Clever sillies: why high IQ people tend to be deficient in common sense

In previous editorials I have written about the absent-minded and socially inept ‘nutty professor’ stereotype in science, and the phenomenon of ‘psychological neoteny’ whereby intelligent modern people (including scientists) decline to grow-up and instead remain in a state of perpetual novelty-seeking adolescence. These can be seen as specific examples of the general phenomenon of ‘clever sillies’ whereby intelligent people with high levels of technical ability are seen (by the majority of the rest of the population) as having foolish ideas and behaviours outside the realm of their professional expertise. In short, it has often been observed that high IQ types are lacking in ‘common sense’–and especially when it comes to dealing with other human beings. General intelligence is not just a cognitive ability; it is also a cognitive disposition. So, the greater cognitive abilities of higher IQ tend also to be accompanied by a distinctive high IQ personality type including the trait of ‘Openness to experience’, ‘enlightened’ or progressive left-wing political values, and atheism. Drawing on the ideas of Kanazawa, 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. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively. I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19733444

A better title would/should be:

SMART people (high IQ and education) are DUMB!

Clever sillies – why high IQ people tend to be deficient in common sense.docx

Your chances of dying from Covid-19? If you’re healthy & under 65, a 40-mile daily commute by car is more likely to kill you

7 Oct, 2020 12:46

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By Malcolm Kendrick, doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, ‘Doctoring Data – How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,’ is available here.

Yes, coronavirus is a serious infection for the elderly and vulnerable. But, for just about everyone else, it’s a relatively mild condition with a very low fatality rate. The only thing to fear is our overreaction to it.

In this piece, I intend to establish a reasonably accurate estimate for the risk of dying of Covid-19 for the average healthy person under the age of sixty-five.

If we go back to the start of the pandemic, most of the world locked down based on a prediction that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid-19 would be in the region of one per cent.

In the UK, the pandemic modellers at Imperial College London, the group with the greatest influence on Government policy, estimated the IFR at 0.9 percent. In short, they predicted that approximately one in a hundred people infected with the Sars-Cov2 virus would die.

Has this estimate proven accurate? If so, within a world population of between seven and eight billion, we would expect to suffer up to 76 million deaths. So far, there have been just over one million.

Having said this, no-one predicted that everyone could become infected. The Imperial College model suggested that about 80 percent of people would need to be infected before we reached ‘herd immunity.’ I prefer to call it community-wide immunity. We are not cattle.

UK health secretary claims rise in Covid-19 cases is ‘very serious problem’

Which means that we were not going to reach that figure of 76 million. Under this 80 percent model, we might expect to reach 61 million deaths (7.5bn x 0.8 x 0.1). Even with this reduced number, we are a long way short. How long might it take to get to 61 million?

At present, worldwide deaths are running at around 5,000 per day. At this rate, it would take 33 years to reach sixty million deaths. I am not certain what the time limitation is before a pandemic could be considered to have ended. I would imagine that 33 years might be stretching things a little far.

Perhaps a more important point to consider is this. Do we know how many people have been infected up to this point? If so, we can make a better guess at the likely IFR, and your risk of dying.

Dr Mike Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies programme, recently stated the WHO has estimated that 750 million people have been infected worldwide.

If this is the case, calculating the current, rather than the estimated, IFR is pretty straightforward.

You simply divide the one million deaths [1,034,068, to be fully accurate], by 750m.

1,034,068/750,000,000 = 0.138 percent.

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So, an IFR of 0.138 percent. Which is significantly lower than the initially predicted one per cent.

Or, to turn this figure around, according to the WHO figures, if you become infected with Covid-19, there is a one-in-750 chance you will die.

Of course, figures will vary from country to country. In Kenya, for example, the most recent attempt to estimate the IFR showed an exceptionally low rate. A study was done where antibodies for Sars-Cov2 were taken between April and June 2020. It was found that seroprevalence, the number of people showing antibodies, was 5.2 percent. (This will be an underestimate of true infection numbers, as many people do not create antibodies).

