A couple years ago I reviewed mathematician Jordan Ellenberg’s fun book, “Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else,” and at the conclusion I discussed Jordan’s statement that he’s no good at “visualizing shapes and what they would look like if rotated or glued together . . . You know the little picture on the credit card machine at the gas station that shows you how to orient the card when you swipe it? That picture is useless to me. It’s beyond my mental capabilities to translate that flat drawing into a three-dimensional action.”
As I wrote, I had no doubt that Ellenberg was telling the truth on this one, but I feared he was just giving ammunition to James “cancer cure is coming in minus 21 years” Watson who notoriously said, “The one aspect of the Jewish brain that is not first class is that Jews are said to be bad in thinking in three dimensions . . . it is true.”
I pointed this out to Jordan, who replied:
That Watson quote was completely new to me, and my interest in learning about about an anti-Semitic stereotype I’d never even heard of before outweighs any sense of guilt I have! Probably because it’s so weirdly antique I think no amount of bellows-pumping could make it flame to life again.
I responded that I’ve seen that particular stereotype bouncing around the web from time to time. I agree that there’s something almost charming about it. But if you start to think more about it, it’s kind of creepy. It’s part of the larger story that Jews aren’t actually creative; they (we!) are just symbol-manipulators. The idea is that the archetypal non-Jewish Great Man is someone like Newton or Edison who builds great things, or maybe someone like Teddy Roosevelt or Alexander the Great who is a brave leader, whereas the archetypal Jewish Great Man is someone like a lawyer who’s good at symbol manipulation or a Rothschild who can manipulate the financial system. When you think about it that way, it’s kind of horrible, denigrating Jewish contributions to science by reducing them to symbol manipulation rather than good healthy robust muscular Christian 3-D rotation. Laughable, but demeaning.
Jordan replied:
So you know, now that I think about it, I researched but ended up not putting into the book some material about European conceptions of national math styles. The Nazis definitely thought this about the Jews. But I had trouble making a coherent story about it — there were interlocking and contradictory beliefs about which nationalities were abstract, algebraic, and ultimately sterile, vs which ones were geometric, intuitive, sloppy, and incapable of rigor — basically a lot of pot-shooting between France and Germany, and none of the material told a clear enough story for me to feel it was necessary. But I never made the connection with my own story about myself!
He continued:
In case it is useful re stereotypes, my fragmentary notes when I was thinking about writing this are:
Read Mathematics under the Nazis and Bieberbach on “Psychological structure…”
“the … Nazi movement saw “truly German” mathematics as intuitive and tied to nature, often geometrical, and certainly not axiomatic. Axiomatics, “logic chopping”, too great abstraction, was Franco-Jewish.” (from S. L. Segal, “Topologists in Hitler’s Germany”)
I [Jordan] have notes to myself that Simone Weil also saw geometry as real/Godlike/connected to nature and algebra as bloodless trickery but I’m not sure where my source for that was.
This thread is also useful.
Perhaps a new anti-Semitic stereotype–Jews are poor at proofreading–is exemplified by Ellenberg’s statement:
“That Watson quote was completely new to me, and my interest in learning about about an anti-Semitic stereotype I’d never even heard of before outweighs any sense of guilt I have! Probably because it’s so weirdly antique I think no amount of bellows-pumping could make it flame to life again.”
Neither Ellenberg nor Andrew caught the typo. For that matter, neither did the spellchecker. And, although I did find the “about about” right away, I have had trouble spotting it again.
——————————————–
Although hardly anyone knows this far more important fact, the term “antisemitic” dates not from antiquity but first appeared in 1879!
https://www.britannica.com/topic/anti-Semitism
“hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group. The term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate the anti-Jewish campaigns underway in central Europe at that time.” Marr shifted the accusation from religion, which offered the possibility of true conversion, to race which implied no redemption possible.
