One I remember is intense focus on one subject, to the exclusion of other areas.
On the downside, from here.
And [url=http://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/resources-parents/social-emotional-issues] here is one with social and emotional issues.
As an example of obsessiveness, when my daughter was in 3rd grade she did math worksheets. Hundreds of math worksheets. Her poor teacher made copies of every book of math worksheets in the universe.
An excellent short story and also a disturbingly realistic allegory. In brief, the story is about a world that is mostly populated by incompetent imbeciles, and is kept running (more or less in secret, IIRC) by a small group of people of normal intelligence.
The problem in the real world is that the underlying premise of democracy gives power to the majority regardless of competence, so it tends to create the converse. And it’s worsened by technological changes that facilitate the dissemination of falsehoods, and by ideologies that promote them.
To me, the human entity typically misses the point on this topic by ignoring the theory of consciousness. I’ll give three examples.
The first example is by employing the movie “The Matrix” as an allegory. Until Neo took the red pill and awoke to the real world, he was intelligent but had limited consciousness.
By escaping the prison of his mind, this equates to an expansion in consciousness that allowed Neo to awaken his dormant self. In esoteric terms, I believe this relates to the third and fourth initiation whereby the central channel is wide enough to allow the kundalini to surge through the core of the body from the base of the spine and explode in the head centre … which is the source of the saying “this will blow your mind” … notice the plugs popping out from the back of Neo’s spine when he is released from his incubator, which replicates the unplugging of obstructions along his central channel and corresponding alignment of his chakras … go here … [URL=“http://soul1.org”]
The second example is by observing human civilisation which has the intelligence to build hydrogen bombs but lacks sufficient expansion in consciousness to appreciate that we are … in the words of Buckminster Fuller … crew members of the one space-ship (space-ship Earth). Intelligence is what would cause crew members to destroy the very spaceship that supports and sustains their lives but only sufficient expansion in consciousness will ensure both crew and spaceship will remain intact.
The third example is when I struggled with this dichotomy between intelligence and consciousness at the age of 18. By that age I had already entered nirvana twice, so I understood the notion of expanded consciousness, but I would walk home from school attempting to cram the concept of infinity into the limited confines of my intellect.
It was only when I left school and finally had the freedom to enrol in a school of Zen that the splinter in my mind was removed. This is the process of Zen whereby the drop of intelligence gets surrendered to the ocean of consciousness.
The intellect and those with high IQ can try and figure these three examples out but the drop of intellect cannot contain the ocean. That is the game we (humans) are in right now.
This was demonstrated in “The Matrix” when Neo discovered the domain of the Architect. The Architect told Neo that humans are put to the test time and time again in an evolutionary game. In esoteric terms, this game is known as “Lila” which means “divine play”.
One test was Atlantis. This didn’t work out so well. This current test is superbly described in Fritjof Capra’s book “The Turning Point” where Capra describes humankind as being divided into two camps … which correspond to the two interpretations of quantum mechanics.
One interpretation is whereby scientists have employed “expanded consciousness” to satisfy the anomalies of the behaviour of particles at the quantum level, which is from ten to one hundred thousand times smaller than the smallest atom (Ref: “Stalking the Wild Pendulum” Itzhak Bentov; “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” Gary Zukav; “The Turning Point” Fritjof Capra.)
Meanwhile, the other camp stubbornly tries to make these anomalies fit within the “drop” of their limited intelligence.
Seeing as you’re also a fan of Bostrom (yay, someone else who likes this stuff!), what do you think the odds that we get 10 more generations without designer babies, cyborg enhancement, or strong AI making the problem entirely moot? Richard Lynn argues that we’re losing about .9 IQ points per generation. The Flynn Effect has increased base IQ by about 3 points in the last decade. So by 2100, we’d be about as dumb from this kind of thing as we were in the mid-2000s. By 2200, assuming that absolutely nothing is done about this issue and our base IQ isn’t in some way made irrelevant, we’d be down to about where we were in the early 1990s.
So… not a big deal.
I feel like you’re using “consciousness” in a very non-standard way here. He didn’t become more conscious, he just became less ignorant. He learned more about his reality. This has very little to do with “consciousness” as such (or would you like to define the term?).
Without diving too deep into your esoteric, but with regards to the etymology of “blow your mind”, that comes from 1960s hippie culture and drugs.
Waitaminute, are you saying Kurt Kobain had a bi side? Shit, TMZ would pay good money for this kind of info!
Its also a good predictor for academic success. However IQ doesn’t measure everything, and can be controversial as some ethic groups score higher than others in the same social status.
For example, The Ashkenazi Jews rate the highest with an average of roughly 115IQ.
