Considering the numbers, their sample should be about half Ashkenazi Jewish.
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West Hunter 
How would you count students with one Ashkenazi Jewish parent?
If I had a population of halfsies, I would try to predict how they would be represented in SMPY, judging from heredity, or mid-parental value, or maybe their GWAS scores if available.
So best practice would be separate predictions of representation for full-Ash and half-Ash.
Lots of different ways. The Talmudic position is that you need a Jewish mother to be considered a Jew, and many half-Jews consider themselves gentiles on that basis.
An alternate method is surname analysis. But this has the opposite problem: most people inherit their fathers’s surname, neglecting half-Jews with Jewish mothers.
Based on the first method, Harrison Ford is Jewish (Irish-Catholic father), while Gloria Steinem isn’t (German/Scottish mother). Based on the second method, Gloria Steinem is Jewish (An American “Steinem” or “Steinemann” is highly likely to be an Askhenazi Jew), while Harrison Ford isn’t (“Ford” is Middle English.)
In the case of both these people, we know their exact ancestry, but for a random noncelebrity we wouldn’t. So there’s a bit of uncertainty.
Easy to tell with gene scan: Ashkenazi ancestry is easy to recognize.
That Harrison Ford is Jewish and Gloria Steinem isn’t may be one of the most counter-intuitive things I have ever heard.
Looks like I was misinformed in my youth by Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah Song…
“We got Ann Landers and her sister Dear Abby
Harrison Ford’s a quarter Jewish — not too shabby”
If you want your mind blown further: Sly Stallone is indeed a quarter Jewish, and only half-Italian.
Barak is part Irish. His half brother Mark is half Jewish. His half sister Maya is half Indonesian. His nieces from Maya are half Chinese. If Mark has any children they will be half Chinese. Barak’s mother, half sisters Auma and Maya, are PhDs. Barak Snr. did not finish his PhD study. Mark was a physics major and has a MBA. The female side of the family are smarter.
Harrison Ford looked somewhat more Jewish in a mid-sized role in FF Coppola’s 1974 movie “The Conversation.” You can also see him in a cameo in G Lucas’s 1973 movie “American Graffiti”, but I don’t recall what he looked like in that.
I don’t know what changed between 1974 and 1977’s “Star Wars.”
He looked like a early twenties Han Solo in a t-shirt. Sounded like him too.
“The Talmudic position is that you need a Jewish mother to be considered a Jew”
I always get a chuckle out of that, because Y and mtDNA show the Ashkenazi ancestors were all Semitic men and European women.
Who says they didn’t convert? The process is pretty easy. Nowadays orthodox Jews make it hard by adding a bunch of hoops beforehand (for good reason, in my experience), but none of these are mentioned in the Talmud.
the jewish orthodox conversion that we know today, did not exist back then.
we dont really know what “conversion” was, probably somthing a lot simpler then today.
also the whole set of rules that the “jewishnes” comes from the mother’s side, was only practiced later on and has no record in the relevant time frame.
Jewish orthodox conversion just consists of immersing in a ritual bath, circumcision*, and a verbal affirmation of observing Jewish law. It certainly did exist ‘back then’. The concept of a ‘ger’ in the sense of a convert (rather than the biblical meaning of landless stranger of unspecified origin) is all over the Mishnah.
So, a lot easier for a woman.
the concepr of the “ger” certainly existed, but the we do not really now what the conversion included. it was certainly very different then how they do it today, since most of the rules orthodox jews follow today didnt even exist back then.
George Zimmerman?
the concepr of the “ger” certainly existed, but the we do not really now what the conversion included.
Well, one can make reasonable extrapolations.
it was certainly very different then how they do it today, since most of the rules orthodox jews follow today didnt even exist back then.
IIRC correctly, the latest genetic evidence suggest that ‘back then’ was after the Roman period. Even if you go with the more historical plausible view that they were refugees from the Bar Kockhba revolt, Rabbi Akiva was Bar Kokhba’s right hand man so ‘most of the rules’ did exist for them at least. They wouldn’t have eaten a beef sandwich spread with butter, though they would certainly be very perplexed at the suggestion of having separate sinks. The degree of disjunction between second temple and rabbinic Judaism is somewhat exaggerated by scholars with axes to grind.
This matrilineal thing never made sense to me. We’re talking about males entering Italy, taking Italian wives and then adopting strict endogamy. By the Talmudic definition, Ashkenazim would not be in the Tribe. From a genetic standpoint, their link to the ancient Israelites is ~half their autosomal DNA and on the Y chromosome, not the mitochondria.
Is there historical data concerning how these Jewish men acquired Italian wives? There were a number of, um, methods used is the old days.
