The obvious reason for female underachievment is that men greatly outnumber women at the highest levels of intelligence.

Almost everything can be explained by IQ, and differential rates in the appearance of intensive agriculture, urbanization, and literacy.

Bah!

It is all almost spiritual factors.

East Asians simply aren’t willing to become as gloomy and frustrated as the West in order to gain some material advantage

You’ve become a parody of yourself, Aaron

Lol, I was kind of joking, but I see Karlin dislikes my comment, so I’ll stop.

I think that the great variability between male and female IQ is also a very important factor. On the very high IQ level, there are far fewer women than men.

Also one should not forget that China did suffer far more barbarian devastation then North-western Europe (which saw none at all after the Magyars and Vikings were tamed). Eastern Europe on the other hand was regularly devastated by warlike tribes from the steppe, who’s ways of war were infinitely more devastating then thus of western European states. Eastern Europe did not exactly develop much, before the Nomad problem wasn’t finally handled in the late 18th century (when the Crimean horde was conquered by Russia), after which the east started to catch up with the west.

We just don’t know how a Song China would have developed, had the Jurchen and Mongols not destroyed it. Europe took over 600 years to recover from the fall of Rome after all. And if anything the Mongols were far more brutal and devastating then any of the tribes, that brought down the Roman Empire. The Manchu conquest also surpassed the religious wars of Europe by far in brutality and devastation.

Meanwhile, the Malthusian crisis of western Europe, like the one that ended in the black death in the 14th and in the religious wars of the 17th, was not accompanied by barbarian invasions, so while population did decline, material wealth and social order did remain far more preserved, for instance opening the way for the early capitalist revolution of the post black death era.

No matter what Pommeranz says….post Song china always had a very small part of its population living in cities. See K Dengs work on “Agrocracy” for a detailed explanation. The Chinese social and political system was developed in a way that encouraged population flow from cities into the countryside, where of course people were generally less intellectually productive. The comercial classes were also far less influential in China then in the most productive areas of western Europe (16th century Northern Italy, 17th century Netherlands and 18th century England). By 1600 around 8% of western Europeans were living in cities with over 10 000 inhabitants, vs only 4% in CHina (the numbers are not much different over the regions of China, while Western Europe had several areas of high urban concentration). By 1800 the highest rate of urbanisation in any province of China was 5,6%, while in Western Europe it was 30%.

I would also say that the Hajnal Line and the institutions it encouraged, does play a role in economic development and might have had an impact on western European IQ.

Sorry for my bad English.

There isn’t near as much to explain about the Middle East and India. They are simply less intelligent – significantly so – than the Europeans or East Asians.

Is there a credible estimate of Indian IQ? I am not convinced by Lynn & Vanhanen’s low-80s estimate. You have mentioned high parasitic load and malnourishment as potential factors holding the subcontinent in general back. Malnourishment in India is higher than even the average Sub-Saharan African country.

You go on to state that you view the g-loaded PISA tests to be better guides, but India notoriously underperformed the (only) time they participated, probably for the same reason(s). Speaking of Jason Richwine, Steve Sailer on his twitter mentioned a few days ago, in response to a direct question on this very topic from an Indian, that the mean IQ of 2nd-gen Indian-Americans is something around 112 IQ, so quite close to mean Ashkenazi IQ. This would imply that ‘regression to the mean’ is quite high, and as such would throw cold water on the idea that the average Indian IQ is low on a genetic basis.

Of course, as most people know, India has many subpopulations and many castes have extremely high endogamy, which makes determining Indian IQ so difficult, especially as most immigrants to the US are high caste(implied as Brahmin). That said, from what I understand, the same can not be said of Indians in the UK and they tend to do quite well there, despite far fewer Brahmins. Then again, some Indians on /pol/ have thrown cold water on this Brahmin = high caste theory.

I say this in the context of recman1’s comments on UK Indians, and his focus on Brahmin’s as high caste, which, if the-above comments is anything to go by, is misleading since ‘high caste’ is not synonymous with Brahmin in a strict socio-economic sense (but more so in a cultural sense).

Verbal skills are much more important for economic productivity than recognizing patterns in weird shapes, ergo GDP per capita and development levels showing the highest levels of correlation precisely with verbal IQ.

This is interesting, and I’ve heard this before. Additionally, I do not remember which author – perhaps it was Murray – who once wrote that mathematical IQ is actually better correlated with verbal IQ than the other way around. In other words, someone with a verbal IQ of 130 will have a higher mathematical IQ on average than someone with a mathematical IQ of 130 will have a verbal IQ. I do not know if this is true, do you know something about this? It goes against the stereotype of “clever humanist but worthless on math”, which is why I was skeptical when I read it. It’d be interesting if true.

My guess is that this underperformance can be ascribed to greater East Asian conformism, relative to the other major races of man (Kura et al., 2015).

Isn’t this an old stereotype(or even a slur) repackaged in a new exterior? I’ve gone back and read some articles from ~2005 recently and it is astonishing how dismissive many Western media outlets were of the Chinese. Sure, they write, the Chinese are growing fast but [insert litany of thinly-veiled dismissive insults about ‘robotic’ Asians who lack innovation]. Yet as you yourself have pointed out, the Chinese have risen very fast at cutting-edge research in the academies. Their AI efforts are already world-class. This does not disprove their historical lag, but it should perhaps caution us on taking an essentialist perspective by tagging them as perpetually ‘incurious’. If that was the case, you’d expect it to remain a constant constraint and that doesn’t appear to be true, or at least far less than many thought 10-15 years ago. Thoughts?

Also, there was plenty of Chinese innovation pre-1500 AD and one could argue that if you focus from 0 AD to 1500 AD, it is not clear that Europeans did better. We innovated in a shorter burst and as technological output accelerated, it was more tightly packed in a shorter timespan, though I will concede that the last 500 years were vastly more important than anything than came before it put together.

However, as Kurzweil has noted, human innovation has sped up consistently over the last 10 000 years. The introduction of each technology has been shorter and shorter, which perhaps shows to a generalised pattern that makes the industrial revolution less of a unique European phenomena in the sense that “without us, it would never have happened” and more a logical end-conclusion of ever-faster innovation over the course of human history. Perhaps we were simply doing better at this particular juncture, which is why it was us, but had it begun in 1300 AD, maybe I would have written this in Mandarin.

P.S. For what it’s worth, there are questions over whether we measure productivity adequately today. Some, like prof Diane Coyle, argue that we are underestimating it and research institutions like the Conference Board has taken in her research and the result of those models is that East Asian GDPpc is higher than it is today due to higher productivity.

It is particularly technological productivity that is undermeasured, and that would remove a lot of this ‘underperformance’. SK has lower productivity than Spain according to the OECD, which is somewhat implausible.

“Verbal skills are much more important for economic productivity than recognizing patterns in weird shapes, ergo GDP per capita and development levels showing the highest levels of correlation precisely with verbal IQ. ”

Quite a statement. If true, and I’ll take your word for it, why?

What are the mechanics of this?

I’ll like to see if there is any correlation between Rex Jung’s temporary hyperfrontality and verbal IQ measures.

(how China was not first to the Industrial Revolution must be one of the biggest puzzles of Intelligence Theory).

Necessity is the mother of invention. It strikes me that east asia (perhaps ultimately owing to some of this conformism) has been relatively much more stable and peaceful throughout history than Europe has. Obviously there is a lot of war and empire and what have you in East Asia as there is anywhere else, but it seems to me like less overall. Asian empires had short periods of ‘senkoku’ followed by extremely long lived dynasties of unified countries.

Europeans comparatively had short periods of unified empires but mostly existed throughout their history in a permanent state of senkoku, disunited warring states. China’s maxim from the Romance of the 3 kingdoms is “that which is long united must divide, and that which is long divided must unite” but in east asia, it seems more like “that which is briefly divided must unite, and that which is long united must divide” whereas Europe is more like “that which is briefly united must divide, that which is long divided must briefly almost unite before blowing back up”.

The Chinese invented the cannon but they did not really develop it because they ultimately had relatively little use for it. Chinese adventures were things like invading Vietnam, where they had no problems at all blasting into the place without cannons but the issue became holding it in a high attrition jungle full of guerrillas which cannons don’t really help with. The only real threat they faced besides peasant rebellions was steppe raiders on horseback (more guerrilla and mobility warfare) and cannons don’t help with that either. The issue is the horse raiders strike where the line is weak, and then run away before you can reinforce. Cannons only slow reinforcements down even more.

In Europe they were basically in a constant state of senkoku. Raiders hitting where the line was weak would take territory but then loose it back again a few years later, so they started building massive defensive fortifications to try to hold on to the land against raiding, and all these massive defensive fortifications (castles) required cannons to bust holes in.

I think this crucible of nearly permanently warring states for a millennia is what necessitated a lot of the military tech advances which is what ended up driving a lot of the non-military tech advancements. Asia became kind of stagnant because it was comparatively too peaceful and stable. And their (relative) peace and stability I think we can blame on their conformism.

East Asians simply aren’t willing to become as gloomy and frustrated as the West in order to gain some material advantage – which reminds me I really need to live there!

Please don’t.

The Chinese invented the cannon but they did not really develop it because they ultimately had relatively little use for it. Chinese adventures were things like invading Vietnam, where they had no problems at all blasting into the place without cannons but the issue became holding it in a high attrition jungle full of guerrillas which cannons don’t really help with

Chinese walls were built in a fashion that cannons did not seem like they could possibly defeat them, as even 20th century cannons had difficulty defeating city walls, which were made of alternating slanted hard portions to deflect and soft portions within in order to dampen surviving impact:

We fought our way to Nanking and joined in the attack on the enemy capital in December. It was our unit which stormed the Chunghua Gate. We attacked continuously for about a week, battering the brick and earth walls with artillery, but they never collapsed. The night of December 11, men in my unit breached the wall. The morning came with most of our unit still behind us, but we were beyond the wall. Behind the gate great heaps of sandbags were piled up. We ‘cleared them away, removed the lock, and opened the gates, with a great creaking noise. We’d done it! We’d opened the fortress! All the enemy ran away, so we didn’t take any fire. The residents too were gone. When we passed beyond the fortress wall we thought we had occupied this city

As a result, development in increasing cannon size was pretty much halted, with larger bores developed later to basically fire grapeshot-equivalents in order to try to maximize their utility against soft targets like horsemen.

It testifies to something of the entire siege mentality of China which I hope has slowly slipped away a bit, but one historian, noted that the walls of the marketplace of Chang’an were thicker than the walls of major European capitals.