Nobel Prizes: Since 1950, 29% of the awards have gone to Ashkenazim, even though they represent only a small fraction of humanity.Ashkenazi achievement in this arena is 117 times greater than their population. This pace isn’t slowing down; it is accelerating. In the 21st century, they’ve received 32% of the total, and in 2011, five of the thirteen Nobel Prize winners were Jewish – 38.5%.
Hungary in the 1930s: Ashkenazim were 6% of the population, but they comprised 55.7% of physicians, 49.2% of attorneys, 30.4% of engineers, and 59.4% of bank officers; plus, they owned 49.4% of the metallurgy industry, 41.6% of machine manufacturing, 72.8% of clothing manufacturing, and, as housing owners, they received 45.1% of Budapest rental income.Jews were similarly successful in nearby nations, like Poland and Germany.
“Significant Figures”: In “Jewish Genius” by Charles Murray, the author tallies up important contributing individuals in a variety of vocations, noting how immensely over-represented Jews are compared to what could be expected due to their small population. His conclusion in various categories is: Biology – “significant” Jews appear 5 times greater their population, Chemistry 6X, Physics 9X, Literature 4X, Music 5X, Visual Arts 5X, Math 12X, Philosophy 14X.2
USA (today): Ashkenazi Jews comprise 2.2% of the USA population, but they represent 30% of faculty at elite colleges, 21% of Ivy League students, and 25% of the Turing Award winners. Plus, “Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals… 40% of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington… 59% of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures
When you have a small group doing so well, its not by accident.
No wonder they’re taking over the world. I, for one, welcome our new Ashkenazim overlords! 
Likely, but as always one has to be careful and not just conclude that just the genes are the cause of that, a lot is more likely to be related to the culture.
Thank you. I’ll give you the less used bathroom to clean. 
(Though our takeover is taking longer than we thought.)
Let me give you a hint. It’s not culture. It is nagging Jewish mothers. Also, we don’t fool ourselves that we can make it in sports.
Professional sports traditionally draws most of its members from the lower class. Upon immigration to the USA, the Jewish population did rather well in boxing and baseball and were some of the best early players in basketball.
While culture may have something to do with it, Jews are small in number and did not seek out others for conversion unless the topic is marriage. It’s a controlled scientific sample. The same group does well in Chess and business.
If you believe economic class correlates with IQ; the horrible truth could be the Jews who were at odds with world powers such as Pharaohs, Romans, and Nazi’s lost their bottom 20% intellectually speaking as they were too poor to flee quickly, or could not use monetary assets to bargain.
I’ve been increasingly unimpressed by PZ Myers the more I’ve heard of him, and this does not break the pattern. His proffered explanation is just as ad-hoc as Cochran’s, but does not actually simplify the problem. He offers two ad-hoc explanations for something, as opposed to Cochran’s one. He doesn’t really offer a reason why Cochran’s explanation is necessarily wrong, just an alternative hypothesis which is not as interesting. Here’s Cochran’s paper, for anyone curious. Also, this:
But Cochran isn’t interested in doing them? He’s just a theorist? That’s where he begins to sound exactly like an intelligent design creationist.
That’s shitty and out of line. But hey look, what’s this in that very paper:
We do have strong but indirect evidence that one of these, Gaucher disease, does indeed increase IQ. Professor Ari Zimran, who heads the Gaucher Clinic at the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre in Jerusalem, furnished us a list of occupations of 302 Gaucher patients. Because of the Israeli medical care system, these are essentially all the Gaucher patients in the country. Of the 255 patients who are not retired and not students, 81 are in occupations that ordinarily average IQ’s greater than 120. There are 13 academics, 23 engineers, 14 scientists, and 31 in other high IQ occupations like accountants, physicians, or lawyers. The government of Israel states that 1.35% of Israeli’s working age population are engineers or scientists, while in the Gaucher patient sample 37/255 or 15% are engineers or scientists. Since Ashkenazim make up 60% of the workforce in Israel, conservative base rate for engineers and scientists among Ashkenazim is 2.25% assuming that all engineers and scientists are Ashkenazim. With this rate, we expect 6 in our sample and we observe 37. The probability of 37 or more scientists and engineers in our sample, given a base rate of 2.25%, is approximately 4x10^-19. There are 5 physicists in the sample, while there is an equal number, 5, of unskilled workers. In the United States the fraction of people with undergraduate or higher degrees in physics is about one in one thousand. If this fraction applies even approximately to Israel the expected number of physicists in our sample is 0.25 while we observe 5. Gaucher patients are clearly a very high IQ subsample of the general population.
…So it’s not like these guys are just pulling shit out of their asses.
I agree, not a big deal.