The statements I’ve seen on the topic have been carefully phrased, along the lines of the Y chromosomes being consistent with ancestry from the Middle East rather than from “the ancient Israelites”. That seems wise to me because it’s not clear that there is a single unambiguous meaning to “Ancient Israelites”. I’ve seen it say that ‘Israel’ has at least 14 different meanings in the Old Testament; certainly I have a list of ten. Anyway, how old is “Ancient” – do you mean the mythical Abraham, Moses, and so on, or do you mean the inhabitants of Judah at the time of the Babylonian conquest, or do you mean the population of Palestine at about the time of Jesus and the Jewish Revolt, or what?
WKPD says: ‘many males with the “high-flat” ability profile pursued educational and vocational pursuits in science.’ What do they mean? That they became engineers, medics or vets?
The selection process really makes me curious about how much the average smart person’s intelligence changes from age 13 to age 16 or 17. As far as I recall, there is no advanced math on the SAT, so it almost seems hard to believe that the score would change dramatically.
The former British system for testing schoolchildren to see who was fit for an academic secondary schooling assumed that their IQs were sufficiently stable to be useful at about 11 (England) or 12 (Scotland). Those assumptions were presumably based on the psychological literature of the time. I should think you could learn more by quizzing Dr Thompson who blogs at Unz.
here you are
http://www.unz.com/author/james-thompson/
Thanks. He covers a lot.
I’ve been reading up on the selection process. They require a minimum score of 700 (out of 800) on a subtest by age 13. I believe this corresponds to roughly the 95th percentile of 16 or 17 year old test-takers, at least for math. By age 13 years 10 months, they expect an 800, which would be 99th percentile, or rather some fraction above it.
The 700 cutoff is what I find so puzzling. Of course, some people do not take the test, so the overall percentile must be higher. It is certainly a good score. Just not one that evokes a super-elite, or, at least, at the normal age. A boy of 8 years who scored it, would certainly be quite impressive.
According to https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Ferriman_20101.pdf, an age-13 99th percentile SAT-M score is 390, so 700 qualifies as impressive in my book.
SAT-M 700+ by an 8 year old is exceedingly rare, as in maybe fingers-of-one-hand rare. To help calibrate this, Terence Tao (who won bronze, silver, and gold medals in the Int’l Mathematics Olympiad at ages 10, 11, & 12, each a record which I think still stands), scored SAT-M 760 at 8 yrs 10 months.
Wow! Thanks for the link. That’s exactly what I was looking for.
I must admit to being totally flabbergasted. The base score is 200, so 390 seems shockingly low, but, of course, 99th percentile speaks for itself.
In my experience, it was probably around a third, and a third East Asian. But that was . . . a long time ago.
I’ve heard in back channels that SMPY’s internal statistics confirm that this is roughly true.
Actually I knew that. But I also did a toy calculation that gave the same result.
What was your math?
Here’s a 1988 paper on 13 year old students who scored high (700-800) on the SAT-M portion of the test.
Only 0.0001% of the students SMPY looked at accomplished such a feat (there was a 12:1 ratio of males to females). If the students were a fair cross-section of the population, you’d expect a median IQ of 155 or more (almost untestable). The paper states that they are the smartest group of children ever assembled.
1% of the children were black, 22% were Asian, and one supposes the rest were Caucasian. If I’m calculating correctly, Ashkenazi Jews (with a 110 IQ mean) should be over-represented 13x in the sample. In the year 1988 Jews made up 2.5% of the US population, and 2.5%*13=32.5%.
So it does seem plausible that they could be half of the SMPY’s sample, or close enough.
Coag, one typo: Your percentage above should be 0.01% (from the paper you reference: “Thus, with respect to mathematical reasoning ability, these [SMPY subjects] are the top one hundredth of 1 percent of that [12-year-old] age group,…”)
That was in 1971.
I asked and didn’t get an answer, but assumed it was the case, given other clues.
I heard from someone that interviewed there, and was told this over dinner.
EEF Master Race.
As a full-blooded Ashie, I can’t help but be flattered by your fascination with our make-up. On the basis of my childhood in 1940s Brooklyn, I can report that really smart kids were few and far between. Morty Richelson was a STEM nerd in the making. Marty Tepper went off to England to medical school. A ringer for the young Elvis Presley, Larry Schwartz’ father drove a laundry truck for the mob. That family was the first to own a small b&w tv. Neil Ross’ father was half-owner of a 12 alley bowling alley on Nostrand Ave. I heard that Neil and Larry went to Florida in some gambling scheme they had cooked up which failed. Howard Simon, the only religious one among us, looked strikingly like Lyle Lovett, with a face as craggy as James Carville’s. He was a born salesman. His MO in selling ladies underwear was to return again and again to stores until they gave him an order to get rid of him. If Ashies are the smartest folks of all, god help the world. I appreciate you interest.
Obviously not all Jews are smart – take yourself as an example, if you really believe the drivel you just wrote. If Jews really aren’t smarter, on average, how else do you explain 0.2% of the population winning 20% of the Nobel prizes and Fields medals? Conspiracy?
There’s not doubt that, were you to pick one at random, the probability that you’d pick a smart Ashkenazi jew is higher than the probability that you’d pick a smart scotsman. Question is, how much higher?
