Stupider Than You Realize

A common bias among the smart is to overestimate how smart everyone else is.  This was certainly my experience in moving from top rank universities as a student to a mid rank university as a teacher.  A better intuition for common abilities can be found by browsing the US National Assesment of Adult Literacy sample questions.

For example, in 1992 out of a random sample of US adults, 7% could not do item SCOR300, which is to find the expiration date on a driver’s license.  26% could not do item AB60303, which is to check the “Please Call” box on a phone message slip when they’ve been told:

James Davidson phones and asks to speak with Ann Jones, who is at a meeting. He needs to know if the contracts he sent are satisfactory and requests that she call before 2:00 p.m. His number is 259-3860. Fill in the message slip below.

Only 52% could do item AB30901, which is to look at a table on page 118 of the 1980 World Almanac and answer:

According to the chart, did U.S. exports of oil (petroleum) increase or decrease between 1976 and 1978?

Only 16% could do item N010301, which is to answer “What is the purpose of the Se Habla Espanol expo?” after reading a short newspaper article called “Se Habla Espanol Hits Chicago; September 25,26,27 are three days that will change your marketing.” The article includes this quote:

It’s Mr. Martinez’s job—his mission in life—to make sure companies learn how they can serve and sell to America’s Hispanics. He has been marketing to the community for many years, working with the best in the business, including Coca-Cola and the advertising firm of Castor GS&B. Now his staff is organizing the largest annual Hispanic market trade show in the business—Se Habla Español.

Acceptable answers include statement such as:

To enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community; to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community; and to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community.

Only 11% could do Item N100701, which asks:

Using the information in the table, write a brief paragraph summarizing the extent to which parents and teachers agreed or disagreed on the statements about issues pertaining to parental involvement at their school.

adultliteracy1I think an acceptable answer is to note that parents tend to have lower opinions than teachers of school performance.

Hat tip to Linda Gottfredson.

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  • fenn

    I’m surprised.

    But there will always be stratification in any group. For the last 5 months I’ve played the physics game Fantastic Contraption. My guess is that most everyone who gets hooked on it enough to fork over 10 bucks and visit the forums has an IQ at least one standard deviation above average.

    But there are definite tiers there. (and plenty of status jockeying). Interesting to see how important these perceived differences are, even when people are virtually anonymous.

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky

    I wonder: How smart does someone have to be to overestimate the intelligence of average people, and does it have more to do with growing up in a closed environment than IQ per se?

    And: Do the very smart tend to overestimate the intelligence of the moderately smart? (Experience and a few conversations suggests the answer is yes.)

    • talisman

      Working in an industry supposedly populated by smart people, I have repeatedly had the following experience:

      industry person A: X is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with!
      i.p. B: X is brilliant!
      i.p. C: I’ve rarely met people in X’s class intellectually!

      Then I and several peers meet X and find X not that bright.

      (And I have met several people smarter than I am!)

  • jsalvati

    Not to nitpick, but N100701 is quite poorly written. I had to read it 3 times.


    Using the information in the table, write a brief paragraph summarizing the how much parents and teachers agreed or disagreed on the questions in the table.



    • Ori





      This could be an aspect of the literacy exam as well- the ability to parse that question properly the way that you have done. I also read it twice to be sure I knew what the question was, but that’s part of the test isn’t it?

      • Feral Gord

        Sure, it’s part of the test, but the more things you consider to be part of the test, the less “easy” the questions seem.

        Frankly, I don’t find the sample questions in this post all that “easy.” While they all ask you to do essentially trivial tasks, they’re also all poorly worded (or at least, ambiguously worded) to the point where most of the work is bound to be tied up in parsing the sentence and imagining what the question-asker likely *meant* when they wrote them.

        For example, in the first question, is the test-taker presumed to be taking messages for James or Ann? The correct answer should change accordingly.

        So, sure, you can shrug your shoulders and say “Well that’s part of the test” but in doing so you’re essentially admitting that the test results aren’t as astonishingly low as the post would have us believe.

  • scott clark

    I sometimes get accused of overestimating how smart people are, but my reply is that people are probably smart enough when it matters to them. I mean what were the parameters of the test, did they get prizes for getting the right answers. Or did they just get paid for showing up no matter what answers they were given. It probably matters. They may be pretty dumb, but they might be just smart enough to ration their cognitive talents and save them for when it counts.

    • hmm

      Do you really think that smart people are only motivated to use their intelligence if there’s a prize? Or that they otherwise do a cost/benefit analysis every time their “cognitive talents” are called upon, no matter how mundane the task before them? I don’t know any people who I consider intelligent who function that way. And I would go even further and say that the fantasy of people functioning purely on the basis of rationality is a tiny bit autistic.

  • scott clark

    see, i know there should have been question marks in the comment above, but didn’t feel like spending the time for proofreading.

  • blink

    Secondary teachers seem to have the opposite bias, often perceiving students to be of lower ability and intelligence than they in fact are. Presumably, college educated teachers would be above the median in intelligence, so perhaps the difference is constant exposure to a truly average population. While teachers may have incentives to keep expectations low, the general underestimate of intelligence seems genuine.

    Also, similar to Scott, I wonder whether participants were unable to answer these questions or simply could not be bothered to exert sufficient effort to do so in this setting.

  • bbass

    It’s tricky without a rigorous definition of “intelligence,” but I think it’s fair to say that most of these pertain to the ability to pay attention rather than intelligence per se. I wouldn’t be surprised if making the questions more difficult/complicated at some margin also made them more interesting, less likely to be blown off, and more likely to be answered correctly.

  • Douglas Knight

    This is a good mix of “real-life” tasks and “book-learning.” I think that the key point that surprises smart people is that reading a chart is a lot more difficult than filling out a phone message slip, which is a lot more difficult than reading a driver’s license. (ignoring the possibility people are more willing to do “real-life” tasks)

    The place where this mix is lacking is inference, where the implication of Robin’s examples is that most people can’t do inference. I’d like to know what kinds they can do. The sample question search turns up two “inferential” questions that most people answer correctly. I wouldn’t describe AB71001 as inferential; it looks like an “application” question. I’m surprised that 2/3 of people can infer the meaning of the poem in AB41001. I’m also surprised that 2/3 of people process the graph in AB21501, which I’d call inference.

    So people can do some inference, but I don’t see the pattern of what kinds they can do.

    • Robin Hanson

      On AB21501, a pretty wide range of points was marked as correct. They had to mark the same or lower than WInder ’84 to be marked wrong.

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  • Katja Grace

    I admit I’m surprised by how stupid people are several times per week. I sometimes wonder why it’s so hard to change expectations enough instead of being continually surprised, and can think of two reasons:
    1) People model others on themselves with imagined differences. I seem pretty silly from the inside – I can’t easily imagine a huge array of even greater stupidity below, so it’s hard to fix my intuitive model.
    2) Smart people are comforting in the same way god is. The world seems dangerous, and the stupider people are the less I can trust others’ info and decisions. This scares me and makes me feel responsible, neither of which is welcome.

