84 replies to this topic

[Do You Read Sutter CandH44]

From a Steve Sailer comment thread http://www.blogger.c...160890011899908

"I'm copying and pasting a very insightful comment by Sineruse on Steve Hsu's blog that nobody has rebutted yet.

"You have that backwards. East Asians underperform at the higher level selections relative to credentials, for the same reason that their absolute performance is higher on the earlier and lower-level metrics (such as SAT, grades, HS graduation rate, college admission results). This is unavoidable no matter whether E.Asians have more or less ability than whites, as long as they tend to "work harder" at any given level of ability. The Asian discrimination complaints would have us ignore this phenomenon, as though all Asian high performance is a result of pure ability with no group differences in effort or investment biasing the results when compared to whites. It is a popular gambit to claim that "ETS studies show" that test prep rarely improves scores by much, even though every East Asian immigrant enclave has a thriving multitude of test prep centers based on the opposite experience. Examples of how this works out in reality on objective measures harder than the SAT:

- declining East Asian-American to white ratio in US math competitions as you follow a cohort from grade 8 to high school to college. e.g., proportionally fewer E.Asian than white US IMO team selectees get gold medals; the number and ranking of US E.Asian high scorers relative to whites (even within the same set of students, so as to control for dropouts from the pipeline) takes a sharp decline from USAMO to the Putnam; no E.Asian winners of the Morgan Prize (top national undergraduate math research award) even though most white and Indian winners are former competition winners.

- the same for grad school fellowships (compare the tiny proportion of Hertz fellowship East Asian American recipients to the 60+ percent share of Siemens AP scholars or high school science contest winners); Ivy League valedictorians and Phi Beta Kappa numbers relative to the Asian share of the selection pool (e.g., the top 200 students per year by SAT+ high school GPA, at each university); or professional prizes and tenure appointments in theoretical math/physics/CS.

- a mountain of Law School Admissions Committee studies (see their website) on LSAT, law school GPA, and bar exam passage (and failure...) rates. Combined LSAT + GPA regression overpredicts bar exam pass rates for Asians. Asian GPA gets lower year by year in law school compared to whites. High verbal SAT scores are 2x more common for Asians than whites in high school, but this advantage disappears on the LSAT, and the Asian LSAT distribution as a whole is well below that of whites, both for the 1990's and much more recent data. The distribution looks like a mixture of two subgroups, gen-1 immigrants + native English speakers, but this does not explain why the latter category that has the same upper LSAT score distribution as whites, lost its huge advantage from the high school verbal SAT results. That is, Asian verbal SAT scores "overpredict" LSAT performance, and Asians underperform their college-level credentials in law school and beyond..........

- As with the LSAT, immigration and socioeconomics does not account for the bar passage rates. Whites in the lowest income level considered passed the bar exam at rates higher than the wealthiest category of Asians. Control for difficulty of bar exam in different regions did not make any of the negative Asian effects go away. The Asian disadvantage in LSAT and LGPA and bar passage has been a robust pattern for as long as LSAC has asked the questions. The implication is that a meritocratic admissions policy would apply an Espenshade-style penalty to Asian LSAT scores. I assume this is illegal, but it is a politically incorrect academic reality if the past 20 years of studies, all singing the same tune, are correct.

- medical licensing exam pass rates (USMLE step 1) are overpredicted for Asians based on GPA and MCAT score. Authors of one of the studies that pointed this out suggested to use a different medical school admissions formula for Asians, so as to avoid the disastrous scenario of several years' med school plus loans followed by a failure on USMLE. Those authors were mostly East Asian, and their proposal amounts to applying yet another Espenshade-style penalty of some number of virtual MCAT points for Asians to more truthfully assess their prospects after medical school. Whites not being able to compete under a meritocracy was not a concern of the study.

In addition to objective underperformance, there has been no subjective sign of any CCNY-style overperformance from East Asian-Americans at the UCs where, if discrimination existed, many highly qualifed Asians locked out from Stanford and the Ivy Leagues would find refuge. From the data I looked at (admittedly not complete), it does not appear that Asians at Berkeley are even reaching their population share of NSF fellowships and academic prizes compared to whites. Note that to assess population share you need not the W:A ratio of enrolled students but the one for students with high average SAT score, where the Asian proportion is much higher."

My own comment on Siserune's analysis:

I do believe Indians have low mean IQs, but I also suspect Indians perform (in terms of productive research) about the same as Whites of a similar IQ. As you go from elite contests to elite research awards, Indians and Chinese in the US are about equal in numbers (Hertz winners, IEEE Fellows, ACM Fellows, ACM Doctoral dissertation winners, Morgan Prize winners, Cole Prize, etc) and are dwarfed by Jews/Whites. Yan Shen will continue to claim that Asians are uber geniuses, but there is little evidence for such overconfidence. Here's what I think is true: for a Chinese to perform as well at research at a White/Jew, he/she needs significantly more cognitive horsepower as measures by g. To quote Christopher Chang, Asians are good at optimizing, not theory building. Something RKU once worried about on a Mangan's thread, but refused to repeat on Steve Hsu's blog :)"

My own comment on the post:  Would like to see the data, but extremely interesting if true.

[Sassy Danny Ramirez]

asians become mediocre at math after calculus (rather, the zeroing the equation type math). After that, its mostly slavs and semitics (jews and arabs)

[namae nanka]

He goes under the name of siserune at college confidential(interestingly SS's commenter used his CC moniker), google brings up reams of debates with people there.

most recent thread

[PRCD: Death (and Taxes)]

Missionary of Hate, on 20 December 2011 - 10:20 AM, said:

I do believe Indians have low mean IQs, but I also suspect Indians perform (in terms of productive research) about the same as Whites of a similar IQ. As you go from elite contests to elite research awards, Indians and Chinese in the US are about equal in numbers (Hertz winners, IEEE Fellows, ACM Fellows, ACM Doctoral dissertation winners, Morgan Prize winners, Cole Prize, etc) and are dwarfed by Jews/Whites. Yan Shen will continue to claim that Asians are uber geniuses, but there is little evidence for such overconfidence. Here's what I think is true: for a Chinese to perform as well at research at a White/Jew, he/she needs significantly more cognitive horsepower as measures by g. To quote Christopher Chang, Asians are good at optimizing, not theory building. Something RKU once worried about on a Mangan's thread, but refused to repeat on Steve Hsu's blog :)"

My own comment on the post:  Would like to see the data, but extremely interesting if true.

