I recall a comment by Carlyle that Jews were known for their cleverness. And a similar comment by Tolkien. The stereotype goes way back anyway. They had to be limited from universities with (very generous) quotas in the early 20th century because so many of them were scoring so highly on admittance tests. Well above their proportion of the population. It's also hard to not think about the great 20th century geniuses like Erdos and Von Neuman. People who could simulate an entire computer in their mind, while holding conversations with three different mathematicians at once. And made major science and math breakthroughs once a month. And were all Jews born in a small region of Hungary around the same time.
I believe in population differences in all mental attributes, and truth in stereotypes. So it doesn't seem implausible to me. It's a terrible political formula to have, in an age where belief in genetics, IQ, and population differences are verboten. It's rarely spoken of publicly. Unlike a normal political formula that has to be hammered into people. Yet it continues on. I think because it resonates as true.
Unz did a pretty good takedown of the theory in the essay Myth of American Meritocracy (on youtube now, skeptical waves channel.) His most convincing argument is that Jews are way more over-represented in less meritocratic universities like Harvard and Yale. And way less overrepresented in the most selective and meritocratic universities like MIT and Carnegie Mellon. This is pretty shocking for the theory. But they are still very overrepresented. I recall a similar stat that Jews were less overrepresented in the "highest IQ fields" like math and physics. And way more overrepresented in the lower IQ fields like humanities. Another convincing stat was how much less overrepresented Jews are in the Math Olympiad, a pretty fair competition of intellect.
The world's most prestigious statistician, Andrew Gellman, actually endorsed the essay and posted it on his blog when it came out. However a week or so later he did a follow up. Posting other works that claimed to debunk it. They really criticized the reliability of Unz's stats. It's not Unz's fault though, there just aren't good statistics on the number of Jews in any institution. Some sources try to exaggerate the number as much as possible, counting half Jews and even quarter Jews. Unz tried to estimate it by Jewish last names (with an adjustment factor, since only some percent of Jews have Jewish last names.) There were inconsistencies in his estimates, but I think he was basically accurate.
Gellman also made a big deal about the breakdown of the IQ differences. With Jews supposedly only having really high Verbal IQ. And less so nonverbal IQ (but still higher than average.) This may be true, but it's not completely convincing. Since "verbal" IQ isn't just "you're good at words". It correlates strongly with a lot of surprising things like memory and math reasoning ability. I forget the full breakdown, but it's not what I expected it to be. The reason IQ is usually given as one number is because the components correlate so strongly, and aren't easily separable. And if you thought great IQ stats were hard to get, good luck getting finer grained stats like that.
The SAT test used in elite universities is basically an IQ test. Correlating with IQ tests, almost as much as different IQ tests correlate with each other. And it's really the only measure of intelligence universities have on applicants, everything else being total bullshit. It has been changed several times to make it worse and less like an IQ test. I think the big changes were made in the 90's. And many universities started dropping it entirely post-woke. I would LOVE to see if the distribution of Jews changed after that, and how much. That could be a very strong data point to disprove the theory.
Regardless of the truth, I just hate the hypocrisy. You mention Peterson, who clearly believes in IQ research and population differences. But he will never ever publicly talk about it in regards to whites doing better than minorities. Even though his main thing is supposed to be attacking wokeness. How do you even begin to dispute systemic racism claims, without referencing that basic fact of reality? Yet he has not the slightest problem in publicly bringing up higher Jewish IQs to excuse their overrepresentation. It's mind boggling.
He's far from the worst. The whole lot of intellectuals and "scientists" promoting systemic racism theory will never mention jewish overrepresentation, ever. I recall a popular blogger I used to read, Scott Alexander Siskind. He has a whole long post on his old blog supporting the Jewish IQ theory. And yet he bans people ever mentioning human biodiversity. And has a bunch of posts lecturing people on "scientific research" about systemic racism against African Americans. It's unreal.
This is a situation where it doesn't matter what the truth is. If it turns out to be true, they are hypocrites and liars. If it turns out to be false, they are hypocrites and liars. You don't need to squint at charts and tables to realize this.
Ashkenazi Jews did not start to be selected for intelligence until 1000 at the earliest. The gap between them and Europeans in general likely did not kick in until about 1500. If you knew something about the subject you want to write about, you probably wouldn't ask stupid questions.
a) Jews who had the financial means had very high fertility, 12 per family not being unusual.
b) Because Jews were not part of the aristocracy, the way they got this money was in usury, tax farming and other trades that required numeracy and literacy (in the era before the decimal point had been invented, this was cognitively demanding).
3) Repeated persecution, expulsion and massacre left only those with the monetary minas to escape (through bribery or fleeing).
There were likely some earlier pressures in earlier eras. The Jewish emphasis on universal literacy likely lead to the dumbest 10% converting to Christianity or Islam. Hence Mizrahi Jews are a bit cleverer than Arabs, but nothing like the intense selection pressures for Ashkenazi Jews.
Shouldn't we do some actual IQ tests of different races and Jews rather than just assume that the astonishing overrepresentation of Jews in positions of power is due to IQ? Ones that do not rely on crystallised intelligence?
a) and b) The aristocracy in medieval Europe was small; many got rich as doctors, engineers, or merchants, for instance, all vocations that require intelligence. And rich people of all races had more children, not just Jews?
c) Then what about the Gypsies? Or Sephardic Jews? Sephardic Jews were just as persecuted, but they have lower intelligence than the European mean.
Also... What's up with Israel? Israel doesn't have an impressive national IQ. They do decently in academia, but worse than many Western countries (despite modern Critical theory, which was created and championed by Jews, but that's a divergence).
As for success in academia... White people are barely in Ivy League, did you know that? Ask me for a source if you want one. There are no quotas for Jews, only for White people, but because they are counted as White people (Jews fluctuate between being an ethnicity of their own, White, and Semitic. They are White for quotas. Jews for victim points, and Semitic for claims to Israel), all of the white "spots" are taken by Jews, meaning that the only White students in Ivy league are legacy students. Consequently, there are no actually good White students who are let into the institutions that produce most of America's top research. What do you make of that? Not very surprising that many American Nobel prize winners are Jewish? And no... This is not explained by SAT scores. Let me know if you want a source.
Finally... A mean IQ difference between Jews and Whites of 1/2-1 SD (and less to north-western Europeans), doesn't explain the disparity at all. Not even close. So what do you make of that?
I didn't use to care about this. I just considered Ashkenazi another type of European, like Italian, or Irishman. But that was before I realised just how overrepresented you are, and before Jews seemed to become intent on destroying the West and tearing down our borders.
You've raised a lot of points, and I'll try to answer as many as I can:
1) Regarding Israel: a minority of the population are Ashkenazi, and the national average is brought down by Arabs, non-Jewish Russians and assorted East Europeans, Ethiopians and, most significantly, Middle Eastern Jews. In addition, of the remaining pure Ashkenazim, a large proportion are ultra-orthodox Jews who may be very smart, but are completely uneducated from a secular perspective and hence don't contribute to science academia, etc. Direct data is hard to come by, but Cremieux has a recent post about this showing that Ashkenazi IQ in Israel is probably around 108. Anecdotally, Israel looks pretty much what you would expect a 96 IQ country to look like, except that it punches way above its weight in high-tech, suggesting a large smart fraction.
2) The data from Jewish Nobel prizes and the like is from the period when Whites made up the overwhelming majority of Ivy League graduates, so your arguments on this score are not pertinent.
3) The important point is not the difference between the mean, it is the difference in proportions far from the mean. Similarly, blacks are 'only' 1 SD less intelligent than blacks, but below a certain IQ threshold blacks actually outnumber whites because that it how bell curves work.
