Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they challenge the widely-held belief about Ashkenazi Jewish intellectual superiority. This eye-opening discussion explores:
The misrepresentation and manipulation of IQ studies
How cultural practices, not genetics, may explain Jewish success
The dangers of racial IQ theories and their societal impact
The role of nepotism and networking in different cultural groups
The future of genetic selection and its implications for ethnic differences
Surprising facts about Jewish involvement in historical movements
How internet culture may be amplifying Jewish representation in certain fields
Whether you're interested in genetics, cultural studies, or the complexities of societal success, this video offers a nuanced perspective on a controversial topic. The Collinses provide a balanced, data-driven approach to understanding the true nature of Jewish achievement and its implications for our understanding of intelligence and success.
[00:00:00] remember the first study I, I mentioned where I said Jews were only 1 percent smarter, right? On average, when you considered all of the information. So what that meant. If you were going to get a like a standard deviation higher, that meant on some tests they had to be scoring unusually good.
Yeah. And on some tests they had to be scoring unusually poorly. Yeah. They were scoring unusually poorly on the nonverbal reasoning test. Yeah, so in other words, Jews appear to be word cells and not shape rotators in internet parlance yeah. So then this guy comes in and he's basically like, I can't believe that there are some areas where Jews do uniquely well and some areas where Jews do uniquely poorly.
So how about we just look at the areas where they do well? Yeah, let's do, redo the battery. But only include the test where I know from the previous data that they're doing well. Problem solved, Malcolm. Problem solved. I want to be clear, the core guy who did this research that was cherry picked using only verbal scores, , Richard Lynn, in [00:01:00] his words, the only representative study ever conducted other than his own.
was that other study that we were looking at. Okay. So it's not that we're cherry picking. We're using the studies that he is pointing to. the strongest data backed claim that a person can reasonably make about Jewish IQ differences is that Ashkenazi Jews have a marginally better verbal IQ and math skills, which is pretty amazing.
offset by marginally lower visual spatial intelligence and reasoning
Would you like to know more?
Hello, Simone. I am excited to be talking to you again today. Today we are going to go over another topic that is delved into heavily in one of our books, which means we'll be reading some parts of one of our books.
Whenever we get to a place where there's a citation, you can just go to the book and find whatever the citation was. It'll be some study or something. As I read, I'll just say citations. Yeah. I don't want to keep interjecting here, but this is one of our biggest surprises when we were writing the pragmatist guide to crafting religion.
Was that we sort of came to the realization that the [00:02:00] Jewish Ashkenazi Jewish population specifically does not actually seem to have the IQ advantage that all the gene bros would tell you that they have. And there has been some intentional misrepresentation of data in this area. And from a cultural perspective, that's really interesting.
Because it means that their cultural success has more to do with cultural practices and a natural advantage. But which is much more interesting to talk about because that's the culture is what we have control over. Yeah. All right. Jump into it. Simone when we started writing this book, we were fairly certain that Jews were smarter than other groups, either at a cultural or genetic level.
Anecdotally, we like to think we associate with disproportionately intelligent people, as gauged by notable professional achievement, and have no reason to mostly be friends with Jews. Yet a huge chunk of our friends are either Orthodox Jews or secular Jews. Objectively, Jews win Nobel [00:03:00] prizes at a rate 100 times higher than would be expected given their population levels.
Among the highest ranked chess players, 51 percent have at least one Jewish parent. This is not something that could be easily explained by nepotism. Jews are represented among the world's richest people at a rate 100, 000 percent higher than would be expected. They make up 19 percent of the Forbes 200 richest list and 0.
19 percent of the world population. Jew, oh, citation, Jews are overrepresented in Congress and the Senate at a rate of about. 400 percent higher than one would expect based on their population in the United States. Another citation there. , Jewish success is plain for anyone to see. Jews are dotted in positions of power throughout our society at a rate that would not be expected, given that they only make up 2 percent of the U.
S. population. Consider, for example, that as of this book's creation, 41. 61 of Joe Rogan's political [00:04:00] guests have been Jewish, and 20. 27 percent of his science guests have been Jewish. , we have a little game that we used to play when we would do parties in New York, where we'd be like, okay, how many people here at the party are Jewish?
Because we're not inviting people to be Jewish. Remember it was always like at least 50 percent of the people. Yeah. Sometimes there would only be like two people in the room who weren't Jewish. And we are not disproportionately like intentionally associating with Jewish individuals. Which to me indicates, for whatever reason, cultural affinity, anything like that, when we're trying to select individuals who we have judged because who goes to our parties.
Like, I'm not friends with people to talk to them. Because we don't like, Friends. Like, I don't want to waste time being friendly with someone, right? I would only invite somebody if I thought that they were either going to be useful to our career or useful to our mission of changing the world. And so we're looking for interesting.
Yeah, people who have power or people who are likely to have power in the future. That's what we were optimizing for and that ended up with a disproportionately Jewish [00:05:00] group. Well, I also wonder because at these parties too, especially because they're largely Gen X, Millennial and Gen Z attendees, they're insanely flaky.
And I wonder if Jews have a lower flake rate. Maybe Jews show up, but maybe that's why Jews have so many positions of power because they don't flake on life. That maybe it Anyway, continue reading. It comes as no surprise that many people have come to the conclusion that Jews must be smarter than other people on average.
That said, after going over the evidence, we have changed our minds on the subject drastically. This was such a jarring change of opinion. We had to make edits throughout the book after it happened. First, let's get the most common myth out of the way that, quote, Jews are smart because the Holocaust acted as a selection event, eliminating less intelligent Jewish population.