Nobel prizes (and similar awards) are highly “political” affairs (even in the “serious” categories), so I wouldn’t put too much weight in using them as a proxy for measuring this. Conspiracy? Depends what you mean by that.
Approximately 50% of the best chess players over the last 2 centuries have been Ashkenazi Jews. I don’t think that is much subject to manipulation.
Yeah, and the overwhelming majority of the best go players have been east Asian. What does that tell you? These are biased samples, non-representative.
The game of chess did not belong at all to traditional Jewish culture. Jews did not begin playing the game until about the mid 19th century but in a very short time they came to dominate the game. In 1872 the World Championship match was played between Steinitz who was Jewish and Zukertort who was half-Jewish. They were the two best players in the world at that time but a few decades earlier there had been hardly any Jewish chess masters.
By the time of the 1895 Hastings Tournament which is generally considered the strongest 19th century tournament Jews made up I recall eight of the about 2 dozen competitors and they dominated the top spots. And that is not even counting Schlecter who although raised as a Catholic apparently was of partially Jewish ancestry.
Jewish success as chess players had nothing to do with any tradition of chess playing in Jewish culture. There wasn’t any such tradition. Rubinstein was 16 when he first accidentally encountered a game of chess. Fascinated he began playing chess and was severely chastised by his rabbi and family.
Chess had been a prestigious game among gentiles going back to about 1000 AD long before Jews took it up.
There is a subjective element in the choice of winners of the Fields Medal but anybody who knows anything about the history of mathematics over the last 200 years knows that the proportion of outstanding Ashkenazi mathematicians is far greater than would be expected from their relative population size.
The last 100 years, sure. Not “far greater” though.
Far greater, by any reasonable standard.
Me & some JBP fans have had enormous success getting Vox Day to go totally bonkers over Jewish IQ at his blog.
His take is that Jewish IQ is 10 pts lower, at most 106 or so, 110+ doesn’t make any sense and all Jewish success can be explained by kin networking and nepotism.
It’s all very entertaining for Kiwi Farms values of fun.
Vox Day is a brilliant acquisitions editor, apparently some kind of big money video games guy, and okay in debate, but he’s the kind of guy who gets in poo-flinging status fights with each individual square every time he unrolls a wad of toilet paper. I like having a smart, rich, quarrelsome publisher in Science Fiction again. Good times.
Well, VD makes a point that tends to be forgotten or conflated: not all Jews are purebred Ashkenazi. To get a better estimate, one would have to look more deeply into Jewish demographics.
With the ordinary assumptions, about 1 in 6 of the purebred Ashkenazis should have below IQ 100 (-1SD).
Closer to 1 in 5 (the best estimate of the mean for purebred Ashkenazim being 112).
The average Ashkenazi Jew is not Leibnitz but neither is the average gentile. There is about a 3/4 standard deviation between the average IQ of gentile white Americans and US Ashkenazi. The difference is increasingly important at higher IQ’s. About 12% of US Ashkenazi Jews can be expected to have an IQ over 130 versus about 2% of the general American population.
It would be interesting to see which surname has the highest ratio of Wikipedia pages for well-known people of that surname relative to percentage of the general population.
Eisenstadt, for example, has 10 Wikipedia pages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenstadt_(surname)
The number of prominent Hamiltons in recent centuries is huge, as is the number of Cohens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_(name)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_surname_Cohen
My impression from Weyl is that Cohen is a little below average in high achievement for Ashkenazis, but as one of the most common Ashkenazis surnames is high relative to the general population.
My wild guess would be that the highest ratio of achievement to numbers belongs to some German Jewish surname, such as Oppenheimer. (Or, of course, Rothschild.)
jewish surnames are tricky, mostly because there very few of them (levi, cohen, cantor, khazan etc…) most ashkenazi jewish surnames were created when they were living amongst other nations, so those names would also be common amongst germans, polish, russions etc…
Levi and Cohen are different because they are Hebrew hereditary designations with significance to Jewish law. They aren’t necessarily Ashkenazi, and are inherited titles/castes that go back to antiquity, whereas most Jewish surnames are relatively recent.
Regarding the genetics of their patrilineages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Aaron
true in principle, but in practive non ashkenazi “levi”s practically do not exist.
cantor is english\german for khazan, so a “cantor” would be ashkenzi and a “khazan” would be mostly sefaradi.
That’s not quite true. There are a sizable amount of distinct Jewish names — though yes, it varies by country of origin. Less distinct in Germany; more distinct in Russia.
Yet even in Germany and Austria a lot of the purely Germanic names were artificially created and don’t have any gentile counterparts.
Warburg?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_family
Michael, do you mind if I ask where in Brooklyn you grew up?
