Talk:Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence

European bottleneck of Ashkenazi Jews

IQ and separating groups performance on tests like it immediately gives me bad eugenic vibes but assuming that testing is valid. Adding the European bottleneck of the ashkenazi population, that is estimated to have occured almost 800 years ago, may be important for context for this subject. The bottle neck was severe enough that a sizable portion of Ashkenazi Jews, over 10 million, descend from one of 4 women, going further, even genetic testing very regularly shows members of the ethnic group being closer on a family tree than they actually are. RCSCott91 (talk) 03:42, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

The quality of editing

this edit is weird to the point of incomprehensibility.

• I drafted without touching the article which in its present form is a stable skeleton, a bibliography. It included many new sources, and, also, added those sources the article - subject to the most astringent scrutiny - still uses.
• Grayfall excised from the bibliography any mention of sources by Lynn et al., while leaving them intact on the page, and in the citations.
• This article cannot be edited irrationally, by a kind of edit-warring consisting of excisions, reverts, dislikes, or whatever.
• An article on theories published in reliable scientific outlets, which fails to gain any traction in the secondary peer-review literature, cannot be written by repressing those publications, If they are eliminated, the whole article is forced to circle around a reference void.
• The Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship examines the utterly sprious ideas and their aftermath of the appropriately name J. Thomas Looney. The article must reference his book, otherwise no one will have a clue. And sceptics like myself accepted it as a primary source, no matter how idiotic those ideas were. And the same goes for this, and any other fringe topic.

Nishidani (talk) 20:23, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

(2nd erasure) "Don't do that again" is not how consensus works. These sources are redundant with citations and unreliable/fringe sources should not be presented as blandly reliable sources without context Nishidani (talk) 02:26, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

is this a quote comment from grayfell?

what exactly are you trying to communicate? Bluethricecreamman (talk) 03:05, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Why ask me? If you click on the link, you would see that it is Grayfell's edit summary for his second disembowelment of a harmless bibliography citing only sources that are themselves mentioned in the secondary literature.Nishidani (talk) 03:20, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

The short version is that there was a dispute over how references should be formatted on the page. Lacking consensus, this seems premature, to put it mildly, so I partly reverted this edit. There is also the issue that a Richard Lynn source was added which is not currently cited nor mentioned in the article. If the article is going to expand the use of a discredited academic like Lynn, it needs to be handled carefully, and introducing more complicated and less intuitive references schemes will only make it harder to address these kinds of issues in the future. To put it another way, Lynn remains fringe regardless of how his work is cited. Grayfell (talk) 03:43, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Ok! It seems Nishidani has left, based on their comments, but they still had a point that we need to resurrect this article eventually somehow instead of WP:TNTing it. Unfortunately, much of the AfD seems to still be leaning towards some sort of TNT (me included tbh).

What exactly are the full remedies for race and intelligence that should apply? I tried copying the talk page templates over from race and intelligence, but was trying to see what else should be the correct consensus? Bluethricecreamman (talk) 03:50, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

The article is dead in the water, and the short version is a laughingstock, and remains so because editors, instead of diving into the full scholarly history on this topic, keep flensing it to its skeletal caricature of an article. I simply noted in that bibliography how a future article, radically rewriting this nonsense, should be sourced (only a small sample). With the atmosphere surrounding this topic, evidently any work on actually rewriting the page for wikipedia would be pointless.

I find it very comical to see that knee-jerk approaches to what would have been a Sander Gilman-(I have cited him as authoritative in many articles long before encountering this one, and subscribe to virtually everything he writes) type analysis of the fringe or minority 'researchers'(most have academic credentials, some like Davide Piffer even had a research position, apparently at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and get their ideas into peer-reviewed journals and even highly praised books like Warne's (see my page) who meddle with borderline theories of ethno-racial differences can't get past an editorial consensus hostile to even naming these people on wikipedia. In my own view these ideas are rubbish, but influential rubbish and should be taken apart as such, just as a couple of us did with numerous articles on the trash pseudo-scholarship surrounding Shakespeare's identity, despite the biliousness of editors who subscribe to that nonsense. So, all the anxieties about exploring this nonsense are totally dislocated from that curiosity with weird stereotypes (in this case about Ashkenazi, often promoted by some notable Ashkenazi themselves) which the equanimity of deep scholarship handles with ease (for which Sander Gilman is our palmary guide). I'm done here, in both senses. Nishidani (talk) 03:53, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

