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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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Is that the result of an insidious Semitic plot? Possibly, or it could just be that they have a higher average IQ than Gentiles.

The former is the reason for many things, collectivism is a very real thing. Grifter extraordinaire Bari Weiss during her previous grift showcased this when she went on JRE, talked about racism and then sounded like a stormfront user but with the word isreal instead of Europe. This is a good post by Academic Agent. The HBD claim here is the correct one political correctness-wise.

I have criticised people in the past for low iq anti semitism, the kind Dan Bilzerian indulges in, pointing out collectivist sentiment is not a call for ill behavior towards them, its just something that most never wish to even consider as a real possibility. This is the de facto behavior in India, I do not expect for others to be markedly different. Does not help at all that boomercon positions in the US are far more philo semitic than what you expect.

This is a good post by Academic Agent.

95% of this article is a ridiculous combination of gish gallop and ‘this doesn’t SEEM to make sense, RIGHT’ begging the question, dismissal of proxies out of hand even though the validation of g as central to human performance is pretty much entirely because it acts as a proxy for countless things etc.

The evidence for higher ashkenazi IQ is overwhelming because of extreme Jewish outperformance even in societies and at times when every tribe was highly clannish. Countless groups in America and elsewhere are still very clannish and yet don’t perform to the same level.

I simply can't fathom the vast differences in their performance agaisnt Indian or Asian Americans who not only are nearly the same size or higher but likely have the same median iq if not more. These are self selected stem immigrants who are some of the highest earners, even the average h1b who isn't a smart person is probably at least 115 if not more.

I linked the article no to state that they aren't smart but it's the collective sentiment that exists alongside it which gets ignored or at best given lip service to. They are smart and have a good amount of group biased which is a healthy thing that modern society despises, white nationalists even more so.

Because the richest, smartest secular Ashkenazim have had intermarriage rates exceeding 70% since the 1990s and exceeding 50% since the 1970s in all likelihood. As a group they/we are declining in size by significant amounts each year.

I would like to apologise if my comments seemed insensitive, the decline thing was something I saw for the first time on slatestarcodex, due to marrying out, you do eventually lose out on more members. Indian castes dealt with it by banishment to preserve cushions of better people from a paltry median.

How is the group difference like within other tribes of hasidic people like the super otrthodox ones? I know of ashkenazis but have been told there are other groups which are not as well represented due to ashkenazis making up the bulk of american jewish populace.

I’m not offended haha, it’s an interesting topic. The Chareidim are almost entirely Ashkenazi, there are some conservative, arguably ashkenazi Sephardic/Mizrachi populations, some of which have adopted some Chareidi customs, but largely in Israel. Estimates of Sephardic IQ are difficult to come by.

lol thank god. I do not want to sound like a guy who starts fights since twitter is there for that. I have with a mixed group of jews irl but interacted with mostly ashkenazis online since the online people I meet are not in Pai partying though the former was a far more fun experience.

Oh, Jews definitely have much higher levels of in-group bias than most Gentile whites (and, along similar lines, Evangelical Christians’ positive views of Jews are definitely not reciprocated), but it seems to me that Jewish success in America has less to do with nepotism than with higher IQ. White Baptists have nearly the same level of in-group bias as Jews do, yet they don’t have the same level of success despite having had a significant head start in this country. It seems to me that differences in IQ likely explain the bulk of those disparate outcomes.

Likewise, some blacks definitely experience some racial discrimination, but that doesn’t mean racism is the primary reason they have worse life outcomes on average.

You get cliques of gentiles that are nearly as successful. They’re just smaller.

This is a good post by Academic Agent.

I did a ctrl-f for "Nobel" in that article and found the following segment

On the Nobel Prize all I will say is that elite theory can serve us well once more: Nobel Prizes are not a neutral institution; they are not selected in an open manner, but tightly controlled through a committee. They demonstrate nothing beyond what power selects. The claim that prizes from this body are an objective measure of anything, therefore, must be discarded. Nothing else needs to be said.