4) The difference between Jews and the European aristocracy is that (a) the Jews had higher fertility (because of younger marriage and cultural/religious differences), (b) the Jewish population was regularly 'culled' in various persecutions, leaving only the wealthiest and sneakiest, (c) Jews exclusively made their money in professions and trade, whereas gentiles had other ways. As a rule, gentiles who had earned a certain amount of money sold their businesses and moved into land, because trade was considered déclassé. With that said, the fact is that the European upper classes are indeed smarter than the general European population, just not as much as Jews.
5) Sephardi Jews and Gypsies did not work in usury and tax farming. The argument isn't that any persecuted group will be selected for intelligence. that would obviously be wrong.
Yes, wealth is correlated with intelligence in every society we know of, and probably in every society that we can conceive of too. However, this is not necessarily of evolutionary significance because the wealthy do not always have a reproductive advantage. Indeed, in most modern societies they don't. However, among European Jews in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, wealth and fertility was very highly correlated.
"They had to be limited from universities with (very generous) quotas in the early 20th century because so many of them were scoring so highly on admittance tests."
You say the truth without realizing, and Carlyle does, without realizing it. It's entirely a selection issue with these universities and jews had to be limited because they are bad actors who subvert these systems. Bad money drives out good, as they say, and you certainly wouldn't claim that the man making fake coinage is better with money or smarter than the honest currency user. They simply make systems which rely on high trust populations fail, because they are low trust. Vox pointed out that when they go head to head with other similarly low trust populations (Chinese) they fail spectacularly.
The absolute proof against it is that high population nations with at least average IQ have more geniuses than they are utilizing. Assuming the US is ~100iq average, it should have 11,000 members with Iq 150+ and a whopping 660,000 with iq 130+ (33 million population, 150 iq being .00037 of the population, 130 being .02). The fancy pants colleges barely break 10,000 in total enrollment combined. There should be more geniuses than any field knows what to do with yet we don't see them. They are selected against by systems that do not use iq as a criterion, without a doubt.
Just as jews control the top academic institutions and who is admitted, (so they can educate their own for future elite positions) you can think of neo-liberal democracy (the chosenites chosen form of governing) as the vehicle for implementing the same discrimination: it prevents the talented from rising above the ranks of the dumbed-down masses, but allows jews to permeate the strata while remaining a cohesive group. The rest of us Whites are relegated to hyper-individualism.
Vox pointed it out? Vox, who? The magazine? Where? I agree with you, and have data to support it, but would like to see the information you reference. It sounds interesting.
It's amazing, I have just replied to an article of Simon Webb's with exactly these thoughts and quoting Leather Apron Club too. Very comforting to see so many others noticing and reiterating this.
Great article. One technical point on PISA you may be interested in.
I did some research into PISA scores for a government job I had a while back. The scores for East Asia are very unreliable. Whereas in the West we are careful to test a wide range of students in a wide range of schools (because that's the point and we sincerely want to know how we're doing so we can target improvements), they play by different rules in East Asia. Even beyond outright in-person cheating—which is widespread—they disproportionately test elite schools in elite cities, and on PISA test day the lowest-scoring students (as measured by regular exams) are all mysteriously off sick. Then the local government crows loudly about how great their PISA scores are. In other words, it's much the same as nearly all statistics that come out of East Asia: corrupt and fake. The partial exception was Japan, where although there is still significant in-person cheating by individual teachers, the national methodology is relatively rigorous. Japan should probably be the highest true PISA score nation, but it might be a North European country.
I don't disagree but I want to make two technical points.
1) IQ tests are not anything special. They are just a variety of cognitive tasks that allow you to get a spread of results that can be calibrated to some average. They only work as a metric because most humans who are not exceptional high or low or autistic tend to have their mental abilities correlated to each other (if you are pretty good at math you are pretty good at English etc.). So it isn't *entirely* unreasonable to bring in non i.q. tests if nothing better is available.
2) Small samples are fine provided they are selected in a proper randomised unbiased way. If you have multiple unbiased samples you can statistically combine them to make up for the weakness of size. But even a biased large sample is still biased and therefore of less use.
But Germany is referred to as "Western Europe" and the British are either Celts or Germanics (Anglo-Saxons), same as the Dutch...Eastern Euros are Slavs.
I don't see how relevant that is. The point is that there is a dearth of real data for something so oft asserted. let's wait until there is an iq study with verified 23andme data and more than 50 schoolboys involved. until then stop claiming "jews have mean iq of 115", it's just not supported.
Hmmm. Christian Europe encouraged its academics to take vows of celibacy for something like a thousand years. The Ashkenazi Jews did not. Even starting with equal genetic stock, that thousand years of breeding difference is bound to produce a difference.
And anecdotally, I have never met a Jewish janitor. I do know quite a few Jewish brainiacs. This could be a fluke of where I grew up — I didn’t meet many Jews until college age — but taking my personal contact list alone, I’d say the Jewish IQ difference is real. Or, at least, the Jews that got to America.
I'll risk asking a basic question, here... Why do you think priests were particularly bright? It doesn't seem to require great intelligence; most everyone can learn to read relatively quickly. It wasn't especially lucrative, and you were barred from men's favourite activity: sex, so... Why would priests be so smart?
Wouldn't intelligence be better, or as well, invested in a careers as a lawyer, architect, engineer, bailiff, merchant, musician, tax collector, diplomat, judge, military officer, spy, astrologer, astronomer, tutor, navigator, captain, landlord, physician, accountant...? Some of those are rare, true, but they do add up, and... What about nobility? It would certainly have had a strong selection for intelligence.
Money lending requires basic math skills, and being a cleric takes... basic reading ability? Do they utilise intelligence any better than the professions I listed?
Definitely apropos the small parish priests, who often didn't understand the Latin liturgy they voiced.
But clerics were also the managers, bureaucrats, and philosophers of the medieval ages. Some of the roles you list were done by clerics. Oxford dons weren't allowed to marry until 1877!
Monasteries were the closest thing to corporations prior to the Crusades. Then you had the Templars...
I agree, the roles you mention would be better played by someone intelligent, but was the clergy selected for them in the first place? Or did just parts of it rise to the occasion? Clerics were among the few who had the time for many intellectual pursuits, but a small minority of them produced anything of intellectual value. The middle ages are known for having relatively little intellectual progress. Perhaps that is because our intellectual roles were not filled by intelligent people because they were not attractive to them?
I think, at the end of the day, the question is to what degree priests were selected for intelligence.
There was progress during the Middle Ages. But the progress was for small scale technology: musical instruments, clocks, glasses, agriculture, wind up toys, armor.
Roads, sewers, and water systems didn't get back up to ancient levels until the 1800s.
Well, keep it in the back of your mind. While there was intellectual progress, it seems to have been relatively slow, and it was driven by a small portion of the clergy. I'm not so sure this theory of high Ashkenazi IQ holds up to scrutiny. Their SAT scores and merit scholar numbers are dropping, and even the top students of Israel are doing poorly. North-Western European countries are outcompeting Israel in Nobel Prizes per capita. Jewish American scholars continue to do well relative to the White population, but that is to be expected when Whites are barred from the Ivy League (I can show data on that, if you are interested).
If I understand correctly, IQ tests have to give more weight to sections that women do better in to get that result. It's well known women are worse at certain mental tasks like spatial reasoning. Observe any of them trying to back up a car or do some kind of geometry task. (Don't know how much spatial reasoning matters to "intelligence" though.)
I think gender differences come mostly from different interests. A high IQ woman is less likely to become obsessed with a math or engineering problem. They also don't have the same competitive drive men do to "win" and show off their talent.
