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Who Owns the Future?

It is an interesting fact that regardless of culture or race (whatever you mean by race), by far the best predictor of the educational outcome of a child, whether that child is male or female.
The exact correlation of course varies by group, but the correlation is always there.

That gives us a good predictor for a society as a whole, and we note that failed societies tend not to educate women, which leads to inferior children of both sexes.

American education is of course sexist, but it is less sexist than many with which it competes, and the US has a highly respectable % of female graduates. A fact that should inspire a healthy dread in religious leaders.

My friend Aaron Brown when he wrote The Poker Face of Wall Street, has formed a hypothesis that games like poker which reward efficient risk management have been critical to the success of the US, though of course this has little to do with the input of mothers.

Since so many here are Americans, the E concept is of course absent. Good parenting is not an objective term, and must be evaluated in the context of an environment, like any other evolutionary factor.
I would take particular exception to the idea that non-white people can't be engineers, which depending on your left/right political position is some factor of genetics or education.

America has never produced many excellent engineers, you might even argue it has produced almost none, if you define "produced" as entirely made in America.

America's space progam was largely German, electronics were pretty much brought up by Italians and Brits, and together with a few Germans gave the world nuclear energy.

Note I say America's space program *was* German. It ain't German any more and doesn't work anymore either.

I am caustic about British cars, but when I encounter most US cars they seem to be the product of 80s Soviet engineers, built by 1960s Indians.

There are people like Edison of course.
Hold that thought...
He was a product of the Victorian education system used in most of Western Europe, the British Empire and the USA. So were the Wright brothers, the engineers who built the first tank, the first electric dynamo, first radio, Radar, and pretty much every critical invention you can think of.

So what educational therem unites these people ?
Yep, rote learning.

Maybe there's a bit of a correlation between system and getting useful people, but I don't see it as causality.

More important is whether smart people are spotted and brought forward, and a society that rewards successful thinking.

China hasn't had a culture like that for over a thousand years, so it's not suprising that for >500 years no useful idea of any kind has come out of 1/4 of the human race.

But as a above, female education in China is not especially sexist, and education us valued. Indeed almost all cultures value education more highly than the average native born American.
 
The Yale dailynews interview Amy Chua recently after the WSJ piece
QA: Yale Law professor Amy Chua | Yale Daily News

The NYT is quoted as saying she's been getting death threats. Whatever for?

For me the epitome of single-minded parental nurture is the Polgar family -- three girls who were intensively taught chess by their father. Yet even the best of the three -- Judit -- could not and cannot climb to the very summit. There is such a thing as raw ability -- the kind Kasparov, Anand, and Carlsen have but which Judit doesn't quite have. The point is that no matter how intensively you nurture your children, what combination of positive and negative feedback you administer, there are going to be some obstacles that are insurmountable and lie encoded in the youngster's DNA. That's karma. It's the recognition of this karma I find lacking in Chua's account. Not everyone can be the best of the lot. For one winner there are dozens, hundreds, millions of those who couldn't make it.
 
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.

the analysis has some valid points, but many fall outs as well. but that aside, I really hate how the author keeps generalizing and profiling, it is really annoying.
 
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.

So you have a better solution of uplifting millions from poverty?
I DONT THINK SO.
I know it's none of my business but - plz dont be so arrogant.
 

I'll flatter Brooks and say he wrote the essay tongue-in-cheek. But with this part I agree:

Furthermore (and this Chua doesn’t appreciate), she is not really rebelling against American-style parenting; she is the logical extension of the prevailing elite practices. She does everything over-pressuring upper-middle-class parents are doing. She’s just hard core.
 
China Will Face Crisis Within 5 Years, 45% of Investors Say

Global investors are bracing for the end of China’s relentless economic growth, with 45 percent saying they expect a financial crisis there within five years.

An additional 40 percent anticipate a Chinese crisis after 2016, according to a quarterly poll of 1,000 Bloomberg customers who are investors, traders or analysts. Only 7 percent are confident China will indefinitely escape turmoil.
China Will Face Crisis Within 5 Years, 45% of Investors Say - Bloomberg
 
For African-Americans it is 84 (the test is standardised so that white Americans score 100). Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are scoring 89. North-East Asians 105 and the small group of Ashkenazi Jews 114. Probably that's the reason why Jews, who constitute 2% of the US population, account for 20% of the professorships. And 60% of Columbia's undergrad population.

