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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25838 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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This Guardian article is a work of art as a culture war artifact.

The story: a Danish data scientist, Pallesen, who claimed that former Harvard president Gay had made "very basic" data errors in her PhD, a claim which was quoted by right wing activist Rufo.

But now the fearless investigators of the Guardian have uncovered that Pallensen also co-authored a paper called "Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans" regarding the Ashkenazi, which was published by some people on the right fringe outside Respectable Academia. Some are into eugenics and "race science". Also they cited an 'antisemitic ' psychologist.

Of course, Pallesen promptly disavowed that paper when questioned by the Guardian.

Where to even start.

"Cite" in the title makes an especially bad verb in an academic context because you can generally not control who cites you. "Scientist who criticized Gay's thesis" would be more on point.

Then there is this whole five degrees of separation thing.

  • Kevin MacDonald is a retired academic who did 'antisemitic publications'. (Let's take the Guardians word for that.)
  • His papers get cited by Kirkegaard et al.
  • One of Kirkegaard's co-authors is Pallesen. (Too bad that he promptly distanced himself from the paper.)
  • Pallesen helped Rufo oust Gay.
  • Rufo is "a major ally of Ron DeSantis".
  • Therefore DeSantis is an evil racist, or something?

While both icky, there is an actual difference between eugenics and "race science" (or HBD or whatever). Eugenics is prescriptive and describes the belief that society should coordinate to affect their gene frequencies. This can go from "let's use CRISPR to fix hereditary diseases" to "kill all the kids with a disfavored eye color". This is completely separate from the claim that there are group differences between human subpopulations caused by genetic differences, which is trivially true for physical characteristics and icky for mental stuff.

My personal view is that most social science is unsound even when it is completely apolitical. If you add politics, be they woke or far-right, I fully expect the conclusions to be whatever the politics say they should be. In respected academia, genetic differences in intelligence are already a third rail. If you publish on racial genetic differences in intelligence, that will end your career faster than putting "I will increase grades for sexual favors" in your e-mail footer. The "fringe" researchers are of course also motivated by politics. So the Ashkenazi genetic intelligence hypothesis is probably undecideable in our society. (From what I remember of Scott's (who is Jewish and thus smarter than me) opinion, I would bet 75% on there being a significant (say, at least five IQ points average) genetic advantage for Ashkenazi.)

Also, I do not find the link between Ashkenazi intelligence and antisemitism all that plausible. The traditional antisemitic trope of Jews is them being shrewd manipulators, which is not exactly the same as being smart. Ask an antisemite why Jews are over-represented in the Ivy League, and they will probably say that it is because the Jews in academia collude to favor Jewish students over gentiles, helping them cheat and so on. If you convince them that the over-representation is due to raw honest brain power, that will conflict with the antisemitic trope.

Finally and foremost, the character of Mr. Pallesen is utterly irrelevant to his claims. He is not the only data scientist, so we don't have to -- and should not -- rely on his testimony exclusively. In the worlds where there is a problem with data science in Gay's PhD, I would not expect that someone who specializes in Intersectionality points it out, thereby -- in the Guardians words -- 'helping oust school’s first Black president'. In worlds where there is no such problem, I would expect that dozens of woke data scientists would jump at the chance to call bullshit on the claims.

So the Ashkenazi genetic intelligence hypothesis is probably undecideable in our society.

Wait, I thought it was pretty well confirmed but not widely publicized that average group intelligences were

  1. Ashkenazi

  2. East Asian

  3. Northern European

  4. Southern European

And then others at much lower average IQ’s(yes, obviously with smaller groups like Tamil Brahmins and Maronites in there). I’ll buy that the magnitudes of the gaps aren’t fully solved but the Ashkenazi IQ advantage being controversial scientifically rather than just not spoken about in polite company is need to me.

If that's the case, why is Israel's GDP per capita way lower than USA's?

It started from a lower starting point. The rate of growth are otherwise tied if you plot them against each other.

Why ask it that way?

Most people in Israel are from Eastern Europe/Russia/The Middle East. How does Israel's GDP per capita compare with those areas? Answer: It's massively higher.

How does the GDP per capita of American Jews compare with non-Jewish Americans? Answer: It's massively higher.

Is there a Jewish Ashkenazi group anywhere in the world that doesn't massively outperform their countrymen economically? No, there isn't.

Here's another way to look at it. Put 10 million random Americans into a tiny strip of arid land with no resources and check how they are doing in 70 years. The results wouldn't be pretty. Israel has outperformed to an almost unbelievable degree.

Here's another way to look at it. Put 10 million random Americans into a tiny strip of arid land with no resources and check how they are doing in 70 years.

