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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Are Indians actually smart? I honestly don’t know. We get higher caste Indians here and heavily filtered from a giant population. If they are then one can probably make an assumption India could replace China. I have some doubts here because India has always been the “next big thing” for perhaps even centuries and it never happens. Sort of feels like a better Africa. They were never the leader or a great power of civilization like China has often been.

I've seen average IQ figures as low as the 70s for India. Of course, there are some smaller ethnicities that are akin to Jews in being oasis of higher IQ for one reason or another, but largely due to consistent endogamy.

The really smart ones are rightly fond of fleeing or have already fled. They know they'll do much better in an economy that doesn't seek to redistribute most of the wealth they create after taxing it away from them.

Trying to make a "national IQ" for a fairly homogeneous population like Han Chinese or ethnic Germans makes sense. You get a pretty even distribution.

But India is made up of thousands of separate castes, divided by millennia of endogamous marriage. That is why even if the India average is low-80s, you will have far more people at the high-end of the distribution than you'd expect from a clean bell curve, precisely because of this heterogeneity.

That makes sense to me, and fits with the observations of the caste makeup of Indians abroad to a degree.

It would seem to me then that india either has higher standard deviations of IQ or have cloistered high IQ populations. A 70-80 high IQ country just isn’t go to throw off the amount of US tech executives that India has accomplished even with massive population. As an American it seems very odd to view India as a low IQ country because of how many Doctors and first-world quality engineers they throw off. As an American it feels like India has Einsteins hiding in subsistence farming. Perhaps the caste system led to this.

I'm not upper caste, but I do live in a very filtered bubble of successful professionals since birth. I do know that my dad was by far the smartest one in his family.

I am, unfortunately, not as well acquainted with HBD arguments pertaining to my home nation as I am to the US (you can see how my priorities lie), but even I grudgingly admit that it's likely that millennia of strict endogamy can produce results, analogous to the Jews in Europe.

If I leave abroad, I'll be contributing to the same impression as you have, but keep in mind you're categorically not seeing all the people who don't have the talent or drive to make it across two oceans.

India still has childhood malnutrition problems.

Some of them exacerbated by ideological reasons- the Hindu opposition to meat eating is likely a contributing factor.

I was under the impression that the upper castes (and the wealthier castes) were more likely to practice strict vegetarianism than the lower castes. Obviously meat is still going to be harder to afford for the poor in lower castes, bit I don't think it would be as much of an issue.

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