I saw this meme:
"Linguistics show he communicates at a 5th grade level. With a73 IQ
THE LATEST WORD SALAD FROM THE STABLE GENIUS:
"Google, nobody called from Google. One of the things like doing a show like yours, your show, you know, you see it on Fox, but when you really see it is all over the place, they take clips of your show that you're doing right now with me and if I do a good job, they're gonna vote for me, they're gonna vote for me because it's not just on Fox, it's on Fox is a smaller part of it. You're on all over this, those little beautiful cell phones you're on, you're all over the place. You have a product, you have a great product. You have a great brand. So you have to get out, you have to get out, you have to do things like your show and other shows and Google has been very bad. They've been very irresponsible and I have a feeling that Google is gonna be close to shut down"
- Donald Trump, Fox News, August 1, 2024
DEMENTIA DON NEEDS TO DROP OUT!"
This claim didn't pass the smell test, not least since I was unaware of methods to estimate IQ from a text, but I decided to investigate.
Since the meme mentioned grade level, a common way of telling the level of complexity of a text, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (Microsoft Word churns this metric too), came to mind. This looks at the "average sentence length amd word complexity".
Now, just because a text is harder to read does not mean that it is superior (or that the person who produces it is superior). Indeed, often the contrary holds: as George Orwell said, "Never use a long word where a short one will do." Purple prose would score as complex on Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, but is not something that good writers should strive for (pretentious ones or ones who want people to think they're smart, on the other hand...)
Be that as it may, I will just take the meme at face value.
So I ran the quote from Trump in the meme through the Readability Scoring System's Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. I got a score of 8.44, which has a Reading Difficulty of Average - Slightly Difficult, and a Grade Level of Eighth Grade (for Ages 13-14).
This is quite different from what the meme claims, but since it is calling on Trump to drop out, I decided to look at Trump's rival in this election, Kamala Harris.
I had to look for a similar length of text to Trump's 157 word quote for a fair-ish comparison, so I found a 141 word quote from Kamala Harris - her talking about inflation in 2021:
REMARKS BY VICE PRESIDENT HARRIS IN PRESS CONFERENCE | The White House
"All right, thank you. Well, let’s start with this: Prices have gone up. And families and individuals are dealing with the realities of — that bread costs more, that gas costs more. And we have to understand what that means. That’s about the cost of living going up. That’s about having to stress and stretch limited resources. That’s about a source of stress for families that is not only economic but is, on a daily level, something that is a heavy weight to carry. So, it is something that we take very seriously. Very seriously.
And we know from the history of this issue in the United States that when you see these prices go up, it has a direct impact on the quality of life for all people in our country. So it’s a big issue, and we take it seriously."
Using the same formula, I got a score of... 6.06, which has a Reading Difficulty of Fairly Easy, and a Grade Level of Sixth Grade (for Ages 11-12).
As a robustness check, I reran the formula including her next paragraph, which brought the extract to 177 words:
"And it is a priority, therefore. So we have addressed it in a number of ways. One of the issues that we know is related to this is the supply chain issue that we just discussed."
I now got a score of... 5.81, which has a Reading Difficulty of Fairly Easy, and a Grade Level of Sixth Grade (for Ages 11-12).
Clearly, Kackling Kamala needs to drop out!
While doing research for this blog post, I also found a site, Writing to IQ Estimator, that claims to estimate IQ based on "the quality of the vocabulary used".
This estimated Trump's IQ as 87 (average).
Meanwhile, it estimated Harris's IQ as... 77 (below average).
(for what it's worth, even the longer 177 word extract had "Not enough data or not enough variance to estimate IQ", so I had to add in: "And so, on a domestic level, in terms of domestic policy, one of the approaches we have taken is to work with labor unions and to work with municipalities in opening back up and extending the hours of our ports. There are actually three I have in mind: Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Savannah. And, in fact, part of the infrastructure bill benefit is, most recently, what we will do to assist Savannah in broadening their ability to be an active port", bringing the total to 260 words)
Ironic.