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In reply to the discussion: Macron says long Trump handshake 'not innocent' [View all]PatrickforO
(15,554 posts)and many people in the education and psychological communities feel current IQ testing is biased.
That cultural bias shouldn't have affected either Obama or Trump, per se, but there has always been a question in the tests, at least in my own mind, of content validity past a certain age. You see, I've always felt that life and work experience, particularly that real-life experience in problem solving, allows one to get a much higher score than one would have gotten had one taken the test at an earlier age.
In addition, I've never seen the IQ score of a sitting or past POTUS expressed as a result of taking any nationally normed IQ test.
What? Really? Yes, it is true. Virtually all of the IQ scores you'll encounter are 'estimates' based on that president's speeches and actions, and flavored with the bias of the person doing the estimating.
So, when we estimate the IQ of someone like Obama, we see a scale on the low end of 116 and the high end of 150. Now, admittedly I'm biased toward the high end of those estimates based on evidence cited in the linked article - the guy is obviously a genius. To me. In fact to anyone who reads this post, I'd imagine. But ask Rush Limbaugh and you'd get a much lower estimate.
As to Trump, he was a mediocre student at best, but went to good schools. He inherited money from his father, so wasn't smart enough to make his own fortune (if we're going to call that ability 'smart,' which I don't necessarily do). But, he was dumb enough to go bankrupt four times and screw thousands of people and firms to which he owed money, some of whom were forced out of business as a result.
Try for the life of me, I just don't think Trump is that intelligent, except in one area. He is a genius in effective branding and marketing of himself. But, when I consider the plethora of weaknesses in other areas of life, I'm inclined to be on the low end, estimate-wise - maybe 115 to 120.
However, and it is a big however, we have possible mental illness and equally possible early-stage dementia. We also have a habitual laziness in vocabulary that took decades to form - the guy habitually uses maybe 800 words and becomes less articulate as more words become necessary. And he does not read. Those two factors drive what may have a higher IQ in youth down in adulthood.
At 70, Trump has nearly run his course in terms of human life span. So any bright IQ he had as a child or youth is likely to have ratcheted down over decades of laziness, sloppiness and bad habits.
God, what a long post in response to a joke....geez! Sometimes I marvel at my own obtuseness and selective lack of humor.
so here's me waving,
...
and here's you, my reader, having an out of body experience if you even made it this far!