The types of evidence cited in this argument, Jews being overrepresented in educated professions and positions of power, can be seen in data before the Holocaust. [00:06:00] For example, in pre Holocaust Germany, Jews were overrepresented in the medical profession at a rate of of more than 1, 500 percent with 47 percent of pediatricians being Jewish, even though Jews accounted for only 0.
9 percent of the population at the time, citation. Stats like this can be found virtually anywhere you look in reference to pre Holocaust Jewish populations. It is similarly unlikely that, quote, pogroms made Jews smart, unquote. We say this for two reasons. The first being that other groups plagued by pogroms, like the Romani, a.
k. a. gypsies, are not also known for being disproportionately in jobs requiring higher education. Second, Jews objectively are not particularly smarter than average. Just as we did when we first dug deeper, you might be thinking, wait, what? That can't be true. I've read my entire life that Jews are super duper smart.
Aren't there like a bunch of scientific studies that showed Jews have [00:07:00] higher IQ? While it is true that there are a bunch of studies on this topic, they don't ultimately demonstrate in a robust manner that Jewish people have systematically higher IQs. The most cited and well conducted study on Jewish IQ differences was published by Margaret Backman in 1972 citation.
This study compared 1, 236 Jews to 1, 051 non Jewish Caucasians across six different batteries of tests focused on different types of intelligence. It found that Jews had an average score of 51. 88 across all test categories, while Caucasians had an average score of 51. 22. That's a 1 percent difference.
Note, Backman also did a preliminary study in 1970 that people sometimes cite. But it only looked at 65 Jewish boys, so we are ignoring it citation. You want to comment on that? No, because it gets really interesting in just a second. What is wild is that people will frequently cite Beckman's 1972 research as [00:08:00] proof that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher than average IQ.
They do this by only mentioning the two of those six areas in which Jews outperformed their. populations, verbal and math, while ignoring the parts where they underperformed, then generalize that score, creating the illusion of some big intelligence difference, but that is objectively not true.
What the study says. So I love that people will go to this study and they'll be like, ah, this is proof. Who's are like 30 percent more intelligent because they did 30 percent higher on this one test. Yeah. But what the study said is they were 1 percent more intelligent, not 30 percent more intelligent.
You just left. How did that, how did it get to the, to the 1%? It's because. The tests were being considered together and, and you'll see where people start manipulating the data here to trick people. If it were true that Jews had much higher IQs, Israel with an 81 percent Jewish population wouldn't have [00:09:00] an average national IQ lower than that in the United States, 94 versus 98%.
That is shocking by, by the way, 94 versus 90. I know. That is shocking. And there's a citation. We find this nationwide number very compelling is it is much harder to manipulate than individual studies. As Ashkenazi Jews make up almost half 44.2% of the Jewish population in Israel. It is preposterous to assert that they.
They sport an average IQ over a standard deviation above what the general population, unless one also asserts that non Ashkenazi Jews are outlandishly stupid, which most supporters of the Jewish competence theory don't argue. Citation. So before we go further here, I have heard a counter to this point.
Okay. School names. Since writing the book. Yeah. What they argued is that a large portion of the group that is identified as Ashkenazi Jews in Israel is actually Russian ethnically and not Ashkenazi Jew at all. So, But they use claims of a Jewish [00:10:00] identity to migrate at various points. Oh, and because a lot of the Jews in Russia are Ashkenazi.
They're just like, yeah, I'm that. Yeah, they get known as Ashkenazi, even though they're not Ashkenazi. However I think when taken into account along with the rest of the evidence we're going to discuss in this particular piece, we'll probably come to the point that, no, they're just not particularly smarter.
And keep in mind what this would mean here. If you have an 81 percent Jewish population and 44. 2 percent of that population of that 81 percent is Ashkenazi Jews, right? The rest of the population and you get this number that people claim, which I often hear Ashkenazi Jews are about one standard deviation.
Higher than the general population you would need the rest of the population in Israel to be like a standard deviation and a half number than the average American, they would need to be like insanely after that number to come out the way so it's just not likely. Yeah, womp womp. Womp womp. I shall continue then.
In fact, one of the core champions of the Ashkenazi high [00:11:00] IQ theory, Miles Storfer, argued in his book, Intelligence and Giftedness, that Sephardic Jews, who make up most of the other half, 44. 9 percent of the Jewish population in Israel, citation, have an average IQ of 111. If this were true, you'd be surprised.
Even if all non Jews in Israel were mentally handicapped, you still couldn't get an average IQ of 94 for the nation. Well, so hold on. I really want to point out the actual insanity of this. You could get that you have a country that is 81 percent Jews who are supposed to be you know, about a standard deviation above the normal IQ, right?
Or American IQ, right? And then another group that is an average IQ of 111. And somehow that country has an average IQ of 94. Well, what you missed, Malcolm Collins, was that everyone's pet goldfish in Israel is counted as a citizen. You would, you would literally need that to [00:12:00] be the case. Okay, I shall go on.
While Beckman's 1972 paper is the most cited peer reviewed article on this topic, being cited 252 times at the time of this book's publication, another well known researcher in this space is Richard Lynn. He argued that Jews have a higher than average IQ in both 2004 and 2010. Citation with a paper now cited 49 times and 2008 and co authorship with Satoshi Kanazawa with the paper cited 32 times Lin used the same test in each case.
However, his 2008 work with Kanazawa involved more participants. While these studies yielded results in line with Beckman's research, they only tested verbal IQ, which allowed them to quote unquote prove that Jews have a general IQ advantage by cherry picking the type of intelligence measured. We suspect Lynn chose to be intentionally manipulative, as he specifically cites Jews getting low non verbal reasoning [00:13:00] scores as motivation for his research.
Quote, but these are so variable and in some instances so low is to raise doubts about their credibility. It is difficult to credit that Jewish sample could have a nonverbal reasoning IQ of 91.3, and at the same time a mathematical iq, quantitative reasoning in the McGrew and Flanagan taxonomy.