We probably aren’t far off from designer babies. Groups like BGI in China are trying to map the various genetic components of intelligence. Combine embryo selection with CRISPR and you could likely push your babies IQ pretty far to the right.
I’d wager machine intelligence that surpasses human intelligence will be widespread by mid-century, and designer babies where you can both select for and alter genes for higher IQ will be possible by the 2030s. Machine-brain interfaces that have the same effect as increasing IQ (but only mildly) are probably going to come around in the 2030s also.
If this were the year 1500, I’d be worried about low IQ people outbreeding high IQ people. But in 2017 it won’t matter because technology will reverse the trend of lower IQ people breeding more.
Here is another statistic.
https://www2.bc.edu/john-heineman/Jews.html
Germany in 1933, Jews (I assume almost all Ashkenazi) made up 0.7% of the German population.
They made up 16% of lawyers, 11% of physicians, 8% of dentists, 15% of brokers and possibly 30% of teachers, journalists and college professors. When 0.7% of the country make up 30% of the college professors, then something is going on.
1933 Germany was very hostile to Jews culturally, yet despite the social persecution they still did disproportionately well in math, science, medicine, academia, law, etc. due to the higher human capital among Ashkenazi Jews.
So then we are still left with one interesting theory with very little to no genetic support as usual.
AFAIK PZ Myers background in Biology is still counts more, And I do remember that a previous discussion on one of Cochran’s book “The 10,000 Year Explosion” did not leave a great impression.
And others did agree on being underwhelmed, like evolutionary anthropologist Cadell Last:
I have to mention here what Marley23 pointed in a past thread, that deals with the past poster that I replied to, also pointed at the Nobel price winners as a good metric for the Ashkenazi’s IQ; not so much:
They do, however, have a roughly 2,000 year tradition of championing literacy within the community. With a much higher rate of literacy, (along with traditions of rhetoric and debate), than any surrounding population, and laws that prevented them from engaging in many non-literate-based careers, it could be posited that they were compelled to provide an inordinate percentage of scholars in any society in which they found themselves without even addressing the notion of genetic intelligence, much less the will o’ the wisp of “IQ.”
I see no reason to accept the opening clause as real or relevant, but any study of history will show that Jewish persecutions always went after the upper classes, first.
How do the Sephardim compare to the non-Jewish population? They would also have had similar traditions and restrictions. My impression was that the Ashkenazim are more likely to have high IQ, intelligence, educational achievement and socioeconomic status than the Sephardim, even in places like Israel where anti-Semitism shouldn’t be much of a factor.
Perhaps violent antisemites went after the Jewish upper classes first but that doesn’t mean they got them first. Is there much data on this? I’ve little specific knowledge but I’d guess that in this as in many other cases, fear, resentment, anger and violence intended at an upper class might get redirected towards a lower one. E.g.: “They might be shtetl dwellers rather than bankers but they’ll do for our pogrom purposes.”
Has someone compared the IQs of Asians in the US/Canada with the populations of the countries they originally came from?
Thanks for the links.
Any ideas as to what causes that intensity of focus? By “what causes”, I mean both from the point-of-view of the gifted person’s psychology and the kinds of topics on which they obsess.
It was often the case that when the royalty got into too much debt from Jewish bankers, the Jews were expelled to clear the books. The bankers were higher class, but everyone got expelled.
And it might be that Jews who lived closer to higher class Christians got attacked first. Or that history only recorded the names of higher class victims.
But I’ve never heard of Tom’s claim. I know my ancestors didn’t leave Russia for here because they won a lottery, and they were not high class. So I’d like a cite better than “all history books.”
No idea. This didn’t come up in the talks, but I’ve just made a note to research this, since it is an interesting point. There might well be no answer.
If you find something, please let me know either here or in PM.
Sorry, I forgot I’d even posted here.
I don’t have an existing citation - my hypothesis is based on personal experience - but since you asked I’ve done a little light research, working on the assumption (flawed, but necessary to find anything relevant) that when people say ‘intelligent/smart/clever’ they mean the same thing as ‘high IQ’.
http://www.managementpsychology.com/articles/the-intersection-of-intelligence-and-arrogance/
As an aside, if you really want to see the vanity thing in action, just check out the number of articles on the net written by people who have high achieved high IQ scores, and will not hear any suggestion that this does not make them better than the rest of mankind in every conceivable way. On the other hand, maybe this is just about people who care about their IQ scores. Could be there’s a silent majority of high IQ types who either don’t know or don’t care, who wouldn’t suffer from the problems I’m imagining for their hypothesised society.
As an open question, though, I do wonder why - if IQ-type intelligence is, as many seem to think, the key to all success in this world - why haven’t we evolved to have significantly higher levels than we do?