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Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by dribbiy8 on Thursday July 02, 2026 @08:07PM (#48769044)
Not just that, a hugely disproportionate number of American politicians are Jewish. It's not a conspiracy or anti-Semitic to point out that objective fact.
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by cassianoleal on Thursday July 02, 2026 @08:45PM (#48769287)
Not only that, but even a lot who aren't Jewish are openly zionists - e.g. Joe Biden.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/i-am-zionist-how-joe-bidens...

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by fsckboy on Thursday July 02, 2026 @08:57PM (#48769365)
>It's not a conspiracy or anti-Semitic

it is if you think the reason is something that's not benign, or if you are keeping track of it and spreading it hoping to foment anger.

A hugely disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews (22% vs 0.2% of total population) and that's with 6 million killed in the holocaust. By Occam's razor, that's a lot of really smart people, and I prefer having smart leaders.

Do you think the President of Mexico and Ukraine are Jewish because Mossad?

Let me guess, you think all the above is because they cheated?

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by newspaper1 on Thursday July 02, 2026 @09:01PM (#48769386)
Are you claiming Jews are more intelligent than non-Jews?
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by fsckboy on Thursday July 02, 2026 @10:41PM (#48770093)
I'm not claiming it, just repeating it, it's very well known in IQ testing. Ashkenazi Jews test more than a standard deviation above the mean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

anything that says that IQ tests don't work is just woke DEI "we don't like the results so we'll dismiss them". IQ testing is a very well trialed and tested field, it's one of the earliest uses of statistics in science.

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by newspaper1 on Friday July 03, 2026 @12:35AM (#48770752)
So you do think Jews are smarter than non-Jews. I welcome your return to reality. It will be well deserved.
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by hagbard_c on Friday July 03, 2026 @11:15AM (#48776052)
How about this: Ashkenazi Jewish culture with its emphasis on education and discipline stemming from studying religious texts leading to widespread literacy has led this group of people to outperform the mainline on intellectual tasks just like other cultures with an emphasis on education and literacy tend to outperform the mainline.

You don't need genetic inheritance to explain Jewish over-performance, cultural inheritance is enough. Do mind I don't know whether there is a genetic component involved but I do know it is not needed to explain why Ashkenazi Jews outperform other cultures.

Looking at national IQ averages [1] currently Hong Kong seems to score highest with an average of 107.73 while Israel is below average at 98.57, below most European countries as well as below the USA. The top 6 in the list are all east-Asian countries, the lowest are nearly all in Africa with Somalia lowest at 83.84.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-i...

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by tptacek on Friday July 03, 2026 @11:44AM (#48776377)
There are no such thing as "national IQ averages".
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by hagbard_c on Friday July 03, 2026 @06:02PM (#48780534)
Yes there are no matter whether you consider IQ a valid concept or not. In the context of the grandparent's remark about Ashkenazi Jews being 'smarter' it is relevant to compare specific group averages (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews) with national averages, especially in the case of Israel where there is a marked difference between the national average IQ and that for the group 'Ashkenazi Jews' (about 24% of the total Israeli population calculated from the numbers presented in [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Jews

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by tptacek on Friday July 03, 2026 @06:09PM (#48780593)
No, there aren't. Countries generally don't do latitudinal IQ surveys. Very few people reading HN have ever been asked to take an IQ test, let alone compelled to do so. Numbers attributing "IQ" to countries are generally fraudulent (i.e., Richard Lynn's "IQ And The Wealth Of Nations" numbers).

I'm not making any other claim than that specific one: there is no such thing as "national IQ averages". If you claim there's some other kind of "IQ average" that isn't "national", you're addressing a point I didn't make.

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by hagbard_c on Friday July 03, 2026 @06:16PM (#48780655)
Countries don't have to do tests, that is done by people who take tests organised by institutions, The results are grouped by whatever factors the test developers consider interesting and the results are published. We can quibble about the value of these results, about the value of IQ as a concept, about the sample size of IQ-test-taking groups in different countries and much more but that is all irrelevant when considering the question whether there is something like an average IQ score grouped by country. Those scores exist and the results from several independent studies are largely the same.
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by akerl_ on Friday July 03, 2026 @07:03PM (#48781036)
Your original link makes fairly clear how disingenuous it is to call the figures a national average:

> Data from International IQ Test (IIT) are based on data from 1,352,763 participants worldwide who took the same IQ test on the website.

> Becker’s estimates are categorized by source. T = value is based upon actual test results from said country. E = value is a best-guess estimate based upon measured values of nearby countries.

Opening up the actual paper from Becker they're citing is basically a wandering tour where they try to find whatever numbers do exist and then math their way out of the fact that the sample sizes are small and the tests are different everywhere.

Various entities have performed IQ tests on people in many nations. But taking that and trying to flip it to say we've derived average national IQ is junk science.