When it comes to Chinese innovations, there were vast differences over time, same as for European innovations.
In the Song period (around 1000-1250) the rate of invention was 2,5 times greater than in the 500 years preceding it. It was one of the most creative periods of premodern history. Meanwhile after the Song and till around 2000 China didn’t really invent anything (with the exception of the Bristle Toothbrush). (see Joseph Needham)
So a moderately creative period was followed by an explosion in creativity, which in turn was followed by a barren wasteland.
Meanwhile in Europe, the creative explosion of classical Greece, was followed by the rather modest creativity of the roman period, followed by a wasteland and slow recovery. Then suddenly there was a hence unseen leap upward around 1500, surpassing anything that came before.
Booth processes seem to correlate with GDP per capita in the areas concerned. While GDP calculations for premodern economies should be treated carefully, most calculations come to the conclusion that there was a strong leap upwards in European per capita GDP at the time of the black death, after which the per capita GDP in most of western Europe remained stably above that of the rest of the world. It was especially high in northern Italy. Later per capita GDP was the highest in the areas, with the largest scientific output. Be it the Netherlands or the UK in the 17th-18th centuries.
Now how did it look like in China?Chinas GDP per capita was respectable during the Song, but plunged to Spanish levels under the Ming, only to reach Malthusian limits under the Qing. All of this was accompanied by low levels of urbanization and a mostly subsistence economy.
From about the 14th century parts of the West took a different path from the rest of the world. This seems to strongly overlap with Scientific and technological progress. China on the other hand, seems to have gone into the opposite direction. And the effect on science was also the opposite one.

Eh, I think he’ll be happy with the Taoists.

English teacher, eh?

I see it as my duty to expose Asians to quality white people – can’t have them thinking you’re typical 🙂

They will fit me like a glove!

If I can locate their mountain huts…

You could just go to Wong Tai Sin Temple(黃大仙祠) in Hong Kong and talk to the Taoists there. Maybe you can learn to design automotive engines by feng shui principles, then move to Germany and work for Benz, so that German_Reader will be eternally plagued by your work every time he turns the ignition key.

English teacher, eh?

Not that old, comrade-kun.

I see it as my duty to expose Asians to quality white people – can’t have them thinking you’re typical

While I do make my general leanings visible occasionally, I generally try to avoid talking about topics that range within the political sphere IRL.

I get told I am very well-mannered and courteous, so clearly their impression of me can’t be all bad (well considering that it is Mainland Chinese perhaps the bar is not too high…)

Online I don’t care quite as much about decorum (which is mainly here at UR as I don’t comment at any other blog I read), although I am sure I am not the worst offender.

I was thinking about normal people, our dearest friend seems quite fond of proselytising…

That said, from what I understand, the same can not be said of Indians in the UK and they tend to do quite well there, despite far fewer Brahmins

Not really

Chinese walls were built in a fashion that cannons did not seem like they could possibly defeat them, as even 20th century cannons had difficulty defeating city walls, which were made of alternating slanted hard portions to deflect and soft portions within in order to dampen surviving impact:

This doesn’t explain why they lagged behind in shipborne cannons, which were by far the most important European technological advantage.

The war junks could beat the wokou, there really wasn’t anyone else to shoot at. For that part, the Ming Dynasty after the Yongle Emperor stopped developing the navy(the largest at the time) as a whole as a Neoconfucian faction won out and aimed to shut out the world.

Neoconfucian faction won out

Frickin’ Neocons – always screwing things up – bastards!

Peace.

This is anecdotal, but based on my experience in India working-class people are much dumber than their equivalents in the West.

Carpenters will for instance simply run out of nails on the job and expect you to provide them with more nails.

Hotel employees misunderstand very simple instructions, and not just in English. Instructions given in native dialects are also misunderstood. Bizarre things like asking for three chairs to be brought up to the room and ending up with ten chairs and a bunch of soda pop.

There are electricians who don’t even know the difference between single-phase and three-phase and have never heard of grounding.

The quality of welding is abysmal and would be rejected by quality control in any Western country.

The emigration of so many talented Indians to the West is also a very serious problem, and something which the Indian government irrationally continues to insist on as part of its foreign policy. Indians are perversely proud that some of their most talented sons are now employed as coolie CEOs of M$FT and Goolag instead of lending their talents to their own country.

The achievements, or lack thereof, of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and the Defence Research and Development Organization are embarrassing. The Tejas (light fighter) and Arjun (main battle tank) projects are fiascos. Indian space program appears to be a rare bright spot.

Now granted India is still a very poor country and has problems with illiteracy (only Kerala has reached 100% primary school enrollment), malnutrition, and certainly pathogen burden as well. There wasn’t much to boast about in China 30 years ago either (the delusions of Godfree Roberts aside).

A lack of necessity. Euros actually developed those naval cannons because they needed them to survive each other. I think the terrain helped too. The southeast asians have jungle, the japanese and southeast islanders have the sea, the koreans have a mountain range cutting off their peninsula. There was a lot of tendency toward stable isolationism in east asia, which is probably a good thing at least until it causes you to fall technologically too far behind barbarians that you can’t defend yourself.

If only the Japanese had gone into a Viking phase 1000 years earlier China would probably have ended up having to develop naval cannons first.

Chinese firms manage to buy peanuts in India, clean them in China and undercut, with better quality, the original Indian growers in Russia. Russia has banned Indian peanuts for years at a time because of fungal disease. I know this from direct involvement. As go peanuts so goes much other Indian produce and manufactures. Indian traders ask me to sell curry powder and mangoes to Russia. They seem to have no cultural awareness. They also expect the Russian side to pay for everything and intermediates like me to work for nothing. There are reasons why most countries have not seen the demands of India in Free Trade Deals as worth the exposure to Indian trade goods. Russia buys some guar gum and bentonite both used in drilling muds but inconsequential food and goods.

Indian traders ask me to sell curry powder and mangoes to Russia. They seem to have no cultural awareness.

Do Russians dislike mangos?

I supplied Russian components for fibre optic gyros to the Indian space program. The weapons control bureaucracy was formidable as they shipped via the UK. (Russian and Indian commercial paper work is not compatible). Letters of credit used in each country are not compatible. BRICS is an hysterical joke so far as non weapons trade between India and Russia are concerned. The Indian national oil company OGNC was ripped off in a massive fraud by Russians (with state backing) the first time they tried investing. Mind you, being too mean to pay for consultancy, they did not know simple things such as Russia taxes oil selling for more than $35 a barrel at over 90% give or take a regional tax break to drill above the Arctic Circle. Serve the lazy, greedy fools right.

Sorry for my bad English.

You must be kidding. Your English is very good (better than mine for sure) and your comment above is very informative. Thank you.

Someone unprepared to invest to promote mangoes is never going to find out. I will guess yes. They are quite bland. Mango pulp can be sold as a food additive but quality … I don’t want to spend a year on the project without pay and be let down by failure to meet food standards.

Engineered parts for cars have the same problems.

Indian traders ask me to sell curry powder and mangoes to Russia. They seem to have no cultural awareness.

This is another odd thing about Indians. I’ve never met more insular people. Civilizationally, they’re completely self-absorbed. They have less curiosity about other cultures, religions, and races than any other group of (intelligent) people I’ve ever encountered.

In fact if I understand their religions correctly, there was even some sort of taboo about venturing outside of India itself. The Indian Ocean was something you weren’t supposed to venture out into.

You can see this in their diaspora as well. Racially speaking they’re a lot more similar to whites than Northeast Asians. But Northeast Asians in white countries adopt white names (even when simply travelling on business), date whites, don’t wear traditional costumes, happily enjoy white foods, etc.

Where does mathematical ability fit? Does it fall under spatial or verbal? I would imagine this aspect of intelligence to be the most important one.

Nonconformity is overrated. Scientific/technogical discoveries are driven by people obsessed with figuring out how something works. They mull over it all hours of the day. The key word is *passion.* You can also call it intelectual curiosity though at the extremes required for innovation it is intelectual obsession.
It’s probably maladaptive. Just think, what benefit did Mendel get for doing his plant experiments? Sure, some discoverers make it big but material rewards are rarely the key driver. Think Nikola Tesla. Put another way, Asians are more practical.

In terms of cultural assimilation, Indians are the least assimilated of all ethnic groups in the USA:

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/cr_59.pdf

(scroll down to page 6)

This is a funny comment. Its down right hilarious! As someone who lived for a decade in the East Asian countries, I can tell you that they are the most materialistic people on the planet, way more than most Americans. You see, I don’t give a rat’s ass what people believe as long as they don’t keep me from doing what I want with my own life.

You know, people use the word “spritual” a lot and I still have no idea WTF they mean by it. The only thing I can come up with is that “spritual” is just a state of mind, nothing more.

You know, there is the concept that the human personality is not an integrated whole, but rather a system of subselves. Eric Berne was the first to talk about this with his theory of “ego states”. Later, there are others to come up with thier own variants of this concept. Julian Jaynes bicameral mind theory is a specific variant of this concept. By his theory, reliigious belief in modern humans is a vestigial remnent of the bicameral mind. I see no reason to reject this explanation out of hand.

The Chinese seem to be the polar opposite.

Although, India and China can perhaps both be noted for their desire for excellent cuisine, and abstention from the international football tournaments.

the Confucian bureaucracy seems to have been remarkably resilient, and provided continuity of governance. And of course Japan did not have that problem, but in many respects followed in China’s footsteps (self-imposed isolation; improvement over innovation).

A modern divergence – between Japan and China – emerges in choice whether to modernize or not, in response to external threats, in the 19th century.

Japan successfully modernizes, and as a result of intentional decisions of its political elite in the middle of 19th century. China, takes a different path, and in fact modernization attempts resisted above all from its rulers, who protested, for example, the introduction of railway. The differences are perhaps first exposed to observers of the First Sino-Japanese War, and another 10 years of modernization, and Japan has defeated the Russian Empire, and which result has amazed the world.

The question why the two countries (or their elites) consciously choose such different paths in this era, is interesting.

This has translated to an approximately one S.D. improvement in general intelligence.

The diffrent rates of Flynn effects on verbal and Raven matrices imply that ‘general intelligence’ may not exist as a single component (factor), i.e., a scalar quantity. Factorization of the same battery of tests now and 40 years ago would yield two different g factors that would not be mutually parallel, meaning that another factor, let’s call it s orthogonal to g, must be introduced. At this point it must be admitted that the church erected by Spearman and refurbished with new mathematical facade by Jensen is crumbling. Instead of scalar ‘general intelligence’ we have a 2-D vector in space spanned by two orthogonal vectors g and s and the Flynn effect consists of rotation of the ‘general intelligence vector’ in this space and also in change of its absolute magnitude. It is a significant departure form the dogma of Spearman. Further consequence is that each orthogonal component of the ‘general intelligence vector’ may have different heritability, however this is of secondary importance as the heritability tests have very poor repeatability.

I can tell you that they are the most materialistic people on the planet, way more than most Americans.

Absolutely. Middle and upper middle class Indians are dreadfully materialistic to the point of disgusting. Chinese are much more guarded and circumspect so they do not appear as greedy as Indians. This also may explain observed lower inventiveness of Asians. I would attribute it to different relation to abstraction which in the West is related to Platonic forms and Christian transcendence. In the West we know that we don’t know and that there is more out there which objectively exists and we can reach it by means of our effort which is independent of some mumbo jumbo good mood of some ghosts of our ancestors that need to be bribed with offerings. Fathers of the Church were obsessed with free will and fortunately this propagated to out culture though Calvinism in its most primitive forms was a step back towards mumbo jumbo.

Only foreigners complain about Chinese writing. Yes, it’s hard to learn. But then you learn it, and it’s done. It doesn’t affect your brain.

Japan has had phonetic writing forever now. Koreans have had phonetic writing for a while. Now it’s the only one they got. Didn’t make them smarter or more innovative.

Asians are just like that. Practical, authoritarian people.

