The AP reports on the declining rates of admission to the University of California:
The low admission rate reflects UC regents' decision in January to reduce freshman enrollment by 2,300 students, or 6 percent. Enrollment will be cut at the Davis, Irvine, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz campuses; remain the same at Berkeley and UCLA; and grow at Merced.
The number of students applying for undergraduate admission for the fall 2009 term increased by nearly 5 percent to almost 127,000, up from 121,000 applications for fall 2008.
Admission offers to California residents increased 2 percent for African Americans, 4 percent for Latinos and 21 percent for American Indians. Offers remained relatively unchanged for Asian Americans and declined 6 percent for whites.About 35 percent of admitted California students are Asian American, 33 percent are white, 22 percent are Latino, 4 percent are African American and 0.7 percent are American Indian.
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43 comments:
I assume that the shrinking schools are dominated by whites and particulary Asians, and that the growing one is NAM dominated?
UCLA and Berkeley are the crown jewels of the California system, so they couldn't back there, but other than that I'd say that's exactly what it looks like.
I'd bet money that the Native American rate is increasing from affluent people gaming the system. I know a few people personally claiming AA benefits from ancestry as far back as the 3rd and 4th generation.
the wheels are coming off in california because demography is destiny. and if the masters of the universe have their way the federal bailout is going to become ongoing..........and permanent.
the current trend points to a 15-20% white state of california in the future.........and the new massive non-white california will need to be permanently supported with federal bailouts paid by white taxpayers in the rest of the country. that is a recipe for discontent to say the least.
I'd bet money that the Native American rate is increasing from affluent people gaming the system.
The second most common mixed race demographic in the US are Americans who claim both Indian and white ancestry according to the Census.
I'd bet money that the Native American rate is increasing from affluent people gaming the system. I know a few people personally claiming AA benefits from ancestry as far back as the 3rd and 4th generation.
Don't you have to be registered with the BIA before you can get AA benefits? Granted, university admissions committees might not bother to check every claim, but if they do happen to check yours and you come up short, you've just screwed yourself royally.
Wishfully claiming to be part Native American has a long history in the US. Even in my high school a bunch of kids claimed to be part Indian. Though I did notice that none of them claimed to be related to any of the local tribes who were pretty down and out before gambling came along. Instead they claimed to be part of tribes like Apache or Cherokee but as far as I could see none of their families came from areas where Apache or Cherokee were prevalent.
DJF
The number of American Indians in the UC system is so tiny compared to other groups that even a modest increase shows up as a large jump in percentage. And for all its problems, California is still a net contributor, not drain, on the federal budget. The state is home to multiple industries-- from Silicon Valley to entertainment to agriculture-- that generate titanic amounts of wealth.
You walk across the UC Berkeley campus and it's like you're in another country. An Asian country. I imagine UCLA is worse. It's sad. It's sad to see such a depiction of one facet of the demographic destruction of America.
Of course no one -- quite literally (well, almost) -- ever remarks on the dramatic overrepresentation of Asians, i.e. vis-a-vis their share of California's population. Least of all white parents, at whose childrens' expense it largely occurs. I imagine much of the equally dramatic overrepresentation of Latinos, i.e. vis-a-vis their generally poor academics, also comes at the expense of Whites. And regarding Latinos, given the sharpened admissions criteria at UC professional schools the data there are also rather stark, I would imagine.
miles, why did you change your handle to wake up?
Can't it be a good thing that many of the best students are having to go to their 2nd or 3rd choice schools? The unfairness of having a less qualified person take their slots aside, high IQ students at less prestigious universities could have the effect of decentralizing the influence held by a handful of notably liberal institutions. I imagine such students are frequently more eligible for scholarships when they choose to attend lesser known universities as well.
Isn't it already the case that certain less competitive universities are known for having excellent writing programs or law schools? I think you alums of schools like UCLA & Berkeley should look at the larger picture; there's some potential here for your pet anthropology theories to reemerge as mainstream for instance. I know you want your kid to get all he deserves but is the engineering department at CAL or the BBA at UCLA really the only one worthy of your child.
