4 ms·
For your argument to be valid, you would have to show that Chinese immigrants have always had higher than average IQ's (i.e. at the time the IQ test was first d
by pazimzadeh 4y ago
For your argument to be valid, you would have to show that Chinese immigrants have always had higher than average IQ's (i.e. at the time the IQ test was first designed).
Otherwise, all it means is that Chinese immigrants may have a higher capacity for work/studies (unless you are also arguing that Chinese people have rapidly been evolving intelligence in the last 100 years. And if so, why?). Which may or may not be genetic, but is definitely not the same thing as intelligence.
I could not find that data, but I found this which is also interesting:
Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology who has written an excellent book about intelligence, cites a study that followed a pool of Chinese-American children and a pool of white children into adulthood. The two groups started out with the same scores on I.Q. tests, but in the end 55 percent of the Asian-Americans entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of the whites. To succeed as a manager, whites needed an I.Q. of 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of only 93.
So the Asian advantage, Nisbett argues, isn’t intellectual firepower as such, but how it is harnessed.
From https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-advantage.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-...
Plus, it's well known that one of the most reliable ways of improving IQ (and SAT scores) is to be born in a wealthier family.
At the end of the day, it still not particularly important if different races score higher or lower on measures of intelligence. It is the environment which selects the traits in a population. There is no adaptive advantage to investing in intelligence if your environment does not require it. It would be "dumb" to be "too smart" if that makes sense. The right question is why is the environment selecting for these traits, whether they are passed down genetically or culturally.