After WWII, South Korea experienced an IQ gain estimated at 7.7 points per decade between 1970 and 1990, along with a 3 SD increase in height over 40 years, due to improvements in nutrition. North Korea is likely to be at the starting line in this regard.
EDIT: North Koreans are now 3-8 cm shorter than South Koreans, so the IQ difference is probably correlated.
I don't think anyone doubted that environment matters (your genes may be the best in the world, but extreme malnourishment will destroy them). The question is whether there are population-level genetic IQ differences on top.
Wonderful post. I was wondering if this was prompted by Nathan Cofnas's claim that to beat woke we need to convince the elites that environmentalism is wrong and hereditarianism is right.
I'm pretty sure it IS a combination of both, as are both Noah and Nathan. But as I understand it, environmentalism is the belief that ALL differences in outcome are caused by environment whereas hereditarians believe only that genes contribute some non-trivial amount to those differences.
Their IQ is either going to be the same or lower but with a lower frequency of creative and individualistic cognitive phenotypes, lower openness. NK went through a signification social selection event that punishes the above phenotypes and since these temperaments are the most correlated to intellect and by instantiation, IQ then they almost certainly have a lower IQ genotypically without considering environmental IQ suppression which is also certainly worse
The reasons why Cambodians are dumber than their counterparts is at least in part due to the selective extermination of their smart fraction elite human capital committed by Pol Pot
That one always upsets me — such a disgusting purge of brilliant minds that could’ve contributed so much more than their authoritarian overlords and the cowards that stood by and watched their countrymen be killed for their intellect.
No, it is not. Even though Pol Pot killed a lot of people, it hardly affected the IQ in Cambodia. The correlation between IQ and occupation is not high enough for that to happen. Flynn calculated the effect of Pol Pots killings in his book Intelligence and Human Progress (2013, pp. 42-44):
"How much did Pol Pot do to lower the mean IQ of the Cambodian people? … This question can be settled by a few calculations. Pol Pot killed somewhere between 1.7 and 2.5 million people. I will put this at 2.1 million or 26% of Cambodia’s 8 million people (Kiernan, 2002). If he had done it using IQ tests, eliminating the top 26% would have lowered the IQ of the remaining parents by 6.4 IQ points and a good portion of this deficit would have been handed down to their children. However, as we have seen, he in fact used occupation as his criterion.
We do not know the correlation between the occupational status of the parent and the IQ of their (no longer to be born) children, but in a semirural society it would be below that of the United States. At that time in the United States, it was 0.300 (Flynn, 2000b). If you eliminated the top 26% of the US population by occupation, the mean IQ of their children would drop by only 1.92 points. Moreover, Pol Pot did not really use a pure criterion of occupational status. For example, a lot of his henchmen doing the killing were intellectuals (Pol Pot attended the Sorbonne, although he did flunk all of his courses). When he tried to eliminate everyone who lived in the capital city of Phnom Penh, this included many in humble occupations. The genetic capital of the Cambodian people was lowered by not much more than an IQ point. The people were hardly stripped of intellectual talent."
There are some points worth adding to this article. In particular, it's likely that North Korea has very different genetics than South Korea. Likewise, there's probably too many variables between the two countries to prove that their differences are primarily environmental rather than genetic:
1. Contrary to what is written in the article, North and South Korea actually have a long history of being culturally and politically divided, which may have affected the genetics between the two populations (See: [Northern Region of Korea](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8622734-the-northern-region-of-korea) by Sun Joo Kim).
2. There were a few years before the 1950-53 Korean War when the educated classes massively fled to the South, which may have affected the IQ differences.
3. Communist policies probably took a greater toll on the smarter factions of North Korea's population, compared to the less intelligent factions.
4. We could also look at how well or badly do North Koreans do in South Korea or China, depending on their occupation back in North Korea. Apparently, such North Korean refugees are more educated than the average North Korea citizen, but they still struggle a lot to compete in SK society. Moreover, their children have high rates of dropping out of school: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Koreans_in_South_Korea.
