June 21, 2013

Tiger Parents riot: "No fairness if you do not let us cheat."

Riot police assemble to rescue test proctors
Malcolm Moore reports from China for The Telegraph:
Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating 
What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students diligently sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them from cheating. 
The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China's notoriously tough "gaokao" exams, each year winning a disproportionate number of places at the country's elite universities. 
Last year, the city received a slap on the wrist from the province's Education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were "harshly criticised" for allowing cheats to prosper. 
So this year, a new pilot scheme was introduced to strictly enforce the rules. 
When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators randomly drafted in from different schools across the county. 
The invigilators wasted no time in using metal detectors to relieve students of their mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers. 
A special team of female invigilators was on hand to intimately search female examinees, according to the Southern Weekend newspaper. 
Outside the school, meanwhile, a squad of officials patrolled the area to catch people transmitting answers to the examinees. At least two groups were caught trying to communicate with students from a hotel opposite the school gates. 
For the students, and for their assembled parents waiting outside the school gates to pick them up afterwards, the new rules were an infringement too far. 
As soon as the exams finished, a mob swarmed into the school in protest. 
"I picked up my son at midday [from his exam]. He started crying. I asked him what was up and he said a teacher had frisked his body and taken his mobile phone from his underwear. I was furious and I asked him if he could identify the teacher. I said we should go back and find him," one of the protesting fathers, named as Mr Yin, said to the police later. 
By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped in a set of school offices, as groups of students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, an angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." 
According to the protesters, cheating is endemic in China, so being forced to sit the exams without help put their children at a disadvantage.

These stories out of the East, such as the recent SAT administration being cancelled across South Korea due to rampant cheating, may add some insight into recent trends within the U.S.. In the four decades I've followed test scores by ethnicity, the biggest single change has been Asian-Americans pulling away in the 21st Century. Here's a graph from Unsilenced Science:

154 comments:

  1. Wasn't Ron Unz talking up the "fairness" and "transparency" of the Chinese university admissions system as opposed to the "corrupt" American method?

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  2. Culture clash. Culture clash.

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  3. Whenever my graduate school professors assigned problem sets from textbooks, the Chinese students would hack into the publishing companies' websites to obtain the answers.

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  4. Florida resident6/21/13, 3:53 PM

    I read the important book “World on fire” by Chua, following the review by Sailer (or was it Derbyshire’s ?), and I appreciate the notion of “market dominant minority” introduced there.
    I still have to overcome my reluctance to read “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”.

    Somehow, I do not sense the feeling of “noblesse oblige” in Chua’s multiple interviews (most of which are aimed at book promotion; there is no such thing as bad publicity.)

    My impression is this.
    If Professor Chua can do such harsh things to _her_ daughters for the sake of future well-being of _her_ daughters,
    then
    I can easily imagine harsh things she is ready to do to _other_ people’s kids for the sake of future well-being of _her_ (_Chua’s_) daughters.
    Some hints of such attitude are scattered already in the “World on Fire” (rather subtle to be discussed here) and in her interviews.

    Your respectfully, F.r.

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  5. Where there's a will there's a way

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  6. Imagine you're playing soccer in a country where the rules against using your hands aren't enforced and almost everyone does it. Then, due to some egregious infraction that makes international rules, the powers that be decide to enforce the rules, but only against YOUR team. That's likely how the Chinese demonstrators feel. Going from an everyone defects to a nearly everyone cooperates equilibrium is pretty messy.

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  7. And we're all still super-sure that East Asians have the highest IQ's, right? The tests say so!

    If they have such super-high IQ's why do they gamble so much (instead of buying shares in the casino)?

    If they have such super-high IQ's why do so many of them in China buy empty apartments in empty towns? Because all those rural people will move into them some day, maybe, right? Of course those country cousins won't be able to pay the rents that justify the prices the 'investor' are paying.

    Of course for security sake many Chinese are buying gold and silver coins. How about platinum or palladium coins? Don't be silly platinum and palladium coins are just too rare. They'll never be worth anything unlike gold or silver.

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  8. Makes you wonder about those very high PISA scores from Chine, doesn't it.

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  9. Not surprised during my time at business school the cheating scandals were the sole domain of Asians. The veneer of Asian intellectual dominance quickly dissipated during group work.

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  10. Hm. So maybe there's a good reason why the Ivies discriminate against Asian-Americans?

    The Coen Brothers did a spoof of this in A Serious Man, I believe. I seem to remember a Korean student trying to bribe the depressive Jewish protagonist. Movie was a miss but still more interesting than anything else out of Hollywood.

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  11. I had some interesting conversations with a young Korean immigrant a few years ago.

    He went to high school in the USA after his parents bought a condo in a top school district. He lived by himself in the condo as a minor starting at age 15, with an aunt living about half an hour away. When he turned 17, his 15 year old sister then moved in with him to go to the same school. He saw his parents less than once a year.

    This was so he could learn English, get in-state tuition at a California college, and avoid military service. Since he did not serve in the military, he risks arrest if he returns, which he doesn't want to do anyway since he's gay and quality of life is better in the USA.

    He described Korean education as 10 hour days in the normal schools, then a few hours more of cram school in the evening, then going to a live-in cram school "camp" over the summer for more 12 hour days. This is typical for a middle class family, and might be even more intense for only children.

