The Myth of an Asian IQ Advantage: The Truth is Somehow More Offensive

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they challenge popular misconceptions about race, IQ, and success. This thought-provoking discussion dives deep into the complex relationship between genetics, culture, and achievement, offering surprising insights that challenge both progressive and conservative narratives. Key topics include:

* The truth about Asian-American academic success

* Debunking the myth of significant racial IQ differences

* The impact of immigration and cultural factors on group success

* How class, rather than race, influences genetic advantages

* The role of Confucianism in creativity and innovation

* Why some immigrant groups outperform others

* The fallacy of attributing success solely to individual effort

Whether you're interested in genetics, sociology, or the complex factors behind group achievement, this video offers a nuanced and data-driven perspective that will challenge your assumptions and broaden your understanding of human potential.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Flynn was comparing American IQ estimates Based on a representative sample with Japanese estimates based on upper income, heavily urban samples.

 Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106. 6, but 99. 2. When the Chinese American scores were reassessed using up to date intelligence metrics, Flynn found they came in at a 97 verbal and a 100 nonverbal. The numbers now suggested Flynn said that they had succeeded not because of their higher IQs, but despite their lower IQs People are cherry picking studies to get these big differences. It's not that you don't get any difference between ethnic groups, but the difference is typically like. two to three IQ points, just not a really significant number.

Malcolm Collins: East Asian students spend approximately 13 more hours per week on academic activities compared to their non academic counterparts.

Holy!

Malcolm Collins: Thirteen more hours. it is not some Asians are smarter than white people thing. [00:01:00] It's Asians work harder than white people. Is that an offensive thing to say?

Like, I know it's it's

so I think it's so commonly understood,

Malcolm Collins: When you remove all of the DEI nonsense, 72 percent of the top academic performers become Asian, like that's wild. But it gets more surprising because Asian Americans are actually way less successful than you would expect them to be. Less than 1 percent of corporate officers and corporate board members in America are Asians and only 2 percent of college presidents. Only nine of the fortune 500 CEOs are Asians. Now we're going to get to the final part where I'm gonna get really offensive here. Yay. Really offensive. I love these parts.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be talking to you. We did an episode that was actually a long quote from our book, that went over the myth of a high Jewish Ashkenazi IQ. This episode has gone viral, so that's fun.

And I was like, Let's double [00:02:00] down because people said this episode is going to get you guys canceled. It's going to get Simone's campaign ruined. And I was like, how could he, like, what are they going to accuse us of saying that Jews aren't genetically superior? And somebody was like, like unironically, yes, they may cancel you for even asking these questions.

Like, but, but I don't, I don't think so. I, I genuinely just like, There's these areas that people are not used to engaging with, but I think that we as a society have moved past sort of reactive cancellations in regards to just engaging with like honest scientific information. Well, yeah,

just the fact that even they're being commonly held group level traits is an extremely controversial thing to say.

And then also admitting that intelligence has a genetic component is extremely controversial. And then of course, talking about Jews. At all is extremely controversial. So we were just, we weren't just stepping on third rails. We were like playing twister just to try to touch as many third rails [00:03:00] as possible with that.

Okay. Well, I decided, I decided I'm going back. Round two of third rail twister begins in three, two.

Malcolm Collins: At the end of the episode, I, I set up this point where I was like, actually the, the, while there are specific cognitive traits that seem to have some ethnic correlation, broad IQ, Doesn't seem to be broadly correlated when you actually dig into the nitty gritty of what's going on in these studies.

But the problem is, is we know that if it was highly correlated with ethnicity, we wouldn't be allowed to say that it was highly correlated with ethnicity. So whenever somebody comes along and says, here are some stats proving that it is, everybody just, Immediately jumps on it because they're like, well, at least somebody is giving me some information here.

But unfortunately, a lot of the people who are doing this often have like alternative [00:04:00] motivations. And so if you actually dig into the stats, which you then find, what we found was the Jewish situation is. It's, it's not clear, it's not it, it appears that Jews have some areas where they're a little different cognitively but there isn't this huge IQ gap that, that is purported by the people who are, the biodiversity bros even, H H and it's actually very similar when you go into the Asian IQ differential.

So that's what we'll be going into in this. I am going to start because I don't want to get in trouble for anything I'm about to say here. So I am going to be quoting from Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote an article in New Yorker on this subject. Which I paid for it to get access to this article, just so I could be quoting Malcolm Gladwell, so no one could say that I had said this stuff, okay?

