A comment on Peterson’s so called Jewish Problem and its reply by MacDonald

While I am not interested in politics, I have followed The Unz Review for some time to check what the American rightists are thinking. It has some connections with the conspiracy that I started studying many years ago. A short while ago there was this post in The Unz Review:

https://www.unz.com/article/a-reply-to-jordan-peterson/

It is Kevin MacDonald’s reply to Jordan Peterson post:

https://jordanbpeterson.com/psychology/on-the-so-called-jewish-question/

As Kevin MacDonal clearly gave a challenged in this paragraph:

“Indeed, one must wonder about the seriousness of someone who thinks he can settle an issue that has gotten the attention of some of the most celebrated thinkers in Western history with an 1100-word blog post.”

I of course decided to settle this question in a short post in full seriousness. I will not count the words, but one post surely can settle this issue. I have tried to solve much harder problems in just one paper.

Jordan Peterson is some kind of a psychology researcher and Kevin MacDonald has his theory that Jews follow a group strategy, which conflicts with the interests of American while people. Peterson denies this and claims that Jewish overrepresentation, which he admits, is due to their higher IQ.

Firstly, let us settle this question of what the average and distribution of the IQ of American Jews is. I have written of this before, but try not to repeat too much. Richard Lynn wrote a book where he concludes that the average IQ of American Jews is 110. American Jews are stronger in verbal IQ than in performance IQ. National IQ figures have some variance: for instance for Finns Lynn and others of the kind have given figures 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, even (counted from PISA) 105. All refer to the same genetic intelligence as the population has not changed genetically that much.

Earlier Lynn analyzed results of Wordsum and concluded that the average verbal IQ of American Jews is 107.5. Ron Unz has in several posts stated that the average verbal IQ of American Jews from Wordsum is 109. I guess these figures mean the same. There is UK standardization and US standardization for IQ tests. If UK average IQ is set to 100, the US average is 98, thus the UK standardization is 2 points below the US standardization. For international comparisons the American Jewish average score from Wordsum is then 107.5.

Wordsum is a ten word vocabulary test measure. According to

https://www.unz.com/gnxp/wordsum-iq/

the correlation between Wordsum and adult IQ is 0.71. It does not look like that. I made one 10 word Wordsum test in the web and got 6 out of 10. The Wordsum test has six easy words, which I knew, and four difficult words, which I did not know and refused to guess. I think that by guessing one would have gone right. The conversion of Wordsum to IQ is that 6/10 gives 100 and 7/10 gives 107. I made another 45 question vocabulary test and got the score 106, but my IQ higher. (I was tested by a real psychologist with some standard IQ test as a part of a job interview, so I know the figure. That was 14 years ago and considering my age I should have some 10 points less in IQ tests which do not have age correction. That is still over 106.)

An obvious reason for the poor correlation of my vocabulary tests and the measured IQ is that I do not know English that well, which I admit, just English from the high school time. The other vocabulary test was similarly designed and also there I did not know many words.

The mathematical questions in standard IQ tests are not less culture dependent: of course I can solve all such simple series and arithmetic problems as a former mathematician. The whole concept of verbal IQ is just culture dependent. It measures something, but one cannot compare groups with different cultural background.

I have read quite much and probably most of it in English but I do not think I ever encountered those words that appeared in the four last questions of the Wordsum test. They are uncommon words and too uncommon words should not be used in communication where the goal is that the receiver understands what is said. I think those words can only appear in humanistic fields. What do the engineers think of men who study humanistic fields? That they are girly men who cannot think logically. Do I think so? To some extent, yes. That is indeed my life experience. Only soft fields use difficult words, hard scientific fields have enough internal difficulty and new concepts without adding artificial difficulty by using uncommon words. You want to learn many new words? Learn a new language or a new field, pick up something useful where there are other people, who know the words and use them, not some snobbish group who look up words from thesaurus and use them because others do not know them. We can make a ten word test of a foreign language. It measures knowledge of vocabulary and rather well correlates with knowledge of the language, but it does not show fluency. We can make a ten word test with acronyms from information technology or military technology. It rather well measures familiarity with the field, but it is rather poor in showing how good one will be in the field in some months of time as previous knowledge does not measure problem solving capability.

Intelligence is really problem solving capability and ability to learn fast and remember.

What does Wordsum measure in American culture? That is a big country and divided into many subcultures. Wordsum correlates with high SES and education. If follows that there must be subgroups which do better on such tests and others which do worse. Alone such a test is quite much culture dependent to measure g accurately.

American Jews get the average 107.5 or 109 from Wordsum. The test has a ceiling 128, but they do not reach it. Their distribution stops to a low level before 10/10. See the plot with religion to IQ in

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/04/verbal-intelligence-by-demographic/#.WoyEwHxG3IV

Estimating from the plot Jews get in average 7/10, but the peak is at 9/10. Why is this plot not normally distributed?

