The Trouble with India

Dear Mr. Hamm , Thanks for the article. It contains many of the challenges facing India. I did not see you mentioning anything about the " Legal System " in India. From a business point of view , it is broken. Justice delayed is justice denied. That is what is happening in India. It is worth an investigation and reporting. Regards, Vergis

Steve,
Business-Government-Society 101 is an aspect that most graduates in the west learn as a matter of fact. Indian graduates too learn it but tend to un-learn it as soon they start off in the 'real world'...

I love the way you describe how "Indian people can throw off the shackles of bad government and corruption the way they did colonial rule. But it won't be easy."

- Mohan

To all those bashing Indian’s average IQ:
Lately, I have seen flood of comments over the web bashing Indian’s low average IQ for her 1.1+ billion people. One of the most frequently quoted sources is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations. There is also some wishful thinking or simply bashing that India will never reclaim her glory as a superpower like http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000828.html and http://www.vdare.com/sailer/india.htm. Some chose to defame India’s reputation of excellent education http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/19/0148220. What these idiots failed to realize is that the demography of India is especially complex due to its caste system, which resembles Jim Crow on steroids and acid. By discouraging intermarriage and strict caste line, caste has subdivided the Indian people into an incredible number of micro-races. You can not just go to Bombay slums to have an IQ test to represent all Indians’ IQ. The facts of matters are some castes are dumb as stone while others castes are intelligent.
Even though India’s average IQ is 81, according to stats of normal bell curve, 10% of India’s 1.1+ billion people should have IQ of 100, the average of developed nations. That is still more than one hundred million, around 1½ times of the total population of Germany! So India should reach the potential 1½ times Germany’s GDP. That is more $4.5 trillion. That is a superpower! So India will be a superpower by 2025! JeiHind!

Hi Mr.Hamm

I am agree with you, to acheive the uniform growth it is important that opportunities and wealth must flow to the masses of poor people.The growth is bringing more GAP between Poor and Rich.Poors are becoming more Poor an so as with Rich.To reduce this I think the goverment can play a major role.for eg in construction business, in city like Pune, average cost of 800 sq.ft Home is RS 25 Lacks which is very high,a person who has a salary of RS 35000 PM also can not afford this, then what about poor, this will increas the poority and slums,goverment should impose some ristriction on the hike of rates.

Disdain and lack of respect or concern for the poor. Severe Caste biases. Chest thumping triviality, endemic corruption, deeply ingrained politicking and easily triggered righteous anger is India as seen in its people.

Our other face shows an eternal hope, worship of hard work, humanity, a natural friendliness, empathy for the fellow man, strong bonds of community and family, close ties with mother earth and meaningful spirituality.

Dear India. We must save you!. For with you will rise the third New World in South Asia.

Mohan,

This IQ thing is all crap. Nobody in his or her right mind would consider gauging IQ through a single number, given the boggling complexity of the brain, which, Roger Penrose and many others argue, incorporates computation at a quantum mechanical level. IQ tests are based on simple arithmetic crunching, which a simple calculator can do.

In short, measuring human intelligence using IQ tests is much like trying to find the velocity of light with a speedometer!

Anybody with a basic understanding of evolution, will also realize that the poorer a nation is, the greater the struggle for survival. People with lesser abilities, such as intelligence, eventually dwindle in numbers, exactly according to the Darwinian precent of survival of the fittest! "Bad" genes have a higher chance of proliferating in an affluent society.

Jared Diamond, in his book "Guns Germs & Steel" had noted that the Papuans were an extremely clever people.

However, the two jokers (Lyn & Vanhanen) took the data about India's IQ from a very old study conducted in 1962 in rural Madhya Pradesh! It is bad data to begin with.

Lynn is married to a chinese, and all his students who compiled the far eastern data were also Chinese. They used urban data from around Beijing!

Sanjoy Das:

Get your record straight and do not try to mislead BW reader! The quote on India's IQ is not based on one single IQ test in 1962 but on close to one thousand IQ tests conducted in India across three decades from 60s to 80s. Like a typical sneaky Indians, you tried to use lies to discredit a truth telling book that happens to not speak favorably of Indian's population qualities. Can you quote your source that Lynn was based on one single test in 1962?

"Anybody with a basic understanding of evolution, will also realize that the poorer a nation is, the greater the struggle for survival. People with lesser abilities, such as intelligence, eventually dwindle in numbers, exactly according to the Darwinian precent of survival of the fittest! "Bad" genes have a higher chance of proliferating in an affluent society" You seem to imply that the harsh living and survival conditions as in India will improve IQ. If your theory were right, you would find most intelligent PPL in sub-Sahara and south Asian countries since these countries are poorest on earth! How laughable is that!

I agree there is creditability issue in IQ stats from Chinese sources because of its history of fudging data. However, Lynn’s data are consistent with India’s consistent extreme poor performance for past 20 plus years in ANY IQ RELATED competitions, being Olympiads in Informatics, Math or International College Programming Contest. Everyone knows that these contests measure a nation’s brainpower. For last 20 years, No India high school student and college student NEVER EVER win a single gold medal or come even with a rank of top 40! What kind of brainpower is that! By a comparison, the following is nation performance in International Math Olympiads country total scores between Vietnam, Iran and India.

Iran 20 6 8 9 3 1 8 10 18 11 17 9 7 10 11
Vietnam 5 9 4 7 10 9 3 5 10 5 4 4 7 3
India 15 19 21 15 17 18 14 17 19 22 23 21 19
You can see that Vietnam and Iran did TOO MUCH BETTER than India even though there are more than 20 times more Indian than Vietnamese and Iranians. Everyone knows that you need two things for a country to be economically successful - human capital as reflected by mathematical ability, and an absence of damaging memes like fundamentalism or Communism. Today we equate fundamentalism with fundamentalist Islam, but in the not-so-distant past Christian prohibitions on usury retarded the economies of Europe (and provided an opening for Jews to enter banking). The utility of this theory (math ability + capitalism = wealth) depends upon its ability to make predictions. In particular, we can identify countries that are performing "below ability" due to bad memes like Communism or fundamentalism. Conversely, we can also identify countries for which natural grafts of capitalism possibly won't work.
That is why India is SO Desperately poor even with capitalism for 60 years; Iranian expats in the US are similarly very successful in math, science, medicine, engineering, and the like; Intel chose Vietnam instead of India EVEN THOUGH India begs for Intel’s attention like hell. Iranian’s intelligence is also demonstrated by Parse’s domination of entire India sub-continent, like Tata, Bombay real estate etc. There less than one hundred thousand Parse. They yet managed to conquer 1.2 billion Indians even more impressive than Brits!
Do not get me wrong, there are bright Indians with 1.2 billion people. However, most of them are in US. What left in India can carry India out of 3rd world status in the faces of competition from more smart ppl from Iran, Vietnam or Philippine.