Alright, so Malcolm says, now hold on, when you're quoting this, you don't get to say, evil Malcolm says, that's what I'll say, evil Malcolm, so nobody thinks this is coming from my mouth, okay? Okay, so, [00:05:00] Malcolm says Uh, Flynn, and he's talking about Flynn from the Flynn effect, a really well observed phenomenon that we now have the reverse Flynn effect and blah, blah, blah, but historically it was the effect that showed that IQ was rising over time as people were getting access to more nutrition and then this effect saturated, blah, blah, blah.

Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians have a genetic advantage in IQ, a possibility that has led to great excitement among IQ fundamentalists in recent years. Data showing that the Japanese had higher IQs than people from European descent,

for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lin to concoct an elaborate evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really

cold weather, pre modern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the IQs of Chinese Americans also seem to be elevated has led IQ fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international IQ pyramid with Asians at the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and Blacks at the [00:06:00] bottom.

Here was a question Taylor made for James Flynn's accounting skills. He looked first at Flynn's data and realized that the comparison was skewed. Flynn was comparing American IQ estimates Based on a representative sample of school children with Japanese estimates based on upper income, heavily urban samples.

 Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106. 6, but 99. 2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese American estimates. They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco's Chinatown using something called the Lord Thorndike Intelligence Test.

But the Lord Thorndike Test was normed in the 1950s. For children in the 1970s, it would have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese American scores were reassessed using up to date intelligence metrics, Flynn found they came in at a 97 verbal and a 100 nonverbal. Chinese Americans had slightly lower IQs than white Americans.

, the Asian American success story has suddenly been turned on its head. [00:07:00] The numbers now suggested Flynn said that they had succeeded not because of their higher IQs, but despite their lower IQs, Asians were overachievers in a nifty piece of statistical analysis. Flynn then worked out just how great that overachievement was.

Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the ranks as a managerial, professional, and technical occupation had an IQ of 97 or above. Among Chinese Americans, that threshold was 90. A Chinese American with an IQ of 90, It would appear does as much with it as white Americans with an IQ of 97. And this is a point we're going to go into a lot later in statistics.

I pulled up after this article. There should be no great mystery about Asian American achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian Americans really did have IQs that were higher than everyone else's.

Coming in somewhere at 103 having worked their [00:08:00] way into the upper reaches of the occupational scale and take a note of how much the professionals value abstract thinking Asian American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific spectacles.

Quote, Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high IQ rather than the reverse. In quote, Flynn concludes reminding us that in our discussion of the relationship between IQ and success, we often confuse causes and effects. So, thoughts?

I had never read anything like that before. This is

Malcolm Collins: surprising. Yeah, it is surprising, but it gets more surprising because there's, there's, there's a few things that we're going to note here. One is that Asian Americans are actually way less successful than you would expect them to be. Um,

How can that be?

Like when you look at general income and performance stats in the United States, they just, when we talk about discrimination at universities, they're the [00:09:00] ones that are

Malcolm Collins: too qualified. Everything you're saying is right. And we're going to get into how this leads to a very surprising results when you actually look at key leadership positions.

And then secondarily, we're going to be talking about something really interesting, which is how. Like, why? If East Asians are not particularly smarter than white Americans, why do they keep out competing them, right? Right, yeah. Well, and I guess not everywhere,

because how many East Asian politicians are there in the U.

S.? Well, that's what we're going to

Malcolm Collins: get to. So they seem to out compete them within the average ranges, and they seem to be massively slammed by them in the extremist angles. Oh, interesting. So how are they So they're like the

women of smart people. Their, their distribution is, is less flat and more clumped, but in a generally high area.

Malcolm Collins: Actually, yes. That is something we actually find with their, their intelligence scores. That's so interesting. They have a less wide [00:10:00] distribution. But we also see from the data why they are so handedly out competing white people. Yeah.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So here I am going to be reading from the abstract of an article called Explaining Asian Americans Academic Advantage Over Whites.

Mm-Hmm. . We find that the Asian American educational advantage over whites is attributable mainly to Asian students, exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio demographics. We test explanations for the Asian white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to one cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and to immigration status.

Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian American achievement and success. So insert Asian dad

meme here. It's. It's the culture. Hold on.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. I, I want to give the actual numbers here because they're interesting. East Asian students spend approximately 13 more [00:11:00] hours per week on academic activities compared to their non academic counterparts.

Holy!

Malcolm Collins: Thirteen more hours. Is

that, that's in the United States, not a world of cram schools and insane

Malcolm Collins: study around Yeah, no, that's in the United States. They are choosing to spend an additional four Thirteen hours is an astronomical amount of time in a week. Consider that like, you sleep, you know, like eight hours a night, right?

