Techno-Puritanism / The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI

TPG 17.2 · 8,286 words · 38 min read · Ecological Niches and Convergent Evolution

The Mystery of Modern Jewish Urban Specialization

What about more generic specializations? For example, why does modern Jewish culture seem heavily biased in favor of living in cities and dense settlements despite this predilection being absent in early Jewish history? Not only do Jews live in cities at a higher proportion than almost any other large culture on earth (a whopping 96% of Jews who live in the U.S. live in urban areas),[[128]](#_ftn128) but even when forced into rural environments like in parts of Israel, they use unique models that betray an intense lack of comfort with isolated rural lifestyles. Specifically, two new types of settlements were invented for these environments, one being the collectivist commune of the Kibbutz and the other being the Moshav, a kind of ultra-dense suburb in otherwise rural areas.

Why would a culture that, for thousands of years, has been repeatedly isolated into ghettos, then “genocided” when returning to cities, not stop putting themselves in such a vulnerable position? It’s not as though Jewish people have a theological reason for returning to cities—or even a history of living primarily in cities before the medieval period. In exploring my (Simone’s) own Jewish heritage, this question intrigued me enough that it in part inspired this book. (My family rediscovered we are matrilineally Jewish while I was growing up, so my mother was not able to pass any Jewish culture on to me.)

For those unfamiliar with Jewish history: The Holocaust was hardly the first genocide that targeted Jews—just the largest. It was common throughout the medieval period for Jews to set up in a city, be pushed into a ghetto, and then be rounded up and expelled or killed in a pogrom. Oddly, it looks like during this period—the period of most intense persecution—the predominant Jewish cultivar became an urban-specialist one.

Also, some might dismiss the above question with the answer: “Oh, Jews have to live in population clusters of other Jews to form minyans (a quorum of ten Jewish adults required for certain religious obligations).” This explanation can be dismissed because historically there were large (now extinct) rural Jewish cultivars. Jewish culture can and has adapted minyans to rural environments. Heck, most of the sects of Christianity that first settled the U.S. were minority religious groups that worshiped in congregations and yet they had no trouble settling in rural areas and traveling long distances to regularly worship together.

This question seems particularly pointed right now, with the rise in antisemitism on both sides of the political spectrum painting a worrying picture for the Jewish community. Why don’t Jews get out of cities and arm themselves before the next pogrom commences? Given the opinions you have read in this book, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that many of our personal friends are Orthodox Jews. Despite many of these friends being quite politically conservative, none of them owns more than a couple guns, all live in difficult-to-defend urban centers, and despite many being wealthy, almost none own ranches or farms outside the city to which they could retreat in a worst-case scenario.

As we hail from mostly rural-specialized cultivars, this seems insane. Even when we don’t hear our people dehumanized on both sides of the political aisle, our inherited culture is screaming at us: “Arm yourself! Become self-sufficient! Own enough land to grow food for your family! Move as far away from others as possible when society starts to become unstable!” We say all this with the clear realization that these rural cultivars have been less successful than Jewish culture (both in being less old and less prevalent today).

Clearly there is some advantage to a Jewish strategy of urban specialization, so what is it?

Our theorized answer comes from understanding we are asking the wrong question. After the Second Temple period, Jewish refugees splintered into a plethora of cultivars, filling dozens of unique ecological niches and causing Jewish culture to undergo something of a cultural Cambrian Explosion. Only a small, tightly related family of these cultivars survived the medieval period intact and that is what created the illusion that Jewish culture is more widely specialized to live in cities. It would be like a Floridian asking, “what is it about Cuba that makes Cubans so conservative, capitalistic, and good at starting companies?” The answer of course is that nothing about Cuba makes Cubans in Florida have those qualities; rather, there was a strict selection event that disproportionately sorted for Cubans with those qualities and drove them to Florida. In the same manner, nothing about Judaism makes it an urban specialist culture—but something about the selective pressures Jewish people faced at a certain point in their history did.

Suppose Jewish culture evolved some rural components (which we know it did historically). What happened to the city components and the rural components every time a local ruler decided he didn’t want Jews anymore? Jews had no larger population center to which they could retreat. Because, to a rural culture, land = wealth = survival, a choice to flee meant giving up everything (possibly even their ability to survive). Their only means of earning an income, and the only way for rural Jews to get food again, would require either finding and settling unused-but-fertile land or taking someone else’s land.