Bear in mind that Africans coming to Europe and the USA for education are probably among the top one per cent in intelligence in Africa and hence are hardly representative. African IQs vary from 59 to 82, depending on the part of Africa they live in. I think there's more detail in the interesting but flawed book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, by Lynn and Vanhanen.

The argument that since the brain is physiological, intelligence may differ among ethnic groups was put forward by Sir James Watson (the Nobel Prize winner in biology for the double helix) a few years ago. The establishment descended on him like a ton of bricks. These are taboo arguments and the discussion of varying performance is itself taboo except in terms of institutional and social racism.

I believe in employing Ockham's razor: What's the simplest explanation for differing academic performance across ethnic groups? Variation in inherent ability seems to be the simplest and most plausible. Other ethnic groups have also faced the brunt of discrimination, so while this may be a factor it is not to my mind the only one or even the main one. Until the 1960s, for example, most elite colleges (Harvard, Yale, Columbia) had Jewish quotas.


Your argument seems most logical, however, you fail to account for the possible effect of harsh events like slavery, colonialism, imposition of new cultures, etc; mentioning that african IQ's range from 59 to 82 is probably the most ridiculous statements I have ever seen. My family is from africa, my IQ is always over 130 when I take an IQ test; so too is my big brother. A simple case that suggests a change in environment can have remarkable effects.

Furthermore I do not care if some guy from Europe or the US has 1000 nobel prizes; that does not qualify him to say intelligence is probably dependent on race. For instance, and you may know this, nobel prize scientists in the US once made assertions such as: blacks can not fly in planes for say the air force because their brains are of inferior build and hence may swell and possible explode. That is not the statement of an intelligent person, it is the statement of a racist person (who chooses to substitute his obvious intelligence for what he grew up hearing from his parents). Scientists once said blacks can not play sports (especially leadership positions like quarterback) because they are incapable of thinking rationally. These are the same 'nobel prize' gods you are quoting.

All human brains are a conglomerate of muscles, hence we are all capable (within limits) of similar levels of brain functions. It also happens that if some 'chief scientist' makes some statement about intelligence and race, then those that fall into the favorable groups would easily accept and quote books and other scientists (who happen to be in the same groups) as further """proof"""; and those who do not fall into that group, like myself would naturally oppose the position. From this point of view, this argument is a waste of time.
 
Your argument seems most logical, however, you fail to account for the possible effect of harsh events like slavery, colonialism, imposition of new cultures, etc; mentioning that african IQ's range from 59 to 82 is probably the most ridiculous statements I have ever seen. My family is from africa, my IQ is always over 130 when I take an IQ test; so too is my big brother. A simple case that suggests a change in environment can have remarkable effects.

Your argument is quite weak as one person's or even two person's intelligence is far from enough to represent people from a whole continent.
Then again, I do believe that the tests that had been taken in this subject are biased towards people from developed countries. First, the researchers will have the problem of designing an accurate test in a foreign language for people from very different cultural backgrounds. Second, there is quite a discrepancies in quality of health care and education which, IMO, would impact the result quite significantly.
 
A word of caution for people extremely bullish on India :

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...-last-in-global-test/articleshow/11492508.cms

Fifteen-year-old Indians who were put, for the first time, on a global stage stood second to last, only beating Kyrgyzstan when tested on their reading, math and science abilities.

India ranked second last among the 73 countries that participated in the
Programme for International Student Assessment
(PISA), conducted annually to evaluate education systems worldwide by the
OECD
(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Secretariat. The survey is based on two-hour tests that half a million students are put through.
 
Bad politics.. corruption...no education system... wonder why they count India to be among the emerging superpowers...
 
helpteye: You say "Your argument seems most logical, however, you fail to account for the possible effect of harsh events like slavery, colonialism, imposition of new cultures, etc;"
At the risk of being called racist, that's the sort of whining self pitying nonsense nonsense I expect from black Americans.
Not because they're black but because evolution is often not taught properly to Americans and sometimes not at all.

If you'd grown up in a country with a good high school system, you'd know that fucking with a population on a large scale improves their intelligence and that the consensus amongst anthropologists is that a major cause in the surprisingly rapid development of human intelligence is having to deal with the complexity of competing in societies run by people trying to screw with you.

The word missing from your vocabulary is "Evolution".