Kings Highway and East 38th street. I don’t understand why my smarts are being impugned here by strangers. On the GRE test for graduate school I got a perfect score on the verbal part, fairly high on the math side. That invitation to the ceremony in honor of a 17th century rabbi in Eisenstadt Austria arriving in the mail day before yesterday was a surprise. The only outstanding Eisenstadt I am aware of is S.N.Eisenstadt, an Israeli sociologist. There is a gentleman with my name who write papers about Iran.
As near as I can tell, a certain percentage of randomly disparaging comments are an obligatory component of internet etiquette. You may find this vexing due to your age.
My “analytical” score was only 50th-percentile! I tell myself that if I had been given a week to think my way through those problems I would have solved them all. Are Ents stupid, just because they think so slowly?
My father grew up in 1940s Sunnyside Queens. His maternal grandparents owned a laundromat, his paternal grandparents a candy-store. I think that David Horowitz, the Frontpagemag guy, grew up in the same neighborhood at the same time.
IOW quit noticing things about the tribe.
Eisenstadt’s the name. And for a full disclosure of our far-flung network, just yesterday in the mail I got an invitation to attend a ceremony in the town of Eisenstadt in what was once the Austro-Hungarian empire in honor of the 300th anniversary of the coronation as Chief Rabbi of the town of
Eisenstadt of Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt on the 10th of June, 2018 at 3:00pm in the Eisenstadt town center, near the castle palace of Esterházy. The invite goes on to say that a ceremony will be held in honour of the reconstruction of the PANIM MEIROT ZION tombstone in the presence of his descendants, and those who recognize his greatness. Presumably Uncle Meir is known as the PANIM MEIROT ZION. Apparently I am in a database of names and addresses.
Please start a blog. I find descriptions of daily life in the past fascinating.
Doubt it.
Another interesting sample is Harvard’s Math 55:
“The final course drop forms are dutifully submitted, finalizing the class roster: 45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male. The tribe has spoken.”
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/12/6/burden-of-proof-at-1002-am/
Non-representative sample. You have to first get into Harvard, and getting in isn’t based on brain power alone. There’s a reason why they’re getting sued right now.
So what do you expect the merit-based percentages to be in Math 55?
If the International Math Olympiad is anything to go by, one should expect more Chinese and Indians:
https://www.imo-official.org/country_individual_r.aspx?code=USA
Probably just less Jews. The Tribesmen are the brightest on average, but their overrepresentation at Harvard is even higher than you’d expect based on their IQs. Now for our mongoloid friends!
It looks as if Asians aren’t discriminated against any harder than Whites are. For one, Unz calculated that Asians have higher representation at elite colleges relative to the proportion predicted by measurements of merit. Second, I’ve taken SAT and ACT data from students at a somewhat elite university and any advantage Asians had going into the test was completely washed out by the time they got to college.
Only two reasonable hypotheses I can draft up to explain that:
1) Asians of a given IQ are more qualified than Whites of a given IQ because they work harder, and will get into the same schools with equal or lower standardized scores as a result. I can test that later this week: this computer doesn’t have my data or statistical software on it, but I’ll be back on campus soon. I’ve taken Conscientiousness scores and high school GPA for the same sample. If the Asians aren’t more conscientious & don’t have higher high school GPAs then we can reject this.
2) The dumber Whites were filtered out harder than the dumber Asians, or the smarter Asians went to better schools while the smarter Whites were stuck here.
Accordingly, any gain that Asian students get from fair representation should be matched by an equal (or greater) gain in White students from the same increase in fairness. Harvard, and subsequently that sadistic math course, would see an increase in your Smiths, Millers etc.
I believe the Harvard 55 stats are only for the 11 students who stayed in it in 2006. But somebody could likely obtain the final rosters for multiple years and do an ethnic surname analysis with a bigger sample size.
Related question: is it possible that the Ashkenazi Jews have evolved a greater avarice along with their higher IQ?
The most probable theory to explain intelligence in Jews is that in the professions in which they were specialized social mobility was more related to “talent” than in the other professions, and that the talented had more surviving children than the others : Jews descend more from talented Jews than Gentiles from talented Gentiles.
What “talent” makes a moneylender or a merchant successful ?
Intelligence, certainly, and what could be called “ambition”, enterprising spirit, passion for success and fame.
And it seems to me that the latter is more often observed among Jews than among Gentiles.
I find typical that Karpov is a relatively quiet man, known for his laziness (for a champion), whereas Kasparov is a man obsessed by success and fame.
As for avarice, specifically, I think it’s a contingent subset of ambition : possibly, some Jews, in some contexts, were avaricious (and, very often, they were not, but were accused of being so, by the borrowers and more generally, the christians).
Proclivity towards mercantilism =/= avarice.
In that recent study of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, Jews had by far the highest rates of philanthropy relative to their wealth of any group.
Seems more than possible. If medieval Ashkenazi got smart largely as an indirect result of selection for skill in finance…
If crime requires a high IQ, we’d expect an over-representation of Jewish criminals.