In a city culture, wealth is stored in things like precious metals and jewelry, making it much easier for urban families to pack up, flee, and start fresh somewhere else. More importantly, city cultures make money off of generalizable skills. If you are a cobbler and you have to flee from one city and set up shop in another, it might be hard, but you will be able to make a living creating and repairing shoes in this new city (unless the local cobblers guild kills you or has some licensing system, but that’s a different story). If, however, you are a farmer and you have to move to new land, you are screwed.

This dynamic makes rural communities more likely to try to stay and tough out persecution[[129]](#_ftn129)—and end up getting themselves killed. While the city branches of Jewish culture presented an easier target, they were also much more mobile. In other words, Jews living in cities prompted more frequent genocide attempts, but less thorough genocide attempts. If anything, the frequent targeting of Jews, which forced them to flee cities and relocate in various other cities, could have served to increase this urban cultivar’s geographic footprint while also ensuring higher genetic and cultural relation across that geographic footprint. A Jew of this city-focused cultivar living in Geneva would be more closely related to a Jew living in London—both culturally and literally—than a member of any Protestant cultivar due to the Jewish population being regularly forced to leave cities and redistribute itself across a smattering of European cities.

Were there any winning strategies for rural Jews during this period? The only conceivable winning strategy would be not to fight back or flee, but get very good at hiding your cultural identity. We see one cultivar of Jews that took this strategy in the Crypto Jews of Spain (and subsequently Mexico).

There also appears to have been at least two small martial rural Jewish cultivars (Jewish cultivars that did evolve into the militaristic rural niche) that survived to modern times and only recently went extinct as distinct cultural identities: The Mountain Jews of Dagestan and the Habbani Jews. Zionist emissary Shmuel Yavne’eli noted: “The Jews in these parts are held in high esteem by everyone in Yemen and Aden. They are said to be courageous, always with their weapons and wild long hair, and the names of their towns are mentioned by the Jews of Yemen with great admiration.”[[130]](#_ftn130) (When we say a cultivar went extinct, we do not mean literally every practicing member has died—just that the community is no longer large enough or graced with enough cultural memory to regrow into a century-spanning identity.)

Clearly rural Jews faced far too many headwinds to produce many surviving cultivars—and it makes perfect sense why: An armed rural population is far more threatening to dominating forces than an urban population that trusts the rule of law to protect them. Let’s say you’re a king and your people are champing at the bit to scapegoat, kick out, and loot a particular culture within your domain. Should the group be urban, you would likely raid and steal their valuables while killing a chunk of them but otherwise let them leave, as they are not an active threat. On the other hand, you would make sure to surround and completely eliminate an armed rural version of this culture, as they represent the type of group that might come back and counterattack should you fail to destroy the entire collective.

This can be seen pretty clearly in Jewish history from the medieval to modern period. While we are aware of Jews fighting back often in their early history (before they were urban specialists), we cannot find a single instance of modern Jewish people (e.g., after the Jewish revolt against Heraclius in 602) counterattacking or trying to forcefully take over a city or regional government after being partially slaughtered and expelled. Given that this happened a lot, it’s pretty remarkable. (Two exceptions to this trend of not fighting back in the moment, though neither instance was retaliatory, can be seen in The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Jewish Labor Bund in Communist Russia.[[131]](#_ftn131))

But again, this makes sense. If someone enters a city-based community and starts killing 5% of the population and you fight back, all of a sudden you are a threat and your attackers become motivated to kill everyone. This cultural imperative is partially ensconced in both Gideon’s story from the Book of Judges, Elijah, and the Book of Esther, with the Book of Esther making it clear that the way to prevent pogroms is to obtain political influence, not to fight back.

What would have happened to the Jewish community if it hadn’t experienced a “Cambrian Explosion” during this period? What would have happened if Jews had stayed in the Levant and kept rebelling? On page 792 of the Appendix (Alternate History Jews: Samaritans), we explore this question. Short answer: They would probably not exist today.

You might be thinking, “What about the Yom Kippur War? It may not have represented exactly those circumstances, but it did involve Jews fighting effectively against an invading force.” While you would be right, this happened at a unique new point in Jewish history at which they finally had land again (land not taken through a Jewish invasion) and this reaction was triggered because they could not retreat from said land. More importantly, they did not fight like a rural group would. A rural specialist culture would have armed families to form a loosely organized guerrilla force (a fun cinematic depiction of this aesthetic can be seen in The Patriot[[132]](#_ftn132)). Instead of a loosely organized, tribal-unit-based guerrilla response to the invasion, Israelites instead organized a state-run-and-supplied military response, very much reacting to the threat as a city-state and not a rural collective.

