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Education, Nutrition and basic physical needs met, the linked post equates IQ as if it's a national characteristic of a population which is kinda debunked and c

Education, Nutrition and basic physical needs met, the linked post equates IQ as if it's a national characteristic of a population which is kinda debunked and closing rapidly on "science" that ends badly. It also plays with statistics quite a bit (lies, damn lies and government statistics been the old refrain). All of that is putting aside that IQ itself is deeply flawed both because a) you can't reduce human intelligence down to a single number that way at best it's a weak measure of the type of intelligence been tested for b) IQ tests vary, both in type and scope and are deeply flawed when applied across socio-economic groups in the same society never mind across societies. There is always variation within a population but I suspect that culture plays a much bigger role. Case in point - Jewish people are 0.2% of the world population, they've won ~20% of all Nobel prizes awarded.

mjh2539 1y ago
I'm not sure if this helps or hurts your point, but the IQ bump is only for Ashkenazi Jews, and not the Mizrahim, Sephardim, Temanim, Beta Israel, etc. So it's actually more remarkable.
tptacek 1y ago
It's not so much "debunked" as it is "completely made up". Despite fraudulent claims to the contrary, there has never been a global country-by-country survey of "average IQ" across the populations of the world's countries.
- noir_lord 1y ago
  Indeed and when you look at the people making such claims their motives rapidly come into focus as somewhat suspect.
bloak 1y ago
I'm a bit suspicious of that sort of claim. You can go through a list of people who got Nobel prizes and investigate their ancestry and argue that lots of those people were "Jewish" but nobody does that sort of investigation on random members of the general population for a fair comparison. (And perhaps it would be impossible to do so: Nobel prize winners tend to come from social classes that have better records of their ancestry.) Also I've seen a huge range of values given for what proportion of the British population might be "Jewish", which shows the level of uncertainty involved. So the Nobel prize committee might not actually be racist ... :-)

mjh2539 1y ago

I'm not sure if this helps or hurts your point, but the IQ bump is only for Ashkenazi Jews, and not the Mizrahim, Sephardim, Temanim, Beta Israel, etc. So it's actually more remarkable.

tptacek 1y ago

It's not so much "debunked" as it is "completely made up". Despite fraudulent claims to the contrary, there has never been a global country-by-country survey of "average IQ" across the populations of the world's countries.

noir_lord 1y ago
Indeed and when you look at the people making such claims their motives rapidly come into focus as somewhat suspect.

bloak 1y ago

I'm a bit suspicious of that sort of claim. You can go through a list of people who got Nobel prizes and investigate their ancestry and argue that lots of those people were "Jewish" but nobody does that sort of investigation on random members of the general population for a fair comparison. (And perhaps it would be impossible to do so: Nobel prize winners tend to come from social classes that have better records of their ancestry.) Also I've seen a huge range of values given for what proportion of the British population might be "Jewish", which shows the level of uncertainty involved. So the Nobel prize committee might not actually be racist ... :-)