This represents an ‘infected’ population of just under three million (2,796,107), and there had been 71 deaths. Which provides an Infection Fatality Ratio of 0.00254 percent. This extremely low rate is, currently, unexplained.

On the other hand, the country with the highest overall death rate based on mortality per million is Peru. The total population of Peru is 32 million, and there have been just over 32,000 deaths. Which is a population fatality rate of almost exactly 0.1 percent. How many people have been infected in Peru in total? Uncertain. However, their IFR is going to end up in excess of 0.1 percent. Not everybody has yet been infected.

Covid-19 death toll tops 1 MILLION worldwide as pandemic spikes in US, Brazil & Europe

Why is there so much variation? This is currently unknown. Some people think that the indigenous population in Peru is at much higher risk than the surrounding ‘European’ population, due to genetic factors. However, let’s leave aside country-to-country and genetic variability for now. Overall, if you get infected, it looks as though the chance of dying currently stands at one in seventy hundred and fifty.

However, there is another enormously important factor at play here. Which is that, in almost all countries, Covid-19 is far more serious and deadly in the elderly population. Therefore, the average IFR doesn’t tell you much about your real risk. You need to factor in age.

For example, across most of Western Europe, if we look at excess mortality rates since the start of the epidemic, there have been just over two thousand more deaths than normal in those under the age of 45. These figures come from EuroMOMO, which gathers data from 24 European countries, with a combined population of 240 million (The UK is treated as four separate countries).

EuroMOMO describes its mission thus: ‘The overall objective of the original European Mortality Monitoring Project was to design a routine public health mortality monitoring system aimed at detecting and measuring, on a real-time basis, excess number of deaths related to influenza and other possible public health threats across participating European Countries.’

In those aged over 45, there have been more than 200,000 excess deaths. The figures from EuroMOMO in more detail are:

1-14 years = -15 deaths (minus 15)

15-44 years = 2,075

45 – 64 years = 17,826

65 – 74 years = 25,674

75 – 84 years = 65,982

85 + years = 98.069

So in all, for people aged 65-plus, there were 190,857 excess deaths.

Below is the EuroMOMO graph of all deaths across Europe on a week-by-week basis in 2020. As you can see there is a big rise in excess deaths, that started in late March and was finished by the middle of May. There was a further small blip in early September, which has now gone.

© EuroMOMO

Essentially, if you are under 45 the risk of death (so far) has been 0.00158 percent or about one in 70,000. Over the age of 65 it is 0.17 percent.

What is it for those with no significant underlying medical conditions? Much lower.

Leaving that issue aside, for those in the lower age range, even in those up to 65, the risk of death remains extremely low. The following statement comes from a paper written by three Stanford University doctors, entitled ‘Population-level COVID-19 mortality risk for non-elderly individuals overall and for non-elderly individuals without underlying diseases in pandemic epicenters’:

“People <65 years old have very small risks of COVID-19 death even in pandemic epicenters and deaths for people <65 years without underlying predisposing conditions are remarkably uncommon.”

Death toll from Covid-19 could ‘very likely’ reach 2 MILLION before vaccine widely available, WHO says

As this paper went on to say, looking at Europe, and various US States:

“The COVID-19 mortality rate in people <65 years old during the period of fatalities from the epidemic was equivalent to the mortality rate from driving between 4 and 82 miles per day for 13 countries and 5 states.”

To put this another way, for healthy individuals under the age of 65, even during the peak weeks of the pandemic, a forty-mile commute was more likely to kill you than Covid-19 in most European countries and several US States.

Yes, for the elderly and vulnerable, Covid-19 is a serious infection, with an Infection Fatality Ratio significantly higher than most influenza epidemics. With the possible exceptions of 1957 and 1968, and leaving aside the flu pandemic of 1918-19 – which dwarfs everything else.

However, for the rest of the population, Covid-19 has proven to be a relatively mild condition with a very low fatality rate.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/502802-chances-dying-covid-19/

Virus-free. www.avg.com

‘When in doubt, call it Covid’: Trump accuses CDC of inflating figures as US passes 20 million coronavirus cases

3 Jan 2021 15:03 / Updated 1 day ago

Donald Trump has lashed out at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, claiming the health agency has exaggerated the pandemic in the US by using a broad definition of what constitutes a Covid-19 case or death.