In contrast to more martial rural cultures, urban-specialized cultivars are more naturally adapted to modern integrated military tactics that require the rapid formation of deep levels of organization and high-trust command structures. The cultural evolutionary pressures that shaped martial cultures perfected them for war of a different era—war that was far more tribalistic and focused on smaller units. This in part explains why Israelites did so well despite being outnumbered, out-supplied, and out-teched. For those unfamiliar with the Yom Kippur War: The invading armies outnumbered the Israelis at a ratio of 100 to 1 in manpower and 10 to 1 in armor and artillery. At that time, Israel was not the military-industrial tech power house it is now.[[133]](#_ftn133)

So, when we state that urban cultures don’t protect themselves, what we mean is they don’t protect themselves at the level of the family. They trust complex systems (governments, militaries, etc.) to protect them—and in a globalized world, that is a very smart strategy. Should globalization break down, it is less clear how sustainable this strategy will be.

It is also unclear how smart this strategy is after the Holocaust, which demonstrated that while pogroms are far more rare in modern times, they are significantly more thorough. With birth rates collapsing around the world and Secular Jews being the only large technophilic cultivar that has an above-repopulation birth rate when practiced in developed countries, Jewish people are going to have a huge target on their backs. (This instinct of collapsing predominant ethnicities to target minority populations with high birth rates can be seen in China’s ethnocide of Uyghur cultivars).

You may be thinking: “There couldn’t actually be another period of massive, extreme, systemic, government-mandated discrimination against Jews in the near future, right?”

Sadly, we think a surge in serious discrimination is likely if the supervirus is not overcome. Given the ethno-nationalism inherent in some strains of right-wing ideology, there has always been some latent antisemitism in certain factions of right-wing thought. While for a time the left wing provided a united counterpoint to these isolated forces, the virus has fundamentally changed the game.

A core ideology the virus needs people to hold so that it can spread is that: (1) Harmful discrimination against a group is the core cause of inequality and (2) Ending that discrimination will end inequality. That the Jewish community has at the same time been oppressed and successful runs counter to this narrative. To address the mismatch, the supervirus has flirted with classifying Jews as not just a privileged class but the supreme privileged class and ultimate enemy. It has begun to claim that Jews were never actually that oppressed, but used their power to write a false narrative of oppression. (If you doubt this, consider how communist groups like The Black Hammer burned copies of Anne Frank’s diaries—or spend some time in an ANTIFA chat room.) When antisemitic rhetoric and policies become a panacea to politicians across the political spectrum, buckle up.

For the last few hundred years, it would seem that a minority culture susceptible to bigotry is best served by having a disposition toward cities. Given this, why do some cultivars like ours strongly prefer rural environments and see cities as dangerous? How are they able to do this while still staying stable? We think this is the case for two reasons.

First: Rural specialist cultures are almost always specialized at the type of guerrilla warfare that makes the land they occupy very hard to hold. For the most part, armies have historically been fueled by cities—outside of no-longer-viable cultural ecological niches, like “nomadic army” specialist cultivars and roaming mercenary specialist cultivars (for example, we know from literature there was a large group of Jews that lived a mercenary lifestyle after the Second Temple period that filled this ecological niche before going extinct).

Rural specialist cultivars have therefore been able to leverage the threat of decentralized, guerrilla warfare to occupy environments that urban cultivars aren’t willing to pay dearly to hold. This is why many of the cultural groups that were most successful on the American frontier—who pushed out the greatly-weakened-by-disease native population (which had lost over 90% to disease in some areas)—came from regions of Europe that were historically thought of as hostile or barbarous (like the Irish, Scots, and some groups of Germans) while immigrants from nations like Italy mostly stayed in cities.

Second: Rural specialist cultivars tend to bestow to adherents a detachment to material and intergenerational wealth (prioritizing ideological objectives instead), making it possible for them to endure despite occasional obligations to drop everything, flee, and start fresh somewhere new. For example, during the Civil War, multiple members of my (Malcolm’s) family chose to repeatedly resettle on new land every time Confederate troops tried to burn them out (the most historically recorded example of this was the Kaiser burnout). Despite this, my ancestor Warren Collins managed to have 13 kids—meaning a choice to forgo wealth in favor of ideals did not interfere with our family’s fitness, genetically speaking.

This sort of mindset has become increasingly engrained in the rural specialist cultivars that both Simone and I have inherited. Though both of us were raised to see wealth as moderately useful, it was emphasized far more that we should always be prepared to lose everything and that what mattered most was the skills we had acquired (which we could ultimately just use to rebuild lost wealth). This mindset enables rural specialist cultivars to endure through time, but is probably detrimental overall as it leads to the frequent total loss of intergenerational wealth (and the cumulative advantage that accompanies it).

