[ExI] ai in education

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2026 at 11:57 AM Kelly Anderson via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> The studies that show that Jew, asian boost generally also show blacks
> to be lower than average.

And "whites" rank between those groups.  If you split humans into
groups and measure some characteristic, they have to rank in one way
or another.  Doesn't mean a damn thing with respect to an individual.
> So you have to be very careful pulling on
> those particular discredited strings, lest you bring the mountain down
> upon the head of Muhammed, cursed be his name.
>
> I've honestly never seen any of these sorts of pseudo studies applied
> to Muslim populations, by the way, and they have to have some pretty
> serious inherited stupidity in that part of the world from the
> shenanigans of the last 8 centuries or so. The Muslims were
> collectively pretty smart before that, inventing Arabic numerals, zero
> and  preserving much of the wisdom of the ancients. But somewhere
> along the line, the mullah's chased off the scientists.

I think there is another human personality direction that should be
considered.  I got to know a few cult members who were
counter-picketing me.  One of them went into considerable detail about
his fellow cult members being extremely vulnerable to MLM scams.  Cult
members rate high on gullibility.  I suspect this is a genetic feature
because there is an overabundance of a Mormon background among cult
members.  (The Mormons raked through Europe for members, and the
process selected for gullibility.)

The few Islamic conversions I know seemed to have this characteristic.

> Speaking of the wisdom of the ancients, I haven't heard a whole lot
> from the Herculaneum scrolls in the last few months. Researching it,
> it appears that the slowdown has nothing to do with the AI part, but
> the other things in the pipeline from charcoal chunk to translated
> wisdom in a book.

When they come along, nanobots will make short work of reading the scrolls.

> As for the Jews, they have had the advantage for much of civilization
> to be the only party willing to lend money and charge interest, which
> is a helpful thing to do. This has put them into an abundance mindset
> longer than the rest of us, which is helpful. I don't think it's an IQ
> thing at all.

I think it is an interaction of culture with genetics, where the
smarter ones did better reproductively.  I can't cite any studies on
this, but I have not looked.  I don't know why the Chinese test high.
I do know that it is easy to distinguish Chinese from rice-growing
areas from those from wheat-growing areas on psychological tests.

Keith

> -Kelly
>
>
> -Kelly
>
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2026 at 2:02 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > >...Jews and nuclear weapons, Jews are demonstrably smarter than average by half a standard deviation, about 7-8 IQ points.  ... Keith
> >
> >
> > Ja.  I don't think it should be all that controversial: the jews were early to figure out selective breeding.  They wrote about it in their ancient texts, with regard to Jacob, son of Isaac, the grandson of Abraham, the ancestor of all the jews.  In Genesis 30: 37-43, the story was that Jacob took poplar branches and cut notches in them, so that the ewes would see the spotted branches while the rams mounted them, causing them to be more likely to produce spotted lambs.  They didn't get that it makes no difference what the ewe was viewing at the time, only that he may have been breeding the stronger beasts, and recognizing there was a specific period of fertility.  He took advantage and built his flocks.
> >
> > If one has ever played Civilization, one recognizes that technologies build upon each other.  The jews were early masters of reading and writing.  This resulted in their inventing a wildly complicated religion.  That may have included gematria from way back, which may have emphasized the value of math in the rabbis and their followers.  The eastern European jews had the necessary math skills already in place when the nuke scientists faced the very difficult problem of how to assemble a critical mass of plutonium quickly enough to cause it to detonate.  That's a hell of a complicated problem.  They were there, with the math.  Perhaps all that traces back to Jacob and his sheep.
> >
> > spike
> >
> >
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