent the development of anxiety in these different contexts. For example, for children at a greater genetic risk of mathematics anxiety, interventions aimed at enhancing motivation and providing positive feedback may help with reducing anxiety and increasing performance in this area.’

We found that spatial anxiety is a multifactorial construct, including two components: navigation anxiety and rotation/visualization anxiety. All anxiety measures were moderately heritable (30% to 41%), and non-shared environmental factors explained the remaining variance. Multivariate genetic analysis showed that, although some genetic and environmental factors contributed to all anxiety measures, a substantial portion of genetic and non-shared environmental influences were specific to each anxiety construct. This suggests that anxiety is a multifactorial construct phenotypically and aetiologically, highlighting the importance of studying anxiety within specific contexts.

– The genetic and environmental aetiology of spatial, mathematics and general anxiety. Scientific Reports, 2017; 7: 42218 DOI: 10.1038/srep42218 Malanchini et al. (2017) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28220830

Could crafting more compelling and inspirational real-life math/test questions/stories be one of the ways forward?

Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling
https://hbr.org/2014/10/why-your-brain-loves-good-storytelling

My research has also shown that stories are useful inside organizations. We know that people are substantially more motivated by their organization’s transcendent purpose (how it improves lives) than by its transactional purpose (how it sells goods and services). Transcendent purpose is effectively communicated through stories – for example, by describing the pitiable situations of actual, named customers and how their problems were solved by your efforts. Make your people empathize with the pain the customer experienced and they will also feel the pleasure of its resolution – all the more if some heroics went in to reducing suffering or struggle, or producing joy. Many of us know from Joseph Campbell’s work that enduring stories tend to share a dramatic arc in which a character struggles and eventually finds heretofore unknown abilities and uses these to triumph over adversity; my work shows that the brain is highly attracted to this story style.

Interestingly Whites/Europeans, not African-Americans, could likely benefit the most from these anxiety-alleviating/management techniques, since they seem to be the most anxiety-prone racial group, which in turn would mean that they could see the biggest boosts/improvements in average group test score results. This actually means, in my opinion, that Whites/Europeans could close the gap with or even surpass Asian Americans in average group test score results.

A Cross-Ethnic Comparison of Lifetime Prevalence Rates of Anxiety Disorders
Asnaani et al. (2010)

Figure 1 link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2931265/figure/F1/
[…]
As was found across a range of psychiatric disorders, Asian Americans consistently endorsed symptoms of all four anxiety disorders less frequently than any of the other racial groups. White Americans consistently endorsed symptoms of SAD (12.6%), GAD (8.6%) and PD (5.1%) more frequently than African Americans (8.6%, 4.9%, 3.8%, respectively), Hispanic Americans (8.2%, 5.8%, 4.1%, respectively), and Asian Americans (5.3%, 2.4%, 2.1%, respectively).

– https://www.unz.com/jthompson/genetics-of-racial-differences-in-intelligence-updated/#comment-1898260

I believe the following data further confirms my theory. Whites seem to benefit the least from test prep. I believe the explanation for this, is that even if a person studies hard for an exam/test, but they have not learned how to control their thoughts and emotions properly under stress/pressure, most of the test prep/studying effect will go out the window if they are anxiety-prone, have difficulty focusing or struggle with other general attention deficit disorders.
[…]
What this means, in my opinion, is that Whites, instead of just studying for exams/tests, should probably invest more of their time and resources in learning and practicing mind-and-body-calming techniques like mediation, breathing exercises, etc. before important tests (including IQ tests), exams, job interviews, etc.

I think what is important to reiterate is that IQ tests seem to measure and predict certain things very accurately, e.g., better cognitive performance/functioning under pressure/stress, educational attainment, income, possibly testosterone and dopamine levels, etc., but they do ironically/paradoxically only seem to test “intelligence” to a limited extent, at least that is my best, current understanding and interpretation of the data I have researched thus far.

– https://www.unz.com/jthompson/genetics-of-racial-differences-in-intelligence-updated/#comment-1898375

“The Euros invaded no one.”