From my own experience of sacrificing the best education for me for brand loyalty, I think most students apply to college based on the school's image and the fact they have friends there without a clear understanding of what they want from their education. And I think high IQ students are just as susceptible to this herd mentality as the lower IQ bourgeois.
Of course this change can only be brought about through the influence of ambitious fathers of wunderkind like the frequenters of iSteve. Isn't grad school prestige what's really important after all?
"Wishfully claiming to be part Native American has a long history in the US." DJF
I've long given up on sorting out fact from fiction in family tales. So while my grandmother insists we are part Cherokee, I have no hard evidence that this is the case. She lost contact with her mother and other family members long before I was born; there are no pictures or family records either, nothing that is but oral tradition.
I've noticed lately these stories are a bit more flexibly rendered than I'd like which makes me suspicious though I can't say why the Indian heritage would've been fabricated in the first place. Any ideas on this? But, hey, if a "white" person can survive in this AA dominated world by morphing into a group with protected status, I can't say I'd blame them.
And for all its problems, California is still a net contributor, not drain, on the federal budget. The state is home to multiple industries-- from Silicon Valley to entertainment to agriculture-- that generate titanic amounts of wealth.
Is some Hollywood lieberal paying you to paste that?
You surely know that movie and TV show production in CA is declining because of higher taxes and the cost of doing business there.
Agriculture? US taxpayers outside Cal. pay to subsidize social services for all the low wage Mexicans toiling in the fields. Wonder how profitable CA ag. would be if the peons were paid decent wages?
Also, I notice that you forget to mention defense contractor and military spending in CA. What ee-kon-O-me would San Diego have without the Navy Dept.? Long Beach is gonna be really cheerful when C-17 production shuts down, etc.
Silicon Valley? So last century.
The Golden State is over the hill. Face it.
You walk across the UC Berkeley campus and it's like you're in another country. An Asian country. I imagine UCLA is worse. It's sad. It's sad to see such a depiction of one facet of the demographic destruction of America.
Ha, ha. Wasn't there just a recent thread in which a whole bunch of commenters kept denying that (on average) Asians were smarter than whites?
So what's the explanation for this? Are all these Asians cheating? Or is it just a mysterious coincidence.
Also, I'll bet that a huge fraction of the Asian students are majoring in real subjects like history and engineering, while lots of the white students are majoring in things like psychology and "self-actualization"...
I've noticed lately these stories are a bit more flexibly rendered than I'd like which makes me suspicious though I can't say why the Indian heritage would've been fabricated in the first place. Any ideas on this?
Maybe the hardy Scots-Irish folks admire the Injuns for being a strong warrior race?
Asian academic success (as far as getting accepted to the top schools) is due more to amazing study ethic than amazing intelligence. It is no accident that the percentage of Asians in the top UCAL schools shot up relative to whites when UCAL decided to deemphasize the SAT in favor of GPA (as a way to remove the SAT as the insurmountable obstacle for NAMs.)
Just check this out, white applicants to UCAL actually have HIGHER SAT scores than Asians. And surprise surprise, Asians do better on the SATIIs, which test acquired knowledge in specific area rather than being straight out IQ tests like the SAT. There is no reason to make Asians out to the some sort of ubermensch.
http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=18634
Mr. Eh, I clicked on your link "well_almost" and laughed at the title of the article: "Making UCLA look like LA". The subtext being, of course "how do we enroll as many Mexicans as their are Mexican street vendors in LA".
The point, of course, is that UCLA should use the CITY race statistics and not NATIONAL race statistics in admissions since the are so many more Mexicans in LA as a percentage of the population than there are in the rest of the USA.
For over 30 years at UW-Madison they have been haranguing the University to use NATIONAL race statistics and not CITY or STATE race statistics in order to eliminate as many white Wisconsinites as possible and replace them with browns from Chicago and elsewhere.
Maybe they should try a new slogan: "Make UW-Madison look like Wisconsin".
IIRC the discussion was whether Asian-American IQ accurately reflects global Asian IQ. If a self-selected high IQ sample group is going to prestigious American colleges in greater numbers, that doesn't contradict the position that most of China's human capital is of low quality. India has experienced a similar brain drain.
Ha, ha. Wasn't there just a recent thread in which a whole bunch of commenters kept denying that (on average) Asians were smarter than whites?