Beyond that, “avarice” sounds incoherent. Many Hunter-Gatheres, for example, have no concept of private property. When Captain Cook made landfall in Taihiti to observe the 1769 transit of Venus, he found it necessary to build a fort – not because the natives were hostile, but because they kept boarding the ship and taking precious scientific equipment. “…great and small chiefs and common men are firmly of opinion that if they can once get possession of an thing it immediately becomes their own…the chiefs employd in stealing what they could in the cabbin while their dependents took every thing that was loose about the ship…”. A Westerner might call this “avarice”…but these natives were also extremely generous, sharing whatever they had.
And that seems to be pretty standard. I have in my possession stone axeheads and a woomera given to my father by an Aboriginal tribe in Australia’s Northern territories in the 1960s (he was working there as a surveyor). He didn’t particularly do anything to deserve these gifts. They just…gave them to him.
As mentioned by another commenter, Askhenazi Jews seem pretty philanthropic.
Anatoly Karlin believes that West Asians and Southern Europeans have a generally more mercantile disposition due to a longer period of selection for urban life. West Asians and Southern Europeans are overrepresented among the super rich relative to their average intelligence.
I think that there certainly were unusual selective forces applied to Ashkenazi personality traits. Cochran and Harpending have previously discussed the Amish-quotient, curiosity and novelty-seeking personality traits decreasing among Amish with every generation as the more adventurous types go off to party with the English. This process can be generalized; in the event that no barrier exists to prevent a subpopulation from blending into a host population, traits which make the subpopulation amenable to blending will be reduced as they are bled off from the subpopulation’s gene-pool. There existed no barrier for Ashkenazim to convert and join the general European population, and a sizable number have probably always done so in every generation. This likely selected for Ashkenazi personality traits which increase the probability of rejecting Europeans and their social norms, thereby making integration less likely. As a mischling I can attest to an irrational hatred of all things European among many Ashkenazim, likely due to increase in this “K-quotient” among Ashkenazim over the centuries.
“There existed no barrier for Ashkenazim to convert and join the general European population, and a sizable number have probably always done so in every generation.”
wrong.
You are correct. I shouldn’t have used “sizable”, the overall numbers per-generation numbers were probably small, but the period of selection was quite long. I would like to ask you these two questions: What was the average Ashkenazi per-generation bleed-off rate into Christian society over the last 1000 years? Do you think that this average bleed-off rate would have been sufficient to substantially alter Ashkenazi personality traits over 1000 years?
Considering the Ashkenazim in the middle Ages – conversion, gene flow and all that. The barriers were pretty high for the Jews living in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Conversion was rare. Most Jews barely spoke Polish, and would have gagged at half the Polish cuisine. They thought of themselves as superior and conversion would have felt like a step down. It wouldn’t surprise if it happened occasionally out on the frontier ( say in the Ukraine), also a place where someone might marry a local girl once in a while.
I’d guess that a bigger source of genetic outflow was getting the maid pregnant.
In places like Palestine under the Byzantines, the story was very different. Probably most of the Jews in Palestine up converting
By the time of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, at least half of Ashkenazi evolutionary history had already past. Do we know anything about Ashkenazi bleed-off rates during early Ashkenazi history in the West? Also, if conversion and integration were to take place, it was likely into nobility or other elites. Jews probably didn’t see themselves as superior to European nobles. It seems that from time to time the Polish even offered noble rank to Jewish converts. If Ashkenazim experienced even a small amount of selective bleed-off over an extended period of time, this might explain some of the peculiar Ashkenazi personality (and possibly physical) traits which can’t be accounted for by selection for mere high-IQ and mercantile disposition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szlachta#Religious_beliefs
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rp.pl%2Fartykul%2F139640-Nobilitacje-neofitow-za-Stanislawa-Augusta.html
Apparently some of the independence generation of Israeli politicians thought so; they thought it obvious that the Palestinians were probably predominantly descendants of the Jews of Palestine.
Possible, but how do you define avarice? And the exercise of avarice is not possible for those who don’t have the ability to accumulate resources.
How much they like playing Monopoly.
In the 1980’s I joined the Prometheus Society and commented in the newsletter that the listed membership of over a hundred was unusually Jewish, Northern European, and male. I was at the time puzzled by this and asked if there were some reason that such folk “were more likely to want to take IQ tests and show off by joining such societies.” Yes, I really thought that, such was my fancy east-coast education and determination to be morally superior and completely biasless.
Few even in the society gave credit to heredity playing more than a 50% part. Yet those few were powerful persuaders. Their numbers and arguments were good. The others were anecdotal – da Vinci was not northern European, for example, so where was my theory now, eh? And Jewish families encouraged academic achievement, don’t ya know? One of the members who was hardest-nosed assured me that the Northeast Asians and some dot-Indians were coming along soon enough, the societies just weren’t in their orbit yet. Interestingly, it was some females in the group who were most certain that it was not a personality difference between the sexes, but they were even more outliers in IQ than males were. Frighteningly but refreshingly candid, some of them.
