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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, 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.