So what's the explanation for this?
Do we really have to explain this to you? California isn't Asia. You're looking at a self-selected sample of Asians.
Instead they claimed to be part of tribes like Apache or Cherokee but as far as I could see none of their families came from areas where Apache or Cherokee were prevalent.
The Cherokee are the largest tribe in the US. Historically they were an advanced, highly civilized tribe that covered major portions of the South. I think intermarriage may have been quite common for people living near the frontier. I'm supposedly part Cherokee, though it's almost a rounding error (<2%).
What ee-kon-O-me would San Diego have without the Navy Dept.?
Um, biotech? But California probably is a net drain. If not it will be there shortly. It's a drain politically (CA politicians getting us to waste money on stupid programs) if not economically.
Whether the Chinese, as a group, are smarter than whites or not is irrelevant. The point is that whites in California are being dispossed of thier own iheritance. It was white Americans who built the state and made it what it was - and THEY built it for thier own descendents, not for those of people form Asia.
Who really cares if Asians have a higher IQ or study harder. The main point should be for white, American folks that they are being squeezed out of the universities their parents and grandparents built and paid for.
i don't have any problem agreeing that east asians are better at school. i see how their time is used. however, the amount of evidence that they are not smarter than europeans is overwhelming. i figure the two groups are about equal in intelligence, and that's being generous to the east asians. chinese underachievement is the THE story of HBD, and yet here we are, still not acknowledging it. there are 1 billion of them. they are, supposedly, smarter on average than europeans, as well as more industrious too. on paper it's a slam dunk for east asians. bookies wouldn't even take bets on such a sure thing. yet when the game is played, the chinese go down in the first round.
as for the europeans losing the "great admission battle of the 21st century" i don't think it will have all that much effect, because they're the leader group. they do most of the work, and it won't matter if they can't get into the "best" university, which increasingly means, the university with the most book studying, expert test taking east asians. there are so many good universities today where you can have access to relatively the same material. they'll just go to some other college, graduate with decent grades, and come up with something important in their 30s and 40s. not many of the titans of american society went to "superU" or as it may be increasingly known, "asian central college". the people who control major industries, and whose ideas shift the entire society, usually went to "random state U" or "liberal arts college 24". or they even dropped out.
eventually europeans will need to take steps to protect themselves. it won't make sense to do most of the creating, yet be forced by the rules of fair play to turn over all of their creations to the other races who massively outnumber them. africa is exploding in population. in the future, what will be the point of turning over every single NCAA sports enterprise to hordes of africans who demand a near monopoly, and the almost complete exclusion, of the founding group? likewise, should the engineering department at every white founded college turn into the department of asian global population domination? the chinese will flood these places, graduate, go back to china, and engineer...nothing of global importance.
i don't have any problem agreeing that east asians are better at school. i see how most of them spend their time. but the amount of evidence that they are not clearly smarter than europeans is overwhelming. they might be smarter, but what about all of the things that suggest they aren't?
if they were smarter, why would any of them leave east asia to go to college? it would be like millions of europeans going to mexico and brazil for college. the only way this makes sense is if we argue that it's actually the dumb among the east asians who have to settle for inferior universities like UCLA, while all the east asian geniuses stay in east asia and go to the world beating, nobel science prize monopolizing universities there.
i figure the two groups are about equal in intelligence, yet that is being generous to the east asians. they appear to have an advantage in learning and memory, while at the same time having less problem solving, obstacle breaking ability. both learning and problem solving are displays of intelligent behavior, but learning can only get you so far. as i've said before, i struggle greatly with the idea that europeans coming up with 80% of everything in the modern world is actually evidence that east asians are clearly smarter. what were the east asians working on while europeans were developing the oil age, the information age? it must have been dreadfully important.
if you took the two groups and put them on identical earths in seperate solar systems, what would each planet be like after 10000 years? would the east asian planet still be going through dynasty after dynasty where a highly organized but technologically stagnant society was unchanged for thousands of years? would the europeans go through an era of barbarian chaos and then figure out science, then space flight, then leave their planet, discover the east asian planet, and invade with laser cannons? i don't know for sure, but let's put some science into the discussion and not just stick to what east asians can do when spending all of their time studying books and taking tests. evidence, experiments, then conclusions. not calling the game before it's even played. and to really be scientific about it, you'd have to do that "seperate earths" experiment about 20 times, the generally accepted figure for reliability in experimentation.