I’ve been wondering about the various writing systems of East Asia, particularly China’s, but I don’t know really anything about it.

One thought had occurred to me, perhaps there’s a formal quality to it, that means even when you go phonetic it has to (for practical purposes) correspond to an already existing logograph. I assume there are exceptions for technology, but it might be harder to coin silly political words, like “racist.” Oh, don’t get me wrong – I’d be surprised if “racist” did not exist, but other, even more ridiculous terms like homophobe or transphobe, cis-gendered, etc. probably can’t exist past a threshold, and so can’t take root.

Maybe, a word coined in Pinyin would naturally be seen as foreign.

All that is pure ignorant theory. The Chinese, Koreans, and probably the Japanese have clearly all had crazy ideas at times, but maybe they still have a certain innate protection, from certain crazy ideas.

Conversely, English could possibly be the easiest language to have crazy ideas in. It has the largest vocabulary, I think. Easier grammar than many other languages. Spelling is bad, but that is easily fixed nowadays by spellcheck. When your nouns all have genders, is it as easy to question gender, as when they have no gender? Probably not.

Languages don’t have vocabularies. People do. English just happens to have more speakers who engage in a variety of scientific endeavors so the words used in English texts are on average more varied than others.

And yes, English as a semi-isolating grammar language makes it somewhat easier to adopt foreign words. But much of that it’s culture. English speakers just have a culture of liberal pedantry where foreign words aren’t rejected as being weird.

Korean and Japanese have loads of foreign words in them, mostly English these days. Hasn’t made them that more creative. Mainland China has a habit of translating everything, which the language allows for. Taiwanese in contrast just use English words for many new concepts. Are Taiwanese more innovative? No.

Let nobody be fooled: language is culture. It changes when required. Language determinism is yet another liberal theory to avoid dealing with HBD. That’s all there is to it.

For what it’s worth, Japanese writing is much more of a pain in the ass than Chinese. Way more. It’s irregular and arbitrary and just plain bad.
Japan didn’t even have a standard system until 1900!

Are the Japanese any less smart and scientific minded than the Chinese?

… it’s hard to deny that Christianity’s influence in late Antiquity was highly negative, helping push the Roman sphere further into obscurantism. It did play a role in conserving knowledge during the Dark Ages, and in advancing knowledge after 1100, but it’s not clear how it did that, or promoted literacy, beyond what it would have been the case under a different religion …

Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy, by Emmet Scott, offers an explanation.

Based on acquaintances, I can easily believe 112 for Jews, 105-106 for NE Asians, but I can’t believe 112 for US Indians, and I believe immigration here makes them more selected than in India.

Two provisions: I did not know many growing up, (the number has since wildly exploded), and I don’t live near Silicon Valley.

By my observation alone, ave. US dot-Indians maybe 100. Many work in convenience or liquor stores, which seems to give the lie to the idea that they are here based on skills. First generation, (at least) has more stable marriages than whites in general, not sure about compared to white immigrants. Horribly, tribal, compared to most other groups. Most of their women are blah to frumpy. Exceptions rare, though notable.

I wouldn’t mind living next to Indians, but still it is obvious they are sharpening their knives politically, and would gut any European country, the whole continent, without one iota of shame, if it meant bringing in more Indians. Same for the US, or any other Western country.

I recently saw a travel commercial for India. It seemed to be targeted toward whites and began with an Indian bookseller in Rome. While it did have two white children in it, I thought that was a lot of effrontery – a wise Indian in the Eternal City of Europe, spreading his knowledge to Europeans, when selling to your own country as a tourist destination to Europeans – which you would not see from any other people, even Jews.

A pity, because I don’t believe the average Indian in India is anywhere as malignant as the average African. Many even have a certain goofy charm and optimism about their country, but they are Malthusian people – tribalistically Malthusian. And the tribal ones ruin any practical possibility of getting along with the others.

Is there any reason to suppose native Indian average is any greater than MENA countries? I don’t believe so. Maybe, 90 in ideal conditions. Can they achieve this in their own country? I don’t know.

Based on acquaintances, I can easily believe 112 for Jews, 105-106 for NE Asians, but I can’t believe 112 for US Indians

Did you test your acquaintances or did they tell you their scores? Does “I can easily believe” mean you are credulous? Or you are not really thoughtful when expressing yourself?

East Asians (Chinese, Koreans, Japanese) tend to have larger brains and larger visuospatial IQs than Caucasians

So how come their higher visuospatial IQ does not make them better drivers?

http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr04/cognitive.aspx

Overall, they found a significant correlation between the cognitive indicators and driving skill. Visuospatial skills–like those that would be used to accurately position and maneuver a car or judge distances–had the highest correlation.

It takes superior visuospatial skills to loop a basketball into a hoop, catch a long pass on the run, hit a curve ball with a baseball bat, bicycle kick a soccer ball etc. Guess which race is the best at doing all that?

People of african ancestry also make good drivers, pilots, space shuttle commanders etc

Does “I can easily believe” mean you are credulous? Or you are not really thoughtful when expressing yourself?

Presumably he means ‘the Jewish and North-East Asian scores sound reasonable, while the Indian scores do not’.

Absolute literalness is not always useful when interpreting statements, ex. if someone says ‘I am afraid that [insert some issue]…’ they are not literally afraid but merely wish to express their apologies.

So how come their higher visuospatial IQ does not make them better drivers?

Aren’t you assuming that the car drivers care about the people outside? It is hard to be a ‘good driver’ if one doesn’t care in the first place.

He used specific numbers 112 and 105-106 so I asked a specific question. Did he mean that his Jewish acquaintances (how many) seems to be smarter than his Asian acquaintances (how many)? Or did the differences in their smartness really felt like 6-7 points? How does 6-7 points feel? The reason I am asking because I think the guy is careless and at the same time he is cementing a meme which might be right or wrong.

Actually you can kind of solve the problem exactly w/o making measurements under assumption that distribution is normal and you know its standard deviation. Let suppose your own IQ score is X and you met n random Jews who were definitively smarter than you and m random Jews who were definitively less smart than you. From values of n and m you could estimate the mean of Jewish IQ score providing that m+n is large and that the sample of Jews was truly random and proving that you can be objective when judging whether somebody is smarter than you or not.

It takes superior visuospatial skills to […] catch a long pass on the run […]. Guess which race is the best at doing all that?

Dogs.

He used specific numbers 112 and 105-106 so I asked a specific question.

But he was using other people’s numbers, right? So probably it fell within a larger range that he would have accepted.

But I agree with you that it would be good if he elaborated a bit more on his thought process.

“Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard”

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the China field. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a group of colleagues and read a randomly-selected passage out loud? Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me “My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can’t read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can’t skim to save my life.” This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task — never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.

The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels — La nausée by Sartre, Voltaire’s Candide, L’étranger by Camus — plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It was a lot of work but fairly painless; all I really needed was a good dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got at a garage sale.

This kind of “sink or swim” approach just doesn’t work in Chinese. At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn’t yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn’t read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the People’s Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested I read The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice three-volume edition. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my shelf like a fat, smug Buddha, only the first twenty or so pages filled with scribbled definitions and question marks, the rest crisp and virgin. After six years of studying Chinese, I’m still not at a level where I can actually read it without an English translation to consult. (By “read it”, I mean, of course, “read it for pleasure”. I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and a dictionary in my hand, I could get through it.) Simply diving into the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even be counterproductive. As George Kennedy writes, “The difficulty of memorizing a Chinese ideograph as compared with the difficulty of learning a new word in a European language, is such that a rigid economy of mental effort is imperative.”6 This is, if anything, an understatement. With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the deep end.

…

Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here’s a secret that sinologists won’t tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the “personal” section of the classified ads that say things like: “Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please.”

Karlin’s Theory of Almost Everything

Almost everything can be explained by IQ, and differential rates in the appearance of intensive agriculture, urbanization, and literacy. The two biggest factors that can’t be are the relative underperformance (relative to IQ!) of East Asians vs. everyone else, and women vs. men.

Since women and East Asians constitute about 60% of the world population the almost everything is under 40%. Karlin’s theory of almost everything is not even 50% theory.

The slight of hand was to use PISA instead of IQ which suppose to correlated better with GDP than IQ, right? So with IQ the ‘almost’ gets even smaller than 40%.

The main fault of the Nomads in China was to interrupt its continuous advancement and most importantly, by destroying the Song Dynasty.

The Song were unique in Chinese history for being far more commercial and Urban then most, it was also the most naval oriented dynasty. We see isolation and hostility to all things outside start under the Ming, which might have been partially a reaction to the Mongol devastation and things that were seen as failures of the previous (Song) dynasty. Just as the Song reacted to what it perceived to have been the failures of the militarist Tang, by horribly weakening the military, so did the Ming react to the failures of the Song, by returning to a peasant focused economic and social order. The founder of the Dynasty Hongwu wrote as much in his will…that largely dictated the policy of his successors. The attempts of Yongle to go against it were met with widespread hostility from the bureaucratic elite. China never became as wealthy as it was by 1100 till around 1990, I wouldnt say this is an unimportant factor. Also several technologies were forgotten and bearly anything new was invented. Romes decline and fall also shows how barbarian invasions can stop progress in the west for centuries.

As for Japan, it was culturally bound to China and not really able to start any scientific revolution on its own.

As I said above, between 1250 and about 2000 China barely made a single invention, while previously it made hundreds. Had Europe been devastated by Nomads and lost half of its population by 1500, do you think that the Industrial revolution would have still occurred around 1800?

The large disparity between eastern Europe and the west (with the east barely inventing anything till 1800) shows how much of a role barbarian neighbors play and how lucky Europe was to have a set of “just war” traditions to limit the destructive capacities of warfare between Europeans. I would say that the Mongol invasion of Russia or China caused more (%) damage, then all the wars between Europeans from 1200 to 1900 combined (including the religious wars of the 17th century.)

I am somewhat dismayed that you scooped my brilliant theory that visuo-spatial-mathematical IQ depends on brain size while handling of sequences does not, and that this explains asian underperformance, jewish brain size and the flynn effect, as well as some male-female differences.

But I think I can add a few thoughts: The handling of sequences as the second factor of intelligence seems to depend on dendritic growth or the ability to create synapses quickly. The jewish genetic diseases indicate that boosting this ability is the main factor behind their high verbal IQ. I also assume that they repurposed part of the spatial processing cortex to handle more high level patterns. So they basically shuffled IQ points from visuo-spatial to mathematical IQ without increasing brain size.

Now, the interesting thing about synapses is that there are lateral synapses, that according to some theories are necessary for sequence learning, and top-down synapses, which might be necessary for creating grand theories that unify many lower level facts. To me it is pretty clear that this is what Ashkenazim excel at. Coming up with just-so-stories. Sometimes correct, sometimes not, but often brilliant. It also seems to me that the European advantage over Asians might be along the same dimension. So verbal IQ might just correlate highly with GDP because it correlates with this ability of high-level conceptual thinking made possible by the ability to quickly create top-down synapses.

This would be an alternative explanation to conformity, though the male-female gap doesn’t drop out of it as naturally.

But acquiring literacy is not hard for children. It takes time, of course, but no way as much as often implied. The script is systematic in many ways, once you got 500 down the rest can be deduced easily.

