Back Training

I think there is an ideal grip width for each pulling/rowing angle. For pull-ups and pulldowns, it will usually be slightly wider than shoulder width. I don’t really like close grip pull-ups or pull-downs (the only thing I feel more are my biceps and forearms). Pull-ups/pulldowns are best suited to hit the armpit region (teres major, teres minor). I think it’s suboptimal to try and use pull-ups and pull-downs to emphasize hitting the lower lats (you often see people try and do this with underhand grip pulldowns). There are much better exercises to achieve that such as 1 arm dumbbell rows and supinated grip seated cable rows.

For barbell rows, the ideal grip width will usually be a little narrower. I prefer the wider v-grip handles for t-bar and seated cable rows.

TLDR: when it comes to back training, yes you want a variety of exercises as it relates to pulling/rowing angles. However, there is usually an ideal grip width for each pulling/rowing angle.

I think single arm dumbbell rows with a slightly staggered stance (usually performed over a dumbbell rack) are one of the best horizontal rowing exercises. There is no other horizontal rowing exercise that confers a better stretch in the lats. There are also many degrees of freedom for you to find the form that hits your (lower) lats the best. How much grip pronation? How staggered of a stance? Stance width? Row to belly or hip? How bent over do you want to be?

Do You Need to Squat?

1) Squats/presses are most effective for hypertrophy bc they impose the most mechanical tension on the muscle compared to leg extensions

2) Squats/presses will be most effective if you can achieve **sufficient knee flexion** in the hole (quad loaded in stretched position)

3) When lifter can achieve sufficient knee flexion in the hole, it is usually **MORE** than what can be achieved on a leg extension machine

4) If you can’t find a stance/form/technique that allows sufficient knee flexion in the hole with barbell back squats, I rec trying smith squats (one of my faves), leg presses, squat machines

5) Not that big of a fan of hack squats due to inordinate stress on patellar tendon (temdinopathy). I think close stance smith squats are better; allows you to kick hips back a little to decrease load on patellar tendon

6) Ideal squat/pressing exercise allows you to achieve both sufficient knee flexion and hip flexion (glutes—squats and presses more effective than hip thrusts) in the hole

7) Some can’t achieve sufficient knee flexion in hole with barbell squats but interestingly can with leg press

8) The above does not apply to post-ACL reconstruction rehab where leg extensions are more important 

Thyroid, Metabolism, Refeeds

"Will it help if I take T3 while dieting to compensate for the metabolic adaptation?"

Consider this: 

“Protein conservation during prolonged fast: a function of triiodothyronine levels”

"During the control fast, the mean serum T3 concentration fell to 61% of baseline, the mean serum RT3 concentration increased 100%, and there was no change in mean serum T4 concentration. These changes are similar to those described in several previous reports of fasting. Administration of small doses of T3 approximating the normal daily T3 production rate resulted in maintenance of serum T3 concentrations slightly above the baseline levels, but within the range of normal, for the duration of the T3 fast. 

In the present study, preventing the fall in serum T3 concentrations significantly increased urinary urea excretion as compared with a control fast, suggesting that the fall in serum T3 concentration in fasting and illness is a protective mechanism limiting muscle protein catabolism. This suggestion is supported by a study, recently reported in abstract form, in which the administration of slightly higher doses of T3 during a prolonged fast resulted in increased muscle glutamine and 3-methylhistidine release and increased urinary urea and ammonia excretion."

I would not recommend T3 for those not taking AAS. The risk of muscle loss is too high. I also know lifters not on AAS who have dieted with and without T3. With (reasonable doses of) T3, they lost more muscle (when BW went down, there was no corresponding improvement in how they looked compared to when they dieted without T3).

There is also more to metabolism than just T3 and leptin. 

“Hypermetabolic low triiodothyronine syndrome of burn injury”

"T3 treatment restored FT3I but did not affect resting metabolic rate (MR), compared with placebo therapy. The hypermatbolic response to burn injury appeared to be independent of thyroid hormones."

This brings me to my last point with regards to those who have dismissed the potential benefits of refeeds (on metabolism), and justifying that based on studies which show refeeds don't sustainably/significantly improve surrogate markers like T3, leptin, and various other hormones. These are surrogate markers and probably don't capture what is happening with the metabolism. Given that (as long as food, fluid, sodium, sleep are consistent; and weighing first thing in the morning after urination) BW loss is pretty highly correlated with fat loss on a good resistance training program and diet, I would argue a better way to assess whether refeeds help the metabolism is by tracking how BW changes day to day. 

It's not unusual that if refeeds are implemented effectively—and while it may run counter to what you would expect due to the increase in weekly calorie intake compared to not incoporating refeeds—they actually not only do not hinder fat loss, but they help it. 

My practical takeaways are not to worry about too much about thyroid hormone when dieting. While there are other factors that contribute to metabolism, thyroid levels will decrease markedly during a diet (metabolic adaptation). However, they recovery swiftly once calories are increased after a diet. 