“The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is far exaggerated in the United States because of @CDCgov’s ridiculous method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom report, purposely, very inaccurately and low. ‘When in doubt, call it Covid.” Fake News!’” Trump tweeted on Sunday.

The outburst comes as the United States surpasses 20 million Covid-19 cases that have been linked to 350,000 deaths since the start of the health crisis.

ALSO, ON RT.COMLA hospital workers balk at taking Covid-19 vaccine, media says they’re somehow not ‘IN TUNE’ with science & Trump is to blame

The US president is not wrong in pointing out that other countries count coronavirus cases differently, however. Starting in April, the CDC began including “probable” cases and deaths in its tallies, although some states choose not to report such figures. A “probable” case or death means that health workers can label someone as Covid-19 positive even if they haven’t been tested, as long as the patient’s symptoms meet the “clinical criteria” of the virus.

Deborah Birx, a member of the White House Covid-19 taskforce who is stepping down from her post once Trump leaves office, acknowledged back in April that “in this country we’ve taken a very liberal approach to [Covid-19] mortality.” She noted that, unlike other nations, “if someone dies with Covid-19 we are counting that as a Covid-19 death,” even if it’s unclear whether the virus was the cause of the fatality.

This policy is wildly different from how China tabulates coronavirus cases, for example. China does not count asymptomatic carriers of the virus in its tally of confirmed cases, and as a result its official number of cases are far lower than what might be expected.

When in doubt call it Covid.docx

This shot really emphasizes Hilary’s lipedema/steatopygia

https://twitter.com/KirbySommers/status/1343432564288139266?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1343432564288139266%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unz.com%2Fisteve%2Frest-in-peace-vagina-monologues-we-hardly-knew-ye%2F

Lipoedema is a long-term (chronic) condition typically involving an abnormal build-up of fat cells in the legs, thighs and buttocks.

Lipoedema – NHS (www.nhs.uk)

STEATOPYGIA

(Gr. arEap, fat, iruy17 rump), an unusual accumulation of fat in and around the buttocks. The deposit of fat is not confined to the gluteal regions, but extends to the outside and front of the thighs, forming a thick layer reaching sometimes to the knee. This curious development constitutes a racial characteristic of the Bushmen. It is specially a feature of the women, but it occurs in a less degree in the males. It is also common among the Hottentots, and has been noted among the pygmies of Central Africa. In women it is regarded among them as a beauty: it begins in infancy and is fully developed on the first pregnancy. It is often accompanied by the peculiar formation known as “the Hottentot-apron,” hypertrophy of the nymphae (Tablier). No satisfactory explanation of these malformations has been offered.

Steatopygia would seem to have been a characteristic of a race which once extended from the Gulf of Aden to the Cape of Good Hope, of which stock Bushmen and pygmies are remnants. The discovery in the caves of the south of France of figures in ivory presenting a remarkable development of the thighs, and even the peculiar prolongation of the nymphae, has been used to support the theory that a steatopygous race once existed in Europe.

What seems certain is that steatopygia in. both sexes was fairly widespread among the early races of man. While the Bushmen and Hottentots afford the most noticeable examples of its development, it is by no means rare in other parts of Africa, and occurs even more frequently among Bastaards of the male sex than among Hottentot women.

Steatopygia – 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica – Bible Encyclopedia (studylight.org)

Vitamin D can help reduce coronavirus risk by 54%: Boston University doctor

The sunshine vitamin is easy to find and relatively cheap

SUDBURY, MA: September 16, 2020: Dr. Michael Holick holds Vitamin D Supplements in Sudbury, Massachusetts. (Staff photo by Nicolaus Czarnecki/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)

By alexi.cohan | Boston Herald

PUBLISHED: September 17, 2020 at 2:00 p.m. | UPDATED: September 19, 2020 at 2:21 p.m.

