can you guess which country has the highest average IQ?

all things tech. mostly optimistic. consistently guilty of facecrime. corporate slave

close guess! china is in the top 5.
yeah, there is a study by richard lynn and david becker. i also recently came across it. top 5 are asian countries :)

I’ve never asked myself this question before, interesting. Without any data to back this up and purely guessing, the first country that comes to mind is an East Asian one, perhaps China?

Are there many studies on this? I’d imagine the results or claims vary.

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Lynn’s work is intriguing but also highly controversial, as I’m sure you know.

He was a self-avowed racialist (when the concept of biological races among Homo sapiens is nonsensical to begin with), and the editor-in-chief of a white supremacist journal (Mankind Quarterly). Of course, his scholarly work should be assessed on its own merits, but it’s hard to ignore that he came with a pretty strong agenda.

The challenges with cross-border IQ testing are cultural and methodological. It’s very hard to normalize for environmental factors, and if you don’t, what you really end up measuring are differences in education, nutrition, health, cultural values, etc.

Lynn was also a strong proponent of the dysgenic effect (the Idiocracy movie premise that dumb people breed more, and that intelligence is hereditary, and thus populations become dumber over time). Yet this also flies in the face of the observed Flynn effect (a longitudinal increase in average IQ).

Deep rabbit hole this is

yeah, it’s not old and not much of use either.

yeah, it’s not old and not much of use either.

https://warpcast.com/aviationdoctor.eth/0x127e9224

They weren't saying this 50 or 100 years ago. Makes me incredibly sceptical of the usefulness of the measure.