Iran possibly experiences what India experiences, in that the masses aren't that smart and international tests (PISA, etc) don't show a small fraction of their young students doing really well either, even though a lot of their people have risen to prominence in science.
Successful Iranian AI scientists isn't similar to Olympiads since the government has no role in organising their careers, and they're mostly people that left Iran to work in western countries. I would also add there are many AI scientists of Iranian origin that aren't classified as Iranian because they left Iran when young and didn't study in Iranian universities, e.g. Zoubin Ghahramani and Ali Ghodsi.
Another interesting thing is there are two Iranian mathematicians who received the Fields Medal, the highest mathematics award.
I'm half Iranian myself, and tbh when I think about it I'm not that surprised Iran has a low average IQ. It's a huge country with huge diversity. Parts of the country are very modern, but large parts are also very backwards. Iranians that find it impossible for Iran to have an IQ in the 80s react that way because they only mix with a certain type of Iranian in the diaspora rather than farmers in Khorasan. HOWEVER I do think there's a substantial number of Iranians that have IQs of at least 100, and I wouldn't be surprised if Iran's pool of very smart people is larger than in neighbouring countries, even if they don't appear in data from PISA. How could there not be given the amount of young prominent scientists coming out of Iran? Not scientific and totally anecdotal, but I've had many good experiences in Iran too.
Yes, but there don't seem to be nearly as many prominent mathematicians or scientists coming out of Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq or other populous countries.
Turkey has a lot of them, though many actually live in Turkey. If you look at their MIC progress in recent years, it's pretty spectacular.
My sense is that braindrain is a problem in both countries but far worse in Iran, partly because of sanctions etc. For the very elite in Turkey, there are many opportunities to make money and not necessarily in the black market and/or based on connections.
Also, Turkey's PISA score is on par with Greece and has been for many years. Their higher economic development is probably a reflection of a brighter general population than in Iran.
1) There's an anomalously large smart fraction that isn't getting counted (probably concentrated in the diaspora),
2) The smart fraction is anomalously well-oriented toward STEM achievement (as contrasted with, say, Soutg Africa where the government is trying to kill them),
Obviously they have to be concentrated in the diaspora, since leaving Iran is both desirable and difficult.
But the characteristics of the diaspora are still informative about Iran in general; you might e.g. assume that the diaspora reflects the top 5% of Iranians (probably too strict) and then see what that implies about the overall distribution.
Note that a "deep roots" analysis says that Iran should be a very high-performing country. Historically, it always has been.
As to this remark:
> It helps a lot to pull from a pool of 88 million people (plus 4 million diaspora). You'll find a few 160-IQ people in there.
With an average IQ of 100, you should find a bit under 3000 such people.
But with an average IQ of 85, you should find 26 of them. So in fact, it's not helpful at all to have a population of ~100 million if your average IQ is 80.
Another way you might approach that question is by comparison to American blacks. By stylized report, they have an average IQ of 85 and by census estimate, they have a population of around 45 million. Since they have around half the population of Iranians and a noticeably higher IQ, Iranians should outnumber them by something under 2:1 in high-performing fields. Is that what we see?
>they only mix with a certain type of Iranian in the diaspora rather than farmers in Khorasan
It is ironic considering the vast majority of iranian scientists during the medieval era came from khorasan lol but isnt khorasan mostly in afghanistan and uzbekistan nowadays??
" It does only slightly better as a country, overall, than one would expect from the estimated average intelligence of the people. Iran doesn't have a communist economy, but is suffering from an Islamic dictatorship, and is under various USA-related sanctions. Despite these problems, Iran appears to be doing about as well as one would expect based on the intelligence of its people. The level of development of the country, therefore, doesn't provide any reason to doubt the estimates of average intelligence."
Wouldn't that suggest though that IQ is slightly underestimated? Given those headwinds (Islamic dictatorship and sanctions), we should expect the country to somewhat underperform its average IQ. If it overperforms it slightly instead, that's at least suggestive of a wrong assumption. Right?
Could be, but this depends on whether you think Islamic theocracy is likely to cause lower S factor scores. In any case, Iran is quite close to the regression line, so whatever issues are with the estimates, they are not likely to be large.