Of 109.7. It is also difficult to credit that the Jewish sample could have a verbal IQ of 107.8, while at the same time having a short term verbal memory of 95.10 Verbal memory IQ of 95.1. These results are in need of checking and replication. So I wanna take a stance here. So, so basically. If you're an audience member and you're like intelligent, right, you should immediately know from what he said there that he intentionally is lying using data.
You can tell that because remember the first study I, I mentioned where I said Jews were only 1 percent smarter, right? On average, when you considered all of the [00:14:00] information. So what that meant. If you were going to get a like a standard deviation higher, that meant on some tests they had to be scoring unusually good.
Yeah. And on some tests they had to be scoring unusually poorly. Yeah. They were scoring unusually poorly on the nonverbal reasoning test. Yeah, so in other words, Jews appear to be word cells and not shape rotators in internet parlance of like three years ago. But anyway, so this guy then comes in, right?
It doesn't exactly break down into words, because for example, they do better on math, but then they're bad on so it's a little complicated. But the point being is that they're, they're appears to be some areas in which Jews excel and some areas in which Jews do uniquely poorly. Yeah. So then this guy comes in and he's basically like, I can't believe that there are some areas where Jews do uniquely well and some areas where Jews do uniquely poorly.
So how about we just look at the areas where they do well? Yeah, let's do, redo the battery. But only include the test where I know from the [00:15:00] previous data that they're doing well. Problem solved, Malcolm. Problem solved. Of course you came up with him appearing about a standard deviation higher than I do.
Eureka! So, so that's what he was doing. So for people who haven't fully worked this all out in your head as to how he manipulated the data. And it's, it's like really obvious when you look at it, but we'll get into this more as you keep reading. Right. You, you write in the book, if Lin's goal was to truly prove the claim that Jews do actually have a higher general IQ, he would have focused on the nonverbal reasoning facets of intelligence investigated by Backman in 1972, where Jews were deficient, not where they had an advantage.
Imagine your kid took a battery of evaluations and while they performed wonderfully on the verbal test, their visual spatial test score was wanting. If you wish to prove the results were wrong about their overall performance, you would have the child retake just the visual spatial test, the one on which they perform poorly, rather than the verbal [00:16:00] evaluation, where presumably you have nothing to contest.
If instead you just wanted to get your kid into a good college and don't actually care about getting a true measure of their performance, you would find some other test that only had a verbal component and present it as an evaluation. representative of your kid's overall performance. Lynn tries to argue exactly this, quote, The first items of information of particular interest to us are the respondents religion and ethnic group.
An analysis of these enables us to categorize respondents as Jewish, non Jewish, white, and non Jewish. Black and other. The second item of interest is the respondents score on a 10 word vocabulary test. Vocabulary is a good measure of both general intelligence and verbal intelligence. Two citations there.
So, so hold on. Well, we need to test them. So what we're going to do is a vocab test. Everyone knows vocabulary is how you gauge intelligence. I mean. Right, right. So I think when a lot of people look at these tests that Lynn did, that they assumed that they were [00:17:00] like a general test. No! They were vocab tests!
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Continue, Simone. Lynn's findings around vocabulary are largely in line with the verbal advantage found in Beckman's research, meaning that there is some reason to have confidence in Beckman's other scores as well. You might be wondering I want to explain what I mean by this if people don't understand the intention here.
What I'm saying is His research produced results that were in line with Beckman's research, which shows that Jews did better on these verbal things. And it showed that they did about as better as Beckman said, which then leads me to more believe the stuff that he didn't want to accidentally replicate.
Yeah, sure. I mean, Jews did reliably worse in non verbal things. You might be wondering about some other data cited by those who argue Jews are something like a standard deviation smarter than other populations. Outside of Richard Lin's work, this data mostly comes to two studies. The [00:18:00] first, 13 citations, compares Wealthy Jewish NYC day school students to a general population, while the second 331 citations uses data from kibbutzim whose graduates have historically outcompeted other Jews within Israel, while the second study itself is not making an argument about Jewish IQ, Myles Stouffer uses its data to Data to make it the assertion the aforementioned book, intelligence and giftedness, despite their samples being quite skewed.
And even though neither study itself claimed to make assertions about general Jewish IQ, people often cite them when making arguments around the average Jewish IQ. Imagine you wanted to show that British people were smarter than other people. So you compare the performance of students at elite British private schools or gifted programs to that of students in other nations, general populations.
Shall I continue? . Well, actually, I just want to note here, like, I hope that people can see that the people who are arguing this are arguing it in bad faith. Like, [00:19:00] this, it's very clear that you cannot get a measure of Jews being smarter than the general population. by looking at elite Jewish private schools in Manhattan or kibbutzims when we know that the graduates of kibbutzim score significantly higher than the general Jewish population in Israel.
So like, why would you do this unless you took to start Jews are high IQ. Right. Yeah. I continue from the book. If you shared our original assumptions and believed there was an abundance of well conducted research featuring large sample sizes that clearly demonstrated outsized Jewish intelligence, you would probably think we are cherry picking.
But in the words of Richard Lynn himself, Quote, there is only one study of the intelligence of American Jews in the last half century, which appears to be representative and had a reasonable sample size. That is Backman's 1972 analysis of the data in [00:20:00] Project Talent, a nationwide American survey of the abilities of 18 year olds carried out in 1960.
That's the very same study that shows only A 1 percent difference mind exploding.
Bwwah. Bwah. Blahah. Bwwah! Bwah!