Many hospitalized ill patients (especially those in an intensive care unit [ICU]) have low serum concentrations of total thyroxine (T4) and triiodothyronine (T3), and their serum thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) concentrations are typically low, but may be low-normal or normal. Almost all patients who have a subnormal but detectable serum TSH concentration (greater than 0.05 mU/L and less than 0.3 mU/L) will be euthyroid when reassessed after recovery from their illness. Some hospitalized patients have transient elevations in serum TSH concentrations (up to 20 mU/L) during recovery from severe nonthyroidal illness (indicative of recovery).

Even many bodybuilders who take T3 during contest prep and immediately discontinue T3 after the prep experience swift recovery of the endogenous hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis—within days. This is in stark contrast to AAS use where endogenous testosterone production takes a while to recover after discontinuation of AAS (which is the reason many enhanced bodybuilders recommend a PCT if coming off gear).

T. Greer (The Scholar's Stage) — Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives, But Why?

It's best to start this piece off with a snippet from David Foster Wallace's interview with Charlie Rose (1997) on teaching:

"Don't get me started on teaching. The cliche is true—teachers learn an enormous amount for about 2-3 years but then the curve falls off sharply after. Most of the older teachers that I know, with the exception of a very few geniuses, are extremely bored with teaching and are not very interested in their students. The teachers are going through the motions, the students are going through the motions. The more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time you get to spend on your own work. This is my fourth year teaching, and I find myself saying the same things this year as last year—it's a little horrifying."

While the psychological reason (if you want any chance in hell of mitigating the psychological reason, exercise and diet better be priorities for you) has merit, I think the sociological reason is more significant . And I favor the more difficult path after reaching the summit: descend and start again. 

Here are the best parts of T. Greer’s piece:

"Several months ago someone on twitter asked the following question: which public thinker did you idolize ten or fifteen years ago but have little intellectual respect for today? A surprising number of people responded with "all of them." These tweeters maintained that no one who was a prominent writer and thinker in the aughts has aged well through the 2010s.

The real question to answer is this: why are so many public intellectuals capable of generating insight, originality, or brilliance at the beginning of their careers, but are utterly incapable of fresh thinking a decade later?

Let me offer two hypotheses. One is psychological, the other sociological.

Psychological:

In most fields creative production increases steadily from the 20s to the late 30s and early 40s then gradually declines thereafter, although not to the same low levels that characterized early adulthood. Peak times of creative achievement also vary from field to field. The productivity of scholars in the humanities (for example, that of philosophers or historians) continues well into old age and peaks in the 60s, possibly because creative work in these fields often involves integrating knowledge that has crystallized over the years. By contrast, productivity in the arts (for example, music or drama) peaks in the 30s and 40s and declines steeply thereafter, because artistic creativity depends on a more fluid or innovative kind of thinking. Scientists seem to be intermediate, peaking in their 40s and declining only in their 70s. Even with the same general field, differences in peak times have been noted. For example, poets reach their peak before novelists do, and mathematicians peak before other scientists do.

Still in many fields (including psychology) creative production rises to a peak in the late 30s and early 40s, and both the total number of works and the number of high quality works decline thereafter. 

Fluid intelligence begins declining in a person's 30s. This implies that most humans reach their peak analytic power before 40. Crystal intelligence holds out quite a bit longer, usually not declining until a person's 60s or 70s. This is probably why historians reach peak achievement so late: the works that make master historians famous tend towards grand tomes that integrate mountains of figures and facts—a lifetime of knowledge—into one sweeping narrative.

Thus most humans develop their most important and original ideas between their late twenties and early forties. With the teens and twenties spent gaining the intellectual tools and foundational knowledge needed to take on big problems, the sweet spot for original intellectual work is a person's 30s:  these are the years in which they have already gained the training necessary to make a real contribution to their chosen field but have not lost enough of their fluid intelligence to slow down creative work. By a person's mid 40s this period is more or less over with. The brain does not shut down creativity altogether once you hit 45, but originality slows down. By then the central ideas and models you use to understand the world are more or less decided. Only rarely will a person who has reached this age add something new to their intellectual toolkit.

Sociological:

Friedman jets from boardroom to newsroom to state welcoming hall. He is a traveler of the gilded paths, a man who experiences the world through taxi windows and guided tours. The Friedman of the 20th century rushed to the scene of war massacres; the Friedman of the 21st hurries to conference panels. What hope does a man living this way have of learning something new about the world?

More importantly: What incentive does he have to live any other way?

The trouble is that just as our historian reaches her full stature as a public name, her well of insight begins to run dry. A true fan of her works might trace elements of their name-making title back to the very first monograph she published as a baby academic. She was able to take all of the ideas and observations from her early years of concentrated study and spin them out over a decade of high-profile book writing. But what happens when the fruits of that study have been spent? What does she have to write about when they have already applied their unique form of insight to the problems of the day?

Nothing at all, really. Historians like this have nothing left to fall back on except the conventional opinions common to their class. So they go about repackaging those, echoing the same hollow shibboleths you could find in the work of any mediocrity.

