All this Ashkenazi ego polishing will get the author zero cred from them so what's the point? We've heard the discussion of Ashkenazi "genius" a million times, but these claims of the higher functioning Ashkenazi mind always makes me ask the question. Why do these great geniuses need less intelligent gentiles to support their country (Israel) with money, resources and technology? Wouldn't a people with such an advantage in mental capacity be able to create everything they need to support a society that would be a paradise on earth? I've heard that Israel is anything but, being nothing more than a cheap and very poor attempt at copying the warmer parts of the US. Ashkenazi's are experts at networking, self-promotion, cheating and convincing people of things that aren't true. They can't live without us, but we can live very well without them.
I think looking at non-intelligence factors is warranted here. For e.g. Israel has very high rates of innovation despite having a national IQ of 97-98. Often well above countries with a higher national IQ. So intelligence (even if we acknowledge IQ being an imperfect proxy for it) isn't sufficient.
Perhaps people from the MENA region are more likely to be risk-takers? Innovation tend to be associated with willingness to take risk, which in turn is associated with willingness to break social conventions. Innovation is all about smashing the conventional wisdom and question past practices. That can sometimes cause conflict with the old guard, so you need higher tolerance for risk and conflict.
But there is also an inverse relationship between being willing to take risk and intelligence broadly speaking (e.g. East Asians are highly intelligent but generally speaking risk-averse). So perhaps the secret is that Jews tend to combine both traits to a greater extent than White Christians even at the same intelligence level?
Finally, there's a question here about path dependency. Jews were more urban than normal during the early 20th century, which is probably just a function of them being minorities. You see the same pattern today. But being more urban often means being more literate (normalised for intelligence), as well as greater proximity to higher learning institutions. Perhaps this had an effect in Jews being overrepresented in academia even relative to intelligence levels early on, and since Nobel prizes are a lagging indicator, this could have been part of the puzzle. In the same way that East Asians didn't begin to win many Nobel prizes until after 2000, because most of them were too poor in earlier decades.
I'm hesitant about the argument from high rates of psychotherapy among Jews, because there is a strain of thought that says psychotherapy is an Jewish ethnic practice because Freud is a Jewish ethnic hero. To whatever degree that is true, it will obviously cause Jews to get more psychotherapy than otherwise.
(That is, the argument goes "Jews do psychotherapy so that they can enjoy being proud of Freud", not "Jews invented psychotherapy, so that makes it a Jewish thing".)
I don't perceive a causal model here. Which I'll get to, but first my personal experience with Ashkenazi Jews. In my late 20's, I had four such girl friends/hookups of whom three were clearly not mentally healthy enough for me to be interested in them long term; one was depressive (divorced from a clinical psychologist whom she married on a whim), the next was an incredible shrew (especially when she and her target were in the company of others), the third bordered on sociopathy to the extent that she used her charms to advance her career, and the last I really did not get to know well. During this same time span, I had separate minor disputes with two Jewish males, and both men quickly escalated to physical threats, both holding a clenched fist in front of my face. I've dealt with Scots-Irish (my own ethnicity) rednecks who were not afraid of violence, but they were certainly more cautious than an immediate display of a clenched fist. So, my experience says Jews tend to be crazy one way or another.
I believe European Jews, particularly Ashkenazim, were naturally selected for both intelligence and for a degree of sociopathy. The plausibility of the former trait evolving over one thousand years has been advanced in published form, as you know. Evolution of sociopathic tendencies makes sense in an endogamous population that derived much of its income from potentially exploitative activities, e.g., tax farming, tavern ownership, livestock trading. The basic model for such evolution is that more income means larger families, more income can be derived from greater pecuniary extraction from the peasantry, more extraction can be facilitated by reduced sympathy for the suffering of counterparties. The souped-up model adds sexual selection by parental choice to the above dynamic. The more sociopathic parents chose the more sociopathic suitors for their daughters, and this results in Fisherian Runaway Sexual Selection for sociopathy directed at outgroup indviduals, as well as assortative mating for sociopathy.
Thus, my causal hypothesis is that the unique economic niche of many Ashkenazim caused selection for intelligence and a higher frequency of sociopaths, and that the sociopathic selection, in messing with a complex system of emotional control, had the side effect of more frequent mental instability.
Very interesting. Some studies show five times more schizophrenia among black than white people. So, this might not be related to race at all, but rather intelligence.
Seeing the Swedish graph it seems Schozophrenia explodes in the lower IQ areas.
Excellent post, with a new & fruitful approach on a topic I've been keenly interested in at least for decades (when I read Jamison, Kay Redfield (1993): Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament). Your theory may help point to why genetic mental illness has been preserved for so long at all.
The natural question, in my mind, is just how much we can optimize for 'genius' -- what's the engineering limit of maximizing g and p to bring about a 'good outcome' & minimize bad? (The matter is of the highest concern: maximizing genius and its free expression.) That norm established, we'll have something to aim for with commercial embryo selection, etc. products.