    He defied a few asian stereotypes. First, he was tall, about 6 feet 1, though extremely thin. Second, he was not very smart, and was not able to get into one of the nearby Cal-State schools, much less the "Asian-American Dream" of a UC school.

    While not smart, he had a perfect work ethic and quiet, pleasant demeanor, and maintained an A- average at his community college.

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  12. @Anonymous 4:15PM

    Those high PISA scores aren't from China as a whole, they are only from selected urban areas in China. They would do about as well as you would expect as they come from China's big well to do cities.

    It's like if you compared the PISA scores of Boston to whole other countries.

    Regardless, this whole riot business is at least progress in the sense that some Chinese care about the cheating problem and they're willing to do something about it

    I'm not sure if Asian-Americans are any more likely to cheat than non-Asians.

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  13. So magically crossing the USA border just makes then not want to cheat anymore. That's ludicrous Kaz. For the most part I like the way that anon goes after Dr. V, but it does seem that Indians don't have this level of cheating problems. Corruption yes, but endemic cheating no. Then again my parents were WASP universalists in the sense that they would turn me into the school if they caught me cheating so the idea that these parents would blame the proctors is appalling to me.

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  14. "And we're all still super-sure that East Asians have the highest IQ's, right? The tests say so!"

    Yes, we are sure than the Japanese, South Koreans have IQs of around 105. They have been tested very extensively, both in their home countries and in the USA going back 100 years. Even as reviled manual laborers in California 100 years ago, they were known to be smart and their US born children dominated public schooling.

    There remain I think two big open questions relating to east asian IQ.

    First, NE asian average IQ has been established to be 1/3 of a SD above the US white mean, why do they seem to underperform at the extremely high IQ level compared to whites?

    There are three explanations I can think of, all of which could be true to some extent. The first is that the east asian IQ SD is smaller than the US white SD. Thus, as you get further and further out to IQ>160 levels, they become relatively rare, but the effect is only noticeable around those ranges.

    The second explanation is that extreme levels of intellectual achievement require progressively greater levels of verbal and/or creative intelligence, while the east asian IQ advantage is in math and spatial reasoning.

    The third is that IQ tests have a very slight bias against whites relative to asians in testing general intelligence, perhaps due to the docility and longer attention spans of asian boys especially relative to whites.

    The second big question is, How smart are rural Chinese? We know that urban coastal chinese as well as overseas chinese perform as well as Japan and South Koreans, but we don't have much data on the average rice farming family that makes up the bulk of the population. How well do they do on culture fair type tests that don't penalize lack of education?

    There are several reason to doubt that rural chinese are as smart as their urban and Japanese/Korean cousins.

    First, rural china has been extremely poor for a long time. Second, China's examination system has led to brain drain for centuries. Third, top Chinese achievers seem to come almost entirely from coastal areas. Fourth, the Chinese minority who immigrated to Taiwan after Mao's revolution are economically and socially dominant over the native majority, suggesting this Chinese emigre population has a higher IQ than the native Taiwanese, who reflect the rural Chinese average. Fifth, we know that in the United States and Europe urban/suburban white populations generally have higher IQs than those in farming areas.

    Finally, as a general matter, human beings do not average 105 IQs, or even 100. The high IQs of Europeans and NE asians are the exception, not a good background assumption. The extremely diverse populations of Africa and the many "archaic" races of Asia all have average IQs well below 100, as do most modern asian populations and the first settlers of the Americas and Pacific islands. The natural null hypothesis is that rural Chinese have an IQ of 100 or less.

    Also, while there were certainly intelligence gene selection pressures on rural Chinese, the Chinese interior was never as densely population as South Korea or Japan, and for the most part warmer and more fertile.

    If I had to pull together an estimate from all this, it would be than rural Chinese, including those who left rice firms in the past 25 years to work at coastal factories, have an average potential IQ of around 100, not 106, and the average for the country is around 102, not the 105/106 estimates you see for Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. That still would make the Chinese the fourth smartest ethnic group in the world after Ashkenazim, Japanese, and Koreans, and ahead of all gentile European populations.

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  15. Zoink:" Second, he was not very smart, and was not able to get into one of the nearby Cal-State schools, much less the "Asian-American Dream" of a UC school."

    If he had such a strong work ethic and was not able to get into a CA Sate uni, he must have been more than merely "not very smart." He must have been kind of stupid.

    Zoink;"While not smart, he had a perfect work ethic and quiet, pleasant demeanor, and maintained an A- average at his community college."

    Since a UC is the "Asian American dream," why didn't he sign an intersegmental transfer agreement? That way, he does his first two years at a CC, and, provided he maintains a good GPA , he then moves on to a UC uni.

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  16. Regardless, this whole riot business is at least progress in the sense that some Chinese care about the cheating problem and they're willing to do something about it

    It is not progress. The rioters want the cheating to continue, not end. How on earth is that progress? Or were you being sarcastic?

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  17. Steve, this is one of those fake but "accurate" news stories put out by the glorious leaders at media pravda.

    There was a gaokao entrance exam and there was a disturbance afterwards by angry parents. However, the cause of which was not because the parents were upset that the students were not allowed to cheat, but rather because of full body searches of male and female students alike. The reporting, if you can call it that, notes the security during the examinations. The disturbance was by angry parents outraged that their little snowflakes had been "molested" and treated like criminals.

