that’s an irrelevant point. assuming no giant conspiracy to graduate black magna’s from HLS (this is a non-trivial chance, but put this to the side), obama’s IQ is safely within the 135-150 interval. that’s 1 standard deviation, enough error for you? he’s still the smartest candidate. we’re not talking about performance, blah, blah, blah. who’s the smartest candidate?

Has anyone actually looked at what a probabilistic interval for the candidates’ fluid intelligence would be? It would be interesting to read.

that’s an irrelevant point. assuming no giant conspiracy to graduate black magna’s from HLS (this is a non-trivial chance, but put this to the side), obama’s IQ is safely within the 135-150 interval. that’s 1 standard deviation, enough error for you? he’s still the smartest candidate. we’re not talking about performance, blah, blah, blah. who’s the smartest candidate? that was sigma’s question, and sigma’s answer was a plausible and likely one. there is a non-trivial chance that mccain has a higher measured IQ than obama, pretty much a zero chance that palin or biden does.

people who start making red-herring arguments are showing either their stupidity or their emotionality. seeing as i have 6 years on record trying to state facts as accurately as i can without putting my personal biases to the fore i think i have some credibility on this score. although to be honest this debate has been useful in smoking out the stupids and the emotionals.

yes, this is distinct from pure “g.” i know plenty of high g retards. they say stupid things really coherently.

1) who cares what your personal experience was?

2) what law school did you go to? your credibility increases if you went to harvard, yale, etc. if not, who cares?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)

Again, you have outrun my vocabulary, hence whatever this may mean, it is not obvious to low-g readers like me.

“obama graduated with magna from HLS. that is not ‘tolerable.’”

Meh. There was a joint “magna” from my law school class. One guy was brilliant, and worked very hard. The woman who also got it was smart, but not brilliant, and obviously was a dedicated student, and not terribly impressive otherwise. These paper credentials impress me less and less the older I get and the more I see. A person who is good at taking exams or writing papers may or may not be good at all kinds of other stuff. I have observed that people who get advanced degrees in hard sciences are in fact usually much smarter than other people, but I also observe that they often have offsetting defects, including inflated self-valuation that makes them bitter when less smart people who have other valuable attributes get more of life’s prizes. Academic credentials are a poor indicator of the quality of work a person will actually do, their value to an organization, or much of anything else. What I do see is that such people form cartels to maintain the “value” of their paper. In the law it is comical to see the high-credentialled young lawyers at big firms working like dogs while some plaintiffs lawyer with a blue collar demeanor and a third-tier law degree runs circles around them. I am working on a case like that right now. This happens pretty frequently. The smartypantses would like to run the whole world all the time, but thank God they never will.

Of the four major candidates, both Palin and Obama are obviously deficient in their schemata.

obama graduated with magna from HLS. that is not “tolerable.”

and yes, it is harder if you are poor to go to an elite school. but it is not that difficult to get scholarships and what not to a relatively good school. she went to 5 schools in 6 years and graduated with a not-too-hard-degree from a not-too-hard-school. you can draw fewer inferences about her IQ than you can about obama’s because of the variance of the sample pool here, so i’m not as confident she’s dumb (e.g., IQ 110) as sigma is.