In each case the intellectual in question is years removed from not just the insights that delivered fame, but the activities that delivered insight.

The tricky thing is that it is hard to go back to the rap and scrabble of real research when you have climbed so high above it. Penguin will pay you a hefty advance for your next two hundred pages of banal boilerplate; they will not pay you for two or three years of archival research on some narrow topic no one cares about.  No matter that the process of writing on that narrow topic refills the well, imbuing you with the ideas needed to fill out another two decades of productive writing. 

There are practical implications for all this. If you are an intellectual, the sort of person whose work consists of generating and implementing ideas, then understand you are working against time. Figure out the most important intellectual problem you think you can help solve and make sure you spend your thirties doing that. Your fifties and sixties are for teaching, judging, managing, leading, and dispensing with wisdom. Your teens and twenties are for gaining skills and locating the problems that matter to you. Your thirties are for solving them.

Public intellectuals who do not wish to transition in the their forties from the role of thinker to mentor or manager are going to have a harder time of it. Optimizing for long term success means turning away from victory at its most intoxicating. When you have reached the summit, time has come to descend, and start again on a different mountain. There are plenty of examples of this—Francis Fukuyama comes to mind as a contemporary one—but it is the harder path.”

Good comments:

“All the reasons mentioned in your post are probably true, but I think you're missing one additional, simpler, explanation: regression to the mean. Producing original intellectual works requires creativity and analytical powers, but also one's share of luck. I think it is an often underestimated part of the work of an intellectual, explorer of ideas who can find a nugget of gold in his garden, or find only mud travelling across the continents.This regression to the mean, combined with the loss of creativity, stimulation, and incentives, gives, I think, a reasonable explanation to the short shelf-life of public intellectuals.

Perhaps the ones who fade and spend their lives reiterating their perspective are more public than intellectual.”

Should You Worry About Lowering Calorie Intake on Off Days?

If you are on a good resistance training program and training at least 3 days per week (and I argue every one should be doing this for general health), the answer is no. I am starting off answering the question with this supposition to suggest that while constrained TDEE does apply, it does not really come into effect until you surpass the low end of physical activity. 

While resistance training does increase TDEE (total daily energy expenditure), much of it is from the increased metabolic cost of the muscle itself (and yes, I will concede this metabolic cost has been overblown); and the portion attributed to the activity itself seems to spill over enough to the off days that there will be no significant disparity in TDEE between training and off days. 

Let me expand on this. I like to diet myself and others right below the lower threshold of the buffer range. When the goal is a lean mass gaining phase, I like to set the kcal target right above the upper threshold of the buffer range (to avoid unnecessary fat gain). 

I have never really witnessed a trend in how bodyweight changes in an athlete that suggests not lowering kcal intake on an off day (“presumably” because their bodies would have a lower TDEE that day) hindered fat loss. 

And when it comes to a lean mass gaining phase, I HAVE witnessed how bodyweight will spike much more than anticipated from a slight increase in kcal intake because I had (incorrectly) assumed that bc the athlete trained extra hard/long or a large body part that day (e.g. back or legs), their TDEE would be higher than their other more normal training days. And no, it's not due to inflammation and water retention from the extra training stress. Especially when an athlete is lean, a softer physique that persists a couple days after the extra grueling training sessions suggests it's actual fat gain. 

Maintaining Shredded Conditioning

Let’s say you’ve capped out your natural genetic potential (maximized how much LBM you can retain while being very lean); and have dieted down and are now shredded. What’s next? The usual advice promoted is to “increase kcal intake and accept putting on some body fat—while your physique will be softer, you can still look reasonably fit.”

This post is for those who want to stay shredded long-term (year-round). 

AFAIK, there are 2 options you can adopt:

1. Reverse diet 

2. “Low days with Q2-4day refeeds."

The issue with the reverse diet strategy is that while you can eat significantly more before weight gain occurs compared to the kcal intake you needed to diet down on (refer to my post on buffer zones here), it’s usually not enough for contentment.

With the “low days with Q2-4day refeed” approach set up optimally, kcal intake should be high enough on the refeed day so you experience contentment (refer to my post on refeeds here). That contentment should seep over into post-refeed day 1 where appetite will still be suppressed. The goal is for bodyweight (proxy for body fat) to baseline by days 2-4 post-refeed so that you can hit another refeed. I find this approach to staying shredded year-round much more sustainable.  

IMO, calorie dense foods (e.g. cookies, cakes, burgers, pizza, pasta, pancakes, sushi, kids cereal, ice cream, etc.) are only worth it (offer that feeling of satisfaction) if you can eat a sizable amount in one sitting; and you can feel reasonably full throughout and by the end of the day. Perhaps “low days with Q2-4day refeeds” will work out for you.

Dumbing Down the Cognitive Elite, Verbal IQ—Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve"

"Until the latter half of this century, it was taken for granted that one of the chief purposes of education was to educate the gifted—not because they deserved it through their own merit but because, for better or worse, the future of society society was so dependent on them.