In an earlier post I made one guess. The way this distribution is skewed is similar to what you would expect from the following experiment. First take a normally distributed set with average 100 and SD 15. Then cut of the part below 100. The average of what remains is 112. In the first generation there is a regression to the mean and the resulting average IQ is 107.5. Then let this population develop still for 2-3 generations. The sharp gradient at IQ=100 dilutes as children can have IQ less than 100. the average stays at 107.5. It means that as much probability moves to levels below 107.5 as to levels above 107.5. The standard deviation, if counted by ignoring the mentally retarded, will be not much different from 15, but 2-3 generations is not enough to turn the distribution into normal. Therefore the fraction of people in this population, who are above 3 SD or 4 SD will be smaller than what would be given from a normal distribution with the average 107.5 and SD=15.

Another possibility is cultural: many Jews live in a culture where you know the uncommon vocabulary. That is very possible. Let us see some other way to evaluate their IQ. American Jews have received lots of Nobel Prizes, but IQ is not the main and only reason why a scientist gets a Nobel Prize. You have to do something to earn a Nobel, it is not enough to have a high IQ. We can look at another set of achievements where the IQs have actually been measured at some point. From the Internet one can find a list of 30 highest IQ serial killers.

https://toppublicenemies.blogspot.com/2016/09/top-30-intelligent-serial-killers-with-highest-iq.html#David_Berkowitz

The people in this list should have committed at least 3 murders. Therefore we must remove the number 1, Leopold and Loeb, who only killed one. There remain 29 cases. Two of them are Jewish: David Berkowitz with a measured IQ of 118 and Harvey Glatman, whose IQ is given in several sources as 130. The lowest IQ in the list is 118, but we can for simplicity assume that the cut off was at 115, that is 1 SD, as it is unlikely that we miss any Jewish serial killers with IQ between 115 and 117.

Above 145 we have 7 serial killers, no Jews among them. 145 is 3 SD and 0.135% of the Gentile while population with average IQ of 100 reach this level. Assuming that the Jewish IQ average is 112 (which is too high, but we use it here), 145 is only 2.2 SD to Jews and 1.39% of them fall into this category assuming that their IQ distribution is normal. The Jewish population is 2%, thus 20% of serial killers with IQ over 145 should be Jewish. From seven 20% is 1.4. We would expect one Jew or even two, there are none.

Above 130 we have 15 serial killers and among them is one Jew. As 130 is 2 SD for non-Jewish whites but 1.2 SD for Jews, we expect to find five times are many Jews than non-Jews. As Jews are 2%, there should be 10% Jews, but there are 6.7%.

We can calculate what IQ this serial killer data gives to American Jews, though the sample is very small and statistics must be unreliable. There are 27 non-Jewish serial killers with IQ over 118, they seem to be all white. There are 198 million white Americans. 11.5% of them are above 118. There are 5.3 million Jewish Americans and there were 2 Jewish serial killers. The percentage of American Jews above IQ 118 should be x=0.115*(2/27)*(198/5.3)=31.8%. It means 0.47 SD, that is above IQ 107. Nicely this gives the same estimate that we already mentioned. These numbers are quite sensitive to small changes. If in the statistics the cutoff is 115 and not 118 (since 115 is 1 SD, a more natural cutoff and as starting from 119 would drop Berkowitz and reduce Jews to one), we get x=0.1587*(2/27)*(198/5.3)=43.9% and IQ as 0.15 SD, that is IQ 102.3, a very reasonable full IQ figure. As a conclusion, American Jewish IQ is a bit over 100, but not remarkably so.

Both findings support the estimation that the American Jewish average IQ is below 112 and that the distribution is not normal: the  number of Jews is not growing as fast as it would in normal distribution when the IQ-level is raised from 2 SD to 3 SD or above.

So, why they have so many Nobel Prizes? This is simple: the awards are given from the work done. Nobel Prize winners may a high IQ of 150+, though many claim it is lower, but this high IQ is not enough. There is no shortage of people with IQ of 150+. The thing is that to get a Nobel you must do top research and get the results published in top journals and impress other researchers so that they vote for you. Working in a top laboratory in the USA, or in some other recognized place, an over 150+ IQ person has a lot better chance in getting a Nobel than, for instance, staying in the local village and herding sheep. Jews are heavily overrepresented in American top universities. That implies that Jews will also be heavily overrepresented as researchers and professors in top universities, and so they will more often get Nobel Prizes.

Why are they overrepresented in the top universities? That can be cultural. American top universities are expensive, not all very smart students get scholarships and not all good students want to apply to these universities. In order to know if there is a bias in the selection of students, one would have to know how many applications are coming from each group, what the quality of the applications is, what the selection rules are and how the rules are applied. Ron Unz made one analysis of it. I do not try to comment if he has identified all factors influencing the student distribution.