In the old days when it was possible to ask questions about group differences in mental abilities, some literature did point to the sorts of differences discussed here. For example, see Figure 2 (p. 64) in Lesser, G. S., Fifer, G., & Clark, D. H. (1965). Mental abilities of children from different social-class and cultural groups. Monographs of the society for research in child development, 30(4), 1-115. That paper also cites earlier studies showing similar results (Brown, 1994; Held, 1941). Chinese were better on spatial abilities. (Other studies of that period found that Jews and Chinese were generally higher than “whites”, and the differences were due to these particular scales. Still other studies found nearly analogous differences between males and females: males better at spatial, females at verbal.)
Many years ago, when I had my first grad student from China, I described the relevant findings to him about Chinese and Jews, and I asked him whether anything about Chinese culture could explain the differences. He didn’t think so. I asked him about what they did in elementary school. He said (roughly), “Oh, it is just normal. I’m sure it is the same everywhere. For example, one of our projects was to take a car engine apart and put it back together.” Hmm.
Of course these group characteristics, even if they were generally true and still exist, might not apply to the “great men” or “great women” in each group, or even to the not-quite-so-great. The study of high achievers now seems to focus more on the development of “expertise” (largely due to the work of the late Anders Ericsson).
Jon –
> In the old days when it was possible to ask questions…
Oy.
I always love it when people say it’s not possible to do something as they’re doing that thing.
> “Oh, it is just normal. I’m sure it is the same everywhere. For example, one of our projects was to take a car engine apart and put it back together.”
So you think the genetic group difference is due to environmental factors? Are you even trying to be logically coherent?
Jon –
Is this you?
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/
One of Donald Trump’s famous pseudonyms was “John Barron”
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/11/04/donald-trump-used-the-pseudonym-john-barron-throughout-the-80s.html
Before anyone quibbles about the spelling of the first name and the spelling of the last name, this is known as engineering accuracy.
Joshua, where in Jon’s comment does he suggest that differences between groups are due to genetics?
The part where I misread what he wrote!
My apology has been issued.
I don’t get the visceral reaction to label any characterization as anti semitic. In my line of work i see a lot of German/ Indian engineering students.
Indian students are great programmers, theorists and abstract thinkers. But struggle with building prototypes, machining things etc. Things I find the typical German student is better at.
Is this my anti Indian stereotype?
The issue is that there’s a recent history of using perceived correlations about Jews to justify policies of oppressing Jews and murdering them en masse.
When you talk, the person you’re talking to doesn’t just pay attention to your literal words, but also what you’re trying to accomplish with them. In this particular case, people think through the list of possible goals, and one in particular sticks out.
I don’t know that you’re Indian, but I’m guessing that you are. Being Indian lowers my prior probability that you’re trying to advocate some kind of horrible political campaign against Indians and hence relaxes my reaction to observations of that kind.
I think this a perfectly rational way of moving through the world. If you take everyone’s words at face value, not attempting to infer a latent motivation, you will quickly fall victim to marketers and scam artists.
> The issue is that there’s a recent history of using perceived correlations about Jews to justify policies of oppressing Jews and murdering them en masse.
I don’t think there have ever been even one Jew who was oppressed because of a perceived deficit in spatial or mechanical reasoning. Not even in Germany 1933-1945. Despite various speculations on a supposedly Jewish style of mathematics, harrassment and removal of Jewish professors was always on ethnic grounds alone and not based on a judgements of their cognitive tendencies.
Utterly stupid response. The propaganda campaign is how they justified their ethnic discrimination. If the propaganda campaign was completely irrelevant to the policy, why would the Nazis bother to produce one?
Having had some experience of both teaching and learning with the groups you’re talking about, as well as several others, I think this is less about their innate abilities than the educational system and culture the students have been immersed in.
While this has probably changed in the last couple of decades, I don’t think that the average Indian school will have as much access to suitable practical facilities as the average German school. I think there has also been more of cultural/societal value placed on the the more theoretical side of the sciences in India (with the exception of medicine), whereas Germany is the land of mittelstand manufacturing and precision engineering (though there are plenty who share [Heisenberg’s](https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199801/heisenberg.cfm) disposition to practical applications). (*)
But with regard to the main post, the negative framing arises from what kind of work a society values and deems to be an “honest” way to earn a living. In post-industrial Europe and N. America (as examples) jobs involving manual labor and physical exertion are seen as more honest than those involving sharp-wits and skills of persuasion — despite the former’s relatively lower pay and higher risks, and the frequent cultural disdain for the people engaged in those jobs (which I think is due to their non-work/recreational activities). I think I have some sense of the answer, but can you say the same is true for India? I.e. is a day laborer/builder/farmer seen as someone doing a more honest day’s work?
