The myth of the Jewish high IQ (2023) | Hacker News Reader

The myth of the Jewish high IQ (2023)

forbiddentexts.substack.com

6 pointsharperlee6 comments

It's a very rambling article, but the data is interesting.

The comments on this are interesting to read, and pick apart the author's argument nicely.

Conclusion: Jewish high IQ isn't a myth.

Having read the article, I came away with the opposite impression. Directly measured IQ data is of laughably poor quality (literally 65 boys, all from the same school, in 1970, and the error bars in the study are larger than any measured difference), so no conclusions can be drawn from that. Meanwhile Israel (Hebrew) performance in PISA is middle of the road at best.

The author thinks so to:

So now we are at the other end of the rabbit hole, have we come out the other side with the slam-dunk data which Peterson and Pinker present as fact? It’s plain that we have not. Their claim is something like ‘Jews are overrepresented in American positions of power and influence because of their high IQ’ but a more accurate articulation of this argument would be something like ‘Jews are overrepresented in American positions of power and influence because 65 fifteen-year-old boys scored well on a quick test in 1970 and 57 monolingual Jewish children in 1959 scored well on a Stanford Binet Test.’ The argument is never presented that way. Their argument has come out of this process greatly damaged.

Just FYI: PISA was never meant to test intelligence. And IQ in general is unscientific bullshit.

> PISA was never meant to test intelligence

Regardless of intention, it is a test where intelligence helps you perform.

> IQ in general is unscientific bullshit

You probably mean to say some specific interpretation of IQ scores is unscientific. I disagree that it's entirely useless, but regardless, if you truly believe that, you have to apply it always - both when it does, and doesn't, show what you want.

You can't, e.g., claim that IQ is bullshit, and also that Jews are overrepresented in influential positions because of their high IQ.

> Regardless of intention, it is a test where intelligence helps you perform.

PISA is just testing if you learned some set of information at specific point in time. It has basically nothing to do with intelligence - it's a test of standard compliance.

> You probably mean to say some specific interpretation of IQ scores is unscientific.

No - I mean that IQ is NOT MEASURING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE AT ALL. It may have some correlation with some aspects of intelligence, or maybe rather have some correlation with human's performance in specific situations which some other people may consider as "acting intelligently", but it's not guaranteed to be the case. So maybe it's rather some kind of an indicator of the current mental and body fitness (oxygen level, nutrition, sleep / exhaustion, focus, or whatsoever), but no more.

> You can't, e.g., claim that IQ is bullshit, and also that Jews are overrepresented in influential positions because of their high IQ.

which i never did in my entire life.

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