So I want to be clear, the core guy who did this research that was cherry picked using only verbal scores, remember that we've been talking about who's intentionally manipulating data and is the core advocate of Jews having a higher general IQ, Richard Lynn, in his words, the only representative study ever conducted other than his own.
was that other study that we were looking at. Okay. So it's not that we're cherry picking. We're using the studies that [00:21:00] he is pointing to.
So, do you want me to continue here? I'll go ahead. You see similar things wherever you look. While Jews are not compared to a Caucasian population in a 1965 paper by Gerald Lesser, Gordon Pfeiffer, and Donald Clark with a whopping.
657 citations. Table 12 indicates that Jews only outperformed Chinese participants on verbal 90. and math 28. 50 to 27. 79 and skill coming below Chinese participants on reasoning 25. 21 to 25. 94 and visual spatial 39. 71 to 42. 51 skill. Hold on. I want to take a quick note here so that people get, this is why I say don't go for the word cell versus shape rotator thing.
Yeah, because of this weird math is included in shape rotator skill sets. And that's not really the way it works. Jews seem to have uniquely good memories [00:22:00] around stuff like vocabulary. They seem to be uniquely good at, at, at verbal like sophistry. And they seem to be uniquely good at math, but uniquely bad at general reasoning.
And uniquely bad at , spatial reasoning. So Relatable, man. So it's, it's more of like a general reasoning problem and not a i. e., they, they would be very good at convincing someone of something. Yes. Um, Very good at doing math and mathematical proofs, but they would have a harder time this is on average, you know, we're just going over the data here.
I'd say checking if the thing that they're convincing the other person of is actually true. Um, Anyway, continue. Greta Adevall, Albert Silverman, and Edward McGough Report in a 1970 research paper, which has been cited 22 times that a when Jewish college freshmen were given a 10 test battery perception skills, Jewish student performance was significantly below that of non Jewish classmates when participants with matching [00:23:00] scores were compared.
So this gets really, really interesting here. So, they gave them a battery of perception scores, right? But they correlated their otherwise IQ, i. e. their, their general IQ by using the SAT scores and found that they had weighed lower on this, on this perception score compared to the general population.
Anyway, continue. Probably the most compelling evidence suggesting a higher Jewish general intelligence comes from the bell curve, which contributes evidence to the NLSY, National Longitudinal Surveys data set to the debate. Though it does admit that quote, . We cannot be sure that the 98 Jews in the sample are nationally representative unquote and that the quote, source of the difference is concentrated in the verbal component, unquote. Here I would note, like everywhere you look, this isn't like one study or something like this or one person everywhere, all of these independently conducted things measured in different ways are [00:24:00] showing not a general IQ advantage among Jews, but a verbal IQ advantage in a deficit in other areas.
Mm hmm. Well, which is, it's kind of why. Any sort of, we'll say like racism based or group based a bias, like this group is worse or better. It seems so dumb to me because we're different. We have, we've lumpy skill sets and that's a good thing. Yeah. I think that this is a huge mistake that individuals make when they're looking at group differences tied to genetics.
And they try to be like, This is the smart group, and this is the dumb group, when really it appears to be that some groups have more talent in parts of their brains that are tied to specific outcomes. And that, that can lead to, like, I, for example. I think it would be pretty hard to argue that Black Americans don't seem to have some sort of cognitive [00:25:00] advantage when it comes to music.
When you look at the number of top selling musical artists in the United States. Well, and like, yeah, verbal delivery, poetry, yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff that. It just seems to be like over representation in those spheres. Well, an over representation, which to me belies some form of either cultural or genetic advantage.
Yeah. But that, that we need to get away from this idea of like genetic intelligence or genetic non intelligence. Yeah. And I think that this helps us do that where we can see that some bad actors, because I actually suspect what's happening here. Is it The human brain likely has to do tradeoffs when it's making an average population uniquely specialized in one area that ends up hurting that population on average within other areas specifically otherwise, like, why wouldn't all humans have that advantage?
Right? It's because the easy ways from a biological perspective to gain that [00:26:00] advantage likely caused a tradeoff. Historically speaking yeah, different groups and different geographies with different resource and limit and limitations are going to have different selective pressures, which will lead to different lumpy skill sets.
It's exactly that as we can recognize this we can get better at getting away from this. Racialized idea, which is a huge problem where people are like, Oh, you are selecting for certain phenotypes of like in your kids. The problem I have with genetic selection is everyone's going to select for the same stuff.
And it's like, that's objectively not true, especially because you're making trade offs. So one population might be selecting for certain types of verbal intelligence. And one population might be selecting for specific types of spatial intelligence. And it might turn out that selecting for one directly negatively affects the other.
Which is what I think we're seeing in the data here. Totally. Continue. After conducting an extensive search, the only other research we found that supports [00:27:00] the Jewish Competency Hypothesis with IQ data are two papers both published in 1976, what's with this subject in the 1970s. Right. One by Julius Romanoff, who has only been cited by.
Five other times suggests an average Jewish IQ of 115. The other cited 42 times by Victor Cicerelli compared Jewish sixth grade students , to those representing the general population and found the Jewish participants to have a seven point IQ advantage. A final source of evidence we have.
Yet to address, but which may prove us wrong relates to the high IQ correlated polygenic risk scores being higher in Jewish populations. While we find this evidence uniquely compelling, we hesitate to update our beliefs based on this finding alone. After seeing so many people misquote and misinterpret research, we also wonder if these polygenic risk scores are picking up IQ correlated traits.
that grant Jews a verbal [00:28:00] advantage more acutely than others. In short, outside a few highly ideologically motivated studies, the strongest data backed claim that a person can reasonably make about Jewish IQ differences is that Ashkenazi Jews have a marginally better verbal IQ and math skills, which is pretty amazing.
offset by marginally lower visual spatial intelligence and reasoning, like 5 to 10 percent in both directions. It is really weird that people always mention Ashkenazi Jews higher verbal and math scores, but almost never bring up their equally lower nonverbal reasoning scores, which is what leads to the neutral effect on IQ overall.
