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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4046 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

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Compared to neighboring mongolia or siberia, IQ is much higher while winters are much milder.

IQ is very helpful when a group of farmers needs to anually plan ahead to have enough food to survive the winter. They can weigh the grain and develop a plan for food shortages ahead of time (eg try to stock up on salt fish, dig up any edible plant roots, flee south). Invaders probably aren't going to come in and harvest all of your grain. Typically it's possible to hide the harvest for the winter if it's at risk.

There's usually a certain coldness in those societies -- if your neighbors keep starving due to their own mistakes it's tempting to just let them die instead of risking your family to save them.

Mongolia's history is much more pastoral. There's a lot of investment in each animal. Invaders stealing animals is common. So survival is more random. Saving your dumb cousin is worthwhile if he's willing to fight to the death to save your animals.

Generally in sub-saharn Africa planning is difficult because the threats are more random. Food is more available in the winter / dry season. The big risks are random events -- invasion, disease, megafauna eating your crops, predators eating your people. If you have a food shortage it's probably local so trading or invading your neighbors are options.

Obviously Africa is a big place and there are exceptions to the usual threats, eg Ukara Island. I'm not aware of any IQ surveys that refect that.

In extremely cold places different survival strategies emerge. The Inuit / Eskimos are pure hunters for the winter and their society focusses heavily on conformity since sharing kills is crucial.

There's also the cube square law. Larger heads get overheated more easily in hot climates.

Siberians, Mongolians and Inuits can be handwaved away by saying nomadic pastoralism cancels out the benefits of living in a cold climate.

I quibble a bit with the "much higher" here. The starting point for Northeast Asians was already quite high.

It's quite interesting that Yakuts have similar IQ scores to Ethnic Russians- most indigenous groups aren't. And it does appear that badly developed and terrible countries in the general vicinity have oddly high IQs compared to similar countries. That significantly changes my priors on the cold winters hypothesis.

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