A reader sends me press releases from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation with the names of semifinalists sorted by high schools in California, Texas, Florida, Virginia, and Indiana.
The 16,000 semifinalists nationally scored in the top 0.5% of the PSAT test. However, minimum scores to be a semifinalist vary by state, with the highest cutoffs in Massachusetts and D.C., and the lowest in Wyoming.
Looking at the California semifinalists announced in 2009, well, holy moly, there are a lot of East Asians. You wouldn't think I'd be surprised after all these years, but I still am. For example, there are 36 semifinalists with the last name of Kim and 49 named Wang. Other Asian names: Nguyen, which is now one of the 100 most common in America (12), Chang (35), Chen or Cheng (56), Tang (8), Yang (15), and Zhang (20).
There are three Guptas and three Singhs. What other common Indian names are there?
My reader, who is Jewish, points out the decline in Jewish names from our day back in the 1970s. For example, in the entire state of California, only one semifinalist has a name beginning with "Gold...". Other common Jewish names also show up only rarely among the semifinalists: Cohen (1), Levy (1), and Kaplan (1).
So, in the state of California, there was one Cohen who was a semifinalist, but 49 Wangs. Wow.
To give some perspective, if you search at Google News, there are 14,900 press pages currently mentioning "Cohen" (e.g., Sacha Baron-Cohen) and 14,500 currently mentioning "Wang" (e.g., Vera Wang), or about 1 to 1, not 49 to 1.
According to Wikipedia, the most common surnames in the U.S. in 2000 were, among white-black names, Adams (3 semifinalists in California), Johnson (3), Williams (3), Brown (6), Jones (7), Miller (2), Davis (1), Wilson (2), Anderson (3), Taylor (3), Thomas (1), However, this Wikipedia list of top 100 surnames is, for unexplained reasons, missing Smith (7).
To give some perspective, if you search at Google News, there are 14,900 press pages currently mentioning "Cohen" (e.g., Sacha Baron-Cohen) and 14,500 currently mentioning "Wang" (e.g., Vera Wang), or about 1 to 1, not 49 to 1.
According to Wikipedia, the most common surnames in the U.S. in 2000 were, among white-black names, Adams (3 semifinalists in California), Johnson (3), Williams (3), Brown (6), Jones (7), Miller (2), Davis (1), Wilson (2), Anderson (3), Taylor (3), Thomas (1), However, this Wikipedia list of top 100 surnames is, for unexplained reasons, missing Smith (7).
Among highbrow WASP names, there are two Clark(e)s. (People named Clark or Clarke are descended in the male line from somebody who was a clerk -- i.e., literate -- seven centuries ago. I know it sounds ridiculous, but Nathanael Weyl found Clarks over-represented in intellectual fields in the late 20th Century.) No Huntingtons or Eliots.
Among celebrity names, I see a Munger in Palo Alto -- likely a relative of billionaire Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's gray eminence.
Among celebrity names, I see a Munger in Palo Alto -- likely a relative of billionaire Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's gray eminence.
Among common Hispanic names found in the top 100 most common names of all types in the country: Garcia (1 semifinalist), Rodriguez (0), Lopez (0), Martinez (0), Hernandez (1), Gonzalez (1), Perez (0), Sanchez (0), Ramirez (0), Torres (2 -- is that a Sephardic name, as in Dana Torres, the Jewish Olympic swimmer from Beverly Hills?), Flores (1), Rivera (0), Gomez (0), Diaz (0), Reyes (0), Cruz (0), Morales (0), and Ortiz (1).
In California, high schools with the most semifinalists include Troy in Fullerton (80), University High in Irvine (60), Lynbrook in San Jose (58), Mission San Jose in Fremont (55), Monte Vista in Cupertino (53), Harker School in San Jose (50), Torrey Pines in north San Diego (48), Harvard-Westlake in North Hollywood (42), Palo Alto (46), Henry M. Gunn in Palo Alto (42), Palos Verdes Penninsula (36), and Arcadia (31). Most of these are public schools, with the exception of Harker and Harvard-Westlake.
Basically, having a lot of semifinalists is now all about having the East Asians. For example, among famous LA schools, Beverly Hills H.S. has eight, Loyola of Los Angeles six, Marlborough of Los Angeles four, Milken of Stephen Wise Temple ten, and Windward in Santa Monica (zero). Those are excellent numbers (except for Windward, which is where movie stars traditionally sent their, uh, more artistic scions), but these five prominent schools add up to 25% of Troy H.S. in Fullerton. Fullerton?
The semifinalists at Harvard-Westlake on Coldwater Canyon are a little less than half East Asian, but, still ... the school's two campuses (the other is just off Sunset Boulevard) are at the historic center of what had been the largest, richest Jewish community in the world outside of NYC
It would be interesting to calculate a sort of GINI score of inequality by high school for semifinalists. Some of these public schools have more semifinalists per year than most public schools in California could be expected to have in a century at recent rates.
For example, in contrast to Troy H.S. with 80, the city of Los Angeles (not counting the San Fernando Valley) has a total of five public school semifinalists: two at LA H.S. for the Performing Arts, one at LACES (the top academic magnet public high school in LAUSD), and one each at Venice HS (at the beach) and one at Eagle Rock HS (next to Pasadena).I'd roughly estimate there are about 50,000 sixteen year olds within these boundaries (although lots are in private schools or have dropped out), so, 5 out of 50,000 ...
The San Fernando Valley is more reasonable with about 30 semifinalists in LA public schools (although it lags well behind the public schools of the more Asian San Gabriel Valley), but the inequality of the main LA Basin is remarkable.
Another interesting thing is to compare San Francisco to San Jose -- maybe four or five times more semifinalists in San Jose than in San Francisco.
In California, high schools with the most semifinalists include Troy in Fullerton (80), University High in Irvine (60), Lynbrook in San Jose (58), Mission San Jose in Fremont (55), Monte Vista in Cupertino (53), Harker School in San Jose (50), Torrey Pines in north San Diego (48), Harvard-Westlake in North Hollywood (42), Palo Alto (46), Henry M. Gunn in Palo Alto (42), Palos Verdes Penninsula (36), and Arcadia (31). Most of these are public schools, with the exception of Harker and Harvard-Westlake.
Basically, having a lot of semifinalists is now all about having the East Asians. For example, among famous LA schools, Beverly Hills H.S. has eight, Loyola of Los Angeles six, Marlborough of Los Angeles four, Milken of Stephen Wise Temple ten, and Windward in Santa Monica (zero). Those are excellent numbers (except for Windward, which is where movie stars traditionally sent their, uh, more artistic scions), but these five prominent schools add up to 25% of Troy H.S. in Fullerton. Fullerton?
The semifinalists at Harvard-Westlake on Coldwater Canyon are a little less than half East Asian, but, still ... the school's two campuses (the other is just off Sunset Boulevard) are at the historic center of what had been the largest, richest Jewish community in the world outside of NYC
It would be interesting to calculate a sort of GINI score of inequality by high school for semifinalists. Some of these public schools have more semifinalists per year than most public schools in California could be expected to have in a century at recent rates.
For example, in contrast to Troy H.S. with 80, the city of Los Angeles (not counting the San Fernando Valley) has a total of five public school semifinalists: two at LA H.S. for the Performing Arts, one at LACES (the top academic magnet public high school in LAUSD), and one each at Venice HS (at the beach) and one at Eagle Rock HS (next to Pasadena).I'd roughly estimate there are about 50,000 sixteen year olds within these boundaries (although lots are in private schools or have dropped out), so, 5 out of 50,000 ...
The San Fernando Valley is more reasonable with about 30 semifinalists in LA public schools (although it lags well behind the public schools of the more Asian San Gabriel Valley), but the inequality of the main LA Basin is remarkable.
Another interesting thing is to compare San Francisco to San Jose -- maybe four or five times more semifinalists in San Jose than in San Francisco.
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289 comments:
1 – 200 of 289 Newer› Newest»Just eyeballing the California list is striking-- lots of unusual Oriental names too. The Korean/Chinese/Japanese proportions might be interesting.
That data does not include the September national merit seminfinalists in Indiana, my state, I see.
It is noteworthy that of the 12 Sept 18 names released for near Bloomingon, Indiana, 2 are homeschooled (3 are listee as homeschooled, but one of them I know personally, and he goes to a private Christian school.)
"What other common Indian names are there?"
Patel, of course, though they tend not to be as gifted as other Indian brethren.
"in the entire state of California, only one semifinalist has a name beginning with "Gold...". Other common Jewish names also show up only rarely among the semifinalists: Cohen (1), Levy (1), and Kaplan (1)."
Persian Jews probably won't have those names, and there are common variations of Cohen, like Kahn, Cohn, Kagan, etc.
What your count inevitably misses are Amerasians, who will disproportionately have European surnames.
Asians are over-represented because they're smarter, but it's also a testament to their work ethic.
My sense is that there is less diversity among Asian surnames than among European ones. Li is far more common in China than Smith is in Great Britian.
Common Indian names:
Patel(3), Chandra(1), Khan(2), Rao(1), Anand(2), Srinivasan(2), Sharma(2), Chatterjee(1), Shah(8).
I assume that someone from Northeast asia could easily separate out the Japanese / Chinese / Korean names. It would be good to know the mix
I am especially interested in how the Japanese are doing academically.
Most Japanese people in California came more than 90 years ago so there have been many generations for them to have become assimilated. I would bet that Japanese in California don't study nearly as much as the Chinese and Koreans that have been here longer.
It would be interesting to see who does better in the next few decades - Koreans and Chinese who grew up with much less money, grew up as outsiders to the elite networks, but were really hungry and hard working, or the Japanese who by and large grew up with more money, more comfort, and who aren't as motivated or hungry.
The Nobel Laureate list, however, will show something a bit different.
Anon.
Jewish semifinalists haven't entirely vanished from California. Just looking at Berkeley High School and Beverley Hills High School, with a total of 19 semifinalists, you have:
Jeremy Gleich
Kerry Goetlich
Alexander Neuhaus
Sasha Sasser-Ginzberg
David Arom
Oxana Ermlova
Sara Hendel
Jordan Klein
Peter
Steve, the data's interesting, but perhaps not reliable for Asian-white comparisons.
I graduated from a small school with two names on the list. Everyone who had taken the PSAT had not studied for it at all. So they're not perfectly comparable to SAT results.
Perhaps Asians are more likely to prepare for the PSAT, while the whites are more apt to put off SAT prep for later. Asians are famously more competitive, even when equally intelligent.
No, I don't see many Japanese names.
And, definitely, test prep matters here.
No Huntingtons or Eliots.
I did see some possible Puritan names glancing through the California list: Brewster, Peabody, Chandler, Chase, Whitney
Given the focus on east asians, the obvious question is, where the heck is Lowell High of SF?
Steve, you missed a Jewish kid in SF: Meyer S. Jacobs. Not too many non-jews with a first name of Meyer, right?
Hey, how about a school where 4 out of 5 finalists are Jews? Lick-Wilmerding of San Francisco: Bach, Gershenson, Shar, Yuscherkoff. Take that Whiskey!
For the best name on the entire California list, I nominate THURSTON ZHU.
You are pretty bad at picking out the Jewish names. Maybe that's because you didn't grow up in the northeast. From the first page in the CA list I find: Sesser-Ginzberg, Yarnow, Arom, Hendel, Smith (I know Jewish Smiths), Samuels, Lincoff, Trefkorn, Swartz, Lee (I went to elem. school with a non-asian, Jewish Lee), Ross, Westerberg, Meisenheimer...
you guys should check out Texas. It is interesting to compare two top private schools in Houston, St. Johns school and The Kinkaid School (several Bushes have graduated from here). Lots of Whites at St. Johns School.
Off topic: What happened to Sandra Bullock's PR baby?
http://www.thesuperficial.com/sandra_bullock_doesnt_f-ck_aro-04-2010
Heh, both of mine were semifinalists in CA and are both half East Asian.
Castillo Spanish names normally end in z rather than s.
Torres could be Portuguese or one of the Spanish dialects other than Castillo, like Galago (Galacian) or Catalano.
Sephardi are less likely to have a Castillo name because they left Spain before Castillo had been fully imposed on most other parts of Spain, but you can't make any assumptions, in particular since many Sephardi conversos might have tried to show their loyalty to the Castillo kings by taking a Castillo spelling.
There is far less diversity among East Asian surnames than there is among Western surnames, so pointing out the numbers of semifinalists with the name "Wang" for instance, isn't really proving your point, at least what I think your point is. There are lots of high performing East Asians! No question about it.
Of course, one has to wonder about the familial backgrounds of the top performing East Asians. There are two types of East Asian families. Technological families who immigrate here to go to school, take jobs in STEM fields, etc and "grocery/restaurant families" (for lack of a better term. The IQ average of the former group, I would estimate to be about one standard deviation higher than the Asian average. It would not surprise me to find that the great majority of East Asian semifinalists are children of the tech group. The East Asians who are high performers are not likely to be immigrants themselves, and if they are, they probably immigrated when they were very young. FOBs don't have the necessary English ability to score well on the reading and writing sections of the PSAT.
