Who Owns the Future?

[DominiConnor]

I think there is absolutely no logical reason why intellect and race should ever be mentioned in the same sentence.
Actually I teach logic, and I although I don't use 'race' as a useful term for describing people, genetics are critical in intelligence.

Any reasonable person would know that the majority of american-born blacks start so low on the economic ladder, they rarely have time to think about school.
Generally it is my esteemed colleague Dr. Riaz Ahmed who helps people through the issues they may have with maths, I have to tell you that 'majority' means more than half. It ain't >50%, it's too high but not that high.

Consider the obvious fact that, very poor whites in the US (for instance those that live in remote country areas) are just as unimpressive as the average african-american
That's genetics, and in most countries, people who live in farming areas are more stupid than those that don't.

in school. Suggesting that ethnic chinese are possibly predisposed to being able to understand mathematics better is an irresponsible and rather stupid statement.
No, it's not stupid. It is a plausible explanation for observed data. People in the PRC are taught less well than people in civilised countries, yet they do well in maths. That ethnic group do well in maths when embedded in multiple cultures, implying that their success is independent of that factor. Also Chinese people suffer from one of the lowest genetic diversities of any group, so it's plausible that they share some genes that assist in the learning of maths. Or not.
I'm a scientist, you're not. A scientist only reject hypotheses that fit the facts when they get facts that don't fit. An arts graduate rejects them if they don't look nice. Thus I may be wrong, and you may even prove me wrong, but you can't be proved wrong because you won't accept facts you don't like. Down that road lies faith, not reason.

Take, native americans for instance.
Let's do that. Look at their genetic diversity, very low.

No one suggests that they are brilliant at mathematics, or science or anything like that. That is because they were almost completely obliterated by Europeans.

I mentioned that I taught logic didn't I ?
That's what we scientists call a non-sequitur.
The low number of that group does not stop them being good at maths. The basis of much of our mathematical heritage comes from an Arab group that is smaller. Did it ever occur to you where the word algebra and algorithm came from ?

If you teach 6 kids from 6 different races mathematics for the same length of time, at the same age, and make sure they all live in the same type of environment, and have the same level of support, and the same level of constant discrimination/ or not, then you may be surprised that there may not be that much of a difference
I'd be ******* shocked, and assume the results were either the result of astonishing coincidence or were simply fraudulent.

The majority of the chinese population can not do basic algebra, just like everywhere else.
Have you ever been outside the USA ?
Have you even been further from your home than walking distance ?
Several countries have populations where the majority can do basic algebra, not the USA of course, nor indeed as you say, China.

Africans have the highest educational attainment rates of any immigrant group in the United States.
Yes, like we all believe that. White liberal racism in the USA for some reason calls black people "African", when any properly educated person would say negro. That's an important distinction. Many people from Africa are in fact Arabs, huge amounts of North Africa fit that filter.

Estimates indicate that a significant percentage of black students at elite universities are African or the children of African immigrants, a notable example of this is Barack Obama."
Barack Obama isn't really a product of the US education system is he ?
Although I'm not some crazy tea partier who believes he's not "American" it's a matter of record that a good % of his education wasn't in the USA. Note the differences in his attitudes to his wife who was entirely educated in the USA and is scathing about such issues.

 

[Andy D.]

Dominic touches on an interesting point here.

It seems that African American is essentially a term used based upon somebodies skin pigmentation and perceived heritage.

I can't see US citizens from the Maghreb, Eygpt or the Boers of the Traansval being included in this. Take Emmanuel Derman as an example, this goes back to my point on the idea of dividing people into IQ groups based upon some vast generalization.
Now would Mr Derman be considered Jewish, European or African? I very much doubt he would be considered African American, even though he was born in South Africa and I believe holds US citizenship?

I can't say that there are no genetic differences between different ethnic groups when it comes to somebodies mental capabilities, because I don't know, I'm not a Neuroscientist or an evolutionary biologist - however I have yet to see any solid facts that prove this to be so.

It is very obvious that environment and cultural factors have a huge impact on the abilities people develop, whether that be fishing, hunting, boat building and similar. However going back to IQ (a concept as I pointed out was treated with scepticism by the Frenchman who invented it) I think trying to correlate this with say academic ability is something I would be wary of, if the very concept is flawed in the first place.

