Amerika

Primeval humans understood the basics of intelligence and sanity. Insane people were dangerous and you killed them; stupid people were a risk and you drove them off. Smarter people and saner people were valuable and you tried to get as many as you could.

In our dark egalitarian times, however, such wisdom is seen as heresy and malevolence.

A new study from the University of Bath’s School of Management has found that individuals with a higher IQ make more realistic predictions, which supports better decision-making and can lead to improved life outcomes.

The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that people with a low IQ (the lowest 2.5% of the population) make forecasting errors that are more than twice as inaccurate as those made by people with a high IQ (the top 2.5% of the population).

Individuals with a higher IQ are significantly better at forecasting, making fewer errors (both positive and negative) and showing more consistent judgment compared to those with a lower IQ.

This follows the currently unpopular but well-established knowledge that higher IQ means higher performance and well-being:

Intelligence as measured by IQ tests is the single most effective predictor known of individual performance at school and on the job. It also predicts many other aspects of well-being, including a person’s chances of divorcing, dropping out of high school, being unemployed or having illegitimate children.

These things tend to come from a better ability to recognize what the results in reality will be to any action that the individual might take. A higher IQ person realizes that pouring gasoline on a fire might be a bad idea, or at least should be done very rapidly.

Some argue that higher IQ allows greater understanding of the operation of the world through induction from root principles:

And so, Glaucon, I said, we have at last arrived at the hymn of dialectic. This is that strain which is of the intellect only, but which the faculty of sight will nevertheless be found to imitate; for sight, as you may remember, was imagined by us after a while to behold the real animals and stars, and last of all the sun himself. And so with dialectic; when a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible.

The ability to perceive the world and adjust the thinking and thus actions of the individual suggests that adaptation is a part of intelligence, which makes intelligence a type of Darwinism:

The characteristic organization of the new world is small, independent, mobile and intelligent. By intelligence, I mean as a measure of adaptibility to circumstances.

Not surprisingly, those with higher IQs are more useful at getting stuff done:

In fact, intelligence is the best predictor of both educational achievement and work performance.

They also make saner life decisions, such as delaying sexual gratification in age and frequency:

Controlling for age, physical maturity, and mother’s education, a significant curvilinear relationship between intelligence and coital status was demonstrated; adolescents at the upper and lower ends of the intelligence distribution were less likely to have sex. Higher intelligence was also associated with postponement of the initiation of the full range of partnered sexual activities.

For a brief period of time, IQ scores went up, mostly because of greater familiarity with test-taking and reduction of deleterious influences (microbial infection, low nutrition) but this reversed over time:

Composite ability scores from 35 items and domain scores (matrix reasoning; letter and number series) showed a pattern consistent with a reversed Flynn effect from 2006 to 2018 when stratified across age, education, or gender. Slopes for verbal reasoning scores, however, failed to meet or exceed an annual threshold of |0.02| SD. A reversed Flynn effect was also present from 2011 to 2018 for composite ability scores from 60 items across age, education, and gender.

Following the Dunning-Kruger Effect, many do not recognize actual intelligence and prefer instead a category-shuffling method called thintelligence:

“They don’t have intelligence. They have what I call ‘thintelligence.’ They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it ‘being focused.’ They don’t see the surround. They don’t see the consequences.” — Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

In other words, some are born to sweet delight, and others are born to be trivial. Ironically, intelligence is even by conservative estimates heritable and cannot be raised, only lowered by deleterious environmental effects:

We found consistent heritability (~0.70) and shared environment (~0.21) estimates. The estimates did not change substantially when additional quantitative traits (height and weight) were added in a multivariate analysis.

The people who do the least amount of physical, emotional, and psychological damage to their children end up with the most intelligent and functional offspring:

Linear multiple regression identified five variables which significantly explained both reading and mathematics test scores: two cognitive ability measures, birthweight, wealthier households, and high attendance at parent-teacher meetings. Gender, parental education, and home language also made a contribution to reading test scores, while a general factor of personality was significant for mathematics. Overall the cognitive ability measures accounted for almost all of the explained variance, and other factors, while sometimes statistically significant, were of relatively minor importance.