    • loqi

      I’ve noticed that my reactions to stupidity tend to be more visceral when I’m exposed to it directly. I do find the above results somewhat surprising, but they don’t “hurt” like watching a video of their performance would.

      Perhaps something like mirror neurons are involved? If it’s “painful” for someone to realize they’ve been or are being stupid, perhaps this same mechanism is triggered when attempting to model another’s cognitive processes. A built-in aversion to accurately modeling poor cognition certainly seems like it would produce biased expectations.

  • steven
  • AllenT

    ..depends upon your definition of “stupid”.

    Many of those “stupid” may just be illiterate, or merely illiterate in english ?

    Does illiteracy = Stupidity (??)

    According to the more recent 2003 U.S. NAAL (National Assessment of Adult Literacy) survey:

    – 14% of U.S. residents are legally illiterate

    – Another 29% have only rudimentary reading comprehension/skills… like being able to find a program in a TV guide

    …. so, not the least bit surprising that a random sample of U.S. adults would have trouble with reading comprehension — since nearly half can’t really read.

    Of course, the basic problem is the horror story of government {public} schools, especially for lower socio-economic groups. More than half of poor blacks/latinos can’t read by 4th Grade… with little or no improvement by 8th Grade.


    • TGGP

      How do you infer that it is government schools that are to blame? As far as I know randomized studies in which disadvantaged children receive vouchers to be used toward private schools show no improvement.

      In reply to Matthew C, I believe that what you refer to as “Machiavellian social intelligence” also draws on g. As one wag said “Life is an IQ test”. The standardized tests taken with pencil and paper are used because they do a good job of predicting how people will do in the larger test of life. Linda Gottfredson has studied the relevance of IQ to a wide variety of jobs and a similar relation always holds (although I think the correlation goes up for more cognitively demanding jobs).

    • Taylor

      Yes they may be those things but much more likely they are just plain stupid.

      • Taylor

        Speaking of stupid I just figured out that this thread is over a year and a half old.

  • Matt

    It’s been my observation that people both underestimate and overestimate the intelligence/capabilities of those around them.

    The standardized test examples are not really representative … one would have to be mentally retarded to lack the ability to perform the logical calculations required to answer correctly — so the deficit probably lies in the reading comprehension aspect.

    Also, human intelligence falters significantly outside of the areas where it is regularly used .. even the brightest people (in their area of interest) can make some embarrassing logical errors when thinking about other things.

  • The Epicurean Dealmaker

    I do not find this at all astounding. First, I think many (most?) people overestimate others’ intelligence/competence because they overestimate their own intelligence/competence. I see no reason why “smart” people should be immune from this narcissistic overestimation of self. Second, there are many forms of “literacy,” of which the examples shown are a severely limited sample. For my part, I am constantly astounded and amused by the extent of financial illiteracy, which is limited to no particular social, economic, or intellectual demographic. I feel safe in asserting that many (most?) PhDs would struggle to balance their checkbooks, much less understand a financial derivative. By the same token, I am reliably assured that I myself am woefully ignorant of basic solid state physics. To each his or her own, n’est-ce pas?

    • Aaron

      Smart people take tests which give them feedback and a percentile, and do so multiple times throughout their school years (even a threshold/pass test like the Bar exams give a percentile); they know exactly how smart they are.

      Its like saying an Olympic runner overestimates his speed.

  • Matthew C.

    People in academia, and people who read academics blogs, are people who have done very well in school and on certain kinds of tests. And they call doing well in school and on tests, “intelligence”.

    If the “test” were to get a good looking woman in a bar to give them their phone number, I bet most of those “smart people” would do significantly worse than average.

    This is only an anecdote, but I use my own experience as a possible illumination. When I was a young child under 8, I went to a public elementary school and did mediocre work. Between the ages of 9 and 12, I began to spend more time with a significantly overachieving peer group, and became much more interested in academic success. I started to read “Games” magazine, determined to figure out and beat the puzzles in it. My ability to solve math and logic problems and my grades in those classes soared. I started writing computer programs in BASIC (albeit mostly video games). By the time I went to college, my test scores were well beyond the 99th percentile.

    I credit most of my ability to a desire to succeed in academic endeavours because of the example of one particular extremely bright friend. I could not countenance the idea of this friend being “smarter than me”, so I engaged fully with academic pursuits in order to make myself feel like a smart person. And so I became one, far beyond my own beliefs of what I could.

    As an undergraduate, I became very close to the faculty in the department of my major (geology). Being close to them led me to learn, first hand, how the academic sausage is made.

    It became indubitably clear that “intelligence” is not even a very important factor in success in academia (unless you mean by that a Machievellian social intelligence), and that primate coalitions were far more important to getting tenure. I would even say that IQ-intelligence is less important in academia than in the business world — the difference, of course, between being paid ultimately for meeting the bottom line vs. being paid by extracting taxpayer funds. . . In any event, I decided that since academia was about who you knew, who knew you and liked you, rather than how smart and correct your ideas are (and God help you if your ideas are before their time!), that I wanted nothing more to do with it. So I finished my bachelor’s degree and left it forever. . .

    So I do not read about test results like this and say, smugly and self-congratulatingly to myself, “my, how brilliant I am, and how stupid are most everyone else”. After all, my “stupider” peers were getting laid all the time in high school and college, while I was getting laughed at. And they knew all the latest bands and artists, while I knew books like “Godel Escher Bach” and “The Panda’s Thumb”.

    Just because someone is not interested in the same things you and I are, does not make them “stupid”.

    • Taylor

      I think you’re being a little bit naive. What drew you to that new peer group? Think about it. It was bound to happen. That’s the age at which IQ differences really start to affect how well you get along with others. I think you have the causal arrow reversed.

    • bruce

      rarely intelligent people come from stupid families in stupid social circles and dont know they are intelligent and pick up the habits and tastes of stupid people. As life goes on they usually find they are the best plumber or cop etc but still have stupid tastes, because of standardized tests we now often find these people sooner and put them to better use but if not they may have your experience and somehow despite their education still not get that they did not learn to be intelligent but they were born that way and they simply learned they were intelligent.that is not to say intellectually stimulating company does not inspire and essentially educate us.

  • Noumenon

    Thanks for following up on reader demand!

    Your link to the questions crashed my browser, but this works.

    I have read that most people overestimate the physical fitness of other people, too, such as how many people are able to stand up from a seated position on the floor. Don’t know where to find hard data on that.

    It’s hard to believe it really matters, though. I work in a low-to-medium-low IQ factory, having had standardized test scores in the 99th percentile all my life. The only way I can see people being stupid is when they do obviously inefficient things, like taking five separate trips instead of making five sets at once. But even then you can explain it as “she likes to keep a steady pace.”