****
Texas
St. Johns school uses IQ-like tests for admission. It is not surprising that there are a large number of high performers from that school.
Large numbers of high performers come from Asian or rich white schools. The Plano schools, Westlake, Clements, etc.
The lack of high performers from on-the-border regions is worrying me. WHY ARE THE HISPANICS NOT DOING WELL???? WHY????
About California:
Thurston Zhu... Steve, please discuss the penchant of East Asians to choose super-WASPy/Anglo first names for their kids. In my experience in Silicon Valley high school and Ivy undergrad, we had Franklin, Felicia, Grace, Rosemary, Spencer, etc. etc. It's like the parents have the anti-Shaniqua set of values.
The three most common Korean surnames (caveats here are obvious) are Park (15), Kim (35), and Lee (45).
Searching for Japanese endings and excluding obviously non-Japanese results: *awa (4), *oto (2), *ki (2), *to (2), *aka (1), *ara (1), *oko (1), *abe (0)...
China: Wang/Hwang (49), Chen (37), Huang (23), Li (21), Zhang (20), Liu (20), Wu (17), Yang (15), Zhou (14), Sun (14), Xu (8), Zhao (5), Ma (4)
- Cupertino, Calif. alum
Weyl pointed out in one of his books on surnames that you can distinguish to some extent between old immigrant Chinese names (ancestors worked on the railroad, that kind of thing) and new immigrant Chinese names (technical degrees). I don't recall his specific examples, but I wouldn't be surprised if Wong (8 semifinalists) is old and Wang (49) is new.
Jimmy Carter told Americans to switch transliteration schemes in about 1979, which is why Peng suddenly became Deng, to the confusion of newspaper readers.
"No, I don't see many Japanese names.
And, definitely, test prep matters here."
HAHA.
Maybe...or East Asians are smarter than whites.
Thomas Jefferson Tech HS in Va. has a ton of Indians. We need to see NJ, NY and Illinois to get a better South Asian sense.
I can think of several reasons why east Asians dominate on this test to a higher degree than their average IQ would suggest:
1) 2 of the 3 sections can be studied for. Studying for the writing test is possible because it is mostly memorizing grammar rules. Studying for the vocabulary questions on the reading sections is also possible since the same words show up over and over. The literary tools can also be memorized.
2) Also, a lot of people go to schools where the PSAT isn't taken. Even though my brother was smart enough to become a semifinalist, he went to a school where no one took it. At my high school, everyone took the PSAT. I imagine that at schools with lots of east Asians, the parents demand that the PSAT is taken.
Common Indian family names resource:
http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061208222415AAsxQ59
Thomas Jefferson HS has a sizable plurality of all semifinalists in the state of Virginia.
Transliteration of Chinese makes no sense to me. There are tons of transliterations that seem to be anti-phonetic for SWPL-type reasons.
Cupertino Calif. alum. says:
China: Wang/Hwang (49), Chen (37), Huang (23),
Hmmm, IMO, Hwang is a variant spelling of Huang, which is a different name from Wang. In Cantonese they are pronounced the same (Wang2-王 and Huang2/Hwang2-黄 that is), but not in Mandarin.
For the best name on the entire California list, I nominate THURSTON ZHU.
I went to grad school with a Chinese guy actually named ROLEX.
I'm rather surprised by the relative paucity of Hispanic names on the Texas list. One thing I've gathered is that Lone Star State Hispanics tend to be more affluent and educated than their Golden State counterparts.
Peter
We've had large scale Asian immigration for about 40 years now. Has it really helped our economy? Has there been an Asian equivalent to Edison, Morse, the Wright brothers, or even Carnegie?
India is a collection of nations instead of just one nation. Among the Punjabi, Rajput is a common name. But saying "hat is a common Indian name" is like saying "what is a common European name."
First of all what about New Hampshire? Or North Dakota? Also I didn't see any Lithuanian, Uzbeki, or any names from Burkina Faso in there!
The differences in romanizations of Chinese surnames are largely due to Cantonese vs Mandarin-speaking backgrounds. Cantonese Wong = Mandarin Wang; Cantonese Chan = Mandarin Chen; Cantonese Lee = Mandarin Li, and so on. A few (such as Liu and Ma, I think) are the same in both dialects.
The Cantonese names might be indicative of longer-term Asian American status, but not necessarily; lots of Cantonese speakers still emigrate to the USA.
Keep in mind also that the Mandarin surnames will likely include quite a few Singaporean/Malaysian/other SE Asian Chinese as well, although in that region you also get some fairly esoteric surname romanizations that won't fit into either of these main categories.
PSAT isn't taken widely in large sections of the country. Only 3-5 people per grade at my public school took it, and I went to a "high-ranking" one by state standards.
The theories profffered by the commenturs as to why East Asians score so well are plausible but probably sour-grapes. we in the hbd-sphere should not resentful.
Wow. No one from my entire (largely white, rural) California county made it. In fact, I think I was the only finalist when I graduated back in the 1980s-- I had no idea what that actually meant, other than a little help with tuition at the UC system.
And color me surprised that even the academic powerhouses of the LAUSD (Taft and El Camino in Woodland Hills, the SOCES and North Hollywood academic magnet schools only have a handful each) are so modestly represented in the ranks, while some crappy suburb like Fullerton has dozens, as do the college towns and Silicon Valley bedroom communities.
And wow, Glendale's 200,000 Armenians don't have a lot to show for their numbers-- I only see one -ian last name.
Classic examples of resentment:
1. Studying is nerdy
2. Those who study probably have no lives.
3. They lack 'creativity'
and so on.
East Asians are bright and EA immigration is somewhat selected, but they're also really hardworking and deferential to their education-oriented parents.
The PSAT is not exactly a finely tuned discriminator of high IQ. If you're in the 120s (top 7 %) you can grind your way to semifinalist status, as Asians do.
separate out the Japanese / Chinese / Korean names
Korean last names will always be one-syllable. Most Koreans are either Chang, Kim or Lee (Yi and Rhee are the same name)
Not sure about Chinese names. If it's multisyllabic, it's probably Japanese.
"Steve, please discuss the penchant of East Asians to choose super-WASPy/Anglo first names for their kids. In my experience in Silicon Valley high school and Ivy undergrad, we had Franklin, Felicia, Grace, Rosemary, Spencer, etc. etc. It's like the parents have the anti-Shaniqua set of values."
They want to fit in. It's exactly as you say.
Not the first group to do this. Irving was actually an aristocratic English name before it got taken by so many Jews it started to sound English.
There's plenty of Indians (won't use the term South Asians - ain't too many Bangladeshis and Pakistanis on *any* academic list one can find in the West).
Looking just at Monta Vista HS in Cupertino one finds 17 Indian kids:
Anand, Sumukh
Ashok, Ravikumar
Banthia, Prachie
Chaudhry, Tarun
Dhulipala, Laxman J.
Kollareddy, Praneeth
Menon, Sidharth
Peddada, Kranti V.
Raju, Akhil G.
Rao, Sohan
Ravi, Akshay
Savanur, Vyas
Setlur, Bhargav G.
Shah, Shreepal N.
Srikanthan, Nishant
Srivastava, Surabhi
Sure, Shilpa
If someone has CA's Asian demographic details (% of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian) a clearer picture can emerge.
A couple things to remember: the PSAT has no purpose in life except the National Merit Scholarship. It used to be a way to prepare for the SAT, but these days most competitive kids are taking the SAT just five or six months (at most) away from the PSAT.
The new PSAT sections, like the SAT sections, are much shorter than the older test sections. Just 3 errors on the math section put you out of the 70s (700s).
The Asian kids you are referring to (recent Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Indian immigrants) are going to SAT boot camps by the time they are sophomores, and that's after Saturday's in training all year.
White kids go to a Kaplan course, usually only for the SAT.
At that level of performance, it's not enough to be good. You have to be damn near perfect, and taking smart kids and giving them 40 tests a year will give them a question or two more right than a smart kid who doesn't train.
Asian kids aren't all that much smarter. They just train for years.
Sez someone who teaches PSAT boot camp and enrichment (in the earlier years) to kids at Harker, Linbrooke, Monte Vista, and Gunn, to name just a few of the schools on that list.
Two notes:
1. I took the PSAT twice and didn't miss a question either time. But I did not get to be a semifinalist. Why not?? :(
2. We've had large scale Asian immigration for about 40 years now. Has it really helped our economy? Has there been an Asian equivalent to Edison, Morse, the Wright brothers, or even Carnegie?
Yes, it has helped our economy.
Famous Taiwanese-Americans include:
David Ho (the man who invented AIDS therapy)
Steve Chen (YouTube founder)
Jen-Hsun Huang (NVidia founder)
Jerry Yang (Yahoo founder)
Min Kao (Garmin founder)
David Chu (Nautica founder)
John Tu (Kingston Technologies founder)
Steve Chen (Cray supercomputer inventor)
Steve Chu (invented laser supercooling)
Famous Indian-Americans include:
Vinod Khosla (Sun founder)
Sanjay Mehrota (SanDisk founder)
Suhas Patil (Cirrus Logic founder)
Ajay Bhatt (invented USB)
Arun Netravali (co-inventor of HDTV and MPEG4)
Narinder Kapany (the father of fiber-optics)
Vinod Dham (designed the Pentium)
Famous Chinese-Americans include:
Min-Chueh Chang (invented birth control pill)
Shing-Ting Yao (Fields medalist)
Terence Tao (Fields medalist)
Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang (discovered parity violation)
Daniel Chee Tsui (discovered quantum Hall effect)
Feng-Hsiung Hsu (co-inventor of Deep Blue)
Samuel Ting (discovered the J/psi meson)
There are lots more.
Yes, that makes sense.
Self-protecting mantra of the white HBD-sphere:
1. Asians aren't (much) smarter, they just study harder.
2. White kids are much smarter than blacks and hispanics. It's not a matter of having better study habits and middle class values. It's genes.
3. White kids are much better at sports than Asians. It's not because white kids spend more time at it.
Notice something here?
"I went to grad school with a Chinese guy actually named ROLEX.?"
I've seen Toshiba as a black woman's first name. True story. I've also seen Tequila and Latrina. If you think I made up Latrina, just Google it.
"I went to grad school with a Chinese guy actually named ROLEX."
I once worked with a Chinese guy named Po Ng. Also a true story. Great guy, actually. It would have felt too awkward to ask if he had a twin sister named Pi.
Anon says:
Cantonese Wong = Mandarin Wang; Cantonese Chan = Mandarin Chen; Cantonese Lee = Mandarin Li, and so on. A few (such as Liu and Ma, I think) are the same in both dialects.
Actually, Cantonese Wong = Mandarin Wang and Mandarin Huang. They are different in Mandarin but pronounced the same (including tone) in Cantonese.
Also, while Ma is the same in both Cantonese and Mandarin, Liu are not the same in Cantonese and Mandarin. Liu2 is 劉, which is pronounced Lau4 in Cantonese.
The name Liu in Cantonese (廖) is Liao in Mandarin ...
It's not that simple.
"For the best name on the entire California list, I nominate THURSTON ZHU."
There is a
"Thurston Zhu is TOO SMART" group on Facebook.
There are very few Japanese immigrants nowadays except by marriage to caucasians and a huge percentage of the 3rd and 4th generation have out-married, so my guess is that there aren't many "pure" Japanese 17-year-olds left.
Chinese have a tradition of having multiple names (public names, private names, secret names, etc.) so it is very easy for them to add on a WASPy name for academic purposes.
BTW, Japanese names almost always end in a vowel or sometimes "n" but never "ng". Kim is always Korean.
So now you know, Steve, just who will be running America circa 2040.
Oh, about that same time too, whites will be a overall minority in the USA, and 1.5 billion Chinese will have certainly surpassed 400 odd million Americans in terms of GDP per capita.
Interesting times, if I live that long, that is.
of course, the English education system is rigidly anti-merit, and such a league table could never be produced in England.
The Labour Government of the 1960s and 70s imposed mixed ability non-selective 'comprehensive' education on England (in the name of class warfare), a policy that f*cked up the lives of a good number talented but poor students.
The irony was that private schools were unaffected and thrived.
Talking about the surname 'Wong', there was a famous immigration court case in the 'White Australia' days of the 1960s (an era in which non-white immigration to Australia was effectively forbidden), in which a certain Mr.Wong tried to claim immigration status by marrying a white Australian woman.
His appeal was rejected.
The case was forever and popularly known by the soubriquet "Two Wongs don't make a White".
"If you're in the 120s (top 7 %) you can grind your way to semifinalist status, as Asians do."
Dem stoopid asheeyunz grindz der whey n de max n feezix ollimpieds @ 20X gr8 whit rayt. Seriously, stop being a whiney dolt and accept the fact that there's a subset of America's population that mates assortatively (a function of being pragmatic rather than romantic), has a higher mean IQ as it is, is far more conscientious and blows everyone else away in pretty much every g-loaded test. And this *IS* a good thing for America. For those who want to know where the next great Asian genius is, well, we have a new winner: Ngo Bau Chau whose kids will be raised in America (following in the footsteps of Terence Tao's kid) :) Both are perhaps a few standard deviations above "Edison, Morse, the Wright brothers, or even Carnegie" in terms of IQ - low hanging fruit, anyone? But you don't understand the fundamental lemma, do you?
