seems low, but if it’s that low i would suspect malnutrition or disease have an effect (i mean, i wonder what outdoor defecation has done to generations of indians).
some of the results look kind of crazy. romania’s IQ is 87. this can’t be due to malnutrition, and for cultural reasons romania has done excellent on international math olympiad.
I’m pretty sure some of this is speculative, at least in the BCs, but still a fun watch.
Numinous
4 years ago
(I tried posting a link, twice, but it got eaten up. What’s the policy on posting here?)
thewarlock
4 years ago
Average Indian IQ in UK is 97 in majority shudra migrants. I wouldn’t be surprised if genetic average is in 90s or higher with malnutrition being a huge culprit.
Continued inbreeding in Pak that has lessened to a greater degree in India will relatively depress their IQs more
Interestingly S Indians, including non Brahmins which is majority, are stereotyped as smartest despite further relation to postulated genetically high groups and closer relations to genetically low groups. The opposite is true of stereotypes of NW people who equally ironically have opposite relations with aforementioned conventionally postulated groups.
It’s just a stereotype regarding non-Brahmin south Indians. We tend to be a just a little bit more nerdy (but not so much) than all types of north Indians so maybe that fuels the popular perception. I suspect all types of south Indian Brahmins have far better average IQs than non-Brahmin groups though a rare person from every non-Brahmin group probably has an IQ that is comparable to the various south Indian Brahmin maxima. It is a mystery why the south Indian Brahmins, especially the Tamil Brahmins have such high intelligence though – given that they did not even face any large recent bottlenecks and stuff like certain types of Bengali Brahmins may have done because of the Bengal famines. Or it may not be a mystery after all and all the Brahmins groups all over India have the same innate intelligence profiles as the Tamil Brahmins.
Regarding northern India, we have to just wait and see – they consistently produce the most brilliant minds of India always and that is clearly noticeable in this blog as well.
Yes lol, I am extremely proud of our ancient Dravidian shaman guys and their daughters (or the right-hand-type ambitious kO and his daughters). Seems like our southern substrate was much superior to the northern Indus substrate.
Okay, on a more serious note, all that simply does not seem to make much sense to me because I still somehow believe (just based on personal observation though; I read somewhere that south Indians actually have higher average IQs compared to north Indians but I believe it may be the case only currently; north Indians may move up regarding the scores issue quite fast as their economic conditions improve) that an average non-Brahmin/whatever north Indian person tends to be more intelligent compared to an average non-Brahmin south Indian. Many of us non-Brahmin south Indians struggle a lot and give up at a certain point in time. But I most certainly am not saying that all the non-Brahmin south Indians are idiots: I can personally attest to the presence of pure hardcore intelligence in at least two non-Brahmin Telugu castes.
“Okay, on a more serious note, all that simply does not seem to make much sense to me because I still somehow believe (just based on personal observation though; I read somewhere that south Indians actually have higher average IQs compared to north Indians but I believe it may be the case only currently; north Indians may move up regarding the scores issue quite fast as their economic conditions improve) that an average non-Brahmin/whatever north Indian person tends to be more intelligent compared to an average non-Brahmin south Indian. Many of us non-Brahmin south Indians struggle a lot and give up at a certain point in time. But I most certainly am not saying that all the non-Brahmin south Indians are idiots: I can personally attest to the presence of pure hardcore intelligence in at least two non-Brahmin Telugu castes.”
You would think that living in the heartland of a country that promotes your own mother tongue as the official language and having greater intelligence would mean that BIMARU wouldn’t be among the poorest regions of the world ever. But maybe they are the smart ones. Letting the dumb non-brahmin Dravidians do the work while BIMARUs relax and produce endless children.
Okay it is needlessly offensive to north Indians for spreading unsupported falsehoods about them, so I sincerely apologise for my initial comment. If it is the case that they currently have lower average scores in tests measuring intelligence and lower general societal performance, then so be it. I should not have dragged them needlessly into my own mess. I realise that I wanted to emphasise the probably high gulf between many non-Brahmin south Indians and Brahmin south Indians but ended up being hurtful to north Indians in the process.
I vehemently disagree. I grew up in browntown aka central NJ. S Indian non Brahmins and Brahmins alike dominated academics along with vaishya caste and brahmins of other groups. Gujarati shudras like Patels also are producing a good number of ivy league entrants and valedictorians. These nonsensical caste trends really disappear quite a bit on more equal ground.
But just good performance in academics, having high college degrees and all may not capture real raw intelligence though; maybe high representation (which I suspect majorly only Brahmins have from the Indian subcontinent) among inventors, pure mathematicians, and to a lower extent other types of research scientists and also to a lower extent college-level valedictorians as you mentioned is more close an indicator to the presence of high intelligence levels in a group. I obviously don’t know much about the intelligence research at all of course, especially compared to giants like Mr. Razib Khan who wrote excellent articles regarding this topic in 2006 or 2008. I recently discovered them but I did not obviously understand them a lot because my knowledge in the basics of the subject is non-existent.
Gujaratis are lumped in with the cow belt, but are actually very different non-Brahmin dominated caste dynamics.
1) You have all these strange highly successful non-Hindu groups Jains, Bohras, Memons, Khojas, Parsis etc. That challenge any sort of Hindu Brahmin dominance.
2) Gujarati Hindu mid-castes, Banias, and Patels, tend to be quite financially successful. Perhaps even more-so than the Brahmins and Kshatriyas in their locality.
3) Gujarati Hindu sects tend to also be less Brahminical, but also ultra Hindu in terms of ritual purity.
For eg. The grandest Hindu temples one tends to come across in the West are built by a single peculiar mostly Gujarati Hindu sect (BAPS) under the auspices of a “Shudra” as its head priest
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pramukh_Swami_Maharaj)
4) There is very little animosity towards Brahmins in Gujarat (compared to say Tamil Nadu). They aren’t viewed as evil oppressors, because there are many other equally or more successful groups around.
Most Jains in Gujarat are vanias (banias) and are casteist while still not “technically” being hindu (I’m Jain). Jains and Jews a few things in common. Stereotypes of restrictive diet, clannish behavior, cheapness, and good intellect.
Yes, Jains are the most Hindu like of the non-Hindu groups. And I think many vaishnava banias / vanias from Mewar and Gujarat are descended from people who used to follow Jainism.
Casteism ( jati moreso than varna ) is a social ill among Sikh and Jains as well. To a lesser extent also among Indian Christians and Muslims.
The point is that it is not wise to extrapolate regional caste dynamics to different parts of India as some of the commentators seemed to be doing. Since the country is so large, and so diverse.
I am very sorry for lumping all Brahmins together like that: but I still do believe that even poor and historically relatively unsuccessful Brahmin groups have more pure potential in them compared to very successful feudal castes or someone. Jains of Gujarat maybe like Brahmins of south India – moderately good standing in society but not invincible (even in south India (excepting Kerala) the Brahmins were not historically that powerful; the feudal village lords who only sometimes belonged to the Brahmin caste tended to wield large portions of power).
But there may be something about what I would call the direct cultural descendants of the old Gangetic-philosophical-belt (which includes Brahmins and Jains currently in India) that makes children born in their families more prone to high success in highly advanced disciplines like pure mathematics, physics, mechanical and electrical engineering, computing (comes under mathematics only), etc. I read hypothesised somewhere, incompletely as is usual for me, so so long ago, that advanced spatial capabilities, creativity and other types of intelligence emerge in toddlers (at a really really young age like 1 year and lower) with very open-minded and inquisitive temperaments (to this extent I can remember what I read that time; all that follows is my own rubbish) and it maybe that toddlers with that ever-so-perfectly right and delicate emotional temperament who have appropriate challenges and materials to experiment with their curiosities beginning from a really really young age may feel inclined to direct some of their energies towards these activities in addition to the usual stuff like learning language, trying walking, etc. at which usually most children succeed like some superhuman monsters and spectacularly effortlessly (from the perspective of us adults at least). It is in this area that the cultural environments in Brahmin or Jain homes may be of help – consider all the stuff that the Brahmin and Jain parents would be speaking in front of the toddler (maybe even inadvertently for the most part), for example.
However, there does exist that occasional toddler like Srinivasa Ramanujan who is not only capable of accomplishing practical challenges assigned to him by others (which in reality his poor Tamil Shrivaishnava Brahmin parents might not have been able to do much; except their inadvertent verbal inputs to feed his mind) but also is resourceful enough to actively pursue and solve some damn challenges for himself like a boss. This highly advanced performance might be possible solely because of the toddler’s particular genetics subtly affecting him/her and maybe because the average intelligence profiles of groups like the Ashkenazi Jews, Brahmins and Jains are shifted towards the right by some means, natural or artificial (assuming intelligence can of course change in a population with time), the maxima also shift to the right and more people are born among these groups with intelligence capabilities between the superior average and the superior maximum. This maybe because of some fascination nature seems to have with the Gaussian distribution; if it is right that natural endogamic populations tend to stabilise with their characteristics following normal distributions, I don’t know in how many generations some potential disturbance created in some characteristic of some population tends to be redistributed back into a normal distribution.
So I do fundamentally hold a speculative belief that if the average can somehow be shifted by creating some appropriate disturbance like cultural, etc., the peaks (and thus everything between average and peak) may take care of themselves (however population groups also seem to be differing in their respective standard deviation values and I don’t know why that is) ultimately. So I think it is indeed possible that all historically disadvantaged and other groups of India or somewhere else with no much history of attaching huge cultural importance to abstract higher disciplines in the home environment can also ultimately achieve a lot in intelligence gains merely with the changing environments. I might be wrong, but that’s my perception of the whole affair.
There is also the thing about different types of intelligence – apparently Indians have relatively higher verbal IQs than spatial among themselves while within the Chinese, it’s the reverse or something. I definitely don’t claim to understand anything worthwhile about the huge topic of intelligence but my superficial, biased perhaps motivated reading and speculating (while also likely subconsciously avoiding any important questions and challenges to my assumptions) definitely does not lead me to non-religious-far-right political conclusions haha. Great way to make everything political at the end though! I am feeling too political today perhaps, haha.
Duh?