Africans have the highest educational attainment rates of any immigrant group in the United States.
Yes, like we all believe that. White liberal racism in the USA for some reason calls black people "African", when any properly educated person would say negro. That's an important distinction. Many people from Africa are in fact Arabs, huge amounts of North Africa fit that filter.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Steve Sailer's analysis of US PISA results by ethnic group makes for fascinating reading. Those who take delight in bashing American education might want to glance at it as it presents a different way of looking at American results. The educational system may not necessarily be at fault.

 

[euroazn]

Steve Sailer's analysis of US PISA results by ethnic group makes for fascinating reading. Those who take delight in bashing American education might want to glance at it as it presents a different way of looking at American results. The educational system may not necessarily be at fault.

Wow, great analysis!

That being said, we shouldn't be proud of the U.S educational system. Just because our students are prepared for multiple choice tests doesn't mean we are being educated

 

[bigbadwolf]

That being said, we shouldn't be proud of the U.S educational system. Just because our students are prepared for multiple choice tests doesn't mean we are being educated

As Sailer argues here, there's a case to be made for educational tracking of the kind they have in Japan and Germany. In egalitarian USA, where everyone is supposed to be equal, the bright ones get short shrift as the emphasis is on getting various pass rates up by 1) lowering the bar by dumbing down the syllabus time and again, and 2) devoting resources to the stupidos while neglecting the top few percentiles. You need vocational training for those with no academic bent. And you need to stretch the minds of the top few percentiles -- those who are going to be tomorrow's programmers, engineers, and physicists. But as I've argued before, the US elite has a policy of neglect towards educating its own people as it relies on poaching both brains and brawn from abroad.

 

[DominiConnor]

Like newhavenct, I'm not a professional neuroscientist, though I did study it long ago. My understanding is that although the genetic difference in intelligence is very much the single biggest factor in variance (note I say variance not mean), the differences that one can assign to 'origin' are really quite surprisingly small, so small that even non-politically correct scientists argue over whether they exist in amongst the statistical noise and effects due to culture and environment.

There is a growing body of evidence that there are currently practical limits to human intelligence in that the size of our heads already mean that humans lost the ability to reproduce reliably without assistance before we left Africa. Also in place like Silicon Valley we see clusters of things like autism where the populations have very high concentrations of smart people who have been there long enough to breed generations.

As for bigbadwolfs idea that we need vocational training, I see the idea, but for it to work you need a system that identifies kids abilities well, and that's viciously hard to do. Germany has achieved it a bit, but at a terrible price. It produced a good average, with fewer failures than many other countries. It also produces very very few geniuses. Remember that Germany has one of the largest populations of any developed countries. Now think of a genius in any field from Germany that is now living.
No, nor can I.
Some single schools in England beat the whole of Germany for emitting the very top grade of people.
But Germany is good at turning out very nearly excellent engineers. Thus a top grade Formula One car may have 90% of it's man hours executed by Germans, but the thought leaders of the efforts are British and Italian. But if you are stupid enough to put Brits in charge of building the car you use to get to work, make sure you have the number of a taxi firm to pick you up when it goes wrong.

That raises an awkward question for those who refer to themselves as 'liberal', since it's clear that the German process is better for the community as a whole.

The English system is in many ways a set of filters rather than a value adding process, and thus has produced more excellence that the modern French and German systems combined, but at the price that the average is almost as bad as America. It's not likely to be a coincidence that France and Germany have significantly higher GDPs per head.

So the question is whose talent do you waste ?
America wastes the talent of black people, and that of people whose parents are poor relative to other Americans. Germany wastes the talents of extremely smart people. Getting back to China, it wastes the talent of nearly everyone who lives there, but especially wastes the talent of those born in the wrong part of the country or whose parents lack the right connections. Thus it's GDP per head is nearer Africa than Europe, sure growth is good, but an economic model that is based upon the idea the your people are amongst the most worthless in the world, and thus cheaper is not one I'd be proud of as a leader.

 

[bigbadwolf]

You realize you're talking to BBW who I presume is a Brit, where a First (A equivalent) is 70%+.