chinese underachievement is the THE story of HBD, yet even here it is not acknowledged. 1 billion people with who are supposedly more intelligent AND more industrious than any european group. yet what do they accomplish? the factors in this equation need to be repeated in every discussion on this topic. it is certainly not scientific by any means to ignore the mountain of data that is china, in exactly the same way the rushton "3 races" idea crashes the very second you first encounter short, fat brown guys loitering outside the local big box store or working in the neighborhood fast food joint. how does rushton account for this group? how does the "east asians are clearly more intelligent" camp account for positively gargantuan chinese underperformance? as a guy with a science degree, the only thing that is evident to me is that in the world of "scholarly" HBD, evidence is ignored when it contradicts the hypothesis. or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that researchers do not even notice negative evidence, because it is not a part of their lives. rushton wasn't dealing with short, fat brown guys every day, so despite the fact that there are hundreds of millions of them in north and south america, they were never part of his model. likewise, chinese underperformance is SO VAST that we typically forget it is even occuring, in the same way HBD people almost never even talk about what south asians are doing. their spectacular lack of effect on the world is their only remarkable quality, and despite indonesia being the 4th largest nation on earth, it is NEVER discussed.
i'm definitely open to the idea that east asians are smarter, but i don't see the CLEAR evidence, the smoking gun, the argument ender. it is, for instance, just so obvious that west africans in the US are more athletic on average than any other group, even other west africans. where is the same proof for east asian intellectual superiority?
The point is that whites in California are being dispossed of thier own iheritance. It was white Americans who built the state and made it what it was - and THEY built it for thier own descendents, not for those of people form Asia.
Five basic spelling errors in two sentences?!!
Maybe this comment was actually by a smart Asian trying to make anti-Asian whites seem like sub-literates...
The SAT/IQ gap between Asian Americans and whites is about the same as found in large scale tests of students in E. Asia versus Europe or the US.
See data here:
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/asian-white-iq-variance-from-pisa.html
In other words, there is no evidence of significant selection effects when comparing Asians in the US and those in their home countries. The Asians in California do not outscore the E. Asians in Japan, Taiwan, Korea on carefully normed international tests administered to hundreds of thousands of students.
Of course, when Asians outperform it must be because they study harder. When whites outperform blacks it's due to genetics ;-)
It is indeed ironic that white gentiles are several times more underrepresented at the top schools than either Hispanics or blacks. If you look at schools like Harvard, Stanford, UChicago, etc, Asians form a good third of the population and jews form probably another good third. White European gentiles probably get a third too, so they get a bit less than a third of their share of the college age population. Blacks get two thirds of their share or so. But nobody cares about that. hehe.
Mr. Anon said...
It was white Americans who built the state and made it what it was - and THEY built it for their own descendants, not for those of people form Asia.
It wasn't just immigration that destroyed California. This destroyed the social fabric, making it harder for White Californians to organize and save themselves.
Of course, when Asians outperform it must be because they study harder. When whites outperform blacks it's due to genetics ;-)
You obviously did not read what the article I posted was saying. The California Education Commission found that Asian applicants to the UCAL system have lower SAT scores than white applicants. Therefore, it is not a great stretch of the imagination to say that their success in dominating the UCAL system is not due to their superior intelligence.
I am a premed student (majors: biology, economics,minor: mathematical computer science) at a university where 25% of the overall student population is Asian. In the classes and groups where I spend my time the percentage of Asians is even greater. I even room with an Asian guy and an Asian girl, so I'm speaking from experience here. Asians are successful, they are intelligent, but their success relative to whites is much more due to outlook on life than higher IQ.
Felix,
I hope your powers of logic improve if you are going to be a doctor someday.
