A Blunted Sickle - Thread II

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To perpetuate the tangent, I was under the impression that IQ tests were normalized so the average IQ is, by definition, 100 (for the group they're normalized on). If that isn't the case even in the US, do you know what population the tests are normalized on?
They're normalized on average IQ for the populations in which they were originally designed. That is, mainly, British and American schoolchildren and (later) adults.

But average IQ is not the same in all populations. If the tests had originally been normed for Ashkenazic Jews, 100 would correspond to about 117 on the now-established scale. Or for Northeast Asians (Chinese/Japanese/Koreans), about 110. Though interpreting that number is trickier than it looks because Northeast Asians skew higher on visual intelligence while having a very similar distribution of verbal intelligence to non-Ashkenazic Brits and Americans.

I won't list any of the populations that have lower average IQs than the baseline 100, because people who can't handle facts very well tend to start screaming "racist" when you do that. Besides, that isn't necessary to explain my previous remarks. I'll just note that the world median is significantly below 100 and leave it at that - you can easily dig up the figure for yourself, but prepare to be shocked if you do. There are a few places (blessedly few) where average IQ is down in the 50s and 60s. They are, not by coincidence, hellholes.

They're hellholes for the same reason the average IQ of an occupying force matters. A trait very strongly tied to higher IQ is lower time preference - that is, the ability to defer or entirely forgo immediate gratification for a larger future reward. If your troops have high time preference, they will tend to loot, burn and rape for immediate gratification because they weight the immediate reward against the future risks differently than a person with low time preference would. That's assuming you enforce consequences for bad behavior in your troops; if you're (say) Japanese of this time period, maybe you don't.

So: an occupying force of Ashkenazic Jews would have been slightly better behaved than the Brits, Americans, and Canadians were, because higher average IQ and lower time preference. Conversely, if you drew your occupying troops from any of the populations with lower average IQ that I'm carefully not going to go anywhere near identifying, they would have had higher time preference and relations with the locals would probably have gone a great deal worse. If I wanted to start a shitstorm, I could name examples from WWII.

(And just to head off another possible source of screaming, none of these predictions depend on why populations have the average IQs that they do. You can assume culture or genetics or childhood nutrition or even a dastardly plot by colonialist exploiters, and it doesn't matter; the predictable consequences of differences in time preference in terms of bad behavior by your troops will not change.)
 
They're normalized on average IQ for the populations in which they were originally designed. That is, mainly, British and American schoolchildren and (later) adults.

But average IQ is not the same in all populations. If the tests had originally been normed for Ashkenazic Jews, 100 would correspond to about 117 on the now-established scale. Or for Northeast Asians (Chinese/Japanese/Koreans), about 110. Though interpreting that number is trickier than it looks because Northeast Asians skew higher on visual intelligence while having a very similar distribution of verbal intelligence to non-Ashkenazic Brits and Americans.

I won't list any of the populations that have lower average IQs than the baseline 100, because people who can't handle facts very well tend to start screaming "racist" when you do that. Besides, that isn't necessary to explain my previous remarks. I'll just note that the world median is significantly below 100 and leave it at that - you can easily dig up the figure for yourself, but prepare to be shocked if you do. There are a few places (blessedly few) where average IQ is down in the 50s and 60s. They are, not by coincidence, hellholes.

They're hellholes for the same reason the average IQ of an occupying force matters. A trait very strongly tied to higher IQ is lower time preference - that is, the ability to defer or entirely forgo immediate gratification for a larger future reward. If your troops have high time preference, they will tend to loot, burn and rape for immediate gratification because they weight the immediate reward against the future risks differently than a person with low time preference would. That's assuming you enforce consequences for bad behavior in your troops; if you're (say) Japanese of this time period, maybe you don't.

So: an occupying force of Ashkenazic Jews would have been slightly better behaved than the Brits, Americans, and Canadians were, because higher average IQ and lower time preference. Conversely, if you drew your occupying troops from any of the populations with lower average IQ that I'm carefully not going to go anywhere near identifying, they would have had higher time preference and relations with the locals would probably have gone a great deal worse. If I wanted to start a shitstorm, I could name examples from WWII.

(And just to head off another possible source of screaming, none of these predictions depend on why populations have the average IQs that they do. You can assume culture or genetics or childhood nutrition or even a dastardly plot by colonialist exploiters, and it doesn't matter; the predictable consequences of differences in time preference in terms of bad behavior by your troops will not change.)
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just don't understand that IQ tests don't actually measure intelligence , they also depend on education and other social factors and are biased on western norms. Otherwise I'd just have to call you racist as ethnic origin and citizenship do not , in any serious study, affect intelligence in any way.
 

CalBear

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They're normalized on average IQ for the populations in which they were originally designed. That is, mainly, British and American schoolchildren and (later) adults.