    Every once in a while someone will tell me something revealing like “Don’t tell them it’s 4-5/8 inches — say 4-3/4, it’s easier.” But as far as superior job performance, or grasping the concepts, or figuring out how management is lying to us, it’s hard to see any lack of intelligence at all.

    I guess what I’m saying is if sorting is efficient, people can end up “just smart enough” and how they would do on an assessment of skills they don’t need doesn’t really matter.

    • TheNuszAbides

      indeed, this must be significant to analyzing the data: taking this test is not established as something the takers necessarily take seriously, reflecting on effort and/or interest at least as much as (i would venture, likely more than) “ability”.

  • VinceP1974

    The closer (in a life-focused way, not spatially) one gets to Washington DC, the dumber one becomes.

  • MnM

    I wonder if that random sample of adults actually took the time to read the questions. I wouldn’t have; I’d have chosen random answers and then gone on with my day. It’s a matter of opportunity cost.

    • GU

      You are evil.

    • foriru

      Particularly for the World Almanac question. 52% sounds like the vast majority was outright guessing.

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  • johnnyonline

    i like to think i’m smarter than the average bear (not the yankees’ berra – the hanna barbera bear) – and when you couple that with optimism as i am forever finding myself – then, you’re in for the occasional disappointment.

    in the end, the most important aspect of communicating with anyone is that they understand you and vice versa – if you have done your best and someone has not understood your point or request – you are allowed to feel guilty for your own shortcomings or blame the other for their shortcomings.

    …or start over and communicate. the cutoff point varies from individual to individual.

    • TheNuszAbides

      i’d still like to see Gatto’s notes on teaching 11-year-olds Moby Dick…

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  • Samantha Atkins

    I find that smart people have had ample experience of the stupidity of others and have usually been rather isolated in early life when they had little control of who their associates were.

    Smart people think of things that would work for them in terms of solutions to problems, explanations, what is interesting, what is an effective argument or stimulus to desirable outcomes and so on. There model of necessity begins with introspection.

    Perhaps one other factor is that the world is a bit more frightening if you imagine most people are significantly more limited. While I am certainly not at the nosebleed peak of IQ my IQ is high enough that I was quite saddened to learn of it. I had rather hoped there were a lot more people smarter than I to carry the load that I felt so inadequate to handle.

  • Texan99

    When something comes very easily to you, it’s natural to assume it comes easily to others until you see hard proof to the contrary. Wouldn’t a person with perfect pitch imagine that others had it, until he confronted the surprising lack in a companion? And how often are our interactions precise enough to make this kind of discrepancy obvious?

    I’d imagine that people who have to train others for a living pretty quickly figure this out, though, unless they’re given a pool to train that is very homogeneous and very similar in intelligence to themselves. If you take a bright person and ask him to train ten random assorted people in a task that seems fairly straightforward to him, he’ll notice that one of them gets it right away, some of the rest seem to be struggling surprisingly hard, and one can’t seem to grasp it no matter how hard he struggles to make it plain.

    • Jim Balter

      I recently read of a young woman with two vaginas who didn’t realize that she was different until, after she started menstruating, her questions to another girl about “left” and “right” were met with startled looks. From a very early age we expect others to be exactly like us, even having the same thoughts, and it takes experience and interaction to become aware of differences.

  • chris

    Presumably, college educated teachers would be above the median in intelligence

    an unwarranted presumption. and education degree is what one gets if one is too stupid to get a degree in basket-weaving.

  • elfu

    Interesting topic.
    Another (slightly different) manifestation of this can be found in academic seminars, at least in my field (economics). Presenters often include very complicated maths in their slides, assuming that the audience can follow this. In my experience, even very smart people can usually not follow though.
    The best presenters simplify their stuff as much as possible and give the audience a simple take-away message.

    • Peter Gerdes

      We all put complex math in our slides (less so in actual math talks ironically) knowing that people won’t be able to read them. Both for the bad reason that we don’t really have a good idea of what else to put on our slides and don’t want them to look empty and because having complex equations on your slides (we think) makes our work seem more impressive.

      • AnthonyC

        Also, because the equations may be important. Even if you know people can’t follow them during the talk, they may be worth including if the slides will be available after the fact and you think you or others may want to reference them later.

  • Mark

    I attended two of the most famous and respected universities in the US – the sort of places that produce Nobel Prize winners on a regular basis. Now, as a professor at a B or C grade university, I am stunned by the low quality of my students.

    However… although, sure, there may be a less “raw intelligence” in the student population, even the top students seem to lack curiosity and certainly lack ambition.

    I wonder if ambition (as in, ambition to learn new things, master a field, make an intellectual contribution) is really the key difference.

    • Independent Accountant

      I went to a grade B undergradudate school. Many of the students there were miserable. Then I got an MBA at the University of Chicago. What a difference in student bodies. Welcome to the real world. I await your saying a large proportion of your students do not belong in college at all.

    • bruce

      maybe it could be affirmative action, over education of the mediocre, the attack on objective thinking and the shackles of political correct doublethink. nah – it must be white and male privilege

      • Brerlou L. King

        MISDIAGNOSIS No, the problem tertiary educators like yourself is facing is inadequate preparation, Mark, starting at the primary and secondary levels. Mediocre teachers is the problem, not mediocre students. (Forget the affirmative action red-herring. Blacks are only 13% of the population anyway, and most blacks don’t even qualify for top tertiary places, anyway.)

        Take a look instead at the comparative performance of secondary students in the US with that of students from other developed countries such as France, Germany, Japan, and urban China for example. The US is underutilizing its human resource, and is coasting along on the critical mass of its population, which is more sizable than any of the other mentioned countries above, except China. However, the sheer mass of the population of China, and yes India, for example, which (populations) are still somewhat underdeveloped, is already allowing it to produce more scholars than the USA in terms of sheer numbers. The economic impact of that on the GDP of China is the most serious non-military threat to the economic hegemony of the USA in the near future.

        How on EARTH does a country “over-educate” mediocre intellects? One would think that mediocre minds would need more education, not less. The biggest problem I, as a former educator from a different country, find in the USA is the unwillingness of the system to compare itself with other developed countries. The most uncompetitive industry in the USA is the education industry, and that could become the source of its economic downfall.

        Education should be inclusive not exclusive. The more educated and informed a man is, the more productive he is, and US workers, individually, need to be several times more productive than workers in other countries, so that our goods can compete in price with goods of other countries. At the present moment, we are unwittingly exporting or exposing our technology to other countries which then ship it back to us at prices we cannot compete against.

