Additionally, I think that we have a tendency to exaggerate what a massive leap was initially required of Japan. When the Meiji oligarchs went out on the Iwakura Mission in the 1870s, one of their goals was to gather knowledge of Western institutions to aid in Japan’s development. Ito Hirobumi, one of the oligarchs on the mission, rather than being discouraged by what he saw, was relieved, noting that by his estimate Japan was only 30 years behind the West in development.
What?
a) I know you’re offering anecdotal evidence, which is fair, but…
b) Do you even know what 2nd and 3rd world denote, and…
c) Do you have any kind of cite for people anywhere in the world actually thinking that cars run on incatations?
Some googling turn up the following: Western Europe, Japan and North America has between 300-500 cars per 1000 inhabitants, Latin America 100-200, Middle East/Central Asia has a wider range from 45 (Azerbaijan) to 313 (Lebanon), Asia and Pacific region region report up to 600, with the abyssmal exception of Pakistan (9), Africa is, of course lower, but there are great regional differences.
For other techonological figures: Cell phones.
Pakistan is a in the low region again (1/62) [cellphone/people]
Malawi (1/89)
Fiji (1/8)
U.S. (1/1.8)
Sweden (1/1.1)
Turkey (1/2.4)
Chile (1/2.5)
Phillipines (1/6)
In short, while many developing countries are more or less behind, it’s not as if cars or cell phones are unheard of. That people might be less acustomed to the technology doesn’t mean they think it runs on incantations.
(OTOH, “any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic” but that goes for westeners as well. Do (generic) you really understand how a computer works?)
Quite complex, maybe. But they were merely primitive agrarian societies. They were technologically way behind say, agrarian sub-saharian african societies. It just doesn’t make sense to compare them with Japan that was, at the time when Europeans began to trade with it, on an equal footing with Europe and only began to lag behind due to a deliberatly chosen isolationism. And even a deliberatly chosen stagnation.
By the way, other countries, like the Ottoman empire, Egypt, China also tried to catch up. But a mix of incompetence of the rulers, inadaptability of the social structure, internal strife (spectacular in the case of China), and heavy-handed power-grabbing policies by western powers prevented them from doing so.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
The actual statement by the “52 experts” has its own problems:
. . . QUOTE]
i.e. it’s offensive and therefore it must be false.
There is a saying on usenet that in all arguments, somebody winds up mentioning Hitler. I will mention Hitler because his name comes up in the alt.atheism faq:
Somone bad believing something does not make that belief wrong. Makes sense, but as soon as IQ gets discussed, a lot of people stop thinking critically.
Indeed it is!
The only thing that any so-called IQ test can measure is someone’s ability, on that one occasion, to get a score on that particular IQ test. If the person (or committee) devising that IQ test happens to devise a test that suits you (in terms of your received cultural ideas about what constitutes ‘intelligence’, and the kind of tasks that your mind seems to have an aptitude for performing), then you’ll do well on that test. If not, then not.
Does scoring well on an IQ test correlate to anything that is useful and seems like intelligent behaviour in real life? No. There are plenty of people who do very ‘intelligent’ things every day, such as running successful businesses or writing cello concertos or raising a family of four children, who woud fare poorly on IQ tests. There
are people who can score very highly on IQ tests who are massively incompetent in real life and lead very unsuccessful lives.
If you think that a document signed by 52 so-called ‘experts’ is a counter-argument, then (a) you have a lot to learn about evidence and reasoning, and (b) a lot to learn about the Straight Dope. In the words of Opus from Bloom County, if many people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. If you want more evidence, go and read ‘The Experts Speak’ (Cerf and Navasky, Villard, 1984), a glorious compendium of ‘experts’ getting things hopelessly wrong. 52 people who have a vested career-interest in believing that IQ tests measure anything useful will sign up to a document saying so. This doesn’t prove a thing. It would be possible to get many times that number to sign up to a document saying they believe in god. Wouldn’t prove a thing.
Yep, lots of ignorance around. Amazing, innit?
