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Ever wanted to determine the IQ of someone who didn’t want to be tested? I have the solution. Simply say “I’m doing a survey, in your opinion, who are the 10 most influential people in history? By influential I mean, had the greatest impact on history and humanity.”
Before reading any further, readers should ask themselves this question, and write down your answers.
While many people don’t like taking IQ tests because they fear they’re being judged, people are more tolerant of surveys, especially short ones, especially when they feel their opinion is being valued. So this is a brief one question IQ test disguised as a survey.
So once you get people to give their opinions, it’s time to score their answers. For each of the 10 people they name who ranks in the top ten of Michael Hart’s list of the 100 most influential persons in history, they get 2 points. For each of the 10 people they name who ranks from #11 to #100, they get 1 point. For each person they name who is not on Hart’s list, they get 0 points. Maximum score 20 points.
Converting these raw points into IQ equivalents will take some research but I suspect this test might have a respectable correlation with IQ because it takes general knowledge and judgement to identify the 10 most influential people in history, and general knowledge correlates highly with general intelligence.
Because history was influenced by science, religion, politics, literature etc, one needs a knowledge and understanding of all those topics to answer this question competently so general knowledge is crucial.
While psychiatrists have long used measures of general knowledge as a rough and ready measure of intelligence, psychologists avoided it, understanding that intelligence and knowledge are two different things. However when the results of the army IQ tests came in during WWI, the big surprise was that general knowledge correlated better with overall IQ than any other subtest. As David Wechsler would later say, the size of a man’s knowledge is not only an index of his schooling, but a measure of his intellect. While knowledge and intelligence should never be confused, it’s obvious that smarter brains can absorb more information, better organize and categorize it, and more quickly retrieve it.
Brain Size 
Interesting idea, but we need a better list.
You don’t think Michael Hart did a good job?
I agree. Several of the top entries are only assumed by many to have existed based on writings about them by others. Those assumptions do hugely influence peoples lives to this day but can we say they were influenced by the people themselves or the idea of the people?
is da vinci missing or I’m shortsighted?
also there’s not Tesla yet there’s a Lenin and Stalin? LOL I think this guy was after something when rendering this list
Essentiality of intelligence (universality of intelligence), capacity to find patterns and also to find ”big picture”, creativity and self-awareness.
Two cognitive kind of humans there, the problem solvers and the technical maintainers.
Many higher smart profile ””’conspirationists”” are problem solvers.
Education filter cognitive diversity to only some similar cognitive profiles, specially, ones with ”simmetrical higher technical intelligence”.
Functionality of intelligence need to be integralized. Mattoids and hairhead higher iq’s are real and today they are destroying our societies.
Functionality of intelligence need to be integralized. Mattoids and hairhead higher iq’s are real and today they are destroying our societies.
You may be right
air and not hair.
My guesses:
1) Jesus (3)
2) Mohammed (1)
3) Confucius (5)
4) Genghis Khan (29)
5) Isaac Newton (2)
6) Buddha (4)
7) Alexander the Great (33)
8) Michelangelo (50)
9) Columbus (9)
10) Shakespeare (31)
Total Score – 16 out of 20
Fun quiz, but it doesn’t mean anything. Genghis Khan behind George Washington and the Wright brothers?
Fun quiz, but it doesn’t mean anything.
No, it means lots.
Genghis Khan behind George Washington and the Wright brothers?
Well the great thing about hart’s book is he rigorously defends each of his rankings. A lot of thought was put into them.
I’m sure there was a lot of thought put into it, but we don’t assign A’s for effort.
Genghis Khan and his heirs of sons and grandsons were responsible for breaking Russia away from Europe and unifying it, isolating Japan from continental East Asia, establishing the first foreign dynasty in China, sacking much of the Middle East, and most importantly creating the incentives which caused the West to start searching for a shortcut to China, which led in turn to the Age of Discovery.
And he’s behind George Washington in influence? One can even make a case that Khan’s accomplishments were more influential than Newton or Einstein’s, given that the scientific discoveries almost certainly would have still been made by some other Western scientist, while it’s questionable Khan’s accomplishments could have been made by anyone else.
I suspect the reason why khan was not ranked higher was that his influence was split with his many heirs, since hart is quite precise about measuring individual influence.
That’s partly why Jesus ranked below Muhammad. Because the influence of Christianity was credited not exclusively to Jesus, but shared with his chief prosletyzer Paul.
Pumpkin,
JFK is ranked the 81st most influential person in the history of the world – ahead of Lenin, Peter the Great, Mao, Mencius, and Charlemagne – and you don’t get the joke?
JFK shouldn’t make a list of the 100 most influential Americans.
*****
None of Genghis Khan’s sons made any major adjustments to his strategic adaptations for invading and subduing kingdoms and territories. That’s quite different from Paul’s major adjustments to Jesus’s message.
Hart argues JFK was supremely important because his political activism was instrumental in putting a man on the moon which was one of the greatest accomplishments ever for our species & marked the dawn of a new era. However, I’m not sure if this is a good argument.
None of those people has had ANY influence excepting Newton.
But what influence is it if one merely reveals/discovers the truth?
Just post your GRE scores again, Dookie, and you’ll prove it to be so.
I figure it out.
http://tinypic.com/r/28s67ih/8
I figured it out.
http://tinypic.com/r/28s67ih/8
Of course my ‘d’ was stuck.
I whited out the identifying info in Paint.
But forgot to white out the test date. Oh well.
You were finally able to post the score report. Very cool.
But you know it’s going to be like Obama’s birth certificate. You’ll still have the conspiracy theorists.
I could post the GMAT and the SAT too, but I don’t know where they are. I’m pretty sure I have them though, somewhere.
I had the GRE picture because I used to get into the BGI study.
Most influential people:
1. Henry Maudslay
2. Gordon Moore
…
non-technical people:
1, 2, 3, and the rest
Marx/Engels
Most significant “thinkers” of the 20th c:
1. Martin Heiddeger
2. Martin Heidegger
3. NOT Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger
Of course I forgot Gutenberg.
And he’s a great example of techne over ideas.
The Reformation was only possible because the production of books became cheap. Gutenberg and whoever reintroduce paper to Europe were a sine qua non for Luther.
I was always open to Dookie acing his test scores.
But as I said earlier, who cares? Dookie’s GRE scores don’t make him smart about any topic, any more than Shawn Bradley’s height made him a great NBA basketball player.
Dookie is the Shawn Bradley of the HBD blogosphere. He’s gangly, inept, and unteachable when discussing any topic, but his extreme “height” gives him some credibility as a small role player in any pickup game of professionals.
