June 12, 2008

India's Average IQ in 2100?

Several weeks ago, I posted a message by a commenter named Rec1Man, who has been doing a lot of work to come up with a model of India's potential average IQ. This is one of the most important questions for predicting the course of the 21st Century.

The first edition of Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations reported four studies from India from 1959-1986, with averages varying only across a rather narrow range of 78-82.

On the other hand, as I've pointed out since 2002, India is the most complicated country in the world, so it's hard to get a nationally representative sample.

Further, the higher IQs registered by Indians in their diaspora, like the higher IQs recorded by African Americans and West Indians compared to Africans, suggests that better nutrition, health, education, and so forth could raise the relative standing of Indians. After all, they've been plagued by extreme poverty, which is starting to abate. For example, India is particularly beset by lack of iodine in the diet, which is a relatively easy IQ-lowering problem to deal with.

Rec1Man's goal has been to come up with a model that's simple enough to comprehend. Lots of critics in the comments responded that his eight part categorization of Indian demographics was too simple. As Einstein said, Science should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Still, we need somewhere to start, so Rec1Man's model, after being refined over the last few weeks, seems like a decent starting point.

First, here is fellow commenter Nsam's verbal summary of Rec1Man's approach, followed by Rec1Man's latest quantitative summary:

Here is my attempt at a summary of rec1man's analyses. Edit as required.

This eight-segment breakdown of the Indian population provides a more accurate picture of the human resource potential of the Indian population, compared to simplistic unimodal population model with mean IQ of 85 and SD =15.

The Indian population can be grouped in terms of the four traditional caste super-categories :

1. Brahmin
2. Merchant,
3. Peasant,
4.1 Dalit ("Untouchable")
4.2 Scheduled Caste
4.3 Low caste converts to Islam

cross-cutting with a

A. North vs.
B. South

geographical distinction.

Note: The usage of the 4 caste supercategories is not literal. For the purposes of estimating national average IQ, Syrian Christians or Parsees would be lumped in with the Brahmins, and the few peasant castes with a literate tradition would be moved up to the merchant class.

The "Brahmin" and "Merchants" have had multiple generations of a literate tradition and also engaged in professions that required greater cognitive ability (memorization, calculation), compared to the "Peasants" (who formed the ranks of the warrior class and had/have the most political power) and Dalits (who also have the least amount of central-west asian-european admixture and have been engaged in menial tasks on the fringes of society). [As in the Cochran-Harpending model of the evolution of high average Ashkenazi Jewish IQs, under Malthusian pressure, these occupational slots are theorized to have selected for higher IQs. -- Steve]

This model posits an IQ penalty for North Indian groups as a result of Islamic invasions/genocide of north Indian elites over a millennium.

Improvement in living conditions, nutrition, and access to education is expected to increase mean IQ by 7.5 points by the end of this century, relative to the Anglo-American average. India has the human resource potential to be to be a developed society with advanced technological capabilities by the end of this century. The cognitive elites of India will primarily come from the Brahmin and Merchant super-categories and numerically compare favorably with the other Asian superpower China.

And here's Rec1Man's latest summary table:

Current IQ

Southern Brahmin, 1% @ 120 IQ
Northern Brahmin, 4% @ 115 IQ
Southern Merchant, 3% @ 110 IQ
Northern Merchant, 12% @ 105 IQ
Southern Peasant, 8% @ 93 IQ
Northern Peasant, 32% @ 88 IQ
Muslim, 15% @ 75 iQ
Southern Dalit, 5% @ 75 IQ
Northern Dalit, 20% @ 75IQ

Avg = 86.10 IQ
Current Flynn for India is +7.8

Hypothesized Flynn effect for India in 21st Century:
Brahmins and merchants = +5
Peasants = +7
Muslims and Dalits = +10
The Flynn for Africa = +10

Future Indian IQ

Southern Brahmin, 1% @ 125 IQ
Northern Brahmin, 4% @ 120 IQ
Southern Merchant, 3% @ 115 IQ
Northern Merchant, 12% @ 110 IQ
Southern Peasant, 8% @ 100 IQ
Northern Peasant, 32% @ 95 IQ
Muslim, 15% @ 85 iQ
Southern Dalit, 5% @ 85 IQ
Northern Dalit, 20% @ 80IQ

Avg = 94

After Flynn
High End Indian IQ
Over 120 IQ = 55 mil
Over 130 IQ = 20 mil
Over 140 IQ = 5 mil

I certainly can't comment on the validity of the empirical details that underlie this model -- India being so complicated -- but the general approach seems not unreasonable to me. The point is to put a framework out there for the public to consider.

One potential problem that jumps out at me with Rec1Man's approach, though, is the potential for disparate fertility interfering with improving environmental conditions. Are fertility rates the same across all groups, or are lower IQ groups growing faster? The Bombay Parsis, who were the most affluent and educated group in India for much of the 20th century, are said to be imploding demographically. If IQ, education, and declining fertility are correlated, then dysgenic / dyscultural effects could undermine some of the gains from an improved environment.

Granted, we haven't seen much hard evidence of a dysgenic / dyscultural relative effect yet. But, then, we haven't seen much hard evidence of a positive Flynn relative effect. We've seen lots of evidence of an absolute Flynn effect, but little evidence of countries shifting relative average IQs, as I documented here. We've probably seen more evidence of relative changes in height than relative changes in IQ.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

244 comments:

1 – 200 of 244   Newer›   Newest»
Anonymous said...

"Southern Brahmin, 1% @ 120 IQ"

I teach students from all over the world, including from this group, and I have to say that this figure (being eg 5 points higher than New York Ashkenazi) seems extremely unlikely and considerably too high. All the high end current figures look around 10 points too high to me.

Stopped Clock said...

Sorry, I find this a little disappointing. All the caste percentages are the same for North and South ... all he did is divide each caste into 80% North and 20% South. And except for the Dalits, each caste has exactly a 5-point IQ difference between North and South. So basically, the four main castes don't take into account any possible variation in North/South population distribution or IQ gradient, and the Dalit number assumes there is none. I can only assume he couldn't find census data by region and caste and had to assume that the castes were all distributed equally.

That's not to say there's no truth in the model. I just think the redundancies should be removed ... no separate North/South categories, just a single number for each caste. And explanations for how each number was derived would go a long way towards grounding the estimates in reality.

Gyan said...

1) Warriors classed being Peasant is Wrong. IQ of Warriors class is at least as high as some Merchant Classes owing to their better nutrition (warriors eat meat, merchants dont tend to)

2) Fertility rates in upper classes is vert low certainly less than 1.5, more likely 1.1-1.2

3) Their is certainly no evidence for higher IQ in South. India's two richest states belong to North (Punjab and Gujarat, also known for commercial acumen).

Razib Khan said...

since you'll get 1,000 comments criticizing the post i would say that i applaud your correspondent for a good college try. it's complicated. two immediate nitpicky points

1) syrian christians, who are around 20% of kerala's population, are unlikely to be equivalent to kerala's brahmins, who are 1% of kerala's population. it's pretty certain that many of the christians derive from converts from the nair caste. (mixed in with west asians and assorted other indian groups). IOW, i do know that many syrian christians assert brahming ancestry, but that posits that 95% of brahmins converted to christian in kerala. unlikely.

2) muslims have a tendency to exhibit the same distribution of alleles in much of north india (the only place where i've seen data). e.g., in uttar pradesh (north-central india) the same haplotype frequencies found in the hindu populations, from brahmin down to dalit, seem represented in the muslims. this suggests that there wasn't that strong of a low caste skew in the converts (though more so in some regions than others). the current depressed state of india muslims is in part due to selective migration of the elites to pakistan (who became mohajirs).

if i had to bet money i'd say 90 is a more conservative and "safe" figure corrected for nutrition.

* do note that successful muslims in india are disproportionately ismailis, who are likely derived from converts from merchant castes.

Anonymous said...

razib:
"if i had to bet money i'd say 90 is a more conservative and "safe" figure corrected for nutrition."

Since Turkey scores 90, that seems a bit high to me - Turkey doesn't have much malnutrition, does it? And her median income is much higher.

Anonymous said...

Rec1man here
--

Some corrections and clarifications

--

4.1 Scheduled Caste / Dalit / Untouchable
4.2 Scheduled Tribe ( forest tribes )
4.3 low caste converts to islam

Most elite muslims left for pakistan in 1947, the bulk of muslims left in India are descendants of dalit and peasant caste converts such as Butcher, tailor, washerman, barber, weaver, Namasudras ( a dalit agricultural worker caste in bengal )

--

Dysgenic fertility
At present the fertility rate
( kids per woman )
Muslims, Dalits = 3.1
Peasants = 2.7
Merchants = 2.3
Brahmin = 2.0

This will likely drop the eventual long term average to 91

---

Regarding Kerala Syrian Xtians

Xtians in kerala come in 2 flavors
Long term ( since 350 AD ) eastern rite ( orthodox, nestorian, jacobite, monophysite and other eastern rite )
elite xtians 5% and recent catholic converts from low caste fishermen and dalits 15%

In kerala, the hindu merchant caste is missing. The ecological niche of merchant in kerala is mostly filled by the elite syrian xtians

There is thus a strong suspicion, that most of the hindu merchant caste converted to xtianity about 1000 years ago and hence the kerala syrian xtian ( 5% ) must be slotted into Southern Merchant

The Parsees are mostly descendants of Zorastrian priests who fled the muslims and can be fitted into the brahmin slot

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--


Responding to 'sleep'
--

There is a long thread on this blog started on 5-18-2008, wherein I use IQ figures for the indian diaspora and knowing the diaspora caste mix in each country, I try to calculate the IQ for each caste
And knowing the caste mix in India, I come up with an average

Unknown said...

Even though the nine data points are averages, if one were to plot them it would yield a distribution that is more Pareto than Gaussian (Gaussian being what I would expect it to look like).

One (or I at least) would expect that the chart would basically line up with a global one using a coarser granularity (e.g. the entire population categorized by nation of residence). If someone feeling charitable could link me to such a dataset, it would be appreciated.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

responding to Simon Newman

--

65% of Indian IITs, software, nuclear missiles, space program, moon shot is contributed by Southern brahmins

The Indian diaspora in silicon valley is 50% southern brahmin

In Dilbert cartoons there is a geek Asok, that is a southern brahmin


--

Southern brahmins are typically not found in New york
In new york, you will mostly find peasant castes such as sikh taxi drivers and caribbean hindus and some Patel merchants
--

In SAT scores and other achievements, The Indian Diaspora in US matches Ashkenazi jews at 115IQ

This diaspora consists of 20% northern peasant, 60% northern merchant and 20% southern brahmin

The IQ of the Indian diaspora is dragged down by Northern merchants and northern peasants and still matches Ashkenazi , which means that the southern brahmin has a significantly higher iQ than the Ashkenazi

In addition for historical buffs, there is a strong historical link between brahmins and druids ( the celtic magicians )

May I also ask, how you can figure out the caste of your students

I can, because each caste tends to have certain names and I know to crack the code

In this blog, there is a thread dated 5-18-2008 which calculates the IQ of the indian diaspora
In UK, for example, academically the Indian diaspora scores at 104
and this is with a mix of 40% northern peasant and 60% northern merchant, and the northern merchant calculates out to 110IQ

In addition, the darwinian pressures on Ashkenazi is about 800 years, whereas the same darwinian pressures ( high literacy ) on brahmins and merchants has been for over 3000 years

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

Another correction

--

Southern Dalit, 5% @ 75 IQ
Northern Dalit, 20% @ 75IQ

--

Current IQ of Northern Dalit = 75 - 5 = 70 IQ

Sriram said...

@gyan:"Warriors classed being Peasant is Wrong."

As I understand it, these are convenient labels, not to be confused with literal caste (although there is a good deal of overlap). If some of these warrior castes have had a literate tradition then they would be "merchant" or "brahmin" effectively. Most of the maharajahs of India were from peasant castes who got "converted" to warrior status by involvement in wars (Scindias); The ex-royalty of Nepal is related to these folks.

razib: I didnt know that 20% of keralites classified themselves as Syrian xtians. That number is way too large.. so its some subset of this group that would map onto Brahmin. Its almost like the people in Bihar/UP etc. who now classify themselves as Rajput (warrior caste with positive connotations) or use nondescript surnames like "Singh" or "Kumar" to get away from the caste labels.

Steve: I think the current Dalit northern number was supposed to be 70.

Besides fertility, another factor is life expectancy.

simon: Isnt NY ashkenazi a higher end IQ subset of American Jewry?

Sriram said...

@sleep

rec1man's hypothesis is that the north distributions are some points lower than the corresponding south distributions (as a consequence of the south being relatively insulated from the negative fallout of invasions). To falsify it, one would have to show, for example, that north indian "brahmins" who are four times as numerous as south indian "brahmins" are represented in proportion to their numbers in higher IQ professions/roles.

The hypothesized higher IQ groups only have modest effects on the mean. They do have dramatic implications for the tail.

Anonymous said...

This is a good and interesting model which helps illuminate the current potential of India, but I wouldn't include your demographic concerns as being particularly meaningful, because absolutely anything could happen by 2100. We may find methods of directly improving g.

Anonymous said...

So let me get this straight. Muslims who convert from the peasant class have a lower IQ than the Peasant class they came from? Does this make sense?

Also India for much of it's history were ruled by the Muslim elites? Those elites would have ancestors who came from the ruling elite.

I have heard repeatedly from this site how the lighter northen skinned have higher IQ? Isn't that the predominant location of Muslims?

Anonymous said...

Are fertility rates the same across all groups, or are lower IQ groups growing faster?

Steve, you should just call this the Idiocracy Effect.

Anonymous said...

4.1 Dalit ("Untouchable")
4.2 Scheduled Caste


This should read

4.1 Scheduled caste (untouchable)

4.2 Scheduled tribes (adivasi "original dwellers" / vanvasi "jungle dwellers")

Anonymous said...

Comparing Indian diaspora vs Ashkenazi jews
--
The Indian diaspora consists of 20% northern peasant, 60% northern merchant and 20% southern brahmin

I assume that the immigration filters in the US add +5IQ to the base iQ of each of these castes

The 20% northern peasant drags down the averages
of this diaspora
--

http://www.arthurhu.com/index/asind.htm

Asian Indians are the only Asian ethnic group that consistently outranks the Jews on socio-economic measures and academic awards,

--

http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/table-education-by-tradition.pdf

Post graduates
Jews 35%
Hindus 48%

Incomes over 100k
Jews 46%
Hindus 43%

--
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IK14Df01.html

Indians account for about 65% of the $26 billion in diamond trade revenues, up from about 25% two decades ago. The share of Jewish businessmen has apparently fallen from 70% to 25% in the same period as Indian businessmen make inroads into the traditional Jewish-dominated hub of Antwerp in Belgium and Tel Aviv.

Mike said...

Very interesting. Educated guess models are good.

One initial thought:
With the combination of massive genetic diversity and pockets of relative genetic segregation in India I would expect a slightly larger standard deviation than e.g., in China. I'd like to see SD estimates built in at some later point.

Anonymous said...

2100 speculation aside (for example, 120 or 125 is way too high for Brahmins, as already pointed out), the *current* output of high IQ people from India is equivalent to a European country of about 100 million people. That means it is producing more high IQ brains than any country in Europe, but 2-3 times fewer than the US.

See the World Bank maths study cited here:

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/to-have-and-have-not.html#comments

And comments on IIT entrance exams here:

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/iit-uber-alles.html#comments

Anonymous said...

Knowledge of the IQs is useless without knowing the associated TFRs [total fertility rates].

Both the CIA & the UN had India at above 3.1 at the turn of the millenium, but plunging down to the high 2s [2.7, 2.8] a mere seven years later.

The key question for India, like all of the civilized world, is whether the high-IQ castes are still at or above 2.10 [what most demographers consider to be replacement level fertility].

I know of only a handful of high-IQ redoubts in the entire world which are maintaining replacement level rates: Israel, Utah, Alaska, Idaho, possibly Iceland, and that's about it.

In general, intelligence and & fertility are almost perfectly inverted [eg Hong Kong has the world's highest average IQ, at 107, and the world's lowest TFR, at 0.97], and pretty much everywhere you look, the demographic collapse of the civilized world is accelerating:

List of countries and territories by fertility rate
en.wikipedia.org

IQ and the Wealth of Nations
en.wikipedia.org

Anonymous said...

By the way, did anyone see the story a few weeks ago where the lower castes were rioting to have their status DOWNGRADED to untouchable so as to have greater access to Affirmative Action goodies?

Low-caste tribe riots in Delhi for right to be 'untouchable'
independent.co.uk

Anonymous said...

This is a decent try but I think the IQ estimates in Rec1Man's data are too extreme (Brahmins too high, Muslims too low). Also rather frivolous North-South split lends a false sense of precision to what is a essentially a guesstimate.

It is easy to envision a better model for estimating IQ in India

I would base it on the Indian government's quota (affirmative action on crack) system used of university admissions.

The system basically creates 3 different playing fields for students trying to enter university.

- Non-Quota [upper-caste](~20% of total population)
- Other Backward Classes (~50% of total population)
- Scheduled Castes and Tribes [Dalits and Tribals] (~30% of total population)

Based on Indian Government Estimates.

Note: I have used a low end population estimate for the forward classes, and a high end population estimate for SC/ST.

These rankings are not based an arbitrary mapping of the traditional occupations of a clan to the ancient Varnas in Hinduims.

Rather, most of groups were classified based on the socio-economic status of the group in the 1950s when the quota system was implemented. (there have been some politically motivated revisions since).

Current IQ estimates
- Non-Quota [upper-caste](~102)
- Other Backward Classes (~87)
- Scheduled Castes and Tribes [Dalits and Tribals] (~75)

Weighted average: 85.

The Flynn adjusted IQ estimates for the 3 main groups

- Non-Quota [upper-caste](~105)
- Other Backward Classes (~90)
- Scheduled Castes and Tribes [Dalits and Tribals] (~80)

Weighted average: 90.

Anonymous said...

rec1man:
"In SAT scores and other achievements, The Indian Diaspora in US matches Ashkenazi jews at 115IQ"

But you can't take a self-selected diaspora as necessarily typical of the larger group; certainly in the USA where Indian immigration is highly selective they're likely to be of considerably higher median ability. 120 just doesn't look right to me; for one thing it's higher than the median IQ of upper middle class white populations in Western nations. 110-115 I could credit.

Anonymous said...

rec1man:
"May I also ask, how you can figure out the caste of your students"

Some of them talk to me about their backgrounds.

Anonymous said...

Rec1Man,

Your estimates of subgroup IQ from the diasporas assumes that the diaspora is unselected, right? I find it hard to believe that the Brahmins in Silicon Valley are a respresentative sample of Brahmins from their region. Doesn't it seem more reasonable that they are an elite within the elite?

I wish I could offer some correction for that. Possibly compare the entrance exam scores of Indians who emigrated to the US with those who did not. Or try to estimate regression to the mean in US Brahmin children.

Anonymous said...

nsam:
"simon: Isnt NY ashkenazi a higher end IQ subset of American Jewry?"

Yes. That was my point.

Anonymous said...

Yes of course diaspora populations are selected. Look at the fraction of Indians in Silicon Valley or US academic science who were IIT graduates. That is a gigantic filter.

Sriram said...

anon

--
So let me get this straight. Muslims who convert from the peasant class have a lower IQ than the Peasant class they came from? Does this make sense?
--

Apparently you havent read the discussion closely enough. Most elite/upper caste muslims migrated to pakistan and in any case most muslims in the BIMARU provinces are lower caste/dalit. Theres also the cultural aspect of Islam thats anti-education etc. etc. that imposes a penalty (as can be seen from education stats from these provinces).

The trimodal classification proposed by Kailash is cruder than necessary; it implies that, of the 25 million people of school leaving age each year, about 6750 exceed an IQ of 147 (102 + 3 SD) which rec1man estimated as the bottom range to get into elite colleges. So if we can use data to show that 6750 per year is too low, then the trimodal scheme can be ruled out.

We should get more data to falsify parts of or tune the 8 population model proposed by rec1man. The easiest part to falsify would be the northern vs. southern brahmin difference (and the southern vs. northern merchant difference.. I am skeptical about this). If in fact the data does not support any north vs. south difference (controlling for supercaste category), then the distinction can be dumped. My hunch is that perhaps even 8 isn't sufficient.

Anonymous said...

What is the average IQ for Indians in South Africa? While they must be poorer than SA whites, they are surely richer on average than Indians living in India? SA Indians might have been selected, but it was generations ago, and they would have regressed at least partway to the the mean.

And SA is wealthy enough that most environmental factors depressing IQ should be greatly reduced.

I just find it vary hard to believe that a region with millions of 120+ people has been so backwards for so long. OTOH, I believe it about China.

What about the historical record? Did people who interacted with South Indian Brahmins, say Arabs, or Persians, or The English during the Raj ever write "wow, these are the smartest people I've ever meet? Because people said that about European Jews.

Sriram said...

Since the mid 90s the filter for Indians migrants to the US has not been stringent (this is when the H1B immigration increased quite a bit, probably accounting for a huge chunk (half?) of the diaspora here); the types of Indians who have been immigrating since the last 10 years are from garden variety middle-class (and even lower class) India and hardly qualify as cognitive elites. A good subset of the diaspora is here by virtue of family connections.. that is to say with minimal filters.

IIT graduates constitute less than one percent of the Indian diaspora in the US (about 30% of IIT graduates settled in USA during 1960-2000; after 2000 the numbers have dropped steeply). A drop in the bucket.

http://www.usinpac.com/indian_americans2007.asp

Anonymous said...

nsam:
"about 6750 exceed an IQ of 147 (102 + 3 SD) which rec1man estimated as the bottom range to get into elite colleges"

That's not true of the UK anyway, I went to Oxford, and no way was everyone there IQ 147+. The bottom was closer to ca 125 or so I'd say, with a median I'd guesstimate in the low 140s.

Mind you I studied Law, IQs might have been higher in the science departments. But we were easily as smart as the Humanities students.

There seems to be a general tendency to exaggerate the frequency of very high IQs. IQ 145 is 3 SDs above the mean, roughly 0.5% of the population. In the UK about 0.5% of the student-age population go to Oxford & Cambridge Universities, but of course there won't be anything like perfect overlap between the two groups.

Anonymous said...

Rob:
"Did people who interacted with South Indian Brahmins, say Arabs, or Persians, or The English during the Raj ever write "wow, these are the smartest people I've ever meet?"

I didn't. They seem a lot smarter than Arabs, though. >:)

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--
Rob:
"Did people who interacted with South Indian Brahmins, say Arabs, or Persians, or The English during the Raj ever write "wow, these are the smartest people I've ever meet?"
--

About 90% of the lower civil service under the british was run by brahmins
There was a strong glass cieling

Further, poverty during british times was much higher and Unlike present wherein I assume brahmins have a Flynn deficit of 5,
during british rule, with widespread famines, the flynn was 10IQ deficit for all Indians

--

Regarding the Arabs
In the arabic madrasas, ( schools )
mathematics is called Hindsa
( hindu knowledge )

--

The early xtian church fathers spent a lot of energy damning the brahmins of Alexandria

"We find St. Hippolytus attacking the Brahmanas as a source of heresy as early as the first quarter of the third country."

--

Megasthenes, the seleucid ambassador to India 300 BC

Megasthenes makes a distinction in the philosophers. He makes a division of the philosophers saying that they are two kinds - one he calls the Brachmanes and the other the Sarmanes ( buddhists ). He states,

The Brachmanes are best esteemed for they are more consistent in their opinions.

--

Anonymous said...

I sent my analysis to Steve as well, one of my main factors of consideration was Singapore.

Singapore's Indians are descended from indentured Southern laborers, not selected for intelligence and are probably representative of the average. Since Malays scored 92 and Chinese 108, and the Indians are usually between the two on all socioeconomic and education statistics, I estimate them at around 100 average.

I would estimate that both the Northern and Southern Brahmins average out to 110, with southerners higher and northerners lower. I say this based on experience with students from these groups compared to Ashkenazi Jews.

I do not believe that the tropical selection effect works for Indians because neither of the two main groups originate in the more tropical areas.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

Some errors made by kailash
--

He assumes the Dalit / Tribal % as 30%, in actuality it is 25%
and they get 22% reservation

Next he assumes a current Flynn Deficit of 5 for Dalits and 3 for Backward castes and upper castes

In Africa, the current Flynn deficit is 10, and Dalits have the same deficit of 10

Next, malnutrition in India is 40%
and even a large number of upper castes and brahmins live in poverty or lower middle class
and I am assuming Flynn of 5
( half the Dalit deficit )

The Backward castes are in the middle with 7 deficit

Next Kailash's model ignores the IQ delta between upper castes and brahmins

In Tamil Nadu, in south India, AA was started on the demand of the upper castes who could not compete with the higher iQ tamil south indian brahmin

In tamil nadu, the upper castes have a separate non-brahmin quota

--

As I said, the eventual real IQ number is going to end up between 90 - 94

The other posters on this thread dont seem to object to that, except the 120IQ of southern brahmins

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

anonymous wrote
--
So let me get this straight. Muslims who convert from the peasant class have a lower IQ than the Peasant class they came from? Does this make sense?

---
Because islam reduces IQ by banning education for women and sending their kids to madrasas
where they learn to kill infidels
---


Also India for much of it's history were ruled by the Muslim elites? Those elites would have ancestors who came from the ruling elite.

---
Just because barbarians sometimes win battles over civilised people does not make them higher IQ
The mongols, the huns the vandals
all destroyed Rome and China

Heck even the british managed to topple china during the opium wars

--


I have heard repeatedly from this site how the lighter northen skinned have higher IQ?

---
In India, the southern
states tend to have higher IQ than the northern states
--


Isn't that the predominant location of Muslims?
--

Yes, the north is the predominant location of the muslims and that is why it is more backward

Anonymous said...

