Undead Astronauts

a chinese company is looking to hire US comp sci grads to work in shanghai, but the grads must first take an IQ test and show they’re IQ is 125+. US companies aren’t allowed to require applicants to take a written IQ test, even though some companies make applicants take a test that is very similar to an IQ test. the funny/practical/non-pc part of this is that the company only hires chinese applicants that demonstrate an IQ of 140 or above.

The lower IQ threshold for new U.S. graduates reflects the fact that the pool of U.S. talent available to the company is smaller than the pool of Chinese talent, Bleum said.

ouch. who would have imagined that the chinese would be giving americans the benefits of affirmative action?

so. “are you dumb?”

haven’t read the entire thing yet, but i’ll try to this weekend. the abstract suggests a very strange result however at first glance. the researchers found that heritability of IQ depends of the socio-economic status of the parents. wtf?

Scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children were analyzed in a sample of 7-year-old twins from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. A substantial proportion of the twins were raised in families living near or below the poverty level. Biometric analyses were conducted using models allowing for components attributable to the additive effects of genotype, shared environment, and non-shared environment to interact with socioeconomic status (SES) measured as a continuous variable. Results demonstrate that the proportions of IQ variance attributable to genes and environment vary nonlinearly with SES. The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse.

AoR writes about the commonly perceived advantage east asians have in visio-spatial (math) iq. i’m not going to spend much time on that b/c i haven’t seen much evidence to the contrary, and at least they do alright in competition. but something that isn’t especially clear to me is the evidence on a lag on verbal scores.

as AoR cited, 97 asian-american verbal iq is a number i’ve seen bandied about in the bell curve, and richard lynn’s comparisons of different national verbal scores show asians with a lower verbal. exactly how the tests were done however is something i still don’t know. the lower verbal score for asian-americans might, in part, be due to a slower start in english b/c their parents spoke an asian language at home. a friend of mine took an iq test at his school’s urging after arriving in the states from taiwan as a young teenager. he did well on the visio-spatial part of the test, but horrible on the verbal. he said that he barely understood half the english questions at the time b/c he had only recently arrived.  by the end of high school, he was in AP english and graduated salutatorian in his class (an ABC grabbed 1st).

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satoshi kanazawa came out w/ a study last week that finds liberals, atheists, and male sexual exclusivity are linked to IQ. kanazawa is an evo psych guy and has some pretty kooky ideas, but his kookiness in this case only extends to how he thinks this came about and not the numbers indicating who has higher IQ.

frankly, i don’t understand the stated evo psych reasoning which says that these views would have hurt our ancestors in the past but now serve to “move the species forward” and are “evolutionarily novel.” well wtf does that mean? just b/c something is new, it’s mostly smarter ppl that will do it? eh, i suppose so, but not a strong argument. so i’m skipping over that. the important thing here is the numbers.

Very liberal IQ (socially, not economically) = 106
Very conservative IQ = 95

Not at all religious IQ = 103
Very religious IQ = 97

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from reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) – Intelligence comes second only to smoking as a predictor of heart disease, scientists said on Wednesday, suggesting public health campaigns may need to be designed for people with lower IQs if they are to work.

Research by Britain’s Medical Research Council (MRC) found that lower intelligence quotient (IQ) scores were associated with higher rates of heart disease and death, and were more important indicators than any other risk factors except smoking.

the less intelligent u are, the less likely u are to understand that eating healthy and working out help u live longer. but being sickly also probably lowers ur IQ. there’s also the factor of future time orientation. ppl w/ lower IQ tend to have lower future time orientation and so even if u understand the risk factors, u don’t have the willpower to defer gratification.

i thought this line was the best however:

“Public health campaigns should focus on early life factors that have been shown to influence IQ levels and tackle social inequalities,” she said in a comment on the study.

“At the same time, the public health messages for known risk factors such as diet may need to be simplified.”

hahaha! ouch… b/c obviously it doesn’t already make enough sense that unhealthy eating and not working out lead to health problems.

caught this on gnxp. a recent study shows that there’s a pretty strong positive correlation between cardiovascular health and iq. there have been plenty of studies that have shown smarter ppl are healthier, so we can’t really say how the arrow of causality points with much conviction. but if u needed motivation to go jogging or spinning, this might help.

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jason richwine, a writer for the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute or AEI, has an article up about how he would change immigration policy.

he goes over some of the ground i’ve mentioned here such as diversity being a killer of community bonds, even between ppl of the same race. he goes on to suggest that immigration policy should change to that of canada’s or australia’s which imports by skill and not family relation.

i don’t have any objection to a change policy which emphasizes IQ over all else, and in fact i’ve supported that position for a long time. but i’m not sure that it will foster much greater community bonding. at best it seems like it would only mitigate an increase in crime. (more…)