It therefore doesn’t surprise us that Jewish culture still outcompetes Calvinist culture over the long run, demonstrating that the city-focused strategy has been optimal for the long-term survival of a culture—at least in a historical context. The question is, is urban specialization still the optimal strategy? As of now, we can’t know. It would be wise to encourage multiple branches of a culture to attempt different angles of the strategy.

Downsides to urban specialization in the modern world:

Downsides to rural specialization in the modern world:

There is also a hybrid approach whereby people are expected to move between a city and rural environment depending on their life stage (e.g., using cities to secure a partner and the countryside to raise a family). There are certainly cultivars that have leveraged this model successfully in the past; just consider the landed gentry in England around the Regency Era, which would flock to London for the Season (enabling their youth to intermingle and marry) and to serve in Parliament, but return to their country estates for the rest of the year. This model might work; however, it may also be too complicated to pass between generations with fidelity, especially for less wealthy families that are unable to occasionally pass rural and urban properties on to future generations.

Our favorite strategy—but one that requires a larger population to execute—involves a significant portion of a cultivar’s population migrating to a cultivar-run city state. This approach grants the dual benefits of a defendable cultural environment and good dating markets, all while nevertheless encouraging a broader diaspora to operate in the wider world, gaining new skills, building wealth, and introducing new cultural developments that might strengthen the central culture. To some extent, Israel showcases an attempt at this strategy—but one that made the mistake of choosing land that other people wanted. To be fair, this was considered at Israel’s establishment and there was a significant push to have the Jewish state set up on less desirable land in Africa (called the Uganda Scheme). If we were going to attempt this strategy for our House’s cultivar, we would establish our city state somewhere in the far north, not just to reduce the odds of others wanting to live on the land, but also to obligate our cultivar to develop high-tech agriculture not dependent on a stable environment and ensure that our descendants grew up with the feeling of daily hardship (more on why this is important later).

Notes:

On the subject of geographic determinism: Look at maps showing where Nobel Prize winners were raised—or average IQ scores by region. They suggest that heat addles the mind.[[134]](#_ftn134) This might have something to do with protein denaturation, time spent inside, or even some sort of physical stress response, similar to how fasting can make you sharper—but with opposite results. Regardless, choose land in the far north: Not only will this keep you sharp, but the hostile climate will dissuade weak people who fear discomfort from joining you and diluting your fervor. Better yet, building a culture that specializes to survive in hostile environments in which one must grow food inside with technology and spend most of the time indoors will hone members for long-term space travel. Besides, if you share our predilections for frostpunk aesthetics, northern settlement will fit you like a glove! (To be clear, we are not arguing that groups which live in cold environments evolve to be smarter but that anyone who moves to a cold environment gains an IQ and productivity boost.)

The Myth of a Large, Genetic Jewish IQ Advantage

Note: This contentious topic has been difficult to research not just because academic philosophers are functionally blocked from discussing such things in public (for example, a paper was recently retracted from a philosophical journal for being offensive),[[136]](#_ftn136) but because independent researchers on both sides of the debate who share their findings have been misleading. If you are familiar with the YouTube war on this subject or think you have read both sides of the debate and have made up your mind, we encourage you to read this chapter nevertheless, as we cover information not present in the public discussion.

When we started writing this book, we were fairly certain that Jews were smarter than other groups either at a cultural or genetic level.

It comes as no surprise that many people have come to the conclusion that Jews must be smarter than other people on average. That said, after going over the evidence, we have changed our minds on this subject drastically. This was such a jarring change of opinion, we had to make edits throughout the book after it happened.

First, let’s get the most common myth out of the way: That “Jews are smart because the Holocaust acted as a selection event, eliminating the less intelligent Jewish population.” The types of evidence cited in this argument (Jews being overrepresented in educated professions and positions of power) can be seen in data before the Holocaust. For example, in pre-Holocaust Germany, Jews were overrepresented in the medical profession at a rate of more than 1,500%, with 47% of pediatricians being Jewish even though Jews accounted for only 0.9% of the population at the time.[[139]](#_ftn139) Stats like this can be found virtually anywhere you look in reference to pre-Holocaust Jewish populations.

It is similarly unlikely that “pogroms made Jews smart.” We say this for two reasons. The first being that other groups plagued by pogroms (like the Romani—aka Gypsies) are not also known for being disproportionately in jobs requiring higher education. Second: Jews, objectively, are not particularly smarter than average.