This would probably agree with what most of us have seen: hard work gets you so far into a certain field, but to excel in higher IQ fields, you simply need the raw brainpower.  What hurts them also is their lack of verbal aptitude so they're not much good for technical marketing or meeting with customers.  

We have yet to see if they can even get out of emulation mode.  You can build pretty impressive radars, for instance, by leveraging Skolnik's Radar Handbook.  All of the IEEE papers you read from the Chinese are low-effort minor tweaks on existing tech, which gets boring and irritating to sift through.  It's basically shitposting.  

The academic shitposting is already bad, but compounding it with StudyAZN shitposting may actually grind science to a dead stop.  

I also take issue with the assertion that AZNs are good at optimizing since - well - famous grind AZNs have been known for doing things like building laughably simplistic models for things:
http://www.wired.com...currentPage=all

[Blythe]

I knew a Sri Lankan guy in college who told me that he had memorized the entire vocab section of the SAT prep book.  That's probably an exaggeration, but still.  

In high school, some of the ABCs brute force memorized some vocab lists for the SAT.  They were native born and could speak English very well, but I guess they weren't the reading kind.

[Blythe]

Also, "siserune" sounds like Godless Capitalist of Gene Expression.

[Gromit]

Found this thread while researching East Asian underperformance in adulthood. I remember seeing some of those stats posted at Steve Sailer's blog and designed to investigate the matter further.

We often hear East Asians (ethnic Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans) uncritically lauded as "model minorities" who outperform Whites in academics and other indices of achievement. I've long suspected that this Emperor had no clothes, and sure enough I discovered numerous studies that documented a pattern of Asian underperformance relative to their credentials at the college level and beyond. This pattern is found in both the US and the UK, and can't be attributed to differences in coursework or major, sampling errors, non-East Asians dragging down the scores, etc. What's pathetic is that Asian immigrants in Western nations are smarter on average than their countrymen back home, and yet here are the results we find:

Quote

Although the above studies have found that Asian Americans have higher grades in elementary, middle, and high school, this is not necessarily the case in college. Data on performance in college has been based on nationally-representative data sets such as the High School and Beyond Study and the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study. It also includes data from an entire cohort of entering freshman at specific universities, such as University of California, Berkeley and also Los Angeles, and also from the entire University of California system.

Grades

Sue and Abe (1988) reported on the high school grade-point averages, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and the College Board Achievement Tests, and the GPAs in freshman year of all Asian American and white students who enrolled in the eight University of California campuses in 1984. Asian Americans had higher high school GPAs, but similar GPAs in their first year of college (i.e., Asian Americans 2.74, and whites 2.72). Other studies also report similar college GPAs for Asian Americans and whites, but higher college GPAs for Asian Americans compared to ethnic minority groups (Castro & Rice, 2003; Tan, 1994).

However, studies focused specifically on students attending the University of California, Berkeley, have reported lower college GPAs for Asian Americans compared to Whites (Thomson, 1998; Ying et al., 2001). Ying et al. reports for all students enrolled in spring 1995, Whites had higher mean GPAs (3.18) than Asian Americans (3.05) who had higher GPAs than Hispanics (2.86) and African Americans (2.71).

Additional studies have also reported lower college GPAs for Asian Americans than Whites or non-Asians (Toupin & Son, 1991; Tseng, 2000). A study by Toupin and Son of all Asian American students who attended a small, private, highly selective university in the Northeast in 1984, 1985, and 1986 in the College of Arts and Science found that Asian Americans had lower GPAs than non-Asians (matched on socio-economic background and SAT scores). They also were more likely to be placed on academic probation, and less likely to appear on the Dean’s List at least one time. A report by Tseng (2000), based on a sub-sample of 1,200 entering students at New York University in 1996 and 1998, also found that Whites had higher college GPAs than Asian Americans.

Tseng (2000) points out that these lower college GPAs among Asian Americans may be due to their being disproportionately enrolled in math and science courses, where on average, students receive lower grades than in other courses. Studies do find that a greater proportion of Asian American students are math/science majors or enroll in math and science courses than other ethnic groups (Ahn Toupin & Son, 1991; Tan, 1994; Tseng, 2000; Xie & Goyette, 2003). However, Tseng found that differences in GPAs between Asian and White students remained when controlling for course of study. Thus, the lower GPAs of Asian students at NYU were not due to their course of study. Tseng found that differences in GPA were somewhat explained by their experiences with prejudice and discrimination.

- Asian American Handbook of Psychology, http://webcache.goog...n&ct=clnk&gl=us

The studies listed above establish the pattern sufficiently, but they were further corroborated by other studies, such as Thomas Espenshade’s book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal (2009, p. 251-252):



Note these lines:

Quote

Even Asian students, long believed by some to be academic superstars, end up graduating with a class rank that is on average 10 percentage points lower than similar Whites…

It is not clear what contributes to underperformance by Asian students. Some of the standard explanations advanced for Blacks do not seem to apply to Asians.

Similar findings were reported in a study of Duke University students:

Quote

Results are presented in Table 6. The first columns just controls for race and gender. Here we see that males and Asians lose ground during their time at Duke relative to their female and non-Asian counterparts. This result continues as more controls are added.

- Peter Arcidiacono, et al. "What happens after enrollment? An analysis of the time path of racial differences in GPA and major choice" 2012 http://link.springer...8997-1-5#page-1

And again at the University of Michigan:

Quote

Proportionately more blacks and Hispanics were on academic probation at some point during their enrollment at UM. A greater percentage of Asians was on academic probation compared to whites...