It is funny how white people love to use HBD to show how they are superior to blacks and Hispanics. These HBD white people would never say that whites score better simply because they study more, which they do compared to blacks and Hispanics.
But when it comes to asians, whites love to deny HBD and throw out every theory they can to account for any differences.
Heh. After seeing the movie "Easy A" the other night, set in Ojai, CA, pop 8K, I looked it up. The (fictional) school was shown as a California School of Excellence. Ojai had eight semifinalists.
It turns out there's a tony private boarding school there that accounted for all of them.
We've had large scale Asian immigration for about 40 years now. Has it really helped our economy? Has there been an Asian equivalent to Edison, Morse, the Wright brothers, or even Carnegie?
Has there been a Jewish or European equivalent? I think the real issue is that a lot of the easy fast progress of the Industrial Revolution and immediately following period has dried up and we aren't going to see that growth again, no matter how many Chinamen Western countries import or don't import. Our economies are mature and developed. Is the diminishing return of growth we would get from this worth importing Asian folks anyway? That's for everyone's conscience to decide, as individuals.
Speaking for myself, the Vietnamese (Nguyen) overrep interests me the most since they have not ever tested with an impressive (greater than Western Euro) IQ as a people, to my knowledge.
The stereotype that Asian aren't creative will probably reverse itself soon, at least in visual arts.
There was this month a front page New York Times article on the emerging dominance of East Asians in American fashion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/fashion/05asians.html
"The mood was set early at the American fashion awards ceremony at Lincoln Center in June, an event often likened to the Oscars of the fashion world, with a guest list that included celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker and Gwyneth Paltrow and almost every top designer.
Jason Wu,Richard Chai and Alexander Wang, from left, after winning best new designer awards at an industry ceremony in June.
In quick succession, three men were called to the stage to accept their awards as the best new designers of the year: Richard Chai for men’s wear, Jason Wu for women’s wear and Alexander Wang for accessories."
Self-protecting mantra of the white HBD-sphere:
1. Asians aren't (much) smarter, they just study harder.
2. White kids are much smarter than blacks and hispanics. It's not a matter of having better study habits and middle class values. It's genes.
3. White kids are much better at sports than Asians. It's not because white kids spend more time at it.
Notice something here?
The way I'd put it is "White-Black IQ genetic differences are stable over time and we have adoption study evidence that suggests they are real. Asian-White IQ differences are less stable over time (so we should be more skeptical of genetic arguments) and are in any case insufficient to explain the pattern seen (in terms of pure size). Hard work and conscientiousness OTOH is anecdotally acknowledged and avoids at least some of this."
Nov. 2008 CA Voter Registration Figures (I know it's not great data for this purpose but the best I could find)
Korean (1%): Democratic 37%, Republican 27%, DTS 33%
Japanese (1%): Democratic 47%, Republican 30%, DTS 21%
Chinese (3%): Democratic 31%, Republican 20%, DTS 45%
Indian (1%): Democratic 50%, Republican 16%, DTS 31%
Vietnamese (1%): Democratic 30%, Republican 34%, DTS 31%
Filipino (2%): Democratic 44%, Republican 27%, DTS 26%
So Chinese 3% and Filipino 2% with everyone else being about 1% (Indians, Japanese, and Koreans)
National Census Numbers 2007
Filipino: 1.5%
Chinese: 1.2%
Indians: .92%
Korean: .5%
Japanese: .4%
"Has there been an Asian equivalent to Edison, Morse, the Wright brothers, or even Carnegie?"
You could say the same about Catholics. 1/4 of this country yet they have not made much of an imprint.
The Atlantic came up with a list of the 100 most influential Americans and there were only 3 Catholics.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/12/the-top-100/5384/
The Nobel Laureate list, however, will show something a bit different.
Yes but unlike the Nobel list, this list is based on scores on a standardized test which makes it far more objective than the arbitrary Nobel list.
"Indian (1%): Democratic 50%, Republican 16%, DTS 31%?"
That's the one that's going to be the real problem for Republicans in the future. A big part of political influence is simply who wants to grab the bullhorn most, and Indians want to a lot more than Chinese or Koreans or Filipinos.
While interesting you miss the mother's maiden name and thus obfuscate 50% of the genes.
What of the Jewess who married a WASP or the Asian lady who married the reformed Jew?
"A big part of political influence is simply who wants to grab the bullhorn most, and Indians want to a lot more than Chinese or Koreans or Filipinos"
Another issue is that there will be an Indian third generation.
For Chinese/Koreans the US born generation, both boys and girls, will marry out and dissolve into America.
To all the commenters who keep bragging 'there is no Chinese Edison etc etc' - I just acquaint you with this fact.
The main reason that you are able to access the internet at this moment is due to fiber optic technology and the digital pulsing of multiple simultaneous telegraphic feeds.
Both of these technologies were largely pioneered by scientists of Chinese descent.
The 16,000 semifinalists nationally scored in the top 0.5% of the PSAT test.
The top 0.5% of the general population, or the top 0.5% of the presumabley more elite subset that takes the PSAT? Have they always needed to score this high?
Looking at the California semifinalists announced in 2009, well, holy moly, there are a lot of East Asians. You wouldn't think I'd be surprised after all these years, but I still am.
It's significant because it shows that not only do East Asians have a higher IQ on average, but they are also overrepresented at the highest levels of intelligence. If they had a list of the 100 smartest people in the world, I wonder if every single one of them would be East Asian, analogous to a list of the 100 fastest runners where every single one is black.
High East Asian SAT scores are especially impressive considering the SAT does not even really measure East Asians' strongest aptitude (spatial ability) and is geared towards skills that Jews excell at. The test is dominated by verbal items where East Asians are relatively weak, and still they outperform everyone. Even the math section of the SAT is largley verbal (i.e. algebra)
Well, a lot of Vietnamese are Chinese-Vietnamese.
As I've said before, the only modern 'economics' book actually worth reading is 'IQ and The Wealth of Nations' by Lynn and Vanhanen.
Perhaps its influence hasn't really hit us with full force yet (though the massive trade imbalance between the USA and China and subsequent subprime meltdown etc are a taste of things to come), but it sure will impact our grandchildren's lives.
Perhaps Asians are more likely to prepare for the PSAT, while the whites are more apt to put off SAT prep for later. Asians are famously more competitive, even when equally intelligent.
But the (P)SATs are not influenced much by preparation.
The PSAT is not exactly a finely tuned discriminator of high IQ. If you're in the 120s (top 7 %) you can grind your way to semifinalist status, as Asians do.
You underestimate how high it can measure. The SAT (and by extention the PSAT) is a good measure of IQ up to about 140. Beyond IQ's of 140, the test does not seem to be measuring intelligence
It is funny how white people love to use HBD to show how they are superior to blacks and Hispanics. These HBD white people would never say that whites score better simply because they study more, which they do compared to blacks and Hispanics.
Yes it does show that many whites and Jews are not as objective as they claim to be. Why are high Jewish test scores never dismissed as a product of hard work, even though Jews have an incredibley verbal and intellectual culture and very advantaged uprbingings, and they score highest on the culturally loaded verbal tests, and genetically they are related to low IQ Middle Easterners (suggesting their high IQ's don't come from genes)?
And why is the white IQ advantage over blacks not dismissed as a product of more study time, especially since black culture is so anti-intellectual that black kids get beat up for doing well in school or speaking with proper English.
The double standard of many of those who comment here shows a level of hypocrisy, self-serving racial bias, intellectual dishonesty, and cognitive dissonance that destroys their credibility.
The frequent Spanish, and to a lesser extent Portuguese, surname "Salazar" is said to be Jewish (derived from "Lazar"). Well before Ken Salazar, there was of course Antonio De Oliveira Salazar the Portuguese Prime Minister, who was widely thought to be Jewish, though none of his English-language biographers seem to know whether he really was.
Somewhere I've read that De Oliveira became a very common converso name once the Inquisition got going in Portugal (and Jews were seized with a frantic desire to rename themselves after boring uncontroversial national objects like olive-trees).
But there seem to be a lot of non-Jewish De Oliveiras too. Middle-aged cricket lovers will recall the South African Basil d'Oliveira (classified as "colored" under apartheid legislation), whose omission from the national cricket team sparked an international furor in the late 1960s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_D%27Oliveira
Okay, but Mitch (see above) knows an awful lot more about the peculiarities of the PSAT than you or I do.
About Nobel laureates:
The science based Nobels are handed out for work done decades ago, when the number of Asian immigrants was much smaller than it is now. If you look at the laureates from the past decade, you can see an acceleration of Asian representation. This will certainly continue each year. Also check out Putnam Prize winners:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putnam_Math_Competition#Putnam_Fellows
Almost entirely white for most of its history, then suddenly in the last decade we see a massive increase in Asian names.
Well, a lot of Vietnamese are Chinese-Vietnamese.
Vietnamese named Nguyen? Seriously. I'm not asking rhetorically here.
So the results that we get are expected. A disproportionate number of East Asian names because they come from families that fanatically push them to figuratively study around the clock and take every preperation course available for every standardized test.
I've worked as a professional in California for the past 35 years and have encountered mainy Asian professionals in that time. Virtually all of them have struck me as nothing more than middle of the road intellectualy and subpar when it comes to creative thinking.
And why is the white IQ advantage over blacks not dismissed as a product of more study time, especially since black culture is so anti-intellectual that black kids get beat up for doing well in school or speaking with proper English.
I think this is nonsense, frankly.
http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2010/05/emphasis-on-education-is-poor-predictor.html
(although bear in mind that this is what they say, not necessarily what they do)
Black people are obsessed with the cult of prosperity, have a strong narrative of "yeah, my people are finally free after generations of oppression" thing and are generally uncritically believe all that sappy stuff that you hear in edutainment raps that are meant to engage urban youth (even if they don't think its the sole secret to success).
It's clear that East Asians place more emphasis on education than Whites, but it's not clear that this is the case for Blacks. Europeans and their descendant culture, as groups, are concerned with individuality, freedom, creativity and happiness, not success, survival or ability.
Matt - there's some force in your observation that a/c/t the SteveoSphere Asian overachivement is down to hard work while black underachievement is down to genes.
But ... I don't think anyone could or would disagree that
a) black school grades would be much better without the ball and chain of 'acting up' and the anti-learning street culture
b) Asian parents DO (on average) push their children harder and positively relish intellectual competition
I didn't do very well on the PSAT (in the late 80s), but did much better on the SAT. I always attributed this to the fact that there was trigonometry on both tests and I took trig as a junior.
My verbal scores were nearly the same, but I went from a mediocre math score to a perfect score on the SAT. Its much easier to improve at math at that age than verbal ability.
Though this would make much more sense if I took the PSAT in the fall of my junior year, which I can't remember. I do remember taking the SAT in the beginning of my senior year.
I also drank 2 coca-colas right before the exam, so I also claimed that help me get a perfect score on the math part. So who knows?
1. Asians aren't (much) smarter, they just study harder.
2. White kids are much smarter than blacks and hispanics. It's not a matter of having better study habits and middle class values. It's genes.
3. White kids are much better at sports than Asians. It's not because white kids spend more time at it.
Notice something here?
Yes. Whites, even rightish ones, are so self-critical that they attribute losing out to northeast Asians on tests to the superior character of the Asians. They assign the white edge over NAMs to something they can't control - genes - so as to minimize the scary possibility of "making whites look good".
So the three-point list is best described as the Self-Attacking Mantra of the White HBD-sphere.
It is funny how white people love to use HBD to show how they are superior to blacks and Hispanics. These HBD white people would never say that whites score better simply because they study more, which they do compared to blacks and Hispanics.
Don't lie. I have many times said that whites studying harder than blacks and Hispanics gives whites an advantage. Tons of HBD rightists have decried the fact that blacks discourage other blacks from studying using the "acting white" charge. I also never use the term "superior" without I'm-quoting-a-leftist marks.
It's funny how mushy-headed leftists can never make any point about human biodiversity without lying.
To all the commenters who keep bragging 'there is no Chinese Edison etc etc' - I just acquaint you with this fact.
The main reason that you are able to access the internet at this moment is due to fiber optic technology and the digital pulsing of multiple simultaneous telegraphic feeds.
Both of these technologies were largely pioneered by scientists of Chinese descent.
Really?
I only found one Chinese guy mentioned in this context. Working alonside white folks in institutions founded and run by other white folks in countries thought of as white, working with technologies established by other white folks.
I think it would take a particularly obtuse person to not notice the difference in attitude towards exam taking European descent people and East/South Asian people have. I think Asian people are pretty smart, but this has got to have some kind of effect.