With these facts in mind, comparing the IQs of North Korea versus South Korea is not a perfect natural experiment for *only* observing how environments affect IQ, while controlling for genetics.
[SebJenSeb also has a post suggests that the actual IQ difference between North and South Korea is ~16 points, rather than 3-4 points or 7-10 points](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/most-accurate-national-iqs-possible). I don't claim to have good estimates for the IQ of North Korea, but I'm skeptical of all the estimates since they vary so differently from each other.
And as an aside, GDP per capita and most other economic metrics for measuring economies are fallacious and they don't really say anything. I completely agree that North Korea is a poor country that has failed to reach its full potential, but I don't need to know the GDP per capita to figure that out, so those numbers actually don't say very much.
Nevertheless, I think this article could make a stronger case for its thesis if it compares the environmental differences between North and South Korea to the environmental differences between European-Americans and African-Americans. There is no way the environmental differences for African-Americans versus European-Americans could possibly be greater than that between North and South Korea. Given the following information:
- African-Americans have an average IQ of 85,
- European-Americans have an average IQ of 100,
- The environmental differences between North Korea and South Korea were only large enough to cause an difference of just 3 points, and
- The environmental differences between African-Americans versus European-Americans are significantly less than those of North Korea and South Korea,
The environmental differences between European-Americans and African-Americans could only account a difference of 1-2 IQ points, at most. The other 13-14 IQ points would have to be caused by differences in genetics.
I think this article is decent, but I think it can be improved. Hopefully Aporia will agree that these points are worth thinking about.
1) A lovely piece of specious writing which is generates its own contradiction almost automatically, because if subpopulations in other countries make them brilliant…
Just commutate a few words, and launch with a similar fact-free conjecture as a proof point.
“On the other hand, for North Korea, it’s likely their accomplishments come disproportionately from subpopulations.” Those subpopulations being the well-nurtured syncophant/engineer/political class.
I doubt that their ICBM engineers are those who are eating boiled cardboard and allowing their children to die of exposure in winter months. Just a hunch.
What a mad chain of convoluted logic which arrives at an its own simple contradiction.
However:
2) The usual specious argument goes “if they’re so smart why are they so poor, and why haven’t they figured out how to topple the regime of the Hermit Kingdom.”
Well, that’s so 19th century isn’t it. The condition of poverty is its own explanation.
And a 3rd proposition:
3) Perhaps North Korea is a puppet of China and the Chinese are the origin of a missile program in a staggeringly impoverished land, providing a ludicrous yet plausible denial of origin, to act as a deterrent to US hegemony in a region, which involves multiple levels of involvement in populations.
“ …you’d expect North Korea to have a relatively high IQ – perhaps not quite as high as South Korea, but still pretty high. “
No I would not. Here’s why—nutrition in the early formative years. My meager understanding of NK from those who’ve fled is one of bare subsistence levels of food for the population at large. That’s not conducive to brain development. Even at a 80% genetic and 20% environment split, I could/would expect to see a difference from NK to SK of some level of IQ. This seems to be supported in the follow up commentary, but initially I’d have expected such automatically and indeed been surprise if any of the later analysis—guesstimating—showed equality.
"On the other hand, Pakistan and Iran are much larger and more ethnically diverse than North Korea, and it’s likely their accomplishments come disproportionately from the smarter subpopulations. In other words, the variance of cognitive ability is presumably greater, and there’s an absolutely larger number of people at any given level of cognitive ability. So in order for North Korea to have produced similar numbers of people with exceptional cognitive ability, its mean must be somewhat higher. A figure in the low 90s seems like the minimum that is consistent with the country’s accomplishments."
Agreed. However, one must understand that in Western civilization, a very small select group of highly intelligent people are responsible for the tremendous technological advancements of the last five hundred years.
"More than anything else, what North Korea illustrates is the woeful inefficiency of autarchic communism."
Exactly. A relatively high level of individualism is necessary for a thriving civilization.
I find it fascinating how North Korea's income and IQ were reconstructed from the available information. Maybe one day we will have the facts and can gauge which method for doing this is the most reliable. One way to test them would be to run the same calculations with the same information on countries where the income and IQ are known, and see how close they come.