4 years ago
IQ is not something absolute. It may depend on how the calculations are done and who are the people exactly. Age and social class of the participants may also matter. Here is an “IQ test” that includes indians:
Thanks for giving me inspiration for another research, DUH. Earlier, I wrote about Serbian word MED (=honey) which is a root for words – Medical, Medal, Medication, Medovina (ancient Serbian alcoholic drink made from honey), etc…I found that in more than 50 languages have the same name for honey – med. I also explained the reason for this.
Using just Google translate, I found that Serbian word DUH (=spirit, ghost, soul) is also identical in a number of worldwide languages, for e.g:
However, I will thorough investigate this and other languages. Cheers.
????
4 years ago
@razib khan please write about
1.who the people of india actually are.
2. Are average indians somehow related to either Africans or Australoids? Or do they have some sort of recent either African or Australoid roots?
3. Who were the aryan invaders exactly and what are the proofs of aryan invasion?
4. Are all south asians genetically the same?
5. Are people from iran and afghanistan very related to different Europeans?
6.Are North indians and pakistanis pure aryan?
7.Are categories like Caucasoid,Mongoloid and ngroid perfect?
8. Do different European groups phenotypically and genetically vary largely from each other?
9. Are religious and cultural differences the main reason why many white people from MENA, Central asia,Afghanistan etc are not being considered “white”?
10. Are majority pakistanis,north indians and arabs fair skinned?
Thanks ?x4 for asking these (Nobelworthy) questions. I will also impatiently wait for Razib’s answers. It seems you are a fairly recent BP reader because we had some discussions before. I will not try answer your questions because you did not ask me, but I will just make couple references in anticipation of Razib’s (primarily genetic) elaborations. Just to make a general remark that, with a reason, the knowledge of ancient European history of average SA pundit (and globally) is just about catastrophic.
#3 – possible indicators: genes, language, mythology, several 000s of toponyms
#5 – which different Europeans? Who were Europeans 5000 or 2000 BC? Which language was spoken in EU at that time?
All the best!
Saurav
4 years ago
Overall a good podcast with HAF. Apart from her answer on caste ( which is understandable considering she is American born) I found her views quite reasonable.
The American-born are never going to understand caste in India because it’s only an academic concern. It just doesn’t matter to us, like Suhag I also only learned my caste in my mid-teens. Even then I didn’t really understand what it meant till my mid-20s.
I know there’s far-Lefties and Sadhana types who insist otherwise (that the Indian diaspora is obsessed with caste.) I find their claims risible, and honestly they’re more interested in bashing Indians than getting to the heart of the matter. Brush them off and move on, I say.
Haha I remember seeing this article and the responses to it all on twitter and somewhere else and feeling that these super-savvy do-gooders are always concerned about whether they are capable or not capable of capturing the persons having the highest raw intelligence by their use of IQ tests into workforce and all. For some reason, during those days, I was especially bitter about my own low-average intelligence and my strong tendency to be lazy and easily depressed over the smallest of things lol (to take a close example of my usual slothful behaviour, I did not even read the original article at the point lol (I never read haha). But funnily, now I read it (incompletely again, of course) and found that Nassim Nicholas Taleb indeed does mention at a place something like risking losing people with high intelligence by insisting on IQ tests and stuff hahaha).
Ali Choudhury
4 years ago
I remember getting in a bizarro argument on Twitter with someone who said standardised tests like IIT entrance exams were objective measures of intelligence and the best way to assess admission on merit. But IQ tests were not standardised tests. Therefore IQ test results showing Han Chinese IQ was on average 20 points higher than Indian IQ were obviously invalid.
yeah a lot of it is just dick measuring. I think key is to look at results that are more tangible and to just let meritocracy do its thing and that includes dejure actions to limit overt discrimination with stuff like segregation.
froginthewell
4 years ago
@Santosh ji, I hear that in north India people who do well in academics tend more to be some non-brAhmaNa jAti-s such as the kAyastha-s. I have even heard a claim that descendants of those historically associated with administrative bureaucracies tend to be smarter, because in those jAti-s develops a culture of delaying gratification and a more subconscious instinctive sense that delaying gratification will eventually yield results. Apparently this is important because only to a small extent can reasoning to oneself about long-term benefits of work can be motivational (this much agrees with my experience).
Then there are various other racist theories (mentioning since I am disappointed to see no fight here :P). One is how south Indian kingdoms such as the Pallavas and the Vijayangara kept getting the best talent as immigrants from the north, e.g., shAraMgadeva who wrote the saMgIta-ratnAkara (there is also something about his study of the factorial function that I don’t remember) was a third generation kashmIri-paNDit after Kashmiris got a perhaps well-deserved whacking from you-know-who. He was with the Yadavas in Maharashtra, his grandfather and father were with perhaps the Yadavas or some kingdom in Karnataka.
Aside: I understand your taking the example of Tam Brahms over say Mallu Brahms, but I am not sure of so much difference between TamBs and TelBs. At super-high-levels I find many TelBs, very likely the smartest of all Indians I know is a TelB.
I meant to say third generation immigrant from Kashmir, not third generation Kashmiri Pandit.
Aside: rather than thinking of IQ as meaningless, these days I wonder if too high IQ should be viewed as “usually a net negative” for the society. It can lead to “elite overproduction” in the Turchin sense?
Or, may be this model (warning: I am agnostic with respect to these models but have some sort of addiction to playing with them): In some countries people have generally high IQ, and that works well for them. In some countries people have generally low IQ, and that doesn’t hurt them either. In India there is great variance, and this results in high IQ elite factionalizing and competing for influencing the low IQ nonelite, not by trying to deliver better services to the poor (that is hard) but by turning them against the competing high IQ faction – say “Brahminical RW” vs “Brahminical LW”, in the fight between whom is caught the average Indian.
(every now and then I turn into a mix of anti-brAhmaNa+anti-intellectual when my self-esteem hits a low).
e.g., shAraMgadeva who wrote the saMgIta-ratnAkara (there is also something about his study of the factorial function that I don’t remember) was a third generation kashmIri-paNDit
frog,
a) The claim in Hindu Indian history
xyz WROTE JKL in the past
b) The claim in Sri Lankas history
xyz built JKL reservoir
So which claim benefits all of the populace.
At the end of the 11th century, building of reservoirs ended because of South Indian (Kalinga) invasions.
That was the erosion of the concept King and people are one.
Parallels are the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and marginalization of older ethos of the Anglo Saxons.
@sbarrkum – in the context of a discussion on a specific topic, I said of xyz having written JKL, and you interpret it as “In Hindu Indian history they make a claim that xyz wrote JKL” to contrast with a randomly chosen claim from Sri Lankan history.
I can also quote a Sri Lankan who wrote xyz and several Hindu Indians who built tonnes of reservoirs and irrigation networks, but unnecessarily cherry picking towards a sweeping generalization and starting a fight is not to my taste.
Racist or not, that idea about the ancestors of southern Brahmins being a special subset of northern Brahmins seems to make sense to me. But I feel severely handicapped regarding the whole topic because I have no sufficiently broad and deep knowledge of the basics of it.
And yes, there does seem to be no much cultural differences between the Telugu, Kannada and Tamil Brahmins and it may just be the case that I mistook the high Tamil Brahmin visibility in India because of their Nobel prizes and all for even more superior intelligence compared to Telugu and Kannada Brahmins.
// shAraMgadeva who wrote the saMgIta-ratnAkara (there is also something about his study of the factorial function that I don’t remember) was a third generation kashmIri-paNDit after Kashmiris got a perhaps well-deserved whacking from you-know-who //
You shouldn’t talk about stuff you do not know 🙂
shAraGgadeva lived in the early 13c (around 1220 CE) which is over a century before any Muslim king (native or foreign) ruled the region. kashmIra-maNDala fell to turuSka mleccha-s by ~1340 CE, until it was liberated by the pAMthika-s under hari siMha half a millennium later.
@उद्ररुहैन्वीय, If you read carefully you would have noted that I said “whacking” and not “conquest” or “rule”, so it means that I was referring to the repeated attacks in the 12th and 13th century driving political instability beyond where it used to be. That said, I don’t know if this was precisely the motivation for shAraMgadeva’s grandfather to leave, but it seems to be agreed popularly that Kashmiris stopped producing anything much worthwhile after around 1150 AD, and being charitable to Kashmiris I lean to the view that this has everything to do with heightened political instability.
But there may be something about what I would call the direct cultural descendants of the old Gangetic-philosophical-belt (which includes Brahmins and Jains currently in India) that makes children born in their families more prone to high success in highly advanced disciplines like pure mathematics, physics, mechanical and electrical engineering, computing (comes under mathematics only),
Santosh,
Think about it. Sri Lanka is the furthest away from all the that Brahmin stuff.
When you can point historical evidence for Hindu Brhamins or other working for benefit of all.
Maybe there are Sanskrit texts extolling the building of water reservoirs.
Even the harshest critics of Islamist fundamentalism here do not say that no Muslim ever worked for the welfare of others, but such is the acceptability of Hindu-phobia that any sort of ignorant proof-free assertion dehumanizing the members of an entire religion as selfish assholes never caring for others goes. Those who aren’t interested in stereotyping Hindus exclusively negatively may look up the following (and note that this is not about some Sanskrit literature glorifying water works):
Also read of Saint Vyasaraya’s (whose resting place was recently damaged presumably by anti-Hindu miscreants) donation for water reservoirs.
2. Read up about Kashmiri Suyya Pandita’s engineering against famine and floods.
3. Read up about the Chozas and others’ extensive water reservoirs and irrigation networks, which is what made parts of a rainshadow state like Tamil Nadu attractive to people, and British were very much impressed by it and developed it further.
Hindu Indians who built tonnes of reservoirs and irrigation networks,
To quote
a) He wrote, “Many of them now abandoned or in ruins … the solicitude of those ancient monarchs for the extension of cultivation even in tracts not favoured by natural position or the quality of the soil
b) 1520 AD, extolled the ingenuity of monarch Krishna Deva Raya to provide irrigation and water supply to the newly-founded city of Nagalapura (Hospet). The traveller wrote, “The king made a tank there, which as it seems to me, has the width of falcon shot
Frog,
a) Sinhalese have been building tanks/reservoirs since at the very least since 300 BC.
b) Tanks/reservoirs construction stopped after the 11th century with invasions from South India
c) The northern Tamil Hindu Kings (after 12th Century) did not build or maintain the Tanks/reservoirs
d) Since the 1500’s the Europeans too neglected the Tanks/reservoirs. They too did not want a independent agricultural village people
Even with all that neglect, much of the Tanks/reservoir system had continuity till post independence.