What about variation in effort? Middle Eastern people are notoriously the laziest people on Earth. I wonder if this negative effect applies to most racial groups when it concerns things like IQ tests or even PISA, and for Middle Eastern populations it is even worse.
Aren't there studies which show that incentives lead to better results? Or if these are real they dont show a much larger benefit for Middle Eastern gains relative to other races?
Yes, but North Korea also has a higher IQ even when suppressed. One thing to note is that more conservative, authoritarian countries -- the closer the skew is to objective materialist views, investment in physics, sciences and mathematics. This is seen in in Middle East and Asia. More emphasis on pragmatics, this could be the multiplier effect of that cause. You see gender-neutral or egalitarian countries showing more sexual dimorphism and vice versa due to economic necessity causing greater preferential treatment towards the pragmatics vs luxury beliefs like social welfare or whatever extraneous causes.
Interestingly, there are quite a few studies of North Korean escapees' intelligence. They test much lower than South Koreans, even when this is presumably a positively selected group. Something like 90. Still a respectable average, by world standards. The difference between the two scores presumably reflect true environmental effects on intelligence, as well as test bias. But we don't know the respective sizes of these two because there is no measurement study.
My argument was that given the fact of it being ruled by an Islamic theocracy and being under sanctions, we should expect it to underperform economically compared to countries with similar average IQs. Instead it somewhat overperforms. (Though it's not far from the trendline, so this is not a decisive argument.)
So that suggests that those few studies we have might not give the correct result. Ideally we could get something like the test results of all draftees or something like that. (Though this generally doesn't exist outside of the Nordics.)
Kazakhstan also does much better in math/programming olympiads than one would predict from its national IQ. Though it has many Russians and some Germans and Koreans
It seems that you need help in collecting sources about Iran, let me help you:
In general, you provided two Raven's norms to evaluate Iran's intelligence, one of them is for 1970 (Brahani) and related to the period of severe iodine deficiency in Iran, the second one is from 2010, but related to which ethnic group? Arab ethnic group, did you notice that Mr. Rajabi's study was conducted in Ahvaz, which is a predominantly Arab city?
Now let me present you a large study from 2020 of 6 to 11 year old children in Iran, whose children were mostly Gilak or Persian, The study is in English, so you can read it completely yourself:
In this study, the raw score was 28 out of 36 for 7-year-old children, which is exactly the same as white British children of the same age or older, and Iranian children were similar to European children in spatial reasoning.
Need more raw data? I can provide you dozens of studies with raw scores that at least the main ethnicity in Iran (Persians) are similar to Europeans in fluid intelligence
have you done India iq based on caste systems? I would love to know what your thoughts are on 1.India's iq, the difference in caste iq and how much of it is genetics
-The test scores of Ashkenazim are very different in Israel and America, indicating that culture plays a major role here. That should not be surprising given that national IQ estimates are usually based on academic test scores. If I skip school a year, my math grades will suffer, but I haven't gotten genetically dumber.
-Asian countries (and Asians in America) infamously cheat on tests. It wouldn't surprise me if that were the cause of China's IQ score fluctuations.
-Minorities in America are not representative of the populations they come from. In the case of Asians, immigrants are of the intellectual elite, "brain-drained" from their countries. 90% of Indian-Americans are Brahmin, for instance. Their children will inherit some of their intelligence.
On another note, your old cranial capacity data is way off modern large scale studies of brain size. Let me know if you are interested in updates (I can't be bothered digging up sources if you are not).
I'm sorry about being curt. I'm in a hurry, but I really appreciate your research and writings.
"90% of Indian-Americans are Brahmin, for instance"
It's actually ~30%. Still a huge overrepresentation compared to India (8%). Though many of the rest are still from highly privileged trading castes (e.g. baniya) or similar groups. Dalits are only 1% of US Indians while being more than a fifth of the population in India. Razib Khan has written greatly about this, because he has actually done a lot of genetic testing himself as well as collecting wider genomic data.
Then, the question is whether those who don't identify with a caste are more or less likely to be Brahmin. The answer to that is not obvious, since Brahmin are more likely to go to Woke universities.
Of note is that Indian-Americans score far higher on IQ tests than Indian Brahmin.