Fortunately for Dookie, he frequents a blog where IQ is worshipped more than accomplishment. If height really were IQ, you can bet that several commentators here would assume Shawn Bradley (7’6″) was a much better basketball player than Michael Jordan (6’6″).
Time magazine named Einstein the most influential person of the 20th century on the grounds that he was the preeminent scientist in a century dominated by science.
Many rumours say about plagiary about Einstein. The over-deification about him is explained specially because of media collective work during XX century.
Confucius and ”Lao Tse” to Oriental Philosophy, selective processes, since that culture create collective transcendence to made genetic pool.
Aristotles and all famous ancient thinkers and inventors (Babylon to Europe Middle Age).
Is complicated to name only few names, but some inventions and philosophies change radically human societies.
Only 0.35, even after reliability correction? My guess would be 0.6 (before any corrections). Similar to what i’d estimate for wordsum (another short measure of crystalized knowledge )
Regarding the army tests, all I know is David Wechsler mentioned that information was more correlated with the overall score than any other subtest. That suggests it was the most g loaded but I don’t think g loadings were directly measured.
Don’t know about other subtests.
A silly list. If Einstein or any of the other scientists on the list had never been born their discoveries would have been soon made by someone else. In contrast, without, say, Kaiser Wilhelm II, or Tsar Nicolas II WWI might never have happened.
I saw a clip of you on fox news. I had no idea you were so articulate & important. Very honored you read this blog.
Fox News?
You watch Fox News Pumpkin?
What a dumbfuck.
Fox News?
You watch Fox News Pumpkin?
What a dumbfuck.
I watched the video of James on Fox news posted in his web site. He was on John Stossel’s show.
But that just shows how silly the VIP list is.
Very Important but interchangeable.
Not so Very Important but irreplaceable.
Whatever.
And not listing Aurelian shows the author doesn’t understand Roman history.
Yes, that was quite a glaring omission
For the record Pinky:
What counts, or what should count regarding heritability, is the answer to the following:
If I, Pincher Martin or Pumpkin Person, had not one identical twin but 100 or more twins, and they were randomly distributed across the developed world…one might even end up in Windhoek…what would be the sample variance/SD of our IQs or other psychological traits?
If IQ in this significant sense really had h^2 = .8, then the sample SD for 100 or more would be close to .6*15 = 9 points. My guess is it would be statistically significantly different from 15 points, but would be practically not that much different, like 12.5 points.
You can make a high-g test that can be administered in less than 5 minutes. The problem with historical trivia is that it has a strong cultural bias. A Russian would probably give different answers than an American
Wrong test. It is test of knwolege which only partially based on mental ability. This knowlege test is heavily cultured biased (westerner favor west, oriental favor East Asian history, African tribe men favor thier tribal oral history).
Like I said before, if the answer is in dispute, the test is not reliable. Any idiot with memorized answer can feel like they are genius. You need to test the fluid mental abitity (abstract reasoning ect) which is more stable and not strongly enfuencied by culture or education. Basically you need the test that produce unquestionable answer like high school math test or novel mental challlenge.
my advice for you, just measure their head size, which is far more reliable than your test. Just imagine I, as East Asian, set up the same question with correct answer defined by me who will judge you, You get the picture.
IC, I see your point. The list is kind of eurocentric,
Quibbling about the minutiae of rankings aside, I’m sure this is actually a very good way to learn a lot about a person in conversation in a very short time, which is something I enjoy doing. More science focused people are likely to list more scientists, just as more literary people are more likely to list Shakespeare (I did). If they instantly list Hitler, Napoleon, and Genghis Khan with a glimmer in their eyes, that could be telling too.
Also, I’d be listening for people to mention more obscure figures, like Zoroaster that show a deeper knowledge of history. I was surprised to see Fritz haber wasn’t even on the list even though his process for producing massive quantities of ammonia both powered the military engines of world war one and made possible modern agriculture, arguably being responsible for more human misery than any other person while also doubling the worlds population.
Yeah, maybe it might work as a personality test in addition to an IQ test,
This list presupposes the “Great Man” of history narrative – ie. history is shaped by great men doing great deeds not historical and economic forces.
However there is an argument (noted with respect to Einstein above – not the best example as it is entirely possible General Relativity would have taken us another 50 years if Einstein hadn’t got there) that says if Darwin hadn’t discovered evolution someone else would and if Lenin hadn’t led the Russian Revolution someone else would.
So this thinking more deeply about historical forces would very likely have me make a far different list to Hart’s and I am sure Braudel’s would have been even more divergent (and Braudel was fairly brilliant).
So, overall a poor test as people with differing valid interpretations of events would score differingly against an artbitrary list (eg. Columbus 9 – really?)
“…there is an argument…that says if Darwin hadn’t discovered evolution someone else would…”
Hmmm. I would say that’s much more than just an argument.
Well obviously, but I wanted to include a non-scientific example too and use the same wording.
Because real-life is chaotic you can’t really say that the Russian Revolution would definitely have occurred in the way it did if Lenin had not been leading it, although it seems likely that it would have done.
I would expect highly intelligent (and narcissistic?) people to scoff at the great man theory because they feel they could have stepped into this or that great person’s shoes easily enough. The average person can’t imagine what it might take to invent something new because they’ve never done so.
Before reading the rest of the article, I’m going to go head and give my list. Feel free to estimate my IQ, pumpkinperson!
Constantine I
Qin Shihuang
Confucius
Mohammad
Karl Marx
Thales of Miletus
Genghis Khan
Christopher Columbus
Emperor Meiji
Charles Martel
I’m not assuming a historical Jesus Christ here, btw. I don’t happen to have a strong opinion on that issue, I’m just not assuming he existed.
Then you’re a MORON.
The Lion does not believe Jesus existed:
The Lion is a moron, and a prole.
@duke
“The Lion is a moron, and a prole.”
Lion blogg and followers are most made of losers (proles). Signs of losers are forever whining, complaining, blaming others for their failure in life.
Winners always exam themself first for reasons of failure. It is much easier to change self than others or outside world. Losers never figure that out.
Observer:
You’re a moron. A much bigger moron than lion. And a much bigger loser.
You missed one, Pumpkin.
The chairman’s second pick is “Qin Shihuang.” It’s on Hart’s list at #17 as “Shih Huang Ti.”
Pincher, good catch! So chairman, your score is actually 10/20, not 9/20 since I incorrectly scored you zero for your second pick.
1. the caveman who discovered fire
2. caveman who invented spearheads
3. caveman who invented writing/glyphs
4. caveman who invented the wheel
.
.
.
etc
those are the most important people
Good point. There are many influential people whose names were never recorded by history.
