Will it ever be confirmed India has a greater >125 IQ population than Japan?

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After China and the U.S., the country with the highest over 125 IQ population appears to be Japan (also the second most populous rich country). The question is, does India, the world's third largest economy by PPP, have a greater >125 IQ population than Japan? India's average IQ has variously been estimated from the high 70s to the low 80s, so assuming a standard deviation within third word norms, this seems unlikely (remember, Brazil has a smaller >125 IQ population than Hong Kong). However, it seems to be agreed by all India's standard deviation of IQ is above third world norms. Will it ever be confirmed India has a greater >125 IQ population than Japan? Resolves on January 1, 2030, or whenever this case is conclusively resolved prior to that. Post your arguments below. Will not resolve to prob.

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This is a very ridiculous market. You don't say how you are measuring IQ. And what counts as confirmation. Are you controlling for age? Just measuring 30 year olds? Adjusting for environment and Flynn effect? Are you giving everyone an IQ test? Polygenic scores? Are we talking about adopting random Japanese and Indian people, raising them in the US with identical environments, and measuring their IQ at 30? If elderly Japanese have some cognitive decline does that count? Looking at Japan's age pyramid, we cannot ignore this effect. I am not going to enter it.

@alwaysrinse "Are you controlling for age?" Nope. "Adjusting for environment and Flynn effect?" Nope. "Are you giving everyone an IQ test?" ??? Why? "Polygenic scores?" Could be useful, but nope. "Are we talking about adopting random Japanese and Indian people, raising them in the US with identical environments, and measuring their IQ at 30?" Nope. "If elderly Japanese have some cognitive decline does that count?" Yup.

@EnopoletusHarding Absolutely no way you can resolve this one way or the other. You need a representative sample of Japanese and Indians of every age group.

@alwaysrinse "You need a representative sample of Japanese and Indians of every age group." Not impossible.

@EnopoletusHarding And who is going to give this study? You want a completely representative sample of Indians? That's really hard. If Tamil Brahmins average 110 and there are 4-5 million of them good luck putting the right number in your sample, out of the 1.5 billion Indians. They are one group but a lot of these castes are going to contribute very disproportionately to India's smart fraction. A distribution is not completely determined by its first and second moments. This will resolve as no because no one will do the study.

@EnopoletusHarding The chance that someone will do a reliable study like this of India by 2030 is close to 0. People are going to be going around giving random rural Indians Raven's Matrices, making sure that every caste and geographic area and age group is equally represented, doing the same thing for Japan, again getting a totally representative sample. And all of this just to answer a question? A study like the one you propose has never been carried out.

@alwaysrinse "A distribution is not completely determined by its first and second moments." Agreed for India. But no large group in India actually has a high avg IQ. It's the SD that matters, though that might not be similar across groups (which makes answering this question even more difficult).

@alwaysrinse "This will resolve as no because no one will do the study." OK, then, when loans come out again, bet no.

@EnopoletusHarding I think 4% is not too far off from the real probability. This takes until 2030 to pay off. Not worth it.

did the math. japan has double the high iq population. changes in the population or national iq are too insignificant to change this. for the retards: normcdf(125, 250, 105, 15)*125 = 11.4 normcdf(125, 250, 85, 15)*125 = 5.28 85 is a very very very generous estimate btw. using 76 gets 1.19.

normcdf(125, 250, 85, 15)*1380 = 5.28 ***

@SebastianJensen 85 is not a generous estimate. You think it's generous that a randomly selected person from India vs a randomly selected black person from the US? The distribution is far from Gaussian with mean 85. It may be 85 before you apply the Flynn effect. Once India develops I expect the mean of the whole thing to be low-90s. Many more top Indian scientists than top Japanese scientists. Not close.

@alwaysrinse india is nowhere near close enough to improving sanitation/nutrition to actualize flynn effect gains fast enough, if it ever will.

