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Ashkenazim seem pretty similar, group IQ-wise, to Japanese. Are they similarly overrepresented among powerful positions, or moreso?
According to Nisbett, who probably isn't popular here, yes. He argues that Jewish accomplishment (measured by Nobel Prize winners, Ivy Leaguers, Supreme Court clerks, and professors at top colleges) outstrips even an average IQ of 115. He, of course, favors a cultural explanation, referring to the differences between Italian/English and Arab/European accomplishment during different centuries, but does not deny that Ashkenazim seem to be 7-15 IQ points higher than white gentiles.
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112 is the upper estimate
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Out of curiosity, where are you getting your figures? Google and DDG are not especially friendly to these queries anymore.
Yeah I tried to double check it because I thought I remembered Asian-Americans had higher average IQ's than Asian-Asians(like in the 110 range, which is more roughly comparable to the Ashkenazi 112 than 104), but google won't return anything. I will accept that the Ashkenazi have a group IQ advantage over Japanese or Chinese Americans in the absence of evidence. The only other group I can think of as having a group IQ similar to the Ashkenazi is Tamil Brahmins, and they're similarly overrepresented among scientific achievement(I feel safe in saying that at least literary/cultural advantage to Jews over Tamils is probably due to circumstances/culture).
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Japan's National IQ is about 105; European jews are 115. Additionally, there are five times as many jews as japanese in the US, and European jews had a dramatically lower cultural and linquistic hurdle to clear on immigrating.
I'd say those factors can plausibly explain the gap.
European jews don't have an IQ of 115. At best you have an upper bound estimate at around 109. Lower bound being 104.
They can cite higher numbers if they want, just like I can cite numbers that say the average IQ of a fieldworker in China is 122. That doesn't mean its very smart to do so. Considering that looking at a small sample of jewish children from high achieving families might skew the data. Similarly to how only looking at test takers from elite universities in Beijing might.
Lynn looked at vocabulary scores of jews living in the US as a proxy for IQ and saw that in that category they had an advantage that ultimately translates to 7 points. Considering that jews, in every study I've seen, are carried by their verbal score, but lag behind in other scores, such as spatial memory, I'd consider 104 to be a reasonable lower estimate, and considering I could be wrong somewhere, a 109 is a reasonable upper estimate.
I don't know why you think Lynn is such a bad researcher. He generated a lot of controversy with his rough estimates for IQ for areas that did not have much data. But it's not like he didn't know that these were rough estimates. The controversy was, as far as I could tell, carried nigh entirely by hysterics from people who did not belong at the table of psychometric research in the first place.
If most HBD figures cited an inflated Chinese IQ score they would be wrong as well. I don't understand this authority worship here. Looking at studies on jewish IQ in the US, most focus on children and/or unrepresentative samples. I see no reason to look at the aggregate of bad studies over a single decent one regardless of what 'leading figures' have to say. If this is what they say I don't see a reason to consider them leading on the topic. Nor do I consider the disagreement between us to be on an equal level.
I don't understand your last paragraph. I'm not saying that it's a myth that jews are overrepresented where they are. I just hazard a guess to say that they are where they are, on top of everything you laid out, because of heavily expressed ingroup bias. Or, for a lack of a better term, nepotism. And I am sure that this is an inherited trait like all psychological traits are.
It's obviously a factor that you left out of your previous comment. Just getting your foot in academia is half the battle for most of the novel scientific advances. Most of which happen as a result of larger teams with networking that relies entirely on the institution. Considering the obscene overrepresentation of jews in all levels of academia I can't see how you could argue to the contrary. Especially considering the actual IQ of jews. The amount of exclusion going on in those institutions at the cost of gentiles is, again, obscene and is in no way justified by any metric. Or maybe it is, we'd have to see what the jewish thought and policy leaders have to say on that question. Hopefully they have some justification outside of racial hatred. Though I am so far yet to see it.
I guess we have a difference in defining performance. As far as I understand the history of jews as something other than wandering gypsies is that of slave merchants and usurers. I wouldn't call it a success to be run out of every other place in Europe and then managing to outcompete Turks in swindling their own peasants only to lose it all to the Greeks. But in any case I don't understand the relevance of this. Neither Turks nor Ukrainian peasants are, as far as I can tell, a relevant comparison to anything.
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