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I'm surprised that more people here aren't talking about Scott ripping off the bandaid in his latest series of posts, which very much take an IQ-realist and pro-Lynn stance, and without really mincing words about it.
Scott has tip-toed around the topic in the past, largely playing it safe. There was some minor controversy almost half a decade in the past when his "friend" (one who had ended up marrying Scott's enbie ex Ozzy) leaked private correspondence between the two of them where Scott explicitly acknowledged that he believed in population-wide IQ differences but felt he couldn't speak up about it. Going back even further, on his now defunct but archived LiveJournal, he outlines his harrowing experience doing charity work in Haiti, where the sheer lack of common sense or perverse and self-defeating antics from the populace knocked him speechless.
I note (with some pleasure) that Scott raises some of the same points I've been on record making myself: Namely that there's a profound difference between a person who is 60 IQ in a population where that's the norm, versus someone who is 60 IQ due to disease in a population with an average of 100.
What's the wider ramification of this? Well, I've been mildly miffed for a while now that the Scott of ACX wasn't quite as radical and outspoken as his SSC days, but now that he's come out and said this, I sincerely doubt that there are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend. It's refreshing, that's what it is. He might not particularly delve into the ramifications of what this might mean for society at large, but he's not burying the lede, and I have to applaud that. It might we too early to celebrate the death of wokeness, but I think that the more milquetoast Scott of today being willing to say this matters a great deal indeed.
Debating the existence of racial IQ differences is boring because they so obviously exist. Now that we're allowed to talk about it, I find myself not really wanting to. There really is no legitimate debate.
I think a more interesting subject is why these difference exist. Is there any settled science on this? I assume that Ashkenazi have higher IQs due to some sort of selection process that happened in the shtetls. But why are Japanese smarter than Britons, Britons smarter than Sicilians, and Sicilians smarter than Sub-Saharans?
My guess is that these could be relatively recent selections (as in, last 2000 years or so). The British population, for example, underwent a millennium long selection process whereby rich people had many more surviving children than the poor. And, even though class mobility was limited it was not non-existent. Smart people became rich and had more children. Do this for 40 generations and IQ will rise significantly.
On the other hand, Italy had higher urbanization than Great Britain during the Middle Ages. Cities, then as now, acted as IQ shredders. Smart people moved to the city where, due to pestilence, they had sub-replacement fertility.
In the year 500, places like Italy, Turkey, Greece, and Syria were far more advanced than northern Europe. But this very advancement may have led to them gradually falling behind in IQ due to higher urbanization.
This is all rank speculation of course. That's what makes it fun!
I'd also like to hear theories about how the East Asian package (high IQ, low agency) came to be...
What's your evidence that Sicilians are lower IQ? On the country map it's as green as the rest of Italy which is as green as the UK.
One could look around modern day Sicily and note the obvious dysfunction and say well duh, but emigration from Sicily since WW2 has been high.
What country map are you talking about? One can't average the whole of Italy due to it effectively being two countries stitched together. The differences are very big.
Lots of studies show Sicily having an average IQ of about 90 with northern Italy having slightly above 100, with the GDP per capita difference being over 100%
Yes. That's why I was asking. The map in the post OP links to just treats Italy as a whole unit.
Okay. But that's explained by upwardly mobile Sicilians leaving after WW2.
I'm not even disputing it necessarily. Cousin marriage is high in that culture, for example.
It would be interesting to see how diaspora Sicilians test.
And yet when people from other similar regions emigrated in similar numbers during largely the same time period, due to the same incentives, the population iq remained more or less completely unchanged? Only in Sicily did it go down by 10 whole IQ points?
If there is some kind of emigration driven selection effects happening it's been going on for far longer, considering Italian cultural and economic development. Southern Italy and Sicily have been backwards since literally the Roman times.
They were quite wealthy during the Middle Ages, e.g. Sicily under the Norman Roger II. However the south's cash crops stagnated the economy as great wealth flowed in without much need for diversification and increasing complexity (...and later the Kingdom of the 2 Sicilies banned agricultural exports!) Prosperity started breaking down in the 14th century, then in the 15th century when large earthquakes and plagues decimated the population and slave raids shifted settlements inland; the Spanish art of governance (rent seeking) also halted development (cf. Spanish literacy into the late 19th century).
Nevertheless, up to unification, Naples remained one of Europe's largest and wealthiest cities. Sicily had 3 of the most industrialized provinces in 1871 - but they hadn't changed production methods for centuries, doing seasonal labor in workshops (compared to the area around Milan which used power looms etc. from the 1820s).
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