If you were like us, you're probably now thinking that they're really, Must be other studies out there but Richard Lynn is right. Margaret Backman really published quote, the only one study of the intelligence of American Jews in the last half century, which appears to be representative and had a reasonable sample size, unquote.
We went over a number of meta studies and they [00:29:00] mostly pulled from the above cited papers. There are three alternate hypotheses we have seen turn around. One, that Jews have a non standard curve in their IQ, i. e. there are more Jews at the extreme high and low end of the curve. However, we've not seen data to back this up.
Two, the Jewish exceptionalism actually comes from some mental health conditions occurring at higher rates in the Jewish community. But again, the evidence is fairly weak. See the article on the footnote for a detailed exploration of this hypothesis. No, basically it says like autism and stuff like that is higher in the Jewish population.
And that explains the Jewish success rate. And three. Marginally higher verbal and math IQ alone explains all Jewish success. This theory seems possible to us, though the world would be a much less interesting place if it is. More on this later. Readers who spend a lot of time online might vaguely remember that Some YouTuber post an argument along these lines [00:30:00] only to be debunked.
The YouTuber who scratched the surface of this argument, motivating us to dig deeper was Leather Apron Club, citation, who's biased against Jews, the citation led to motivated reasoning as can be demonstrated by his choice to cite Backman's 1972 data when talking about Lin's 2004 research and leaving out some studies we do address here.
Ubersoy on YouTube, quote unquote, debunked his argument, though his rebuttal fails to address the problem that there is no large, well conducted study demonstrating that Jews have dramatically higher general intelligence, neglects to mention that the largest, most respected study in the space only showed a 1 percent difference in IQ, and doesn't acknowledge that researchers have manipulatively measured Only verbal IQ.
Well, implying that their findings are representative of general IQ. Citation. So here I note if people don't know the leather apron club channel, I actually think it's a pretty good [00:31:00] channel in regards to the way he delivers arguments and stuff like that.
So basically the point I'm making here is I think. Leather Apron Club was actually right, even though he sort of manipulated the way he was presenting the data to convince his audience of what he wanted them to believe, which is that they're, you know, Jews do not have an IQ advantage. And I, I don't have any animosity to him.
I mean, he's, he's targeting a audience that's far to the right of our audience. And so he is basically, I mean, his channel is about in an intelligent way, Telling super, super far right leaning people what they want to believe is true. . You, you get a feel of who watches his channel, but you can still learn stuff from his channel, you know, even if you disagree with somebody it was, his channel was the first where I had ever seen somebody really be like, no, there isn't a high Jewish, Jewish genetic IQ advantage.
And you know, you have a lesson for asking those questions. Yeah. Like, why does nobody ask this? This is also just. So to me, classic in terms of how many means spread where people think there's like [00:32:00] this super robustly understood concept. And yet it turns out that one person said something once and then just people kept citing them and citing them and citing them.
And you see this happen on Wikipedia a lot too, where trusted or reliable sources are cited from multiple different angles, confirming. A quote unquote fact when it turns out that just one quote of like a supposedly reliable source actually posted something fake and then a bunch of other people and other quote unquote reliable sources as, as deemed reliable by Wikipedia standards and voting and whatnot.
Then just. cite that original. I, yeah, I think you get this problem so much worse when it's plausible. Outsized Jewish success. It just makes sense if you're like, Oh, they're probably smarter. And we're not allowed to talk about that as a society because, you know, you're not allowed to talk about like, maybe some groups could be smarter than other groups.
And so what I think most. Other intelligent people think if they're [00:33:00] like, yeah, I mean that checks out. Yeah. They're probably smarter. Instead of, instead of is it, so there's not really a motivation, like for me to challenge this assumption of Jews are smarter because it, it would make a lot of weird things in our society, otherwise make a lot of sense.
And then you don't need to ask questions around them, but we live in a more interesting world. If that's not the explanation for outside Jewish success, which we'll get into in a bit, but continue reading.
We suspect that Ubersoy simply got so caught up in creating a strong counter argument that he allowed himself to get taken In By the Shell Game, Lin and others play with verbal IQ. There is real reason to be skeptical that a markedly higher Ashkenazi average IQ is a genuine phenomenon. This is a great example of why an intellectually diverse cultural ecosystem is valuable.
Other apron clubs hatred of the Jewish people caused them to question something we would have never thought to question on our own. That Jews are smarter than the general population and That this [00:34:00] intelligence largely explains their disproportionate success. Ironically, his catching the street hustlers in their verbal IQ shell game serves to undermine his larger agenda among people like us who don't think Jewish success can be explained by nepotism or an evil Jewish cabal, as it indicates there is something genuinely valuable about Jewish culture itself rather than just Jewish genetics.
More on these points shortly. If Jewish people did have significantly higher IQs, elements of Jewish cultural success would be very hard, if not impossible, to replicate through the intentional creation of a family culture. If, however, most Jewish success comes from a purely cultural edge, and the network that culture provides elements of Jewish success can theoretically be replicated.
All this assumes that Jewish success is not just a product of slightly higher verbal and mathematical IQ, which appears to be robustly attested. We aren't dwelling on that possibility because it is probably not the case and boring. If true [00:35:00] fun side note, there is an entire niche industry focused around trying to copy Jewish culture in China with books that are titles like.
Become rich like a Jew, citation. To make money with the Jews, and Jewish people and business, the Bible of how to live their lives, citation. You can never get away with this in the US. Beautiful. Finally, some portion of readers will see Jews not being particularly smarter than everyone else, yet Still ending up in their positions of power as definitive proof that something nefarious is afoot.