For instance, I've heard from admission committee members that there a lot of foreign Chinese grad students who get near perfect scores on the TOEFL (the test to see if they speak English), who objectively don't come anywhere near the ability to speak English. Its just pure test-taking ability (and twelve years of filling out worksheets in school which is what passes for learning English in the PRC). This has got to show up somewhere.
Me on the other hand, didn't study at all for the PSAT or the SAT besides some practice tests that they make everyone take in school. Those courses were expensive and seemed kind of fradulent. I've known a lot of white people who felt the same. I know a white guy who didn't study for Physics GRE Subject exam (which is used to get into physics grad school), even though its a knowledge test. He said the test was there to see what he retained and didn't see the point stressing over it. \
Also, because it covers so much material, its a pretty hard test to study for if you can't get a hold of old tests, which I couldn't when I took it. Asian grad students (of both the East and South variety) said there a huge number of old exams that float around at their undergrad universities, which is indicative of their attitude towards important tests.
Hmm, let's see, "Bach", "Westenberg", "Meisenheimer", "Gleich", "Gotlich", "Hendel", "Klein"...there's a plausible alternate source for those names. Why is there no love from the HBDers for German-Americans, that traditional source of enterprise and achievement in America? And yes, I know that there's a substantial German Jewish component here, but I don't exclude them, unlike someone whose name is rarely mentioned around here but is uppermost in everyone's thoughts.
Catperson,
'Jews' might be genetically related to moodern Levantines (particularly Lebanese and ironically Palestinians), but here we are dealing with an endogamous population that has undergone very strong selection pressure, over centuries, selecting for intelligence
Steve: Huntington and Eliot are New England gentry. Look at the Massachusetts list...if you can get it. (I can't!) Given that it's the smartest state at the top anyway, I'd love to see who our future Edisons are.
Here's something else you might be interested in:
2011 National Hispanic Recognition Program Cutoff Scores
New England 184
Mid Atlantic 184
South 193
Southwest 182
Midwest 193
West 184
Besides the obvious observation that they're much, much, lower than the white numbers, why are the scores higher in the Midwest and South? Greater discipline? Does this suggest something similar to your previous suggestion about militaristic environments being good for blacks?
These East Asian Californians are surely gaming the academic system. No?
"...not only do East Asians have a higher IQ on average, but they are also overrepresented at the highest levels of intelligence."
Yes, but not by much, if you consider the entire country. But I would hardly say they are overrepresented at the highest levels of scientific and literary creativity -- you are more likely to find them on Engineering faculties, than say on Physics and Math faculties. I believe that what CA's list of PSAT semi-finalists demonstrates is that middle and upper middle class Jews have fled CA because of Mexifornication. On the other hand, Mandarin speaking opportunists continue to flow into CA for the free education and graduate schools offered by the UC system. But once this system goes into severe decline along with the state economy, the Asians will move on. My prediction: the next big Asian destination will be Texas. Eventually however China will develop their own world class university system and the yellow tide will ebb.
Steve, have you ever read the book School of Dreams? It is ostensibly the story of Whitney High School in Cerritos California, where Koreans move when their kids are in second grade and prep them for a chance at admission--which is what explains the elevated real estate prices in Cerritos that you've sometimes wondered about.
But the story is really about recent Asian immigrants and how their priorities decisions radically distort a local school district.
Cupertino (home to Monte Vista and Lynbrooke) is 44% Asian, but the schools are 80% Asian . Fremont, particularly south Fremont, went from being white working class to 60% or so Asian in about 10 years. Mission San Jose, the high school in south Fremont, is now 80% Asian, again, mostly recent immigrants from Korea, China, Vietnam, and India.(Gunn and Paly are in Palo Alto, and have more Indians than Chinese/Korean--also still fairly white).
In School of Dreams, a kid writes about the SAT academy that employs me (a different branch). It is nothing like Kaplan, Princeton, Revolution, or the other places, which focus primarily on test prep. They start the kids in seventh grade: enrichment courses in reading, composition, math. Summer schools run all summer for 6-7 weeks, either three hours M-F or two hours at lunch twice a week. SAT boot camp is five days a week. I've worked there five years and only just started PSAT prep (before I was limited by non-compete).
I love my job and stayed even after moving to public school teaching. I love the kids, and the management is realistic and compassionate to kids who are being pressured constantly by their parents to succeed. The notion that Asians are just hardworking swotters with no creativity is nonsense, at least in my considerable anecdotal experience. But it is true that they are required to be obsessed about getting good grades.
Also, remember that Asians face considerable prejudice in college admissions, and know it. They are competing against each other for slots at schools that would like to limit the number of Asians they get.
One example I may have mentioned before: I tutored a very bright white boy with a 4.3 GPA, excellent extracurriculars in sports and music. His original schedule was to take the SAT in January, prepare for the April ACT, and then take his subject tests in June. I expected him to get 2100 or so the first time.
Instead, he got a 2220. The mom called me up and said "When do we start preparing for the ACT?" I said, "You don't. He's done. White boy, those extracurriculars, and a 2200? It's all over. He's in. Let me know if he needs any help with his subject tests." And he's now at Princeton.
At almost the same time, I was working with an Indian student at this SAT academy on his college admissions essay. He mentioned he got a 2200 on his SAT. "Awesome," I said. He snorted, and told me to tell his mom that. She'd sent him back to bootcamp with instructions to raise it to a 2300. And in all honesty, I can't really disagree with the logic behind it. (He got a 2250, and his mom was still unhappy, last I checked.)
I'm not denying that Asians from these populations probably have an IQ advantage, but it's slight. I just think the more likely probability is the far more intense test prep.
If I could rule educational policy, I would require colleges to stop using GPA in admissions. Better yet, I'd require high school grades to be set by test results in end of year courses. This would show a more realistic comparison between whites and Asians--and would probably also spur white parents to invest more money in training for test prep, which would also help level the field.
Off Topic- Hey Steve you got a blurb in the Weekly Warmonger. At least they gave you credit, right?
http://weeklystandard.com/articles/america%E2%80%99s-one-child-policy?page=6
May I humbly suggest that the success of Northeast Asians on the PSAT is a function of two things. First of all, Northeast Asians are genetically superior to European Americans when it comes to IQ. That is to say the genetic material that Northeast Asians carry leads to higher IQ than the genetic material that European Americans carry.
Second of all, Northeast Asians tend to spend more hours studying for the PSAT than European Americans.
Since everyone on this blog is HBD aware, I couldn't imagine much serious dispute for the above two points. The question on the table is, what is the relative importance of the two factors?
My understanding is that massive numbers of Chinese and Korean baby girls have been adopted by white parents in the USA and these baby girls grow up to be adult women with dramatically higher IQs than their "white" sisters. My point is that here you have two girls, one white and one Asian, growing up with the same parents, the same home environment, attending the same schools, and the adult IQ differential is huge. I can't think of a better way to prove the impact of genes.
What I would find very interesting, and would invite anyone reading this to cite the data, is evidence of how social class differences in white households impacts adult IQ of Asian adoptees.
Specifically, the experiment I would like to do is take one hundred thousand Korean female identical twins, separate all 100 thousand pairs and send 50 thousand to be raised by average IQ avearage status whites in the USA. Take the other 50 thousand and send them to be raised by super high IQ , super high status whites.
Test these 100 thousand Korean females at the age of 40 and compare their IQ.
If you could show that on average the IQ of all the Korean females was the same no matter who raised them, it would be even more evidence for HBD.
If you found that the ones raised by high IQ high status parents had higher IQ at the age of 40, it would provide some ammunition for those that oppose HBD.
- Honest HBD Realist
"I went to grad school with a Chinese guy actually named ROLEX.?"
I've seen Toshiba as a black woman's first name. True story. I've also seen Tequila and Latrina.
Blacks always win the wacky name contests. At the SF Welfare Department in the sixties we had the Pancake family, The matriarch was Aunt Jemima Pancake. Her husband was Uncle Ben Pancake. One of the relatives was General Mills Pancake.
BTW I was a semi finalist at Washington Lee High and we had more semifinalists than any other high school in the country except a Brooklyn high school that selected students.
Thomas Jefferson High was an object of contempt then.
Albertosaurus
Chinese...fiber optics...etc.
A look at the wikipedia entry for fiber optics shows a bunch of dead white males investigated the topic and even applied it as far back as the 1900s. Some dude called Alexander Graham Bell made a 'photophone' using fiber optic concepts. But bringing us up to today ...
Hockham started looking at the theoretical aspects in particular the loss due to discontinuities in the fibre and also the loss incurred when the fibre was curved, both were known to affect the performance and needed to be quantified as any one of these could have rendered the fibre approach unacceptable. The single fibre would need to be less than 1 micrometre in diameter to preserve single mode operation and also most of the energy is carried outside the fibe core to preserve the low loss, this too was a non starter. However, if the core was surrounded by a cladding whose refractive index was close to that of the core a larger structure (in relative terms) could be accommodated. In this case most of the energy is now contained in the core and cladding regions of the fibre thus returning to the high losses. Charles Kao's part of the joint project was to investigate the losses in the glass material to determine if this could be reduced. All parts of the programme were successful leading now to a viable solution of a fibre optic communication system.
More power to Charles Kao, but it sounds like the heavy lifting here was done by George Hockham. An (indigenous) Brit right down to his tragic teeth and overgrown eyebrows.
"Anonymous said...
The stereotype that Asian aren't creative will probably reverse itself soon, at least in visual arts.
Jason Wu,Richard Chai and Alexander Wang, from left, after winning best new designer awards at an industry ceremony in June."
I'm sure that chinese people will be very proud to know that they are competing in the vital cultural area of producing gay men who design women's clothing for pre-pubescent boys.
Noah and others comments just goes to show how marginal the Asian contribution has been. Okay, you have a guy who worked for Cray computers. That's Cray computers founded by a white man, Seymour Cray, from Chippewa falls. Or you have a guy who invented yet another form of exchanging information electronically -- i.e. USB , according to principles worked out by Claude Shannon, of Petrosky Michigan.
The question is how many Shannon's, Cray's, or even Gates's and Jobs's, are crowded out by this Asian influx. I see no evidence that the rate of technological improvement is increasing, seems to me it is decreasing. Now, that is probably inevitable -- low hanging fruit as one person. But our (and by our I mean white American) past shows that we are perfectly capable of producing great scientists and inventors, and so far the Asian influx has yielded marginal benefits and unknown, but probably very real, opportunity costs.
That Asians are bright and hard working goes without question. But where are they on the creativity scale? Pretty low, I'd say.
I'm surprised there aren't any Japanese names.
... while some crappy suburb like Fullerton has dozens ...
a large percentage of[Orasnge County] Fullertonians are descendants of the "Okies" of the 1930's and '40.s' Is that why you label Fullerton "crappy"?
( Note to people not familiar with SoCal: Fullerton, Fontana, and some other municipalities on the inland edges of LA are blue collar white areas, historically speaking.)
White kids go to a Kaplan course, usually only for the SAT."
Kaplan educational services is the only profitable part of the Washington Post newspaper's parent corpaoration. The WashPost is bleeding money. Kaplan is its life support.
/////////////
... The main reason that you are able to access the internet at this moment is due to fiber optic technology and the digital pulsing of multiple simultaneous telegraphic feeds.
Both of these technologies were largely pioneered by scientists of Chinese descent. ...
Featured Story:
The Birth of Fiber Optics
...
In 1958, at the US Army Signal Corps Labs in Fort Monmouth New Jersey, the Manager of Copper Cable and Wire hated the signal transmission problems caused by lightening and water. He encouraged the Manager of Materials Research, Sam DiVita, to find a replacement for copper wire. Sam thought glass fiber and light signals might work, but the engineers who worked for Sam told him a glass fiber would break! In September 1959, Sam DiVita asked 2nd Lt. Richard Sturzebecher if he knew how to write the formula for a glass fiber capable of transmitting light signals. (Sam had learned that Richard, who was attending the Signal School, had melted 3 triaxial glass systems, using SiO2, for his 1958 senior thesis at Alfred University under Dr. Harold Simpson, Professor of Glass Technology.)
Richard knew the answer. While using a microscope to measuring the index-of-refraction on SiO2 glasses, Richard developed a severe headache. The 60% and 70% SiO2 glass powders under the microscope allowed higher and higher amounts of brilliant, white light to pass through the microscope slide into his eyes. Remembering the headache and the brilliant white light from high SiO2 glass, Richard knew that the formula would be ultra pure SiO2. Richard also knew that Corning made high purity SiO2 powder, by oxidizing pure SiCl4 into SiO2. He suggested that Sam use his power to award a Federal Contract to Corning to develop the fiber.
Sam DiVita had already worked with Corning research people. But he had to make the idea public, because all research laboratories had a right to bid on a Federal contract. So, in 1961 and 1962, the idea of using high purity SiO2 for a glass fiber to transmit light was made public information in a bid solicitation to all research laboratories. As expected, Sam awarded the contract to the Corning Glass Works in Corning, New York in 1962. Federal funding for glass fiber optics at Corning was about $1,000,000 between 1963 and 1970. Signal Corps Federal funding of many research programs on fiber optics until 1985, thereby seeding this industry and making today's multibillion dollar industry that eliminates copper wire in communications a reality.