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by hagbard_c on Sunday July 05, 2026 @03:25PM (#48797169)
If you don't like that link - which is just one of the many I got when searching for 'national IQ average' there are many other similar studies to be had. Here's a few of them, again just some results from the first page in my SearXNG instance. The results are not identical but they are comparable.

https://international-iq-test.com/en/test/IQ_by_country

https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php

https://www.universaliqtest.com/statistics/average-iq-by-cou...

https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/average-iq-by-country

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229401257_National_...

https://openpsych.net/files/papers/Parra_2025a.pdf

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by akerl_ on Sunday July 05, 2026 @04:46PM (#48797787)
> Countries with fewer than 100 test-takers were excluded from the ranking due to limited sample size and are shown in gray on the map above.

How generous of them.

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by tptacek on Sunday July 05, 2026 @05:13PM (#48798005)
You've just provided:

(1) Several surveys backed by anonymous online "IQ test" web sites.

(2) Richard Lynn, whose numbers are essentially fraudulent.

(3) Emil Kirkegaard, the famous Danish white supremacist.

The counterargument is very simple: countries don't generally do IQ surveys. Most people on HN have never been asked to take a calibrated IQ test. The data simply doesn't exist.

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by akerl_ on Sunday July 05, 2026 @06:31PM (#48798547)
Don’t worry, they got data from a whole 5000 people in Australia and 300 people in Afghanistan!

I’m sure that’s generalizable to the whole country’s worth of 28 and 40 million, respectively.

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by tptacek on Sunday July 05, 2026 @06:35PM (#48798599)
Hard to beat Richard Lynn's sample of Senegal, which came from 57 children in a malaria hospital.
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by fsckboy on Friday July 03, 2026 @12:52PM (#48777131)
>You don't need genetic inheritance to explain Jewish over-performance, cultural inheritance is enough.

but it is known, independently of Jewish population studies, that genetic inheritance is a strong factor in IQ performance, and such data also demands explanation; there is no point in leaving it out of population studies.

It is much more frustrating to perform tasks that are more difficult for you than things that are easy. So if a task requires intellect, you are more likely to engage in that task if you are intelligent, and more likely to progress in that field if other people note and reward your performance. Such a process carried out on a particular gene pool might reinforce tendencies that lead to part of what we call culture.

>Looking at national IQ averages currently Hong Kong seems to score highest with an average of 107.73 while Israel is below average at 98.57, below most European countries as well as below the USA.

Ashkenazi Jews as a population average scores above 107. The IQ mean of 100 has a standard deviation of about 15. Also, Ashkenazi Jews are less than half of Israel.

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by hagbard_c on Friday July 03, 2026 @06:09PM (#48780594)
Yes, there does seem to be a genetic component to IQ but as I stated you don't need to include it here to explain why cultures which place emphasis on education and discipline score higher than those which don't. Even if intelligence were not heritable those cultures would on average still perform better than those which don't value education and discipline. Adding a heritable component makes the effect stronger, especially in cultures where intracultural marriages are common or the norm.
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by fsckboy on Friday July 03, 2026 @12:43PM (#48777046)
64 Fields Medals have been awarded, 15 went to Jews, just over 23%.

Jews are 2.5% of the US but less than 0.2% of Europe (10% of all Jews live in Europe; in 1933, it was 60%)

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by grandpajoey on Friday July 03, 2026 @01:34PM (#48777575)
This sounds like fuel for antisemitic conspiracies because collusion != intelligence.
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by fsckboy on Friday July 03, 2026 @01:05PM (#48777277)
https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/

"Cochran and Harpending also cite studies claiming that Ashkenazim have the highest IQ of any ethnic group for which there’s reliable data, perhaps as much as a full standard deviation above the general European average, which means, at the far end of the spectrum, that 23 per thousand Ashkenazim have an IQ over 140, as opposed to 4 per thousand Northern Europeans."

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by newspaper1 on Friday July 03, 2026 @06:53PM (#48780969)
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by dribbiy8 on Friday July 03, 2026 @12:48AM (#48770867)
I don't know or care if Mossad has anything to do with their positions, that wasn't my point. My point was that Israel doesn't even need to blackmail or bribe politicians when they already have some allegiance to Israel (ie. being Jewish).

I mean, if there was an ethnostate for my people, and I happened to be in an influential position in a foreign superpower, you'd better believe I'm taking every opportunity to fleece the foreigners to send resources to my family, friends, and people back home. I don't know how you could live with yourself if you didn't do this.

Jewish politicians in the US certainly seem to see it this way in any matter regarding Israel or the Jewish people.

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by thecrash on Friday July 03, 2026 @01:10AM (#48771020)
It's important to note that there are very many Jews in the world who are not Zionist and many Jews in Israel who disagree with the Palestinian genocide.

They're not the majority, but there are still a lot of them.

Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by throw310822 on Friday July 03, 2026 @03:15AM (#48771878)
They are a lot but they're a small minority overall.
Re:U.S. officials believed Israel was plotting to kill Irani... by hardbass on Saturday July 04, 2026 @02:17PM (#48787519)
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were both clearly highly intelligent individuals, especially Stalin I'd say given how he managed to survive and grow his power for far longer.

However iq by itself doesn't mean whether the person applies it to good or bad things. It's a shame a certain part of the current crop of jews are using their iq toward absurd and evil activities.