"In addition, the darwinian pressures on Ashkenazi is about 800 years, whereas the same darwinian pressures ( high literacy ) on brahmins and merchants has been for over 3000 years"

Maybe this was only meant as hyperbole, but if you're being serious with this reasoning, it sounds sounds pretty off to me. The selection pressure on the Ashkenazi was not "high literacy" but the mangerial niche they occupied. Is there a historical analogue for the Ashkenazi niche for the brahmins, a selection pressure for the intelligent earning more wealth and having more children? If not, then the situation for the brahmins would seem to more like that of those for the jews before migrating to Europe, living as a very literate endogamous subgroup. Such circumstance might select for higher IQ but it's not equivalent to the effect of Askenazi mangerial niche, as can be seen by the lower IQ means of Sephardic and Oriental jews who didn't fill such a niche, or atleast not to the same extent. So the 3000 to 800 yr argument seems a very poor basis for arguing that southern brahmin IQ exceeds that of the Ashkenazi.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

nsam wrote
--
The hypothesized higher IQ groups only have modest effects on the mean. They do have dramatic implications for the tail.
--

Absolutely correct

Even if the brahmin iQ is rolled back to 110, the average will only drop by 0.5IQ and my overall model is still valid

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

rob said
--
Rec1Man,

Your estimates of subgroup IQ from the diasporas assumes that the diaspora is unselected, right? I find it hard to believe that the Brahmins in Silicon Valley are a respresentative sample of Brahmins from their region. Doesn't it seem more reasonable that they are an elite within the elite?

I wish I could offer some correction for that. Possibly compare the entrance exam scores of Indians who emigrated to the US with those who did not.
--

In my model, I assume that the diaspora that emigrated to USA has an IQ 5 points above its base IQ

So the typical south Indian brahmin in the US is 5 points above his relative in India

The diaspora in other countries does not have this 5IQ filter

If we consider south Indian brahmins, most got in by the F-1 route , scholarships, Teaching and research assistantships
To get a scholarship, a south Indian brahmin needed over IQ140 per GRE, then as he brings in his relatives, I assume that the IQ slowly drops to 130 in the US for southern brahmin

This 130 IQ makes sense because
If you do the algebra for
20% northern peasant ( 95+5) and 60% northern merchant ( 110+5 )
and 20% southern brahmin ( 125+5 )
this gives an average of 115, which matches
Ashkenazi IQ of 115

This would mean that the base ideal IQ for southern brahmin in India is 125, and subtracting 5 for Flynn, the current IQ for southern brahmin in India is 120

--

Even in the US, 80% of immigration is family reunification and so a filter of 5IQ seems reasonable

--

Sriram said...

Mundane things like better nutrition and privatization of education has already made a difference in some places like the southern state of tamil nadu which rivals Bangalore as the IT capital of India.

"South India, particularly Tamil Nadu, has reaped the benefits of opening up of primary & secondary education. At first, primary education expanded through free lunch program in schools, initiated 40 years ago, and strengthened further 25 years ago. Then in the 80’s opening up of higher education created another huge wave."

from

http://tinyurl.com/4ml92q

which contains an interesting approach by an IT company (disregard college degrees, train high schoolers who dont want to or cannot afford college within 2 years and make them part of a team building complex software)

Ultimately the discussion has to go beyond IQ (even though it is a convenient place to start). The Gujaratis, who own half the hotel rooms in the USA, as a group arent exactly associated with intellectual traits but it hasnt mattered too much has it? Investment in family and social networking beyond family can make a group without large numbers of extraordinary individuals quite successful.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

rob wrote

Or try to estimate regression to the mean in US Brahmin children.
--

Let us look at the second generation of the Indian diaspora in the US

--

List of 2nd generation outstanding south Indian brahmin kids
Most brahmins in USA are south Indian brahmins

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/21/AR2008052102479.html

Thursday, May 22, 2008; Page C12

Nebraska Sixth-Grader Takes On the World

Standing onstage yesterday holding a big cardboard check representing the $25,000 college scholarship he had just won in the 20th annual National Geographic Bee, 11-year-old Akshay Rajagopal said: "It just feels like I'm really special."



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scripps_National_Spelling_Bee_champions#1970.E2.80.931979

1985 - balu natarajan
1988 - ragashree ramachandran
2002 - pratyush buddiga
2003 - sai gunturi
2005 - anurag kashyap

---

In addition, Vinodhini Vasudevan is also a south indian brahmin

http://www.rediff.com/news/1999/jul/16us2.htm

12-Year-Old Who Scored Perfect SAT Score Wants To Remain A `Regular' Kid
E-Mail this report to a friend

Sonia Chopra

Vinodhini (Vino) Vasudevan When Vinodhini (Vino) Vasudevan says she wants to keep away from the media, many people are surprised

How can the first 12-year-old to score a perfect 1,600 on the SAT want to keep away from the media, many wonder. The test is conducted for gifted children by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Of the 600,000 gifted seventh- and eighth-graders the program has tracked through two decades, Vino is the first to earn perfect scores on both the math and verbal portions of the college-admissions test, said Claudia Burns, program coordinator.

--

http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jun/04spec1.htm

Estimates indicate that Indian Americans constitute the largest number of medical students in the country, between 10 to 12 per cent of the total, replacing traditional Jewish American hegemony.

--

South Indian brahmin
7 year old, 2nd grader, youngest spelling bee finalist
--

http://www.the-leader.com/archive/x1379332543

Campbell, N.Y. -

Seemingly impervious to the steadily growing pressure, 7-year-old whiz kid Sriram Hathwar
--

Out of 45 semifinalists in Spelling bee
--

Nawaz, Samia - Muslim Upper caste

Arunachalam, Easun - South Indian Upper caste / brahmin

Jauhari, Arushi - North Indian upper caste

Kangeyan, Shiva - South Indian upper caste / brahmin

Vavilala, Vaibhav - North Indian upper caste

Mishra, Sameer - North Indian brahmin

Shivashankar, Kavya - south Indian brahmin

Shekhar, Akshat - South Indian brahmin

Chand, Sidharth - North Indian upper caste

Iyer, Jahnavi - South Indian brahmin

--

http://public.spellingbee.com/public/results/round_results/summarypdf/10

Round-10, 7 advancing


Samia Nawaz - muslim upper caste
Sameer Mishra - northern brahmin
Kavya Shivashankar - southern brahmin
Sidharth Chand - northern merchant




Spelling bee winner

Mishra, Sameer - North Indian brahmin

Runner Up

Chand, Sidharth - North Indian upper caste

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

simon newman wrote

--
120 just doesn't look right to me; for one thing it's higher than the median IQ of upper middle class white populations in Western nations. 110-115 I could credit.
--

Middle class and upper middle class south Indian brahmins can run rings around upper middle class whites

--

Since 1920, Tamil Nadu brahmins in south india have faced a 70% anti-brahmin quota,

for a tamil brahmin to get into med school takes 150IQ ( my niece who stood 4th rank in 12th grade in tamil nadu, out of 200,000 ) could not get into med school due to anti-brahmin quotas, and she went into engineering

-

I have 22 siblings and first cousins - of these -
5 MDs, 3 PhD, 7 Engineers, and 2 Post graduates


Due to the anti-brahmin quotas, anyone with 115IQ would be considered dumb and could not get into any professional college

I personally scored in GRE
670 verbal + 780 math = 1450 = 147 IQ and could not get into IIT
which kind of suggests, entry floor into IIT is about 150IQ

--

I went to high school in a 3rd tier city in South India, and the class had 30 kids, of which 15 were southern brahmins of middle class ( their dads mostly did not have a car ) I stood 3rd

which kind of suggests that the other 2 kids were about 150IQ

Compared to high school in India, I found the competition in MS degree class in US to be easy

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---
rob said

What is the average IQ for Indians in South Africa? While they must be poorer than SA whites, they are surely richer on average than Indians living in India? SA Indians might have been selected, but it was generations ago, and they would have regressed at least partway to the the mean.
---

South Africa

Steve Sailer gives an average of 83 based on 2 IQ tests
First, 77 raw IQ in 1925, ( by adjusting for Flynn effect should this not be closer to 93 by now )

Second , 88 raw IQ in 1990, adjusted by Flynn effect to 90 in 1992

In the same table, Steve Sailer has a white IQ in 1990
raw score 94, adjusted by Flynn to 96

There is no white score for 1925
which would move the white average much lower than 94
By looking at UK, white scores in 1925 would probably be 85

In short white IQ is based on a single 1990 test, whereas the Indian IQ is based on an average of 1925 and 1990 scores
--
The Indian diaspora in South Africa is 50% northern Dalit + 50% northern peasant and scores at 90 IQ with hardly any hindu upper castes or brahmins
This was in 1990, when they still suffered from bad schools due to apartheid

So 90IQ can be considered a long term floor, inspite of any dysgenics

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

rob said

I just find it vary hard to believe that a region with millions of 120+ people has been so backwards for so long
--

India has suffered 1000 years of muslim massacres and 200 years of colonial looting and 50 years of fabian socialism

Here is historical gdp data from wikipedia

--

Historical GDP of India as % of World GDP

During all this time the caste system has existed

--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)

World = 100%
--

1 AD
India = 32.9%
China = 26.2%
Roman Empire = 21.5%

1000 AD
India = 28.9%
China = 22.7%
Western Europe = 8.7%

( Muslim invasions of north India started 1000 AD )

1500 AD
China = 25%
India = 24.5%
UK = 1.1%

1600 AD
China = 29.2%
India = 22.6%
UK = 1.8%


1700 AD
India = 24.4%
China = 22.3%
Western Europe = 22.1%

( British colonialism in Indiawas started 1750 )

1820 AD
China = 32.9%
India = 16%
UK = 5.2%

( UK started opium war on china in
1840 )

1870 AD

UK = 24.1%
China = 17.2%
India = 12.2%
USA = 8.9%

1913 AD
UK = 21.1%
USA = 19.1%
China = 8.9%
India = 7.6%

1950 AD
USA = 27.3%
UK = 6.5%
China = 4.5%
India = 4.2%

( Fabian socialism in india until slowly relaxed starting 1991 )

1973 AD
USA = 22%
China = 4.6%
India = 3.1%


1998 AD
USA = 21.9%
China = 11.5%
India = 5.0%

rec1man said...

rec1man here
--

attn rob
--

Collins, Colonial Crime, and the Brahmin Sublime: The Orientalist Vision of a Hindu-Brahmin India in The Moonstone
Comparative Critical Studies - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2007, pp. 67-86

Edinburgh University Press

Krishna Manavalli - Collins, Colonial Crime, and the Brahmin Sublime: The Orientalist Vision of a Hindu-Brahmin India in The Moonstone - Comparative Critical Studies 4:1 Comparative Critical Studies 4.1 (2007) 67-86 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Collins, Colonial Crime, and the Brahmin Sublime: The Orientalist Vision of a Hindu-Brahmin India in The Moonstone Krishna Manavalli Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, the popular mid-nineteenth century work of crime fiction which weaves into itself the tale of adventure of three Indian Brahmins, traces the journey of a precious yellow diamond from India to England as a part of colonial booty. Tellingly, the novel ends with the repossession of the gem by the Hindu-Brahmins. The Brahmins pursue the diamond with an unerring determination through to the end and, finally, escape with it from England to their native land. It is particularly significant that the novel concedes victory to the Brahmins over the English police and the nineteenth-century systems of Western scientific detection. Not only does this conflictual sense of poetic justice in Collins's work celebrate the heroism of the Brahmin priests, but these high-caste men are also idealized in various other ways. In forging his Gothic vision of a 'prehistoric' Hindu religion, Collins contrasts what I term the 'Brahmin Sublime' with English middle-class domesticity in order to question the latter's comfortable illusions of safety and its all

Anonymous said...

"it implies that, of the 25 million people of school leaving age each year, about 6750 exceed an IQ of 147 (102 + 3 SD) which rec1man estimated as the bottom range to get into elite colleges. So if we can use data to show that 6750 per year is too low, then the trimodal scheme can be ruled out."

I didn't say anything about the SD of the IQ distribution of those people ;)

But even in homogeneous countries with good data on IQ it isn't a wise idea to assume a perfect normal distribution and start making predictions at the tails.

There are always more retards and geniuses then you would expect. (Most likely because the mechanisms involved in the determination of intelligence are interdependent to some degree.)

P.S. The IITs together admit around 4000 undergraduates each year. Many of them not high caste.

KlaosOldanburg said...

I wonder if the gender imbalance will have any effect on IQ.

The ladies of India (especially rural India?) will have their pick of suitors. Hopefully the increased competition results in the nonviolent conquest of intelligence.

The relative shortage of women might also put extra social pressure on women (lot's of them will be their mother's only daughter) on the right side of the curve to take a few years off from software engineering and do some human engineering.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here

--

anonymous wrote
--
nsam,

Can you falsify the possibility that the more mediocre parts of the diaspora have average IQ of 110 (mild filtering; even an H1B visa requires a college degree), but that, say, 5-10% of the diaspora is drawn from the extreme tail of elite (in India), with IQ>130?
---
In my model, the Indian diaspora in the US consists of 20% northern peasant of 95+5 = 100IQ
60% northern merchant, 110+5 = 115IQ
and 20% southern brahmin, 125+5 = 130iq

Next thanks to 70% anti-brahmin quotas against southern brahmins,
with an IQ less than 130, they cant even get into 2nd tier engineering colleges
--

In this model the Brahmin average in India could still be quite modest, like 105. After all, if 30% of IITians are in the US (and those are probably the top 30%!), that means a big chunk (the majority?) of the very smartest Indians are *here*.
---
Even this 30% of IITians is only about 20% of the southern brahmins in the USA
--


I think there is good evidence that the current high IQ output of India is equivalent to an IQ100 country with population of 100M. (See links above.) I don't think that can be reconciled with a Brahmin population of >(10M +40M) with IQ120 and 115. In fact, it's laughable -- that would be equivalent to 10x the US Ashkenazi population, which has average IQ around 115. Certainly the contributions of US Ashkenazim are not an order of magnitude less than what is coming out of India!

--

I can only speak for southern brahmins, 10Mil,
There is a 70% anti-brahmin quota
That cripples the potential
There is a large pool of quota candidates AA in most colleges
So what is coming out of India at the high end is reduced by 70%
A southern brahmin with IQ less than 130 is doomed to a second rate career

15 years ago, nobody in the west even knew a large Hi-IQ pool existed in south India

As of now there are 20 mil brahmin english fluent, college graduates, who will simply suck up any white collar job that can be exported through the internet

As far as Ashkenazi , look at the second generation of the Indian diaspora and per Arthur Hu, this is acing the Ashkenazi across the board

Now keep in mind, the Indian diaspora is not the cream of Indian IQ since it is weighed down by 80% non-brahmins

In addition, India still has a lot of fabian socialism


---
In this model the Brahmin average in India could still be quite modest, like 105.
--

In the UK, the diaspora, non-filtered consisting of 60% northern merchant and 40% northern peasant, performs academically midway between
Whites 100IQ and Chinese 108 IQ
So if this blend is at 104IQ
how can the brahmin be at 105IQ

In south India, 105IQ brahmins will go extinct thanks to intense anti-brahmin quotas

--

Anyways wait and see

Regarding output vs Ashkenazi,
you have to look at the historical record, of wholesale export of indian civilisation to tibet, and south east asia

Truth said...

"India has suffered 1000 years of muslim massacres and 200 years of colonial looting and 50 years of fabian socialism"

Wouldn't all of these geniuses have found a way, over a 1250 year period, to invent better weapons?

rec1man said...

Wouldn't all of these geniuses have found a way, over a 1250 year period, to invent better weapons?
--

Apart from Spain, and the balkans, India has been the only other region
to stop the muslims

The colonialism started just as the hindu and sikh armies were throwing out the muslims

--
Anyways Indian nukes and missiles are 65% done by southern brahmins

rec1man said...

anonymous wrote
--
Is there a historical analogue for the Ashkenazi niche for the brahmins, a selection pressure for the intelligent earning more wealth and having more children?
--

Historically hinduism has had a small amount of polygamy

A brahmin who cant predict eclipses and who cant chant the sanskrit mantras fluently and cannot teach in the village school will be out of a job
If he is out of a job, nobody will marry his daughter to this unfit brahmin, whereas the fit brahmin may get 2-3 wives

Same applies to merchants who cant earn money

Anonymous said...

Rec1man,

I checked out a GRE conversion chart: I don't have a 143 IQ, but that's where the chart puts me. Something is wrong with the model.

I find it very odd that you argue that they must be smart because they chose a terrible economic system and got stomped and conquered by Muslims and Brits.

As to why the British would idealize India: the aristocracy would have loved for the British lower classes to be as docile as Indians.

I'm not clear on your Flynn adjustments in general

Under the Raj, the British would not have benefitted much from the Flynn Effect either. But it is interesting that at least one novelist thought they were bright.

"you have to look at the historical record, of wholesale export of indian civilisation to tibet, and south east asia"

This would also apply to Arabs, who do not have high IQs.

By Hu's numbers, Hindus score as well as top white American religions. Sadly, he doesn't report sd. If US Indians are from a multi-hump population, it would show up in sd.

I'm still guessing that Indian American Brahmins are from the top few percent of Brahmins.

Also, you can use the Name/URL button to enter Rec1man as your name.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure what the point of this analysis is with respect to predicting India's future development. First, India is a democracy. That means that, like here, the political power belongs to the lummoxes, because there are more of them. So India has populist policies such as affirmative action, make-work jobs, tariffs, etc. that hinder its advancement.

Also, its national infrastructure is woeful. Jim Rogers noted this in his writing about his traveling through the country: how he was lucky to make 30mph on India's main east-west high way, which he had to share with pack animals, while he easily cruised across China's east-west highway; how he needed a different cell phone in every state in India, while one worked just fine everywhere in China, and so forth.

Rogers said there will be some investing opportunities in India -- there'd have to be in a country that big -- but as much as he enjoyed Indian culture, cuisine etc., the country as a whole wasn't ready for prime time and there were better opportunities elsewhere.

- Fred

Hizzla said...

That IQ GRE conversion chart is terrible. For one, the GRE is a poor IQ test in general, since it is very knowledge-based and many of the takers who comprise the curve will care much more strongly about one section (and many won't speak English as a first language). It combines two tests with completely different distributions - an 800 math is only 92nd percentile, while only a 740 is needed for 99th in verbal. A 1000, which shows as a 111 IQ, could be a 600 math (48th %ile) and a 400 verbal (30th %ile), and it's not like the people taking it are a very elite group (college students have a 105 IQ nowadays).

But just generally, it fails the smell test, showing scores far too high.

Anonymous said...

I doubt if the selected Indian diaspora should be used to represent the entire nation of India. If I am not mistaken Nigerians now outdo all other ethnic groups in educational achievements in the U.S.A. However an island filled with say Englishmen or Koreans will always be a more advanced and desirable place to live than an island filled with Igbos and Yarubas.

I do not agree with this North South divide and the caste divisions vary a lot from state to state. For example Maharastra state in Western India is divided into Brahmin (priest), Maratha (warriors) and lower castes. There is no merchant caste as such. In the Eastern state of West Bengal (The Eastern part is now the nation of Bangladesh) Hindus are primarily made up of Brahmins, Kayasthas (A combination of scholar and warrior caste) and lower castes. The Kayasthas are not even mentioned in the analysis, a caste which had a hold on secular knowledge while Brahmins concentrated on religious knowledge.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayastha
“Kayasthas were valued in the second millennia by most kingdoms and princely states as desired citizens or immigrants within India. They were treated more as a race rather than a caste because they developed expertise in Persian (the state language in Islamic India), learnt Turkish, Arabic and later Urdu, economics, administration and taxation. This gave them an edge over the Brahmins (the priestly caste), who traditionally had reserved the study of Sanskrit shastras to themselves. They successfully adapted themselves as scribes and functionaries under Islamic rule and later on under the British. Their secular viewpoint to life, adaptability and lifestyle was an asset which allowed them to succeed. The Kayastha community also adapted to changes, such as the advent of the British rule in India. They learnt English, the more affluent ones sent their children to England, and they became civil servants, tax officers, junior administrators, teachers, legal helpers and barristers. They rose to the highest positions accessible to natives in British India.”
Even though Kayasthas have north Indian origin, they make a larger percentage of the population of the Eastern state of West Bengal. Most common Bengali surnames like Guha, Ghosh, Dutta, Das, Roy, Pal, Bose, Sen etc… are Kayasthas surnames.
Thus rather than restrict oneself to Brahmins, the term Forward caste should be used to include all the higher IQ groups of India. Their state wise distribution is given here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:StatewiseFC.jpg


One more fact is what kind of standard of living will Indians achieve? A nation made up primarily of Indians where their talents are not held back by any restriction of government red tape, traditional values etc… is Mauritius. A bigger version of Mauritius is what India will become in the future. Compare that to the Chinese achievements in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore and the achievements of fellow racial types in Japan and South Korea and one can safe predict that China is on a per capita basis going to be far more prosperous than India in the future. India may end up having a larger number of billionaires as it will have a massive IQ variation but on average per capita terms the Chinese and probably the Russians of the future will be far more prosperous than the average Indian. Though I expect the kind of poverty seen in Indian slums will become a thing of the past in the India of the future.

Anonymous said...

rec1man:
"In India, with its poverty and lousy colleges, 39% of brahmins have a college degree or more"

I have found that Indian college degrees are not comparable to Western (or Latin American, or even African ex-British-empire territory) college degrees. There seems to be a lot of relative grade inflation. The same goes for the Arab nations and Pakistan.

rec1man said...

Rob said
--
you have to look at the historical record, of wholesale export of indian civilisation to tibet, and south east asia"

This would also apply to Arabs, who do not have high IQs.
--

The arabs expanded by the sword
Indian expansion was peaceful by traders

Go back to 700AD, before the muslim invasions

East Asia, China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan were under Sanskritic Mahayanist Bhuddhism which has thousands of hindu gods
A whole host of chinese , japanese and korean emperors were Mahayanist buddhists

South east asia, was even more firmly under hindu orbit
The alphabet and the basic civilisation of Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia were hindu or theravada buddhist. Bali is the sole remnant today

rec1man said...

Debkumar guha wrote
---

One more fact is what kind of standard of living will Indians achieve? A nation made up primarily of Indians where their talents are not held back by any restriction of government red tape, traditional values etc… is Mauritius. A bigger version of Mauritius is what India will become in the future

-

Per my model, Mauritius diaspora consists of 50% northern dalit and 50% northern peasant

Mauritius represents a floor

rec1man said...

Attn Hizzla regarding GRE
--

The basic GRE consists of verbal + math and needs no specialised knowledge

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/GREIQ.aspx

Gives me table

From this table 1250 represents the 98th percentile

I did my GRE in 1979 and
Prior to 5/94 (Q + V) 1250. was the MENSA criterion

And in 1979, I got 1450

rec1man said...

Regarding Kayasthas

I am classifying them as Northern Merchant

The most accurate model will really have 10000 castes, I am trying to simplify to 8 caste groups

rec1man said...

rob said
--
By Hu's numbers, Hindus score as well as top white American religions. Sadly, he doesn't report sd. If US Indians are from a multi-hump population, it would show up in sd.

I'm still guessing that Indian American Brahmins are from the top few percent of Brahmins.
--

I am saying that the Indian american IQ blend is a mix of 20% northern peasant and 60% northern merchant and 20% southern brahmin

each of these castes with a 5IQ upward shift than the base in India

The reason is 80% of immigration to US is based on family reunification and not on skills

That being said, even though the southern brahmin in USA is a higher sub-set of the overall southern brahmin,

The southern brahmin average stand alone is higher than the US Indian diaspora since the diaspora has 80% non-southern brahmin

Anonymous said...

rec1man:

Even assuming a 70% anti-Brahmin quota, I would assume the best Brahmins get into IIT. (There is little competition from other career paths now as engineering salaries have outstripped medicine, etc. -- the best will try for IIT.) So the cream of the IIT crop would be a good test of your model. You claim a population of tens of millions with avg IQ of 115-120 in India, and the IITians are drawn from this pool *plus* the rest of India.

The very best IITians inevitably end up in the US graduate system. This top pool should be equivalent to 10x the high IQ tail of Ashkenazim in the US. If you look at very high IQs, like >160, the US pool is actually dominated by Ashkenazim (do the math: even at 1% of population they dominate at the tail if their avg is 115 vs 100 for the rest). So your hypothesis would imply that at the most elite PhD programs (where the avg IQ is over 150 and good candidates are >160) the IITians would be by far the most dominant group. However, this is not what is seen. Rather, the IIT output is roughly similar to (somewhat less than) the US homegrown output. It simply isn't true that IITians dominate among, e.g., EE or CS or math or physics graduates from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/Caltech/... -- they are just one of several successful ethnic groups, but not overwhelmingly dominant as your model would imply.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, it's interesting. In fact it's a real tour de force by blog standards, perhaps the first ever. I don't necessarily agree with all of it though. I don't think any group in India has an average IQ of 120, that is extremely high. I think the estimation of Southern Brahmins is greatly exaggerated. Overall, I don't think there's much differences between regions of India, though there are differences between caste and religious groups that tend to be consistent.

Anonymous said...

Rec1man: Dysgenic fertility
At present the fertility rate
( kids per woman )
Muslims, Dalits = 3.1
Peasants = 2.7
Merchants = 2.3
Brahmin = 2.0


Where are you getting your fertility numbers?

Anonymous said...

Rec1man:

"The Indian diaspora in South Africa is 50% northern Dalit + 50% northern peasant"

The initial wave of Indians that started to arrive in the middle 19th century were indentured servants.

They make up the majority of the SA Indian population I believe and this group could be "50% dalit + 50% northern peasant".

A smaller wave that occurred in the early 20th Century was made up of merchants and traders.

Anonymous said...

Rogers said there will be some investing opportunities in India -- there'd have to be in a country that big -- but as much as he enjoyed Indian culture, cuisine etc., the country as a whole wasn't ready for prime time and there were better opportunities elsewhere.

A look on jimrogers.com shows that this was his opinion in Mar 2001. Of course we know now that he was wrong about this as growth in the Indian economy has accelerated since.

kurt9 said...

Rec1man's postings are very interesting. His is the only attempt I know of to come up with a respectable analysis of Indian IQ.

I would like to comment to those here who wonder how a relatively high IQ populace could be so "backward" for so long. This is not limited to India. China declined and suffered for 400 years, starting with the end of the Ming dynasty. Europe was stagnant and backward from the end of the Roman Empire until the enlightenment. And the only reason why Europe had the enlightenment is because the plague killed off half of the population, thus destroying the feudal system that kept Europe down.

So, any "high IQ" society can have extended stagnant periods in its history.

Also, many high IQ people are capable of self-delusion. For example, many high IQ people in the U.S. and Europe believe in liberal-left ideology or in religion.

As for the reduced IQs of muslims, I can think of two additional mechanisms of how Islam can reduce the IQ of a populace. First, Islam is by far the most proscriptive religion on the planet. Every single activity that you engage in is government by "fatwas" (there is even a fatwa for how you are supposed to brush your teeth). Such a proscriptive religion eliminates (as well as discourages it) the need for one to think for themselves. The brain, like muscles and motor skills, tend to atrophy if it is not used for extended periods of time. Thus, long-term reduction in IQ. If brain atrophy has epigenetic effects, and those epigenetic effects affect the IQ of the next generation, then the reduced IQ effect becomes multi-generational.

