Ha! I'm a gentile (only about half "Aryan" though) married to an Ashkenazi Jew and we've talked about this a lot. My spatial skills are insanely good, like freak-of-nature-good-at-Tetris etc and I did really well on standardized intelligence tests as a kid. According to tests, my "IQ" is a little higher than my husband's, but in reality he's smarter than me in almost every way that matters. His memory is significantly better than mine, as is his verbal IQ and ability to learn to foreign languages (etc etc etc).
IQ tests seem to be weighted toward what I'll loosely call "autistic" intelligence. Aryans seem to be more "autistic" on average than most other groups.
“[T]he Binet test, especially at older age levels, involves above all logical, abstract thinking. Since this is what autistic children often find so congenial, they may achieve a high score, which would give a false picture of their intelligence.” -- Hans Asperger
I go into this more here (the essay is technically on the link between childhood giftedness / high iQ, autism, and gender dysphoria), you might find it interesting. Cheers.
Someone needs to perform a detailed multi-skill & full genetic study of representive samples of top (1%) cognitive (100% ethnic) Jews, Chinese, Japanese, South-Asian, Igbo, British, & Russians to see if & how different cognitive & other skills manifest differently.
Makes no difference. The ‘Sunday truth’ imposed upon us is that race is merely skin deep, all differences in ‘performance’ whether athletic but especially intellectual are a product of systemic economic inequality, nothing more.
Even if no one buys this on a practical level, such a research project would set an uncomfortable precedent (for the social engineers in opposition).
I disagree with your interpretation of the SLODR; I think that happens because IQ tests test relatively high-level tasks for stupid people, and relatively low-level tasks for smart people.
When you solve a complicated mental problem, you have to do many different steps of thinking building on top of each other. The higher these build up, the more they will use the low-level steps in similar proportion. This is why, for example, there arent CPUs which trade off speed at AND for speed at NOT: Our tasks for the computer are so high-level that they all use AND and NOT in similar ratios, and so theres just an optimal way to make a CPU which everyone does. And this stacking to higher levels is also how you get to more advanced cognitive functions.
So if you test someone on a task thats high-level relative to their ability, theyll have to stack up their "simple steps", and so their performance will average out their aptitude at those simple steps. When you then give them another high-level task, itll average in a slightly different but similar way, giving highly correlated performance.
But a more intelligent person may be able to learn more complex tasks natively, so that theyre "simple steps" for them. If you then test them on this simple-for-them task, theres not necessarily a lot of correlation with other simple-for-them tasks.
So when you have a test at a fixed level of difficulty, there will be more correlation among the less intelligent. This explains the observations without any real diminishing returns. It also explains why correlation among different abilities is higher within humans than across animal species, even though the humans are more intelligent (so opposite to what generalising Spearman would get): animals often dont stack but have specialised hardcoded skills in specific areas.
Thanks for the comment. If I understand correctly - and please correct me if I don't - you basically subscribe to the sampling model of g, namely that even alleged tests of one ability actually involve multiple stacked abilities and that's why they correlate. SLODR is thus an artefact of more intelligent people relying on fewer of these abilities in their stacks. My first question is, if this model is correct, how do you even know there are more generally intelligent people at all? The second question is does this make any difference to the argument that spatial ability should be ignored when calculating Asheknazi IQ?
As regards comparison with animals, it's obvious that many animals have incredibly high-functioning abilities without being intelligent at all in a sense we would recognise so maybe they are just too different to draw inferences from. I would find it more persuasive if it could be demonstrated correlation is lower among chimpanzees.
>My first question is, if this model is correct, how do you even know there are more generally intelligent people at all?
Imagine intelligence was simply processing speed of the brain, and theres two ways in which brains get faster: Nerve cells can get smaller or react to signals more quickly. It makes no difference to cognition how you got your speed, and cell size and reaction time dont correlate. In that scenario, does general intelligence exist or is there only cell size and reaction time? I think clearly the former.
In the same way, I dont think the stacking model means general intelligence doesnt exist. Now, if the tests involved multiple abilities in a more linear-combination-y way, then you could make the case against g. In that case, you could have isolated ability tests that are a similar kind of thing as the tests you actually have - the constructors of the test just failed to do it that way. But in the stacking model, the "simple steps" are a very different sort of thing from the compound abilities youre testing. The stacking is inherent to advanced cognition, and theres no way to separate out the basic abilities without reducing the difficulty.
Even in the linear combination scenario though, if cognitive tasks youd realistically do in the real world are combined in a similar way to those in the test, the practical utility of IQ testing is mostly the same, even if IQ is less "real".
>does this make any difference to the argument that spatial ability should be ignored when calculating Asheknazi IQ?
Your argument is that general intelligence comes apart at the higher end, and so you want to focus in on the part that closest tracks the intuitive concept of intelligence. This model implies that general intelligence doesnt come apart.
>I would find it more persuasive if it could be demonstrated correlation is lower among chimpanzees.
That depends on what you mean exactly. Id put my prediction as: Those abilities where humans are most ahead of chimps, are also the ones that most correlate with each other across people.
Is there a body of research for the stacking model, or is it your idea?
"This model implies that general intelligence doesnt come apart."
OK, so what do you do practically with a group like Ashkenazim where, on an empirical level, it does seem to be coming apart? Why are they natively learning certain tasks, but still doing stacking for other tasks that are of equivalent difficulty?
>OK, so what do you do practically with a group like Ashkenazim where, on an empirical level, it does seem to be coming apart?
Your model suggests that theres a general trend for things to come further and further apart the higher intelligence you look at, and that I definitely disagree with. Obviously there can be some differences in how strongly things correlate within different groups, because some skills may correlate for reasons other then the stacking-averaging.
