What if Jews are just better?

[Metaphor]

In the fait accompli critical theory, postmodern, equity "understanding" of society, all groups are equal in all relevant respects, and so if there are disparate outcomes, it's because society has done something (bad) to cause groups to have differential outcomes. This is accepted without question by the modern left, even though no proof is ever offered. It's certainly the case that people more accomplished than I have been fired for saying far less than I did in my 'what if men are just better?' thread.

Although I predict this thread to have a similar outcome as that one (that is, the people who categorically believe that nearly all relevant differences between men and women is due to social conditioning and/or discrimination, continuing to believe that), I nevertheless want to float another idea, and probably an idea that won't be too popular with the antisemitic left:

Jews are just better at almost every human endeavour (except, I think, sporting/athletic achievement).

What do I mean by this? I mean, for a group that is less than 0.2% of the world population, and 2% of the American population, Jewish achievement is staggeringly disproportionate to its population. Twenty percent of Nobel prize winners are Jewish, (and probably more if Jewish ancestry is considered more broadly). A quarter of Fields medallists (the highest prize in Mathematics) are Jewish.

The success is not confined merely to sciences; Jewish talent is staggeringly abundant in the arts as well. More than a third of Academy Award Best Director trophies went to Jewish directors; more than two-thirds of Tony-award winning composers and lyricists are Jewish. Jewish comedians number among the most successful of all time. Jewish achievement in politics and finance and economics and industry and medicine and literature are widely known.

In the first half of the twentieth century, American universities had quotas to keep out the allegedly 'feeble minded' Jewish population. No doubt similar quotas apply today under 'diversity' initiatives.

I think that Jewish success is partly--or perhaps mostly--explained by higher than average intelligence in the Ashkenazi Jewish population. But explaining differential success between groups as partly dependent on intelligence is anathema to the left. It is forbidden. It is verboten.

The only thing that can explain Jewish success relative to other groups is Jewish privilege. Jews are not just white-adjacent. They must be superwhites.

Mazel tov

Again another of Metaphor's posts in Political Discussions that has nothing to do with politics.

The public policy formed around education and employment, and every other sector of human life that is subject to the faulty assumption of group equality is of course political.

 

[Metaphor]

As mentioned, your paper gets us closer, but a proper treatment of this question would look at the entire body of research done on the topic and present an argument that is multi-faceted, and which accounts for both genetic and social influences. There is a kind of irony to those in the thread calling out the far-left for eschewing biological explanations, and then themselves failing to say absolutely anything about social processes, or social complexity. It is possible to not look at the issue as a binary.

But I'm not denying social influences. I'm trying to get people to accept the possibility of genetic influences.

And further than that, what does the phrase Jews are better mean in a broader, global context? People who follow the Jewish tradition are incredibly diverse, so it's likely that even if some sub-groups of them were pressured into higher IQ, that there are other groups which were not, which makes the phrase Jews are better meaningless, it's a broad, vague generalization that says nothing about what is an incredibly diverse topic.

Of course it isn't meaningless. People with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, have, as a group, higher intelligence than the general population.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Jews in pre-modern Europe faced significant discrimination. They could not own land. They were excluded from the trades. In many places they were confined to ghettos. But they could be money changers. They could engaged in mental/financial occupations. Over centuries this selected for high intelligence. Such that, when the Jews became free to leave the ghettos, the Rothschilds controlled Europe’s finances. Jews are wildly overrepresented with Nobel prizes and on the list of the world’s wealthiest. While creationists and Lysenkoists reject that humans are animals subject to natural selection, Nature doesn’t care about their feelings.

This would have required some pretty aggressive pruning in those times to have altered the genetics significantly that quickly. I think it's much more likely to be a cultural issue--they favored the wealth of education over physical wealth that could be taken away. However, there's also a hybrid possibility--those centuries selected for a liking of learning.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

People with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, have, as a group, higher intelligence than the general population.

I was wondering when we'd come around to the actual purpose of this thread. This is a white supremacist shell game, the purpose of which is to establish biological differences in a seemingly benign, non-racist manner, which in turn justifies separating the species according to biological differences. Aka, stereotypes. The piece linked does a good job of explaining. Snippet:

The claim that there is a link between race and intelligence is the main tenet of what is known as “race science” or, in many cases, “scientific racism”. Race scientists claim there are evolutionary bases for disparities in social outcomes – such as life expectancy, educational attainment, wealth, and incarceration rates – between racial groups. In particular, many of them argue that black people fare worse than white people because they tend to be less naturally intelligent.

