Average Wordsum scores by age

As a frequent user of the GSS, I spend a lot of time looking at Wordsum scores. For those unfamiliar with the Wordsum test, it is a simple, 10 question definitional vocabulary test in which respondents earn one point for each word correctly identified from a multiple choice listing of potential synonyms (to see the actual test material, click here). I frequently employ it as a useful, though imperfect, proxy for IQ.

One reason for its imperfection is that rather than measure problem solving or deductive reasoning abilities, it tests for knowledge previously attained. Unlike an IQ test, Wordsum performance can be significantly improved by preparation, even if the specific words included in the test are unknown by the test taker ahead of time. According to my college psych 101 course, this demonstrates the differences between assessing a test-taker's fluid intelligence (which IQ tests mostly do) and crystallized intelligence (Wordsum). The two are highly correlated, however, which is why Wordsum results provide a useful approximation of IQ scores at the group level.

Crystallized intelligence is said to increase with time, as the accumulation of knowledge and experience builds. But at some point, the destructive forces of aging set in and begin attacking crystallized intelligence, the assault on fluid intelligence having been well under way for several decades.

By looking at average Wordsum scores by age range, the GSS allows one angle from which to look at the decline in crystallized intelligence and when it tends to begin. The following graph shows as much. To avoid racial confounding, non-white scores are excluded. For contemporary relevance, all results are from 2000 onward (n = 4,072):


Some noise notwithstanding, there is a steady increase in mean Wordsum scores from the late teens into the mid-sixties, at which point decline sets in. People tend to enter retirement when they're minds are filled to the brim. Those who are forced to work into their retirement years are not afforded the luxury of going out on top. It must be depressing to experience a seepage of knowledge in one's chosen career after potentially having spent an entire professional lifetime accumulating it.

How nice it would be if we were able to reverse the declines aging inevitably (or evitably, perhaps?) brings.

Scared of nuclear power, dummy?

Prior to the release of the 2010 GSS data set, finding questions on the perceived danger of nuclear power generation required going back as far as the early nineties. In response to a commenter, I attempted just that. Now, more contemporary responses are available, albeit still prior to the Japanese tsunami.

Responses are on a 5-point scale that has been inverted from the GSS for ease of viewing. A 1 indicates the belief that the perils of nuclear power are minimal, a 5 that nuclear power is extremely dangerous. Respondents are broken up into five categories; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%). The average (mean) response for members of each group is shown. One standard deviation for the entire respondent pool is 1.14 (n = 1301):

IQ group	Danger
Really dumbs	3.82
Pretty dumbs	3.64
Normals	3.55
Pretty smarts	3.21
Really smarts	2.87

Although there is some perception that SWPLs-types oppose expanding nuclear power generation because of the environmental dangers it putatively imposes, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming concerns mitigate this. Nuclear power is the only way to viably produce power on a large scale without significant carbon dioxide emissions, so opposing nuclear power while simultaneously maintaining good standing in the Gaia church means putting modernity on the very weak backs of wind and solar, or simply looking like a luddite. So it comes as little surprise that more intelligent people are more supportive of nuclear power generation than less intelligent people are.

Parenthetically, over the 16 year interval since the nuclear question was posed in the GSS, the pretty smarts and really smarts have become even less fearful of nuclear power than they had been, while the sentiments of the other three groups have remained the same.

Will the Fukushima Daiichi evacuation and closure change that? Smarter people will more easily discern that had the emergency generators required to cool the reactors been on higher ground (they could handle 20-foot high waves, but needed to handle 50-foot high waves last March), no meltdown would've occurred--an unfortunate shortcoming, but an irrelevant one for most of Europe and the US. Germany has announced that it will close all of the country's nuclear power plants by 2022, but other European nations haven't followed suit (and if that remains the case, Germany will probably end up buying energy generated by nuclear power from places like France in the future).

GSS variables used: NUKEGEN, YEAR(2010), WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10)

Intelligence isn't just good for your head, it's good for your heart!

Work by Britain's Medical Research Council (similar to the NIH in the US) provides more support for the assertion that intelligence is good for your health:

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.

Heart disease is the leading killer of men and women Europe, the United States and
most industrialised countries.

This is further evidence that libertarians like Bryan Kaplan and Megan McArdle are off the mark when they argue that an uber-intelligent society would be an inefficient and unpleasant one. Essentially, they contend that if everyone is a brainiac, near-geniuses would be forced to pick up garbage and work in fast food restaurants, whereas in contemporary Western society, there are people of more modest intelligence to do that sort of work.