We are fed up with the most barbaric Brahmin parasites. The Brahmin not only shackles India with the evil caste system for thousands of years; polluted Indian mind; it but also sold India to RAJ. These Brahmins enslaved backward castes, raped their people, ripped India of her wealth. Majorities of them benefited Indian public funded education and yet try all the way to immigrate to US or UK at the 1st opportunities. They praise India and brag fully knowing Indian people are living in destitute and poverty. They try to sell India as paradise and yet abandon their countries at all costs. If they love India so much, THEN WHY LEAVE India in the first place! Stop lying! They are social parasites and we despise them!
VJ

nickn.

you say parsee's dominate india....you forgot that they are also indians.

i hope we are not talking about native indians....because i dont remember that we have a lot of them.

india is made up of settlers/immigrants over thousands of years.....same as america.

being an indian though i am a bit disappointed by indians....and the question has popped hundred times in my mind as to why india is still poor....even after 60 years of independence?? is it low IQ of our people who dont know what is good in the long run and they get easily fooled by politicians....or is it possible that india was left in medieval state when Brits left india??

but i am not sure IQ is the only determining factor for a nations success....otherwise your smart iranian mullahs would have made acted intelligently for the benefit of their future generations and made iran a successful country...

i believe that success is mostly a product of luck/chance.

america is the best today....it may be the number 10 after 15-20 years....or it may go into depression in the next few years...

isnt talking about IQ of a population similar to racism?? can we say that IQ of african-americans are less than white (caucasians)?? i am sure you dont want to say that, chances are you may get killed.

stop this debate about race based intelligence. (greeks and romans and brits.....they were ruler of the world once upon a time.

nickn:

Puerile accusations such as "sneaky Indian" does not get us anywhere. As is clear from my earlier comment, I am questioning the concept of IQ tests itself. I am not speaking as an Indian but as a scientist and a human being.

Your point about the Math olympiad is wrong. The very same source claims that Iran's IQ is 84%, the same as India’s!

The obvious reason why Indians don't do well in Math Olympiads is the same as why Indian's don't do well in the Olympics, or any competition for that matter: poor infrastructure, malnutrition (India's malnutrition levels are comparable to sub-Saharan Africa), a bad education system, and the abhorrent caste system. “Bad memes” like communism, apparently have gone a long way in bettering the lives of the poor.

I will now waste my time with Lynn's book. But I have noticed Lynn report that the IQ of Indians when raised in "first world" living conditions is 98%:
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001949.html
That study further reveals Lynn's own racist intentions - he was trying to "elevate" Indian IQ to "caucasian" levels!

Now whether India's IQ is 81, 84, or 98, I DON'T CARE, simply because IQ is no measure of intelligence as I will argue below.

The rest of the comment – such as IBM investing in Vietnam over India being an indication of Indian intelligence – is just too silly to merit a response.

I dare you to provide counter arguments for each of these points:

ONE: Yes, the poorer the nation is, the lower the chances of survival of the less "fit". Jared Diamond correctly observed that Papuans are very intelligent. People in hunter-gatherer societies are exceptionally clever, because of increased evolutionary pressure towards higher intelligence. At the other extreme, in wealthy nations, thanks to good healthcare, basically everyone survives and reproduces. Within India, I have personally observed that those living in abject poverty are smarter on an average than their wealthy counterparts.

Exactly how is calling some group of humanity intelligent “laughable”?

TWO: The Piraha – an Amazonian tribe – cannot count beyond the number One!! They have no numbers, just “one” and “many”. The concept of counting is so alien, no matter how much they are taught, they can simply not grasp the idea. On the other hand, the coot (a bird) has the ability to count.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,414291,00.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0402_030402_coots.html

Who, according to you, is more intelligent: the Piraha native (a human), or the coot (a bird)?

THREE: The Welsh have better mathematical abilities than the English:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/1531275.stm
The difference is solely because of language. Now, if you know any Chinese, you will find that the Chinese language preserves the place-coding in numbers very well (unlike the Indian languages, where it is too complex).

That, my friend, is precisely why speakers of some languages do better than others at mathematics: the difference lies in language. It is NURTURE, not NATURE.

FOUR: IQ tests are based upon very trivial numerical and pattern matching problems. In computer science, there is a concept called Chomsky’s hierarchy, for computing machines, based on their computing power. At the lowest level is the Finite State Automaton, and at the highest is the Turing Machine. To do calculations like addition/ subtraction/multiplication/elementrary pattern recognition – precisely the kind of tasks one is given in IQ tests – all you need is a rudimentary Finite State Machine. The ability of humans on the other hand, goes well beyond that of a Turing machine. It is capable of MUCH more than rudimentary arithmetic.

In other words, trying to gauge human intelligence through simple IQ tests is like trying to measure the velocity of light with a speed-o-meter!

Nickn:

(i) Kindly stop posting misleading comments. Iran has an IQ of 84, almost exactly the same as India's. The reason they perform better than India in Math olympiads (or in the Olympic games) is much better explained by poverty, malnutrition approaching sub Saharan levels, institutionalized racism in the form of the caste system, and a lack of infrastructure.

(ii) I have not read Lynn's book, nor do I plan to. But, I see that the original data for Lynn's "analysis" was obtained from Sinha et al. (1968). The data, I believe, was from a survey of Madhya Pradesh. I briefly checked again. Most of the later data from the 1970s and 1980s was mainly from even more backward places - UP, Bihar, and my own homestate of Orissa, not Delhi, Mumbai, or Bangalore.

Lynn also attempts to "elevate" the Indian IQ to "caucasoid" levels, further revealing his own racist motivations:
http://www.geocities.com/race_articles/lynn_race_diff.html

However, you completely missed the crux of my argument. I don't care what the Indian IQ turns out to be. As I said before, IQ is no measure of intelligence, as people of the stature of Stephen J. Gould would tell you. Here is why:

(iii) As I said before, there is a much stronger evolutionary pressure towards better intelligence in backward societies. At one extreme are the hunter-gatherer societies. As Jared Diamond observed, the Papuans are a highly intelligent people. In affluent societies, less intelligent people have almost the same probability of survival. It is just Darwinism 101. The San Bushmen must be an extremely intelligent and resourceful people to survive in the harsh Kalahari conditions. There is nothing "laughable" about this statement, except in the eyes of a bigot.

(iv) Mathematical ability is no measure of intelligence. In a study, it was found that the Welsh do better than the English at mathematics, simply because their language handles the place coded numerals better. The Chinese language is also excellent at treating place coding. That alone will go a long way in explaining the better Chinese mathematics skills. The processing time to parse numbers inside the cortex is eliminated in Chinese speakers.

(v) The Piraha, an Amazonian tribe, can't even count up to two! Does it mean that they are really dumb? Contrast the Piraha with the coot (a bird) which, recent studies reveal, has the ability to count its eggs. Does it mean that the coots (birds) are dumber than the Piraha (humans)?

(vi) As I said before, the brain is a vastly complex entity. In computational theory, you have something called Chomsky's hierarchy. The least powerful computing machines in this hierarchy are Finite State Machines (FSM), at the other end is the Deterministic Turing Machine (DTM). The brain is probably infinitely more powerful than even the DTM, as Penrose would argue.

Now, arithmetic operations and other rudimentary tasks in typical IQ tests, involve computations that can be accomplished by the simple FSM! In other words, attempting to measure intelligence through IQ tests is - as I said before –is like trying to measure the velocity of light with a speedometer!

At best, IQ can be used as some indication of scholastic achievement within an ethnic group. Beyond that, IQ is meaningless.