It is excruciating for adults, which is why foreigners complain so much. But that does not reflect real feelings on the ground, which is what matter.

Agreed on conformism, but again that’s in their blood. Hangul can be learned in a week but it hasn’t made Koreans any more drone-like.

By the way most texts found in Han dynasty tombs show a semi phonetic system, with generic characters being used for their sound value in many places. That didn’t stick.

“I am certainly not one of those militant atheist types, but it’s hard to deny that Christianity’s influence in late Antiquity was highly negative, helping push the Roman sphere further into obscurantism.”

Ok but by how much? This sounds very similar to the atheist larping that says “Christianity held the west back 1000 years”. Was Christianity the reason the Roman(Western) empire collapsed?

Yes it does affect your brain.
Japanese and Chinese themselves now often forget how to draw some symbols, because often they type it on computer which does it for them. They are able to recognize symbol visually but can’t handwrite it.
As for Japanese having phonetic writing, it was never meant to displace kanji (except for little children). Even worse, Japanese has a lot of homophones which require kanji to tell them apart. Yes, English has similar problem too but it pales in comparison to Japanese.
Korean phonetic writing gained widespread usage only in 20th century.

I agree about devastation by Mongols, but then… Mongols didn’t raze India and Egypt. But we don’t see major difference compared to the nearby countries where Mongols did invade.

The saddest thing is that being a great composer or musician is probably maladaptive, too. Some better than average musical ability is probably adaptive.

Mongols did raze India in a way…as did Turks and Pushtuns before them. India was raided so often from the steppe, that it might have lost 80 million people in these raids and invasions.

Also India has a naturally lower IQ. It is Chinas underperformance, that needs to be explained. One can see a vast difference between pre and postmongol china, booth in innovation and GDP per capita (which I think correlate strongly, no use having a vast rural subsistence population really). Still when it comes to scientific output, the less raided south of India did produce substantially more than the more raided north. One should not forget that western Europe was just about the only large part of civilized Eurasia, that was not frequently raided by barbarians.

As for the Islamic world……One should not forget that by 1800 the population in most of the middle east was about the same as at year 1…while the population of Europe, China and even India grew strongly. Islam brought the Nomad into power there, leading to frequent subsequent nomad invasions and clan wars, which kept population down. Also Egypt did become the center of Islamic learning for a while, Cairo replacing Baghdad…but one should not forget that it was a country of a mere 4-5 million and was ruled by an extremely chaotic mamluk elite, which spent much of its free time behaving as if they were looting a conquered enemy country.

Also the Mongols are just the strongest expression of a far more larger phenomena.

On average civilized states wage wars in a milder and less destructive way then barbarians do. This is especially true for Europeans, when they waged war amongst themselves from the middle ages till WW2.

Among barbarians the Turanian/Altaic steppe nomads stand out for waging war in a particularly devastating way, which is why their invasions, be it into the middle east, or Europe or India or China were recorded as being uniquely destructive. Now once said nomads convert to Islam, they become on average less destructive then in their Tengri/Pagan ancestors, but still show a marked brutality. European interstate wars on the other hand were probably more beneficial in the long term. They caused relatively little destruction, while at the same time encouraging innovation trough interstate competition.

how China was not first to the Industrial Revolution must be one of the biggest puzzles of Intelligence Theory

There’s no such thing as an ‘Industrial Revolution’, it’s a moronic Anglo meme. (Gott strafe England.)

According to Charles Murray’s calculations, women only account for about 2% of human accomplishment across most scientific or cultural domains, and this figure hasn’t budged upwards despite the appearance of feminism and affirmative action. Women are, of course, far more conformist than men, less willing to challenge the dominant paradigms, and there is good reason to think East Asians are “tilted” in a similar direction.

You don’t need to ‘challenge dominant paradigms’ to invent stuff. Women don’t invent for the same reason they don’t do Super Mario speedruns: both activities require a level of autism to an extreme intensity that women don’t have.

As anyone who has studied Mandarin can confirm, literacy is MUCH simpler to acquire with alphabetic systems

I studied Mandarin and I have a basic proficiency. I do not confirm. Reading logographic Chinese is significantly easier than reading pinyin. (Pinyin Chinese is like a phonetic English except without spaces or punctuation; i.e., a nightmare.)

The Chinese knew of alphabetic writing systems since very ancient times and in fact used them for their non-Chinese official languages. They reason they keep using a logographic system is not stupidity or masochism. It’s simply easier to use for their language.

haven’t read the comments yet so may have already been mentioned but…

Finally, I don’t think Jaychick’s ideas about clannishness played a major role either…

The two biggest factors that can’t be are the relative underperformance (relative to IQ!) of East Asians vs. everyone else, and women vs. men. Common factor there seems to be higher conformism.

so the question then would be does reduced clannishness reduce conformism?

if innovation is a combination of brains + wildness

(where wildness = anti-conformism in your formulation)

then females should have less wildness for “sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive” reasons

People of african ancestry also make good drivers

Sure:

pilots,

Totally:

Jet hull loss rates by region of operator (per millions departures)
REGION 2012- 2016
Africa 2.21
Asia Pacific 0.48
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) 1.17
Europe 0.14
Latin America and the Caribbean 0.53
Middle East and North Africa 0.74
North America 0.22
North Asia 0.00​

space shuttle commanders

no doubt about that:

“Bliss” a.k.a. “the southward-pointing compass”.

However, it seems pretty clear acquiring literacy, especially truly fluent literacy, is far, far harder with Chinese than with alphabetic languages.

This has nothing to do with the writing system. Literate Chinese is just a very complex and huge language in general, because they rolled in various dialects, sociolects and classical languages into one huge (mostly unified) thing.

Imagine having to learn Spanish, Italian and Classical Latin at the same time, with the whole result called ‘Romance’.

That’s kinda what Mandarin is like.

Chinese kids still have to learn (and pass tests on!) their ancient classical language. Europe ditched Latin a long, long time ago.

that you can be objective when judging whether somebody is smarter than you or not.

I think that is the crux of the problem! In my case for example, n is always equal to 0 🙂

The drawing of the homunculus with the elephant-shaped brain is very spooky!

So how come their higher visuospatial IQ does not make them better drivers?

That’s because its an incorrect heuristic.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash fatality rates for the African American populations are 12.31 deaths per 100,000 people and its pretty similar with other races(except for Native Americans, who have insanely high driving fatality rates). For Asians, the fatality rate was only 4 per 100k. That could be attributed to reduced alcoholism, however, in just crash numbers, Australia’s University of Sydney found in 2010 that Asians are involved in only half as many automotive accidents, and a Canadian study replicated this in 2011.

The reason why this heuristic exists, nonetheless, is because Asians(especially in Asia) do not seem to acknowledge traffic rules often enough, which can be incredibly annoying and makes driving in Asian countries extremely unpleasant. Niceties such as communicating with the other driver, or even signaling are often just not done; the fact that it doesn’t result in more accidents actually means that such behavior will keep continuing. But all of the spatial awareness in the world won’t help your fellow drivers if you don’t think the rules apply to you, or more specifically, just don’t care about them.

At any rate, the WHO rundown of the most dangerous countries to be on the road has only one vaguely East Asian country, Thailand, and several African states.

https://www.therichest.com/rich-list/poorest-list/10-countries-with-the-worst-drivers-in-the-world/

Michael Hart’s book Understanding Human History is good entertainment and just-so stories, not good if you’re trying to actually learn about human history.

Does “I can easily believe” mean you are credulous? Or you are not really thoughtful when expressing yourself?

Now, now… “I can easily believe” is an expression, just as is “I find it hard to believe.” Maybe, it is as others have inferred and you aren’t a native English speaker?

Let me put it this way, so it is more understandable for you: I did not live in a Jewish neighborhood (though probably a more Jewish part of the country). The nearest synagogue I knew of was two towns over, but many of my smarter than average classmates were Jews, based on what classes they were in: honors and advanced placement, based on their SAT scores, and what colleges they went to: Harvard, John-Hopkins, etc. Who their fathers were: doctors, a concert player, etc.

The smartest guy I ever knew was probably Chinese. He drew a complicated phase diagram from memory. I once heard his intelligence remarked on, by someone I had no reason to suspect even knew him – I recognized who he was talking about immediately, even though I did not myself know him very well either.

The only out and out dumb East Asian I ever knew had Down Syndrome. In contrast, one of the few Indians I knew as a boy was a complete dumb-ass. I knew another one who was about average, but a pothead. I did not know any obviously smart ones in college. I am sure there were some, but I did not know them.

Meanwhile, I have repeatedly been struck by how stupid many of the blacks I’ve known seem to be. Now, none of this is scientific or statistical, but Asians and Ashenazis seem to punch above their weight, while the American dot-Indians I’ve known seem at best to have the intelligence of whites. Maybe, they don’t. Maybe, it is statistically higher, and/or maybe the mean has risen, as new ones have come ashore.

Could the official Ashkenazi IQ estimate be off? Higher than it actually is? Quite possibly. The true average seems higher than the white average though. Maybe, there are even subgroups of whites that are the same, but whites aren’t as tribalistic, so it is harder to know when someone is an Episcopalian than a Jew.

BTW, contra Ron Unz and I believe also you, two of the stupidest people I ever knew were Hispanic. They had AIDS that they had gotten from sharing needles, and decided to have a baby, I was literally gawking at how stupid they were, and the dysgenics of it all, so that my teacher noticed, probably misinterpreted it, and smiled at me, probably thinking I was impressed with the technology that gave the baby a good chance of being born HIV-free. Now, of course that is incident, but I never knew a smart Hispanic.

“I think that the great variability between male and female IQ is also a very important factor”

It’s built into the test.

PISA are scholastic achievement tests; not tests of “intelligence” (whatever that is).

“How does 6-7 points feel?”

What does 6-7 points mean in terms of brain states?

“Almost everything can be explained by IQ”

If you craft just-so stories sure “Almost everything can be explained by IQ”, but if no novel predictions are made than who cares that “Almost everything can be explained by IQ”, since no novel predictions are made to possibly falsify the “IQ hypothesis”?

I suspect that virtually everything we value is now maladaptive. Good luck to us.

Only foreigners complain about Chinese writing. Yes, it’s hard to learn. But then you learn it, and it’s done. It doesn’t affect your brain.

But there is evidence that it does, or something in the culture does if not the language, affecting perception which is a pretty significant part of how you use your brain.

This is the classic Nisbettian work based on the Morris & Peng studies on Asian versus European perceptions of the world which found that Asians generally saw the world as contextual and holistic rather than specific and detailed(the latter which would be better for scientific association). What’s less known though is that in a followup study, however, Hong Kong participants(who had grown up in British schools and spoke English) could be primed to think in “Western” ways simply by showing them images of Western culture(Mickey Mouse, cowboys, etc). Showing them pictures indicative of Chinese culture reinforced their “Eastern” thinking. Showing them neutral pictures kept results in the middle.

Another study by Ara Norenzayan in 1999 looked to see if the Japanese participants could make the correct “rule-making” associations for criteria judgment(something likely relevant for science), and found that Japanese participants made twice as many errors as European tested. However. Asian Americans did not make more errors, so it seems unlikely to be purely genetic unless there’s some self-selection for immigration that involves rule-making associations.