Reading these comments (not yours) I can tell a lot of people don’t grasp the significance of statistics. By that I mean they don’t know how incredibly significant it is to increasing the far left tail of a bell shaped curve to push an entire population out one standard deviation. Ashkenazi Jews, as per wiki, have an entire world population of 10 to 11 million. 1 out of 690 people yet they are about 1 out of 5 Nobel prize winners.
Slate had an article a while back titled “Stop Talking about race and IQ, take it from someone who did.” I am not going to link to it because I didn’t read it because I know it’s worthless. Maybe Cochran can hurt his brain and read it to rebut it but I am not, but it is interesting that people get so weirded about IQ.
If you are smart you STFU about it. You have gears in your brain that unconsciously gear your conversation to your audience. If you don’t you piss people off. It’s like walking through a room of height sensitive midgets and patting everybody on the head. Here we have the quality that makes us human and it’s forbidden to talk about it. It’s goofy.
Cochran can talk about Ashkenazi Jews and it’s interesting, To me fascinating and important, but out there in the big bad world beyond Westhunter it’s a no go zone.
Let’s say you are of an ethnic group that averages one standard deviation below the norm of 100 and that’s your IQ. How long are you going to listen to a conversation that spells this out to you before you get fighting mad? Not long. So while this Slate article can be disparaged here at the Westhunter, we are just a tiny few talking about a subject that is usually censored.
“Let’s say you are of an ethnic group that averages one standard deviation below the norm of 100 and that’s your IQ. How long are you going to listen to a conversation that spells this out to you before you get fighting mad?“
Why? When people here say that Jews and East Asians are on average smarter then my people, I read the data and if its true I accept it and say “good for them”. I dont get fighting mad.
I’m surprised someone made that argument using da Vinci. Though Florence is not quite the Po Valley, I’d definitely consider it to be in Northern Italy. It is above the Hajnal line, if that counts for anything.
Of course, it is another anecdote, but Virgil was born somewhere around Mantua. Perhaps, against that: Archimedes was supposedly born in Syracuse.
Syracuse at the time of Archimedes was presumably quite a bit different culturally and demographically from what it is today.
Many in Syracuse have Greek names and remember the grandma speaking Greek. It appears that there was no population replacement in Sicily nor in mainland Greece. There may have been selection against intelligence (or playing with crowns in the bathtub).
I’m guessing those are more recent immigrants. Many peoples have been through the area in the days since Archimedes: Romans, Lombards, Normans, Arabs.
I know, still they are mostly descendants of the original Ionian colonists (minus the IQ).
Wasn’t Syracuse a Doric city?
Thanks for the correction. South Italians spoke the Doric dialect.
How can you know that? Wasn’t Syracuse under the Byzantines for many centuries.
Language is weak evidence to genetics.
Soon African and Arabs mix in Britain will speak English.
Florence is in Tuscany, which is genetically between Northern Italy and Sicily. And Northern Italy is genetically between Tuscany and Spain. Nowhere near Northern Europe.
https://italianthro.blogspot.com/2017/05/genetically-southern-european.html
Mr Cochrane, would you care to exercise your talent for disparagement on this?
http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2018/05/genetics-iq-and-race-are-genetic.html
At least one of my kids qualified for this:
Study of Exceptional Talent
“Since 1980, SET has assisted students throughout the world who exhibit extraordinary mathematical or verbal reasoning ability by scoring at least 700 on either the Mathematical or Verbal (Critical Reading or Evidence-Based Reading and Writing) part of the SAT before the age of 13 (or score an additional ten points for each additional month of age).”
https://cty.jhu.edu/set/
I think there’s some relationship between SMPY and this SET, but I’m not sure what it is.
We got their IMAGINE magazine, which always had pictures of new qualifiers. They were mostly Asian, as I recall, and I think to a greater degree than on the picture on the linked web page.
I’m sure there are some kids smart enough to qualify for SET but without the sort of tiger parents who go to the trouble of getting them to take (and train for) the SAT before age 13.
Math contests are increasingly dominated by Asians, and I think tiger parenting has a lot to do with that. For example:
Click to access 2017%20National%20Final%20Standings.pdf
A reasonable guess as to the number of Jews among the top 56 scores is 2 (Ben Epstein in place 16 and Sam Goodman in place 36).
The US IMO team is 4 Chinese and two Indians.
If Mathcounts had anything close to a representative sample of high IQ youth, then California would be #1 and the New York team would be in the top 5, not #19, behind Kansas.
“If Mathcounts had anything close to a representative sample of high IQ youth…”
I pretty much explained that Mathcounts does not have close to a representative sample of high IQ youth. Tiger parenting is a big part of it. There’s direct tiger parenting, with the parents themselves training the kids themselves. There’s also indirect tiger parenting, with the tiger parents choosing a school where there’s effective coaching for math contests and pushing the kids to participate and work at it.