Today, at age 87, Sam DiVita still comes to work at the US Army Signal Corps every day.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfiberoptics.htm
"The top 0.5% of the general population, or the top 0.5% of the presumabley more elite subset that takes the PSAT? Have they always needed to score this high?"
I doubt it's an "elite subset" taking the test. In my school district the PSAT, unlike the SAT, was free, iirc.
If you're white, this data has to be depressing and eye-opening. Yes, to a large extent IQ is genetically determined. But all the Asian students in the library on Friday nights (and Saturdays, Sundays, Thursdays, and Mondays) don't seem to think that's a guarantee of success. All the white kids watching television and playing Xbox - and that includes some pretty smart ones - could learn something from them.
"It is funny how white people love to use HBD to show how they are superior to blacks and Hispanics. These HBD white people would never say that whites score better simply because they study more, which they do compared to blacks and Hispanics."
Well, gee, maybe it's because, unlike blacks and Hispanics - and even many Asians - many white ethnic groups have managed to produce stable, prosperous, technologically and culturally innovative countries.
Just a guess.
We've had large scale Asian immigration for about 40 years now. Has it really helped our economy?
Yes. Many Silicon Valley startups revolve around asians. Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia, for example.
The main reason that you are able to access the internet at this moment is due to fiber optic technology and the digital pulsing of multiple simultaneous telegraphic feeds.
Both of these technologies were largely pioneered by scientists of Chinese descent.
Like the way Latin American janitors are the main reason that American megacorporations can operate? I mean would these companies be able to do their business while wading knee-deep through unemptied trash? No way!
No doubt there are black people reading this saying that white people only score better because they study more, which is true. Compared to black people white people study a thousand times more for these things.
This is why it is always better to fall back on more objective tests like IQ. These clearly show that East Asians are smarter than white people, with Ashkenazie Jews being the smartest. I wonder what the IQ of white people would be if yo removed all Jews from the sample.
Sorry, Asians, but Asians really do study harder than whites, and that helps on the PSAT. I should know. I was a semifinalist myself, and I did see my score go up significantly the second time I took it after I studied a bunch of vocabulary words and took some practice tests (the first time I went in cold because I naively believed the bullshit about how you can't study for it).
For those of you who think that East Asians are so much smarter than whites, explain why East Asia stagnated and ended up being colonized or conquered by whites. Maybe South Park had it right.
Antonio De Oliveira Salazar the Portuguese Prime Minister, who was widely thought to be Jewish
"Widely" by whom exactly?
Nobody is bashing Asians. In fact, we are crediting them. They have slightly higher IQ's than whites (mostly spatially) but lower IQ's than Jews, from what I've seen. Yet they seriously outperform both whites and even Jews in these top academic honors. We are crediting their hard work and studying, and many whites and Jews would rather do other things than study all the time. There is nothing wrong with being hard working.
Chinese-Americans are in large part drawn from the diaspora that fled Mao, an elite group with higher IQs than the Chinese mean. They are why the list of richest parts of Asia reads: Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan. In that order.
Thailand and Malaysia have also benefited by accepting many elite Chinese refugees and both have much higher living standards than mainland China.
The same can be said of other immigrant groups in the USA from countries that suffered a violent revolution and dictatorship: Russia, Iran, Vietnam, Cuba.
Mainland China is under-performing given its strong human capital, but you can't get carried away based on the success of Chinese-Americans.
To the Anonymous commenter who wrote:
"There's plenty of Indians (won't use the term South Asians - ain't too many Bangladeshis and Pakistanis on *any* academic list one can find in the West)."
Why would you conclude that there aren't many intelligent Bangladeshis or Pakistanis in the US? Are you familiar with Razib Khan of GNXP?
The name Khan appears on the list 9 times. Khan is a common name among South Asian Muslims. So it is possible that some of those Khans are of Bangladeshi or Pakistani descent.
You could say the same about Catholics. 1/4 of this country yet they have not made much of an imprint.
The Atlantic came up with a list of the 100 most influential Americans and there were only 3 Catholics.
Which ones? I see Babe Ruth and Enrico Fermi, but who is the third? Are you counting James Gordon Bennett, who was born to a Catholic family in Scotland and seminary-educated, but who later apostatized? Or Louis Sullivan?
The list is crap, anyway.
Cupertino native (1990s) here again...
Ah, the memories. When I graduated high school it was at a turning point between the decline of the whites and the rise of the Asians. Getting away with taking only five classes in senior year, and football, band, the newspaper, etc., were big deals. Honors classes were divided between white kids who often went to private colleges, East and West coast, and Asians who mostly went to Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD or a few CA private colleges.
Now, from anecdotal evidence (i.e. many of my friends, family, and acquaintances), a huge chunk of that entire class of white people live in Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, etc. They cashed in the real-estate ticket and bought a big home in a place where their kids don't have to compete with Asians. The CA schools are now much more focused on racking up the APs, etc. - it is no longer "cool" to take a reduced load as a senior. There was a story in the WSJ. I'm sure this is a good thing but nonetheless, I'm nostalgic.
* * *
Mitch, I'm sure you're right about the PSATs, but I hope you spell "Lynbrook" and "MONTA Vista" correctly on your official documents. Also, Steve et al, MONTE Vista is several schools across the Golden State, but MONTA Vista is the one in Cupertino with the Asians.
* * *
"Why are high Jewish test scores never dismissed as a product of hard work?" -- if you read any of the literature on early-20th century Ivy League admissions, you learn that, yes, Jews were universally disparaged as "grinds" by the WASPs. That passed and maybe this will too.
WASPy names - I forgot, Pinker talks about it in The Stuff of Thought - "Most American readers, knowing nothing else about a man other than that his name is Murray, would guess that he is over sixty, middle-class, and probably Jewish..."
http://books.google.com/books?id=jylSITT9ZNUC&pg=PA13
To all those who decry the hypocrisy of white HBD complaints about high-achieving Asians:
Yes, undoubtedly racial prejudice means that the present and future achievements of Asian fashion designers, high-tech inventors, etc., are under-appreciated.
The unacknowledged subtext, however, is that we whites enjoy the comfort of our culture's historic appreciation of the rights of the individual, and admiration of the individual genius who challenges social conventions, and don't want to see it replaced by Confucian conformism.
'Thomas Jefferson HS has a sizable plurality of all semifinalists in the state of Virginia.'
It has an entrance exam even though it is a public school. That's why it has so many semifinalists. Ya don't pass, ya don't get in. Sounds like a plan to me.
These HBD white people would never say that whites score better simply because they study more, which they do compared to blacks and Hispanics.
There's no question that hard work is a large factor behind "racial differences" in IQ.
Of course, it's still possible that "racial differences" in hard work have some genetic component themselves.
As I've said before, the only modern 'economics' book actually worth reading is 'IQ and The Wealth of Nations' by Lynn and Vanhanen.
Perhaps its influence hasn't really hit us with full force yet (though the massive trade imbalance between the USA and China and subsequent subprime meltdown etc are a taste of things to come), but it sure will impact our grandchildren's lives.
The US trade imbalance with China owes exactly nothing to IQ. It s driven almost entirely by political decisions in Washington and Beijing. The rest is attributable to wage differences between the two countries.
When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I suppose that's why HBD-reductionists try to explain everything that happens in terms of IQ.
I wonder how Mitch knows so much about the way Asian Americans train for the PSAT? Has he observed this personally? Is he saying that whites are lazy or what?
He says that East Asians aren't much smarter than whites. But that seems to be contradicted by the psychometric literature. The high end estimates put the East Asian IQ at 6-7 points above the white IQ, which is fairly significant when it comes to determining the relative percentages of the smart fractions of each of the respective populations. This is the same psychometric literature that says that whites are also significantly smarter than blacks and Hispanics.
I agree with Catperson in that tests like the SAT and PSAT aren't as amenable to preparation as other more content loaded tests are. For instance, the SAT math generally has a fairly low level of actual content, though this was revised recently to include some higher level algebra. What these tests more accurately assess, is a person's intrinsic ability to think and reason, more so a than a person's grasp of some particular body of knowledge. In contrast, a highly contented loaded exam would be something like the AP exams, where even fairly smart people can do extremely poorly on some particular subject test if they don't adequately prepare for it. In fact, there are many studies which show that on average, SAT/PSAT scores can only be minimally boosted through the effects of coaching.
Steve, I'd say that Mitch knows shit about the PSAT. I took in 2002, was a national merit scholar, and later attended the University of Pennsylvania, an ivy league institution. I knew quite a few Asian Americans who didn't prepare insanely hard for the exam and who were still national merit scholars. I also knew plenty of whites who studied very hard for the exam and who failed to become national merit scholars. Of course, it's a fallacy to draw general conclusions merely based off of personal experiences. That's why you need actual aggregate evidence, if you're going to make the assertion that the national merit gap between East Asians and whites is due primarily to significantly higher degrees of conscientiousness. Otherwise, your readers just come off as being resentful losers.
Let me add something to the previous comment of mine about innate intelligence, as opposed to hard work. In the city of NYC, they started offering free intensive test prep programs to black and Hispanic studies only, as a means of closing the racial gap at the elite high schools. What they found was that even blacks and Hispanics who had gone through the program, still passed the gifted and talented exams at significantly lower rates than their white and Asian counterparts.
I love how Steve's readers come up with arbitrary assertions based on zero evidence, like how you can grind your way to being a national merit scholar if you surpass a certain minimum IQ threshold. As Catperson has duly noted, the level of shoddy reasoning and hypocrisy in response to this post has been absolutely mind-boggling.
OT, or maybe not ...
Best-selling author Stephen J. Dubner may owe his existence to Catholicism, but his life belongs to Judaism.
Dubner, best known as co-author of Freakonomics, will be in Ottawa this evening to deliver the keynote address at the launch of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa’s annual fundraising drive.
The former writer and editor at the New York Times Magazine is expected to expound upon his strange and wondrous religious journey. Of that journey, Dubner has written: “I did not grow up Jewish, but my parents did.”
Dubner, 47, is the son of Florence Greenglass and Sol Dubner, Brooklyn Jews who converted to Catholicism during the Second World War.
The history of technological innovation (see Youtube for the James Burke 1970's series "Connections") generally stems from:
A bunch of stuff, created by people, looking for one thing and finding another.
Said stuff being put aside for years, while people pursue other things.
Someone comes along and puts pieces already there, which are obvious in retrospect but NOT at the time.
This is more a function of a society being "built for change" than anything else. Burke makes a point about how much (printing, paper money, the compass, gunpowder) came from China, and how little was done with it. While the West NEEDED change, just to survive. There being a nasty neighbor, or constant challenges, and always people on the make, and allowed to be on the make, in ways there just weren't in India or China.
It would seem that genetics and proportions (smart people and enough of them to make a difference) are a requirement, but so is culture (i.e. change is *allowed*). The Wright Brothers were not ordered to stop their experiments because, thank you very much, the Smithsonian has this flight thing well in hand (in actual fact, the Smithsonian was working off German theories of lift and dynamics that the Wrights through direct experimentation found all wrong -- and they had to work it out themselves).
Let me add, the social cachet of the Smithsonian, headed by distinguished and wealthy aristocratic professors, did not prevent a couple of HS grad bicycle mechanics from figuring things out on their own. And just as critically, commercializing it.
As troubling as the mass wave of low IQ immigration from Mexico is the accompanying resistance to technological change because it disrupts established social patterns. Makes today's Kings (Bill Gates) tomorrow's pauper, and vice-versa.
Self-protecting mantra of the white HBD-sphere:
1. Asians aren't (much) smarter, they just study harder.
2. White kids are much smarter than blacks and hispanics. It's not a matter of having better study habits and middle class values. It's genes.
3. White kids are much better at sports than Asians. It's not because white kids spend more time at it.
Notice something here?
I notice that you're almost pathologically dishonest. Go ahead and cite the person(s) saying these things.
stop being a whiney dolt and accept the fact that there's a subset of America's population that mates assortatively (a function of being pragmatic rather than romantic), has a higher mean IQ as it is, is far more conscientious and blows everyone else away in pretty much every g-loaded test. And this *IS* a good thing for America.
Why IS this a good thing for America?
Flynn looked at the children of pre-WWII Chinese (Cantonese) and Japanese immigrants and found that they scord at about a mean IQ of 98.5, but achieved significantly more on a variety of academic and professional metrics. For example, they were more likely to take the SAT and, despite drawing from a larger pool, achieved higher SAT scores. This suggests something non-g is helping Asians to excel.
Going back to the Chinese ....... Interestingly, there was a divergence in success among the Cantonese Chinese. Those that came from the regions of Canton known for intensive agriculture, strong mercantile tradition, and producing lots of successful imperial exam candidates - well those Chinese excelled in America. However, the Chinese that came from the poorer, less developed parts of Canton performed significantly below the first group.
In Cuba, this trend was replicated too. Those Chinese from the more successful parts of Canton did well; those from the less successful parts tended to be roughly lower middle class. In the Phillipines, we see this as well.