You are historically ignorant.

“In general they moved colonies into mostly empty territory (North America, Australia, Siberia)…”

No, these places were filled with civilizations who had defined borders.

“or where natives swiftly shifted allegiance to get rid of crazed local tyrants (Mexico, India, Africa).”

No different than the authoritarian rule of European monarchs. In reality, the leaders of those places were no different, and no worse, than European authoritarian monarchs.

“The US made decolonization a condition of entering WWII, and created a UN to teach basic democracy.”

The condition was for America, Great Britain, France, and Russia not to carve up the world. The Europeans were granted the liberty to keep their existing colonies, but in the aftermath of the war Indian, Indonesia, the Philippines and a number of Middle Eastern countries were freed from the grip of the colonial masters.

You are going “life is (like) a IQ test” in the next level. I doubt anxiety only make some people do bad in IQ tests.

There are anxious people who do well on math or spatial isn’t?

In the end IQ is not intelligence; IQ is not the last verdict of intellectual levels of individuals or collectives even can be used as proxy.

Also is important to analyze individual variation on cognitive substests. My bet is that white Europeans will have more people with higher (psycho) cognitive individual amplitude than in other races.

Senyor Karlin is cowardly for disallowing your posts on his comment sections. And Poland is cowardly for disallowing Africans and Arabs to live there. It’s a pity two such birds of a feather don’t get along any better.

There are anxious people who do well on math or spatial isn’t?

Your comment reminded me of the following comment on another blog:

Evan (@Elder1Evan)
October 10, 2015 at 5:26 PM

Strange, but true… I am 66, white male. I just had my testosterone checked a month ago, first time ever. It is currently at 803 ng/dL, very high, equivalent to an 18 year old. My IQ was last measured while in University at about 145 to 150. I was able to get into UC Berkeley by challenging the SAT in the sixties. If you scored in the top 2% your previous education and grades did not matter. I scored in the top 1%. I have three masters in engineering, computer science, electrical and mechanical. Now that I am retired I am considering going back just for something to do. I think I will challenge a PhD. I already have a full thesis for it including several inventions, one in quantum physics.

While at Berkeley I would simply go to the “student union” (so aptly named ), read a textbook, and just wait for a good looking girl to sit by me and say hello. This nearly always led to a very enjoyable evening. Often it was more than one evening…

– https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/high-testosterone-linked-to-lowered-iq/#comment-242250

I am sure that there are people, who score very high on IQ tests even though they are anxiety-prone, have high testosterone levels, etc. My main point is, that these individuals would do likely even better than they are already doing if they could get their anxiety under control with the help of meditation, breathing exercises, etc. or lowered their testosterone levels a bit by changing their diet, exercising less/differently, etc.

Maybe the gentleman from above could have accomplished even more than he already has, if chasing after coeds/women had not been one of his main priorities in university and in life in general?

I think IQ tests measure intelligence to a certain extent, my main concern is an over-reliance on IQ tests to identify geniuses. This is still my best summary on this topic, in my opinion:

As I understood it, the author was arguing in this paper, that ‘genius’ is not merely a matter of intelligence, even though intelligence is a major component of it, but that ‘genius’ is a combination of intelligence plus creativity. Therefore it is tough to measure ‘geniusness’ and IQ tests therefore have a limited applicability in this field (I think you argued this point before as well in a little different context, in a short comment exchange we had about Christopher Langan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan on the topic of intelligence versus wisdom, where my argument was, that intelligence and wisdom always go hand in hand, but that there are plenty of very intelligent people, who lack wisdom, or can be outright evil, e.g. psychopaths. The same could be said about ‘genius’, in my opinion. Genius and high intelligence always come in a package, but there are plenty of highly intelligent people, who are not geniuses), but of course the probability to find and the frequency of geniuses increases in high IQ populations/groups, and so IQ tests are still a very valuable and important tool to figure out where to look for geniuses.

