In the 1920s and 1930s Jewish Americans scored very poorly in IQ tests. Since WW2 they have rapidly risen up the ranks and now as a group score among the highest of any ethnicity.
Economic and sociological factors make a massive difference to population IQ scores and are very difficult to control for because we don’t know what all the factors that influence it are.
To give benefit of the doubt, the comment that spawned this thread didn't make any claim as to why Asians are supposedly more intelligent. If it's from social and economic factors then that it stands to reason that it's something worth studying so that the knowledge gained can be used over time to make everyone more intelligent.
I don't see why we should be blinding ourselves to any difference that happens to fall along racial lines. It seems like an overwhelming majority of the time once the issue is studied we find out it has nothing to do with genetics or race anyway and that it's something socioeconomic and cultural that applies to everybody and it happens to correlate with race for historical reasons. We have no problem studying mostly isolated cultures (e.g. the Amish, some tribe in the Amazon, etc) in a clinical manner without people getting their panties in a knot. Why is this not true for big groups?
Socioeconommic conditions are themselves not independent of race though. It's not so long ago that it was perfectly legal to discriminate who got a job on the basis of Race, and it was commonplace for people to do so.
Economic and sociological factors make a massive difference to population IQ scores and are very difficult to control for because we don’t know what all the factors that influence it are.