Comparing Asian and white admittees at the same percentiles, Asian GPAs were either the same or lower than white GPAs. In 2004, for instance, Asian GPAs at the 75th percentile were lower than those for whites at the same percentile, while scores at the other percentiles were the same. In 2005, the Asian median was lower than the median for white admittees, as was the Asian GPA at the 75th percentile....

The college GPAs for Asians were lower than those for whites at the same percentile for every year. For the class entering in 1999, the median GPA for Asians was 3.0, which was the same as the GPA for whites at the 25th percentile. That is, half the Asian enrollees had lower college grades compared to 75 percent of white enrollees. Asian GPAs at the 75th percentile fell between white GPAs at the 50th and 75th percentiles. For the entering class of 2003, the Asian GPA at the 75th percentile was the same as the white median, while the Asian median fell between the 25th and 50th percentile for whites. For 2004, Asian GPAs at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles are all slightly lower than GPAs for whites at the same percentiles.

- Althea K. Nagai, "Racial and Ethnic Preferences in Undergraduate Admissions at the University of Michigan" 2006 http://www.ceousa.or...UGRAD_final.pdf

The trends in academic probation rates also hold at UC Berkeley. Not only do domestic Asians have slightly higher probation rates than Whites, but the picture of international students is even more startling:

Quote

International transfers, however, have a significantly higher probation rate (12%) than their domestic counterparts. With students from China and South Korea accounting for about 70% of international transfer students, we looked at probation rates by country of origin and found significant differences. Fall 2011 entering transfer students from South Korea had a 1st year probation rate of 18%, compared to a rate of 8% for transfer students from China (includes Hong Kong & Macau). Among international freshmen, South Korean students also have higher probation rates than Chinese students (4% versus 2%).

http://opa.berkeley....onRateBrief.pdf

The pattern continues in Medical School when looking at Asian performance there and on the Medical Licensing Exam:

Quote

Although White students on average scored highest, followed by Asian Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans, these gaps become narrower after controlling for MCAT scores and undergraduate GPAs. One might expect Asian Americans, who as a group have had the highest mean MCAT scores, to outperform other racial groups during medical school. However, two major studies across time and across medical schools have reported lower mean performance for Asian Americans than for White students in medical school.

- Jon Veloski et al. "Prediction of Students’ Performances on Licensing Examinations Using Age, Race, Sex, Undergraduate GPAs, and MCAT scores" 2000 http://www.docin.com/p-586576062.html

How about Law School? Here are Bar Exam passage rates for California state, which certainly has a representative sample of Asians:

Quote

Whites: 74.7%
Asians: 63.6%
Hispanics: 57.4%
Blacks: 44.4%

Among repeat test takers, the same order holds:

Whites: 21.1%
Asians: 16.7%
Hispanics: 15.9%
Blacks: 10.4%

http://admissions.ca...ts.122112_r.pdf

The Asian streak of bad luck extends to the business world:

Quote

But despite their seeming success at integrating into corporate cultures, Asians are, in fact, failing in one key factor: They haven’t been able to break through the “bamboo ceiling.” Asians are woefully underrepresented in top leadership positions at U.S. companies. They constitute 5 percent of the U.S. population, yet only 1.5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are Asian. Prevented from reaching their full potential in the workplace, CWLP research finds, Asian men are more than three times as likely as Caucasians to have one foot out the door and are looking to quit in the next year, and Asian women are 40 percent more likely to plan to quit within the year.

It's not because of lack of ambition or assertiveness either:

Quote

In surveys and interviews, Asians describe themselves as being highly ambitious and willing to go the extra mile for their companies. New research from the Center for Work-Life Policy, a New York think tank, finds that 64 percent of Asian professionals aspire to top jobs, compared to only 52 percent of their Caucasian peers...

In fact, Asians are far from passive, unassertive workhorses. CWLP research shows that Asian respondents were as likely as other ethnic groups to have asked a manager or supervisor for a pay raise or a promotion at work. Thirty-seven percent of Asians report asking for a pay raise and 28 percent for a promotion, figures on par with peers in other groups. The fact is, both male and female Asian professionals actively advocate for themselves and the rewards they feel they deserve.

http://www.forbes.co...model-minority/

Heck, the bad luck extends across the Atlantic to Chinese in the UK:

Quote

White students were more likely to have obtained first-class or upper second-class honours than were students from ethnic minorities. In particular, Connor et al. pointed out that only a third of Black students had gained first-class or upper second-class honours, compared with about 45% of Indian and Chinese students and about 60% of White students.

- John T.E. Richardson, "The attainment of ethnic minority students in UK higher education" 2008 http://lesacreduprin...r-education.pdf

The study at the link above separates "Chinese" from "other" as well, but that doesn't affect the figures. In fact, "other" slightly inflates the number of first-class honours achieved by Chinese students.

An even more damning study of Chinese students in the UK was reported by The Guardian of all sources this year

Quote

But while the numbers of Chinese students attending UK universities is a success story, new research shows that where their academic attainment is concerned, the picture is not so good. While nearly 68% of all students – and 52% of overseas students from outside the European Union – graduated with a first or 2.1 last year, this was true of only 42% of students from China, according to the latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa).

This undermines the traditional stereotype of the hard-working, high-achieving Chinese student. “There is all this talk – almost propaganda – about how brilliant the Chinese education system is, so when they come to the UK you would expect them to do really well,” says Zhiqi Wang, senior lecturer in accounting and finance at Bath Spa University and one of the authors of the new research. Wang says the reason for Chinese students’ low academic attainment is unknown. “We could clearly see the poor performance of Chinese students at UK universities but we had no idea why it was.” So to find an explanation, Wang and Ian Crawford, a teaching fellow in accounting and finance at the University of Bath, decided to compare the performance of Chinese and British undergraduates in each year of their degree. Taking a sample of just over 100 British and Chinese accounting and finance first-degree students who enrolled in 2008, and comparing their average marks and final degree classification, they found a dramatic drop in performance among the Chinese students between year one, when they performed better than their UK counterparts, and year two, when they performed worse. This did not seem to be explained by their previous academic qualifications.

