We’re on our second (or maybe our first) President that routinely works comments about people’s IQ’s in. Biden would just tell people that he had a higher IQ than they did. Trump has a series of people that he calls “low IQ.” Most of them disagree with him on several topics – and as I look at a list of people he has dismissed as low IQ, my thoughts are that he is including a bunch of people who would test average or higher. I’m not sure that either Trump or Biden really understands Intelligence all that well.
One of the ironies of IQ is that, as a field, the psychology boys and girls test out lower than virtually all of the other majors. The top scorers tend to be in physics – but let’s look at how the test is set up. The average, the mean score is supposed to be 100 – kind of by definition. Normal is within one standard deviation above or below the mean – which pretty well defines a low IQ as below 85. Jordan Peterson interprets the point where the US military keeps Forest Gump out as 83. It wasn’t always so – the fictional Forest Gump, drafted during the Viet Nam war, is an example of what was termed McNamara’s Morons – selected for low intelligence, drafted between 1966 and 1971, they died at three times the rate of their normal IQ compatriots.
I guess that time, from 1966 to the end of 1971, left people around my age damned well informed that a low IQ was not a good thing. Both Trump and -Biden, like me, would have brushed against folks stuck in this program – young men who scored right at the top of the bottom 10%.
I was lucky – I met Doug in the early eighties. Basically a good man, shunted out of the army for a low IQ – permanently damaged by that heartless evaluation, Doug made a living as a hired man on north-central Montana ranches. There were jobs Doug could handle well – but the Army’s rejection was a heavy burden. He was in the bottom ten or 12 percent – but he was reliable and conscientious.
I’d like to think that neither Trump nor Biden, had they known Doug, would have judged him by his IQ test any more than I would. If a cow had trouble calving, Doug was there. If a fence needed repair, Doug did a better job than a lot of people brighter than he was. I would rather have Doug reload ammunition than do it myself – I get bored and lose attention to detail – Doug stayed focused on that repetitive task.
If the lowest score you can get is zero, and the average is 100, you can extrapolate the scale to a top of around 200 (Marilyn vos Savant is supposed to have scored 228 when she was ten). Hawking scored 160. I’ve been tested, and consistently scored well. I believe the tests measure something – but I’ve made enough bad calls and dumb mistakes that I’m not sure that my IQ test scores measured intelligence.
Using 15 points as a standard deviation, Stephen Hawking’s 160 score is one out of 31,560. Flathead County has an estimated population of 116,000 – so probably 4 people equal to Hawking. The reverse is the IQ of 40 – equally rare. Lincoln County has about 22,000 people – so we should have someone who reliably tests at 159. Statistically speaking, that person is probably not in the county elections office.
I have a tendency to look at midwits as more problematic than the low IQ – and looking at the politicians Trump has called low IQ, I think he is looking at midwits. A midwit has an above normal IQ, but not nearly so far above normal as they believe. I’ve been a decent engineering technician, and a good to great rural demographer. There are a lot of topics I don’t know – the problem with midwits is not that they’re stupid, but that they have opinions and make decisions on data that they only think they have.
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