Uriah

The big division in human memory is between a semantic memory for isolated facts and an episodic memory for real events. Scores on all mental tests are positively correlated, but I think these qualities get in each other's way in the sense of the absent minded professor.

An early unifying theory of autism was that it’s a kind of amnesia, an extremely poor episodic memory that detaches autistics from the world around them and forces them to revel in their obsessions.

My working hypothesis is that Jews have by far the world’s best episodic memories: A Jewish lawyer can act as his own stenographer, repeating back word for word what his opponent said five minutes earlier. A Jewish actor can memorize huge paragraphs of lines with amazing speed.

A person with a poor episodic memory tends to forget exact wording but remembers the essence, the Platonic ideal of the sentence he read in a way that facilitates recall of specific facts later.

This difference in memory accounts for the difference in interests: Jews like politics, finance, the law, the real, present world. Northwest Europeans prefer history, fantasy, nerdy stamp collecting and the pursuit of meaningless knowledge for its own sake.

Part of the difference in memory is attributable to the fact that NW European are better at autistically clumping facts into categories in the sense of bug collectors, movie buffs, and Internet HBD guys.

Feynman himself, one of the smartest guys ever, had real trouble with any kind of technical vocabulary of the kind displayed by Asperger’s “little professors”. He famously asked a librarian if she could show him “a map of the cat” for his biology class.

The people that stand out as the direct opposites of Jews in cognitive style and interests are the Scandinavians. Whereas Jews are sharp eyed and attuned to their surroundings, Scandinavians are detached and otherworldly.

The 100% Norwegian Bill Fagerbakke has made his living as actor putting on a Scandinavian minstrel show, playing up this racial type even in characters that aren’t Scandinavian, like Dauber from Coach or more famously, Patrick Star: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Cia5P_9UQ …

That Czechs again represent a European extreme is no surprise, as it stands to reason that a brachycephalic skull with a lower surface area can pass through a narrower set of hips.

Mongolians are not very lactose tolerant except by East Asian standards (88% intolerant) but they may derive a higher percentage of their total calories from dairy products than any other people on earth and have been doing so for a very long time: http://www.khovsgoldairyproject.org/news/mongolia/dairy-products/ …

One way to prove that this cluster of distinctive mental and physical qualities in NW Europeans are connected is by demonstrating that a similar suite of traits exists in other milk drinking populations around the world and Mongols are a perfect example.

The World Memory Championship is more popular in China than anywhere else, but in 2017 1.2. Billion Han could not find a man to best Munkhshur Narmandakh of Mongolia.

Mongolians dominate here because they bring together the autistic mental organization of NW Europeans with a superior 105 East Asian IQ, a combination whose effectiveness in memory competitions was recently demonstrated by the half-Japanese, half-German James Holzhauer.

It may not a coincidence that the Mongols are responsible for the greatest per capita military achievement in history.

The most spectacular military conquests of the last 2,000 years were accomplished by the Germanics, the Turks, the peninsular Arabs, Mongols, and NW Europeans; all ethnos who consumed substantially more dairy than the people they conquered.

The wide ranging conquests of the Vikings and the Arabs were accompanied by surprisingly impressive literary achievements: The Eddas, the Icelandic Sagas, the Koran. The frontal lobe is a Swiss Army Knife, useful for many tasks, but mostly stabbing things.

Nerds may not be perfect in many ways, but one thing you can never take away from them is that when they get together in groups they’re extraordinarily good at killing people.

NW Europeans are not smarter than other Eurasians. It wasn’t an Englishman that invented paper, gunpowder, or the water mill. There were early signs of a military superiority in the far ranging conquests of the Vikings and the French in the Holy Land, but nothing overwhelming.

But from the moment Gutenberg invented the printing press the rest of the world was doomed. The easy spread of literacy allowed the mental advantages of autistic milk drinkers to become apparent in the formation of scientific societies.

Jews produce more high quality science per capita than any other group in the world, but only NW Europeans could have built up the nerdy critical mass to invent science itself and once they did their superior rote memories gave them an insurmountable advantage.