Crawford and Wang believe the slump in attainment can be put down to two factors. First, Chinese students fail to adapt their approaches to learning and so their performance declines in the later years of a degree when the complexity of the work increases. And, second, while the UK and Chinese education systems are not that different, the strong focus in China on study and achieving qualifications means many young people enroll in higher education due to pressure from family or the jobs market rather than their own motivation.

According to Cristina Iannelli, professor of education and social stratification at the University of Edinburgh, part of the problem may be the changing socio-economic background of Chinese undergraduates. Using figures from the Hesa, Ianelli found that while 85% of Chinese undergraduates at British universities in 2000 and 2001 were mature students, often funded by the Chinese government, since 2004, they have have been younger, more likely to be women, funded by their families and therefore more in need of support. "We accept all these students but we don't know much about them," says Ianelli. "I see some of them struggling because they really don't know before coming here exactly what is expected of them." She says it can be difficult to measure how well they are prepared academically because it is hard to benchmark the qualifications they have against A-levels. "Are we just opening up our universities and we don't care what their prior attainment is, or are we actually comparing qualifications across international education systems?" she asks. "We may be accepting students who aren't as good as they should be. Or it could be language, or experiencing a different culture."

http://www.theguardi...uk-poor-results

This is the study cited by the article: http://www.tandfonli...079.2014.943658

One might hope that linguistic/cultural barriers could account for some of this, but the data suggest that assimilated Asians perform worse!

Quote

Using data from recent Current Population Surveys (CPS), this study compares third-and-higher generation with earlier generation Asian Americans and non-Hispanic whites in terms of socioeconomic characteristics and demographics. The findings suggest a “third-generation decline or flattening” for Asian American and white men as well as Asian American and white women. For each of these groups, the mean of years of schooling among the 2.5 and third generations is lower than among the first and second generations. This pattern is most pronounced among Asian Americans. As for wage determination, the generational differentials can be explained by educational attainment and other basic demographic variables. Overall, these results suggest that assimilation beyond the first generation immigrants no longer improves socioeconomic attainments as expected by traditional assimilation theory. Furthermore, in the case of Asian Americans, cultural assimilation across the generations may actually lower educational attainment and thereby reduce wages contrary to traditional assimilation theory.

- Isao Takei & Arthur Sakamoto, "Demographic Characteristics of Third-Generation Asian Americans: Socioeconomic Attainments and Assimilations" 2009 http://paa2009.princ...du/papers/90354

In fact, perceptions of Asian performance may actually be inflated by first-generation immigrants:

Quote

Shinagawa pointed out another interesting phenomenon; later generation (second, third, fourth, etc.) Asian Americans on average have markedly lower education and income compared to immigrant Asians. In 2007, 33 percent of PhDs conferred in the U.S. were to Asians. However, of that 33 percent, only 2 percent were Asians Americans born or raised in the U.S.

http://www.ibtimes.c...ereotype-246578

I think this is one of those cases where the stereotype doesn't quite match reality.

How to explain this all? Well, HBD blogger Education Realist posted about rampant Asian cheating:

Quote

I wonder about payoffs. Given its prevalence in China, Korea, and India and given the cheating history I’ve just outlined, it’s hard not to wonder if the practice isn’t continuing. The parents certainly aren’t in any hurry to assimilate; they view American kids as negative influences. (and when the Asians in question say “American”, they mean “whites”, as in this pretty horrifying tale of the fraud in Chinese English teaching industry.)...

The universities look at the resumes of all Asian kids—recent immigrants, long-established natives, nationals—and know that many of them are fraudulent. They know that many of the kids they accept will not be able to function on their campus, whereas others will be able to get great grades so long as they cheat. They know that many of the students don’t have the inquisitive mind, genuine interest in intellectual pursuits that universities like to see in students (or pretend they do). But the universities want the great, if often fraudulent, stats to puff up their numbers for the rankings systems, to offset the athlete, the legacies (for privates), and the Kashawn Campbells (for publics). And so they try to minimize it, while still getting what they want—an improved profile, out of state fees for four years, instead of just one, while not overloading the campus with too many Asians.

That’s disgusting. But if that’s not bad enough—and it is—here’s the thing: the cheating I describe perpetuates two frauds. The first, of course, benefits the cheaters and their schools at both high school and university level. But the second perpetuates a much larger misconception: People really believe that our top high school students are taking ten-twelve AP courses during their high school year, maintaining 4.5 GPAs, and have the underlying knowledge one would expect from such study. But this almost certainly isn’t true. And once you understand the reality, it’s hard not to wonder about all the “weeding out courses” in organic chemistry and other brutal STEM college courses, the ones that Americans are abandoning in large numbers. The willingness to accept the cheating, to slap it on the wrist if that, is leading to lies that convince a lot of American kids that they aren’t smart enough for tough courses because they don’t cheat and aren’t aware that others are.

http://educationreal...mentions-aloud/

Even The Huffington Post couldn't resist this story:

Quote

As evidence, the Times quotes a report concluding that “90 percent of Chinese applicants submit false recommendations, 70 percent have other people write their personal essays, 50 percent have forged high school transcripts and 10 percent list academic awards and other achievements they did not receive.” The report predicts this will only get worse going forward. The Times calls this a “conundrum.”

One thing it is not is a revelation; in fact, any American with experience in China’s school system will read this article and shrug. For years, American college admissions officers have seemed to be saying: “Chinese cheat. It’s just the way they are, and accepting this is part of the cost of doing business in China.”

In other words, gaining a student who can pay full admission is the goal; gaining someone honest is not.