If yes, perhaps you can see the argument that other sectors of the economy — in particular, the financial sector — aren’t earning their incomes in an honest fashion, and in fact are generating returns on the backs of those who do.
If you couple this with the antisemitic view of Jews as outsiders to “real” society and the high profile of some Jewish financiers (which incidentally arose as a result of earlier antisemitism), then perhaps it becomes clearer how characterizing Jewish people as unable to do spatial reasoning — i.e. something necessary for honest, productive work — can be seen as antisemitic.
(*) If I may indulge haphazardly in national stereotyping on this blog.
Let me recycle my thoughts on Jewish spatial awareness. When I first heard it, I tried to think of examples. From the art world, I came up with the two Marks from Russia, Chagall and Rothko, whose works are planar. Jewish scientists brought out Feynman who is famous for diagrams that are clearly two dimensional. But then I remembered my Mom who sewed. Sewing takes a flat piece of fabric and turns it into a three dimensional form. There are many Jews who design and make clothes. My nephew is an architect as is Frank Gehry. Architecture is surely a three D endeavor.
I did meet James Watson at a drug company luncheon. He struck as a stereotypical nerdy guy with limited social skills but maybe he saw me as one of those fast-talking urban Jews which led him to keep his barriers up.
Let me apologize for not mentioning Rosalind Franklin whose contributions to understanding the structure of DNA are often overlooked. X-ray crystallography turns images that look like fuzzy photos of clouds into 3-D structures. Franklin’s work in this area made very large impacts on the eventual elucidation of the structure of DNA. She was Jewish and a woman. Many feel that her work did not receive proper recognition because of her gender. She was a great scientist with a great understanding of 3-D.
Oncodoc:
James Watson said that Rosalind Franklin couldn’t think in three dimensions very well. Which is kind of an odd thing to say, given her work on crystallography, but maybe not such an odd thing to say from someone who was so prejudiced.
Does a modern crystallographer really need great 3D visualisation?
Once you take the right transforms isn’t it mostly a very different kind of mathematical thinking. Not easy of course but it’s not much like the sort of 3D thinking we would expect an architect or machinist to work with.
Rahul:
Bad news, cos it seems that Watson also said that Franklin “couldn’t do maths.” Couldn’t think in three dimensions, couldn’t do maths . . . kind of amazing that she could do crystallography at all!
Given that humans are basically pattern-seeking machines, and that such a high percentage of our genetic composition is shared, it seems to me that to avoid finding spurious patterns in group differences one should start with outlining the plausible mechanism for how, say, Jews are worse at spatial reasoning. What is the plausible explanation of brain architecture or biological functioning that would explain this group difference?
And no, reverse engineering Just-So evolution stories doesn’t cut it.
In a thread downstairs Clyde called me out for wanting to impose a law that explicating plausible mechanisms has to be a first step, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to do so.
Yes, also what are the plausible mechanisms that make Labrador retrievers love water and my coonhound mix will barely put her feet in a 1 inch deep stream. Also my friends border Collie is incredibly human focused and knows hundreds of words, whereas my mixed hunting mutt only occasionally follows verbal commands but is way better at hand signals.
I’m not advocating anything one way or another about humans, just that it’s totally plausible that genetics affects brain development and has been seen throughout dog breeding for tens of thousands of years.
Daniel –
> just that it’s totally plausible that genetics affects brain development and has been seen throughout dog breeding for tens of thousands of years.
Sure. I should be clear I’m not questioning that – just the level of confidence some people have in their ability to assess the causality of genetic evolution over time. With dog breeding the causality of the evolution is relatively straight-forward; it’s a pretty clear kind of teleology.
Dogs that are genetically engineered to have certain traits tend to exhibit those traits, therefore it’s plausible that Jews are generally inferior at spatial reasoning.