Although race science has been repeatedly debunked by scholarly research, in recent years it has made a comeback. Many of the keenest promoters of race science today are stars of the “alt-right”, who like to use pseudoscience to lend intellectual justification to ethno-nationalist politics. If you believe that poor people are poor because they are inherently less intelligent, then it is easy to leap to the conclusion that liberal remedies, such as affirmative action or foreign aid, are doomed to fail.

There are scores of recent examples of rightwingers banging the drum for race science. In July 2016, for example, Steve Bannon, who was then Breitbart boss and would go on to be Donald Trump’s chief strategist, wrote an article in which he suggested that some black people who had been shot by the police might have deserved it. “There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent,” Bannon wrote, evoking one of scientific racism’s ugliest contentions: that black people are more genetically predisposed to violence than others.

In regard to Ashkenazis in particular:

The recent revival of ideas about race and IQ began with a seemingly benign scientific observation. In 2005, Steven Pinker, one of the world’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, began promoting the view that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent – first in a lecture to a Jewish studies institute, then in a lengthy article in the liberal American magazine The New Republic the following year. This claim has long been the smiling face of race science; if it is true that Jews are naturally more intelligent, then it’s only logical to say that others are naturally less so.

The background to Pinker’s essay was a 2005 paper entitled “Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence”, written by a trio of anthropologists at the University of Utah. In their 2005 paper, the anthropologists argued that high IQ scores among Ashkenazi Jews indicated that they evolved to be smarter than anyone else (including other groups of Jews).

This evolutionary development supposedly took root between 800 and 1650 AD, when Ashkenazis, who primarily lived in Europe, were pushed by antisemitism into money-lending, which was stigmatised among Christians. This rapid evolution was possible, the paper argued, in part because the practice of not marrying outside the Jewish community meant a “very low inward gene flow”. This was also a factor behind the disproportionate prevalence in Ashkenazi Jews of genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher’s, which the researchers claimed were a byproduct of natural selection for higher intelligence; those carrying the gene variants, or alleles, for these diseases were said to be smarter than the rest.

Pinker followed this logic in his New Republic article, and elsewhere described the Ashkenazi paper as “thorough and well-argued”. He went on to castigate those who doubted the scientific value of talking about genetic differences between races, and claimed that “personality traits are measurable, heritable within a group and slightly different, on average, between groups”.

In subsequent years, Nicholas Wade, Charles Murray, Richard Lynn, the increasingly popular Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and others have all piled in on the Jewish intelligence thesis, using it as ballast for their views that different population groups inherit different mental capacities. Another member of this chorus is the journalist Andrew Sullivan, who was one of the loudest cheerleaders for The Bell Curve in 1994, featuring it prominently in The New Republic, which he edited at the time. He returned to the fray in 2011, using his popular blog, The Dish, to promote the view that population groups had different innate potentials when it came to intelligence.

Sullivan noted that the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews were “striking in the data”. It was a prime example of the rhetoric of race science, whose proponents love to claim that they are honouring the data, not political commitments. The far right has even rebranded race science with an alternative name that sounds like it was taken straight from the pages of a university course catalogue: “human biodiversity”.

A common theme in the rhetoric of race science is that its opponents are guilty of wishful thinking about the nature of human equality. “The IQ literature reveals that which no one would want to be the case,” Peterson told Molyneux on his YouTube show recently. Even the prominent social scientist Jonathan Haidt has criticised liberals as “IQ deniers”, who reject the truth of inherited IQ difference between groups because of a misguided commitment to the idea that social outcomes depend entirely on nurture, and are therefore mutable.

Defenders of race science claim they are simply describing the facts as they are – and the truth isn’t always comfortable. “We remain the same species, just as a poodle and a beagle are of the same species,” Sullivan wrote in 2013. “But poodles, in general, are smarter than beagles, and beagles have a much better sense of smell.”