Steve,
I took the PSAT 4 years ago. Mitch is correct that just a few careless errors can mess you up. Oddly enough, if you miss one math question, your score drops, but you can miss one reading question without penalty.
Also, memorization can help you in the ways I mentioned in my previous comment.
Finally, no one is saying that east Asians aren't smart. However, IQ alone doesn't explain the huge numbers of Asians here. Also, the reason so few hispanics are seen is a function of IQ, and (I'm guessing) the fact that they don't take the test as often.
I love how everyone asserts that IQ alone doesn't explain the higher East Asian performance. First, California is something like 1/8 Asian. So the Asian population is significantly higher in California, relative to the national average. Given the higher average East Asian IQ and the higher than average percentage of Asians in California, one useful thing to do would be to try to roughly estimate what the IQ cutoff is for becoming a national merit scholar in California. As Steve has stated, different states have slightly different cutoffs. Only then, can we talk about whether or not the East Asian over-performance trumps even what would be predicted given their average IQ.
As I've stated before, many studies have shown that SAT/PSAT scores can only be minimally boosted through the effects of coaching. This is in contrast to far more content loaded exams such as the AP tests.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that smarter people also tend to be harder working? That is, while conscientiousness and IQ may be positively correlated, it's not necessarily the case that working hard significantly boosts your intellectual output, as much as it is that being innately intelligent also makes one harder working and more conscientious.
Which way does the causality run?
Mitch, you claim that the Asian IQ advantage is very slight relative to whites. Obviously you haven't been paying attention to the psychometric literature. Here's one of Steve's own posts.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/03/legal-immigrants-hints-of-iq-scores.html
White natives are at 100, with a standard deviation of 15.
European legal immigrants' kids: 99
India: 112
Northeast Asia: 106
Southeast Asia: 104
sub-Saharan Africa 89
Mexico 82
Central America/Caribbean 83
South America 86
"Has it ever occurred to anyone that smarter people also tend to be harder working?"
Some of this effect happens right while taking a test, even an IQ test. The dumber kids will get bored or defeated and bubble in or the like.
"Some of this effect happens right while taking a test, even an IQ test. The dumber kids will get bored or defeated and bubble in or the like."
Steve, wouldn't this put somewhat of a dent into your implicit argument that the East Asian over-performance is significantly due to a higher degree of conscientiousness? That is, East Asians may indeed be harder working than whites, but if in fact the causality goes from being smarter to being harder working, rather than the reverse, then it would seem to go against what you've been implying here.
"then it would seem to go against what you've been implying here."
What have I been trying to imply here?
It looks to me like I've been puttering around with a big list of names, writing down various patterns I notice. I don't know what it all means.
Since you ask Steve, let me just say that any intelligent reader who has followed you for any length of time will easily jump to the conclusion that your thesis is that the academic over-performance of East Asians relative to whites is primarily due to a higher degree of conscientiousness rather than due to significantly higher innate intelligence. Perhaps I've read you incorrectly, but I get the sense that deep down this is what you really believe.
There's nothing wrong with harboring this attitude. In fact, this is how liberals in general tend to describe differences in academic performance between different ethnic groups in America. Whether you're right or not will ultimately depend on the facts of the matter involved.
You frequently characterize East Asians as being workaholics and willing to grind it out, and in some of your posts you've suggested that whites can close much of the achievement gap if they simply studied harder. While it's true that for posts which specifically talk about IQ, you do mention the higher East Asian average, in general I've rarely seen you use phrases like "those smart Asian whiz kids". I've frequently seen you use the terms workaholic and grinding it out, though.
"sub-Saharan Africa 89
Mexico 82"
Sub-Saharan Africa 89? Higher than Mexico? Check that one out bub. It's at least 10 points too high. Probably 20 points.
but I hope you spell "Lynbrook" and "MONTA Vista" correctly on your official documents.
Ha! Actually, neither school is on my official documents. I work with the kids at another organization. My son went to the Santa Clara schools, and I'm very familiar with mid-Pen schools, but I don't think I've written the Cupertino school names more than once or twice. Which is no excuse--I should have looked at the spelling.
Mitch, you claim that the Asian IQ advantage is very slight relative to whites.
I consider the well-documented Asian IQ advantage (as broken down by subpopulation) to be slight. If that is the wrong word to describe it, I apologize.
I think the overrepresentation of Asians on the NM list is caused by more than IQ differences, although that certainly plays a part.
I wonder how Mitch knows so much about the way Asian Americans train for the PSAT? Has he observed this personally?
You don't have to wonder. You only have to read.
@Anonymous, those are the IQs of immigrants to America. Selective immigration can certainly lead to a different IQ ranking than what is the case for the different populations at large. What that ranking shows it that African immigrants to America are disproportionately the cream of the crop from Africa.
Steve, you should write a post about the significant East Asian American and Jewish American over-representation on extremely high IQ competitions like the International Mathematics Olympiad.
See here.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/10math_report.pdf
I found this sentence in particular to be rather eye-opening.
"Analysis of the USA and Canadian boy participants
led to a similar conclusion: Asian and ethnic Jewish
boys were approximately ten- to twenty-fold more
likely to become IMO participants than other non-
Hispanic white boys."
I think that this may give us a more accurate picture of the intrinsic intellectual aptitude of various ethnic groups, especially at the tail end of the IQ distribution.
"But when it comes to asians, whites love to deny HBD and throw out every theory they can to account for any differences."
Could be; but to me, fawning over Asians as being so much more intelligent when said Asians are basically flourishing in a modern world almost entirely invented by several centuries of European diligence, creativity, gradual improvement and technological invention, is just, well, nutty.
Yeah, many among them are just as smart as many among whites. Maybe the generality are just a little smarter, as well as more disciplined, than the generality of whites. But the thought of them as of "superior" intelligence, when I look at all that whites have done is just, well, crazy. It doesn't make any sense and yet whites on hbd blogs keep parroting that "whites will never be as smart as asians." Like saying the British will never speak English as well New Jerseyites.
I wonder what the IQ of white people would be if yo removed all Jews from the sample.
It would be essentially unchanged. The small number of Jews makes it so.
Any other tendentious questions?
Since you ask Steve, let me just say that any intelligent reader who has followed you for any length of time will easily jump to the conclusion that your thesis is that the academic over-performance of East Asians relative to whites is primarily due to a higher degree of conscientiousness rather than due to significantly higher innate intelligence. Perhaps I've read you incorrectly, but I get the sense that deep down this is what you really believe.
Where would the world be without liberals and their innate sense of what other people "deep down .. really believe"?
Blacks always win the wacky name contests. At the SF Welfare Department in the sixties we had the Pancake family, The matriarch was Aunt Jemima Pancake. Her husband was Uncle Ben Pancake. One of the relatives was General Mills Pancake."
Actually kind of cute. At least they are easy to pronounce, they take pride in those advertising icons that blacks nowadays are supposed to despise; and everybody likes pancakes.
In fact, the above described naming-convention has nothing to with the grotesque and scary concoctions that bubble up from that demographic in the last 30 years.
Mitch, you claim that the Asian IQ advantage is very slight relative to whites. Obviously you haven't been paying attention to the psychometric literature. Here's one of Steve's own posts
Anonymous, since you clearly consider yourself an intelligent person, please figure out how to post with some name.
As for Asian IQ relative to whites, you cannot determine that by examining the IQ scores for whites and Asians here in the US, for reasons which should be obvious to any intelligence person.
Re IDGH's query about Prime Minister Salazar, the allegation that he was Jewish was quite often made by, inter alia, domestic political enemies during his lifetime who wanted the Portuguese government to come out and support Hitler openly, which Salazar was always too sensible and decent to do. This is discussed in F. R. de Meneses' recent book Salazar: A Political Biography.
useful thing to do would be to try to roughly estimate what the IQ cutoff is for becoming a national merit scholar in California.
'R' can do this for you.
qnorm(1-.005)=2.57 (above mean).
Assuming (probably incorrectly) the population of 16 year olds has a mean IQ of 100, sd 15, normally distributed this translates to an IQ of 139.
Quick and dirty, if Asians have an IQ of 1/2 standard deviation higher than whites, that cut of would be at 2.07 sd above ASIAN mean IQ. That works out to asian representation in NMS at about 3.8 times their presence in the general population. The same figures for the 106 asian iq bandied about earlier leads to about 3 times.
As far as I know, there are still about 3 times the number of white kids in Cali as Asians, so we should have roughly equal representation. The list sure doesn't look like equal representation.
I wonder what the IQ of white people would be if yo removed all Jews from the sample.
German mean IQ is 102 according to wiki/IQ and wealth of nations
Aren't East Asians just smarter than whites (by around 5 points, 1/3 of a standard deviation)?
This would make a huge difference at the right tail, where East Asians would dominate.
All this hand waving about "hard working" is bs.
A comedian once had a joke (it may have been George Lopez):
Q: How do you pass a hard math class?
A: Sit next to the Asian kid.
It's amazing to me the amount of attention on this blog being given to high school test scores that won't even matter in a year's time. Sure, they correlate with IQ, but you guys have dedicated well over 100 posts to this! Don't you guys have anything better to worry about? Oh, wait, the Asians scored higher than whites; that's why everyone is so riled up.
Consider a test that measures real achievement, like the IMOs or one of the international Math Olympiad competitions. Those are impressive testaments to talent.
FWIW, At the high school I graduated from a few years ago, there were about a dozen National Merit semifinalists. Some of them were outstanding students, some of them were slackers (like myself, hehe.)The three Asians students that graduated at the very top of the class didn't make National Merit semis. Were they grinds? Maybe. But their GPA (grindingness(?)) mattered more than missing the National Merit cutoff by a few points.
In the post about IQs by world region, that's based on immigrant populations. Sub-Saharan Africans who have to jump hoops through the immigration process likely have higher IQs than Mexicans running across the border.
This is why the Asian girl is the perfect creature. As an example, one of the ones I'm dating is 22 years old, has a bachelors in mathematics and is doing a masters in biostatistics. She is very humble about her intelligence because she scored "only" 700 on the quantitative reasoning section of the GRE. And most importantly she is extremely cute. Go ahead and try getting that combo in a white girl. LOL
"Going back to the Chinese ....... Interestingly, there was a divergence in success among the Cantonese Chinese. Those that came from the regions of Canton known for intensive agriculture, strong mercantile tradition, and producing lots of successful imperial exam candidates - well those Chinese excelled in America. However, the Chinese that came from the poorer, less developed parts of Canton performed significantly below the first group."
I've never heard of this and I pay attention in this area. Can you link to something?
"That Asians are bright and hard working goes without question. But where are they on the creativity scale? Pretty low, I'd say."
Anyone who claims this wants to explain the new dominance of East Asians in American fashion?
Kevin K said..."I also drank 2 coca-colas right before the exam, so I also claimed that help me get a perfect score on the math part."
Coincidentally, TCM just showed Wait Until Dark. I was reminded that I first saw it the night before I took the SAT. The movie got me so wound up I was limp with relief when it was over. I slept like a baby that night and while I didn't get a perfect score on either the math or the verbal, I was a National Merit Finalist. I've always attributed how well I did to how relaxed I was after watching that movie.
On a tangential point, the scholarship award is $2,500 for a select number of the 8,000 finalists (not-semifinalists), with awards allocated by state. When I took the psat in 1992, the award was $2,000, but college tuition at my good state school was about 4K a year and today it is around 15K a year.
As I've stated before, many studies have shown that SAT/PSAT scores can only be minimally boosted through the effects of coaching ...
What studies? Please cite some specific references to these alleged studies.
"Has it ever occurred to anyone that smarter people also tend to be harder working?"
Actually, very high levels of intelligence do not correlated well with conscientiousness - we get bored easily.
The Atlantic came up with a list of the 100 most influential Americans and there were only 3 Catholics.
Considering some of the names that made the list -- Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Brown, Mary Baker Eddy, Elizabeth Stanton, Jane Addams, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Stowe's father -- Catholics shouldn't feel slighted.
I think Steve needs to decide if this is a pro white website or an objective HBD website.
Regarding creativity and Asians. The usual negative association put on asian intelligence. Who are the most creative people on the planet? Not white people, not asians, but blacks.
I don't think anyone can deny that blacks can be incredibly creative.
But what has this gotten black people? And why is it relevant? Creativity is more abstract and harder to measure than something like IQ.
"Why would you conclude that there aren't many intelligent Bangladeshis or Pakistanis in the US? Are you familiar with Razib Khan of GNXP?
The name Khan appears on the list 9 times. Khan is a common name among South Asian Muslims. So it is possible that some of those Khans are of Bangladeshi or Pakistani descent."
I'm also familiar with Abiola Lapite of Foreign Dispatches, but won't generalize on the basis of that.
I'm certain there are smart Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, but I'd wager:
a) that they're less academically focused than Indians (religious school, learning Urdu/Arabic, etc take precedence).
b) that they've regressed to the mean somewhat more than Indians (no caste system).
