My guess is that because Jewish children are encouraged to read and learn. As adults, they would be attracted to a message board that is a good place to learn new things. Then again, it could be the international Zionist conspiracy to pollute our precious bodily fluids :D.
I didn’t know you posted here! Welcome to the Straight Dope, Miss Coulter.
WTF?
Pit him if you must, but sheesh, calling somebody Miss Coulter should IMO be akin to calling somebody an asshole.
These signs point to posters being Jewish??? I often do not post on Saturdays, but that’s because it’s, um, the weekend, and I’m generally out doing other things. And “Og” is a Jewish thing?
Not stated, because it is not only not obvious, but has not been demonstrated to be true. I think you are confusing a general tradition of respect for learning with innate ability.
The Jewish culture highly emphasizes education and success. Look at the Ivy Leagues…Penn’s white population is 80% Jewish(I only know because I go there). If we hope that the SDMB is full of highly educated people, than it follows that there would be a higher proportion here.
Somebody ought to do a new poll in IMHO.
It was last done 6 years ago and it’s results basically agree with tomndebs surmised guess as to the make up of the board. According to that poll I would say atheists/agnostics (who make up ~ 10% of the US population are “disproportionate” at the SDMB to the population at large - but I do not like the implied judgement the language provides.
Another thread on How many times have you changed religions gets at the same question.
Well, I meant that I notice these things in context. I never meant to imply that someone who waits until late Saturday night to respond to a post must automatically be a Jew. And forget the Og thing…but i do take G-d to be more of an indicator. But, as most of the vocal and active members of the board have no problem discussing their religious affiliation, I don’t generally see the need to make these assumptions. Most of our Jewish board members are happy to self-identify.
And 20%…nah…i was just throwing out numbers without thinking too hard. But I stand by the possibility that 10% is around the real value…which is still a noticeable over-representation.
For the sake of my OP, I think *tomndebb may be the closest to the real answer (of the two or three posts that have actually attempted to answer anything). A cultural inclination towards learned discussion is a likely cause.
An attempt at providing my own solution: Perhaps it’s not really an over-representation of Jews by membership, but by sheer post volume. If Jewish folks as a group like good intellectual discussion, perhaps they are more inclined to take the time to type out a GQ response or jump on a heated GD thread. So maybe they have a much higher than average post frequency, thus making themselves some of the more visible members of the board.
11 of 776 Nobel Prize winners are black. This represents 1.42% of the awarded nobel prizes, a figure which grossly underrepresents the black population. Are black people therefore less intelligent? Or, perhaps, is there some third variable in play (such as socioeconomic status, bias in the Nobel committee, or cultural attitude towards education)? Perhaps winning the nobel prize is not necessarily a good indicator of innate intelligence–at the very least I think it’s positively ludicrous to turn around and apply Nobel Prize recipient statistics to an entire ethnic group.
I’ve yet to see someone cite The Bell Curve and not get ripped to shreds, but I’ll just say that the book’s methodology is extremely controversial and is perhaps not a good way to convince us that Jews have heightened intelligence as a group.
Finally, chess is not a good indicator of raw intelligence. It is a skill that relies on the ability to think creatively and strategically, but it is not an appropriate metric to determine something as broad as “intelligence”. To extrapolate and call one ethnic group more innately intelligent based on that is absurd.
Even taken together, I don’t think these pieces of circumstantial evidence are convincing. Tomndebb said it best when he pointed out that Jewish culture has a history of intellectual inquiry.
Impossible. Cite?
But they’re not gonna pollute our beer, right? 'Cuz I just couldn’t live with that …
The demographics of the SDMB strike me as being quite similar to my undergraduate college, which was a highly selective college with even more of a reputation for being liberal than most such colleges. The average student was moderately liberal, but there were some outspoken very liberal and very conservative students. Somewhere between 5% and 10% of the student body was ethnically Jewish. There were more students that were admittedly gay than average for the U.S. population. There were more students that were outspoken about their atheism or agnosticism than was average for the U.S. population and less that were outspoken about their Christianity than was average for the U.S. population. In other words, there’s nothing special about the SDMB that’s not also true for a highly selective college with a tendency toward liberalness. I think these characteristics are more true for long-time posters than the short-time posters. I suspect that less educated posters tend to discover quickly that poorly stated questions tend to get made fun of and drift away from the SDMB. I think a new poster with very conservative views who wasn’t willing to stick with a message board where many people disagree with him would also tend to drift away from the SDMB.
Why are you saying all this? I said they were smarter, is that the same as “more intelligent” in your vocabulary?
Anyway, I’ll rephrase smarter to “more skilled in intellectual matters”.
Just to be clear, I am not trying to say that people who get more nobel prizes are more intelligent. I am saying that when a group is more succesful in many intellectual areas such as chess, winning nobel prizes, taking IQ tests, etc, it is likely that they are more succesful in other intellectual areas, such as the SDMB.
No, Im not confusing anything. I am just giving some arguments that jews are “more skilled in intellectual matters”. I am not saying I know anything about whether this is innate or due to a tradition with respect for learning.
“Why are you saying all this? I said they were smarter, is that the same as “more intelligent” in your vocabulary?”
And is “more intelligent” the same as “higher IQ”?
I thought it was a typo that became a habit, as in “Og smash!” ??
Penn’s white population 80% Jewish??
<<A large, active Jewish community enjoys a warm, welcoming environment at the new state-of-the-art Hillel facility, Steinhardt Hall, which is centrally located on this West Philadelphia campus. Spruce College House in the center of the quad also offers a comfortable meeting place for Jewish students on campus. Of the 20,000 students at Penn (10,000 undergraduate, 10,000 graduate), 6,000 are Jewish (3,000 undergraduate, 3,000 graduate).>>
So 6000 Jewish students. Say 70% of the students are white, so 6000/14000 < 80% but still significant.
“Chock Full O’ Jews”, the Kosher Koffee! 
I think management would have to do this. They could ask religion , sex, age, . Then compile . A thread is too restrictive.
Well… yeah, actually.
I’m not sure that helps. Maybe I am just reflexively opposing a statement that, on its face, suggests that Jews are just innately smarter than other ethnic groups. You’ve clarified that you do not know whether this is genetic or environmental. I’m still not even convinced that it can be shown that Jews are smarter than the population as a whole. You can maybe show that they play chess better on average, or that they win disproportionate amounts of Nobel Prizes, but that can’t be extrapolated–it’s just too broad of a claim that you’re trying to support. There’s not a definition of intelligence that enough people agree on to assess whether one ethnic group is “more intelligent” than another.
Just saw Annie Hall again recently (I think that may have been by a Jewish guy) and your post reminded me of the scene where the screen is split with Annie and Alvie each sitting in their therapists’ offices.
Therapists: So, how often do you have sex?
Alvie: Hardly ever, maybe three times a week.
Annie: Constantly, probably three times a week.
I think a better question is “Why are there so many non-US/Canadian members here, when the Straight Dope column isn’t published outside North America?”
I’ve always been disturbed by the large proportion of SDMB Methodists.