In other words, the more dreadful the things done to black people in the past, the smarter and tougher you expect their descendants to be.
That is part of the root of modern racism, although some people think of the "others" as inferior, more commonly it is a fear amongst mediocre to low grade white people of the rise of the "others". We see that expressed as fear of globalisation and outsourcing and immigration quotas that stop the "others" competing with low grade whites who have votes.

Your ignorance of basic unAmerican biology also fails to cope with a fact that anyone with a decent non-American education knows, which is that there is vastly more genetic diversity in Africans (however you define that) than amongst what gets labelled as "white" people. So you'd expect a greater variance in intelligence. Full disclosure: My own ethnic group has about the lowest diversity of any faction of white people.

But... and it's a big but that even someone with an American education should know, your brain uses 20-25% of your resting energy budget and we've evolved (that word again) mechanisms to mitigate the effect of malnutrition. Sadly that means our bodies economise on brain development if not given proper diets as children, meaning that people who grow up in places subject to famine (or highly excessive processed food) can easily be shown to have lower intelligence on average, not just the sort that lets you do maths, but inadequate development across all brain functions including vision and manual dexterity. So people living in Africa can and do have lower intelligence than roughly identical people in other places. Note I did not say "black" people, because of course there are many Arabs in Africa and we see the same effects there.
I can't explain white South Africans though.

So why isn't the world ruled by strong smart black people ?

The bad things have happened to white people as well, up until the 18th century the majority of white people were slaves under various names, like Serfs in Eurasia or various forms of compulsory servitude, right up until the 1980s young white males suffered conscription in almost all majority-white states and in failing white states like Russia it is still going on. As for "colonialism", the British English term for the most excessive form of appalling behaviour comes from what my ancestors did to Brits trying to colonise them, we stopped that and then lost, the difference between them and black people was the Irish inflicted respectable casualties, Africans surprisingly few.

Europe (where white people come from) was pretty much continually at war for most of the last 2,000 years, the mean time between failure for a European state in that period is about 40-50 years. Google on "hundred years war", "thirty years war" , etc. The term "holocaust" was first applied to some British nastiness, not German. Even when European nations didn't get defeated they indulged in vicious civil wars and every so often one type of Christian would decide that another type was evil and try really quite hard to exterminate them, succeeding in several cases. Anti-semitism only became a form of mass murder because the politics stopped them doing it for a while. Africa had wars of course in that time, but not on anything like the same scale.

Every European region has been colonised multiple times, there is really quite a poor correlation between ethnic and cultural divisions and state borders. There are Germans in Russia, Britain may not exist after the 2014 referendum, Poland is in a very different place than it was 70 years ago, Romania and Hungary have substantial "minority" issues, Germany didn't exist at all before 1870, Irish Christians of various factions torture and murder each other in Ireland, the Swedish empire wasn't based upon well made furniture and respect for women's rights, and ask yourself why Russia a very white country is has almost no friendly borders like those enjoyed by the USA. Many white people went to America not to get rich, but simply to survive.

You also make yourself look silly by saying "mentioning that african IQ's range from 59 to 82 is probably the most ridiculous statements I have ever seen." is not the issue, it is the bizarrely naive statement that follows it :

"My family is from africa, my IQ is always over 130 when I take an IQ test; so too is my big brother. "
You are aware that this is QuantNet ?
Some of us have done maths, yes honest, some have done experimental science and even an evangelical would sneer at this as proof of anything. It's simply not statistically relevant.

Also, you are aware that IQs in the USA have been steadily rising for decades ? Having >100 is not as special as it once was.

A simple case that suggests a change in environment can have remarkable effects.
Maybe it does, but you really need to think about filtering, (did you do any chemistry ??)
People who migrate have gone through a filter and we observe in pretty much every immigrant population that they are smarter and fitter than both the population they leave and the population they join. Many Africans were transported to the USA in conditions that killed the weak and those with obvious defects weren't taken in the first place, voluntary migration leaves behind those who have lower motivation and initiative and that is a major factor in the economic and military success of the USA. Broken people stay where they are put.

Yes, there is racism but that's different from finding excuses.
 
Well if you sneer at helptye's comments I just as effectively dismiss Bigbadwolf for stating that jews making 60% of Columbia's population is somehow the foundation of an argument. Bigbadwolf also stated that "Africans coming to Europe and the USA for education are probably among the top one per cent in intelligence in Africa ". Anyone who finds these arguments sound would have a rough time in any math course so I have real concern for his career if it relies on his logic. If a child had no access to education is he also included in Bigbadwolf's conjured statistics?