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  18. Invigilators, huh? You learn something every day.

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  19. We should teach NAM's to cheat (better). Gap Closed and we can all move on.

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  20. "In the four decades I've followed test scores by ethnicity, the biggest single change has been Asian-Americans pulling away in the 21st Century."

    Not all cheating is the same(though none is justifiable). Some cheat because they don't wanna study and just make the grade.
    Others cheat because getting an A is not good enough. They must cheat to get an A+.

    Blacks in Atlanta cheat just to make the grade. Asians cheat in Asia to get the best grade.
    Both are bad, but one group is clearly more ambitious than others.

    I don't know about Asia, but we must show zero tolerance for cheating in the US.

    but but but... what about amnesty that openly allows and rewards 15 million illegals for cheating!!!

    Maybe 'cheating' is odious word like 'illegal' and 'alien'!

    Call it 'extraordinary initiative'.
    I mean those kids DREAM of going to elite colleges. How dare we pass judgment on them!!

    The Dream Test!

    No Dream Left Behind!

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  21. Oh... Democrats and Voting.

    Massive cheating.

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  22. invigilators


    Proctors.

    Yeah, I had to look it up.

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  23. Chief Seattle6/21/13, 6:35 PM

    I smile every time I see a Sailer demographics chart chart where the yellow line is asian and the black line is black.

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  24. "invigilators"

    The Telegraph, the main Tory broadsheet, has a lot of older subscribers who studied Latin and even Greek in school, so they have pretty big vocabularies.

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  25. I went to a bog standard English comprehensive state school and we called the supervisors of the exams invigilators without having any Greek or Latin expanded vocabularies.

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  26. @Edward

    I wasn't being sarcastic. Well, not completely at least.

    There is a long way to go before culturally cheating is no longer acceptable. An institution at the very least is initiating that cultural shift.

    @Derek

    I was talking more about Asians raised in America.

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  27. Culture clash. Culture clash. No. Is grounds for lawsuit.

    /third A Serious Man reference for you there.

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  28. "If he had such a strong work ethic and was not able to get into a CA State uni, he must have been more than merely 'not very smart.' He must have been kind of stupid."

    He had several strikes against him:
    Korean, male, lack of native English fluency, and upper-middle class public school. The good UC schools are attracting increasing numbers of foreign and out-of-state students and are now extremely competitive, while the next few tiers have suffered from cutbacks in public funding. Meanwhile the influx of asians and college educated Americans from other states to California is making the competition for the decreasing number of in-state tuition slots increasingly fierce.

    Also, he didn't apply to every single cal state, just the ones within reasonable driving distance.

    His IQ is probably around 105 and is pleasant and unpretentious. I'd never call such a person stupid.

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  29. I think the cheating scandal speaks highly of the Chinese (FWIW I am not Chinese). It shows them to be ruthless, cutthroat, unwilling to let pedestrian notions of morality infringe upon their path to success.

    Also known as the Genghis Khan strategy.

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  30. "invigilator" is also common in Canada.

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  31. What is a verbal east asian iq and caucasian iq??
    Ly'ing' and your blue cops should be study verbal iq and create new book
    about Wealth of Nations.

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  32. Ex Submarine Officer6/21/13, 9:23 PM

    " the Chinese interior was never as densely population as South Korea or Japan, and for the most part warmer and more fertile."

    I'm taking it that you've never spent a summer in Japan. Palmettos anyone?

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  33. All I know is that America became the most powerful nation on earth without the help of third world immigrants. America didn't need Chinese cheaters then and it doesn't need them now.

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  34. @ Zoink

    “The first is that the east asian IQ SD is smaller than the US white SD.”

    I think this an urban legend. I haven’t studied IQ research as well as others, but the SAT is supposed to be a large-sample IQ test. Asians have the highest SAT standard deviations for math and critical reading. White SD is almost as low as African-American SD. Asian SAT scores have risen a lot (both for Asian Americans and foreign students), but even in the 80s, when their scores were much lower, Asians had higher percentages scoring in the top ranges on both the math and verbal SAT tests. Asian verbal distributions are bimodal due to the language differences.

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  35. The Wobbly Guy6/21/13, 10:24 PM

    In Singapore, national exams are ALWAYS supervised by teachers from other schools. Keeps everybody honest.

    The prevailing attitude we have is: even if you can cheat now, can you cheat throughout your life?

    I have it on good authority that other than chinese language and chinese literature, all the other 'A' level (pre-university) subjects tested in Singapore are magnitudes of difficulty beyond PRC exams.

    I have top PRC students come in as government sponsored scholars,and then find themselves struggling, surprisingly not because of language barrier issues. It's because the level of critical thinking required goes well beyond rote memory and is just something they actually don't have too much practice in (or may not be very good at it in the first place).

    Few in Singapore have any high opinion of the national exams in PRC.

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  36. "It is not progress. The rioters want the cheating to continue, not end. How on earth is that progress? Or were you being sarcastic?" - I believe he is making the point that the riot was triggered in the 1st place, though they'll have to back down. I'd bet the reason for the rioting is that these parents don't trust everyone not to cheat, living in a low trust country is going to suck.