It is true that Lynn reported that the 2nd generation India Diasporas in UK does achieve average IQ of 96. That is within 1 standard deviation of British IQ. However, it is true that majority of the immigrants to U.K. and U.S. in particular are from Indian’s elite upper castes. The lower castes Indian immigrants to South Africa, SE Asia and Fiji etc consistently score IQ test at around or below 80. So it is really hard to estimate a true IQ average for India due to its wide and deep social stratification. General belief is that upper caste like Brahmin may have higher IQ close to 100. Please refer to our detailed discussion and blog at http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/002508.html.

VJ, I am sick of seeing sick people like you talk about the caste system. You plan to draw light on caste discrimination...by discriminating against another caste - brahmins! I myself am a Brahman and never have I once said about any other caste. Hell, my best friend is a Christian. Why do you want to end discrimination by discriminating against an entire race? I think people like you are a parasite to India. Brahmans were "superior" because of their duties which were related to temple work. This got corrupted and yes, it went downward. But you say that all modern Brahmans are corrupted and racial. What a big generalization! You just included me without even knowing who I am!

Yes, I am a college student in the US AFTER doing on year in India in NIT Trichy. Why? It is because Indian college education is repulsive. After 4 years of Indian education, if I am presented with a problem that I studied in college, I could solve it. If it was new, I would glare blankly at it. I can however name a million other non-brahmins who are in my same University. All of us try to sell India as a paradise because Americans and the world think that India is a practical village. How would you like that, vj? Do you want us to tell all Americans that India is rotting like hell? Not that it is the truth but Indian mainland other than the metros is practically like being in the middle of no where.

Why don't we come back to India? Because either our parents work abroad or we can afford to live in a better place. That is absolutely true with any other non-Brahman. Isn't India a democracy? How would you like to live in the outskirts of Trichy when you are the CEO of a major bank?

Your comment is utterly racist and people like YOU make us Brahmans feel insecure and are the actual reason for many caste wars.

Please don't identify radical Brahmans as Brahmans since we are supposed to keep caste identification to WORK and not to society. And any such person who does so, it actually violating a rule we are supposed to maintain. They are animals and we hate them. But you can't generalize an entire group of people who do so as parasites.

P.S. Sorry to be harsh but that comment really offended me. Instead of talking about improving poor conditions and elevating Indian socio-economic status, he blatantly talked about getting rid of another caste - priests. Next time anyone says anything about us, think before you speak. Not all of us are bad. A small minority who control politics do not represent our caste.

Sanjoy Das:

There is a recent article published by renown Canadian psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton on VDARE (http://www.vdare.com/rushton/070926_indians.htm) on human intelligence and its’ economic implication. This article is being widely blogged and discussed on the net. The data compiled by Rushton also corroborate with Lynn’s observation of Indian average IQ in India and those of Indian Diasporas in Europe and U.S. However, he estimates an average of 85 instead of 81 for Indian’s average IQ. According to him, only India’s top 5% have a bright future. He also mentioned that Indian Diasporas in U.S. are from India’s top 0.5% tier of India’s billion plus population. Even 0.5% of a billion is still a very large number in absolute term.

Please read this article and comment.

ez:

ONE. You missed the point in my earlier argument. I am not denying the lower IQ scores among those Indians who are living in India.

However, those differences are much better explained by malnutrition, illiteracy, and grammatical rules of the Indian language. Indian pregnant women are severely malnourished BTW. Besides, I am at a total loss to see how IQ tests could have been conducted in MP and Bihar villages.

Also, unlike Indians living in the US, those in Britain originally were working class Indians. Somehow, just living for 1-2 generations makes their IQs equal that of the British.

TWO. Neither is J. Philippe Rushton that renowned nor does his work deserve much merit. His source of funding is the discredited Pioneer Trust, not the Canadian equivalent of the NIH or NSF. This guy resembles Michael Behe, a Lehigh Univ biologist and a covert intelligent design proponent whose funding comes from the Discovery Institute.

(Even renowned scientists - including those of double helix fame - are capable of intense bigotry though!)

THREE. Interesting that you mentioned Rushton. Idiots like Lynn, Vanhanen and Rushton try to "explain" IQ differences across ethnicities as differences in reproductive strategies. They claim that low IQ scores correlate with larger genitals, sexual promiscuity, and unstable marriages. (In fact Rushton was citing a pornographic magazine in one of his scientific papers to further his claim that Africans have larger genitalia!).

How then, do you explain that Indians probably have the smallest genitals (BBC ran a report that Indian condoms are an inch smaller than the world standard), that Indian divorce rates are among the lowest in the world, and that Indians are among the least sexually promiscuous of all peoples?

Razib,

The Indians living in the US are drawn largely from privileged, "upper" caste groups. However, those who came to the UK were not necessarily so. The 96% IQ comes from those UK Indians (as far as my understanding about the IQ data goes - and as I have said before, I don't read utter crap!)

Want the Truth.
IQ are science "dirty little secret" because IQ tests do tell the Truth.
Note, the japanese and koreans, who have totally different culture than the Euro-Americans who developed the tests have tested 5-8 points higher on IQ tests.
Contrast Japan with Philippines. A gap of 20 points.
Japan, 2nd largest economy on earth. Honda, Toyota, Sony.
Philippines, 400 years a colony of Spain and USA
India, colony of UK. Not like Hong Kong, a tiny seaport.

How the the hell could present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangledash be part of British India.
Want the Truth. IQ of 81-82.
Google map of British Empire.
How many Gold Medals India win last 3 Olympics.
Answer Zero.
India, per capita income is $600-$700.
With IQ 81. India will be 3rd world forever.

The above diatribe by Josh Stein is way too silly. His comment as well as the earlier one by Nickn only goes to show that people with such a mindset have a alarmingly low intelligence themselves, intellectually incapable of appreciating the intricacies of history that led to the industrial revolution, colonialism, and exploitation.

For much of world history, the Indian (and Chinese) economies have been one-fourth of the world's economy. In fact if one were to plot the currently estimated IQs vs. per capita incomes of nations in the tenth century, we woould land up with the conclusion that IQs inversely correlate with wealth!

Why Europe was the first to industrialize had to do with geography, climate, the mini ice age in Europe, and free access to natural resources in the new world, as well as free labor (slavery). Europe was lucky to have the Islamic world as its neighbor, as when Europe was in its dark ages, it was the Islamic world that preserved Greco-Roman knowledge to hand it back to Europe centuries later - in addition to mathematical developments in India. Colonialism proves nothing at all!

Let us take the case of Ireland - another former colony of England. English colonialism of Ireland unleashed the Great Potato Famine. It led to a serious drop in the natural population growth in Ireland. The Irish were subject to racist attacks, and an English cartoon actually compared the Irish features to that of "Negroes", asking why the Irish were not extinct yet. Until recently, Ireland was referred to as the "Sick Man of Europe" - until its economy boomed. Today Ireland is probably the wealthiest nations in the world, and ahead of any English speaking country!

In the 1940s (I wish I could remember), one eugenicist had proposed that a nation's RATE OF ECONOMIC GROWTH was a measure of average national intelligence. Today, India is the second fastest growing economy. China's demographic bulge will end in 2010 when India's will begin. That is when India will become the fastest growing economy. Duing the same period Europe and Japan will stagnate. Perhaps a measure of relative intelligence?

I do notice one common oversimplistic argument in both Nickn and Josh Stein's argument:
"If nation X invaded nation Y, then the intelligence of nation X is more than that of nation Y."
That is the dangerous extreme right for you! Justification for invasion based on the obnoxious, stupid, assumption of racial superiority.

