Memories of the 28th Century

I was trying to think of something to write about in my blog, and after a few false starts, the idea of the qualifications for becoming president of the United States of America came to mind. The only legal requirements are that one be a citizen of at least thirty-five years, and that's it. Lawyers need to be admitted to the bar, and that usually requires a law degree and passing an entry exam.. Physicians need to be licensed, and the licensing requirements include a doctorate in medicine including internship and so on. To be a physical therapist, one needs a doctorate in physical therapy and state license. There are few professions that don't require something to become one. Construction laborers don’t need an advanced degree, but they need to bee able to tolerate the physical stresses of the job, and one doesn't need a license to be a retail store clerk or sales person, but there are practical requirements. Apparently one doesn’t even need to know what the duties and responsibilities of the president are to become president.

Then came the hard part, I tried to figure out what the it should be required for someone to be president. The idea of a minimum IQ came to mind, so I looked for a list of presidents with actual IQ’s, rather than the politically motivated numbers that have been reported. Eventually, I found a list that was near reality; although it still had JFK listed as much higher than the 120 that he actually tested at, but it doesn't put anyone into the major genius category, as the politically charged lists do,
There are certain characteristics of highly intelligent people that would qualify them for high offices, if they were willing to do such things. Those include tolerance for ambiguity, ability ti explain complex ideas simply, ability ti understand complicated concepts, skill in communication, creativity, logical thinking, and so on.

It is clear that some of the greatest U.S. Presidents had great intellectual capacity and abilities to understand others and communicate with them. While George Washington wasn't an academic genius, he could understand situations and balance the possibilities and act on his decisions about those, and the same was true of John Adams, who spent years as a diplomat in France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, along with Jefferson, who also was very highly intelligent and creative. If we also consider some later presidents, such as Garfield and Teddy Roosevelt, it is clear that high intelligence leads to a president being competent as a president.

Similarly, when we look at presidents who had relatively low intellectual abilities, such as Andrew Johnson and Millard Fillmore, they had relatively low IQ’s for U.S. Presidents, but they were still above average, because people do not rise to that level without superior intellectual abilities. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a reasonable estimate of the IQ of Trump, but we can infer from his poor comprehension, and his inability to understand that he isn't bright, and that he seems unable to understand that many other people are more intelligent than he is, that he probably has an IQ in the low end of the normal range.

My thought is that it might be a good idea to require that before running for U.S. president people demonstrate through previous or new tests results that they are capable of handling the job. If we required an IQ of 115 or above to serve, we would exclude only a few of the presidents in the last fifty years, only Trump and. W. Bush. Or maybe the people would prefer to have truly superior presidents, and we should set 125 as the minimum. That would have screen out nearly all of the presidents in the last hundred years. That's a question we can consider when the proposal comes up for a vote.

A more important question is whether a screening test would eliminate people who are dangerously stupid from the job, and I think the answer is that it would. We should also eliminate the seriously arrogant from high office. There have been more arrogant presidents than stupid ones, but it would be more difficult to test for. Narcissism, but that test might not be necessary, because intelligent people seldom are afflicted with narcissism.

One question remains: What is the intelligence level of Donald J. Trump? I believe that it is clear that he is not in the subnormal range, and it is equally clear that he is not in the superior range. I have found that there are people in the low part of the normal range who do not believe that anyone is more intelligent than they are, and I think that is Trump's part of the intelligence spectrum, with an IQ between 80 and 90. Several years ago a representatives of American Mensa offered to test Trump, maybe that offer is still open.,




https://www.researchgate.net/publica...xpY2F0aW9uIn19