Yep, countries with a greater average IQ have much less people believing dumb theories (e.g about bill gates and covid-19), countries like Japan and South Korea. All countries that reduced funds for public education years ago in a short-sighted attempt to save money are seeing it's dire consequences, and now amplified thanks to the internet.
Did you miss the news where average IQ is lowering across the board due to various poorly understood factors (increase of CO2 levels, endocrine disruptors, etc...).
We are getting at a massive amount of dumb people ala idiocracy, not sure if that also means more smart scientists in total.
Some countries have higher IQ populations than others. Eg South Korea was poorer than many African countries in the 60s, now they make smartphones.
This would have been hard to predict given a blank slate talent is everywhere thesis, but not if you know they have one of the highest IQs in the world. Same with Singapore.
Of course a really bad government (North Korea) can screw you up.
East Asia(Japan,Korea,China) has the highest IQ in the world as I read somewhere a while ago. Education has also been a traditional priority. Two combined, no surprise.
Because the population is decreasing in high-IQ countries, where the vast, vast majority of humanity's economic, scientific and cultural output is generated, and increasing in low-IQ countries, which are typically stricken by famine, warfare, poor human rights (particularly for women) and foreign aid reliance.
IQ has nothing to do with it. That is simply a crappy measure of certain types of problem solving ability.
That is a cultural divide problem. Asian cultures value education so much more than North American culture so families have a large focus on ensuring their children are well educated (in spite of our education system) as they view that as their ticket to success.
If we in Western countries continue to eschew improvements to our education system, and even reduce the ability for students to access programs that provide them a proper education, then we will continue to fall further and further behind Asian countries in innovation and productivity. Instead we look at the few programs for students that thrive in spite of the system and kill them because it is cheaper than investing in bringing other students up to that level.
Some sources online list the average IQ of the bottom 14 countries to be under 60. I find this really hard to believe and to me indicates more of an issue with testing IQ than the intelligence of people across various countries
To put numbers in perspective, IQ is generally defined as a normal distribution (also called a gaussian curve, bell curve, etc.--it's a "normal" distribution because it's extremely common in nature) with a global average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 points. What this means in practice is that, roughly, about 2/3 of the population has an IQ in the range 85-115.
So, assuming each country also has the same shape of distribution but different averages, a difference of 15 points means that an average person in the "smart" country is smarter than 83% of the people in the other country. An average IQ difference of 30 points would be more like 98%.
Which, to me, seems like a pretty extreme difference. Without knowing more about their methodology I don't know if I trust these numbers much. On the other hand, looking at the countries at the lower end, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the difference was due to environmental factors such as poor nutrition.
Unfortunately, IQ is a field of study that's far too politically charged for there to be much in the way of reputable research.
I wonder what implications this has for the reports claiming that general IQ is going down in most countries. Obviously, there are people out there who do not suffer from this trend. And perhaps they are the ones making the systems that help those less endowed? Anyway, the road to the tech religions Warhammer 40,000 seems set!
I agree, but I’m surprised that GP said that people in the West have lower IQ because pollution is vastly superior. If proven, it would help me choose a country to emigrate, but I recall dodgy plastics in Indonesia and smog in China, and I’m quite sure the less-tertiary countries have more pollutants.
The number of clever high-IQ people and engineers will continue falling. It's only the nations and cultures that don't value learning and invention that are expanding.
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