When you talk about India, you have to differentiate between upper castes and under castes. India’s elite upper castes have IQ next to nobody. However, India does have the problem of huge mass of low IQ under castes which will become a problem in long run. I feel fortunate that my parents are the upper echelon.

I hate do degenerate into petty nation-level arguments, but I will make this exception only to show how silly this IQ argument is.

(It is also both interesting and relevant to observe that IQ-race proponents such as Josh Stein singularly harp on the same thing ad nauseam without providing any effective counterpoint. Perhaps a sad reflection of their own intelligence levels.)

INDIAN vs. CHINESE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS

There are six Indian Nobel laureates, and nine Chinese. A pretty fair ratio considering that there are 20% more Chinese in the world than Indians.

However, observe carefully - Indians have won other forms of recognition for their scientific contributions too, which Chinese have not. Here is how:

(i) The second space telescope was named "Chandra", and there is "Chandrasekhar limit" in connection with black holes, in honor of famed Indian astronomer Chandrasekhar.

(ii) Elementary particles that do not conform to Fermi-Dirac statistics are called "Bosons" in honor of J C. Bose. You also have Bose-Einstein condensate.

(iii) Then, E C G Sudarshan, co-founder of the Tachyon hypothesis was not given a Nobel, arguably due to racism. I do not recall any instance of a Chinese being dened a Nobel on similar grounds.

(iv) There is the awe-inspiring name of Ramanujam, the Indian mathematician who can well claim to be among the greatest intellectuals of the last few centuries. I do not recall any Chinese name in the past 100 years.

What more, the Chinese Nobel prizes are all shared ones. The Chinese got one-third to one-half of a Nobel apiece, not full ones like the Indians.

Care to explain why the "high IQ Chinese" managed significantly less compared to the Indians? Why the discrepancy?

INDIAN AMERICANS vs. CHINESE AMERICANS

Care also to explain why Indians have been so successful in the West, in comparison to the Chinese? In the USA, the Indians are well ahead of all ethnic other communities, including the Jews, the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese, in education, academic success, as well as wealth.

If only high IQ Indians manage to come to the West, the same filter should apply to Chinese immigrants too, correct?

And what is more shameful than Josh Stein's and Nick Nguyen's comments is how some Indians (such as Maharaja Heir), claiming to belong to the "upper echelon" are only too willing to libel their own unlucky "low" caste brethren just to make them look good.

All this only goes to prove (for the umpteenth time) that those who swallow this race-IQ BS are not intelligent themselves.

I am Chinese. I think Chinese are stupid. Or the current education system makes us so.

SANJOY DAS:

First of all, you need to straight your record and stats. 1st it is ABSOLUTELY lies or urban legends widespread in Indian community that Indians are richer than and achieve more academically than Jews which BTW is most intelligent ethnic group on the earth. Among many things, 1/3 of all Noble prize laureates are Jewish decedents. 2nd 6 Chinese won the noble prize, not 9. 3rd Indian elites do pretty well. So do other Asians in America. It is not true Indian is much better than rest of Asian American. Please see http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/censr-17.pdf. Please remember, unlike Indians through selected H1 process, Japanese Americans are primarily descendents from pre-WWII farmer immigrants, Majorities of Chinese are still part of early hard labor descendents and Vietnamese are refuges of Vietnamese world.

Second, you missed the points. No body is arguing that Indians can not do top-notch scientific or technological jobs. What professor RUSHTON tries to make in his article is that average Indians are not as intelligent as most Indians brag (http://vdare.com/rushton/070926_indians.htm). Indians Diasporas did pretty well in U.S. However, they are top 0.5% of India’s 1.1 billions peoples. Given India’s large population base, even 0.5% is a large number. However, Indians, NASSCOM in particular, endeavor to mislead MNS to believe that India has unlimited supplies of talented peoples for outsourcing and off-shore jobs. This will affects MNS long tern ROI and prevent MNS from investing in some other countries with better talent pools like Malaysia, Thailand or Vietnam etc. It affects immigration as well.

The false hype could not be better illustrated by Indian performance on TOPCODER (http://www.topcoder.com). TOPCODER is an online computer science competition site where computer professionals and college computer science students compete against each other for monetary rewards, prizes and bragging right. TOPCODER attracts some of the best minds in computer science, e.g. most of AMC ICPC champions and IOI champions. India takes tremendous pride in its large number of programmer and outsourcing industry. Unsurprisingly, India is one of the countries with most participants. However according to TOPCODER, Indian programmers and students (so-called IITIANS) on average are ranked lowest among all 57 nations represented, lower than Pakistan, Thailand, Philippine and Vietnam etc (http://www.news.com/Coding-for-fame%2C-and-dollars---page-2/2100-1007_3-6067549-2.html?tag=st.num). Best Indian programmer can be ranked among top 100 (http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank). The much bragged IIT can not join top 50(http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=school_avg_rating). With its 1.1 billion people, best Indian computer minds can not outperform tiny Thailand or Vietnam.

Is this an isolated incident? No. Let check International college programming competition where India sent out its IIT every year (http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/default.htm). For past 20 years, not a single Indian school is ever ranked among top thirty. Ever poorer performances are for Indian Math/Computer Olympiads or any intelligence related competition (http://www.imo2007.edu.vn/index.php?module=ViewResultByCountry.php). Indians like to point that the Indian poor showing are caused by poor economical condition and bad infrastructure. However, these students are from Indian upper castes and IITs enjoy all the support India can provide. On the other hand, countries with even poorer economical condition like Vietnam and North Korea etc. beat India hand down so easily. There is no excuse to blame everything just on economical condition.

So, best Indian students do poorly on every international academic competition. How about Indian’s average education level from Indian’s own source? Let us take a look at the report According to India's largest educational non governmental organization (NGO) Parham, in 2006, nearly 47 percent of children who were in school and studying in grade 5 could not read the story text at grade 2 level of difficulty. In arithmetic, 55 percent of grade 5 and 25 percent of grade 8 children could not solve a simple division problem (3 digits divided by 1 digit). The data is presented at http://i22.tinypic.com/2r4n0o4.jpg. The above figure is self-explanatory, but let’s highlights the findings. Look at the following groups of primary grade Indian students and their reading skills.

1. At Grade 2, only 8.3 percent read at grade level.
2. At Grade 3, only 19.9 percent read at grade level.
3. At Grade 4, only 37.6 percent read at grade level.
4. At Grade 5, only 53.0% of Indian students read at grade level
In other words, an average Indian student (defined as 50 percentile) is almost 3 years behind in reading by the second grade. Remember that these data include most of Indian’s upper castes. This dismal performance can be explained away lack of nutrition. At the same, the countries like North Korea or Vietnam with the same income level or even poorer nutrition do MUCH better in overall education.
But what does India’s trouble with education/intelligence have anything to do with us. The impacts are quite important.
1. The average intelligence affects talent availabilities and qualities which in turn affect quality of outsourced jobs. My company deals with large numbers of outsource contractors from India, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Eastern Europe and Philippine. It is almost always Indians who take undeserved credits and avoid responsibilities whenever there is something wrong.
2. India, NASSCOM in particular, conspires to mislead MNS to invest in India by exaggerating Indian talents availability and quality. This not only diverts investment from other poor countries with better talent qualities, but also affects ROI for MNS’s investments made in India.
3. It has a lot to do with consequence for immigration for Indian to U.S. I have no problem with H1 for the high IQ Indians selected. However, once these H1 holders get their permanent residency, they start to bring in their extended families. These family members are not highly selected. Their average intelligence is more like Indian average IQ level. That is the points professor Rushton tries to make that these large number of extended members will bring down the average IQ of the whole group and thus affecting the host countries.
4. India has very limited resources and yet has an ever growing population. It is evident that India tries to emigrate some of their population to other developed countries like U.S. or SE Asian countries. It helps if Indians succeed in hyped up their intelligence. The truth should help the host countries.
I hope this will not add the heat, but rather bring light to the importance of the subject. I hope you read the referenced links and challenge the stats quoted if you disagree.

