gwern comments on Open Thread - Aug 24 - Aug 30 - Less Wrong
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It is one of the poorest parts of Europe, and Communist governments tended to be big on a lot of things they couldn't deliver.
If you're comparing within an Indian population, then the much higher rates of inbreeding aren't the confound; all you have is the remaining selection effect, and that's must be small because anything else would drastically contradict the animal and other breeding experiments, and the estimates from genomic methods.
It would probably drop by more like 25 points, looking at the weighted averages. (For the surviving children, that is.)
Communist governments delivered on that one.
Take a look here, specifically pages 21 and 23. The secondary education in Eastern Europe was more prevalent than in Mediterranean countries and Great Britain + Ireland (but less than in Nordic countries and Central Europe). And Czechoslovakia was one of the better Eastern European countries.
I went and looked at the Jammu & Kashmir study and it is more convincing than the Czechoslovak study. Hm. It seems my scepticism about the 20+ IQ points drop was unfounded, <screech of rusty metal> changing my mind... </screech of rusty metal> :-)
But why did my intuition didn't like the large magnitude of IQ drop? I think because it implies that intelligence is very fragile and very easy to genetically screw up. But if the IQ drop is valid, then intelligence is very fragile. Hmm...