So that means that they are spending probably around 25 percent of the recreational time as their white counterparts.

Huh.

Malcolm Collins: Basically, they're earning it is how they're it is not some Asians are smarter than white people thing. It's Asians work harder than white people. Is that an offensive thing to say?

Like, I know it's it's

so I think it's so commonly understood, though. I mean, as much as I'm surprised by what you're saying, I also shouldn't be surprised because yes, it is common knowledge that East Asians in the United [00:12:00] States perform really well, but it's also a common meme, and certainly among even people who aren't around Asian populations, that Asian families tend to have higher Higher academic and professional standards.

And then don't forget Asian dad meme, which is just my favorite. You know, you're a bra size B cup. Why not a cup? Pregnancy test. I have very mixed feelings about this one. You're watching the bachelor. Why not watch the doctorate? You know, like just, I just, I love, I love it. And I should have thought like, yes, especially because you and I are the it's the culture people.

I should have thought this is this. Why would it be genetic when the culture is so obviously oriented around high performance?

Malcolm Collins: And like, we all know this, right? Like if you had Asian friends growing up, like you knew their parents were harder on them than yours. Yeah. And, and I will note before we get further here, we are not saying IQ doesn't have a genetic correlate. The, the purported stereotypes of how it [00:13:00] clusters around ethnic groups is just super wrong. That is, that is what we're saying. And it is so super wrong that you basically, as an individual don't have the data to make that statement.

statements or views or prescriptions around this information. Just because it's, it's so, muddled by bad actors, basically.

Yeah. I guess it's kind of like a lot of unregulated medicine where I think it's totally legitimate to say, yeah, mainstream medicine doesn't necessarily have all the right answers, but then.

You go into alternative medicine and people are giving you homeopathic cures and, you know, caffeine enemas and it's like, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So, so that's, that's all we're trying to point out here. Okay. So, so next I'm going to go into an article that I found really interesting which ends up. The writer of this article was so cucked.

They ended up being like, Oh, this means nothing. It'll all even out over time. We can just, you know, but, but I'm going to say no, no, no, no, [00:14:00] no. This is actually significant and it's something we need to talk about. Article was titled

if Asian Americans are so smart, how come they have no power or influence? And so it starts out. Ouch.

In California, where a voter initiative, outlawed racial preferences in admission, nearly half of the undergraduates at the top public universities.

Malcolm Collins: U. C. Berkeley and U. C. L. A. Are now Asians in the Ivy League, which maintains all the traditional preferences for disadvantaged minorities and athletes and alumni legacies. Undergraduate enrollment is still disproportionately between 15 percent and 20 percent Asian because of academic performance.

 Study set high school in elite public school in New York, which is a feeder school for top colleges and universities and admits exclusively on test performance. So, in a city that's less than 13 percent Asian, 72 percent of the students at Stony's Dent are Asian. So, when you remove all of the DEI nonsense, 72 percent of the top academic performers become Asian, like [00:15:00] that's wild.

Now you might conclude that although Asians made up only 4. 8 of the U. S. population in 2010 census, they probably have a disproportionate amount of power and influence in the U. S. because of their educational accomplishments. But that seems not to be the case. According to a much discussed article in New York magazine by Weasley Ying, statistics tell a different story.

The article cites various studies showing that less than 1 percent of corporate officers and corporate board members in America are Asians and only 2 percent of college presidents. Only nine of the fortune 500 CEOs are Asians. Even in specific areas with a lot of Asian Americans, they are concentrated in lower ranks.

Although a third of software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, they make up only 6 percent of board members and 10 percent of corporate officers in the Bay Area's 25 largest companies. At the National Institute of Health, where 21. 5 percent of the scientists are Asians, only 4. 7 percent of the lab or [00:16:00] branch directors are.

Good lord. Asians get creamed at the upper ranks. So one, I would say I think a huge portion of this is DEI. Asians, I think by far are the most discriminated class in the DEI world because on average they are the biggest large group to outcompete other groups. And so Yeah, but

wouldn't you, I mean, I feel like you could still get points when there are, when your imperative is to just not hire or promote another white man, the Asian competent person would seem like the obvious

Malcolm Collins: choice.

So you would, so this, this actually, and I think it's why a lot of Indians have been able to move up so much. But not Asians,

not East Asians? Well no,

Malcolm Collins: but some Indians look Asian. Like quote unquote, people of color to people in the states look dark. They look darker. This is about how dark you look. They look darker.