NCK NGUYEN:


You revealed a lot when you labeled me a “typical sneaky Indian”. That speaks volumes about your own mindset.


I have pointed out several fallacies in your earlier comments that you chose not to address. Once again:


(i) According to your very sources, Iranians have an IQ, almost exactly the same as India’s. Furthermore, Indians, South East Asians, Arabs, and North Africans are lumped into one category, i.e. mid-low IQ range.
(ii) Your earlier claim that Parsees managed to conquer India because of higher IQ is dead wrong. Parsees sought refuge in India, when Persia was invaded by the Muslims. So you have that fact entirely backwards.
(iii) You have a half baked understanding of memes and memetics. Memes are units of cultural transmission. You cannot have “communist memes”.
(iv) You claimed that India became a colony because of a low IQ. I would request you to check out the history of your own country, Vietnam, which gained its independence from the French.
(v) More bad news for you. Kindly check back on the ancient history of your own nation. Vietnam was in fact, ‘colonized’ by India in ancient times. Would it then mean that Vietnamese were somehow dumber than Indians some 1500 years ago? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champa


None of your above arguments are consistent, are they?


Likewise, the hackneyed “arguments” that you provide are neither statistically valid nor intellectually stimulating. I hope you come up with more cogent ones next time. But allow me to discredit your “arguments” once and for all:


1. INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONS
=============================


Also, you keep repeating the same few things over and over again. FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME – PERFORMANCES IN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONS DO NOT COUNT. I showed you that India has made deeper inroads into the Nobel laureates and eminent scientists category than China has. I could add that India has produced top class chess players in the world, including Vishwanath Anand, while China hasn’t managed any. That too is no indication of anything. None of these examples are statistically valid.


India performed dismally in the Asian Games until recently managing a handful of medals. India’s gold medal tally in the last four Asian games were: 1 (1990), 4 (1994), 7 (1998), and 10 (2002), and 10 (2006). Two observations are immediately apparent: 1. India has a dismal record in the Asian games, and 2. India’s medal tally keeps increasing each four years. But would you then conclude that Indians are weak and physically incapable of sports, but that they are gradually becoming stronger? Of course you wouldn’t! That would be too infantile a conclusion. Likewise, your own conclusion based on Math and programming competitions do not count either.


Your example of topcoder actually is the most infantile one of all. Since when has programming skills been an indication of intelligence? The way I look at it, programmers in the 21st century are no different than unskilled factory workers in the late 19th century.


I’ll make this explicitly clear: NONE OF YOUR EXAMPLES ON INDIA’S POOR PERFORMANCE IN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONS ARE VALID. THEY WOULD NOT HOLD UP TO EVEN BASIC STATISTICAL SCRUTINY ANY MORE THAN MY COUNTER EXAMPLES OF INDIA PRODUCING MORE EMINENT SCIENTISTS, NOBEL LAUREATES, AND CHESS PLAYERS DOES. THOSE ARE ALL INVALID ARGUMENTS.


2. PRIMARY EDUCATION IN INDIA
============================


That observation of yours actually bolsters my own claim. You are right! India does not fare well in IQ contests simply because India’s primary education system is very poor. But poor infrastructure and malnutrition are only partly to blame. Indians have a pretty elitist, casteist mindset, and unlike that of Vietnamese or Filipinos. India has invested very little in primary education, as India always has viewed its masses as a “drag” on the economy, rather than an asset. Contrast this with China under Mao and Deng, or Vietnam under its own communist government which view its population as a potential asset!


Also do get your facts straight. INDIA’S MALNUTRITION RATE IS WELL BELOW THAT OF VIETNAM OR THE PHILIPPINES. Again, because India’s casteist government catered to the elite than the common man all these decades, India, inspite of its much vaunted economic advances, has an appalling malnutrition and illiteracy level comparable only to sub-Saharan Africa! ULTIMATELY, IT IS THE CASTE SYSTEM THAT IS SO DEEPLY ENGRAINED IN THE INDIAN PSYCHE THAT IS THE CULPRIT!


3. YOUR COMPANY EXPERIENCE, NASSCOM ETC.
==========================================


This is entirely a non-issue. YOUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH /VENDETTA AGAINST INDIANS OR ANY OTHER ETHNIC GROUP DOES NOT COUNT. NEITHER ARE PROGRAMMING SKILLS AN INDICATION OF HIGHER INTELLIGENCE.

I personally do not consider programmers to be smart people. Churning out lines of Java code requires no creativity. It is not fundamentally any different than producing machine tools on lathe machines.


In any case, FYI - almost all of Indian programmers hail from only 2-3 cities. Most of them are from Hyderabad, and a smaller fraction are from Chennai and Bengaluru. The sudden software boom in those places caused far too many colleges to mushroom, offering substandard degrees and diplomas in software engineering and related disciplines. The worthier ones from those cities (particularly Chennai) become scientists in American research labs and professors in American universities, not programmers or software experts.


There are hardly any programmers from my own home state of Orissa living in the USA. About half of them settled in the USA are university professors. Yet, does that make the people of my home state smarter? Of course it doesn’t!


4. INDIAN IMMIGRANTS
===================


Looks like this argument went over your head. Read my first sentence again, where I state that the argument is a SILLY one. I merely raised the issue of the scholastic/financial success of the Indian diaspora MERELY TO HIGHLIGHT HOW SILLY YOUR OWN ARGUMENTS WERE.


You say that Indians getting H-1 visas are smart, but their relatives are not. That is again an infantile argument. The Indian community in America is supposed to be the best educated and affluent of all communities. It is ‘ahead’ of the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Jewish, and most certainly the Vietnamese communities.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Indians-most-affluent-educated-in-Silicon-Valley/240888/


Yet, does that indicate that the Indian community more intelligent? Of course it does not!


5. HIGH IQ ‘UPPER’ CASTE INDIANS
=============================


Looks like this argument also went over your head. When did I claim that ‘upper’-caste Indians are more intelligent?


In fact I said the exact opposite! As I argued before, THE LOWER CASTE INDIANS ARE MORE INTELLIGENT THAN THE UPPER CASTE ONES. LIKEWISE, THE AFRICANS ARE MORE INTELLIGENT THAN THE INDIANS OR THE CHINESE.


Kindly read my Jared Diamond-ian argument on evolutionary pressure again.