Related to this are you aware of any studies on what makes "exceptional people" differ? Here I mean not necessarily exceptional by IQ but even just putting in top dancers, musicians, researchers etc and checking cogitive profile. If this theory is true then the measured p factor should be higher than just what you'd expect from the average g of the group.
What about bottleneck/ inbreeding depression? AJ have around 10 times less genetic variance as compared to white gentiles.
Could positive mutational load interconnection effects be possible? Mutational load seems to be a double-edged sword. Maybe there is a reverse sweet spot?
Finns could be a control group as they are also quite inbred/ genetically homogenous.
This is an area I've done a great deal of work in, and while you're on the right track, the answer is rather simple - more so than you'd imagine. Here's a hint: a) Jewish exceptionalism (verbal, pictorial), b) work capacity. c) and jewish mental illness, d) and jewish anti-social behavior share a common origin: the sex differenxes in brain organization, bias, and defect expression. So the question is, e) did generations of selection narrow or reverse sex differences in cognition? And of course, if we f) combine male jewish diaspora with southern european females, g) and then push the population through bottlnecks, and h) use upward reproduction by rabbis, we'd get exactly what we observe. And within a decade or so we'll narrow down the SNPs sufficiently to demonstrate it. Even thought in the data we have to date, including rahter odd tendency for ashkenazim to demonstrate female 'adaptive' sexuality.
Now I'm not going to plow through all the literature in this little comment block, but you can put money on this solution as correct.
The crazy factor (''disagreeable, systematic, factorial-focused, utilitarianistic, clinical, negatively suggestible, asocial") + the creative factor ("relations, intuitions, visions, holistic conceptions"), etc.
Even von neumann said :
A facility with the symbolic manipulation of linear operators;
An intuitive feeling for the logical structure of any new mathematical theory;
An intuitive feeling for the combinatorial superstructure of new theories.
In my view it must be a type-2 or type-3 fuzzy logical reasoning process that geniuses must possess as they invariably have much more working memory and computational structural-integration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-2_fuzzy_sets_and_systems
And yes, as you noted, the propensity for 'anti-social' factor, 'craziness' or 'maladjustment' increases as a function of increased intelligence or conversely put, "outesiderness" is a correlated vector with intelligence. If the general population held much more intelligence, then this would probably not likely be a fact in the first place as humans are social animals who ostensibly exhibit proxemic dispositions.
All this Ashkenazi ego polishing will get the author zero cred from them so what's the point? We've heard the discussion of Ashkenazi "genius" a million times, but these claims of the higher functioning Ashkenazi mind always makes me ask the question. Why do these great geniuses need less intelligent gentiles to support their country (Israel) with money, resources and technology? Wouldn't a people with such an advantage in mental capacity be able to create everything they need to support a society that would be a paradise on earth? I've heard that Israel is anything but, being nothing more than a cheap and very poor attempt at copying the warmer parts of the US. Ashkenazi's are experts at networking, self-promotion, cheating and convincing people of things that aren't true. They can't live without us, but we can live very well without them.
I think looking at non-intelligence factors is warranted here. For e.g. Israel has very high rates of innovation despite having a national IQ of 97-98. Often well above countries with a higher national IQ. So intelligence (even if we acknowledge IQ being an imperfect proxy for it) isn't sufficient.
Perhaps people from the MENA region are more likely to be risk-takers? Innovation tend to be associated with willingness to take risk, which in turn is associated with willingness to break social conventions. Innovation is all about smashing the conventional wisdom and question past practices. That can sometimes cause conflict with the old guard, so you need higher tolerance for risk and conflict.
But there is also an inverse relationship between being willing to take risk and intelligence broadly speaking (e.g. East Asians are highly intelligent but generally speaking risk-averse). So perhaps the secret is that Jews tend to combine both traits to a greater extent than White Christians even at the same intelligence level?
Finally, there's a question here about path dependency. Jews were more urban than normal during the early 20th century, which is probably just a function of them being minorities. You see the same pattern today. But being more urban often means being more literate (normalised for intelligence), as well as greater proximity to higher learning institutions. Perhaps this had an effect in Jews being overrepresented in academia even relative to intelligence levels early on, and since Nobel prizes are a lagging indicator, this could have been part of the puzzle. In the same way that East Asians didn't begin to win many Nobel prizes until after 2000, because most of them were too poor in earlier decades.
I'm hesitant about the argument from high rates of psychotherapy among Jews, because there is a strain of thought that says psychotherapy is an Jewish ethnic practice because Freud is a Jewish ethnic hero. To whatever degree that is true, it will obviously cause Jews to get more psychotherapy than otherwise.
(That is, the argument goes "Jews do psychotherapy so that they can enjoy being proud of Freud", not "Jews invented psychotherapy, so that makes it a Jewish thing".)
