Ok. Interesting point, but did this group of Asians take English language courses at school? Do they have knowledge of American culture via entertainment channels? Perhaps the Africans who allegedly got low scores were people who grew up living in tribes in the wild, and only came into the city where they ended up getting tested recently. I met a person whose mother fell in love with an African tribesman and I read her memoir on the experience - it wasn't long ago that she met him, a decade or two maybe. There may be a large proportion of people in Africa who literally grew up in a jungle.
In addition to straight up single-culture cultural differences, there are also variations from one culture to the next between which foreign cultures they've been exposed to (if any) and enjoy. Some cultures seek to limit their exposure to the outside (North Korea) while in others, the ideal is to embrace them (USA). For instance, here, there are many fans of Asian culture - think anime, Japanese video games and lovers of Thai food. Do they have a multicultural atmosphere like that in Africa? Sure there are American missionaries around who probably bring teacups and the like, but there's a giant difference between occasionally seeing some white people with some cups they didn't tell you anything about because they were too busy feeding starving children versus being taught their language in a class and spending time absorbing culture from their entertainment products.
Not only that, but differences between one IQ test and another could be gigantic when it comes to how many culture-dependent questions are in them. If you haven't specifically controlled for that during test design, that would be completely random. Maybe the Asians just so happened to get the test that had fewer cultural questions on it, and the Africans got one that was thoroughly based on many obscure pieces of cultural knowledge.
What we really need to be asking here is this:
Has anyone done a culture fair test for multiple different countries, using the exact same test with each one, and controlled for factors like whether the people being tested were schooled as children, whether they ever experienced starvation (that can cause brain damage) and any other important things?
Only if all the factors are controlled for would we have relevant data.
One big cultural difference might be how seriously tests are viewed, and how much practice people get at taking them.
Idang Alibi of Abuja, Nigeria writes on the James Watson affair:
An intriguing opening. Is Idang Alibi about to take a position on the real heart of the uproar?
Darn, it's just a lecture on personal and national responsibility. Of course, for African nationals, taking responsibility for their country's problems is the most productive attitude regardless. But it doesn't engage with the controversies that got Watson fired.
Later in the article came this:
This intrigued me for two reasons: First, I'm always on the lookout for yet another case of theology making a falsifiable experimental prediction. And second, the prediction follows obviously if God is just, but what does skin colour have to do with it at all?
A great deal has already been said about the Watson affair, and I suspect that in most respects I have little to contribute that has not been said before.
But why is it that the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay, whereas racial genetic differences in intelligence are not? Am I the only one who's every bit as horrified by the proposition that there's any way whatsoever to be screwed before you even start, whether it's genes or lead-based paint or Down's Syndrome? What difference does skin colour make? At all?
This is only half a rhetorical question. Race adds extra controversy to anything; in that sense, it's obvious what difference skin colour makes politically. However, just because this attitude is common, should not cause us to overlook its insanity. Some kind of different psychological processing is taking place around individually-unfair intelligence distributions, and group-unfair intelligence distributions.
So, in defiance of this psychological difference, and in defiance of politics, let me point out that a group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals. It's individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It's individuals who deserve, and often don't get, a fair chance at life. If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
And I don't think there's any serious scholar of intelligence who disputes that God has been definitively shown to be most terribly unfair. Never mind the airtight case that intelligence has a hereditary genetic component among individuals; if you think that being born with Down's Syndrome doesn't impact life outcomes, then you are on crack. What about lead-based paint? Does it not count, because parents theoretically could have prevented it but didn't? In the beginning no one knew that it was damaging. How is it just for such a tiny mistake to have such huge, irrevocable consequences? And regardless, would not a just God damn us for only our own choices? Kids don't choose to live in apartments with lead-based paint.
So much for God being "just", unless you count the people whom God has just screwed over. Maybe that's part of the fuel in the burning controversy - that people do realize, on some level, the implications for religion. They can rationalize away the implications of a child born with no legs, but not a child born with no possibility of ever understanding calculus. But then this doesn't help explain the original observation, which is that people, for some odd reason, think that adding race makes it worse somehow.
And why is my own perspective, apparently, unusual? Perhaps because I also think that intelligence deficits will be fixable given sufficiently advanced technology, biotech or nanotech. When truly huge horrors are believed unfixable, the mind's eye tends to just skip over the hideous unfairness - for much the same reason you don't deliberately rest your hand on a hot stoveburner; it hurts.