A study once was done, where they put students' grades at the front of the class for everyone to see. Boys improved a whole grade level on average, competing with each other. Girls' grades didn't change at all. The idea was abandoned because it didn't benefit girls (and also "muh self esteem", etc.)
IQ tests were adjusted so that the genders would score the same. Men and women perform better on different subtests, so by changing how much importance is put on each of them, one can achieve the same average score for the genders.
This simply does not stand up to the logic of evolution. Mass literacy has been a requirement for around 2,000 years within the Jewish community, which forced those who refused to be literate into farming and eventually conversion to other faiths, namely Christianity and Hellenistic Paganism. Between 1 AD and 750 AD there was a massive decline in the Jewish population from 5 million to only 1 million. Those that stayed Jewish were the most literate, the ones that were least literate were most likely to convert. Between 0-200 AD 80-90% of Jews in Palestine were farmers, by 1170 AD only 20-30% of Jews were farmers with the majority of Jews becoming craftsmen, merchants, doctors and moneylenders. As Jews migrated from Palestine and into North Africa, Anatolia, Iberia and North Western Europe this trend became only more pronounced. Between 638-1170 AD only between 5-10% of Jews in Western Europe were farmers. https://web.archive.org/web/20230329021502/https:/www.bu.edu/econ/files/2012/11/dp124.pdf
I fail to see how this kind of history and resultant evolutionary pressure would not lead to a significant increase in Jewish intelligence over the course of thousands of years that clearly explains why Jews, (especially Ashkenazi Jews) are so successful. You are quite correct that the studies that are often cited are too small in their sample size and in many cases do not actually measure IQ in terms of the respondents taking IQ tests, nevertheless, it seems perfectly logical that a group that has selected in favour of the more intelligent, increasingly urban, cosmopolitan would have a massive advantage over the gentile population/s. It seems you are willing to assume population differences in intelligence when it comes to blacks and whites, but the level of proof required to prove a 3/4 SD advantage over Europeans is much higher. I think you may have ideological blinders on here which make you unwilling to accept HBD realities when it comes to Jewish people.
Ferguson is a poster-boy for the incompetence of contemporary anthropology. He's an explicit Rousseauian, and thought Fiddler on the Roof was a good guide to the typical occupational status of European Jews. You can find a quick response to him from Greg Cochran on my blog:
Not interested in anything you have to say because you started the post with an ad hominem which disqualifies everything you then say later. I have no idea who Ferguson is by the way.
You have no idea who Ferguson is? You are the one citing him as evidence that Cochran/Harpending are wrong. If he's an incompetent, then why would you rely on him?
"Not interested in anything you have to say because you started the post with an ad hominem which disqualifies everything you then say later."
This is a logical fallacy, commonly known as "the genetic fallacy".
There are a bunch of basic intro-level logic courses available for free on YouTube to avoid such highschool-level errors, even some decent full "Triviums" to improve your writing and rhetoric.
A. Any talk about trait evolution on a 1000 years timescale is laughable
B. Intelligence is a complex trait influenced by 1000s of genetic loci, we have no idea how it inherited or selected for
C. That observed IQ is 100% genetically determined is very obviously untrue; you can take a child with a 130 IQ potential and turn them into a non-verbal imbecile given the wrong set of circumstances
I'm firmly in the camp of bogus Jewish IQ, here, but... Trait selection within 1000 years is entirely possible. It can happen within a generation. It doesn't require mutations, but simply selection for certain alleles.
Selection within a generation or a few is only theoretically possible if the allelle causes immediate obvious reduction in ability to reproduce in large percentage of its carriers. But then you in the realm of deadly genetic diseases not regular traits
Virtually anyone can learn how to read relatively quickly. Money lending requires basic math skills. North European countries receive more nobel prizes than Israel per capita, and do better on PISA. Jews have less than twice as many American merit scholars per capita as Whites, and far fewer than Asians, which is flabbergasting if they really have an average IQ 3/4 of an SD higher than that of Whites.
Ideology aside, this one just doesn't hold up to scrutiny, man.
“On the Nobel Prize all I will say is that elite theory can serve us well once more: Nobel Prizes are not a neutral institution; they are not selected in an open manner, but tightly controlled through a committee. They demonstrate nothing beyond what power selects. The claim that prizes from this body are an objective measure of anything, therefore, must be discarded. Nothing else needs to be said.”
This is true, but who exactly makes up those committees? If the implication is that it’s a bunch of Jews that’s clearly false, since the committees are in fact composed of a few Swedish (Norwegian in one case) scientists. So “nepotism” is not a helpful explanation here.
And if the idea is that the committee members are not actually free to choose who they like because “power”, that also takes explanation, since although they are appointed by various Swedish academic institutions, there is no penalty for awarding the prize to the “wrong” nominee (especially in the cases of the four prizes for the sciences, which are far less politically contentious than the nobel peace prize).
And since the prize is still funded by the estate of Alfred Nobel (who established it in the first place), they are certainly not beholden to international financial institutions.
So given the above, how exactly can such an independently run institution as the nobel prizes be dismissed as ‘just an instrument of power’ with no evidence presented? Such a claim could only seem believable to one who has no idea how the whole thing works. Perhaps you have a low opinion of the IQ’s of your audience as well?
Yes, the process for awarding the nobel peace prize is more subject to political pressures, as i literally stated myself. But that’s hardly relevant since my point is in relation to the other four nobel prizes (which are given for great advances in physics, medicine etc.) where Jews are greatly over represented despite not being as politically motivated as the peace prize. You have not even contradicted my point let alone disproven it.
And they haven't been for a long time. It's limited how many White students they allow, but they take an unlimited amount of Jewish students. Since they count the Jewish students as White, the Jewish students take up nearly all of the White quota. Virtually all white students you see at Harvard are either legacy or exchange students. In other words, they are not there on merit.
So, in America, the most gifted White students are not let into the universities that produce more than a quarter of American Nobel prizes. And that's just the Ivy league. I'd be surprised if the situation weren't the same at other important, research producing instiutions.
My brother in law got a 1600 on his SATs . Got rejected by them all.
" (...) how exactly can such an independently run institution as the nobel prizes be dismissed as ‘just an instrument of power’ with no evidence presented? Such a claim could only seem believable to one who has no idea how the whole thing works."
It works by voting, and they disclose only the final results (as far as I know). So the only sane thing one could ever possibly and based on evidence state is that, they do not do it because of objectively-oriented recognition of such achievements. They give no rationale at all, but vacuous observations that mean close to nothing. Therefore, yes, it is more of an instrument of power and an institution that runs based on nepotistic intent. Or, Would a couple of clichés justify a great human act?
The nature of voting obeys randomness. There is more importance given to informal things such as talking with your intendent/mayor about the day than taking future decisions seriously. Good day.
Decided by vote, therefore an instrument of power based on “nepotistic intent”? How does that follow?
I recommend you read my comment again, since i clearly explained how just because there’s no objective standard by which they select who the prize gets awarded to does not by any means require that the choice is guided by the will of “power”.
Power is not some mysterious, amorphous force of physics which exerts its effect upon whatever it pleases; power is exerted by men (or groups of them) upon other men, and typically through highly visible channels.
Anyone who is familiar with the thesis of the Populist Delusion (which everyone here should be) knows exactly what I’m talking about.
Therefore, if you’re going go say that power influenced something, you should be able to say how. Even in theory, if actual evidence is not available.
Furthermore, the selections made by (vote of) the committee need reflect nothing more than the personal biases of the scientists and such that make up the committees. And since those are selected from the swedish academy, very few (perhaps none, but who am i kidding) of them are likely to be of even fractionally Jewish descent. Therefore, all charges of nepotism must be discarded, at least until further evidence is presented.
