3/28/06

Nation Intellligence: my country is smarter than your country :)

Follow-up on the “IQ of the nation” post:
My post in French earlier about Lynn, Richard studies of national intelligence demanded a little further investigating. To recap, his study stated 3 things: 1) Germany’s IQ is 107 which is top with Honk Kong 107 while France was at the bottom of the EU well with 94. 2) men average 5pts higher than women 3) intelligence is related to cold climate as cold expands brain size (?????) hence Germany is smarter than southern EU nations such as Spain or Serbia ( last with 94).
I discarded the article as nothing more than funny stuff until I digged a little further down into Lynn’s body of work. He is a professor emeritus at University of Ulster and wrote a book called” IQ and the health of nations.”
Lynn uses different tests to measure IQ and provide the score for each tests in his book. He is also adamant about giving the results without too much adjustment so that further investigation can be scored. The intriguing part is that his IQ average is very closely proportional to nation’s wealth. (You might say this is the same quandary as "the egg and the chicken" story here so not much to talk about here ) . Hold on though, one of the test they use was the non-verbal Raven's Progressive Matrices that does not factor in literacy or education level. Moreover, Israel who one would probably have guessed in the upper nations is scoring 94. (By the way US is 98 , world average is 90, India scores at 81 and China at 100, my roommate by now know for a fact that this is crap and my labmates are all laughing secretly).
Madagascar ? I did not dare to look it up….. Kidding they did not test us but they estimated that we should be close to the average of Philippines (86) and Tanzania (72): 79. ( WTH ???)(2 small points below India, Darn Ranjit ! ). It is actually a fun read and not as bad as I thought it would be. I don’t think any conclusions can be drawn from the studies but it is fairly unbiased even if ultimately useless. I wanted to have fun and look up the IQ of the nation of the people around me so here goes the IQ War of nations:
1) Germany 107 7) India: 81
2) Taiwan 104 7)Sri Lanka:81
3) China 100 8) Madagascar:79
4) UK: 100 9) Zambia: 77
5) France: 98 10) South Africa: 72
6) Tunisia: 84 11) Ethiopia: 63
I will not write anymore about this topic as I am about to either 1) slowly burned myself to death 2) find Lynn and make him it eat his own foot 3) Run away from the South-African and Ethiopian mob ready to cut me to pieces for spreading these unverifiable claims. I still had fun looking it up though. Cheer up everyone , you can either rejoice for your country's average IQ and bragg until your face turns blue or prove to the world that you are the one exception that will lead your nation back to glory !!! In the word of Howard Dean, YEEEEAH !
PS: If it was not clear from the beginning, I believe the whole study and its purpose are absolute unadultered crap ( pardon my french). I am just glad it entertained me for 5 min.


8 comments:

  1. I think they were just measuring the Indians or Zambians in Germany, Lova. At least that's my official word on it.

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  2. Anonymous4:23 PM

    Damn, I shouldn't have registered as Indian...think I brought down the average IQ of India quite a bit!

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  3. >mos: definetely skewed data overall :) the Zambian and Indian communities called to say that, on the contrary, if their test scores were counted as Zambian or Indian and not Germans, the average score of germany would have dropped 4pts :)
    >GSL: as a GSL, you automatically register as German so you might have done better thank you think :)

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  4. Anonymous12:32 PM

    why did they estimate that we should be close to philippines and tanzania's average iq?
    so did this guy win an ig nobel prize?

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  5. >sipakv: his article stated that " given the malayo-african origins of malagasy people and the overall ethnic distribution, an average of the Philippines and Tanzania IQs' would be an accurate estimate..." I am with you, it makes no sense whatsoever. ( why philippines and not malaysia ?)It took him 5 y. and lots of money to get to that conclusion, well done,I say. Does "ig" stand for "ignorant" or "idiotic guy " ? He is probably sharing the same circle of "experts" with the "Bell Curve" authors.

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  6. Anonymous5:34 PM

    In this case, Ig should stand for "ignoble". Ha ha ha.
    I just looked at the Peace Ignobel Prize 2002 :
    "A Japanese team got the prize for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a device that translates a dog's barks into Japanese."
    Barf barf !
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2298873.stm

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  7. Thanks for the update, my roomate was making fun of me for not knowing ignobel prize :) So now I know that Chrac won one for testing nuclear weapons in the pacific on the anniversary of Hiroshima :) u could not make this up if you wanted to

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  8. Anonymous7:56 PM

    Wharf... They should invent a device translating french or english to dog's bark too...
    So we can hire dogs as translaters in international organizations ;-)
    BTW, they should study the pq (pride quotient) too hhhhhh

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