Just as we did when we first dug deeper, you might be thinking: “Wait, what? That can’t be true. I have read my entire life that Jews are super-duper smart. Aren’t there like a bunch of scientific studies that show Jews have higher IQ?”

While it is true there are a bunch of studies on this topic, they don’t ultimately demonstrate in a robust manner that Jewish people have systematically higher IQs.

The most-cited and well-conducted study on Jewish IQ differences was published by Margaret Backman in 1972.[[140]](#_ftn140) This study compared 1236 Jews to 1051 non-Jewish Caucasians across six different batteries of tests focused on different types of intelligence. It found that Jews had an average score of 51.88 across all test categories while Caucasians had an average score of 51.22—that’s a 1% difference. (Note: Backman also did a preliminary study in 1970 that people sometimes cite, but it only looked at 65 Jewish boys, so we are ignoring it.[[141]](#_ftn141))

What is wild is that people will frequently cite Backman’s 1972 research as proof that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher-than-average IQ. They do this by only mentioning the two of those six test areas in which Jews outperformed other populations (verbal and math) while ignoring the parts where they underperformed, then generalize that score, creating the illusion of some big intelligence difference—but that is objectively not what study says.

If it were true that Jews had much higher IQs, Israel (with an 81% Jewish population) wouldn’t have an average national IQ lower than that in the United States (94 vs. 98).[[142]](#_ftn142) We find this nation-wide number very compelling, as it is much harder to manipulate than individual studies. As Ashkenazi Jews make up almost half (44.2%[[143]](#_ftn143)) of the Jewish population in Israel, it is preposterous to assert that they sport an average IQ over a standard deviation above that of the general population—unless one also asserts that non-Ashkenazi Jews are outlandishly stupid, which (most) supporters of the “Jewish competence” theory don’t argue.[[144]](#_ftn144)

In fact, one of the core champions of the Ashkenazi-high-IQ theory, Miles Storfer, argued in his book Intelligence and Giftedness that Sephardic Jews (who make up most of the other half—44.9%—of the Jewish population in Israel)[[145]](#_ftn145) have an average IQ of 111. If this were true, even if all non-Jews in Israel were mentally handicapped, you still couldn’t get an average IQ of 94 for the nation.[[146]](#_ftn146)

While Backman’s 1972 paper is the most cited peer-reviewed article on this topic (being cited 252 times at the time of this book’s publication), another well-known researcher in the space is Richard Lynn. He argued that Jews have a higher-than-average IQ in both 2004[[147]](#_ftn147) (with a paper now cited 49 times) and 2008 in co-authorship with Satoshi Kanazawa[[148]](#_ftn148) (with a paper cited 32 times). Lynn used the same test in each case, however his 2008 work with Kanazawa involved more participants.

While these studies yielded results in line with Backman’s research, they only tested verbal IQ, which allowed them to “prove” that Jews have a general IQ advantage by cherry picking the type of intelligence measured. We suspect Lynn chose to be intentionally manipulative as he specifically cites Jews getting low non-verbal reasoning scores as motivation for his research:

“.. but these are so variable and in some instances so low as to raise doubts about their credibility. It is difficult to credit that the Jewish sample could have a non-verbal reasoning IQ of 91.3, and at the same time a mathematical IQ (‘‘quantitative reasoning’’ in the McGrew and Flanagan taxonomy) of 109.7. It is also difficult to credit that the Jewish sample could have a verbal IQ of 107.8 while at the same time having a short-term verbal memory IQ of 95.1. These results are in need of checking and replication.”

If Lynn’s goal was to truly prove the claim that Jews do actually have a higher general IQ, he would have focused on the non-verbal-reasoning facets of intelligence investigated by Backman in 1972, where Jews were deficient—not where they had an advantage.

Imagine your kid took a battery of evaluations and while they performed wonderfully on the verbal test, their visuospatial test score was wanting. If you wished to prove the results were wrong about their overall performance, you would have your child retake just the visuospatial test—the one on which they performed poorly—rather than the verbal evaluation (where presumably you have nothing to contest). If instead you just wanted your kid to get into a good college and didn’t actually care about getting a “true” measure of their performance, you would find some other test that only had a verbal component and present it as an evaluation representative of your kid’s overall performance.