Big yikes.
Wow, intentional misreading online in the context of claims about race, who would have thought?
As I said explicitly “I’m not advocating anything one way or another about humans, just that it’s totally plausible that genetics affects brain development”.
Isn’t it silly to demand a mechanism before stating an observed correlation?
Empirical science would have never advanced had such a law existed. There has always been a significant lag between noticing something and explaining why it happens.
Rahul –
> Isn’t it silly to demand a mechanism before stating an observed correlation?
Of course there’s absolutely nothing wrong with stating that there’s a correlation. What I’m getting at is when do you assert a causal relationship, and with what degree of certainty do you do so? What should the rules of the road be? Where can lines be drawn?
I ask this because with the explosion of easy access to evidence showing correlations we’ve had a concurrent explosion in the societal impact from facile assertions of causality – for example the correlation between vaccinations and increases in autism diagnosis. In the hands of grifters and idiots, this shit is having a material, deliterious impact. The negative impact of academics ‘overfitting’ causation into correlation is one thing, but I think it’s dwarfed by the larger societal phenomenon.
Anyway, that’s why I like the Bradford Hill criteria for causation.
There is a big difference between the autism-vaccine correlation and the ethnicity/race-IQ one. The former has not been reproduced and has been actively debunked. Whereas the latter has been studied for deceased and reproduced in just about every study imaginable, from adoption studies to mixed-raced IQ result, and sometimes even popping up in unexpected places. There is nothing antisemitic about believe Jews may have lower spatial-reasoning abilities than Europeans or East Asians. Nor does this preclude some Jewish genius from having amazing spatial abilities, Einstein likely one of them, given that IQs are distributed along a bell curve. Not every Jewish person will be below average.
I for one am a huge admirer of Jewish intelligence, yet experience no cognitive dissonance contemplating this one particular deficiency. Whether it is true or not, does not really matter.
It is my experience that these spaces dance a two-step: to outsiders they talk a lot about the power of IQ to predict life outcomes and argue that some races have a higher IQ than Christians from north-west Europe “and therefore we are not white supremacists”, but to insiders they explain that Chinese or Ashkenazi have high IQs but lack some other essential mental attributes that Christians from north-west Europe have. Its not necessarily the same person giving me both arguments but they bloody well know each other.
Sean:
Yes, we discussed this a few years ago in the context of my review of Nicholas Wade’s racist book. See also followup here.
Yes this is certainly true that there their is the inner and outer story. However It can still be true. North-western Europeans may very well have some extra mental attributes, to wit creativity, that others lack to the same degree. This extra trait is a source of pride for white-supremacist and then run with it. Their unduly ethnic pride notwithstanding, does not invalidate the fact. This is as stupid as pretending a rich man is poor because he thinks himself better than paupers.
John:
Just avoid being subject to the one-way street fallacy. It could also be true that northwestern Europeans have less creativity on average than others. Or, more realistically, that different groups vary in this and other traits in different ways at different times.
I used to have a book about the nature of antisemitism in Germany and Austria in the late 19th, early 20thC. The comment by Watson fits exactly. The book lists criticism after criticism of Jewish abilities. Most focused on Jews being imitators, the old trope that Jews don’t have an actual culture of their own, but rather imitate whatever culture they’re in, but the hard edge was that Jews simply aren’t capable of deep insight, and that this is embedded within them (somehow, in some non-specified manner). As I remember, and it’s been decades, the book looked at specific comments made right before and as Einstein published his work.
These Jew-denigrators could ignore the contributions of Jewish mathematicians in part because they took the Jewish work in the 19thC as a fluke in which Jews glommed on to Christian work. To them, that Jews had only recently been allowed to contribute at all only reinforced the idea that Jews were merely clever imitators.
I see this today in an upswelling of sentiment that Maxwell really did Einstein’s work, that you really don’t need Einstein’s work because you can cut out the Jew that way. Another favorite is that Jews win so many Nobels, which is cast aside as somehow it being easier to win those prizes in the 20thC. Whatever these fools can do to convince themselves.