What I saw is that Nishidani started to work on the article, but Grayfell obstructed the work by deleting sources without waiting to see how Nishidani would use them. Grayfell complained about context without knowing what the context would be. Grayfell is also wrong about the use of fringe sources. Even the worst sources are reliable for what they contain, and if they played a significant role in the story that the article is telling then they should be cited. Not as a source of facts, but as a source for who claimed what when and to make the reaction to them comprehensible to readers. We don't cite Mein Kampf in Lebensraum because we think it is a reliable source; we cite it because the article would be incomplete without it. Zero^talk 04:37, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

WP:BRD should still remain our guiding principle. I think the article had been static for a few weeks, before a bold edit had been done. Grayfell did a revert, and we should probably discuss if we wanna push on ahead. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 05:16, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

When someone embarks on a major revision, there is no requirement to separately justify the intermediate stages. Lots of people work by adding the sources and then gradually writing the text that uses the sources, especially people who use the Harvard citation style. Of course intermediate stages cannot achieve consensus in isolation and BRD is not intended to impose that impossible standard. It would be similar to jumping in to delete some just-added text for being unsourced while the editor who added it is busy typing in the source. Reverts like this are not based on an assessment of text that is intended to be final, and so are not the type of revert that triggers BRD. Zero^talk 08:00, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Pointless arguing further, Zero. The practices established here are so absurd and unencyclopedic, and worse still, driven perhaps by 'the best intentions' (one could write an article about that in historical fiascos!) that commonsense tells one any further work here, even if allowed, would just be hacked to pieces. No one in their right mind, taking the temperature of the place, would waste a week with that prospect. So, there are things wikipedia won't cover because political correctness has prevailed. One must be realistic, and above all, not waste any more of one's time battling a windmill of 'concerns'. Cheers Nishidani (talk08:35, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Nishidani, I think somebody should take this to AN/I. I have experienced multiple situations that are comparable in the last few weeks. For some articles in this content area, the burden of proof is so crassly skewed, every supposedly "FRINGE" source must be "contextualized" - which really only means immediate and final deletion - etc., that it simply amounts to WP:OWNERSHIP behavior. Other solutions are extremely unlikely to work; and I absolutely speak from experience with the user(s). Biohistorian15 (talk) 13:27, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

AN/I would dismiss it as a content dispute that hasn't been through the standard dispute resolution processes. Zero^talk 13:33, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't on principle ever take any dispute to fora like AN/I, AE. And I can see some editors there who would delete did so on the basis of reasonable inferences from the state of the page as it exists. The problem was and remains that a notable number of editors in these areas don't know more about a topic than what the wiki article and its often exiguous sources tell them. So flawed judgments can thrive in good faith because a very simple principle is ignored, i.e., when there is a difficult content dispute in some controversial' topic, take time off to muster every available RS (beyond what our always partisan sampling yields), read them through, and then form an opinion, always keeping in mind NPOV and WP:Undue. When one lacks competence, then rather than throwing a wide net to trawl for more, cogent sources and catch up, the temptation is strong to play with policies to find any excuse that might assist one in challenging, reverting or erasing the work of other editors with whom one disagrees. In short, many prefer to edit rather than to study. That article is comparatively easy to write up - if one is familiar with most of the angles on Ashkenazi history and aspects of the 'science' that in recent decades have come to inflect it - a matter of a day or two, but there is no way it will be written (on wikipedia). Stiff cheddar.Nishidani (talk) 15:31, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

@Nishidani: As long as we're all working on these articles together, we can improve the quality of the editing environment. People like you, Zero and Bluethricecreamman are what the articles need: people who are motivated to write an encyclopedia, not to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS. The reason the practices here have been "absurd and unencyclopedic" is that RGW-type editors have been dominant recently, but we can change that. The fact that Bluethricecreamman was able to rewrite this article suggests the environment is improving already.

By the way: I'm using a different internet connection currently, but I'm the same IP user that recently commented in your user talk. 84.212.187.87 (talk) 19:05, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Well, my reading of the situation is that edit-warring will continue, and nonsense will prevail, so, since I have plenty of files on the topic, I am writing it off-line. It's a practice of mental house-keeping, tidying up 'my place', so that all of the material I have finally finds some logical expository order. One can't do that here, piecemeal if many editors don't accept the very legitimacy of the topic(farcical given that it has a broad literature) and to try and do so, for me at least would mean spending a month or so or negotiating in a hostile environment, when I can do an article in two days just for the private pleasure of it. I've done this often in the past, and sometimes, after several years, feel the time is ripe and plunk an article into wikipedia. It usually remains intact, and I save myself useless bartering for weeks if not months. And that's what I'll do here. Of course, editors who can see the flaws do well to press on and try to put flesh on this sad skeleton. My advice is to pause, take a rest from the article, and read and make notes on the literature while (a) distinguishing between the science (statistics on Ashkenazi intelligence in comparative perspective: that data is in impeccable sources and can't be removed.(b) writing per secondary sources about the research conducted by Heernstein, Murray Lynn et al., building on (a) (c) examining the alternative theories that strive to account for that observed difference in terms of history and culture. In this area, all three have built-in biases, but some are self-correcting.