The article goes on in depth to thoroughly debunk the whole nonsense, but, basically, no, no one group of people are generally any more intelligent than any other group of people genetically speaking. Though a very good argument can be made that anyone who voted for Trump is a fucking moron, it's really more like a core 20% that are that way due most likely to inbreeding.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Jews in pre-modern Europe faced significant discrimination. They could not own land. They were excluded from the trades. In many places they were confined to ghettos. But they could be money changers. They could engaged in mental/financial occupations. Over centuries this selected for high intelligence. Such that, when the Jews became free to leave the ghettos, the Rothschilds controlled Europe’s finances. Jews are wildly overrepresented with Nobel prizes and on the list of the world’s wealthiest. While creationists and Lysenkoists reject that humans are animals subject to natural selection, Nature doesn’t care about their feelings.

People are certainly subject to natural selection, but I don't see you present any research backing up your claim.

I'd presume it'd be pretty difficult, because evolution doesn't exactly work that​ quickly. Is there a comedian gene?

It depends on how hard you cull. I wouldn't say it was impossible, just that it would mean the less suitable had to be culled pretty hard. (Note that this could be simply an inability to attract a mate, it need not be death.)

 

[Metaphor]

The article goes on in depth to thoroughly debunk the whole nonsense, but, basically, no, no one group of people are generally any more intelligent than any other group of people genetically speaking. Though a very good argument can be made that anyone who voted for Trump is a fucking moron, it's really more like a core 20% that are that way due most likely to inbreeding.

I doubt that it does that, since Ashkenazi Jews do, in fact, have a measured IQ higher than other groups.

You are indulging in the wishful thinking yourself.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

The article goes on in depth to thoroughly debunk the whole nonsense, but, basically, no, no one group of people are generally any more intelligent than any other group of people genetically speaking. Though a very good argument can be made that anyone who voted for Trump is a fucking moron, it's really more like a core 20% that are that way due most likely to inbreeding.

I doubt that it does that, since Ashkenazi Jews do, in fact, have a measured IQ higher than other groups.

No, they don't. Had you bothered to read the article I posted, you'd have learned that but for your edification:

Since the 2005 University of Utah paper was published, DNA research by other scientists has shown that Ashkenazi Jews are far less genetically isolated than the paper argued. On the claims that Ashkenazi diseases were caused by rapid natural selection, further research has shown that they were caused by a random mutation. And there is no evidence that those carrying the gene variants for these diseases are any more or less intelligent than the rest of the community.

But it was on IQ that the paper’s case really floundered. Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor who analysed the exam data, wrote: “Our figures … would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”. And yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores were above average.

A similar pattern could be seen from studies of two generations of Mizrahi Jewish children in Israel: the older generation had a mean IQ of 92.8, the younger of 101.3. And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Chinese Americans recorded average IQ scores of 97 in 1948, and 108.6 in 1990. And the gap between African Americans and white Americans narrowed by 5.5 points between 1972 and 2002.

No one could reasonably claim that there had been genetic changes in the Jewish, Chinese American or African American populations in a generation or two. After reading the University of Utah paper, Harry Ostrer, who headed New York University’s human genetics programme, took the opposite view to Steven Pinker: “It’s bad science – not because it’s provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.”

Again, more details in the piece that I'm sure you will either ignore or cherry pick, which.

You are indulging in the wishful thinking yourself.

You are indulging in stealth bigotry.

 

[Metaphor]

But it was on IQ that the paper’s case really floundered. Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor who analysed the exam data, wrote: “Our figures … would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”. And yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores were above average.

A similar pattern could be seen from studies of two generations of Mizrahi Jewish children in Israel: the older generation had a mean IQ of 92.8, the younger of 101.3. And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Chinese Americans recorded average IQ scores of 97 in 1948, and 108.6 in 1990. And the gap between African Americans and white Americans narrowed by 5.5 points between 1972 and 2002.

No one could reasonably claim that there had been genetic changes in the Jewish, Chinese American or African American populations in a generation or two. After reading the University of Utah paper, Harry Ostrer, who headed New York University’s human genetics programme, took the opposite view to Steven Pinker: “It’s bad science – not because it’s provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.”

If Jewish scores were above average after the second world war, does that not indicate higher Jewish intelligence?

The immigration pattern of Chinese into America could certainly explain the apparent increase in IQ observed in 'a generation or two' in America.