Stop waiting for a miracle drug: A Boston University doctor says a sufficient amount of vitamin D can cut the risk of catching coronavirus by 54%.

“People have been looking for the magic drug or waiting for the vaccine and not looking for something this simple,” said Dr. Michael Holick, professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at Boston University School of Medicine.

Holick and his colleagues studied blood samples from Quest Diagnostics of more than 190,000 Americans from all 50 states and found that those who had deficient levels of vitamin D had 54% higher COVID positivity compared to those with adequate levels of vitamin D in the blood.

The risk of getting coronavirus continued to decline as vitamin D levels increased, the study, published in the Public Library of Science One peer-reviewed journal shows.

“The higher your vitamin D status, lower was your risk,” Holick said.

Many people are vitamin D-deficient because there are only small amounts in food, Holick said. Most vitamin D comes from sun exposure and many are deprived, especially during winter months.

But the sunshine vitamin is easy to find and relatively cheap in drug stores, and taking vitamin D pills comes at no risk. “It’s perfectly safe,” Holick said.

“It’s considered to be, by many, the nutrient of the decade,” Holick said.

COVID-19 positivity is strongly associated with vitamin D levels in the blood, a relationship that stayed the same across different races, sexes and age ranges, the study states.

Vitamin D suppresses excessive cytokine release that can present as a cytokine storm, a common cause of COVID-related morbidity and mortality.

A deficiency in the nutrient alters the immune system, making one more likely to get upper respiratory infections, Holick said.

Throughout the pandemic, people of color have been disproportionately affected by coronavirus, experiencing a higher risk of acquiring it and having serious complications, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

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Holick’s study examined the ZIP codes of people of color and found patients from predominantly Black and Hispanic ZIP codes had lower levels of vitamin D and were also more likely to have coronavirus than in patients from predominantly white, non-Hispanic ZIP codes.

The average adult needs around 2,000 units of vitamin D a day, Holick said. He said he’s been taking 6,000 units a day for decades and is in great health.

Several other studies on vitamin D have shown its benefits to the immune system.

Research published with the National Institutes of Health showed people with lower vitamin D levels were more likely to self-report a recent upper respiratory tract infection than those with sufficient levels.

Another study of more than 11,000 participants published in the British Medical Journal found vitamin D supplementation reduced the risk of acute respiratory tract infection among all participants.

“Vitamin D definitely improves your overall immunity to fight infections,” Holick said.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/09/17/vitamin-d-can-help-reduce-coronavirus-risk-by-54-boston-university-doctor/

The Top 10 Most-Suppressed News Stories Of 2020

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

Back in the day, when I was managing editor at the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., I enjoyed the end-of-year ritual of voting in the Associated Press’s poll of the Top 10 news stories.

When I started participating in the year 2000, my list would include many of the same stories that made the final AP list, although often with differences in ranking. But by the time I retired in 2018, my view of the news had sharply diverged from the AP’s consensus view. I’d become something of a gadfly by then, questioning what seemed to be an ever more transparent left-leaning bias in mainstream reporting.

That divergence was probably magnified by the 2016 candidacy of Donald Trump and the bright light he had shined on Fake News, but my disenchantment with my profession had been growing for years, as chronicled in my book “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?”

Still, there is no way that even as recently as four years ago I would have predicted just how abysmally irresponsible the media would become by 2020. Major newspapers are winning Pulitzer Prizes for blatantly false reporting on topics such as “Russian collusion.” Meanwhile, Silicon Valley oligarchs have appointed themselves censors — warning the American people not to read or watch anything that hasn’t been “fact-checked” by their hand-picked thought police.

The situation has gotten so bad that it’s no longer worth ranking the top news stories of the year because so little that is covered is news and so much that is news is written off as a “conspiracy theory.” That’s why I’m introducing Heartland Diary USA’s first annual presentation of “Last Chance to Wake Up and Smell the News They Tried to Kill.”

So here are five of the biggest suppressed stories of 2020. Pardon me if I don’t go into great detail on them, but the closer I get to the truth, the more likely that Google, Twitter and Facebook will bury my story, too.