The second way that Islam can reduce IQ over a period of generations is that it promotes cousin marriage. The resultant inbreeding, especially of first cousin marriage, tends to cut IQ a little each generation.

Rec1man has commented that Fabian socialism is one of the things that has kept India from realizing its economic potential. Do most Indians today realize that fabian socialism was a mistake and seek to overcome it like the Chinese seek to overcome Maoism? Or do most Indians still think Fabian socialism is still desirable?

Anonymous said...

recman is rather obviously biased since he seems to be part of the group he wants to argue has a much higher IQ than Ashkenazim.

My own experience at Harvard is that the Askenazim to Indian ratio is about 15 to 1.

And of course American Jews have a vastly inferior work ethic (like all groups who have been in the US for a long time) compared to Indians, and a much older average age.

And again there is a big selection effect. About half of Ashkenazim in the world live in the US but only a tiny portion of Brahmans, who are both self-selected to seeking to come to the US, and selected by US companies wanting immigrant employees, and by having high-income (and likely high-IQ) relatives in the US already.

Even with that selection they are not as successful as US Jews.

Anonymous said...

The very best IITians inevitably end up in the US graduate system.

Not a valid assumption. Since after 2001, only the academically oriented or less talented will end up in an American college. All sorts of companies have dicovered that they can hire directly in India for local and global roles so there is little practical advantage in spending some more time in an American graduate program.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a4nDoUoP4kqI
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5936/is_200602/ai_n23946747
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5936/is_200701/ai_n23951783?tag=rel.res1

Anonymous said...

...I strongly disagree with this blog on a variety of areas, and I think the view here that IQ is almost purely genetic is way too simplistic.

I'll make a few points because I know a bit about this topic.

From what I read recently from the toronto star is that highschool dropout rates for kids who speak tamil, hindi and russian are three times lower than kids who speak spanish at home. Spanish speaking kids have a drop out rate approaching 40% in Ontario. So that would put the above three groups at around 13%. Also lower than the average dropout rate which is about 30%. The hindi and russian groups maybe "selected" groups but the kids who speak tamil are overwhelmingly refugees from Sri Lanka - people from every section of society probably even slightly sqewed to people who were deeply disadvantaged previously.

Anonymous said...

kurt: Europe was stagnant and backward from the end of the Roman Empire until the enlightenment.

It is true that "Europe" as we know it [the inheritrix of the Greek, Roman, and Messianic Jewish traditions] very nearly vanished in the Dark Ages, but Europe began to improve on those schools of thought long before any of the various "enlightenments" [Scottish, German, or other].

Substantial pre-Enlightenment advances:

1) Magna Carta signed, 1215AD

2) Scotus contemplates infinitely large sets, circa 1300AD

3) Wycliffe & Hus agitate for universal literacy, circa 1375-1400AD

4) Gutenberg invents movable type, circa 1450; publishes Bible, circa 1453AD

5) Columbus sails to the New World and lives to write about it, circa 1493AD

6) Luther, Cauvin, and Tyndale revolt against state-sponsored religion, circa 1500AD

7) New World colonized [South circa 1550AD, North circa 1600AD]

8) Sweelinck invents the fugue, circa 1600AD

9) Newton & Leibniz discover the Calculus, circa 1675AD

10) Werckmeister & Bach invent the well-tempered scale, circa 1700AD

And I haven't even mentioned Galileo, Fermat, Descartes, Taylor, the Bernoullis, Euler, etc etc etc.

By the way, if you want to get a really good sense of the ancient night life, and of the miracle of modern diatonic polyphonic music, then spend an afternoon listening to this stuff:

Ancient Greek Music: The Melodies
http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/agm/

Anonymous said...

Rec1man,

While all I've done is criticize, I too want to congradulate you for this.

And now another criticism, you took the SAT scores and calculated numbers based on pop fractions. But isn't it more likely that a smart population will be overrepresented among SAT test takers?

Sriram said...

One thing to note is that 2 generations ago (pre 1950), many/most south indian brahmins (SIBs) were in rural environments, impoverished (even in terms of food and nutrition) with little access to education. Note that they are only 1% of the Indian population and perhaps a bigger (5% ?) chunk of the US Indian diaspora . So we are talking about a relatively small group (no more than 100,000 in number) in the USA. So all of them, including many in my and rec1man's generation, have direct (or at least second hand) memory of poverty (where one is very aware of the scarcity of simple things like food and milk). I am pretty sure that my dad and his siblings were under nourished as kids and such poverty still exists today in many other groups in India, preventing them from reaching their potential. My parents provided for me and my siblings (food and good environment) but we didnt have any luxuries (no car, no eating out etc). Now, of course its very different for the third generation who live closer to first world lifestyles.

SIBs have improved their economic standing via the expansion of educational opportunities and better nutrition/medicine, post independence (this is now happening for other groups). Due to drastic affirmative action against this group in south india, SIBs were forced to migrate to other parts of India and the world.

Circa 1970, my uncle and his family of six lived in a tiny (500 square foot) apartment in Mumbai (this was a huge step up from the extreme poverty of the village). He and his wife worked as clerks (they probably finished less than 8 years of school). Their children have science/engg PhDs from elite US univs and work in research organizations and their oldest grand kid got admits to MIT and Princeton. I am pretty sure that the parents with no college education had nothing to do with their accomplishments (except in terms of values). This type of story is pretty common (although it may take different directions.. like becoming a VP of some multinational or an inventor or whatever). Sure some have ordinary lives and barely graduate out of college or high school but its pretty rare to come across someone who is otherwise normal (no mental retardation) who would not be at least a 100 IQ (aside: there must be thousands of reasonably high IQ SIB spouses in the US who stay at home because their visa status does not allow them to work).

Their value system is also somewhat non-western in that they invest a lot in their religious rituals and family affairs and typically wont invest the kind of time/effort necessary to make the big name/fame in academia/society etc. (although a few do that!). On average, they lack the self promotion skills that put people at an advantage in western societies (this is not the case with successful north indian merchant castes, viz. people like vinod khosla).

So its certainly not out of the realm of possibility that SIBs (south indian brahmin) groups are associated with the kind of numbers put forward by rec1man (despite him and myself belonging to this group). If he is wrong, then at most by 5 points (reduce his numbers by 5 points).

my own daughter was adjudged the best math and language student in an entire grade level (probably 400 or 500 students) in a high school in a somewhat well known US university town (I was a little surprised.. maybe this tells something about the type of education that US school kids are getting). And while she is a well rounded student and likes the US system, I doubt she could deal with the rigors/craziness of the Indian high school system and college entrance exams (most IIT professors send their kids to ordinary colleges as they cant make it in the entrance exams and have no way to get over AA quotas). My nephew who was supposedly a top student in a Delhi school didnt make it to the IITs and had to settle for a Delhi university engineering course. The competition is crazy and probably distorts real learning.

If we consider the narrow topic of IQ, I wouldnt rule out SIBs having similar profiles as other outlier groups. If they fail to convert that into other outcomes, other factors could be at work.

As for the relevance of IQ and various groups in India, the key issue seems to be of governance. Indian politics is mostly driven by folks from the peasant castes (who are the beneficiaries of AA) and this obviously creates huge inefficiencies. So unlike more homogeneous China, getting a system to divide the spoils in a way that wont piss off one group or another seems key (and the capitalism model seems to be the best hope as the growth in the private sector makes quotas and such less relevant as corporates will use their own hiring criteria. unlike the USA. corporates can use their own IQ tests to hire employees, taking out some of the sting of the quotas).

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

anonymous wrote
---
The selection pressure on the Ashkenazi was not "high literacy" but the mangerial niche they occupied. Is there a historical analogue for the Ashkenazi niche for the brahmins,
--

In practise, most kings were semi literate and they depended on brahmin advisors who were appointed prime minister and filled much of the bureaucracy

Anonymous said...

Though I do not agree in the north south divide among non-Brahmins, among Brahmins I will agree on the remarkable achievements of Tamil Brahmins. Though Brahmins from throughout India tend to be a successful intelligent lot, Tam Brahmins are the cream of the creams. Many of my close friends were Tam Brahmins, the guy who repeatedly topped my class in my school in Maharastra was a Tam Brahmin (Iyer) in a classroom made up of Maharastrians (Western Indians the people who created the Hindu Maratha empire), Gujrathi Jains, Kerelian Christian (from the South), Punjabis (from the North), Bengalis (from the East, the same ethnic group as Bangladeshis) and others. I do not know if they are smarter than Ashkenazis. But one thing which did strike me is the trouble Tam Brahmins tend to have competing with Slavonic Europeans and the Chinese in programming competitions, something in which they dominate in the industry. Most IIT and BUET (Bangladesh’s version of IITs) teams as well as American Universities having Southern Brahmins and Indians in their teams repeatedly struggle against Chinese and Eastern European Universities in these competitions. One being the ACM programming competition held by IBM. Note most IITs perform dismally in them.
http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/default.htm
http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/v2/default.asp?page=results

Most Eastern European teams may have Ashkenazis in them but will definitely include more Slavonics. I wonder if we are underestimating the intellectual ability of Slavonics. One of my Polish friends (who topped his Electronics Engineering BSc class in England BTW) was boasting that Poles are beating everybody in brawns (he was refering to the four times winner of the Strongest Man competition Mariusz Pudzianowski) and brains. Besides some of the Indian names which crop up in past winner lists of the IBM ACM contest in Western teams are Rajiv Gupta (California Institute of Technology) who is a North Indian and Vivek Sarkar (Stanford University) a Bengali Kayastha. No Tam Brahmins!
The same with the International Olympiad in Informatics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Informatics

Virtually all the winners are Europeans and Chinese. No Tam Brahmin and a lot of Slavonic and Baltic names. Will Bangalore be out-programmed by Warsaw and St. Petersburg in the future?

Same with top coder winners
http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank
http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=10574855&tab=alg

Petr could be Ashkenazi, most probably is Russian but is definitely not a Tam Brahmin. I am not saying not winning these competitions means you are low IQ as other high IQ groups like Swedes, Northern Italians, Japanese and Koreans have hardly won these competitions but I was expecting some Southern Brahmins in them as they tend to dominate the programming industry.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

How much of a US Immigrant Filter
--

The southern brahmin comes in initially via the F-1 scholarship route and the filter is 140IQ to get a scholarship

And as he later brings in his relatives, I posit that the average IQ drops to 130 in the US segment

The US Indian immigrant is assumed to be 20% southern brahmin, 60% northern merchant and 20% northern peasant

and within this per my earlier posts, the southern brahmin is calculated at 130IQ

--
If we assume a 10IQ difference between the southern brahmin in the USA and the same caste back in India, 10IQ is 0.67 SD of SD = 15

130IQ - 10 = 120IQ

This would mean that the southern brahmin in US reflects the top quartile of the caste

--


If we assume a 15IQ difference between the southern brahmin in the USA and the same caste back in India, 15IQ is 1 SD of SD = 15

130IQ - 15 = 115IQ

This would mean that the southern brahmin in US reflects the top 16% of the caste

--

In my model, I assume that the upper castes in India still suffer a flynn deficit of 5, vs 10 for Africa
--

Anonymous said...

rec1man
--

Lucius Vorenus
asked a question on dysgenic fertility

--

National Family Health Survey does a survey in India every 6 years

nfhsindia.org

This gives fertility based on
muslim, dalit, backward caste ( peasant ) and others ( upper castes, merchants and brahmins )

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

kurt said

Rec1man has commented that Fabian socialism is one of the things that has kept India from realizing its economic potential. Do most Indians today realize that fabian socialism was a mistake and seek to overcome it like the Chinese seek to overcome Maoism? Or do most Indians still think Fabian socialism is still desirable?
--

BJP voters, predominatly brahmins, merchants and upper segments of peasants despise fabian socialism

However, Sonia congress, commies, xtian missionaries all support fabian socialism since it is easy to fool the backward segments of society with promises of free lunch

The commies are paid agents of the chinese

The xtian missionaries support fabian socialism since it keeps the populace poorer and more amenable to rice-xtianity conversion

BJP voters tend to be upper caste, urban, college educated and middle class

Congress voters tend to be rural, poor and illiterate and Dalits and muslims

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
----

anonymous wrote

---

I strongly disagree with this blog on a variety of areas, and I think the view here that IQ is almost purely genetic is way too simplistic.

I'll make a few points because I know a bit about this topic.

From what I read recently from the toronto star is that highschool dropout rates for kids who speak tamil, hindi and russian are three times lower than kids who speak spanish at home. Spanish speaking kids have a drop out rate approaching 40% in Ontario. So that would put the above three groups at around 13%. Also lower than the average dropout rate which is about 30%. The hindi and russian groups maybe "selected" groups but the kids who speak tamil are overwhelmingly refugees from Sri Lanka - people from every section of society probably even slightly sqewed to people who were deeply disadvantaged previously.

--

Actually your data from Ontario Canada, supports my model

Sri Lankan tamils consists of
25% Southern Dalit, 85IQ
50% Southern Peasant, 100IQ
25% Southern Merchant, 115IQ
Almost no brahmins

The refugees will reflect the overall population mix

The Average for this mix works out to 100IQ, which matches the white IQ

In addition thanks to caste, illegitimacy is discouraged which allows the tamils to perform well overall

And keep in mind, the top segment of this, the southern merchant was the first to start AA against the southern brahmin

Anonymous said...

Now even though Brahmins have higher IQ as compared to the rest of India due to Darwinist pressures similar to Ashkenazis, they makeup only a tiny fraction of India’s population. As far as the remaining population is concerned their IQ falls in the same range as that of what can be called as the ‘Brown’ group of nations. What I have observed while reading ‘IQ and wealth of nations’ was that there is a hierarchy of colour in IQ averages which ‘Yellows’ on top, followed by ‘Whites’, followed by ‘browns’ (and ‘reds’) and with ‘blacks’ making up the bottom of the barrel. Gulf Arabs (Kuwaitis, Saudis etc…), Persians, Turks, North Africans (Algerians, Moroccans etc…) , Native Americans (Cree, Iroquois etc…), Hispanics (Mexicans, Columbians etc…), South East Asians (Thais, Malays, Filipinos etc…), South Asians (Indians, Sri Lankans etc…) and probably Polynesians and Maoris tend to have overlapping ‘average IQ ranges’ sandwiched between the Whites and North East Asians above and Blacks below.
What is strange is that while some from the above group like Arabs, Persians and Aztecs built big empires others like the Maoris never went beyond big tribal alliances. IQ though one important factor is not the only one determining the ability of a people to build civilizations or win wars. The requirements of the pre-Industrial era were different than now. Some groups were better in practical inventions and warfare while others excelled in theoretical thinking and theology. East Asians were rarely defeated and conquered by outsiders even after several attempts. China was never colonised like India was even though several European nations, Japan and the United States attempted to do so. Japan was never colonised in the same way as India or Malaysia. Mongol armies on the other hand massacred non East Asian armies with ease, may they be Middle-Eastern, European or South Asian. Thus militarily East Asians were more dominant compared to the rest of the world, they made better weapons and used superior strategy yet Shinto, Taoism or Korean Musok never had much influence outside East Asia. Similarly non Europeans have normally struggled to conquer Europe. Events like the Persian defeat in Greece, the defeat of Carthaginian forces by the Romans, Charles Martel’s routing of the Arabs, the Turkish defeat at Vienna etc… show how hard a nut Europe was to crack. South Asia fell nearly completely under Islamic rule yet the Islamic forces with all the might of the Turkish Empire behind them had only limited and a costly military success in Europe. The same Europe virtually completely dominated the world later during the colonial era. Yet European religions like the Greco-Roman, Norse (worship of Odin), Slavic, Druidic Celtic never had much influence outside Europe (except that there are strange similarities between ancient Persian, Hinduism and the European pagan religions) and have nearly been wiped out.
On the other hand Hindus and Jews have been military losers in the bigger scheme of things but had a much greater influence from a religious point of view on the world stage. India might have influenced China through Buddhism but could never have conquered China militarily as I believe the Chinese would have superior weapons and strategy.
It is as if populations from the frigid-colder temperate regions (Northern Asians, Northern Europeans) have a more practical bent of mind and are better at inventing superior complex tools while the opposite is true for the ‘brown’ populations of the warmer temperate-tropical regions (Arabs, Indians etc…) who tend to be better at subjects like metaphysics, philosophy etc…The northerners (Northern Asians, Northern Europeans) also tend to be socially more disciplined as compared to the ‘brown’ populations of the warmer temperate-tropical regions.

Anonymous said...

"Just because barbarians sometimes win battles over civilised people does not make them higher IQ
The mongols, the huns the vandals
all destroyed Rome and China

Heck even the british managed to topple china during the opium wars
"

Are you crazy? The Vandals were basically Germans so I am sure they were very high IQ. The Mongols are racially similar to the Japanese and Chinese and I thus believe were high IQ too. The British started the Industrial revolution. That itself makes them high IQ. The British and Germans combined would be responsible for a large chunk of all modern technological inventions even if you exclude Ashkenazis.

Sriram said...

A well known "equation" states

performance = ability x motivation

So while IQ is a convenient proxy for potential ability, introducing a motivational parameter will clarify matters a great deal (which has genetic influences, like temperament)

Indian empires AFAIK never had a missionary zeal for expanding their empires or conquest. Similarly, the average Indian (especially the south indian) isnt particularly assertive (he is talkative, a different matter) or has a particular wish to leave his mark on the planet. This is entirely consistent with his metaphysics (endless cycles of birth etc.) which doesnt make death as terrifying as it to the adherents of judeao-xtian traditions. The Hindu world view is ahistoric (not tied in any crucial way to historical events such as the birth and death of Jesus for example).

So my hunch is that the motivational counterpart of IQ (drawing from genetic sources such as temperament as well as memetic aspects like the meaning and purpose of life) will vary markedly across groups. Two groups with similar IQ (eg, South Indian Brahmins and Jews) may have very divergent outcomes based on contrasting motivational drivers (something similar probably applies to a contrast say between the Scandinavians and the Italians) Based on my casual observation of Jewish academics, I doubt their level of drive and motivation to leave a mark on the discipline is equalled by any other group. And this motivational parameter must, in part, be culturally transmitted after having been tuned over generations.

Anonymous said...

However, Sonia congress, commies, xtian missionaries all support fabian socialism since it is easy to fool the backward segments of society with promises of free lunch

Exactly right. This is why universal education in India had to wait for the advent of the first stable BJP-led government. Now that the Congress, communists and xtian missionaries are in power they are doing their best to spike the progress made on universal education.

http://www.blonnet.com/2004/03/06/stories/2004030600250800.htm
http://www.thehindu.com/2007/06/15/stories/2007061500401400.htm

Sriram said...

As a follow-up to the need for including a motivational parameter that varies across groups

It just occurred to me that status seeking which is such a huge motivator for male accomplishments in most societies may be muted in traditional indian society.

If caste, especially being a upper caste such as a south indian brahmin, provided hereditary status with religious/societal sanction, there's no particular pressure to go after status seeking/empire building for the males (beyond the demands of leading a tolerable life)

for other indian groups, status seeking and status displays may be a much bigger deal (although I couldnt quite tell which ones.. the punjabis and marwaris come to mind)

Anonymous said...

Anonymous: China was never colonised like India was even though several European nations, Japan and the United States attempted to do so.

What in the world are you talking about?

The USA has never even tried to colonize Canada, Mexico or Cuba, much less China, of all places.

Some of you people need to develop a healthy case of cynicism and learn to take all of this leftist propaganda with a grain of salt.

Gee whiz.

Anonymous said...

I would like to congradulate Rec1Man on his bold attempt to estimate Indian IQ, even if it does smack a bit of ethnic triumphalism. I do, however, have doubts about how he seems (implicitly) to view academic credentials and economic success as nearly perfect measures of IQ and other indicators of g. Whereas measures of g seem to indicate to a large extant the quality of one's mind (basically to deal with complexity and abstractions and assimilate information), academic and economic performace, although correlated with g, are due to many other factors as well.

Setting aside the comparability of degrees granted in different nations (and my personal experience is the same as Simon's who noted that the consistency and quality of degrees from developing countries can often be spotty), I would imagine that cultural factors also play a large role. Things such as intact families that place an emphasis on education and discipline for their children and an entrepreneurial culture would have positive effects. Flynn has pointed out that East Asian academic and socioeconomic performance in the US far outstrips what one would predict based upon their (above average) IQs. Jews in the US also outperform expectations based on their very high average IQs, while low IQ groups, such as blacks and hispanics underperform their IQs.

Cultures almost certainly reflect the IQ distribution of their constituent members, but they work the other way as well, influencing the behavior of their members. A stable family structure, emphasis on education and demands that the children succeed and better their position can help beyond IQ. For instance, Rec1Man estimates Indian IQ in the UK to be 104 based on their academic performance. However, all the IQ data for Indians raised in the UK points to a slightly lower IQ than the white average, combined with somewhat higher academic achievement. I do not think this is necessarily out of line. I could easily see that intact family structures emphasising success and hard work could enable a population with slightly lower g to do better academically than a narcissistic Western population with a collapsing family structure that no longer requires personal responsibility such as Britain's. (See Dalrymple's "Life at the Bottom" and "Our Culture, What's Left of It" for a discription of this).

I have no doubt that the Indian diaspora here in the US is higher in g than the average American (and may or may not be as high as the the average Jewish American), but Rec1Man's offering of spelling bee finalists as proof of staggeringly high IQs is somewhat doubtful. A lot of it is recent immigrant parents pushing their children to excel, whereas those who have been corrupted by many generations of affluence in the US tend to indulge their children rather than push them. When I was in (a private) high school I was in the track that took mostly honors/AP courses and almost all of my sectionmates where National Merit Scholarship finalists or commended (I was a finalist ;-). We were a diverse group consisting of WASPs (of which I was one), Catholics, Jews, Indians, Chinese, and Koreans. All of us were good students and did extremely well on the SAT, but I was always astounded how hard the Asian parents (South and East) pushed their children to excel compared to those of their Christian and Jewish classmates. We were usually more interested in pursuing our own interests or planning our next ski trip or vacation was going to be. Even though I've been out of highschool for more than a decade, whenever I visit Barnes & Nobel or Borders to browse for books and grab a coffee I see nothing has changed. I always see tons of East and South Asian kids sitting there diligently studying, whereas the few white kids are invariably sitting gossiping over coffee. My point is that the hunger for success from new immigrants from cultures with the right characteristics can greatly aid inherent benefits from g in achieving success and SES and academic data are not necessarily ideal proxies for estimating population differences in g.

rec1man said...

rec1man here
--

anonymous wrote

--
This top pool should be equivalent to 10x the high IQ tail of Ashkenazim in the US. If you look at very high IQs, like >160, the US pool is actually dominated by Ashkenazim (do the math: even at 1% of population they dominate at the tail if their avg is 115 vs 100 for the rest). So your hypothesis would imply that at the most elite PhD programs (where the avg IQ is over 150 and good candidates are >160) the IITians would be by far the most dominant group. However, this is not what is seen.
--

I think you dont understand the basic motivation of any IIT or similar south indian brahmin techie

Doing a PhD is not high on the list of goals

The goal is to do a masters and get a job and send money home to his parents / siblings / cousins etc , and get a bride arranged from home

Only those who cant get a job after their masters go on to PhD

--

I did not get into IIT
but I can tell you my experience in a Masters program at a famous univ in North Carolina

There were 5 Euro-Americans and myself in the class

In the first test, the Euro-Americans who were studying for MS , they got between 57% to 62%
I got 98%

At that time the west was not aware of the pool of Hi-IQ talent among the upper castes and brahmins and were not aware having a southern brahmin in the class could bust the grading curve,
even in post graduate courses

The competition in MS was much easier than in high school

rec1man said...

rob wrote
--

I find it very odd that you argue that they must be smart because they chose a terrible economic system and got stomped and conquered by Muslims and Brits.

--

They did not choose Fabian socialism
Nehru when he went to college in UK got influenced by the English socialists, Lasker etc

Hindus did not choose to get conquered by the muslims
as neither did the chinese choose to get conquered by the mongols

I am saying that despite terrible odds, most of the high end stuff coming out of India that is starting to get globally competitive is mostly done by southern brahmins

rec1man said...

anonymous said
--
My own experience at Harvard is that the Askenazim to Indian ratio is about 15 to 1

..

Even with that selection they are not as successful as US Jews

-----

In medical students, 2nd generation, Indians are 12% of the intake

Indians are in general look for value for the money

Why go to Harvard when the local state univ can get you a medical and engineering degree for 20% of the cost

The overall Indian diaspora, per SAT scores matches the Ashkenazi
of this only 20% are southern brahmins
So the southern brahmins stand alone score much higher

And lets look at the spelling bee
My guess is that jews used to dominate it before the upper caste Indians took it over , at the far right end of the IQ tail

rec1man said...

anonymous wrote
----

A stable family structure, emphasis on education and demands that the children succeed and better their position can help beyond IQ
--

Absolutely correct

Even Dalits and backward castes have very strong family values and I expect them to outperform their IQ-g

--

In addition, there is a question of which IQ, which is why I prefer SAT / GRE

There is at least verbal-g and math-g

Tests like Ravens matrices, which do not have a verbal component,
assume that the testee has similar levels of verbal-g and math-g
and may not measure over-performance or under-performance in verbal or math g

Anonymous said...

Sorry RecMan, but Indian domination of medical schools relative to Jews does not prove your point. While it is certainly a high-prestige profession, among our elites it is well below high finance, the law, diplomacy/elected office, and the upper tier of academia.

Furthermore, while doctors certainly make a lot of money, they do so only after a very long and expensive education and residency, and with surgeons at least cannot stay at the top for nearly as long an age. You can be a senator, lawyer, judge, professor, or hedge fund manager well into your 70's and 80's if you so choose.

Finally, the very smartest of the smart would be wise NOT to go into medicine because there is much less of a "superstar" system.

Let me put in this way. There is really not much financial advantage in being a doctor with a 160IQ v a 150IQ. By contrast, in finance, law, or academia, there certainly is.

Anyway, it is not my burden to disprove that South Indian Brahmans have IQ's substantially higher than Ashkenazim, which I frankly find absurd given the relative contributions to our intellectual heritage by each group.

It is well proven that Ashkenazim have an IQ averaging about 115, and this is rather obvious when you go to the places where very high IQ people dominate: Harvard, Wall Street, Congress, etc.