The narrowing of the black-white IQ gap is explained by an uplift in IQ scores of the lower half of test-takers, indicating improving social conditions for black Americans.

Again, more details in the piece that I'm sure you will either ignore or cherry pick, which.

No. Evidence of environmental factors on measured IQ (which I've never denied) does not somehow cancel genetic influences.

 

[Trausti]

If a population group is under selective pressure, and only those in the population group that can survive the selective pressure are able to reproduce, why would it be so surprising that the selective traits would eventually dominate that population group?

Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads

The indigenous Bajau people (“Sea Nomads”) of Southeast Asia live a subsistence lifestyle based on breath-hold diving and are renowned for their extraordinary breath-holding abilities. However, it is unknown whether this has a genetic basis. Using a comparative genomic study, we show that natural selection on genetic variants in the PDE10A gene have increased spleen size in the Bajau, providing them with a larger reservoir of oxygenated red blood cells.

But evolution doesn't work that quickly!

Actual population genetics studies aren't relevant to the analysis of folk taxonomies of race.

Population group is just another name for race.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

But it was on IQ that the paper’s case really floundered. Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor who analysed the exam data, wrote: “Our figures … would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”. And yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores were above average.

A similar pattern could be seen from studies of two generations of Mizrahi Jewish children in Israel: the older generation had a mean IQ of 92.8, the younger of 101.3. And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Chinese Americans recorded average IQ scores of 97 in 1948, and 108.6 in 1990. And the gap between African Americans and white Americans narrowed by 5.5 points between 1972 and 2002.

No one could reasonably claim that there had been genetic changes in the Jewish, Chinese American or African American populations in a generation or two. After reading the University of Utah paper, Harry Ostrer, who headed New York University’s human genetics programme, took the opposite view to Steven Pinker: “It’s bad science – not because it’s provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.”

If Jewish scores were above average after the second world war, does that not indicate higher Jewish intelligence?

No, it does not.

 

[Politesse]

In the fait accompli critical theory..

I have never heard of this school? They must be pretty damn obscure.

It's an adjective for critical theory in general.

"All critical theory" is generally overtly opposed to the idea of their being any fait accompli truths. Hence, "critical".

 

[Politesse]

Actual population genetics studies aren't relevant to the analysis of folk taxonomies of race.

Population group is just another name for race.

Then there are hundreds of thousands of races on planet Earth, and none of them are named "Jew". Bible-thumping morons were going on about race long before genetics were discovered, and their antipathy toward Jews is not difficult to unravel.

 

[Trausti]

Jews in pre-modern Europe faced significant discrimination. They could not own land. They were excluded from the trades. In many places they were confined to ghettos. But they could be money changers. They could engaged in mental/financial occupations. Over centuries this selected for high intelligence. Such that, when the Jews became free to leave the ghettos, the Rothschilds controlled Europe’s finances. Jews are wildly overrepresented with Nobel prizes and on the list of the world’s wealthiest. While creationists and Lysenkoists reject that humans are animals subject to natural selection, Nature doesn’t care about their feelings.

This would have required some pretty aggressive pruning in those times to have altered the genetics significantly that quickly. I think it's much more likely to be a cultural issue--they favored the wealth of education over physical wealth that could be taken away. However, there's also a hybrid possibility--those centuries selected for a liking of learning.

Where does intelligence come from? Does it fall from the sky? That cognitive function is heritable is well established in psychology. If it’s culture, then you’d expect adoptive children to take after their adoptive parents. But they don’t.

 

[Trausti]

Actual population genetics studies aren't relevant to the analysis of folk taxonomies of race.

Population group is just another name for race.

Then there are hundreds of thousands of races on planet Earth, and none of them are named "Jew". Bible-thumping morons were going on about race long before genetics were discovered, and their antipathy toward Jews is not difficult to unravel.

Oh, that’s right. Just like the creationists, the neo-Lysenkoists deny that humans are animals.

 

[Metaphor]

But it was on IQ that the paper’s case really floundered. Tests conducted in the first two decades of the 20th century routinely showed Ashkenazi Jewish Americans scoring below average. For example, the IQ tests conducted on American soldiers during the first world war found Nordics scoring well above Jews. Carl Brigham, the Princeton professor who analysed the exam data, wrote: “Our figures … would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent”. And yet, by the second world war, Jewish IQ scores were above average.