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  37. Duke of Qin said...
    -----------------------


    You ruined the fun. I was enjoying the yellow peril hysteria.

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  38. Canadians riot over hockey.

    Chinese riot over tests.

    Brazilians riot to riot. Yikes.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2345600/Teenager-killed-million-Brazilian-protesters-streets-80-cities-worst-night-violence-yet.html

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  39. Marlowe said...
    I went to a bog standard English comprehensive state school and we called the supervisors of the exams invigilators without having any Greek or Latin expanded vocabularies.

    6/21/13, 7:03 PM

    Same here, graduated in the last decade.

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  40. One of the lessons imparted to my sons from their (black) football coaches was:

    "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying"

    Some people play to win.

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  41. Dr Van Nostrand6/21/13, 11:20 PM


    "invigilators"

    The Telegraph, the main Tory broadsheet, has a lot of older subscribers who studied Latin and even Greek in school, so they have pretty big vocabularies."

    Actually thats the word they used in India. And of course cheating was pretty common there too.

    Not so much in the entrace exams but once you are in college,its pretty much the done thing.

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  42. Dr Van Nostrand6/21/13, 11:23 PM


    "invigilator" is also common in Canada."

    Forgot to mention, this term like others is more of a British holdover as it is used often in commonwealth countries.

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  43. Remember all those brain-teasing quizzes from Google?.

    That they used to screen potential recruits?
    Well, their head of recruiting has just confirmed that they are worthless are going over the data. Google is also much less likely to look at GPA or SAT scores, since they also do no predict work performance.

    An irony: the guy who was behind these GPA/SAT restrictions was an East Asian dude. Then Laszlo Bock and other genius top chiefs went over them and said, hold on, the data we have make no prediciton at all between SAT/GPA's and how well they're doing even after only a few years.

    Bock said that having a high GPA/SAT showed a willingness to adapt to very specific conditions but showed much less ability to adapt to a fast-changing one.

    Remember that both the ACT and the now post-recentered SAT's are less tied to G than they were.
    In California, it's not unsual to see Asian parents send their kids to prep for SATs years and years in advance, and that pays off a lot more because it works.
    And does cheating occur? Who knows, it's quite possible.

    Read more here:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all

    They are now hiring more college and high school dropouts even if college grads dominate, they look a lot less on GPA/SAT.

    Remember, this is Google, so they don't do things on a whim, and they have the data to back it up.

    Could this partly explain why there's a gap between Asian performance in the work force, which isn't outstanding(but not bad by any stretch) and their SAT/GPA's?

    Have to be bitter to see yourself be outworked and outsmarted by a high school dropout after spending years on perfecting the SAT scores.
    Heh.

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  44. Any thoughts on why the rise in ACT scores are more dramatic than the rise in SAT scores amongst Asian-Americans?

    Do Asians even take the ACT?

    Regardless, the National Center for Education Statistics seems to have different ACT composites scores by race than what the Unsilenced Science graph shows, although it's only compiled to 2009.

    http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_147.asp

    Even if the graph correctly depicts 2010-2013, the rise isn't as dramatic as the curve would indicate because Asians were already scoring in the mid-22's in late 90's before dipping... look at the table.

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  45. One possibility is that the ACT used to be taken mostly by people living with, say 800 miles of Iowa while the SAT was taken by West Coasters and people living near New Jersey, but then they both went national, typically as the second choice of ambitious students in their region. But I don't know if that coincides with the sudden rise in Asian-American ACT scores or not.

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  46. All I know is that America became the most powerful nation on earth without the help of third world immigrants. America didn't need Chinese cheaters then and it doesn't need them now.

    You're wrong. It's generally understood that the vast majority of immigrants to America were basically escaping third world living conditions from whichever country they came from.

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    Replies
    1. By third world I mean non-white. As the Prince Regent on Black Adder might say,"You must be a bit of a thick-o."

      Delete
  47. "He described Korean education as 10 hour days in the normal schools, then a few hours more of cram school in the evening, then going to a live-in cram school "camp" over the summer for more 12 hour days. This is typical for a middle class family, and might be even more intense for only children."

    that's overkill. the chinese students (enrolled in private schools)in the philippines study from 7-11:30am (english/filipino) and 1-4:30pm (chinese). why are they better than the average filipino in math? because they study twice the math that ordinary filipino students usually get. english math in the morning, taught by filipino teachers, then chinese math in the afternoon, taught by chinese teachers using different math techniques.

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  48. Chief Seattle said...
    "I smile every time I see a Sailer demographics chart chart where the yellow line is asian and the black line is black."

    It's my chief contribution to human understanding.

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  49. @Zoink

    It's not uncommon with Koreans and Japanese, with the Japanese concentrated in Hawaii and California.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goose_father

    I knew a few kids that did this. The unfortunate part in making these sacrifices is that not all dreams come true.

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  50. I'm taking it that you've never spent a summer in Japan. Palmettos anyone?

    Okinawa is quite a bit south of the mainland.

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  51. “Regardless, the National Center for Education Statistics seems to have different ACT composites scores by race than what the Unsilenced Science graph shows”

    I took my data from ACT.org. It appears that my data matches the NCES table, except for 1998, 1999, and 2000. For those years, the NCES appears to inflate scores for all racial groups, but for the total group, men, and women, the scores are not inflated in those years. Therefore, their race numbers are wrong.