Is DPRK as poor as many ‘conservatjves’ allege? Is South Korea a better society with its high stress and sub-replacement level fertility rate and corruption by American values? We’ll see which country remains Korean 50 years from now.
With the exception of their attitudes towards sex and gender, this is complete bullshit that not even Sorhab is fool enough to believe. The CCP probably just has video footage of him 69'ing a tranny hooker. Their more vain, more materialistic, more bureaucratized, more anti-family, and in general worse along every trajectory natcons claim to care about:
Even their sex and gender attitudes are hardly healthier than our own. They're expected to be faithless to their wives and girlfriends the moment they have the money for it, and often before if they have a generous boss they're looking to impress.
Sure. How many migrants have they took in? How do they treat feminists? Liberal NGOs? Let me know, maybe one of these times you'll actually answer a question being asked instead of evading it.
"Even their sex and gender attitudes are hardly healthier than our own"
A good portion of 'merican populace can't even tell you what sex, gender, a man, or a woman is, so what in the world are you even talking about?
Also fyi, but that's a rag ran by neo-con (NRO/Foreign Affairs/Foreign Policy). If it was in print, I wouldn't even wipe my ass with it. He's been parroting anti-Chinese "muh Uighurs" propaganda for years.
You being a bootlicking retard isn't my fault. China is a miserable commie shithole of a country that even its defenders don't think is better, or you would've long ago moved there given their lower cost of living alone. You know better just from looking at their air, let alone whiffing it.
Comparing China to the US is unfair. Over the past 30 years, the Chinese government raised hundreds of millions of people from poverty to the middle class. That doesn't mean we should emulate them or that anyone who thinks that's impressive should immediately move there. But parroting the knee-jerk GOP talking point of "Chicoms are bad hurr durr" shows that you're either ignorant or brainwashed.
Yeah, I value my time & detest neo-cons. Your repeated avoidance of even basic questions, as if you're a character in some Mission Impossible movie, demonstrates the futility of conversation with people like you.
The trail of bodies liberal & neo-con imperialists have left behind them speaks for itself.
Implying Norks live free of stress relative to their southern neighbors?
Why don't you head for a visit to see? And don't forget to bring back a propaganda poster on your way out. I'm sure they won't mind. Especially if you tell them how we're all brothers in the Kingdom of Christ.
You mention South Africa as the only African country with a missile program, implying of course that this is due to the higher IQ of the substantial white population there. But you then suddenly ignore the fact that South Africa has not done very well at the math Olympiads, despite the presence of that same white population, which presents a more complicated picture to grapple with before rushing to your more simplistic non sequiturs. This (and the circular arguments in this article) is typical of the reasoning process I always see in modern Hereditarians.
Nothing is monocausal. A population with a high average IQ is necessary to do well in the IMO or have a missile programme, but not sufficient.
Similar to Soviet interest in chess, I'd guess North Korea put a lot of effort into the IMO for the sake of their international reputation - ensuring all their best students compete, training them, etc. They probably care about it a lot more than South Africa.
Maybe so. But this makes this method of argument *circular.* Only a person who already agrees with the predetermined conclusion can follow the "logic."
The method works by picking and choosing what achievements you will accept as only possible for highly intelligent societies -- by making sure you choose only those that fit your desired pattern. For example, you say chess works for this (Soviet Union). But if someone says Scrabble works too (Nigeria), you will reject it only because it does not confirm that racial hypothesis. Hence, circular method. There is more documented (published) evidence that Scrabble championship takes extremely high IQ than there is for chess championship (although it does too), so such rejection can only be because it contradicts desired/predetermined conclusion.
In fact, Richard Lynn (himself) suggested women can't become Scrabble champions (or chess champions) because of a lower intelligence compared to men. But could not answer why Africans can do it, despite supposedly even lower intelligence:
Scrabble isn't nearly as g-loaded as the Math Olympiad. You can teach a child how to play Scrabble. Most people can't even understand how to get the answers to an average Math Olympiad problem when you tell it to them step by step. Look at this shit:
Also, just because Nigeria has an average IQ of 68 doesn't mean there are no people smart enough to compete in games of intellect. There are still several hundred-thousand +4sd and several thousand +5sd Nigerians, which is more than enough to build a team of top scrabblers.