      • bruce

        when you back out non Europeans from out education stats we do quite well, granted we could do a lot better if we eliminated the leftism from the curricula, were culturally confident enough to insist on excellence from student and educators alike however insisting on excellence is considered racist so this will get worse.We are under utilizing our resources by not spending out dollars on the greatest minds rather spending the finite education dollars [we spend twice the next highest country] on political correctness , special ed and trying to teach the ineducable. you are incorrect that stupid people need more education their inability to v=be educated is whats defines them as stupid they need a place in the world that affords them security and dignity unfortunately we have decided to give those spaces traditionally occupied by the less cogently fortunate to foreigners. There is no benefit whatsoever in fact it doesn’t even mean anything education is inclusive. education should be for those that can be educate degrees should not be handed out to make unqualified people feel good about themselves, to make it easier for employers to hire utterly unqualified people or to use the education system as a communist reeducation camp and propaganda outlet.

      • Gurney Halleck

        Listen, there are smarter and better writers (of your “rights for whites” camp) who make these arguments. You would do well just to link to their work rather than blathering on in this fashion and wasting your breath.

      • bruce

        yes their certainly are Im pretty smart but have an eigth grade education and type with two fingers I will suggest HBDCHICK and JAYMANS blogs [a woman and black both liberals]as an introduction and where to find links to all the scientists quietly working in the HBD field from genetics to anthropology.

      • Stephen Diamond

        Who cares if they’re “a woman and a black”?

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  • Brerlou L. King

    This is about right, if you consider that slightly less than 50% of all people have an IQ below 100, that of that, say, 45% most of them have given up trying to become educated except in very narrow areas of functioning. Finally, we are mostly insulated against interacting on an intellectual level with most of such people because we tend to interact, mainly, with people of similar backgrounds to ourselves.

    • bruce

      Unless of course affirmative action imposes upon one Negroes who ‘most of such’ have average IQ of 85 when of mixed heritage but only 65 when of pure sub Saharan lineage, Then one must just pretend not to notice. unless ones just tired of the fronting and just calls the brotha out

      • Brerlou L. King

        As a negro twice tested at an IQ of 148 I would love to question your sources for that data. My own great-great-grandfather was a ship jumping Scotsman who mated with a negro cook in Barbados, who hid him for a while, but I see no reason to credit his 1/256 input for my smarts.

      • Reichsführer Gordon

        You’ve clearly missed the very simple point bruce was making, and therefore I doubt your claim to a 148 IQ.

      • Stephen Diamond

        Ridiculous response. He was questioning the premise, not the inference.

        However, if all assumptions are true, Brerlou would have an IQ as rare as 163 would be in the general population. Not unprecedented.

      • Brerlou L. King

        NO! You have clearly missed the point I was making, which was a simple request for the sources on which his hypothetical was based. This makes ME express some doubt as to your own freedom from bias of a different sort. I am well aware of the tired old argument against affirmative action, and had no interest in engaging it.

      • Jim Balter

        You’re clearly a worthless racist sack of garbage.

      • Gurney Halleck

        It doesn’t take much of an IQ to realize what a storm front poster is moaning about.

      • bruce

        Ill tell you what one of the best sources for an introduction to human bio diversity is a blog run by a liberal black also of west indian extraction and married to a white woman jaymansbolg there you will find tens of thousands of huge long term studies as well as his own work and link to all the scientists papers and blogs who are working on all sorts of human differences not just intelligence. your own or any one persons intelligence says nothing about what the average is for their race, their are tall china men strong women and stupid Ashkenazim jews one should judge individuals however when designing a society one must consider the larger picture it is suicide for western countries to import low iq immigrants even if they are higher than their groups average their children will revert to the mean.

      • Brerlou L. King

        THE INBREEDING DISADVANTAGE, and the argument for diversity which your Hitlerian, master race, hypothesis fails to take into account. The reality is that intelligence is such a complex characteristic that there is no way to predict the outcome of mixing two ethnic types.
        You, for example, are oversimplifying the genetic argument by not quite grasping the statistical implications of what some, maybe like yourself, mislabel as miscegenation. I refer you to the bell curve which suggests that the greater the diversity of a population the greater the extension of the two tails of the bell curve, which represent the outlier extremes, viz the highly intelligent and/or the highly surviable sturdy stock in the one tail, and the highly retarded dysfunctional stock in the other tail.
        Without going into the significance of RNA, as opposed to the DNA on which it was supposed all along that Darwinism depended, I would contend that the dysfunctional tail disappears from the equation because it can’t survive. This suggests that the more genetic combinations and permutations that exist in a population, through diversity, the more survivable and functional outcomes one is likely to find.

        THE SPECIALIZATION FALLACY, (and paranoid schizophrenia.)
        What the master race concept erroneously focuses on is the specialization goal. Plant and animal breeders have long understood the dangers of inbreeding, in susceptibility to skin cancer from the ever present sunshine in whites, and sickle cell anemia in a subset of Sub-Saharan blacks, for example. The coefficient of inbreeding has been well established, and even calculated, since the 1920s. Of course if you are breeding for a single trait, which IQ is NOT, then you have an argument for keeping the race “pure” with all the attendant survival problems. (The German Shepherd is a beautiful and intelligent dog, for example, but is subject to congenital dysplasia.)
        In your case, I would say the psychosomatic ethnic danger from inbreeding is multiple myeloma, on the one hand, and paranoid schizophrenia on the other. (Most mass shooters in America are white, that should tell you something.) In fact I see symptoms of paranoia in some of these offerings here already, (chuckling.)

      • bruce

        lol youre an idiot there must be half a dozen laughs in your comment. but ill address the half truths. yeah intelligence is a trait that no single gene can be assigned that doesnt mean we havnt spent the last 100 year doing iq tests on populations and finding that africans have sub 65 whites plus 100 and mixed race blacks 85, that doesnt prove why but its a strong guess what happened.
        the iq curves of blacks is steeper and has shorter fatter tails which is why we know youre not really 148 iq cause while that would make you a bright jew it would make you the smartest black on the planet and we all know obamas that.
        rna dna wtf are you talking about yeah i know what they are and do, do you?
        the hybrid vigor thing is a myth btw think about it its anti evolution.
        Its not a master race thing ts a fitness for a given environment ing africans excel at hunter gathering on a savanah but europeans invented the western civilization model the whole world is adopting and sorry for you thats out milieu.
        Heres the thing if you guys were n not so violent and socially dysfunctional we could get along but enough of you are so horrible that life with you is impossible . even if you would own your shortcoming and accept things like stricter law enforcement it might work but you just riot when you dont get what others have earned for free including trust. so its not working out and you have to go, take my advice it may seem like youre about to take over actually the white man is finally waking up because its gone so far so if you dont want to end up in an oven hightail it back to the motherland with your iq you could run the place plenty of oil to trade for limousines etc

      • Gurney Halleck

        The children of Indian and Asian immigrants punch above their weight IQ wise. If they regressed to the means of their populations (what, 80s and 105 respectively) why should this be the case? Also see Nigerian immigrants and their children.