I wouldn’t call this a “conundrum.” I’d call it a a disgrace, and one that I viewed first hand. From 2005-2007, I was an English teacher at Guizhou University, the flagship school of China’s poorest province. When I assigned papers, they would often be cribbed from the internet (and when I say often, I mean 75 percent of the work submitted contained some form of plagiarism, and about 10 percent was entirely cut-and-pasted from the web). In the most depressing incident I witnessed, a fellow teacher refused to turn one of her students in for using a cheat-sheet during an important test. “It’s none of my business if someone cheats,” my colleague told me. “And this student has influential parents. It would be foolish to report this.”

http://www.huffingto..._b_1074544.html

But I don't think cheating explains it all. Much time and pixels have been wasted on the autistic HBD blogosphere attempting to explain why those East Asians with their supposedly superior IQs don't seem to produce as many geniuses as White Europeans. In light of the above, I have a parsimonious explanation: East Asians don't have a higher IQ than White Europeans. My hunch is that this was a myth propagated by Richard Lynn and later J. Philippe Rushton to discuss racial differences in intelligence while avoiding the "White Supremacist" slur. ("How can I be a White Supremacist if I claim that East Asians have a higher IQ than Whites? Herp derp.") No one thought East Asians were smarter than Whites before Lynn published his studies claiming such. But most of those studies are either derived from unrepresentative elite samples or from achievement tests like PISA which aren't real IQ tests.

I'll also note that most of the evidence marshaled to prove the supposedly superior East Asian IQ either involve high school students (SATs, PISA scores, Science Olympiads, National Merit Scholars etc.) or are based on superficial statistics like college completion rates. But you don't need to be brilliant to graduate from college in the usual 4-5 years. Plenty of unremarkable people manage it. You just need to not be retarded and have a solid work ethic.

As far as I know, I'm the first person to notice just how consistent the pattern of Asian underachievement during adulthood is and collect the data to back it up. I think this annihilates the ridiculous claim that East Asians are "smarter" than White Europeans. Next some some HBD chucklehead regurgitates the party line on East Asian IQ, feel free to direct them to this thread.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Great post.  I think it also has to do with the passive and group-minded (antlike) behavior of Asians.  People commonly overestimate the intelligence of passive drudges because they appear so different from the stereotype of the gregarious but mentally lazy extrovert.  More and more evidence is piling up that what Chinese and Indians are really good at is gaming systems.  Anecdotally, the Asians I've worked with don't seem any smarter than white co-workers.  I've known some bright ones but I've also known some pretty dull shirkers.

[PLEASUREMAN]

By the way I share your exasperation with the HBD set.  We have a thread devoted to particularly laughable comments on Sailer's blog.

[Blarg]

"As far as I know, I'm the first person to notice just how consistent the pattern of Asian underachievement during adulthood is and collect the data to back it up."

This issue has been discussed fairly extensively over at Steve Hsu's blog. See the threads he links to in this post: http://infoproc.blog...rediction.html. In particular, sineruse marshaled a lot of data in the same vein.

Edited by Blarg, 16 September 2014 - 10:10 PM.

[Taxi Commander]

Just frame it as "Asian intelligence is like Asian beauty-requires massive upkeep and doesn't hold up past 25."

[NO_LIMIT_NIGGA]

Horrendous Thinspiration, on 17 September 2014 - 09:41 AM, said:

Just frame it as "Asian intelligence is like Asian beauty-requires massive upkeep and doesn't hold up past 25 only exists in the minds of white nerds and smug slants."

[Gromit]

PLEASUREMAN, on 16 September 2014 - 09:31 PM, said:

By the way I share your exasperation with the HBD set.  We have a thread devoted to particularly laughable comments on Sailer's blog.

Yes, and the worst offenders are those who worship "high IQ" Jews and think we need to inundate our countries with millions of "high IQ" Asian immigrants. You find them at sites like AmRen and AlternativeRight as well. One infamous commentator by the name of "JonEngelman" does nothing but recite IQ stats in the spergiest manner possible. He seriously believes that America would be improved if it were taken over by the Chinese.

Blarg, on 16 September 2014 - 10:08 PM, said:

This issue has been discussed fairly extensively over at Steve Hsu's blog. See the threads he links to in this post: http://infoproc.blog...rediction.html. In particular, sineruse marshaled a lot of data in the same vein.

I saw sineruse/siserune's statistics posted elsewhere, but the problem was that he rarely cited his sources, which made it easy for others to dismiss him as a crank. As a result, we still get HBDtards repeating the lie about an East Asian cognitive advantage despite all the evidence to the contrary. This is unfortunate, because as I've shown, the vast majority of sineruse/siserune's claims were accurate. Now we just need to spread the truth. I'm also looking for studies of Asian performance in Canada and Australia to see if the same patterns show up there.

This information likewise resolves another "mystery" that has befuddled HBD spergs.

Quote

A great feat of Chinese engineering which actually worked as intended was the Grand Canal, which has later been extended and now stretches from Beijing to the city of Hangzhou, roughly 1,770 km. The Japanese Buddhist pilgrim and writer Ennin (ca. 794-864), who is better known in Japan as Jikaku Daishi, was one of the many visitors who were impressed by the sheer size of the Grand Canal. Nevertheless, in architecture “The Chinese were relatively late in making use of the arch and the dome; and although they did build many attractive homes and other buildings, they did not construct anything that rivals the Parthenon in Athens, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, or the magnificent cathedrals of medieval Europe.”

In sharp contrast to the impressive list of great practical inventions was the relative sparseness of major Chinese achievements in science and mathematics. They suffered from a general lack of interest in theory in the sciences. For instance, the Chinese were diligent in keeping astronomical records, but they never created any elaborate theoretical structure and never deduced that the Earth was round. Their failure to do so made significant progress in astronomy difficult. In 1600 AD, Chinese astronomy was at least 2000 years behind the West. The Chinese made no major contributions to physics, chemistry or geology, either...

Between 600 and 1300 AD, China was clearly more prosperous than the West. Because of this, it has often been asserted that (until the rise of modern science in the last five centuries) China was usually more advanced than the West. However, that assertion is incorrect. In the first place, even during that period, China was far behind the West in mathematics and science. In the second place, the interval 600-1300 AD was atypical. For most of recorded history — and for most of the last ten thousand years — China has been well behind the Western world in both technology and the arts.