That's what large chunks of the American west were. Nevada, Arizona, the Dakotas etc. all seem to be roughly on par with Israel if not ahead.

Is there a Jewish group anywhere in the world that doesn't massively outperform their countrymen economically? No, there isn't.

Yes, absolutely. Sephardic and Mizrahi jews don't noticeably outperform their countrymen, and they especially don't do it in Israel. IIRC (but I may be wrong, so don't trust this without verification) it was actually the Christians in the middle-east who outperformed economically and on IQ tests.

Here's another way to look at it. Put 10 million random Americans into a tiny strip of arid land with no resources and check how they are doing in 70 years.

This is a silly hypothetical because you have selection effects for Israel which aren't actually completely random. Exactly who counts as American is different as well - are you drawing this 10 million-strong cohort from the America of today or America as it was when Israel was founded? But even if you correct for that, throw in all the resources that Israel receives from America and the jewish Diaspora and the random Americans would most likely be doing better, if only because they don't have to support a population of non-working, non-military serving orthodox.

selection effects for Israel

Many Jews remained in the US and Europe, but hundreds of thousands were forced out of Arab countries and now there are practically no Jews in Arab countries. The selection effects were importing a lot of mizrahis which you consider unremarkable.

The selection effects were importing a lot of mizrahis which you consider unremarkable.

And from a HBD perspective, they largely are unremarkable compared to others. But the point remains that the forces bringing them and the Ashkenazim to Israel were not random at all, which is one of the reasons why it would be silly to compare them to a random selection of Americans.

I don't see how you can argue for selection effects for mizrahim when they were entirely expelled from the Arab world which was their home and are now almost all in Israel. Such a uniform phenomenon is like the opposite of a selection effect, unless you are thinking they were selected for being Jews.

Because they weren't entirely expelled - there remain populations of mizrahim in various countries, and according to wikipedia at least several of them end up moving to the USA instead. I do agree that they were under less severe pressures than the ashkenazim, but that doesn't mean there wasn't any such pressure at all.

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Yes, absolutely. Sephardic and Mizrahi jews don't noticeably outperform their countrymen,

Sorry, I thought it was assumed we are talking about Ashkenazi. My bad.

For the record, I don't believe that practicing Judaism magically make you more intelligent. There was obvious some sort of genetic funnel in the Middle Ages in Europe.

Sephardic and Mizrahi jews don't noticeably outperform their countrymen, and they especially don't do it in Israel.

Sephardic Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity (Marranos) certainly were overrepresented in positions of influence, power and wealth in the Latin world, and later two of the most prominent Anglosphere Jewish politicians of the 19th century (Disraeli and Judah Benjamin) were Sephardic. Sephardim were extremely overrepresented among the affluent middle classes in Thessaloniki, Istanbul and elsewhere before WW1. And Mizrachi Jews were also very overrepresented in powerful positions, both as court advisers and as bankers, retailers, department store magnates, theater owners and so on across Egypt and the rest of Islamic North Africa, and in Persia and the Levant at times. And even before the colonial period were overrepresented among courtiers, bankers, jewelers, merchants and so on.

But again, the baseline gentile host populations have / had lower performance, so this ‘works’ even if Mizrachim average, say, 95, provided those around them are 80 or 85. The Lebanese do extremely well in Central America, but badly in Australia - the difference is a host population at 80 vs a host population at 100.

That's really interesting - I hadn't seen any sources which made the claim that they were overrepresented in those areas but I freely admit to not looking at the situation throughout history. Do you have any good links for more information on that topic? Most of the sources I can find compare Sephardim/Misrahim to Ashkenazim, which really doesn't do them any favours.

In 2003 the US had 202% of the GDP/capita of Israel. In 2022 it was only 140%. And this in a country where less than 1/3 are secular or modern orthodox Ashkenazim, the rest being Mizrachim/Sephardim, Arabs, or work-shy Chareidim. That’s not too unimpressive, and the figure is still substantially higher than most gentile white Northern European countries, without anything like the resource bounty of the US.

Most of said capita are either not Ashkenazi or economically unproductive Haredi.

USA is hardly a pure ethnostate of the most productive demographics. Cut 2 or 3 geographic regions or 2 or 3 ethnicities and it'd be similarly buoyed.

Add a rough neighborhood, minimal natural resources, a national language virtually unused outside its borders... I was only addressing the overstatement of its human capital.

Israel's average IQ is 92, a score that would be roughly on par with the nicer parts of Latin America or most of the Balkans. The US average is 97. Not an enormous difference, but the large white majority(US whites score higher than whites elsewhere in the world IIRC, closer to the east Asian average) brings it up considering Israel has very large lower-IQ demographics in comparison.

Ashkenazim are a minority in Israel and aren’t as GDP-maxing as in the USA.

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