The Global IQ Debate

Tove K at Wood From Eden on Substack has a guest post from a Nigerian psychologist about African IQ scores and what they mean The Global IQ Debate: A Modest Contribution from a Resident African. She includes her own introduction. She is an interesting person herself, and I have read posts of hers before. But this guest post is a point of view I have not heard before. One would think that a Nigerian might feel defensive and dismiss the idea that the majority of sub-Saharan Africans have IQs less than 85, but he thinks that is about right. He sees a particular strength in rote memory among the population, especially those who pursue education, combined with a significant rarity of what we would call abstract reasoning or information processing.  He tries to define exactly what he means by that quite carefully. 

Fascinating stuff.

His essay is fairly long, but it was all new enough and provoking enough to be worth the effort. I would rather let it speak for itself than try and interpret at this point. A sample, halfway in:

 So, back to the point I have only so far made passing references to: if Africa has a real IQ disadvantage, I don't think it is much in the cognitive dimension. Nigerians, as you probably know, are a notoriously successful immigrant group - even after we take selection bias into account (although some data have shown that second generation diasporic Nigerians, and immigrants from third world in general, tend to regress eventually to their country of origin means). But I think when the environment is optimal and held constant, and the incentive structures are robust, I don't think there'll be significant difference in pure average academic performance between children of African and European (or of Asian) descent. I think if there's indeed a dysgenic factor, it must lie in some other property of the 'mind' (which I'm using to mean 'emergent brain function'). And one such property is what I would call 'Information processing', not of facts and factoids printed and presented in textbooks but of the raw unstructured reality. The kind of ongoing information processing that gives rise to how a people conceive of reality, what they think this reality, as conceptualized by them, demands of them in order to maximize its impartial offerings, and how they believe this reality should be interrogated and organized.

This is by far the most fundamental sense in which I think the poor countries of this world are different from the rich ones.