What I would do with the Ashkenazim is look at how they do on problems that are on their upper limit. This is difficult because we dont have a way to do tests that are independent of prior knowledge up there, but if you care about knowing yourself rather than proving things very legibly, you can still form an opinion based on observation.
My impression is that spatial abilities continue to be helpful for high-level science, and that successfull jewish scientists werent bad at them. There are some fields of mathematics where the Grothendiecks of this world get by without, but thats the exception. So you shouldnt ignore spatial scores when judging the intelligence of smart people, though maybe you should weigh it a bit less (or more?); measuring by eye cant rule that out.
On second thought, I guess I should explain a little bit why I believe this. I was thinking about why there is a general intelligence, and found that straightforward theories generally implied that theres a simple way by which anyone can do any task. For example, if intelligence is processing speed, then anyone would be able to solve any problem if only he has long enough to think. Thats obviously not true. If it was working memory, youd only need pen and paper, if it was reliability/precision, you could attempt the problem many times and give the average answer etc.
This is because if intelligence was some simple *thing*, then you could improve someones effective intelligence arbitrarily without doing any cognitive work for him (i.e. a "one weird trick"). The way to avoid this is that cognitive abilities depend on other cognitive abilities - that way, theres no guaranteed way to improve them without doing cognitive work (e.g. giving him a calculator).
That already restricts you to something in the general area of the stacking model, and the details are just based on what I think complex tasks are like in general.
1. There might be some animals which have higher spatial intelligence and memory than humans. I have no direct evidence for this claim, but imagine that it is theoretically possible. At the very least, we should consider the idea that Neanderthals or Homo Erectus had higher spatial intelligence. Finally, consider the possibility that our ancient ancestors, who spent a huge amount of time knapping flint, had both bigger brains and higher spatial intelligence. This isn't to say that spatial intelligence is "useless," but that it does not confer the same types of socio-economic advantages as verbal or mathematical intelligence does.
2. Spatial intelligence is supremely important for navigating terrain, finding buried treasure, building log cabins without a protractor, and probably is helpful for taking apart a car and putting it back together. While Jews excel in developing software, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons (math heavy fields), they were not historically prominent in structural engineering, like inventing jets, rockets, planes, trains, automobiles, canons, guns, fortresses, castles, or trebuchets. This is where spatial intelligence may be of civilizational importance.
3. Unlike math and verbal intelligence, which are important in all fields, spatial intelligence is only relevant to structural engineering (building robots, machines, or military hardware). Instead of G, let's refer to M as the general factor of socio-economic success within modern capitalist economies (essentially G minus spatial intelligence). Most nations aren't highly selected enough for there to be a big divergence between G and M, which is why the difference between G and M is generally ignored. However, understanding the difference between the two is necessary to repudiate certain conspiratorial views about Jews "cheating to win" as opposed to being "more M-loaded."
There are 2 basic approaches to g namely (a) it's real or (b) it's not real. According to (a) you can't just subtract spatial intelligence from g, but what you can do is add some hypothetical factor to supercharge certain g-based components. Indeed, it seems that since SLODR is consistently replicated, you have to do this. I went with an (a) based argument because I think it's more true.
Anyway, you got me thinking of a market opening for a new Rightoid ideology: homo sapiens are cucked and spiritually Jewish; we must use selective breeding to increase the proportion of Neanderthal DNA until we finally undo the terrible wrong of the Homo Sapien genocide, the prototype of Jewish genocides until today.
Observing jumping spiders, wasps, mantids etc, they might actually be better at the whole "shape rotation" thing. Anything that truly navigates in 3D might be.
Yeah it sucks. It's really bad. This was the first thing that really put me off Zionism. I couldn't understand why it's so important to fight Arabs for the land of Israel if you are just going to build a bunch of grey prison boxes all over it. Never got a straight answer on it.
I don't think, though, that it's literally that we're too spatially retarded, it's just that it's easy for us to lean into verbal IQ and explain why something is good rather than actually make it good, and combined with not having an indigenous architectural traditon and global culture of modernism we end up with crap everywhere.
Ah. High-end for IQ tests is almost entirely spatial reasoning. If your verbal and mathematical reasoning are fantastic but your spatial reasoning is basic-to-poor, your IQ will be about 130. Richard Feynman's was only 125 despite very obviously being a genius... maybe this is why?
Excellent point. This whole post started because I joked once that spatial reasoning was just put in the test to make gentiles feel better, and then I realised it was somewhat true.
The claim that Feynman scored 125 isn’t really that strong. It’s just a vague recollection of a test he supposedly took in high school. There aren’t any records.
Ah damn. I read about it in an article claiming that IQ scores for celebrity geniuses are all complete guesses except for Feynman's in particular.
Wikipedia doesn't dispute that score but it entirely cites https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Life-Science-Richard-Feynman/dp/0679747044 which I am not going to read to verify. Other sources I can quickly find are more shallow, though one points out that IQ testing at that time was handled differently than today.
A lot of people are saying that he clearly has a higher IQ or the IQ test did a bad job of estimating his mathematical ability. But those're consistent with NZ's hypothesis that the inclusion of spatial reasoning into IQ testing produces lower IQs for geniuses.
> You can do a Google search as well as me, so feel free to add more definitions. Notice that what you don’t find is ‘rotating shapes in your head’. Now, for the smart gentiles out there, I am not trying to knock your ability to rotate shapes in your head. Rotating shapes in your head is great, I have nothing but respect for it, but it’s not intelligence. It’s a neat skill you can amuse yourself with while the Jews are subverting your society, but, again, not intelligence. What is intelligence? Well, at a certain level of simplification, it’s verbal and mathematical reasoning ability.