"I saw research years ago that listed 90% of legal immigrants from India being of Brahmin ancestry, but that could, of course, be wrong"
It's wrong, because Brahmin isn't a religious self-identity. It's a jati, the Indian word for caste. These jatis are ethnic communities which had minimal exogamy for thousands of years, so they are genetically distinct. This is what Razib Khan found in his research as he collected DNA data on Indian-Americans. It doesn't matter if a Brahmin self-identifies as one or not. His genes will tell the story regardless. And Brahmins are ~30% of the US Indian-American population.
"Of note is that Indian-Americans score far higher on IQ tests than Indian Brahmin."
8% of India's population is Brahmin, which translates to over 100 million people. There's maybe 4-5 million Indian-Americans, depending on how you count. And 1/3rd of that are Brahmins. It goes without saying that US brain-drain of India is extreme, even when you only look within an already privileged community. The same is true for all other communities.
This is why obsessing over the exact share of Brahmins is pretty irrelevant, because you can find high-IQ individuals in every jati, merchant community etc and those are the ones that the US braindrains. There's this mistaken belief among some Westerners that only Brahmins are intelligent in India. I can assure you, that such delusions should be dispensed with. Look up "marwaris" or "banias".
Yes, I'm aware of the nature of castes, and the distinct genetics due to low exogamy is core to my point.
Are you saying that a selection large enough to be representative of Indian Americans has been DNA tested to examine caste belonging, so we have better data than self-reported caste? Okay, I'm very interested in seeing it. Do you have a link?
High IQ individuals are far more likely to come from high castes from the data I've seen, so the percentage of Brahmin among Indian Americans is very interesting to me. Obviously, there are bright people within every people group, including the dalits.
And, yes... The brain drain is absolutely insane. America is lucky to have you.
Something doesn't add up here. There are currently three Iranians (one of them an expat with French citizenship) among the world's top 40 chess players. This puts the country level with China; only America, India and Russia have more. The odds against a medium-sized country with an average IQ of 80 achieving this must be astronomical.
There are a few things to consider there. There is a strong cultural effect on production of top chess players. We can safely say that this elevates the Russian rate and depresses the Chinese rate.
But, unlike the case with Scrabble, we can't say that anywhere could develop a significant presence among top chess players just because the competitive field is so weak. Chess competitiveness may not be even everywhere, but it is strong.
So I'd agree that strong Iranian performance in chess is saying something meaningful about the Iranian population, but it's hard to be much more detailed than that.
That's like claiming that tennis doesn't have much to do with athleticism because it's a skill. The guys I play with, just ordinary club players, typically work in software. One or two are professors at a world-leading university. Magnus Carlsen's IQ has been estimated as 190.
Thanks to the Internet chess culture is everywhere now, but not everywhere is turning out elite players the way China and Iran are.
The best chess players in the world are high IQ but very few of the smartest people in the world are good at chess, let alone have any interest in it.
If you look at top chess-producing nations, the Caucasian nations like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan all produce a hugely disproportionate sample of top players. This is not because they are genius nations. It's a cultural preference for chess along with a deliberate effort to cultivate top players.
People using chess as proxy for national intelligence is using an old fallacy which intelligence reseachers have debunked years ago. There's a correlation, but it's a very weak one.
Tennis is not a good test of athletic potential, no. The best tennis players will have great athletic potential, but anyone with a year or two of tennis experience will be better at tennis that Michael Jordan (provided he's never played tennis). So being a world class tennis player means you're a great athlete, but being a great athlete does not mean you're good at tennis.
Here's a meta-analysis for you. "Full-scale IQ explained < 1% of the variance in chess skill."
Being a Norwegian from Oslo West born in 1991, I vaguely know him. His IQ is not 190, lol. He laughs at that himself. He's bright, but language isn't his strong suit, and his memory is not extraordinary outside of chess. He did well in math, but wasn't a top student. Who estimated his IQ?
"The results suggest that cognitive ability contributes meaningfully to individual differences in chess skill, particularly in young chess players and/or at lower levels of skill."
Carlsen hasn't taken an IQ test and I'm not going to bet the house on him being a 190, but I certainly will on him not being a 100, or even in the 130 zone with me.
