I have a hard time believing Tibet is that low, given that they have created magnificent buildings and a good body of literature. Sure, maybe the lowest in China, but not that low. Probably more around Myanmar's, or Northeast India. If you want to remove minorities from the calculation of Western IQ, I'd suggest you only include Han for China, even though I'm not sure if doing so is easy. But let's be real: there are probably not a lot of Tibetans in the halls of Chinese power and influence, or from the southern minorities.
I agree. Unless there's a practical reason why it cannot be calculated, it seems very biased to compute an IQ for US whites (which excludes US minorities), while not computing an IQ for Chinese Han (which would exclude Chinese minority ethnic groups).
The IQ data inferred from the 2022 PISA results also shows US Asians as being higher than US whites. So I think the subtitle is misleading. East Asians are still smarter than Europeans on average.
A) China is supermajority Han iirc in a way that many large White countries are not.
B) Most of the non-Han minorities I assume are still East Asian in cluster Analysis.
C) I also didn't bother figuring out how to separate the non-Slavic peoples from Russia so that's probably a source of downward bias in the European estimate. (I should clarify, I reduced Russia's *population* down only to its White population, but i didn't account for Russia's non-White population in estimating the intelligence of the country's White population)
D) Of course US Asians are higher than US Whites. I stated as much and included US Asians in the East Asian mean. White expats in Japan and Singapore are also smarter than the local Asians. There's immigrant selection whenever people move abroad.
I will admit though it's worth being more perfectionistic about China than any other country due to it being such an enormous population share of the East Asian sample. Alas I was lazy and just in a place of wanting to get the post out the door when I was writing this.
As of 2020, China is approximately ~9% non-Han. There's also considerable genetic variation within the Han ethnic group, as it has multiple sub-ethnic groups.
Even if the non-Han minorities are still within the East Asian cluster, there can still be considerable variation between each other. Just like how there's variation and IQ differences between different European ethnicities.
I don't know if this explanation does make the writer's subtitle true, but couldn't one argue that US Asians are a more "selected" group than US Whites? Just thinking out loud.
Maybe, but the article said that the data for all countries was stripped of their first and second generation immigrants.
The earlier Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian immigrants to the US in the 1900s were rather poor. Many of the immigrants in the first wave of Chinese immigration to the US were refugees from the Hakka-Punti Clan Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punti%E2%80%93Hakka_Clan_Wars). Same with the Korean and Vietnamese refugees who fled the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Many of the Asian immigrants who came to the US prior to two generations ago thus had refugee backgrounds.
Less intelligent Asian races like Filipinos, Hmong, Cambodians, etc also get indistinguishably grouped in with the (East) Asian statistics in the US. Despite all these factors, US Asians *still* have higher IQs than US whites.
Even if those early refugees were poor on paper, a lot of them could still be from high IQ minority groups ( Cantonese, Hakka). A lot of anti-IQers say European Jews were poor and were tested as having low IQs when they arrived, but the reality is that virtually all of those immigrants were descended from successful 18th century ancestors, and only became/arrived in the US poor because a population boom in the Ashkenazi community lead to the creation of an underclass during the 19th century. Interesting to think about, maybe Han IQ is indeed higher than White American IQ, with the advantage of the latter being more in things like Openness and Extraversion.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is not a highly accurate measure of a nation’s overall intelligence. Specifically, PISA evaluates creative problem-solving, an area where Eastern cultures, particularly South Asian ones, may not excel due to their emphasis on rote learning.
In many of these countries, the public sector is dominant, and securing a job often depends less on merit and more on test performance. General intelligence (g) is undoubtedly real, but PISA reflects correlation, not causation. The causal factors are a mix of genetics and environment, which explains the variation in scores across populations.
I do not believe all populations are equal in this regard, but using PISA to estimate genetic IQ in third-world countries with cultures focused on rote learning and predominantly public-sector economies where cronyism is common seems misleading, especially given the significant variation within populations in IQ
You did your best given the datasets you have available. But putting Tibetan IQ at around 80 on par with Sub-Saharan Africans it a big mistake. Tibetans have developed a written language and has a functional society that can farm, grow and store food, and live through harsh winters. That's something that is absent in most of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The only reliable way to calculate Chinese IQ by province is using their university exam (the gao kao). It used to be the same test for the entire country. But now it's run by each province so the test is different in each province. It's still useful as the test has to sort students in each province. Unfortunately this data is not unavailable to researchers outside China.
Vietnam having a slightly higher native IQ than China does not seem very believable.
I have a hard time believing Tibet is that low, given that they have created magnificent buildings and a good body of literature. Sure, maybe the lowest in China, but not that low. Probably more around Myanmar's, or Northeast India. If you want to remove minorities from the calculation of Western IQ, I'd suggest you only include Han for China, even though I'm not sure if doing so is easy. But let's be real: there are probably not a lot of Tibetans in the halls of Chinese power and influence, or from the southern minorities.