I genuinely think that's why Indians have risen so much in the tech industry is because they, they look, because they look some, look, they have [00:17:00] similar, I, I think it's that they have similar Kamala Harris,

well, Kamala Harris is

Malcolm Collins: half black, but yeah. I think that, that, that, that realistically, when these people in these tech companies are choosing to promote someone and keep in mind how much of their staff is Asian, right?

So if you're talking in Silicon Valley, they were saying 21. 5 percent of the scientists in this one group are Asian. And then in Silicon Valley, it was around a third of software. And it's a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. But the point being is that when you are the person. Promoting officer. When you're the HR person and you're looking at your pool of software engineers, you see your Asian employees as white because there are just so many of them.

Um, I'm, I'm telling you that's what it is in huge part. And you see this when they talk about it, when Asians get out there and they're like, we're being discriminated against in college admission. That they are from. Yeah, they are. Wow. Asians are white to the left as Jews are, for example.

At [00:18:00] least they're not, they're not hated the same way as Jews, though they had their, man, like, World War II was just, oh, let's forget about the fact that we had Japanese internment camps.

I mean, talk about, like, just like Jews, they were put in camps, but guess who put them in the camps? We did. I mean, we didn't burn them, but

Malcolm Collins: I would say that they had their property stolen. A lot of the Asian American community. This is what's really interesting is, is black Americans will say the reason that we're behind is because we had everything taken from us.

And I'm like, yeah, well, Japanese Americans had that happen much more recently in their history. They had all their, a lot of their businesses taken a lot of their homes taken everything that they, they war, war two set. I can't believe that happened. It still blows my

mind. That that happened. It is insane.

Malcolm Collins: Did one of your family members, like, stay in some Japanese person's property to save it for them after they got out of the internment camp?

A lot of our extended, like, friends and family either were themselves related to. Like had, had you say like first generation Japanese immigrant ancestors who were themselves [00:19:00] interned or who tried to help people who were interned, but it doesn't matter if your neighbors try to help keep squatters out of your house while you're sent off to a camp as an American waters out

Malcolm Collins: of your house, people would just take the houses or the farms or the property or the businesses.

So anyway the, the East Asian community, but, but all of this creates a problem for modern narratives, right? If East Asians are doing better than white people because they're working harder, this creates some troubling It's such a bad look. Yeah, it's

not Because the whole thing of like, work harder, get a job,

Get a goddamn job, Al. You got a negative attitude. That's what's stopping you. You gotta get your act together.

everyone hates, there's this meme on the internet, I'm sure you've seen it, where Kim Kardashian is just like, just work, get up and work, get out of bed, like she, people hate that, they use it all the time in a mocking way, but she's right.

It seems like nobody [00:20:00] wants to work these days. You have to.

What's it Kim is. Kim is right. And also Kim is very successful and all the people who I see dumping on her are not as successful as she is. So get out of bed and work kids. But yeah, no,

Malcolm Collins: no one wants to say that. So, so hold on because, because that is actually, I think DEI is a big part of why they're not reaching the tops of these organizations.

And I think another big part comes from the work. It could be due to a distributional concentration that we talked about earlier that they have fewer long tails. It could be due to their specific specializations. Remember how we said that The whole

doctor lawyer thing.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, in the same way that Jewish people don't really have a significantly different IQ than other people.

It's like 1 percent different. Oh, right. But the things that they specialize

in put them into positions of especially memetic influential, influential power, like politics, like media.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Specifically with Asia, [00:21:00] East Asian populations, the area where they consistently underperform is in verbal which would mean that they're probably not as good at the bureaucratic game and they're getting kind of screwed.

Like our our economy runs on them apparently like Silicon Valley and stuff like that. But Yeah, but they're

not, they're, they're, they're, they're failing at the water cooler. They're killing it. On the, you know,

Malcolm Collins: about this. But before we do that, I want to get into another thing here because a lot of people might still be under this illusion that if you actually like split the data or you go into the data, they're like, Oh, there's, there's probably a reason why you guys never mentioned.

Black American IQ like you you must be just trying to avoid that. It's like way lower or something like that. Well, but it's it's Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So I'm gonna go into a study here. Okay? Because I think that if you are just reading human biodiversity bro stuff you can be convinced that that there are [00:22:00] bigger differences than there are if you're actually looking at the preponderance of data.

Oh, with all

groups, right? I mean, with Jews and with Asians and with blacks. And yeah, yeah. So here I'm going to be reading a

Malcolm Collins: study that that's titled racial IQ differences amongst transracial adoptees fact or artifact. What is a transracial adoptee? So this is specifically

because culture, right? Oh, okay.