Meaningful? Sure, by scientific standards. If you think an explanation of 1% of variance is significant in everyday parlor, that's your prerogative, served to you on a platter by my sending you an actual meta-analysis. If you think that that's anything but conscientious by internet standards, you are just arguing in bad faith.
Carlson is neither young nor at the lower levels of skill. This discussion is about whether chess skill at its highest levels correlates strongly enough with IQ that it warrants our doubting the data presented in the article. Chess skill explains 1% variation. I rest my case, and then you can do you, boo.
Maybe smart Iranian expats went to the USA, stupid ones to Europe? Iirc, Sean Last in his old blog showed that the USA gets the smart expats (except Mexicans, that by themselves make the immigration cost-benefit balance sheet negative), Europe the stupid ones - sadly i failed to find the post...
Iran possibly experiences what India experiences, in that the masses aren't that smart and international tests (PISA, etc) don't show a small fraction of their young students doing really well either, even though a lot of their people have risen to prominence in science.
If you look at the field of AI, people with undergrad degrees from Iranian universities are well represented among top AI scientists: https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-tracker/
And Iranian people's participation in AI research is very overrepresented for Asian countries, with Iran producing more top (0.5%) researchers than South Korea: https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-tracker/asian-ai-researchers/
Successful Iranian AI scientists isn't similar to Olympiads since the government has no role in organising their careers, and they're mostly people that left Iran to work in western countries. I would also add there are many AI scientists of Iranian origin that aren't classified as Iranian because they left Iran when young and didn't study in Iranian universities, e.g. Zoubin Ghahramani and Ali Ghodsi.
Another interesting thing is there are two Iranian mathematicians who received the Fields Medal, the highest mathematics award.
I'm half Iranian myself, and tbh when I think about it I'm not that surprised Iran has a low average IQ. It's a huge country with huge diversity. Parts of the country are very modern, but large parts are also very backwards. Iranians that find it impossible for Iran to have an IQ in the 80s react that way because they only mix with a certain type of Iranian in the diaspora rather than farmers in Khorasan. HOWEVER I do think there's a substantial number of Iranians that have IQs of at least 100, and I wouldn't be surprised if Iran's pool of very smart people is larger than in neighbouring countries, even if they don't appear in data from PISA. How could there not be given the amount of young prominent scientists coming out of Iran? Not scientific and totally anecdotal, but I've had many good experiences in Iran too.
It helps a lot to pull from a pool of 88 million people (plus 4 million diaspora). You'll find a few 160-IQ people in there.
Yes, but there don't seem to be nearly as many prominent mathematicians or scientists coming out of Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq or other populous countries.
Turkey has a lot of them, though many actually live in Turkey. If you look at their MIC progress in recent years, it's pretty spectacular.
My sense is that braindrain is a problem in both countries but far worse in Iran, partly because of sanctions etc. For the very elite in Turkey, there are many opportunities to make money and not necessarily in the black market and/or based on connections.
Also, Turkey's PISA score is on par with Greece and has been for many years. Their higher economic development is probably a reflection of a brighter general population than in Iran.
If I may summarize then, either:
1) There's an anomalously large smart fraction that isn't getting counted (probably concentrated in the diaspora),
2) The smart fraction is anomalously well-oriented toward STEM achievement (as contrasted with, say, Soutg Africa where the government is trying to kill them),
3) Something we aren't thinking of,
or some combination of these.
Obviously they have to be concentrated in the diaspora, since leaving Iran is both desirable and difficult.
But the characteristics of the diaspora are still informative about Iran in general; you might e.g. assume that the diaspora reflects the top 5% of Iranians (probably too strict) and then see what that implies about the overall distribution.
Note that a "deep roots" analysis says that Iran should be a very high-performing country. Historically, it always has been.
As to this remark:
> It helps a lot to pull from a pool of 88 million people (plus 4 million diaspora). You'll find a few 160-IQ people in there.
With an average IQ of 100, you should find a bit under 3000 such people.
But with an average IQ of 85, you should find 26 of them. So in fact, it's not helpful at all to have a population of ~100 million if your average IQ is 80.
Another way you might approach that question is by comparison to American blacks. By stylized report, they have an average IQ of 85 and by census estimate, they have a population of around 45 million. Since they have around half the population of Iranians and a noticeably higher IQ, Iranians should outnumber them by something under 2:1 in high-performing fields. Is that what we see?