Related was the Tiger Parenting of jewish families that their kid might be the next Jascha Heifetz. A guy in my high school was the concertmeister of the All-City classical orchestra which used to practice at Brooklyn Tech. I was 2nd or 3d chair first violinist in it. In fact, I did not have even a smidgeon of talent. Mohammed X has got that knack. The guy at my high-school had the gift in spades. Graduating high-school he got a job selling mens clothing in a haberdashery store on the main drag of that neighborhood. A musical gift is the most common talent among humans. I trust there is substantial literature on that genetic component. A paper in Science reported the findings of non-verbal testing of the So-and-so tribe in the Amazon for geometrical knowledge. Their score in recognizing geometrical concepts was north of 65%. That paper in Science reproduces the ingenious non-verbal tests administered to that tribe. Many learning geometry have been surprised at the ease with which the mind recognizes axioms suggesting that geometrical insight is innate. Almost everybody learns elementary geometry with ease. In college I ran around with a raffish crew. 3 of them were mathematicians who got Ph.D’s at the Courant Institute at New York University. 1 of them an eccentric redhead named Marty Siegel drifted to England to get on the dole and may be found in a few YouTube videos ranting and raving. 1 of them Irwin Feinberg just died. He inherited mental disease and had an even more extravagant hegira or tour d’horizon than Marty, including teaching math in rural China, working for the French military in the 50s, jailed in Morrocco, Libya, Egypt and then turned away at the Allenby Bridge since his name was already on the persona non grata list as he did his fugue through Europe. The third mathematician is alive if not well a retired professor of math.
The M in SMPY is for maths, later on they included verbal as well. I’m not sure of a spatial test. Looking at the link you gave, they include writing as well.
The pic they have is interesting, so many asians, and if you wouldn’t know it, you’d think that this might be a special needs class.
I hope our host will make a post on Reich on Africa.
After having read Reich, I remain with three questions :
1° What is the quantity of ME post 50 000 BP admixture in Black Africa ? [So, the smart people from the ME who conquered and peopled Eurasia, how much did they contribute to the population of Black Africa ?]
2° Specially, how much did they contribute to the population of Ethiopia [So, are Ethiopians Negroes, or black-skinned non-Negroes ?]
3° How is it possible that agriculture did not spread early from the ME through Ethiopia to present day Kenya and Tanzania, and that it had to wait for an expansion coming from present day Nigeria ?
One line of argument that might answer (3) is that the crops were wrong for the climate. ME crops presumably depended either on irrigation or on rain in winter (Mediterranean climate). What’s the rainfall pattern in E Africa? Monsoonal? (I ask from ignorance.)
It’s the rainfall pattern that’s used to explain why there were no Bantu at the Cape when the Dutch immigrated there. It was then Bushmen/Hottentot territory.
“are Ethiopians Negroes?”: the hostesses on the flights we’ve taken on Ethiopian Airlines were stunners to my European eyes – very unNigerian.
Hostesses were certainly cherry picked. The criteria might include bias to European looking.
SMPY had this interesting study about multipotentiality among their selected students,
“In the ability domain, approximately 58% (158/273) of gifted 7th and 8th graders in Cohort 4 of SMPY (students who scored SAT-V 370 or SAT-M 390, original scale, by age13; approximately the top 1% in ability level for this age-group) had ability profiles that qualified as flat when assessed in two of three general ability domains (verbal and quantitative) using the SAT. That is, for 58% of partici-pants, math and verbal subtest scores on the SAT differed by less than 83 points, which equals approximately one standard deviation on the SAT in gifted adolescent popula-tions (compared to a value of 100 in college-bound highschool student samples). ”
The third domain being spatial.
Regarding jewish success on such tests, I think it has helped them that the highly intelligent among them have similar company nearby while for whites(or other ethnicities for that matter) they’d be scattered far more, so that they are less likely to grow up as ‘outsiders’.
http://www.unz.com/article/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
I remember when this came out being especially surprised at the assertion that Jews weren’t crushing it in school anymore, or at least not compared to the Jews of yesteryear.
I also remember Unz getting criticism as to his methodology for counting Jews et al. I never sort of got to the bottom as to whether the criticisms were sound, and also thought if there were errors they would be systemic in that Jews would be overcounted or undercounted all the time so between period comparisons as to changes were still valid.
I read the original article, but I really didn’t follow all the back and forth about whether he got his numbers right. How did all that turn out?
Unz made a number of errors, all in the same direction by some coincidence.
I’d guess that the surname analysis stuff would lead to overcounting, but it would be constant across all the stuff he compares, so if it’s overcounting the number of Jews in the class of 2016 at Harvard, it’s also overcounting the number of Jews in the class of 2016 at Cal Tech, or amongst the high school kids who are National Merit Scholars for 2016, as well as for all the same numbers for 1979.
I’m not sure I’m getting this right, but googling SMPY gets to the study, and if I’m reading it right, the newest tranche they look at is 18 year old kids in 1997, or kids born in 1979. If Unz is right about Jews collapsing as to how over represented they are amongst top performers in academic type contests, it happened afterwards and won’t be in the SMPY data, if I am reading it right.