Lynn tries to argue exactly this:

“The first items of information of particular interest to us are the respondents’ religion and ethnic group. An analysis of these enables us to categorize the respondents as Jewish, non-Jewish white, Black and other. The second item of interest is the respondents’ score on a 10-word vocabulary test. Vocabulary is a good measure of both general intelligence and verbal intelligence.”[[149]](#_ftn149) [[150]](#_ftn150)

Lynn’s findings around vocabulary are largely in line with the verbal advantage found in Backman’s research, meaning there is some reason to have confidence in Backman’s other scores as well.

You might be wondering about other data cited by those who argue Jews are something like a standard deviation smarter than other populations. Outside of the Richard Lynn’s work, this data mostly comes from two studies: The first (13 citations)[[151]](#_ftn151) compares wealthy, Jewish, NYC day school students to a general population, while the second (331 citations)[[152]](#_ftn152) uses data from Kibbutzim whose graduates have historically outcompeted other Jews within Israel. While the second study itself is not making an argument about Jewish IQ, Miles Stopher used its data to make that assertion in the aforementioned book, Intelligence and Giftedness.[[153]](#_ftn153)

Despite their samples being quite skewed—and even though neither study itself claimed to make assertions about general Jewish IQ—people often cite them when making arguments around the average Jewish IQ. Imagine you wanted to show that British people were smarter than other people, so you compared the performance of students at elite British private schools or gifted programs to that of students in other nations’ general populations.

If you shared our original assumptions and believed there were was an abundance of well-conducted research featuring large sample sizes that clearly demonstrated outsized Jewish intelligence, you probably think we are cherry picking, but in the words of Richard Lynn himself,

“There is only one study of the intelligence of American Jews in the last half century which appears to be representative and had a reasonable sample size. This is Backman’s (1972) analysis of the data in Project Talent, a nationwide American survey of the abilities of 18 year olds carried out in 1960.”[[154]](#_ftn154)

That’s the very same study that shows an only 1% difference. (Mind exploding gif.[[155]](#_ftn155))

You see similar things wherever you look:

Probably the most compelling evidence suggesting a higher Jewish general intelligence comes from The Bell Curve, which contributes evidence from the NLSY (National Longitudinal Surveys) data set to the debate. This data does indicate a dramatically higher Jewish general IQ (0.84 standard deviations from white Christians), though it does admit that “we cannot be sure that the ninety-eight Jews in this sample are nationally representative” and that the “source of the difference is concentrated in the verbal component.”

After conducting an extensive search, the only other research we found that supports the “Jewish competency hypothesis” with IQ data are two papers, both published in 1976 (what’s with this subject and the 1970s, right?). One, by Julius Romanoff (which has only been cited by others five times), suggests an average Jewish IQ of 115.[[158]](#_ftn158) The other (cited 42 times), by Victor Cicirelli, compared Jewish sixth-grade students to those representing the general population and found the Jewish participants to have a seven-point IQ advantage.[[159]](#_ftn159)

A final source of evidence we have yet to address—but which may prove us wrong—relates to high-IQ-correlated polygenic risk scores being higher in Jewish populations.[[160]](#_ftn160) While we find this evidence uniquely compelling, we hesitate to update our beliefs based on this finding alone after seeing so many people misquote and misinterpret research. We also wonder if these polygenic risk scores are picking up IQ-correlated traits that grant Jews a verbal advantage more acutely than others.

In short, outside of a few highly ideologically motivated studies, the strongest data-backed claim that a person can reasonably make about Jewish IQ differences is that Ashkenazi Jews have marginally better verbal IQ and math skills, which is offset by marginally lower visuospatial intelligence and reasoning—like 5%-10% in both directions. It is really weird that people always mention Ashkenazi Jews’ higher verbal and math scores but almost never bring up their equally lower non-verbal reasoning scores, which is what leads to the neutral effect on IQ overall.

If you are like us, you are now probably thinking that there must be other studies out there but Richard Lynn is right; Margaret Backman really published “the only one study of the intelligence of American Jews in the last half century which appears to be representative and had a reasonable sample size.” We went over a number of meta studies and they mostly pulled from the above cited papers. There are three alternate hypotheses we have seen thrown around:

  1. That Jews have a non-standard curve in their IQ (i.e., there are more Jews at the extreme high end and low end of the curve)—however we have not seen data to back this up.
  2. That Jewish exceptionalism actually comes from some mental health conditions occurring at higher rates in the Jewish community—but again the evidence here is fairly weak (see the article in the footnote for a detailed exploration of this hypothesis).[[161]](#_ftn161)
  3. Marginally higher verbal and math IQ alone explains all Jewish success. This theory seems possible to us, though the world would be a much less interesting place if it is (more on this later).