Just off the top of my head. There seems to be plenty of room for Nepotism in academia. On the committee itself, well...Financial corruption, revolving door principle, friendships... But I think that most nepotism happens in other arenas than the Nobel committee itself.
I claimed that there may be the possibility of such intent, given that votes do not have explicit rationale behind them. I was not antagonizing you directly. For example, when we vote for elections there is no writting of our hand on ballots, nor a system to consider that voting is an action 'from' the electorate instead of the elected.
Regarding evidence, we only have the results of those elections. . .
As I consider it, it gets decided by whim in favor of a certain group. Such a system has no real meritocratic value at all, unless one justifies it; and this would open the gate to bias more than not.
It's often cited that Jews couldn't own land in Europe so the low IQ one's boiled off as sexual selection selected for specialised professions such as money lending. But working out interest rates and so on isn't that difficult, you don't need a stella IQ to lend money. It's GCSE maths.
Not related but can you please do a stream on this interview with Dominic Cummings. He discusses elite theory, the reasons why democracies always fail, the rise and fall of civilisations and the need for a vanguard to get anything done.
For a short time he held power and was surrounded by power and the deep state seeing it operate close up. He's cucked on some issues but I think you'd find it fascinating and I'd love to hear your opinions on it. https://youtu.be/3i7ym_Qh7BA?si=VJsD2STODV4rxeID
A stream with Cummings would be amazing, but as you say, very unlikely.
For the time being we'll have to settle for AA commenting on the interview.
Cumming's does actually talk of creating a new political party to take advantage of an electorally destroyed Tory party. We could help him enormously with this if he was willing to meet and engage with us. A pipe dream for now, of course, but if he could feel the latent energy within our movement, get a taste ... well, who knows.
You know you give shit to Richard Hanania for his odd philo-semitism but here you are myopically focused on the same group of people just in the opposite way.
Along with your hysterics on Twitter over Israel, you’re starting to sound a bit stale.
My two cents as an American Jew regarding the “Jewish” mind. Jewish culture celebrates diversity of thought, and values inquisitiveness and questioning assumptions. “Two Jews, three opinions” as they say. It’s not about getting the right score on a test, it’s about being able to think of things in different ways, making new connections and preserving old ones. Jews argue about every layer of meaning of every passage, every word in the Torah, and remain friends. That is our tradition.
Do you think that disproves that nepotism is behind the extreme overrepresentation of Jews in positions of power? "It's not IQ; it's our divergent thinking."? Well, that's conveniently difficult to test for...
Funny how pro equity Jews are as long as it applies to any other group. Jews prescribe a lot of ethics that they somehow exempt themselves from. Nationalism/tribalism, equity... somehow, Jews peg slavery on White people, despite arguably having been disproportionately involved in it themselves. But I digress.
I don’t think IQ tests in any way whether one can think differently and come up with a solution. Academia certainly trains against that. Without that, success is unlikely. Unless success to you means getting a good job. But real high net worth success? Nah.
There are very few Jews in the world. Which isn’t logical. An ethny around for 3000 years should have a billion or more people. Genetically there must be, but identifying as there aren’t. Why? I talked to a lapsed Jew. He was from a wealthy Jewish family, very successful
Brothers and parents. He was not successful. And a scoundrel. His rationale was the pressure to succeed in the Jewish community meant those like him drifted away. Those who were overachievers, forget IQ, stayed in and became
Big shots at the local synagogue. He said ‘we high grade all the time, with the losers, such as myself, drop out and marry out of the faith’. So the Billion genetic Jews self selected down to twenty million high achievers.
That's been my theory too, but... We don't see that tendency today. Secular Jews do better.
But most importantly... There still is no evidence of high Jewish IQ. Crucially, Jews simply don't do very well when in Israel, and their academic performance in America is rapidly dropping. Even with exceptional IQ, the outcome inequity between Jews and others can't be explained, so there must be other reasons for it.
You fail to mention that the ToI article says the children of Jewish immigrants from North America (aka. the Jews people notice as having a lot of power) to Israel score significantly higher than the Israeli mean, putting them near the top. It is quite an accomplishment considering they are tested in Hebrew and their native language is English. Also choosing the Pisa mathematics test put Jews at a disadvantage as Jewish IQ is verbally loaded, so it is not surprising that Jews did not perform well on the PISA math test (especially if it tests geometry). It is interesting to note that Israel scores better in reading.
Didn't you say in your article that "The claim that prizes from this body are an objective measure of anything, therefore, must be discarded"? Also you did not address my main point.
We already know that Jews do better at school in America (although, they have less than twice as many merit scholars per capita as whites, and that number is dropping). The question is whether that is for genetic reasons. It seems that Ashkenazi school performance drops after a couple of generations in Israel.
Here's another example of "YT-philosophers" not being clever enough to grapple with difficult subjects like statistics. It's easier to live in a low IQ bubble and get shekels by repeating 100 years-old stuff with no original research whatsoever.
Citing a bunch of bad old studies and ignoring the good ones (no mention of genetics lol) is intellectually dishonest. It's like Skull Shaun "debunking" Bell Curve, but it is rightwing... It's funny that AA didn't understand (and believe in) HBD when he was libertarian but started to believe in it selectively, still not understanding it.
Frankly, the OP sounds remarkably like the leftist articles "debunking the Black-White IQ gap". This basically boils down to, "all the IQ studies about groups whose IQs are below mine are accurate, all the IQ studies about groups whose IQs are above mine are frauds".
I recall a comment by Carlyle that Jews were known for their cleverness. And a similar comment by Tolkien. The stereotype goes way back anyway. They had to be limited from universities with (very generous) quotas in the early 20th century because so many of them were scoring so highly on admittance tests. Well above their proportion of the population. It's also hard to not think about the great 20th century geniuses like Erdos and Von Neuman. People who could simulate an entire computer in their mind, while holding conversations with three different mathematicians at once. And made major science and math breakthroughs once a month. And were all Jews born in a small region of Hungary around the same time.
I believe in population differences in all mental attributes, and truth in stereotypes. So it doesn't seem implausible to me. It's a terrible political formula to have, in an age where belief in genetics, IQ, and population differences are verboten. It's rarely spoken of publicly. Unlike a normal political formula that has to be hammered into people. Yet it continues on. I think because it resonates as true.
Unz did a pretty good takedown of the theory in the essay Myth of American Meritocracy (on youtube now, skeptical waves channel.) His most convincing argument is that Jews are way more over-represented in less meritocratic universities like Harvard and Yale. And way less overrepresented in the most selective and meritocratic universities like MIT and Carnegie Mellon. This is pretty shocking for the theory. But they are still very overrepresented. I recall a similar stat that Jews were less overrepresented in the "highest IQ fields" like math and physics. And way more overrepresented in the lower IQ fields like humanities. Another convincing stat was how much less overrepresented Jews are in the Math Olympiad, a pretty fair competition of intellect.
The world's most prestigious statistician, Andrew Gellman, actually endorsed the essay and posted it on his blog when it came out. However a week or so later he did a follow up. Posting other works that claimed to debunk it. They really criticized the reliability of Unz's stats. It's not Unz's fault though, there just aren't good statistics on the number of Jews in any institution. Some sources try to exaggerate the number as much as possible, counting half Jews and even quarter Jews. Unz tried to estimate it by Jewish last names (with an adjustment factor, since only some percent of Jews have Jewish last names.) There were inconsistencies in his estimates, but I think he was basically accurate.
Gellman also made a big deal about the breakdown of the IQ differences. With Jews supposedly only having really high Verbal IQ. And less so nonverbal IQ (but still higher than average.) This may be true, but it's not completely convincing. Since "verbal" IQ isn't just "you're good at words". It correlates strongly with a lot of surprising things like memory and math reasoning ability. I forget the full breakdown, but it's not what I expected it to be. The reason IQ is usually given as one number is because the components correlate so strongly, and aren't easily separable. And if you thought great IQ stats were hard to get, good luck getting finer grained stats like that.
