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IQ of Nations

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday November 02 2017, @05:57PM   
from the maybe-they-only-surveyed-the-nimnobs dept.

bradley13 writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• Difference goes away when compared via ... (Score: 5, Interesting) by Bobs on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:24PM

  by Bobs (1462) on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:24PM (#591319)

  I was curious about the source for this article.

  Interestingly, they have an entire sub-section devoted to Race/ethnicity articles.

  I did find one with this counter example to the submission:

  TLDR summary:
    Being a world champion at Scrabble takes high order mental skills, People from African nations have a strong representation in World class Scrabble champions.
    Author concludes the deficit in "average national IQs" in Africa is the ubiquitous, crappy educational systems there, and not racial limitations.

  ... I think that it should be obvious that the drastically inferior environment of Africa, especially the learning or educational environment (the training factor), is a sufficient explanation for any inferior intellectual performance or IQ of Africans living in Africa (which is why African school children born in Western countries perform as well as white European children, if not better). This article tests that proposition by examining the performance of Sub-Saharan Africans on contests that are much less hindered by the artificial lack of educational (training) resources while simultaneously requiring the application of high natural cognitive resources.

  ...
  Gabon has a population of 1.7 million and a reported national IQ of 64.

  If the world champion needs an IQ of just 140 (it should probably be higher than that, given the level of gender disparity at the very top), then there is statistically no one in Gabon who should ever come anywhere close to the world championship. Three made it to the top 10 in 2015.

  ...
  If Africans are doing well on these games because of some special environmental reason, then that contradicts the genetic racial hypothesis. If Africans in Africa are outperforming others due to some environmental reason, then black American performance on Scrabble can also be raised by environmental methods; if black American Scrabble performance can be raised to equal whites, then black American math performance can also be raised by environmental intervention. If it can’t, then the fallacy of the hereditarian position has been to assume that native black Americans are cognitively representative of blacks everywhere.

  The global racial hypothesis is therefore not just contradicted by these findings, it is logically refuted. Under this hypothesis, there should not be even one single cognitive field where the top blacks are equal or more over-represented than the top whites, especially when white participation in such fields is elite enough to result in a wide gender performance gap in favor of males even with relatively high numbers of female participants. The additional presence of Jewish over-representation at the top of a field should only reinforce the impossibility of black dominance or equality under that hypothesis. You have the opposite empirical result in Scrabble and checkers since you get increasing African over-representation with rising cognitive selectivity, suggesting a reversal of the gap, if anything.

  The falsifiable part of the racial hypothesis is duly falsified.

    From http://www.unz.com/article/scrabble-spells-doom-for-the-racial-hypothesis-of-intelligence/ [unz.com]

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+3
  Interesting=2, Informative=1, Total=3
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5