Interesting thread. Thanks to all posters.
Interesting thread. Thanks to all posters.
Actually, Nigeria by national IQ is very low, along with other developing countries, while Nigerian-Americans (this is counted by voluntary immigrants in recent decades, obviously) have the highest educational attainment in the U.S. That's pretty suggestive that these national IQ rankings are bunk, though of course someone could respond that the immigrants are non-representative of the population, with, no doubt, much higher parental income/education than poorer Nigerians who could not afford to emigrate.
Uh oh, getting involved wrote:
There is more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else. Nigerians, on average, have a higher IQ than many other ethnic groups in Africa.
El Jefe is correct about his point. That's not to say that IQ is the answer to Yali's question, but is to say that it was unscientific of Diamond to dismiss it as a possible factor a priori.
I agree with the posts highlighting the importance of other traits for success. I think motivation is huge, and would rather have a highly motivated person of average intelligence working for me than a slacker with high intelligence.
Part of the problem as well is that people don't know how to think about the meaning of a distribution. If the mean intelligence of one group is higher than that of another group, that tells you nothing about differences between 2 individuals selected from the groups. There is a huge overlap between curves, and so there are plenty of people in the group of lower mean intelligence that are more intelligent than a good portion of the group with higher mean intelligence.
It's not racist to accept the substantial evidence for differences in intelligence between groups, but it is racist to draw conclusions about individuals on the basis of that evidence.
jjjjjj wrote:
Actually, Nigeria by national IQ is very low, along with other developing countries, while Nigerian-Americans (this is counted by voluntary immigrants in recent decades, obviously) have the highest educational attainment in the U.S. That's pretty suggestive that these national IQ rankings are bunk, though of course someone could respond that the immigrants are non-representative of the population, with, no doubt, much higher parental income/education than poorer Nigerians who could not afford to emigrate.
The Nigerians who emigrate to the U.S.--and, in particular, those who subsequently find their way to elite American colleges and universities--are generally of Igbo ethnicity. They are very distinct from other Nigerians.
Names like Chioma on an Ivy League track team's roster are a giveaway: black students of (recent) Nigerian, usually Igbo, descent.
In fact some Ivies and other top schools are more likely to recruit a student of recent Igbo ancestry than they are African-Americans whose families have been in the U.S. for centuries. As with other black immigrant groups (notably those from the Caribbean), these Igbo students are more likely to succeed at academically-demanding schools: they have strong family backgrounds of academic/professional success, and (on average) high IQs.
All of this doesn't change the fact that *overall* Nigeria's population has a low IQ, but it helps explain why *some* Nigerians are outstanding successful in American schools: There are substantial differences in average cognitive abilities between ethnic groups.
For more about Igbos and academics:
http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/I agree with the OP's main point here: Diamond was dishonest from the get-go.
Fun read, though!
ty45 wrote:
I agree with the OP's main point here: Diamond was dishonest from the get-go.
Fun read, though!
These books are fun to read. Just don't take them that seriously. Other people come up with different explanations for the same outcomes with equally good logic. Reality is probably a mixture.
Tinfoil wrote:
Or the average person is getting smarter due to better nutrition and better education.
You have an eating disorder and should seek treatment
See the chapter on the Maoris slaughtering the Moriori's on the Chatham Islands (another race of Maori or Polynesians). Down here it is completely ignored historically and some commie in our government decided that it was the white guy's fault, although no white guy was there. Naturally, white guy's who pay most of the taxes had to pay compensation for something two centuries ago and had nothing to do with them. Sadly, I am not joking!
When I read this book, many moons ago, I noticed that Diamond underplays the influence of limited liability companies, individualism and the hard money gold standard era for the advantages they provided the west particularly the Anglo-Saxon countries. But this is the bias you will find among Fabian Socialists on University campuses around the world.
GG&S is a great read. And yes, intellectually dishonest in some respects.