I'm pretty certain this is the sort of argument that's only persuasive to people who really don't want to believe that Ashkenazis have a higher IQ.

I found this point wierd too, the case in general does make sense though. A difference of half a standard deviation can't explain collectivism, which is what I am arguing agaisnt here. Indian Americans or even Asian Americans have a sizeable population, probably higher iq than average, their representation in various prizes, exec postions, number of public intellectuals etc is far lower than Jewish Americans. Figures estimate Indians to be 4.8 million and Jewish to be 7 million.

So all Asians put together somehow seem to not have the same pull at all, this isn't even mentioning the political side of things or aspects influencing things. Academic Agent is half Welsh and Half Persian, so that makes him a little biased

For the time being, this can at least somewhat plausibly be explained by cultural fit. Most Jews have been living in the US for generations, while most Asians are first- or second-generation. Asians also skew towards quantitative ability, while Jews skew verbal, which is more important for success in things like politics.

Thirty years down the road, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot more Asian representation outside of STEM. Hopefully they're better than Ro Khanna, Kshama Sawant, and Pramila Jayapal.

If Indian representation in the US is the people you named then I would prefer them not being represented at all. The leftwards lean they have makes sense to me since I know leftism will only get worse with time yet the Indians in the US are the ones who will suffer due to it.

The name alone makes me mad, Ro, just use your first name pal, it is not as hard to pronounce as mine.

Might have to wait for third-gen. A lot of second-gens seem to spend their whole lives seething with resentment over white kids making fun of their lunches in elementary school.

From a rough look at the numbers it seems that if we group Japanese, Chinese and Indian Americans together, they're about twice as numerous as Ashkenazis. Assuming the Ashkenazis have an average IQ 4-5 points higher than that of the "Asian" distribution, it's not particularly unlikely they'd outnumber the Asians on the extreme edges of the distribution. Jews have also lived in America in large numbers longer than the above groups; this means family wealth has accumulated (although the advantage this gives to modern-day Jews is just standard upper-class privilege, nothing to do with collectivism).

Incidentally, I don't doubt that there could be non-IQ factors that contribute to the success of Jewish Americans. I'm skeptical of the collectivism/group evolutionary strategy argument, but that's another discussion. The people who bring these things up though almost universally deny any Jewish IQ edge (and/or tend to be holocaust deniers) which tends to make me treat their arguments with skepticism.

Assuming the Ashkenazis have an average IQ 4-5 points higher than that of the "Asian" distribution

I doubt that given test scores which are a good measure of G. Asians and Indians were selected for maximising these test scores, you have far more Asians and Indians in the highest percentiles of test scores. The collectivism only works because they are smart to begin with, but the collectivism makes the differences so dramatic in these things. I appreciate ingroup biases since that is natural human behaviour. If Jews are half a standard deviation smarter than white gentiles, then how do Asians and Indians do so much better than both in various tests?

I am not an asian supremacist, tails being fat is a real thing especially given how Asians likely have thinner ones compared to other people in the conversation.

This is like @self_made_human’s original post and earlier comment. The Indians who do so well are selected as the smartest people in a 90 average population. Their performance is going to be completely different to a population where the average is 112. For example, they might be overrepresented in some things and not in others. A 130 Indian might just seem more ‘weird’ than a 130 Ashkenazi.

I know smart Indians like to imagine they’re all from highly endogamous castes that preserved their unique intelligence through the millennia, but as you yourself have argued this is mostly cope.

Ok this is a fair point, I'm a little hesitant with matters pertaining to group differences because I'm not as well versed with stats as I should be. My main aim isn't a total denial of ashkenazis being a smart group, I have some skepticism which may be wrong.

The left and right in the mainstream simply use the word culture to avoid stating Ingroup bias or being smart whereas the truth is a combination of both which magnify results. This is the correct thing to do by all accounts, the purpose of an Ingroup is to help its people