Comment by newspaper1
4 days ago
So you do think Jews are smarter than non-Jews. I welcome your return to reality. It will be well deserved.
4 days ago
So you do think Jews are smarter than non-Jews. I welcome your return to reality. It will be well deserved.
How about this: Ashkenazi Jewish culture with its emphasis on education and discipline stemming from studying religious texts leading to widespread literacy has led this group of people to outperform the mainline on intellectual tasks just like other cultures with an emphasis on education and literacy tend to outperform the mainline.
You don't need genetic inheritance to explain Jewish over-performance, cultural inheritance is enough. Do mind I don't know whether there is a genetic component involved but I do know it is not needed to explain why Ashkenazi Jews outperform other cultures.
Looking at national IQ averages [1] currently Hong Kong seems to score highest with an average of 107.73 while Israel is below average at 98.57, below most European countries as well as below the USA. The top 6 in the list are all east-Asian countries, the lowest are nearly all in Africa with Somalia lowest at 83.84.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-i...
>You don't need genetic inheritance to explain Jewish over-performance, cultural inheritance is enough.
but it is known, independently of Jewish population studies, that genetic inheritance is a strong factor in IQ performance, and such data also demands explanation; there is no point in leaving it out of population studies.
It is much more frustrating to perform tasks that are more difficult for you than things that are easy. So if a task requires intellect, you are more likely to engage in that task if you are intelligent, and more likely to progress in that field if other people note and reward your performance. Such a process carried out on a particular gene pool might reinforce tendencies that lead to part of what we call culture.
>Looking at national IQ averages currently Hong Kong seems to score highest with an average of 107.73 while Israel is below average at 98.57, below most European countries as well as below the USA.
Ashkenazi Jews as a population average scores above 107. The IQ mean of 100 has a standard deviation of about 15. Also, Ashkenazi Jews are less than half of Israel.
Yes, there does seem to be a genetic component to IQ but as I stated you don't need to include it here to explain why cultures which place emphasis on education and discipline score higher than those which don't. Even if intelligence were not heritable those cultures would on average still perform better than those which don't value education and discipline. Adding a heritable component makes the effect stronger, especially in cultures where intracultural marriages are common or the norm.
There are no such thing as "national IQ averages".
Yes there are no matter whether you consider IQ a valid concept or not. In the context of the grandparent's remark about Ashkenazi Jews being 'smarter' it is relevant to compare specific group averages (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews) with national averages, especially in the case of Israel where there is a marked difference between the national average IQ and that for the group 'Ashkenazi Jews' (about 24% of the total Israeli population calculated from the numbers presented in [1]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Jews
8 replies →
64 Fields Medals have been awarded, 15 went to Jews, just over 23%.
Jews are 2.5% of the US but less than 0.2% of Europe (10% of all Jews live in Europe; in 1933, it was 60%)
This sounds like fuel for antisemitic conspiracies because collusion != intelligence.