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East Asians and South Asians are on opposite ends of the verbal IQ spectrum. For example, South Asians are overrepresented among comedians and in Hollywood, increasingly in journalism and literature too. The higher castes appear to have very high verbal IQ, as @BurdensomeCount suggests.
Speaking as an East Asian - in my experience our verbal abilities as a group are so strikingly poor that I sometimes wonder that people don't generally think that we are kinda dumb. All the more so since verbal intelligence is the most apparent form of intelligence; you generally aren't going to be able to judge someone's math skills in casual conversation. In the workplace, among friends, at school, I find it hard not to notice the general inability of otherwise competent Asians (including myself) to put together coherent, grammatical sentences on the fly like everyone else does. Sometimes one has the pleasure of meeting startlingly articulate people. They are never East Asian. I'm not sure I can name a single very articulate East Asian. Even writers I enjoy, like Dan Wang, turn out to be not great at speaking. On the other hand there are plenty of very articulate black public intellectuals, for instance (and I say that not in a condescending way).
Interesting thought, though I want to defend our East Asian's "verbal abilities" here.
First question, are we talking about East Asians or American East Asians?
If it's American East Asians, I think there are plenty of famous American East Asian comedians (Ronny Chieng, Troy Iwata, Jimmy Yang, Ali Wong) . And yes, I am using "famous comedians" as correlation for "verbal abilities".
If it's East Asians, then maybe more exposure to more East Asian media might show that there can't possibly be a lack of good writing or verbal spars in East Asia. We have Nisio Isin whose entire career spanning novels and manga is built on Japanese wordplay (notice how his pseudonym is a palindrome). Chinese couplets, especially the combative kind (where one writer challenges and another respond) are to me essentially proto-rap battles. But I especially adore the subversive ways Chinese netizens subvert censorship
Second question, are we talking about American humor / verbal abilities in English?
I think we have to take into account that maybe the humor is just different. I was born and grew up in an East Asian country until I'm 18 (albeit at an international school). But after nearly a decade in the US, I can't really enjoy the humor of my home country the same way when I watch their TV anymore. We definitely can't really say that there is lacking in "verbal abilities" when examining historical works or contemporary entertainment industries for countries like China/Japan/Korea. The professionals in those countries are definitely not out of work or love from their audiences (love Stephen Chow).
On the other hand, I do think East Asia's general culture of being deferential means less biting comedy and a general tendency to follow well-worn life paths (doctor/lawyer/engineer) means there are less going into the "chatty" careers (journalism, comedian, writers, youtubers).
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Francis Fukuyama and John Yoo come immediately to mind.
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But (returning to the object-level) a genius verbal IQ is only meritorious if the person who has it also has prosocial genes and cultural values. As a thought experiment, we can imagine that a sociopath with a high verbal IQ can do a lot of damage to a country, and on the other end a person with a lot of empathy and a high verbal IQ can do a lot of good. The latter person is probably doing groundbreaking journalism, or explaining science to the masses, or taking corporations to court pro-bono, or is an incredible psychiatrist or Scott Alexander type. The former people are doing, I don’t know, political propaganda and “thank you for smoking” stuff and purposely not helping his psychoanalytic clients.
In between the extremes of “sociopath” and “the aunt you have who cried when looking at photos of refugees” (to pick a personal example) there’s probably an amount of prosociality which is greater than some quantity of IQ. I have no idea what the breakdown is, but thinking about it a little bit more, the emotional dimension to prosociality probably necessitates guilt. A person who is apt to feel guilt at their actions is more apt to behave prosocially, because guilt comes in regardless of external surveillance, and shame only comes in when there’s a risk of being caught. Although this wouldn’t explain Japan, which is presumably a shame culture, so maybe back to the drawing board…
I don't think you need to go back to the drawing board, I'd say you have nailed the prerequisite prosocial emotion of an honour culture and it necessarily works differently in a shame culture, where shame takes the top spot. It doesn't fully align, but honour cultures tend to privilege internal locus of control, while shame cultures privilege external locus of control.
But consider —
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200114-why-japan-is-so-successful-at-returning-lost-property
The study occurred in 2002, so before the surveillance state. The actions could not be purely motivated from the threat of social judgment. This seems to indicate that the Japanese internalize their shame/honor to such a high degree that it’s intrinsically motivated. But if shame can be so intrinsically motivated, then there are limited practical consequences to a guilt/shame distinction.
Cultural differences are real and meaningful, but in this case I wonder if the difference in honesty looks bigger due to a difference in norms about how to return lost property. Unless I were in a small town, handing a lost wallet in to the police probably wouldn't occur to me, and then it would likely be option two or three.
There are these tiny little police stations everywhere in Japan that have a well known function of being a place to return lost property to.
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I mean, if I didn’t know the person, that’s what I would do- the police should be able to look up the person’s phone number based off of their ID.
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