      • bruce

        “culture” counts for something. Meaning other factors might make one group get the most or the least out of any given brainpower. However most of what we think of as culture is also biological. its not so much nature vs nurture but nature informs culture [cold climate future time and cooperation]which culture becomes environment,[ violence is selected out] and shapes nature in a feedback loop. so perhaps east asians have better future time orientation traits and better impulse control which allows them to maximize a 103 IQ.Maybe europeans out breeding from catholicism anti cousin marriage strictures has made them more daring and despite a lower IQ invent more things.The south asians or more specifically indians are possibly genetically isolated perhaps from castes so that the tests were not accurate in finding a single average,this is argued about nigerians too but the back and forth at Unz left me unconvinced the nigerians are doing as well as posited we shall see.

      • Gurney Halleck

        An awful lot of maybes, perhapses and posibilies there. It’s evident that the children of South East Asians end up doing fine, despite regression towards the mean, as do the children of nigerian immigrants. I see no reason not to keep letting them in because clearly these groups do just fine in America. Let all high IQ people from any group come to America, IMO. Are you just fearful that these people would out compete you in this hyper-competitive economy?

      • bruce

        no my family throws 130 consistently we will do fine for the forseable future but while i agree IQ should certainly be a consideration for immigration i would still be opposed for several reasons one i suspect you would approve is the brain drain on say india and africa, both need all the G they can get.You may be surprised to know despite being what you might at least loosely call a white nationalist i like all cultures peoples and would like to see them survive one of the things i hate about multiculturalism is its a culture shredder. Obviously when it comes to a choice its my own european culture i most care about and since multiculturalism seems to be a one way route its the european diasporas cultures thats most endangered and for that reason i oppose all non euopean immigration to western nations and the expulsion of as many as can be done humanely. I would not be opposed to guest workers of high IQs under the understanding they were to stay out of out politics and culture.The left has basically fathered several billion third world children over the past several decades that are on svhedule to double the worlds population in 65-85 IQ peasants in the next 25 years this was outrageously irresponsible and frankly i think you should all be shipped to africa and guatemalla to support them certainly im not falling for another round of whoops the left made a huge mistake so lets let the left solve it with another great idea. I fear youre not going over to support them and there will be blood, no doubt the blood will not be your fault for creating mouths you couldnt feed but mine for not offeriing my body

      • Gurney Halleck

        You just don’t like people who aren’t Europeans moving into the West and resent the ones who are already here, all this stuff about IQ is just an excuse (as evidenced by your willingness not even to accept the high IQ ones.) No one takes this shit seriously fyi which is why you’re the one desperately peddling these views.

      • bruce

        Its not that I dont like them anthropology was my first love.its that i see what ought to be plain as the nose on your face by now that european peoples will cease to exist if this goes on any longer. While I have been pointing this out for decades Its gotten bad enough that actually quite a lot of people have begun to see the writing on the wall. So now all over the european diaspora there is a reaction so far its quite civilized though leftys of course feign horror and shout nazi, the Trumps Faranges LePens Wilders et al are quite circumspect and civilized in their pleas for reasonable policies. For decades I have been warning my liberal friends if you keep thinking a 1% margin of votes gives you the tight to piss in the cornflake of the other 49% then you will have bloody civil war one day. Civil wars never happen when one side has overwhelming support.This is what trump/sanders and others are about many have realized even when they win elections they get the same thing; an unholy alliance between global capitalists and marxist deconstructionists.My positions are more extreme because I have thought longer and harder about what will actually work and what will be a patch that eventually fails. I no longer think democracy can lead to anything other than this and this situation and the fascism that inevitably follows the collapse of democracy i would for sentimental reasons be willing to try a democracy without womens suffrage and the franchise limited to property owning or net tax paying males over 25 with a limited government almost entirely outsourced through tech. But of course that is what we started with and here we are. Whats probably going to happen is this will continue to devolve until we have a massive south african type situation where whites are terrorized as minority and the propaganda is justifying it on dubious marxist grounds 9oh wait we are already there] if things dont change there will be a horrific ethnic war for survival at some point.If we were the countrys we were 50 years ago your high IQ proposition would have sounded reasonable to me and I would have supported it, even now I would like a guest worker system as I described. What I have seen in the past 50 years is how a tiny percentage of outsiders [jew sat first] were used as an excuse to begin dismantling out culture it began with little innocuous things like christmas decorations the pledge of allegiance and picked up steam until the entire western cannon was blacklisted as imperialist privileged power structure of oppression.Civilization as we will have to learn once again is a fragile thing culture binds it deconstuct your culture at you peril, I undertand the left thinks they can replace culture with facebook remonstrations to not be racist sexist etc but I posit that the cultural institutions and types of archetypal myths family tynic and national consciousness work so well as social binders because they actually are biological in origin, that is to say we evolved to respond to religions etc and FB and lefty propaganda is not going to over come them.Blood will out in the end. I simply propose doing it civilly while we still can. theres nothing hateful about wanting your own distinct culture to survive. I dare say if whites were doing to other nations whats happening we would and have called it cultural genocide colonialism imperialism etc.

      • Gurney Halleck

        I don’t believe in the one drop rule, European people will still be around if they mixed genetically with other peoples.

      • bruce

        really hows that going to work? people will be Anthony Burges olive green but still insist they are not theyre actually european? Com on already out culture is hanging on by a thread only because angry old white guys like myself care. no a culture canot survive a multicultural society and a people can not survive the demise of their culture.Or maybe its that when a people no longer care enough to defend their culture they are already dying. Unfortunately I dont think mankind will survive without the european

      • Gurney Halleck

        Brazil is not a bad country the US becoming like Brazil is not a bad outcome.

      • bruce

        -then move there its a shit hole

      • Gurney Halleck

        The USA is my county and I do not despair of it becoming like Brazil, which I don’t think is a “shithole.”

      • bruce

        im sure you have ways of keeping the shittiness off you and yours congrats the rest of us want our country back and it will happen one way or the other trust me

      • Gurney Halleck

        I am working class, somewhat upwardly mobile (hopefully) but working class the nonetheless. I work along side Hispanics and don’t resent them.