Frog, what you call a Tank in South India and Sri Lanka are completely different.
a) A small tank is about 1 km x 500m wide. That is one about 1 km from where I live.
b) There are 30K tanks in the dry zone of SL. The dry zone is about 2/3rd of SL. ie 40K km squared. That is roughly 1 tank per sq km. All in use and over 1000 years old.
dehumanizing the members of an entire religion as selfish assholes never caring for others goes. Those who aren’t interested in stereotyping Hindus exclusively negatively may look up the following (and note that this is not about some Sanskrit literature glorifying water works)
Frog,
I stand by what I said, Hindu Kings did not work for the benefit of all the citizenry.
By its very precepts Hinduism is discriminatory. How could a Hindu King enforce, say all and sundry to a drink water from a common well, let alone use of tank/reservoir water by all.
Just so you realize the scale of tank/reservoir in Sri Lanka compared to South India.
You asked if there is any historical evidence at all, and I provided them. Then you quietly shift the goal post to making claims like “Tanks in South India are big ponds” as if cursory glance at some google images, without any tabulation of dimensions, proves anything.
The easiest thing to do is to make random claims, expect the other person to have to disprove them, and in the event of the other person disproving them quietly move on to making new random claims.
If you show better epistemic hygiene, may be we can talk again. Good day.
a) I questioned if writing some text benefited all the population
b) You replied “I can also quote several Hindu Indians who built tonnes of reservoirs and irrigation networks”
c) You then quoted/pointed
1)A 15th century Krishna Deva Raya Irrigation (with link)
The last paragraph “Many of them now abandoned or in ruins”
2)Read up about Kashmiri Suyya Pandita Engineering against
famine and floods
What was built and still in use ?
3)to read of Saint Vyasaraya (read where, link please)
4)Shivaji’s agrarian management:
This is just a letter, nothing about construction.
5)Some utsargas and danas of medieval Hindus
Basically asking ponds to be built as dana
Not for all the public
to quote “Hindu authorities as to whether the maker of the
water reservoir can use it as a member of the public.
A water-shed may also be built in the temple and a
nominal brahmin appointed to distribute drinking water
to the general public.
I replied with following details
a) Number of Tanks: 30K in approx 40,000 km2
b) A small tank is a bout 0.5 km2
c) All are over 1,000 years old.
Then you reply saying “without any tabulation of dimensions, proves anything”
I’ll be generous, maybe you didnt read my reply.
Anyway two examples.
Two examples,
a) the first recorded Tank, Abhaya Wewa/Basawakkulama built around 300 BC (1 km2).
b) The last with a record of joining 5 older tanks, the Parakrama Samudra, renovated around 1150’s (22.6 km2). Both are still in use.
Abhaya Wewa/ Basawak kulama
=============================
Built by King Pandukabhaya (437 BC to 367 BC)
Approx 1 km2. Today 1.74 km2.
Even after 2500 years, one of the tanks that still continues to supply water toAnuradhapura.
Fed by the 87 km Jaya Ganga/Yodha Ela (canal) which in itself is an engineering marvel with 6 inches per mile. (1:10,000) gradient. It also functions as a moving reservoir because of its single banking
The Jaya Ganga feeds as a cascade Balalu wewa, Nachchaduwa wewa, Abhaya wewa, Tissa wewa and Nuwara wewa. https://amazinglanka.com/wp/kala-wewa-and-jaya-ganga/ https://amazinglanka.com/wp/basawakkulama-wewa-tank/
He had the pond deepened and abundantly filled with water, and since he had taken water therefrom, when victories (for his consecration), they called it Jayavapi.[20]
I. e. the tank of victory. [?]
See v. 88. The Abhaya-vapi which was laid out by the king Pandukabhaya himself, is the tank now called Basawak-kulam. PARKER, Ancient Ceylon, p. 360 foll. http://mahavamsa.org/mahavamsa/original-version/10-consecrating-pandukabhaya/#footnote_19_1641
========================================
Parakrama Samudra
=================
Revovated by King Parakrama Bahu 1 (1153-1186)
Area 22.6km2 ; Depth 5 m (16 ft);
Shallow reservoir, consisting of five separate reservoirs(Thopa, Dumbutulu,Erabadu, Boo, Katu tanks) connected by narrow channels in Polonnaruwa.
The oldest Topa wewa built around 386 AD.
The problem precisely is your shameless lying like this: I replied with following details…Then you reply saying “without any tabulation of dimensions, proves anything”
Look, you made an allegation that “Tanks in South India are big ponds” – which is a lie, and giving me Sri Lankan dimensions doesn’t prove anything about Tamil Nadu. I didn’t attack Sri Lanka or ask for numbers about it, you attacked Tamil Nadu without providing numbers about it. Providing lists of numbers that don’t prove what you assert is charlatanry, not worthwhile statistics.
Throughout the rest of your comment is similar goal-post-shifting bullshit – as if Krishna Deva Raya’s work being in ruins today negates what he did then.
You yourself started the debate from a completely different sub-thread, with weak questions like “Maybe there are Sanskrit texts extolling the building of water reservoirs…Let me know” – suggesting even these weren’t there, and then quietly strengthening the question hoping that the other person will tire scurrying to fetch links to spoon-feed you with, and will be too tired to point out your goal-post-shifting and so on.
Haha where did I speak anything about the Brahmin tendency/lack of it for doing good to other people? I don’t know very much about that topic at all. I only wondered about the possible causes for high Brahmin representation in sciences, mathematics, etc.
(Even if it turns out to be the case that the Brahmins somehow managed to increase evil-scientist genes inside their own endogamous subgroups by not writing texts that would lead to better access to water for the other castes (lol I am being tongue-in-cheek here but who knows lol the evil Brahmins are capable of anything), we cannot do much about it since it’s all in the past and our duty in the present is the general welfare of all the people – both non-Brahmin and Brahmin.)
However, I do agree that my and some others’ extreme obsession with intelligence on the internet, in this period, is not very warranted. But in my defense though, my major point in writing that super-long and tedious post was to make my personal belief known for once (I will try my level best not to repeat it much later) which is one of a nice, warm optimistic leftist conclusion only, no?
Well, as it happens each and every damn time when I get so snug about myself and write some stupid edgy stuff on the internet like a good millennial, I get face to face with a hitherto completely unknown challenge and this time I noticed someone suggest a book on Mr. Razib Khan’s GNXP blog titled “Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste”. I googled that and read the introduction that the authors discuss in there what is this entire weirdness about super-extremised notions of ritual purity that apparently dictate many rural Hindus to not use and abandon toilets built for them by the government and instead continue open defecation. I don’t even know what to think here; may God have mercy on all children everywhere in the world.
“Well, as it happens each and every damn time when I get so snug about myself and write some stupid edgy stuff on the internet like a good millennial, I get face to face with a hitherto completely unknown challenge and this time I noticed someone suggest a book on Mr. Razib Khan’s GNXP blog titled “Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste”. I googled that and read the introduction that the authors discuss in there what is this entire weirdness about super-extremised notions of ritual purity that apparently dictate many rural Hindus to not use and abandon toilets built for them by the government and instead continue open defecation. I don’t even know what to think here; may God have mercy on all children everywhere in the world.”
Don’t worry, this kind of open defecation is most common in the holy Gangu philosophical belt wherefrom high IQ brahmins and nonbrahmins arise. I’m sure they’ll figure out the mysteries of plumbing one day.
I become so clueless if it’s the case that social reform has anything to do with religious beliefs (which it actually does, in most cases, especially in countries like India) because I am temperamentally both afraid of religion and super-fond of it (comes from my unfortunate nature, I suppose) and do not want the devout to sacrifice it and its character to scientific and modern liberal pressures and so on. But some practices seem too much really; it’s perhaps best to go the religious rationalist way and disown the said practices and put loving pressure on people following them to discontinue them gradually.
Also, I believe that it may be relatively easier to goad people into stopping this and there is no need for much worry at all. There are a few things that are incompatible with any religion but I don’t think this is one of them. Kind and able people should really try to work hard and not let these types of beliefs lead a very good policy of the current government to become not very beneficial like that.
Dear Santosh ji, It is fair to say this much: that the unhygenic choices may come from preferences that were shaped by religious practices. That said, I am not aware of any religious movement or injunction against toilets.
We work with heuristics all the time and not rational reasoning, because else life will be too complicated; religious set up contributed to a certain heuristic of keeping one’s house away from faeces, in the interest of keeping diseases out. Even today, open defecation in rural areas, while still unhygienic, is not nearly as unhygienic as in cities. Even those famous roman public toilets were away from residences.
Eventually this heuristic became outdated because of better indoor plumbing etc. Unlike many other practices, the religious don’t recommend sticking to this practice. But many continue with their residual mental heuristics. How fair is it to blame religion for this?
A useful heuristic in thinking of such matters would be: think of what left-liberals would have said if Hinduism was replaced by Islam. They would probably have said that Islam insisted on a better hygienic practice, it is just that modern technology changed everything. But Hinduism is a free-for-all punching bag.
I understand very clearly what you say, froginthewell. Please don’t take my comments of the SJW type any seriously. It’s just that my fundamental response to any new thing or information is pure fear because of my nature and I shut down in thinking whether or not a certain practice can be removed or not and thus tend to dictate religion to the religious especially when I am probably outside of religion/ struggling with it now myself because of my tAmasika nature. I sometimes take some solace in liking to think (don’t know if that is true though) that I am ultimately doing God’s work, something like that of Jaya and Vijaya after they were cursed perhaps. Maybe God blesses me with correct intuitions and brain wiring at least in any of my future lives.
On the same subject matter, I think it would be interesting to see how urban poor and others with newfound access to toilets behave – whether they are like the above type of rurals or middle class urban people. I certainly agree with your point about urban open defecation is probably lot more unhygienic than the rural one; I particularly remember a scene in a documentary about the rapid improvement of sanitation in Bangladesh in recent years – this particular bit was in some urban slum in Dhaka and everything looked so horrible there.