It needs to be said openly: The people who run the United States—create its jobs, expand its technologies, cure its sick, teach in its universities, administer its cultural and political and legal institutions—are drawn mainly from a thin layer of cognitive ability at the top.

Rather than democratization, the decline was more probably due to leveling down, or mediocritization: a downward trend of the educational skills of America’s academically most promising youngsters toward those of the average student. The net drop in verbal skills was especially large, much larger than net drop in math skills. It affected even those students with the highest levels of cognitive ability. Does this drop represent a fall in realized intelligence as well as a drop in the quality of academic training? We assume that it does to some extent but are unwilling to try to estimate how much of which. The SAT score decline does underscore a frustrating, perverse reality: However hard it may be to raise IQ among the less talented with discrete interventions, as described in Chapter 17, it may be within the capability of an educational system—probably with the complicity of broader social trends—to put a ceiling on, or actually dampen, the realized intelligence of those with high potential.

The educational change is epitomized by the title for this section. “Dumbing down” has become a term of art for the process by which the vocabulary in a textbook is deliberately simplified.

Another feature of math skills at the high school level is that they can be increased independent of the student’s development in other intellectual skills. A student may learn to manipulate quadratic equations even if he is given not a glimmer of how formal logic might relate to expository prose or to the use of evidence in civics class. It is good that math scores have risen, but it remains true that raising math standards can be routinized in ways that cannot be applied to the rest of the curriculum. How, for example, does one decide that the standards for an English literature course have been “raised”? In the old days, it wouldn’t have been seen as a difficult question. Standards would be raised if the students were required to read a larger number of the Great Books (no one would have had much quarrel about what they were) or if students were required to write longer term papers, subject to stricter grading on argumentation and documentation. But since the late 1960s, such straightforward ways of looking at standards in the humanities, social sciences, and even the physical sciences were corrupted, in the sense that the standards of each discipline were subordinated to other considerations. Chief among these other considerations were multiculturalism in the curriculum, the need to minimize racial differences in performance measures, and enthusiasm for fostering self-esteem independent of performance. We assume that a politically compromised curriculum is less likely to sharpen the verbal skills of students than one that hews to standards of intellectual rigor and quality. We make these observations without belittling the issues that have been at center stage in American secondary education. But if the question is why the downhill slide in verbal skills has not reversed, here is one possible explanation: The agendas that have had the most influence on curricula are generally antagonistic to traditional criteria of rigor and excellence.

Television, rather than the printed page, became the primary medium for getting news and recreation at home after mid-century, and that process was also reaching full flower in the 1960s. Telephones displaced letter writing as the medium for long-range communication. Such trends are hostile to traditional definitions of excellence in verbal skills.

A textbook that is dumbed down is in fact helpful to the mediocre student. A recent study of six textbooks over a twelve-year period demonstrated that they had indeed been simplified, and students performed significantly better on the current, dumbed-down texts. Subjects that were traditionally not included in the curriculum for the lower end of the distribution—for example, exposure to serious literature—have now been so simplified as to be accessible to almost all.

Banneker’s “elitest” admissions policy? Applicants had to write an essay, be interviewed, be in the top 18 percent of their class, and read and compute at grade level—a broad conception of “elitist” indeed. Throughout it all, teachers competed to teach at Banneker and students competed to attend. Banneker placed large proportions of its graduates in college and had no significant problems with discipline, drugs, crime, or the other ills of contemporary urban schools.

Critics of American education must come to terms with the reality that in a universal education system, many students will not reach the level of education that most people view as basic. Most of these nonreaders come from the bottom of the cognitive ability distribution. How well should they be able to read after a proper education, given the economic, technological, and political constraints on any system of mass education?

Only youngsters who aspire to colleges that usually take students with higher scores than their own have a strong incentive to study hard—and however common this situation may seem at the school attended by the children of most of our readers, it describes a minuscule proportion of the national high school population.

On the average, and assuming no legal restrictions on testing, an employer can get a better idea of how well a job applicant will perform in job training by giving him an inexpensive twelve-minute intelligence test than by anything that the high school can tell the employer about the applicant’s academic record.

In countries such as France and Germany, with more homogeneous populations and more authoritarian and unapologetically elitest educational traditions, the national government can get away with centralized school systems that educate their brightest youth well. In the United States, it cannot. Federal standards, federal rules, and federal curricula, were they to be established, would inevitably be watered down and educational goals would be compromised with social and political ones. The federal government responds to pushes from all sides and gets equally nervous about affirming the genius of either Huck Finn or Charles Darwin. Powerful teachers’ organizations will not tolerate certification tests that flunk large numbers of teachers. Organizations that represent minority groups will not tolerate national educational standards that cause large numbers of minority children to flunk. These are political facts of life that will not change soon, no matter who is in the White House.