I agree. Unless there's a practical reason why it cannot be calculated, it seems very biased to compute an IQ for US whites (which excludes US minorities), while not computing an IQ for Chinese Han (which would exclude Chinese minority ethnic groups).
The IQ data inferred from the 2022 PISA results also shows US Asians as being higher than US whites. So I think the subtitle is misleading. East Asians are still smarter than Europeans on average.
A) China is supermajority Han iirc in a way that many large White countries are not.
B) Most of the non-Han minorities I assume are still East Asian in cluster Analysis.
C) I also didn't bother figuring out how to separate the non-Slavic peoples from Russia so that's probably a source of downward bias in the European estimate. (I should clarify, I reduced Russia's *population* down only to its White population, but i didn't account for Russia's non-White population in estimating the intelligence of the country's White population)
D) Of course US Asians are higher than US Whites. I stated as much and included US Asians in the East Asian mean. White expats in Japan and Singapore are also smarter than the local Asians. There's immigrant selection whenever people move abroad.
I will admit though it's worth being more perfectionistic about China than any other country due to it being such an enormous population share of the East Asian sample. Alas I was lazy and just in a place of wanting to get the post out the door when I was writing this.
As of 2020, China is approximately ~9% non-Han. There's also considerable genetic variation within the Han ethnic group, as it has multiple sub-ethnic groups.
Even if the non-Han minorities are still within the East Asian cluster, there can still be considerable variation between each other. Just like how there's variation and IQ differences between different European ethnicities.
Thanks for the clarification on Russia.
I'm sure there may be some immigration selection for US Asians, but I don't think it's significant, as I explained in this comment: https://werkat.substack.com/p/how-smart-is-china/comment/135339088.
I don't know if this explanation does make the writer's subtitle true, but couldn't one argue that US Asians are a more "selected" group than US Whites? Just thinking out loud.
Maybe, but the article said that the data for all countries was stripped of their first and second generation immigrants.
The earlier Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian immigrants to the US in the 1900s were rather poor. Many of the immigrants in the first wave of Chinese immigration to the US were refugees from the Hakka-Punti Clan Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punti%E2%80%93Hakka_Clan_Wars). Same with the Korean and Vietnamese refugees who fled the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Many of the Asian immigrants who came to the US prior to two generations ago thus had refugee backgrounds.
Less intelligent Asian races like Filipinos, Hmong, Cambodians, etc also get indistinguishably grouped in with the (East) Asian statistics in the US. Despite all these factors, US Asians *still* have higher IQs than US whites.
Even if those early refugees were poor on paper, a lot of them could still be from high IQ minority groups ( Cantonese, Hakka). A lot of anti-IQers say European Jews were poor and were tested as having low IQs when they arrived, but the reality is that virtually all of those immigrants were descended from successful 18th century ancestors, and only became/arrived in the US poor because a population boom in the Ashkenazi community lead to the creation of an underclass during the 19th century. Interesting to think about, maybe Han IQ is indeed higher than White American IQ, with the advantage of the latter being more in things like Openness and Extraversion.
Tibet has an IQ 90-95. https://richardlynn.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/lynn2014.pdf
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is not a highly accurate measure of a nation’s overall intelligence. Specifically, PISA evaluates creative problem-solving, an area where Eastern cultures, particularly South Asian ones, may not excel due to their emphasis on rote learning.
In many of these countries, the public sector is dominant, and securing a job often depends less on merit and more on test performance. General intelligence (g) is undoubtedly real, but PISA reflects correlation, not causation. The causal factors are a mix of genetics and environment, which explains the variation in scores across populations.
I do not believe all populations are equal in this regard, but using PISA to estimate genetic IQ in third-world countries with cultures focused on rote learning and predominantly public-sector economies where cronyism is common seems misleading, especially given the significant variation within populations in IQ
Fortunately for us, accurate measurement is a correlational question, not a causal one.
The population seems off. There aren't 250 million white Americans.
iirc there are two different standards. Pretty sure the PISA thing uses the more lenient one
You did your best given the datasets you have available. But putting Tibetan IQ at around 80 on par with Sub-Saharan Africans it a big mistake. Tibetans have developed a written language and has a functional society that can farm, grow and store food, and live through harsh winters. That's something that is absent in most of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The only reliable way to calculate Chinese IQ by province is using their university exam (the gao kao). It used to be the same test for the entire country. But now it's run by each province so the test is different in each province. It's still useful as the test has to sort students in each province. Unfortunately this data is not unavailable to researchers outside China.
American Black IQ is 81 in the most-representative samples, and they have 20% White admixture. Sub-Saharan Africa is lower than this.