Dear Santosh, at this point I feel compelled to emphasize that I didn’t accuse you in any way, more like a possible/tentative disagreement, while being fully conscious that my view may be impacted by bias towards defending Hinduism against every non-Hindu and (unwitting damage by) most Hindus. All those allegations you hurl at yourself hurt me too because they resonate much with my self-perception.
Since you seem to feel guilty about attempts at “race realism”, especially after stating the tentativeness of your view explicitly and still being attacked by thought-police, let me add my own thinking of race-realism hoping you might be able to relate to it.
We are all limited in so many ways and it is a miracle that we survive. Even then, life is hard. So ever the more reason for each person to be acutely aware of one’s defects and try to fix them. I talk to high-IQ leftists all the time, and the resulting complexes have helped me discover so much about my structural neuro-biological weaknesses. I believe my not being able to read as extensively as Razib thinks every human should, is also biological. These awareness-es often give closure by preventing me from attempting things I could never; this frees up time for things that will be more helpful for my purpose.
I would like everyone to have the luxury of not being distracted or buying dreams that are beyond their accomplishment. I see the left-liberals as selling such dreams – they are high IQ people, and it helps them to believe or propagandize that everyone is of the same IQ, because then they get to believe that their vast erudition and success is a consequence of their well-deserved hard work, instead of a random quirky windfall from nature. I say “or propagandize” because these are also in many cases people happy to dismiss others as “not good enough” instead of looking at the person’s positives. The not-so-high-IQ part of the society, in my opinion, can make excellent contributions in various fields, better than even most high-IQ people, because IQ is overrated; in specialized situations alone is it of that great use. But the lack of race-realism, and the resulting lack of introspection about one’s own strengths and weaknesses implies that the proletariat ends up pursuing pointless dreams in areas where they are not strong, instead of their strengths.
This farce also works well for those leftists who are mediocre: by writing articles about how “we as a society” suck, they can delude themselves into being an exceptional civilized few standing out from the vast unwashed public. This in my view explains most Indian journalists.
Unlike you, then, I don’t ask for greater intelligence in a different life; I ask for greater mental strength to accept and come to terms with my low IQ, and clarity to see where I can make contributions. I would rather be a practical low IQ person who contributes productively to the society than a high IQ person who does damage by promoting faux egalitarianism.
froginthewell, when I said I yearn for a more correct intuition, I meant an intuition that makes me more easily and happily close to God and not necessarily a hyper-intelligent or even an averagely intelligent being like I currently have. For all my ranting about my lack of intelligence, I am fundamentally comfortable with my intelligence and with the help of God, my family members and God’s children everywhere in the world, I can manage in that regard. All my problems stem from not being able to live an easy godly life – if anything, I believe my level of not-too-low average intelligence coupled with my innate temperament is also detrimental to the pursuit of such a life.
Regarding the race-realism or other such things, I really don’t care about anything except the truth; so if it is the case that all the East Asians and Northern Europeans (and in the Indian context, Brahmins, etc.) have better aptitude for certain kinds of things than others currently, perfectly well and good. I have an intuition that this is not horribly fixed except for some minor differences between old northern and southern latitude peoples and can change with time. If this is not right, then that is so easily okay too. In either case, my inclination is centre/left of centre and I believe that we have to do our bit to try to improve using moderate and not too extreme means, the intelligence levels of low-IQ people’s distant descendants in the future; actually not even this: just to try to introduce all people everywhere to the things at the higher end so that some of them may derive happiness out of them – by associating with them, by touching them, by feeling them and not necessarily by mastering them (of course qualified by the requirement that they should not cause any harm to others in the process). Thus I will still hold equality of opportunity (and to some extent, well-qualified and contextual affirmative action) as a very important ideal, even if it turns out that trying for such things delays human material progress or anything else. I don’t know if it is right to think all this but these are the parts of my nature I am okayishly comfortable with.
I am trying to write something more to finish this but cannot think of anything at the moment, so maybe I should end with this interesting thing: you remember that little discussion we had about the reDDi-raTTaDi-rASTrika connection? I found out just yesterday that there is this other word raTTaguDi in Telugu dictionaries with the same meaning, and this other one looks so awfully close phonologically to the rAStrakUTa word, the first part raTTa Prakrit-influenced Telugu/Kannada-like and the second part guDi Telugu/Kannada-like. I think this conclusively shows that the Reddy dudes (or more realistically, just the old title reDDi) have something to do with the Rashtrakutas.
And yes, I perfectly agree with you that high intelligence is of course overrated. Even I who typically have the tendency to go full genocidal (with nothing but compassionate human intent (however perverse it may be) and with parental consent in each case also, of course) on unborn babies of a certain type, typically don’t think low intelligence qualifies as ground for such a measure (the thought does not even cross my mind very much and am thankful for it). The ideal anyway is to go the religious route and stop committing the sin of mental genocide of this type of unborn soul and the other type of unborn soul without any break, based on my own personal perverse ideas about “reducing suffering”, whatever, whatever.
And needless to say I also agree with you on the importance of introspection, froginthewell. My own left-liberal tendencies on many normal issues are highly qualified by inputs from my association with a few other domains of knowledge in addition to my own personal nature. And it is definitely important that the proletariat, as you say, is aware of what reasonable leftists are aware of and hope for, too. Greed (even if it is caused by harmless naivete) about anything is anyhow one of the six foes, seven deadly sins, etc. so should be tried to be kept in control by everybody, both big and small.
Santosh, Sorry I missed you last comment. I have never thought in these terms – of trying to fix the inequality or proactively creating opportunities for people to sample stuff. Thanks also for the additional comments on reDDis; wasn’t aware of such things at all, and it is a pleasure to see more details being filled in making the conclusion appear more and more reasonable.
froginthewell
4 years ago
Akismet is suspicious of pro-Hindu links, it seems 🙁
Karan
4 years ago
Hi Razib quick Q please. The 1000genomes data you use for your analyses, did you download all the VCF files? I’ve heard each sample is around 1gb compressed. So does that mean i need to FTP hundreds of gigabytes?
I want to get hold of files that can be used with 3rd party programs like gedmatch or DIYDodecad calculators (so smaller converted files would be suffice). But the sheer size of the VCF files are putting me off. Thanks
The 1000genomes data you use for your analyses, did you download all the VCF files?
yeah.
they’re big.
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
To all those who are having a field day making wild speculations based on IQ and race, a reality check may be in order. It is ridiculous to take two of the most scientifically dubious concepts, viz race and IQ, and make overreaching judgments based on them.
Jews are supposed to be the smartest human race, and yet they came scarily close to complete annihilation in 20th century. How can they be so smart and couldn’t foresee the calamity that befell them in time.
I remember once reading on the blog of a self-important public intellectual that since mongoloid (east asian) races have the highest IQ on earth, they will eventually subjugate and dominate India. The only anomaly in this groundbreaking research was that Indians from NE states, who have them most east asian genes in them, have never played any meaningful role in in India’s history. In fact some of the most mongoloid looking tribes from Arunachal Pradesh were literally living in stone age (no metals!) before the british brought modern world to them. So much for the utility of IQ and race as a tool for predicting people’s destiny.
“India shies away from arbitration simply because it has no interest in a solution. No Indian leader has much to gain by attempting to sort Kashmir out once and for all. Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, both envisioning a tranquil subcontinent, initiated serious discussions, but didn’t get very far, because any negotiation, has to be about give and take. As I mentioned in a column five years ago, in the case of Kashmir, Pakistan wants something that India possesses, but has nothing of anywhere near equal worth to offer in return. India does lay claim to areas now controlled by Pakistan and China, but there’s no public demand to press that claim, nor any movement within those regions to secede and join India.”
“It is clear, then, that once the kerfuffle over Donald Trump’s fabrication is over, and whatever political points that can be squeezed from it have been scored, we will be left again with a status quo that pleases nobody but will not change. “
Hoju
4 years ago
@Santosh I don’t think we need to worry much about open defecation. With high IQs and Aryan genes and Gangu philosophical traditions I am confident cow belters been be potty trained over the course of a few generations.
Apart from that I care two hoots whether I am Son of Steppe or Grandson of East or West Iranian farmer or Nilotic hunter or VVAASI – very very ancient ancestral south Indian.
When genetic knowledge can make me run a mile a day at the age of 95, that would be useful.
Milan Todorovic
4 years ago
The board of the International Mathematics Olympiads, proclaimed the Serbian student Theodore von Burg the best young mathematician of all time. He took the title after his fourth consecutive math gold. Jelena Ivancic, who graduated from the third grade of the High School, received a special award at the Mathematics Olympiad for the best in the world in the girls category. Congratulations!
Milan Todorovic
4 years ago
PS: The name of previously mentioned award for the best in the world in the girls category is – Mirzahani.
Mariam Mirzahani was an Iranian mathematician and professor of mathematics at Stanford University. In 2014, Mirzahani received the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics (equivalent to mathematicians’ Nobel). She became the first woman to whom the award was presented. The award committee cited her work in the area of “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their module spaces”. In 2017, Mirzahani died of breast cancer at the age of 40.
my white friends keep saying i should watch the aziz ansari special on netflix. i already did!
What do you think about Iq estimate of India around 76?
What source is this from?
Richard Lynn and David becker.considering the extreme malnutrition and stunting in India their number looks realistic.
what paper is this? can you post the cite?
seems low, but if it’s that low i would suspect malnutrition or disease have an effect (i mean, i wonder what outdoor defecation has done to generations of indians).
did u make that up?
This is according to Richard Lynn and David Becker in their new book.
Richard Lynn is infamous for lying about IQ data. David Becker is not even a scientist.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aLkZFEYmsrNxbFbVJ6LKlWtGBGEPQODu/view?usp=drivesdk
Check the pdf.
some of the results look kind of crazy. romania’s IQ is 87. this can’t be due to malnutrition, and for cultural reasons romania has done excellent on international math olympiad.
Yeh,iq of Nepal was claimed to be 45,also Guatemala around 40.
ok, those are crazy numbers.
Video of Indian historical changes from the IVC to the present: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN41DJLQmPk
I’m pretty sure some of this is speculative, at least in the BCs, but still a fun watch.
(I tried posting a link, twice, but it got eaten up. What’s the policy on posting here?)