The SAT test used in elite universities is basically an IQ test. Correlating with IQ tests, almost as much as different IQ tests correlate with each other. And it's really the only measure of intelligence universities have on applicants, everything else being total bullshit. It has been changed several times to make it worse and less like an IQ test. I think the big changes were made in the 90's. And many universities started dropping it entirely post-woke. I would LOVE to see if the distribution of Jews changed after that, and how much. That could be a very strong data point to disprove the theory.
Regardless of the truth, I just hate the hypocrisy. You mention Peterson, who clearly believes in IQ research and population differences. But he will never ever publicly talk about it in regards to whites doing better than minorities. Even though his main thing is supposed to be attacking wokeness. How do you even begin to dispute systemic racism claims, without referencing that basic fact of reality? Yet he has not the slightest problem in publicly bringing up higher Jewish IQs to excuse their overrepresentation. It's mind boggling.
He's far from the worst. The whole lot of intellectuals and "scientists" promoting systemic racism theory will never mention jewish overrepresentation, ever. I recall a popular blogger I used to read, Scott Alexander Siskind. He has a whole long post on his old blog supporting the Jewish IQ theory. And yet he bans people ever mentioning human biodiversity. And has a bunch of posts lecturing people on "scientific research" about systemic racism against African Americans. It's unreal.
This is a situation where it doesn't matter what the truth is. If it turns out to be true, they are hypocrites and liars. If it turns out to be false, they are hypocrites and liars. You don't need to squint at charts and tables to realize this.
Carlyle was around in the 1860s and Tolkein at the turn of the century. Where are examples of this from the 800s, 1400s, 1600s?
Ashkenazi Jews did not start to be selected for intelligence until 1000 at the earliest. The gap between them and Europeans in general likely did not kick in until about 1500. If you knew something about the subject you want to write about, you probably wouldn't ask stupid questions.
Pil pul & ad hominem.
Many such cases.
Who did the selecting Binah?
The general mechanism is that:
a) Jews who had the financial means had very high fertility, 12 per family not being unusual.
b) Because Jews were not part of the aristocracy, the way they got this money was in usury, tax farming and other trades that required numeracy and literacy (in the era before the decimal point had been invented, this was cognitively demanding).
3) Repeated persecution, expulsion and massacre left only those with the monetary minas to escape (through bribery or fleeing).
There were likely some earlier pressures in earlier eras. The Jewish emphasis on universal literacy likely lead to the dumbest 10% converting to Christianity or Islam. Hence Mizrahi Jews are a bit cleverer than Arabs, but nothing like the intense selection pressures for Ashkenazi Jews.
Shouldn't we do some actual IQ tests of different races and Jews rather than just assume that the astonishing overrepresentation of Jews in positions of power is due to IQ? Ones that do not rely on crystallised intelligence?
a) and b) The aristocracy in medieval Europe was small; many got rich as doctors, engineers, or merchants, for instance, all vocations that require intelligence. And rich people of all races had more children, not just Jews?
c) Then what about the Gypsies? Or Sephardic Jews? Sephardic Jews were just as persecuted, but they have lower intelligence than the European mean.
Also... What's up with Israel? Israel doesn't have an impressive national IQ. They do decently in academia, but worse than many Western countries (despite modern Critical theory, which was created and championed by Jews, but that's a divergence).
As for success in academia... White people are barely in Ivy League, did you know that? Ask me for a source if you want one. There are no quotas for Jews, only for White people, but because they are counted as White people (Jews fluctuate between being an ethnicity of their own, White, and Semitic. They are White for quotas. Jews for victim points, and Semitic for claims to Israel), all of the white "spots" are taken by Jews, meaning that the only White students in Ivy league are legacy students. Consequently, there are no actually good White students who are let into the institutions that produce most of America's top research. What do you make of that? Not very surprising that many American Nobel prize winners are Jewish? And no... This is not explained by SAT scores. Let me know if you want a source.
Finally... A mean IQ difference between Jews and Whites of 1/2-1 SD (and less to north-western Europeans), doesn't explain the disparity at all. Not even close. So what do you make of that?
I didn't use to care about this. I just considered Ashkenazi another type of European, like Italian, or Irishman. But that was before I realised just how overrepresented you are, and before Jews seemed to become intent on destroying the West and tearing down our borders.
You've raised a lot of points, and I'll try to answer as many as I can:
1) Regarding Israel: a minority of the population are Ashkenazi, and the national average is brought down by Arabs, non-Jewish Russians and assorted East Europeans, Ethiopians and, most significantly, Middle Eastern Jews. In addition, of the remaining pure Ashkenazim, a large proportion are ultra-orthodox Jews who may be very smart, but are completely uneducated from a secular perspective and hence don't contribute to science academia, etc. Direct data is hard to come by, but Cremieux has a recent post about this showing that Ashkenazi IQ in Israel is probably around 108. Anecdotally, Israel looks pretty much what you would expect a 96 IQ country to look like, except that it punches way above its weight in high-tech, suggesting a large smart fraction.
2) The data from Jewish Nobel prizes and the like is from the period when Whites made up the overwhelming majority of Ivy League graduates, so your arguments on this score are not pertinent.
3) The important point is not the difference between the mean, it is the difference in proportions far from the mean. Similarly, blacks are 'only' 1 SD less intelligent than blacks, but below a certain IQ threshold blacks actually outnumber whites because that it how bell curves work.
4) The difference between Jews and the European aristocracy is that (a) the Jews had higher fertility (because of younger marriage and cultural/religious differences), (b) the Jewish population was regularly 'culled' in various persecutions, leaving only the wealthiest and sneakiest, (c) Jews exclusively made their money in professions and trade, whereas gentiles had other ways. As a rule, gentiles who had earned a certain amount of money sold their businesses and moved into land, because trade was considered déclassé. With that said, the fact is that the European upper classes are indeed smarter than the general European population, just not as much as Jews.
5) Sephardi Jews and Gypsies did not work in usury and tax farming. The argument isn't that any persecuted group will be selected for intelligence. that would obviously be wrong.
So money = intelligence?
Yes, wealth is correlated with intelligence in every society we know of, and probably in every society that we can conceive of too. However, this is not necessarily of evolutionary significance because the wealthy do not always have a reproductive advantage. Indeed, in most modern societies they don't. However, among European Jews in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, wealth and fertility was very highly correlated.
In modern or capitalist or market societies? There's a relationship between wealth and intelligence.
Idk how it worked in other times and societies with other priorities.
Tax farming was normally a benefit given to Jews in the Ottoman Empire. I'd argue that they were very privileged by doing so. Also they paid no tax.
Not sure I'd argue that this wasn't aristocracy.
"They had to be limited from universities with (very generous) quotas in the early 20th century because so many of them were scoring so highly on admittance tests."
You say the truth without realizing, and Carlyle does, without realizing it. It's entirely a selection issue with these universities and jews had to be limited because they are bad actors who subvert these systems. Bad money drives out good, as they say, and you certainly wouldn't claim that the man making fake coinage is better with money or smarter than the honest currency user. They simply make systems which rely on high trust populations fail, because they are low trust. Vox pointed out that when they go head to head with other similarly low trust populations (Chinese) they fail spectacularly.
The absolute proof against it is that high population nations with at least average IQ have more geniuses than they are utilizing. Assuming the US is ~100iq average, it should have 11,000 members with Iq 150+ and a whopping 660,000 with iq 130+ (33 million population, 150 iq being .00037 of the population, 130 being .02). The fancy pants colleges barely break 10,000 in total enrollment combined. There should be more geniuses than any field knows what to do with yet we don't see them. They are selected against by systems that do not use iq as a criterion, without a doubt.