Once this conceptual distinction is clear in editors' minds,(d) write up a chronology of the debate, from its antecedents in Arthur Jensen, William Shockley et al., to its revival in 1992 with The Bell Curve, out of which Lynn and others, down to the recent restatements of the theory in terms of allele variables hypothetically connected to high intelligence (in the IQ measurements, about which I have serious doubts. The Nepalese in one result emerged as having only one third of the Ashkenazi or japanese mean IQ, which means they must be all morons). In short, go systematically through the history of these arguments re the Ashkenazis (and it is not something 'Jewish' since the results of Sephardim, Mizrachi etc., reproduce the averages we get for European non-Jewish populations - a strong point for those who argue that the observed Ashkenazim difference is due to specific cultural forces - the allele evidence is far too tentative to allow firm factual conclusions so far) and organize the article that way, bit by bit, period by period.

It is best to do this kind of synthesis off-line allowing oneself plenty of time to read and evaluate each source, using RS that comment on these developments, and when one has a paragraph, post it, and then the next para. If one works strictly in terms of the indisputably reliable sources, some of which I listed before the gutting, one will be able to empirically evaluate who is editing in observance of wiki's best standards, and who is just throwing their weight around. Good luck Nishidani (talk) 19:41, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

I strongly support the idea of a historical chronology of the Jewish intelligence topic in particular. But don't even try connecting this too deeply with other scientific literature regarding race differences (in intelligence) as - among other perils - there is apparently an actively prohibitive RFC instigated by mostly the same users that also dominated the recent AFC. Biohistorian15 (talk) 19:13, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Requested move 4 August 2024

Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence → Jewish Genius Stereotype – Multiple sourcing argues that racial and ethnic differences cannot directly correlate to intelligence (I know Ashkenazi Jew is not a race, but race is arbitrary and many of the studies that disprove racial intelligence also disprove ethnic intelligence)). We should be honest and discuss this topic as is, as a stereotype that is part of a long line of work that is connected to Race and Intelligence — Bluethricecreamman (talk) 16:58, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

This vein of literature arose specifically in regard to reports about the IQ not of 'Jews', but of Ashkenazi Jews, whose average intelligence quotient was, according to some studies, higher than that of their European and American compatriots' mean IQ. But it was also putatively higher than the IQs of other Jewish groups, Sephardim, Mizrachi and North African Jews, who, according to some of the authors of these ideas, figured as having a mean similar to the 'Western' average. How this specific result got generalized into the notion that Ashkenazi ergo all Jews are brighter than others is an interesting confusion with its own story. Therefore to generalize a particular argument about a specific group onto Jews would be pointless. Israeli Jews, according to one of the main promotors of the Ashkenazi theory, had a mean IQ of 100 or thereabouts, and that population constitutes half of world Jewry. Nishidani (talk) 17:45, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Oppose. Agree with Nishidani. Furthermore, "Genius" is a somewhat unscientific term right at the outset and "stereotype" is unnecessarily loaded language. Biohistorian15 (talk) 18:52, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Oppose This isn't what the article is about. Killuminator (talk) 20:54, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Oppose. Present title captures the topic better. Also, "genius" often refers to skills that are different from intelligence (think of a mechanical genius or a genius gardener). Zero^talk 01:32, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Oppose name with 'genius'. Too strong (plenty of Jews aren't geniuses) and too flowery to be encyclopedic. Jruderman (talk) 04:10, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

If this article survives both AfD and deletion review, I'm thinking Jewish intelligence might be a better title. The fact(?) that Ashkenazim got the long end of the stick is not really meaningful. And concision is always nice. Jruderman (talk) 04:17, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

That kind of title would play into the Richard Lynn-generated stereotyping of 'races' associated with the Ulster Institute for Social Research. There are no robust data for anything like this (6 Asian countries invariably top all lists of IQ by country, but not for that do we have articles on Japanese Intelligence or Taiwanese Intelligence, etc. This whole focus on 'Jews' (when we are referring to rather Ashkenazi Jews) is utterly eurocentric in its backhanded antisemitic premises, and collapses into its intrinsic provincialism when we get outside of this "us" (Western whites) vs "them" (that minority in our midst) and recast the whole argument in terms of IQ estimates per country/(often implicitly overlapping with the residual notion of race), most of the data on which is in any case unreliable, when not indeed, to pun on our wiki Fibonacci's handle, a matter of 'crookèd figures'. Nishidani (talk) 04:57, 5 August 2024 (UTC)