It's important to not compare oranges to apples. I don't know how difficult it is to get 60% on AP calculus. It's probably more difficult than getting an "A" in high school calculus (or even college calculus), where a percentage is assigned to homework, a percentage to class attendance and participation, a percentage to how assiduously the student smooches the teacher's/instructor's backside, and the rest to performance on various tests.

To give an extreme example of how difficult some exams can be, let me cite from the book, Littlewood's Miscellany: The Cambridge Tripos (in math) for 1881 consisted of 18 papers, each of three hours length. The full marks available were 33,541. The Senior Wrangler (the top performing student) got 16,368 (i.e., less than 50%); the second Wrangler 13,188; and the last Wrangler 3123 (and by "Wrangler" is meant first-class honours in today's nomenclature). The Wooden Spoon (i.e., the student with lowest passing marks) got 247 (i.e., less than 1% of the available marks). The Putnam exam of today is also fiendishly difficult, with a median score of 0.

 

[DominiConnor]

@BBW, one difference between American negroes and other groups is that many didn't come voluntarily, they were sold as slaves by their own people to white slavers, so the filter doesn't apply so strongly.

Race is a scientific concept, it's merely one that's not very useful, and is especially useless in the context of negroes because they are more genetically diverse than everyone else put together.

The american penchant for hyphening people clouds many people's thinking. On more than one occasion I've had to explain to Americans that I'm not an Irish American, and since I speak a variety of languages (all badly) I'd also point out that no other people use their nationality to describe people. Next time you hear a Brit on the TV talking about something good/bad that has happened to lots of people he will say "people", unless the nationality is relevant, and often not even then. Americans will say "4 Americans died in the car crash" even when the context makes it improbable that any other nationality might be affected.
Ditto Germans, Russians, French, Chinese, et al.

I find the dialogue that euroazn has got himself sucked into quite sad, competitive victimhood always is. I'd point out that far more Chinese have been killed by Chinese over longer periods than Jews can make a claim for, but does that prove anything useful ?
No, thought not. Sad fact is that humans have been murdering each other throughout history, in some people's eyes, history is merely the sequence of excuses they've had for it.
The Europeans also murdered Jehovah's Witnesses, no, I don't know why, I don't even care, but they have fewer people in the media so no one has ever done yet another documentary on it.

Americans also suffer from a collective failure to understand evolution, which to me is the most compelling evidence of their failure of their education system.

Evolution is not about 'superiority', it's about survival.
The Lion and Eagle are seen as 'superior' in many cultures, so much so that they are on coins, flags, etc. Both are facing extinction.
Rats are rarely national symbols, few kings have rats on their banners, even fewer jet fighters or spaceships are named after them
But rats are doing very nicely in the world, because they fit the way it is.
Same with beetles.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Race is a scientific concept, it's merely one that's not very useful, and is especially useless in the context of negroes because they are more genetically diverse than everyone else put together.

Take a look at Cavalli-Sforza's The History and Geography of Human Genes. And perhaps Genes, Culture, and Human Evolution by Stone, et al to understand the severe limitations of the concept of race. Race is ill-defined to begin with. How to classify Armenian and Georgians? Are they "white?" "White" itself keeps shifting and is a social construct -- for instance, if memory serves, there was a court case in the US in the '20s, when an African-American was charged with raping an Italian woman. At the time, a black raping a white carried an automatic death sentence. But the jury couldn't decide how to classify the Italian -- was she white? Or take Berbers -- are they black? Race is a fuzzy notion. We use it for lack of anything better (yet); one day we will be able to associate more precisely gene combinations with particular traits.

 

[euroazn]

I'd point out that far more Chinese have been killed by Chinese over longer periods than Jews can make a claim for, but does that prove anything useful ?

Nominally, yes, but not as a percentage. But I would like to point out that the second-highest scoring group is Asians...

 

[alain]

, but not as a percentage.

is that relevant?

more ethnic russians were killed in world war II than any other so called ethnicity.

 

[DominiConnor]

BBW, I would ask you to read my post, I agree with you that it's not a very useful scientific concept, and that it is often badly defined.
We must distinguish between the way that many people use terms sloppily, and the term itself not being capable of definition. The term "scientific" itself is often used as a term of approval, not as a description of processes and definitions.

