Comment by hagbard_c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hagbard_c | Hacker News Reader

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How about this: Ashkenazi Jewish culture with its emphasis on education and discipline stemming from studying religious texts leading to widespread literacy has led this group of people to outperform the mainline on intellectual tasks just like other cultures with an emphasis on education and literacy tend to outperform the mainline.

You don't need genetic inheritance to explain Jewish over-performance, cultural inheritance is enough. Do mind I don't know whether there is a genetic component involved but I do know it is not needed to explain why Ashkenazi Jews outperform other cultures.

Looking at national IQ averages [1] currently Hong Kong seems to score highest with an average of 107.73 while Israel is below average at 98.57, below most European countries as well as below the USA. The top 6 in the list are all east-Asian countries, the lowest are nearly all in Africa with Somalia lowest at 83.84.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-i...

>You don't need genetic inheritance to explain Jewish over-performance, cultural inheritance is enough.

but it is known, independently of Jewish population studies, that genetic inheritance is a strong factor in IQ performance, and such data also demands explanation; there is no point in leaving it out of population studies.

It is much more frustrating to perform tasks that are more difficult for you than things that are easy. So if a task requires intellect, you are more likely to engage in that task if you are intelligent, and more likely to progress in that field if other people note and reward your performance. Such a process carried out on a particular gene pool might reinforce tendencies that lead to part of what we call culture.

>Looking at national IQ averages currently Hong Kong seems to score highest with an average of 107.73 while Israel is below average at 98.57, below most European countries as well as below the USA.

Ashkenazi Jews as a population average scores above 107. The IQ mean of 100 has a standard deviation of about 15. Also, Ashkenazi Jews are less than half of Israel.

Yes, there does seem to be a genetic component to IQ but as I stated you don't need to include it here to explain why cultures which place emphasis on education and discipline score higher than those which don't. Even if intelligence were not heritable those cultures would on average still perform better than those which don't value education and discipline. Adding a heritable component makes the effect stronger, especially in cultures where intracultural marriages are common or the norm.

There are no such thing as "national IQ averages".

Yes there are no matter whether you consider IQ a valid concept or not. In the context of the grandparent's remark about Ashkenazi Jews being 'smarter' it is relevant to compare specific group averages (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews) with national averages, especially in the case of Israel where there is a marked difference between the national average IQ and that for the group 'Ashkenazi Jews' (about 24% of the total Israeli population calculated from the numbers presented in [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Jews

No, there aren't. Countries generally don't do latitudinal IQ surveys. Very few people reading HN have ever been asked to take an IQ test, let alone compelled to do so. Numbers attributing "IQ" to countries are generally fraudulent (i.e., Richard Lynn's "IQ And The Wealth Of Nations" numbers).

I'm not making any other claim than that specific one: there is no such thing as "national IQ averages". If you claim there's some other kind of "IQ average" that isn't "national", you're addressing a point I didn't make.

Countries don't have to do tests, that is done by people who take tests organised by institutions, The results are grouped by whatever factors the test developers consider interesting and the results are published. We can quibble about the value of these results, about the value of IQ as a concept, about the sample size of IQ-test-taking groups in different countries and much more but that is all irrelevant when considering the question whether there is something like an average IQ score grouped by country. Those scores exist and the results from several independent studies are largely the same.

Your original link makes fairly clear how disingenuous it is to call the figures a national average:

> Data from International IQ Test (IIT) are based on data from 1,352,763 participants worldwide who took the same IQ test on the website.

> Becker’s estimates are categorized by source. T = value is based upon actual test results from said country. E = value is a best-guess estimate based upon measured values of nearby countries.

Opening up the actual paper from Becker they're citing is basically a wandering tour where they try to find whatever numbers do exist and then math their way out of the fact that the sample sizes are small and the tests are different everywhere.

Various entities have performed IQ tests on people in many nations. But taking that and trying to flip it to say we've derived average national IQ is junk science.

If you don't like that link - which is just one of the many I got when searching for 'national IQ average' there are many other similar studies to be had. Here's a few of them, again just some results from the first page in my SearXNG instance. The results are not identical but they are comparable.

https://international-iq-test.com/en/test/IQ_by_country

https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php

https://www.universaliqtest.com/statistics/average-iq-by-cou...

https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/average-iq-by-country

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229401257_National_...

https://openpsych.net/files/papers/Parra_2025a.pdf

You've just provided:

(1) Several surveys backed by anonymous online "IQ test" web sites.

(2) Richard Lynn, whose numbers are essentially fraudulent.

(3) Emil Kirkegaard, the famous Danish white supremacist.

The counterargument is very simple: countries don't generally do IQ surveys. Most people on HN have never been asked to take a calibrated IQ test. The data simply doesn't exist.

Don’t worry, they got data from a whole 5000 people in Australia and 300 people in Afghanistan!

I’m sure that’s generalizable to the whole country’s worth of 28 and 40 million, respectively.

Hard to beat Richard Lynn's sample of Senegal, which came from 57 children in a malaria hospital.

> Countries with fewer than 100 test-takers were excluded from the ranking due to limited sample size and are shown in gray on the map above.

How generous of them.

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