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  52. That is the Errol of Flynns effects they've got going on there in China.

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  53. "Asians have the highest SAT standard deviations for math and critical reading"

    Cheating by some but not all Asians would likely raise both the mean and standard deviation.

    Robert Hume

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  54. Flynns = Flynn.

    Preview is for cwoards.

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  55. I took my data from ACT.org. It appears that my data matches the NCES table, except for 1998, 1999, and 2000. For those years, the NCES appears to inflate scores for all racial groups, but for the total group, men, and women, the scores are not inflated in those years. Therefore, their race numbers are wrong.

    The other thing I noticed after I made my initial comment was that the NCES table grouped Islanders along with Asians, whereas your graph had them as distinct groups. The grouped score should have been slightly lower. Good enough for government work...

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  56. Cheating by some but not all Asians would likely raise both the mean and standard deviation.

    If there is mass cheating on the SAT in the US, it will most likely be from the boarding school crowd.

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  57. Simon in London6/22/13, 1:29 AM

    "anony-mouse said...
    And we're all still super-sure that East Asians have the highest IQ's, right? The tests say so!

    If they have such super-high IQ's why do..."

    Best estimate is north-east Asian IQ is around 5 points higher than European, due to visual-spatial advantages (not verbal). 5 points is not super-high, it's about what you'd expect a difference between urban-rural to be. 105 would not traditionally get you to University, for instance.

    But it is pretty clear that north-east Asians are in a class with Europeans in having the potential to create and maintain advanced, wealthy industrial societies - Japan, South Korea, Singapore - and it doesn't much look as if anyone else has the same capability.

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  58. Simon in London6/22/13, 1:35 AM

    Derek Brown:
    "it does seem that Indians don't have this level of cheating problems. Corruption yes, but endemic cheating no."

    IME all south-Asian countries are a risk for cheating, though it tends to be the lower-class students who are most likely to cheat - the upper classes appear to have an honour code and are smarter. This may be different from China or Saudi Arabia where I don't see any class gradient.

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  59. Simon in London6/22/13, 1:41 AM

    "invigilators"

    Steve Sailer:
    "The Telegraph, the main Tory broadsheet, has a lot of older subscribers who studied Latin and even Greek in school, so they have pretty big vocabularies."

    'Invigilator' is standard UK English. I 'invigilated' last week. :) What do you call them in American English?

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  60. "It's generally understood that the vast majority of immigrants to America were basically escaping third world living conditions from whichever country they came from."

    And it's also what anti-immigrationists are trying to escape from too.

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  61. Nooffensebut,

    My theory is that the white IQ SD is larger than the _NE asian_ IQ SD.

    The SAT "asian" catagory includes many other non-NE asian groups, and is also not a representative sample of a group, and does not even try to be one.

    I tried looking, but I could not find any evidence either way on the issue for actual IQ tests that seek representative samples.

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  62. "According to the protesters, cheating is endemic in China, so being forced to sit the exams without help put their children at a disadvantage": well then they should have paid their bribes like sensible people.went

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  63. Steve,

    Asians also pull a version of the Danny Almonte scam. I meet several Korean and Chinese undergraduates who already had a degree from a university in Asia who were repeating their last two years of undergraduate college to get a better GPA and thus a better graduate school. I also meet graduate school who had already studied in Asian and were repeating graduate school in the U.S. It is easy to look smart when you are older and have already taken the class once.

    I wonder how many supposed 15 y/o Korea are really 17 or 18.

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  64. >A special team of female invigilators was on hand to intimately search female examinees<

    What's the Latin term for that?

    >It is basically the end point of this blog's anti-PC ideology. PC subverts the will to power, this sort of remorseless cheating is the ultimate expression of the will to power.<

    PC is an expression of the will to power. "The will to power" (the beau ideal of every mean weakling) is the attempt to crush or be a parasite on genuine strength, i.e. the traits that build what's valuable in the world: traits such as honesty, intelligence, consistency, integrity, etc.

    >Brazilians riot to riot.<

    They're rioting against government corruption. For example, public money goes into the pockets of the bureaucrats and into professional soccer, and not into its promised targets: health care and schools.

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  65. "Asians have the highest SAT standard deviations for math and critical reading"

    Would lumping all Asians together, including those from lower performing populations in the Phillipines, etc. -- increase the SD? Would it even be a normal distribution?

    BTW, what is the Ashkenazi SD? Anybody know?

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  66. "rampant cheating on SAT" may not be an accurate description occurred recently in Korea. Rather, it was associated with an inherent problem of SAT system coupled with profit-minded SAT cram schools. SAT system randomly choose questions from the Bank, thus if one studies enough number of previous questions, it's likely that you will see exact questions in the test. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine that some SAT cram school analyzed enough number of previously administered SAT questions and began to teach their students. Korean branch of SAT office found out that some books used by cram schools contained questions that would appear in their next SAT text, so decided to cancel the test. That's what happened in Korea a few months ago.