5) Mysterious mutating lockdown:

Has anyone ever figured out why it is OK for grocery store workers to remain on the job during an international pandemic while serving the needs of the entire population with no restrictions other than wearing a mask, but it is considered dangerous for gyms to open or, most ludicrously, for anyone other than spouses of governors to take their boat for a quick spin around the lake? It seems like the lockdown can turn into whatever is convenient for politicians. The uneven effects of the lockdown on different states and different sectors have resulted in the shift of trillions of dollars of capital in ways that will reshape the economy for generations to come, yet we are not supposed to talk about it.

4) Hydroxychloroquine:

If you know anything about this drug, it is probably just that some guy in Arizona died after drinking it, and that maybe President Trump was somehow responsible. Well, as they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The guy in Arizona didn’t take hydroxychloroquine; he took a fish tank cleaner called chloroquine phosphate. And Trump never told anyone to take either the drug or the fish-tank cleaner. He just said hydroxychloroquine was a promising treatment against COVID-19. Of course, as soon as he said it, the radical academic leftists who control medical journals and associations warned that hydroxychloroquine had no benefit as a treatment and was potentially dangerous even though it had been safely used against malaria and various immune deficiency syndromes for decades. Fortunately, many doctors who were familiar with the drug continued to use it as a therapy in the early stages of COVID infections, and many patients around the world have been spared the most dire effects of the virus as a result. Just don’t expect to read about it in the New York Times.

3) Trump’s vaccine victory:

While the president has been painted as anti-science, it was his administration’s support that led to the fastest turnaround ever from viral discovery to viral vaccine — essentially less than a year. Even as House Democrats are poised to launch investigations into Trump’s supposed crimes against humanity for being president during the COVID crisis, lives are being saved as a result of his policies. Just don’t expect to read about it in the mainstream media, which spent much of 2020 ridiculing Trump for his prescient predictions that a vaccine would be developed by the end of the year.

2) Hunter Biden’s laptop:

The ability to bury the Hunter Biden story throughout the 2020 presidential campaign ranks as one of the greatest victories in the history of propaganda. Hunter is the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, and his acknowledged history as a drug addict is now considered his strong suit. The Senate Homeland Security Committee found extensive evidence that Hunter has made hundreds of millions of dollars for the Biden family by selling access to his father, so when Hunter’s laptop turned up with first-person incriminating evidence, it was pretty obvious that Joe Biden had a lot of answer for. Except that the media never made him answer for anything. It preferred to rest on the bizarre assertion from 50 former U.S. intelligence officials that clear evidence of foreign collusion on Hunter’s laptop had all the earmarks of a “Russian disinformation” campaign. This was errant nonsense. Reporters read the emails!

1) Election fraud:

It turned out that everything that happened in 2020 before Nov. 3 was just prologue for the greatest deception in American history — namely the hijacking of a presidential election through means both legal and illegal. Most importantly, every state that changed its election procedures without the consent of its legislature violated the U.S. Constitution. That’s why Republicans plan to challenge the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6. Whether you like Donald Trump or not should be irrelevant. You either follow the Constitution or you don’t. The fact that Trump increased his support in almost every demographic since 2016 and yet lost the election will apparently remain a mystery because the Democratic Party, with an assist from weak Republicans, is intent on continuing the charade that Joe Biden is a beloved elder statesman even more popular than Barack Obama.

I should add a disclaimer here. My list will not be your list. This is 2020, and there is plenty of suppression to go around.

You are hereby invited to submit your own contributions in the comments section below. In the meantime, rounding out my Top 10, here are some of the other major stories suppressed in 2020:

• The communist links to antifa and Black Lives Matter;
• how the Russian hoax was exposed but left unpunished;
• how the policies of a certain governor in New York state led to thousands of COVID deaths in nursing homes;
• the successful campaign of billionaire George Soros to subvert American jurisprudence by electing pro-criminal district attorneys;
• and of course, the suppression of news itself.

Big Tech, take a bow!

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/top-10-most-suppressed-news-stories-2020

The Top 10 Most-Suppressed News Stories Of 2020.docx