The flaws in such an argument are legion. Even in jobs not requiring sophisticated skill sets or abstract reasoning ability, more intelligent people make for more reliable employees. They are less likely to injure themselves or others, or need constant supervision in performing menial tasks. Of course, these over-qualified workers will be more likely to find better and more efficient ways of performing their duties. With fewer smart people (think lawyers, social workers, etc) devoting their careers to tending to the problems created by (mostly low-IQ) criminals, welfare recipients, drug users, the unhealthy, and the like, more brain power will be available for technological innovation and the increasing of process efficiencies--things that lead to real standard of living increases. More blatantly, Lynn and Vanhanen's book IQ and the Wealth of Nations shows an indisputable relationship (r = .82) between intelligence and national wealth. The more intelligent a society is, the wealthier it tends to be.

Further, what people do as compensated employees does not constitute the sum of their contribution to society. Think of Linux or the HBD blogging community. I've enjoyed Japanese rpgs never released stateside thanks to enthusiasts who have programmed emulators to run the games for free on my PC, complete with English language translations. These guys aren't getting paid for this, it's just the type of thing intelligent people like to do. If they mow lawns or sweep parking lots by day and program emulators by night, they're still providing me with a higher quality of life than the contemporary lawn mower or lot sweeper is. And intelligence is positively correlated with a host of other socially desirable behaviors (lower criminality, higher marriage rates, better financial management, etc).

Well, the article excerpted above constitutes another piece of evidence to be marshaled against collectivist libertarians--intelligence is the second most important factor in predicting who will suffer from the leading killer of both men and women in the developed world. In our theoretical uber high-IQ societies, fewer people will suffer from heart disease (in addition to obesity, and probably a host of other maladies as well) than do today.

The piece goes on to emphasize educational strategies that putatively increase IQ, without making mention of more consquential factors like birthing patterns, and, at the national level, immigration trends. But policies aimed at increasing average intgelligence via these later factors deserve at least as much consideration. Progressive child credits (as opposed to the regressive credit currently in place) and the growth of charitable agencies like Project Prevention are potential methods for increasing home-grown intelligence. The EB-5 visa program provides a way to circumvent the political problems inherent in an immigration system explicitly tailored toward accepting aspiring high-IQ immigrants while rejecting those of lower intelligence.

Smarties fear nuclear power less than dummies do

In the comments of the previous post, a reader asserts a common perception (or misperception, apparently) concerning green luddites:

I'm glad to learn that the (self-described) "smarties" are now in favor of all that nuclear stuff they used to decry. I wonder if Hallmark makes a "I was stupid 'cause I was smart--I'm sorry!" card.

With the popularity among "smarties" of Red & Green anti-vivisection, anti-science, and anti-technology the "Scientists often pry into things they ought to leave alone" should have elicited close to 90% not 5.1%.

The GSS asked a couple of questions concerning the potential dangers of nuclear power generation--one about those posed to a respondent's family, the other posed to the environment in general--in 1993 and again in 1994. Responses are on a 5-point scale that I've inverted for ease of viewing. A 1 indicates the belief that the perils of nuclear power are minimal, a 5 that nuclear power is extremely dangerous. Respondents are broken up into five categories; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%). The average (mean) response for members of each group is shown. One standard deviation for the question regarding the respondent's family is 1.10 and 1.04 for the question pertaining to the environment in general:

Group	Family	Environment
Really Smarts	2.94	3.15
Pretty Smarts	3.12	3.32
Normals	3.38	3.51
Pretty Dumbs	3.48	3.63
Really Dumbs	3.68	3.82

The tendency is clear--the more intelligent a person is, the less likely he is to fear nuclear power. The notion that hostile sentiments toward nuclear power disproportionately come from (or at least previously came from) affluent SWPLs is incorrect. That the most vociferous opponents are high-IQ types claiming to represent many other high-IQ types of the same mind may still be accurate, as that seems to be the case for protest movements in general (in addition to being sharp, it is my impression that they also tend to be underachieving leftists with little social prestige). But in aggregate, smarties are more technologically progressive than the masses are.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), NUKEFAM, NUKEGEN

Clever sillies indeed, at least when it comes to HBD

++Addition++Steve Sailer makes note, calling out the inclusion of the question on astronomy out (and rightly so, as in reviewing the items chosen, it appears the least obviously commonsensical of the entire field) and waxing on the relationship between vocabulary and intelligence more generally.

---

Bruce G. Charlton, academic and editor in chief of the journal Medical Hypotheses, has previously described the perceived tendency for people of high intelligence to lack common sense, a consequence of ignoring instinctive reactions ("gut feelings" in the vernacular):

My suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and personality is that an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense.

Bruce suggested I take a look at the GSS to see to what extent it confirms or repudiates his assessment. To avoid the problem of cherry-picking, he thought it prudent to have someone other than himself peruse the data.

