The average IQ of Iran is not 97 or 106

Dispelling some bad science

Ever since the Israel-Iran war broke out, I’ve been seeing a lot of pining for the old days of the Shah. There is this idea that, if it wasn’t for the Ayatollah, Iran would be like Turkey or Israel today. Every village would look like 1960s Tehran. There are many people who are under the impression that Iranians are smarter than the rest of the Middle East, albeit for good reason. Persians were heavily overrepresented among innovators during the Islamic Golden Age, and were regarded as a wise people by the nations of antiquity. Persians in Western countries are well-integrated and wealthy, but this is mostly because Persians who have left Iran over the past few decades have been disproportionately educated and skilled. In fact, Iran’s brain drain has been so bad that it may be actively diminishing the IQ of modern-day Iran. An equivalent of 4% of the Iranian population has left since the Revolution (not on net, the population has grown overall), but around 25% of Iranians with a tertiary education live abroad (or at least this was the case in the 90s). Educated Iranians today want to leave the country more than they would ever want to fight for it or fight for some sort of color revolution. The national IQ of Iran in most National IQ studies (Lynn, Rindermann, Kierkegaard, Basic Skills Test, Harmonized Learning Outcomes, etc) is in the 80-90 range, which is typical for the Middle East. The average IQ of Kurds in Turkey is also around 85, the average IQ of Azeris is 85 to 90, Iraq is 80-85, it just seems like Iranians (being genetically similar to all of these groups) wouldn’t diverge that much.

Some people didn’t get the memo, though. I’m seeing some people suggest that better, more recent studies have found that Iranians have much higher IQs than MENA groups. If they say 104 or more, they’re referring to the International IQ Test. You may have also seen other people from low-IQ countries, such as India, use this website to prove that their country has a higher IQ than it is given credit for. This test is not representative. When the sample of each country is determined not by random lot, but by whoever has the free time, internet access, and intellectual curiosity to take an online IQ test, results are going to be skewed. They’re going to be skewed especially in countries where only a small minority of people are part of this “online IQ test taking type”. This wouldn’t be so bad, if it wasn’t for the fact that the International IQ Test isn’t really much of an IQ test. It’s a matrix test, and matrix reasoning only around as g-loaded as most standardized school tests (and potentially less g-loaded). See:

Matrix Reasoning is a Mediocre Test of Intelligence

It’s not terrible for estimating IQ, but it is only so popular because people were trying to make an IQ test that isn’t “culturally biased” for a long time. What’s much worse is that Matrix tests are highly gameable. Simply watching a video demonstrating the best rules to follow for solving matrices increase score averages by over a standard deviation. When people are trained on Matrix tests, it also makes said test much less g-loaded. It doesn’t correlate so much with the other subtests anymore. In the context of the International IQ Test, people can really take the test as much as they want with as much outside resources as they want. Yes, if you look on the website for long enough you will find advice not to take the test more than once a year if you want the most accurate results. But a lot of people don’t look at that advice, and don’t really care about it either. They just want to get a good score, it’s a puzzle game. Who knows how many people try multiple times even in a single day. Who knows how many people take the test dishonestly just to share a good score on social media. The “study” the site links to demonstrate its accuracy is that it has a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, which doesn’t mean anything because the test is presumably using the British norm. It’s either a redundancy or a total coincidence that the mean is 100. Simply looking at national standardized test scores is a better estimate of NIQ than the IIT.

The second study which people bring up to suggest Iran is a smart country is this 51-study Iranian meta-analysis which finds that Iran’s national IQ is 97. It sounds promising, at first. Then you look at the study, and your faith in science in a post-Western world plummets. Because several of the studies are not measuring IQ using an American or British norm, but an Iranian norm! They are using scores from studies which are comparing Iranians with some sort of affliction to the general Iranian population, so many of them use the Iranian version of the WISC, which of course is normed on Iranians. Meaning… Iranians are going to have an average score of 100. Some of them specifically state that they are using the Persian WISC (or WAIS) or are norming on Persians while for some it isn’t explicitly stated anywhere what norm is being used (after all, why would they?). Furthermore, many of these studies are not interested in creating a representative sample of Iran, and so they are relying entirely on the urban population around the universities. Almost every study used in the meta-analysis was simply comparing the intelligences of some sort of disorder-afflicted group with a control, in order to identify any impact of these disorders on intelligence. One of the studies cited supposedly records an average IQ of 165, and this is so preposterous that I can only assume that the authors just saw the number 165 somewhere in the paper and rolled with it. However, I can’t access the original study, or maybe around half of the cited papers right now, presumably due to the war fucking everything up. I’ve been told this was a problem early in the Ukraine conflict as well.

I would be interested in seeing if intelligence differences exist between ethnic groups in Iran, but I don’t think such a study exists. Iran is highly consanguineous, with nearly 40% of Iranian marriages being between cousins or closer. Incest was pretty common in pre-Islamic Iran too, at least among the aristocracy. Much of the so-called Persian population of the Islamic Golden Age would be more accurately described today as Tajik, residing outside of modern Persian borders in Khwarazm, Transoxiana, and Khorasan. Avicenna was a Bukharian Persian. Alpharabius was likely from Sogdia or Khorasan. Al-Khwarizmi was… Well, I think you can take a guess based on his name. Ferdowsi, al-Tusi, and Omar Khayyam were from the far northwest of modern Persia, which was heavily depopulated by the Mongol invasions along Khwarazm and Transoxiana. The modern population of Iranian Khorasan is still the most steppe-rich in Iran but was repopulated by Westerners during the early modern period (ex: the mass population transfer of Kurds into the Northwest to defend against Turkmen raids).

I think people see pictures of the few urban parts of Iran at the time and imagine it was a secular developed paradise, but rural Iran would have looked much more like Afghanistan or something of that sort. As far as my general thoughts on the Iran debacle go, I am against Israel. I do not support any U.S. involvement. I think that the Iranian regime, while theorized as a sort of Platonic government led by sages, has ended up being led by retarded geriatric village preachers and incompetent underqualified generals. It isn’t our friend, it is rabidly anti-Western, hating on the degeneracy of the West while oddly enough providing massive amounts of gender reassignment surgeries. At the same time, though, it’s not the worst thing in the universe, and if they have a nuke they are going to hold onto it for dear life. If they use it, they are dead. The men running Iran are conservative, not just religiously but in everything. They aren’t Wahhabis, they aren’t trying to launch a global Jihad. The goal of American interventionists in keeping nukes away from Iran has always been to bide time for an eventual regime change there, but now we have seen how that turns out in Iraq and Libya. It will be worse in Iran. The separatist groups have too many friends in high places. The Kurds militarily control large swathes of Iraq and Syria, and there they are friendly with Israel and the US. The Azeris are backed by the Turks, and the Balochs may be backed by the Taliban. Pakistan has used the Balochs to sabotage Iran in the past, but if Iran is knocked out of the picture they will likely not want Balochs to actually have independence due to the demands they would have in Pakistan to join a new Balochi state. Arabs in Khuzestan and the Gulf Coast will likely be supported by the Saudis, Qatar and the UAE. All of this war could result in a massive refugee crisis. Imagine Syria, but with nearly 100 million people. Where will they go? Will they go to Europe? Will they go to America? We can’t have this, it’s unacceptable. It’s not just unacceptable for it to happen to America, it is unacceptable for America to do this to Europe. If Iran served the interests of our enemies so very much, China would have stepped in, but it hasn’t. It’s just not that important. The Chinese can work with what emerges from the chaos.