You're the one making the claim, and so far you have no evidence other than your unsourced assertions, such as the average IQ of SIBs who come here on academic visas is 140.

Anonymous said...

Rec1man talks alot of nonsense without any hard data!

SA data wasn't researched very well. The other data relating to Brahmin's seems to be made up!!

Shame on Razib for saying "since you'll get 1,000 comments criticizing the post i would say that i applaud your correspondent for a good college try."

Fucking nonsense. Provide some real psychometric data and then i'll take some of these numbers for " BRAHMINS" seriously!!!

I think Rec1man is Godless Capitalist(nothing wrong with that).

Rec1man's (or Godless or whoever)is too biased.

Anonymous said...

Speaking for the simpler minds here: can we reach to an agreement to this discussion?

-Are South Indian Brahmins to be our new overlords displacing Ashkenazis?

-Does Indian IQ hover around 95, or simply around world average 85?

-Can India successfully challenge China for number 1 status in 2100? (I'm not talking about the Olympics)

- Is rec1man none other than Godless Capitalist on a ethnocentric mood?

Thanks in advance.

Anonymous said...

anon:
"For instance, Rec1Man estimates Indian IQ in the UK to be 104 based on their academic performance. However, all the IQ data for Indians raised in the UK points to a slightly lower IQ than the white average, combined with somewhat higher academic achievement."

This tallies with my experience - I find white British undergrads tend to be smart but lazy and often do poorly; while non-Muslim south Asian undergrads generally work harder and do better even though they are more likely to have trouble with concepts; the same is true for black African students. I don't know if Islam directly lowers IQ but certainly Muslim students are often lazy; this isn't true of all female students (although true of many, especially those in strict hijab) but it seems to be true of pretty well all British Muslim males I've encountered.

Anonymous said...

"Some of you people need to develop a healthy case of cynicism and learn to take all of this leftist propaganda with a grain of salt."

And what about the leftist propaganda about the british colonial rule?

These excellent articles were written by a high IQ Tamil Brahmin by the name of Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar

http://www.swaminomics.org/articles/19970810_newtheory.htm
http://www.swaminomics.org/articles/19970817_colonialtheory.htm
http://www.swaminomics.org/articles/19970824_hongkongindia.htm

And from the website
http://www.friesian.com/british.htm

"Another lesson to be read off the trade figures is that a relatively small fraction of British trade involved colonies that would later constitute the "Third World." Indeed, the only trade surpluses in the table are with India, Africa, the West Indies, and the Far East, which might give some heart to Marxist claims that British colonies, especially India, were the outlet for Capitalist "excess production." However, the trade surpluses are small, and overall British trade with India and the other colonies is hardly larger than with the much, much smaller populations of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. No serious argument can be made that the likes of Australia and New Zealand, with their own autonomous governments and protective tariffs, were being "exploited" by Great Britain. Instead the largest British export market is simply with the rest of Europe. Indeed, Europe, the United States, Australia, Canada, etc. are the places where more people would have enough money to buy British goods."

The claim that Britain looted India by exporting manufactured goods and importing raw materials are unfounded. Indeed even at the height of the British Empire it was the Americans who were 'looting' Great Britain. This whole looting fairy tale bores me now a days. Persia was hardly 'looted' but it has not left them very rich has it but Hongkong even after a century of British 'looting' is very prosperous.

Anonymous said...

Lucius, never tried to colonize Canada? 54' 40 or fight means nothing to you?

Rec1man, When you used SAT data, did you assume that 20% of the Hindu test-takers were Brahmin, in line with the Indian-American population? Because between other groups, there is a big gap between higher and lower IQ participation rates. We should expect a massive difference in SAT participation over a 2 sd+ gap.

That alone would bring down the Brahmin SAT average.

Sriram said...

-Are South Indian Brahmins to be our new overlords displacing Ashkenazis?

NO (IQ need not translate into engagement in high status occupations..Values and motivational factors are hugely important)

-Does Indian IQ hover around 95, or simply around world average 85?

It is 86 currently (read the f*ing post!)

-Can India successfully challenge China for number 1 status in 2100? (I'm not talking about the Olympics)

Probably not. It takes more co-ordination to govern a heterogeneous society that, overall is 10 points lower in IQ. The only dark horse is demographics and as yet unknown tech advances.

- Is rec1man none other than Godless Capitalist on a ethnocentric mood?

???

Anonymous said...

The websites by Mr. Aiyer have not come up properly it seems. They are

http://www.swaminomics.org/
articles/19970810_newtheory.htm

http://www.swaminomics.org/
articles/19970817colonialtheory.htm

http://www.swaminomics.org/
articles/19970824_hongkongindia.htm

rec1man said...

anonymous wrote
---

Sorry RecMan, but Indian domination of medical schools relative to Jews does not prove your point. While it is certainly a high-prestige profession, among our elites it is well below high finance, the law, diplomacy/elected office, and the upper tier of academia.

Furthermore, while doctors certainly make a lot of money, they do so only after a very long and expensive education and residency, and with surgeons at least cannot stay at the top for nearly as long an age. You can be a senator, lawyer, judge, professor, or hedge fund manager well into your 70's and 80's if you so choose.

--

The Indian 2nd generation is influenced by their parents
who are using their experience in India

In the Indian context, either you are a doctor or an engineer or you are a failure

Indian schools have a 3 tier system in 11 and 12 grade
The top tier is the science stream
math, medicine, engineering ,science

The second tier is commerce, law, finance etc

The 3rd tier is arts for those who simply need a degree


Only 2nd tier people in India go into finance , law etc

Indians in the USA as a practical matter will face a glass ceiling / old boy network if trying for diplomacy or elected office

The other aspect is engineering or medicine is a low risk enterprise, almost everyone makes 100k to 200k, whereas in these other professions it is hit or miss

The Indian immigrants are 2-3 generations away from semi-starvation and want no part of risk

However, southern brahmins

As far as upper academia, it is not considered lucrative since you have to study 5 years beyond BS and an assistant Prof makes no more than 60k

Sriram said...

rec1man

http://tinyurl.com/63urms

Is this consistent with your model? Granted that Orissa and Rajasthan are two of the most backward Indian provinces? Are the inequalities in these states are even more extreme than what your model might presuppose?

abstract
--------
This paper uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international testing agency together with statistical methods from Item Response Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states -Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution of mathematics achievement. These two states fall below 43 of the 51 countries for which data exist. The bottom 5 percent of children rank higher than the bottom 5 percent in only three countries-South Africa, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. But not all students test poorly. Inequality in the test-score distribution for both states is next only to South Africa in the worldwide ranking exercise. Consequently, and to the extent that these two states can represent India, the two statements "for every ten top performers in the United States there are four in India" and "for every ten low performers in the United States there are two hundred in India" are both consistent with the data. The combination of India's size and large variance in achievement give both the perceptions that India is shining even as Bharat, the vernacular for India, is drowning. Comparable estimates of inequalities in learning are the building blocks for substantive research on the correlates of earnings inequality in India and other low-income countries; the methods proposed here allow for independent testing exercises to build up such data by linking scores to internationally comparable tests.

rec1man said...

Basically on this board, there seems to be a broad consensus on Indian IQ of Dalits, peasants etc and an eventual 90IQ floor based on Mauritius and South Africa , where upper castes and brahmins are mostly absent

I seem to cross a red line, when I assert that southern brahmins exceed Ashkenazi IQ

Many board members even suggest as low an IQ as 105 for southern brahmins

Performance Output depends on both iq and infrastructure
I suggest that the Ashkenazi performance is boosted by the advantage of living in a 100IQ society with per capita of $40k
and not facing 70% AA
vs southern brahmins living in a 92IQ society ( depressed by flynn to 85) and a per capita of $1k

20 years ago, no one suspected a hi-iq pool in southern India,
and 20 years from now as the Indian economy improves, nobody will question the iq of southern brahmins. Everything on the hitech end such as software, nukes, missiles, moon rocket, comes 65% from southen brahmins

I have seen jews, or the lack thereof, up close , in the hitech fields in the US for nearly 30 years. I have seen plenty of chinese and vietnamese and indians but almost no jews

Ashkenazi over-performance is a matter of the last 400 years only
Brahmins fill a niche analogous to Druids among the celts

There is also the matter of ignorance of oriental history among this blog

rec1man said...

Measuring Indian IQ

IQ tests vs academic tests

--

The academic tests include the entire population and thus reflect the caste blend

whereas IQ tests, only a sample is tested and unless we know the caste blend, the data is meaningless

Anonymous said...

They did not choose Fabian socialism
Nehru when he went to college in UK got influenced by the English socialists, Lasker etc


That sort of makes one wonder why he was so easily led. After all, Adam Smith had enormous influence on a great many thinkers. Does socialism fit well with Hindu civilization?

Taking a step back for the nitty-gritty of the discussion. I think we only criticize the Brahmin numbers because it is well-known that many populations have low average IQ, so any numbers you assigned below 100 don't require extraordinary evidence.

The claim that SIBs are the highest IQ population on earth is extraodinary. Would you be willing to share your dataset and sources?

rec1man said...

anonymous wrote
--
Anyway, it is not my burden to disprove that South Indian Brahmans have IQ's substantially higher than Ashkenazim, which I frankly find absurd given the relative contributions to our intellectual heritage by each group.

--

The arab mathematics that lay the foundation of the industrial revolution in the west came from India

In arabic schools mathematics is called Hindsa

(Hindu-knowledge)

Try doing calculations with roman numerals

Here is a small list of pre-newtonian mathematics that came from India through the arabs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mathematics

Fields of Indian mathematics

Some of the areas of mathematics studied in ancient and medieval India include the following:

* Arithmetic: Decimal system, Negative numbers (see Brahmagupta), Zero (see Hindu-Arabic numeral system), the modern positional notation numeral system, Floating point numbers (see Kerala School), Number theory, Infinity (see Yajur Veda), Transfinite numbers, Irrational numbers (see Sulba Sutras)
* Geometry: Square roots (see Bakhshali approximation), Cube roots (see Mahavira), Pythagorean triples (see Sulba Sutras; Baudhayana and Apastamba state the Pythagorean theorem without proof), Transformation (see Panini), Pascal's triangle (see Pingala)
* Algebra: Quadratic equations (see Sulba Sutras, Aryabhata, and Brahmagupta), Cubic equations (see Mahavira and Bhaskara), Quartic equations (biquadratic equations; see Mahavira and Bhaskara)
* Mathematical logic: Formal grammars, formal language theory, the Panini-Backus form (see Panini), Recursion (see Panini)
* General mathematics: Fibonacci numbers (see Pingala), Earliest forms of Morse code (see Pingala), Logarithms, indices (see Jaina mathematics), Algorithms, Algorism (see Aryabhata and Brahmagupta)
* Trigonometry: Trigonometric functions (see Surya Siddhanta and Aryabhata), Trigonometric series (see Madhava and Kerala School)

rec1man said...

anonymous wrote
--
Sorry RecMan, but Indian domination of medical schools relative to Jews does not prove your point. While it is certainly a high-prestige profession, among our elites it is well below high finance, the law, diplomacy/elected office, and the upper tier of academia.

--

Actually when citibank went bust, they did not invite an Ashkenazi to take over
They invited Vikram Pandit, a Southern Maharashtrian brahmin

( the boundary line between southern and northern brahmins is the Narmada river in India )
--

In running for elected office,
Hindu candidates face open attacks on their religion
Swati Dandekar and Satveer choudhary, both got elected despite their republican opponents running an open smear campaign against their religious background

--

Indira Nooyi, CEO of pepsico is also a southern brahmin

--

And let us see how jews fail to compete against Indian northern merchants

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FB19Df04.html

Indeed, Indian diamond traders are progressively displacing the Jewish community that dominated this trade in Belgium's diamond city - Antwerp - and are now calling for better representation on Antwerp's High Diamond Council, the powerful regulatory body in the trade. This, Indian traders say, has raised the ire of some of the other global diamond trading communities.

In fact, in a provocative report, the Wall Street Journal said recently that, "Indians are among the world's most successful newcomers. They have reinvigorated the jewelry districts in New York and Hong Kong and revived the US motel industry; they are among the programmers of choice in Silicon Valley and Berlin. In the global diamond world, Indians have been so successful that they are challenging Jewish dealers, even in Tel Aviv. About 80 percent of all polished diamonds sold worldwide pass through Indian hands."

rec1man said...

anonymous wrote
---

You're the one making the claim, and so far you have no evidence other than your unsourced assertions, such as the average IQ of SIBs who come here on academic visas is 140.

--

I did my BSEE in a 2nd tier college in India in 1979, and at that time India was much poorer
and 80% wrote the GRE,
and 40% scored over 1250

Only 10% got Full Scholarship
of free tuition and monthly stipend of Teaching or Research Assistantship
These came in on the F-1 visa

American collegee professors could pick and choose and given the surplus of hi-IQ applicants,
mostly only those above 140IQ on GRE got the financial aid and got in on F1 visa

Soon american MS students started noticing that south Indians in the class could bust the grading curve

rec1man said...

proof reader wrote
--
Speaking for the simpler minds here: can we reach to an agreement to this discussion?

-Are South Indian Brahmins to be our new overlords displacing Ashkenazis?

-Does Indian IQ hover around 95, or simply around world average 85?

-Can India successfully challenge China for number 1 status in 2100? (I'm not talking about the Olympics)

- Is rec1man none other than Godless Capitalist on a ethnocentric mood?

Thanks in advance.

--

I am not Godless Capitalist

IMHO, as the Indian economy expands the floor of the Indian IQ will prove to be somewhere above 90 and the ceiling less than 94

IMHO, as far as Avg IQ, India will be 10 - 11 points below china

At the high end, it depends on the chinese SD, whether it is 15, 10, 7.5 or 6
and the individual bell curves of the Merchant caste and Brahmins

You can plug in the numbers and have various IQ benchmark levels
120, 130, 140 etc

Run the numbers for various scenarios at the high end IQ and you will be surprised

IMHO, in 20 years, it will be self evident that Southern brahmins will be on top
A southern brahmin who is not a doctor or an engineer is considered second rate IQ and with 70% AA a southern brahmin
with 115 IQ cant even get into a science college thanks to AA and needs 130+ to get an engineering seat

A southern brahmin with 115IQ is considered rather dumb

rec1man said...

anon:
"For instance, Rec1Man estimates Indian IQ in the UK to be 104 based on their academic performance. However, all the IQ data for Indians raised in the UK points to a slightly lower IQ than the white average, combined with somewhat higher academic achievement."

--

In the IQ test, how many jat sikh northern peasants and how many patel northern merchants ??

Whereas the academic test reflects the caste blend

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

Anonymous wrote

Rec1Man estimates Indian IQ in the UK to be 104 based on their academic performance. However, all the IQ data for Indians raised in the UK points to a slightly lower IQ than the white average, combined with somewhat higher academic achievement.
-- and he goes on about family pressures towards education

---

In this UK study, Indians, whites and chinese are compared

I can assume that the chinese 108IQ have the same family pressures towards education as the Indians and the chinese have a certain Delta in grades above the whites

The Indians who have the same family motivations as the 108IQ chinese have half the Delta over whites and thats how I came up with 104

--

Indian IQ in UK has been badly mismeasured
A decade ago it was 85, then 97 more recently and Lynn has made all kinds of wild assumptions without looking at the first basic question
What is the caste background of the Indians in the IQ test

Thats why I prefer SAT and other similar tests, since it reflects the combined score of the caste blend

Anonymous said...

rec1man here

Difference between regular F1 and Scholarship F1

Each year 75k indian students enter US on F1 visa
of these 65K pay their own way and these tend to be from northern and southern merchant castes

Another 10K come through the scholarship route and these tend to be southern brahmins who are much poorer and cross the GRE 140IQ scholarship cut off

The H1-B crowd represents a lower grade IQ than the F1 scholarship route

While the F1 scholarship route is predominantly southern brahmin, the H1-B crowd has a large segment of southern merchant and northern merchant

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

Some common caste stereotypes
( found on the web )

Bihari
One Bihari = Laloo Prasad Yadav.
Two Biharis = booth-capturing squad.
Three Biharis = caste killing.
Four Biharis = entire literate population of Patna.

Mallu
One Mallu = coconut stall.
Two Mallus = a boat race.
Three Mallus = Gulf job racket.
Four Mallus = oil slick.

UP Bhaiyya
One UP bhaiyya = a milkman.
Two UP bhaiyyas = halwai shop.
Three UP bhaiyyas = a fist-fight in the UP assembly.
Four UP bhaiyyas = mosque-destruction squad.

Gujju
One Gujju = share-broker in a Bombaytrain.
Two Gujjus = rummy game in a Bombaytrain.
Three Gujjus = Bombay's noisiest restaurant.
Four Gujjus = stock market scam.

Andhraite
One Andhraite = chili farmer.
Two Andhraites = software company in New Jersey.
Three Andhraites = Naxalite outfit.
Four Andhraites = song-and-dance number in a Telugu movie.

Kashmiri
One Kashmiri = carpet salesman.
Two Kashmiris = carpet factory.
Three Kashmiris = terrorist outfit.
Four Kashmiris = shoot-at-sight order.

Tamil-Brahmin
One Tam-Brahm = priest at the Vardarajaperumal temple.
Two Tam-Brahms = Maths tuition class.
Three Tam-Brahms = Queue outside the U.S consulate at 4 a.m.
Four Tam-Brahms = Thyagaraja music festival in Santa Clara.

Sindhi
One Sindhi = currency racket.
Two Sindhis = papad factory.
Three Sindhis = duplicate goods shop in Ulhasnagar.
Four Sindhis = Hong Kong Retail Traders Association.

Marwari
One Marwari = The neighbourhood foodstuff adulterator.
Two Marwaris = 50% of Calcutta.
Three Marwaris = Finish off all Gujaratis & Sindhis.
Four Marwaris = Threaten the Jews as a community.

Anonymous said...

[Posting again as this seems to have gotten lost since submitted yesterday].

I think it's pretty clear rec1man is not an unbiased researcher in this field :-)

Your only response to my IIT analysis is that since 2000 most of the best have not come to the US but rather stayed in India? Firstly, this is implausible (an IIT senior who gets into, e.g., Stanford or MIT would be an idiot not to come to the US even for a few years to get a masters or PhD), but let me just accept it for a moment.

This does nothing to explain the pre-2000 observation that IITians have come nowhere near to dominating US graduate programs (although they've done well, they have not in any way dominated), which would have had to be the case if they were the best of a 10-40M population of avg IQ115-120.

Do the math, please, and compare with the Ashkenzi and european American high IQ populations that they were competing with in US grad schools -- what would you say is the number of IQ>160 individuals in the various pools? Let's take the following numbers, in the spirit of your previous claims: (assume SD=15 in all cases)

3M Ashkenazi with avg 115
250M euro-Americans with avg 100
40M Indians with avg 115-120

Please tell me the number from each group with IQ>160. I get something like (using pop fraction of 1/1000 for +3SD and 1/50000 for +4SD):

Ashkenazim 3000
euro-Americans 5000
Brahmins in India >40,000

The answer is completely contradicted by observation!

Do you not admit that your model predicts that *today* there are 5x as many IQ>160 people *just in the Brahmin groups* as in the entire USA, counting Ashkenazim? Do you really believe that?

Steve Sailer said...

Keep in mind that Jewish contributions to the arts and sciences were minimal, with the exception of a few isolated giants (typically Sephardic) like Spinoza. Ashkenazis were insular and, while they made money, didn't contribute much at all to the general culture. Then from about the 1820s, great Ashkenazi artists and scientists appear in ever increasing numbers.

So, Indians might be like Ashkenazis in 1825. Or like gentile Russians, who made almost no cultural contribution at the high end of Western civilization, until after 1825.

Or, then again they might not be. Time will tell.

Anonymous said...

Steve,

It's possible, but highly improbable. India has a relentlessly meritocratic system of selection for the IITs, and the best from that system come to the US. The students who get into IIT are lionized (e.g., in the popular press) in India and many Indians can remember, from a young age, dreaming of admittance. Rec1man himself dwells on the fact that he was denied admission.

So we already have a good idea of what the cream of the crop there looks like. A careful quantitative analysis contradicts the proposal that there is a 10-40M population with avg IQ 115-120 in India.

Rec1man's most important point in this entire thread is his observation that if the Chinese SD is anywhere near 15, the largest repository of super high IQ individuals is there. That is why it is an interesting question, addressed in previous discussion on your blog, what the NE Asian SD is.

Anonymous said...

This is a much better version of the one given above. This joke will give you a brief idea about the various tribes of India. I have included a map here to give you an idea of the states. Hope India’s ethnic jungle becomes a bit clearer to you.
POLITICAL MAP OF INDIA
http://bhagya.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/india-map.gif
The map is outdated as three new states has been created


MALAYEES (Native to the Southernmost State of Kerela)
One Malayalee is a narial-pani shop. (narial-pani = coconut juice)
Two Malayalees is a boat race.
Three Malayalees is a Gulf job racket.
Four Malayalees is an oil slick.

TAMILIANS (Natives to the Southernmost State of Tamil Nadu speaking a Dravidian language Tamil)
One Tamilian is a fugitive sandalwood smuggler.
Two Tamilians is a suicide-bomb squad.
Three Tamilians is a classical music school.
Four Tamilians is a Jayalalitha fan club. (Jayalalitha is a famous politician in that state)

ANDHRAITES (Natives to the Southern State of Andhra Pradesh)
One Andhraite is a cycle-rickshaw driver.
Two Andhraites is a spice shop.
Three Andhraites is a Naxalite outfit. (Naxalite = Maoist rebels)
Four Andhraites is the Telugu film industry. (Telugu = language of Andhra Pradesh, not related to the Aryan languages of north but to Tamil of South)

BENGALIS (Natives to the Eastern State of West Bengal, the same guys as Bangladeshis only Hindu majority, speaking an Aryan language Bengali)
One Bengali is a rosagulla shop. (rosagulla = a famous sweet made of cheeseball in sugary syrup)
Two Bengalis is a black-and-white movie.
Three Bengalis is a Mohum Bagan support group. (Mohan Bagan football club in Calcutta)
Four Bengalis is a Marxist movement.

RAJASTHANIS (Natives to the Northern state of Rajasthan, state of desert and palaces)
One Rajasthani is a cattle-seller.
Two Rajasthanis is a mason.
Three Rajasthanis is a puppet show.
Four Rajasthanis is a folk dance-drama.

GOANS (Natives to the tiny western state of Goa, unlike the rest of India it was a Portuguese colony)
One Goan is Remo Fernandes. (famous Goan rock star)
Two Goans is a Feni distillery. (Feni = local booze)
Three Goans is a football club.
Four Goans is an all-night long beach party.

MANGALOREANS (Natives in a part of the southern State of Karnantaka cantered around the city of Mangalore )
One Mangalorean is a supari seller. (Supari = Betelnut)
Two Mangaloreans can't stand one another.
Three Mangaloreans is an Udupi restaurant.
Four Mangaloreans is a fanatical Konkani Sabha.

BOMBAYITES (Bombay city also called Mumbai)
One Bombayite is a hawker.
Two Bombayites is a film industry.
Three Bombayites is a slum.
Four Bombayites is the rush-hour train crowd.

MAHARASHTRIANS (Natives to the Western State of Maharastra, builders of the Great Hindu Maratha Empire speaking an Aryan language Marathi)
One Maharashtrian is a bus conductor.
Two Maharashtrians is a kabaddi match. (kabaddi = type of sport)
Three Maharashtrians is a Ganapati procession. (Ganpati = Elephant headed God of Hinduism)
Four Maharashtrains is a Shiv Sena shakha. (Shiv Sena shaka = Marathi Hindu nationalist Party, Shaka means branch)

GUJARATIS (Natives to the Western state of Gujrat speaking an Aryan language Gujarati well known as good businessmen)
One Gujarati is a share broker in a Mumbai train.
Two Gujaratis is the total chatter in a Mumbai train.
Three Gujaratis is a rummy game in a Mumbai train.
Four Gujaratis is a dandiya-raas session all night long. (Dandiya Raas = Gujrat folk dance)

KUTCHIES (Natives to a part of Gujrat state)
One Kutchie is a kirana shop. (kirana = grocery)
Two Kutchies is a stationery shop.
Three Kutchies is a saree shop. (Saree = common dress worn by Indian women)
Four Kutchies is the entire Bombay retail trade.

SARDARJIS (Sikhs)
One Sardarji is a truck driver.
Two Sardarjis is a roadside dbaha. (eatery)
Three Sardarjis is a terrorist outfit.
Four Sardarjis are always found in jokes.

SINDHIS (Hindus from the Pakistani province of Sindh, speaking an Aryan language Sindhi)
One Sindhi is a currency racket.
Two Sindhis is a papad factory. (papad = papadom)
Three Sindhis is a duplicate goods shop.
Four Sindhis is a lot of gas around (yeech!).

BIHARIS (Natives from the northern state of Bihar speaking Bihari a language very similar to Hindi)
One Bihari is Laloo Prasad Yadav. (He is the Ex- chief minister of Bihar)
Two Biharis is a booth-capturing squad.
Three Biharis is a caste killing.
Four Biharis is the total literate population of the state.

BHAIYYAS (Natives from the northern state of Utter Pradesh where people speak Hindi)
One Bhaiyya is a milkman.
Two Bhaiyyas is a chanawala (or panipuriwala). (Roadside eateries on hand carts just like Hot Dog stands in America)
Three Bhaiyyas is a temple-destruction squad.
Four Bhaiyyas is a halwai shop. (Sweet shop)
(And 12 Bhaiyyas is one SMALL family).

KASHMIRIS (Natives to the northernmost state of Kashmir known for their separatism as the majority population is Muslim, the only one in India)
One Kashmire is a boatman.
Two Kashmiris is a carpet factory.
Three Kashmiris is a tourist agency.
Four Kashmiris is a terrorist outfit.
KANNADIGAS (Natives of the southern state of Karnataka, the state containing Bangalore speaking Kannad a non Aryan language related to Tamil, Malyali and Telugu)
One Kannadiga is a coffee estate.
Two Kannadigas is a Udupi restaurant.
Three Kannadigas is a pepper powder factory.
Four Kannadigas is an anti-Cauvery squad. (Cauvery river dam controversy)

PUNJABIS (Natives from the northern state of Punjab who also make up the largest ethnic group of Pakistan speaking Punjabi a Aryan language related to Sanskrit)
One Punjabi is chhole-bathure 5 times a week.
Two Punjabis is one bottle of whisky in one night.
Three Punjabis is a public fist-fight.
Four Punjabis is 200 kg of excess weight.