Perhaps this calls for separate lists of most influential religious thinkers, statesmen, scientists, artists, etc. Hart’s own list shows he leans toward religion. Jesus AND St. Paul both in the top ten?
Napoleon should have been higher, btw.
Whatmakes the list interesting is that you have people from different fields being ranked on a single scale of influence.
This is a test of intellectual name-dropping and of verbal IQ. I don’t doubt it correlates with g, but does it continue to do so however far to the right of the bell curve you go? Would it really distinguish between Newton and Galileo themselves, as distinct from people who have heard of Newton and Galileo?
g doesn’t exist.
Only morons with low g think it does.
Philip, it probably correlates well with IQ below Michael Hart’s IQ since he made the list & the answers are only as good as his intellect. Though Hart is probably super smart given that he has a self-reported BA from Cornell in math, a Princeton astronomy PhD, an M.S. in physics, an M.S. in computer science & even a law degree.
“g doesn’t exist.
Only morons with low g think it does.”
Oxymoron.
It takes a non-moron to realize that only morons believe in g.
Good on ya.
But then again every moron will point out the oxymoron.
Which is it? I’m a moron.
Are you a moron or are you funnin’ the morons?
Religionists and philosophers have no influence. Neither do belletrists.
They’re all just entertainers. If you’d read Marx you’d understand this. That is, the history of the world that matters IS the history of technology.
History as taught at school is just the history of famous people. It’s People Magazine for people who can read without moving their lips.
Material culture, techne, is advanced by countless no-names, and is NOT advanced at all even by some big name scientists.
For example,
Otto Hahn has had almost infinitely more influence than Einstein on every day life.
The biggest genius BY FAR of the Industrial Revolution was Henry Maudslay. Without him it was impossible.
Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, even Shockley (with whom I agree on eugenics) are a distant second.
Of the last 200 years Maudslay towers over all others.
Before him who were the great innovators? Too many.
If any philosopher has had an influence it is Aristotle and Marx.
Darwin has has 0 influence on everyday life. A creationist or ID medical doctor or even medical scientist is no less effective for his uncommon convictions.
Evolution will be argued about until it’s useful. It can explain a lot, like why a three drug cocktail works but a single drug doesn’t for HIV, but the science which led to the discovery of the protease inhibitors has absolutely nothing to do with evolution.
Science is for the most part just a means whereby really smart people entertain each other.
What a ridiculous post. Dookie’s mind is filled with a lot of garbage.
“Religionists and philosophers have no influence. Neither do belletrists.
They’re all just entertainers. If you’d read Marx you’d understand this.”
Funny how Dookie tells us philosophers have no influence and yet his entire understanding of religion’s influence on history comes from Karl Marx.
But Dookie can’t even read his heroes accurately. Marx didn’t think religion had no influence. To the contrary, he was quite respectful of its symbolic power. He saw it as a misguided protest by people against their material conditions.
Marx’s criticized religion for being an illusion, not for being uninfluential.
“The biggest genius BY FAR of the Industrial Revolution was Henry Maudslay. Without him it was impossible.”
The Industrial Revolution did not hinge on Maudsley. The interchangeability of parts was advancing, and would have continued to advance, had Maudsley never existed.
“Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, even Shockley (with whom I agree on eugenics) are a distant second.”
These men were merely the first in a race. Shockley, for example, is occasionally even criticized for trying to appropriate (i.e., steal) his Bell Lab comrades’ ideas for which all three received the Nobel Prize. Bardeen and Brattain were on the right track before Shockley, their boss, recognized the value of what they were doing and quickly intervened to take credit for it. When he saw his junior colleagues’ work, he immediately understood its value.
Shockley’s book on semiconductors was a first-rate explanation of the technology of the new age. But if Shockley’s influence ought to be celebrated today, it’s for being the first man to recognize the commercial applications of the semiconductor and for bringing together the minds who would eventually create Silicon Valley. But if Shockley hadn’t done it, somebody else would have. And Shockley’s management and people skills were so horrible that he did nothing useful after bringing them together.
You’ve never read Marx or understood him if you’ve read him.
He was a radical critic of philosophy. For him it was and still today if he were alive would be bourgeois decadence.
Marx did not believe religion had any influence qua religion. It was the hand puppet of techne/material culture. Duh!
That Marx was RIGHT in his observations DOES NOT mean he lived up to his own expectations or demands:
Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
But Marx DID NOT change it, not permanently at least.
The world of ideas is mere superstructure determined ENTIRELY by the base.
Without Gutenberg there is no Luther and there is no Reformation.
Without Luther there is Gutenberg and there is a Reformation.
Get it?
Base determines superstructure. Duh!
Dookie,
“You’ve never read Marx or understood him if you’ve read him.”
Keep bluffing, Dookie. Keep huffing and puffing and pretending like you know something.
You claimed that if we read Marx, we would know that the religious have no influence.
But Marx understood that religion is immensely powerful and something he must make account of in his own materialist philosophy
Marx, in his most famous phrase about religion:
Does that sound like a man who thinks religion has no influence?
Back to you, Dooks:
“Without Gutenberg there is no Luther and there is no Reformation.”
This is no different from saying that if the fifteenth century had not been what it had been, then the sixteenth century would’ve been different.
But that doesn’t make a prominent person in the fifteenth century more influential than a prominent person in the sixteenth century.
You need to know the history to make those determinations. If Maudsley had not been born, the Industrial Revolution would’ve still happened. If Shockley had never been born, the semiconductor would’ve still been invented. I don’t know enough about the history of the printing press to know if the same is true of Gutenberg, but I suspect so. It’s not as if printing was unknown before Gutenberg introduced it to Europeans.
Some people are truly indispensable to historical events. No other American could have replaced George Washington, for example. Or Genghis Khan. They were singular men with an outsized influence. But most men of science and technology are replaceable with the contributions of other brilliant contemporaries.
Thanks Pinky.
The quote you give proves my point.
Remind me not to respond to you.
You remind me of Mr Tulliver Pinky.
But I should like Tom to be a bit of a scholard, so as he might be up to the tricks o’ these fellows as talk fine and write with a flourish.
And of course Tom learns how worthless his erudtion really is.
At the very top one finds Marxists, not admirers or students of Marx to be sure, but Marxists nonetheless.
Marx was an IDEALIST. His materialism was not the vulgar Dawkins sort. His materialism was and has been so named by men more scholarly…
“technism”.
You might read Heidegger’s essay on technology if Marx’s having techne as his quintessence, Ideas, ousia, etc. his ultimate reality seems ridiculous.