Incidentally, Mr. Karlin, there is a study which supports the idea of East Asians being more similar to women in terms of group behavior/conformity. Japanese participants sought to escape from unpleasant situations by seeking to be in a group, similar to American women in the study. American men, on the other hand, sought to escape unpleasant situations alone. No objective reason was provided for either to be more likely.

Rat Utopia!

Do blogs/forums where people spend countless hours of their lives discussing abstruse topics that give them no material benefit exist in East Asian countries?

I don’t get how AK goes from deciding it’s not IQ to thinking it must be conformity. Conformity explains differentials in number of rebellious teens. Intellectual obsession explains differentials in innovation.

It’s a small percentage of innovations that require upending a tabboo. Euclid’s geometry didn’t. Neither did coming up with the ideal gas law.

Even if some do, I doubt being a non-conformist is a significant factor. Did Galileo develop his idea about the sun and the earth cause he was a rebel? Doubt it. After all, only one of his many innovations challenged a taboo. Intellectual obsession explains all of them.

Let’s look at one of the most innovative people of the 20th century – Jon Von Neumann. There are lots of stories about how smart he was. What else did he have? Edward Teller thought it was this: “For most people thinking is painful. Jonny loves to think; in fact, it’s the only thing he enjoys doing.”

Someone unprepared to invest to promote mangoes is never going to find out. I will guess yes.

Someone should do a study on chupatz. To have the audacity to get people – even highly experienced, credentialed, etc – to work for free for you for the opportunity to help you make money is a pretty classic example of that. Its interesting how it can often work, by framed in the right way, and by aiming at the right people.

I suspect its one example of behavior that’s probably individually beneficially, but societially negative especially as it becomes adaptive to have the skills needed to convince others to do so. At some point, it basically is a form of legal business in hoodwinking.

Check this out:
https://www.rt.com/news/431692-latvia-racist-political-ad/

Good to see that not everyone in Latvia is a complete cuck or neoliberal.

Conformity can affect scientific production in many ways. I had a friend who was studying an brain/machine emulation in Beijing University, and was doing well on it until his family pressured him to get a “real job” instead of an academic job that paid nothing. He eventually gave in.

He’s still smart and he’s still very capable, but now he’s just yet another software design architect crunching for a big company rather than advancing the frontiers of human knowledge.

In fact if I understand their religions correctly, there was even some sort of taboo about venturing outside of India itself. The Indian Ocean was something you weren’t supposed to venture out into.

That was for Brahmins; the result was loss-of-caste. I imagine that was probably some sort of power play on some group’s behalf five hundred years or so ago.

By his theory, reliigious belief in modern humans is a vestigial remnent of the bicameral mind.

I’m sympathetic to some materialistic explanations for religious belief, but the notion that all humans were once all schizophrenic and we “grew sane” seems as likely as fairies in the backyard. Pop psychological history really does deserve to be together with Freud: entertaining fictions.

Fair enough, I didn’t think of that type of conformity.
Innovation results from:
1) Challenging taboo.
2) Innovator disregarding disapproval from relatives and society by pursuing an impractical project.

Still seems weak. Innovation normally occurs in line with a good career or a harmless pastime. Pretty sure Darwin was advancing his career by sailing on the Beagle. Did Zheng He have a naturalist? If so, what was he doing? If not, why didn’t the Mandarins put one on his boat?

There aren’t that many of these great innovations that Murray lists. Someone with intellectual curiosity could go through them and see if non-conformity was a key requirement.

Charles Darwin, a religious man, struggled for many years of his life with the theory of evolution because he was aware of what it might mean for the theistic creation of life. A more conformist Darwin might just decide that its not worth it, or water down his findings significantly to fit the zeitgeist of the time. And as expected, Darwin did get condemned by many religious authorities during his lifetime.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393201000677

Random, but possibly connected.

The effect of testosterone (T) on sexual function in men is well established. However, less is known about its effects on cognitive function. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between T levels and sex-typed cognitive abilities in both eugonadal and hypogonadal men…These results offer support to the notion that increased T has a differential effect on cognitive function, inhibiting spatial abilities while improving verbal fluency in eugonadal men.

German Shepherds are considered the most intelligent of dogs based on ability to learn commands. I wonder what is their cranial capacity versus other dogs? Are toy dogs mentally more impaired in some way?

Gott strafe England

Based Jew memes

Do blogs/forums where people spend countless hours of their lives discussing abstruse topics that give them no material benefit exist in East Asian countries?

The Japanese invented imageboards

I studied Mandarin and I have a basic proficiency. I do not confirm. Reading logographic Chinese is significantly easier than reading pinyin. (Pinyin Chinese is like a phonetic English except without spaces or punctuation; i.e., a nightmare.)

You do realize Chinese students in China use pinyin to help them learn the characters, right? It’s not a perfect complete system but it’s easier to acquire, which is what Karlin said.

Inuit and Yakuts have some of the biggest brains on the planet … their visuospatial abilities are legendary

All that fish (omega-3 etc)? I get a vague impression that fish-eating people (Scandinavians, Japanese) always seem to be better at visual design.

This may be offtopip or little relevant – an interesting article this week in Nature’s website, about various problems in the research culture in South Korea.

South Korean science needs restructuring

Something is wrong with the South Korean R&D system, and everyone knows it. The country invests a lot but gets less and less back. Scientists feel disenfranchised by the government’s opaque system for funding. The public is not seeing solutions to pressing problems, such as air pollution. Even government ministers and economists complain that all those highly cited papers are not generating enough new technologies.

Full article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05508-z

Its a different kind of materialism.

Western materialism is ‘transcendental’ while Asian materialism is normal human interest in acquiring stuff.

The West seeks salvation in developing the material world – its literally religious. So we pour all our energy and willpower into it. The most important thing to us is to come up with some new way to control or affect the physical world – because we literally expect salvation from it. See transhumanism.

Asians have the ordinary materialism, they just like stuff – sometimes a bit too much, u admit, esp lately 🙂

I’d be interested in seeing a statistical analysis of evidence for and against that claim.

Rimsky-Korsakov and his wife had seven children.

Having relatively large families may have been typical of people with his class background, though.

Priming, and most psychology is fake science. Don’t believe any of it.

At any rate none of it has anything to do with the language and much less with the script.

Japan does not have that. All online activity is either 2chan, where people go to shitpost, and Twitter, which is mostly networking.

China also does not have a blog culture. It does have Zhihu, a very popular Quora clone where very smart people discuss abstruse topics anonymously for no observable benefit besides feeling smart, so yeah, it’s somewhat close to this. There’s also Douban which is a review site for movies and books and people discuss stuff there too.

I disagree.

The Japanese kanji are simplified compared to the traditional Chinese kanji, and they have hana as well. Kana, both hiragan and katakana are alphabets and are very easy to learn because they are purely phonetic. Of course, the mainland Chinese also simplified their kanji, but in a manner different from that of Japan (this was shortly after the war and they were not about to copy anything from Japan). Hongkong and Taiwan still use the traditional kanji. South Korea uses it for place names but not much else since they have their hangul written system (which I know nothing about).

Really?

Because I have yet to run across an explanation for the origin of religion, especially the Abrahamic ones, that comes even close to being as good as Julien Jaynes’ theory. For one, his theory explains 100% perfectly what is called “the Fall” in Christianity. No other theory that I know of even comes close on this one.

The bicameral mind theory is a specific version of the more general concept of the human personality being a system of subselves. Eric Berne has his version of such with his concept of “Ego States”, which he describes in “Transactional Analysis”, which is still the best psychology book available.

I’m very familiar with the Society of Mind which originates with Dr. Marvin Minsky(and its opposite, Sir Roger Penrose’s quantum brain) . Its interesting. I think its probably not totally accurate since there is a “semantic default network” observed in the brain, so its not merely a series of isolated subsystems. Its probably still relatively accurate, but I think to some extent, we assume a more mechanistic view of the mind than is warranted. Biological systems don’t isolate as much as our mechanical systems do, so the effects of, for example, hormones and neurotransmitters can wander and cause emergent effects. Even the blood-brain barrier is quite permeable and there is a lot of evidence of the influence of the enteric nervous system which is external to the skull.

You can trigger religious feelings with DMT without the need for internal voices, and this feels much more consistent with what we know of how the brain works, for example with the striatum having a strong association with positivity(so called “reward center”) but with the actual interpretation of the “good feelings” being filtered through the brain. Dr. Heath’s experiments had one woman experience her “reward” stimulation as seduced; another one of his patients simply experienced it as happiness, and so on. Such religious experiences would be varied: euphoria, seeing beings, and so on. To exactly indicate voices which are then fading away now seems dubious, a kind of precision in evolution without exact mechanism of selection. When in doubt, I favor the more parsimonious explanation especially since DMT is created endogenously by the body.

Bach had twenty children. But then I think very few descendants down the line. Most of the greatest composers left few or no descendants. Mozart left no descendants (both of his children surviving to adulthood were childless). Beethoven had no children. Schubert, Bruckner, Brahms: no children. Haydn had just one child. (I don’t know if he has descendants today, but I think unlikely.) Mahler had one surviving daughter, who had maybe two children. Wagner had three children (which was probably not more than average at the time), and so still has a number of descendants.

That’s not much, on average. Maybe it’s not a representative sample, though I’d wager it already contains the very best.

To me it is pretty clear that this is what Ashkenazim excel at. Coming up with just-so-stories.

here’s one, if I may: the male-female gap in innovation is because it’s all ultimately a mating display.

Ravel had no children. Debussy one daughter, who barely survived her a year.

From memory – I can think of example of “maladaptive” are Schumann and Scriabin, who both had notable mental disorders.

Both Schumann and Scriabin have a lot of children (Scriabin with two wives, and Schumann with his brilliant wife who also inspired Brahms).

I’m not sure having children is the correct criteria.

Mental illness is probably the factor which can positively correlate with genius, to some extent – so genius is maladaptive to the extent of that positive correlation.

Recall, Brahms has no children, but despite his alcoholism, he was much more well adapted to normal life than was e.g. Scriabin.

We can also note that Scriabin was not exactly a “good father” – after his death his family has no money left (his genius son has drowned in the Dnieper shortly after).
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Of course, all this is kind of a strange perspective, since normally any of us would think that men of genius like Brahms have a vastly more long-living legacy in their works than children are worth (children remember you for a few decades after your death, if you are lucky and they are loyal – while legacy Brahms will outlive us all, and even our great-grandchildren).

This is the biological perspective. My point was that it was not biologically adaptive. Did you not understand it?

Also, what counts is number of descendants (long term), not number of children. You can have many children and yet no grandchildren. It happened a lot.

Verdi only had two children, both died in infancy. Then he married a soprano, who had had a number of children from a number of men (and she gave each of them to foster care or to the orphanage), but who had no children with Verdi.

It’s interesting because Verdi was a very successful composer in the material sense of the world. He made a lot of money and was smart enough to invest it well (he bought land), so he reaped all the benefits of being a great composer.

You want determine “biologically adaptiveness” (to environment) of having musical genius, by number of descendants of the great geniuses?

You want to say that being musical genius is “maladaptive” because the geniuses have fewer kids or something like this?

