I actually wasn’t being sarcastic (except to the extent that the answer slightly begs the question). Also, i guess i should have said “high iq” in place of “genius”.
Still, i have trouble believing that possessing a greater number of high iq people in one’s part of the world does not make a difference (all else being equal).
I don’t know how true this is, but don’t the east asian nations have stricter immigration policies than places like the US? Like I was saying earlier, I had professors from various nations who were foreign born. Off the top of my head I had professors in math, physics and science from Iran, Venezuela, Japan, Australia, England, Romania, South Korea, Russia, India, etc. Several of them were extremely bright, starting side companies and working on cutting edge research.
Something like 1/3 of all corporate startups are started by foreign born people in the US, and about half of PhDs in science are from the foreign born. If nations like Japan, South Korea, etc. are not as welcoming to the best and brightest from the rest of the world they are not going to have as much success in innovation.
So that would play a role too. The best scientists from latin america, the middle east, eastern europe, etc. might feel more welcome in western nations than in east asian nations. That is going to change the face of innovation and R&D in those nations.
The question itself is actually a reference to the fact that the vast majority of top tier scientists (those that stand out from the mainstream research crowd - such as nobel prize winners and field medalists) have been white and it still continues to be the case. When you talk about ‘researchers’ and ‘professors’, most of them fall precisely within the range of iq that asians would be mostly populated in, as far as the right side of the curve is concerned, IF the claim of higher deviation among whites was true. Therefore it is a bit besides the point to say that most of the doctors and researchers you see working in your environment are from asia. Also, the question is really concerning differences in achievement between races rather than actual countries or continents. So the issue of immigration is only slightly relevant.
Still i get the point that, as far as national achievement is concerned, those factors you mention play a huge role.
About 20-25% of top tier scientists are jewish, who are only about 1% of white people (maybe 0.2% of humanity). So the other 99% of white people make up the other 2/3 of white top tier scientists as defined by nobel prize winners and field medalists. That is assuming whites make up 3/4 of nobel prize and fields medal winners. I can’t find statistics on it.
According to that there have been about 841 nobel prizes among northern americans and western europeans since 1901. There have only been 41 among all of southeast asia, including east asia (which would be even smaller).
So I don’t know. How much of that is due to the fact that east asians nations are only recently industrialized? South Korea only reached wealthy status about 20-30 years ago, same with Taiwan. Japan maybe 40 years ago.
Japan has won 11 nobel prizes in just the last 13 years all in science and physics. Canada (with 1/3 the population) has only won 4 in science, medicine and physics in the last 15 years or so. Germany has won about 13 in non-literature fields in the last couple decades. However Taiwan and South Korea have only won one overall. On a per capita basis Japan is about equal to Australia or Canada for science and physics nobel prizes recently.
Of course. You don’t really understand the problem with using IQ as a measure, or how it works, or the problems with the tests we currently have (see also: the commend regarding the average citizen in sub-saharan africa being functionally retarded).
As for the Fields medalists, examining the names and links on this table, reveals that East Asians were 5 out of the 52 recipients since 1936. To be fair, four of those were won starting from 1982. In other words, nearly all the East Asian recipients were during the last three decades. And two of them were in the last 8 years. So it looks like there’s a lot going for the idea that it just gets better with time.
Oh i’m sorry, that is 6 out of 52. Not 5.
Using prizes, especially prizes established in the last century or two) as a proxy for intellectual ability is itself intellectually suspect.
For example, count the number of Nobel prizes in Physics or Chemistry won by the US or the USSR/Russia between 1950 and 2000. The US comes out far, far ahead. Were Americans actually that much ahead scientifically for the entire period? The US itself certainly didn’t think so, nor was it true anyway.
This is true in mathematics as well, where we only learned significantly after the fact that many mathematical discoveries were coincidentally made or even made earlier in Russia or the USSR than in the West. But problems with language barriers and politics often made attribution difficult.
Prize committees themselves have inherent biases. And scientific research in some countries was more apt to be openly published and disseminated than in others (particularly during the Cold War).
If you want to attack people who disagree with you, open a threadin The BBQ Pit.
If you want to argue that a particular discussion is not worth having, open a thread to discuss it.
Wandering into a thread and claiming that the discussion is not worth having is threadshitting. Doing so while labeling one’s opponents “dishonest” and “racist” is well-poisoning (with a dash of personal attack).
You are not required to participate in a thread when you doubt its validity, but you will not engage in threadshitting or similar behavior without consequences.
Knock it off.
[ /Moderating ]
Perhaps I was thinking of someone else.
In a lot of ways they are: they all stem from the same types of flawed beliefs and assumptions, like the unreliable data on race and IQ and the belief that IQ explains everything.
There’s nothing spooky about it. History is full of one group mistreating another based on some claim of superiority. Racism (well, along with religion and nationalism) have been the basis of countless atrocities.
Once you start talking about one race being different than another, in any but the most superficial way, you revive all that history. The consensus, at least sense the 60’s, is to say everyone is the same. What’s important is not whether it’s true or not, but that it’s a way to avoid discrimination and prejudice and even outright violence. Those are important social goals. So if you challenge them, you should be prepared to be attacked.
Linky no worky.
Once you start talking about biological races you end up on the wrong end of science. Everything else derived from that is subject to attack.
This. It is not a threadshit to point out that the basic premise of the thread and the philosophy underpinning it has been completely refuted by modern science.