Click to access question_concerning_technology.pdf
Or you might watch this movie by Italian aristocrat and Olivia Wilde ex-husband Tao Ruspoli: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-rmGy9gWvE.
I found the whole thing online for free a few months ago.
Dookie,
“The quote you give proves my point.”
Only if you have forgotten what your original point was.
Marx thought religion was illusory, not uninfluential.
You have compounded your error, Dookie. You not only made the mistake of relying on Marx to understand religion, but you then misunderstood what he was trying to say about it.
And you continue to misrepresent Marx here:
“Marx was an IDEALIST. His materialism was not the vulgar Dawkins sort.”
Except that both Marx and Engels themselves called their philosophy historical materialism to differentiate it from Hegel’s dialectical idealism.
But then when have words meant anything to you?
*****
And Heidigger is a bore.
And another example of what rubes and dullards are Anglo-America,
More commentary has been devoted to Heidegger than Wittgenstein, and it’s only getting worse.
According to this Heidegger has already surpassed all but Aristotle.
And Heidegger died in 1976!!!
Wow, Duke, where is that philosophers have no influence …
You are starting from modern assumptions about the supposed uselessness of philosophy in a world where mechanistic thinking has become the rule. However, even their way of thinking, seems to derive from thinkers.
In my list of possible most prominent names that changed the history of mankind, I have listed only two names (I know) of philosophers who have dramatically changed Chinese history.
The power of the philosophers is much bigger than just ramble on abstractions that 90% of the population does not understand and does not try to understand. They can change the evolutionary course of an entire population. They that give motivations to sustain certain systems as opposed to others.
Your comments about religion seem to be based on the denial of reality, where it has a huge influence in the lives of most human beings.
Even without religion, it is possible that we return to live like wild animals, practicing incest, free sex … One of the largest artifacts used for domestication is precisely the religion.
Notice again, the grand purpose of philosophical thought, today, with identity disintegration of Western nations. Where do you think this came
Your comments about religion seem to be based on the denial of reality, where it has a huge influence in the lives of most human beings.
Yeah I take that back.
Most influential men EVER =
Alexander Fleming, Pasteur
MUCH MUCH MUCH more important than the entertainer Ian Fleming. No?
Vaccines and antibiotics and plumbing are responsible for 90% of the gains in life expectancy.
In mid 19th c Britain life expectancy wasn’t any greater than it is today for the few savages living in a “state of nature”. In 1900 it was a few years longer. Now a newborn female in Japan has life expectancy near 90. Unfortunately the most “modern” medicine is exclusively for the treatment of diseases of civilization.
To be honest, this test is not short at all. still not minimal…
The best estimate of IQ, at first sight, would be the size of the head…
You can even quantify this in a sunny day, comparing the persons head shadow area to yours, if you know your IQ and head size distribution.
Religionists and philosophers are influential? No.
At most they influence the jive talk of their fellow religionists and philosophers.
For Lubavitcher hasidim Manachem Schneerson is the messiah much more “influential” than Jesus.
For haredi Jews after Biblical figures:
Hillel and Shammai, Judah the Prince, Maimonides, Rashi, Luria, …
These are “influential” for them.
You just don’t understand the meaning of the word influence, Dookie.
If I don’t then you more than don’t.
Read Marx, understand him, and shut up until you do.
I trust you can read without moving your lips Pinky, but you’re still reading People Magazine, metaphorically speaking and, in your case, perhaps literally.
Monty Python ridicules philosophy here:
I just read too much Dickens as a child! Now check out the first line of “A Tale of Two Cities” for a real sentence!
just found an easier online calculator, you can make better counts now 🙂
https://readability-score.com/
as far as I see, without the dialogs, tale of two cities has on average 25-30 words per sentence. 🙂 it seems to depend on chapter.. but could not see a long first line…
You had me doubting my memory there – here is the first sentence…
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way-in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
sorry, the first lines in gutenberg page were like a poem, so I did not think of it…
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/98/98-h/98-h.htm
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Dickens was a prole.
MMmmm… I try very hard to keep that number down as well. Obviously I haven’t been as successful as I’d hoped.
Let’s test that out by looking at the opening three paragraphs of some of the best nonfiction writing of the last sixty-five years. Here, for example, is one selection of the top ten essays since 1950. It includes writing by James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion.
We’ll also use George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” as a sort of control. (Even though I think the essay is overrated.)
George Orwell – 23.6 words per sentence. (11.9 grade level.)
James Baldwin – 35.3 words per sentence (12.8 grade level)
Norman Mailer – 41.9 words per sentence (17.4 grade level)
Susan Sontag – 16.8 words per sentence (9.8 grade level)
John McPhee – 9.1 words per sentence (5.6 grade level)
Joan Didion – 31.6 words per sentence. (10.9 grade level)
******
So it appears to be all over the place. Mailer is long winded, while McPhee is brief.
Also, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural are considered to be masterpieces in composition. How do they fare when run through the same analysis?
Gettysburg Address – 27.1 words per sentence (10.7 grade level)
Second Inaugural – 27 words per sentence (12.1 grade level)
interesting sample.
It is not really all over the place. Average of them is very high.
I came up with this thing because it seemed quite easy to calculate.
maybe it measures more consciousness.
sorry I meant “conscientiousness”
alcoholic wisdom,
“It is not really all over the place. Average of them is very high.”
It’s a small sample, and yet the variance in it is quite high compared to your larger, heterogenous sample of commentators, writers, and scientists.
The result could have been the opposite, with talented writers showing a remarkable consistency in the average number of words they used per sentence. Yet that wasn’t the case.
Let’s look at two other writers, one famous for his short sentences and one famous for his long sentences. Both were primarily writers of fiction, but I’ll stick to analyzing their nonfiction work because fiction lends itself too easily to an impressionistic style of word play.
As before, I only look at the first three paragraphs.
Ernest Hemingway – 20.5 words per sentence (8.2 grade level)
Henry James – 30.4 words per sentence (13.3 grade level)
Not nearly as large a difference as I expected.
Let’s do an HBD version, using a handful of books I have on my Kindle reader. Unless otherwise noted, I refer to the first three paragraphs of most famous book written by the authors.
Cochran and Harpending – 21.3 words per sentence (11.9 grade level)
Nicholas Wade – 29 words per sentence (15.7 grade level)
Stephen Jay Gould – 30.9 words per sentence (15.5 grade level)
Charles Murray (Human Accomplishment) – 25.9 words per sentence (13.1 grade level)
Greg Clark – 18.3 words per sentence (11.1 grade level)
Richard Lynn (The Chosen People) – 29.8 words per sentence (16.0 grade level).
Madison Grant – 35.1 words per sentence (18.3 grade level).