But average IQ is not the same in all populations. If the tests had originally been normed for Ashkenazic Jews, 100 would correspond to about 117 on the now-established scale. Or for Northeast Asians (Chinese/Japanese/Koreans), about 110. Though interpreting that number is trickier than it looks because Northeast Asians skew higher on visual intelligence while having a very similar distribution of verbal intelligence to non-Ashkenazic Brits and Americans.

I won't list any of the populations that have lower average IQs than the baseline 100, because people who can't handle facts very well tend to start screaming "racist" when you do that. Besides, that isn't necessary to explain my previous remarks. I'll just note that the world median is significantly below 100 and leave it at that - you can easily dig up the figure for yourself, but prepare to be shocked if you do. There are a few places (blessedly few) where average IQ is down in the 50s and 60s. They are, not by coincidence, hellholes.

They're hellholes for the same reason the average IQ of an occupying force matters. A trait very strongly tied to higher IQ is lower time preference - that is, the ability to defer or entirely forgo immediate gratification for a larger future reward. If your troops have high time preference, they will tend to loot, burn and rape for immediate gratification because they weight the immediate reward against the future risks differently than a person with low time preference would. That's assuming you enforce consequences for bad behavior in your troops; if you're (say) Japanese of this time period, maybe you don't.

So: an occupying force of Ashkenazic Jews would have been slightly better behaved than the Brits, Americans, and Canadians were, because higher average IQ and lower time preference. Conversely, if you drew your occupying troops from any of the populations with lower average IQ that I'm carefully not going to go anywhere near identifying, they would have had higher time preference and relations with the locals would probably have gone a great deal worse. If I wanted to start a shitstorm, I could name examples from WWII.

(And just to head off another possible source of screaming, none of these predictions depend on why populations have the average IQs that they do. You can assume culture or genetics or childhood nutrition or even a dastardly plot by colonialist exploiters, and it doesn't matter; the predictable consequences of differences in time preference in terms of bad behavior by your troops will not change.)
Thank you for confirming that you were, in fact, saying what your earlier post seemed to imply.

This is clearly the wrong Board for you or anyone who actually believes that large part of the world (coincidentally, of course, all located in Africa) are, by definition, populated by hundreds of million of profoundly mentally challenged people based on a test that ha been largely demonstrated to be invalid when used for differ in socioeconomic status.

This may be your first action, but it is also your last.

To Coventry with you.
 
So... new topic, how will American politics play out for the rest of the 40's? I'd say Dewey is in a good position for '44.
Trying to remember, did FDR get Wallace as his VP in 1940 as iOTL? Who does FDR support to succeed him as the Democratic nominee? I'm *guessing* William O. Douglas. If so, does it resign before the convention, or only after he gets the nomination.

Though Byrnes as the Democratic Nominee would be interesting in a "Send the African Americans right back to the Republicans" sort of way.
 
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One thought on the Italian situation: even if the passes are not suitable for large troop movements right now, wouldn't at this point be a feasible solution to just put troops on trains and pull into any Austrian border post and accept their surrender?
 
Trying to remember, did FDR get Wallace as his VP in 1940 as iOTL? Who does FDR support to succeed him as the Democratic nominee? I'm *guessing* William O. Douglas. If so, does it resign before the convention, or only after he gets the nomination.

Though Byrnes as the Democratic Nominee would be interesting in a "Send the African Americans right back to the Republicans" sort of way.
Wallace is VP. I remember that since the GOP nominee in 1940 was Dewey instead of Willkie, Wallace's weirdness got hit harder without Willkie's, I want to say affair, baggage that resulted in a ceasefire OTL.
 
It was always going to end that way for Mr. ESR. His name, after all, is an anagram for "Yonder Racism", as RationalWiki once pointed out.

Anyway, thank you for your service CalBear !
 
Honestly and sadly, on a 800+ pages timeline about WW2, the only surprising thing is that this didn't happen sooner. Thanks to CalBear for their quick action, and let's hope this will not have disgusted anyone of the thread, deeply uncomfortable as it was... That said, personnally I'm not going anywhere until I know the fate of the Kaigun ITTL.
 
I'm surprised that the Hungarian 2nd army isn't making a mad dash for Graz and then to the border to link up with Italy. The Italians and the Poles are their best bet for getting support in the postwar negotiations. Mussolini could also potentially move their forces from Romania via Hungary, couldn't he?
Not a huge amount in Romania, and what there is won't really be available in a hurry. The real issue is what the Italians can offer the Hungarians - I can't imagine any support they're giving will be worth very much in the postwar conferences, simply because they spent most of the war cosying up to the Germans.