Okay. So, so like a white Midwestern couple adopting a baby from Korea. That's what they mean.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so some academic publications infer from studies of transracial adoptee IQs that East Asian adoptees raised in the West by whites have higher IQs than Western whites, and white adoptees raised by whites have higher IQs than black adoptees raised by whites.

Those publications suggest that this is because of genetic differences. This is because genetic differences give East Asians a higher mean IQ than whites, and whites a higher mean IQ than blacks. This paper proposes a parsimonious alternative [00:23:00] explanation. The apparent IQ advantage of East Asian adoptees is an artifact caused by ignoring the Flynn effect and adoption's beneficial effect on IQ, and most of the IQ disadvantage of black adoptees disappears when one allows for attrition in the Minnesota population.

Transracial Adoption Study and acknowledges the results of other studies. Diagnosing these artifacts suggests a nil hypothesis. East Asian, white, and black adoptees raised in the same environment would have similar IQs, hinting at a minimum role of genes in racial IQ differences. So, Flynn Effect Adjustments, the author adjusts IQ scores from older studies to account for the Finn Effect, the tendency of IQ scores to rise over time, for example, he subtracts 6 to 8 points from IQ scores in the Lane et al.

study to account for this effect. Comparison of adjusted

scores.

Malcolm Collins: After adjusting for the FinEffect, the author shows that many East Asian adoptees IQ scores are closer to or below 100, rather than significantly above, as previously claimed. Meta analysis. [00:24:00] The author combined results from multiple studies, weighing them by sample size and variance, where it calculates the black white biracial adoptees lagged white adoptees likely IQ scores.

0. 4 to 3. 1 IQ points on average. Attrition analysis. In the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, the author demonstrates how attrition, loss of participants over time, inflated white adoptees mean IQ by about 3. 8 points while having minimum effect on black adoptee scores. Environmental factor analysis.

The author quantifies environmental differences between adoptee groups, showing that Black, black adoptees in the Minnesota study had worse environments on several measures 2. 1 standard deviation when you're looking at this large scale data analysis. The author analyzes from Swedish national studies, Dana et al and Lundborg et al, showing that the Korean adoptees showed only 1.

5 IQ points above the general Swedish population which he argues is negligible when accounting for the adoptive IQ boost statistical significance testing. They also use t tests [00:25:00] and discuss p values and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so the, the point being is that a lot of these studies that you, that, that you classically look at around this, when you start to account for statistical artifacts, the big differences that they're showing disappear.

People are cherry picking studies to get these big differences. It's not that you don't get any difference between ethnic groups, but the difference is typically like. two to three IQ points, just not a really significant number. And I think this really surprises people. And you've also got to keep in mind the effects of bias here.

When I say bias, I mean, bias on the adoptive parents. There have been studies. On teachers where they were in one instance told that this student is a genius and is going to do really well. And in another instance, we're told this student is really dumb and it's going to do really great. And they're

the same students.

And then they start treating the dumb students as though they're dumb and the genius students

Malcolm Collins: do this between students. So this study I think would be pretty unethical to do by today's standards. But the [00:26:00] students that the teachers told were dumb end up doing much worse than the Yeah. I

remember seeing that

Malcolm Collins: study.

Yeah. So if you have a belief that a group is smarter than another group and you're raising kids within that group, it's going to have an effect. And here I should note with, with the black stuff, any, anything that's like, Black people are like this genetically can largely just be trashed in my mind because black people have the highest genetic variation of any population.

That is insane. By this what I mean is if you're looking at African pools of, of, of people if you look at a population on, Like one side of Africa versus the population on the other side of Africa. And I'll put a graph on screen here that will show this they will have significantly more genetic variation between them than whites and East Asians have between them or whites and native Americans have between them.

And I don't mean significant, like. 20 percent more. I mean, significant, like [00:27:00] 500 percent more. They, they, they just are, are far more genetically distant from each other. Yeah. And you can't

just be like, Oh, well, then I'll look at a Nigerian immigrant differently than I'll look at someone descended from colonial slaves, because even people who were Stolen and then sold as slaves, kidnapped and sold as slaves from Africa, were kidnapped in totally different regions over long periods of time.

Like this is also, these are very different populations. So it doesn't matter where someone came from. This is not a monolithic

Malcolm Collins: group at all. Huge differences in American. A lot of people would be like, yeah, but once they came to the United States, they all intermix. And it's like, this is functionally not true.

For example, the descendants of the escaped slaves that moved to the North versus the slaves that were freed and then moved to the North basically exist as two populations that for a long time, didn't intermarry and didn't like each other. And if you look at the recent African immigration [00:28:00] waves, they don't really like the American, they are way more racist against American blacks than American whites are against American blacks.