In Part I, we went to some lengths to describe the dangers of a cognitive elite. And yet here we call for steps that could easily increase the segregation of the gifted from everyone else. Won’t programs for the gifted further isolate them? The answers to such questions have nothing to do with social justice but much to do with the welfare of the nation, including the ultimate welfare of the disadvantaged. The first point echoes a continuing theme of this book: To be intellectually gifted is indeed a gift. Nobody “deserves” it. The monetary and social rewards that accrue to being intellectually gifted are growing all the time, for reasons that are easily condemned as being unfair. Never mind, we are saying. These gifted youngsters are important because our society’s future depends on them. The one clear and enduring failure of contemporary American education education is at the high end of the cognitive ability distribution.

The educational deficit that worries us is symbolized by the drop in verbal skills on the SAT. What we call verbal skills encompass, among other things, the ability to think about difficult problems: to analyze, pick apart, disaggregate, synthesize, and ultimately to understand. It has seldom been more apparent how important it is that the people who count in business, law, politics, and our universities know how to think about their problems in complex, rigorous modes and how important it is that they bring to their thinking depth of judgment and, in the language of Aristotle, the habit of virtue. This kind of wisdom—for wisdom is what we need more of—does not come naturally with a high IQ. It has to be added through education, and education of a particular kind.

To be an educated person meant being able to write competently and argue logically. Therefore, children were taught the inner logic of grammar and syntax because that kind of attention to detail was believed to carry over to greater precision of thinking. They were expected to learn Aristotle’s catalog of fallacies, because educators understood that the ability to assess an argument in everyday life was honed by mastering the formal elements of logic. Ethics and theology were part of the curriculum, to teach and to refine virtue. We will not try to prescribe how a contemporary curriculum might be revised to achieve the same ends, beyond a few essentials: To be an educated person must mean to have mastered a core of history, literature, arts, ethics, and the sciences and, in the process of learning those disciplines, to have been trained to weigh, analyze, and evaluate according to exacting standards. 

Our proposal will sound, and is, elitist, but only in the sense that, after exposing students to the best the world’s intellectual heritage has to offer and challenging them to achieve whatever level of excellence they are capable of, just a minority of students has the potential to become “an educated person” as we are using the term. It is not within everyone’s ability to understand the world’s intellectual heritage at the same level, any more than everyone who enters college can expect to be a theoretical physicist by trying hard enough. At every stage of learning, some people reach their limits. This is not a controversial statement when it applies to the highest levels of learning."

The Intellectual Gulf

The title of the article is called “The Inappropriately Excluded.” When you read the comments at the end of this post, you’ll see why it’s a misnomer:

“Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above 145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different thinking emerges.  By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn't just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally different intellectual processes.  David Wechsler, D. K. Simonton, et alia, have observed the same thing.

Since intimate social relationships are predicated upon mutual understanding, this draws a kind of 'line in the sand' at 140-150 D15IQ that appears to separate humans into two distinct groups.  This may truncate the 30 point limit for those between 150 and 160 D15IQ people. Even when 150+ D15IQ people learn to function in the mainstream society, they will always be considered, and will feel, in some way 'different'.

if these extremely high IQ (>140) individuals were allowed to work on the hardest problems, the result would be eminence. To provide perspective for readers, one in 261 people have IQs over 140 and one in 2,331 have IQs over 150.  While the high IQ exclusion does not directly affect a large percentage of the population, the people it does affect, it affects profoundly.  Because of the large population of western civiliztion, the absolute number in this group is not small.  There are approximately 6.5 million people with an IQ over 140 and 729,000 people with an IQ over 150.

From a theoretical standpoint, democratic meritocracies should evolve five IQ defined 'castes', The Leaders, The Advisors, The Followers, The Clueless and The Excluded. These castes are natural in that they are the result of how people of different intellectual abilities relate to one another.

When IQ differences are greater than 30 points, leader/follower relationships will break down or will not form.  It establishes an absolute limit to the intellectual gulf between leader and followers. 

We have no reason to conclude that this upper limit on IQ differences changes in adulthood and, consequently, an elite with a mean R16IQ of 128 will have no leaders with R16IQs over 158 (149 D15IQ). 

Persuasiveness is at its maximum when the IQ differential between speaker and audience is about 20 points. 

We already know that elites have an average IQ of about 125 (R16 128) which implies that the audience that is to be convinced by the elites has a mean R16IQ of 108 (D15IQ is about the same under 120 IQ).  People with R16IQs below 98, after Hollingworth, are not effective followers and in a modern meritocracy are essentially disenfranchised and in the public discourse, essentially 'The Clueless'.  It means that the 'The Followers' in the public discourse have a R16IQ mode of 108 R16IQ and 'The Leaders' have a R16IQ mode of 128 (125 D15IQ).  

In free markets people choose to whom they listen.  In other words, in audiences dominated by high school graduates, who average around 105 IQ, the successful leaders will have an average IQ of 105+20=125.  Speakers with R16IQs over 105+30=135 (D15IQ130) will be cancelled from radio, fired from TV and print or not elected because they confuse rather than enlighten their audience.  A college educated audience (115 IQ) will be most convinced by a R16IQ of 115+20=135 and confused by a 115+30=145 R16IQ (140 D15IQ). 