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  67. hardly wrote:

    "I think the cheating scandal speaks highly of the Chinese (FWIW I am not Chinese). It shows them to be ruthless, cutthroat, unwilling to let pedestrian notions of morality infringe upon their path to success.
    It is basically the end point of this blog's anti-PC ideology. PC subverts the will to power, this sort of remorseless cheating is the ultimate expression of the will to power.
    No shame, no guilt, no honor. Reactionaries think sympathy and altruism are signs of mental weakness. But they still hold up shame, guilt and honor as virtues. Intellectual consistency by anyone who opposes PC would recognize any moral system that impedes personal success as mental weakness.
    Chinese people really are one step ahead on the evolutionary tree."

    This site is pretty ethnocentric, and that center is not asian, so I don't think you are going to get many commenters.

    If it makes you feel any better, other people have similar thoughts, ie about what hbd actually implies.

    Everyone is going to find something different to focus on in a field of knowledge. But so far what depresses me the most is the fact that everything I have ever been taught or considered to be "good" is associated with higher intelligence.

    I don't have time to pull all these strings and research this stuff. And I'd have to learn a lot about things I don't know much about, and honestly have never been much interested in, like genetics, biology, and statistics (The "uncool" area of math. Makes Topology seem sexy.)

    But if taken at face value, and usually a pretty compelling argument is made, intelligent == "good," less intelligent == "less good or useless."

    As a matter of fact, reading this stuff makes you think that intelligence is the only good there is.

    Now as to the rest of your post, I don't have many thoughts on the philosophical implications.

    But I have gotten totally cynical about the American system as it operates now. And if you are playing the game with others who have different notions about morality, integrity, altruism, and honor then you need to throw away what's not working.

    I think we all need to start being realistic with kids.

    1) Explain to them how the system works, all that sweet, sweet, money Goldman and the Wall Streeters make.

    2) Explain how elite schools are the gatekeeper to jobs there, and the fact that the cachet associated with them is important in other areas of striving like science.

    3) Explain that their future can depend on convincing an interviewer of a totally different background, one who might well despise the world you came from, to bless you by admittance.

    4) Explain that they are competing for admission to elite schools with people whose families and culture, asian or not, prioritize academic achievement.

    And who rightly understand that such an important test is too important not to cheat on.

    5) Basically things need to change. Sat prep needs to be the new cool. Cheating on tests is just what it takes. Sell yourself to an Ivy league interviewer by any means necessary. Whole arrays of on paper only activities need to be manufactured for students to be associated with to warm the hackles of interviewers.

    6) An organized effort to move the center of wealth and power from where it is now. It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be forever.

    "I personally don't have the strength to be like the Chinese."

    Come on, you are making a mountain out of a molehill.

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  68. "Asians have the highest SAT standard deviations for math and critical reading"

    Cheating by some but not all Asians would likely raise both the mean and standard deviation."


    Just as widespread cheating by blacks boosted their voter participation percentage above whites in the last election. Mail-in vote banking by Democrats has to have been the biggest scandal in US election history. I have a majority black school board where I live, and they pioneered this practice a decade ago. They are constantly passing crazy bond measures against the wishes of a slim majority (people and businesses who actually pay property taxes). The board figures out how many votes it banks, then goes out and gets blacks to vote again on election day. The fraud is ignored by local election officials.

    In our recent presidential election, vote banking insulated Democrats from Obama's unintelligible and Biden's childish debate performances. Their idiocy was a real eye opener for many white Obama supporters, but before they figured out how uninformed and dangerously disconnected from reality their president and vice president were, they had already mailed in their ballots. After that, the Democrat strategy was an attempt to start a race riot before the election and get blacks fired up enough to vote twice.

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  69. IQ test is not SAT. You can not study for IQ test. And the IQ is quite stable for any one over lifetime.

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  70. " A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.
    "

    Chinese ingenuity on full dispray!

    http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/chinese-magic-drive.html

    Now where are the haters who think chinese are only copycats? huh!

    http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/x1k9c/chinese_black_market_scams_or_theres_no_such/

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  71. That chart is kind of depressing when the most intelligent group averages less than 24. It shows just how dull the average human is, no matter the race.

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  72. Re: invigilators. I didn't recognize the word, but the meaning was pretty obvious from both context and etymology. (Honestly!) Knowing that knight candidates sat up keeping a vigil probably made it easier.

    hardly said: Intellectual consistency by anyone who opposes PC would recognize any moral system that impedes personal success as mental weakness.

    Hunsdon said: That whole citizenism thing just flew right past you, didn't it?

    Marlowe said: I went to a bog standard English comprehensive state school . . . .

    Hunsdon said: One of the things I dislike about America is the way our education system has calved off from the old country, and in calving lost much of our rich literary and educational heritage.

    Don't much miss the cold showers and pooftery of Rugby. (Good Lord, is Rugby now co-educational? My word.)

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  73. Asian higher standard deviation on SAT is due to more anomalous high end outliers - which their IQ distribution does not have, plus SAT has that bimodal thing going on (due to language) which jacks up the Asian standard deviation a bit more.

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  74. http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2013/06/federal-authorities-say-a-farmers-branch-man-now-in-custody-is-the-so-called-mesh-mask-bandit.html/

    OT: immigrant rights activist Luis de la Garza arrested for robbing banks. I guess activism isn't as lucrative as he hoped?

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  75. Right, because Asian Americans are exactly the same as Asians.

    So do you have any hard evidence to indicate that ASIAN AMERICANS cheat on the SAT more than everybody else? I am guessing no because otherwise you would have linked it.