6. J. PHILIPPE RUSHTON
======================


As I said before, J. PHILIPPE RUSHTON IS A CHARLATAN. He is the Michael Behe of psychology. While Behe gets his research funds from the Discovery Institute to carry our ‘research’ on creationism (he calls it “irreducible complexity”), Rushton draws his funding from the equally discredited Pioneer fund and does ‘research’ in an equally bogus area, namely race and intelligence.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=83


The only difference between Behe and Rushton is that while Behe’s ideas on creationism fit squarely in the 10th century, those of Rushton belong to the 19th. Hence, fraudulent reasoning in Behe’s work is easier to spot and dismiss than Rushton’s.


However, as an active researcher in a scientific discipline myself, I can assure you that Rushton’s work has no merit. He does not get any funding from the prestigious sources (like the NIH or NSF in the USA). His main “contribution” is applying his bigoted theory of lesser black intelligence within an evolutionary framework (called r-K matrix).


QUESTIONS FOR NICK NGUYEN
===========================


QUESTION 1.
===========
According to Rushton, larger African genitals, physical prowess, and social measures such as higher divorce rates and crime rates, are all inversely correlated to intelligence.


As I argued before, why limit it to blacks vs. whites? Try fitting the Asian Indian population within the same r-K matrix! Indians have, on an average, the smallest genitals (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6161691.stm). There was a substantial downward revision in India’s HIV infection rates as it was observed that cultural taboos in Indian society helped confine the HIV rates to within the sex-workers, truck-drivers, and other small groups. Indians are also thoroughly non-violent. Why, over half of them practice varying degrees of vegetarianism. Based on this data, Rushton would have extrapolated Indians to be exceptionally smart!


Please explain how this very obvious discrepancy fits into Rushton’s research.


QUESTION 2.
===========


Only a few years back, anthropologists made a startling discovery. Another species of hominid, H. Floresiensis. At a brain size of 380 cc, the H. Floresiensis cranium looks more like a chimpanzee than a modern human. Yet, H. Floresiensis manages to manufacture stone tools, displaying advanced intelligence second only to H. sapiens.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/flores.html


In fact, H. Floresiensis made tools more complex than even H. Neanderthalensis. (H. Neanderthalensis incidentally has a larger brain than modern humans.)


If (as Rushton says), intelligence is related to skull size, then how is that H. Floresiensis displays such advanced intelligence?


QUESTION 3.
===========


As I argued before, the human brain is far more complex than simple computing devices. There are abstract mathematical models of computation. The simplest one is called a “Finite State Machine”. At the other end of the spectrum is the all powerful “Turing Machine”. Simple numerical calculations and pattern recognition tasks require no more computing than what the simple Finite State Machine can provide.


Check out this paper:
www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/preprints/sofia.pdf
As you can see from that research article, one can write simple programs using artificial intelligence to do tasks that seemingly involve a good deal of mental agility. Using artificial intelligence techniques, one can easily device algorithms that can do the work of, say a physician, or even an engineer.


The simplest ones are numerical ones. You only need a pocket calculator to solve them. The human brain is far more complex than even a supercomputer.
www.osl.iu.edu/~kyross/pub/new-godelian.pdf


So how can you possibly think that you can test the infinite power of the human mind with simple IQ tests”?


(Stephen J. Gould of course realized this in his book “The Mismeasure of Man”. Unfortunately, psychology researchers are not equipped to think deeply enough. Otherwise, they would immediately see through Rushton’s sophistry.)


QUESTION 4.
===========


You keep repeating how Indians do not fare well in Math Olympiads. I ask you, since when is the ability to juggle a few numbers a reflection of one’s intelligence?


In addition to the above argument based on computation, I also gave you the example of an Amazonian tribe, the Piraha, who can’t even count up to the number two!
http://www.jcrows.com/withoutnumbers.html
Does it indicate that they have no intelligence at all?


Contrast this with Shakuntala Devi (ironically, an Indian woman) who can calculate faster than a supercomputer:
http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/DEVI.HTM
In fact she has been dubbed as the “human computer”. Yet, does her unique mathematical ability make her is exceptionally intelligent?


(Guess what Shakuntala Devi writes books about? Astrology! Our mathematical genius, in reality, is no more than a superstitious, irrational person!)


QUESTION 5.
===========


I also argued how language and script translates to better IQ scores. Since Mr. Nguyen speaks Vietnamese, let me take an example from that language.


In Vietnamese, the number 12 is “möôøi hai” (möôøi=ten; hai =two). Hence Mr. Nguyen perceives the number 12 simply as “ten-two”. This obviates the need to translate back and forth during numerical tasks.


On the other hand, in my own language (Oriya), the number 12 would be “bara”. The word “bara” is a separate word on its own, not a combination of “ten” and “two” as in Vietnamese, which would have been “dasha-dui” (“ten-two”). In order to accomplish equivalent tasks, I have to go through a whole extra set of mental processes than Mr. Nguyen for the same task.


The word for another number 36 further illustrates this point. Mr. Nguyen who speaks Vietnamese, perceives the number 36 simply as “three-ten-six”. To me the same number is actually “chhattis”, which is an entire word of its own, roughly mapping to “six-thirty” (much worse than even English!).


Chinese, Japanese, Korean, all share this feature. Number manipulation is a much easier task in those languages than in Indian languages. English is somewhere in-between.


Again, I have also pointed out how the intricate Chinese script helps children develop the ability to manipulate visual patterns better. While I know that there have been studies done in this direction, I was unable to find anything online.


However, I can supply a parallel example. Many Chinese, Japanese and other Orientals adults display the ability to recognize absolute pitch (not relative pitch). Even trained musicians in Western cultures are sometimes unable to accomplish this rare feat. That of course does not mean that Orientals have better musical abilities than Caucasians. The simple explanation lies in the fact that Oriental languages make use of complex intonations. Chinese is after all a highly tonal language! Oriental children learn to discern subtle differences in tone at a very tender age than whites, and grow up to recognize absolute pitch. Voila!


Please also do a google search on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.


QUESTION 6.
===========


As I argued before, there is considerable evolutionary pressure on less affluent communities with high mortality rates. In the wealthy West, everyone has an equal chance of survival. At the other extreme are nomadic communities. In those communities, those who are not smart enough, have a lesser chance of survival. In densely populated urban communities, the evolutionary pressure is towards developing immunity to contagious diseases, and in nomadic ones, it is towards superior intelligence.


Here is another article by Jared Diamond:
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/dept/d10/asb/anthro2003/lifeways/hg_ag/worst_mistake.html


He argues that people living in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies were better than agricultural ones. He calls farming the ‘worst mistake in the history of humankind’. Clearly, settled lifestyle is no indication of superior intelligence. If at all, it is an indication to the very opposite!


I would like to see you provide a counter-argument to the above.


CONCLUSION
===========


I’ll end here with a challenge to Nick Nguyen (and to Josh Stein who was even worse!) to answer the above six questions that I posed. Furthermore, I request him to provide more rational, scientifically valid, and intellectually stimulating arguments than he did before (his ‘superior’ IQ notwithstanding, I strongly doubt that he can!).

Nick Nguyen:

Wonders never cease to happen!

Scientific American just published a new theory that corroborates by earlier claim.

Just three days ago, Scientific American ran an article on how human evolution has accelerated after 10,000 BC.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=culture-speeds-up-human-evolution

I rarely trash an academic peer inspite of diametrically opposing views, but this charlatan whom you refer to as "Professor Rushton" has his entire "research" on higher IQ among cold-climate humans, based on the Karst glaciation, which I recall, happened in 10,000 BC, i.e. BEFORE the accelerated evolution in humans occurred.