******
I want to emphasize, in case it’s still not clear, that I don’t think this exercise proves a thing. I subscribe to the A.J. Liebling theory of writing: “The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business.”
http://megasociety.org/noesis/195.htm
one of mega society journals, Issue #195, December 2013
19.1
20.6
20.7
19.2
average: 19.9
4 articles from 4 people, and strangely very close to each other.
another journal from August 2004
http://megasociety.org/noesis/172.htm
18.7
14.6
30.7
18.5
average 20.625
another one from November 1997
http://megasociety.org/noesis/135.htm
17,8
13,2
18,8
19,2
21
average 18,0
another journal from MArch 2008
http://megasociety.org/noesis/186.htm
17
18.7
17.4
18.8
21
average 18.58
I do not why they are around more or less the same area between 18-21…
alcoholicwisdom & pincher, you guys might find this post interesting if you haven’t read it already:
It’s about measuring cognitive ability from writings.
Pumpkin,
Good piece. I read it before, but I’d forgotten about the particulars of the nun study.
I like the idea of combining grammatical complexity and idea density. But I foresee one problem with such an approach: Many Americans favor a simple prose style stripped of qualifying phrases and subordinate clauses. So I’m curious to know how the two scholars handled that.
American models for prose writing have been Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln, Mark Twain (when not writing colloquial speech), Ernest Hemingway, and Strunk and White. American writers with florid and/or convoluted styles, like Melville and James, were admired and celebrated, but not as frequently copied.
The many Americans who deliberately follow these leaner models for writing would seem to be at a disadvantage if measured for their grammatical complexity. The Brits are less inclined to follow this model, in my opinion. Their models are not Franklin, Twain, Hemingway, etc., but Macaulay, Swift, Burke, Addison, Steele, Johnson, etc., and so their sentences tend to be longer, more complex and more convoluted.
I like the idea of combining grammatical complexity and idea density. But I foresee one problem with such an approach: Many Americans favor a simple prose style stripped of qualifying phrases and subordinate clauses. So I’m curious to know how the two scholars handled that.
The lead authors of the nun study was skeptical about grammatical complexity, citing the fact that a very eminent writer was famous for his short simple sentences. The language expert simply replied by saying she never claimed grammatical complexity made for good literature, but they hoped it might predict dementia in later life…and it did, but with much less accuracy than idea density. So eventually they just abandoned grammatical complexity & focused only on idea density.
Perhaps idea density was less sensitive to personal writing style than grammatical complexity at least among that generation of nuns?
But Dr. Sue Kemper has done other research with spoken language samples & those studies found very high correlations between grammatical complexity & working memory.
Many Americans favor a simple prose style stripped of qualifying phrases and subordinate clauses.
I was punished for such writing in school so my current “style” such as it is has none of that.
And no style need have such. The qualifying phrases and subordinate clauses can be their own full sentences.
As I’ve said so many times,
Anglo-Americans have BAD taste. Writing isn’t an exception.
Dookie,
You’re obsessed with class differences, but write like a prole. If you read widely, you’d know the difference.
“The qualifying phrases and subordinate clauses can be their own full sentences.”
Well, no shit. But not all writing styles are to be run through a factory, stripping them of dependent clauses and qualifying phrases, in order to make them more presentable. The reason most schoolmarms tell their charges to write less and simplify their sentences is because that’s the easiest style to master quickly. The average school lad has a far better chance of writing like Hemingway than he will ever have of writing like Macauley. In fact, the Hemingway style is often parodied because it is so easy to emulate.
The other writing lessons presented to schoolchildren like Holy Writ are frequently just as stupid. Use the active voice and avoid passive constructions, for example.
But as many grammarians and linguists have complained over the years, Strunk and White got it mostly wrong on that matter. Here’s one recent complaint: 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.
A far better explanation of when to use active versus passive constructions is found in Joseph Williams’ Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. His explanation is far more detailed and reasonable: “Using the Passive Voice to Create Coherence.”
*****
A simple, stripped-down style is probably the best style for most writers. But that doesn’t make it the best style for better writers. There are hundreds if not thousands of celebrated writers in the English language who mastered a more complex style, and literature is far richer for it.
Take two American politicians who were (roughly) contemporaries – Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Franklin tried to simplify his writing. Jefferson did not. (The first sentence in the Declaration of Independence is 72 words long.) But both men wrote well.
As A. J Leibling wisely wrote: “The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business.”
“Anglo-Americans have BAD taste. Writing isn’t an exception.”
Like most of your dipshit generalizations, you have no idea what you’re talking about. In what other language other than English do you even read literature? And I’m not talking about English translations.
Alcoholicwisdom, you say you calculated our words per sentence, but you have 2 numbers for each of us? Or is that comma supposed to be a decimal?
yeah it is only one number, sorry, I copied from excel which uses a comma for decimal.
it is not really that accurate maybe, as I did it randomly, taking sentences from right and left…
Quite flattering. Thank you.
I always make an effort to have as few words as possible per “sentence”.
Sentences end with a “.”. One may write two or three sentences for one. That is, if one can write at all.
But for people who can’t write they never end.
Total vocabulary would be much more revealing.
And more revealing still would be range of construction and rarity of construction.
The proles think they can “talk fine and with a flourish”, but they just sound like Pincher Martin…
too many notes at best.
Faulkner had reeeeeeeeeeeeally long “sentences”,
YET from the POV of grammatical complexity Hemingway was his better.
As Churchill said, “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter.”
Might have been, “If I’d been smarter, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter.”
My comments on Lion’s blog have been described as Shakespearean and as Lacanian.
VERY HIGH PRAISE as it was never my intention to be either poetic or obscure.
Yet Martini esteems me at naught and esteems a fat ‘tached faggot G. K. Chesterton.
“My comments on Lion’s blog have been described as Shakespearean and as Lacanian.”
The acid test for an absolutely first-rate mind is whether it understands irony.
Someone was surely yanking your chain when they called you Shakespearean – unless they were comparing you to the fat and vain Falstaff.
Nope. They were not.
U R a MORON
And btw I’m NOT kidding.
You’re the dumbest person I’ve ever come across in these HBD blogs.
Full of sound and fury signifying nothing…
But Shakespeare was a VERY BAD WRITER.
I have to take issue with that somewhat – Shakespeare was writing plays not prose and he was writing 400 years ago. One thing you notice as you get older is how much life experience he captured in his plays, a particular character or phrase rings true again and again, it is really quite incredible.
I don’t think you can say Shakepeare was a bad writer of plays – or if you are – bring evidence… (I really hope you didn’t think the piece of writing above that sentence was evidence of being a very bad writer – it is brilliantly evocative to me at least).