Given the relative population sizes in CA, for Asians to produce 40% or so of the UC population with scores roughly comparable (slightly higher or lower doesn't matter) to the white UC population means they are already outperforming on cognitive tests. If the two SAT distributions were equal Asians would have similar *proportional* representation to whites (i.e., they might make up 12% of UC population, in line with their overall population fraction in CA), rather than several times higher. Instead, (roughly) the 90th percentile Asian scores the same as a 96th percentile white (2.5x over-representation if the UC cutoff were 96th percentile), which is similar to what is found on PISA (half standard deviation gap).
But of course these higher scores on g-loaded tests only imply that Asians study harder than whites. (Oops, can one raise g by studying?) When whites outscore blacks it's not because their lower T-levels allow them to sit still longer in class, it's because blacks have genetically low IQ's right?
Given the relative population sizes in CA, for Asians to produce 40% or so of the UC population with scores roughly comparable (slightly higher or lower doesn't matter) to the white UC population means they are already outperforming on cognitive tests.
It looks like you're the one that needs to improve your powers of logic. How can you say that Asians are outperforming on cognitive tests in the same paragraph in which you admit that their scores are "roughly comparable (slightly higher or lower doesn't matter) to the white UC population" If the scores are comparable then clearly no outperforming is taking place. As it is the scores are not comparable but lower for Asians.
Also, note that the article talked about the SAT scores of Asian and white applicants, not admits. White applicants, whether they got accepted or not, had higher average SATs than Asian applicants. That's a crucial distinction that makes it irrelevant that there are fewer Asians than whites. Hopefully I don't have to explain to you why that is.
I'll say this again: Asians are dominating the UCAL system vs whites because UCAL decided to deemphasize the SAT in favor of gpa. THAT'S where the superior study ethic of Asians comes in. You take an Asian and a white with similar IQs and almost every time the Asian will end up with a higher GPA. Just a different outlook on life. On the other hand like you said yourself studying does not help much on the SAT. That's why when UCAL abolished affirmative action (which affected whites and Asians equally) and instead changed its weighing of SAT and gpa, Asian representation shot up relative to whites.
"Interesting how to work out the "reparations" for that, no?"
Not all all. Whitey will pay up. The End.
Any ideas why East Asians have contributed so little in the way of ground breaking intellectual accomplishments?
My personal belief is that the Orientals have spent millennia under arbitrary despotic government.
Felix: If you don't understand the argument, just look up the average SAT scores for NE Asians versus whites. The half sigma gap is approximately the same as shown by PISA. Then, fixing a threshold like the average SAT score at Berkeley or UCLA, find the respective fractions of whites and Asians that are at this level. You will find an over-representation of Asians relative to population. BTW, I don't disagree with you that Asians probably also study harder and get higher grades, but both g and personality or cultural differences are at work.
Re: historical intellectual accomplishments, I think any serious historian would not put the Asians behind until after 1500 or so. In fact they were well ahead for most of recorded history (see, e.g., Marco Polo or Needham's many books). Just because you don't know who actually invented printing, paper, paper currency, the compass, zero, "Arabic" numbers, meritocratic bureaucracy, gunpowder, ceramics, the Pythagorean theorem, futures markets, etc. doesn't mean it was done by Europeans.
To have lagged for a few hundred years does not signal very much. For example, from 600 BC to 600 AD (a full millennium) the Romans and Greeks had every right (by your logic) to question the intelligence of northern Europeans. There are multiple factors affecting intellectual achievement beyond just IQ -- social stability, system of government, institutions, culture, etc.
The fatter IQ tail theory doesn't seem to be supported by actual data -- the Asian variance is similar to that of Europeans; see link to PISA data in earlier comment.
RE: Historical Intellectual Achievements
Yes, I know who invented most of the things you mentioned which is why I called out SE Asian Indians for special consideration. Indians are usually credited for the majority of profound intellectual contributions coming from Asia (eg mathematics, astrology, religion) which China borrowed heavily and disseminated into Korea, Japan and other parts of Asia. Not coincidentally, SE Asian Indians are much more closely related to Europeans than Han Chinese or any other NE Asians.
The inventions China is credited with during their thousands of years head start in a highly organized, specialized dense urban civilization (vis-Ã -vis Europe) are relatively sparse and mundane. Things like paper, printing press and gunpowder were arguably independently invented and/or in more useful and superior forms once similar levels of social organization arose elsewhere creating the necessity.
