Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
The original piece had two things to say Eastern European Jews are smart. See, he needed that because his point was the reason they are is they kept getting kicked out of places. One point was they have won a disproportionate number of Nobels. The other was the IQ point. Citing that was sloppy, given the actual thesis.
|
As they’ve been historically marginalized by other groups, however, could not an equally offensive argument that they are booksmart but not much else be made?
This sort of thinking gets reckless unless it’s informed with really rigorous science. And average IQ and Nobels are simply inadequate science. I’ll actually go farther and say they’re woefully inadequate and make one sound foolish if they’re the bedrock of an argument a group is “genius.”
If I run the clock back several hundred years, I could argue Muslims, who far exceeded most other backward European cultures, were the greatest scientific and math minds. And to rewind even further, I could take us back to the Chinese.
But it’s all brutally incomplete.
Who’ll give a fuck about a Nobel in 300 years? And genetics, and the culture that impacts what we understand it to be, must be measured over thousands of years. Even Murray admits the concept of “assortative mating” punches a hole in his own theories.
Stephens fucked up, as he was sure to do, and I suspect will do more often in the future, as he’s just bright enough to know it’s better to be controversial and loathed than overlooked as a bore.
