Hacker News Reader

Comment by trashtester | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, Jews tend to overperform even more outside of Israel. From Wikipedia:

Of the 965 individual recipients of the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences between 1901 and 2023,[1] at least 214 have been Jews or people with at least one Jewish parent, representing 22% of all recipients. For comparison, 65.4% of Nobel prize winners were either Christians or had a Christian background. Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world's population, meaning their share of winners is 110 times their proportion of the world's population.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates

View on HN

Unless they're somehow 110 times better than everyone else, this indicates some powerful nepotism.

Not true. The differences don't have to be that large.

If one person consistently runs 0.1s faster than everyone else, they can win 100x the races of the next best person without being 100x better.

Nobel prizes, like running races, are winner take all. The person in 100th place doesn't get any points proportional to how good their proposal is.

That's the oppressor/oppressed narrative for any such difference. Hitler came to the same conclusion, and decided to do something about it. Various communists revolutionaries have used the same kind of thinking to get rid of the ruling classes in their countries after the revolution.

But if you consider it this way: The Nobel price was given mostly to white people (including Jews) until about 1970. That's a factor of 10 already.

Then you consider that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of about 115 vs other Europeans somewhere south of 100 on average.

If the standard deviation is a constant 15, a population with a mean of 100 has about 0.4% of the population with an IQ >140. Increase the mean to 115, and that grows to about 5%. That's another factor of 10. And the gap widens as the threshold increases.

This seems to fit the 110x almost perfectly.

Disclaimer: I have no Jewish ancestry that I'm aware of.

Edit: Also, to my knowledge, the Nobel committee has NOT been dominated by Jews.

13% of the world population have an IQ higher than 117. That means that there is a billion non jew that has an IQ higher than the average Ashkenazi. Thus your arguments makes no sense. Even if every single jewish person had a high IQ, they will be less than 1% of the pool.

Well, there is the part about the selection pool, but there is also how a normal distribution behaves far out on the tail.

Most Nobel Laureates in the sciences are highly intelligent, so they exist on that tail.

Basically, if you sample from the top 13% from a normal distribution with (mean, std)=(100,15) you get fewer with 140+ than if you sample from one with (mean, std)=(115,15), and the higher the intelligence, the bigger the difference will be.

This follows from the squaring of the exponential term in the standard distribution.

While it's possible that the shape or standard deviations for various population doesn't match my assumptions, but if they do, the observed number of Nobel prizes given to Jews is very close to what one would expect.

The selection pool is not the global population, as stated in the previous comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com