Rex Kerr
3 min readFeb 13, 2023

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The problem is that this only makes sense if any accomplishment-enabling conditions are largely uncorrelated. But they're not: Einstein was working in the tradition of Newton to a large extent. Letting Einstein count as another independent exemplar is only fair if you normalize by the number of people of different backgrounds who had the opportunity to be in that tradition. Furthermore, your stated methodology exacerbates this dependence by measuring what is "crucial to the overall progress of the intellectual evolution"--so if some other group made the same intellectual discovery, but due to geographical or other considerations didn't manage to become part of the scientific revolution in Europe, it sounds like you're leaving it out. This shouldn't take any credit away from those who developed the scientific method and used it to generate amazingly reliable knowledge about an amazing diversity of things: this is fantastic and highly laudable. But you can't learn very much about the human potential around the world when there was only one main actual instance which we've been swept up in for the past 400ish years.

You also make multiple claims that are highly misleading if not flat-out wrong. For instance, you claim that the Germans make German culture, not the other way around. But why is it not possible that culture (and environment) makes the German? We have plenty of modern tests of this where people from all manner of places around the world and all sorts of cultures end up in, say, the United States. And you find that after enough generations pass (~3) for the original culture to have mostly been supplanted by the new culture, differences tend to disappear. For instance: https://www.ozy.com/news-and-politics/why-the-model-minority-ends-with-second-generation-asian-americans/90337/.

There could be something intrinsic in addition to culture and environment: there's no reason biologically why it would be impossible. But the evidence, when we've looked, suggests that at least there's not very much intrinsic difference, and that humans are very responsive to culture and environment. But you apparently want us to ignore the obvious and well-documented large effect in favor of a non-obvious partly-disproven at-most-small effect.

You postulate curiosity as a critical factor, but show no evidence either that it differs by race (or ethnicity, or geography), or that it actually helps make critical discoveries, or that it doesn't end up highly correlated with IQ anyway. In contrast, almost everyone who has made recent critical advances is known to have had an incredibly high IQ (probably including Feynman, incidentally: he never took a formal IQ test, and by all accounts he could mentally run rings around most other physicists, who already are an extremely rarified bunch when it comes to IQ...which would be a very, very odd phenomenon if he was actually slow on the uptake or had difficulty with abstract thinking and manipulation compared to all of his peers).

And this time you have managed to add some stuff that is simultaneously bafflingly wrong in multiple dimensions (did you forget to pay attention to the intellectual advancements in biological sciences and evolution, maybe?) and offensive to (hopefully) pretty much everyone. I think, at this point, that a good deal of scorn would be well-deserved.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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