This morning while I was booting up for work, I somehow accidentally clicked on MS News. I typically avoid US news like the plague because I get too worked up and emotional.
Michael Flynn is revving up the nutters of QAnon while his brother is the commander of all US forces in the Pacific? A black man in SC was killed by police while they were forcibly dragging him from his cell?
(How do you guys do it, cope with all the shit? But I’m not going to waste keystrokes on a rant here.)
I had to escape all this news pounding my eyes fast! I should have X-ed in the upper right corner but I was in a panic, so I quickly clicked on a link that promised some escapism - advertised as an article in Spanish listing the US presidents with the lowest IQs.
It proceeded to list ALL the US presidents and give a little bio and their IQs. At first it seemed to go from lowest to highest, but then after JFK at 159.5 it started to be a jumble. It definitely wasn’t chronological. I never figured out the order, but whew! So glad to see that GWB really was actually pretty low on the scale (as we all knew). Obama is not as high as I would expect. And Bill was the same as JFK (in so many ways!). Now, that I’m thinking about it… they didn’t show Trump. Hmmmmmmmmm, maybe the article had a lower limit… a floor?
But they did show George Washington, John Adams, James Madison…. And so instead of getting to work, I went down the rabbit hole to research IQ tests. I wanted to find out how long they’ve been around and how did we possibly know the IQ of George Washington.
Developed in 1905 by Alfred Binet, upon request by the French government, the Binet-Simon Scale was used to identify which students would need remedial assistance. This altruistic beginning was sent in a sad new direction when Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman introduced the American version of the IQ test in 1916.
Terman believed the IQ score showed the absolute limit of a person. This belief, espoused by a renowned doctor, was co-opted by eugenicists, who viewed intelligence and other social behaviors as being determined by biology and race. Results from these tests were then used to deny immigrants admittance into the US and to impose sterilization on people.
Use of the IQ test has matured and the abuses have been done away with, however one thing I read this morning brought me to a full stop:
“Some districts in the US have recently employed a maximum IQ score for admission into the police force. The fear was that those who scored too highly would eventually find the work boring and leave — after significant time and resources had been put towards their training.”
Let me say that again. Police in the US have an IQ ceiling – which the courts have upheld.
Never did find Trump’s IQ. Probably less than the Thin Blue ceiling, though.