If you have African friends, we have a quite a number of African friends and it's, it often comes up and I have these moments where I have to like, you know, sort of do that mentally. I don't know if you've ever been in a conversation where somebody gets really racist and you're like, doing a little whistle and you're like,

I'm just gonna go to the bathroom now.

I don't wanna

Malcolm Collins: be here. I'm not hearing this, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not hearing this, I'm not here, this isn't happening right now. Please go and have a recorder on. But this happens all the time when I'm talking to my African friends. Because, well, because they know that they're not going to have the same blowback that, you know, I would have for saying something like that.

And so, you know, they, I think, relish in being able to get away with this. But then let's, let's go over some other stuff. And

watching us sweat. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: God. Three other studies lend support to the environmental explanations of group IQ differences. Eyal's first, 1961, studied out of wedlock children of black and white soldiers stationed in Germany after World War II, who were then raised [00:29:00] by white German mothers.

In what has become known as the Eyerhoff study, he found no significant differences. in average IQ between groups. Tizard et al, 1972, studied black, West Indian, white, and mixed race children raised in British long stay residential nurseries. Two of three tests found no statistical differences. One test found higher scores for non white people.

Moore, 1986, compared black and mixed race children adopted by either black Or white middle class families in the United States, Moore observed that 23 black and interracial children raised by white parents had significantly higher mean scores than 23 age matched children raised by black parents 111 versus 104, and argued that differences in early socialization explain these differences.

And here's the thing about all of this. Like, this isn't necessarily better. It's kind of Like worse, right? If, if, if you [00:30:00] point out three things, okay, there are not actually large IQ differences between groups in the United States. Okay. And, and actually we'll see, there are some differences within the United States.

So here we've got to talk about the immigrant effect, right? And this is where you actually get like big IQ differences with some groups is immigrants are typically going to have traits that will make them better in business when contrasted With non immigrants, you're going to be more ambitious, more open to change, more open to risk, more open to, I mean, I think that this is why, you know, America's entrepreneur class is disproportionately our immigrant class.

It's like 37 percent of like, whilst driven by new companies was, were created by immigrants. Well, and

there are many, many, many Asian entrepreneurs.

Malcolm Collins: And that would also, this would also go to my DEI hypothesis. It's, it's not about the distribution thing because Asian entrepreneurs aren't being selected as against by DEI as much as like, do you become the head of a fortune 500 company?

Do you become the head of a department? [00:31:00] Right. Which is a DEI hurt, which means that they actually could perform equally if not for DEI. But it's, it's not like this, this, what I'm saying here isn't offensive. So I want you to consider the implications if everything I'm saying here is true.

Okay. There

Malcolm Collins: aren't big IQ differences between groups in the United States. Yeah. Okay?

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Historic discrimination does not explain when a group is underperforming, and then finally most of the difference between things like Asian and white outcomes is due to how hard they're working due to cultural expectations placed on them. People will say that I'm here, like, trying to cover for stuff, okay? Like, I'm here trying to, like, be a woke apologist or something.

Excuse me. Those three things taken together don't lead to a woke explanation for anything. If anything, they are significantly worse [00:32:00] than just saying one group had a systemic disadvantage around their IQ. But anyway, let's keep going here. So what can we say? So I tried to then look like with Jews where you saw a slightly difference in some areas, you know, like they did slightly better in verbal.

They did slightly, they did slightly better on verbal and math and they did slightly worse on visual, spatial and general reasoning. And this. I actually think it's mostly their culture, but you could argue this has helped them. Okay. So if

both Jews and East Asians are doing poorly on general reasoning, who's doing well on general reasoning?

Malcolm Collins: I can't say that, Simone. You know, I can't say that, but hold on. I've got to keep going good. Okay. So what can I say?

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Overall IQ, East Asians tend to score slightly higher. On average than whites on IQ tests, but we're typically looking at like maybe three to two points here. Okay. Okay. Not, not a meaningful number.

Spatial reasoning. East agents typically demonstrate stronger spatial [00:33:00] slash nonverbal intelligence compared with white populations. And it's, it's very consistent across studies. Verbal abilities they tend to store, they tend to underscore on verbal abilities, this is across scores. Mathematical abilities, they tend to outperform in mathematical abilities, and some research suggests a smaller distribution.

Well, here, if you're saying, okay, they're about equal with, like, the Jewish and white populations, right? And black populations, but here I'm just using whites because that's what all the studies Would compare them to and you don't need to correct for all the additional artifacts. So, if you're doing this right what it could mean is specifically what allows a group to outcompete for the top ranked position in our existing society, like the Jewish population clearly does see our Jewish video.