Just as jews control the top academic institutions and who is admitted, (so they can educate their own for future elite positions) you can think of neo-liberal democracy (the chosenites chosen form of governing) as the vehicle for implementing the same discrimination: it prevents the talented from rising above the ranks of the dumbed-down masses, but allows jews to permeate the strata while remaining a cohesive group. The rest of us Whites are relegated to hyper-individualism.
Vox pointed it out? Vox, who? The magazine? Where? I agree with you, and have data to support it, but would like to see the information you reference. It sounds interesting.
Vox Day, who has quite the infamous but informative blog. He'll mention the consequences of low trust vs high trust occasionally, as in this post:
https://voxday.net/2019/06/20/the-clash-of-low-trust-cultures/
Thanks, man! This is fascinating. Really appreciate it.
Theodor Robert Beale aka Vox Day; his views must certainly be tainted by his experiences because of his father's naivete. https://www.startribune.com/dec-30-2007-ex-ceo-regrets-mission-to-take-on-irs/12916286/
https://www.conservapedia.com/Vox_Day
But this is a very good video on "western" civilization:
"WHY WESTERN CIVILIZATION NEEDS CHRISTIANITY"
https://www.bitchute.com/video/NdNFU0c6TXEM/
Here's one about the Chinese
https://voxday.net/2022/06/07/a-rare-confluence/
https://voxday.net/2020/07/17/its-a-little-late-for-that/
Indians:
https://voxday.net/2018/04/18/conservatism-and-immigration/
Leather Apron Club has a great video on this as well.
Ubersoy made a reply video.
Ubersoy is part of that group
He’s 1/4
So?
UBERSOY is a subversive.
This is as worthy of mention as incidental flatulence.
It's amazing, I have just replied to an article of Simon Webb's with exactly these thoughts and quoting Leather Apron Club too. Very comforting to see so many others noticing and reiterating this.
Great article. One technical point on PISA you may be interested in.
I did some research into PISA scores for a government job I had a while back. The scores for East Asia are very unreliable. Whereas in the West we are careful to test a wide range of students in a wide range of schools (because that's the point and we sincerely want to know how we're doing so we can target improvements), they play by different rules in East Asia. Even beyond outright in-person cheating—which is widespread—they disproportionately test elite schools in elite cities, and on PISA test day the lowest-scoring students (as measured by regular exams) are all mysteriously off sick. Then the local government crows loudly about how great their PISA scores are. In other words, it's much the same as nearly all statistics that come out of East Asia: corrupt and fake. The partial exception was Japan, where although there is still significant in-person cheating by individual teachers, the national methodology is relatively rigorous. Japan should probably be the highest true PISA score nation, but it might be a North European country.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Do you have some sources, or more information?
I don't disagree but I want to make two technical points.
1) IQ tests are not anything special. They are just a variety of cognitive tasks that allow you to get a spread of results that can be calibrated to some average. They only work as a metric because most humans who are not exceptional high or low or autistic tend to have their mental abilities correlated to each other (if you are pretty good at math you are pretty good at English etc.). So it isn't *entirely* unreasonable to bring in non i.q. tests if nothing better is available.
2) Small samples are fine provided they are selected in a proper randomised unbiased way. If you have multiple unbiased samples you can statistically combine them to make up for the weakness of size. But even a biased large sample is still biased and therefore of less use.
You’re ignoring that the majority of Israelis are not Ashkenazic.
Read that section carefully where it specifically mentions that the top ones are nothing special.
Did it provide scores for Ashkenazi specifically vs Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews?
Irrelevent because it says the TOP grades are not special
So it didn't actually provide any data and you are instead relying on the verbal summation by some journalist.
enough with your pilpul, you're wrong and your lies are over.
I'd never come across the word "pilpul" before, are you Jewish?
Maybe their smarter, because they mixed with Europeans. Germans, Dutch, British, etc.
The term "Ashkenazi" itself refers to central/eastern Europe. So more likely Germans than Dutch & British.
But Germany is referred to as "Western Europe" and the British are either Celts or Germanics (Anglo-Saxons), same as the Dutch...Eastern Euros are Slavs.
The Anglo-Saxons had large cultural impact on Britain, but not that much of a genetic one.
A lot of Slavic eastern Europe used to be Germanic.
SATs and grades arent IQ tests facepalm
Neither are any of the tests of Jews that allegedly show Jewish intellectual superiority. They're word problems and vocabulary tests.
I don't see how relevant that is. The point is that there is a dearth of real data for something so oft asserted. let's wait until there is an iq study with verified 23andme data and more than 50 schoolboys involved. until then stop claiming "jews have mean iq of 115", it's just not supported.
Christian Arab and Druze students in Israel have higher test scores on average than Israel’s Jewish students.
Could you share that data with me? I would appreciate it.
Jews is a big grouping within Israel. Druze and Christian Arab are not.
Exactly. Do these minorities hold 50% of the most important positions in Israel? Are they the only ones attending the best colleges?
Besides AA's point about the top ones, Ashkenazim are a large proportion of Israel's Hebrew speakers and should be pulling those scores up bigly.
45% of them are...
Hmmm. Christian Europe encouraged its academics to take vows of celibacy for something like a thousand years. The Ashkenazi Jews did not. Even starting with equal genetic stock, that thousand years of breeding difference is bound to produce a difference.
And anecdotally, I have never met a Jewish janitor. I do know quite a few Jewish brainiacs. This could be a fluke of where I grew up — I didn’t meet many Jews until college age — but taking my personal contact list alone, I’d say the Jewish IQ difference is real. Or, at least, the Jews that got to America.
I'll risk asking a basic question, here... Why do you think priests were particularly bright? It doesn't seem to require great intelligence; most everyone can learn to read relatively quickly. It wasn't especially lucrative, and you were barred from men's favourite activity: sex, so... Why would priests be so smart?
Wouldn't intelligence be better, or as well, invested in a careers as a lawyer, architect, engineer, bailiff, merchant, musician, tax collector, diplomat, judge, military officer, spy, astrologer, astronomer, tutor, navigator, captain, landlord, physician, accountant...? Some of those are rare, true, but they do add up, and... What about nobility? It would certainly have had a strong selection for intelligence.
Money lending requires basic math skills, and being a cleric takes... basic reading ability? Do they utilise intelligence any better than the professions I listed?
Interesting point.
Definitely apropos the small parish priests, who often didn't understand the Latin liturgy they voiced.
But clerics were also the managers, bureaucrats, and philosophers of the medieval ages. Some of the roles you list were done by clerics. Oxford dons weren't allowed to marry until 1877!
Monasteries were the closest thing to corporations prior to the Crusades. Then you had the Templars...
I agree, the roles you mention would be better played by someone intelligent, but was the clergy selected for them in the first place? Or did just parts of it rise to the occasion? Clerics were among the few who had the time for many intellectual pursuits, but a small minority of them produced anything of intellectual value. The middle ages are known for having relatively little intellectual progress. Perhaps that is because our intellectual roles were not filled by intelligent people because they were not attractive to them?
I think, at the end of the day, the question is to what degree priests were selected for intelligence.
There was progress during the Middle Ages. But the progress was for small scale technology: musical instruments, clocks, glasses, agriculture, wind up toys, armor.
Roads, sewers, and water systems didn't get back up to ancient levels until the 1800s.