This is an utterly ridiculous way of going about this. First of all, Subtests for general intelligence come out of general intelligence, not the other way around. That’s kind of the whole point of general factors in all categories. Secondly, “rotate shapes in head” is one of the most direct tests of intelligence on an IQ test, which doesn’t make it better or worse because again, these tests only derive value from correlating heavily with general intelligence. It doesn’t really matter what’s in them. Vocabulary tests correlate the most with general intelligence and are also not at all testing “the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason”. They correlate with this ability because a person with good reasoning and memory tends to develop a large vocabulary, just like someone with good reasoning tends to be able to re-orient shapes in their head.
Shape rotation is also not the same thing as general intelligence. Matrix tests, efficient use of space, shape construction, and various mathematical skills also measure spatial intelligence. People who suffer from aphantasia actually do completely fine on spatial ability tests which shows that it is actually derived from reasoning. Spatial intelligence is very useful because conceptual space tends to come prior to interpretation and imprinting of language. For example, if you have ever taken an upper level math class and have had to do a proof, it is way easier to understand what you’re going to write if you already have a mental image of why the proof works.
Also, I really doubt Jews have average verbal IQs over 120. The verbal tilt of Jews is not that intense. Pretty sure they have above average spatial too.
1) Subtests for general intelligence literally do not come out of general intelligence. Not practically and not ontologically.
2) There are all sorts of things in addition to intelligence that help you out in intelligence-loaded fields. For example, the ability to sit still and endure boredom, but that doesn't make them intelligence.
2) Yes, but being able to sit still and endure boredom is not a problem-solving skill. You endure boredom, you do not solve it in the way you solve a rubick’s cube or a sudoku puzzle, or the way you win a game of chess. If it looks like a duck and it sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
1) It is literally true. General intelligence is derived from doing factor analysis on scores on 'subtests'. There is no other way of measuring it, or even conceiving of it.
2) Let us take musical ability as comparison. This has a strong correlation with g (though not as high as spatial ability). If two people score 115 on all the other subtests and one scores 80 on music and the second scores 120, no reasonable person would say the second was substantially more intelligent. He's just better at music.
Also, it's funny that you guys tend to argue that Jewish intelligence is just about symbol manipulation, but when pushed for an example of why spatial ability counts as intelligence, you resort to a newspaper puzzles. Not demonstrative of anything, but amusing.
1. You’re misunderstanding me, I’m not saying we don’t measure general intelligence based on subtests. I’m saying that the legitimacy of subtests is not determined by their innate qualities so much as it is determined by their statistical relation with general intelligence, and subsequently with other subtests.
2. Hmm, I’m not sure about that. Most people would think of Mozart and Bach when asked to name “geniuses”. Either way, the difference between being a musical genius and being good at spatial reasoning is that spatial reasoning questions are reasoning questions. Musical ability is somewhat subjective while instrumental ability is largely determined by things like hand eye coordination. Not to mention, both of these things are extremely gameable. Spatial reasoning tests are also somewhat gameable but obviously not to the extent music is
3. I’ve never denied that Ashkenazi Jews are a gifted group, clearly their intelligence is highly valuable whether or not it is just “symbol manipulation” (it’s not)
1) It’s not really as simple as that. Before g could even be conceptualised, there had to be different tests that could be recognised as capturing some element of intelligence. Then when you have g, you can re-analyse these subtests in line with which most closely correlate with g, and add new ones. There is an issue of infinite regress here, but it’s an issue that we solve through the scientific process.
2a) Interesting point, but you are mixing up two things I think. We use ‘genius’ to mean high ability in a given field plus creativity, so Messi is a football genius, Heston Blumenthal is a cooking genius etc. There were children at my school who were good at music, i.e. had natural ability to keep a beat, recognise pitch, hear a tune being hummed and recreate it on the piano etc but not ‘musical geniuses’. I’m sure you had these too. What did people call them: ‘clever’ or ‘musical’?
2b) It’s true that spatial ability tests are the hardest to game, but I think that cuts against your argument, because it indicates that the high g-loading of spatial tests relative to math/verbal is because it’s easier to make reliable tests, not because the ability is actually more g loaded.
3) I apologise, as I said before, I respect your sisyphean efforts to represent internet rightoidism as an ideology of sane and intelligent people and I won’t tar you with the spaz brush in future.
1. Hmm, you do make a good point, that some arbitration had to exist when first conceptualizing general intelligence. It was first thought up just noticing the correlation between excellence in different school subjects, which often were probably not super g-loaded (ex: Music) , but later on the subtests were filtered more.
2a. I always grew up viewing Mozart as a genius in the intellectual sense in the same way I viewed a scientific genius. It wouldn’t really apply to a “football genius” like Messi or even apply to Mozart’s secondary talent at being a brilliant pianist.
2b. Spatial tests are actually among the easier tests to game, but they’re the least biased. I was only saying they’re less gameable than music. Spatial reasoning is overall somewhat less g-loaded than verbal and arithmetic tests but they factor that in when calculating total intelligence. The main reason matrix tests are so popular is because people are very obsessed with finding an unbiased intelligence test, but what you gain in long-term resistance to lifestyle factors you lose in short-term resistance to gameability
3. Thank you, but I can be wicked as well at times. A true chudcel freak
Surely every practical invention from the sundial to the steam engine has involved spatial reasoning, and been recognized as a product of intelligence. This type may have become less relevant to modern-day cognitive elites, but that is no reason to change the definition, and doing so will only make it easier for the political patrons of basketball-intellectuals to screech about cultural bias.