This is one of the most ignorant arguments I've seen on this site to date.
 
JesseLevermore, given that far less than 1% of Africans go to the USA for education and that there are no top ranked universities there with a quite miserable average many would like to, it is not unreasonable to suspect that only an elite get to the USA.

Of course "elite" is not quite the same as smart, being more a function of the political faction the parents belong to and their wealth, but I would still expect there to be a decent correlation. There are many white S.Africans studying in civilised countries, which rather undermines the idea of it being purely intelligence though.

The reason I was so harsh on helptye's wibbling was that I scorn those who identify themselves as part of a group before they think.
Even if you believe Africans are on average less intelligent than white people, it's not actually a very useful filtration, since we know that the distribution includes some very smart people and as my above post the variance due to genetics seems to be higher, implying that the wretched way that every type of African from Arab, through Negro through to European run their countries is almost certainly wasting the potential of the smartest people on Earth who are quite possibly black, but we'll never know.

This has a direct relevance to my role as a headhunter, and there is distinct correlation between having a name in the first half of the alphabet and being better in this line of work. I mention this because it attracts less emotional heat than ethnicity.

Should I as someone who filters people ignore people whose surname begins with R because they are on average less smart ?
It is important to separate search space from control space, by that I mean the metric by which you measure people should be independent of where you find them. Yes some places are better to look, if looking for tall people I'd look first at a set of Dutch men, but a 7ft high Japanese woman is exactly the same height as a 7ft Dutchman.
 
It's not just true for Africa -- it's also true for South Asia. The Indians, Pakistanis, and Bengalis coming to the USA (and to the West in general) for higher education are among the best their countries have to offer. Sure, there are stories about how Indians who got rejected by their IITs ended up applying to, and getting accepted by, elite American universities. But that doesn't affect the broad thrust of my argument that it's overwhelmingly the best and brightest arriving here. Darth's recent post above adds weight to this contention.
 
I want to here your thoughts on this...

If a Chinese descendent was born in Africa and raised in America, would that make him less intelligent than native Chinese people?
 
Well reading forums on a quant finance site it is quite reasonable to expect that contributors as prominent as Bigbadwolf would use statistics effectively and not in the way that defines cheap marketing gimmicks. Unfortunately reality rarely conforms to expectations.

A man who is touted as having the highest IQ among living and many prominent dead academics is himself a bouncer at a nightclub. Does this in itself say anything about the individual's capacity to learn? The number of truly great minds that have been passed over because of the bureaucratic inefficiencies of the current system may well be equal to, or greater than those we are aware of despite our expectations.

Many formulas and new sciences may rely on diverging from this current academic setup. Godel's theorems are proof enough to me that this system is inefficient. I am asking, what is the point of all these brilliant academics with no emphasis on unique thought?
 
If a Chinese descendent was born in Africa and raised in America, would that make him less intelligent than native Chinese people?

No, but were he raised in Africa, he might not be able to fully develop his potential. And were his descendants to continue living there, there would be a perceptible decline in abstract intelligence (as defined in the West) over the generations because the environment, via natural selection, would not select for such a quality. Northern climates, being more inhospitable, tend to select for survival-enhancing abilities such as abstract thought and the ability to cooperate. It's a Darwinian argument.

I don't know how this thread got resurrected. "Intelligence" is an emotionally charged word. Were I to say that northern climates choose for fairer skin, no-on would bother arguing.
 
No, but were he raised in Africa, he might not be able to fully develop his potential.
So is this because of economic factors, or biological?
And were his descendants to continue living there, there would be a perceptible decline in abstract intelligence (as defined in the West) over the generations because the environment, via natural selection, would not select for such a quality.
Natural selection? This is insulting to Africans and Africa, where their is a large population of highly intelligent people. Proof of the earliest human life form was found in Africa, which tells us that we all derived from there. So if we all derived from Africa and the continents slowly separated, you would be saying that just because you are born in a certain part of the world that you are more or less intelligent than others born in a different region. False. Physical differences, yes, not mental capacity.

I don't know how this thread got resurrected. "Intelligence" is an emotionally charged word. Were I to say that northern climates choose for fairer skin, no-on would bother arguing.
It becomes emotionally charged when a group tries to prove superiority over another through inaccurate measures. The IQ argument you present is an perspective charged by a social construct, not factual information.
 
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