I used Soviet domination of chess as an example where the key variable wasn't intelligence, but training/culture. Chess is (perhaps surprisingly) not particularly g-loaded, and neither is Scrabble.
Whether or not Scrabble (specifically expert level Scrabble) is g-loaded is not a matter of just random opinion. As I said, this is an area of published research, cited both by Lynn and the author of the article I linked to. If you have found a mistake in those papers from the cited experts, you can explain it rather than just dismissing it.
They're still both g-loaded, as are all intellectual activities, but they're not nearly as so as the Math Olympiad, which is so g-loaded most people can't even understand the questions, let alone attempt an answer.
Nothing of the sort. Whites have a lower average IQ than yellows, and there are a lot more yellow Koreans than white South Africans. There's also some evidence that general intelligence in Eastasians leans more heavily towards spatial reasoning than linguistics relative to Europeans:
Also, Norks cheat. They've probably only been caught twice, but it takes considerable g-loading to cheat in a way that lets you get away with fooling people who are nerdy enough to organize competitive mathematics. Otherwise, every idiot would do it.
Extrapolating the mean from high achievements in a few select fields presumes that these high achievers are the result of a random distribution of talent. However this is most certainly not the case with arms manufacturing: there is no doubt that the North Korean regime specifically directs its best talent to advanced arms development. It is also highly likely that it does the same with the maths olympics, for propaganda purposes. Comparison with sub-Saharan Africa would only be fair if there were a similar regime with similar incentives there. However there isn't.
All 'information' about North Korea is subjective. However, since I believe intelligence is vastly more influenced by nature rather than nurture, IQ is very close.
Many countries with high average IQ today, not too long ago, had living conditions similar to modern North Korea. North Koreas conditions are better explained by their geopolitical and political situation than by their phenotypic maximum IQ.
No they aren't. There's countries in Africa just as oppressive as North Korea, such as Eritrea, where the entire population has been pressganged into slave labor by the state, and it hasn't won them medals in the IMO, nor built them ICBMs. It did for North Korea. Because of the g factor.
Not sure what you mean. South Koreas living conditions were similar to North Korea not that long ago. North Korean phenotypic maximum IQ is probably not that different from South Korea.
South Korea was poorer than North Korea within living memory. But since they're actually prosperous, they have several dozen more medals in every category than the Norks, including qlmost six-dozen more golds:
And the only reason they don't have nukes is because of our extensive military presence in the country. Which is probably a mistake for them, but it's the way things are.
Yes but is this meant to be a counter argument to my original point? I'm saying high average IQ in a country doesnt necessarily equate to high living standards. There are ways to mess it up even with a decent phenotypic IQ. North Korea probably doesnt have a very low phenotypic maximum IQ but has low living standards due to other reasons.
I don't disagree with that point at all. North Korea proves property rights are more important to a nation's wellbeing than average IQ, and they're hardly the only example.
After WWII, South Korea experienced an IQ gain estimated at 7.7 points per decade between 1970 and 1990, along with a 3 SD increase in height over 40 years, due to improvements in nutrition. North Korea is likely to be at the starting line in this regard.
EDIT: North Koreans are now 3-8 cm shorter than South Koreans, so the IQ difference is probably correlated.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886911001437
That's a good point. Perhaps high 80s is more realistic for North Korea's measured IQ.
South Korea was poorer than the North for some time.
I don't think anyone doubted that environment matters (your genes may be the best in the world, but extreme malnourishment will destroy them). The question is whether there are population-level genetic IQ differences on top.
Wonderful post. I was wondering if this was prompted by Nathan Cofnas's claim that to beat woke we need to convince the elites that environmentalism is wrong and hereditarianism is right.
What if it's a combination of both?
I'm pretty sure it IS a combination of both, as are both Noah and Nathan. But as I understand it, environmentalism is the belief that ALL differences in outcome are caused by environment whereas hereditarians believe only that genes contribute some non-trivial amount to those differences.