The standard deviation of IQ scores is always 15. It’s standardized to be that way.
Does it ever bother any of you that there is a new thread every other day on this topic yet the people discussing it almost never know anything on the topic of IQ, population genetics, or molecular genetics? And the impartiality of the mods is stupid. Just shut these down as soon as you see them open up. Or at least put politics back in Great Debates because looking at the first page of Great Debates makes us look like StormFront. I am embarrassed to open this forum in public.
Respectfully, this statement suggests that you know very little about American history.
The belief that there are intellectual differences between the races(which don’t actually exist) has been the dominant belief throughout most of American history.
A hundred years ago, without a single exception the President of every Ivy League university and every Ivy League history department believed in Eugenics and the same was true of European universities. It’s also worth noting that most of history departments were headed by Southerners who were the children of slave owners. Woodrow Wilson being the most famous.
However over the decades educated people upon examining the evidence realized that their beliefs about “race” and the supposed intellectual inferiority of some and the intellectual superiority of others was complete bullshit.
So yes, non-kooks and non-racists don’t generally ask the questions you’re asking because doing so would be like debating about lamarckian evolution or phrenology.
If you’re genuinely interested I’d recommend reading Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream.
The first part of the question is straightforward enough:
Do the populations labelled as Asian (which are a very broad group of gene pools and cultures) perform in a narrower range on the Western normed IQ tests than do Caucasions of the West?
In the abscence of somone finding a study that broadly surveys the breadth of Asian populations on those Western normed IQ measures there may be no clear answer to the question. That said it would be highly surprising if the answer was yes. More likely the opposite is true.
To the degree that genetics and culture each might play a role in IQ test results the label Asian includes a wide variety of sub-populations. Broad genetic and cultural inputs should result in broad outputs, not narrow ones.
As far as the assertion that there is some dearth of Asian intellectual accomplishment relative to the average IQ of those populations, I am not so sure. The comparison surely must be between those with equal educational opportunities, something that a relatively few have in many highly populous Asian countries (e.g. China and India) compared to many countries of the West. The rose seed that is never planted in fertile soil and never watered never blooms. OTOH Japan with more educational opportunities has much more to show in the way of inventions than does more populous Russia. South Korea has contributed more in recent decades than more populous France. Singapore and Denmark are similarly sized and both with good educational systems - Singapore has brought us the thumb drive, sound cards, and more … Denmark? Legos. Oh okay, also the fiberscope. So given equal popultions having educational access I don’t see Asian populations doing too shabby.
Given what I have been taught about Asian cultures being more about the group and less individual accomplishment (as exemplified by the Japanese proverb of “The protruding nail will get hammered down”) it seems unsurprising to me that celebrated individual geniuses will be less frequent in many Asian cultures. I also think that exposure to a wide variety of ideas is a critical aspect of creative invention and that the hodgepodge stew of American culture gives the U.S. a huge advantage there. As has its historic ability to attract the best and most creative minds from around the world to play on its team. The breadth of cultures and gene pools that make up America (which includes a wide variety of Asian populations among many others) may be greater than Japan has as one isolated portion of Asia, but the op’s premise is flawed and even if granted the IQ S.D. hypothesis for individual acts of scientific creative genius is lacking.
This.
But applying concepts like “IQ” and “genius” and so on across disparate groups is fraught with hazard.
That average outcomes on skillsets for specific measurable performances varies by population is hardly surprising when those populations are separated in some way, such as evolutionary time or cultural/geographic/ethnic/social boundary. Where they are separated by evolution, and genes play a part, then a more tightly-defined population would probably have less variance than a more loosely-defined population since the gene pool variance for a tightly-defined population is smaller.
I recognize the limits of practical language use, but the concept of “superior” (implied, imo, by “genius” and other such terms) is of very limited value. Nature might give one group superior X that ends up being costly for a different group in a different setting. (Maybe fat guys do well in one climate but need to be muscular in another…lame example, but you get the idea).
Intellect, in particular, is difficult to evaluate across groups–and that statement is coming from an individual (me) who does not think only nurturing separates us. But if groups are differently wired by nature, we have to also accept that concepts which are tailored to one group–indeed, developed by them in the case of IQ–may not be accurately tailored for another group.
On re-read, this post is sort of lame, but I hope it gets the point across. I am out of country with limited ability to wordsmith.
It is, however, threadshitting and pretty much a personal attack to say
Declaring that a thread should not exist is pretty much the archtype of threadshitting. Calling “people” dishonest is against the rules of this forum if it is directed against another poster. Since you have specifically mentioned other threads, (even using part of the username of one participant), it is pretty hard to imagine that this is other than a personal attack.
You will stop doing this in this thread and if you have any more issues with the Moderating, you will take them to ATMB.
[ /Moderating ]
I would agree. It circles around to how we choose to define “intelligence.” Your post is consistent with the definition of intelligence as the ability to solve novel and salient problems. The significance being that what is salient in one set of circumstances (time, place, culture) might not be in another and therefore what is valued as intellect will vary as well. There is no universal objective measure for superior intelligence, it is always relative to the particular set of salient novel problems.
You’d likely be interested in Richard Nisbett’s “Geography of Thought”. He argues quite cogently and with quite an impressive body of evidence that different cultures result in very different sorts of cognitive process, ways of perciving the world, and of dealing with novel problems. Neither one is better or worse but they are different.