There’s only about 8 million people in the whole country. There are plenty of cities with more people than that.
How come they punch so far above their weight?
Similar cultural enclaves exist elsewhere in the world and are presumably similarly effective, but they just aren't as large a portion of the population.
Even small cultural differences can have outsized effects because of pollination-- e.g. it's easier to learn from an expert in a domain if there are more experts around you.
I think your question isn't really that much different to asking why the bay area has "punched above its weight" in terms of producing successful tech companies compared to other regions around the US... or why other regions have had a lot more success in other domains.
So these cultural affects will snowball.
The difference with Israel, specifically in regards to hacking, is purely the amount of government support and protection independent actors receive for things that might otherwise be considered nefarious in other countries.
I don’t think it’s that uncommon.
You can probably say something similar about Finland or Ireland.
Being civilized seems to be a low priority in the civilized world.
When I worked in the radar business we couldnt just sell them to anyone.
Our punch is above our weight because of hard work and skepticism.
That's not the terrible stuff like NSO. NSO is just a clever way for the government (and the US government - don't forget) to export the military technology, regulate it and then claim they did not do it but a private company did.
Virtually everyone in NSO was in 8200, this is a way for the US and its allies to get around military trade issues.
If you ever get the chance to talk to someone from Israel, especially someone in tech who was raised in Israel, I recommend it. Ask them about where they went to school. You'll learn a lot.
Is that so?!
I’m an Israeli and I assumed that it’s the really bad education that is responsible for stronger skepticism and Chutzpah.
In any case, it's far away from being a "sweatshop", technology companies are a nice gig.
(Normally I get flagged on HN for saying things like this, would love an explanation if it happens this time.)
I don't have the numbers but I would be very surprised if the majority of Israeli cyber-ops ex-military sells spyware to authoritarian regimes. A few did do that but I don't think it's justified to blame the military service and whatnot for this.
Another thing to remember is that an Italian company also sold spyware to authoritarian regimes. The things they did was really similar to the Israeli one. Same excuses, same pr, same blabla... but without the compulsory military service and whatever reasons you listed.
For instance we tech worker share a very distinct culture from the general culture. Maybe the general culture/ a big subpart of the general culture in Israel is closer to the tech culture, and thus spurring more tech development.
https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jb...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
> "Nobel Prizes[note 1] have been awarded to over 900 individuals,[1] of whom at least 20% were Jews, although the Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world's population"
This is also true in my personal experience as well. A lot of my professors had Jewish ancestry and are some of the smartest people that I know. A lot of famous computer scientists have Jewish ancestry too (Sussman, Stallman, etc).
Sort of similar to how “Asian parents push their children to become doctors.” It’s not necessarily that Asians are smarter, but they do work hard to achieve what they want… statistically speaking.
I could be wrong ofc, but I was under the impression that it is widely accepted in the scientific community that intelligence is at least partially affected by genes.
> saying that one race is smarter directly implies that another race is dumber
Note: I said on average.
A standard deviation increase in the average leads to a huge difference in demographics at the extremes. The population with lower mean will have the majority of the lower tail of the distribution, and the the other population will dominate the upper tail. In the highest 1% they will appear enormously over-represented.
In the middle is where it matters least, because near average people for both populations might have very similar iqs.
For a paper on the issue of specifically ashkenazi (rather than 'jewish') IQ I recommend this one from the University of Utah:
http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbi...
Note the increased IQ is specifically for askenazi jews, as opposed to say sephardic jews. The paper identifies historical social issues that would make selection for intelligence a strong factor in ashkenazi history, explores possible genetic causes identified through unique mutations not present in adjacent populations, and goes into depth on IQ and IQ heritability.
A high level summary available from the economist behind a paywall but viewable here:
I hope you find it interesting. I think its scientific enough that few people should find it controversial, except those who believe that IQ is not a useful measurement of intelligence, which I don't think is an opinion you share given your previous posts.
The controversial part would be Jordan B Peterson talking about it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQHH6o9ual8
No matter your feelings on him, worth a watch.
The people with the greatest influence over our language have succeeded in merging the two concepts, walling them both off from polite discourse for reasons known only to themselves.
Of course, that is an extreme. But assigning intelligence to a "gene" and excluding any kind of environmental or societal/cultural reason for this kind of outlier is not very "smart"
I simply and in good faith answered jonplackett's question based on my personal opinion and observations. My intention was not to provoke, although I do realise that this is a sensitive topic for some.
> But assigning intelligence to a "gene" and excluding any kind of environmental or societal/cultural reason for this kind of outlier is not very "smart"
Certainly, I do not believe that genetics is the only factor that affects intelligence. That being said, in the same spirit, I think that excluding genetics as a potential factor just because it makes some feel uncomfortable is not very smart.