Commented on this 12 years ago: https://akarlin.com/north-korea-poster-child-for-hbd-theory/
Their IQ is either going to be the same or lower but with a lower frequency of creative and individualistic cognitive phenotypes, lower openness. NK went through a signification social selection event that punishes the above phenotypes and since these temperaments are the most correlated to intellect and by instantiation, IQ then they almost certainly have a lower IQ genotypically without considering environmental IQ suppression which is also certainly worse
The reasons why Cambodians are dumber than their counterparts is at least in part due to the selective extermination of their smart fraction elite human capital committed by Pol Pot
That one always upsets me — such a disgusting purge of brilliant minds that could’ve contributed so much more than their authoritarian overlords and the cowards that stood by and watched their countrymen be killed for their intellect.
No, it is not. Even though Pol Pot killed a lot of people, it hardly affected the IQ in Cambodia. The correlation between IQ and occupation is not high enough for that to happen. Flynn calculated the effect of Pol Pots killings in his book Intelligence and Human Progress (2013, pp. 42-44):
"How much did Pol Pot do to lower the mean IQ of the Cambodian people? … This question can be settled by a few calculations. Pol Pot killed somewhere between 1.7 and 2.5 million people. I will put this at 2.1 million or 26% of Cambodia’s 8 million people (Kiernan, 2002). If he had done it using IQ tests, eliminating the top 26% would have lowered the IQ of the remaining parents by 6.4 IQ points and a good portion of this deficit would have been handed down to their children. However, as we have seen, he in fact used occupation as his criterion.
We do not know the correlation between the occupational status of the parent and the IQ of their (no longer to be born) children, but in a semirural society it would be below that of the United States. At that time in the United States, it was 0.300 (Flynn, 2000b). If you eliminated the top 26% of the US population by occupation, the mean IQ of their children would drop by only 1.92 points. Moreover, Pol Pot did not really use a pure criterion of occupational status. For example, a lot of his henchmen doing the killing were intellectuals (Pol Pot attended the Sorbonne, although he did flunk all of his courses). When he tried to eliminate everyone who lived in the capital city of Phnom Penh, this included many in humble occupations. The genetic capital of the Cambodian people was lowered by not much more than an IQ point. The people were hardly stripped of intellectual talent."
There are some points worth adding to this article. In particular, it's likely that North Korea has very different genetics than South Korea. Likewise, there's probably too many variables between the two countries to prove that their differences are primarily environmental rather than genetic:
1. Contrary to what is written in the article, North and South Korea actually have a long history of being culturally and politically divided, which may have affected the genetics between the two populations (See: [Northern Region of Korea](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8622734-the-northern-region-of-korea) by Sun Joo Kim).
2. There were a few years before the 1950-53 Korean War when the educated classes massively fled to the South, which may have affected the IQ differences.
3. Communist policies probably took a greater toll on the smarter factions of North Korea's population, compared to the less intelligent factions.
4. We could also look at how well or badly do North Koreans do in South Korea or China, depending on their occupation back in North Korea. Apparently, such North Korean refugees are more educated than the average North Korea citizen, but they still struggle a lot to compete in SK society. Moreover, their children have high rates of dropping out of school: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Koreans_in_South_Korea.
With these facts in mind, comparing the IQs of North Korea versus South Korea is not a perfect natural experiment for *only* observing how environments affect IQ, while controlling for genetics.
[SebJenSeb also has a post suggests that the actual IQ difference between North and South Korea is ~16 points, rather than 3-4 points or 7-10 points](https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/most-accurate-national-iqs-possible). I don't claim to have good estimates for the IQ of North Korea, but I'm skeptical of all the estimates since they vary so differently from each other.
And as an aside, GDP per capita and most other economic metrics for measuring economies are fallacious and they don't really say anything. I completely agree that North Korea is a poor country that has failed to reach its full potential, but I don't need to know the GDP per capita to figure that out, so those numbers actually don't say very much.