There are good reasons to stick with g, but there are also good reasons not to stick with g. Psychometrics is an imperfect science with a difficult subject matter. Perhaps, in cases of groups with unusual cognitive profiles, we should just get more used to quoting multiple figures.
every single form of patents also require concept art/prior art, hell if you take a look at those old botany/mechanical drawing (Darwin, Da Vinci etc) they are all pretty visually and spatially rigorous, whereas today's PHD professors can't even draw proper 3d cross section/cutaway on a paper, they need CAD software instead
we did go to the moon on a slide ruler remember, not silly verbal sophistry
hell, the medieval cathedrals were constructed with little math, they were mainly made with the engineering method instead
I would think that shape rotation in tests is a proxy for some quantity that makes people good at the hard problems in science and engineering compared to social engineering, literature, or other applications of intelligence. The Nazi Yahtzee bugbear of degrading verbal intelligence may reflect that spatial vs verbal intelligence produce differing value systems in such individuals. A society led by engineers will look different then one led by artists
There are doubtless personality differences other than intelligence, and also cultural ones, which are a mixture of innate and historically contingent. But it's absolutely not true that being good at science is not a Jewish stereotype. People use 'Einstein' as a ironical term to describe stupidity, not Newton.
Someone who’s really good at finance or cinema or writing probably won’t be outright bad at science. The stereotype would be that there are some Jews really good and really interested in science (the small group of Viennese Jews responsible for the atomic bomb features prominently here), but they are outnumbered by Jews interested in financial and cultural pursuits.
Feels like the low Ashkenazi spatial reasoning results are a bit sus/not the whole story anyway, given how many visually/spatially/geometrically lateral thinking modern artists are Ashkenazi (eg Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs etc)
I think it's legit. More relevant than the specialties of Jewish visual artists are the brute fact that there aren't so many of them. In addition, it seems to me they concentrate in the types of art that lend themselves more to 3,000 word explanations of why a work of art is good rather than just making something that people look at and think is good.
Maybe youre right, I’m extrapolating from a small sample size here. But there are only not that many Ashkenazi visual artists if you exclude motion pictures, the most spatially dynamic modern art. And I think the 3 guys I mentioned are the perfect epitome of spatially unintuitive visual art that captivates without the need for gratuitous textual scaffolding.
I don't understand what we gain by aggregating multiple types of cognitive abilities under one number. It's like, we wanted to abstract the concept of "being smart" to a single nifty value because that's cool or something, then realized that this is a limited oversimplification, but are trying to hold on to it... because we like the concept??
Maybe I have Ash Cold Nazi genes or maybe I don’t. I dunno. That’s another dim story. But I do so LUVS(!) the n’ocean that my lamentably low IQ should be a lot more super higher since I can’t rotate Platonic schemas in my noggin, recognize a carborator (in my head or in a carton) and even have challenges manipulating shoestrings on my sneakers when my High Anxiety besets me baselessly.
I dunno TOO much about intelligence or IQ (or which imparticular realities they’s supposedly supposed to helm me deal with), but I do gotz a theorem about stoopid.
See, I figured out something bout STOOPID way back when Billy Boy Clinton was implicated in the diddling of Miss Monica Lewinsky, a famous female impersonator who married, divorced and then impregnated Tiny Tim (POOO000R little crippled boychick!) once when they were tumbling through the tulips that sad sweety evening in storied MacArthur Park.
Here’s the conclusion that you’re soitanly specting me to jump to. See, STOOPID is far from the nopposite of intelligentsia or smartness. In fact, any serious empirical investigation or careful thought experiment will conclusively convince y’all that stupid is highly correlated with IQ, a numerical coefficient that mis models specific definitions of intellect. Yes, that bores repeating. The more intelligent is a person, the more likely they are to do or say stuff that’s stupid!
Think about it. Low intelligence, like low bandwidth is a LACK of certain capacities, capabilities, potentials - or at least a lack of an ability to realize or express the such and such. Without ability there is a lack of action or expression. With ability there can be a sure foot. (Let’s never mishmash cleverness with wisdom!) Hence, WITHOUT intelligence: less smart stuff AND less stoopid stuff! Or to putz it another weigh, the smarter you are, the stupidest you are too!
Now that you’ve red it hear, you realize that (Platonically) you nude it all the time. And sew you did! NOW, go head and tell everyone you meat that it was your own broiling fish of brilliance and than stare back and laugh in the faces of their sympathetic, condescending, dismissive, contemptuous incomprehension!
I have high verbal IQ and I often feel the particular impostor syndrome of being an LLM. I am basically just predicting the next word, because I fed myself so many texts. Is that really reasoning or understanding?
Anyhow, let me ask a question - why does the "spergy" kind of thinking feel so much Ashkenazi? The Talmud is very "spergy". By "spergy" I mean STEM, math, chess, programming - systematizing, as opposed to empathizing. Spergy thinking is really good at designing systems, but the lack of empathizing often leads to lack of common sense (like the Substack philosopher who proposed to end all suffering by killing all animals). Or a Talmudic example: no harvesting at Sabbath, therefore, not taking a branch of a tree on Sabbath, therefore, no riding horses on Sabbath as one might want to take a branch to whip the horse, therefore also no bicycle riding on Sabbath. Very smart but at some point in this reasoning common sense was lost.
Oh oh oh this isn't a perfect answer to your question but I kind of address this in this essay about the longterm effects of alphabet literacy on the brain -- which Dr. Leonard Shlain (who was Jewish) attributed to the Ancient Hebrews. His book (The Alphabet Versus the Goddess) has more details.
Ha! I'm a gentile (only about half "Aryan" though) married to an Ashkenazi Jew and we've talked about this a lot. My spatial skills are insanely good, like freak-of-nature-good-at-Tetris etc and I did really well on standardized intelligence tests as a kid. According to tests, my "IQ" is a little higher than my husband's, but in reality he's smarter than me in almost every way that matters. His memory is significantly better than mine, as is his verbal IQ and ability to learn to foreign languages (etc etc etc).
IQ tests seem to be weighted toward what I'll loosely call "autistic" intelligence. Aryans seem to be more "autistic" on average than most other groups.
