[Moshe_Silnorin]

It's pretty well established that East Asians have significantly higher average IQs than Europeans. High IQ predicts low crime rate. Ashkenazi Jews and high-caste Indians are other examples of demographics with much higher IQs on average and also lower crime rate and higher average income. Selective immigration accounts for some of this but is not the whole story.

[AlexC04]

I'm sorry, but I've never heard this. Can you provide a source? IQ as a test has been criticized for cultural bias:

http://wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceCulturalBias.ht...

http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2013/09/intelligence-testi...

Additionally, the very measure of IQ is based around the performance of the mean (where 100 is legged as standard)

How can groups be measured across race with a culturally biased test and NOT have the validity of the measure questioned?

I've got a lot of trouble believing there are any real studies that would make such a claim as you've made.

[Moshe_Silnorin]

First, we have culture fair IQ tests. Raven's Progressive Matrices is entirely symbolic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices... very hard to see how it could be culturally biased, and if it is, why do Europeans do so poorly compared to Chinese and Japanese people?

Regarding differences in average IQ, Ashkenazi Jews are the most stark example. It is indisputable that they score roughly a standard deviation above gentiles:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606...

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...

Some claim this is purely cultural. But I think genetics is a much more parsimonious explanation. Ashkenazi Jews are about 2% of the population yet 22% of nobel prize winners are Ashkenazi:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence#... The difference in culture between secular jews and gentiles is just not enough to account for that.

Also note, I think acknowledging this fact prevents racism. Antisemites love pointing out that jews are overrepresented in many high status occupations, postulating crazy conspiracy theories for why this is the case. But once you acknowledge the IQ gap, we have an entirely benign explanation and it's evident that these conspiracy theories hold no water.

[AlexC04]

> First, we have culture fair IQ tests. Raven's Progressive Matrices is entirely symbolic: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices.... very hard to see how it could be culturally biased, and if it is, why do Europeans do so poorly compared to Chinese and Japanese people?

So one hypothesis is that the test is unbiased and that Chinese & Japanese people have a higher IQ than Europeans?

Perhaps another hypothesis is that Kanji based languages with a high number of glyphs and characters gives a lifetime of practice to Chinese and Japanese people who are then more adept amd practised at specially rotating random or nonsense glyphs.

While the Ashkenazi Jews' IQ differences are interesting, your conclusions remain spurious and based on correlation & epidemiology.

One of the studies you cite for example examines a cohort of Jews who settles in Britain from Germany between 1908 and 1940. Wealth and connections could account for a massive "selection bias"

Additionally "high caste Indian" would also speak to other possible confounding variables.

For example: a very high socioeconomic status appears to be a common thread to all your examples which don't point to race as the dependent variable.

It's all interesting, but I'm not sure the interpretation you're presenting really stands up.

[Moshe_Silnorin]

Raven's Progressive Matrices aren't really based on spacial rotation, but an interesting point. One thing we might look for to test this idea would be Raven's Matrices tests of illiterate Chinese farmers. They were developed in the late 30s, so it's possible such studies were done. Though we'd need to be wary of the Flynn effect.

We see similar IQ differences in Ashkenazi immigrants to America and Canada, and these differences have persisted over multiple generations. You would expect regression to the mean if it is purely a selection effect. Also, selection effects can't explain 27% of United States Nobel prize winners in the 20th century, 25% of Fields Medal winners, and 25% of ACM Turing Award winners, for obvious reasons. 10x overrepresentation isn't something selective immigration can explain when the the global Ashkenazi population is so small.

Wealth is tied with cognitive ability. Look at Jewish immigrants in the 1930s, most of them were extremely poor, but their children grew up to be disproportionately successful. Most people desire wealth. Intelligence is your ability to realize your desires. Intelligent people will tend to acquire more wealth than less intelligent people. As intelligence is highly heritable, this has class implications that can't be ignored.

[telotortium]

Regarding Progressive Matrices, you could try comparing Japanese and Chinese, who use kanji; Koreans, who use hangul, which is derived from kanji; and Vietnamese, who use the Latin alphabet (albeit with a lot of diacritics).

[nilkn]

Do you have sources for any of this? And they'd need to be pretty high quality sources too since there are cultural biases at play here which could skew results.

[moon_of_moon]

Citation?