>they only mix with a certain type of Iranian in the diaspora rather than farmers in Khorasan
It is ironic considering the vast majority of iranian scientists during the medieval era came from khorasan lol but isnt khorasan mostly in afghanistan and uzbekistan nowadays??
" It does only slightly better as a country, overall, than one would expect from the estimated average intelligence of the people. Iran doesn't have a communist economy, but is suffering from an Islamic dictatorship, and is under various USA-related sanctions. Despite these problems, Iran appears to be doing about as well as one would expect based on the intelligence of its people. The level of development of the country, therefore, doesn't provide any reason to doubt the estimates of average intelligence."
Wouldn't that suggest though that IQ is slightly underestimated? Given those headwinds (Islamic dictatorship and sanctions), we should expect the country to somewhat underperform its average IQ. If it overperforms it slightly instead, that's at least suggestive of a wrong assumption. Right?
Could be, but this depends on whether you think Islamic theocracy is likely to cause lower S factor scores. In any case, Iran is quite close to the regression line, so whatever issues are with the estimates, they are not likely to be large.
What about variation in effort? Middle Eastern people are notoriously the laziest people on Earth. I wonder if this negative effect applies to most racial groups when it concerns things like IQ tests or even PISA, and for Middle Eastern populations it is even worse.
Aren't there studies which show that incentives lead to better results? Or if these are real they dont show a much larger benefit for Middle Eastern gains relative to other races?
Yes, but North Korea also has a higher IQ even when suppressed. One thing to note is that more conservative, authoritarian countries -- the closer the skew is to objective materialist views, investment in physics, sciences and mathematics. This is seen in in Middle East and Asia. More emphasis on pragmatics, this could be the multiplier effect of that cause. You see gender-neutral or egalitarian countries showing more sexual dimorphism and vice versa due to economic necessity causing greater preferential treatment towards the pragmatics vs luxury beliefs like social welfare or whatever extraneous causes.
Interestingly, there are quite a few studies of North Korean escapees' intelligence. They test much lower than South Koreans, even when this is presumably a positively selected group. Something like 90. Still a respectable average, by world standards. The difference between the two scores presumably reflect true environmental effects on intelligence, as well as test bias. But we don't know the respective sizes of these two because there is no measurement study.
How would sanctions lower its national IQ?
I don't know. They might not do that at all.
My argument was that given the fact of it being ruled by an Islamic theocracy and being under sanctions, we should expect it to underperform economically compared to countries with similar average IQs. Instead it somewhat overperforms. (Though it's not far from the trendline, so this is not a decisive argument.)
So that suggests that those few studies we have might not give the correct result. Ideally we could get something like the test results of all draftees or something like that. (Though this generally doesn't exist outside of the Nordics.)
"Instead it somewhat overperforms."
Fossil fuels.
Kazakhstan also does much better in math/programming olympiads than one would predict from its national IQ. Though it has many Russians and some Germans and Koreans
It's also possible they're bringing in ringers. The US team is all Chinese guys. I don't think this is likely, but it's possible.
It seems that you need help in collecting sources about Iran, let me help you:
In general, you provided two Raven's norms to evaluate Iran's intelligence, one of them is for 1970 (Brahani) and related to the period of severe iodine deficiency in Iran, the second one is from 2010, but related to which ethnic group? Arab ethnic group, did you notice that Mr. Rajabi's study was conducted in Ahvaz, which is a predominantly Arab city?
Now let me present you a large study from 2020 of 6 to 11 year old children in Iran, whose children were mostly Gilak or Persian, The study is in English, so you can read it completely yourself:
https://childmentalhealth.ir/article-1-1215-fa.pdf
In this study, the raw score was 28 out of 36 for 7-year-old children, which is exactly the same as white British children of the same age or older, and Iranian children were similar to European children in spatial reasoning.
Need more raw data? I can provide you dozens of studies with raw scores that at least the main ethnicity in Iran (Persians) are similar to Europeans in fluid intelligence
Are you surprised? I'm waiting for your answer.
