IQ

is the quotient intelligent?

A theory has circulated that high IQ (smart) people conformed to the Covid superstition more than low IQ (not smart) people. There is a subset of the the theory, illustrated below, that the not intelligent and really intelligent did not conform while the middle of the Bell curve, known derogatorily as mid-wits, completely conformed as they are seemingly wired to do:

This was taken from this essay

The mid-wits occupy much of our academic class. They are smart enough to read and regurgitate, but not bright enough to come up with novel theories or expand much beyond accepted parameters of thought. This cohort makes up almost our entire media and political class as well as running most academic institutions.

Many of the vaccine/Covid regime conformity theory of intelligence proponents actually take this a step further like this essay:

Vaccines and the Midwit Effect, or: Why smart people seem to believe all manner of crazy things, and smarter people seem to believe them even harder

This essay and the one linked in the vaccine acceptance curve above are great reads and both writers were excellent on the Covid question. The peer groups of these authors seem to derive from the intellectual class while mine are the working class. As

John Carter

said of his peer group:

These aren’t stupid people, by any means. I’m talking PhD scientists, computer programmers, engineers. In terms of raw cognitive grunt this is a group with serious horsepower.

In the “thinking class,” I have heard and read it posited that people who did not conform to the Covid regime did so out of baseline mistrust of government, general contrariness, being too simple to understand the vaccines (which mRNA is not), or were just too dumb to make and keep an appointment (see Swedish paper below). Seriously, too dumb (with cognitive barriers) to make an appointment or read train schedules! While those who conformed suffered from a GIGO(garbage in, garbage out) data problem. For me, questioning and filtering all data or information is step one for the intelligence test known as life.

eugyppius says of the Swedish study that addressed the questions of IQ and vaccine uptake:

What the Swedish study showed, more than anything, is that in a highly compliant, consensus-driven society, cognitive barriers limit vaccine uptake.

This study looked at IQ scores from a 700,000 person cohort. The (mostly)men, currently aged between 42 and 59, were tested when they were 18. Here is the conclusion taken directly from the abstract:

The results suggest that the complexity of the vaccination decision may make it difficult for individuals with lower cognitive abilities to understand the benefits of vaccination. Consistent with this, we show that simplifying the vaccination decision through pre-booked vaccination appointments alleviates almost all of the inequality in vaccination behavior.

There you have it. Pre-book their appointments(because they don’t understand vaccination) and the dummies will show up. This ridiculous conclusion calls into question the assumption that the pattern recognitions that take place in a testing facility and are collated onto a piece of paper or a computer screen in a single day, at a single period of time correlate to a person’s ability:

to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment.

The above is a current definition from psychologists of the slippery concept known as intelligence. Now that the psychologists who define intelligence are focused on adaptation to environment and an ability to change one’s mind, do they give locked room mysteries or panic room tests to establish IQ? This is the issue I always have with the IQ and intelligence question. First define intelligence. The IQ tests seem to test some narrow aspect of some form of intelligence at best.

By my (limited) estimation, the above definition means people who work in the trades are more intelligent due to adaptability and the ability to manipulate one’s environment, which is literally the definition of many blue-collar jobs. However, this is not the belief of the thinking class. eugyppius again:

The average IQ of lawyers will be about the same as the average IQ of doctors, and both will be significantly higher than the average IQ of plumbers. This doesn’t mean doctors and lawyers matter more than plumbers, it just means that some professions are more cognitively demanding than others.

I do believe that the tests measure some aspect of what people are calling intelligence, but to me that aspect is so narrow as to be meaningless. Cognitive ability is more nuanced and includes qualities like physical coordination, artistic ability, analytical skills, social intelligence. These other aspects not captured by these IQ tests, which themselves are conjured by mid-wits from the halls of academia, where the majority of the intelligence on display is often a cut and paste/ rote memorization ability, which these tests then measure.

The thing I see that the IQ tests measure accurately is a high level of conformity and establishment thinking — e.g. the Swedish study authors still believe that the unvaccinated do not understand the stated benefits of vaccination. As if the stated purpose has given the compliant population a real understanding of virology or epidemiology. For me, the unvaccinated understood their personal risk calculus of taking an experimental gene therapy for a corona virus whose adaptation and infection rate was high but whose death rate was very low (like a common cold).

My general distaste for people lauding their IQs and considering this an indication of actual intelligence goes back to my own experience. They introduced IQ tests in the rural public school where I grew up in my 5th grade year. In 6th grade, I noted that some people I was friends with were in a special class while I sat with other friends in the normal class. It piqued my ego that they labeled these other kids “gifted”.

That year we took the IQ test again. This time the results anointed me as one of the gifted (by God?) for the following academic year. I do not remember clearly my mindset nor my environmental circumstances for the respective tests, I only know that according to the IQ test, one year I was a dipshit and the next I was gifted. For me, this invalidates much of the IQ data, other than simply measuring how a person took a particular test on a given day. It cannot test know a test subject’s motivations or personal circumstances, the environmental conditions surrounding the test, nor a multitude of other factors surrounding the test that are impossible to quantify.

That Gifted Program gave us logic puzzles and Shakespeare while the “average” students read the type of books and did the type of busy work that would have bored me to sleep. Magically all of the kids from that program ended up in the AP track (minus maybe one slacker). From an academic perspective, early placement in a program such as this had an effect on me similar to what happened with the hockey players in Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers. Essentially, all the great hockey players in Canada were born in the first few months of the calendar year, which made them the oldest and most physically developed in youth leagues. Because of this, they were given more attention and coaching and therefore developed as serious hockey players from a young age. This natural prejudice of birthday months apparently continues into professional hockey, much as early IQ tests do into advanced academia (or so my theory goes).

Ever since, when people tout IQ and high academic achievement as signs of intelligence, I am not only skeptical but actively hostile to the concept. Since that early experience, I have known high school dropouts who were brilliant autodidacts teaching themselves trigonometry so they could derive the angles to cut for a piece of art, electricians who learned the chemistry to harvest gold and platinum from circuit boards, etc. I don’t necessarily know these folks IQ scores, but they had the lowest vaccine uptake of any other group in my anecdotal dataset . I also know that I was, and am, the same dumbass who scored poorly and then well on a test that eventually proclaimed me gifted. And this gifted dumbass found all of the established interventions laughable.

The idea that anyone in the human species knows anything about the complex system that is our brain and that it can be measured in a test on one day, is as laughable as humans being able to model complex systems to predict future temperatures and weather.

I read once that there are more neural connections in a human brain than there are stars in the known universe (Carl Sagan in “The Dragons of Eden” I believe). To imagine that some social science folks could create a test that determines someone’s mental capacities and gifts is such a preposterous thesis that I have trouble taking it seriously.

From my experience as a regular, non-academic person the Covid experience reinforced my own theory of intelligence and conformity. The greatest tests of intelligence are real-world, dynamic tests that have real consequences. A person’s reaction to the Covid regime is a better indicator of intelligence than a test taken in their 19th year (perhaps they were hung over or had to take a pee). In fact, reaction to the Covid regime seems to be a nearly perfect IQ test for my own purposes. So how did you score?