So while you have academic superstars like Ravi Vakil (one of only seven four-time Putnam fellows) or Kiran Kedlaya (one of only 18 three-time Putnam fellows) or Arnav Tripathy (again a three-time Putnam fellow), you won't find a *single* Pakistani or Bangladeshi Putnam fellow/USAMO finalist. I've scanned multiple lists with indicate competence at the +3 to +4 SD level (like the ISEF, Intel STS, Siemens competition; Putnam fellows are likely +5 SDs from the mean or higher), and I don't find significant numbers of Pakistani or Bangladeshi Americans. Nor do they do especially well on moderate IQ and high-conscientiousness contests like the spelling bee (where I presume they are still overrepresented). Including them with Indians creates a loss of granularity.
"Why IS this a good thing for America?"
Why isn't it good to have a bunch of super-smart Americans who can contribute to the economy, create jobs, work on the next big thing, and at least make those incremental advances in research that eventually lead to breakthroughs? And you're talking about pretty assimilable groups with exogamy rates close to 40% here.
Does anyone have a way to access the press releases that list semifinalists for the rest of the states?
@Dexter
The East Asian American over-representation for elite events such as the IMO or the International Physics Olympiad, is even more overwhelming than their performance on the PSAT. This is of course to be expected, given that making the IMO team or the likes requires a much higher IQ threshold than merely becoming a national merit semifinalist.
Since you ask Steve, let me just say that any intelligent reader who has followed you for any length of time will easily jump to the conclusion that your thesis is that the academic over-performance of East Asians relative to whites is primarily due to a higher degree of conscientiousness rather than due to significantly higher innate intelligence. Perhaps I've read you incorrectly, but I get the sense that deep down this is what you really believe.
The reason this is believable is because the great achievements of European peoples are still fresh and in living memory. Europeans have contributed mightily to the world we live in today, and have been the driving force in technological advancement for the last 500 plus years.
Contrast this to the achievements of previous civilizations. I am sure the ancient Egyptians were intelligent and they came up with great things, but looking at modern Egypt, it is hard to see how. China is noted for its long 4000 year history with all that entails. But they have been asleep for the last 150 years and are just now waking up. With Europeans, you don't have to look back much, if at all, to see the product of their minds.
Even today the East Asians and Indians who do well are running with the tools and institutions created by Europeans. The universities in which they excel and the technology in which they work have been created by Europeans. I am not denigrating these folks. I respect them for their hard work. I admire them because they must see the world differently. They have a sense of optimism that we don't know. My immigrant dad told me the one advantage he had over me in life was that he was born poor.
Europeans today, even those born poor, don't know what that means. Being poor in the West since the latter half of the twentieth century is not the same as being poor across the globe. Europeans have become soft and accustomed to a high standard of living with moderate effort.
The East Asians and Indians seem to have the drive and desire today that Europeans had a few generations ago. So yes, I think this contributes mightily to the differences in performance we see today between Whites and East Asians.
Japanese-American student are a good acid test. They're representative of the East-Asians, but also pretty assimilated into white American slacker culture.
Looking at the California list, I find about 20 Japanese-American names out of around 2000 students, for a grand total of 1% of the names. According to the 2000 census, Japanese-Americans form 1.1% of California's population. So they are about as well represented as NMSQT/PSAT winners as they are in the general population.
Whites form 44% of California's population, but 40% of the PSAT winners according to the official stats (this is not including students who fail to report their race, which would elevate the white percentage by a few points). So whites are represented about in proportion to their population too.
By the way, 11% of succesful PSAT takers did not state a race. Assuming they resemble the other 89% who did, then whites consitute 45% of successul PSAT takers - v.s. 44% of California's population.
Just in case you're wondering, Japanese-Americans and whites have similar age demographics. So they tend to be equally well represented in the high school-age demographic that takes the PSAT/NMSQT.
One more thing..... White California students score about 0.1standard deviations below the white American mean. So perhaps white Californians are dragged down slightly, maybe by white immigrants from the Mid East, Armenia, and the former USSR.
The point is......... Whites and Japanese-Americans tend to do about equally well in California.
Yet other East-Asians do better. Why? Hard work, parents, and selective immigration make sense. However, it does not seem that high IQ is a significant contributing factor. Otherwise Japanese, who are similar to the other East Asians, would be doing a lot better than whites.
They are not. So I think a non-IQ explanation is persuasive for East Asian American performance on the PSAT.
"Looking at the California list, I find about 20 Japanese-American names out of around 2000"
Thanks. That's very helpful.
It would be interesting to correlate the changes over time in number of star students at public high schools with real estate prices in the school district. For example, which one is a leading indicator of the other?
Could it be that the Japanese are under-performing relative to their IQ potential? Or perhaps the Japanese in California today constitute a below average sample in terms of IQ.
Also, someone mentioned earlier that because the Japanese have been in America longer, the population has become more ethnically diluted due to out-group marriage.
By the way, there's plenty of evidence showing that on average Japanese Americans still do better than whites on measures such as educational attainment, salary, and the likes. So in this regard, the Japanese are similar to other East Asians.
I think that all of these excuses reflect the fact that people in the HBD sphere would sooner bite off their own arms than admit that East Asians are smarter than whites.
re: Japanese in California,
They've had a high out-marriage rate for a long time. It's not clear what the Japanese surname representation on this list implies.
It could be that more able Japanese-Americans married out over the generations, leaving some real slackers/laggards behind. It's possible that Japanese-Americans today are not as bright as average Japanese in Japan: an additional effect is that they were anti-selected (agricultural laborers) to begin with.
From this iSteve post:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/05/interracial-marriage-2008-stats.html
Group / white out-marriage rates by gender for Asians raised in the US, from 2006 US Census:
Chinese M 30% F 40%
Japanese M 27% F 32%
Korean M 40% F 60%
Look at the third column, USR + USR. Japanese have been in the US the longest and their M/F out-marriage rates are almost the same (small gender disparity).
http://www.asian-nation.org/interracial.shtml
5/27/2010
Anonymous said..."I think Steve needs to decide if this is a pro white website or an objective HBD website."
Clearly Steve has decided to write about what interests him, wherever that takes him. I doubt he'd be willing to give up that freedom to appease his readers. Indeed, I can't think of one good reason why he should.
It's funny that the Anonymous directly beneath your comment said..."Who are the most creative people on the planet? Not white people, not asians, but blacks.
I don't think anyone can deny that blacks can be incredibly creative."
That's not the kind of comment I would expect to see posted on a pro white website.
I hope it's obvious to Steve that the racial bias here is enormous. Since the psychometric literature fairly persuasively indicates that East Asians are anywhere from 6-7 points higher than whites in terms of average IQ, shouldn't East Asian over-representation be expected? Furthermore, as I've alluded to earlier, the over-representation only further widens when you examine extremely high IQ thresholds, such as for instance making the American IMO team. I'm not sure what the purpose of all of this hand-waving is, but it certainly reeks of a tremendous degree of self-serving racial bias.
Did anyone read this Thomas Friedman article from before? I know Steve did, even though he never discussed it directly on his site.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21friedman.html
Apparently, East Asians are also vastly over-represented amongst finalists and semi-finalists for the Intel Talent Science Search. Is that the result of working hard too? Or for that matter, is black and Hispanic under-performance relative to whites the result of whites working a lot harder?
In addition, virtually no one has contemplated my earlier point, that even if IQ and conscientiousness are positively correlated, the causality may actually run from being smarter to being harder working.
Anyone who claims this wants to explain the new dominance of East Asians in American fashion?
I think people confuse too often the fact that East Asians aren't exciting people with being uncreative. They're averagely creative (or more creative than Europeans, although I think this varies by culture - Japanese probably beat the European creative average, Chinese do not), it's just that a lot of people aren't interested in their creativity, particularly when it moves through the medium of their personalities and self expression about their lives. When they try to be creative in ways that are strongly alienated from their selves and personalities and even to some extent world view, the larger world find what they do appealing.
Having said that, I'm not sure that all East Asian societies, collectively tend to nurture people within them who have ideas and want to take risks or want to forge a new paradigm. There are types of creativity and limiting factors to being able to express them.
That Asians are bright and hard working goes without question. But where are they on the creativity scale? Pretty low, I'd say.
I just finished playing the blockbuster PC game Starcraft II, by California company Blizzard. When the credits rolled, I was truly astounded at the amount of Asian names involved with game design, art, programming etc.. It may have been approaching 50%.
Anyone who claims this wants to explain the new dominance of East Asians in American fashion?
Maybe it is the dominance of East Asians that explains current American 'fashion'.
I did some research on Troy HS (Fullerton). Just as I thought, it is the HS literally a quarter mile from CSUF -- not exactly a destination of 'best and brightest' but probably a lot of kids of faculty attend the HS. More importantly, the school is some sort of Science and Technology magnet, that change was effected in the late 1980s, early 1990s. Now Troy seems to be some sort of egghead academy, ironic because the place was a hot bed for early 1980s SoCal punk. Members of the Adolescents etc attended.
And that's the thing -- before the huge immigrant influx we didn't have this magnet BS. The vast majority of us went to our local public HS, or Catholic School. They were good. As amother commentator pointed out, senior year was very light load, we weren't racking up AP. We did band, or Key Club, played two,three sports etc. Fairly smart kids could score 1300-1350, have a 3.4 GPA and still get into a UC (not Riverside!)
And it was good. Moreover, as far as I can see, there's not been a whole lot we've gotten for making our kids start cramming at 5 just to be able to get into UC.
Really? Are Asians really cramming at age 5 just to get into UC? I love the wildly exaggerated descriptions of Asian American behavior, ironically from whites who probably have no real clue how most Asian Americans really live their lives. It's one thing to suggest that Asians work harder than whites. It's another to engage in wild proclamations about how Asians study 24/7 beginning from the moment they're toddlers. Many of the comments here seem to be ill-grounded in actual facts and most embody an aura of extreme and unrealistic exaggeration.
I counted no more than 20 Japanese-American surnames and calculated that translates into about 1% of the list being JA.
Japanese in America are not a below average sample. According to Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America, Japanese emigrants were drawn mainly from the agricultural middle classes. The underclass was discouraged from immigrating, while the gentry had no need to do so. It's likely that today's JAs are representatitve of Japan's potential.
Even if Japanese have diluted themselves through intermarriage, it doesn't really negate my point. First of all, Japanese often intermarry with other Asians. Second, people marry according to their professional and economic background. When Japanese intermarry, they tend to pair with nerds and SWPLs, who compare pretty well with Asians. Japanese aren't marrying NASCAR dads or trailer trash. Third, Japanese live in expensive areas (SF, Seattle), which skews their mate choice to the more affluent.
By the way, Jews have intermarried a lot, but they still do really well in pretty much everything even today. Furthermore, I see no evidence that half Jews lag full blooded Jews. Why is that? It's because Jews marry high IQ whites, which means that their kids come out smart. Intermarriage doesn't lower IQ, assuming people have a wide array of mating choices. In general, people marry others of similar IQ and personality.
Right. Japanese-Americans outearn whites (Japanese in Japan do not). This supports Flynn's finding, which is that Asians perform better than IQ alone would suggest.
Are you implying that parental pressure and work ethic play no major role in Intel Science or Spelling Bees? If you're right, Japanese-Americans would have to be significantly less intelligent, on average, than other Asians, since Japanese are basically invisible in these contests.
I have no problem admitting who's smart, but the Japanese are tough to explain. Especially since they have the best society of Asia.
Japanese-Americans have a illegitimacy rate of 10%. That suggests they are marrying SWPLs and nerds, not NASCAR and trailer park whites.
About 2% of Japanese-American moms are not high school graduates. That suggests that there is no dysgenic trend in the community, unlike other race, and that JAs are not diluting themselves into the mainstream all that much.
Their incarceration rate is really low too, which supports the nerds-not-NASCAR hypothesis.
They're averagely creative (or more creative than Europeans, although I think this varies by culture - Japanese probably beat the European creative average
Is there some reasonably objective list of creative output we could see that might back this up?
My small sample size of Japanese-American neighbors suggests that after a few generations in California, the Surfer Gene increasingly expresses itself.
Since the "Surfer Gene" expresses itself amongst Japanese Americans, perhaps they are under-performing relative to their IQ potential? After all, I believe Sailer has documented how Hispanic Americans graduate from high school at the same rate as blacks, despite having an IQ advantage of 5 points on average. (I'm not sure if this was the exact fact that Sailer relayed. I just know that it was something along these lines.)
@Anon
Regarding the role of work ethic. My assertion is that high IQ is a necessary, though not sufficient criteria for attaining success in many fields. I don't believe that a person of mediocre intelligence can grind their way to spelling bee or Intel Science Talent Search Success. You have to be fairly smart to begin with. Then in addition, hard work is also needed.
You're right to point out that Japanese Americans don't do as well as Chinese Americans. That in no way proves or even strongly suggests that either 1) the average IQ of East Asian Americans isn't higher than the average IQ of whites by a meaningful amount 2) the IQ of East Asians in general isn't higher than the IQ of whites by a meaningful amount.