It might just be that little extra verbal intelligence. It could be that verbal intelligence is incredibly important in accessing bureaucratically gated positions.

And that seems intuitively right.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Now I'm gonna get to something [00:34:00] very offensive. So I am not saying it. This is coming from South Korean psychologists.

Hun Hon Kim in 2004, and she argues that there is a strong negative correlation to be found between creativity and Confucianism. In her exploration of creativity among Southeast Asian countries with strong Confucius traditions, Kwon Hee Kim concluded that there is an Quote, ideological opposition between Confucianism and creativity, where Confucianism is about staying with tradition and living with inexistent confines, while creative strengths are about investigating fresh, Investing fresh energy into new ideas in quote and so here I'm just going to go over a few points.

She makes Confucian principles in Asian parenting and education emphasize conformity, hierarchy, filial piety, and academic achievement, which can stifle creativity, which like, yeah, I guess that kind of checks out, right? Like if you.

Training people to toe a line, [00:35:00] then they're not going to thrive it.

Yeah. I mean, what we've seen with pretty much all research on mental performance and body performance is use it or lose it. So any modality that would, you know, lead to some, some element of your brain function to atrophy like creativity or running against authority or doing stuff that's weird. Yeah.

That makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: And then What makes you think it's offensive then? Hold on. I mean, I'll explain why it's offensive when I get to the end of this. Okay. Kim found in her research a strong nail good of correlation between Confucianism and creativity in her research. So basically the more Confucian somebody was in their value system, the less creative they would be.

And the specific elements that she said led to this were obedience and respect for hierarchy, which yes, would create that outcome. She argues gender inequality. I don't think so. I think that's just woke nonsense. Conformity, conformity would definitely, and conformity is important to Confucian [00:36:00] value sets, right?

Suppression of expression. I don't believe that that's important, but work pay dichotomy. Now this could actually be one of the key aspects here. And I've really seen this was my Asian parent. friend group, right? Is there's a much stronger dichotomy in the Asian friends I have between work and play than in white cultural values?

Especially because white cultural values aren't unanimous. So here I'd say, I noticed this dichotomy. I also see it more in like Catholic cultural groups, but if you're looking at like, The greater Appalachian cultural group, which we come from you know, and here I'll play a clip for one of Simone's favorite songs that you cry whenever you listen to

 Do what your lover called it worth And

 Find the one you can't live without Get a ring, let your knee hit the ground And add a few limbs to your family tree

Malcolm Collins: do, do what you love, but call it work.

They say in the song and it's, it's true. It is a strong cultural value of the greater Appalachian region. And was in a number of white [00:37:00] cultures that have ended up becoming dominant in the greater American cultural ecosystem. But keep in mind, there's many different white cultures in the American cultural ecosystem that are as different from each other as they are from East Asian cultural groups.

Now we're going to get to the final part where I'm gonna get really offensive here. Yay. Really offensive. I love these parts. So I just came in here and I had this conversation with you all where I was like, look, ethnicity just really doesn't matter that much to IQ differences. It's culture. It's culture.

It's culture.

Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And then people may hear. You know, somebody's here and they're, they're all sad. They're like, but I wanted a master race. Why isn't there a master race, Malcolm? Who are they? And I'm like, well, unfortunately the data just doesn't seem to show any groups. It's really like, out competing everyone except for maybe JNs.

We'll get to that later.

Oh, what? Okay. Twists. JNs are going

Malcolm Collins: extinct. So it [00:38:00] doesn't really matter. Yeah. I

guess you have to kind of define, I see that as failure to thrive, but okay.

Malcolm Collins: Failure to, yeah, whatever you want to call it, they're not having kids. Okay. But, but IQ does have a genetic correlate and that genetic correlate differentiates.

Not between ethnic groups, but due to two core things. Okay. One, culture and culture. . Recent genetic bottlenecks.

Oh, duh. Yeah. Two class. Oh boy. Okay. Rah. Okay. Yeah. Here's the, here's the part where it got really offensive. We finally got there. Thank you. Wonderful.

Malcolm Collins: I'll, I'll give you an explanation of what I mean here.

When I talk about. Asian population groups right here, right? So in the United States, I'll give an example for starting with the United States, because it's one I always give, [00:39:00] which is of Cubans. I talk to Americans about Cubans and they go, Oh, Cubans. Yes. Cubans. They're, they're very Republican. They're very entrepreneurial.

They're very hardworking. They're very wealthy. Their businesses seem to work at like really disproportionate rates when contrasted with other groups. Cubans. Yes. Those are the traits of Cubans. And it's like, no, those are the traits of Cuban Americans. There's a whole other f ing communist country out there, you knobhead.