Here’s my evidence motherfucker.
My graddad taught English at Columbia and was an AB PhD in English from Princeton.
He said that Shakespeare’s own Elizabethan audience DID NOT understand his plays.
He has absolutely nothing to say.
He just says what he does say with fucked up grammar and a large vocabulary.
Vomit.
He’s is THE example of English speaking peoples’ bad taste.
Really, that is your argument?
Shakespeare’s plays were successful, so your Grandad is arguing that people kept going to plays they didn’t understand? I take the point that they didn’t understand all of them, as Shakespeare invented words – so they had no chance – but there were baser, comedic moments in the plays – Shakespeare was a man of the people not an elite poet as you seem to think him.
I am afraid you are just displaying your own ignorance and arrogance here.
Jorge,
“My graddad taught English at Columbia and was an AB PhD in English from Princeton.”
I don’t care if your granddad sucked the cock of every Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature between 1925 and 1975 and then wrote his thesis on how the quality of their sperm correlated with their literary production.
You reported with some pride that a commentator was reminded of the Bard by your writing. I thought he must be putting you on. You’ve known shown that he was completely serious, which I suppose only goes to prove how easily idiots are drawn together.
Nothing about your writing gets within six country blocks of being Shakespearean. Not your insults. Not your prose. Not your poetry. Not your cirrhosis of the liver.
Shakespeare didn’t write repetitive insults. He did not write over and over and over again that “England is SHIT.” He was occasionally profane, but not often.
Some examples of Shakespeare insults:
“[Thou art] a fusty nut with no kernel!”
***
“[Thou art] a dull and muddy-mettled rascal.”
***
“Away, you bottle-ale rascal, you filthy bung, away!”
***
That last one seems most appropriate for you, Jorgeous.
CORRECTION:
“You’ve now shown that he was completely serious….”
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Hahaha !
Lion, don’t discourage Jorge. His talent at creative invective is almost Shakespearean. A lost art that, regardless of the target, provides great value. Consider him your equivalent of Lear’s fool.
The best commentator on this site in my opinion is Jorge Videla. Many may not like him because he comes across as sour grapes, but I think he sounds incomprehensibly brilliant at times and spot on. He reminds me of Jacques Lacan, a much hated person by the establishment, the French Psychoanalyst who was full of jibberish in his writings, Anti-American and Anti-Anglosphere as a person, and very perceptive when it comes to human behavior…
Now go fuck your mum Pinky.
You collect these little bits of praise thrown your way, Jorgeous, like a miser cherishing a few dirty pennies.
I WAS JUST PROVING YOU WRONG (as I always have) MOTHERFUCKER.
And again meaningless jabber.
Do you have some rare mental problem that you can only speak in bad jokes and have nothing whatever substantial to say?
“I WAS JUST PROVING YOU WRONG (as I always have) MOTHERFUCKER.”
Congratulations. The score is now 10 to 1 in my favor, Dookie.
So far you’ve been wrong about Marx being an idealist, Shakespeare being known for bad grammar and for mystifying his audiences in the Elizabethan era, and for a host of other bad ideas about literature and philosophy that you’ve collected over the years.
But you stopped me from pitching a shutout because you’re an assiduous collector of posts in which someone praises you without irony.
Your family would be so proud.
Here it motherfuckers.
Average number of words per sentence in the KJV of the Bible = 9!!!
average of some others:
william james sidis: 33
Immanuel Kant: 35
hermann hesse: 22
Rene Descartes : 85 (this is a lot!)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 32
one of the headhunters who wrote me: 25
lawrence of arabia: 25
bruce charlton: 28
turgenyev: 14 (one of the biggest brain sizes ever recorded)
schopenhauer: 30
I don’t believe any of those.
Did Sidis write anything?
Kant is another example of verbosity and repetition disguising vacuity. What Kant had to say in all his Critiques deserves repeating, but it doesn’t take more than a page.
This is NOT true of Heidegger.
It’s odd in Kant’s case because he admits it. He praises Hume’s clarity and simplicity over his own. (Hume’s Inquiry was the spark to his Critique of Pure Reason.)
Please could you summarise all the ideas in Kant’s Critiques in one page? It would be a service to humanity and you say it is easy – it’s only one page of writing after all? I wonder how many words per sentence you will achieve?
picked random text, therefore it is not that accurate but gives some information at least.
http://www.sidis.net/
bible: 25 words on average(picked random chapters)
Here are some other prose models used by English school boys for generations.
Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” – 65.5 words per sentence (21.6 grade level)
Samuel Johnson’s “The Decay of Friendship” – 25.6 words per sentence (14.4 grade level)
Joseph Addison’s “False and True Humour” 43.2 words per sentence (16.7 grade level)
Edmund Burke’s “On the Sublime and Beautiful” 36.7 words per sentence (15.5 grade level)
Richard Steele’s “Recollections” 61.4 words per sentence (20.4 grade level)
Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” 33.7 words per sentence (16.3 grade level)
Thomas Macauley’s “History of England” 51 words per sentence (21.1 grade level)
David Hume’s “History of England” 47.9 words per sentence (21.1 grade level)
FUCKING MORON.
CPR: Science as human enterprise must assume that phenomona have an order corresponding to human reason. Das ding-an-sich may not in fact be so ordered, but natsci must assume it is nonetheless or give up. It must assume it for the nonce, for the interminable nonce. Don’t confuse model and reality however close the approximation.
CP(Pracical)R: In order to be a good person one must assume that there is reward and punishment for in a life after this sublunary hell with untermenschen like Pink Martini.
So there you have it YOU FUCKING MORON in MUCH LESS than a page.
Move on to philosophers worth reading and ignore the MIDGET in body AND mind Kant.
What? Was Kant even 5′ tall?
100% of those stats of words per sentence are FALSE.
Is everyone other than me commenting from a gay bath house? I know that’s where Pincher’s IP address is, but all y’all?
You can find the stats on Amazon.
Sein und Zeit English MacQuarrie & Robinson translation is < 30 words per sentence.
“Is everyone other than me commenting from a gay bath house? I know that’s where Pincher’s IP address is, but all y’all?”
Dookie, if I was commenting from a gay bath house, you would be massaging my toes right now with your tongue, which would surely be a better use of that massive appendage than what you usually do with it.
I am surprised about the KJB, there are some short begats early on but I would have thought the sentence longer – can anyone verify that figure?
Not that it means anything anyway – its just a matter of style.
That’s because it’s wrong.
Maybe it was grade level I saw. I can’t find the stat. But the KJV is good writing IMHO. The best. I don’t say that as a believer. Even atheist Alan Dershowitz regards the Bible’s authors with awe.