From another perspective, Germany was one of the bloodiest and msot chaotic areas of Europe, but since unification in 1871 they have vastly outperformed China intellectually with a fraction of the people over a fraction of time. The same with tiny England and France.
What is holding China and the Chinese back now? Even if China itself is not conducive to heavyweight intellectual progress, the Chinese Diaspora (incl. many intellectual elites) have enjoyed the advantages as N. Europeans throughout the Western world for several generations (perhaps only a generation or so more than Jews in America). When will we see as many Chinese as European/Jewish standouts in heavy weight intellectual pursuits?
The PISA exam you refer to appears to had have data released for only one iteration in 2000. This test also appears to be less of a g-loaded IQ test (e.g. SAT) and heavily reliant on study/prep (e.g. SAT subject tests) because it tests the application of specific mathematical training and concepts to solve problems.
It was new to discover that UC "applicants" who are Caucasian outperform Asians on the more g-loaded SAT, but I did expect a lower GPA and SAT subject test. And no, some people have used data to argue NE Asians have a higher avg IQ but smaller SD to explain why NE Asians underperform in the extremes of intellectual pursuits.
Data to compare IQ across countries are fuzzy, but the notable lack of fundamental breakthroughs coming from NE Asia is not.
You're correct, China itself is not currently conducive to heavyweight intellectual progress. As for the diaspora, it's highly difficult in the modern era for ANY individual of any race to make "fundamental breakthroughs", because progress in this field has been taken over by corporations and group science projects. The era of one guy coming up with the telephone, and two brothers designing an airplane are over. Northeast Asians are still well represented as elite scientists and mathematicians, considering they make up a fraction of the Western population. Yes, we all know Ashkenazi Jews are vastly over represented, but they're something else.
It's funny that you don't want to consider data from PISA re: variance and other issues. When that data came out people like Lynn were very quick to use it to justify the questionable tiny statistics results they had used to characterize national IQs. Since you seem to agree the SAT is g loaded, do you deny there is a roughly half sigma gap between whites and NE Asians there? You can even see here that when family income is middle class or above (removing most recent immigrants), Asians outscore whites on the verbal part as well:
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm#APPENDIX%20B
Re: "Germany was one of the bloodiest and msot chaotic areas of Europe, but since unification in 1871 they have vastly outperformed China intellectually with a fraction of the people over a fraction of time. The same with tiny England and France."
But don't you see that the same argument could have been used, over a much longer period of time, to argue that Greeks and Romans were somehow intrinsically "smarter", or had "fatter tails" or were "more creative" than N. Europeans? Those claims seem quite ridiculous now, so the method of reasoning is suspect. What it leaves out is cultural, institutional, historical factors which are largely independent of IQ.
If you look at the small Asian populations in the West today, you will find them over-represented at the high end of scientific contributions -- Nobels, National Academy of Science/Engineering, tenure at top universities. Many older Jewish scientists today bemoan that fewer Jews are pursuing science, and observe that Asians seem to be taking over. If you're not familiar with the pipeline this might surprise you.
BTW, crediting India with certain inventions or discoveries, rather than NE Asia, suffers from the same bias as accounts for "Arabic" numbers -- proximity to western historians. Much less is known by western historians about NE Asian scientific progress; I suggest you have a closer look at Needham. For example, the origin of zero (India or China) is rather controversial and unsettled.
Anon wrote
--
Asians outscore whites on the verbal part as well:
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm#APPENDIX%20B
--
The Asian group here includes Indians
Per the Sue and Abe study 1988,
on the verbal segment of SAT,
Indians outscore whites by 8 points and chinese by 47 points
rec1man,
Based on the 1995 numbers from LaGriffe for the > $60k family income group the gap between S and NE Asians cannot be as large as indicated in the study you cite for middle and upper middle class families.
NE Asian verbal averages are suppressed by large number of test takers who are from recent immigrant families.
Indians certainly have an advantage with English, given their colonial heritage and the fact that Hindi is an Indo-European language.
I do not reject the PISA result you mention, but put it in context as I do Lynn’s results. The PISA results you emphasize are results released for the very first and only administration of an entirely new math exam testing specific math concepts requiring particular training. Lynn also has to rely on sparse and sometimes suspect data to fill in gaps, but both have value in beginning to quantitatively answer difficult questions with real world consequences.
