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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3326 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

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Another HBD question(the motte's favorite topic). What is the reason for higher north-east Asian IQ? Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews and Brahmins all have plausible enough explanations, but my understanding is that the hajnal line doesn't cover east Asia and that most inhabitants there were rice farmers for thousands upon thousands of years, not scholars.

Cold winters, The hajnal line has far more to do with individualism than it does IQ.

Compared to neighboring mongolia or siberia, IQ is much higher while winters are much milder.

I quibble a bit with the "much higher" here. The starting point for Northeast Asians was already quite high.

It's quite interesting that Yakuts have similar IQ scores to Ethnic Russians- most indigenous groups aren't. And it does appear that badly developed and terrible countries in the general vicinity have oddly high IQs compared to similar countries. That significantly changes my priors on the cold winters hypothesis.

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