Even at the minimum number of troops on Iceland iOTL, there were a number of issues. With the Americans never having stationed troops, the Icelanders might look to the US after the end of the war.
Why look to anybody in the first place? Without the US involved in Europe, NATO doesn't happen and then in turn Iceland can sit quietly in the North Atlantic. I would say "splendid isolation" but, well, I've been there.

Surely it's a given that a garrison of troops, foreign or otherwise, are going to piss off local men when it comes to women.
It gets a lot worse when the local men are conscripted and sent to a godforsaken desert or jungle on the other side of the world.

But what it boils down to is I don't think there isn't anything in the TL which would makes a different result than independence in 1944 more likely and even the same *day* is reasonable, OTOH, if the independence day of another nation starting with I is still the same date in 1948 as OTL, I will be very surprised.
Writing about what happens to OTL Israel isn't something I'm looking forward to.

In short the Entente is about to have a human disaster in Poland on their hands within the next two months. Not sure that this is something that Stalin can take advantage of though.
How is this different from OTL? The Germans were not providing lots of food and fuel to the Poles in December/January 1941 in OTL, they were too busy trying to feed their army in front of Moscow. At this point the ration scale for Poles was as little as 300 calories for Jews, not very much higher for non-Jewish Poles. That's deep in starvation territory anyway.

Stalin's best case scenario is hanging on to his gains in Eastern Poland and the Baltics and he won't be risking any aggressive moves.
Thing is, that's a really good outcome in objective terms. He's essentially recovered all the territory lost by Nicholas II with the exception of Finland and South Sakhalin, having only had to fight the Winter War while much of the rest of Europe has descended into a cataclysm. Sure, compared to OTL the USSR is in a weaker position but from the viewpoint of 1938 it's doing really well.

Oh yes, definitely lots of propaganda on the topic. The headlines are easy to imagine: "The Communist Party, lead by Comrade Stalin ensured that the people of Belorussia and Ukraine were kept safe from Fascist Aggression", "Capitalist soldiers prevent starving Poles from entering the Soviet land of plenty", etc. Maybe not in Pravda though, since it's high profile and might be needed to signal peaceful overtures to London and Paris.
Why would they? All that's going to do is make them think that they were under threat.

So... new topic, how will American politics play out for the rest of the 40's? I'd say Dewey is in a good position for '44.
Probably. Roosevelt winning 4 elections in peacetime is a stretch too far for me.

Though Byrnes as the Democratic Nominee would be interesting in a "Send the African Americans right back to the Republicans" sort of way.
At this point it isn't as clear-cut as it would later become - the Democratic party is really two parties at the moment, and postwar even formally splits into the Democrat and Dixiecrats.

One thought on the Italian situation: even if the passes are not suitable for large troop movements right now, wouldn't at this point be a feasible solution to just put troops on trains and pull into any Austrian border post and accept their surrender?
That's just embarrassing - turning up and knocking off a border post and nothing else at the end of the war. At best they'd get laughed out of the peace conference.

Honestly and sadly, on a 800+ pages timeline about WW2, the only surprising thing is that this didn't happen sooner. Thanks to CalBear for their quick action, and let's hope this will not have disgusted anyone of the thread, deeply uncomfortable as it was... That said, personnally I'm not going anywhere until I know the fate of the Kaigun ITTL.
I always hate it when people get banned on this thread - it feels like I'm somehow responsible.
 
Thing is, that's a really good outcome in objective terms. He's essentially recovered all the territory lost by Nicholas II with the exception of Finland and South Sakhalin, having only had to fight the Winter War while much of the rest of Europe has descended into a cataclysm. Sure, compared to OTL the USSR is in a weaker position but from the viewpoint of 1938 it's doing really well.
In terms of territory and influence outside of its border, the USSR is doing worse than OTL (although better than in 1938, as you say) they've also avoided millions and millions of deaths, as well as the huge amount of disruption caused by foreign admitted traipsing across large areas of the nation and killing anything that looked at them funny. Definitely swings and roundabouts.
 
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Thank you for confirming that you were, in fact, saying what your earlier post seemed to imply.

This is clearly the wrong Board for you or anyone who actually believes that large part of the world (coincidentally, of course, all located in Africa) are, by definition, populated by hundreds of million of profoundly mentally challenged people based on a test that ha been largely demonstrated to be invalid when used for differ in socioeconomic status.

This may be your first action, but it is also your last.

To Coventry with you.
Thank you for your speedy actions in dealing with this and also your courtesy and restraint in pointing out some of the known issues with IQ tests. As a teacher, I personally am very much against the use of these tests and actively refuse to use them in my classroom.
 
IQ tests depend very little on socioeconomic status. Can anyone site a single study that says IQ is a significantly worse predictor of outcomes for some socioeconomic classes than others?
 
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