– https://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-secret-in-your-eyes/#comment-1817068

Which brings me to the question from your blog post:

Finally, to test the creative abilities of the presenters I confronted two of them and demanded they tell me what was the most creative idea humankind had ever come up with.
[…]
What is your candidate idea?

My candidates, after about 2 minutes of thinking about it, would be “Freedom of Speech and Thought” and Utilitarianism, in that order.

Jeremy Bentham was quite eccentric as well, as I understand

– https://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-secret-in-your-eyes/#comment-1817667

Bentham was deeply eccentric. He avoided social engagements and didn’t need company, describing himself as being ‘in a state of perpetual and unruffled gaiety’.
[…]
Apart from two early dalliances, he seemed to have no intimate dealings with women, although even at the end of his life, memories of his romantic youth would quickly move him to tears.

– https://www.unz.com/jthompson/isteve-metrics/#comment-1824441

I think one of the characteristics of true geniuses is that they are natural utilitarians and extremely good and talented at creating win-win, triple-win, etc. situations, i.e.,

Creating order out of chaos, or creating peace out of war.

I have observed and noticed this trait/talent in both Steve Sailer and Ron Unz.

In my opinion and according to my observations and knowledge Mr. Sailer is what I would classify as a “real genius”

– https://www.unz.com/jthompson/isteve-metrics/#comment-1823832

They are both really good at finding common ground with all sorts of different groups and peoples, and then bringing them together to, as I said, create win-win scenarios, which result in more balance and order, and ultimately create greater happiness and a higher quality of life for greater numbers of people and this also protects planet Earth and the animal and plant kingdoms. They are visionaries (another alternative term for genius), in my opinion. They see and understand the “bigger picture”.

What’s matter is not you/we do better in IQ tests but this scores reflects near perfectly your/our levels based on what the tests is measuring. That’s may main point/view here. If “whites” do worst than east Asians on spatial tests and the cause really is the differential levels of anxiety-proneness it’s don’t matter too much only if this differences have real-world impact but this don’t seems to be this case.

IQ simply don’t measure creative levels so the best IQ can do is correlates accidentally with creativity levels.

About Unz and Sailer… Good you say it’s your (personal) view, 😉

May = my = merda

Light-skinned beings with beards, to be precise.

“That doesn’t explain the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs, but Fred’s screed also ignores the fact that after those civilizations were gone, intellectual progress stopped ”

What do you mean “after they were gone?”

The Aztecs and Incas were in full bloom when the Spanish showed up, and were indeed both relatively new empires and still expanding.

The Maya, to be sure, were past their sell-by date, but they were still around. In fact, they still are, though their days of intellectual feats are long in the past.

Very large jar? Very small bugs?

There is also the apparent existence of hormesis. Which means that materials toxic in high or medium doses often have a beneficial or tonic effect at low doses.

The negative effects of lead appear to be mostly associated with developing neuro systems. Much less effect on adults.

“I’d like to know not only about the relative impact of disease, but the disposition of the nobility and civil service class after the Spanish arrival.”

Don’t know about the statistics, but in both Mexico and Peru significant numbers of the native elite were welcomed into the new colonial elite.

The Maya, to be sure, were past their sell-by date, but they were still around. In fact, they still are, though their days of intellectual feats are long in the past.

You do realize you answered your own question don’t you?

There is considerable evidence that the Mayan civilization largely collapsed in an internal revolution, presumably with the oppressed proles slaughtering the elite. The proles kept on living their lives as they always had, there were just no more massive temples or calenddrical observations produced.

It’s possible that in the process they killed off most of the higher IQ members of their society.

Something similar, BTW, may have happened in North America among the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon and at the huge city at Monk’s Mound near East St. Louis.

The Inca and Aztec were not in decline when the Spanish showed up. They were both in fact recently arisen empires and were still expanding. The Spanish largely conquered by recruiting the resentful natives against their overlords. As it turned out, this was not a wise thing for the resentful natives to do, but by the time they found this out, it was too late.