I’m willing to follow wherever the data leads. Most data and empirical evidence I’ve seen suggests (NE) Asians have a slightly higher average IQ but smaller SD than (N. European) Caucasians. Large differences in educational motivation and focus cloud the issue of “average” Asian results as some have mentioned (although I was explicit in focusing on “SD”). Any evidence that Caucasians outscore Asians on the SAT in CA is the best apples-to-apples comparisons between these two groups I’ve seen (CA has the largest legacy Asian pop more representative of norms than federal data it seems). If true and consistent, this info would seriously challenge the conventional wisdom.
Again, my focus is on the exceptional individuals that advance society individually or in teams. These are not 1SD college students or 2SD doctors or even further out run of the mill researchers or academics. Sixty-one percent of the world lives in Asia vs 12% in Europe (20% in China, 1.2% in Germany, 0.92% in UK). Most people in Asia with the ability so far in the right tail as I’m speaking about would probably come from at least middle-class or better backgrounds given the genetics involved, get recognized for such exceptional talent and have the ability to work at nearly any of the world’s top research institutions – most in the US or Europe. Thus, many of the top Asian-America researchers are drawing from 62% of the world’s population, not <5% of America’s Asian-American population as is a popular misconception. This is easily verified by looking at the birth places of the handful of only the very top Asian academics and researchers in the US.
A minimal level of social complexity and stability is required before civilization creates the environment for these individuals to reach their potential to contribute and advance their societies. One meaningful watershed is the establishment of universities or academies which coincidentally marks the intellectual ascent of Europe. Before such state supported institutionalized learning, such exceptional individuals would find fitting in and possibly even survival a struggle. This is why thousands years of (pre-)Germanic barbarians wandering in the forests does not suggest a thin-tail IQ distribution nearly as much as those same years where the Chinese lived in a civilization that had many more opportunities for intellectually exceptional individuals to advance and prosper.
While no expert on the Greek vs Indian vs Chinese disputes over intellectual ownership of profound breakthroughs of the ancient world, it does seem China is at best playing the defensive role in vis-Ã -vis India. I’ve seen Indian academics identified in Chinese sources associated with breakthroughs in areas like religion and astrology. I’ve never read about Chinese missions sending information to India. I also sense that Western historians have a strong bias towards China and Chinese sources over Indian ones both modern and ancient given the relative proportions of East Asian studies and research papers as well as paucity of historic Indian sources. I’m curious to learn more and will take a look at Needham as you suggest.
I have never seen any actual data supporting a smaller Asian SD. Could you supply references please?
PISA has been administered since 2000. In terms of funding, expertise, systematic methodology, sophistication, it blows away the amateurish efforts of the few psychometric researchers cited here. If you want to claim that Asians here are highly selected you should just compare the performance of Asians in the US to those in their home countries. There is no sign of selection when averaged over the whole immigrant population (kids of dish washers are included with kids of engineers). The half sigma gap is seen here and in the home country groups. Lynn et al. would agree on the consistency of these results -- selection is not evident.
Re: "Any evidence that Caucasians outscore Asians on the SAT in CA is the best apples-to-apples comparisons between these two groups I’ve seen."
Caucasians don't outscore Asians on the SAT, that is easy to verify (see LaGriffe link for actual data). The comment you are referring to is about UC applicants, which are a small selected pool. A much larger percentage of Asians vs Caucasians apply to UC, so it is quite far from an apples to apples comparison (i.e., they are over-represented among applicants as well as admits -- you might be comparing 60th percentile Asians against 85th percentile Caucasians). I've tried to explain this several times now.
I suggest you have a look at Needham -- there are significant snippets available at Google books. Look at mathematics or ship building or metallurgy or hydrology.
Your estimate of the bias is completely off -- recall why we refer to "Arabic" numerals. Proximity -- cultural, linguistic and geographical -- is the main effect biasing understanding of histories of distant peoples. Europe was behind for a thousand+ years and the Arabs stood in their way to accessing the fruits of much more advanced (technologically, economically) civilizations. Why did Roman emperors crave Chinese silk or ceramics? What was Columbus looking for? How big was Indian ocean trade relative to the size of the whole European economy at the time? You might want to research these questions before advancing any theories about global intellectual achievement.