Because of the emotional baggage around the word 'race', many fall into the trap of not applying level of reason they apply to (for instance) care.
Take the VW Beetle, many of these were made, but over time they added features, changed components and customers could choose options. The design was licenced to firms to build in several countries. But they were all Beetles.
Beetles share components with other cars, and are made of much the same materials, but we can usually define a given car as being a Beetle or not being a Beetle.

So a condition that needs to met is : With a reasonable degree of accuracy can I divide people into two sets by objective tests ?

I believe this is possible for many ethnic groups using genetic tests. You will get some results that people will disagree with, and some will be 'wrong' by whatever definition you pick, but most tests we use in the real world have that issue.

A model is 'scientific' when it makes predictions.
Can you make predictions based upon the genetic model of race I described ?
The answer seems to be yes.
By my definition of race I can predict that some races are more likely to get certain diseases, that height will vary even if given the same diet, and in some sports certain 'races' do very much better than others.
I've purposefully avoided contentious issues here like the genetic base of intelligence. IQ tests, et al are all very contentious and really hard to separate from other issues. That doesn't mean that there isn't a correlation between genetic 'race' and ability to learn to read, do maths, or physical/mental skills like flying an aircraft.

The reason I earlier rejected race as not useful was that these correlations are poor, much poorer than one would expect. That's because people's surface appearance seems to vary much more than the wiring and plumbing in their heads, based upon our current understanding. Tests on twins etc, and whole populations show something that I find hard to explain, which is that we know for a fact that any large population will show great variation on any test of mental faculties, yet this doesn't seem to vary across populations, even ones that have substantially different genetics.
It's that which accounts for part of my reluctance to use race as a model, it's ability to predict is quite poor.
In particular when we talk of so called "African Americans", i'm not sure there are any.
Some people get labelled as black out of convenience and laziness but interbreeding means that the % that are 'pure' African is not huge. When you get a subset of a population that is already highly diverse genetically, and then mix it with the general population I'm am sceptical that you can do anything more useful than find a correlation between the genes for melanin production and poorly defined social outcomes.

I also frankly don't trust anyone's research 100% on this. They all seem to want to 'prove' that a given ethnic group fulfils some condition that fits their social and political views.

But, and it is a big but. There is some predictive value, and it's possible that we learn things about brain function related to genetics that improve such models, at which point I will change my view.

That is a scientific view, I have a test, my models can make predictions, and my future use of that model varies with how the supporting work develops. I may throw this model away, or rely upon it in my work. What I will not do, is indulge racist fantasies, or politically correct ignorance of observed facts.

 

[tobias elbert]

The English system is in many ways a set of filters rather than a value adding process, and thus has produced more excellence that the modern French and German systems combined, but at the price that the average is almost as bad as America. It's not likely to be a coincidence that France and Germany have significantly higher GDPs per head.

Don't entirely agree with that statement, Dominic. Though I do not know the English schooling system very well, I can speak of the German system which filters (or has filtered during my time) extremely from an early age onwards.

Where else in Western schooling systems do you have to make a decision at the tender age of 9-10 as to whether you'll be heading down the vocational or academic path? As you can imagine very much the parents make this decision on their kids' behalf regardless of the child's suitability (often). Their socioeconomic background and role in society play a big role on that decision.

Though university in Germany is free of tuition (not entirely true anymore - a semester's tuition for local and international students alike is in the order of Eu500) selection doesn't stop there for obvious reasons. Unlike many other systems you have three trials at most for each exam - if you dont pass after your third try then that's it. You will no longer be allowed to continue your studies in your chosen degree program at any German university (though you really shouldn't need three tries anyway).

Also, how do you measure "the English system [...] thus has produced more excellence that the modern French and German systems combined [...] "?

 

[Andy Nguyen]

I was in a magnet middle school, got accepted into a magnet high school (but declined and went to one of the "top" public high schools in the country... we're talking Blue-Ribbon.)

I've taken AP Calc Freshman Year, and 9 others my first three years of high school alone. 3 college classes beyond the AP Level......