It seems preposterous to a layperson like me (and a typical sneaky one at that!), this putative high intelligence got preserved within cold climate humans, and never got introduced (through simple genetic diffusion) to us lowly warm-climate humans.

To me it also appears that in human communities with a high death rate, such as the "pygmies" ( http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-pygmies-evolved-to-be-shorter ), the evolutionary pressure would be higher! Consequently, it is these humans who would evolve higher intelligences.

In contrast, in populations with a well settled lifestyle, the evolutionary pressure towards higher intelligence would be minimal. For example, in the Anglo-saxon world, blondes are considered to be dumb - indeed there are jokes galore about blonde stupidity. Yet, blondes are somehow considered "hot". It this male preference for "hot" blondes translates to higher fecundity for "dumb" women, clearly we have a case of REVERSE evolutionary pressure.

I invite you to take some time off managing your stupid Indian code-slaves and super-smart Oriental code-slaves ;) and share your expert comments on this issue as well. I await your response to my earlier six-question challenge also.

======================

If I were stranded in the Amazonian rainforest, with a New Yorker and a San "Bushman" (both equally alien to a rainforest), and faced with a life threatening situation, I'd run to the San Bushman for help, rather than the New Yorker. I wonder which one would Nick Nguyen choose?

In this site that Nick Nguyen provided to me to illustrate how poorly those from the "much bragged IITs" perform, and how India was beaten by smaller nations, the other worst performer is the USA. I wonder if Nick Nguyen would consider Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia to be "much bragged" also.

http://www.news.com/Coding-for-fame%2C-and-dollars---page-2/2100-1007_3-6067549-2.html?tag=st.num

In any case, I do not claim that IITans, or Stanford graduates have higher intelligences. As far as I am concerned, these are the smartest people on earth:

http://www.rhymer.net/New%20Folder/gourd1.jpg
http://www.xenophilia.net/png/kaminabitwoman3.jpg
http://users.stlcc.edu/nfuller/ca/subsist/pygmy.jpg

And these Indians (from the Andamans) are cleverer than members of the the "uppermost" caste, such as Maharaja heir:
http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter1/Onge-couple.jpg
http://www2.db.dk/pe/images/Andaman/andaman-1.jpg

And so is this stunningly beautiful Piraha woman, who can't even count upto 2:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/144/358867725_e4cdfaba9d.jpg

Forget all my evolutionary reasoning - that these people have survived for millenia in the harshest possible conditions, which neither Nick Nguyen nor I can endure for more than a few days at best, is proof positive that they are smarter, more resourceful, and more ingenious humans than any of us.

As for dumb human beings are concerned, nothing can ever
beat this pitiable excuse of a human being in mental retardation: http://www.internationalterrorist.com/bush.gif

With this, and with the hope that Nick Nguyen will respond rationally to my six questions, I'll rest my case.

I rarely read long winding comments on BW blogs - especially on India-China articles, and specifically if I see a long comment from Nick Nguyen. But Sanjoy man, thank you for investing the time to blabber on as much as you did. Of course Nguyen could come back with a highly intelligent retort that will roughly translate into "yeah? well, f you" and that will be the end of the debate.

Actually mine came natural as I am interested in all those issues and write a lot. It is Nick Nguyen who actually invested more time. Remember, he isn't Indian and so must have had to google substantially to get all his spurious data. He even went ahead and uploaded images to show me. Unfortunately his comments revolve around one central (very dumb) theme:
Indian code-slaves are all bad, Oriental code-slaves are all great.

Go figure!

In the process, he didn't hesitate to diss poor sub-Saharan Africans. That, and his labeling me a "typical sneaky Indian" makes him a racist and a bigot.

His strategic error was to reply to me post (Nov 18). Until then I wondered whether he even read my responses. It now gives me immense satisfaction to note that he did read all of them but simply does not know how to reply. ;-).

Sanjoy man you got a wealth of knowledge. Therein lies the Irony- as knowledgable Indians are difficult to come by. As a fellow Indian and a recent product of the education system I increasingly realize with a sense of defeat that our potential of being a developed nation will remain just that- always a potential and never convert to reality. We the highly educated young human capital of India always ponder what keeps our nation lagging. I have had endless discussions with my collegues in architecture school on this subject. We blame the skewed political and educational systems but after coming to Europe to pursue my masters education in Industrial design, I realized that maybe it is also the general lack of intelligence and low IQ which is to blame. We are a selfish and petty people who fail to realize the common good; therefore our nation suffers despite the immense talent it possesses.
There is an element of truth in what Nick says when he points out indians grab undue credit and never stand up to except failure. As an Indian I have noticed these attributes in the political, proffesional, and academic spheres.
As I'm an architect(triple gold Medallist) and an Industrial Designer I'm proud to say that I constitute the top 1-2% of the educated Indian population. Therefore I make the following observations:
1) In my school (which BusinessWeek rates as one of the best design schools worldwide) the Indian students constitute both the smartest and the dumbest cross section.
2)As a designer I have studied lots of product innovations and on a list of smart product innovations India figures nowhere, compared to the western counterparts (Google,Mooi,Prius,Ikea,Skype,Linux ). Outsourcing industry is just mindless coolie work, it is Design and Architecture which gauges the intelligence and the development of a civilization.
3)Despite nuclear weapons we are still perceived as a village nation with no development and creativity. Despite this the professors who teach me insist that India is where the future is & not China due to our inherent spiritual and cultural development.
4) Indian students I find are generally good at mathematical skills and problem solving skills compared to their Caucasian counterparts. But thats where it ends. We as a people lack originality of thought, creativity, general knowledge. I have students both from IIT and NID in my college and they are surely amongst the least talented ones around.
So I say to both you and Nick that the development of a nation cannot be gauged in such overly simplistic terms. What say Sanjoy? If we were so intelligent then how come we still haven't been able to design even the most basic amenities for our citizens? Do you know we still haven't been able to design footpaths which are accessible through wheelchairs? This takes no money but just ingenuity and plain innovation.
But none the less it was a pleasure reading your well researched replies. A brave effort! Truly patriotic.

Sanjoy Das-
You seem to have drowned your opponent Nick Nguyen with a deluge of information. Very impressive, you are a highly knowledgeable person indeed. But you take an extremist position. You are trying to say that IQ basically measures nothing. Isn't it just a mere random number then according to you? What about all evidence to the contrary?

Pleas

If INDians are so stupid how come they routinely beat westerners in their own universities,how is it that they have a space program,HOW is it that INDians abroad like in the UK WHERE THEY are primarily from lower class backgrounds and face a fair bit of racism daily are actually richer than the average white briton?
HOW is it that these stupid indians had civilization millenia before the clever westerners could cook their food.so please we all know the survey is crap.try to get into an iit and then talk.