And those are not the traits of the people who stayed in that country. There was a recent hard selection event, which led to a bunch of people with similar beliefs. And keep in mind that it's not just Like IQ, right? Like in terms of success, IQ isn't the predominant factor. It's things like ambition and entrepreneurialism and comfortableness with change and all of these things, which also have genetic correlates, right?

So you had a recent bottleneck that was both cultural because it wasn't just a genetic bottleneck. It was also a cultural bottleneck [00:40:00] that led to this group of Cubans coming to the United States. And they created a culture that represented not necessarily Cuban more broadly. But the selection of it, okay, we also see this in East Asian immigrants to the United States and I've seen larger analysis that argue this, this small advantage, because remember you do still, when you really watch things out, see like a small, like three point advantage in East Asian populations, the United States if you contrast it with non immigrant The populations that stayed in a station.

This it disappears. Because immigrating to the United States from East Asia is very difficult. It's a lot of sacrifices. It requires a base level of wealth, and there are certain pressures that are going to draw you here. Cultural pressures like a value for entrepreneurial ism of values for freedom of value for but then you also have a bottleneck.

There is one country in the world today that 70 percent of the world's computing powder relies on. If [00:41:00] they disappeared, our entire world of AI would collapse, our entire world of modernity would collapse, and you might say, Oh, this country must be uniquely competent in some way. What could have created this country of modernity?

Hyper competence. It was a recent selection event. The country, of course I am talking about here is Taiwan. And Taiwan was largely created when the Shanghai Shek's government was retreating and they were fascist to start, but they were, the communists were coming in first, people who didn't like communism were like, I'm going to get out of here, similar to the Cubans who went to the United States.

Right. And then secondly, the Shanghai Shek group, they were like, Oh, We want to take everyone who looks like they could be useful in any like entrepreneurial business people or any people who had achieved the level of success and they pulled them out and that created the birthplace of the modern. Whatever, you know, what's the Taiwanese cultural group, which [00:42:00] now produces the world chips like Taiwan and China are basically the same ethnicity.

Okay, it is. Genuinely remarkable with like 10x their wealth and the government is is pumping money into this in china The chinese cannot figure out how to make advanced semiconductors They are trying hard and yet the taiwanese have just figured out And they can't even, like, work with Americans.

Like, there's studies of, like, them trying to, like, set up factories in America, and they're like, these white people just can't figure out these factories. But I mean, that, that, I mean, it should, it should. They're like, they're, they don't follow orders well enough. They don't, and this is all true. Like, we can look at Confucianism and say, well, Confucianism leads to lower types of creative outcomes, right?

But, Sometimes

that's not, sometimes that's ideal. Yeah. Maybe

Malcolm Collins: it's this very conformity, which has allowed them and, and, and hierarchy preference, which has allowed them to do [00:43:00] these super clean fabs that no one else can create on scale. Okay. And everyone else has tried, this is a national security interest of every other country on earth.

Yeah. Just can't do it. Or not at scale in the way that they're doing it. And so the, the, the, the. The, the thing here is that, yes, different groups are different, and we globally benefit from that difference. Progressives say, we love diversity, but everyone's secretly the same. And it's like, then why would diversity matter to you if everyone's secretly the same?

We're like, we love diversity because No group is better than another group, but each group brings its own proficiencies and perspectives and through working with people who have different proficiencies and perspectives, we can do more. But here I'm going to talk about the last super offensive thing, okay?

Social class?

Malcolm Collins: Class. Social class. Oh boy. Oh no. We're not going to get fully into this, but I'm going to talk about it here in the context of China. [00:44:00] So, for people who aren't familiar with the Chinese revolution when they did the revolution, they inverted the social classes. They took any family who had wealth, Or had businesses or who had education.

And as they were redistributing land, as they were redistributing opportunities, they gave them and their children less they would be regularly mocked in ceremonies, like walking through the town. They would be sometimes just killed for having been rich in the past. And the kids had to grow up as orphans.

This was very

separated from their kids. Yeah, totally. It was. You had a

Malcolm Collins: complete class inversion. Okay. So the communist China attempted a class inversion. What happened to that class inversion? Okay.

It got reversed over time.

Malcolm Collins: It became reversed over time. Yeah. So led by Alberto Alessini of Harvard university.

The academics mind data from household surveys and census reports and land records. And they found that by 2010, the income of the descendants of the pre communist elite [00:45:00] were 16 to 17 percent higher than those born into families that were underprivileg