PARSIS (Descendants of Persians who fled the Islamic invaders of Persia)
One Parsi is a sentence punctuated with BC's and MC's.
Two Parsis is a doctor and a lawyer.
Three Parsis is a 75 year old and man his two unmarried sisters.
Four Parsis is half their remaining population.

Sriram said...

In marketing/management and maybe some other areas in biz schools many Indians in the 80s and beyond saw an opportunity to enter academic fields that were relatively under-developed and paid well (compared to the more established areas in humanities or social sciences). I dont know if its still true but there are tons of these folks (as any random perusal of any marketing/business journal will tell) all over the place. In the end, it was simply a cold economic calculation (for their relatively modest talents, this was the best place to make dollars without too much effort or risk) and not so much an innate driven desire to contribute to human knowledge :-) And yes, a significant subset of this group are SIBs.

Anonymous said...

From current and past Indian achievements it seems highly likely that there is a substantial discrete Indian population (or populations) with IQ well above 100; probably skewed towards non-verbal IQ. This is already impressive given that the global mean IQ is below 90. And in the future this group may well become much more prominent on the global stage.

But as anon indicates above, there just isn't any evidence for "5x as many IQ>160 people *just in the Brahmin groups* as in the entire USA, counting Ashkenazim". Such claims look more like the IQ-by-US-state hoax data (with its IQ 115 Democrat states vs IQ 85 Republican states) than like any real IQ data I've ever seen.

Anonymous said...

As far as the UK, well I have an MSc in Electronics Engineering from an English University in Northern England and am doing a PhD in the same place, so I have seen some years of MSc classes. The course was quite comprehensive and reasonably difficult. The MSc toppers in all of the three last years have either been Euros or Chinese even though there are a lot of Indians from good backgrounds. In one year there was an Indian who made it to the second position and he was a Tam Brahmin from Pilani University (one of those universities ranked just below the IITs) in India but whose father was an IITian. But the guy who made it to the top that year was a reddish/ blond haired Scotsman who was most probably not Ashkenazi at all. One year it was a Pole in the top spot followed by an Englishman (None seemed Ashkenazi to me). The other year it was a Chinese guy who spoke really bad English but was brilliant in Engineering. The girl who came second that year with the Chinese was a Swede (so much for dumb Swedes). In all the three years I have seen Africans (mostly Nigerians) lagging behind with many ending up with a diploma rather than a degree.

One night when I was in the department building working late, I remember seeing a combined group of Indians and Nigerians trying to steal the assignment of that Scotsman from a secure submission box (They nearly picked up the heavy box and tilted the whole thing) as they could not solve a complex problem given in the assignment on their own. It was the last day of submission and they copied the whole damn thing from the Scotsman’s assignment and most of them did not understand what they were copying.

What I have found was that British and European students are very bright but take it easy. Asians and Africans on the other hand have a greater drive though I have serious doubts about African intellectual abilities after my experience in the UK. I think Africans will make really good car salesmen but I would not trust Engineering work of any kind with them. Sorry.

I used to work part time during my MSc days in the local ASDA (British Wal-Mart) in the stockroom. What I realised was that most British working class folks (Most were English but there were a few Scots as Scotland is not very far away from here) were quite smart and could handle modern mechanical and complex electronic devices needed on the job quite easily (I wonder if Indian working classes can do that as India modernises). A lot of them were just out of school but had no desire to study any further. They just did not have the drive, did not want to make the sacrifices and were earning quite well doing a blue collared job. I can guarantee you that a lot of them would have been decent engineers but were just not interested in studying engineering. One of them said he planned to learn plumbing as plumbers make a lot in Britain. He never thought of ever pursuing Engineering or Medicine. In one incident when I was in a youth hostel in Kent, a British truck driver beat my friends easy in chess several times. Both of those friends were Northern Brahmins and were quite good in chess (and the truck driver claimed he was just average as he was often beaten by other working class folks).

I wonder if high paying blue collared jobs combined with lack of status consciousness in European societies and a fall in discipline is robbing away a lot of high IQ Europeans from pursuing higher studies? Before leaving for Britain I had this belief that Whites were intellectually inferior to desis (South Asians) but my opinion has changed a lot after my stay here in England. They are probably smarter but they have no drive.

Sriram said...

anon:

A lot of the supersmart indians (160 IQ plus) didnt have the patience/social skills to navigate the treacherous waters of academia. Even if they manage to finish the phd, in many cases they head for industry and rack up patents or kick back and allocate more attention to personal life and relationships or become independent (self owned business or startup).

I know one case of a fellow who got a big-name fellowship to Stanford for a PhD (his IQ is likely over 160; he got perfect scores 800/800/800 in the GRE of the mid 80s), did finish his Phd with a couple of papers... did not get along with his advisor and dropped out of academia and does his thing in industry.

I also know one mediocre student (only relatively speaking.. he is still definitely in the 140 IQ plus category) who by dint of social skills and hard work is now a member of the national academy. Many successful academics aren't necessarily super bright. they are experts in career management and know what is in fashion before it becomes fashionable.

My old room-mate came from a humble village background in one of the most backward states, married a white american.. felt unappreciated in his company where he slogged for over a decade, quit and now heads his own chip design firm. It would be hard to predict that trajectory when he was 18 (a full time job that would assure him a good bride was probably the optimistic scenario).

Nowadays I think top undergrad students from good Indian colleges are directly hired by the companies (so the obligate step of doing a US masters is skipped)

Typically, academics isnt that rewarding except for people who absolutely must have that lifestyle or are really passionate about their field. So chances of Indians being prominent in US academia aren't that high.

Anonymous said...

I wish I understood those Indian caste jokes.

Keep in mind that Jewish contributions to the arts and sciences were minimal, with the exception of a few isolated giants (typically Sephardic) like Spinoza. Ashkenazis were insular and, while they made money, didn't contribute much at all to the general culture. Then from about the 1820s, great Ashkenazi artists and scientists appear in ever increasing numbers.

So, Indians might be like Ashkenazis in 1825. Or like gentile Russians, who made almost no cultural contribution at the high end of Western civilization, until after 1825.

Or, then again they might not be. Time will tell.


One thing is that Ashkenazi Jews were isolated from gentiles until after the mid 1800s. There were classical composers like Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer who were Jewish.

As for the Russians... Russia had only about 20 million people in the early 1800s and a very high birth rate. The proliferation of cultured Russians such as Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff may be due quite simply to the fact that there were a lot more Russians in 1900 than in 1800!

Anonymous said...

rec1man here

---

Rec1man, When you used SAT data, did you assume that 20% of the Hindu test-takers were Brahmin, in line with the Indian-American population?

--

All Indians even taxi drivers get their kids to do SAT because college is free if you go to state univ or community college
--

Yes, I assumed , that 20% of Indian SAT test takers were SIBs

with calculated average of 130

which is lower than the entry filter for F1-scholarship of 140IQ in GRE
and somewhat reflects regression to the mean

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

anonymous wrote

A stable family structure, emphasis on education and demands that the children succeed and better their position can help beyond IQ.

--

How much does this offset IQ
5 points, 7 points, 10 points ??

This is back to nature vs nurture

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---
Differences between Ashkenazi vs SIB

--

SIB are 2-3 generations away from semi-starvation and driven to play it safe and make an economical calculation, since they have to support siblings, parents and cousins

So they tend to go for safe hi-income fields like medicine and engineering, some go into MBA

Most dont go beyond Masters degree because of financial pressures back home

Very few have the financial luxury to dabble in a PhD and get only 60K after 6 years

Law and other such professions are high risk, while some lawyers make it big, most earn less than doctors or engineers

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

SA data wasn't researched very well. The other data relating to Brahmin's seems to be made up!!



Fucking nonsense. Provide some real psychometric data and then i'll take some of these numbers for " BRAHMINS" seriously!!!

--

In what way was my SA data incorrect??

and good luck finding an Indian IQ report that shows the caste composition, thats why I tend to use academic results

Anonymous said...

rob said
--

Does socialism fit well with Hindu civilization?

--

No, only the commies who are anti-hindu support socialism

The merchant is a highly respected caste

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

rob said

The claim that SIBs are the highest IQ population on earth is extraodinary. Would you be willing to share your dataset and sources?

--

The entry IQ for SIBs who come through F-1 scholarship is 140IQ

Based on SAT scores and the caste blend of the Indian diaspora in the US, the SIB IQ works out to 130
in the US

This 130IQ reflects the fact that even for the SIB diaspora, 80% of the immigrants are Family reunifications

Assume that the SIB diaspora in the USA, reflects the top 25% of his caste back in India, the caste back in India is 10IQ less which is 120IQ

--

In addition, since the SIB still suffers from some malnutrition and social stress I assume that Flynn will allow some further improvement in India

--

Anonymous said...

"In what way was my SA data incorrect?"

The caste makeup of South African Indians has to include some non-trivial amount of the merchant castes so it wouldn't be 50% dalit/50% peasant.

Anonymous said...

debkumar:
"Before leaving for Britain I had this belief that Whites were intellectually inferior to desis (South Asians) but my opinion has changed a lot after my stay here in England. They are probably smarter but they have no drive."

That's certainly my experience likewise.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---
anon wrote

"In what way was my SA data incorrect?"

The caste makeup of South African Indians has to include some non-trivial amount of the merchant castes so it wouldn't be 50% dalit/50% peasant.

--




Let us assume the SA blend is 20% northern merchant, 40% northern Dalit and 40% northern peasant

--

IQ = 0.2 * 110 + 0.4 * 95 + 0.4 * 80 = 92

This is the ideal score if this blend is in the west,

I think it is close enough

Steve Sailers 1990 score, for SA
raw 88, corrected 90
At that time Indians still had bad schools and suffered from apartheid,

The Sailer data closely matches my prediction

Anonymous said...

The mistake of over-reliance on IITs
---

All 12th graders have to take the 12th grade exam it is mandatory
Whereas IIT exam is optional

Next the IIT curriculum and exam pattern are quite different from the 12th grade state exams

With the result that many students prefer to focus on 12th grade exams and a sure seat in a medical college or 2nd tier engineering college

My 2 nieces skipped IIT and in 12th grade tamil nadu exams
( 100IQ in Singapore diaspora, per Takahata Joe)
They secured rank-1 and rank-4 out of 200,000.
In the bell curve it sure is above 150

Anonymous said...

rec1man,

I can't describe your arguments anymore as even approximating scientific discussion, so I am going to stop after this message.

Regarding your last comment, let's say there are at least 40-60k IQ>160 individuals in India, which your model implies. This means just under 1k or so per cohort of graduating high school students at that level. IIT accepts 4k students a year. No one who is >>160 would have any fear of being denied admission since there are more seats than >160 students (even taking into account seats reserved for scheduled castes). That means the better IIT students will all be >>160 IQ. Since the US has only about 8k >160IQ individuals *of all ages*, the number of those in each of its annual cohorts is only around 100. So, once again I conclude that the largest component of the highest IQ group in US graduate schools (MS or PhD or professional schools) would be, year after year, coming from IIT as implied by your model. IIT just gives a lower bound. Of course students who went to second tier engineering colleges would also like to come to the US, and will appear as well in this (postulated) huge wave of high IQ Indians. However, an influx of that size is not seen.

Sriram said...

From the discussion so far, it appears that there is agreement that the current mean Indian IQ is around 86 and that it is expected to increase to 92 in 2100, at which point point it will be around 10 points less than the chinese mean IQ.

The extent to which Chinese intellect dominates Asia depends strongly on the SD of the Chinese distribution. Is there a decent estimate of this number?

Second, there is considerable disagreement on the mean of the Indian subgroup (south indian brahmins). Is it 120 as rec1man posits or is it 110? It appears that 110 is a floor for this group.
I think a good anchor would be to obtain SAT scores for this group and use that to estimate (after correcting for selection and environmental effects).. rec1man has done this in an indirect way to get 130 for the SIB diaspora but it would be more convincing to get these numbers directly.

Besides IQ, outcomes strongly depend on governance and infrastructure. The Indian system is based on electoral democracy which necessarily implies that the cognitive elites wont have any significant political power and will completely rely on other groups for letting them function/contribute. The prognosis is optimistic in that increasingly, the private sector of the economy is growing and meritocratic measures can be applied in job selection (unlike education where AA is on steroids and the quality of education tends to be substandard which wastes human resources).

--nsam

rec1man: The Tamil Nadu board exams is a test of memorization and apparently is specifically designed for non SIB groups to do well. that is, it has zero resolution at the higher end (which means it is utterly useless as a criteria for engg/medical college entrance which is what the politicians would want.. however there is a somewhat better measure(TNPCEE entrance exam) that is also a factor required also counts and restores some sanity to the process.

AA distorts the indian educational system a great deal and introduces horrendous inefficiencies (the recent move to add 27% OBC or peasant caste reservations in IITs being case in point). This basically implies that Indian universities will not be world class in this century (unlike the chinese who are investing a lot in this direction and dont need to deal with AA in any substantial way)

An unrelated point: Admission to medical colleges in India is far more insane than the IITs. The odds of getting in a top tier institution are so small that any rational person wouldn't invest the effort (unless they were privileged AA students).

Every year AIIMS accepts 45 Indian students, of which 33 belong to General Category and 11 belong to the reserved category (SC/ST) and 1 orthopedic physically handicapped, based on the results of an all-India entrance examination for its MBBS program. The number of students who take the entrance exam every year varies from 70,000 to 80,000. The acceptance rate for admission to the undergrad course (medical school) is thus 45/75000 i.e 0.06%.

Note that the AA here only applied to SC/ST group (the mean IQ of 80). There is tremendous pressure to have reservations for backward peasant castes (OBCs)and the director of the institute (a famed surgeon who happens to be a SIB) had to move the supreme court to oppose such quotas (probably these are inevitable in the end). The complete and utter idiocy of having quotas in ultra-elite institutions does not have any effect on politicians.

If elite institutions have to spend their energy and resources on dealing with increased numbers substandard quota students (at a scale thats not even imaginable in the USA.. where AA is well under control relatively speaking), theres every chance that they will continue to decline (unless privatization of education happens in a big way and institutes have liberty to select students.. much as in the private sector of the economy)

godlesscapitalist said...

Ok, so I heard my name invoked in vain and thought I'd jump in :)

The model by rec1man can be improved :) The only thing right about it is that the Indian IQ distribution is multimodal.

Putting TamBrams at 120 in particular is inaccurate. TamBrams are smart, but 5 points smarter than the smartest group on earth (http://jinfo.org/) is unmoored from reality.

I thought about how to get estimates of Indian IQs the right way, and came up with the following.

1) spider a social networking site (e.g. Friendster, Facebook) which has Indian names and universities/education/work info. You can use Heritrix or Nutch or whatever to do this.

2) parse out the (first name, last name) and education/work info from each of your social network pages

3) derive a function which probabilistically maps from a given (first name, last name) pair to an estimated ethnicity.

It's easy to do this if you have a moderately sized training set of names along with manually assigned ethnic/caste labels.
You can find this on the web or create it yourself, e.g. with 100 examples from each ethnic group that you want to work with.
You simply featurize each name into a vector. You could get pretty far by using a vector with

a) the counts of each letter
b) the counts of each 2-letter block
c) possibly other features based on knowledge of Indian names (e.g. n-letter blocks, syllables, etc.)

For example, names with many letters, the syllable "ma", and so on will have different frequencies among different ethnic groups.

Now you have a standard classification problem, where you're estimating the caste category from the name features.

Example w/ just 1- and 2- character features:

Patel --> x = [a: 1, b: 0, c: 0,... , z: 0, aa: 0, ..., at: 1,..., zz: 0] (26 + 26^2 dimensional vector)

y = [1,0,0,0,...] if Gujarati
= [0,1,0,0,...] if Bengali
= [.8,.2,0,.. ] if name predicted to be 80% Gujarati, 20% Bengali
...

So, the function takes a name, builds a count vector x, and then returns a vector of probabilistic caste category assignments y.


4) Now, for each row in this table:

a) apply the classifier to determine the vector of caste probabilities (e.g. 20% prob of Gujarati, 70% prob of Bengali, etc.)

b) do a lookup on educational affiliation to obtain median SAT score (more sophisticated things also possible)

Boom. Now you have a rough estimate of the SAT distribution as a function of caste, as well as a global survey of caste frequencies. Much more rigorous than anything else out there.


--------

PS: Main tasks here are data related.

a) figure out which castes/subgroups should be represented

b) generate training set with ~100 names per subgroup. A three column tab-delimited text file or Excel file w/ subgroup,
first name, last name would be fine.

If someone is willing to put this training set together and send it to Sailer or me (godlesscapitalist@gmail.com), then I'll take care of the rest at some later point.

Anonymous said...

I asked "Does socialism fit well with Hindu civilization?

--
anon (maybe Rec1man) said

"No, only the commies who are anti-hindu support socialism."

Does that mean now, or when under a Brahmin-dominated government Indians chose socialism for themselves? Nehru was a Brahmin, and socialism must have appealed to him, or he would have chosen a different economic system.

In Nepal, the Brahmin mean IQ was 4 points higher, but not significant at a .05 alpha. (p 973)

Ogbu and Sterna cite studies showing that Ravens scores are fairly consistent across caste, though Vaishya (highest SES) score the highest. There are bigger gaps on verbal tests.

pg 16
It seems reasonable that in a country with greater variance in environment, a larger fraction of the variance in verbal ability can be attributed to environment.

I suppose it is possible that Brahmins were strongly selected for verbal ability, but did brighter Brahmins actually have more children that survived to adulthood than dumber Brahmins? That's the crux of selection. In fact, it would be more logical that a relationship between intelligence and reproductive success would be highest in occupations where greater intelligence had the highest payoff in calories, fertile women, and reduced disease.

In Europe, that relationship was stronger in trade than in farming. So we should expect trading and merchant castes to have the highest verbal and mathematical ability.

The relationship for people in religious occupations is less clear. I don't know what historically caused differences in reproductive success among Brahmins. Was it status within the caste? Ability to manipulate the lower caste into giving them food and money?

Anonymous said...

rob asked:

Does socialism fit well with Hindu civilization?

and

Does that mean now, or when under a Brahmin-dominated government Indians chose socialism for themselves? Nehru was a Brahmin, and socialism must have appealed to him, or he would have chosen a different economic system.

Nehru was looking to destroy Hindu civilization and replace it with a new one. The civilizational aspect comes into play because Hinduism provides explicit sanction to the capitalist motive as being one of the four noble goals of life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purusharthas


Here's some excerpts from a biography of Nehru.

http://books.google.com/books?id=MUeyUhVGIDMC&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=why+nehru+chose+socialism&source=web&ots=vU7N40L7Zs&sig=MW3o3IucpMsMM_ENPs29SdBy0HE&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

Page 87

Gandhi was eager to prevent a breach between the rightists and the leftists. He thought the same could be prevented if Nehru became the Congress president, for that would satisfy the leftists; but as Nehru though radical in theory, was moderate in practice, his being president will really not hurt the rightists.

Page 89

Nehru said the world was divided into two vast camps; the imperialist and the fascist on the one side, and the socialist and the nationalist on the other....Capitalism in its difficulties, he claimed, took to fascism...

Page 89/90

Nehru realized that he was going a little beyond the usual beat of a Congress president in advocating socialism....It would mean ultimately a change in our instincts, habits and desires, in short, a new civilization.

Anonymous said...

BJP represents the interests of rapacious businessmen and feudal landlords. BJP opposes policies and legislation which help middle class,poor and oppressed groups to claim their rightful place in the country.

Anonymous said...

BJP represents the interests of rapacious businessmen and feudal landlords. BJP opposes policies and legislation which help middle class,poor and oppressed groups to claim their rightful place in the country.

Congress is a bad reincarnation of the National Socialist party. Bad because the national socialists at least educated the people.

Anonymous said...

rec1man
--

rob said

I suppose it is possible that Brahmins were strongly selected for verbal ability, but did brighter Brahmins actually have more children that survived to adulthood than dumber Brahmins?

--

Dumber brahmins and merchants will have no children at all and die out

India has the arranged marraige system. Here if a girls father sees a man of the same caste with a sound job, he will offer to marry his daughter to the man with the stable job

A dumb brahmin or merchant will have nobody willing to offer him a wife and hence no kids at all

The smart brahmin or merchant may get 2 or 3 wives ( hinduism allows a small amount of polygamy historically )

So each generation the dumb brahmin and dumb merchant is removed totally from the gene pool

Anonymous said...

rec1man
--

anonymous wrote

Of course students who went to second tier engineering colleges would also like to come to the US, and will appear as well in this (postulated) huge wave of high IQ Indians. However, an influx of that size is not seen.

--

Let me explain the workings of the SIB techie mind

In the period, 1975-1995, the Indian economy was socialist with few job opportunities
Engineering salaries in India were 5% of US salaries

The goal of everyone is to get out of India, Dubai, Singopore, Europe , wherever to make money for 5 years and retire rich by 30

At that time no western country recognised Indian degrees
To work abroad and earn big bucks it was necessary to get a foreign degree, MS

Nowadays intl companies recognise degrees from 1st and 2nd tier Indian colleges and directly hire locally in India and there is no need to get an MS or PhD from USA
Now, Engineering salaries in India are 20% of US levels and you can hire a chauffer, maid, gardener and live a very rich life in India
Thats why very few Indians are going for MS these days

It so happens that US college professors were willing to give scholarships for Engineers with over 140IQ

So most engineers applied to US for post graduates studies and scholarships and mostly SIBs cracked the 140IQ in GRE and got scholarship

The SIB has no interest or love for the field of MS
It is simply a meal ticket

He has plenty of relatives that need financial support from him

The jewish guy is already rich by Indian standards and in no danger of starvation
He loves the field of study and wants Nobel etc

The SIB on the other hand has the attitude, how soon do I finish the MS and get a job

The smarter SIBs get a job in the US after 12-18 months of MS
and his goal is achieved

The dumber SIBs who cant get a job after MS try to get into a PhD program anywhere he can get in
He may hate the field and he tries again in 3-4 years for a Industrial job, many go into industry after PhD at this time

The really dumb SIBs who cant get an industry job after both MS and PhD goes into post-doctoral and academia

As I said, the goal of the SIB is medicine, engineering and job
not research and academia and nobels

Of course if given no other choice, he will do research in any field, since he has the IQ to handle it

Anonymous said...

rec1man here

--

corvinus asked about caste jokes

--

The Tamil Brahmin ( SIB ) is stereotyped here

Throughout India, the IQ of SIB is a well known fact

The lowest quartile is a temple priest
The second quartile runs math tuition classes for the public, non-SIB
The 3rd quartile tries to go to US on Scholarship
The 4th quartile has achieved job in silicon valley and is having a good time

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

rob said

The relationship for people in religious occupations is less clear. I don't know what historically caused differences in reproductive success among Brahmins. Was it status within the caste? Ability to manipulate the lower caste into giving them food and money?

--

Historically the brahmin was a shaman like the Druid
He invoked gods and nature spirits by using magical invocation in sanskrit

The invocation had to be pronounced right or it was ineffective
Think Harry Potter

Many of these invocations also had to be repeated 108, 1008, 100008, 10000008 times and this number of repitions also needed to be accurate. Large number of chants had to be divided up accurately among hundreds of brahmins

Also by 1000BC, Sanskrit became a dead language so the brahmin had to be at least bilingual

And there was no phonetic script before 600BC, so the brahmin had to carry all the sanskrit chants in his head using oral transmission

The brahmin also had to predict eclipses

The brahmin also had to run village primary schools

In addition, many of the maharajas were illiterate and needed brahmin advisors ( think Merlin )

A brahmin who was a successful chanter of sanskrit and successful predictor or eclipses, and successful primary school teacher would have a steady job and get 2-3 wives

The brahmin who could not do the above, got no wife at all and went extinct

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---
Calibrating the upper end of Indian IQ

--

This is where the biggest controversy is about

The lowest IQ upper caste is the northern merchant - Patel- motel

This caste is present without any filters in UK

In UK, they control 10% of the economy

So what is the IQ of the Patel
Is it 100, white mean
Is it 105 ( chinese Avg )
Is it 95 ( blue collar white )

IQ and academic tests in UK only give the score of the combined blend of 60% patel northern merchants and 40% jat sikh northern peasants
The jat sikh is a blue collar middle class high school complete
--

Next level up is the southern merchant - Chettiar
Found in Singapore

The Indian diaspora in Singapore, 50% Southern Merchant, 25% Southern Dalit, and 25% southern peasant , academically in math performs midway between the 108IQ chinese and 92IQ malay
and in english, they beat both the chinese and the malays

My model assumes that the southern merchant is IQ5 above the northern patel merchant

Next, AA against SIB was started by southern merchants, because the SIB was wiping out the southern merchant in the civil service exams
I am assuming SIB is 10IQ above Southern merchant

Per my model , the Northern brahmin is 5IQ below SIB and this has consensus on this blog

---

Summarising

Patel IQ = benchmark
Southern Merchant = Patekl + 5IQ
Northern Brahmin = Patel + 10IQ
SIB = Patel + 15IQ

--

If Patel = White Average = 100IQ
Southern merchant = 105IQ
Northern brahmin = 110IQ
SIB = 115IQ

As the Patel IQ moves up or down the rest follow

Anonymous said...

rec1man
--
What is the selection filter for SIB diaspora in US
---

The total SIB population is 11 mil

In the US, the Indian diaspora is 1.1 mil and of this 0.220 mil is SIB

In other words, the SIB diaspora in US is 2% of the global SIB pop

Obviously this 2% SIB diaspora is not the median , 50% of the global SIB

It is also not true that this 2% represents the absolute top 2% of the global SIB diaspora

The 2% SIB diaspora is the median shifted by a filter of the total

If we assume that the 2% SIB diaspora reflects the top quartile, then there is a 10IQ, 0.67SD filter from the base pop in India, 130 - 10 = 120IQ

If we assume that the SIB diaspora reflects the top 15%, then there is a 15IQ, 1SD filter, base SIB in India = 130 - 15 = 115IQ

If we assume that the SIB diaspora reflects the top 10% of the base SIB, there the filter is 20IQ , 1.33SD
Base SIB in India = 130 - 20 = 110IQ

Any more filtering and the SIB will start to overlap with chinese IQ

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

anonymous wrote

Of course students who went to second tier engineering colleges would also like to come to the US, and will appear as well in this (postulated) huge wave of high IQ Indians. However, an influx of that size is not seen.