Even more, it turns out that ability and effort outweigh social advantages, suggesting that heritability is pivotal in intelligence, compared to advantages when looking at inequality in outcomes by IQ:

The analysis shows that ability is an important factor influencing social mobility chances, and through a series of logistic regression and multiple regression models, it demonstrates that meritocratic factors (individual effort and ability) outweigh social advantage/disadvantage factors in predicting the occupational class achieved by over 6,000 men and women by age 33.

Not surprisingly, Leftist regimes target intelligence for removal so that the remaining lobotomized zombies can serve the total state

In fact, if we look back at Stalin, we see not only terror and ruthlessness, but – even more – deception. Not only in such things as the faked public trials, the disappearance of leading figures, of writers, of physicists, even of astronomers, but in the invention of a factually non-existent society. The British socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb were taken in by the not very sophisticated trick of having meaningless elections, trade unions, economic claims and so on.

One major attribute of Stalinism was stupefaction or stultification. His subjects, or dupes, had to act as if they believed what the Kremlin was telling them in the press, on the radio. Anna Akhmatova, the poet, said that no one could understand the Soviet system who had not been subjected to the continuous roar of the Soviet radios at street corners and elsewhere. And, with all that, the effective banning of non-Stalinist thought, or its expression.

As one Russian scholar later remarked, “we wiped out the best and brightest in our country and, as a result, sapped ourselves of intelligence and energy”.

Higher intelligences are prone to notice patterns, including failures of narrative, which makes them harder to govern. They adopt stereotype bias by observing consistent similarities in items belonging to natural categories:

Across 6 studies, we find that superior pattern detectors efficiently learn and use stereotypes about social groups. This pattern holds across explicit (Studies 1 and 2), implicit (Studies 2 and 4), and behavioral measures of stereotyping (Study 3). We also find that superior pattern detectors readily update their stereotypes when confronted with new information (Study 5), making them particularly susceptible to counterstereotype training (Study 6). Pattern detection skills therefore equip people to act as naïve empiricists who calibrate their stereotypes to match incoming information. These findings highlight novel effects of individual aptitudes on social-cognitive processes.

Of course, that leads to hierarchy, and that in turn rejects egalitarianism, which is necessary for the formation of mob rule by kingless populations. Stereotype bias in turn leads to racial noticing until sufficient saturation in propaganda dulls that awareness:

Results suggest that high-ability whites are less likely than low-ability whites to report prejudicial attitudes and more likely to support racial equality in principle. Despite these liberalizing effects, high-ability whites are no more likely to support a variety of remedial policies for racial inequality. Results also suggest that the ostensibly liberalizing effects of verbal ability on anti-black prejudice and views about racial equality in principle emerged slowly over time, consistent with ideological refinement theory.

As always, the psychological needs of the herd drag down those who rise above. This even extends to economic views, where smarter people tend to reject socialism:

Research has consistently shown that intelligence is positively correlated with socially liberal beliefs and negatively correlated with religious beliefs. This should lead one to expect that Republicans are less intelligent than Democrats. However, I find that individuals who identify as Republican have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who identify as Democrat (2–5 IQ points), and that individuals who supported the Republican Party in elections have slightly higher verbal intelligence than those who supported the Democratic Party (2 IQ points). I reconcile these findings with the previous literature by showing that verbal intelligence is correlated with both socially and economically liberal beliefs (β = .10–.32). My findings suggest that higher intelligence among classically liberal Republicans compensates for lower intelligence among socially conservative Republicans.

You cannot have a mass society without egalitarianism and socialism to buy allegiance from the voters and thus control them, and intelligence resists this, so societies dumb themselves down over time in order to be able to manage themselves via bureaucracy, and this then makes them incompetent.

That alone can explain why human societies tend to self-destruct after a certain number of generations. In order to keep everyone together, they adopt methods that alienate the intelligent, and then the intelligent die out, leaving an incompetent herd in a short-lived state of victory.

Tags: adaptation, hbd, intelligence, IQ, political polarization, stereotype bias