Rishon Rishon's David is currently very occupied with this discussion on Jews and their abnormally high IQ's.
I personally do not like the strong faith people appear to have in intelligence tests. It is far too often that I've heard remarks such as "African Americans have lower average IQ's, and therefore they are not as smart", or "his IQ is 150, so he must understand that".
I'd like to show you something I read on the mensa website:
Are there really any true geniuses?:
Genius may be in the eye of the beholder. Furthermore, a true genius may not score particularly well on a standard group IQ test. We know a Nobel Prize winner who never scored at Mensa level on a school IQ test - he was too busy seeing all the alternate possibilities for each answer. At the present time, all IQ scores are read off of tables. Now there are almost no tests in use that will give extraordinary high IQs except those with very large standard deviations. And really, those who are what we may call a genius don't need a score to prove it.
Abbie F. Salny, Ed.D.
Supervisory Psychologist, American Mensa
Looking into achievements should be a far better way to determine intelligence than a bunch of meaningless testscores. An example could be the fact that 22% of Nobel Prize recipients between the years 1901-2004 have been Jewish. And that's.. a lot.
Even Albert Einstein failed exams
Who cares about IQ tests? It's a fact that no one can ignore that Jews have disproportionate acheivements in many fields.
It's hard to ignore it and it's an interesting subject for research, but I don't think it has or should have any effect on daily life.
Posted by: Orly at June 23, 2005 10:57 AM PermalinkOrly... Don't confuse motivation with smarts. as a Mensa member who very nearly failed out of school on more than one occasion, I can tell you that there are far more homeless geniuses than anyone likes to admit.
Posted by: David at June 23, 2005 11:07 AM PermalinkI don't think motivation is enough to become Einstein, Freud, Marx, Kafka, etc. I also don't have statistics about the average Jews. But certainly there are much more excellent Jews that anyone would expect. Besides, many Jews have huge motivation to become international soccer players and the end beeing successful engineers. Not everything is motivation.
Posted by: Orly at June 23, 2005 01:31 PM Permalink