And yet they weren’t considered as good as Shakespeare by their contemporaries…
Tolstoy denounced Shakespeare as a bad dramatist, not a true artist at all, and declared that Shakespeare’s fame was due to propaganda by German professors towards the end of the eighteenth century. Tolstoy claimed that Shakespeare was still admired only because of a sort of mass hypnosis or “epidemic suggestion”.
William Schwenk Gilbert was a genius in comparison to Shak.
What is with all the appeals to authority – your Grandad and now Tolstoy?
I don’t know why Tolstoy didn’t like Shakespeare, it could be because Shakespeare was a populist and Tolstoy was writing for a more elite audience? Or maybe he was upset that Russian literature, great though it is, wasn’t getting it’s due?
Anyway, you could have argued that Shakepeare was the equivalent of soap operas of it’s day and we only venerate it because of it’s age, or that it is historically innaccurate, written to suck up to the ruling classes of the day, or that it is misogynistic, or anti-semitic, and all of these arguments would be true to an extent – but you didn’t make them.
Xanadan,
“I don’t know why Tolstoy didn’t like Shakespeare, it could be because Shakespeare was a populist and Tolstoy was writing for a more elite audience? Or maybe he was upset that Russian literature, great though it is, wasn’t getting it’s due”
The history of literature is filled with incidents where one famous writer takes strong issue with a predecessor’s reputation.
Vladimir Nabokov said of Dostoevsky: “”Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment– by this reader anyway.”
Gore Vidal once called Hemingway a “Field and Stream writer.”
Mark Twain said of Jane Austin, “[Her] books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”
Tolstoy also hated Chekov’s work, saying he was even worse than Shakespeare.
The list goes on and on and on.
I wouldn’t make too much of these comments. A lot of artistic merit is ultimately subjective. Shakespeare’s reputation is secure no matter what Tolstoy thought of him. Indeed, it’s more secure than Tolstoy’s reputation.
You might be interested to know that George Orwell wrote an essay about Tolstoy’s views of Shakespeare. Orwell’s conclusion? It was probably motivated by malice, and in any case didn’t do the slightest damage to Shakespeare.
YOU ASKED FOR THE APPEALS MOTHERFUCKER!!!
WHAT’RE YOU RETARDED?
What is there other than authority in matters of taste?
My taste without authority:
Shakespeare was a conman, common, vulgar, prole motherfucker.
“YOU ASKED FOR THE APPEALS MOTHERFUCKER!!!”
That’s the point, YOU STEAMING PILE OF HIPPO SHIT !
Tolstoy’s opinion on Shakespeare is a decidedly minority opinion. Just a handful of literary cavilers think Shakespeare is bad.
Besides, Tolstoy’s native language was not English. He read and spoke English, but he probably missed much of the lyricism in Shakespeare because it wasn’t his native language.
You really shouldn’t trust someone’s opinion on a writer when they don’t read and speak the language with native-like fluency.
CORRECTION:
“YOU ASKED FOR THE APPEALS MOTHERFUCKER!!!”
That’s the point, YOU STEAMING PILE OF HIPPO SHIT !
Tolstoy’s opinion on Shakespeare is a decidedly minority opinion. Just a handful of literary cavilers think Shakespeare is bad.
Besides, Tolstoy’s native language was not English. He read and spoke English, but he probably missed much of the lyricism in Shakespeare because it wasn’t his native language.
You really shouldn’t trust someone’s opinion on a writer when they don’t read and speak the language with native-like fluency.
Jorgeous Jorge aka Dookie aka ypresi cites the arguments of his distinguished ancestor and professional literary fellator as proof Shakespeare was a bad writer.
“[Dookie’s grandpappy] said that Shakespeare’s own Elizabethan audience DID NOT understand his plays.”
Of course this was not true. Theater attendance was not mandatory in the Elizabethan era. No one had to go to the theater and pay good money to be mystified by actors flapping their gums on stage, especially when there were several playwrights competing for the honor of luring them to the several theaters which existed at the time.
Shakespeare wrote more than thirty-five plays over a period of nearly twenty-five years. He couldn’t have done that if his audience didn’t understand what was in them.
Shakespeare was not – or at least not always – the most popular playwright in his day. That honor belonged to Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Shakespeare borrowed much from Marlowe. But Shakespeare was popular.
Dookie writes:
[Shakespeare] has absolutely nothing to say.”
Who cares what an artist has to say? We should only care how he says it. Style and structure are everything; message is nothing.
Any idiot is capable of writing a play or novel that says “war is bad,” but the real skill of the artist is in how he builds his creation, the lyrical quality of his words and the structure of his theme.
Dookie writes:
“He just says what he does say with fucked up grammar and a large vocabulary.”
What a silly comment. English grammar (and orthography) didn’t really become systematized until after Shakespeare was long gone. And to the extent it was systematized, the fucked-up schoolmarms of the day tried to make English grammar conform to Latin grammar because Latin was the more prestigious language.
Shakespeare was a dramatist, not some idiot schoolmarm trying to follow some dumb language rules. But like most literary geniuses, he had a natural sense of how language worked and how it should sound. That is the reason he is celebrated today.
THERE IS NO PROOF in matters of taste. DUHHHH!
YOU’RE JUST ANOTHER RETARDED CUNT.
SHAKESPEARE = SHIT.
If you’d any taste at all you’d know it.
But you haven’t.
“THERE IS NO PROOF in matters of taste.”
Then tell us again about Shakespeare’s bad grammar and how his audiences couldn’t understand his plays. Tell us how Shakespeare had nothing to say.
You’re talking out of your ass again, and when you get caught, you like to PUT EVERYTHING IN CAPITAL LETTERS TO SHOW HOW REALLY MEAN YOU ARE.
But I know you’re a pussy, Dookie, so your capital letters don’t scare me.
I’ll take The Death of Ivan Ilyich or even One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
over ANYTHING written by Shakespeare.
Grow up and start reading REAL literature.
Shakespeare is for not too bright tweens.
“I’ll take The Death of Ivan Ilyich or even One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
over ANYTHING written by Shakespeare.”
Unless Dookie reads Russian, how would he know? Like 99 percent of Americans (including myself), the only thing Dookie probably reads are the translations, which is another way of saying he’s never read Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn at all.
If you haven’t read an author like Flaubert or Tolstoy or Thomas Mann in the original languages of French, Russian, or German, then all you’re getting is a watered-down version of their stories. It’s fine to admire the translation, but no one should ever mistake it for the real thing when reading literature.
Translations should be viewed as literature in and of themselves.
