Estimating the IQ of Richard Nixon

According to this article, Richard Nixon scored a 143 on the Otis test, which has a standard deviation between 10 and 12 based on the available evidence. This gives him a z-score estimate of roughly 3.9. I’ll regress this to 3.6 due to my lack of faith in IQ scores of above 155.

In addition, he graduated 3rd in both his high school class and Duke class. I don’t know how many people are in that duke class, but there was 207 in the high school one. This gives him an eddutainment score of 2.18.

Using these two z-scores (3.6 and 2.18) with their respective coefficients (0.9, 0.6) yields an estimate of 148 with a standard error of 7. 343 nixons were identified in the simulations.

set.seed(1)
g <- rnorm(60000000, mean=0)
iq <- 0.9*g + rnorm(60000000)*sqrt(1-0.9^2)
sc <- 0.6*g + rnorm(60000000)*sqrt(1-0.6^2)

subby1 <- data.frame(iq, sc)
subby1$g = g
subby2 <- subset(subby1, (subby1$iq > 3.5 & subby1$iq < 3.7) & (subby1$sc > 2.1 & subby1$sc < 2.2))
mean(subby2$g)
sd(subby2$g)