Pardon my ignorance, but how is this IQ data obtained? It is reported by the government? Are IQ tests standardized?
IQ tests can't be standardized across cultures. Even something like Raven's Progressive Matrices has a cultural component. https://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence
Also China has some issues with the way they report scholastic achievement that make their results appear higher than they should. China is very selective about which students take standardized tests that are used for global comparisons--they aren't random samples.
not sure where hilarity comes into play ... it has well defined statistical properties
perhaps you mean that the results of IQ tests can be, and often are grossly misinterpreted, that is not related to standardization
Very few adults are comfortable with the idea that any substantial group of people are objectively more intelligent than themselves, because admitting that comes uncomfortably close to relinquishing autonomy, at least in contemporary Western understanding that says the more intelligent should rule.
European history throughout the 20th century shows the horrifying, depraved danger in capitulating to a ruling intelligentsia. We should earnestly hope that no group allows their self-interest, protected by native instinct, to be overridden by the despotic, unfeeling ideologies of "intelligent" rulership. That philosophy has shown itself over and over again to be a quick route to starvation, genocide, and widespread desolation.
Nevertheless, IQ is the most general/objective measurement we have, and it seems to be a reasonably good approximation on aggregate.
If you're referring to communism and national socialism here, those were rabidly anti-intellectual (the later particularly so).
The median IQ should be 100, with a standard deviation of 15.
If the median IQ is not 100 over the population, the test is flawed.
They use raw IQ score data.
If you can't accurately quantify the cultural component, then yes it does.
>Claims that basic pattern recognition is somehow not a valid means of assessment across cultures are dubious at best.
Basic pattern recognition isn't the only thing that's being measured--that's the problem. Even something as simple as how often a student has been exposed to a matrix of rows and columns has an impact on performance. Repeated exposure to similar tests also increases performance.
Wrong information is often worse than no information.
That's one of the problems with PISA results. Policy makers look at other countries with higher scores and try to emulate them without understanding why their scores are higher. In that case it's just cargo culting education.
This doesn't mean that standardized testing is completely useless, but you have to know the limitations, and comparing results between cultures is one of the limitations.