As stated previously, I feel the data on international IQ comparisons is suspect and I don’t think a good g-loaded exam benchmark exists. The PISA exam may be one of the best, but it is highly dependent upon previous training (not a great g-loaded exam) and has been administered only 3 times (not once).
As repeated in several posts, my working assumption is that Asians do have a higher average IQ, but they probably have a smaller SD. I have not seen the original data on the CA SAT and subject tests and thus qualified that it would be significant only if “true and consistent” given it contradicts “conventional” results. You appear to know the approximate magnitude of a significant sampling bias or are extrapolating it to fit your PISA data. Either way, your criticisms about average IQs are focused on an aside that I too discounted until further proven.
As another poster here asked, one of the biggest HBD questions is why Asian intellectual achievements have not dwarfed those of Europe given higher average IQs, a population many times larger and a far older civilization structured to reward uncommon intelligence over club wielding. Part of the obvious solution would require first looking into IQ SD.
One of the easiest ways to quantify even small differences in SD is to observe how they result in large differences at the far ends of the distribution. These intellectual oddities of nature operate in a relatively frictionless and public globalized marketplace of human talent today much like world-class sprinters.
While Asian-Americans are overrepresented in many intellectual fields like medicine and engineering, one cannot help but notice that their percentages drop off at the far tails. It is worth restating that the top Asian American intellectual contributors are not drawn from <5% of America but closer to 62% of worlds population that is Asian (it would be more accurate to compare Taiwan/China to the UK/Germany). For example, the following website has only 1 of the 7 most eminent Asian American Scientists born in the US under normal circumstances even though most came to the US decades ago when travel from China was far more restrictive. To imply that the US and the West is not receiving a disproportionate number of the Chinese intellectual elite is not credible despite another misdirected use of “average”.
http://www.goldsea.com/Personalities/Brilliant/brilliant.html
Regarding Indian contributions to Chinese religion, mathematics and astronomy, ad hominems do not constitute a counter argument. Although medieval historical bias may have been a result of geography, current historical bias results more from the ethnocentric views inseparable from surviving histories. Even the “middle earth” Chinese acknowledge in their own histories intellectual contributions from India while I have not seen any citations for the reverse flow.
Sue and Abe analysis of 1984 University of California freshmen
Reported in book, The asian american educational experience by Don Nakanishi
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In their analyses of all freshman students enrolled in the eight University of California campuses in 1984, Sue and Abe (1988) reported on both the high school GPAs and SAT scores of different subethnic groups of Asian Americans. With high school GPA, they found East Indians/Pakistanis had the highest GPAs (3.8) followed by Japanese (3.75) and Chinese (3.73), and Filipinos the lowest (3.56). All subethnic groups had higher mean GPAs than whites (3.59) with the exception of Filipinos (3.56). With SAT verbal and math scores, East Indians/Pakistanis had the highest verbal scores (520.0), followed by the Japanese (510.8) and Chinese (473.4), and Koreans the lowest (417.8), whereas the Chinese had the highest math scores (611.8) followed by East Indians/Pakistanis (605.8), Japanese (603.8), and Koreans (594.0). Only the East Indians/Pakistanis had higher verbal SAT scores than whites (512.4), whereas all the subethnic groups had higher math SAT scores than whites (576.9) with the exception of Filipinos (519.5) and Other Asian Americans (555
Here is my theory for lack of east asian high end achievement
The main ruling doctrine of china ( Japan ) is Legalism,
very crudely it is a more intelligent form of islam
Islam forbids freethinking and freethinkers get killed as apostates
Xtianity also persecuted freethinkers from Hyapatia ( 400AD ) to Gallileo ( 1600 AD )
( read Umberto Eco's novels )
and the deeply catholic parts of Europe are still backward
In northern protestant Europe, Freethinking was allowed and this allowed for innovation
The doctrine of Legalism each generation for thousands of years killed off freethinkers
and created a nation of conformists
And this, not low SD is the cause of the east asian vacuum at the high end
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