--

No SIB will come unless he gets scholarship and a stipend

So this influx is limited by how many TA / RA are given out by US college professors

This question must be directed at US college professors

Anonymous said...

rec1man
--

Difference between F1-scholarship and H1 immigrants

The F1-scholarship is primarily SIB and has 140IQ cut off

The H1 represents the median or worse of second or third tier colleges, maybe 115IQ - 120IQ and has mostly merchant castes

Anonymous said...

Uhh.. let me get this straight. The smartest brahmins -- who are smarter than the mediocre Nobel prize winners here in the US -- are all working for $5k a year doing mindless code work for outsourcers? They're not in silicon valley, they're not professors at Harvard or MIT, they're not running hedge funds and they're not the founders of startups like hotmail? Because the path to all of those other things definitely go through US (grad or undergrad) schools, if you are someone born in India. I guess they can't be that smart in the end...

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---
Dumber brahmins and merchants will have no children at all and die out

Do you have a cite for that?

I don't know a thing about the current reproductive structure in India, but this was a question about the past. I don't know what Brahmins did to earn a living in the past, or if success translated into increased number of children.

---

For the last 3000 years, there is no such thing as love marraige
It is all arranged marraige

Even now, 20 miles from Delhi, if you try to do a love marraige the girls father will lynch you

So for 3000 years for all castes, no decent job = no wife

The definition of decent job of course varies with caste level

For an untouchable, decent job could mean flourishing leather business

For a peasant it could mean, owning a large farm

For a merchant it could mean wealth

For a brahmin it could mean job as a teacher or a priest or some other white collar job

Those unsuccessful will have no
wife and hence no children at all

Anonymous said...

rec1man
--

It is not immediately obvious that religious occupations demand tremendous intelligence, or if intelligence, or that religious occupations have high IQ elasticity.
--

The role of a brahmin is not just priest, it is also shaman, able to invoke spirits with accurate chants and predicting eclipses
all in a dead language sanskrit

---

You also haven't touched that on more pure measures of g, like Ravens, there are small caste differences, and they don't favor Brahmins.

--

Which ravens tests, what area of India

Also, pure priests rank low among brahmins, usually the bottom quartile and these may well be sub-100 IQ

More successful brahmins are bureaucrats, and school teachers

Anonymous said...

rob said
--

Also, having been strongly selected for IQ, we should see some sign of that. Is myopia especially common in Brahmins?

--

About 90% of my siblings and cousins are myopic

Sriram said...

rob

myopia is common among SIBs (as well as other brahmin groups) although I have no idea how it compares with other indian caste groups.

It is also possible (no hard evidence) that certain types of mental illness among males may be above average (schizophrenia perhaps which isnt as neatly defined as myopia)

http://www.schizophreniaforum.org/new/detail.asp?id=1411

also note that in past generations mortality of females at child birth was astoundingly high.. So it was fairly common for successful SIBs to have multiple, serial marriages and spawn quite a few kids (besides concurrent polygamy). all this doesnt exist these days. sexual selection was completely rational (totally hinged ability of male as provider)

here is a guy who is the tenth child of an SIB (currently, I guess the average SIB family has 2 to 3 kids)

http://tinyurl.com/3wfatj

Anonymous said...

Tibet is very interesting
The lama priests have to memorise a lot of stuff like brahmins and this would push their IQ to about 115...


You can't possibly think that a history of memorizing stuff would increase IQ by a standard dev?

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

anon wrote

Uhh.. let me get this straight. The smartest brahmins -- who are smarter than the mediocre Nobel prize winners here in the US -- are all working for $5k a year doing mindless code work for outsourcers? They're not in silicon valley, they're not professors at Harvard or MIT, they're not running hedge funds and they're not the founders of startups like hotmail? Because the path to all of those other things definitely go through US (grad or undergrad) schools, if you are someone born in India. I guess they can't be that smart in the end...
--

SIBs , the top end of the code writers for Outsources currently earn $20K in India

Given PPP, it works out to 120K in the US
It is a perfectly rational decision to avoid 6 years of doing PhD and end up as a post-doc getting 35k and trying for a Nobel

--

Regarding Hedge Funds
Read up on Anand Murti, SIB, the oil analyst at Goldman whose pronouncements move the oil market

Also when Citi went bust they called in a SIB, Vikram Pandit,
they needed the best, not someone from the old boy network

--

The smartest SIBs used to be in silicon valley until 2000, after that, since the Indian economy boomed, based on PPP, they can get 100k equivalent salaries while staying in India without the need for a US degree, so why bother with a US degree

Infosys, Congizant and so on have plenty of SIB millionaires who never got a US degree

--

SIBs lack business skills only recently have they been starting software companies
Hot mail was started by Sabeer Bhatia a northern merchant

--

Regarding Professorships

Being a Professor for SIB ranks below Doctor, Engineer all of which pay over 100k
Whereas an Assistant Professor by 35 is only making 50k
so only those SIBs who cant make it as doctors or engineers will go into professorships

--

Because the path to all of those other things definitely go through US (grad or undergrad) schools,
---

SIBs cannot afford to pay for US degrees unless they get a full scholarship, full tuition and stipend

----

if you are someone born in India. I guess they can't be that smart in the end...

---

keep thinking that way as the SIBs and other upper castes suck up most white collar jobs in the west through the internet

10 years ago, outsourcing was unknown, 10 years from now, very few jobs will be non-outsourced

--

Anonymous said...

nsam wrote

--

Typically, academics isnt that rewarding except for people who absolutely must have that lifestyle or are really passionate about their field. So chances of Indians being prominent in US academia aren't that high.

---

Absolutely, only when a SIB cant get a job as a doctor or engineer will he turn to academia
Very few SIBs are passionate about any field, except as a meal ticket

Anonymous said...

nsam wrote
--
Second, there is considerable disagreement on the mean of the Indian subgroup (south indian brahmins). Is it 120 as rec1man posits or is it 110? It appears that 110 is a floor for this group.
--

The big controversy is not about the absolute number for the IQ but for the fact it seems to overlap the Ashkenazi range
--

Lets do a sanity check in Singapore

In Singapore, the Avg Chinese is 108
Does it make sense for the SIB to be as low as 110 ( after Flynn improvement ), to virtually overlap with the Average Chinese
Median

Next in Singapore the Malay IQ is 92

In math, the Indian diaspora is midway between the chinese and Malay with a 100IQ for math

In English, the Indian diaspora beats both the chinese and the malays giving a verbal IQ above both

Even taking the lower number of 100IQ for the non-filtered diaspora in Singapore

Takahata Joe also concurs with a 100IQ for the Singapore Indian Diaspora

This is from a diaspora that consists of 25% southern Dalit 85IQ and 25% southern peasant, 100IQ and 50% southern merchant

By algebra, the Southern Merchant = ( 100 - 0.25 * 85 - 0.25 * 100) / 0.50

Southern merchant, Chettiar = 108 = Singapore Avg Chinese, after Flynn improvements

Incidentally this would put the northern merchant, after flynn improvements at 108 - 5 = 103

--

In most of India there is a 22% quota for dalits and a 27% quota for peasants

--

In tamil nadu alone, the southern merchant because he was getting wiped out by SIBs demanded a separate Anti-brahmin 20% quota to protect him from the IQ of the SIB,
taking the total quota to 69%

Given that each stage of the quota
Dalit to peasant to merchant, there is roughly a 10IQ delta

The SIB is 10IQ above the southern merchant = 108 + 10 = 118 ( after Flynn improvements )

Another sanity check, if the SIB number is 110 after Flynn improvements, it is only 2 points above southern merchant
and does this 2IQ delta make sense given what we all know about all India entrance exams

Anonymous said...

rob said
--

You can't possibly think that a history of memorizing stuff would increase IQ by a standard dev?

---

Let me put it another way

Without a significantly higher IQ, it is not possible to do large scale memorising

The capability to do large scale memorising is by itself a sign of higher IQ

Anonymous said...

rob
You also haven't touched that on more pure measures of g, like Ravens, there are small caste differences, and they don't favor Brahmins.
--

Ravens test is pure visual spacial test
and does not measure verbal skills or the lack thereof

In Singapore the Indian diaspora scores midway in math between Chinese and Malays
But in english, the Indian diaspora outscores both the chinese and the malays

IMHO, thanks to millenia of bilingualism, sanskrit plus local language, I expect brahmins to score very strongly in verbal skills, which is kind of reflected in the US spelling bees

Anonymous said...

anon said
--
Uhh.. let me get this straight. The smartest brahmins -- and much more sarcasm

--

The current world champion both in regular chess and in speed chess is Vish Anand (SIB )

The first asiatic to win a science nobel was CV.Raman a SIB in 1930
while working in a shitty colonial college in Calcutta

His nephew, Subramanya Chandrasekhar also won a Nobel in 1973 and the Chandra space telescope is named after him

There have been 3 science nobels won by Indians and 2 of these are by SIBs

Without SIBs, the high end stuff in India reduces by 65%,
Software, nukes, missiles and moon rocket ( in 3 months )

Anonymous said...

The role of a brahmin is not just priest, it is also shaman, able to invoke spirits with accurate chants

But magic is pretend, so it doesn't matter if they got the chants right. If shamanistic traditions created selection pressure for IQ, virtually every primitive people would be smart: they aren't.

The same applies to arranged marriage: many cultures have it, and it didn't make them smart.

Which ravens tests, what area of India

You could start with the ones I cited.

Anonymous said...

There is a myth floating in this thread that "exceptionally" high IQs are needed to do well in academia and contribute to science/engg.

This is likely true for a few disciplines like pure math and pure physics. For the rest (i.e. more than 90% of science and engg) the threshold IQ is much lower and there are thousands of people who could have contributed but chose to give Science a miss.

I dont recall the source but I recall it was a study done on bell lab scientists and given the threshold IQ (probably 140) restricted the range, what mattered for outcomes were other factors (skills in communication etc). And of course a passion for the subject, which probably matters most. Here is where environmental and cultural factors play a big part.

So it is likely that SIBs performance on SATs and the like is superior to all other largish groups in the US (including Jews); recall that they are only number 200,000 or fewer. At the same time, its possible their energies are focused in areas that are not as likely to lead to lasting contributions in science (professional engineer or doctor for example).

The two measures (IQ and contributions to science) are separable. Its also likely that the SD within SIB is smaller than the 15 points in the general population (It would be very surprising if it was higher than 10); That could also account for the purported absence of outliers.

The big uncertainty involves projecting back to the Indian SIBs as its hard to tell how self selected these USA SIBs are. If the USA SIBs are 2 SDs above the Indian SIB mean and they have a mean IQ of 130 and the SD within the SIB group was 10, then the mean current Indian SIB is 110 which seems pretty conservative (but plausible, given environmental differences). So my conservative estimate for mean current Indian SIB (by the way this is a much larger group than Tamil Brahmins as it includes folks from the other southern provinces and totals, as per rec1man, 11 million) is 110 with an SD of 10.

note: The difference between IQ means does not have the same meaning within groups, as it does for the general population because the SDs within groups are expected to be less than 15.

An equally or more interesting issue (which hasnt attracted much attention in this thread) is the IQ of the merchant and peasant castes as they are far more numerous and drive the growth of the economy. I find it hard to believe the north-south difference for the merchants and peasants but if, in fact, there is a main effect of geography (north vs. south) that applies to many caste groups that would certainly be a non-intuitive/unexpected finding.

Thanks to rec1man and Steve for starting this thread.

Anonymous said...

nsam said:
"There is a myth floating in this thread that "exceptionally" high IQs are needed to do well in academia and contribute to science/engg.

This is likely true for a few disciplines like pure math and pure physics."

If recman's claims were correct about 40k IQ>160 Brahmins in India (vs. only 8k in the entire US), wouldn't you agree that they would necessarily dominate these disciplines? Whereas, in reality they do not. That makes me think recman is nuts. (In science, this is called comparing model to data. In this case the model fails.)

Recman tried to weasel out by claiming that the bulk of the 40k IQ>160 geniuses are happy to do outsourced low level coding for $5k per year. Totally implausible, and disagrees with observations that the depth of technical talent in India is fairly shallow -- companies are having a hard time now finding good people (well documented in the IT business press). His latest response is to mention a handful of Indian geniuses -- fewer Nobelists than Switzerland has produced -- as evidence for 5x as many geniuses in India today as in the US.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--

Based on feedback, I am offering an updated model

The changes are mainly that the Dalit category was improved from 80IQ ( African ) to 85IQ ( African American ) this reduced the spread and the high end

Updated Step by Step 6-18-2008

---



1. Population distribution is

Southern Brahmin, 1%

Northern Brahmin, 4%

Southern Merchant, 3%

Northern Merchant, 12%

Peasant, 40%

Dalit, Muslim, Tribal, 40%



2. Islamic massacres were of 2 types,

First general massacres in which all castes suffered and secondly

religious massacres associated with destruction of hindu temples

this focused on the elite of the brahmins and to a lesser extent merchants

Muslim rule was mainly based in Urban areas in north India

and rural areas were often semi-independent hindu rule

The Islam massacre penalty for Northern Brahmins is 5IQ and

Northern Merchants is 3IQ, for Northern Peasants and Northern Dalits 0IQ penalty



3. I assume that Dalits ( including muslims and tribals ) will eventually be no

worse than African Americans, 85IQ



4. The Flynn deficit for Dalits is 10IQ, for Peasants 5IQ and

3IQ for Merchants and brahmins

Current IQ of Dalits = 75



5. Per 1999 Malnutrition Study in a northern merchant Neighborhood in Pune

the Avg for the healthy kids was 102



6. Current Northern Merchant = 102

Current Southern Merchant = 105



7. In unfiltered Diaspora in advanced Countries

Northern Merchant = 105

Southern Merchant = 108



8. Based on Above, Peasant in Advanced Diaspora = 85 + 8 ( half SD above Dalit ) = 93IQ

Peasant in India today = 88IQ

The peasant is half an SD above the Dalit and comes under a separate

reservation category



9. The Southern Merchant comes under a separate reservation category than

the Southern brahmin and

Southern Brahmin = Southern Merchant + 8 ( half SD ) =

108 + 8 = 116IQ in Advanced Diaspora



11. Southern Brahmin in India = 116 -3 = 113IQ



12. Northern Brahmin in India = 113 - 5 = 108IQ



13. Current Indian IQ =

1% Southern Brahmin @ 113IQ

4% Northern Brahmin @ 108IQ

3% Southern Merchant @ 105IQ

12% Northern Merchant @ 102 IQ

40% Peasant @ 88IQ

40% Dalit @ 75IQ

Average = 86.04IQ



14. Future Indian IQ =

1% Southern Brahmin @ 116IQ

4% Northern Brahmin @ 111IQ

3% Southern Merchant @ 108IQ

12% Northern Merchant @ 105 IQ

40% Peasant @ 93IQ

40% Dalit @ 85IQ

Average = 92.64IQ

Anonymous said...

rob said
---
The role of a brahmin is not just priest, it is also shaman, able to invoke spirits with accurate chants

But magic is pretend, so it doesn't matter if they got the chants right. If shamanistic traditions created selection pressure for IQ, virtually every primitive people would be smart: they aren't.

The same applies to arranged marriage: many cultures have it, and it didn't make them smart.

---

For believers, magic is not pretend
Even now 90% of Indian believe in astrology

A shaman is typically smarter than the rest of his tribe

In other religions such as Egypt,
the shaman evolved into a priest interested in building large monuments
Whereas the brahmin evolved into a precision shaman
precision in chanting, precision in invocations, precision in predicting eclipses and the seasons, and precision in numbers

--

All cultures used to have arranged marraiges, The successful generalist got wives

With the caste system forcing occupational niches, in each caste, men who were the best fit for the ecological niches in the caste occupations got wives

In the case of the brahmin, advanced literacy was the skill that gave him a job, and wives

Anonymous said...

anon wrote
--
Recman tried to weasel out by claiming that the bulk of the 40k IQ>160 geniuses are happy to do outsourced low level coding for $5k per year.
---

They get not 5k per year, but 20K per year, for the graduates of top tier colleges

Thanks to purchasing power parity
it is equal to $120K per year in the US

At $20k per year in India, you can hire maid, cook, gardener and chauffer
and still save $5k per year


SIBs are extremely risk averse
Doctor and Engineer are high status jobs
Academia is middling status job

Why spend 6 years doing a PhD and making $30k as a post doc and eventually becoming assistant prof at $60k

Anonymous said...

Someone had commented about the lack of Indians in wall street
--

Here is an article on high end wall street jobs being outsourced to upper castes in India

Except for the top quartile, thanks to the internet, virtually every white collar back office job will go to India

It wont go to the Philipines, since they have 90IQ and it wont go to china, because even in Singapore, the Mediocre Indian diaspora outscores the chinese in English and the chinese in Singapore are exposed to English for 100 years

--

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2006/06/outsourcing-securities-research.html

Wall Street Gets `Outsourced' as Analyst Jobs Shift to Mumbai
2006-06-05 00:37 (New York)


By Yalman Onaran
June 5 (Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. had no analysts in India four years ago. Now, the third-largest U.S. bank has 80, including Naresh Bilandani, a 26-year-old London School of Economics graduate hired last year in Mumbai to help provide clients with investment recommendations on European lenders.

The group accounts for 14 percent of New York-based JPMorgan's research staff and illustrates a growing trend. Niket Patankar, who sells research services to investment banks in less-expensive markets, estimates that India's analyst ranks swelled to 5,700 from 300 in 2002. Merrill Lynch & Co., the second-largest U.S. securities firm by market value, and No. 3 Morgan Stanley employ more than 50 of them.

Securities firms are leaning on India's expanding pool of financial talent for number-crunching so they can afford to keep franchise analysts in New York and London. Wall Street's 2003 settlement with U.S. regulators cut off research departments from the revenue they got for helping investment bankers bring in fees. Now institutional customers such as Fidelity Investments are refusing to pay the inflated trading commissions that subsidized analyst reports for decades.

``We got outsourced,'' said Tom Larsen, who lost his job in London covering U.K. companies when Credit Suisse Group moved five of the seven analyst jobs in his group to India. ``Wall Street is aware that the old model, financed by investment banking, doesn't work any more. So it's trying different new models, including outsourcing.''

Larsen, 45, is now a senior policy analyst at the CFA Institute, the Charlottesville, Virginia-based organization that gives the required Chartered Financial Analyst designation to candidates who pass a grueling three-level set of once-a-year, half-day exams on everything from research ethics to discounted cash flow modeling.

CFA Exams

The number of people taking CFA tests in India climbed fivefold since 2002 to 3,178 this year, according to the CFA Institute. U.S. candidates fell by about 25 percent to 30,384. Patankar, co-founder of New York-based Adventity Inc., predicts India will have more than 20,000 analysts in 2011. That would put it ahead of the 15,229 securities analysts working at brokerages and investment banks in the U.S., according to Thomson Financial, a New York-based firm that tracks Wall Street research. The U.K. has 1,228 analysts.

``Research is probably the easiest investment-banking service that can be duplicated in India, where people are just as smart and educated as here,'' said Nejat Seyhun, a professor of finance at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. ``Technology has reduced the need for physical presence.''

The trend mirrors past shifts in industries from computers to automobiles, where companies from Dell Inc. to Ford Motor Co. moved production to low-cost centers such as Malaysia and Vietnam.

3,218 Miles Away

JPMorgan is keeping more-experienced analysts such as Michael Weinstein, ranked No. 1 in Institutional Investor's annual poll for his coverage of medical supply and device companies. Weinstein, based in New York, works less than an hour's drive from the biggest company in that industry, New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson.

Bilandini's Mumbai office is 3,218 miles from the headquarters of Athens-based National Bank of Greece, one of the companies that he tracks for JPMorgan.

Investment banks are ``salami-slicing their research activities and separating what needs to be at high-cost centers like New York from what doesn't,'' said Chris Gentle, director of financial-services research at Deloitte Services LP in London.
``Pressure to move offshore will grow as investment banks look for ways to cut costs while their budgets are squeezed.''

High-Cost Centers

Wall Street's research spending fell about 35 percent from 2001 to 2005, estimates Brad Hintz, a New York-based analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. who tracks the securities industry. Hintz's own firm relies mainly on bundling, or billing clients for research and trade execution in a single commission, for the revenue it needs to compensate analysts.

Total commissions paid for trading U.S. stocks dropped to $11.3 billion in 2005 from $13.4 billion in 2002, according to a survey of 239 fund managers by industry consultants at Greenwich Associates in Greenwich, Connecticut. The proportion allocated to research stayed constant at 40 percent, the survey found.

That decline made it impossible for the securities industry to maintain the same research staff in high-cost centers. The number of analysts working for the 10 biggest firms declined 21 percent to 2,641 as of November from 3,364 in 2001, according to Thomson figures.

India is helping to reverse the trend. Analysts in cities like Mumbai make as little as $20,000 a year, according to Absolute Return, a hedge fund newsletter. That compares with an average of $181,000 in the U.S. in 2005, a survey by the CFA Institute found.

Anonymous said...

I take back all of my criticism of Recman :-)
His amended model data:

13. Current Indian IQ =

1% Southern Brahmin @ 113IQ

4% Northern Brahmin @ 108IQ ...

are entirely believable!

Using these numbers, the very high IQ population in India is similar to that of the US, perhaps a 2x larger. Entirely plausible, and it is likely to improve with better nutrition, access to education, etc.

Anonymous said...

Debkumar Guha said
--
The same with the International Olympiad in Informatics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Informatics

Virtually all the winners are Europeans and Chinese. No Tam Brahmin and a lot of Slavonic and Baltic names. Will Bangalore be out-programmed by Warsaw and St. Petersburg in the future?

---

Let me offer my explanation

The Ravens matrix test assumes that the testee is normal and has equal verbal and math skills

The Ravens Matrix test is visuo-spacial and east asians do very well here

So let us grant that east asians can write code that maybe runs 10% faster than SIBs

Software is a lot more than speed of code. It has to do with meeting customer requirements and understanding nuances of the specifications. Utter fluency in english, not basic literacy, is required and very many SIBs can beat most native speakers of english in english in understanding nuances

In the Ravens matrices, East Asians can score at 108
and this carries over into pure mathematics

As we move into applied mathematics
the picture changes
Verbal skills are also required, such as which equation to use in any given context

Per La griffe du lion, east asians score 4 IQ points less than whites in verbal IQ

In Singapore, in english, the mediocre Indian diaspora beats the 108IQ chinese

--

Just as the east asians have a verbal deficit, IMHO, Indians have a verbal advantage, which is not measured in the Ravens matrices
Most Indians are bilingual
Tens of millions are tri-lingual
and can skip from script to script as they move in India

--

I purchased a copy of
Lilavati by the Indian mathematician Bhaskara
( 1100AD )

It was the basic math text in india, until the british changed the curriculum

This book covers all the math knowledge upto Newton

I have seen western math text books in college which just give equations

Lilavati on the other hand teaches every math concept in the form of a short story and instead of dry stuff like x, y, z
uses variables as elephants, umbrellas, monkeys etc

The method is purely applied math and not pure math, and in applied math, such as software, I believe that Indians have an edge

Panini the sanskrit grammarian discovered concepts in 500BC
( look Panini up in wiki )
that set the foundations of computer languages and their syntax and their constraints

Look up Panini Bachus form

Hence it is not just speed that matters in software

Anonymous said...

rec1man

How many high end IQ in India
---

Based on assumptions of SD = 15
and
Current
1% Southern Brahmin @ 113
4% Northern Brahmin @ 108
3% Southern Merchant @ 105
12% Northern Merchant @ 102
40% Peasant @ 88
40% Dalit @ 75

--
Above 120IQ = 41.102 mil
Above 130IQ = 11.392 mil
Above 140IQ = 2.308 mil
Above 150IQ = 0.331 mil
Above 160IQ = 33K

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
--
Re-calibrating Indian diaspora IQ in USA
--

SD = 15

Shift from base Indian IQ = 13 = 0.85SD

Northern Merchant in USA = 102 + 13 = 115

Peasant in USA = 88 + 13 = 101

SIB in USA = 113 + 13 = 126

Indian Diaspora Avg in USA
= 0.2 * 101 + 0.6 * 115 + 0.2 * 126
= 114.4IQ

Anonymous said...

About Indian lack of penetration in law in the US
--

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/002200709062075.htm

"Attacks on the competence of Indian lawyers and law graduates are about as valid as saying that Indian software engineers are incapable of handling sophisticated IT (information technology) work. To the contrary, the Indian IT industry is a world leader, and the same will be the case with offshored legal services."

…at least in the US, law graduates for the most part are notoriously incapable of writing effectively in English. The problem is so severe that some large US law firms now assign a writing coach to each incoming associate.

"Every sector of the legal offshoring industry will grow dramatically, including lower end services, such as document coding and legal transcription. Ultimately, however, the biggest impact, the long-term mother lode, will be higher-value services such as legal research and drafting – services that constitute the bulk of the legal work now done in the West."

Sriram said...

anon
--
If recman's claims were correct about 40k IQ>160 Brahmins in India (vs. only 8k in the entire US), wouldn't you agree that they would necessarily dominate these disciplines?
--

rec1man has since put current Indian SIB mean at 113. Note that the SD is likely much less than 15 for SIB, due to restriction by range. All this reduces the > 160 numbers quite a lot, definitely far less than 8 k. My estimate would probably be anywhere in the 1000 to 4000 range (over all groups) in India. And the corresponding number for the Indian diaspora in the US would probably be at least 1000. I dont think its wise to use gaussian statistics to estimate the far tail (see reference at the end)and only actual research can establish the fat tails for various groups.

Second, hardly anyone from the really talented set studies math or physics at advanced levels in India. Yes, there are a few but most of the really smart people do stuff for safe bucks (engg, medicine or business). On this rec1man is absolutely right. Lets say per year there are 50 of these people. Maybe 2 or 3 may opt for pure physics or pure math. Quite a few of these will eventually find their way into good US univs as faculty. Its a small number (maybe much less than 100 total in decent US math and physics departments and maybe many of these are american born as they have more freedom, I am guessing; applied sciences, engg, medicine, and business is a completely different matter, there are plenty of indians and they can find niches to dominate).

Once the living standards go up in a couple of generations, hopefully students will have more freedom to shape their careers without wasting it on entrance exam preparation and the like.

---

Someone could pursue a Cochran et al type investigation into South Indian Brahmins (or a subgroup such as Tamil Brahmins). Payoff seems quite likely (i.e a publishable paper).