For some reason, you assume that the disparity in performance between Chinese and the Japanese Americans implies that Chinese Americans are over-performing relative to the true East Asian average. It could just as easily be that the Japanese are under-performing relative to the East Asian average.
Re: Japanese,
If the ablest Japanese-Americans out-marry at high rates (look at the current rates -- about 30% of BOTH males and females marry WHITES), then you would have net flow of good genes OUT of the Japanese-surnamed subgroup.
That is:
If it's a M high-ability Japanese-American marrying out, the surname stays Japanese for 1 more generation. But after that the genes are likely go by some other name like "Smith" from then on. For a F high-ability J-A it happens right away to the kids.
If you do a little math this is a non-negligible effect after a few generations. And the Japanese have been here a long time now -- it's been 2-3 generations since WWII.
There is no evidence that the ablest Jews have been marrying out (in fact, probably the opposite). But it's generally the more successful Asian-Americans that marry out. The other E. Asian groups haven't been here that long and/or have had their numbers replenished by recent immigration.
The guy who did the original 1% calculation on J-A's seems reasonably bright. Perhaps he'll understand this (sizeable) correction to the interpretation of his result.
As usual, Steve's intuition is on target: J-A's today are pretty mellow. Is this due to socialization or selective breeding, or both?
I agree with the comment that the NY, Illinois, and NJ names would tell a lot more about the Indian names. At JP Stevens in Edison, NJ for example, there are tons and tons of Indian national merit semifinalists. However, most of them are Jains -- Shahs, Mehtas...not Patels.
I also agree that they are more Jew-like as far as political apsirations and leanings than the Asians, a far more ominous situation for Republicans.
As an aside, the distribution of names across Asian and Europeans is very different.
For example, There are only about 250 Korean family names currently in use, and the three most common (Kim, Lee, and Park) account for nearly half of the population This helps explain why there are so many Asians NMS with the same surname.
In contrast, the three most common surnames in the US circa 1990 (Smith, Johnson and Williams) accounted for only 2.5% of population.
Discounting non-European Americans with these names, if white Americans accounted for only 70% of the 250M Americans in 1990 that's still only 3.6% of European Americans having one of the top 3 surnames vs about 50% of Koreans having a top 3 Korean surname.
Really? Are Asians really cramming at age 5 just to get into UC?
Yeah, no one ever uses hyperbole in an internet comment thread. But seriously, it seems that SoCal is increasingly resembling Manhattan in terms of getting kids into the right schools, etc.
As to the Japanese, those in Cali are almost exclusively the descendants of peasants, quite a different background, I'll bet, than the kids at University High in Irvine or Troy HS in Fullerton. This probably explains why Lowell in SF is mediocre in this regard; the Chinese kids there are 'restaurant families' etc. There are so many Chinese now in SF that they better reflect normal population, not the kids of university professors and H1-Bs.
As a hybrid Asian-European American I observe two trends:
* Asians of my father's generation had a powerful drive to assimilate, but only the most successful men were able to marry-out.
These successful men tended to marry attractive Caucasian women of more modest backgrounds or other NE Asian women from solid similarly rising families. Successful out-marrying Asian men today are more often selectively mating with equally high SES Caucasian women.
When Asian women married out they married more successful or educated men. This seems to be the same today.
* The contribution by ethnic Asians are under-counted in surveys that go only by surname. Most Asian-European intermarriages in America involve Asian brides/Euro grooms thus all offspring are counted as Euro by name. These mixed offspring nearly always assimilate to Euro-American standards and have a disproportionate number of high performers as expected by their gifted parents.
A growing number of Asian groom/Euro bride couples I know give their children the mother's Euro name to avoid the strong anti-Asian discrimination by colleges, professional schools, and other real world situations where Asians are over represented or simply disliked. This is true especially when the non-Asian wife has a name that confirms status and/or advantage such as a Jewish or Hispanic name.
Steve, I think you will surely enjoy this:
http://www.salon.com/books/memoirs/index.html?story=/books/int/2010/09/20/meredith_maran_my_lie_interview
it's laughable, and sad.
"Really? Are Asians really cramming at age 5 just to get into UC? I love the wildly exaggerated descriptions of Asian American behavior, ironically from whites who probably have no real clue how most Asian Americans really live their lives. It's one thing to suggest that Asians work harder than whites."
I live in an Asian majority community in the SF Bay area and my children are half Asian (I'm white). When Chinese parents get together, all they talk about is their kids' school and college prospects, beginning about age 6. In the spirit of monkey-see monkey-do I have been taking my kids to chess, mandarin, math cram school, and music classes since the age of four. Child rearing feels like war. My kids' tuition and enrichment class bills top $50K/year. I submit that the above commenter does not know what the hell he is talking about!
"It would be interesting to correlate the changes over time in number of star students at public high schools with real estate prices in the school district. For example, which one is a leading indicator of the other?"
My observation is that low crime rates and a majority white population are the precursors to rapid Asian colonization, at least in CA, followed by a run-up in home prices. But like Albany CA, there is a saturation point where the Asians feel so much competition from other Asians, not to mention a general disgust in the crowding due to parachute kids whose parents are renting garage apartments in the district, that they start to look for other white majority communities to colonize.
@Anon
I love how hilarious your exaggeration is. So you are saying that Chinese parents talk about their children's academic prospects 100 of the time and nothing else, beginning from the age that their children are 6.
But in the spirit of generalizing from absurd specific over-exaggerations, let me offer up the following. Growing up in a majority white community, I noticed that every time white parents got together, they never talked about their children's future academic prospects. Therefore, I submit that whites are the laziest and most educationally disinterested people on planet earth.
"Besides the obvious observation that they're much, much, lower than the white numbers, why are the scores higher in the Midwest and South? Greater discipline? Does this suggest something similar to your previous suggestion about militaristic environments being good for blacks?"
At our school, the first thing most of the Mexicans and Mayans do is put on an ROTC uniform, and start learning commands, as do a lot of our Somalis, Iraqis, and Congolese.
Off Topic, but has the holy grail been found?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/found-genes-that-make-kids-smart/story-e6frg6nf-1225926421510
"SCIENTISTS have identified more than 200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren.
Those schoolchildren possessing the "right" combinations achieved significantly better results in numeracy, literacy and science.
The finding emerged from a study of more than 4000 British children to pinpoint the genes and genetic combinations that influence reasoning skills and general intelligence.
One of its main conclusions is that intelligence is controlled by a network of thousands of genes with each making just a small contribution to overall intelligence, rather than the handful of powerful genes that scientists once predicted."
I think this extremely long comment thread highlights one of the more amusing aspects of WN ideology. On the one hand, most of the world's top WN academic intellectuals, such as Phil Rushton and Richard Lynn, not only fully accept that East Asians are (on average) considerably smarter than white Europeans, but have actually made it an important centerpiece of their various published books and other research. On the other hand, this same theory is hotly disputed and denounced by many of the sort of populist/ignorant WN activist-types who tend to comment on HBD blogsites. Thus, there sometimes seems to be quite a bit of miscommunication between the brain and the body of the WN Movement.
In fact, I think that Lynn (who's perhaps more of a quasi-WN), has gone so far as to argue that China's eventual global dominance will perhaps prove the most likely hope of future salvation for the White Race, in that the Chinese generally have a pretty good opinion of European abilities (which are somewhat different in skew from their own), great admiration for centuries of important European accomplishments, and much less unwillingness to be bound by the sort of unscientific PC nonsense which currently governs the dominant ideologies of the West. I believe the rough analogy which he proposes is the role which Rome played with regard to Greece. Whether or not the WNs commenting here find proposed scenario highly repugnant, they should at least be aware of it.
As for me, I'm not Asian myself but it's been totally obvious to me since about the age of nine that Asians were (on average!) smarter than whites. Now admittedly, it's just as obvious that Asians are also (on average) harder-working and more studious, so it's not entirely clear just how much of their enormous academic over-performance is due to the one factor as opposed to the other, and it's also clear that the Asian-white intellectual gap is considerably smaller than the corresponding black-white gap. But anyone who consistently refuses to admit that Asians are generally smarter is simply making a complete fool of himself.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that smarter people also tend to be harder working? [...] being innately intelligent also makes one harder working and more conscientious.
I can't find the link right now, but I have read a study claiming that in fact it's those just below the top IQ-wise that work the hardest.
Anecdotal evidence: I slacked all through school and still managed to get all '5's on AP exams, nearly maxed out my SATs, and never worked hard until I got to MIT. I got out with a Bachelor's and found a good tech job, at which I'm slacking right now posting this comment.
Meanwhile my kid brother, who never quite matched my grades or test scores, compensated by studying his ass off... all the way to a doctorate, even if it wasn't at as prestigious of a school. He's now a professor, still works a lot harder than me, and I'm glad he has a bigger paycheck and house to show for it.
Being innately intelligent doesn't make you work harder; in some cases, quite the contrary.
At our school, the first thing most of the Mexicans and Mayans do is put on an ROTC uniform, and start learning commands, as do a lot of our Somalis, Iraqis, and Congolese.
Perhaps, but the LA Times recently did a report about the California high school hardest hit by war dead. It was Buchanan (hah!)High. Not surprisingly its predominately white, in 'red' area of the central valley. Take a look at the seven dead kids' names, not unlike one could have found among the heroes of the Mexican-American war (US side that is)
http://projects.latimes.com/wardead/high-school/clovis/buchanan-high/
This list is last year's list. does anybody know 2010 list for ca.
But since Chinese had the benefit of eugenic breeding policies and Japanese had no such benefit, wouldn't we expect the IQ of Chinese to be higher than the IQ of Japanese?
Assuming the exams have a role I guess the solution might go along the lines
exams > high IQ pop > advanced agricultural techniques/social patterns/something that requires a high IQ pop to sustain > this second phenom expands to Japan > Japanese high IQ even without exams
I don't actually think the exam selected for high IQs though (the number of successful applicants was tiny and they were rather privileged by connection [how much naturally smarter are privately educated children even in a much more universally educated society like ours with lots of room for social mobility?], so we're not even thinking about the differential reproductive success of them, but of the "also ran" gentry - if it's not higher than randomly selected Chinese individuals, no selection happens) and I'm not sure what our "something" would be (certainly not rice paddy agriculture for example, judging by the Javanese).
There's a lot of talk about how the Samurai became a quasi-clerical caste and had strong differential reproductive success (a la Greg Clark's genetic industrial revolution idea) but I don't know if I find that plausible.
"I love how hilarious your exaggeration is. So you are saying that Chinese parents talk about their children's academic prospects 100 of the time and nothing else, beginning from the age that their children are 6."
Well, let's just say that the topic is broached at every get together among mandarin speaking mothers. There is also a corollary phenomenon of Being-Chinese-in-America, "The second son syndrome." Parents self-consciously put less pressure on #2 son because #1 son, a National Merit Scholar and concert pianist, is at MIT and miserable with no social life and threatening not to talk to his parents ever again. But usually #1 son delivers the goods for mom and dad, becoming the loving son who buys them a condo, so #2 son can think about studying to become an architect instead of a thoracic surgeon.
"The imperial exam system had the effect of elevating massive numbers of high IQ Chinese men in to positions where each high IQ Chinese man could father dozens or even hundreds of children, and make sure that most of those children survived to adulthood. This had a powerful eugenic effect in China...."
whew. That's one full-blown fantasy scenario.
The vast majority of Chinese were illiterate, but since I don't have percentages either, I may not be much better than your absurd assertion. However, I have read a great deal about Chinese history, and they hardly had enough knowledge based jobs for "vast" numbers of Chinese to occupy. In the United States, only 2% of the workforce was in knowledge-based (clerical type) jobs in 1800. By the middle of the 19th century, the percentage was, I think, 20%. Then by the 20th century it was 50% or more.
China was overwhelmingly rural until very recently, and indeed, still is heavily rural. The idea that the Chinese were filtering through the mass of their population for centuries in quest of the "right stuff" for clerical work and scholarly pursuits is nonsense. No society until the late 19th century came close to that. As for the assertion that "high-iq" persons had more children because they were taxed less--this is projecting 21st century standards and birth control practices onto people living long ago in an entirely different culture. I recall a Chinese woman in her 80s recollecting how most children died in the "old days", which seems to have meant pre-WWII, after which birth control and improved hygiene and water supplies also controlled the child mortality rate.
Scotland was the first country to have mandatory school attendance, or at least literacy acquirement, dating back to the 15th century. I have read that North Carolina, heavily settled by Scots, had an unusually active school system, with mandatory attendance at a very early date in U.S. history, especially by southern standards.
Can anyone explain to me why Chinese and Japanese seem to have the same average IQ, both if you look at mainland China vs Japan and also if you look at Chinese in America vs Japanese in America?
They don't.
By the way, Jews have intermarried a lot, but they still do really well in pretty much everything even today.
It's almost like their genes are less important than are other factors ...
What caught my attention was Flower Mound, Texas, with about the same number of semifinalists as all of Fort Worth. I'd never heard of Flower Mound; turns out to be a VERY new suburb near Irving, pop 50K, most of its growth since 1990, strong emphasis on environmentalist crap.
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