But even AP is a joke. Consider Comp Sci, or Calculus (god forbid I mention Stat, which isn't even calculus based... wtf!?!?)

APs ARE A JOKE. It's no wonder I got 5's on every exam...
Education in the US is based on tests with very high curves. 60% in AP Calc = 5. Hooray! We are achievers!

Advanced Placement courses are about to get a facelift
Rethinking Advanced Placement - NYTimes.com

 

[euroazn]

A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide

Yeah, for the worse...

The original APs, that is, the ones pre 1990, were actually half-decent. And now they're making them even worse.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

WSJ is running some series on how Tiger moms and Western moms raise their children
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior - WSJ.com
Ayelet Waldman on Amy Chua's 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' - WSJ.com

 

[goldski]

Why American Mothers are Superior

 

[bigbadwolf]

WSJ is running some series on how Tiger moms and Western moms raise their children
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior - WSJ.com
Ayelet Waldman on Amy Chua's 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' - WSJ.com

Off-topic but I read Amy Chua's book, "World on Fire" a few years ago. It's difficult to agree with some of the things she says. Your child may not excel when he or she is in a group composed of other capable -- even talented - children. All the pressure and rote practice in the world is not going to cause them to improve beyond a certain level. Shrieking and name-calling will be unproductive, if not counterproductive. The pressure to achieve conventional academic success may inhibit a child from leisurely exploring an area for himself and developing his own creative impulses and insights. Reading Chua's piece I get the feeling she is trying to perpetuate a Western stereotype of how Chinese parents do their job.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Why American Mothers are Superior

Some good stuff there:

There are a few areas I would take exception with her article. First is her grasp of mathematics and logic. It is clearly impossible that every child in China is number one in the class, unless every classroom in the country has a thirty-way tie for first. Second, as my daughter asked, “There are 1.3 billion people in China. None of them ever got a B?” Third is the issue of claiming your parenting is such a great success when your children are not yet out of high school.

And this strikes a chord:

When I ask the latter questions such as, “If you were going to redesign programming language X, what would you do?”

They will tell me what X does in great detail but not answer the question.

American students are more likely to jump in with ideas about how to change X, replete with statements like “X sucks because…”

My twenty-five years of experience, agrees with Wadhwa’s research findings in that the international students I have met are far less likely to question results.

As does this:

The international scholars I know, far more often than American ones, chose their field for practical reasons. They could get a job. The salaries were good. Their parents really wanted them to become a doctor/ engineer.

Not to mention this:

Sometimes these Chinese (and other) students change while in America. Not always. Lots of middle managers like people to do exactly what they’re told. Not always the best thing for business but perhaps best for the comfort and convenience of that manager.

Schools really like people to do what they are told, and universities just love having graduate students who will pay high out-of-state tuition, teach for low wages, or even work in the lab for free. Hey, don’t blame us if 30% of the students we admit are from other countries, they did the best on the tests AND had a 4.0 GPA. You should have studied more, you lazy slackers!

 

[bigbadwolf]

I glanced at Vivek Wadhwa's article in Business Week, and again there are points to agree with:

The independence and social skills American children develop give them a huge advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They can think for themselves, and they can innovate. This is why America remains the world leader in innovation; why Chinese and Indians invest their life savings to send their children to expensive U.S. schools when they can. India and China are changing, and as the next generations of students become like American ones, they too are beginning to innovate. So far, their education systems have held them back.

My research team at Duke looked in depth at the engineering education of China and India. We documented that these countries now graduate four to seven times as many engineers as does the U.S.The quality of these engineers, however, is so poor that most are not fit to work as engineers; their system of rote learning handicaps those who do get jobs, so it takes two to three years for them to achieve the same productivity as fresh American graduates.As a result, significant proportions of China's engineering graduates end up working on factory floors and Indian industry has to spend large sums of money retraining its employees. After four or five years in the workforce, Indians do become innovative and produce, overall, at the same quality as Americans, but they lose a valuable two to three years in their retraining.

And the point that like is not being compared to like:

Additionally, we're comparing America's diverse population—which includes disadvantaged minorities and unskilled immigrants with little education—with the homogeneous populations of countries like Finland, Japan, and New Zealand.

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