North America had some reasonably well-established groups with defined borders, especially in the lower Mississippi and among the Iroquois and their neighbors. Siberia was mostly controlled by Mongols and similar groups. Were either of them “civilizations?” Depends on your definition.

Australia had nothing even vaguely resembling a state or civilization. All stone-age hunter-gatherers.

Except that someone with high creativity but low IQ is unlikely to be able to do much of anything with their creativity.

I don’t think so. It’s not IQ that mediate capacity to be talented but self-awareness/ self-knowledge, firstly.

I personally have a soft spot for [typo here in my above comment, I did not mean to put a ”the” in front of his name] Christopher Langan for example, but even with him I have noticed, that he seems to lack some self-awareness. The same character trait/flaw, even more strongly expressed than in Christopher Langan, I noticed in Marilyn vos Savant, Rick Rosner, etc. There seems to be a trade-off when it comes to extremely high IQ test scores and a person’s level of self-awareness. Many of these people live in their own little bubbles and are so wrapped up in their own projects, etc., that they don’t seem to be able to tap into and properly gauge the mood and intent of the collective consciousness/intelligence. Something is being lost in translation or does not fully compute in their super-brains in this regard. I don’t know what it could be, and also this is just my own personal observation, and I could be biased here and be the one lacking self-awareness…

I just came across an old comment of mine, I had forgotten about, which seems to confirm my observation:

The surprising downsides of being clever

Can high intelligence be a burden rather than a boon? David Robson investigates.
[…]
Consider the “my-side bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.
That’s not all. People who ace standard cognitive tests are in fact slightly more likely to have a “bias blind spot”. That is, they are less able to see their own flaws, even when though they are quite capable of criticising the foibles of others. And they have a greater tendency to fall for the “gambler’s fallacy” – the idea that if a tossed coin turns heads 10 times, it will be more likely to fall tails on the 11th. The fallacy has been the ruination of roulette players planning for a red after a string of blacks, and it can also lead stock investors to sell their shares before they reach peak value – in the belief that their luck has to run out sooner or later. – http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150413-the-downsides-of-being-clever

– https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-in-enormous-success-scientists-tie-52-genes-to-human-intelligence/#comment-1882605

“North America had some reasonably well-established groups with defined borders, especially in the lower Mississippi and among the Iroquois and their neighbors. Siberia was mostly controlled by Mongols and similar groups. Were either of them “civilizations?” Depends on your definition.”

The definition is clear– A civilization is a complex culture in which large numbers of human beings share a number of common elements, which generally include centralized government, organized religion, job specialization, writing, and technology. Some here on this fine blog appear to be fixated with the “technology” component of the definition, claiming that innovations is the defining criteria as to what constitutes “uncivilized” with “civilized”.

“Australia had nothing even vaguely resembling a state or civilization. All stone-age hunter-gatherers.”

Not necessarily.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/21/indigenous-australians-most-ancient-civilisation-on-earth-dna-study-confirms

North America includes Mexico and Central America but I assume you are using the term “North America” incorrectly to mean the US and Canada. The most advanced Amerindian cultures in what is now the US and Canada were in the American Southwest. Of these the most advanced was Chaco Canyon. They had irrigation systems and roads and although no fully developed writing has been found there about 1000 pictographs have been found.

Chaco Canyon could be considered at least an embryonic “civilization”. It was abandoned around 1200 AD, perhaps because of drought. The Zuni live today not far from Chaco Canyon and according to tribal traditions they are the descendants of the builders of Chaco Canyon. This may well be true. The Zuni language has little resemblance to any other Amerindian language ( it is classified as a Penutian isolate by Greenberg) which suggests that the Zuni have not recently migrated into the area but have been there for some time.

The article you cite gives no reason whatsoever to refer to traditional Australian Aboriginal culture as a “civilization”. They use the word “civilization” in a purely arbitrary way. Traditional Australian Aboriginal Culture was in fact Paleolithic. They had neither pottery nor bows and arrows. The Tasmanians did not even know how to start fires. That the Australian Aborigines have been in Australia for about 50,000-60,000 has long been known. The genetic evidence indicates that they have been largely genetically isolated from the rest of humanity since coming to Australia. The average brain size of Australian aborigines is about 85% of that of Europeans. One IQ study of them has been published with an average IQ of 62. The highest IQ in the sample was 74.

