Yes, but I’m finding it harder and harder to parse your responses. My premise is simply not that complicated:
[ul][li]Smart people pop up in every culture, on every continent[/li][li]Being able to use that smartness to its full potential requires contact with (or at least a full opportunity to examine the work of) other smart people. They examine and improve your work; you examine and improve theirs[/li][li]A “culture of education” is the best way to bring smart people into contact, including publishing lots of books and academic papers that can be read by lots of people[/li][li]Societies that lack a culture of education, because of civil war, ethnic violence, the “disappearing” of outspoken intellectuals, widespread illiteracy or just unchecked schoolyard bullying may have lots of smart people, but their talents go to waste, being stifled or stunted[/ul][/li]
Ashkenazi Jews have done a pretty good job introducing talent to opportunity, when they can operate freely in liberalized western democracies.
Can we have some evidence to suport this contention? For example the results of intelligence tests for the Nobel literature winners vs. the science winners?
If you want more info on Jewish genealogy than you can shake a stick at, just poke around here. Of course it’s quite difficult to trace the lineage of people who frequently didn’t have last names in the Western sense until 100 or so years ago. But here’s some info on genealogy by genetics.
(I love this site, by the way, and have gotten in touch with a number of lost family members by posting what little I knew of my own family history there, in most cases only a couple of generations’ worth.)
Hemingway vs Einstein? Though Hemingway could sure as hell write better. The kind of mathematical intelligence needed for science is not needed for writing. The question, which the OP has not proven, is whether this intelligence is genetic or cultural. I’ve just read The Blank Slate so I’m in a state leaning to genetic, but I could easily change my mind in a week.
:smack:
Damn, that I should have remembered. It’s interesting how much greater the representation is in the sciences. To be fair, we should remove the past 10 or so years from the Literature prize, since the committee is going all out to make up for the Western bias that Tom mentioned.
This last comment being somewhat more salient given the evolutionary mechanism proposed by the articles in the op: if anything linguistic and communicative intelligence would be precisely that selected in the shtetl, not math.
So of course “intelligence” is task specific, of course the premise is flawed and there is every reason to explain more sigma outliers on the basis of culture than on genetics, but still, hypothetically, let us humor the op’s requests:
Nope, not unfair. Making any assumptions of any sort about any individual because of group membership would be unfair though.
It is certainly reasonable to acknowledge statistical differences between subpopulations and to examine what factors result in those differences. But we must do so with eyes open to our preconceptions. You illustrate it right off with the word choice of “better” and usually the items of study illustrate the preconceptions as well: the groups get defined by sociologic preconceptions of group identity. This means of study is well suited for studying possible sociologic factors but ill-suited for studying any potential genetic factor other than by very crude correlations, sometimes so crude as to be meaningless. If genetic factors are to be studied, then study them right: use specific genetic markers, not self declared sociologic group membership. Define your terms precisely. And be very sure to keep the cultural stereotypes from biasing the questions asked.
To go there we’d have to start discussing what intelligence means, and that is a rathole which never leads anywhere good. If you’re talking about logical or mathematical skills, the scientists win. Emotional skills, the writers win. The interesting thing about the data is that whatever Nobel Prizes measure, Jews do better on the science part than on the writing part - and significantly so.
Success in science is filtered by success in school to some extent, since if you don’t do well enough to get a PhD you are very unlikely to get a Nobel is science. Success in literature isn’t. That may be a factor also for all I know.
Again, just speculation now, but as Steven Pinker put it "It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is. A portion of that for those too lazy to click .
There’s certainly nothing wrong with speculating on issues like whether Nobel-Prize winning might have an ethnic/genetic component. The trouble arises when people like the OP get so excited about the speculation that they consider it more firmly established than it actually is, and refuse to take seriously any criticisms of it.
Here’s a discussion of the hypothesized sphingolipid disorder/intelligence link research that you mentioned, with some criticisms:
DeAngelo Williams. I hope that aish.com has credited The Economist somewhere. Those quotations are directly from the article under discussion that prompted the OP. (It is not so much supporting the issue as repeating it.)
Not sure that appearing in The Economist, if this article did, is the same as holding the copyright elsewhere. Whatever’s the case — there’s no credit given to The Economist in the article. In fact “Am Echad Resources” is shown as the copyright holder in this article — elsewhere, who knows. ;j
And just to be clear - the “if the article did” wording is there because the two linked (the OP’s, which works, and mine, which doesn’t) are not the same articles.
Your quotation in Post #55 is a very close paraphrase of some text in the article in The Economist. I suppose that they could be independent renderings from the original paper; I was just curious whether the other website extended credit. Given that the site is not directly linked and that it appears short enough to fall within fair use, I was not suggesting that you had done anything wrong. I was simpy curious as to the provenance of the aish.com text.
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