Effective leaders recognize that they need the counsel of those smarter than themselves.  They will be most convinced by advisors with R16IQs of 128+20=148 (D15IQ 139). 

A Leader needs to be persuasive within the community of Leaders which limits the R16IQ to 128+20=148 which is the same as the mode for Advisors.  However, the 148 R16IQ Leader becomes incomprehensible to most Followers, which limits their effectiveness and encourages them to become an Advisor. Because Leaders become ineffective above an R16IQ of 148, Advisors won't find clients if their R16IQ is over 148+20=168=155 D15IQ.

So we see that these parameters of maximum persuasiveness of 20 R16 points and maximum leader/follower differential of 30 R16 points, create a natural trifurcation of enfranchised people into 'The Advisors' (128-168 R16IQ; 125-155 D15IQ), Leaders (115-141 R16IQ; 112-138 D15IQ) and Followers (98-128 R16IQ; 98-125 D15IQ)  'The Clueless' with D15 IQs below 98 are effectively lost to the process.  They cannot really understand the public discourse and will often not follow discussions in productive environments.

The exclusion really begins in primary school with the failure of the educational process to provide an appropriate learning environment.  The grading process, which should be a reliable assessment of knowledge learned and skills acquired, becomes nothing more than a measure of the child's willingness to bend to the will of the teachers' demand that he or she acquiesce to a profoundly inappropriate curriculum and learning process.

Leta Hollingworth noted that, if mainstreamed, children with R16IQs over 150 (D15IQ 141) check out and do not excel.  Miraca Gross has done a long-term longitudinal study of 60, 160+ D15IQ Australian children. 17 of the children were radically accelerated, 10 were accelerated one or two years and the remaining 33 were mainstreamed.  The results were astonishing with every radically accelerated student reported as educationally and professionally successful and emotionally and socially satisfied.  The group that was not accelerated she characterizes as follows: 'With few exceptions, they have very jaded views of their education. Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficulties at university, not because of a lack of ability but because they have found it difficult to commit to undergraduate study that is less than stimulating'. These children have IQs similar to Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, etc., so the loss from unrealized potential is enormous.

The problem stems from the misconception among educators that the intellectual gulf between moderately and highly gifted children is not that great.  In fact, depending upon the conceptual content, Professor Gross suggests that the exceptionally gifted children and above may learn 4-5 times faster than the midrange students. 

So, a 150 D15IQ child would be expected to progress through a K-12 public school curriculum geared to the 100 IQ student in 12/1.6=7.5 years.  They would graduate from high school at 13. Some children may be physically and emotionally prepared for full time school a year early and would finish high school at 12. When we hear about a child who finishes high school at 12 or 13, we think of a 'one in a million' prodigy and we suspect that the child was pushed to his or her detriment.  Yet, with an enabling educational environment, it is actually a reasonable expectation for about one in 200 children.  The true 'one in a million' child is doing college level learning at 7 or 8.

These children can be expected to complete their six years of college, which is geared to a 120 IQ, in about 6/(160/120)=4.5 years.  So, we would expect the 150 D15IQ person to receive their first advanced degree at age 17 or 18 if the educational system didn't actively retard them.  This will provide them with another five or six years of education, during which they can acquire another four advanced degrees or equivalent.

It is often stated that gifted children become bored in mainstream classes.  However, that is too passive a description.  Often they are frustrated and even angered by the slow pace.  Garth Zietsman states that people with IQs over 124 'don't require assistance to learn. They can find the information and master the methods themselves'. It is probably the case that for most 140+ D15IQ people, autodidactic or self paced learning is preferred.  It is also likely that they prefer the polymathic 'question first' approach to learning, as well.”

Comments:

“I suspect that a lot of super-intelligent men simply aren't interested in a lot of "elite" professions. In these cases, the super-intelligent aren't "inappropriately excluded"; they are appropriately excluding themselves. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of doctors, lawyers, and academics don't do anything that requires an IQ over 140, and it is no surprise that men with such IQs don't want these jobs.

Often the basic principle can be explained to those more than 30 IQ points below. However, the understanding is illusory. As a very practical example, I challenge you to explain the Monty Hall problem to a 90 IQ person. You will reach a point of complete frustration and you will not succeed. As D.K. Simonton says, you may be able to use words they understand but the concept is inaccessible to them. The reason that the Strong Anthropic Principle demands a Creator is an example of a concept that simply cannot be explained to a person with an IQ below about 130. Again, if you want to frustrate yourself, go ahead and try. The notion that any concept can be effectively explained to any person of any given intelligence is absurd on its face and only seems reasonable because of the egalitarian myth. I got into this once with the Principal of my son's elementary school (I took him out after 2nd grade). He wanted to pull the 'You will agree that all children can learn?' I replied, 'I will do you one better. I will grant you that all vertebrates can learn. Now make your point.' That actually made him angry because the argument that comes after that is clearly absurd when applied to all vertebrates, but because we have been conditioned to egalitarianism, it sounds good for children.

