I'm married to a Jewish man but am not Jewish myself (except for a fraction of my DNA, courtesy of a Calabrian grandparent). I tested in the 99th percentile on an intelligence test as a kid, am a math whiz, and always felt pretty smart ... but oh man, my Jewish friends and husband are SO smart, insanely talented (the musical ability!!). My husband's memory and verbal IQ are way higher than mine (I'm better at math and logic and have better spatial skills). I don't even understand how he can remember the things he does. He'll pull obscure scientific jargon he's encountered once or twice out of nowhere. It's crazy.
Jewish Ashky here. I score around 125-ish, but heavy on the verbal side. I come from a family of Talmudists and academics. My weak math and spatial skills were an impediment to academic and even Talmudic excellence. I excelled in business (have a couple thousand employees). (Don't judge my poor writing; I went to Yeshiva instead of high school.)
Since I grew up traditionally religious, I have a real network within my community to choose from for employment. For high-level jobs, I try really hard to find gentiles for my important tasks. I prefer them over my own community as we simply don't scale, and Jewish holidays are tough to deal with.
I find that IQ/G is not actually the principal issue. Although, yes, it's much easier to find high IQ within my network. It's that average gentiles—average to average disclaimer, totally gross stereotype and not indicative of the tail end of the bell curve, etc.—are just missing some kind of common sense necessary for business success. I've encountered so many high IQ gentiles who easily get stuck in negative feedback loops but never question their core assumptions that would help them get out of it.
When in doubt, question everything.
To paraphrase Elon Musk: Physics is the only law; the rest are just recommendations.
My hypothesis—obviously influenced by my traditional background—is that our axiomatic emphasis on a single source of causal truth for anything and everything IS the source of our high IQ and success.
As we are finding with training AI models, the core inputs/assumptions/rewards matter a whole lot more than the number of cycles and even the breadth of training data. Garbage in, garbage out. How this plays out genetically and evolutionarily can be explained in several ways; I don't need to elaborate here.
Working against this argument is some data showing that religious Jews score lower than secular Jews. My assumption is that this effect is temporary and reversible. The fact that we have less secular education and a less fluent grasp of the native language (Israel or U.S.) can play some role, similar to how Jewish immigrants to the U.S. scored lower in the '30s. My feeling is that this doesn't explain all of it. Paucity of language and intentional isolation from the dominant culture probably has a direct—hopefully non-permanent—diminutive influence on IQ versus our educated (non-intermarried, if you can still find them anymore) Ashky control group.
As the secular Ashkys in the U.S. disappear, you are already seeing IQ/success dilution the further this group gets away from their genetic and religious formative circumstances.
Expect traditional Ashky IQ to stabilize at higher than gentile IQ over time, along with the "success" quotient. However anti-Semitism and anti-Haredi attitudes, along with intentional isolation effects, will work against traditional Ashky financial success.
This bottled strength will lay dormant until we have another "coming out" moment like we had in the mid-1800s, where a large percentage of traditional religious Jews were suddenly introduced to the host environment. I can see this happening in Israel if the religious reach a tipping point and somehow find themselves in charge of a country and the secular start leaving en masse. We won't be able to continue our splendid isolation, and we will be forced to expand our religious sphere to confront political and even military challenges.
I think the MCV method corrects it too far upwards and that it should be much closer to the 108.5 estimate. The fanciest of latent IRT scores correlate with simple IQ sumscores at .99:
Project Talent was the huge Sputnik Era test of American schoolkids (c. 1960), who were given two days of cognitive tests, right?
That's correct.
I'm married to a Jewish man but am not Jewish myself (except for a fraction of my DNA, courtesy of a Calabrian grandparent). I tested in the 99th percentile on an intelligence test as a kid, am a math whiz, and always felt pretty smart ... but oh man, my Jewish friends and husband are SO smart, insanely talented (the musical ability!!). My husband's memory and verbal IQ are way higher than mine (I'm better at math and logic and have better spatial skills). I don't even understand how he can remember the things he does. He'll pull obscure scientific jargon he's encountered once or twice out of nowhere. It's crazy.
My own experiences:
Jewish Ashky here. I score around 125-ish, but heavy on the verbal side. I come from a family of Talmudists and academics. My weak math and spatial skills were an impediment to academic and even Talmudic excellence. I excelled in business (have a couple thousand employees). (Don't judge my poor writing; I went to Yeshiva instead of high school.)
Since I grew up traditionally religious, I have a real network within my community to choose from for employment. For high-level jobs, I try really hard to find gentiles for my important tasks. I prefer them over my own community as we simply don't scale, and Jewish holidays are tough to deal with.
I find that IQ/G is not actually the principal issue. Although, yes, it's much easier to find high IQ within my network. It's that average gentiles—average to average disclaimer, totally gross stereotype and not indicative of the tail end of the bell curve, etc.—are just missing some kind of common sense necessary for business success. I've encountered so many high IQ gentiles who easily get stuck in negative feedback loops but never question their core assumptions that would help them get out of it.
When in doubt, question everything.
To paraphrase Elon Musk: Physics is the only law; the rest are just recommendations.
My hypothesis—obviously influenced by my traditional background—is that our axiomatic emphasis on a single source of causal truth for anything and everything IS the source of our high IQ and success.
As we are finding with training AI models, the core inputs/assumptions/rewards matter a whole lot more than the number of cycles and even the breadth of training data. Garbage in, garbage out. How this plays out genetically and evolutionarily can be explained in several ways; I don't need to elaborate here.
Working against this argument is some data showing that religious Jews score lower than secular Jews. My assumption is that this effect is temporary and reversible. The fact that we have less secular education and a less fluent grasp of the native language (Israel or U.S.) can play some role, similar to how Jewish immigrants to the U.S. scored lower in the '30s. My feeling is that this doesn't explain all of it. Paucity of language and intentional isolation from the dominant culture probably has a direct—hopefully non-permanent—diminutive influence on IQ versus our educated (non-intermarried, if you can still find them anymore) Ashky control group.
As the secular Ashkys in the U.S. disappear, you are already seeing IQ/success dilution the further this group gets away from their genetic and religious formative circumstances.
Expect traditional Ashky IQ to stabilize at higher than gentile IQ over time, along with the "success" quotient. However anti-Semitism and anti-Haredi attitudes, along with intentional isolation effects, will work against traditional Ashky financial success.
This bottled strength will lay dormant until we have another "coming out" moment like we had in the mid-1800s, where a large percentage of traditional religious Jews were suddenly introduced to the host environment. I can see this happening in Israel if the religious reach a tipping point and somehow find themselves in charge of a country and the secular start leaving en masse. We won't be able to continue our splendid isolation, and we will be forced to expand our religious sphere to confront political and even military challenges.
I accept the data but the question is why the difference?
I think the MCV method corrects it too far upwards and that it should be much closer to the 108.5 estimate. The fanciest of latent IRT scores correlate with simple IQ sumscores at .99:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/02/defense-against-the-psychometricians/
At such, if we take the 108.5 estimate as being a d = .57 effect size, this is the equivalent of r = .274:
https://www.escal.site/
Dividing this by .99 gives us an assumed true r of .277, which converts back to d = .577, or an estimate of 108.66.