BUT NOTE: Though subsequent studies have contradicted some of the research on which Diamond's book is based (e.g. about the peopling of the Pacific), we have to give Diamond credit for having used the best information available to him when he was writing (at the end of the last century).
...EXCEPT for his pre-judgment (aka prejudice) about all human groups having similar average IQs/intelligence. That prejudgment was not data-based.
I guess I could have continued reading the book, but I did not. Can't read a book that starts off which such an unusual claim followed up with the weakest of justification to support it.
Malcom X did better when he claimed that the black street hustler, if enfranchised as a young person, would be your doctor , lawyer or banker.
Tinfoil wrote:
Or the average person is getting smarter due to better nutrition and better education..
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Which might mean that the difference between New Guinea IQs and European IQs is just nutrition and education and not due to anything fundamental.
Which is at least part of Diamond's point.
It was a boring book. I didn't finish it.
Umm, okay. wrote:
GG&S is a great read. And yes, intellectually dishonest in some respects.
BUT NOTE: Though subsequent studies have contradicted some of the research on which Diamond's book is based (e.g. about the peopling of the Pacific), we have to give Diamond credit for having used the best information available to him when he was writing (at the end of the last century).
...EXCEPT for his pre-judgment (aka prejudice) about all human groups having similar average IQs/intelligence. That prejudgment was not data-based.
Pretty much my thoughts exactly. Enjoyed the book, though!
Is he wrong? Some groups have higher IQ than others, and thus have higher incomes and lower crime rates.
This is a purely hypothetical scenario: Imagine there are 3 groups in a society, groups A, B, and C. Group A has an average IQ of 106 and has a high average income. Group C has an average IQ of exactly 100 and has average household income. Now, 80% of group B has an average IQ in the low 80s (81-82) and thus earns less and commits more crime, while 20% of group B has an average to slightly above average IQ (100-103), and performs slightly better than group C with respect to income/testing because of a higher IQ.
also read the book wrote:
Then let's take a European with an IQ of 100 (the "average" European) and drop him in New Guinea in the middle of the forest. Due to his intelligence, he'll be able to survive, right?
You must've missed the chapter where Diamond discusses the intelligence that is gained by knowing one's environment and how to survive in it.
We are all born with different abilities to learning from our environmental feedback and make associations between cause-and-effect that help us get the results we want - this is what we think of as "intelligence." And no, it's not as relative and fluid as you propose.
Everybody is born with a general IQ range that can't change*. So, someone whose "base IQ" would be 115 could be increased to 125-130 if they grow up in an IQ-nurturing environment (both parents likely have degrees, probably masters or more, parents actually care about their children - reading to them, teaching them things), or if they don't care at all the IQ will go down, but it'll still be above average.
* it can't increase suddenly; it can only decrease suddenly due to oxygen deprivation or similar.
el jefe wrote:
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" and have recommended it to many others. But I was looking at it again today and reminded of the untruth at its very foundation.
At the beginning of the book--literally, the second page of the Prologue--he says: "He [Yali, a New Guinean friend of Diamond's] and I knew perfectly well that New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans." This is simply false. The average IQ in those European countries is around 100 or a little lower; the average in Papua New Guinea is around 85 or a little lower.
With Google, this is easy to confirm nowadays. But even in the pre-Google days that Diamond was writing the book, the data were pretty readily available to a scholar like him. So either he *knew* he was writing falsely, in which case he just plain lied; or he *should* have known that his statement of equal intelligence was false, in which case his research on this point was culpably shoddy.
Only a dummy would make this argument.
Tinfoil wrote:
Or the average person is getting smarter due to better nutrition and better education.
agip wrote:
IQ tests are nonsense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effecttest scores have been increasing steadily in developed nations - project that back, and the average citizen in 1776 had an IQ of around 10.
People seem to be getting better at taking tests, that's all.
You clearly have not been paying attention to the (ahem) intelligence of your fellow Americans recently.