Nevertheless, I think this article could make a stronger case for its thesis if it compares the environmental differences between North and South Korea to the environmental differences between European-Americans and African-Americans. There is no way the environmental differences for African-Americans versus European-Americans could possibly be greater than that between North and South Korea. Given the following information:
- African-Americans have an average IQ of 85,
- European-Americans have an average IQ of 100,
- The environmental differences between North Korea and South Korea were only large enough to cause an difference of just 3 points, and
- The environmental differences between African-Americans versus European-Americans are significantly less than those of North Korea and South Korea,
The environmental differences between European-Americans and African-Americans could only account a difference of 1-2 IQ points, at most. The other 13-14 IQ points would have to be caused by differences in genetics.
I think this article is decent, but I think it can be improved. Hopefully Aporia will agree that these points are worth thinking about.
"- African-Americans have an average IQ of 85,"
One must remember that most African Americans have an admixture of European DNA.
I know that, but it's not relevant to what I wrote to what I wrote in the comment.
The Race FAQs has a section that talks about this more, if you're interested: https://zerocontradictions.net/FAQs/race-FAQs#black-white-IQ-gap
And a higher per-capita GDP than anywhere in Africa by at minimum double, and an order of magnitude more generally.
1) A lovely piece of specious writing which is generates its own contradiction almost automatically, because if subpopulations in other countries make them brilliant…
Just commutate a few words, and launch with a similar fact-free conjecture as a proof point.
“On the other hand, for North Korea, it’s likely their accomplishments come disproportionately from subpopulations.” Those subpopulations being the well-nurtured syncophant/engineer/political class.
I doubt that their ICBM engineers are those who are eating boiled cardboard and allowing their children to die of exposure in winter months. Just a hunch.
What a mad chain of convoluted logic which arrives at an its own simple contradiction.
However:
2) The usual specious argument goes “if they’re so smart why are they so poor, and why haven’t they figured out how to topple the regime of the Hermit Kingdom.”
Well, that’s so 19th century isn’t it. The condition of poverty is its own explanation.
And a 3rd proposition:
3) Perhaps North Korea is a puppet of China and the Chinese are the origin of a missile program in a staggeringly impoverished land, providing a ludicrous yet plausible denial of origin, to act as a deterrent to US hegemony in a region, which involves multiple levels of involvement in populations.
I’d be totally shocked! What a crazy explanation!
But entertaining logic chain.
“ …you’d expect North Korea to have a relatively high IQ – perhaps not quite as high as South Korea, but still pretty high. “
No I would not. Here’s why—nutrition in the early formative years. My meager understanding of NK from those who’ve fled is one of bare subsistence levels of food for the population at large. That’s not conducive to brain development. Even at a 80% genetic and 20% environment split, I could/would expect to see a difference from NK to SK of some level of IQ. This seems to be supported in the follow up commentary, but initially I’d have expected such automatically and indeed been surprise if any of the later analysis—guesstimating—showed equality.
Heritability estimates are contextual. So its not that 80% of iq is always genetic and the rest environmental.
And that changes my comment how?
"On the other hand, Pakistan and Iran are much larger and more ethnically diverse than North Korea, and it’s likely their accomplishments come disproportionately from the smarter subpopulations. In other words, the variance of cognitive ability is presumably greater, and there’s an absolutely larger number of people at any given level of cognitive ability. So in order for North Korea to have produced similar numbers of people with exceptional cognitive ability, its mean must be somewhat higher. A figure in the low 90s seems like the minimum that is consistent with the country’s accomplishments."
Agreed. However, one must understand that in Western civilization, a very small select group of highly intelligent people are responsible for the tremendous technological advancements of the last five hundred years.
"More than anything else, what North Korea illustrates is the woeful inefficiency of autarchic communism."
Exactly. A relatively high level of individualism is necessary for a thriving civilization.
I find it fascinating how North Korea's income and IQ were reconstructed from the available information. Maybe one day we will have the facts and can gauge which method for doing this is the most reliable. One way to test them would be to run the same calculations with the same information on countries where the income and IQ are known, and see how close they come.
Is DPRK as poor as many ‘conservatjves’ allege? Is South Korea a better society with its high stress and sub-replacement level fertility rate and corruption by American values? We’ll see which country remains Korean 50 years from now.