Readers who spend a lot of time online might vaguely remember that some YouTuber posed an argument along these lines only to be debunked. The YouTuber who scratched the surface of this argument, motivating us to dig deeper, was Leather Apron Club[[162]](#_ftn162) (whose bias against Jews[[163]](#_ftn163) lead to motivated reasoning—as can be demonstrated by his choice to cite Backman’s 1972 data when talking about Lynn’s 2004 research and leaving out some studies we do address here). UBERSOY on YouTube “debunked” his argument, though his rebuttal fails to address the problem that there is no large, well-conducted study demonstrating that Jews have dramatically higher general intelligence, neglects to mention that the largest, most respected study in the space only showed a 1% difference in IQ, and doesn’t acknowledge that researchers have manipulatively measured only verbal IQ while implying their findings are representative of general IQ.[[164]](#_ftn164)

Whereas we think Leather Apron Club was not going through the evidence in good faith and would have manipulated the data to support his bias against Jews, it seems as though UBERSOY was trying to be intellectually honest. We suspect that UBERSOY simply got so caught up in creating a strong counter argument that he allowed himself to get taken in by the shell game Lynn and others play with verbal IQ. There is real reason to be skeptical that a markedly higher Ashkenazi average IQ is a genuine phenomenon.

This is a great example of why an intellectually diverse cultural ecosystem is valuable. Leather Apron Club’s hatred of the Jewish people caused him to question something we would have never thought to question on our own—that Jews are smarter than the general population and this intelligence largely explains their disproportionate success. Ironically, his catching the street hustlers in their verbal IQ shell game serves to undermine his larger agenda among people like us who don’t think Jewish success can be explained by nepotism or an evil Jewish cabal, as it indicates there is something genuinely valuable about Jewish culture itself rather than just Jewish genetics (more on those points shortly).

**If Jewish people did have significantly higher IQs, elements of Jewish cultural success would be very hard—if not impossible—to replicate through the intentional creation of a family culture. If, however, most Jewish success comes from a purely cultural edge (and the network that culture provides), elements of Jewish success can theoretically be replicated.** (All this assumes that Jewish success is not just a product of slightly higher verbal and mathematical IQ, which appears to be robustly attested. We aren’t dwelling on that possibility because it is probably not the case and boring if true.)

Fun side note: There is an entire niche industry focused around trying to copy Jewish culture in China, with books that have titles like: Become Rich Like a Jew,[[165]](#_ftn165) To Make Money With the Jews, and Jewish People and Business: The Bible of How to Live Their Lives.[[166]](#_ftn166)

Finally, some portion of readers will see Jews not being particularly smarter than everyone else, yet still ending up in positions of power, as definitive proof that something nefarious is afoot—that Jews are somehow conspiring to control our democracy. First, let us emphatically guarantee you that there is no intentional Jewish conspiracy. There are enough stupid Jews with low self-control, as there are with any large enough population, that the mechanisms of this system would be revealed if it did exist. Jews find it just as confusing that they outcompete other groups as outsiders do. There is no shadowy group advancing their careers any more than there is a shadowy group of Catholics slotting church members disproportionately into positions on the Supreme court. (If you are wondering on what authority can we state so emphatically that there is no secret society of Jews controlling the world read: “The Jewish Cabal Theory” in the Appendix on page 796.)

While Jews do benefit from nepotism, they don’t benefit more from it than other groups that share a strong sense of cultural identity, like Mormons and Catholics (keep in mind that Mormons have even systematically institutionalized nepotism by often favoring people who have received a temple recommend—that is, Mormons who have gone through the steps required to be welcomed into LDS Temples). We would even go so far as to argue that Jewish networks are less nepotistic and supportive than those belonging to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists. Anyone living in the U.S. has access to these kinds of nepotistic networks through various groups they can choose to join. Heck, these days, the Effective Altruist community’s nepotistic network will help people more than the Jewish network—and is open to all.

If Jewish people aren’t somehow “cheating” to get ahead in society, how are they doing it? While we don’t have a strong answer, we suspect our private dinner parties, at which we host people we think might change the course of world history, grant some insight. Around 2% of the U.S. population is Jewish and yet somehow when we select high-potential-for-impact guests (at what to us feels like random), around 50%+ end up Jewish.

How is this “random” selection method for people we think have a high likelihood of changing the world pulling up mostly Jews? When inviting people to these dinners, we often send out cold invitations to people who recently wrote something online that we found intellectually stimulating or controversial in a way that engages us. It seems if you send cold invitations to creators of intellectually engaging blogs, podcasts, and Substacks, a huge portion of them will be Jewish.