The musical genius of this person will usually be something adaptive to environment in the sense that it provides profession and income for that person. So by definition, is usually an adaptive trait for this person.

The plausible explanation musical genius (which is in very extenuated form amongst the great names you discuss) might be maladaptive in population, is that any representative population of geniuses will perhaps have higher rates of mental illness than a control population (there is probably some correlation between genius and mental illness).

In this case, it will be the particular mental illness which we would identity as maladaptive (and the musical genius is simply factor which may positively correlate with rates of mental illnesses).

The correlation between musical genius and mental illness will be a very interesting and complicated topic, although trying to claim the musical intelligence is maladaptive factor – not very plausible.

The thing is mental illnesses are maladaptive factors in most (societal) contexts, but not necessarily in the area of having children (what you are defining as “biological adaptedness”) – otherwise we will see rates of mental illness falling in each generation, and the genetic preconditions of mental illness falling in the population, other things equal. (Although someone may respond that recessive genetic passing of genetic preconditions bypass this and allow it to remain in population).

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I find your discussion is interesting though, to see you mentioning facts about the life of these great composers.

I think of Bruckner in this discussion. Another musical genius, who never had any girlfriends.

In this case, perhaps some factors could be related inseparably to his musical intelligence. His mental illness was being “obsessively pedantic” (it could be obsessive compulsive disorder).

This could be seen as inseparable part of his musical genius, considering the obsessively intricate nature of his symphonies.

It also exhibited in obsessiveness of his musical studies, in which he wanted a perfect knowledge of harmony theory before he started composing – so he only wrote his first symphony when he was almost middle-aged.

But it could surely be more plausible, that the more decisive reason for a lack of romances (and therefore descendants), was a simply much more ordinary trait not necessarily linked to his musical talent – his introverted personality. So that after he only tried to get a wife, after he was a famous composer, and already an old man proposing to young women who had no interest in him.

These results offer support to the notion that increased T has a differential effect on cognitive function, inhibiting spatial abilities while improving verbal fluency in eugonadal men.

The “Chad” is canonically a horrible driver.

the WHO rundown of the most dangerous countries to be on the road has only one vaguely East Asian country, Thailand, and several African states.

90% of all fatalities on the road are in low to middle income countries. Chaotic conditions, bad roads, few lights and crosswalks, over crowded vehicles, lack of ambulances and hospitals, untrained drivers etc skew the numbers. Better to compare developed countries:

https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/transport/road-safety-annual-report-2015/korea_irtad-2015-26-en#page4

https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/transport/road-safety-annual-report-2015/australia_irtad-2015-7-en#page4

In Australia deaths per billion km in 2000 was 9.1, in South Korea it was 49.5. South Korea must have taken some safety measures, for deaths in 2013 went down to 17.2, but that was still 3.4 times the deaths (5) in Australia that year.

For the year 2013 here is how it looked for East Asian vs West European countries in deaths per billion km:

S. Korea—>17.2
Japan ——>6.9

Germany->4.6
Norway—->4.3
UK————>3.5
Sweden—-> 3.4

South Korea has 5 times and Japan 2 times the death rate of UK and Sweden. Maybe there is some truth in the stereotype after all?

Another comparison of driving IQ is to look at the very best drivers: the race car drivers. Formula One racing is the gold standard here. The field is dominated by Europeans but the very best driver is an Afro-Brit, Lewis Hamilton. No East Asians to be found at this level, even though F1 racing is popular in Japan, China and Singapore (they all host a Grand Prix).

Is there any prospect of treating dementia soon to at least stop it from getting worse? A genius IQ is not going to save you if you are dying from dementia.

You did not even read your own links correctly.

Road deaths by mileage is a pointless metric given differences in population density that is over twenty times higher in South Korea versus Australia. The metric primarily used in the report itself was death by population, which in 2013 is 10.1, and in 2015 is 9.3 per 100k population(WHO statistics). The US has 10.6 per 100k, France at 5.1 and Australia at 5.4.

Furthermore, this is of mixed vehicle usage, and notable quantities of fatalities were of pedestrians and cyclists. These will naturally be lower in countries with less pedestrian and cycling traffic.

Are you referring to age-related dementia? In that sense, it is part of the entire effort to address aging.

To my knowledge, the most promising results have been from carnosine, which has had generally successful results in animal and cell studies, where they decreased brain age in rats and increased the life span on male fruitflies by 20%(female fruitflies benefit only if also treated with vitamin E, at 36%).

There is some tangential support that it will also help with Alzheimer’s including before/after brain scans, but I don’t believe that a lot of human research has been done. There appears to only have been one specifically with humans in regards to dementia that measured behavioral/cognitive effects:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20224285

In a double-blind placebo-controlled study addressing the therapeutic potential of carnosine in AD, it was assessed the efficacy of a combination of carnosine plus other antioxidants (formula F) in volunteers receiving donepezil (n = 26), in comparison to patients receiving donepezil plus placebo (n = 26) [90]. Using the Mini-Mental State Examination II (MMSE II) score, Cornelli [90] observed a significantly improvement of cognition in the group receiving donepezil plus formula F, as compared to those receiving donepezil plus placebo.

I do believe with an aging population, this will be of ever increasing importance.

You do realize Chinese students in China use pinyin to help them learn the characters, right?

Of course I do. How do you think I learn the characters myself?

It’s not a perfect complete system but it’s easier to acquire, which is what Karlin said.

Read my post again and don’t be stupid this time around.

Literacy (i.e., the ability to read and understand complex texts) is much harder in pinyin than in characters. Recognizing and sounding out words is maybe like 5% of being literate.

Ultimately the challenge is that its hard to heal the brain when we really don’t understand it, and it pays to be skeptical of any hard claims in neuroscience when things like this keep happening.

Something like that happened with the idea that the brain lacked a lymphatic system, so sleep had a purpose to repair damage and remove waste products from the brain and allow capillaries to act as a substitute lymphatic system. It was all rather elegant and pretty as a theory, and taught in medical schools right up until 2017. And well, probably untrue at least in significant part.

Well there is an experiment around LMTX that looks at getting rid of taught tangles that seems to have worked with a group of patients. Much of the research so far has been around beta amyloid which seems to be a wild goose chase

Indeed, removing beta amyloids appears to worsen the condition.

Are you referring to this?

https://www.j-alz.com/content/second-phase-3-study-results-lmtx%C2%AE-published-journal-alzheimer%E2%80%99s-disease

I might look into it further. I think ultimately we will be limited since even neurogenesis doesn’t seem like it’ll recover everything, just areas in the hippocampus and maybe a few other selected places. The other neurons will eventually die and nothing will replace it short of superexotic ideas like stem cells or something like that which is basically sci-fi.

some recent stuff on that

1) may be connected to a virus – connection to immune system -> lack of vitamin D from sun light (a lot of elderly don’t get enough sun)

2) may be connected to brain no longer accepting glucose – connected to diabetes -> switch to low carb, high fat diet

To have the audacity to get people – even highly experienced, credentialed, etc – to work for free for you for the opportunity to help you make money is a pretty classic example of that. Its interesting how it can often work, by framed in the right way, and by aiming at the right people.

the central banking mafia being the perfect example: “hey guys let’s you make us rich by letting us legally counterfeit your currency!”

chutzpah is mostly just sociopathy – the big lie works cos

1) sociopaths enjoy big lies – they get a kick out of fooling people, the bigger the better

2) normal people are only comfortable telling small lies

3) normal people assume everyone else thinks like them i.e. mostly honest people think others are mostly honest

-> normal people find it hard to believe big lies are possible

2) Innovator disregarding disapproval from relatives and society by pursuing an impractical project.

I think that’s a good (and common) hurdle in more clannish societies but more widely all innovation comes about as a conflict with the current way of doing things as “conservative” is the safe option: your ancestors survived by doing things this way so don’t change it.

Still seems weak. Innovation normally occurs in line with a good career or a harmless pastime. Pretty sure Darwin was advancing his career by sailing on the Beagle.

“normally” – in the West since the industrial revolution – sure but other times and places proto science was witchcraft.

the well-known quote

Science advances one funeral at a time.

speaks to how most people instinctively defend whatever the current “normal” is (for risk-minimizing evolutionary reasons).

First of all, the majority of great composers were definitely not mentally ill. They were within the normal range, though often had difficult personalities, but I’d certainly not characterize a Beethoven or a Mozart as mentally ill. I don’t even think Bruckner was mentally ill, though something was definitely off with the guy. Was Ravel mentally ill? Perhaps homosexual (though even that is lacking any proof), if you consider that an illness. (As it definitely is an illness from an evolutionary point of view.) I’m not sure about your examples Schumann and Scriabin. Whatever the reasons for Schumann’s illness, he was still healthy at the time of his marriage and when his children were born. Am I wrong?

Second, it’s questionable that mental illness has genetic causes. Most likely, it doesn’t. The most likely explanation for a majority of cases is some kind of infection, either viral or bacterial. As is the most likely explanation for a host of chronic diseases. Please read Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease by Paul W. Ewald.

Third, you still didn’t address my point that having many children is not necessarily adaptive, unless you have grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on. Especially in an era where mortality was very high.

I find your discussion is interesting though

You don’t seem to read a lot of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. People like Steve Pinker will often drop things like that in their books.

Road deaths by mileage is a pointless metric given differences in population density that is over twenty times higher in South Korea versus Australia. The metric primarily used in the report itself was death by population

When you are measuring driving ability the population metric is pointless. Accidents can only happen when someone is driving. So accidents by kilometers driven is the most apt metric for our purpose.

As for population density Australia is 90% urban, compared to 83% for South Korea and 94% for Japan. Very few aussies live in the Outback. You are just looking for an excuse. Why else would you latch on to only Australia and ignore the data for UK, Germany, Sweden and Norway?

Furthermore, this is of mixed vehicle usage, and notable quantities of fatalities were of pedestrians and cyclists. These will naturally be lower in countries with less pedestrian and cycling traffic.

Your visuospatial driving skills include avoiding crashing into slow moving pedestrians and bicyclists.

Almost everything can be explained by IQ, and differential rates in the appearance of intensive agriculture, urbanization, and literacy

Cause consequence effects for realized intelligence? The need for collaboration and close exchanges, the probabilities for associations of better brains or their resulting output, resulting in being better when intensive agriculture is developed. Allowing for denser communities. Allowing for specialization. Allowing for ease and choice of collaboration.

About the worry of non-linearity. Today, abstract thinking, resulting performance and product output should not need dense population concentrations, should not need distinction between different political entities, cultures, ethnicities theoretically. There could be a breaking point where the model of urban dominated ways of living would be averse, merely by derivative factors.

Secondly, the untouched question, does a difference of say a billion people on the total of eight billion have a correlation in realized intelligence? Is there a breaking point here also, that shifts total human numbers from asset to liability.

How do you stop the well educated and higher IQ people from supporting SJW causes? Before anyone says STEM, what about the very high cases of austistic people who develop autogynephilia?

Dog owners agree that one of the smartest breeds is papillon, a toy breed.

Do you listen to classical music? Can you recommend Russian composers?

For example from Scriabin I only know Le Poème de l’extase, op. 54, which is good, but I don’t listen to it too much. I don’t know most Russian composers, except Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

I don’t think Isaac Newton was particularly noted as a babe magnet. Those nterested in mating displays are more likely to try to become Big Men than advance the frontiers of knowledge.

