Kazakhstan people are smarter than Irish people.

dx22 wrote: »

Emm...celtic tiger, keeping fianna fail in for all those years, having healy-rea's as TD's...clearly as a nation we are a bunch of slack-jawed yokels

However, last week's publication of Blinkhorn's critique in Nature represents a major change in attitudes to their claims. He points to a number of 'serious flaws' in the approach taken by Lynn and Irwing. For a start, he accuses them of carefully selecting those IQ studies that they allowed in their meta-analysis.
In particular, he says they chose to ignore a massive study, carried out in Mexico, which showed there was very little difference in the IQs of men and women. 'They say it is "an outlier" in data terms --in other words, it was a statistical freak,' Blinkhorn said.
'It was nothing of the kind. It was just plain inconvenient. Had it been included, as it should have been, it would have removed a huge chunk of the differences they claim to have observed.'
In addition, Blinkhorn said the pair were ignoring a vast body of work that had found no differences. 'Psychologists often carry out studies that find no differences between men's and women's IQs but don't publish them for the simple reason that finding nothing seems uninteresting. But you have to take these studies into account as well as those studies that do find differences. But Lynn and Irwing did not. That also skewed their results.'
Blinkhorn also accuses the pair of adopting a variety of statistical manoeuvres that he describes, in his paper, as being 'flawed and suspect'.

Several negative reviews have been published in the scholarly literature. Susan Barnett and Wendy Williams wrote that "we see an edifice built on layer upon layer of arbitrary assumptions and selective data manipulation. The data on which the entire book is based are of questionable validity and are used in ways that cannot be justified." They also wrote that cross country comparisons are "virtually meaningless."[8] Ken Richardson wrote "This is not so much science, then, as a social crusade. The Pioneer Fund of America, champion of many dubious causes in the past, will obtain little credit from having assisted this one."