A fundamental assymetry isn't reflected in the studies: it's possible to pretend to be stupider, but not smarter. It's not surprising studies in children would miss this, as it either hasn't occurred to them to dissemble yet, or they yet lack the social wherewithal to succeed. That said, obviously it's of no use to society - the superior decision and strategies can't be advised if you're pretending not to have them. (Caveats apply.) Nevertheless, this is why I don't find it all surprising that high IQ is not a guarantee of socioeconomic failure. At least, I have no issues being liked by average and below-average brains. Indeed the problem is being trusted too much and accidentally manipulating them.

By the time I was 30 I had returned to finish high school; graduated summa cum laude from a first-tier institution in a non-hobby discipline; got straight 'firsts' for Masters coursework; had a 'full ride' scholarship for PhD; was the 'golden boy' PhD student in a world-leader 'think tank'.  And I have never, ever run at more than half-speed - ask any of my former colleagues if they ever got the impression that I was 'having a crack'. I've also never been part of any 'high IQ' society: they strike me as having about the same relevance to my life, as groups of wine-wankers, olive-oil wankers, cigar wankers... you get the drift. Smart people are square pegs, Morty. They 'under-achieve' as measured by dummy-metrics, because dummies have the wrong definition of 'achieve'... the objective is happiness, not status, income or membership of some wanky society.

Talking about high-IQ individuals being 'excluded' perhaps misses about half the issue - namely, that high-IQ individuals are less interested in signalling, status and other nonsense. You were sneaking up on that idea when you got to 

"By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn't just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally different intellectual processes."

If, from there, you had developed the argument along the lines that high-IQ folks have different preferences, including different propensities to be annoyed by nonsense and hamster-wheels, you would have been on to something. In my experience, genuinely smart people have no time for stupid games of the type that dominate most workplaces (including academia). If intelligence indicates problem-solving capability, then how can someone have a high IQ and not be persuasive? I mean, "How to be persuasive" is a problem that can be solved just like any other, right?

Instead, I would say the exclusion is probably often self-exclusion. I'm getting a PhD in physics and I can already tell that academia is not a place for creative people. Here, like everywhere else, connections and style are more important than substance. I have too much curiosity and ambition to stay in an environment that claims to be intellectual yet at its core is driven mostly by politics. Heck, I would rather work in a low-skill job where I can do the work AND think about my own ideas simultaneously, whereas academia would demand that I focus all my attention on problems that I don't find interesting. So my point is that you seem to assume that high IQ people are being excluded from the academic and leadership positions, but its possible that they are just smart enough to voluntarily remove themselves from the game out of disgust. Maybe they see the sacrifices of human dignity that are necessary to get into those positions of power that you value so highly and don't think it's worth it. This isn't a "personal flaw", just a value call that smart people tend to make (apparently).

Then again, I haven't met other people as smart as me. Maybe they all tend to be assholes, but then to my original point: Solving "How to be successful" means solving "How to get people to like you", and if intelligence means what it's supposed to, then high-IQ people should be able to solve those problems... But again this is assuming that very smart people would value mainstream definitions of success. I don't think they would."

Best Predictor of Job Performance (Especially for Cognitively Complex Jobs) — Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve”

“One notable finding is that the correlation between IQ and job status is just about as high if the IQ test is given in childhood, decades before people enter the job market, as it is among young adults who are taking an intelligence test after years of education.

The IQ scores they got when they were 7 or 8 years old were about as correlated with the status level of their adult jobs as their adult IQs would have been.

Mostly, relatives occupy neighboring, if not the same, rungs on the job status ladder, and the closer the relationship is, the nearer they are. Such commonplace findings have many possible explanations, but an obvious one that is not mentioned or tested often by social scientists is that since intelligence runs in families and intelligence predicts status, status must run in families. In fact, this explanation somehow manages to be both obvious and controversial.

The biologically related siblings resembled each other in job status, even though they grew up in different homes. And among them, the full siblings had more similar job status than the half siblings. Meanwhile, adoptive siblings were not significantly correlated with each other in job status.

We have been discussing the top decile: everyone with an IQ of 120 or higher. What about people in the even more rarefied cognitive elite, the top fraction of a centile who are so concentrated in a handful of universities during their college years? We have little to tell us exactly what is happening now, but we know what the situation was fifty years ago, through Lewis Terman’s famous study of 1,500 highly gifted children who were born in the early 1900s and followed throughout their lives. Their average IQs were over three standard deviations above the mean, meaning that the Terman sample represented about l/300th of the population. As of 1940, the members of the Terman sample who had finished their schooling were engaged in high-IQ professions at three times the rate of people in the top 10 percent—24 percent for the Terman sample against 8 percent for the top decile in 1940, as the preceding figure shows.