Ewald’s theory was interesting in that he believed homosexuality was propagated by a viral infection. I think Greg Cochran also agreed with that.

As for population density Australia is 90% urban, compared to 83% for South Korea and 94% for Japan.

You don’t seem to realize or seem to choose to ignore that “urban” areas can have enormously different population densities.

Incidentally, in the deeper past, I actually long resisted the claim that East Asians are somehow less curious and so forth. However, things like the Nature Science Index, Kura’s arguments, the data on East Asian participation in “out of left field” communities, etc. have gradually convinced me that there is something to those stereotypes.

I don’t think it’s lower “curiosity.” East Asians are actually quite curious about, for example, new gadgets.

My own observation is that East Asians tend to be highly risk-averse, thus driving them toward more the practical than the abstract (hence the massive government funding toward basic research in the West vs. corporation-driven applied science/technological research in Japan and South Korea).

I even see this comparative tendency even in – of all things – Judo. My decades of coaching youth Judo in the U.S. has confirmed for me that East Asian youngsters are, on average, much more risk-averse than white youngsters. Stereotypically, East Asian kids won’t use a newly learned technique right away in randori and shiai. They’ll drill it for a very long time and only use it once they feel comfortable and confident of a high rate of success. White kids on average tend to jump into using newly learned techniques “live” much sooner… even when they are pretty bad at executing them and invariably get smashed/countered backwards.

S. Korea—>17.2
Japan ——>6.9

This seems to indicate Flynn effect in driving ability. Or maybe it’s just increased familiarity. The history of automobile use is rather shallow in East Asia (and longer in Japan than in South Korea).

We can figure this out better if we had access to similar data for American-born whites, blacks, East Asians, etc.

Recognizing and sounding out words is maybe like 5% of being literate.

Well, thanks very much for this extremely accurate statistic, derived no doubt with arduous calculation.

Pinyin is a significant aid to literacy, as are the existence of phonetic alphabets in general. That’s what I said. That’s what Karlin said. That’s even what you said: How do you think I learn the characters myself?

So with respect to don’t be stupid this time around, maybe try and take your own advice for a change?

If 500 deaths occurred between 500 car accidents with each, your metric will show twice as much safety versus 500 deaths involving a car and a pedestrian (or cycle) in spite of it actually being exactly the same.

And even casual analysis would have shown that I was comparing the population density of Sydeny against Seoul(urban vs urban). You have neither understood the links you posted, nor my comments about vehicle mixture.

currently, successful careers depend on bowing to SJW hegemony

so the solution is to change the cultural hegemony

east Asian drivers

could a population with particularly high visuo-spatial ability get away with “bad” driving (aka correctly judged near misses) if and only if every driver is east Asian but not otherwise?

Pinyin is a significant aid to literacy

It’s an aid to memorizing characters. It is not an aid in achieving Chinese literacy. (Quite the opposite, in fact. It’d be much easier if the characters had saner and more memorable phonetic labels.)

Do you understand the difference between ‘knowing characters’ and ‘being literate’?

That’s what I said. That’s what Karlin said.

I don’t know who you are, but Karlin has no clue about the Chinese language. No offense, but I really don’t care about his opinion on this topic.

In this, I agree with AaronB that you have to provide an alternative worldview to work towards. A position of defense is unlikely to appeal to the high performing. Mr Karlin, I think, hints at this in fighting for a cause vs fighting for gimmedats.

I addressed that in post 75, basically, though it also includes immigrants.

I agree with AaronB

I don’t know if it’s his idea, it came up multiple times before. A defensive ideology doesn’t attract people. For example when talking about National Socialism, it came up many times that they offered something higher to people: a sense of belonging to a community, a desire to sacrifice (even oneself) for idealistic reasons (the vision of the Thousand Year Reich), something transcendental. Hitler had a genius for theater (he probably got a lot of ideas from Wagner), and he also had a good aesthetic sense. Even Himmler’s stupid mysticism helped a lot. The SS had a huge appeal, and in part it must’ve been due to his mysticism, for example the Wewelsburg complex.

I’m sure that Richard Spencer’s frequent Nietzsche quotes or the tendency to quote Evola and the likes is also a kind of attempt at creating something less materialistic. It’s obvious that you cannot start a movement by HBD above. I don’t think many of us were under such an illusion.

That said, the people supporting SJW causes are either self-interested (especially those being members of grievance groups) or they don’t understand its long term results (e.g. unaware of HBD, unaware of the pace of demographic transformation, etc.)

It is not an aid in achieving Chinese literacy.

Right, that’s why it’s taught in Chinese schools. Makes sense.

I really don’t care about his opinion on this topic.

Then why spend so much time in useless acrimony? If you want to make the point that China shouldn’t drop characters and go pinyin-only, that’s a very good point, but why pretend you’re engaging in some sort of disagreement with our host Sr. Karlin about it?

You said ” I can easily believe 112 for Jews, 105-106 for NE Asians.” And you know that 112 is larger than 106, right? And your experience of Asians and Jews does not lend support to your “easy belief” that Jews are smarter than Asians. Nonetheless, you exactly stated that “based on acquaintances, I can easily believe [Jews are smarter than Asians].”

And yes, English is not my native language but I do not think it is the issue of my understanding English but it is about you being careless/sloppy in expressing some kind of thought. Actually what was your thought?

Oh dear! That is indeed a very manly thing to say! But not because of IQ at all, it is rather an impulse, a striving to construct, to achieve, to conquer and hold. A properly formed conscience is indispensable for the ‘constructive’ part. Otherwise the IQ losses much of its charm, imo.

I’ll repeat again, for the third time: literacy is not recognizing the characters. The thai language has a simple alphabet, you could learn it in a week. Good luck becoming literate in thai, though.

Chinese characters are hard to learn but they greatly simplify Chinese literacy. They have a practical use. Don’t comment on the issue unless you know something about it.

I would also like to specifically request if the commentator AP could reply to this with his thoughts.

A (wild) idea.
Following Mr.Karlins theory, might it not have been better for Europe to have been conquered by Islam in the 8th-9th centuries? Here I mostly refer to the sieges of Constantinople, rather than to the battle of Tours (losing which would not have brought down the Frankish kingdom).
According to even someone like Toby Huff (who is known to be among the most “eurocentric” contemporary historians of medieval science), the world of Islam was ahead of the West in science (Natural-Philosophy) till the late 14th century……which would mean that Islam was ahead for about 700 years, not a small period of time by any measure. This is despite that fact that the Muslim world had a smaller population then Western Europe at least from the 12th century on that it mostly consisted of a thinly populated vast landmass, while the wests population was far more concentrated, with most of the west being accessible via water transport making communications much easier. The core of the Muslim world was also ravaged by very violent nomad invasions on a semi-regular basis and had a far lower IQ. Despite all of this it managed to stay ahead for 700 years.
The west had a far worst access to ancient writing and was hampered by the anti-rationalist mindset of the church. This changed only slowly and one of the main catalysts for this was the loot of a vast massive of writing after the fall of Toledo 1085, this new knowledge did a lot to kick start scholastics and rationalism but despite this, it still took the west another 300 years to catch up and overtake the “arab masters”.

Now had Islam taken over the West by 800 (not necessarily trough conquest, voulonteer conversions of western Kings would also have been a possibility, especially after the fall of Byzantium and the Khazar Khaganate, would have made the eastern Slavs convert and become a battering ram for Islam in Europe) the west would have still retained its genetic and geographical advantages, but also would have had immediate access to ancient writings and to eastern inventions like the Indian numerals or Chinese paper, it would also have converted to Islam at a time when rationalism was flowering in the muslim world, removing the mystical obscurantism of the church as a factor. The (superior) Northwest Europeans would then easily have taken over leadership of the muslim world from the (inferior) Arabs. al-ghazali would not have been a factor, because the intellectual dominance in the world of Islam would have been western anyway (not to mention that according to many scholars, his influence on the development of science is vastly exaggerated in the west). The scientific revolution might have occurred 500 years earlier then it did (probably towards the end of the “medieval warm period”).

Now there are some objections to this “thesis” that I would like to address:

1.Racial mixture with Arabs, Berbers and African slaves would have led to a degeneration of the Nordic race: First few Arabs, let alone Africans would settle in northern Europe, in our own history, even the Turks beardly settled in the Balkans and African slaves would not have survived in most of Europe anyway. Arabs and Berbers were few in number, they beardly colonized Spain or Sicily, they would have at best spread as a purely administrative elite north of the pyrenes/Alps and would have been replaced by (superior) natives after a few centuries.

2. Inbreeding would have led to a degeneration of the Nordic race: Firstly, Muslims in Europe didn’t practice much of the cousin marriage, typical for the middle east (and had far lower rates of polygamy as well). Albanians, Bosnjaks or Wolga Tatars don’t practice it, so it seems that this custom usually remains in Asia or Africa and does not spread into Europe. But the Europeans of 800 were still used to clannishness….could they have maintained it under Islam? If this is so one has to ask how harmful inbreeding actually is. Does it lower IQ? The Japanese are far more inbred then other (civilized) East Asians, but while having more genetic diseases and a smaller stature, they still retain the IQ typical for (civilized) East Asians. Ashkenazi Jews are also strongly inbred as well. Inbreeding might indeed lead to clannishness, but as Mr.Karlin stated above, clannishness does have no effect on either science or economic wealth. While clannishness in the Muslim world can often be violent and dysfunctional, the clannishness of East Asians or Ashkenazi Jews is neither. Why would the higher IQ Europeans follow the pattern of low IQ middle easterners?

3. Islamic financial laws would have hindered economic growth: See Mr.Karlin, institutions have no impact on wealth (unless its communism).

So what do you people think about this idea? Were Hitler and Nietzsche right for having desired an Islamic takeover of Europe (although for rather different reasons)? Would the Wests embrace of Islam led to far earlier progress and put the natural Nordic master-race on top of a vast Muslim world-system over half a millennium before it actually took it over (for a short period of time)?

Such a well thought out (and sourced) theory…..marked as spam. Im disappointed. And this despite the fact that so many far-right authorities have already contemplated the very same question.

AK: Oops. Maybe better wait a few minutes before throwing around censorship accusations.

I’m sure that Richard Spencer’s frequent Nietzsche quotes or the tendency to quote Evola and the likes is also a kind of attempt at creating something less materialistic.

You give him too much credit. He just says stuff that sounds cool to his juvenile mind.

Apart from IQ considerations, women are less interested, on average, in abstract speculation.

He just says stuff that sounds cool to his juvenile mind.

Non-materialistic (or non-materialistic sounding) things usually sound cool to most minds. Would Star Wars be as popular (or as good) with all the cool technical stuff (including the spaceships and the light sabers) if it didn’t have the cool mystical sounding religion of “Force” (and its magic) as well? I don’t think so either.

I don’t know if Spencer understands this consciously, but he surely does understand it at some level. Unfortunately religion cannot discriminate based on any “protected” category like race (except Judaism can discriminate based on descent, or women could be discriminated against in Judaism or Islam, etc.), so you cannot use the religious loophole to create a parallel society.