      • bruce

        me too and I am very good friends with many blacks and hispanics I dont resent them personally i dont blame someone for wanting better i resent the elites who allowed them into my country. I also cant help noticing they are not as good workers in fact they are terrible I have been a construction foreman for thirty years and its almost impossible to to build anymore even though the works been massively simplified over the decades, Its almost a given that i will have to send teams back 3-4 times to redo work and its still not what i could do.The stories of corruption I hear at coffee and lunch are mind boggling even for me who grew up in a minority slum and knows the score on the street.sure many are likable at least only heartless people can spend time and not see the humanity in people that doesnt make them good candidates for citizenship in my country and thats to say nothing of what a shithole its become living in the land of global consumerism and third world idiots. I used to relish my ability to speak a little of several languages eat pickled pigs feet goat curry and talk street, i judged racists as ignorant and mean. Which back then most were. But as a native new york city kid i knew people you had to to survive, and so i knew race differences and though I was often a target being white I never hated just learned strange in retrospect perhaps the zeitgeist of the 60s. I still dont hate but crime stats HBD and 60 years of watching liberal programs fail spectacularly watching those programs from the slum looking up and noe w the cold hard science on racial differences I realize its simply hopeless. and that took about two years of shock as if a child had been killed because the implications are ghastly probably why most wont face it. Now we have the permanent revolution curated by the media where every generation is led to believe they are the first to do something about white oppression all the past failures are swept away and a new generation of white liberals gets their religion hole filled with the new religion only its getting to be a blood thirsty religion as we become less civilized more like the other cultures so now we have white privilege and dijango unchained and all the sinners saints and every cop a criminal. Its only a matter of time before whites are a minority they are already set up to be hated and envied this always ends the same as a more able economically dominant minority is killed by the majority. I wont be alive probably but I have children and grandchildren. The crazy thing is it will make the world worse for the third world they cant survive without our technology and if the chinese take over they have no enlightenment/christian baggage they know themselves to be the the best people and have no qualms about slavery and colonialism whatever their needs are they will do. In the meantime Bill Gates and co have tripled the worlds population with 65- 85 IQ peoples at a time when we are on the cusp of needing vastly less labor even skilled is gates going to feed them and their progeny in perpetuity?They are already swarming us thinking we can feed cloth and provide welfare for an unlimited billions. western nations are already on the verge of collapse from the 60-90s failed welfare this will crush them and ethnic war will break out and leftists will not blame themselves for creating these people filling their minds with hate and inviting them to take over western civilization despite the citizens of those nations vehemently opposing this for decades they will blame the people defending themselves as nazis.I can only hope That the third worlders are mostly just pushed out and the liberals are the one who get the wrath of the people because they are the one smart enough to know better.

      • Stephen Diamond

        It’s puzzling that immigrant construction workers are employed despite their incompetence when many native workers have been shoved out of the labor force.

        The solution to the puzzle, I conjecture, is that the immigrant workers receive wages below the level acceptable to native workers.

        What do you think about a dramatic hike in the minimum wage – say to $15, including agricultural labor? This would block the employment of low-wage migrant labor.

      • bruce

        if it were competitive economics it would be a bit more palatable [though a nation should be administered for its citizens] Its affirmative action so whats basically happened is what were once highly skilled unionm jobs that paid a good wage in high cost cities have been taken from american citizens and given to south american african caribean etc immigrants we make about 90K plus almost a much in benefits which sounds like a lot but i promise you you wouldnt have done it 30 years ago we have to make up in productivity and brains what we cant compete with in non union wages. also new york starter homes are 600k and property taxes can be 10-20 k a year. Why hispanics get affirmative action is a mystery no one will talk about they just do. but whats worse is you cant fire them or even insist they do better they constantly sue the union for back wages heres the game. first they are constntly late and take off sometimes for months because the union has several additional unenployment plans also they make deals to work overtime off the books for cash which of course destroys the union.Then every few years they have a lawyer show that minority workers worked less hours and the only reason possible is.. racism so the union us sued for 30 million which they get in tax free checks for 80 30 20 35k of course this has to be made up by the members. they also pass the med insurance cards around the ghetto and do things like find drs they know from welfare fraud days to write them scripts for sneakers and gold rimmed prescription glasses and other things they can sell, ironically they all sign up for obama care as well. a couple years ago at lunch i listened as a bunch of them i know are all from honduras talked strategy of how they give their union card to relatives to work while they retire early to boost their pension payouts, another time about a dozen guys ridiculed me for paying income taxes i was told no one does that any hr block in the hood will give you enough SS numbers to have a dozen dependents for $50 each if i didnt have enough friends and relatives i knew who could give me theirs.They all and I mean every damn one has at least two babymamas that they dont support well actually they give her 50 or 100 here and there and are all proud of that while the divorced white guys are paying about 1000 month for the first kid. the baby mamas have no idea what these guys make and are on welfare.Most cant read or write they ask me to read letters usually creditors,I try to council them on how to succeed here but its hopeless they usually buy luxury cars with liar loans as aprentices and remain cash strapped their whole lives while white guys brown bag it and buy houses and save, then we hear how their a wealth gap. I had one kid want to leave early I asked why and he told me he was going to Hermes to buy a belt $1200 for a belt because he want to look fresh at the club that night, most have side criminal businesses as well, if you have lived with these all your life you would understand theres a criminal angle to everything they do from cradle to grave everythings some sort of scam from their car insurance their loans gift cards cable tv income taxes the specious lawsuits hey all have going the tools walk faster than i can order them, they sneak out an hour early and expect to be paid just because, They all have some criminal court case going on usually an assault or gun charge, if theyre married which is really rare they still have at least one girlfriend usually they are just constantly on the make no thought to how this might affect their children.They actually think they work hard and some do try they are just incredibly ineffectual Im a really good teacher but many are simply not teachable they seem incredulous that I want it done properly the attitude is if no one sees it why bother but of course it wont function properly and there are all sorts of inspections so i must have them go back sometimes six times the bosses are clueless how bad its gotten since the whites are now almost gone and the few left are not going to kill themselves in an atmosphere like that. so of course there is now little difference between union and non union except the cost so the unions are disintegrating ironically they will inherit the wind but these were good jobs for prole whites that afforded the dignity and security they needed for family formation but of course the solution will be more immigrants its clever how the lefts unintended consequences always seem to give them an opening for another leftist fix almost like they planned it that way.

      • Stephen Diamond

        I don’t understand how the whites being almost gone can be attributed to affirmative action.

      • bruce

        my own union was actually the 78 supreme court case that set the standard basically every time theres a census theres an increasde of non whites found then though the union has faithfully met the previous target its found to be in contempt of the decree penalized back wages assessed and the order for the special master to continue to administer the unions apprenticeship program. This is ironic since the court appointed lawyer controls all the hiring but the union is never the less found in contempt, also the court seems to go out of its way to hire the worst candidates not military or something they go to prisons and the welfare systems. Because of this you can no longer get you son or nephew into the union unless of course youre black.What you may not realize is the ratios in the cities where the unions are able to survive because of the size and complexity of the projects is less than 50% white some cities far less. its not quite fair since many of the whites saved and moved to suburbs to live and do long commutes but its the city census counts. Its interesting that they dont have to be citizens or even legal,astounding but true. Even in the general population the US is only about 60-% white now perhaps lower since many hispanics identify as white.Its not just construction almost all federal and state workers are minority as well in the cities. If this were what it was sold as the 8% of legacy slaves and temporary at that. I forget who said it but AA goes from it cant be eliminated because its beneficiaries are too weak to it cant be eliminated because they are too strong.

      • Stephen Diamond


        True, I didn’t realize this.

      • Gurney Halleck

        Myy minority co-workers are excellent and non-corrupt. I don’t resent them or their families and people. The future looks bright. Take a chill pill.