“[T]he Binet test, especially at older age levels, involves above all logical, abstract thinking. Since this is what autistic children often find so congenial, they may achieve a high score, which would give a false picture of their intelligence.” -- Hans Asperger
I go into this more here (the essay is technically on the link between childhood giftedness / high iQ, autism, and gender dysphoria), you might find it interesting. Cheers.
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-drama-of-the-gifted-children
Someone needs to perform a detailed multi-skill & full genetic study of representive samples of top (1%) cognitive (100% ethnic) Jews, Chinese, Japanese, South-Asian, Igbo, British, & Russians to see if & how different cognitive & other skills manifest differently.
It would be extremely politically incorrect, if not outright illegal, to do so (unfortunately).
What's wrong if you just use extremely typical genetic markers for those 7 populations & just choose subjects with extremely high intelligence?
Makes no difference. The ‘Sunday truth’ imposed upon us is that race is merely skin deep, all differences in ‘performance’ whether athletic but especially intellectual are a product of systemic economic inequality, nothing more.
Even if no one buys this on a practical level, such a research project would set an uncomfortable precedent (for the social engineers in opposition).
I disagree with your interpretation of the SLODR; I think that happens because IQ tests test relatively high-level tasks for stupid people, and relatively low-level tasks for smart people.
When you solve a complicated mental problem, you have to do many different steps of thinking building on top of each other. The higher these build up, the more they will use the low-level steps in similar proportion. This is why, for example, there arent CPUs which trade off speed at AND for speed at NOT: Our tasks for the computer are so high-level that they all use AND and NOT in similar ratios, and so theres just an optimal way to make a CPU which everyone does. And this stacking to higher levels is also how you get to more advanced cognitive functions.
So if you test someone on a task thats high-level relative to their ability, theyll have to stack up their "simple steps", and so their performance will average out their aptitude at those simple steps. When you then give them another high-level task, itll average in a slightly different but similar way, giving highly correlated performance.
But a more intelligent person may be able to learn more complex tasks natively, so that theyre "simple steps" for them. If you then test them on this simple-for-them task, theres not necessarily a lot of correlation with other simple-for-them tasks.
So when you have a test at a fixed level of difficulty, there will be more correlation among the less intelligent. This explains the observations without any real diminishing returns. It also explains why correlation among different abilities is higher within humans than across animal species, even though the humans are more intelligent (so opposite to what generalising Spearman would get): animals often dont stack but have specialised hardcoded skills in specific areas.
Thanks for the comment. If I understand correctly - and please correct me if I don't - you basically subscribe to the sampling model of g, namely that even alleged tests of one ability actually involve multiple stacked abilities and that's why they correlate. SLODR is thus an artefact of more intelligent people relying on fewer of these abilities in their stacks. My first question is, if this model is correct, how do you even know there are more generally intelligent people at all? The second question is does this make any difference to the argument that spatial ability should be ignored when calculating Asheknazi IQ?
As regards comparison with animals, it's obvious that many animals have incredibly high-functioning abilities without being intelligent at all in a sense we would recognise so maybe they are just too different to draw inferences from. I would find it more persuasive if it could be demonstrated correlation is lower among chimpanzees.
>My first question is, if this model is correct, how do you even know there are more generally intelligent people at all?
Imagine intelligence was simply processing speed of the brain, and theres two ways in which brains get faster: Nerve cells can get smaller or react to signals more quickly. It makes no difference to cognition how you got your speed, and cell size and reaction time dont correlate. In that scenario, does general intelligence exist or is there only cell size and reaction time? I think clearly the former.
In the same way, I dont think the stacking model means general intelligence doesnt exist. Now, if the tests involved multiple abilities in a more linear-combination-y way, then you could make the case against g. In that case, you could have isolated ability tests that are a similar kind of thing as the tests you actually have - the constructors of the test just failed to do it that way. But in the stacking model, the "simple steps" are a very different sort of thing from the compound abilities youre testing. The stacking is inherent to advanced cognition, and theres no way to separate out the basic abilities without reducing the difficulty.
Even in the linear combination scenario though, if cognitive tasks youd realistically do in the real world are combined in a similar way to those in the test, the practical utility of IQ testing is mostly the same, even if IQ is less "real".
>does this make any difference to the argument that spatial ability should be ignored when calculating Asheknazi IQ?
Your argument is that general intelligence comes apart at the higher end, and so you want to focus in on the part that closest tracks the intuitive concept of intelligence. This model implies that general intelligence doesnt come apart.
>I would find it more persuasive if it could be demonstrated correlation is lower among chimpanzees.
That depends on what you mean exactly. Id put my prediction as: Those abilities where humans are most ahead of chimps, are also the ones that most correlate with each other across people.
Is there a body of research for the stacking model, or is it your idea?
"This model implies that general intelligence doesnt come apart."
OK, so what do you do practically with a group like Ashkenazim where, on an empirical level, it does seem to be coming apart? Why are they natively learning certain tasks, but still doing stacking for other tasks that are of equivalent difficulty?
Im not aware of any research on this.
>OK, so what do you do practically with a group like Ashkenazim where, on an empirical level, it does seem to be coming apart?
Your model suggests that theres a general trend for things to come further and further apart the higher intelligence you look at, and that I definitely disagree with. Obviously there can be some differences in how strongly things correlate within different groups, because some skills may correlate for reasons other then the stacking-averaging.
What I would do with the Ashkenazim is look at how they do on problems that are on their upper limit. This is difficult because we dont have a way to do tests that are independent of prior knowledge up there, but if you care about knowing yourself rather than proving things very legibly, you can still form an opinion based on observation.
My impression is that spatial abilities continue to be helpful for high-level science, and that successfull jewish scientists werent bad at them. There are some fields of mathematics where the Grothendiecks of this world get by without, but thats the exception. So you shouldnt ignore spatial scores when judging the intelligence of smart people, though maybe you should weigh it a bit less (or more?); measuring by eye cant rule that out.