…greater East Asian conformism
…Isn’t this an old stereotype(or even a slur)
…Their AI efforts are already world-class.

.
China’s Social Credit System: AI-driven panopticon

Eh, I wouldn’t read too much into the social credit system. As the article itself notes, there are “credit” systems worldwide already and this doesn’t actually look like its centralized.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Society in the West has already accepted a fairly extensive social credit system for many decades, including private credit ratings, employee assessments which can be shared, customer cards and reward credit cards, Professor of Law and International Affairs at Penn State Law Larry Cata Backer told TechNode.

Which incidentally, I was reminded of today when my social media under my real name just got randomly checked by a some company recruiter, I presume, someone who was scouting me from LinkedIn. Good thing that I removed any of my actual opinions there. Glory to social justice, blahblah.

Anyway, from the most optimistic perspective, I can hope that it’ll help engineer a higher trust culture. in China.

I repeat:

why pretend you’re engaging in some sort of disagreement with our host Sr. Karlin about it?

Yes, when you have learned pinyin, you have not learned Chinese, any more than my using the Latin alphabet proves I read Spanish (I do, but that’s beside the point). This is a valid point, but one wonders in what way you imagine you are disagreeing with any point anyone else has made? Is there something else you are trying to say?

When you become mecha-AK, allocate some process memory for moderating comments. But more for remembering grudges.

The (superior) Northwest Europeans would then easily have taken over leadership of the muslim world from the (inferior) Arabs

From what I could tell, the Persians were culturally and intellectually quite superior to the Arabic portions of Islam(and significant contributor of the Islamic Golden Age), but they didn’t manage to takeover leadership of the Muslim world, did they?

So what do you people think about this idea? Were Hitler and Nietzsche right for having desired an Islamic takeover of Europe (although for rather different reasons)? Would the Wests embrace of Islam led to far earlier progress and put the natural Nordic master-race on top of a vast Muslim world-system over half a millennium before it actually took it over (for a short period of time)?

Not worth slouching towards Mecca for.

Interesting. I went through this:

https://petrix.com/dogint/intelligence.html

Most of the top 10 dogs are medium-large dogs – some of them, such as the Poodle, have mini variants but I doubt those were the ones ranked by the trainers(can’t tell for certain). The Papillion is there, though, as an interesting outlier at 10 lbs and #7. It also has an interesting pedigree from spaniels, which are themselves in “excellent” intelligence before being bred into a toy form, but it outranks its predecessors.

DMT eh? I’ll have to give it a try sometime.

One of my fantasies is to introduce human astrocytes to wolves and then allow the natural process of rewilding to take place. BAP-senpai would approve, don’t you think?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26639-the-smart-mouse-with-the-half-human-brain/

I also played Green in Magic the Gathering.

Persians don’t exactly have higher IQs then most other middle easterners. They just were more civilized culturally. Also they happened to be in the way of Turkic tribes….I think that between 1000 and 1900 there were like 15 Turkic and Mongol dynasties ruling Persia, some of which had colorful names like “Black rams”….Meanwhile Northern Europe was geographically much safer and whatever Islam would have been practiced there would have been a specifically European one (considering that European Muslims would have outnumbered Middle easterners by at least 1200).

Actually they did on the intellectual and spiritual levels for sure. As far as politics; the Abbasids were often half or more ethnic Persian. And that’s not taking into account two other major factors; 1) all conquering tribal people were civilized through Persian cultural influences in that area and 2) part way through the Abbasid reign, the unity of Islam shattered and they were simply titular heads over fairly powerful and independent Persian-Turko rulers like Khwarezm and Ghznavids.

Peace.

The Dog Who Knows 1,000 Words

If you want to keep top spot, it is not enough to be intellectual and civilized. You need fighting ability and Persia simply did not have enough to hold its own against people like the Arabs or various Turks. They had to settle for civilizing and absorbing them – a lot of parallels actually with the various Germanic tribes and their takeover of Rome.

Peace.

Just-so stories of evolution are unfalsifiable. This is the ultimate strength of the theory of evolution. Even Karl Popper had doubts whether the theory of evolution was a theory at all beyond being a tautology that must be true ex definitione and thus can’t be falsified. But the theory of evolution can be falsified but not on the level of the just-so stories that are being commonly told. The stories are destined to be true. That’s why that they so much fun telling them because making utterance that are always true is very empowering. The truth is the ultimate rhetorical device.

The IQism however is entirely different matter. Its popularity and success hinges on sneaky reifications that blind people to notice serious epistemological issues.

Do you listen to classical music? Can you recommend Russian composers?

For example from Scriabin I only know Le Poème de l’extase, op. 54, which is good, but I don’t listen to it too much. I don’t know most Russian composers, except Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

It’s an area I’m sorry to be a geek – and I’m not sure Karlin wants us to convert his blog comments to a music forum, so I add this MORE tag and continue write underneath MORE and will copy and paste you some recommendations from a youtube playlist.

If 500 deaths occurred between 500 car accidents with each, your metric will show twice as much safety

How does that make the mileage metric pointless as you claimed ? How is the population metric (which includes non-drivers), the correct metric to measure driving ability? Try and think rationally.

And why the hell should the crashes with pedestrians and cyclists be ignored? Do they not also measure visuospatial IQ?

And btw, even if you disregard the deaths involving pedestrians and cyclists the rate is still many times higher in South Korea (6.84) than in the UK (2.26)

https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/transport/road-safety-annual-report-2015/united-kingdom_irtad-2015-42-en#page5

https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/transport/road-safety-annual-report-2015/korea_irtad-2015-26-en#page4

And even casual analysis would have shown that I was comparing the population density of Sydeny against Seoul(urban vs urban).

No you were not. You were comparing Australia to South Korea. Anyone can check and confirm.

In any case your point that higher population density results in higher deadly car accident rates is contradicted by the data. For example:

https://stats-japan.com/t/kiji/11911

Kagawa Prefecture (1355/sq mi density) has almost 5 times the accident fatality rate as Tokyo (16,121/sq mi density).

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eb63/be3106ea8fa91f1ad1b39b90bd852ce8f0f1.pdf

Population density was also associated with fewer crashes. Each additional person per net residential acre decreased accident incidence by 0.05%.

A study by Reid Ewing of the University of Maryland 2009[3] also concluded that dense urban areas appear to be safer than the lower volume environments of the suburbs.

Mixed traffic will badly distort the fatality/mileage metric but not the fatality/population metric, which I just explained and which you failed to understand. And as far as the effort to cherry pick in an increasingly futile effort to make your point(suburbs with less road development are going to have more accidents, what a surprise), I think this picture alone is enough to explain how density neatly increases accidents:

Again, traffic mix alters things. In Tokyo, where commuting by foot via public transportation exceeds all other forms of transportation, you will have…fewer road deaths.

Such an amazing thought.

Really, the most useful comparison in this that minimizes other variables is National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which compares ethnicity directly against each other, with at least the same mix of vehicles, in the same driving conditions, in the same country.

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/810995

Which is, in fact, a nontrivial difference in fatality rate.

Have fun being wrong as you continue to cherry pick for your ego.

In fact, the NHTSA stats themselves demonstrate an excellent example of how vehicle mix impacts fatality statistics, making this a teachable moment. On page 3, it mentions that whites make up an enormous number of motorcycle fatalities.

Over the last several years motorcyclist fatalities have increased significantly. In 2006, 4,837 motorcyclists were killed in motor vehicle traffic crashes. As shown in Table 2, Whites accounted for 68 percent of motorcyclist fatalities as compared to Hispanics and African-Americans, who accounted for 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

Does this mean that whites are much worse drivers than Hispanics or African-Americans, or at least specifically, much worse motorcyclists? No. Whites are simply much more likely to be motorcycle users:

https://brandongaille.com/32-compelling-motorcycle-demographics/

the primary customer is a Caucasian/White male above the age of 35, it is important for the industry to create an interest in their product.

By simply having a more motorcycles in the hands of whites versus car usage, this increases the number of accidents on motorcycles, and increases the number of fatalities experienced due to dangers of motorcycles accidents. This does not indicate, for example, that whites are bad drivers or even bad drivers specifically on motorcycles.

Mixed traffic will badly distort the fatality/mileage metric but not the fatality/population metric

You keep repeating this BS as if you are making sense. The fatality/population metric does not measure driving ability because it includes non-drivers (who may be the majority in densely populated cities). It is distorted from the get go. Why is this so hard for you to understand?

Whether you drive 100 fast miles on the freeway, 10 medium paced miles in the suburbs or 1 slow mile in the city, you are still driving. It still requires visuospatial skill. You can nitpick the fatality/mileage metric all you want, but it is still the best metric available.

Running over pedestrians and cyclists while driving at slow speeds in the city is very bad driving. Capische?

I think this picture alone is enough to explain how density neatly increases accidents:

Laughable stupidity. As if this picture trumps the data I provided. It is truly foolish to think such traffic congestions lead to accidents that result in death or injury.

As for the NHTSA chart it should be obvious to you that it can’t be a true reflection of asian driving ability. Why don’t you apply your nitpicking skills to figure out what’s wrong with that chart?

Whether you drive 100 fast miles on the freeway, 10 medium paced miles in the suburbs or 1 slow mile in the city, you are still driving. It still requires visuospatial skill. You can nitpick the fatality/mileage metric all you want, but it is still the best metric available

Whether you ride 100, 10 or just 1 mile on a bike, you will not be recorded. It’s such a great metric that the WHO does not even record it.

Like I said, enjoy being wrong.

Whether you ride 100, 10 or just 1 mile on a bike, you will not be recorded. It’s such a great metric that the WHO does not even record it.

How the hell could WHO record bike mileage anyway? WHO does not record pedestrian mileage either. How could it? Does that make the fatality/mileage metric pointless as you insist? Get real. You don’t have even a single good point to make.

enjoy being wrong.

Lol. Continue deluding yourself. You have plenty of company here. Your HBD/alt-right buddies invite you to their circle jerk.

Running over pedestrians and cyclists while driving at slow speeds in the city is very bad driving.

I’d say driving at high speeds on a highway is easier than driving in a densely populated city full of cyclists and pedestrians, though. Especially on a mileage basis – you can drive 20 miles in 20 minutes at the highway while taking over, say, 20 cars, whereas in a city it takes several hours and encountering thousands of other vehicles.

Actually, I mostly drive in a city, but something like a fifth of my mileage comes from longer trips on the highway. In huge countries with low population densities this could be more. For example in Australia there must be a number of Sydney or Melbourne residents regularly (like every other month) driving between these two cities, while in South Korea the percentage of Gangnam residents driving to Busan must be lower (because Busan is much smaller relative to Seoul than Melbourne is relative to Sydney), and, to top it off, the Seoul-Busan distance is also much smaller. Therefore, the number of miles driven under not very dangerous circumstances (on a highway) must be inflated in Australia relative to South Korea.

I’d also guess trucks are included in miles driven, in which case the statistic is further distorted, because huge trucks will drive most of the distance on highways, so in Australia this relatively low danger driving by professionals must be longer (in terms of mileage; not in terms of hours driven), as opposed to South Korea, where such long haul truck routes are non-existent, with the longest distance being something like 250 miles or shorter (less than half the Melbourne-Sydney distance).