Yes, yes, and both.
Not really, but in fairness, Cons even don’t like China, which is kinda ironic as China is far more conservative than 90% of western conservatives.
With the exception of their attitudes towards sex and gender, this is complete bullshit that not even Sorhab is fool enough to believe. The CCP probably just has video footage of him 69'ing a tranny hooker. Their more vain, more materialistic, more bureaucratized, more anti-family, and in general worse along every trajectory natcons claim to care about:
https://scholars-stage.org/everything-is-worse-in-china/
Even their sex and gender attitudes are hardly healthier than our own. They're expected to be faithless to their wives and girlfriends the moment they have the money for it, and often before if they have a generous boss they're looking to impress.
Sure. How many migrants have they took in? How do they treat feminists? Liberal NGOs? Let me know, maybe one of these times you'll actually answer a question being asked instead of evading it.
"Even their sex and gender attitudes are hardly healthier than our own"
A good portion of 'merican populace can't even tell you what sex, gender, a man, or a woman is, so what in the world are you even talking about?
Also fyi, but that's a rag ran by neo-con (NRO/Foreign Affairs/Foreign Policy). If it was in print, I wouldn't even wipe my ass with it. He's been parroting anti-Chinese "muh Uighurs" propaganda for years.
You being a bootlicking retard isn't my fault. China is a miserable commie shithole of a country that even its defenders don't think is better, or you would've long ago moved there given their lower cost of living alone. You know better just from looking at their air, let alone whiffing it.
Comparing China to the US is unfair. Over the past 30 years, the Chinese government raised hundreds of millions of people from poverty to the middle class. That doesn't mean we should emulate them or that anyone who thinks that's impressive should immediately move there. But parroting the knee-jerk GOP talking point of "Chicoms are bad hurr durr" shows that you're either ignorant or brainwashed.
Yeah, I value my time & detest neo-cons. Your repeated avoidance of even basic questions, as if you're a character in some Mission Impossible movie, demonstrates the futility of conversation with people like you.
The trail of bodies liberal & neo-con imperialists have left behind them speaks for itself.
We're done.
Implying Norks live free of stress relative to their southern neighbors?
Why don't you head for a visit to see? And don't forget to bring back a propaganda poster on your way out. I'm sure they won't mind. Especially if you tell them how we're all brothers in the Kingdom of Christ.
Where’s the laugh react for your comment. How superficial could you possibly be?
You mention South Africa as the only African country with a missile program, implying of course that this is due to the higher IQ of the substantial white population there. But you then suddenly ignore the fact that South Africa has not done very well at the math Olympiads, despite the presence of that same white population, which presents a more complicated picture to grapple with before rushing to your more simplistic non sequiturs. This (and the circular arguments in this article) is typical of the reasoning process I always see in modern Hereditarians.
Nothing is monocausal. A population with a high average IQ is necessary to do well in the IMO or have a missile programme, but not sufficient.
Similar to Soviet interest in chess, I'd guess North Korea put a lot of effort into the IMO for the sake of their international reputation - ensuring all their best students compete, training them, etc. They probably care about it a lot more than South Africa.
Maybe so. But this makes this method of argument *circular.* Only a person who already agrees with the predetermined conclusion can follow the "logic."
How so? All you need to accept is that people with low IQs can't answer difficult maths questions or manufacture nuclear weapons.
The method works by picking and choosing what achievements you will accept as only possible for highly intelligent societies -- by making sure you choose only those that fit your desired pattern. For example, you say chess works for this (Soviet Union). But if someone says Scrabble works too (Nigeria), you will reject it only because it does not confirm that racial hypothesis. Hence, circular method. There is more documented (published) evidence that Scrabble championship takes extremely high IQ than there is for chess championship (although it does too), so such rejection can only be because it contradicts desired/predetermined conclusion.
In fact, Richard Lynn (himself) suggested women can't become Scrabble champions (or chess champions) because of a lower intelligence compared to men. But could not answer why Africans can do it, despite supposedly even lower intelligence:
https://www.unz.com/article/nigerians-jews-and-scrabble-an-update-on-the-iq-debate/
Ok, thanks for the discussion. Bye for now.