The Jews are somehow conspiring to control our democracy. First, let us emphatically guarantee you that there is no intentional Jewish conspiracy. There are enough stupid Jews with low self control as there are with the any large enough population that the mechanisms of this system would be revealed if it did exist.
Jews find it just as [00:36:00] confusing that they out compete other groups as outsiders do. There's no shadowy group advancing their careers any more than there's a shadowy group of Catholics slotting church members disproportionately into positions on the Supreme Court. If you're wondering on what authority we can state so emphatically that there is no secret society of Jews controlling the world, read, quote, the Jewish cabal theory, unquote, um, again, by our book, The Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, if you want to read this.
I've got a note here on the the Supreme Court thing, because people might not know this. And we talked about this earlier in the book 20 percent of Americans are Catholic, but in the last Supreme court cycle, when we wrote the book, 80 percent of the Supreme court was raised Catholic. So do we take that to mean that there's a shadowy group of Catholics controlling our society?
Like, no I just think that something about Catholic culture, which we talk about what in Catholic culture in the episode about The great replacement that already happened or what, what, how Catholics changed America, I think is what we call the, the [00:37:00] episode. It goes into why Catholics do so much better in the legal profession due to cultural and not genetic reasons.
Anyway, continue. While Jews do benefit from nepotism, they don't benefit more from it than other groups that share a strong sense of cultural identity like Mormons and Catholics. We would even go so far as to argue that Jewish networks are less nepotistic and supportive than those belonging to Jehovah's witnesses and Scientologists. Anyone living in the U. S. has access to these kinds of nepotistic networks through various groups they can choose to join.
Heck these days, the effective altruist community's nepotistic network will help people more than the Jewish network. And it is open to all. And I mean, seriously, like people are like, Oh, Jews are nepotistic. Yeah. Jews are nepotistic. Catholics are nepotistic. Well, Scientologists are nepotistic. Sororities and fraternities are nepotistic.
That's why people join them for the quote unquote career advancement. They offer Jews are not super nepotistic by that. I mean, they, they don't [00:38:00] have some. Disproportionate ability to be nepotistic or I, I, I, and again, as people who associate with lots of Jews I have not seen them be more nepotistic than I have seen other groups be.
If anything, I've actually seen them be a little less nepotistic because the way that Jewish nepotism works in my experience actually is more of cultural fit nepotism. So Mo and I often get benefits from Jewish individuals in terms of like hiring us and stuff like that, because we like vibe with Jews.
it also just seems to be more meritocratic. So those who within Jewish networks broadly are able to meritocratically show themselves to be the most expert or capable tend to rise. So assuming that you were within that and you're the best, then you rise, but like you. It's not your inherent Jewishness that gets you there.
It's, it's, I guess it's, we'll say playing by the Jewish value system or cultural [00:39:00] system and being within the broader network. That seems to be the biggest thing. Whereas in the LDS church, you need temple recommends in the EA community, you have to say exactly the right things. And yeah champion exactly the right causes and invest a lot of time.
Like everyone has their separate rule set. They're all slightly different sports, but yeah, it is a pretty open sport. If Jewish people aren't somehow cheating to get ahead in society, how are they doing it? While we don't have a strong answer, we suspect our private dinner parties at which we host people we think might change the course of world history grant some insight. Around 2 percent of the US population is Jewish, and yet somehow when we select high potential for impact guests at what to us feels like random, around 50 percent or more end up Jewish.
How is this random selection method for people we think have a high likelihood of changing the world, pulling up mostly Jews? When inviting people to these dinners, we often send out cold invitations to people who recently wrote something online that we found [00:40:00] intellectually stimulating or controversial in a way that engages us.
It seems if you send cold invitations to creators of intellectually engaging blogs, podcasts, and substacks, a huge portion of them will be Jewish. Why? Jewish culture encourages adherence to invest time in the types of public discourse that can feel pointless, even socially dangerous, to members of most other cultures.
This higher likelihood to speak publicly when others would feel social pressure to stay quiet may also explain, at least in part, the preponderance of Jewish comedians, something we discuss in detail in the chapter Relation to Pleasure and the Arts on So if you go to the, the proportion of Jewish comedians is insanely high.
I remember it was like one was looking, it was like 92 percent of like New York comedians in the seventies or something were Jewish. It was insanely high. And so when you look at this, you're like, okay, so there's something pushing Jewish people to outcomes that lead them to be more visible for their controversial ideas.
And here you could [00:41:00] say, okay, Because I think when people are contrasting Jews to the general population, they, the mistake is, you shouldn't think of this as, how are Jews different from the general population? It's, how are Jews different from specific other populations that aren't getting these benefits?
So let's contrast Jews here with Wasps. That's why Anglo Saxon Protestants in America. In Wasp culture, which I'm sure Many of our audience are familiar with would it be seen as high status to have published a controversial like op ed or sub stack post? No, you go to your family meeting and you'd be shamed.
People would be like, why are you doing all that weird stuff out there? Right? You know, Stop saying that weird stuff. It's making everyone look at us like we're weird. But within the Jewish circles, people, you go, you know, you go back to your family and they're like, Oh, that was really cool. How you did that thing that no one else had thought before.
And so why are Jews being socially rewarded for this is interesting. So keep going. Across all layers of [00:42:00] Jewish culture, from rituals, shavrusa, I know I butchered that, to internal hierarchy, the rabbinic system, debate skill is both practiced and rewarded at an unparalleled level vis a vis other cultures.
Those who grew up in Jewish culture will therefore more enthusiastically call bullshit on society because their cultural framing trained them to emotionally reward themselves for doing so. It's not that Jews are smarter than other people, people are on average, it's that when individual Jews are smarter, they're more likely to speak up in ways that get them noticed.