I scoured the entire library (in the process propitiously stumbling on some other interesting variables I had previously been ignorant of!) to assemble what is laid out below. Naturally, there is some level of arbitrariness in what is included and what is not. To minimize this, I cast a wide net to include those for which 'common sense' provides an obvious answer. Also, I did not break out responses by wordsum scores until after I'd settled on the questions to be included to avoid subconsciously favoring one item or another.

Items that solicit opinions without inquiring about consequences were passed over in favor of those dealing with predictable outcomes. That is, I'm less interested in whether or not a person favors governmentally enforced affirmative action, for which plausibly commensensical arguments can be made on both sides (the benefit to upper-echelon NAMs outweighs the harm done to middling and lower-end ice people or it doesn't), than I am in whether or not whites, specifically, are hurt by affirmative action. Obviously giving preferential treatment to a black job applicant hurts a more qualified white applicant who is passed over because of his ancestry.

Several potentially informative items are dead because they are not cross-referenced with wordsum scores. To avoid confounding factors, only white responses are included.

The items are separated into three categories; those for which the high IQ (smarties) people show more common sense than everybody else (the masses) does, those for which smarties and the masses demonstrate equal levels of common sense, and those for which the masses are more commonsensical than the smarties are. The percentages show in what proportions members of each group answered in affirmation of the question or agreed with the statement being made.

Smarties include only the sliver of the respondent pool scoring a perfect 10 of 10 on the wordsum test, equivalent to an IQ floor approaching 130 if the average white score is assumed to represent an IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15. They comprise about 5% of the population. The masses (wordsum scores of 0-9) includes everybody else.

Items for which smarties display more common sense than the masses do	Smarties	Masses
People must live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself.	27.9%	44.7%
Favor allowing women who are poor and cannot afford any children to have abortions if they want to do so.	64.7%	47.0%
Homosexual attraction is a conscious choice.	16.9%	49.2%
Are there situations in which it is okay for a man to punch another man?	82.9%	67.2%
Is it ever okay for a policeman to strike a citizen?	89.7%	77.1%
It is a civic obligation to report a crime if you witness it.	96.0%	91.8%
Scientists often pry into things they ought to leave alone*.	5.1%	29.3%
Morality is a personal matter and society should not try to force everyone to maintain the same moral standards.	66.7%	74.9%
Genes are important in determining whether or not a person's life turns out poorly or turns out well.	49.4%	36.2%
There is no sense in planning for the future. If things are to happen, they will happen.	11.7%	40.6%
Astrology is not scientific.	84.6%	71.3%
Refuse to eat genetically modified food.	19.6%	31.2%
It should be illegal to carry a firearm while intoxicated.	98.9%	91.6%
A single parent is able to raise a child as well as a couple can.	29.0%	34.8%
Modern science does more good than harm.	70.9%	62.9%
Animal testing is okay if it might result in human lives being saved.	70.0%	62.4%
Items for which smarties and the masses dispaly equal levels of common sense	Smarties	Masses
Favor busing black and white children from one district to another**.	24.0%	22.8%
Allow incurable patients to die if the patient and family support doing so.	70.1%	71.4%
It's okay for a man to hit someone who has broken into his house.	84.9%	85.1%
Political organizations based on race and/or ethnicity make it more difficult for everyone to get along with one another.	70.6%	72.6%
Items for which the masses display more common sense than the smarties do	Smarties	Masses
Average difference between the intelligence of whites and of blacks, measured in standard deviations.	0.20	0.53
Genes play a major role in determining personality.	20.7%	24.8%
Things for blacks in the US have improved over time.	51.1%	64.5%
It is better for a man to work and a woman to take care of home.	24.0%	36.9%
Blacks do worse in life because of their innate inability to learn as much as whites.	4.2%	12.9%
There should be more women in the US military than there currently are.	56.2%	33.6%
Women should be assigned to military roles where hand-to-hand combat is likely.	39.3%	34.8%
Poor schools are an important reason why there are poor people in the US.	81.8%	72.5%
Whites are hurt by affirmative action policies that favor blacks.	52.7%	71.6%
It is a shame that traditional American literature is ignored while other literature is promoted because it is written by women or minorities.	57.4%	70.7%
Increased immigration makes it more difficult to keep the US united.	45.6%	74.4%
Biological differences between men and women are important in explaining why women are more likely to take care of children than men are.	42.4%	57.4%
Because of science and technology, there will be more opportunities for future generations.	86.5%	92.0%

I don't gather from this that intelligence is a handicap when it comes to arriving at commonsensical conclusions about most things. The assertion that intelligence either lacks significant correlation with or correlates positively with nearly all desirable outcomes and behaviors seems to hold up here (though there are a couple of exceptions, including the question on genes and personality and also the question about future opportunities provided by advances in science and technology). With the glaring exception of HBD-related issues, smarties display more common sense in their thinking than the masses do.