Think of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu. When I was a kid, the most popular English translation was C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s Remembrance of Things Past. I loved that title (which was taken from a Shakespearean sonnet), and I loved the translation.
But what I didn’t know was that the title and some of the other translations in the book were misleading. Moncrieff’s literary license bothered some, including most notably Marcel Proust himself, who thought it misrepresented his book’s theme, and so the most recent translations of Proust’s work have been changed to the more literal In Search of Lost Time.
You can read more about the fascinating episode here. In the end, most people still believe that Moncrieff’s work was an excellent translation of Proust’s work, even though it failed to covey the author’s precise meaning in a couple of important places.
*****
This kind of row about the translation of major literary works is quite common. The literary critic Edmund Wilson and the Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov, for example, had a legendary public argument about his translation of the Russian poem Eugene Onegin. Nabokov decided to translate Pushkin’s poem literally, sacrificing any beauty or meter for precision. Edmund Wilson criticized that decision in the New York Review of Books. Wilson had studied some Russian, but he was still lightly equipped to take on Nabokov in a dispute over a Russian author, and most people feel Wilson lost the exchange.
*****
Arthur Waley was also famous for his translations of Chinese and Japanese classics. His translations have sometimes been criticized for their errors, which is understandable given that Waley never spoke the languages nor did he ever visit the Far East.
The Chinese historian Jonathan Spence explained the power of Waley’s translations:
In other words, translations are almost works of art in and of themselves. But the reader of the translation isn’t reading the original work. He’s reading a work inspired by the original work.
Dear God how many words is that motherfucker?
Yanking your own chain and spooging all over the comments section of HBD-tard blogs.
I’d stomp my own Dad to death and laugh, but he did finish in the top 10% of his law school class.
…the jewels of Chinese and Japanese literature…
There are no such jewels. Chinamen are verbally RETARDED.
And it’s not that they’re recent immigrants.
Ancient “wisdom” from the Far East is 100% INDIAN.
China people 😉 always lose on Jeopardy, always have marbles in their mouth.
And as an HBD-tard you’d know this. NE Asian VIQ is < European. All the advantage they may have is in the non-verbal, the mirrior of the Ashkenazim.
Uh jorge,
If we had a list of the 100 smartest people in the world, all of them would be East Asian. Every single one of them.
You have an extremely high verbal IQ but i would seriously doubt you could score within FIFTEY POINTS of my East Asian cleaning lady on a test of pure spatial IQ. And she has the brain size to back it up.
And despite coming here dirt poor, her kids all probably run circles around you financially despite your privileged high class background.
Jorgeous,
“I’d stomp my own Dad to death and laugh…”
Will you be selling tickets to this fratricidal affair?
“There are no such jewels. Chinamen are verbally RETARDED.”
What you mean to say is that you’ve never read any East Asian literature.
“China people 😉 always lose on Jeopardy, always have marbles in their mouth.”
Yep, they’ve had real trouble on that game show recently
“And as an HBD-tard you’d know this. NE Asian VIQ is < European. All the advantage they may have is in the non-verbal, the mirrior of the Ashkenazim."
Literary masterpieces are created by individuals within a literate culture, not by a race. So the overall population numbers matter. China has had enough bright and literate people to create a literature worthy of attention and respect by people who still care about that sort of thing.
Your comment is as dumb as saying that no worthwhile literature was created by Europeans until the Ashkenazim came along because the Jews clearly have far higher verbal IQs than their gentile neighbors.
Of course if that were true, then we would have to throw out nearly every literary masterpiece Europe ever created before the 20th century, and a lot of masterpieces since then.
I wrote:
“Literary masterpieces are created by individuals within a literate culture, not by a race. So the overall population numbers matter.”
As an example, go back to the year 1800. At the time the U.K. had a population of 10 million people; France had a population of 30 million; Russia had a population of 37 million; the German-speaking kingdoms, duchies, and principalities had a population of 20 million; the Italian peninsula, 17 million; Spain, 10 million.
The Qing dynasty, on the other hand, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912, had a population of 300 million in 1800. That’s thirty times the number found in England and Scotland at the time, and more people than resided across the entire continent of Europe.
So even if we were to assume a large gap in verbal IQs between East Asians and Europeans – let’s say, one third of a SD – there would still be far more people with a high verbal IQ in Qing China than in the U.K. and France combined. And no one can seriously argue that the racial gap between verbal IQs is that high. It may, in fact, be nonexistent.
There were also no significant structural differences in 1800. Literary rates in China and the U.K. at the time were comparable. Around 30 percent. Again, even if we assume that literacy in the Qing meant something entirely different than literacy in England, and that the number of Chinese who could conceivably read a novel like Dream of the Red Chamber, let alone write it, would’ve numbered no more than 10 percent of the population, the much larger numbers of Chinese would still overwhelm any advantage we give to higher verbal IQ and literacy rates in England.
Oh for a muse of fire…
Or for a sock to shove down your throat you English POS.
By D’Oyly Carte:
For Real (Val Kilmer) Genius:
Or (Ha!) a German who outdid Shak in libretto AND composed:
Remember the millions of men who died because there was a cancer in the human race.
That cancer is England and its diaspora.
My dad was a douche bag POS, but he did have that Harvard AB in English.
He thought very little of Shakespeare.
What did he reckon the best novel in English?
Trent’s Last Case
And even in his own time? What is sonnet 147 to Death be not Proud?
Shakespeare’s like the Beatles. Crap compared to The Who, but much more promoted.
Shakespeare’s like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
IT’S THE CHEESIEST!!!
Indeed, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
The Chinks come to the US and Canada and bitch about “discrimination” when they THEMSELVES are biggest racist pieces of shit in the world.
If they were so racist they would have put your ancestors in chains back when China was the richest & most powerful nation on Earth. Do you know your history? I think not.
The Chinese in China are without a doubt racist (or ethnocentric – since even other East Asians are often treated with condescension), but the ABCs are the least likely minority group in the U.S. to complain about how they’re treated.
Jorgeous Jorge is just trying to compensate for his own crude racism. He was recently over at Hsu’s blog posting some crude racist banter that he apparently wanted his audience to believe is how Chinese talk. It’s since been deleted, but it was pretty revealing of JJ’s low character.
So….After all emotional talks… PP, are you still in?) I got a sample – 1, 5, 5, 10, 12, 13, 14. What IQ s can correspondent to these scores?
correspond *
:))) I wish I had read this some time ago :))
Actually, it’s very very hard to persuade any normally-strong-charactered person to take an IQ test, no fear’s as deep as that of getting their vanity injured. (And need not tell you the ridiculous self-lies they find as pretexts to refrain from doing the test.)