@SebastianJensen These days at least, top US universities have a lot more Indian than Japanese professors. Historically Japan has won more Nobel Prizes, but India has a young population, Japan is old, India is developing. How are we measuring the IQ here?

predicts NO

@alwaysrinse >how measure iq ravens exams taken, pisa, timss, etc. flynn and becker do this very well. >diff in professors id imagine that the japanese profs just study in japan

@SebastianJensen Fast enough for what? This idea that India's IQ looks like mean 85 and SD 15 is ridiculous. There is no way we'd get so many top Indian scientists in that case. It's an absurd assumption, not a generous one. It's true Japanese professors study in Japan. But among young scientists today I'd expect many more top ones are Indian. I don't think these Becker tables are particularly reliable. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6425765/ (Iran is just below Western Europe in IQ) and https://conference.iza.org/conference_files/edu_2021/ofek-shanny_y31696.pdf (this latter paper shows Israel doing like almost 1 whole SD better on PISA after being tried). International tests run into all sorts of issues, people in some countries care more to do well on a test given to them by some random examiner, low-trust societies like Israel and Romania will underperform a lot relative to IQ. Huge confounds based on how you measure IQ.

predicts NO

@alwaysrinse >they dont trust test takers >then they do poorly how does this work?

@SebastianJensen Or at least they don't give a shit, in many countries. Good example is Israel. https://conference.iza.org/conference_files/edu_2021/ofek-shanny_y31696.pdf The reported IQ from Lynn and Becker and so on is laughably low and inconsistent with everything else about Israel (e.g. it leads the world in 21st century Nobels per capita, and its average scores on its psychometric test are higher than the average of the SAT even though it's much harder than the SAT). Lynn's claim that Israeli Ashkenazi have an IQ of 103 compared to 110+ in the Diaspora makes no sense, given the intellectual achievements of both groups and would have to take into account huge selective migration (not the ~10% Russian admixture in Israeli Ashkenazi). The paper I attached shows that it's because Israeli students do not care and skip huge numbers of questions (even relative to their score) and do almost a whole standard deviation better when incentivized financially, no effect from East Asia. Israel is obviously a high IQ country. You really have to understand that in some societies, when you give a bunch of teenagers a test where there is no incentive to do well, half of them are going to skip a bunch of the questions and go outside to play with their friends. This is a *MASSIVE* confound. You need to look at high-stakes testing, not the PISA.

@SebastianJensen Is there any national IQ source that is not trash like Becker, which puts Iran at like 80 and Israel in the low 90s, and give ridiculously low numbers for Africa that are utterly inconsistent with the ~85 for Black Americans?

The numbers for Africa are not ridiculously low. Environment.

@alwaysrinse "85 is not a generous estimate." Yeah it is. Brazil is much richer than India, and with similar income inequality (though probably lower SD of IQ).

@alwaysrinse "(Iran is just below Western Europe in IQ)" Again, not actually possible.

@alwaysrinse "Israel is obviously a high IQ country." The country that had hyperinflation in the 1980s is high IQ? Doubt. Sounds more like Greece.

@SebastianJensen Your math is right, but it neglects the high probability India has a higher SD. Of course, that gap would have to be extremely high for the math to work out, which is why this is an open question.

@EnopoletusHarding Sure if you include environment the numbers for Africa are low, but not as ridiculously low. Lynn tested some people. 85 is reasonable, I think a random Indian (with the bad environment and all) would get around 85. I think the SD will be larger than 15, and the SD will undersell how big the 125+ fraction is because we are talking about a weighted mixture of Gaussians. Iran is 97 according to that study that I linked. Yes, Israel is obviously a high IQ country. It was socialist in its early years, and is capitalist now. Even higher IQ now than in the 1980s, following many Ashkenazi coming from Russia, but was high IQ then too. North Korea is a high IQ country too. Economy way worse than Israel and Greece. China had a cultural revolution in the 1960s and was literally Maoist. Weimar Germany had hyperinflation. High IQ countries can have economic crises. A high IQ country that adopts bad economic policies will have bad outcomes.

@alwaysrinse "Weimar Germany had hyperinflation." That was geopolitical trolling. China and North Korea were poor dictatorships. There wasn't any reason for the Israeli hyperinflation. Actual high IQ countries (US, Germany, Japan, France) had modest 1970s-1980s inflation. Park's South Korea was an exception (though not an extraordinary one), but it was poor and this was ended quickly under Chun Doo-Hwan.

@EnopoletusHarding The reason for the Israeli hyperinflation is obviously that it was set up as a socialist country and had awful economic policies. How does this show Israel has low IQ? We can look at the Israeli Nobel Prize counts and other measures of achievement, we know 40% of Israelis are Ashkenazi, another 40% are Sephardi/Mizrahi, and the IQ gap between the former and the latter is something like half a standard deviation, smaller than the Ashkenazi-White gap in the US, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/ (remember, US Ashkenazi have much higher median age than Israeli ones, and many Ashkenazi Israelis immigrated in 1990 from the USSR and have had no chance to win Nobels, so age-adjusted per-capita Nobels are pretty similar).

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