OK thanks. This is a perspective I haven't heard before and I appreciate you sharing it.
On second thought, I guess I should explain a little bit why I believe this. I was thinking about why there is a general intelligence, and found that straightforward theories generally implied that theres a simple way by which anyone can do any task. For example, if intelligence is processing speed, then anyone would be able to solve any problem if only he has long enough to think. Thats obviously not true. If it was working memory, youd only need pen and paper, if it was reliability/precision, you could attempt the problem many times and give the average answer etc.
This is because if intelligence was some simple *thing*, then you could improve someones effective intelligence arbitrarily without doing any cognitive work for him (i.e. a "one weird trick"). The way to avoid this is that cognitive abilities depend on other cognitive abilities - that way, theres no guaranteed way to improve them without doing cognitive work (e.g. giving him a calculator).
That already restricts you to something in the general area of the stacking model, and the details are just based on what I think complex tasks are like in general.
1. There might be some animals which have higher spatial intelligence and memory than humans. I have no direct evidence for this claim, but imagine that it is theoretically possible. At the very least, we should consider the idea that Neanderthals or Homo Erectus had higher spatial intelligence. Finally, consider the possibility that our ancient ancestors, who spent a huge amount of time knapping flint, had both bigger brains and higher spatial intelligence. This isn't to say that spatial intelligence is "useless," but that it does not confer the same types of socio-economic advantages as verbal or mathematical intelligence does.
2. Spatial intelligence is supremely important for navigating terrain, finding buried treasure, building log cabins without a protractor, and probably is helpful for taking apart a car and putting it back together. While Jews excel in developing software, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons (math heavy fields), they were not historically prominent in structural engineering, like inventing jets, rockets, planes, trains, automobiles, canons, guns, fortresses, castles, or trebuchets. This is where spatial intelligence may be of civilizational importance.
3. Unlike math and verbal intelligence, which are important in all fields, spatial intelligence is only relevant to structural engineering (building robots, machines, or military hardware). Instead of G, let's refer to M as the general factor of socio-economic success within modern capitalist economies (essentially G minus spatial intelligence). Most nations aren't highly selected enough for there to be a big divergence between G and M, which is why the difference between G and M is generally ignored. However, understanding the difference between the two is necessary to repudiate certain conspiratorial views about Jews "cheating to win" as opposed to being "more M-loaded."
There are 2 basic approaches to g namely (a) it's real or (b) it's not real. According to (a) you can't just subtract spatial intelligence from g, but what you can do is add some hypothetical factor to supercharge certain g-based components. Indeed, it seems that since SLODR is consistently replicated, you have to do this. I went with an (a) based argument because I think it's more true.
Anyway, you got me thinking of a market opening for a new Rightoid ideology: homo sapiens are cucked and spiritually Jewish; we must use selective breeding to increase the proportion of Neanderthal DNA until we finally undo the terrible wrong of the Homo Sapien genocide, the prototype of Jewish genocides until today.
Observing jumping spiders, wasps, mantids etc, they might actually be better at the whole "shape rotation" thing. Anything that truly navigates in 3D might be.
I have noticed how boring Israeli architecture is. It is cubes. Then it is more cubes. Then some more cubes.
Yeah it sucks. It's really bad. This was the first thing that really put me off Zionism. I couldn't understand why it's so important to fight Arabs for the land of Israel if you are just going to build a bunch of grey prison boxes all over it. Never got a straight answer on it.
I don't think, though, that it's literally that we're too spatially retarded, it's just that it's easy for us to lean into verbal IQ and explain why something is good rather than actually make it good, and combined with not having an indigenous architectural traditon and global culture of modernism we end up with crap everywhere.
Ah. High-end for IQ tests is almost entirely spatial reasoning. If your verbal and mathematical reasoning are fantastic but your spatial reasoning is basic-to-poor, your IQ will be about 130. Richard Feynman's was only 125 despite very obviously being a genius... maybe this is why?
Excellent point. This whole post started because I joked once that spatial reasoning was just put in the test to make gentiles feel better, and then I realised it was somewhat true.
The claim that Feynman scored 125 isn’t really that strong. It’s just a vague recollection of a test he supposedly took in high school. There aren’t any records.
Ah damn. I read about it in an article claiming that IQ scores for celebrity geniuses are all complete guesses except for Feynman's in particular.
Wikipedia doesn't dispute that score but it entirely cites https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Life-Science-Richard-Feynman/dp/0679747044 which I am not going to read to verify. Other sources I can quickly find are more shallow, though one points out that IQ testing at that time was handled differently than today.
A lot of people are saying that he clearly has a higher IQ or the IQ test did a bad job of estimating his mathematical ability. But those're consistent with NZ's hypothesis that the inclusion of spatial reasoning into IQ testing produces lower IQs for geniuses.
> You can do a Google search as well as me, so feel free to add more definitions. Notice that what you don’t find is ‘rotating shapes in your head’. Now, for the smart gentiles out there, I am not trying to knock your ability to rotate shapes in your head. Rotating shapes in your head is great, I have nothing but respect for it, but it’s not intelligence. It’s a neat skill you can amuse yourself with while the Jews are subverting your society, but, again, not intelligence. What is intelligence? Well, at a certain level of simplification, it’s verbal and mathematical reasoning ability.
This is an utterly ridiculous way of going about this. First of all, Subtests for general intelligence come out of general intelligence, not the other way around. That’s kind of the whole point of general factors in all categories. Secondly, “rotate shapes in head” is one of the most direct tests of intelligence on an IQ test, which doesn’t make it better or worse because again, these tests only derive value from correlating heavily with general intelligence. It doesn’t really matter what’s in them. Vocabulary tests correlate the most with general intelligence and are also not at all testing “the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason”. They correlate with this ability because a person with good reasoning and memory tends to develop a large vocabulary, just like someone with good reasoning tends to be able to re-orient shapes in their head.