Chaco Canyon is the most advanced pre-Columbian culture in the territory of the present day US but it is not Anasazi.

The collapse of the Maya cities occurred only in the Highlands. The Lowland Maya cities were still going strong when the Spanish arrived and proved much harder to subdue than the Aztecs.

You are correct that the evidence regarding the collapse of the Highland Maya suggests a scenario of “oppressed proles slaughtering the elites”. There is deliberate desecration and overturning of the Maya monuments. On the other hand there is no archaeological evidence of foreign intrusion and the Amerindian languages spoken in the area today are Mayan. Some of the archaeological evidence does suggest the spread into the area of new cults from the Valley of Mexico but no evidence of population movements into the Highlands from the Valley of Mexico.

“The article you cite gives no reason whatsoever to refer to traditional Australian Aboriginal culture as a “civilization”. ”

The source, as well as the links, discussed several aspects of civilization– cave art, more sophisticated tools, evidence of stone houses, trade among groups from different locations, eel-farming in complex and extensive irrigated pond systems, and semi-permanent villages.

“They use the word “civilization” in a purely arbitrary way.”

That is other than accurate.

“They had neither pottery nor bows and arrows. The Tasmanians did not even know how to start fires.”

The Tasmanians are one of several Australian Aboriginal Cultures. In the the context of an anthropological model (Flood/Dispersion), it is noteworthy that a general pattern of “devolution” occurs from North to South, with Tasmania the furthest place from the original center of migration. These “subhumans” may be the result of an environment that did not require nor demand such technology or because they were forced to migrate due to invasion or extreme weather.

“The average brain size of Australian aborigines is about 85% of that of Europeans. One IQ study of them has been published with an average IQ of 62. The highest IQ in the sample was 74.”

IQ is overrated in this regard. You are comparing apples to oranges. European civilization was far advanced in the technological and intellectual sophistication realm compared to Tasmanians due to their environment.

The term “Anasazi” is presently considered politically incorrect, since it is a Navajo term. We are now supposed to use “Ancestral Puebloan” instead, which of course is two words that can be traced back to Latin.

Whatever you call them, Chaco Canyon was their largest settlement.

Most of the Maya cities were pretty much defunct by 1500 except along the coast. There were still a lot of Maya people around in all these areas, but they lived in villages at a much lower level of high civilization than their ancestors.

BTW, Teotihuacan invaded and conquered Tikal, one of the largest Maya cities, in the 4th century AD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikal#Tikal_and_Teotihuacan

“centralized government, organized religion, job specialization, writing, and technology.”

The natives of Australia had none of these. Their technology was astonishingly primitive.

“The natives of Australia had none of these. Their technology was astonishingly primitive.”

You would be in error.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal

Also there is evidence of Toltec intrusion into Mayan territory. Chichen-Itza shows a lot of signs of
Toltec influence.

Note though that it was never the case that the Mayan area and the Valley of Mexico were isolated from each other. There is evidence that some of the Highland Mayan cities had at some times rulers from the valley of Mexico. Also there were Mayan colonies located in the Valley of Mexico.

Funny about the political correctness. I suppose we shouldn’t use the terms “German” or “Greek” but instead “Deutsch” or “Hellenika” if we’re even allowed to use the Latin alphabet in the latter case.

“Navaho” is itself a Tanoan word. They call themselves “Dine”.

I’ve heard that Yupik in Alaska hate being referred to as “Inuit”. They would much rather be called “Eskimo” instead of “Inuit”.

Your list of criteria for civilization is simply silly. Cave art is at least 40,000 years old.

damn nigh impossible to design and IQ test without some sort of bias, i expect. that said, it’s likely that each race has individual strengths & weaknesses.
and what would we do about the neanderthal population had they survived? i wonder what the average neanderthal’s IQ would be?