Well, keep it in the back of your mind. While there was intellectual progress, it seems to have been relatively slow, and it was driven by a small portion of the clergy. I'm not so sure this theory of high Ashkenazi IQ holds up to scrutiny. Their SAT scores and merit scholar numbers are dropping, and even the top students of Israel are doing poorly. North-Western European countries are outcompeting Israel in Nobel Prizes per capita. Jewish American scholars continue to do well relative to the White population, but that is to be expected when Whites are barred from the Ivy League (I can show data on that, if you are interested).
I did know a Jewish woman who worked at McDonalds though.
Average IQ misses the point - consider: it is very well documented that men and women have the same average IQ.
Fat tails drive important differences in outcomes, without changing median/mean.
"There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper" Camille Paglia
If I understand correctly, IQ tests have to give more weight to sections that women do better in to get that result. It's well known women are worse at certain mental tasks like spatial reasoning. Observe any of them trying to back up a car or do some kind of geometry task. (Don't know how much spatial reasoning matters to "intelligence" though.)
I think gender differences come mostly from different interests. A high IQ woman is less likely to become obsessed with a math or engineering problem. They also don't have the same competitive drive men do to "win" and show off their talent.
A study once was done, where they put students' grades at the front of the class for everyone to see. Boys improved a whole grade level on average, competing with each other. Girls' grades didn't change at all. The idea was abandoned because it didn't benefit girls (and also "muh self esteem", etc.)
IQ tests were adjusted so that the genders would score the same. Men and women perform better on different subtests, so by changing how much importance is put on each of them, one can achieve the same average score for the genders.
Great article. As expected midwits abound in the comments section.
Well, the original article is pure midwittery so what did you expect.
This simply does not stand up to the logic of evolution. Mass literacy has been a requirement for around 2,000 years within the Jewish community, which forced those who refused to be literate into farming and eventually conversion to other faiths, namely Christianity and Hellenistic Paganism. Between 1 AD and 750 AD there was a massive decline in the Jewish population from 5 million to only 1 million. Those that stayed Jewish were the most literate, the ones that were least literate were most likely to convert. Between 0-200 AD 80-90% of Jews in Palestine were farmers, by 1170 AD only 20-30% of Jews were farmers with the majority of Jews becoming craftsmen, merchants, doctors and moneylenders. As Jews migrated from Palestine and into North Africa, Anatolia, Iberia and North Western Europe this trend became only more pronounced. Between 638-1170 AD only between 5-10% of Jews in Western Europe were farmers. https://web.archive.org/web/20230329021502/https:/www.bu.edu/econ/files/2012/11/dp124.pdf
I fail to see how this kind of history and resultant evolutionary pressure would not lead to a significant increase in Jewish intelligence over the course of thousands of years that clearly explains why Jews, (especially Ashkenazi Jews) are so successful. You are quite correct that the studies that are often cited are too small in their sample size and in many cases do not actually measure IQ in terms of the respondents taking IQ tests, nevertheless, it seems perfectly logical that a group that has selected in favour of the more intelligent, increasingly urban, cosmopolitan would have a massive advantage over the gentile population/s. It seems you are willing to assume population differences in intelligence when it comes to blacks and whites, but the level of proof required to prove a 3/4 SD advantage over Europeans is much higher. I think you may have ideological blinders on here which make you unwilling to accept HBD realities when it comes to Jewish people.
This is the thesis of the paper I quote which is refuted by Ferguson above. I don't accept this outline whatsoever.
Ferguson is a poster-boy for the incompetence of contemporary anthropology. He's an explicit Rousseauian, and thought Fiddler on the Roof was a good guide to the typical occupational status of European Jews. You can find a quick response to him from Greg Cochran on my blog:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/primitive-warfare-primitive-warfare-primitive-warfare-warfare-warfare/
Not interested in anything you have to say because you started the post with an ad hominem which disqualifies everything you then say later. I have no idea who Ferguson is by the way.
You have no idea who Ferguson is? You are the one citing him as evidence that Cochran/Harpending are wrong. If he's an incompetent, then why would you rely on him?
Sticking your fingers in your ears and saying “na na na boo boo” doesn’t inspire much confidence
Lol true unfortunately with Mr. Parvini....BS BS now lets get to super chats lol
"Not interested in anything you have to say because you started the post with an ad hominem which disqualifies everything you then say later."
This is a logical fallacy, commonly known as "the genetic fallacy".
There are a bunch of basic intro-level logic courses available for free on YouTube to avoid such highschool-level errors, even some decent full "Triviums" to improve your writing and rhetoric.
Couple of things:
A. Any talk about trait evolution on a 1000 years timescale is laughable
B. Intelligence is a complex trait influenced by 1000s of genetic loci, we have no idea how it inherited or selected for
C. That observed IQ is 100% genetically determined is very obviously untrue; you can take a child with a 130 IQ potential and turn them into a non-verbal imbecile given the wrong set of circumstances
I'm firmly in the camp of bogus Jewish IQ, here, but... Trait selection within 1000 years is entirely possible. It can happen within a generation. It doesn't require mutations, but simply selection for certain alleles.
Selection within a generation or a few is only theoretically possible if the allelle causes immediate obvious reduction in ability to reproduce in large percentage of its carriers. But then you in the realm of deadly genetic diseases not regular traits
Virtually anyone can learn how to read relatively quickly. Money lending requires basic math skills. North European countries receive more nobel prizes than Israel per capita, and do better on PISA. Jews have less than twice as many American merit scholars per capita as Whites, and far fewer than Asians, which is flabbergasting if they really have an average IQ 3/4 of an SD higher than that of Whites.
Ideology aside, this one just doesn't hold up to scrutiny, man.
“On the Nobel Prize all I will say is that elite theory can serve us well once more: Nobel Prizes are not a neutral institution; they are not selected in an open manner, but tightly controlled through a committee. They demonstrate nothing beyond what power selects. The claim that prizes from this body are an objective measure of anything, therefore, must be discarded. Nothing else needs to be said.”
This is true, but who exactly makes up those committees? If the implication is that it’s a bunch of Jews that’s clearly false, since the committees are in fact composed of a few Swedish (Norwegian in one case) scientists. So “nepotism” is not a helpful explanation here.
And if the idea is that the committee members are not actually free to choose who they like because “power”, that also takes explanation, since although they are appointed by various Swedish academic institutions, there is no penalty for awarding the prize to the “wrong” nominee (especially in the cases of the four prizes for the sciences, which are far less politically contentious than the nobel peace prize).
And since the prize is still funded by the estate of Alfred Nobel (who established it in the first place), they are certainly not beholden to international financial institutions.
So given the above, how exactly can such an independently run institution as the nobel prizes be dismissed as ‘just an instrument of power’ with no evidence presented? Such a claim could only seem believable to one who has no idea how the whole thing works. Perhaps you have a low opinion of the IQ’s of your audience as well?
Obama got a nobel peace prize for being black. That is power speaking, "independent" institutions invariably bending to official ideology.
Yes, the process for awarding the nobel peace prize is more subject to political pressures, as i literally stated myself. But that’s hardly relevant since my point is in relation to the other four nobel prizes (which are given for great advances in physics, medicine etc.) where Jews are greatly over represented despite not being as politically motivated as the peace prize. You have not even contradicted my point let alone disproven it.
White Americans produce few Nobel Prizes because White kids aren't let into Ivy League and other elite universities. And it's not because of their SAT scores: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
And they haven't been for a long time. It's limited how many White students they allow, but they take an unlimited amount of Jewish students. Since they count the Jewish students as White, the Jewish students take up nearly all of the White quota. Virtually all white students you see at Harvard are either legacy or exchange students. In other words, they are not there on merit.
So, in America, the most gifted White students are not let into the universities that produce more than a quarter of American Nobel prizes. And that's just the Ivy league. I'd be surprised if the situation weren't the same at other important, research producing instiutions.
My brother in law got a 1600 on his SATs . Got rejected by them all.
