Returning to Summers’ calculation, and boldly extrapolating the normal distribution to the far tail (not necessarily reliable, but let’s follow Larry a bit further), the fraction of NE Asians at +4SD (relative to the OECD avg) is about 1 in 4k, whereas the fraction of Europeans at +4SD is 1 in 33k. So the relative representation is about 8 to 1. (This assumed the same SD=90 for both populations. The Finnish numbers might be similar, although it depends crucially on whether you use the smaller SD=80.) Are these results plausible? Have a look at the pictures here of the last dozen or so US Mathematical Olympiad teams (the US Asian population percentage is about 3 percent; the most recent team seems to be about half Asians). The IMO results from 2007 are here. Of the top 15 countries, half are East Asian (including tiny Hong Kong, which outperformed Germany, India and the UK).
Incidentally, again assuming a normal distribution, there are only about 10k people in the US who perform at +4SD (and a similar number in Europe), so this is quite a select population (roughly, the top few hundred high school seniors each year in the US). If you extrapolate the NE Asian numbers to the 1.3 billion population of China you get something like 300k individuals at this level, which is pretty overwhelming.
If you think AGI will not come in the next 5-10 years then I think there is a very good chance it comes from China. Also, China certainly has the engineering talent to surpass the rest of the world in basically everything, including fabs. Personally, I expect AGI in the new few years though.
Given this argument hinges on China’s higher IQ, why couldn’t the same be said about Japan, which according to most figures has an average IQ at or above China, which would indicate the same higher proportion of +4SD individuals in the population. If it’s 1 in 4k, there would be 30k of those in Japan, 3x as much as the US. Japan also has a more stable democracy, better overall quality of life and per capita GDP than China. If outsized technological success in any domain was solely about IQ, then one would have expected Japan to be the center of world tech and the likely creators of AGI, not the USA, but that’s likely not the case.
Hsu on China’s huge human capital advantage:
If you think AGI will not come in the next 5-10 years then I think there is a very good chance it comes from China. Also, China certainly has the engineering talent to surpass the rest of the world in basically everything, including fabs. Personally, I expect AGI in the new few years though.
Given this argument hinges on China’s higher IQ, why couldn’t the same be said about Japan, which according to most figures has an average IQ at or above China, which would indicate the same higher proportion of +4SD individuals in the population. If it’s 1 in 4k, there would be 30k of those in Japan, 3x as much as the US. Japan also has a more stable democracy, better overall quality of life and per capita GDP than China. If outsized technological success in any domain was solely about IQ, then one would have expected Japan to be the center of world tech and the likely creators of AGI, not the USA, but that’s likely not the case.