Shape rotation is also not the same thing as general intelligence. Matrix tests, efficient use of space, shape construction, and various mathematical skills also measure spatial intelligence. People who suffer from aphantasia actually do completely fine on spatial ability tests which shows that it is actually derived from reasoning. Spatial intelligence is very useful because conceptual space tends to come prior to interpretation and imprinting of language. For example, if you have ever taken an upper level math class and have had to do a proof, it is way easier to understand what you’re going to write if you already have a mental image of why the proof works.
Also, I really doubt Jews have average verbal IQs over 120. The verbal tilt of Jews is not that intense. Pretty sure they have above average spatial too.
1) Subtests for general intelligence literally do not come out of general intelligence. Not practically and not ontologically.
2) There are all sorts of things in addition to intelligence that help you out in intelligence-loaded fields. For example, the ability to sit still and endure boredom, but that doesn't make them intelligence.
1) You can say something, doesn’t make it true
2) Yes, but being able to sit still and endure boredom is not a problem-solving skill. You endure boredom, you do not solve it in the way you solve a rubick’s cube or a sudoku puzzle, or the way you win a game of chess. If it looks like a duck and it sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
1) It is literally true. General intelligence is derived from doing factor analysis on scores on 'subtests'. There is no other way of measuring it, or even conceiving of it.
2) Let us take musical ability as comparison. This has a strong correlation with g (though not as high as spatial ability). If two people score 115 on all the other subtests and one scores 80 on music and the second scores 120, no reasonable person would say the second was substantially more intelligent. He's just better at music.
Also, it's funny that you guys tend to argue that Jewish intelligence is just about symbol manipulation, but when pushed for an example of why spatial ability counts as intelligence, you resort to a newspaper puzzles. Not demonstrative of anything, but amusing.
1. You’re misunderstanding me, I’m not saying we don’t measure general intelligence based on subtests. I’m saying that the legitimacy of subtests is not determined by their innate qualities so much as it is determined by their statistical relation with general intelligence, and subsequently with other subtests.
2. Hmm, I’m not sure about that. Most people would think of Mozart and Bach when asked to name “geniuses”. Either way, the difference between being a musical genius and being good at spatial reasoning is that spatial reasoning questions are reasoning questions. Musical ability is somewhat subjective while instrumental ability is largely determined by things like hand eye coordination. Not to mention, both of these things are extremely gameable. Spatial reasoning tests are also somewhat gameable but obviously not to the extent music is
3. I’ve never denied that Ashkenazi Jews are a gifted group, clearly their intelligence is highly valuable whether or not it is just “symbol manipulation” (it’s not)
1) It’s not really as simple as that. Before g could even be conceptualised, there had to be different tests that could be recognised as capturing some element of intelligence. Then when you have g, you can re-analyse these subtests in line with which most closely correlate with g, and add new ones. There is an issue of infinite regress here, but it’s an issue that we solve through the scientific process.
2a) Interesting point, but you are mixing up two things I think. We use ‘genius’ to mean high ability in a given field plus creativity, so Messi is a football genius, Heston Blumenthal is a cooking genius etc. There were children at my school who were good at music, i.e. had natural ability to keep a beat, recognise pitch, hear a tune being hummed and recreate it on the piano etc but not ‘musical geniuses’. I’m sure you had these too. What did people call them: ‘clever’ or ‘musical’?
2b) It’s true that spatial ability tests are the hardest to game, but I think that cuts against your argument, because it indicates that the high g-loading of spatial tests relative to math/verbal is because it’s easier to make reliable tests, not because the ability is actually more g loaded.
3) I apologise, as I said before, I respect your sisyphean efforts to represent internet rightoidism as an ideology of sane and intelligent people and I won’t tar you with the spaz brush in future.
1. Hmm, you do make a good point, that some arbitration had to exist when first conceptualizing general intelligence. It was first thought up just noticing the correlation between excellence in different school subjects, which often were probably not super g-loaded (ex: Music) , but later on the subtests were filtered more.
2a. I always grew up viewing Mozart as a genius in the intellectual sense in the same way I viewed a scientific genius. It wouldn’t really apply to a “football genius” like Messi or even apply to Mozart’s secondary talent at being a brilliant pianist.
2b. Spatial tests are actually among the easier tests to game, but they’re the least biased. I was only saying they’re less gameable than music. Spatial reasoning is overall somewhat less g-loaded than verbal and arithmetic tests but they factor that in when calculating total intelligence. The main reason matrix tests are so popular is because people are very obsessed with finding an unbiased intelligence test, but what you gain in long-term resistance to lifestyle factors you lose in short-term resistance to gameability
3. Thank you, but I can be wicked as well at times. A true chudcel freak
Surely every practical invention from the sundial to the steam engine has involved spatial reasoning, and been recognized as a product of intelligence. This type may have become less relevant to modern-day cognitive elites, but that is no reason to change the definition, and doing so will only make it easier for the political patrons of basketball-intellectuals to screech about cultural bias.
There are good reasons to stick with g, but there are also good reasons not to stick with g. Psychometrics is an imperfect science with a difficult subject matter. Perhaps, in cases of groups with unusual cognitive profiles, we should just get more used to quoting multiple figures.
every single form of patents also require concept art/prior art, hell if you take a look at those old botany/mechanical drawing (Darwin, Da Vinci etc) they are all pretty visually and spatially rigorous, whereas today's PHD professors can't even draw proper 3d cross section/cutaway on a paper, they need CAD software instead
we did go to the moon on a slide ruler remember, not silly verbal sophistry
hell, the medieval cathedrals were constructed with little math, they were mainly made with the engineering method instead
I think there is some truth to this. I fret a lot about the state of visual culture in Israel, but you are overdoing it.