...there were no Chinese equivalents to Copernicus, Newton, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Columbus or Magellan. In the ancient world, there were none to Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Hipparchus or Ptolemy, either.

http://gatesofvienna...n-world_22.html

But this historical pattern is entirely consistent with the present data. It's only a "mystery" if you mindlessly accept the HBD propaganda line about higher East Asian IQ. I think we can therefore make a sound Bayesian inference on the likelihood of China usurping the West as the fount of science and technological progress.

[Probably Not Posting Here Anymore]

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This undermines the traditional stereotype of the hard-working, high-achieving Chinese student. “There is all this talk – almost propaganda – about how brilliant the Chinese education system is, so when they come to the UK you would expect them to do really well

It's hard for me to convey just how much of a lie this stereotype is, but it's a lie. Chinks have the best propaganda in the world. My conclusion is their positive propaganda is in exact proportion to the size of their market.

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Just frame it as "Asian intelligence is like Asian beauty-requires massive upkeep and doesn't hold up past 25."

This sounds like a nerd trying to be worldly and sophisticated - it's based on nothing and just wrong. The upkeep varies widely among Asians (Thais, Koreans, Japs put in a lot of effort; Flips, Chinks, Viets not all that much). How well they hold up varies also (Flips do not age well, Chinks and Japs do, but only if middle class - poor Chinese look rough as hell). In general they tend to avoid bloating up after pregnancy which goes a long way to helping many of them hold up better than westerners. The problem with Asians generally isn't how they age, it's rampant butterface syndrome and ridiculously tiny tits.

[PLEASUREMAN]

none of them age well, race traitor

[PLEASUREMAN]

Probably Not an Edomite, on 17 September 2014 - 10:41 PM, said:

which goes a long way to helping many of them hold up better than westerners

[Taxi Commander]

This is why we lost middlebrow, guys-can't take a broad and useful generalization anymore without people being pedantic or partisan about the details.

[Probably Not Posting Here Anymore]

Oh, I also left out that chinks have some of the worst hygiene I've seen in a country that styles itself as industrialized. So in addition to butterface syndrome you get butterteeth syndrome too. Very sad to see otherwise pretty 22 year old girls with yellow or god help me gray teeth.

edit: the generalization isn't useful, brah. The problem with Asians isn't how they age. It's lack of personality, lack of tits, lack of soul

Edited by Probably Not an Edomite, 17 September 2014 - 11:17 PM.

[Gromit]

Blarg, on 16 September 2014 - 10:08 PM, said:

This issue has been discussed fairly extensively over at Steve Hsu's blog. See the threads he links to in this post: http://infoproc.blog...rediction.html. In particular, sineruse marshaled a lot of data in the same vein.

By the way, it's amazing how Hsu's post hits so many of the tropes of the typical whiney minority screed: blame minority underachievement on racism, demand that Whites put aside their ethnic interests while applying a different standard to minorities, exaggerate the importance and contributions of minorities to White countries, etc. My comments are in bold.

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Asian admissions, statistical prediction, and all that
This post addresses comments by Sineruse, David Versace, and others on earlier threads here, here and here.

I've been pretty busy during my visit to BGI so I kind of lost track of the conversation. But here are my thoughts.

I think it is possible that Asian "strength of application" overpredicts later career success*. There could be many reasons for this. For example, it could be that Asian hard work boosts test taking results and grades more than it does real world achievement. [Fraud and cheating could also play a role.]It could also be that tests and grades are fair, whereas Asians face a certain amount of race-related disadvantage later in their careers -- e.g., unconscious bias, lack of "ethnic affinity" networks, etc. (If you talk to highly trained Chinese scientists and businesspeople returning to China from the US, most will describe an uphill struggle for Asians in the US; this contrasts with glib statements from white Americans about how little anti-Asian bias there is in elite careers). [Yes, when Asians outperform Whites during high school, Hsu claims it's because they have a genetic advantage. When Asians produce mediocrity in adulthood compared to Whites, it's because of racism, discrimination, stereotype threat, etc. Perfectly logical.]Finally, Asians may have lower rates of sociopathy, which reduces their chances of making it to the top (close inspection suggests it is mostly sociopaths at the top ;-)

I don't think the evidence is overwhelming on this question. But if, say, Asians have a .5 SD advantage in g and 1 SD advantage in conscientiousness or work ethic[.5 SD translates to 7.5 IQ points. If Asians truly had that large of an advantage in genuine cognitive ability in addition to their work ethic, it would show up somewhere in adult life, especially at the extreme right end of the bell curve. We should be awash in Asian mathematical and scientific geniuses by now. But neither the hard data nor reality reflect that.], that might lead to a "fair" Ivy population representation which is less than 20% if by "fair" we mean: apportion slots based on future success odds. (An additional factor which is usually mistakenly ignored in numbers like +.5/+1 is the large offshore "reservoir" of Asians and the fact that some A-As are drawn from a very elite subgroup in their ancestral countries.) Note though, as emphasized by RKU, the current Ivy standards for what constitutes "success" may not be aligned with the real interests of the Nation. That is, the connection between money and power and actual value creation in our current system seems to have become quite weak of late. What is good for Harvard may not necessarily be what is good for the USA. [It would have been good for both Harvard and the USA to retain their Jewish quotas.]

Having said all this, I think you are missing a key point -- perhaps because you think mainly in terms of (white) ethnic interests. [Hear that, White people? Don't you dare consider your own ethnic interests. Only minorities have that privilege.]Even if elite universities are acting in their narrow self-interest in assessing an outright Asian penalty to compensate for inflation of application strength, their methodology may violate the law. While some Asian application profiles overestimate later career prospects, universities should not be allowed to make generalizations based solely on race. [This is what is simply called pattern recognition. If it's obvious that members of a certain group constantly underperform relative to their credentials, then it's perfectly rational to start distrusting the credentials claimed by that group.]This may not be a principle that you believe in, but it's an important one to me. [Except when those generalizations are favorable to Asians.]If universities have some other way to correct for false signals in admissions profiles ("this kid scored high, but we know he's just a grind"), then fine. [An Asian name seems like a damn good way of identifying these sorts of people.]However, I suspect what is going on now is crudely (if perhaps subconsciously) race-based**.[Subconscious biases are often based on facts: Blacks are violent criminals; Jews are a stingy bunch; women suck at math; etc.]