Skill of manipulating 3-D objects in space reminds me of the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which was purported to be a valid and reliable IQ test. The examinee is presented with some number of figures, representing a 3-D figure being rotated and translated. The test taker is given 4 (?) choices for the next logical figure in the progression. (I may not be remembering this completely accurately. This goes back to my days studying psychometrics a long time ago.) The fact that the ability being tested is a global intelligence indicator conflicts with the idea that one group which is thought to have higher than average intelligence but lower than average 3-D spacial visualization ability points to one of two conclusions: 1) the progressive matrices test is not really a valid test of generalized intelligence, or 2) Jews are not generally bad at 3-D visualization.
I can’t speak to spatial reasoning, but I can to visual imagination, which I suspect plays a role. I’m 1/8th Jewish and have aphantasia, which is a lack of visual imagination. My grandmother was half Jewish and she had it too.
I’m not Jewish at all and also have Aphantasia. There are now online communities where people discuss their experiences of Aphantasia. I’ve never heard even anecdotes about Jewishness being enriched in those communities. Doesn’t mean it’s not true just that it’s not a common knowledge thing as far as I know.
That’s a fair point. My brother is pretty much the opposite in terms of visual imagination.
I think where I come down is that we don’t really know a lot about aphantasia. For instance, is it possible that it is more common in people with more analytical brains or people with higher IQs? I don’t know. There are likely some underlying cause or causes completely unrelated to ancestry. However, the fact that my grandmother had it and I have it suggests it is worthwhile to investigate if there is a genetic component.
Richard Nisbett writes in a note in “Intelligence and How to Get It”:
“Before leaving the topic of Jewish IQ, I should note that there is an anomaly concerning Jewish intelligence. The major random samples of Americans having large numbers of Jewish participants show that whereas verbal and mathematical IQ run 10 to 15 points above the non-Jewish average, scores on tests requiring spatial-relations ability (ability to mentally manipulate objects in two- and three-dimensional space) are about 10 points below the non-Jewish average (Flynn, 1991a). This is an absolutely enormous discrepancy and I know of no ethnic group that comes close to having this 20 to 25-point difference among Jews. I do not for a minute doubt that the discrepancy is real. I know half a dozen Jews who are at the top of their fields who are as likely to turn in the wrong direction as in the right direction when leaving a restaurant. The single ethnic difference that I believe is likely to have a genetic basis is the relative Jewish incapacity for spatial reasoning. I have no theory about why this should be the case, but I note that it casts an interesting light on the Jews’ wandering in the desert for forty years!”
https://archive.org/details/intelligencehowt00nisb
(“It is important to note that the average IQ of Sephardic (mostly North African) Jews is apparently no higher than that of non-Jews and is considerably lower than that of Ashkenazi Jews. This is true even of Sephardic and Oriental Jews in Israel.”)
“I do not for a minute doubt that the discrepancy is real. I know half a dozen Jews who are at the top of their fields who are as likely to turn in the wrong direction as in the right direction when leaving a restaurant.” . . . Give me a break!
Then again, this is a statement about statistical evidence being made by the editor of the notorious “Participants reported being hungrier when they walked into the café (mean = 7.38, SD = 2.20) than when they walked out [mean = 1.53, SD = 2.70, F(1, 75) = 107.68, P < 0.001]" paper (see also my comment here), so take from that what you will.
To answer a few questions:
1. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron is correct.
2. When I said “possible to ask questions about group differences”, I meant “do research on this topic without getting attacked”. And even that is an exaggeration.
3. From Joshua, “so you think that genetic group difference is due to environment …” I don’t understand this. Note that the title of the paper I cited says “cultural”. That was just the definition of the groups they used. This early literature did not address heredity vs. environment.
I was just pointing out that the idea of Jews having a pattern of high-verbal plus relatively low spatial was once not seen as antisemitic but rather as an explanation of the general superiority of Jews, without any serious attempt to determine the cause of these group differences.
There is a GENETIC story about why Ashkenazi Jews are smart (especially in verbal/mathematical domains):
https://plancksconstant.org/blog1/pdfs/ashkiq.webpub.pdf
As you might imagine, this paper generated lots of discussion over the years.