If you have problems opening the PDF, you can search:
Determination of Psychometric Indicators and Standardization of Intelligence Test of Children’s
Raven Colored Progressive Matrices in Elementary School Students
Authors: Ali Rasouli Foshtami , Touraj Hashemi* , Azar Kiamarsi , Azra Ghaffari
have you done India iq based on caste systems? I would love to know what your thoughts are on 1.India's iq, the difference in caste iq and how much of it is genetics
"These are tests like the PISA." Iran does not participate in Pisa. You should have done more meticulous research. New research suggests a mean IQ of 97 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6425765/
Some thoughts:
-The test scores of Ashkenazim are very different in Israel and America, indicating that culture plays a major role here. That should not be surprising given that national IQ estimates are usually based on academic test scores. If I skip school a year, my math grades will suffer, but I haven't gotten genetically dumber.
-Asian countries (and Asians in America) infamously cheat on tests. It wouldn't surprise me if that were the cause of China's IQ score fluctuations.
-Minorities in America are not representative of the populations they come from. In the case of Asians, immigrants are of the intellectual elite, "brain-drained" from their countries. 90% of Indian-Americans are Brahmin, for instance. Their children will inherit some of their intelligence.
On another note, your old cranial capacity data is way off modern large scale studies of brain size. Let me know if you are interested in updates (I can't be bothered digging up sources if you are not).
I'm sorry about being curt. I'm in a hurry, but I really appreciate your research and writings.
"90% of Indian-Americans are Brahmin, for instance"
It's actually ~30%. Still a huge overrepresentation compared to India (8%). Though many of the rest are still from highly privileged trading castes (e.g. baniya) or similar groups. Dalits are only 1% of US Indians while being more than a fifth of the population in India. Razib Khan has written greatly about this, because he has actually done a lot of genetic testing himself as well as collecting wider genomic data.
I believe you forget to take into account that many Indian-Americans do not identify with a caste. In the context of genetic intellectual potential, we should investigate caste background. I saw research years ago that listed 90% of legal immigrants from India being of Brahmin ancestry, but that could, of course, be wrong. I cannot remember the origin of the research. Estimates a quick Google search yields at the moment are all over the place, but this article indicates that 83% of Indians who identify with a caste say they are Brahmin: https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/06/09/social-realities-of-indian-americans-results-from-2020-indian-american-attitudes-survey-pub-84667#:~:text=Whereas%2053%20percent%20of%20foreign,stay%20in%20the%20United%20States.
Then, the question is whether those who don't identify with a caste are more or less likely to be Brahmin. The answer to that is not obvious, since Brahmin are more likely to go to Woke universities.
Of note is that Indian-Americans score far higher on IQ tests than Indian Brahmin.
"I saw research years ago that listed 90% of legal immigrants from India being of Brahmin ancestry, but that could, of course, be wrong"
It's wrong, because Brahmin isn't a religious self-identity. It's a jati, the Indian word for caste. These jatis are ethnic communities which had minimal exogamy for thousands of years, so they are genetically distinct. This is what Razib Khan found in his research as he collected DNA data on Indian-Americans. It doesn't matter if a Brahmin self-identifies as one or not. His genes will tell the story regardless. And Brahmins are ~30% of the US Indian-American population.
"Of note is that Indian-Americans score far higher on IQ tests than Indian Brahmin."
8% of India's population is Brahmin, which translates to over 100 million people. There's maybe 4-5 million Indian-Americans, depending on how you count. And 1/3rd of that are Brahmins. It goes without saying that US brain-drain of India is extreme, even when you only look within an already privileged community. The same is true for all other communities.
This is why obsessing over the exact share of Brahmins is pretty irrelevant, because you can find high-IQ individuals in every jati, merchant community etc and those are the ones that the US braindrains. There's this mistaken belief among some Westerners that only Brahmins are intelligent in India. I can assure you, that such delusions should be dispensed with. Look up "marwaris" or "banias".
Yes, I'm aware of the nature of castes, and the distinct genetics due to low exogamy is core to my point.
Are you saying that a selection large enough to be representative of Indian Americans has been DNA tested to examine caste belonging, so we have better data than self-reported caste? Okay, I'm very interested in seeing it. Do you have a link?