You will note that the famous untutored Ramanujan (SIB) of the early 20th century was rated as a mathematician of the very highest class by GH Hardy. This was in a different era and Ramanujan was poor, malnourished and died early. Its not unlikely that these outliers appear now and then; one sees cases like the girl who maxed out the SATs at age 12 and the kid who won the geo bee this year (both SIBs) at 11 years.

I have noted high incidence of myopia and possibly high incidence of schizophrenia as well among SIBs. Add to this disorders like Autism or Aspergers (the extreme male brain as per Simon Baron Cohen). A nephew of mine memorized the entire railway time table as a child (he is a high functioning Aspergers) and another made plans for an elaborate imagined city over hundreds of drawing sheets (this kid is otherwise normal but one can see a hint of some special quality).

There are plenty (millions) of poor Brahmins all over India (especially in North India) and these groups face a double whammy of poverty and AA. Would be Philanthropists would get their best bang for the buck by targeting such groups.

Anonymous said...

Ravens test is pure visual spacial test
and does not measure verbal skills or the lack thereof


Counterfactual. Ravens is an almost pure measure of g.

It is also possible (no hard evidence) that certain types of mental illness among males may be above average

That would make sense, as it seems that Brahmins would be strongly selected for being delusional. Shamans are not known for their close ties to reality.

Without a significantly higher IQ, it is not possible to do large scale memorising

The capability to do large scale memorising is by itself a sign of higher IQ


Probably not: IQ is more important as task difficulty increases. Memorizing is much easier than thinking.

Anonymous said...

There have been two nobel prize winners from India (C.V. Raman and S. Chandrahekar) and both have been Tamil Brahmins of whom there are about 4 million world wide. The great 20th century mathematician Ramanujan was also a Tamil Brahmin as is the current second ranked chess grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand.

The per-capita production of physics Nobel prize winners, top-rate mathematicians and chess grandmasters by Tamil Brahmins is still considerably smaller than that by the Ashkenazim.

I propose that the average IQ of "pure" Ashenazim is greater than 115. With the reduction of anti-semitism and the increased secularization among Jews, many Jews have taken to marrying non-Jews. If the American Ashkenazim have a 50% European admixture, than the average IQ of "pure" Ashkenazim might be 130.

Anonymous said...

"There have been two nobel prize winners from India"

Correction:
There have been two nobel prize winners from India in Science who are SIB.
You forget the Nobel prize winners Amartya Sen (Bengali Kayastha)for Economics and Hargobind Khorana for Medicine (Punjabi). (I am ready to ignore Rabindranath Tagore for Literature who was a Bengali Brahmin and V.S Naipaul for Literature who was Northern Brahmin. I am also ignoring Mother Teresa for Peace as she was ethnically Serb and Rudyard Kipling for literature as he was ethnically Englishman). As far as South Asia is concerned you forget Abdus Salam for Physics who is a Pakistani Ahmadiya Punjabi and Mohhamed Yunnus for Peace who is Bengali from Bangladesh.

Anyways the number of Nobel prize winners for India is very low on a per capita probability basis. I remember that table for Nobel prize winners per thousand population with Iceland on top and India was near the bottom.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here

Sanity Checking the upper tail in India
--

rec1man

How many high end IQ in India
---

Based on assumptions of SD = 15
and
Current
1% Southern Brahmin @ 113
4% Northern Brahmin @ 108
3% Southern Merchant @ 105
12% Northern Merchant @ 102
40% Peasant @ 88
40% Dalit @ 75

--
Above 120IQ = 41.102 mil
Above 130IQ = 11.392 mil
Above 140IQ = 2.308 mil
Above 150IQ = 0.331 mil
Above 160IQ = 33K
--

If we look at the above 150IQ
the number is 330K

The annual cohort of over 150IQ leaving grade 12
= 330k / 66 = 5000

This just about matches the IIT entrants each year
and I had earlier said that the IIT floor is 150IQ

Beyond 150IQ, I am not sure whether the IQ curve is gaussian and whether each caste has 15 SD

And at the extremities the fat-tail may vary a lot

And as the economy improves the over 150IQ numbers will also improve

Anonymous said...

Am I the only one who thinks the entire Indian IQ debate on this post is wish-fulfillment by a clique of innumerate Hindu chauvinists (the self-pitying whining about a thousand years of muslim followed by subsequent English domination is the first clue)?

Two immediate points of contention spring to mind immediately. First the IQ of Indian Singaporeans.

Rec1man attributes this as 104. Simply on the basis that the Indians score between the Chinese and Malays. I cannot fathom how no one else has contested this mathematical idiocy.

Based on his own scores that Rec1man provided, the breakdown is as follows.

2006 English score
Chinese = 97.9
Indian = 98.3
Malay = 94.9

2006 Math Score
Chinese = 90.3
Indian = 74.7
Malay = 58.9

Even assuming a linear relationship between test scores and IQ exists (which it doesn't) the gap between Indian-Chinese math scores is far more significant than the difference in English scores. Since there is no clear formulaic relationship, even simply assigning proportional weighting to the actual test scores yields an Indian IQ of 99.27. This is of course a flawed calculation in and of itself because it makes assumptions of correlations that do not exist, but its better than the 2nd grade math that the Indians use.

Secondly, historical projections of GDP are at best guesstimates, considering two major limitations. The territorial notions of what we consider today India are not that of India at 1CE. Also even population estimates for so long ago are prone to a wide degree of divergence. If Rec1man had actually bothered to read Maddison's work, he would have realized that per capita GDP in the world up until around 1500 was remarkably consistent with only a divergence of a few percentage points. A given considering that all of humanity toiled under the agricultural whip. Thus India's GDP as historically noted should factor in the population of the Indian subcontinent (a geo-climactic feature and not a social one) rather than any notions of Indian genius.

Anonymous said...

A look at Offshoring 4 years ago

---

http://www.sangam.org/articles/view2/index.php?uid=482

It had become apparent to them that not every typist and copyist working the midnight shift in their investment banks - the moonlighting actor, the artist with the ring in his nose - as putting his heart, soul, and syntactical memory into completing the PowerPoint presentations that needed to be done, perfectly, by morning. Randy began to speculate that workers overseas might invest more care in the menial jobs that Manhattanites seemed not to relish. Joe, who had been introduced to Madras on a family vacation when he was twelve, thought that some of its underemployed citizens might be grateful indeed. ‘You met people in factories or running the elevator who had the intelligence and spirit to do so much more,’ he remembered. ‘We thought, why not release that talent?’

During the mutual-reassurance sessions common to foundering enterprises, Joe and Randy got to know their employees better than they ordinarily might have. All were college educated. A third possessed postgraduate or doctoral degrees. Randy returned to New York to establish the American side of the business and, from a small office overlooking a DunkinDonuts, pressed his former Wall Street colleagues to give the Indian workers a trial run at higher-end labor.

Soon after, during a fast-turnaround project, Joe offended his staff by waving rupee notes – incentive - in front of their noses. He has given up trying to reprogram the hotel coffee-shop pianist, who, having realized that Joe is perhaps the only Jew in Chennai, routinely serenades him with ‘Hava Nagila’ when he sits down to lunch,

One false assumption had been that only the manufacture of goods, not the provision of services, could be exported. Another, supported most recently by the U.S. Department of Labor, is that the number of American jobs lost to outsourcing is minuscule. But Labor statisticians rely on the corporations to link their domestic downsizing to work they now send abroad - a connection that some corporate leaders are loath to make. Other analyses suggest that the number of American jobs lost to this phenomenon will soon reach a million,

Indian analysts foresee outsourcing in biotech research, pharmaceuticals, architecture, and the law. Although many economists believe that this global transition is mutually beneficial - that an economy is better off specializing in areas where it is relatively more productive and importing in areas where it is not - a study by the University of California at Berkeley identifies fourteen million American jobs at risk in the near term. The latest consolation is that, since many outsourced jobs are low-end and mechanistic, Americans are now being liberated to use their exceptional skills as innovators and entrepreneurs. Being tactful, the Tigers pretend to agree. What is the advantage of pointing out that the country of Salman Rushdie and Amartya Sen may not, in fact, be creatively impaired? The resumes and credit-repair leaflets spewing into the copy shop from Texas are less diplomatic. They intimate that some Americans have been ‘freed up’ to do nothing productive whatsoever.

An Office Tiger manager concluded a phone call that required an American accent and began to help one of his document specialists decipher a five-page scrawled submission. ‘The supervisor called plaintiff gay, child molester, pedophile, and other malicious things’ he slowly made out the words. ‘Pedophile’ misspelled here, - the typist noted quietly, in order not to disturb the concentration of her colleagues. ‘It’s not ‘p-h-e-d-o’.

‘And he obviously didn’d mean to write ‘viscous,’ the manager said. ‘It should be ‘The vicious rumors that were spread’

Upon consideration, the students will argue that, since America is globalization’s great hegemon, it’s an advantage to work for Americans directly, instead of for Indian-owned companies like Infosys or Wipro, where U.S. work is also done.

After three years at Office Tiger, Harish is still occasionally jarred by dislocation. When Wall Streeters call and say, ‘Hey, Harry, what’s up?’ - as they do, often - the wrong picture always pops into his mind. What’s up is a rotating metal fan on the low Styrofoam ceiling of the room where he sleeps, on the floor, beside his father, mother, brother, and grandmother

The neighborhood where Harish has lived all his life is named Triplicane, and was once an ancient fishermen’s village. It is today so densely populated that some travel guides mistake it for a slum.

The family was of the education-revering Brahmin caste, but the parents were too poor for the mother to fulfill her expected role of staying home and tutoring Harish and his younger brother and sister. She worked instead as a clerk in a government office, her intelligence never rewarded. Her husband worked across town, in another government office,

There was a programming job that outside contractors had said they’d need three months to complete. Harish did it on his own in sixty hours. ‘It was just intuitive, a three-day stunt,’ he said, modestly. ‘I have no big theories, but some problems I can solve from the bottom up.’ Such efficiency-minded innovation was a Tiger trademark, and helped explain why, over five years, only a single American company had, after a trial run at Office Tiger, opted out.

Today, at private corporations like Office Tiger, the official stance on caste is ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ This scruple excuses executives from acknowledging what impolite inquiry makes clear: Brahmin and other upper castes dominate the supervisory class, while untouchables still clean toilets. They’re lucky to have jobs at all.

Anonymous said...

anon said
--
Based on his own scores that Rec1man provided, the breakdown is as follows.

2006 English score
Chinese = 97.9
Indian = 98.3
Malay = 94.9

2006 Math Score
Chinese = 90.3
Indian = 74.7
Malay = 58.9

Even assuming a linear relationship between test scores and IQ exists (which it doesn't) the gap between Indian-Chinese math scores is far more significant than the difference in English scores. Since there is no clear formulaic relationship, even simply assigning proportional weighting to the actual test scores yields an Indian IQ of 99.27.
--

The above method yielded IQ of
Southern Merchant at 115

Yesterday, I posted an updated model, which seems to have found consensus

The higher castes have been moved down by 7IQ
So southern Merchant is now 108
in Singapore and 105 in India

Anonymous said...

What I found interesting was that even though the IIT’s performed badly in those programming contests Debkumar showed, the IIT from Madras performed better than the one from Bombay.
http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2007/Finals/Results-2007/standings-2007.htm
http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2005/Finals/Standings.html
How is the admission process of these IIT’s? Do South Indian Brahmins have a better chance of getting into the Madras one as compared to the other ones say at Bombay as Madras is in Tamil state (correct me if I am wrong).

Anonymous said...

How is the admission process of these IIT’s? Do South Indian Brahmins have a better chance of getting into the Madras one as compared to the other ones say at Bombay as Madras is in Tamil state (correct me if I am wrong).
--

There is an all india entrance screen for IITs

Each IIT offers a set of Engineering Degrees in many fields

The way it works is that the top rankers have first choice of location and field of engineering

As we go down the list, the most popular locations and courses get filled up and the guy who cant make it to what he wants, then moves onto his second choice and so on and as the second choice gets filled up, to the 3rd choice and so on

Thanks to 70% AA, now 70% of Tamil Brahmins are now outside Tamil Nadu

The Tamil Brahmin who lives in Chennai would probably opt for the IIT in Chennai and the Tam Brahmin who lives in Mumbai would probably opt for the IIT in Mumbai

Anonymous said...

What I found interesting was that even though the IIT’s performed badly in those programming contests Debkumar showed, the IIT from Madras performed better than the one from Bombay.
http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2007/Finals/Results-2007/standings-2007.htm
http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2005/Finals/Standings.html
How is the admission process of these IIT’s? Do South Indian Brahmins have a better chance of getting into the Madras one as compared to the other ones say at Bombay as Madras is in Tamil state (correct me if I am wrong).

--

Tamil Brahmins who get into IIT would be more likely to opt for Chennai, where 90% of the IIT faculty is SIB

Whereas Maharashtrian brahmins would be more likely to opt for IIT Mumbai

However, Tam brahmins who cant get their choice of field in Chennai would choose IIT mumbai if their field has open slots in Mumbai

Sriram said...

anon

you are right..due to a variety of factors, SIBs are to be found in relatively greater numbers in chennai (although they are to be found in other places as well)

http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/acm/

indicates southern institutes fare better

However I dont think this type of competition should be taken too seriously however; it is well known that IIT Kanpur has the best rep in CS education (in India) since the 70s. I guess the best computer scientists are not necessarily the best hackers or they dont care enough for such competitions. Similarly in the overall competition, if Stanford and Harvard arent at the top, I wouldnt conclude that they dont have talented software people. Hacking doesnt need any formal education AFAIK.

Anonymous said...

The SIBs are absent in the Maths Olympiads as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
International_Mathematical_Olympiad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_International_Mathematical
_Olympiad_exceptional_participants

Among the high scoring participants we have 4 Germans, 5 Romanian/ Moldovans, 4 Hungarians, 6 Russians, 1 Chinese from the U.S.A, 2 Britons, 4 Bulgarians, 1 Ukrainian, 1 Japanese and 1 Ashkenazi who migrated from Russia to the U.S.A (There could be more Ashkenazis among the above). Check out the photo on the first wikipedia page of those four perfect scoreres. Two anglos and two E. Asians. No SIBs!

Sriram said...

the indian segment of the contest for 2008 was won by a team from a second tier college (NIT trichy.. apologies for labeling it as such.. perhaps it deserves to be better known) and all 4 participants in the winning team were SIBs (tamil brahmins)

Anonymous said...

There is a lot of training required to do well on the Olympiads (math or informatics), so a lack of Indians doesn't necessarily mean anything (unless they *do* have a well-organized national program but still don't perform well). That is why you see some less famous schools or smaller countries doing very well. Note the Hungarians, Romanians and other eastern Europeans have a strong tradition in academic competitions.

Among the exceptional math competitors should be listed many from the PRC -- their team typically wins 3-5 golds each year -- but probably the individuals are unknown in the west.

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
---

Reasons for western ignorance of IQ of upper castes

---

1. In 1760, contact with the west happened due to colonialism, and while it is easy to justify colonising low IQ people like africans, it is hard to justify it in a place where 20% is above white IQ, hence suppressing news about upper caste Indian IQ made sense from a colonialist project
In 1780, Sir William Jones discovered the common Indo-european roots for Sanskrit and English and Indian upper caste IQ got a good press for a few decades
But after 1830, the good press vanished

2. Since 1500, the Xtian church has been trying to convert hindus.
The Xtian church has been the main source of information / misinformation / slander about India to the western public
While the western public may give a lot of money to convert a primitive tribe, it is hard to get funding if 20% of the target is higher IQ than whites

3. Within India, in its conversion campaigns, the xtian church has targeted the brahmins and maligned the brahmins in their publications and it is hard to do it against an acknowledged higher IQ opponent

4. Unlike East Asian women, who will do anything to marry a white man. I have seen rich chinese girls marry white truck drivers, and other blue collar people, Upper caste women are not accessible to outsiders and the average american is less familiar with Indians. The mixed breed Anglo-Indians were the product of Dalit women and the british

5. There is a lot of church prejudice against upper caste Indians, because unlike East Asians, who have converted by the hundreds of millions to xtianity,
there is almost zero conversion among the upper castes and given that the church is the information gateway to the white public, they would definitely suppress the news about high IQ among upper castes

6. Overall Indian poverty until 20 years ago and it is hard to imagine that 20% are above white IQ
The economic reforms liberated the merchant caste, AA still cripples the brahmins

7. In the US, blacks are lower IQ than whites and it is hard for white americans to understand that the darker south Indian brahmins are the top of the IQ pile in India and very near Ashkenazi levels and that in the US, the dark SIB diaspora is 10 points above the Ashkenazi
In India, northern Dalits are fairer than SIB

8. SIBs are a publicity shy community and the only time the US public sees them is in the spelling and geographic bees
SIBs have been in the US for 30 years in very large numbers and their IQ is hidden by so called 'Indian' achievements in SAT and other awards
The H1-B Indian engineers ( mostly non-SIB ) are getting a free ride based on the glowing reputation of the F1-Scholarship SIBs in silicon valley

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
----

Estimating the over 150IQ in the 12th grade cohort
SD for all castes = 15
--
SIB = 1136
NIB = 1703
Southern Merchant = 675
Northern Merchant = 1374
Peasant = 119
Dalit = 2
Total = 5010
---

Total IIT entrants per year = 5000

Anonymous said...

"The mixed breed Anglo-Indians were the product of Dalit women and the british"

Are you sure? I find it hard to believe the Brits would find Dalits attractive for marriage even though most of those Brits who intermarried after the mutiny were lower class soldiers. Half breed were looked down upon by the offer class British. I would think more on the lines of Merchant classes or Muslims. I had met an old woman in a church once whose mother was a Bihari/UP Brahmin and father was English. If I am not mistaken her mother had to run away with her father to England due to caste restrictions and the English were not very favourable to the marriage as well. Her only son was married to a British Gujrati. William Dalrymple's book 'White Mughals' gives a good idea about this.

Anonymous said...

Her only son was married to a British Gujrati. William Dalrymple's book 'White Mughals' gives a good idea about this.
---

The british officers may have had access to women of muslim nobility

But the common british soldier had access only to dalit women

In Tamil Nadu, in local parlance the Anglo-Indians are referred to as the product of women who are street vendors and british soldiers

Anonymous said...

rec1man here
----

Estimating the over 150IQ in the 12th grade cohort
SD for all castes = 15
--
SIB = 1136
NIB = 1703
Southern Merchant = 675
Northern Merchant = 1374
Peasant = 119
Dalit = 2
Total = 5010
---

Total IIT entrants per year = 5000

--

From Above, SIBs are predicted to be 22% of the IIT intake

In gene expression I saw an article that of the top 100 in IIT, 17% are Tamil Brahmins ( a sub-set of SIB ) and so adding in the remaining SIB, 22% seems very real

Sriram said...

AIs are probably the offspring of british men to lower caste (not dalit) women, IMO. Its interesting that Anglo indians themselves became an Indian caste. I am not sure how accurate the report below is regarding migration; I thought that virtually all anglo indians are now in uk/aus/canada. I was familiar with a few AIs (note that many of the AIs are indistinguishable in skin tone from many Indians while others are very light skinned) and in general they were good at sports (particularly field hockey) but not very interested in academics.

Anglo-Indians in India

The largest group of European Indians, however, are descendants of British men, generally from the colonial service and the military, and lower-caste Hindu or Muslim women. From some time in the nineteenth century, both the British and the Indian societies rejected the offspring of these unions, and so the Anglo-Indians, as they became known, sought marriage partners among other Anglo Indians. Over time this group developed a number of caste-like features and acquired a special occupational niche in the railroad, postal, and customs services. A number of factors fostered a strong sense of community among Anglo-Indians. The school system focused on English language and culture and was virtually segregated, as were Anglo-Indian social clubs; the group's adherence to Christianity also set members apart from most other Indians; and distinctive manners, diet, dress, and speech contributed to their segregation.

During the independence movement, many Anglo-Indians identified (or were assumed to identify) with British rule, and, therefore, incurred the distrust and hostility of Indian nationalists. Their position at independence was difficult. They felt a loyalty to a British "home" that most had never seen and where they would gain little social acceptance. They felt insecure in an India that put a premium on participation in the independence movement as a prerequisite for important government positions.

Some Anglo-Indians left the country in 1947, hoping to make a new life in Britain or elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Nations, such as Australia or Canada. Many of these people returned to India after unsuccessful attempts to find a place in "alien" societies. Most Anglo-Indians, however, opted to stay in India and made whatever adjustments they deemed necessary.

Like the Parsis, the Anglo-Indians are essentially urban dwellers. Unlike the Parsis, relatively few have attained high levels of education, amassed great wealth, or achieved more than subordinate government positions. In the 1990s, Anglo-Indians remained scattered throughout the country in the larger cities and those smaller towns serving as railroad junctions and communications centers.

Constitutional guarantees of the rights of communities and religious and linguistic minorities permit Anglo-Indians to maintain their own schools and to use English as the medium of instruction. In order to encourage the integration of the community into the larger society, the government stipulates that a certain percentage of the student body come from other Indian communities. There is no evident official discrimination against Anglo-Indians in terms of current government employment. A few have risen to high posts; some are high-ranking officers in the military, and a few are judges. In occupational terms, at least, the assimilation of Anglo-Indians into the mainstream of Indian life was well under way by the 1990s.

Nevertheless, the group will probably remain socially distinct as long as its members marry only other Anglo-Indians and its European descent continues to be noted.

Africans

Still another foreign-origin group, usually known collectively as Siddhis, are the descendants of Africans brought to India as slaves. Although most African-origin Indians are descendants of the large influx of slaves brought to western India in the seventeenth century, the first Africans reportedly arrived on the Konkani Coast in the first century A.D. as a result of the Arab slave trade, and there was an important African presence, including several short-term rulers, in Bengal in the fifteenth century. Siddhis (the name means lord or prince in African usage) sometimes rose to prominent--even ruling--governmental and military positions during the Mughal and British periods.

Most modern-day Siddhis are Muslims and are engaged in agricultural pursuits. They are found in Gujarat, Daman and Diu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and other states and union territories, where they are designated as Scheduled Tribe members.

Anonymous said...

more about office tiger in chennai in 2004
---

http://courses.washington.edu/globfut/req%20readings/BooBestJob.pdf

One Monday this spring, a forty-three-year-old salesclerk
at the Home Depot in Plano, Texas, scribbled some
updates onto an old resume and took it to his local copy
shop. To his education and work history--a bachelor’s
degree in industrial engineering and technology, service in
the U.S. Marine Corps--he added a recent moonlighting
job as a handyman and a new "career objective." Ten
minutes later, in southern India, a middle-aged Hindu man
in a cavernous workplace began to type the Home Depot
clerk’s words.

--

Their employer, a company named Office
Tiger, did the work not just of an American copy-shop
chain but of seven of the twelve biggest banks on Wall
Street--confidential labor carried out in unmarked rooms
with film-covered windows, closed-circuit cameras, and
electronic security so unforgiving that as the typist finished
the resume from Plano three bankers, accidentally locked
in a nearby room, were frantically pounding on a door.
Office Tiger also performed work for a Big Four accounting
agency, several white-shoe Northeastern law firms, an
insurance conglomerate, two large publishing concerns, a
Madison Avenue advertising agency, global management
consultancies, and other enterprises whose identities were
not divulged to workers of the resume-typing rank.
The document specialists, all college graduates, earned
roughly a tenth of what they would have commanded for
this work in the U.S., and less, too, than they would have
been paid in some call centers. But it was the possibility
that one could rise up from a lowly position that had made
Office Tiger one of the city’s status employers,

A clerk
who today did a bang-up job of formatting the work history
of a part-time handyman in Plano might be an adjunct
investment banker by year’s end.

Capitalizing on their celebrated work
ethic, on a dozen practical-minded local universities, and
on the ability of the elites to speak, in addition to Tamil, the
clipped and elegant English of their colonizers,
Chennaians developed the sort of forward-looking
economy that many of America’s post-manufacturing cities
still struggle to achieve. "Better cheape" Western business
is Chennai’s new niche.

American uneasiness about
outsourcing--an issue in the current Presidential
campaign--has turned Chennai into a secretive city, where
the American back-office presence, everywhere felt, is
almost nowhere stated. Although American companies
with Picassos in their foyers and Corbusier chairs in
reception still dispatch work to South Asia office buildings
fronted by beggars and spavined cattle, the company
names have been deleted from phone books, Web sites,
and corporate entryways.

--

The
new American attachment is not physical but
conceptual--the lure of cheap, smart, pliable labor. Among
Chennai’s janitors and security guards, as well as its
bankers, the need for discretion about that labor is
understood. Even the ephemera of the United States
offshoring debate becomes front-page news here; many of
Chennai’s young professionals now know the names John
Kerry, Lou Dobbs, Benedict Arnold, and Timothy Platt--the
latter the proprietor of a U. S.-based Web site called
yourjobisgoingtoindia.com, which is as closely followed in
Chennai as it is in Silicon Valley. Fascination with the
American controversy is more bemused than fearful.
Chennaians in general believe that what they call
"outsource hoopla" has already redounded to their favor,
alerting a wider audience of executives and stockholders
to the benefits of wage arbitrage.
Some American companies, such as Ford, have been
manufacturing in the region for years, working to capture a
piece of a potentially vast consumer market. But now
non-factory, professional employment is surging. Among
the white-collar options available to Chennai’s college
graduates are work for Verizon, Bank of America,
Hewlett-Packard, Citibank, Visa, MasterCard, and
Electronic Data Systems, a Plano-based tech company
founded by the free-trade opponent Ross Perot, which
recently announced a layoff of fifty-two hundred U.S.
employees.

--

The Americanization of Chennai has been so swift
and--save inside the Park Hotel--so quiet that many of its
citizens do not yet grasp the change in their cultural and
literal landscape. An animation company makes cartoons
seen by American children on Saturday mornings.
Radiologists read American MRIs, clerks adjudicate
patients’ insurance claims, and programmers automate
Medicaid eligibility for an entire Midwestern state.
Chartered accountants complete U.S. tax returns while
underwriters certify U.S. mortgages. And within Office
Tiger’s pink building aspiring financiers analyze American
firms that are ripe for corporate takeover in a place they
call Wall Street East.
One afternoon in late March,

One afternoon in late March, Office Tiger’s wiry
thirty-three-year-old co-C.E.O. stood at his desk,
surrounded by luggage, receiving from Manhattan the
news that his firm had just landed Wall Street investment
bank No. 8--a half-a-million-dollar "starter" contract.

he was pleased but also
harried. Executives of a Fortune 10 company would be
descending on the office the following day, but he had
decided he would have to miss the visit: officials of a
Fortune 5 company were awaiting him the same morning
in Bangalore, a thirty-five-minute plane ride away.