" (...) how exactly can such an independently run institution as the nobel prizes be dismissed as ‘just an instrument of power’ with no evidence presented? Such a claim could only seem believable to one who has no idea how the whole thing works."
It works by voting, and they disclose only the final results (as far as I know). So the only sane thing one could ever possibly and based on evidence state is that, they do not do it because of objectively-oriented recognition of such achievements. They give no rationale at all, but vacuous observations that mean close to nothing. Therefore, yes, it is more of an instrument of power and an institution that runs based on nepotistic intent. Or, Would a couple of clichés justify a great human act?
The nature of voting obeys randomness. There is more importance given to informal things such as talking with your intendent/mayor about the day than taking future decisions seriously. Good day.
Decided by vote, therefore an instrument of power based on “nepotistic intent”? How does that follow?
I recommend you read my comment again, since i clearly explained how just because there’s no objective standard by which they select who the prize gets awarded to does not by any means require that the choice is guided by the will of “power”.
Power is not some mysterious, amorphous force of physics which exerts its effect upon whatever it pleases; power is exerted by men (or groups of them) upon other men, and typically through highly visible channels.
Anyone who is familiar with the thesis of the Populist Delusion (which everyone here should be) knows exactly what I’m talking about.
Therefore, if you’re going go say that power influenced something, you should be able to say how. Even in theory, if actual evidence is not available.
Furthermore, the selections made by (vote of) the committee need reflect nothing more than the personal biases of the scientists and such that make up the committees. And since those are selected from the swedish academy, very few (perhaps none, but who am i kidding) of them are likely to be of even fractionally Jewish descent. Therefore, all charges of nepotism must be discarded, at least until further evidence is presented.
1) Nepotism in admissions to Ivy League
2) Nepotism in grants
3) Nepotism in research hierarchies
4) Nepotism in media coverage
Just off the top of my head. There seems to be plenty of room for Nepotism in academia. On the committee itself, well...Financial corruption, revolving door principle, friendships... But I think that most nepotism happens in other arenas than the Nobel committee itself.
I claimed that there may be the possibility of such intent, given that votes do not have explicit rationale behind them. I was not antagonizing you directly. For example, when we vote for elections there is no writting of our hand on ballots, nor a system to consider that voting is an action 'from' the electorate instead of the elected.
Regarding evidence, we only have the results of those elections. . .
As I consider it, it gets decided by whim in favor of a certain group. Such a system has no real meritocratic value at all, unless one justifies it; and this would open the gate to bias more than not.
Good day.
It's often cited that Jews couldn't own land in Europe so the low IQ one's boiled off as sexual selection selected for specialised professions such as money lending. But working out interest rates and so on isn't that difficult, you don't need a stella IQ to lend money. It's GCSE maths.
Not related but can you please do a stream on this interview with Dominic Cummings. He discusses elite theory, the reasons why democracies always fail, the rise and fall of civilisations and the need for a vanguard to get anything done.
For a short time he held power and was surrounded by power and the deep state seeing it operate close up. He's cucked on some issues but I think you'd find it fascinating and I'd love to hear your opinions on it. https://youtu.be/3i7ym_Qh7BA?si=VJsD2STODV4rxeID
As much as this would be an amazing meeting of minds, it is never going to happen (at least in public).
A stream with Cummings would be amazing, but as you say, very unlikely.
For the time being we'll have to settle for AA commenting on the interview.
Cumming's does actually talk of creating a new political party to take advantage of an electorally destroyed Tory party. We could help him enormously with this if he was willing to meet and engage with us. A pipe dream for now, of course, but if he could feel the latent energy within our movement, get a taste ... well, who knows.
You know you give shit to Richard Hanania for his odd philo-semitism but here you are myopically focused on the same group of people just in the opposite way.
Along with your hysterics on Twitter over Israel, you’re starting to sound a bit stale.
My two cents as an American Jew regarding the “Jewish” mind. Jewish culture celebrates diversity of thought, and values inquisitiveness and questioning assumptions. “Two Jews, three opinions” as they say. It’s not about getting the right score on a test, it’s about being able to think of things in different ways, making new connections and preserving old ones. Jews argue about every layer of meaning of every passage, every word in the Torah, and remain friends. That is our tradition.
Do you think that disproves that nepotism is behind the extreme overrepresentation of Jews in positions of power? "It's not IQ; it's our divergent thinking."? Well, that's conveniently difficult to test for...
Funny how pro equity Jews are as long as it applies to any other group. Jews prescribe a lot of ethics that they somehow exempt themselves from. Nationalism/tribalism, equity... somehow, Jews peg slavery on White people, despite arguably having been disproportionately involved in it themselves. But I digress.
I don’t think my observations stated here prove or disprove anything. They are just presented as food for thought.
Okay, fair. People tend to be very confrontational on this topic. I came out swinging. Sorry about that.
Something in Jewish culture seems to have changed a while ago:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
I don’t think IQ tests in any way whether one can think differently and come up with a solution. Academia certainly trains against that. Without that, success is unlikely. Unless success to you means getting a good job. But real high net worth success? Nah.
There are very few Jews in the world. Which isn’t logical. An ethny around for 3000 years should have a billion or more people. Genetically there must be, but identifying as there aren’t. Why? I talked to a lapsed Jew. He was from a wealthy Jewish family, very successful
Brothers and parents. He was not successful. And a scoundrel. His rationale was the pressure to succeed in the Jewish community meant those like him drifted away. Those who were overachievers, forget IQ, stayed in and became
Big shots at the local synagogue. He said ‘we high grade all the time, with the losers, such as myself, drop out and marry out of the faith’. So the Billion genetic Jews self selected down to twenty million high achievers.
That's been my theory too, but... We don't see that tendency today. Secular Jews do better.
But most importantly... There still is no evidence of high Jewish IQ. Crucially, Jews simply don't do very well when in Israel, and their academic performance in America is rapidly dropping. Even with exceptional IQ, the outcome inequity between Jews and others can't be explained, so there must be other reasons for it.
IQ being one factor.
You fail to mention that the ToI article says the children of Jewish immigrants from North America (aka. the Jews people notice as having a lot of power) to Israel score significantly higher than the Israeli mean, putting them near the top. It is quite an accomplishment considering they are tested in Hebrew and their native language is English. Also choosing the Pisa mathematics test put Jews at a disadvantage as Jewish IQ is verbally loaded, so it is not surprising that Jews did not perform well on the PISA math test (especially if it tests geometry). It is interesting to note that Israel scores better in reading.
So what relevance has Phyics Nobel prizes if it's verbal and not mathematical?
Didn't you say in your article that "The claim that prizes from this body are an objective measure of anything, therefore, must be discarded"? Also you did not address my main point.
We already know that Jews do better at school in America (although, they have less than twice as many merit scholars per capita as whites, and that number is dropping). The question is whether that is for genetic reasons. It seems that Ashkenazi school performance drops after a couple of generations in Israel.
Here's another example of "YT-philosophers" not being clever enough to grapple with difficult subjects like statistics. It's easier to live in a low IQ bubble and get shekels by repeating 100 years-old stuff with no original research whatsoever.
What was incorrect here?
Citing a bunch of bad old studies and ignoring the good ones (no mention of genetics lol) is intellectually dishonest. It's like Skull Shaun "debunking" Bell Curve, but it is rightwing... It's funny that AA didn't understand (and believe in) HBD when he was libertarian but started to believe in it selectively, still not understanding it.
Frankly, the OP sounds remarkably like the leftist articles "debunking the Black-White IQ gap". This basically boils down to, "all the IQ studies about groups whose IQs are below mine are accurate, all the IQ studies about groups whose IQs are above mine are frauds".
Where are the good studies?