Scrabble isn't nearly as g-loaded as the Math Olympiad. You can teach a child how to play Scrabble. Most people can't even understand how to get the answers to an average Math Olympiad problem when you tell it to them step by step. Look at this shit:
https://www.imo-official.org/problems.aspx
Also, just because Nigeria has an average IQ of 68 doesn't mean there are no people smart enough to compete in games of intellect. There are still several hundred-thousand +4sd and several thousand +5sd Nigerians, which is more than enough to build a team of top scrabblers.
I used Soviet domination of chess as an example where the key variable wasn't intelligence, but training/culture. Chess is (perhaps surprisingly) not particularly g-loaded, and neither is Scrabble.
Whether or not Scrabble (specifically expert level Scrabble) is g-loaded is not a matter of just random opinion. As I said, this is an area of published research, cited both by Lynn and the author of the article I linked to. If you have found a mistake in those papers from the cited experts, you can explain it rather than just dismissing it.
" But if someone says Scrabble works too (Nigeria), you will reject it only because it does not confirm that racial hypothesis."
Scrabble and spelling bees are strongly memory-weighted, as is chess. They are not problem-solving weighted.
They're still both g-loaded, as are all intellectual activities, but they're not nearly as so as the Math Olympiad, which is so g-loaded most people can't even understand the questions, let alone attempt an answer.
Nothing of the sort. Whites have a lower average IQ than yellows, and there are a lot more yellow Koreans than white South Africans. There's also some evidence that general intelligence in Eastasians leans more heavily towards spatial reasoning than linguistics relative to Europeans:
https://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/05/11/why-east-asians-have-iq-profile-skewed-to-visual-spatial/
Also, Norks cheat. They've probably only been caught twice, but it takes considerable g-loading to cheat in a way that lets you get away with fooling people who are nerdy enough to organize competitive mathematics. Otherwise, every idiot would do it.
Extrapolating the mean from high achievements in a few select fields presumes that these high achievers are the result of a random distribution of talent. However this is most certainly not the case with arms manufacturing: there is no doubt that the North Korean regime specifically directs its best talent to advanced arms development. It is also highly likely that it does the same with the maths olympics, for propaganda purposes. Comparison with sub-Saharan Africa would only be fair if there were a similar regime with similar incentives there. However there isn't.
"Korea was a single nation for most of its history, only splitting into North and South at the end of World War II".
Was the splitting spontaneous?
All 'information' about North Korea is subjective. However, since I believe intelligence is vastly more influenced by nature rather than nurture, IQ is very close.
Many countries with high average IQ today, not too long ago, had living conditions similar to modern North Korea. North Koreas conditions are better explained by their geopolitical and political situation than by their phenotypic maximum IQ.
No they aren't. There's countries in Africa just as oppressive as North Korea, such as Eritrea, where the entire population has been pressganged into slave labor by the state, and it hasn't won them medals in the IMO, nor built them ICBMs. It did for North Korea. Because of the g factor.
Not sure what you mean. South Koreas living conditions were similar to North Korea not that long ago. North Korean phenotypic maximum IQ is probably not that different from South Korea.
South Korea was poorer than North Korea within living memory. But since they're actually prosperous, they have several dozen more medals in every category than the Norks, including qlmost six-dozen more golds:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_medal_count_at_International_Mathematical_Olympiad
And the only reason they don't have nukes is because of our extensive military presence in the country. Which is probably a mistake for them, but it's the way things are.
Yes but is this meant to be a counter argument to my original point? I'm saying high average IQ in a country doesnt necessarily equate to high living standards. There are ways to mess it up even with a decent phenotypic IQ. North Korea probably doesnt have a very low phenotypic maximum IQ but has low living standards due to other reasons.
I don't disagree with that point at all. North Korea proves property rights are more important to a nation's wellbeing than average IQ, and they're hardly the only example.
The obvious confounder is that North Korea spends selectively on kids with math and science potential.