I would think that shape rotation in tests is a proxy for some quantity that makes people good at the hard problems in science and engineering compared to social engineering, literature, or other applications of intelligence. The Nazi Yahtzee bugbear of degrading verbal intelligence may reflect that spatial vs verbal intelligence produce differing value systems in such individuals. A society led by engineers will look different then one led by artists
Jews do pretty good in the hard sciences.
Germanics and britoids also display aptitude for financing, but still have less of a reputation for it compared to…
There are doubtless personality differences other than intelligence, and also cultural ones, which are a mixture of innate and historically contingent. But it's absolutely not true that being good at science is not a Jewish stereotype. People use 'Einstein' as a ironical term to describe stupidity, not Newton.
Someone who’s really good at finance or cinema or writing probably won’t be outright bad at science. The stereotype would be that there are some Jews really good and really interested in science (the small group of Viennese Jews responsible for the atomic bomb features prominently here), but they are outnumbered by Jews interested in financial and cultural pursuits.
Is there some other nation where scientists outnumber bankers?
This was definitely the case in the Soviet Union, although the quality of the scientists was often suspect
Feels like the low Ashkenazi spatial reasoning results are a bit sus/not the whole story anyway, given how many visually/spatially/geometrically lateral thinking modern artists are Ashkenazi (eg Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs etc)
I think it's legit. More relevant than the specialties of Jewish visual artists are the brute fact that there aren't so many of them. In addition, it seems to me they concentrate in the types of art that lend themselves more to 3,000 word explanations of why a work of art is good rather than just making something that people look at and think is good.
Maybe youre right, I’m extrapolating from a small sample size here. But there are only not that many Ashkenazi visual artists if you exclude motion pictures, the most spatially dynamic modern art. And I think the 3 guys I mentioned are the perfect epitome of spatially unintuitive visual art that captivates without the need for gratuitous textual scaffolding.
Doesn't Cremieux have a different take, that spatial ability is just less g-loaded?
I don't understand what we gain by aggregating multiple types of cognitive abilities under one number. It's like, we wanted to abstract the concept of "being smart" to a single nifty value because that's cool or something, then realized that this is a limited oversimplification, but are trying to hold on to it... because we like the concept??
It works most of the time and is the most replicable and predictive construct in the whole of psychology. Seems good enough to me.
"you need to stop crashing your car Mr. Neumann"
also is this where the stereotype of Jews can't into visual arts came from? or was that a Halakha thing?
Sp Nassim Taleb, not Nissim you can spell it idiot , I don’t care.
Important to note, of course, this means spatial perception is not low but on par with the average.
Thanks. Fixed.
Verbal scores & skills unlike math, generally increase with age.
Perhaps mixing verbal with math & spatial and calling it g causes more confusion than clarity.
Maybe I have Ash Cold Nazi genes or maybe I don’t. I dunno. That’s another dim story. But I do so LUVS(!) the n’ocean that my lamentably low IQ should be a lot more super higher since I can’t rotate Platonic schemas in my noggin, recognize a carborator (in my head or in a carton) and even have challenges manipulating shoestrings on my sneakers when my High Anxiety besets me baselessly.
I dunno TOO much about intelligence or IQ (or which imparticular realities they’s supposedly supposed to helm me deal with), but I do gotz a theorem about stoopid.
See, I figured out something bout STOOPID way back when Billy Boy Clinton was implicated in the diddling of Miss Monica Lewinsky, a famous female impersonator who married, divorced and then impregnated Tiny Tim (POOO000R little crippled boychick!) once when they were tumbling through the tulips that sad sweety evening in storied MacArthur Park.
Here’s the conclusion that you’re soitanly specting me to jump to. See, STOOPID is far from the nopposite of intelligentsia or smartness. In fact, any serious empirical investigation or careful thought experiment will conclusively convince y’all that stupid is highly correlated with IQ, a numerical coefficient that mis models specific definitions of intellect. Yes, that bores repeating. The more intelligent is a person, the more likely they are to do or say stuff that’s stupid!
Think about it. Low intelligence, like low bandwidth is a LACK of certain capacities, capabilities, potentials - or at least a lack of an ability to realize or express the such and such. Without ability there is a lack of action or expression. With ability there can be a sure foot. (Let’s never mishmash cleverness with wisdom!) Hence, WITHOUT intelligence: less smart stuff AND less stoopid stuff! Or to putz it another weigh, the smarter you are, the stupidest you are too!
Now that you’ve red it hear, you realize that (Platonically) you nude it all the time. And sew you did! NOW, go head and tell everyone you meat that it was your own broiling fish of brilliance and than stare back and laugh in the faces of their sympathetic, condescending, dismissive, contemptuous incomprehension!
I have high verbal IQ and I often feel the particular impostor syndrome of being an LLM. I am basically just predicting the next word, because I fed myself so many texts. Is that really reasoning or understanding?
Anyhow, let me ask a question - why does the "spergy" kind of thinking feel so much Ashkenazi? The Talmud is very "spergy". By "spergy" I mean STEM, math, chess, programming - systematizing, as opposed to empathizing. Spergy thinking is really good at designing systems, but the lack of empathizing often leads to lack of common sense (like the Substack philosopher who proposed to end all suffering by killing all animals). Or a Talmudic example: no harvesting at Sabbath, therefore, not taking a branch of a tree on Sabbath, therefore, no riding horses on Sabbath as one might want to take a branch to whip the horse, therefore also no bicycle riding on Sabbath. Very smart but at some point in this reasoning common sense was lost.
Oh oh oh this isn't a perfect answer to your question but I kind of address this in this essay about the longterm effects of alphabet literacy on the brain -- which Dr. Leonard Shlain (who was Jewish) attributed to the Ancient Hebrews. His book (The Alphabet Versus the Goddess) has more details.
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-androgynous-mind