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Is the 99-105 figure accurate or coming from highly filtered groups (people in Iran who actually take the test). I guess I probably assumed Iran would be a less extreme India with very high IQ groups and some low IQ peasants. If they are a true 103 IQ country then they’ve probably hit below their weight for centuries.
I understand many people haven't interacted with much of the Iranian diaspora, like always that's a self selecting group but they resemble Asians or Jews in many ways - strong family ties, a focus on education, and lots of involvement in successful industries and business. This is world class elite human capital with a lot of national pride who would be willing to go back, should the situation change.
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Persian exiles and expatriates are overrepresented in academia in the West. They're an ancient culture-civilization dating back to antiquity, of which courtly culture has been exported to both Ottoman and Mughal empires. They got through colonialism without the humiliation of direct annexation and build drones and run nuclear reactors despite pretty severe sanctions. I don't doubt their IQ.
The main factor holding them back is geopolitics: mountainous nations have a hard time centralizing. Since the days of Alexander Persia has always been more of a coalition of culturally-associated governates and with the decapitation of Iran's leadership, the country is essentially now being run by provincial IRGC warlords. And being a warlord doesn't necessarily select for intellect. Their elites may be dumber than the people they're oppressing.
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Persia did respectably for itself, and Islam tends to make civilizations punch below their weight over a long enough time scale for a variety of reasons.
I don’t really believe 103 but upper nineties seems plausible. Russia has a similar IQ with shitty broken institutions and poverty.
Upper 90’s would be my guess. Grok gives me a very wide range. I think most people have ran into Persians enough to believe a sizable elite exists at typical western elite levels.
A lot of brown countries seem to have larger IQ spreads than western nations. I think India has maybe 200m people as smart as anyone in the world but likely a billion lower caste people at close to Africa levels. A country with that level of diversity is likely never going to be a partner you can trust on the world stage. A country with >100 average plus a sizable 130 IQ (people that create tech like nuke) can do things on the world stage. Basically it gives you administrative stability but also for doing “stuff” both the smart general class and competent grunts on the ground. That would be a very useful country to have America aligned.
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Lots of countries have hit below their weight for centuries.
A cursory glance suggests that Iran did pretty well for itself…until it had to compete with Tsarist Russia.
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IMO, I think they have.
I continue to believe the dumbest geopolitical naming change in the past hundred years (maybe secondary to the Turkish umlaut disaster) was the Iranian decision to tell the Anglophone world to call them "Iran" instead of "Persia." "Iran" just has no purchase in the Anglophone world, it doesn't mean anything, it just makes Anglophones intuitively place them in the same category as the other four-letter 'I' country, Iraq, which is not good company. The closest thing that Anglophones have to "Iran" meaning something is, of course, "Aryan," which is also not a word with good connotations for the West, however long the Persians have called themselves that. "Persia," however, calls to mind ancient empires, deep history, conquest, power, mystery, adventure, Zoroaster. Even at my not-so-great primary school in the US, we learned a surprising amount about Zoroastrianism and the Persian empire (alongside the Mesopotamians).
The Arab conquerors gained great prestige by claiming the mantle of "Egyptian." Why the Iranians don't realize how much prestige they lost from their enemies by demanding they stop referring to them by the name that carries the legacy of their ancient, powerful forebears, I will never understand.
Switching from "Persia" to "Iran" reduced the country's soft-power inheritance in the Anglosphere. That made it easier to frame Iran as a hostile "regime," rather than a venerable civilization. "The Persians have nuclear enrichment" feels iconic. "The Iranians have nuclear enrichment" sounds like a problem.
I've always thought this, it's great to see it articulated so well.
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I'm not familiar with the methodology there but Iranians are a different racial group (Persians) than Arabs, so it's plausible to me. I've also known many Iranians and they've generally been smart, competent people, though c.f. usual caveats about filter bubbles.
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