Average Indian IQ in UK is 97 in majority shudra migrants. I wouldn’t be surprised if genetic average is in 90s or higher with malnutrition being a huge culprit.
Continued inbreeding in Pak that has lessened to a greater degree in India will relatively depress their IQs more
Interestingly S Indians, including non Brahmins which is majority, are stereotyped as smartest despite further relation to postulated genetically high groups and closer relations to genetically low groups. The opposite is true of stereotypes of NW people who equally ironically have opposite relations with aforementioned conventionally postulated groups.
It’s just a stereotype regarding non-Brahmin south Indians. We tend to be a just a little bit more nerdy (but not so much) than all types of north Indians so maybe that fuels the popular perception. I suspect all types of south Indian Brahmins have far better average IQs than non-Brahmin groups though a rare person from every non-Brahmin group probably has an IQ that is comparable to the various south Indian Brahmin maxima. It is a mystery why the south Indian Brahmins, especially the Tamil Brahmins have such high intelligence though – given that they did not even face any large recent bottlenecks and stuff like certain types of Bengali Brahmins may have done because of the Bengal famines. Or it may not be a mystery after all and all the Brahmins groups all over India have the same innate intelligence profiles as the Tamil Brahmins.
Regarding northern India, we have to just wait and see – they consistently produce the most brilliant minds of India always and that is clearly noticeable in this blog as well.
South indian brahmins are smarter may be because of south indian admixture that north indian brahmins do not have
Yes lol, I am extremely proud of our ancient Dravidian shaman guys and their daughters (or the right-hand-type ambitious kO and his daughters). Seems like our southern substrate was much superior to the northern Indus substrate.
Okay, on a more serious note, all that simply does not seem to make much sense to me because I still somehow believe (just based on personal observation though; I read somewhere that south Indians actually have higher average IQs compared to north Indians but I believe it may be the case only currently; north Indians may move up regarding the scores issue quite fast as their economic conditions improve) that an average non-Brahmin/whatever north Indian person tends to be more intelligent compared to an average non-Brahmin south Indian. Many of us non-Brahmin south Indians struggle a lot and give up at a certain point in time. But I most certainly am not saying that all the non-Brahmin south Indians are idiots: I can personally attest to the presence of pure hardcore intelligence in at least two non-Brahmin Telugu castes.
“Okay, on a more serious note, all that simply does not seem to make much sense to me because I still somehow believe (just based on personal observation though; I read somewhere that south Indians actually have higher average IQs compared to north Indians but I believe it may be the case only currently; north Indians may move up regarding the scores issue quite fast as their economic conditions improve) that an average non-Brahmin/whatever north Indian person tends to be more intelligent compared to an average non-Brahmin south Indian. Many of us non-Brahmin south Indians struggle a lot and give up at a certain point in time. But I most certainly am not saying that all the non-Brahmin south Indians are idiots: I can personally attest to the presence of pure hardcore intelligence in at least two non-Brahmin Telugu castes.”
You would think that living in the heartland of a country that promotes your own mother tongue as the official language and having greater intelligence would mean that BIMARU wouldn’t be among the poorest regions of the world ever. But maybe they are the smart ones. Letting the dumb non-brahmin Dravidians do the work while BIMARUs relax and produce endless children.
Okay it is needlessly offensive to north Indians for spreading unsupported falsehoods about them, so I sincerely apologise for my initial comment. If it is the case that they currently have lower average scores in tests measuring intelligence and lower general societal performance, then so be it. I should not have dragged them needlessly into my own mess. I realise that I wanted to emphasise the probably high gulf between many non-Brahmin south Indians and Brahmin south Indians but ended up being hurtful to north Indians in the process.
I vehemently disagree. I grew up in browntown aka central NJ. S Indian non Brahmins and Brahmins alike dominated academics along with vaishya caste and brahmins of other groups. Gujarati shudras like Patels also are producing a good number of ivy league entrants and valedictorians. These nonsensical caste trends really disappear quite a bit on more equal ground.
But just good performance in academics, having high college degrees and all may not capture real raw intelligence though; maybe high representation (which I suspect majorly only Brahmins have from the Indian subcontinent) among inventors, pure mathematicians, and to a lower extent other types of research scientists and also to a lower extent college-level valedictorians as you mentioned is more close an indicator to the presence of high intelligence levels in a group. I obviously don’t know much about the intelligence research at all of course, especially compared to giants like Mr. Razib Khan who wrote excellent articles regarding this topic in 2006 or 2008. I recently discovered them but I did not obviously understand them a lot because my knowledge in the basics of the subject is non-existent.
India is a big place.
Gujaratis are lumped in with the cow belt, but are actually very different non-Brahmin dominated caste dynamics.
1) You have all these strange highly successful non-Hindu groups Jains, Bohras, Memons, Khojas, Parsis etc. That challenge any sort of Hindu Brahmin dominance.
2) Gujarati Hindu mid-castes, Banias, and Patels, tend to be quite financially successful. Perhaps even more-so than the Brahmins and Kshatriyas in their locality.
3) Gujarati Hindu sects tend to also be less Brahminical, but also ultra Hindu in terms of ritual purity.
For eg. The grandest Hindu temples one tends to come across in the West are built by a single peculiar mostly Gujarati Hindu sect (BAPS) under the auspices of a “Shudra” as its head priest
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pramukh_Swami_Maharaj)
4) There is very little animosity towards Brahmins in Gujarat (compared to say Tamil Nadu). They aren’t viewed as evil oppressors, because there are many other equally or more successful groups around.
Most Jains in Gujarat are vanias (banias) and are casteist while still not “technically” being hindu (I’m Jain). Jains and Jews a few things in common. Stereotypes of restrictive diet, clannish behavior, cheapness, and good intellect.
Yes, Jains are the most Hindu like of the non-Hindu groups. And I think many vaishnava banias / vanias from Mewar and Gujarat are descended from people who used to follow Jainism.
Casteism ( jati moreso than varna ) is a social ill among Sikh and Jains as well. To a lesser extent also among Indian Christians and Muslims.
The point is that it is not wise to extrapolate regional caste dynamics to different parts of India as some of the commentators seemed to be doing. Since the country is so large, and so diverse.
I am very sorry for lumping all Brahmins together like that: but I still do believe that even poor and historically relatively unsuccessful Brahmin groups have more pure potential in them compared to very successful feudal castes or someone. Jains of Gujarat maybe like Brahmins of south India – moderately good standing in society but not invincible (even in south India (excepting Kerala) the Brahmins were not historically that powerful; the feudal village lords who only sometimes belonged to the Brahmin caste tended to wield large portions of power).
But there may be something about what I would call the direct cultural descendants of the old Gangetic-philosophical-belt (which includes Brahmins and Jains currently in India) that makes children born in their families more prone to high success in highly advanced disciplines like pure mathematics, physics, mechanical and electrical engineering, computing (comes under mathematics only), etc. I read hypothesised somewhere, incompletely as is usual for me, so so long ago, that advanced spatial capabilities, creativity and other types of intelligence emerge in toddlers (at a really really young age like 1 year and lower) with very open-minded and inquisitive temperaments (to this extent I can remember what I read that time; all that follows is my own rubbish) and it maybe that toddlers with that ever-so-perfectly right and delicate emotional temperament who have appropriate challenges and materials to experiment with their curiosities beginning from a really really young age may feel inclined to direct some of their energies towards these activities in addition to the usual stuff like learning language, trying walking, etc. at which usually most children succeed like some superhuman monsters and spectacularly effortlessly (from the perspective of us adults at least). It is in this area that the cultural environments in Brahmin or Jain homes may be of help – consider all the stuff that the Brahmin and Jain parents would be speaking in front of the toddler (maybe even inadvertently for the most part), for example.
However, there does exist that occasional toddler like Srinivasa Ramanujan who is not only capable of accomplishing practical challenges assigned to him by others (which in reality his poor Tamil Shrivaishnava Brahmin parents might not have been able to do much; except their inadvertent verbal inputs to feed his mind) but also is resourceful enough to actively pursue and solve some damn challenges for himself like a boss. This highly advanced performance might be possible solely because of the toddler’s particular genetics subtly affecting him/her and maybe because the average intelligence profiles of groups like the Ashkenazi Jews, Brahmins and Jains are shifted towards the right by some means, natural or artificial (assuming intelligence can of course change in a population with time), the maxima also shift to the right and more people are born among these groups with intelligence capabilities between the superior average and the superior maximum. This maybe because of some fascination nature seems to have with the Gaussian distribution; if it is right that natural endogamic populations tend to stabilise with their characteristics following normal distributions, I don’t know in how many generations some potential disturbance created in some characteristic of some population tends to be redistributed back into a normal distribution.
So I do fundamentally hold a speculative belief that if the average can somehow be shifted by creating some appropriate disturbance like cultural, etc., the peaks (and thus everything between average and peak) may take care of themselves (however population groups also seem to be differing in their respective standard deviation values and I don’t know why that is) ultimately. So I think it is indeed possible that all historically disadvantaged and other groups of India or somewhere else with no much history of attaching huge cultural importance to abstract higher disciplines in the home environment can also ultimately achieve a lot in intelligence gains merely with the changing environments. I might be wrong, but that’s my perception of the whole affair.
There is also the thing about different types of intelligence – apparently Indians have relatively higher verbal IQs than spatial among themselves while within the Chinese, it’s the reverse or something. I definitely don’t claim to understand anything worthwhile about the huge topic of intelligence but my superficial, biased perhaps motivated reading and speculating (while also likely subconsciously avoiding any important questions and challenges to my assumptions) definitely does not lead me to non-religious-far-right political conclusions haha. Great way to make everything political at the end though! I am feeling too political today perhaps, haha.
IQ is not something absolute. It may depend on how the calculations are done and who are the people exactly. Age and social class of the participants may also matter. Here is an “IQ test” that includes indians:
https://akarlin.com/2012/08/minorities-cognitive-performance-in-the-uk/
Thanks for giving me inspiration for another research, DUH. Earlier, I wrote about Serbian word MED (=honey) which is a root for words – Medical, Medal, Medication, Medovina (ancient Serbian alcoholic drink made from honey), etc…I found that in more than 50 languages have the same name for honey – med. I also explained the reason for this.