* Something to keep in mind is that Harvard et al. would like to have influence abroad as well as at home, and Chinese ethnicity alumni are well placed to influence what will soon be the largest economy on the planet. Underperformance vs predictor in the US may be compensated by overperformance in the new reality of the coming century. [Veiled threats and ethnic chauvinism. But yeah, he just wants a race-blind world. And Steve, if China's elite immigrants can't dominate the West, there's little reason to believe that the average Chinese back home can. Unless, of course, China is hiding all of their REAL geniuses from the world so that we'll underestimate them. Yes, that's it!]Ask yourself why BGI was more willing to work with me than, say, the Sanger or Broad institutes might have been.

** An astute commenter asks why we should oppose race-based decision making, if there is real correlational information to be had from ethnicity. I offer two reasons: 1. this country has a bad record on race, and striving towards a race-blind society is worth some small sacrifices, [Or large sacrifices, as long as only Whites are making them.]2. the evidence for genetic group differences is not conclusive and should be treated with great caution.[Yet he'll speak of the supposed Asian advantage in general intelligence as if it were conclusive. Why no caution there, Steve?]

Some great blasts of wisdom from the comments section:

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Kevin Rose • 3 years ago
Now there is another point of extreme importance I want to emphasize. It is not merely in terms of CAREER performance that Asian underperform - where MAYBE personality traits like lack of sociopathy and white discrimination can explain things - but in terms of important intellectual performance in ANY area of life. Where are all the Asian books on all sorts of subjects making fascinating and novel contributions? Or the great mathematicians and scientists (proportionately, of course. I know there are some. Even Terence Tao, though, needed a white collaborater for his greatest contributions))? What is stopping Asians from doing great intellectual work outside traditional structures and outside the context of a CAREER in the literally hundreds of intellectual fields available to them?I love how people who advance the discrimination explanation narrowly focus on one area of achievement and forget that there are literally hundreds and that many of them are outside corporate structures where discrimination would hold little sway. In other words it is plausible (though in my view unlikely) that in some areas of our national life Asians underperform because of discrimination, but then why doesn't this Asian talent pop up elsewhere?  

As sineruse had pointed out, if there IS discrimination against Asians, then Asian talent should be manifesting itself in some OTHER area of national life. Where does that supposed talent just go? To revert to the analogy of the Jews, even when society discriminated against them MASSIVELY, they STILL somehow managed to make MASSIVE contributions to intellectual life and to achieve eminence in top fields. The excess talent did not simply DISAPPEAR.

"f you talk to highly trained Chinese scientists and businesspeople returning to China from the US, most will describe an uphill struggle for Asians in the US; this contrasts with glib statements by white Americans about how little anti-Asian bias there is in elite careers"

Well, they WOULD say that, wouldn't they? lol

One wonders, though, how much of that is sour grapes as arrogant Chinese scientists discover to their dismay that their self-conception is largely illusory as they bump up against actual white performance. I have experienced this phenomenon first hand - Chinese people, especially outside the US, have a self-conception that is laughably out of sync with reality, and when it clashes with reality, it aint pretty.

In this respect Asian Americans are not so different - most will refuse to consider any explanation for Asian underperformance other than white discrimination and will twist the facts and logic to support this case in  incredible ways.

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Kevin Rose • 3 years ago
"Thus he finds that common Chinese names like Wong are greatly overrepresented in American Men and Women of Science, as compared with their frequency in the general population, but under represented in Who's Who in American Law."

Dude, we are talking about top achievers, not mere representation. Presumably Chinese scientists and businessmen come here thinking they will dominate only to discover their limits once in direct competition with whites, then go back home saying *whew! The only reason I did not become a top achiever in America is because whites dsicriminate against me*.  Its sour grapes.

The reason for the mere overrepresentation of Chinese names in these fields has been discussed 1) STEM-intelligent whites being culturally dis-incentivized (did you read that NYTimes article profiling whites with SAT-M of 800 and other stellar credentials who dropped out of STEM that I provided on the other thread? Its interesting.) 2) Asians being culturally incentivized 3) Asians being better at these fields than they are at other fields 4) STEM rewards the ability to grind away in a way that many other fields do not, where orignality, flair, and a rebellious streak will serve one better 5) Importation from a select pool of non-representative foreign Asians to fill some of these roles.

"As I stated earlier, Chinese Americans, along with Indian Americans, are also disproportionately over-represented in the Silicon Valley infrastructure. Think of names like Jerry Yang of Yahoo, Jen Hsun Huang of Nvidia, Steven Chen of YouTube, etc."

Quite, and your inclusion of Indians pretty much makes my point. No one claims these Indians are represententive. They are quite clearly drawn from a select pool of Indians that represent the top tier of their population in terms of talent. Similarly with other Asians in SV, many of whome are drawn from a select foreign pool (actually many of the whites are too, which is fine.)

Obviously IQ tests have some level of statistical value, but it is interesting to point out in how many ways IQ tests convey only limited information about the real world and fail to predict the realities of different populations and how they perform. There are things we dont understand yet, which is why real world performance is ALWAYS MORE SIGNIFICANT than peformance on a TEST that we artifically devised ourselves based on theories and that we dont fully understand the implications of yet. Unfortunately this does not paint the best picture of Asians.