High IQ individuals are far more likely to come from high castes from the data I've seen, so the percentage of Brahmin among Indian Americans is very interesting to me. Obviously, there are bright people within every people group, including the dalits.
And, yes... The brain drain is absolutely insane. America is lucky to have you.
Something doesn't add up here. There are currently three Iranians (one of them an expat with French citizenship) among the world's top 40 chess players. This puts the country level with China; only America, India and Russia have more. The odds against a medium-sized country with an average IQ of 80 achieving this must be astronomical.
There are a few things to consider there. There is a strong cultural effect on production of top chess players. We can safely say that this elevates the Russian rate and depresses the Chinese rate.
But, unlike the case with Scrabble, we can't say that anywhere could develop a significant presence among top chess players just because the competitive field is so weak. Chess competitiveness may not be even everywhere, but it is strong.
So I'd agree that strong Iranian performance in chess is saying something meaningful about the Iranian population, but it's hard to be much more detailed than that.
Chess does not have a very strong correlation with IQ, surprisingly, and it's very much a skill. China does not have much of a culture for Chess.
That's like claiming that tennis doesn't have much to do with athleticism because it's a skill. The guys I play with, just ordinary club players, typically work in software. One or two are professors at a world-leading university. Magnus Carlsen's IQ has been estimated as 190.
Thanks to the Internet chess culture is everywhere now, but not everywhere is turning out elite players the way China and Iran are.
The best chess players in the world are high IQ but very few of the smartest people in the world are good at chess, let alone have any interest in it.
If you look at top chess-producing nations, the Caucasian nations like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan all produce a hugely disproportionate sample of top players. This is not because they are genius nations. It's a cultural preference for chess along with a deliberate effort to cultivate top players.
People using chess as proxy for national intelligence is using an old fallacy which intelligence reseachers have debunked years ago. There's a correlation, but it's a very weak one.
Tennis is not a good test of athletic potential, no. The best tennis players will have great athletic potential, but anyone with a year or two of tennis experience will be better at tennis that Michael Jordan (provided he's never played tennis). So being a world class tennis player means you're a great athlete, but being a great athlete does not mean you're good at tennis.
Here's a meta-analysis for you. "Full-scale IQ explained < 1% of the variance in chess skill."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289616301593
Regarding Carlsen:
Being a Norwegian from Oslo West born in 1991, I vaguely know him. His IQ is not 190, lol. He laughs at that himself. He's bright, but language isn't his strong suit, and his memory is not extraordinary outside of chess. He did well in math, but wasn't a top student. Who estimated his IQ?
Why didn't you quote the abstract?
"The results suggest that cognitive ability contributes meaningfully to individual differences in chess skill, particularly in young chess players and/or at lower levels of skill."
Carlsen hasn't taken an IQ test and I'm not going to bet the house on him being a 190, but I certainly will on him not being a 100, or even in the 130 zone with me.
Meaningful? Sure, by scientific standards. If you think an explanation of 1% of variance is significant in everyday parlor, that's your prerogative, served to you on a platter by my sending you an actual meta-analysis. If you think that that's anything but conscientious by internet standards, you are just arguing in bad faith.
Carlson is neither young nor at the lower levels of skill. This discussion is about whether chess skill at its highest levels correlates strongly enough with IQ that it warrants our doubting the data presented in the article. Chess skill explains 1% variation. I rest my case, and then you can do you, boo.
Yes, Iranian refugees do very well in some places. There are many of them in elite positions, writers etc. But looking at other data, it does not appear Iranians do well in e.g. Denmark, on average. E.g., GPA in school was below Danish norms. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350393113_Country_of_Origin_IQ_and_Muslim_Percentage_Predict_Grade_Point_Average_in_School_among_116_Immigrant_Groups_in_Denmark Iranians in Netherlands commit more than 2x the crime of Dutch natives. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339213786_Public_Preferences_and_Reality_Crime_Rates_among_70_Immigrant_Groups_in_the_Netherlands
Maybe smart Iranian expats went to the USA, stupid ones to Europe? Iirc, Sean Last in his old blog showed that the USA gets the smart expats (except Mexicans, that by themselves make the immigration cost-benefit balance sheet negative), Europe the stupid ones - sadly i failed to find the post...