Using just Google translate, I found that Serbian word DUH (=spirit, ghost, soul) is also identical in a number of worldwide languages, for e.g:
German, Punjabi, Gujarati, Russian, Polish, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Uzbek, Urdu, Spanish, French, Sinhala, Portuguese, Corsican, Maltese, Nepali, Sindhi, Yiddish, Esperanto, Marathi, Malayalam, Kurdish, Kazakh, Kannada, Icelandic, Western Frisian…
However, I will thorough investigate this and other languages. Cheers.
@razib khan please write about
1.who the people of india actually are.
2. Are average indians somehow related to either Africans or Australoids? Or do they have some sort of recent either African or Australoid roots?
3. Who were the aryan invaders exactly and what are the proofs of aryan invasion?
4. Are all south asians genetically the same?
5. Are people from iran and afghanistan very related to different Europeans?
6.Are North indians and pakistanis pure aryan?
7.Are categories like Caucasoid,Mongoloid and ngroid perfect?
8. Do different European groups phenotypically and genetically vary largely from each other?
9. Are religious and cultural differences the main reason why many white people from MENA, Central asia,Afghanistan etc are not being considered “white”?
10. Are majority pakistanis,north indians and arabs fair skinned?
Thanks ?x4 for asking these (Nobelworthy) questions. I will also impatiently wait for Razib’s answers. It seems you are a fairly recent BP reader because we had some discussions before. I will not try answer your questions because you did not ask me, but I will just make couple references in anticipation of Razib’s (primarily genetic) elaborations. Just to make a general remark that, with a reason, the knowledge of ancient European history of average SA pundit (and globally) is just about catastrophic.
#3 – possible indicators: genes, language, mythology, several 000s of toponyms
#5 – which different Europeans? Who were Europeans 5000 or 2000 BC? Which language was spoken in EU at that time?
All the best!
Overall a good podcast with HAF. Apart from her answer on caste ( which is understandable considering she is American born) I found her views quite reasonable.
The American-born are never going to understand caste in India because it’s only an academic concern. It just doesn’t matter to us, like Suhag I also only learned my caste in my mid-teens. Even then I didn’t really understand what it meant till my mid-20s.
I know there’s far-Lefties and Sadhana types who insist otherwise (that the Indian diaspora is obsessed with caste.) I find their claims risible, and honestly they’re more interested in bashing Indians than getting to the heart of the matter. Brush them off and move on, I say.
[your comments are kind of incoherent]
i need to reduce my sound on the podcast. you could here me moe around my coffee cup!
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
Haha I remember seeing this article and the responses to it all on twitter and somewhere else and feeling that these super-savvy do-gooders are always concerned about whether they are capable or not capable of capturing the persons having the highest raw intelligence by their use of IQ tests into workforce and all. For some reason, during those days, I was especially bitter about my own low-average intelligence and my strong tendency to be lazy and easily depressed over the smallest of things lol (to take a close example of my usual slothful behaviour, I did not even read the original article at the point lol (I never read haha). But funnily, now I read it (incompletely again, of course) and found that Nassim Nicholas Taleb indeed does mention at a place something like risking losing people with high intelligence by insisting on IQ tests and stuff hahaha).
I remember getting in a bizarro argument on Twitter with someone who said standardised tests like IIT entrance exams were objective measures of intelligence and the best way to assess admission on merit. But IQ tests were not standardised tests. Therefore IQ test results showing Han Chinese IQ was on average 20 points higher than Indian IQ were obviously invalid.
yeah a lot of it is just dick measuring. I think key is to look at results that are more tangible and to just let meritocracy do its thing and that includes dejure actions to limit overt discrimination with stuff like segregation.
@Santosh ji, I hear that in north India people who do well in academics tend more to be some non-brAhmaNa jAti-s such as the kAyastha-s. I have even heard a claim that descendants of those historically associated with administrative bureaucracies tend to be smarter, because in those jAti-s develops a culture of delaying gratification and a more subconscious instinctive sense that delaying gratification will eventually yield results. Apparently this is important because only to a small extent can reasoning to oneself about long-term benefits of work can be motivational (this much agrees with my experience).
Then there are various other racist theories (mentioning since I am disappointed to see no fight here :P). One is how south Indian kingdoms such as the Pallavas and the Vijayangara kept getting the best talent as immigrants from the north, e.g., shAraMgadeva who wrote the saMgIta-ratnAkara (there is also something about his study of the factorial function that I don’t remember) was a third generation kashmIri-paNDit after Kashmiris got a perhaps well-deserved whacking from you-know-who. He was with the Yadavas in Maharashtra, his grandfather and father were with perhaps the Yadavas or some kingdom in Karnataka.
Aside: I understand your taking the example of Tam Brahms over say Mallu Brahms, but I am not sure of so much difference between TamBs and TelBs. At super-high-levels I find many TelBs, very likely the smartest of all Indians I know is a TelB.
I meant to say third generation immigrant from Kashmir, not third generation Kashmiri Pandit.
Aside: rather than thinking of IQ as meaningless, these days I wonder if too high IQ should be viewed as “usually a net negative” for the society. It can lead to “elite overproduction” in the Turchin sense?
Or, may be this model (warning: I am agnostic with respect to these models but have some sort of addiction to playing with them): In some countries people have generally high IQ, and that works well for them. In some countries people have generally low IQ, and that doesn’t hurt them either. In India there is great variance, and this results in high IQ elite factionalizing and competing for influencing the low IQ nonelite, not by trying to deliver better services to the poor (that is hard) but by turning them against the competing high IQ faction – say “Brahminical RW” vs “Brahminical LW”, in the fight between whom is caught the average Indian.
(every now and then I turn into a mix of anti-brAhmaNa+anti-intellectual when my self-esteem hits a low).
e.g., shAraMgadeva who wrote the saMgIta-ratnAkara (there is also something about his study of the factorial function that I don’t remember) was a third generation kashmIri-paNDit
frog,
a) The claim in Hindu Indian history
xyz WROTE JKL in the past
b) The claim in Sri Lankas history
xyz built JKL reservoir
So which claim benefits all of the populace.
At the end of the 11th century, building of reservoirs ended because of South Indian (Kalinga) invasions.
That was the erosion of the concept King and people are one.
Parallels are the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and marginalization of older ethos of the Anglo Saxons.
@sbarrkum – in the context of a discussion on a specific topic, I said of xyz having written JKL, and you interpret it as “In Hindu Indian history they make a claim that xyz wrote JKL” to contrast with a randomly chosen claim from Sri Lankan history.
I can also quote a Sri Lankan who wrote xyz and several Hindu Indians who built tonnes of reservoirs and irrigation networks, but unnecessarily cherry picking towards a sweeping generalization and starting a fight is not to my taste.
Racist or not, that idea about the ancestors of southern Brahmins being a special subset of northern Brahmins seems to make sense to me. But I feel severely handicapped regarding the whole topic because I have no sufficiently broad and deep knowledge of the basics of it.
And yes, there does seem to be no much cultural differences between the Telugu, Kannada and Tamil Brahmins and it may just be the case that I mistook the high Tamil Brahmin visibility in India because of their Nobel prizes and all for even more superior intelligence compared to Telugu and Kannada Brahmins.
// shAraMgadeva who wrote the saMgIta-ratnAkara (there is also something about his study of the factorial function that I don’t remember) was a third generation kashmIri-paNDit after Kashmiris got a perhaps well-deserved whacking from you-know-who //
You shouldn’t talk about stuff you do not know 🙂
shAraGgadeva lived in the early 13c (around 1220 CE) which is over a century before any Muslim king (native or foreign) ruled the region. kashmIra-maNDala fell to turuSka mleccha-s by ~1340 CE, until it was liberated by the pAMthika-s under hari siMha half a millennium later.
@उद्ररुहैन्वीय, If you read carefully you would have noted that I said “whacking” and not “conquest” or “rule”, so it means that I was referring to the repeated attacks in the 12th and 13th century driving political instability beyond where it used to be. That said, I don’t know if this was precisely the motivation for shAraMgadeva’s grandfather to leave, but it seems to be agreed popularly that Kashmiris stopped producing anything much worthwhile after around 1150 AD, and being charitable to Kashmiris I lean to the view that this has everything to do with heightened political instability.
But there may be something about what I would call the direct cultural descendants of the old Gangetic-philosophical-belt (which includes Brahmins and Jains currently in India) that makes children born in their families more prone to high success in highly advanced disciplines like pure mathematics, physics, mechanical and electrical engineering, computing (comes under mathematics only),
Santosh,
Think about it. Sri Lanka is the furthest away from all the that Brahmin stuff.
When you can point historical evidence for Hindu Brhamins or other working for benefit of all.
Maybe there are Sanskrit texts extolling the building of water reservoirs.
Let me Know.
Even the harshest critics of Islamist fundamentalism here do not say that no Muslim ever worked for the welfare of others, but such is the acceptability of Hindu-phobia that any sort of ignorant proof-free assertion dehumanizing the members of an entire religion as selfish assholes never caring for others goes. Those who aren’t interested in stereotyping Hindus exclusively negatively may look up the following (and note that this is not about some Sanskrit literature glorifying water works):
1. Water works in the Vijayanagara empire, as recorded by the visitor Domingo Paes: https://www.thestatesman.com/supplements/water-wisdom-of-the-vijayanagar-empire-121357.html
Also read of Saint Vyasaraya’s (whose resting place was recently damaged presumably by anti-Hindu miscreants) donation for water reservoirs.
2. Read up about Kashmiri Suyya Pandita’s engineering against famine and floods.
3. Read up about the Chozas and others’ extensive water reservoirs and irrigation networks, which is what made parts of a rainshadow state like Tamil Nadu attractive to people, and British were very much impressed by it and developed it further.
4. Shivaji’s agrarian management: https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2016/02/25/a-note-on-the-agrarian-management-in-hindavi-svarajya/
5. Some utsargas and danas of medieval Hindus: https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2006/09/24/on-some-danas-and-utsargas-of-the-mediaeval-hindus/
Hindu Indians who built tonnes of reservoirs and irrigation networks,
To quote
a) He wrote, “Many of them now abandoned or in ruins … the solicitude of those ancient monarchs for the extension of cultivation even in tracts not favoured by natural position or the quality of the soil
b) 1520 AD, extolled the ingenuity of monarch Krishna Deva Raya to provide irrigation and water supply to the newly-founded city of Nagalapura (Hospet). The traveller wrote, “The king made a tank there, which as it seems to me, has the width of falcon shot
Frog,
a) Sinhalese have been building tanks/reservoirs since at the very least since 300 BC.
b) Tanks/reservoirs construction stopped after the 11th century with invasions from South India
c) The northern Tamil Hindu Kings (after 12th Century) did not build or maintain the Tanks/reservoirs
d) Since the 1500’s the Europeans too neglected the Tanks/reservoirs. They too did not want a independent agricultural village people
Even with all that neglect, much of the Tanks/reservoir system had continuity till post independence.