      • bruce

        well for what its worth I outlined below for another commenter my 56 years experience with minorities below ill bet you a thousand dollars you dont have a clue what ghetto life is like i was raised in it if you havnt had had a dozen puerto ricans offer you a turn on their sisters, or every black you know tell you their mom says youre the devil while she cheats welfare ten different ways you dont know jack what you know is some outlier exceptions strained through the gets along with whites filter. The reality is dismal and it gets worse as they increase percentage their culture becomes dominant and they try less hard and so do we.

      • Європейський-Американський

        If you’re white, a vote for (D) is a vote against your interests.

      • Stephen Diamond

        Not a bad outcome if you like an oversized role for the military and tendency toward military dictatorship, as is produced by a multicultural society.

      • Gurney Halleck

        Not necessarily true that multicultural society produces military dictatorship, plus not so sure how “multicultural” our society will be, as most people will be either Christians or agnostics of various backgrounds with other religious minorities like Jews and Muslims continuing to be…minorities. Yes, it will be multi-racial, but not necessarily multicultural. You WNs are pissing against the wind I suggest you just go set up your homeland in Alaska and gtfo.

      • Stephen Diamond

        I’m no WN (any more than I’m a “liberal,” as one of your opponents accused me). But when you extol Brazil’s racist society ( ) as an example to be followed, you’re taking a position as repugnant to me as WN.

        [For my views on migration, see , third letter, titled (not by me) “Marxist Borders”.]

      • Європейський-Американський


      • bruce

        for all your smarts you cant do maths your great great grandparents contribute 1/26 or 6.25 %DNA

      • Jim Balter

        Funny that “bruce”, a functional illiterate who actually appears to have a sub 85 IQ, is writing such things.

      • bruce

        so let me guess genius you believe in evolution and that all men are created equal. does that doublethinkin give you headache

      • Stephen Diamond

        Does this contradiction hurt your head:



        we know you’re not really 148

      • bruce

        I know its hard for liberals to think rationally but let me see if i can walk you through it. The first sentence is a refutation of his anecdotal assertion, the second is an educated guess judging by all sorts of things he writes. However I shouldnt have said it tells us nothing it tells us the likelihood, for instance if a woman claimed to have one the Fields medal Id call BS. [yeah I know even the Fields medal fell to the progressives last year but it used to be an honest contest.
        But its interesting youre not offering to explain how it is you think evolution happened to make all men equal in intelligence and social traits despite evolving in sexual isolation to each other while hybridizing with entirely different hominid species in extremely different environments producing a genome that scientist find different enough to be able to tell poles from Germans or which part of England a person is from within 300 miles. Maybe its just your religion?

      • Stephen Diamond

        I’m no liberal, and I certainly don’t need to be one to see the hypocrisy of a white nationalist trying to appear (in the earlier quote) as a “cuckservative.”

      • bruce

        kind of ironic you criticizing me for writing as a cuckservative to disarm and educate. I would try to school you into understanding your liberal bias but as you say my head hurts

  • Brerlou L. King

    My first job after graduating high school was a temporary assignment, teaching, at one of the old secondary grammar schools. The following year, I took up a more permanent assignment at a secondary school with no entrance requirements, and was assigned to teach a C stream class. Even at primary school level I had never encountered children with such serious learning disabilities, talk about culture shock! Yet, I learned to like and be protective of all those kids.

    On the other hand, flowers are pretty, perfume smells nice, ballet is graceful, and rap is rhythmic and even poetic. Beyond that, I have no gradation of appreciation for any of these things. To me, no flower is appreciably more beautiful than another, no pleasant smell is more pleasant, one minute of ballet is no different than the next, and rap quickly becomes monotonous, FOR ME! So who am I to look down my nose at people who can’t think their way through the meaning of an equation, or respond to the aching beauty of a series of musical cadences, or who can’t write a grammatical sentence of more than 5 words to save their lives?

    • bruce

      youre not fooling anyone slightly misusing those tertiary dollar words a series of cadences huh youre a fool and the guy with the gay flag is looking get all batty boy with you i think his gaydar has scented you out.

      • Stephen Diamond

        tertiary dollar words

        Are you perhaps being ironical: grossly misusing a word in the course of criticizing a “slight” misuse?

      • bruce

        lol yes if you scroll up he kept using tertiary in an earlier post to denote university i suppose a bit grandiose i thought.

  • Trevor Blake

    Harold Walsby called this the ‘mass rationality assumption’ in his 1947 book “The Domain of Ideologies.” He said people who value rationality think others do or should as well. But some people prefer tradition over decision-making. It isn’t a matter of IQ but it does seem related to numbers: many traditionalists, fewer rationalists.

    • Jim Balter

      Indeed, this is correlated with political ideology far more than with intelligence, and in fact higher intelligence and education tend to strengthen biases, independent of their factuality.

  • Pierre

    When I was at a mid-ranking University I would always look up my professors alma-mata and then start to feel really bad and embarrassed around them as me and my friends mumbled through yet another seminar I hadn’t done the reading for

    • Nathan Pinney

      “me and my friends mumbled…”
      English major?

      • Francois Harmant

        Pierre is french for Peter,so I suggest you write Pierre’s comment in french to see how you’re doing in french major ?!

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  • Louis Burke

    What is this bias called?

    • Stephen Diamond

      “The curse of knowledge.” – Pinker, most recently.

      • Stephen Diamond

        The most straightforward explanation is egocentric bias (essentially Katja Grace’s first explanation in these comments). More specifically, what Pinker calls the curse of knowledge:

        Call it the Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The term was invented by economists to help explain why people are not as shrewd in bargaining as they could be when they possess information that their opposite number does not. Psychologists sometimes call it mindblindness. In the textbook experiment, a child comes into the lab, opens an M&M box and is surprised to find pencils in it. Not only does the child think that another child entering the lab will somehow know it contains pencils, but the child will say that he himself knew it contained pencils all along!

        We kind it surprisingly hard to predict what others know when they know less – to predict what it would be like not to have certain information.

        I discuss the curse of knowledge in “Breaking the knowledge barrier: Steven Pinker versus Albert Einstein on the ‘curse of knowledge'” – .

      • Jim Balter

        “Not only does the child think that another child entering the lab will somehow know it contains pencils”

        This is a failure of the Sally-Anne test, and an indicator of autism (or at least an underdeveloped theory of mind).

      • Stephen Diamond

        Autists and young children: or are you disputing the second?

      • Jim Balter

        Three year olds and autistic four years fail it. No, I wasn’t disputing “young children” for correctly small values of “young”. But “a child comes into the lab, opens an M&M box and is surprised to find pencils in it” doesn’t mention the child’s age but certainly sounds older than three. And the Pinker paragraph is about a difficulty that “people” are purported to have. The whole thing is quite misleading, whereas what I wrote, with reference to the Sally-Anne test, which has a well known age limit for failure among “normal” children, is quite accurate.