A similar pattern could be seen from studies of two generations of Mizrahi Jewish children in Israel: the older generation had a mean IQ of 92.8, the younger of 101.3. And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Chinese Americans recorded average IQ scores of 97 in 1948, and 108.6 in 1990. And the gap between African Americans and white Americans narrowed by 5.5 points between 1972 and 2002.

No one could reasonably claim that there had been genetic changes in the Jewish, Chinese American or African American populations in a generation or two. After reading the University of Utah paper, Harry Ostrer, who headed New York University’s human genetics programme, took the opposite view to Steven Pinker: “It’s bad science – not because it’s provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.”

If Jewish scores were above average after the second world war, does that not indicate higher Jewish intelligence?

No, it does not.

Okay. I can see any debate with you on this would be fruitless.

 

[Metaphor]

It's an adjective for critical theory in general.

"All critical theory" is generally overtly opposed to the idea of their being any fait accompli truths. Hence, "critical".

No--that isn't the state of critical theory. Critical theories very much proclaim unambiguous 'truths'. For example, critical race theory proclaims:

• All white people are racist, or complicit in racism, and whether they are complicit or not, benefit from it
• No black people can be racist
• Being unaware that you are racist, or that you are complicit in racism, is a marker of white privilege
• Being presented with the 'facts' of critical theory and continuing your questioning is a sign of white fragility
• Although you cannot ever stop benefiting from your white privilege, you can work at being anti-racist. Failing to put in the effort of anti-racism work means you accept your racism. It is not enough to 'get out of the way'

Postmodernism started out with layers of inscrutability proclaiming nothing is really knowable and there are no universal truths only forms of power and all words are defined by other words in a hopelessly circular nihilistic framework. But that isn't what it has evolved in to.

 

[laughing dog]

It's an adjective for critical theory in general.

"All critical theory" is generally overtly opposed to the idea of their being any fait accompli truths. Hence, "critical".

No--that isn't the state of critical theory. Critical theories very much proclaim unambiguous 'truths'. For example, critical race theory proclaims:

• All white people are racist, or complicit in racism, and whether they are complicit or not, benefit from it
• No black people can be racist
• Being unaware that you are racist, or that you are complicit in racism, is a marker of white privilege
• Being presented with the 'facts' of critical theory and continuing your questioning is a sign of white fragility
• Although you cannot ever stop benefiting from your white privilege, you can work at being anti-racist. Failing to put in the effort of anti-racism work means you accept your racism. It is not enough to 'get out of the way'

The very little I have seen of critical race theory says none of that. Do you have citation for your claims?

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

No, it does not.

Okay. I can see any debate with you on this would be fruitless.

Because you're wrong. Both in regard to Ashkenazi Jews being more intelligent and in regard to IQ tests being an indication of arbitrary group intelligence. You have no standing to debate anything.

 

[Metaphor]

No--that isn't the state of critical theory. Critical theories very much proclaim unambiguous 'truths'. For example, critical race theory proclaims:

• All white people are racist, or complicit in racism, and whether they are complicit or not, benefit from it
• No black people can be racist
• Being unaware that you are racist, or that you are complicit in racism, is a marker of white privilege
• Being presented with the 'facts' of critical theory and continuing your questioning is a sign of white fragility
• Although you cannot ever stop benefiting from your white privilege, you can work at being anti-racist. Failing to put in the effort of anti-racism work means you accept your racism. It is not enough to 'get out of the way'

The very little I have seen of critical race theory says none of that. Do you have citation for your claims?

Look at any lecture given by Robin DiAngelo.

 

[steve_bank]

An IQ test measures only basic skills like pattern recognition and application of basic problem solving. Take the MENSA sample test.

It does not measure motivation and creativity. It does not measure emotion skills or emotional IQ.

Back inn 80s after the founder of Byte Magazine gave a talk to a MENSA group he wrote an editorial calling them a bunch of under achievers.

I worked with people from all over the world. From high school grads to PHDs. From my experience people with the same education equivalent to western education perform no better or worse than any one else.

Jews always had strong community ties and support. Culture does matter.