Hello all, and (as usual) thank you for this session.
A few weeks after reading it, a question stays in my mind, so I have to ask it (particularly to
@Pierre ).
About this percentage :
Reading it for the first time, I understood it clearly... or so I believed.
I knew what an Ashkenazi Jew is, and (thanks to Lobaczewski) what a psychopath is. And these themes were already covered in previous sessions, so no special problem.
BUT when I thought about it again, and reread it, I wondered :
Q1/ how do you define what an Ashkenazi Jew is, and count them ?
Q2/ how do you define what a psychopath is, and count them in a particular population ?
to be able to give a precise rate of the latter ones among the former ones ?
For instance, in France, it's not unusual among Jews to have a parent from Central Europe (Ashkenazim) and another one from Maghreb (Sephardim) : which one are they, then ?
An example that I've stumbled upon a few months ago, while researching on scoutism :
Léon Ashkenazi, who, despite his family name, is of Sephardim origin (well, at least it seems so). But maybe he has a real (remote) Ashkenazi ancestor. So Jewish for sure, but not Ashkenazi ?
Another example :
Karl Popper (famous sciences philosopher) : all his grand-parents were (Ashkenazim) Jews, but his parents "converted to
Lutheranism before he was born"and so he received a Lutheran baptism." OK, he's already dead. But if he were living today, would he be included ?
1/ For the Ashkenazim : is it a genetic definition, or ethnic (religious + geographic), or linguistic (Yiddish-speaking), or something else ?
2/ For the psychopaths : are we talking here about essential (genetic mutants) psychopaths, or general psychopaths including all causes (among which : psycho or physical traumas, including ritual sexual mutilations) ?
From my point of view, these two sets of people are hard to define precisely, so the precise answer (we can guess less than 1% precision) of the Cs is difficult to understand, to me. They could have answered something like "around half of them". And the answer could vary broadly (my guess : at least +/- 20%), depending on the definitions of the sets. Maybe we would even need fuzzy logic for that ?
Any comment/clarification will be welcome. Thanks.
PS : I read (in R. Hare I think) that generally psychopaths have an average intelligence (IQ around 100), but some of them have high IQ (the most nefarious, I suppose).
Ashkenazim are well-known to have a mean IQ higher than the general population (in the USA but not only). 25% of Nobel prize are Ashkenazi Jews !
So another good question would be : what's the rate (or approximate number) of Ashkenazi Jews who are psychopaths AND (over)gifted or even genious ?