Frog, what you call a Tank in South India and Sri Lanka are completely different.
a) A small tank is about 1 km x 500m wide. That is one about 1 km from where I live.
b) There are 30K tanks in the dry zone of SL. The dry zone is about 2/3rd of SL. ie 40K km squared. That is roughly 1 tank per sq km. All in use and over 1000 years old.
dehumanizing the members of an entire religion as selfish assholes never caring for others goes. Those who aren’t interested in stereotyping Hindus exclusively negatively may look up the following (and note that this is not about some Sanskrit literature glorifying water works)
Frog,
I stand by what I said, Hindu Kings did not work for the benefit of all the citizenry.
By its very precepts Hinduism is discriminatory. How could a Hindu King enforce, say all and sundry to a drink water from a common well, let alone use of tank/reservoir water by all.
Just so you realize the scale of tank/reservoir in Sri Lanka compared to South India.
Tanks in South India are big ponds
https://www.google.com/search?q=lanka+tank&tbm=isch
https://www.google.com/search?q=south%20india+tank&tbm=isch
You asked if there is any historical evidence at all, and I provided them. Then you quietly shift the goal post to making claims like “Tanks in South India are big ponds” as if cursory glance at some google images, without any tabulation of dimensions, proves anything.
The easiest thing to do is to make random claims, expect the other person to have to disprove them, and in the event of the other person disproving them quietly move on to making new random claims.
If you show better epistemic hygiene, may be we can talk again. Good day.
frog,
a) I questioned if writing some text benefited all the population
b) You replied “I can also quote several Hindu Indians who built tonnes of reservoirs and irrigation networks”
c) You then quoted/pointed
1)A 15th century Krishna Deva Raya Irrigation (with link)
The last paragraph “Many of them now abandoned or in ruins”
2)Read up about Kashmiri Suyya Pandita Engineering against
famine and floods
What was built and still in use ?
3)to read of Saint Vyasaraya (read where, link please)
4)Shivaji’s agrarian management:
This is just a letter, nothing about construction.
5)Some utsargas and danas of medieval Hindus
Basically asking ponds to be built as dana
Not for all the public
to quote “Hindu authorities as to whether the maker of the
water reservoir can use it as a member of the public.
A water-shed may also be built in the temple and a
nominal brahmin appointed to distribute drinking water
to the general public.
I replied with following details
a) Number of Tanks: 30K in approx 40,000 km2
b) A small tank is a bout 0.5 km2
c) All are over 1,000 years old.
Then you reply saying “without any tabulation of dimensions, proves anything”
I’ll be generous, maybe you didnt read my reply.
Anyway two examples.
Two examples,
a) the first recorded Tank, Abhaya Wewa/Basawakkulama built around 300 BC (1 km2).
b) The last with a record of joining 5 older tanks, the Parakrama Samudra, renovated around 1150’s (22.6 km2). Both are still in use.
Abhaya Wewa/ Basawak kulama
=============================
Built by King Pandukabhaya (437 BC to 367 BC)
Approx 1 km2. Today 1.74 km2.
Even after 2500 years, one of the tanks that still continues to supply water toAnuradhapura.
Fed by the 87 km Jaya Ganga/Yodha Ela (canal) which in itself is an engineering marvel with 6 inches per mile. (1:10,000) gradient. It also functions as a moving reservoir because of its single banking
The Jaya Ganga feeds as a cascade Balalu wewa, Nachchaduwa wewa, Abhaya wewa, Tissa wewa and Nuwara wewa.
https://amazinglanka.com/wp/kala-wewa-and-jaya-ganga/
https://amazinglanka.com/wp/basawakkulama-wewa-tank/
The historical record of Abhaya Wewa
======================
Anuradha built a tank and when he had built a palace to the south of this, he took up his abode there
http://mahavamsa.org/mahavamsa/original-version/09-consecrating-abhaya/
He had the pond deepened and abundantly filled with water, and since he had taken water therefrom, when victories (for his consecration), they called it Jayavapi.[20]
I. e. the tank of victory. [?]
See v. 88. The Abhaya-vapi which was laid out by the king Pandukabhaya himself, is the tank now called Basawak-kulam. PARKER, Ancient Ceylon, p. 360 foll.
http://mahavamsa.org/mahavamsa/original-version/10-consecrating-pandukabhaya/#footnote_19_1641
========================================
Parakrama Samudra
=================
Revovated by King Parakrama Bahu 1 (1153-1186)
Area 22.6km2 ; Depth 5 m (16 ft);
Shallow reservoir, consisting of five separate reservoirs(Thopa, Dumbutulu,Erabadu, Boo, Katu tanks) connected by narrow channels in Polonnaruwa.
The oldest Topa wewa built around 386 AD.
Historical Record
=================
In Culavamsa. Not online.
If you need can dig a up screen shot of text.
https://amazinglanka.com/wp/parakrama-samudraya/
The problem precisely is your shameless lying like this:
I replied with following details…Then you reply saying “without any tabulation of dimensions, proves anything”
Look, you made an allegation that “Tanks in South India are big ponds” – which is a lie, and giving me Sri Lankan dimensions doesn’t prove anything about Tamil Nadu. I didn’t attack Sri Lanka or ask for numbers about it, you attacked Tamil Nadu without providing numbers about it. Providing lists of numbers that don’t prove what you assert is charlatanry, not worthwhile statistics.
Throughout the rest of your comment is similar goal-post-shifting bullshit – as if Krishna Deva Raya’s work being in ruins today negates what he did then.
You yourself started the debate from a completely different sub-thread, with weak questions like “Maybe there are Sanskrit texts extolling the building of water reservoirs…Let me know” – suggesting even these weren’t there, and then quietly strengthening the question hoping that the other person will tire scurrying to fetch links to spoon-feed you with, and will be too tired to point out your goal-post-shifting and so on.
Haha where did I speak anything about the Brahmin tendency/lack of it for doing good to other people? I don’t know very much about that topic at all. I only wondered about the possible causes for high Brahmin representation in sciences, mathematics, etc.
(Even if it turns out to be the case that the Brahmins somehow managed to increase evil-scientist genes inside their own endogamous subgroups by not writing texts that would lead to better access to water for the other castes (lol I am being tongue-in-cheek here but who knows lol the evil Brahmins are capable of anything), we cannot do much about it since it’s all in the past and our duty in the present is the general welfare of all the people – both non-Brahmin and Brahmin.)
However, I do agree that my and some others’ extreme obsession with intelligence on the internet, in this period, is not very warranted. But in my defense though, my major point in writing that super-long and tedious post was to make my personal belief known for once (I will try my level best not to repeat it much later) which is one of a nice, warm optimistic leftist conclusion only, no?
Well, as it happens each and every damn time when I get so snug about myself and write some stupid edgy stuff on the internet like a good millennial, I get face to face with a hitherto completely unknown challenge and this time I noticed someone suggest a book on Mr. Razib Khan’s GNXP blog titled “Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste”. I googled that and read the introduction that the authors discuss in there what is this entire weirdness about super-extremised notions of ritual purity that apparently dictate many rural Hindus to not use and abandon toilets built for them by the government and instead continue open defecation. I don’t even know what to think here; may God have mercy on all children everywhere in the world.
“Well, as it happens each and every damn time when I get so snug about myself and write some stupid edgy stuff on the internet like a good millennial, I get face to face with a hitherto completely unknown challenge and this time I noticed someone suggest a book on Mr. Razib Khan’s GNXP blog titled “Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste”. I googled that and read the introduction that the authors discuss in there what is this entire weirdness about super-extremised notions of ritual purity that apparently dictate many rural Hindus to not use and abandon toilets built for them by the government and instead continue open defecation. I don’t even know what to think here; may God have mercy on all children everywhere in the world.”
Don’t worry, this kind of open defecation is most common in the holy Gangu philosophical belt wherefrom high IQ brahmins and nonbrahmins arise. I’m sure they’ll figure out the mysteries of plumbing one day.
I become so clueless if it’s the case that social reform has anything to do with religious beliefs (which it actually does, in most cases, especially in countries like India) because I am temperamentally both afraid of religion and super-fond of it (comes from my unfortunate nature, I suppose) and do not want the devout to sacrifice it and its character to scientific and modern liberal pressures and so on. But some practices seem too much really; it’s perhaps best to go the religious rationalist way and disown the said practices and put loving pressure on people following them to discontinue them gradually.
Also, I believe that it may be relatively easier to goad people into stopping this and there is no need for much worry at all. There are a few things that are incompatible with any religion but I don’t think this is one of them. Kind and able people should really try to work hard and not let these types of beliefs lead a very good policy of the current government to become not very beneficial like that.
Dear Santosh ji, It is fair to say this much: that the unhygenic choices may come from preferences that were shaped by religious practices. That said, I am not aware of any religious movement or injunction against toilets.
We work with heuristics all the time and not rational reasoning, because else life will be too complicated; religious set up contributed to a certain heuristic of keeping one’s house away from faeces, in the interest of keeping diseases out. Even today, open defecation in rural areas, while still unhygienic, is not nearly as unhygienic as in cities. Even those famous roman public toilets were away from residences.
Eventually this heuristic became outdated because of better indoor plumbing etc. Unlike many other practices, the religious don’t recommend sticking to this practice. But many continue with their residual mental heuristics. How fair is it to blame religion for this?
A useful heuristic in thinking of such matters would be: think of what left-liberals would have said if Hinduism was replaced by Islam. They would probably have said that Islam insisted on a better hygienic practice, it is just that modern technology changed everything. But Hinduism is a free-for-all punching bag.