Ron Unz used Hillel’s estimate for Harvard, surname analysis for PSAT. Apples and durians.
Hillel numbers look a bit dodgy, I’d agree and I guess I should have reread the thing before posting. I’d guess it might matter how seriously Hillel is about getting the number right, or at least consistent over chapters, as in the Harvard number and the MIT number for the same year are gotten using the same methodology. I do not know if they have some sort of uniform method or they just let the rabbi at each university decide, which, if that is the case means the numbers or worthless, both across institutions and across time periods. I’d guess that if Hillel uses the one drop rule, and I’d bet it does though I do not know, that would raise the recent count versus time past since there were far less fractionals in the past as there are now.
The surname stuff for NMS finalists, putnam competitions, looks like it’s pretty sound as for Team Jewish being on a severe cold streak, starting around 2000, with regards to being super students. I’d bet that that’s right.
His results are consistent with SAT score differences, which show a 0.5 SD advantage over White gentiles.
How gifted children globally are handled can be estimated from the OECD PISA data that has the relative grade levels the 15 yo are assigned to. On average the 15 yo globally are in grade10. This is not about the peak performers but the % students with the highest cutoff scores which received special treatment regarding their grade levels relative to the other peers. The grade levels they are in cannot be directly compared due to some countries like UK and Brazil are doing hot-housing on a national level whereas countries like Finland and Sweden intentionally raised the entry age of the students. From this the special cutoff scores of the gifted students can be estimated. The cutoff scores are from arbitrary national policies and cannot be directly compared across countries but the how much the countries concerned value the gifted students can be estimated.
The highest cutoff scores of IQ 161 was from Singapore which is 4 SD above the nominal mean and 3 SD above the national mean IQ and they were only placed in grade11. All the country scores look reasonable except that for UK which has 95% OF 15 yo in grade11, i.e. all those above IQ 65.3 were automatically promoted to grade11 without repeating any grade, and that left the cutoff scores for 15 yo in grade10 and grade09 extremely low. The cutoff values are calculated from the top down for those in the school systems. If those who dropped out of school are included the cutoff % will be lower and the resulting cutoff IQ will be higher. The mean IQs of US states are from McDaniel2006.
Region IQdb G09 G10 G11 G12
ARE 74 48.1 59.3 85.9 110.5 UAE
ARG 94 78.7 89.8 121.2 129.0
AUS 98 54.0 80.0 111.6 148.8
BRA 84 61.8 71.7 86.1 113.1
CAN 99 65.7 83.6 134.0 148.9
CHE 95 79.2 105.4 138.2 — Switzerland
DEU 102 83.4 106.9 138.3 — Germany
DNK 98 85.2 133.4 — —
FIN 99 84.1 144.2 144.2 —
FRA 98 67.7 90.7 125.6 143.8
GBR 98 ?.? 46.9 65.3 125.4 UK
HKG 106 84.7 99.9 138.8 —
ISR 90 50.1 76.9 127.2 — Israel
ITA 89 58.9 76.2 118.5 145.2
IRL 85 54.9 90.7 102.6 — Ireland
KOR 99 99.0 75.7 142.0 —
MEX 88 65.5 83.5 118.8 137.1
NOR 103 13.3 63.8 147.5 —
NZL 99 50.0 55.9 76.5 123.6
POL 95 70.5 134.4 — —
SGP 114 84.7 95.4 161.2 — Singapore
SWE 98 71.7 128.6 — —
TUR 87 58.2 79.4 113.0 128.5
USA 96 54.6 78.8 110.9 139.4
TWN 108.2 64.0 103.0 — — Taiwan
RUS 95.3 74.9 109.3 141.6 —
CNSH 106.2 82.4 104.4 143.4 153.6 Shanghai
USMA104.3 48.5 69.3 118.5 152.9 Massachusetts
USFL 98.4 52.9 86.2 115.7 — Florida
USCT103.1 103.1 80.8 109.3 — Connecticut
Rounding off error upsetting the calculation.
USCT103.1 47.3 80.8 109.3 — Connecticut
Finland has weird system, 85% in G09, 0% in G10, 0.15% in G11. Is it so bimodal? So it should be
FIN 99 84.1 — 144.2 —
I have met some very smart Jews. But has anybody else noticed a tendency among Jews to be unable to filter information and data and decide what is relevant to an analysis and what is not? I have only met two individuals with this bug, and both of them happened to be Jewish.
Two? Out of how many? Doesn’t sound like a tendency to me.
Any idea how many in SMPY’s sample would be Indian American? Given they are heavily selected for IQ, and have the second highest median income (~$105,000) of any ethnic group in the U.S. aside from Ashkenazim, one would expect them to also be overrepresented in high IQ samples like the SMPY. For example, Indians (whether U.S. or foreign-born) comprise only 1.3% of the American general population yet are 8% of licensed physicians.