But the relationship of cognitive ability to job performance goes beyond that. A smarter employee is, on the average, a more proficient employee. This holds true within professions: Lawyers with higher IQs are, on the average, more productive than lawyers with lower IQs. It holds true for skilled blue-collar jobs: Carpenters with high IQs are also (on average) more productive than carpenters with lower IQs. The relationship holds, although weakly, even among people in unskilled manual jobs. The magnitude of the relationship between cognitive ability and job performance is greater than once thought.

The smarter employee tends to remain more productive than the less smart employee even after years on the job. An IQ score is a better predictor of job productivity than a job interview, reference checks, or college transcript. Most sweepingly important, an employer that is free to pick among applicants can realize large economic gains from hiring those with the highest IQs. An economy that lets employers pick applicants with the highest IQs is a significantly more efficient economy.

Cognitive ability itself—sheer intellectual horsepower, independent of education—has market value. Seen from this perspective, the college degree is not a credential but an indirect measure of intelligence. People with college degrees tend to be smarter than people without them and, by extension, more valuable in the marketplace. Employers recruit at Stanford or Yale not because graduates of those schools know more than graduates of less prestigious schools but for the same generic reason that Willie Sutton gave for robbing banks. Places like Stanford and Yale are where you find the coin of cognitive talent.

Intelligence is fundamentally related to productivity. This relationship holds not only for highly skilled professions but for jobs across the spectrum. The power of the relationship is sufficient to give every business some incentive to use IQ as an important selection criterion.

1. Job training and job performance in many common occupations are well predicted by any broadly based test of intelligence, as compared to narrower tests more specifically targeted to the routines of the job. As a corollary: Narrower tests that predict well do so largely because they happen themselves to be correlated with tests of general cognitive ability. 

2. Mental tests predict job performance largely via their loading on g. 

3. The correlations between tested intelligence and job performance or training are higher than had been estimated prior to the 1980s. They are high enough to have economic consequences.

Why should it be that variation in general cognitive ability, g, is more important than job-specific skills and knowledge?

The really good busboy is engaged in using g when he is solving the problems of his job, and the more g he has, the more quickly he comes up with the solutions and can call on them when appropriate.

Job-specific items reveal mostly whether an applicant has ever been a busboy before. But that makes very little difference to job productivity, because a bright person can pick up the basic routine in the course of a few shifts. The g-loaded items, on the other hand, will reveal whether the applicant will ever become the kind of busboy who will clear table 12 before he clears table 20 because he relates the needed task to something that happened twenty minutes earlier regarding table 15. And that is why employers who want to select productive busboys should give applicants a test of general intelligence rather than a test of busboy skills. The kind of test that would pass muster with the courts—a test of job-specific skills—is a less effective kind of test to administer. What applies to busboys applies ever more powerfully as the jobs become more complex.

No comparable leveling-off effect has been observed for increasing intelligence. Wherever on the scale of intelligence pairs of applicants are, the smarter ones not only will outperform the others, on the average, but the benefit of having a score that is higher by a given amount is approximately the same throughout the range. Or, to put it more conservatively, no one has produced good evidence of diminishing returns to intelligence.”

Swiftly or Gradually Cut Calories?

Should you swiftly or gradually cut calories at the beginning of a diet? Swiftly.

Should you swiftly or gradually cut calories towards the middle or end of a diet? Gradually.

I blogged about metabolic adaptation and buffer zones here. Read that first.  

Now, let me illustrate with my own experience. 

Transitioning from a lean mass gaining phase—where I am able to maintain weight on ~4,000 kcals/day—to a fat loss phase, I have tried 2 approaches to decreasing calorie intake:

1. Decreasing calories gradually by ~200-300 kcals/day per week (with the hopes that I would be able to lose body fat while eating more)

2. Decreasing calories more swiftly by ~500-600 kcals/day per week

Disappointingly, the first approach (decreasing calories gradually) usually leads to no significant fat loss the first couple weeks; bodyweight also does not really budge. Since my calorie intake is still in the buffer zone, metabolism rapidly adapts to relatively small adjustments in calorie intake. 

With the second approach, I can achieve a significant amount of fat loss the first couple weeks (about 5-10 lbs of body weight loss). Despite my calorie intake still falling in the buffer zone, I can sort of capitalize on the opportunity with the precondition that the calorie adjustments are large enough. A caveat is that approach two works better if you know—from prior experience—what your buffer zone calorie intake is. Otherwise, you risk overshooting the decreases in calorie intake, ending up eating less than you would need to for fat loss. 

Now, once you are dieting near the lower threshold of your buffer range, that is when smaller adjustments/decreases in calorie intake are better options if fat loss stalls. While your TEE may still drop (e.g. from further decreases in body weight and the inevitable loss in LBM), it won’t be as significant. Decreases in calorie intake of ~100-200 kcals/day per week if fat loss stalls are appropriate. 

Throughout my first couple years working with coaches and asking about why the phenomenon I described above happens, the common response was something along the lines of “it takes a while to get the ball rolling” or “you need to build momentum.” This never made sense to me. Like they just pulled these answers out of their asses. Nope. What I described above is what is happening.