Replies: @Jack D, @Peter Lund, @Curt Dunkel

"Say what you want about the book, and we already did here, but To Kill a Mockingbird‘s tomboy Scout was a very endearing character. 'Pass the damn ham, Ma’am.'”

Lol! And the interactions between Scout and her Aunt Augusta are hilarious. I love TKAM, and own the book and the movie. Its one flaw is that it's too episodic, the Christmas interval doesn't really fit it all.

It irritates me that nearly everyone thinks it's a novel about racial injustice in the South. It's not. It's a valentine to Lee's father, to whom she was extremely close. In portraying him as a near saint (and apparently he was a truly good man), she cleverly picked the one thing sure to show him in the best light: robustly defending a Negro accused of raping a white woman in a time and place where that defense was virtually unthinkable. Notice how after Tom Robinson dies, the blacks in the story aren't mentioned again. They've served their purpose. The novel is about Scout and Atticus (and a little about Dill). Apparently Lee, despite her mother's troubles, had a near idyllic childhood, largely due to the love and indulgence shown her by her father. Look at the novel in that light and you'll see what I mean.

N.B. And The Road is not a post-apocalyptic novel. It's a love letter to McCarthy's young son.

Replies: @Harry Baldwin, @Fauxi's Balls, @Curt Dunkel, @Achmed E. Newman

Replies: @Jack P, @Curt Dunkel

Either I'm just lazy or my search engine is broken, but I'm trying to find raw data on Ashkenazi Jewish IQ scores, and this is the only raw data I came across:

There's a table with sample size and average score, which I'll clumsily copy/paste below:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source Sample sizes. Number of Ashkenazi Jews tested. Average IQ Ashkenazi Jews in USA and/or UK
Backman 1972 1236 107.8 verbal IQ
Backman in present study 150 107.5 crystallized IQ
Lynn Estimated 103.5 Ashkenazi Jews in Israel
Macdonald 1994 Suggested IQ 117
Storfer Suggested IQ 112
Shuey 1942 764 1.2 below non-Jewish whites
Bachman 1970 Lesser than 100 112.8
Herrnstein/Murray 1994 59 112.6

The two studies with the largest samples sizes of 1236 and 764 (Backman and Shuey) say that their IQ is 107.8 Verbal and "1.2 below non-Jewish whites." Am I reading this correctly, it's 1.2 points below the White mean?

I'm trying to find more raw data on this topic and the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence lists "Backman, M. E. (1972) and Levinson, B.M. & Block, Z" as the sources for the high IQ data, but it gives no scores, and I don't have access to the raw data in those studies. (Does someone else?)

And then I see this article and I think: huh? An average overall IQ score of 102?

"I learned that most studies of American Jews are not very representative, because samples are often drawn just from New York city or from children in Orthodox schools."

So, my impression is that the data on Ashkenazi IQ is lousy. What am I missing? I thought that we knew this stuff. 115 is quoted everywhere so authoritatively. Where is this number coming from? Why is it quoted everywhere with so much confidence?

And Jewish brains are smaller by 2 cubic inches? Hmm.

Replies: @Doug, @utu, @Curt Dunkel, @Krastos the Gluemaker

Replies: @curt dunkel