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  76. "All I know is that America became the most powerful nation on earth without the help of third world immigrants. America didn't need Chinese cheaters then and it doesn't need them now."

    You're wrong. It's generally understood that the vast majority of immigrants to America were basically escaping third world living conditions from whichever country they came from.


    No, you're wrong. The "Third World" is a place. Poor people who live in other places do not come from the Third World. Unbelievable.

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  77. "In L.A., however, the typical conspiracy theorist is more likely a Near Eastern immigrant in a luxury car. The Persians, Arabs, Armenians, Israelis, Georgians, Bulgarians, and Russians, however, are not self-conscious about being conspiracy theorists. They don't see themselves as a despised and defiant minority. Back in the old country, nobody doubts that there are conspiracies. The only question is who can come up with the best conspiracy."

    So you are saying that immigrants can change once they reach Americans shores? Yet only East Asians stay the same? So which is it?

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  78. Anyways, watching a bunch of white supremacists crying large emo tears over their lack of achievement vis a vis the Asians on the ACT brings a big smile on my face :) .

    Sour grapes, anyone :) ?

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  79. I am still waiting on the hard evidence.

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  80. Still waiting ...

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  81. PC subverts the will to power, this sort of remorseless cheating is the ultimate expression of the will to power.


    There's a lot of half-baked poorly understood Nietzsche going around these days. The "will to power" had SFA to do with "remorseless cheating".

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  82. @Anon: "Not surprised during my time at business school the cheating scandals were the sole domain of Asians. The veneer of Asian intellectual dominance quickly dissipated during group work."

    Yes, I experienced the same thing regarding the Chinese students in my MBA program. They were useless on the many group projects. No one was ever caught cheating, but none of them spoke English at better than nursery school level. It was painful to try to have a conversation with them. I couldn't figure out how they could understand the profs and read the materials.

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  83. Hong Xiuquan flunked the civil service exams twice. That led to six hundred cities being destroyed and twenty million deaths.

    The Chinese take test taking seriously.

    But it is literally true that there is no fairness if you do not let us cheat. It happened to me.

    As a junior in high school I took history. That was at a Catholic military high school. Like most mediocre history teachers our lay teacher graded 'on the curve' and only judged student competence by the knowledge of specific dates.

    So I felt at a disadvantage when most of my classmates took the history tests with the text book laying open in their laps. The teacher didn't proctor. He just sat at his desk at the front and did other things that kept him from observing the behavior of the cadets.

    Reluctantly I too began to cheat out of a sense of self preservation.

    I got out of that school and went to public school shortly thereafter. To my astonishment there was no cheating in public school at all. Previously in military high school we had religion classes and we did a group recitation of a rosary everyday - and we all cheated whenever we could.

    Albertosaurus


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  84. I am absolutely certain that Native Born White Americans can survive and thrive without hardly any Asians at all in America. How do I know this with such a high level of certainty? Just go have a look at the photo of the NASA mission control room Steve posted a year ago.Demographics:99 percent..possibly a hundred percent Native Born White American Male. You see, the experiment has already been performed.

    I've been reading up on what research grade phd mathematicians have to say about the brutal Putnam Exam. Great sucess on the Putnam Exam is not to be taken as a proxy for high orignal and creative mathematical IQ. The concensus seems to be high level of success on Putnam exams and IMO competition are not high predictors of doing orignal mathematical research. Training on Putnam type problems helps to achieve sucess on Putnam type and IMO type problems...which do not remotely resemble the types of problems encountered in serious mathematical research.

    How many of you here take seriously the notion that the current "US IMO Team is really an American IMO Team in a geneline sense that reflects the historic American Nation? I certainly don't accept the current "US" IMO team as a bona American IMO team in the authentic American geneline sense.

    I can live without the Asians being in America. How bout you folks? And it really is not a choice between Mexican Mayans and Chinese legal immigrants..for there is another option:none of the above.

    What was the demographics of Lockheed Skunkworks in the old days under Kelly Johnson? I am very certain Steve knows this answer having had an aerospace engineer father..my late father was an Native Born White American Male Aerospace Gruman Engineer.

    Bill Blizzard and his Men

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  85. We should teach NAM's to cheat (better). Gap Closed and we can all move on.



    Well, that is the whole problem, now isn't it?

    NAM's are too incompetent to cheat, to intractable to teach, and too incorrigible to care.

    If they weren't so, they would have figured out how to cheat all on their own like Koreans and Chinese.

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    Replies
    1. Excellent suggestion, Eric Cartman.

      Delete

  86. You're wrong. It's generally understood that the vast majority of immigrants to America were basically escaping third world living conditions from whichever country they came from.


    This is just utter BS. Europe in the "dark ages" was better than some of the world now. Lots of immigrants were skilled and educated. The American colonies were the market for book sellers because Americans were far more literate than the general populations in Europe. Immigrants to America were more daring and ambitious, but they weren't escaping hell holes. Lots came for religious freedom as well. They were non conformists. Third world conditions don't produce that kind of folks and those kind of folks don't create the kinds of nasty places we now consider "third world conditions." What you describe comes from lib professors imaginations.

    When European emigrants left Europe for America, Europe was at the top of the worldwide performance heap. Conditions in America were not better than in Europe in many ways. So, no, they did not expect to escape third world conditions by coming here. That just is not the case.

