Uriah

A question I’ve never heard anyone around these parts raise is “Why don’t Jews dominate Jeopardy the way they dominate everything else?” There don’t seem to ANY Jews among the top achievers in a competition that rewards verbal memory https://www.jeopardy.com/contestant-zone/hall-of-fame …

Based on everything right thinking 21st century people are allowed to know there is only explanation: the Jeopardy casting committee is composed of Yale blue bloods who keep out Jews in favorite of handsome Dutchmen like Charles Van Doren.

But I don’t think so, because I’ve noticed a similar striking absence of Jews from the same part of the Quiz Bowl section of the right wing that I belong to. As far as I can tell not even one of the 147 minted World Grandmasters of Memory are Jewish.

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.