>>12719541I've got (some) experience with this and kind of have an idea why. The first big reason is clearly
>>12719594 - there's no need to dress it up in academic language, because the vast majority of the rural Chinese population is dumb as fuck.
But there are other issues with the methodology. Most of the "IQ tests" from which we get our data in China are actually these stupid computerised tests which they give people in hospitals. If you actually do one, you'll see that it's almost identical to the ones you can find online by googling them. No supervision at all, except maybe by a nurse since these are intended to be cheap ways to test whether someone's had a brain injury. So these aren't going to be hugely accurate to begin with.
Secondly, the more complicated factor in my opinion is that European IQ is declining. This is sort of debated, so some disagree, but the basic idea here is that we're no longer in a situation which rewards high IQ with increased opportunities to breed. In fact, the opposite is now true, if anything. The stupid outbreed the smart by quite a bit. Also, our nutrition is no longer improving, and may actually be degrading. Chinese nutrition in particular has increased over the past 50 years or so, especially in cities, which is where most of our data come from, and when you couple this with declining European IQ, you end up with this weird situation we have.
I don't know whether I'd say on average Europeans or Asians are actually smarter. I think the methodology is a bit shit, but I do think one thing worth pointing out is that the Italians and Japanese are consistently measured as having high IQs. They also stand out as having particularly healthy diets. I don't believe that's a coincidence.
Having said all that, in the future I also expect Asian IQ to start decreasing as well. If only we'd had a eugenic policy...