Essentially, when not using preexisting accreditation networks like the universities, guilds or secret societies, individuals looking for the smartest people in society to hire and befriend are going to search for people writing or saying engaging stuff in a public context. And those people are disproportionately Jewish.
This gives Jews a little used side path to power. Jews access this side path, not because they're smarter, but because they have a cultural compulsion to share engaging ideas publicly at higher [00:43:00] rates. Take the top 10 controversial online intellectuals you like to follow. Focus on those you believe you chose without any outside influence, small blogs, undiscovered podcasts, and the like, and try to determine whether they have Jewish ancestry.
We think you will be surprised. And if our theory is accurate, it means Jewish over representation and positions of power will increase with the sustained rise in internet culture. This theory does not explain why among the highest ranked chess players, 51 percent have at least one Jewish parent. When deciding whether or not valid, keep that in mind.
And it doesn't explain something else. And it gets something wrong there. In my little prediction is the rapid crash of Jewish exceptionalism. If you look at IQ what is it, like Nobel Prize winners over time, the percent that are Jewish has been dropping dramatically over the past 20 years or so. And you actually see this in other areas of Jewish exceptionalism with the rate dropping dramatically.
As [00:44:00] to why the rate of Jewish exceptionalism is dropping dramatically I suspect it actually has a lot to do with it. In, for example, the Nobel Prize Asian competition. It's that over that period Asian countries that got higher access to nutrition ended up reaching their IQ potentiality, their cultural IQ potentiality, which allowed them to compete in these marketplaces.
But I also think that when you look at like the nuance of the subject, and you actually dig into it, you try to find out what's actually going on, you see why the focus on racializing IQ is often so wrongheaded and gets you to really wrongheaded interpretations. Which can cause you to make decisions that are very bad or develop world schema that are very bad that leads you to, for example, perceive like what, why does it matter, you know, that you don't come into the schemas?
Well, it matters because then you might end up. Perceiving Jews as maybe having some sort of, like, cabal or nepotistic framework, and that's why they're getting [00:45:00] ahead, and so then maybe you are like, well, I can't have too many Jews working in my company, or they'll build this nepotistic network, and now your company has lost access to To like really high quality talent.
Or you waste time fighting a group that really you have no beef with, you know, you look at like a leather apron club. And it's like, well, many of the best people at pushing right leaning, I politics in the United States, like Ben Shapiro and stuff like that are Jewish. Like you, you, you can't, that's my take there.
This piece actually then goes much further talking about. Jews and communism which is to say that Jews are not actually, actually, we have time to read this because you got 10 minutes and then you're cutting off, right? So why don't you read this section? Okay. It's pretty interesting. In researching this subject, we came across an interesting and widely believed conspiracy theory that Jews were overrepresented among the Bolshevik communists who took over Russia.
We say this is interesting as digging into the stats actually presents the opposite question. Why were so [00:46:00] few Jews represented? Among the Bolsheviks, Jews only made up around 3% of highly ranked Bolsheviks. While this is an overrepresentation of Jews, it is dramatically below what would expect given Jewish overrepresentation.
other areas of power. For a deeper, well sourced discussion of this, check out the Wikipedia article citation. In short, it looks like there were far, far fewer Jews in the upper level of the Communist Party than one would expect. Anecdotally, Simone's Jewish side of the family had to leave Russia because they were white Russians, people who fought for the support of the czar.
We suppose the lack of Jewish support for Bolsheviks shouldn't be surprising based on the fact that the communist government of Russia later specifically targeted Jews to be eliminated as a cultural group, citation. This should not be surprising given that Karl Marx was wildly anti Semitic, quote, What is the worldly religion of the Jew?
Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. An organization of [00:47:00] society which would abolish the preconditions of huckstering and therefore the possibility of huckstering would make the Jew impossible. Unquote. Marx furthermore complained that Jews were, quote, reproducing like lice.
Unquote. While some claim Marx made statements like these in an attempt to hide his pro Jewish inclinations as he had some Jewish ancestry. Citation the fact that Marx's goal was this systematic elimination of Judaism as a cultural identity would make such obfuscation conspiratorial in the extreme citation there, but yeah, it's just insane like his first book or something I think it was at first because one of his books Karl Marxist was like the Jewish problem like communism is not an ideology that is friendly to Jewish individuals or is a Jewish cultural group.
And it. Has not had a historically, like, if you look at our own government, if you look at the disproportional representation of like Jews in Congress [00:48:00] and stuff like that way, way, way, way above what you had with the Bolsheviks. So it's like, it's just not true. There is a connection there. Do you want to keep you have time to read the, this last outro here.
Yeah. Generally, generally we would shy away from conversations that attempt to tie an IQ trend to a specific ethnic group. But this particular instance warrants discussion because people use the myth of Jews higher IQ to dismiss the role Jewish culture plays in their success. Obviously, given the topic of this book, the pragmatist guide to religion from which we're reading, just a reminder.
You should check it out and give it a five star review on Amazon. This myth is very important for us to dispel. We shy away from the topic of, from the topic of IQ trends as they broadly relate to ethnic groups for two reasons. First, as you can see from the case of claims around Jewish IQ, data used to prove this stuff is often far more shaky than those who would authoritatively [00:49:00] share it may imply.
I want to note here because I, because society says. You will be shamed and you will be attacked. If you publicly mentioned that there might be IQ differences between ethnic or cultural groups it leads people to be like, well, I know that if Jews had a much higher IQ than other groups, people wouldn't be allowed to say that, you know, like people in universities and people in positions of power in our society wouldn't be allowed to say that without risk of being fired.
