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from the maybe-they-only-surveyed-the-nimnobs dept.
Why can we talk about PISA results, comparing the performance of students in school, but we are not allowed to talk about differences in IQ? Bring this subject up, and you are immediately accused of racism. And yet. And yet, if there are substantial differences in intellectual capability, might this not explain some of the world's problems?
An update of a massive "study of studies" is underway; this article summarizes the work to date, and provides links to the work in progress. A quick summary of the answers to the questions no one dares ask:
- Eastern Asia (Japan, China): IQ around 105
- Europe/North America: IQ around 98
- Middle East: IQ around 85
- Africa: IQ around 70
In the first instance, it doesn't even matter why there are differences. They may be genetic, or disease related, or nutrition related, or something else. If these differences are real (and the evidence is pretty strong that they are), then we need to deal with them. Imagine if the low IQs in Africa turn out to be fixable - what would the impact be, if we could raise the IQ of an entire continent by 30 points?!
Sticking our collective heads in the sand, because the topic is not PC, is not going to solve any problems.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:29PM (4 children)
Looking at the geodistribution of white-looking people against the table of IQs, it looks like the white supremacists *are* the inferior people, and it's the east asia supremacists who are at the top of the numbers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:53PM
Lots of people claim that whites are over-represented in Facebook and Google, but they are wrong.
Speaking of distribution the average/mean and median are useful for some stuff but not all. Often it's the outliers that matter more. Few care how fast on average white or black person runs. Whereas more people know who Usain Bolt is. Same for Einstein vs some random physics teacher.
But in many democracies the average person's vote often counts as much if not more than the outliers...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:50PM
Of course. But to be fair there is a significant part of population in China that never gets to take this test. Think about people from rural China who pull their pants down on a crowded train and shit right on the floor thinking it is OK, because where they are from they shit anywhere they want (yes China, not India, although obviously that happens there too).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by KiloByte on Friday November 03 2017, @01:31AM
Actually, Ashkenazi jews fare significantly better than east asians.
Lemme recall, which race was considered to be the worst not so long ago? But that was not even contemporary science -- they followed the likes of Mme Blavatsky rather than those who actually tried looking at data. It's mind-boggling how even an early-20th century anthropologist would not know what an "Aryan" race is: with Germans murdering Gypsies, there's only one Aryan race between the two. (Such people live in Persia, northern India, some parts of Afghanistan, etc).
So yeah, there's a nasty tradition of people using pseudo-science for some massive discrimination.
And today, there's racism and discrimination all around. Some hate Jews. Some hate white males with no gender-related mental illness. Some hate... pretty much any group.
But, the data in this article gives us an important conclusion: if you pick candidates (be it for a job, an elected office, etc) based on merit, the results will have racial/gender/ethnicity ratios much different from general population counts. And that, as individual variance is higher than racial differences, any method to pick that's not 100% race/gender/etc-blind is unfair.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @11:02PM
Maybe, but at least for the US, only 73% of the population is white, and 5% Asian, so you're not really getting the 'White' sample from US/NA/Europe. You need to separate out the races in the countries that are more mixed if you're going to correlate some race statistics