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ytrewq123  • 3 years ago
"Yet again, you keep trying to indoctrinate people with your obnoxious propaganda without presenting any empirical datum. "

Empirical datum? There's tons of it if you go and look at research awards. It's interesting that Steve Hsu doesn't attempt to rebut  this part of Sineruse's post. Whether it's the Fields/Abel Prize/Cole Prize/Waterman Awards/Hertz Fellowships/Nobels/Fulkerson Prizes/ACM Doctoral Dissertation prizes/Morgan Prizes/Turing Awards/INFORMS Fellows/Knuth Prize winners/Nevanlinna Prize winners/Bocher Prize winners, etc.

Some of these prizes have lots of young winners, so there's no lag effect that's yet to kick-in. The problem is that research ability is hard to quantify using a metric (in the apriori sense). It will necessarily remain "metaphysical," in the sense of being nebulous to quantify, but easy to observe. I don't know why you're getting so worked up about this. If it doesn't gel with your perception of Asian superiority, well, sorry.  I guess the only valid metrics are those that confirm your biases.

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sineruse • 3 years ago
>So the most striking pattern is that the last few years have witnessed a *gigantic* rise in East Asian
>performance on the Putnam, shifting from a mere presence to near total domination.

There has been a gigantic increase in US E.Asian *representation* in national math competitions, starting from elementary school.  It propagates to high school and college and graduate school, down the pipeline -- with considerable losses at each step (i.e., underperformance, even accounting for natural forms of attrition).   Some reasons:

1. More Asians (per capita) of high school age, many of them scientists' children. Recently there was an uptick of kids of the Tiananmen green card recipients.

2. Qualification became relatively easier. Number of USAMO qualifiers is 500 instead of 100.

3. USAMO and IMO became more trainable (and consequently more difficult in absolute terms). Problem books, databases and contest-focused math web sites have proliferated since 2000.

3b. As a result, starting early became more important for those wanting to reach the high echelons. Since Asians on average start their childrens' math education earlier and/or more intensively, there are relatively more Asians who have enough time to reach the ever-increasing training levels needed to reach USAMO and beyond.

4. Word of the association between olympiad success and elite college admission has reached the Chinese and Korean immigrant communities.

4b. As a result, dozens of math olympiad schools (some conduct classes in Chinese or Korean) and math olympiad camps (published attendance figure from the first year of a camp run by ex-US IMO coach: 80+ percent Asian) have opened in the past 5-8 years. A few are oriented toward Russian or Indian immigrants but the vast majority of olympiad schools are started by East Asian immigrants and pitched to East Asian parents.

4c. At the high end one could count Philips Exeter as a special program of this kind, producing one or more E.Asian winners of the USAMO or IMOeach year. Of the 20+ USAMO qualifications from Exeter in the past two years, 100 percent are Asian. The US IMO coach, Zuming Feng, is an instructor at Exeter, and apparently Asian parents are using Exeter as an olympiad school at a much higher rate than whites.

Equivalent factors don't operate after elementary and high school, and as a result one would expect some deterioration of the Asian percentages as time and selectivity levels increase along the academic pipeline.  Which is exactly what happens.

The comments thread is very much worth reading. There's a hilarious digression in which RKU1 denies being Ron Unz, despite using his initials (Ron Keeva Unz) and making the same arguments that Unz does in his published articles, sometimes with the same phrasing, as well as sharing all of Unz's opinions, experiences, anecdotes, etc. You would think someone with Unz's IQ would avoid using his initials as his alias if he wanted to remain incognito, but I guess 'g' doesn't correlate with common sense after all.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Hsu doesn't want to make generalizations based on race.  Yeah, right.  Hsu admires his co-ethnics' grinding, probably because he recognizes it in himself.

You have to wonder why the ant people grinders didn't develop the computer industry but only came along well after it was established to produce cheap knockoffs.  Maybe it's because grinding is only good for brute force solving of relatively uninteresting problems (and acquiring spandrel-like violin playing skills).  This makes them good at optimizing the productivity of bunny suits so that only a non-disruptive number have nervous breakdowns or kill themselves from the strain of working a semiconductor line.

No one is skeptical of Jewish or German intellectual achievement because by any standard they've produced the goods--so what about Asians?  I guess they gave us oppressively conformist standards in cute video game avatars.  And they beat a lazy, inept, and mismanaged US auto industry by grinding car improvements in their anthill factories.

And lol at the attempt to make Indian "overrepresentation" sound like a victorious march through Silicon Valley.  Indians are really the worst representation of the Asian grinding phenomenon, being generally not as smart and relying on the dumbest and lowest methods of system gaming, usually without producing anything of even incidental value.

But more than anything what is to be objected to about Asians (at least those who come here--I have no complaint about what they do in their own countries) is that they are morally stunted, which is why politically they tend to be conformist dishrags.  As Yahoo's Jerry Yang was mentioned, it's fitting to post this illustration of Asian morality:

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While in China, Shi Tao used a Yahoo email address to notify a pro-democracy website that the Chinese government ordered the Chinese media not to cover the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 on June 4. Yahoo! provided the Chinese security agencies with the IP addresses of the senders, the recipients and the time of the message. Tao was subsequently convicted for "divulging state secrets abroad." Yang was heavily criticized and Reporters Without Borders called Yahoo! "a Chinese police informant" whose actions led to the conviction of a journalist and writer.

Yang declared, "To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law[s]." This was controversial, as critics claimed Yahoo! violated international law as well as a 1989 decision by the U.S. Congress to prohibit U.S. companies from selling "crime control and detection" equipment or software to the Chinese Government.[20]

"I was onry forroring orders!"  Asian moral brilliance in a nutshell (even a Jew might not be this openly crass).  Not that there is any shortage of other groups who would do the same thing, and even employ the same amoral calculus in their self-defense.  But what is remarkable about Asian behavior is how basically amoral it is on the whole, and the inability of the Asian mind to understand that forms of misbehavior can be wrong even when there is no one person who is directly harmed (such as with plagiarism).

And yet despite being amoral grinders some of them whine that there is a bamboo ceiling crafted by white devil sociopaths.  Actually I think the main reason they don't get into the top executive ranks is because they have no personalities and in all their grinding spend too much time trying to calculate the optimal route instead of just going for it.