So when I hear some random person online to say it was authority. It must be true because I know that I wouldn't get it from positions of power, right? But this is the problem you get across sort of this research around race and IQ and stuff like that is because everybody knows that the mainstream power players can't say this stuff, when they see minor people say this stuff they're like, Oh, it must be true because, so, [00:50:00] so basically the urban monoculture in shaming talk of this makes the sources that do try to elevate it feel much more believable to your average well intentioned person.
They're just like, oh, well, they must have a higher IQ. It's just, we can't talk about it or act as if they do because that could lead to racism or whatever. When the actual truth of all this is much more interesting. Second, even if IQ does vary across ethnic groups, , such variation is largely irrelevant as of our generation and any variation would be totally irrelevant going forward in our species.
The idea of one ethnicity being superior to another along all Any number of measures is nonsensical in a world in which families can create their own vision of the ubermensch in just a few generations, through the use of IVG and polygenic risk score selection. Objectively, the more cultural and genetic diversity there is in the genetic data, the more robust and safe the [00:51:00] future of our species will be when performing intentional genetic selection at the level of individual genes rather than ethnic groups.
The more colors of paint on the palette, the better. Whenever we hear someone talking about ethnic IQ differences, the world is changing. We feel like we just broke into the big bad's lair at the end of an action movie to find him monologuing about the sharpness of the masterfully honed samurai sword he used to win many impressive historic battles, waving it around like a goofus.
Bro, we have guns. Fully automatic guns. No one cares about your samurai sword. That's great. Well, I have a 75 year old child on this top. No, but it is that way, you know, in this world. It is. It's so dumb. It's so dumb.
But that, that's what's so satisfying about racism in general is that it is like, It gets dumber when you consider that in the development, you know, [00:52:00] rapidly, rapidly fast.
IQ is falling. We all have another podcast in the developed world. It looks like we're going to have a one standard deviation decline in IQ within the next 75 years. That is stunning. But it also means that if you're like, Oh, this group has like, I don't know, one quarter of a standard deviation, higher IQ than this group.
It's like, well, that won't be relevant within literally. One to two generations of today, like, so why are we talking about this? The thing that matters is the people who do polygenic selection versus the people who don't do polygenic selection or the people who do genetic modification versus the people who don't do genetic modification.
It's not an ethno group thing or at least some form of like how a group is choosing its mates is going to matter a lot. Right? So I guess. Yeah, it's, it's, it's sad and pathetic when I see people try to make fights about this, given that it's just not relevant anymore if you are a forward thinking instead of backwards thinking person.
It, it really matters. But I, I would [00:53:00] say in the same vein, We also need to be honest here, that while there aren't like meaningful IQ differences between ethnic groups that are going to be persistent there are between individuals. And that's one thing that our society really needs to get over, is people who had, Huge advantages in their lives because you know, that's who we're usually talking to.
Like I'll be talking to a friend at like Stanford business school and they'll be like, everyone's born exactly genetically the same. Everyone had the same shot at getting into Stanford business school as I had, you know? And I'm like that is just not true. You had a huge amount of systemic privilege over other people likely born smarter than your peer group.
It's really bad in the pull yourself up by your own bootstraps crew where they didn't come from wealthy families, so they don't know to have any level of humility around why they were able to achieve things and their peer group wasn't. They're just like, well, my peer group is lazy and pathetic and terrible.
You know, the Bill Cosby effect, I guess I'd call it. And it's like, [00:54:00] no, you likely had a genetic advantage that other specific individuals in that group didn't have. And that should give you more compassion for their situation. But it also matters when you look at society more broadly and is this effect going to increase?
I mean, obviously this is the other thing when I say to people, like, as soon as you realize that there's a genetic correlate to IQ, it's like, and you can see that's being really heavily selected against, right? Like the beginning of idiocracy ain't a joke.
As the 21st century began. Human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, began to favor different traits with no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to reward those who reproduce the most
having kids is such an important decision. We're just waiting for the right time. It's not something you want to rush into, obviously. I'm pregnant again! Shit! I got too many damn kids!
There's no way we can have a child now. Not with the market the way it is, no. [00:55:00] God, no. Come on over here, bitch! He don't care about you! Well, we finally decided to have children, and I'm not pointing fingers, but it's not going well. Yeah! Yeah! I'm gonna fuck all of you! That's my boy! And so it went for generations. Although few, if any, seemed to notice.
Like that's obviously happening. Like Obviously, obviously happening if you look at the data or if you just anecdotally look around you in the world and this is something that we need to take seriously because a lot of people are going to suffer and die if we don't.
Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna hop on. call. Do you want lasagna? Or do you want reheated Indian food? Because I have lasagna in the fridge now. Reheated Indian food and then we'll do a lasagna tomorrow. Tomorrow. [00:56:00] All right. Is it and it's just all in the fridge. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a full thing of mango chicken because I want me to pan pan fry it and then steam some rice.
A pan fry it but put in a little bit of coconut milk. So that Cut off if you don't have any open coconut milk, right? If I don't then open a can. You don't want whole milk instead as a base? Okay. Coconut milk. I love you. I love you too. Your mom continues to impact me. And I think of her phrases all the time still, which was like, well, we were just, you know, based on our conversation right now, I just keep thinking. And I titled our, our stream yard thing, intelligent J O O's. And it was your mom that got me started on that. She's like, Oh, I used to know that.
I got hurt. No, no. Yeah. She got me started on that. It was from South park. Yeah, but it was originally from South park,
I didn't want to have to say this, but I think maybe we're not seeing heaven because one of us doesn't believe in it enough. Huh? Heaven could be like the pixie fairies of [00:57:00] Bubble Yum Forest. You only see them if you really believe in them. What? You know, maybe we're not seeing heaven because one of us is a J O O.
but your mom popularized it with France in our family. Cause she's so hip to everything.
The Jewish IQ Myth: The Truth is Much Weirder