But what is a Jewish Problem? Jews have occasionally caused problems, like in the first and beginning of the second century they rebelled against the Roman Empire and were a problem for Romans, just like Scandinavians were a problem to Central Europeans in the Viking time, but that is not what the Jewish Problem means. The Jewish Problem was the question of how Jews could adapt to the social changes in the 19th century. The possible answers were assimilation, Communism or Zionism.

There was a conspiracy. There were actually three conspiracies, which derived from the same origins. Freemasons had a conspiracy trying to change the old regime to the new world. Masons more or less stopped their revolutionary activities after the Paris Commune fell, but the conspiracy continued in secret societies associated with Rosicrucians and Theosophists. Communism was a conspiracy, though not by an occult secret society. They used secret parties. Zionism tried to restore the Jews and create Israel, and there is Israel. One cannot really seriously question whether there was a plan and whether the plan was advanced by secret plots. I have noticed efforts against the Catholic Church and for promoting multi-culture, gender equality, immigration, holocaust cult, Israel interests, race denial and all these things the rightists in The Unz Review so like to mention. I do not think these efforts are spontaneous and I link them to the original conspiracy.

When did Zionism start? One could answer that it started from pre-Zionism around 1840 and that is a reasonable answer, but one could also claim that it started in Napoleon’s time when Napoleon almost promised Jews a home country. But I think it started much earlier. I suggest the 17th century when Judah Leon Templo presented his plans for the Temple of Salomon. It so well fits to the beginning of the secret society of the builders of the temple of Solomon. The time fits to Shabbatai Zevi, the translation of Kabbalah to Latin and Christian Zionism in England. If this is the correct starting time and all these things are linked, then it was always a conspiracy and it still continues today.

The central question in the Jewish Problem was that in the old world order, monarchy and aristocracy, Jews had a special position as king’s people. They had privileges and restrictions. It the Kings of Edom were destroyed, this position had to change. If Jews were to assimilate, they would lose their identity and their leaders would lose the people, but assimilation was not so easy because Jews become to be in direct competition with Christians. Jews had better education than Christians, more money and they had their social networks because of their former special position, not from a higher genetic intelligence as some try to claim. This situation could only create new Anti-Semitism even where it did not earlier exist. Therefore Zionists wanted a home country, and finally it had to be in Palestine. The plan was made and executed by using all connections, but the result is seen now and it is not good. In modern time you should not do what Israel is currently doing. There is always a solution, here there is no wish to find a solution.

Assimilation also failed. Two million Jews stayed in the Soviet Union, but they finally did not assimilate and most of them immigrated to Israel after Communism fell. It cannot be said that assimilation succeeded in the USA, as there is the pro-Israel lobby and many powerful double citizens. It is not strange that assimilation fails. Nobody has managed to assimilate Basques. Russians did not manage to assimilate Finns, Poles or Jews. But there is a difference, since none of these other people ever tried to use their position as a group to take over a country. So, how to solve MacDonald’s challenge in a short post? Maybe MacDonald is correct after all. I am quite sure that Peterson is wrong. Maybe that is the solution.

3 Comments

jorma November 13, 2018 Reply

Thanks, I am a bit busy right now with some calculations, but will read these as soon as there is time.

jorma December 8, 2018 Reply

I have met very few Ashkenazi Jews. Two Ashkenazi Jews have sent me their paper and asked me to read and to comment it. Both papers were wrong in a very elementary way and I really did not get the impression that their IQ was especially high. You refer again to Cochran’s theory. This theory has not been confirmed. None of those diseases have been shown to give any heterozygote advantage. My own calculations show that if these diseases gave a heterozygote advantage, the ratio between the carrier frequency and the disease prevalence would be different from what is observed. Thus, they do not give heterozygote advantage. About this issue that there was a group of clever Jews in Budapest. The issue is that there are much more people with IQ in the genius level than there are geniuses. To become a genius you need an environment that will notice your talents and encourage it. Jews give such help for their children. Most other people just ignore the talent. By the way, I have read several works by John von Neumann and I think he is much overappreciated, just like Einstein is. Jews create a cult around their clever people, so they get prizes and their achievements are praised. But they may be not so good. Freud was once a genius, today he is a charlatan, the same with Marx. Your article is correct in that a school cannot raise IQ very much and cannot create a genius from a person who has no talent, but the environment can ignore a talented person or raise him to fame. In those times you refer to much of the local population still worked in agriculture, Jews were very much over represented in schools and universities. In IQ tests education raised their IQ points. But this is not a difference in genetic IQ. My guess is that Ashkenazi genetic IQ is actually slightly below the average in Northern Europe. That is what GWAS research on IQ genes seems to indicate: Ashkenazi are genetically like Italians and Italians are not on the top of Piffer’s plots. So, I think this obsession of high IQ of the Ashkenazi is just one form of propaganda. It is an expression of imagined superiority one ethnic group has and propagates it in the mass media, but it is not true.

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