Indian diaspora populations perform quite well in a lot of different locales:

1.) Singapore - The descedants of laborers from Tamil Nadu, up to 1/3 of whom were untouchable, perform slightly below the Singapore-Chinese (IQ=106) on most academic/economic metrics.
2.) Canada, Australia, NZ - Skilled Indian immigrants outperform the native population.
3.) U.S. - Highly educated Indian immigrants perform roughly on par with high-achieving Jewish-Americans.
4.) UK - Indian laborers from Punjab outperform whites both academically and economically.
5.) East Africa - Indian railroad laborers from Gujarat became a market dominant minority, akin to the Chinese in SE Asia.
6.) South Africa - In spite of massive apartheid era discrimination, Indians did very well and massively outperformed the other minority groups (Malays, Coloreds, Africans).
7.) Marutius - This nation is predominately populated by low caste Indian laborers that came from the poorest and most backward regions of Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh. There is a large African minority. Despite its obscure location off the coast of Africa, this country has a per capita GDP of $14,000.
8.) Fiji - Indians arrived as poor laborers from Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh. If you look at the stats for the Indo-Fijians living in Australia and NZ, you will see that Indians are performing very well. Indo-Fijians in Australia earn more per week than white Australians.
9.) Carribean - Indo-Carribeans were mainly low caste laborers from Bihar. Let me quote for you an article on Indo-Carribean immigrants in Canda:

"The primary concern of Indo-Caribbean Canadians has been survival. As a thrifty, energetic, industrious people, they have prospered in Canada and achieved a material standard of living that is much higher than the one they left behind in the Caribbean. In Toronto, for instance, they have excelled in their traditional professions of law and medicine. Most of all they have shown an aptitude for retail business that is evident in the many Indo-Caribbean groceries, restaurants, and roti shops that can now be found all over Toronto. While most of these establishments are patronized chiefly by Indo-Caribbean customers, the roti shop, with its menu of spicy, exotic dishes and its organization as a fast-food outlet, has made the strongest impact on the wider Canadian community. Indo-Caribbean real-estate agencies are another successful business enterprise. Evidence of Indo-Caribbean activities in business and the professions may be found in numerous advertisements in Indo-Caribbean newspapers in Canada."

INDIA SUCKS WHEN IT COMES TO PROFESSIONALISM. Hard work and originality are regarded as MAGICAL attributes by most indians, rather than a function of independent mindedness and preparedness( SOmetimes mistaken for intelligence) . 90 % of INDIANS dream of owning their own grocery store cause they cannot think beyond it. I am an INDIAN myself and i have heard 75% of my indian friends making comments - "Academics is just academics, wont help you with 'practical' skills", there is no teenage rebellion- crucial to independent mindedness and growth to adulthood in INDIA, 90% of indians are STUPID, petty and cash conscious, all that matters is "making money" , thats why they join AMWAY in droves , even talented bay area indian techies suck up to AMWAY coz they lack faith in themselves and their abilities... soo dumb..

I personally believe Indians are intelligent but sometimes arrogant.I believe that they are not professionals except the upper corporate sector like Tata,infosys,HCL,DLF etc. Although things are changing fast and I find them becoming more professional.However there is strong need to improve the education system in India as in govt schools and bring them upto date especially most of the teachers in govt school lack the interests to teach students they are far more happy relaxing and not teaching in the class and I have a heard a lot of stories in Delhi itself where teachers of govt school take kids to their home and ask them to wash their clothes and utensils if they want to pass and most of their parents are illiterate and dont care about their kids....The biggest problem of all is the population growth which is eating and outperforms all the new jobs and development in the country

"TWO. Neither is J. Philippe Rushton that renowned nor does his work deserve much merit. His source of funding is the discredited Pioneer Trust, not the Canadian equivalent of the NIH or NSF."

You are obviously quite naive if you think Government agencies would fund research on differential intelligence. Look at the difficulty they had getting funding for the Minnesotta Twin study. It's not a pc area so funding simply isn't available.

As for Jared Diamond, note he states psychometric tests are wrong but doesn't offer any evidence why. You also cite Stephen Jay Gould, whose book the Mismeasure of Man was dismissed by actual researchers, but praised in the media.

Read Gottfredson's article here on the usual fallacies used to attack IQ tests:

Gottfredson, L. S. (2009). Logical fallacies used to dismiss the evidence on intelligence testing. In R. Phelps (Ed.), Correcting fallacies about educational and psychological testing (pp. 11-65). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies.pdf

> You are obviously quite naive if you think Government
> agencies would fund research on differential intelligence.
> Look at the difficulty they had getting funding for the
> Minnesotta Twin study. It's not a pc area so funding
> simply isn't available.

Fine, let me accept for a change that the government wouldn't fund politically incorrect research. Does that still mean Rushton is a meritorious researcher? Take a look at the rest of his shoddy record, including the source of his funds.

Besides, I understand that Rushton is linked to a lot of controversies, right?

> As for Jared Diamond, note he states psychometric tests
> are wrong but doesn't offer any evidence why. You also
> cite Stephen Jay Gould, whose book the Mismeasure of
> Man was dismissed by actual researchers, but praised in
> the media.

Not Jared Diamond but Stephen J. Gould. Gould is the one who rightly dismisses psychometric studies. Rightly so.

Psychology today in ill equipped to handle deeper issues concerning the brain. Stephen J. Gould (as far as I remember) raised some issues regarding the use of principle component analysis (PCA). Isn't it true that psychologists blindly use PCA without an clue of how it works? I can get into the math behind PCA and how it is used blindly by psychology researchers with you.

As a trivial example, do a google on say - Independent Component Analysis. PCA cannot separate out statistically independent distributions. It works with linear data only. These are severe limitations!

Frankly the psychology research community has to grow out of Stat 101 level tools.

I don't need Gould or Diamond to backup my claims when I can do it myself (right here if necessary).

> Read Gottfredson's article here on the usual fallacies
> used to attack IQ tests:

A quick look at the paper shows me that it addresses none of the issues that I have raised.

One needs a FAR deeper understanding of various issues before making blanket statements like X-ethnic group being more intelligent than Y-ethnic group. Here is one my own arguments, summarized again (that you ignored earlier):

The brain could be a hypercomputer, relying on quantum mechanical processing at the microtubule level. The brain could be breaking away from the Church-Turing bottleneck (do a google on Church-Turing thesis). To measure its performance using simple IQ tests is incredibly naive.

(Disclaimer: I do not believe that quantum decoherence is involved in neural processing, but that is besides the point!).

The typical problems that go into measuring IQ can be accomplished by a very rudimentary model of computation called a Finite State Automaton. To use such tests to measure the incredible power of the brain is - I quote for the umpteenth time - like measuring the velocity of light with a speedometer!

The entire psychology research community is not equipped to handle such issues. Psychologists do not understand common terms from various other disciplines like "Automata" or "Church-Turing thesis" or "Nash equilibria" or "Independent Component Analysis" or "Kolmogorov complexity". All these are mathematical and computational tools necessary to delve into the processing that takes place in the human brain.

You need artificial intelligence theorists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, applied mathematicians, philosophers and evolutionary biologists to do investigations into this issue not psychologists.

With due respects to the American Psychological Association, that rigorously peer reviewed paper looked amateurish.

References:

[1] Bringsjord et al. (2006) "The modal argument for hypercomputing minds", Theoretical Computer Science 317 (2004) pp. 167 – 190.

[2] Cotogno (2003) "Hypercomputation and the physical Church-Turing thesis," The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 4(2):181-223.

[3] Vitiello (2003) "Quantum noise, entanglement and chaos in the quantum field theory of mind/brain states," arxiv.org.