(BTW, there’s no bitterness here (just in case you suspect). My IQ has been tested twice, and both times I scored around 140. Ask anyone who knows me - I’m not an impressively intelligent person. I’m average or below. But happily so.)
The Second World no longer exists. It referred to the Communist countries (led by the USSR and China) during the Cold War. What was the Second World is now either the First World (Russia, China) or the Third World (Cuba, North Korea).
(You could easily argue that parts of First World countries are, in fact, Third World. But the classification scheme was always vague and, quite frankly, wasn’t intended for this era.)
Reminds me of a note about the history of a Japanese military officer who started his career in a nation armed with swordsmen and ended it with the nation armed with battleships and rifles. Wish I could remember who.
Cite?
Cite?
Perhaps the great frequency of natural disasters & city-destroying fires had something to do with it.
If an otherwise stable society gets turned on it’s collective ear every decade or so, due to natural disasters, perhaps they general community can view rapid modernization as just another upheaval?
You know, as the British learned, sometimes it helps to be an island nation. Japan, in very marked contrast to Africa and China, was basically left alone by the West and by adjoining nations for a very long time. No slave trade, no opium wars, no devastating epidemics. That, combined with other factors already mentioned (cultural homogeneity, literacy, bureaucracy) helped Japan catch up quickly. But that said, by World War II, they still hadn’t caught up entirely. They started the war with an exaggerated sense of their technological parity with the West, but America began to disabuse them of that idea pretty quickly.
[QUOTE=lskinner]
Have you considered the idea that you’re eager to push that idea simply because it comforting to you? That what makes it easy for you to accept the idea that group of exclusively white males from the same cultural background were able to come up with a paper test that objectively measures the abstract concept of intelligence across the entire human population is the fact that their results put you in a favorable position? That there’s now scientific proof that you’re from a smart group of people and that there are swaths of folks who are naturally dumber than you? Then, of course, there’s the cache you get from bucking political correctness.
If you guys want to discuss I.Q., start a thread about it rather than hijacking this thread.
Sigh. This dumb list AGAIN?
What was Japan’s average IQ in 1854? (You don’t know, of course.)
As we’ve discussed in other thread, Diamond’s hypothesis just keeps right on working. Japan by 1854 had already - like, centuries and centuries before - gotten the benefits of centralized, agricultural society, in large part because the east-west spread of technology and agricultural methods from the Fertile Crescent had gotten there long before.
Japan in 1854 was in no way comparable to, say, North America in 1492, or sub-Saharan Africa. The really key tevchnological improvements - multiple types of livestock, mass agriculture, city building, hierarchical state - had long been borrowed, mostly via China, from the Fertile Crescent.
Just what I was going to say!
Anyway, for whatever reason, Japan had a highly conformist and obedient society. (Does J. Diamond talk about this at all?) They were and are capable of vast cultural shifts in very short periods. rapid modernization is only one example. Look at their rapid shift from the militarism of the first half of the twentieth century to the peaceful and business oriented society of the second. Also This book deals with an earlier Japanese move to de-modernize, something unique in history, AFAIK.
Economically they were still well behind, but how were they still deficient re: technology when WW2 started?
Someone can speak about this with more authority than I, but I think that when it came to ships, planes, guns, transport, etc., the U.S. had, or was quickly able to get, a technological edge. It’s certainly the case that Japan began to lose the war almost from the moment it started. And granted, more than technology was at play there.
I started to read* Guns, Germs and Steel* over winter break, but did not finish it before non-recreational reading took precedence again. Does Diamond address what level of culture is necessary for technological innovation?
I remember reading this soon after it came out. How they got rid of the gun - very cool. How they got rid of Christians, very not cool.
I agree. This point has been addressed. I would prefer to keep this in GQ, rather GD, though my OP may be a GD topic in the end anyways.
I think the US advantage had more to do with the availability of Raw Materials and the Huge Existing Industrial complex that was able to regear and for 4 years out-produce the rest of the world combined.
Was the advantage in Code Breaking, Technology or just better training and dedication to this area?
Jim