I don't perceive a causal model here. Which I'll get to, but first my personal experience with Ashkenazi Jews. In my late 20's, I had four such girl friends/hookups of whom three were clearly not mentally healthy enough for me to be interested in them long term; one was depressive (divorced from a clinical psychologist whom she married on a whim), the next was an incredible shrew (especially when she and her target were in the company of others), the third bordered on sociopathy to the extent that she used her charms to advance her career, and the last I really did not get to know well. During this same time span, I had separate minor disputes with two Jewish males, and both men quickly escalated to physical threats, both holding a clenched fist in front of my face. I've dealt with Scots-Irish (my own ethnicity) rednecks who were not afraid of violence, but they were certainly more cautious than an immediate display of a clenched fist. So, my experience says Jews tend to be crazy one way or another.
I believe European Jews, particularly Ashkenazim, were naturally selected for both intelligence and for a degree of sociopathy. The plausibility of the former trait evolving over one thousand years has been advanced in published form, as you know. Evolution of sociopathic tendencies makes sense in an endogamous population that derived much of its income from potentially exploitative activities, e.g., tax farming, tavern ownership, livestock trading. The basic model for such evolution is that more income means larger families, more income can be derived from greater pecuniary extraction from the peasantry, more extraction can be facilitated by reduced sympathy for the suffering of counterparties. The souped-up model adds sexual selection by parental choice to the above dynamic. The more sociopathic parents chose the more sociopathic suitors for their daughters, and this results in Fisherian Runaway Sexual Selection for sociopathy directed at outgroup indviduals, as well as assortative mating for sociopathy.
Thus, my causal hypothesis is that the unique economic niche of many Ashkenazim caused selection for intelligence and a higher frequency of sociopaths, and that the sociopathic selection, in messing with a complex system of emotional control, had the side effect of more frequent mental instability.
Very interesting. Some studies show five times more schizophrenia among black than white people. So, this might not be related to race at all, but rather intelligence.
Seeing the Swedish graph it seems Schozophrenia explodes in the lower IQ areas.
Excellent post, with a new & fruitful approach on a topic I've been keenly interested in at least for decades (when I read Jamison, Kay Redfield (1993): Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament). Your theory may help point to why genetic mental illness has been preserved for so long at all.
The natural question, in my mind, is just how much we can optimize for 'genius' -- what's the engineering limit of maximizing g and p to bring about a 'good outcome' & minimize bad? (The matter is of the highest concern: maximizing genius and its free expression.) That norm established, we'll have something to aim for with commercial embryo selection, etc. products.
Related to this are you aware of any studies on what makes "exceptional people" differ? Here I mean not necessarily exceptional by IQ but even just putting in top dancers, musicians, researchers etc and checking cogitive profile. If this theory is true then the measured p factor should be higher than just what you'd expect from the average g of the group.
What about bottleneck/ inbreeding depression? AJ have around 10 times less genetic variance as compared to white gentiles.
Could positive mutational load interconnection effects be possible? Mutational load seems to be a double-edged sword. Maybe there is a reverse sweet spot?
Finns could be a control group as they are also quite inbred/ genetically homogenous.
Great comedy special. Relevant to the topic of ethnocentrism
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_m-gO0HSCYk
This is an area I've done a great deal of work in, and while you're on the right track, the answer is rather simple - more so than you'd imagine. Here's a hint: a) Jewish exceptionalism (verbal, pictorial), b) work capacity. c) and jewish mental illness, d) and jewish anti-social behavior share a common origin: the sex differenxes in brain organization, bias, and defect expression. So the question is, e) did generations of selection narrow or reverse sex differences in cognition? And of course, if we f) combine male jewish diaspora with southern european females, g) and then push the population through bottlnecks, and h) use upward reproduction by rabbis, we'd get exactly what we observe. And within a decade or so we'll narrow down the SNPs sufficiently to demonstrate it. Even thought in the data we have to date, including rahter odd tendency for ashkenazim to demonstrate female 'adaptive' sexuality.
Now I'm not going to plow through all the literature in this little comment block, but you can put money on this solution as correct.
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
I'd add that higher levels of mental illness is what you'd expect from recent selection for intelligence.
i thought the 110 jew IQ thing was debunked?? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stLCurXu0fc
If you want to know what high IQ individuals think on the nature of genius, it is pretty much identical.
https://paulcooijmans.com/genius/genius.html
https://paulcooijmans.com/genius/associative_horizon.html
https://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/
The crazy factor (''disagreeable, systematic, factorial-focused, utilitarianistic, clinical, negatively suggestible, asocial") + the creative factor ("relations, intuitions, visions, holistic conceptions"), etc.
Even von neumann said :
A facility with the symbolic manipulation of linear operators;
An intuitive feeling for the logical structure of any new mathematical theory;
An intuitive feeling for the combinatorial superstructure of new theories.
In my view it must be a type-2 or type-3 fuzzy logical reasoning process that geniuses must possess as they invariably have much more working memory and computational structural-integration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-2_fuzzy_sets_and_systems
And yes, as you noted, the propensity for 'anti-social' factor, 'craziness' or 'maladjustment' increases as a function of increased intelligence or conversely put, "outesiderness" is a correlated vector with intelligence. If the general population held much more intelligence, then this would probably not likely be a fact in the first place as humans are social animals who ostensibly exhibit proxemic dispositions.