These blog comments are not the place for further discussion with me involved. I just happened to check to see if there were any more comments, but I do not do that regularly.
Jon –
So maybe you won’t see this comment, but apologies for my misreading.
Oh, and if you have some links to the discussion of that paper they would be appreciated.
A quote from the linked pdf:
Ashkenazi Jews have an unusual ability profile as well as higher than average IQ. They have high verbal and mathematical scores, while their visuo-spatial abilities are typically somewhat lower, by about one half a standard deviation, than the European average (Levinson, 1977; Levinson & Block, 1977). Han Eysenck (Eysenck, 1995) noted ‘The correlation between verbal and performance tests is about 0·77 in the general population, but only 0·31 among Jewish children. Differences of 10–20 points have been found in samples of Jewish children; there is no other group that shows anything like this size difference.’
Those two citations comparing to the European average are:
Levinson, B. (1977) Cognitive style of Eastern European Jewish males. Perceptual and Motor
Skills 45, 279–283.
Levinson, B. & Block, Z. (1977) Goodenough–Harris drawings of Jewish children of Orthodox
background. Psychological Reports 41, 155–158.
It’s a really interesting article – particularly in that it discusses a genetic mechanism. I may have to revise my opinion.
I hate it when that happens.
An article by John Jackson which asks how often hereditarians face major misrepresentations in the media, denouncements, physical threats, or academic job loss (he thinks “not often”) has a piece in Mankind Quarterly as the second suggested article on academia dot edu https://www.academia.edu/61008215/The_Mythical_Taboo_on_Race_and_Intelligence I think that suggests why if you like to organize human difference by race, your friends and acquaintances may question whether your interest is purely academic. (Most of the other suggested articles are criticism of racist thinking such as Nancy McClernan on Steven Pinker’s racist friends).
Sean:
Interesting. The Jackson and Winston article is a good read, full of lots of interesting detail.
Regarding people in science and the news media who promote ideas of innate racial intellectual differences, I think there is a wide mix of motivations. Setting aside the hardcore racists, there are the people who are convinced by the evidence and reasoning they’ve seen regarding racial differences, the people who have no strong opinion but think it should be talked about because it’s taboo (I guess that would describe Pinker), and those who are politically on the left and so feel that it’s ok for them to speculate about such things because they themselves are not racist. I’m guessing that Richard Nisbett (see discussion in thread) falls into that last category.
See this post from 2005 for more discussion of political ideology in this context.
I’m not sure what’s the point of the last link but it seems ironic that one of the most outspoken critics of those “Franco-Jewish” mathematics around the turn of the century was V.I. Arnold.
Also: B.M. Levinson may have been a major contributor to the propagation of that weird stereotype.
All that Albert Einstein did was come up with the special theory of relativity, explain the photoelectric effect, explain Brownian motion, and some other things. Moreover, he came up with the general theory of relativity, which many physicists say might otherwise not have been discovered for decades. Also, he advised a student’s professors to approve a dissertation that predicted that electrons were like waves in some respects. In addition, he helped Bose gain recognition for what are now called Bose-Einstein statistics. (Bose wrote a letter to Einstein and Einstein read the letter, which means a lot when you think of how many letters Einstein probably received.) Later on, Einstein, together with Podolsky and Rosen, came up with is now called the EPR thought experiment, which led to David Bohm’s thought experiment, which led to John Bell’s thought experiment, which was actually performed, winning a Nobel prize for Alain Aspect.
What’s more, Einstein predicted gravitational lenses. There’s probably more that I don’t know about. That’s all.
“the archetypal Jewish Great Man is someone like a lawyer…” Who knew Moses, Jesus and Einstein were lawyers…
Gilligan:
Lawyers, no, but all three of your examples were lawgivers. Ten commandments, Golden rule, Speed of light.
Some Eurasian Jewish families encourage success in some areas over others. It’s is considered a badge of honor to publish a book, or teach college classes.
I do not trust IQ studies relating to race because the people interested in this type of thing often seem untrustworthy. A prominent example is Canadian lecturer Jordan Peterson.