Why? Jewish culture encourages adherents to invest time in the types of public discussions that can feel pointless—even socially dangerous—to members of most other cultures. This higher likelihood to speak publicly when others would feel social pressure to stay quiet may also explain (at least in part) the preponderance of Jewish comedians (something we discuss detail in the chapter “Relation to Pleasure and the Arts” on page 554).

Across all layers of Jewish culture, from rituals (chavrusa) to internal hierarchy (the rabbinic system), debate skill is both practiced and rewarded at an unparalleled level vis-à-vis other cultures. Those who grow up in Jewish culture will therefore more enthusiastically call bullshit on society because their cultural framing trained them to emotionally reward themselves for doing so. It’s not that Jews are smarter than other people on average; it is that when individual Jews are smarter, they are more likely to speak up in ways that get them noticed.

Essentially, when not using pre-existing accreditation networks (like universities, guilds, and secret societies), individuals looking for the smartest people in society to hire and befriend are going to search for people writing or saying engaging stuff in a public context, and those people are disproportionately Jewish. This gives Jews a little-used “side path” to power. Jews access this side path not because they are smarter, but because they have a cultural compulsion to share engaging ideas publicly at higher rates.

Take the top ten controversial online intellectuals you like to follow, focus on those you believe you chose without any outside influence (small blogs, undiscovered podcasts, and the like), and try to determine whether they have Jewish ancestry. We think you will be surprised. If our theory is accurate, it means Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power will increase with the sustained rise in internet culture.

This theory does not explain why among the highest-ranked chess players, 51% have at least one Jewish parent. When deciding whether or not it valid, keep that in mind.

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*In researching this subject, we came across an interesting and widely believed conspiracy theory: That Jews were overrepresented among the Bolshevik communists who took over Russia. We say this is interesting, as digging into the stats actually presents the opposite question: “Why were so few Jews represented among the Bolsheviks?” Jews only made up around 3% of highly ranked Bolsheviks. While this is an overrepresentation of Jews, it is dramatically below what one would expect given Jewish overrepresentation in other areas of power (for a deeper, well-sourced discussion on this, check out the Wikipedia article).[[167]](#_ftn167) In short, it looks like there were far, far fewer Jews in the upper level of the communist party than one would expect. Anecdotally, Simone’s Jewish side of the family had to leave Russia because they were White Russians (people who fought to support the Tsar).

We suppose the lack of Jewish support for Bolsheviks shouldn’t be surprising based on the fact that the Communist government of Russia later specifically targeted Jews to be eliminated as a cultural group.[[168]](#_ftn168) This should not be surprising given that Karl Marx was wildly antisemitic: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money….An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible.” Marx furthermore complained that Jews were “reproducing like lice.” While some claim Marx made statements like these in an attempt to hide his pro-Jewish inclinations (as he had some Jewish ancestry), [[169]](#_ftn169) the fact that Marx’s goal was the systematic elimination of Judaism as a cultural identity would make such obfuscation conspiratorial in the extreme.[[170]](#_ftn170)*

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Generally, we would shy away from conversations that attempt to tie an IQ trend to a specific ethnic group, but this particular instance warrants discussion because people use the myth of Jews’ higher IQ to dismiss the role Jewish culture plays in their success. Obviously, given the topic of this book, this myth is very important for us to dispel.

We shy away from the topic of IQ trends as they broadly relate to ethnic groups for two reasons.

First, as you can see in the case of claims around Jewish IQ, data used to prove this stuff is often far more shaky than those who authoritatively share it imply.

Second,even if IQ does vary across ethnic groups, such variation is largely irrelevant as of our generation—and any variation will be totally irrelevant going forward for our species. The idea of one ethnicity being superior to another along any number of measures is nonsensical in a world in which families can create their own vision of an Übermensch in just a few generations through the use of IVG and polygenic risk score selection. Objectively, the more cultural and genetic diversity there is in the genetic pools that uplift themselves through technology, the more robust and safe the future of our species will be. When performing intentional genetic selection at the level of individual genes rather than ethnic groups, the more colors of paint on the palate, the better.

Whenever we hear someone talking about ethnic IQ differences, we feel like we just broke into the Big Bad’s lair at the end of an action movie to find him monologuing about the sharpness of the masterfully honed samurai sword he used to win many impressive historic battles, waving it around like a goofus. Bro, we have guns. Fully automatic guns. No one cares about your samurai sword. …

Speaking of Guns …

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