    • Andy

      I believe it is a form of the Dunning-Kruger effect.



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  • bruce

    this is why we are in a liberal designed idiocracy heading for Mogadishu, because when they imagine themselves and their friends reaction to their harebrained schemes it always works out

    • Reichsführer Gordon

      Within a mono-racial high IQ society, these harebrained schemes did work, and worked so well the rest of the world wanted to come live in it too. The problems start when the low IQ people arrive.

      • Brerlou L. King

        Well then this report should scare you a little Mr Gordon.
        “PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Two Brown University professors are issuing a new policy report challenging what they say is the conventional view of immigrants in the United States, hoping to inform government officials, policymakers, educators, and the general public.

        “The conventional view on the children of immigrants asserts that because of their social and economic environment and lower levels of assimilation, they are more at risk to fail in school and become delinquents,” according to the report, written by Evelyn Hu-DeHart and Cynthia Garcia Coll. “The conventional view is fundamentally wrong: New data and research shows that the children of immigrants do well in school and in the community. In fact, many studies show that many children of immigrants outperform their American-born peers both in school performance and in out-of-school positive behaviors.”

        They call this phenomenon the “immigrant paradox.” Their report, titled The Immigrant Paradox in Children’s Education & Behavior: Evidence from New Research, will be presented and discussed on Thursday, Sept. 16, 2010, at 5 p.m. at the Rhode Island Foundation, 1 Union Station, Providence. To attend, or call 401-863-3446.”

      • cliveklg

        Don’t bother trying to educate the racists like them. They will never change their view.

      • Jim Balter

        The appearance of stupid racist garbage like Mr. Gordon and bruce was inevitable.

      • bruce

        youre right in a high iq culturally confident country socialism might not be lethal for a while but the meme is toxic and leads to it not staying white very long as you point out. their is no defense against enlightenment values except non enlightenment responses im afraid we will have to root it out entirely and take a page from the commies

      • Peter David Jones

        There was a time when the US was mono-racial?

      • Carpenter E

        “Ha ha, the US was never White!” Little Peter has learned to parrot socialist propaganda like a good boy. Fact: as late as 1950 there were more Swiss in the U.S. than Mexicans. The U.S. was always overwhelmingly White, at least 90%. That only changed in the last decades with the Left’s plan to import voters in order to enrich themselves. But you are too dishonest to acknowledge that. Of course, if you were honest you wouldn’t be a leftist.

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  • Jim Balter

    “I think an acceptable answer is to note that parents tend to have lower opinions than teachers of school performance.”

    Uh,no, that’s blatantly wrong. There’s close agreement on the first two questions, and parent ratings are slightly higher than teacher ratings on the second question. And the whole questionnaire is about about parental involvement, not about “school performance”.

    As someone who ranks in the top 2% of Mensans, I find that people who think they are smart tend to vastly overrate how smart they are.

    • jimmyxsan

      For someone who self-identifies as a genius amongst geniuses, perhaps you should work in your reading comprehension. Go back and read question two again: the parent ratings are certainly NOT higher than teacher ratings, they are lower.

      Though perhaps you are just proving your point, that smart people tend to overrate how smart they are.

      • Jim Balter

        Regardless of how I rate myself, you are clearly an imbecile. My statement, which you are apparently too stupid to comprehend, is correct in all its detail: “There’s close agreement on the first two questions, and parent ratings are slightly higher than teacher ratings on the second question. And the whole questionnaire is about parental involvement, not about “school performance””.
        Perhaps you are incapable of counting to 2, among your other evident failings.

      • jimmyxsan

        Ha you went back and edited your original post!! The first time you misinterpreted the second question and claimed that the parents were rating the school higher than the teachers and when I called you on it you went back and edited!!!

        Also, again, reading comprehension. I said you self-described, not self rated. Which is true.

        I’m not interested in scoring points against you because clearly you are so smart I could never win. I just thought it was pretty funny that you came here talking about how smart you were, and couldn’t even read the survey results properly, which is what the article is all about, after all.

        And now you don’t even have the courage to admit you were wrong! You went and edited! Too funny. I guess you STILL proving your point, that people who think they are smart vastly overrate how smart they are!

      • Jim Balter

        “Ha you went back and edited your original post!! ”

        Yes, dumbfuck, I corrected my error. Now if only your parents could correct theirs.

      • Stephen Diamond

        The convention is to note the change in he comment – at least after the error has been pointed out by another commenter! Otherwise, you unfairly make your critic look like an idiot.

        I think what you did was borderline dishonest.

      • Jim Balter

        I cared about my comment being correct … I did not care about the “other commenter” and “critic”, who is, indeed an idiot — not for calling out my error, but for his entire troll asshole approach.

      • Carpenter E

        Jimmyboy, you sound like a severely disturbed person, full of yourself. You should listen more to others, but it seems you are too much in love with seeing your own words in print.

      • Jim Balter

        I only sound that way lying garbage like you.

      • jimmyxsan

        His original reply to me, before he edited, as it came to my inbox:

        “Regardless of how I rate myself, you are clearly an imbecile. The teacher ratings are higher numerically on the last two *negative* questions.”
        He didn’t even get it right the second time! So much for this top 2% genius!

      • Jim Balter

        jimmtxsan = obsessed asshole.

        “So much for this top 2% genius!”

        It’s an empirical fact, you moron, regardless of the number of mistakes I have made.

      • jimmyxsan

        Wow you are incredibly defensive about making a simple mistake! I mean even genius’s like yourself must make one or two a year, right? Does it really make you that mad? Here you are calling me obsessed and all. but so far you’ve called me an “imbecile”, a “moron”, an “asshole”, and a “dumbfuck.”
        And I’ve only made fun of you a little bit for coming out strong about how the author of the article was “completely wrong” in his interpretation of one question, and then bragging about how smart you are, and then telling us all how smart people really aren’t that smart, when all along it was you with the reading comprehension mistake.
        Do you really not see the irony here? In any case, your over the top response marks you as either completely unhinged, or really way way way too insecure about your self-proclaimed genius status.
        By the way, your genius status may well be an empirical fact, but in my world such facts have to be sourced. Please post your test results if you want to make factual claims.

    • Carpenter E

      “Uh, no, that’s blatantly wrong” – My, how smart you sound starting your post with arrogant crap like that.

      “ranks in the top 2% of Mensans” – I think you mean you rank in the top 2% of the population’s IQ, which is the qualification needed for Mensa membership. Mensa does not hand out stats on how a member ranks within the membership. Which you’d know if you actually were a member.

      I am in Mensa. You say “people who think they are smart tend to vastly overrate how smart they are”. I think that opinion is common for all people, not just those who “think they are smart”, which is a nonsense category. A better category would be to say “people who are smart tend to….” but you couldn’t bear calling Mensa members smart, could you? I suspect you are not in Mensa at all.