Before all other things, I study power and politics. Keen awareness of elite theory keeps one alert of Schmittian exceptions, which is to say when special allowances are made in one case but not in others. The vexed area of IQ research is one such case. For example, notorious race-denier Jordan Peterson, who believes that white collectivism is an unspeakable evil, in the next breath will happily repeat the claim that Jews have
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.
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.
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.
“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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The blog post raises similar issues, but also includes Vox Day's standard argument involving Israel's average IQ.
"Third, given the average reported Israeli IQ of 95, and the average reported Jordanian IQ of 84, the claim of an average 115 IQ for Ashkenazi Jews would necessarily require all other Jews to have an average IQ of 84.2. This means that even if Ashkenazi Jews did have a mean IQ of 115, then the average global Jewish IQ would be 107.0. However, on the basis of the original studies pointing out that the reported IQ scores are not indicative of mean or average Ashkenazi IQ, we can be 100 percent certain that this estimated 107 IQ is higher than the real Jewish average.
For example, if Lynn is correct and the Ashkenazi mean is 107.5, then the average global Jewish IQ is 103.2. Not bad, certainly, but considerably lower than 115 and an insufficient foundation on which to construct a believable narrative of intellectual superiority and inevitable success."
The sample size is perhaps not as much the issue as the likely selection bias. For example, the 95% confidence interval for a sample of 50 is only approximately +/- 4 IQ points and for 99% the CI is still less than 6 points.
Leather Apron Club has a great video on this as well.
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.
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.
You’re ignoring that the majority of Israelis are not Ashkenazic.
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.
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.
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.
Great article. As expected midwits abound in the comments section.
“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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vox Day has highlighted the issue multiple times before, and has even published a blog post with a similar title. https://voxday.net/2018/04/29/the-myth-of-jewish-intelligence/
The blog post raises similar issues, but also includes Vox Day's standard argument involving Israel's average IQ.
"Third, given the average reported Israeli IQ of 95, and the average reported Jordanian IQ of 84, the claim of an average 115 IQ for Ashkenazi Jews would necessarily require all other Jews to have an average IQ of 84.2. This means that even if Ashkenazi Jews did have a mean IQ of 115, then the average global Jewish IQ would be 107.0. However, on the basis of the original studies pointing out that the reported IQ scores are not indicative of mean or average Ashkenazi IQ, we can be 100 percent certain that this estimated 107 IQ is higher than the real Jewish average.
For example, if Lynn is correct and the Ashkenazi mean is 107.5, then the average global Jewish IQ is 103.2. Not bad, certainly, but considerably lower than 115 and an insufficient foundation on which to construct a believable narrative of intellectual superiority and inevitable success."
The sample size is perhaps not as much the issue as the likely selection bias. For example, the 95% confidence interval for a sample of 50 is only approximately +/- 4 IQ points and for 99% the CI is still less than 6 points.