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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   31198 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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Currnetly [sic] you have cases where people who score a literal zero in exams can teach math

To be fair, (decimal) zero was an important mathematical concept invented in India

To be fair, from what I could parse from the comments on that reddit link, it seems possible that they are using some scoring system where the mean is zero, e.g. you can score negative, so minimum score of zero would imply "at least average".

Given only this information, I don't think we can conclude how much India is putting their hand on the scales here.

  • It could be that this entrance exam is taken by people with a wide variety of degrees which do not enable them to complete a math PhD, that the standard deviation of the scores is 20, and the interview process is basically just approving them.

  • It could also be that the people sitting the Entrance exam all hold a Master's degree in math, that the standard deviation is 200 and that the interview process is weeding out a lot of people.

I am slightly against attributing too much of the difference between castes to HBD based on priors. My baseline for the HBD hypothesis are the Ashkenazi. The idea is that if you were a Jew in medieval Eastern Europe, intelligence lead to reproductive success -- if you were smart enough to become a Rabbi, you would probably increase the frequency of your genes in the population. By contrast, a very smart Christian probably became a priest, a profession associated (at least in the RCC) with below-average long term reproductive success.

By contrast, I do not believe that European aristocracy was likewise selected for intelligence. A cunning baron who schemed his way into becoming a count probably did less for the frequency of his genes than one who just fucked his servants, though I admit that this changes a bit if one only considers the gene pool of nobility.

Like the Ashkenazi and European Nobility (to some degree), and unlike most of the rest of society in medieval Europe, the caste system of India was strongly endogamous. This is a very double-edged sword, on the one hand, it prevents the selection effects from diluting, but on the other hand, it removes the possibility of getting advantageous genes from selected outsiders.

For HBD in the caste system, there would have to be different selection mechanisms in place in different castes. For the priesthood caste, it seems vaguely plausible that it at least selected against crass stupidity. For the warrior caste, my prior would be that the selection pressure was similar to European nobility, more brawns than brains. For traders, such an effect seems most plausible -- cunning might make the difference between just making ends meet and leaving a fortune to your descendants which will increase their reproductive success. For farmers, I don't exactly see anything which will select for them being stupid. If anything, a very smart European farmer might try his luck in a city (and thus cease to be a farmer, depriving that subpopulation of his genes) while a very smart Indian farmer was stuck being a farmer due to the caste system.

To be fair, from what I could parse from the comments on that reddit link, it seems possible that they are using some scoring system where the mean is zero

Nope, they're using negative scoring where wrong answers lose you marks (to discourage guessing on multiple choice questions). You get a score of 0 if you leave the exam paper blank, so yes, people from SC and ST just had to leave their exam paper blank and they'd be admitted to a PhD in mathematics...

It's totally absurd but funnily enough if you're going to have Affirmative Action I consider this a much better system than the US "holistic assessment"; at least with this method I know that to get in all I need to do is score 94+ marks and then I'm in (barring random yearly variations) rather than worry about not getting in because my parents made me go down the "he started his own charity" route three years ago which is now out of fashion with admission committees and their caprices.

The argument for IQ differences between castes in India as I understand it is that Brahmins and Brahmins alone were selected for higher verbal intelligence because they were expected to memorize, recite, and discuss long and complex religious texts, and that those who were better at this were rewarded socially, financially, and by implication reproductively. If this were true, one would expect a bimodal distribution, with the 10% of the Indian population that are Brahmins having higher intelligence and the remaining 90% of all other castes clustering together (however, since each Brahmin jati was itself reproductively isolated from the others, this would introduce additional variation based on how strong the selection was in each case). I don't know enough about ancient Indian culture to know if this is a reasonable assumption, but it is analogous to arguments about Jews being selected for skill at making Talmudic arguments or interpreting the Torah.

The idea is that if you were a Jew in medieval Eastern Europe, intelligence lead to reproductive success -- if you were smart enough to become a Rabbi, you would probably increase the frequency of your genes in the population.

This is not my understanding and IIRC the thesis has been studied and found to have poor support, not least because if it were valid it should apply to more Jews than just the Ashkenazim.

The thesis which seems to hold more water is that the Ashkenazi population was pushed into lines of work which required high intelligence, financial sense, and above all fluency in speech. This is much better-supported. Scott has an article on it somewhere but I've got a meeting in two minutes and probably won't bother afterward. I think it was the Hungarian high school one. Four parts IIRC.

From "The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project":

Here’s something interesting: every single person I mentioned above is of Jewish descent. Every single one. This isn’t some clever setup where I only selected Jewish-Hungarians in order to spring this on you later. I selected all the interesting Hungarians I could find, then went back and checked, and every one of them was Jewish.

This puts the excellence of the Hungarian education system in a different light. Hungarian schools totally failed to work their magic on Gentiles. You can talk all you want about “elitism and a spirit of competition” and “striving to encourage creativity”, yet for some reason this worked on exactly one of Hungary’s many ethnic groups.

This reduces the difficult question of Hungarian intellectual achievement to the easier question of Jewish intellectual achievement.

I say “easier question” because I find the solution by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending really compelling. Their paper is called A Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence (“Ashkenazi” means Eastern European Jew) and they start by expressing the extent of the issue:

Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112 – 115. This fact has social significance because IQ (as measured by IQ tests) is the best predictor we have of success in academic subjects and most jobs. Ashkenazi Jews are just as successful as their tested IQ would predict, and they are hugely overrepresented in occupations and fields with the highest cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the Turing Awards [in computer science]. They account for more than half of world chess champions.