--

Six years later, the Manhattan banks that Randy and Joe
abandoned still have odes to "thrift" in their marble lobbies,
but those banks also have rows of capacious, upholstered,
untenanted cubicles. Almost twenty per cent of the jobs on
Wall Street have disappeared in the last three years.
--

Office Tiger sometimes receives
fifteen hundred applicants a day, many of them
accompanied by parents who pray as their sons and
daughters take one test after another in the hope of
earning an interview with the beautiful, ruthlessly efficient
human-resources executive in black pajamas, who does
her work in the reception area, behind a thin glass wall. As
Joe returned one more phone call--a cautious executive
from Germany, which is experiencing an outsourcing
backlash, too--the narrow hallway outside the firm’s door
grew crowded with the survivors of that testing
--
"Mercy, how do you think you did on the proofreading
test?" the human-resources goddess, whose name is
Sudha ( SIB ), asked one such survivor, who was perched on the
edge of her seat
"I found it quite easy," responded Mercy, fatally. Her score
was eighty-five. Joe and Randy seek workers like
themselves--the type haunted fifteen years later by the
single question botched on the college aptitude test, and
game to perform even dull tasks with, to use the local
term, "full sincerity." A minute later, another applicant was
warming the chair.
--
Cost-saving improvements percolated up from the
production level. Satisfied clients begat more clients
--

"Harish? There are a hundred here like him," the
human-resources goddess once observed in passing
Since becoming a Tiger, he has made a
single significant outlay: to help his parents retire

A society with far more bright aspirants than promising
jobs inevitably becomes an over-credentialled one. The
institutions from which the young amass certificates and
ribbons are sometimes rigorous, sometimes fraudulent, but all have rousing names

For other Tigers, there were
other metaphors, but the sense of movement after
decades of socioeconomic stasis was the same. Harish’s
friend Vidhya ( SIB ), who is twenty-five, heady with her rise from
reception to well-salaried senior management, bought her
parents not just freedom from their jobs but a house

Harish, usually lighthearted, was sobered by the fact that
the hopes of some trainees would be thwarted in his
classroom. The ultimate goal of his teaching was
something that Joe and Randy called "foolproofing." In a
company that offered judgment-dependent services,
clients needed to believe that those judgments were
routine, culturally uninflected, idiosyncrasy-free

the Rotary governor gleefully
reeled off the names of Global Adjustment’s prominent
clients, but then his mood darkened slightly. Hollywood--"a
multibillion-dollar industry, you know"--was not on the list.
Reach out to American film moguls, he urged Ranjini and
the other attendees. "Tell them that they can film in India for ten per cent of what they’re currently spending."

of greater local interest was
the progress of a Chennai-based hospital chain named
Apollo. Apollo was aggressively recruiting ailing
Westerners who were willing to outsource their hip
replacements or chemotherapy. Thanks in part to
reasonably priced postsurgical sightseeing tours, the
chain’s hospitals were now treating twenty thousand
foreign patients a year.

In the outsourcing
business, a sudden surge in clients is called an
"escalation"--a word that warns of seven-day workweeks.
Office Tiger has been escalating for nearly two years now,
the growth of its Wall Street research operations fuelled by
regulatory reforms that came (along with criminal actions
and billion-dollar legal settlements) when United States
banks were caught manipulating their research in order to
boost the profits of favored clients. Companies now send
junior-analyst and research jobs to Office Tiger not just
because it is cheaper but also because it is nine thousand
miles from Wall Street temptations.

Anonymous said...

Recalibrating SIB IQ at the high end

Assume that the cut off for IIT is 150IQ and SD for SIB is 15
And assume 100% of over 150IQ people apply for IIT,

( In reality it is more like 85%, since some apply for medicine and some focus on 12th grade exams instead )

and per my model there are in the 12th grade 5000 Indians with over 150IQ

Let us calculate Predicted SIB % in IIT vs actual

( If focusing on over 150IQ medical students, places like JIPMER and AIMS could also be studied )

Also remember Tamil Brahmins are only a subset of SIB

SIB = 110, model prediction = 12.7%
SIB = 111, model prediction = 15.5%
SIB = 112, model prediction = 18.8%
SIB = 113, model prediction = 22.7%
SIB = 114, model prediction = 27.3%
SIB = 115, model prediction = 32.7%
SIB = 116, model prediction = 39.0%

IMHO, the real numbers lie between 113 on the low end and 115 on the high end

In the top 100 in IITs, Tamil brahmins alone ( a subset of SIB ), get 17%, per article in gene expression

And keep in mind the SIB still suffer from poverty and malnutrition with a Flynn deficit of at least 3

Sriram said...

Here is a list of Indian mathematicians (most of them alive) who have made significant contributions. Other than Ramanujam, I dont think the others are known outside their fields. The key point is that at least 9 of 13 are SIBs and perhaps 3 are american born second generation.
--------

Srinivasa Ramanujam was an Indian mathematician. With almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions in the areas of mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions. Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3900 results (mostly identities and equations) during his short lifetime. Although a small number of these results were actually false and some were already known, most of his claims have now been proven to be correct. He stated results that were both original and highly unconventional, such as the Ramanujan prime and the Ramanujan theta function, and these have inspired a vast amount of further research. However, some of his major discoveries have been rather slow to enter the mathematical mainstream. Recently, Ramanujan's formulae have found applications in the field of crystallography and in string theory. Bruce C. Berndt: 'Paul Erdos has passed on to us G. H. Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100, Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J.E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.'"

Harish-Chandra Mehrotra was an Indian-born American mathematician, who did fundamental work in representation theory, especially Harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups. From 1968, until his death in 1983, he was IBM von Neumann Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He was a Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S. and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao is a world-renowned Indian statistician and currently professor emeritus at Penn State University. Rao is a Wilks and Mahalanobis medalist; a member of eight National Academies in India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy; he has received dozens of medals, citations, awards, and other honors for his contributions to statistics and science. Rao was awarded the United States National Medal of Science, that nation's highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research, in June 2002.

Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York. Winner of the 2007 Abel Prize (USD 920,000) for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviations.

Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar is an Indian mathematician known for his contributions to algebraic geometry. He is the Marshall Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Computer Science and Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. His name is associated with Abhyankar's conjecture of finite group theory.

Vijay Kumar Patodi made fundamental contributions to differential geometry and topology. He was the first to apply heat equation methods to the proof of the Index Theorem for elliptic operators. At the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, he collaborated with Michael Atiyah, Isadore Singer, and Raoul Bott. The joint work led to a series of papers, "Spectral Asymmetry and Riemannian Geometry" in which the eta-invariant was defined. This invariant was to play a major role in subsequent advances in the area in the 1980s. Patodi was promoted to full professor at Tata Institute at age 30, However, he died tragically at age 31.

Narendra K. Karmarkar is an applied mathematician, renowned for developing Karmarkar's algorithm. Karmarkar's algorithm solves linear programming problems in polynomial time. Karmarkar received his B.Tech at the IIT Bombay in 1978. He published his famous result in 1984 while he was working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Awards: Fulkerson Prize in Discrete Mathematics, The Association for Computing Machinery awarded him the prestigious Paris Kanellakis Award in 2000 for his work.

Manindra Agrawal is a Professor at IIT, Kanpur. He obtained a B.Tech and Ph.D. from IIT Kanpur. He co-created the AKS primality test and won the 2002 Clay Research Award, the 2006 Fulkerson Prize, and the 2006 Gödel Prize. This is the first deterministic algorithm to test an n-digit number for primality in a time that has been proven to be polynomial in n.

Madhu Sudan, professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002. The prize recognizes outstanding work in the mathematical aspects of computer science. Sudan was honored for his work in advancing the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs—a way to recast a mathematical proof in computer language for additional checks on its validity—and developing error-correcting codes. Madhu Sudan was born in Madras (Chennai), India. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Delhi in 1987.

Manjul Bhargava is a professor of mathematics at Princeton University. His research interests span algebraic number theory, combinatorics, and representation theory. He graduated from Harvard University in 1996 and received his doctorate from Princeton in 2001, working under Andrew Wiles. His breakthrough Ph.D. thesis surprised the mathematical community by generalizing the classical Gauss composition law for quadratic forms to many other situations. Princeton hired him at the rank of full professor with tenure just two years after he finished graduate school.

UCLA Mathematics Professor Chandrashekhar Khare was awarded the 2007 Fermat Prize for Mathematics Research . Khare was recognized for his proof of Serre's modularity conjecture in number theory in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger. Previous winners in number theory include K.A. Ribet (1989), J. L. Colliot-Thélène (1991), A.J. Wiles (1995), R.L. Taylor (2001), and P. Colmez (2005). Prior to his UCLA appointment, Khare was at University of Utah and Tata Institute, Bombay.

Kannan Soundararajan, Professor of Math, Stanford University. He won the inaugural Morgan Prize in 1995 for his work in analytic number theory whilst an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, where he later served as professor. He received the Salem Prize in 2003.

Divakar Viswanath; Viswanath's constant is a mathematical constant, occurring in number theory, specifically in the study of random Fibonacci sequences. The value of Viswanath's constant is approximately 1.13198824. Divakar is a professor at the University of Michigan.

rec1man said...

A historical report of SIB IQ

By Abbe Dubois a French Catholic priest in 1800

Naturally cunning, wily, double-tongued, and servile, they turn the most undesirable qualities to account by insinuating themselves everywhere; their main object, upon which they expend the greatest ingenuity, being to gain access to the courts of princes or other people of high rank.


( Hmm does this remind of a white ethnic group ?? )

---

In addition, the main reason for risk taking
The household income of SIB is below $100 a month and a SIB cannot afford to take any risk,
and has to look for a safe buck,
unlike a Jew, whose household income is $8k a month, and can pursue pure science and nobels

--

A Wall Street Journal article on the diminishing fortunes of Brahmins, quotes a study by the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, as saying that close to half of Brahmin households in the country earn less $100 a month

---

Sriram said...

The 1800 description finds its echoes as recent as 1998

http://tinyurl.com/6mj2k7

maratha: peasant caste (shivaji, the most famous king in western india was from this caste)and ruling class of politicians in this area

note: the Patil SIB is the caste of the lead surgeon involved in the operation which was on cnn and elsewhere (removing the parasitic twin from the 2 year old girl)

rec1man said...

From outlookindia

The fifth parallel is that both anti-Semitism and anti-Brahminism have deep roots in Christian theology. In the case of Judaism, its continuing vitality as a tradition was a threat to Christianity's claim to be the fulfilment of the Jewish prophecies about the Messiah. The refusal of Jews to join the religion of Christ (the true Messiah, according to Christians) was seen as an unacceptable denial of the truth of Christianity. Saint Augustine even wrote that the Jews had to continue to exist, but only to show that Christians had not fabricated the prophesies about Christ and to confirm that some would not follow Christ and be damned for it.

The contemporary stereotypes about Brahmins and the story about Brahminism also originate in Christian theology. They reproduce Protestant images of the priests of false religion. When European missionaries and merchants began to travel to India in great numbers, they held two certainties that came from Christian theology: false religion would exist in India; and false religion revolved around evil priests who had fabricated all kinds of laws, doctrines and rites in order to bully the innocent believers into submission. In this way, the priests of the devil abused religion for worldly goals. The European story about Brahminism and the caste system simply reproduced this Protestant image of false religion. The colonials identified the Brahmins as the priests and Brahminism as the foundation of false religion in India. This is how the dominant image of "the Hindu religion" came into being.

The sixth parallel lies in the fact that Christian theology penetrated and shaped the "secular" discourse about Judaism and Brahminism. The theological criticism became part of common sense and was reproduced as scientific truth. In India, this continues unto this day. Social scientists still talk about "Brahminism" as the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

rec1man said...

A look at the SIB milieu in India

Here we have a SIB english school teacher, at least the mean 113 current iQ, ( more likely 120IQ ), making $100 a month and sleeping in the class room

This guy would probably snap up any menial white collar off shoring job, working in an air-conditioned job that even paid $3k a year. Most likely he can do a job that pays $80K in the US and $8k in Chennai
In short, he represents a future downsizing of the white collar middle class in the US, that the chinese worker has done to blue collar whites

This guy targets the middle and upper middle class whites

He does not have to immigrate to the US to de-skill whites, just an internet connection will do

Since 1999, Office Tiger, a US run company based in Chennai has sucked out thousands of all kinds of white collar jobs to Chennai
and there are 11 million SIBs, fluent in english and college educated, 113IQ available

There are 11 mil SIBs 113IQ and 44 mil NIB 108IQ on the other side of the internet



--
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB119889387595256961-lMyQjAxMDE4OTA4NDgwOTQzWj.html

Reversal of Fortune Isolates India's Brahmins
By ERIC BELLMAN
December 29, 2007

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

CHENNAI, India -- Brahmins, as Hinduism's priestly and scholarly caste, have traditionally occupied a place of privilege in India.

Brahmins have been advisers to Maharajas, Mughals and military rulers. Under British rule, they served as administrators, a position they kept after Indian independence in 1947.

But in today's India, high-caste privileges are dwindling, and with the government giving extensive preferences to the lower-caste majority, many Brahmins are feeling left out of the economy's rapid expansion.

R. Parameswaran has suffered that reversal of fortune. The 29-year-old starts every day with a prayer to the Hindu god Shiva, marking his forehead with red and white powder to let the world know he is a Brahmin. In his home village, his caste's mark brought him respect, but since he moved to Chennai, a sprawling high-tech city in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, in the late 1990s, he has found his status a liability.

In Tamil Nadu, nearly 70% of government jobs and public-college slots are reserved for people from lower castes and other historically disadvantaged groups. Although he says he graduated near the top of his high-school class and had strong test scores, Mr. Parameswaran couldn't get into any of the state engineering colleges. His family had to borrow from friends to send him to a second-rate private college.

He now teaches English at a small vocational school. On a salary of $100 a month, Mr. Parameswaran can't afford an apartment, so he sleeps in the classroom at night. "I am suffering," says the intense young man, using the exaggerated enunciation of an English teacher. "Unfortunately, I was born as a Brahmin."

Although the role of Brahmins has never been synonymous with accumulating wealth, many are affluent enough to educate their children in the better private schools. On average, members of the caste, who make up about 5% of India's population of 1.1 billion, are better educated and better paid than the rest of Indian people.

The term Brahmin has come to be used globally to describe those at the top of the heap with an attitude to match, as in Boston Brahmins. Yet close to half of Brahmin households earn less than $100 a month, according to the Center for a Study of Developing Societies, a New Delhi think tank. For these Brahmins, the array of state-mandated preferences for other groups present a high hurdle.

The reverse discrimination is rooted in Indian history and politics. For decades, Brahmins were resented for their dominance of the government, economy and culture. Indeed, political parties in Tamil Nadu sprang from anti-Brahmin feelings. "If you see a Brahmin and a snake, kill the Brahmin first" was an old slogan.

A national constitution adopted in 1950 reserved more than 20% of government jobs for lower castes. In 1990, an additional 27% were set aside for what were called "other backward castes." Some states set higher quotas, including Tamil Nadu, which reserves 69% of government jobs for lower castes and other needy groups.

The ugliest Brahmin bashing in India ended years ago, but Mr. Parameswaran says that in college in the late 1990s, he still faced ridicule as a Brahmin. He says one student tried to break his sacred thread, a simple circle of twine Brahmins wear under their clothes.

After college, he had an internship in a state-owned chemical company, but says he was told he wouldn't be hired, as there were openings only for lower-caste applicants. He says he took exams to join national railways, state banks and other government agencies, such as the immigration department, but found most posts closed to all Brahmins except the most brilliant.

From his makeshift home where he sleeps with a blanket on a desk most nights, Mr. Parameswaran still applies for government jobs. He pulls out his latest application form and shows a visitor where he always gets stuck: the three squares where he has to write the abbreviation indicating his caste. "I want government work," he says, shaking the application, "but they have no jobs for Brahmins."

Mr. Parameswaran often visits the sister in the Brahmin enclave of Mylapore. On a recent day there, dozens of shirtless priests in the traditional Brahmin uniform of a white dhoti and partially shaved head were standing around at a Hindu-scriptures school, hoping for work. For as little as 100 rupees, about $2.50, they offered to perform complicated rituals and blessings required when any Hindu has a baby, a wedding or a new home.

"My sons can't support me, so I have to survive by performing Hindu rituals," says K. Narayana, an 81-year-old scholar. "If we had been from another community, we would have had better opportunities."

At the temple's back gate, Brahmins beg for spare change or look for odd jobs as cooks or even bearers of bodies to funeral pyres, normally a lower-caste pursuit.

"I see so many Brahmins begging" in Mylapore, Mr. Parameswaran says. "It's very difficult to see. It makes me totally upset."

--Tariq Engineer contributed to this article.

Write to Eric Bellman at eric.bellman@awsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications:

The percentage of Brahmin households in India that earned less than $100 a month was about 50% in 2007 and 65% in 2004, according to the Center for the Study of Developing Societies. This article fails to note that the study mentioned in the article was from 2007, while the statistics in the accompanying chart were from 2004.

rec1man said...

The following is a brief description of a massacre of brahmins, by Tipu the muslim sultan of mysore

Mysore was under muslim rule for only 30 years, whereas north india was under muslim rule for 500 years

That explains the truncation of higher end IQ of northern brahmins

--

http://venu1005.blogspot.com/2006/12/genocide-of-brahmin-men-women-and.html

more than 200 years ago when the muslim ruler Tipu had herded some 700 Brahmin men, women and children and brutally beheaded all of them in the typical muslim fashion on a Deepavali day in Melkote, Karnataka. The decapitated Karnataka Brahmins belonged to the mandyam Iyengar sect of Karnataka

Anonymous said...

Even though SIBs may be darker than northern Dalits, they tend to be fairer than the lower caste members of their own ethnic groups. Now I have seen jet black Brahmins but what I have observed is that Brahmins tend to have stronger Caucasian features on average as compared to other members of their own tribe. Tamils tend to be jet black but most SIB’s and Nayars (non Brahmin forward caste of Tamil state) tend to have a darkish Indonesian colour. Saraswat Brahmins from the southern state of Karnataka (and thus are SIBs) are very fair and many resemble Europeans. Many Brahmins like the Maitheli Brahmins of Bihar state look so fair that many can easily be mistaken as Dark Englishmen. Among the Kokanastha (Chitpavan) Brahmins of Western India light eyes is not very uncommon.
http://www.kokanastha.com/htm/geninfo.htm
Many Brahmins from Kashmir state look like northern Europeans. Anyways in every Brahmin community on average Brahmins tend to have very strong Caucasian features (in many cases European like) but of course there are millions of Brahmins who do not as well (as I have said I have seen jet black Brahmins as well). And obviously there are many middle castes especially in the north that look very Caucasian too.

rec1man said...

http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/colItems.asp?ID=SEG20030330072132

Tamil Brahmins: The best second-rate men in the world

This piece, it must be explained at the outset, is not a history of the Tamil Brahmins, or a gratulatory account of the community’s famous achievers. It is more in the nature of a portraiture of the “average or the median” member of the species.

What follows is one man’s perception, necessarily subjective, of the defining qualities of this “representative” Tamil Brahmin.

Those who have seen the 1971 Satyajit Ray classic Seemabaddha (Company Limited) would recall a cameo in it of a conversation between the yuppie Bengali hero of the film and his personal secretary, a middle-aged Tamil Brahmin. The young man “on the make” is a “covenanted officer” in one of those once-famous British Merchant Houses of Calcutta. The two have forged a relationship of extraordinary mutuality based on trust and admiration for each other’s contrasting qualities. Tormented by the neurosis of upward mobility, particularly by his frustration over a decisive promotion still eluding him, the young executive asks his elderly secretary the secret of his sangfroid, his total imperviousness to tension and worry. The secretary sagely replies: “Sir, it is quite simple. On a cold day, when the hearth-fire is on, the best position to occupy is the place that is neither too near the fire nor too far. If you are too near, you might get singed. If you are too far, you would not get the necessary warmth.”

Here, if you like, is the metaphor of the working philosophy of the archetypal Tamil Brahmin. What this illustrates is that the Tamil Brahmin prefers to function (and function efficiently) from behind the scene, rather than thrust himself to the front, with all the hassles and hazards of overexposure and too public a presence. His preferred position is the row behind the throne (as when the pompous minister briefs the Press). His passion for anonymity is notorious. His real successes are private ones secretly to be gloated over by himself or at the most in the intimacy of chosen friends. Even his jokes are private, with his cynical wit much in evidence when among intimates. His forte is wit rather than humour, unlike, say, the Punjabi’s. He is a master of the double entendre and is an inveterate punster, often bilingual and sometimes even trilingual.

An apocryphal quip describes the Tamil Brahmins as “the best second-rate men in the world.” Rude as this remark is on the face of it, it is in many ways perceptive and could well be considered a compliment. (It is certainly better than being considered the worst first-rate men.) The sneer latches on to the central characteristic of a Tamil Brahmin — his instinctive preference for anonymous functionality behind the scene rather than high profile highfalutin from centre-stage. A Tamil Brahmin would readily endorse E M Foster’s famous prayer: “Let no achievement on an imposing scale ever be mine.”

This ineradicable modesty coexisting with proven competence is the reason why his preferred professions are the great anonymous ones, such as the Civil Service, where it is easy — indeed the required trait — to be “the faceless bureaucrat.” He lets his nominal boss, the publicity-hungry politician, boast about policies whose details his ingenious mind has given legal and formal shape to, with all the ambiguities and obfuscations safely hidden in the fine print. Give him a brief of your intention, and he will give it a shape that would pass muster with a trusting public. Like the prestidigitator, he gloats in secret not over the illusion that the public laps up but over his real skill of sleight of hand that had made the illusion possible. An extreme example of this is the Tamil Brahmin folklore to the effect that some of the brilliant judgments of the English judges in pre-Independence Madras High Court were really written by their Tamil Brahmin bench clerks.

In the public sphere, the representative Tamil Brahmin is an apolitical pragmatist rather than a passionate ideologue, a trait that makes him an ideal public servant rather than a political leader. Temperamentally, he is a natural Tory, believing in the art of the possible rather than in the impossible dream.

Grand gestures and conspicuous posturing are not in his blood. Risk averse by temperament and playing for safety, he is rarely given to extreme positions or assertive stances in public.

Intellect rather than imagination is the Tamil Brahmin’s forte. (Harsher judges might even say that intelligence rather than intellect is a Tamil Brahmin’s strength.) Typically, a Tamil Brahmin is a professional executive or administrator rather than a professional politician or entrepreneur or a labour leader. It can even be argued that this is a throw-forward of the ancient Varna taxonomy: of the Brahmin — the purohit and the counsellor, in contrast to the Kshatria ( maharaja ) (the forerunner of the modern-day politician)


Thus it is that you find that some of the greatest Diwans ( Prime Ministers ) of Indian States of yore were vintage Tamil Brahmins.

The Tamil Brahmin is by instinct a Rajabhakta, putting his ingenious mind at the disposal of the ruler of the moment for any purpose the latter chooses. But it is not a passive role of the flunkey, doing the bidding of his master. His manifest intellectual superiority makes him an ideal Amaathya, or Counsellor. Many a ruler of the former princely States had the good sense to listen to their Tamil Brahmin Diwans: this was true even when the advice was to quietly quit the scene collecting their privy purses when Sardar Patel ( integration of princely states into India in 1947 ) ran a coach and four through their puny sovereignties. Quite often, some of these princelings have been saved from the extreme consequences of their rather lurid private lives by the sagacious intervention of their counsellors.

Ostentatious wealth is rare in this community, testifying once again that a representatve Tamil Brahmin abhors extremes. Though poverty and privation are not unknown in the community the median Tamil Brahmin has a reasonable competence that meets his un-extravagant needs. Thrift comes naturally to him to the point of stinginess.

Competent, conventional and conformist, the median Tamil Brahmin is rarely adventurous or conspicuously unorthodox. Resilient and quickly adaptive, he would never wish “to stand out” as too heterodox or for that matter excessively orthodox either, despite the fact that until recent times, the “caste mark” on his forehead was a give-away.

A favourite expression of approbation in the community is “God-fearing.” But his conformity is a convenience rather than conviction, arising partly from his reluctance to be the “odd man out”. Ancient taboos atavistically present in him are observed in letter rather than in spirit as in the obligatory rituals regularly performed. His house has its sacred and secular spaces clearly demarcated. Even today, in villages and small towns where the “flat culture” has not yet found its way, a traditional Tamil Brahmin house has the ancient layout of increasingly “sacred” space as one goes inwards with the right of admission to each strictly caste-graded. In cities, where the “drawing-cum-dining room” layout has insinuated itself into domestic architecture, the Pooja room is inviolable.

A Tamil Brahmin’s modernity is equally skin-deep, readily discarded in the privacy of his home. He eagerly sheds his trousers and shirt the moment he is back home and gets back to his comfortable lungi and bare chest. Until recently, alcohol was not a domestic amenity even among the more affluent and “modern” Tamil Brahmins and was meant mostly for others who might visit. Though for professional reasons and for compulsions of livelihood, he will go to the end of the earth, he is by no means as cosmopolitan, readily jettisoning his cultural baggage and merging with homogenized non-descript new environment. His domestic pieties are preserved whether in New Delhi or New Jersey and his twin-passion of temple worship and Carnatic music are never ever abandoned wherever he is.

Like the Jew to whom he is often compared, he is a great survivor. One of the earliest communities to have eagerly embraced the exhilarating new opportunities offered by English education in the early 19th century, the Tamil Brahmins had acquired a near monopoly of the much coveted Government employment of the times. This had naturally led to upper caste non-brahmin resentment, which effectively politicised itself in the first decades of the last century. When this self-consciousness captured political power and formed governments in the 1920s in the Madras Presidency, it pursued vigorously a policy of reservation that ended the Brahmin’s earlier monopoly of government jobs. This was the signal for the great Tamil Brahmin Diaspora that still continues.

Denied opportunities at home, the Tamil Brahmin sought and found newer pastures in Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta. Caste-neutral professions such as accountancy and journalism became the alternatives. Still later, newer professional opportunities abroad, notably in the United States, became the magnet. And with the ascendancy in recent years of the new information technology where brainpower is more important than capital investment, this dispersal has become a flood. Almost every English-educated middle class Tamil Brahmin family has a younger member abroad.

But deep down, not much has changed. They are still the world’s best second-rate men.

«Oldest ‹Older   1 – 200 of 244   Newer› Newest»