I understand very clearly what you say, froginthewell. Please don’t take my comments of the SJW type any seriously. It’s just that my fundamental response to any new thing or information is pure fear because of my nature and I shut down in thinking whether or not a certain practice can be removed or not and thus tend to dictate religion to the religious especially when I am probably outside of religion/ struggling with it now myself because of my tAmasika nature. I sometimes take some solace in liking to think (don’t know if that is true though) that I am ultimately doing God’s work, something like that of Jaya and Vijaya after they were cursed perhaps. Maybe God blesses me with correct intuitions and brain wiring at least in any of my future lives.
On the same subject matter, I think it would be interesting to see how urban poor and others with newfound access to toilets behave – whether they are like the above type of rurals or middle class urban people. I certainly agree with your point about urban open defecation is probably lot more unhygienic than the rural one; I particularly remember a scene in a documentary about the rapid improvement of sanitation in Bangladesh in recent years – this particular bit was in some urban slum in Dhaka and everything looked so horrible there.
Dear Santosh, at this point I feel compelled to emphasize that I didn’t accuse you in any way, more like a possible/tentative disagreement, while being fully conscious that my view may be impacted by bias towards defending Hinduism against every non-Hindu and (unwitting damage by) most Hindus. All those allegations you hurl at yourself hurt me too because they resonate much with my self-perception.
Since you seem to feel guilty about attempts at “race realism”, especially after stating the tentativeness of your view explicitly and still being attacked by thought-police, let me add my own thinking of race-realism hoping you might be able to relate to it.
We are all limited in so many ways and it is a miracle that we survive. Even then, life is hard. So ever the more reason for each person to be acutely aware of one’s defects and try to fix them. I talk to high-IQ leftists all the time, and the resulting complexes have helped me discover so much about my structural neuro-biological weaknesses. I believe my not being able to read as extensively as Razib thinks every human should, is also biological. These awareness-es often give closure by preventing me from attempting things I could never; this frees up time for things that will be more helpful for my purpose.
I would like everyone to have the luxury of not being distracted or buying dreams that are beyond their accomplishment. I see the left-liberals as selling such dreams – they are high IQ people, and it helps them to believe or propagandize that everyone is of the same IQ, because then they get to believe that their vast erudition and success is a consequence of their well-deserved hard work, instead of a random quirky windfall from nature. I say “or propagandize” because these are also in many cases people happy to dismiss others as “not good enough” instead of looking at the person’s positives. The not-so-high-IQ part of the society, in my opinion, can make excellent contributions in various fields, better than even most high-IQ people, because IQ is overrated; in specialized situations alone is it of that great use. But the lack of race-realism, and the resulting lack of introspection about one’s own strengths and weaknesses implies that the proletariat ends up pursuing pointless dreams in areas where they are not strong, instead of their strengths.
This farce also works well for those leftists who are mediocre: by writing articles about how “we as a society” suck, they can delude themselves into being an exceptional civilized few standing out from the vast unwashed public. This in my view explains most Indian journalists.
Unlike you, then, I don’t ask for greater intelligence in a different life; I ask for greater mental strength to accept and come to terms with my low IQ, and clarity to see where I can make contributions. I would rather be a practical low IQ person who contributes productively to the society than a high IQ person who does damage by promoting faux egalitarianism.
froginthewell, when I said I yearn for a more correct intuition, I meant an intuition that makes me more easily and happily close to God and not necessarily a hyper-intelligent or even an averagely intelligent being like I currently have. For all my ranting about my lack of intelligence, I am fundamentally comfortable with my intelligence and with the help of God, my family members and God’s children everywhere in the world, I can manage in that regard. All my problems stem from not being able to live an easy godly life – if anything, I believe my level of not-too-low average intelligence coupled with my innate temperament is also detrimental to the pursuit of such a life.
Regarding the race-realism or other such things, I really don’t care about anything except the truth; so if it is the case that all the East Asians and Northern Europeans (and in the Indian context, Brahmins, etc.) have better aptitude for certain kinds of things than others currently, perfectly well and good. I have an intuition that this is not horribly fixed except for some minor differences between old northern and southern latitude peoples and can change with time. If this is not right, then that is so easily okay too. In either case, my inclination is centre/left of centre and I believe that we have to do our bit to try to improve using moderate and not too extreme means, the intelligence levels of low-IQ people’s distant descendants in the future; actually not even this: just to try to introduce all people everywhere to the things at the higher end so that some of them may derive happiness out of them – by associating with them, by touching them, by feeling them and not necessarily by mastering them (of course qualified by the requirement that they should not cause any harm to others in the process). Thus I will still hold equality of opportunity (and to some extent, well-qualified and contextual affirmative action) as a very important ideal, even if it turns out that trying for such things delays human material progress or anything else. I don’t know if it is right to think all this but these are the parts of my nature I am okayishly comfortable with.
I am trying to write something more to finish this but cannot think of anything at the moment, so maybe I should end with this interesting thing: you remember that little discussion we had about the reDDi-raTTaDi-rASTrika connection? I found out just yesterday that there is this other word raTTaguDi in Telugu dictionaries with the same meaning, and this other one looks so awfully close phonologically to the rAStrakUTa word, the first part raTTa Prakrit-influenced Telugu/Kannada-like and the second part guDi Telugu/Kannada-like. I think this conclusively shows that the Reddy dudes (or more realistically, just the old title reDDi) have something to do with the Rashtrakutas.
And yes, I perfectly agree with you that high intelligence is of course overrated. Even I who typically have the tendency to go full genocidal (with nothing but compassionate human intent (however perverse it may be) and with parental consent in each case also, of course) on unborn babies of a certain type, typically don’t think low intelligence qualifies as ground for such a measure (the thought does not even cross my mind very much and am thankful for it). The ideal anyway is to go the religious route and stop committing the sin of mental genocide of this type of unborn soul and the other type of unborn soul without any break, based on my own personal perverse ideas about “reducing suffering”, whatever, whatever.
And needless to say I also agree with you on the importance of introspection, froginthewell. My own left-liberal tendencies on many normal issues are highly qualified by inputs from my association with a few other domains of knowledge in addition to my own personal nature. And it is definitely important that the proletariat, as you say, is aware of what reasonable leftists are aware of and hope for, too. Greed (even if it is caused by harmless naivete) about anything is anyhow one of the six foes, seven deadly sins, etc. so should be tried to be kept in control by everybody, both big and small.
Santosh, Sorry I missed you last comment. I have never thought in these terms – of trying to fix the inequality or proactively creating opportunities for people to sample stuff. Thanks also for the additional comments on reDDis; wasn’t aware of such things at all, and it is a pleasure to see more details being filled in making the conclusion appear more and more reasonable.
Akismet is suspicious of pro-Hindu links, it seems 🙁
Hi Razib quick Q please. The 1000genomes data you use for your analyses, did you download all the VCF files? I’ve heard each sample is around 1gb compressed. So does that mean i need to FTP hundreds of gigabytes?
I want to get hold of files that can be used with 3rd party programs like gedmatch or DIYDodecad calculators (so smaller converted files would be suffice). But the sheer size of the VCF files are putting me off. Thanks
The 1000genomes data you use for your analyses, did you download all the VCF files?
yeah.
they’re big.
To all those who are having a field day making wild speculations based on IQ and race, a reality check may be in order. It is ridiculous to take two of the most scientifically dubious concepts, viz race and IQ, and make overreaching judgments based on them.
Jews are supposed to be the smartest human race, and yet they came scarily close to complete annihilation in 20th century. How can they be so smart and couldn’t foresee the calamity that befell them in time.
I remember once reading on the blog of a self-important public intellectual that since mongoloid (east asian) races have the highest IQ on earth, they will eventually subjugate and dominate India. The only anomaly in this groundbreaking research was that Indians from NE states, who have them most east asian genes in them, have never played any meaningful role in in India’s history. In fact some of the most mongoloid looking tribes from Arunachal Pradesh were literally living in stone age (no metals!) before the british brought modern world to them. So much for the utility of IQ and race as a tool for predicting people’s destiny.
Another good article by contributor rohit
http://www.retributions.in/the-letter-wars/
A good article on India-Pakistan
https://scroll.in/article/931667/why-india-welcomes-global-help-against-terror-in-kashmir-but-not-to-resolve-dispute-about-state
“India shies away from arbitration simply because it has no interest in a solution. No Indian leader has much to gain by attempting to sort Kashmir out once and for all. Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, both envisioning a tranquil subcontinent, initiated serious discussions, but didn’t get very far, because any negotiation, has to be about give and take. As I mentioned in a column five years ago, in the case of Kashmir, Pakistan wants something that India possesses, but has nothing of anywhere near equal worth to offer in return. India does lay claim to areas now controlled by Pakistan and China, but there’s no public demand to press that claim, nor any movement within those regions to secede and join India.”
“It is clear, then, that once the kerfuffle over Donald Trump’s fabrication is over, and whatever political points that can be squeezed from it have been scored, we will be left again with a status quo that pleases nobody but will not change. “
@Santosh I don’t think we need to worry much about open defecation. With high IQs and Aryan genes and Gangu philosophical traditions I am confident cow belters been be potty trained over the course of a few generations.
This is what I like about genetic testing i.e. health and medical uses.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49090754
Apart from that I care two hoots whether I am Son of Steppe or Grandson of East or West Iranian farmer or Nilotic hunter or VVAASI – very very ancient ancestral south Indian.
When genetic knowledge can make me run a mile a day at the age of 95, that would be useful.
The board of the International Mathematics Olympiads, proclaimed the Serbian student Theodore von Burg the best young mathematician of all time. He took the title after his fourth consecutive math gold. Jelena Ivancic, who graduated from the third grade of the High School, received a special award at the Mathematics Olympiad for the best in the world in the girls category. Congratulations!
PS: The name of previously mentioned award for the best in the world in the girls category is – Mirzahani.
Mariam Mirzahani was an Iranian mathematician and professor of mathematics at Stanford University. In 2014, Mirzahani received the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics (equivalent to mathematicians’ Nobel). She became the first woman to whom the award was presented. The award committee cited her work in the area of “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their module spaces”. In 2017, Mirzahani died of breast cancer at the age of 40.
Jelena Ivancic (photo):
http://www.politika.rs/scc/clanak/434112/Jelena-Ivancic-dobitnica-Mirzahani-nagrade-iz-matematike