This doesn’t seem to be due to any advantage in material privilege; Ashkenazi Jews frequently did well even in countries where they were persecuted. Nor is it obviously linked to Jewish culture; Jews from other regions of the world show no such advantage. So what’s going on?

Doctors have long noted that Ashkenazi Jews are uniquely susceptible to various genetic diseases. For example, they’re about a hundred times more likely to have Gaucher’s Disease, a hundred times more likely to get Tay-Sachs Disease, ten times more likely to have torsion dystonia, et cetera. Genetic diseases are so common in this population that the are official recommendation is that all Ashkenazi Jewish couples get screened for genetic disease before marriage. I’m Ashkenazi Jewish, I got screened, and I turn out to be a carrier for Riley-Day syndrome – three hundred times as common in Ashkenazi Jews as in anyone else.

Evolution usually gets rid of genetic diseases pretty quickly. If they stick around, it’s because they’re doing something to earn their keep. One common pattern is “heterozygote advantage” – two copies of the gene cause a disease, but one copy does something good. For example, people with two copies of the sickle cell gene get sickle cell anaemia, but people with one copy get some protection against malaria. In Africa, where malaria is relatively common, the tradeoff is worth it – so people of African descent have high rates of the sickle cell gene and correspondingly high rates of sickle cell anaemia. In other places, where malaria is relatively uncommon, the tradeoff isn’t worth it and evolution eliminates the sickle cell gene. That’s why sickle cell is about a hundred times more common in US blacks than US whites.

The moral of the story is: populations can have genetic diseases if they also provide a useful advantage to carriers. And if those genetic diseases are limited to a single group, we expect them to provide a useful advantage for that group, but not others. Might the Jewish genetic diseases provide some advantage? And why would that advantage be limited to Jews?

Most of the Jewish genetic diseases cluster into two biological systems – the sphingolipid system and the DNA repair system. This is suspicious. It suggests that they’re not just random. They’re doing something specific. Both of these systems are related to neural growth and neural branching. Might they be doing something to the brain?

Gaucher’s disease, one of the Ashkenazi genetic diseases, appears to increase IQ. CHH obtained a list of all of the Gaucher’s patients in Israel. They were about 15 times more likely than the Israeli average to be in high-IQ occupations like scientist or engineer; CHH calculate the probability that this is a coincidence to be 4×10^-19.

Torsion dystonia, another Ashkenazi genetic disease, shows a similar pattern. CHH find ten reports in the literature where doctors comment on unusual levels of intelligence in their torsion dystonia patients. Eldridge, Harlan, Cooper, and Riklan tested 14 torsion dystonia patients and found an average IQ of 121; another similar study found an average of 117. Torsion dystonia is pretty horrendous, but sufferers will at least get the consolation prize of being really, really smart.

Moving from medicine to history, we find that Ashkenazi Jews were persecuted for the better part of a millennium, and the particular form of this persecution was locking them out of various jobs until the main career opportunities open to them were things like banker, merchant, and doctor. CHH write:

For 800 to 900 years, from roughly 800 AD to 1650 or 1700 AD, the great majority of the Ashkenazi Jews had managerial and financial jobs, jobs of high complexity, and were neither farmers nor craftsmen. In this they differed from all other settled peoples of which we have knowledge.

They continue:

Jews who were particularly good at these jobs enjoyed increased reproductive success. Weinryb (1972, see also Hundert 1992) comments: “More children survived to adulthood in affluent families than in less affluent ones. A number of genealogies of business leaders, prominent rabbis, community leaders, and the like – generally belonging to the more affluent classes – show that such people often had four, six, sometimes even eight or nine children who reached adulthood. On the other hands, there are some indications that poorer families tended to be small ones…as an example, in a census of the town of Brody in 1764 homeowner households had 1.2 children per adult member while tenant households had 0.6.

Now we can start to sketch out the theory in full. Due to persecution, Jews were pushed into cognitively-demanding occupations like banker or merchant and forced to sink or swim. The ones who swam – people who were intellectually up to the challenge – had more kids than the ones who sank, producing an evolutionary pressure in favor of intelligence greater than that in any other ethnic group. Just as Africans experiencing evolutionary pressure for malaria resistance developed the sickle cell gene, so Ashkenazim experiencing evolutionary pressure for intelligence developed a bunch of genes which increased heterozygotes’ IQ but caused serious genetic disease in homozygotes. As a result, Ashkenazi ended up somewhat more intelligent – and somewhat more prone to genetic disease – than the rest of the European population.

If true, this would explain the 27% of Nobel Prizes and 50% of world chess champions thing.

By contrast, a very smart Christian probably became a priest, a profession associated (at least in the RCC) with below-average long term reproductive success.

The Latin-rite priesthood is currently selected slightly for intelligence, but it's selected even moreso for coming from very large families. This was even more a factor in the past when the church was a great way to get younger sons out of the way- and have someone else support them, to boot.

Eastern rite diocesan priesthoods seem to be hereditary a big chunk of the time.

By contrast, a very smart Christian probably became a priest

Going to quibble with this a bit - in Europe, as I recall, it was common for priests to be second-born sons of gentle blood, because the firstborn would inherit. Given that firstborns are slightly more intelligent than their siblings as a general rule, and that wealthy elites are probably more likely to have more children, I think the Christians (at least among the elites) were likely also pursuing a "eugenic" policy, if you will, although it might not be as effective as the one you put forth as the Jewish strategy.

For the warrior caste, my prior would be that the selection pressure was similar to European nobility, more brawns than brains.

Combat is g-loaded, actually, although of course physical prowess is also important. My guess is that if there was a selection effect on the nobility or warrior caste that it was for a combination of both.

Roman Catholic priests are still slanted towards 'younger sons of big families'.

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