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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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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.

I think that there's an element of both of these in play to be honest. The Ashkenazim verbal IQ advantage is real(and I believe it is also tied to the same alleles that are responsible for so many of the genetic disorders they encounter) but not sufficient to explain their overrepresentation in certain fields (you can just go and do the maths on that if you want) - but ethnic nepotism in combination with the IQ advantage explains it perfectly. I don't think you need to be an antisemite to point out that jewish identity is fairly strong, and it isn't like that ethnic nepotism is hidden or obscured in any way. You can just go look at various institutions and bodies set up by the jewish community to support their own, it isn't a secret at all.

I think IQ + some favoritism (not not as much as sometimes assumed) + good environment. Jewish households may do a better job fostering talent compared to gentile ones.

Jewish households may do a better job fostering talent compared to gentile ones.

A factor that itself is heritable. Genetic heritability of traits can be more than 100% due to things like that.

As I understand it, heritability can only be greater than 100% if you have negative gene-environment correlation, i.e. if the people with higher polygenic scores tend to raise their children in environments less conducive to increasing intelligence.

Hypothetically you could have infinite heritability if environment perfectly cancelled out genes, resulting in everyone having equal intelligence despite variation in genetic potential.