However, when it comes to accurately assessing differences in human subgroups--or even acknowledging that they exist--society's brightest squelch common sense in the name of politically correct moral posturing. Virtually every question for which the masses are more grounded in reality than the smarties are involves race or gender. The epicycles constructed and maintained by smarties are demonstrably if one simply believes his own lying eyes.

The explanations for why this occurs are surely familiar to most readers. My favored working explanation is that smart whites compete primarily against other whites (and Asians). NAMs are abstract pawns used in a moral posturing game played against other whites. Ilkka puts a clever spin on it:

Liberalism is status signaling that demonstrates that you are immune to the
societal consequences of liberalism.

And Steve Sailer states it in no uncertain terms:

Political correctness makes people stupid.

To the extent, if any, that this challenges Bruce's assertion^, it strikes me as encouraging. Rather than being maladaptive in facing the mundania of life, ceteris paribus, intelligence improves one's quality of life and his ability to comprehend the world around him.

GSS variables used: RACE(1), WORDSUM(0-9)(10), GENEEXPS, BUSING, BLKSIMP, ANOMIA4, ABPOOR, HOMOCHNG, LETDIE1, HITOK, HITROBBR, POLHITOK, FEFAM, RACDIF2, FENUMOK, FIGHTLND, OB911, SCIPRY, PERMORAL, WHYPOOR1, INTLWHTS, INTLBLKS, DISCAFF, LFEGENES, PCLIT, ETHORGS, IMMUNITE, FEKIDS1, NOPLAN, NEXTGEN, ASTROSCI, EATGM, GUNSDRINK, SINGLPAR, HARMGOOD, ANTESTS

* (I hear Ned Flanders exclaiming, "Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins the movie by telling you how it ends. Well, I say there are some things we don't want to know!")

** Even though this solicits a personal opinion, it strikes me as being so disruptive to society to merit being deemed as an opinion lacking in common sense entirely.

^ Again, the criteria for selected GSS items, beyond adequate sample size and cross-referenced data on wordsum scores, was arbitrarily selected and is consequently open to crticism for not adequately finding proxies for common sense. Also, the reasonable responses to some of the questions seem as though they should be obvious to a thinking person of even modest intellect, but do not involve what would generally be deemed commonsensical in popular parlance, the question on astrology serving as an example.

Burden of boredom borne by blockheads

Razib has previously wondered whether or not GNXP readers ever become bored:

Do readers of this weblog ever get bored? It seems that life is short, and there's so much to do and read. I understand that work can quite often be tedious and mind-numbing, but that's not quite what I'm talking about. What I'm referring to is having leisure or free time, and being bored because you don't know what to do with it.

The post struck me as a reminder of how different the relationship with time is for those with an insatiable need for cognition compared to those who are intellectually incurious. For the former, it's in perpetually short supply. For the latter, time often cannot pass by quickly enough. In the words of Roman general and Hannibal nightmare Scipio Africanus:

I'm never less at leisure than when at leisure...

I cannot recall the last time I've been in boredom. I always keep at least one book in the car and have my iPod in pocket at all times. Just getting to work on my backlog of books to read and podcasts to listen to guarantees I won't be twiddling my thumbs for months, and even if I did nothing else with my free time but these two things, I've reached a sort of singularity in which my to-do stack grows at a faster rate than my ability to shrink it down does. Yet I get texts and calls frequently enough from people I know asking what I'm doing at the moment, and if I want to go do something with them because they're bored sitting at home. I would never be the originator of such a text. Even if it's with a vivacious girl in her late teens, I can't imagine going somewhere without having already formulated a desirable plan about what I'm going to be doing.

I am quite confident in asserting that the same is true for the vast majority of readers, who are both intelligent and curious (the two are not synonymous, of course, but they are good proxies for one another). Most high IQ people always have something stimulating to engage in with their free time.

This isn't just me speaking from personal experience--the data confirm it. The GSS asked respondents in 1982 and again in 2004 how often they have time on their hands that they don't know what to do with. Using the familiar categorization method employed here before*, the following table shows the percentage of each group's members who reported to "almost never" be without something worthwhile to do in their free time:

Unboreable	%
Really Smarts	69.6
Pretty Smarts	52.8
Normals	39.9
Pretty Dumbs	39.2
Really Dumbs	33.7

So much to do, so little time to do it. Now when are we ever going to get around to reproducing?

GSS variables used: WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), BORED

* Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%).