    When my own forbear left Norway when he was widowed, he came here and lived in a sod hut on the South Dakota prairie. No way in the world was that better than in Norway. Even his granddaughter lived in a soddie that my mother described to me. Norway had less opportunity because he could not own a farm like he could in South Dakota. But the actual conditions in Norway were better. At a minimum the weather is far better in Norway.

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  87. "But it is literally true that there is no fairness if you do not let us cheat. It happened to me.
    As a junior in high school I took history. That was at a Catholic military high school. Like most mediocre history teachers our lay teacher graded 'on the curve' and only judged student competence by the knowledge of specific dates."

    You could have blown the whistle and reported on the problem.

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  88. Jews make up only 20% of Mensa qualified whites in the US. Flush out your head gear new guy.

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  89. So you are saying that immigrants can change once they reach Americans shores? Yet only East Asians stay the same? So which is it?

    It's both. I think it's called the Round-eye effect.

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  90. As Albertosaurus said, Americans have proctors.

    r daneel goatweed

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  91. Invigilator is a pretty good name for a super hero.

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  92. > Indians don't have this level of cheating problems.

    Only an anecdote, but in my (poor) grad school I met an Indian guy who claimed to have gotten very high scores in his GRE. So why wasn't he at a better school? His explanation was that there's a lot of cheating in India so US schools don't take scores from there seriously.

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  93. @Anon: "Just go have a look at the photo of the NASA mission control room Steve posted a year ago.Demographics:99 percent..possibly a hundred percent Native Born White American Male."

    Sounds like grounds for a federal disparate impact case.

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  94. @Anon: "What was the demographics of Lockheed Skunkworks in the old days under Kelly Johnson? I am very certain Steve knows this answer having had an aerospace engineer father..my late father was an Native Born White American Male Aerospace Gruman Engineer."

    In the late '80s, I worked for a large defense contractor developing software for missile guidance systems. Out of three thousand engineers and technicians at my facility,I recall one inept black engineer, very few Asians and Indians, less than 10% females, and the rest just smart, dedicated, dependable regular White guys.

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  95. "Would lumping all Asians together, including those from lower performing populations in the Phillipines, etc. -- increase the SD? Would it even be a normal distribution? "

    That's exactly right.

    "BTW, what is the Ashkenazi SD?"

    Unlike NE Asians, Ashkenazi seem to overperform gentiles all the way to the top of the intellectual spectrum. Just as you'd expect if they have a mean of around 112 and SD of 15, they are somewhat overrepresented at the local junior college faculty, even more overrepresented at the fancy liberal arts college, and their overrepresentation peaks when you get up to senior ivy league faculty, top hedge fund managers, and nobel prize science winners.

    If I remember right, they are 3x their population in the US House, but 6x in the US Senate.

    You're starting to see this with South v. NE Asians as well. The NE Asian mean IQ is obviously higher, but outside of the hard sciences, you see more South Asians getting top competitive positions in business, law and politics, even though they are greatly outnumbered by NE Asians. We have two South Asian governors now, but a NE asian has never been elected outside of Hawaii.

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  96. 'Don't let this be another excuse for "If Chinese people are so smart why have all major inventions come from Europeans" chest-thumping.'

    how long do we have to wait for the chinese to, say, design and manufacture a car for sale in the US? cars are well understood, 100 year old technology. no new technology, breakthroughs, or innovative thinking is necessary to turn out a basic, capable car. if you want to get in the game, copying established industry standards and principles is all you have to do when you're starting out.

    no nobel prize level, original scientific lab work is required here. i've specifically picked an example where nothing like that is necessary.

    south korea was able to do this in about 20 years. hyundai motors was formed in 1967 and they began selling in the US in 1986. now they are a dominant player in the mainstream car market.

    what's taking china so long? the chinese outnumber the south koreans by 30 to 1. they have THIRTY times as many people as south korea, and, supposedly, the same level of intelligence, and didn't go through a nation destroying war in the last 50 years requiring a permanently demilitarized zone.

    where are the cars?

    how much time does china need? how much of a numerical advantage does china need? 40 times more people? 50 times? 100 times as many people as south korea, before they can build ONE CAR good enough to be sold in the US?

    when is china going to show us ANYTHING? for 1 billion people who are supposed to have an IQ above 100, they sure don't do much. i remain as skeptical as ever that they are just as smart as the japanese and south koreans.

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  97. ""Asians have a smaller percentage than do Caucasians at the lower than average iq level, but also a smaller percentage at the extremely high level. That is my understanding."

    They aint got Jews and peckerwoods."

    All due respect to Jews (I'm not anti-Jewish; quite the contrary), most of the modern world was not invented by Jews. In fact, by the time Jews were reaching their full potential in 20th century America, much of the modern world had already been invented, most by gentiles.
    Jewish genius is far more evidence in non-tech areas of life, anyway.

    The Space program, both Russian and American, was largely a construction of ex-Nazi (?) Germans, after WWII, in Operation Paperclip.

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  98. We have friends in a DC suburb. Their children report many Chinese national students living with "uncles" and "aunts", paying board of course.

    They also report that cheating and collusion are rampant among Chinese nationals and some American Chinese. The Chinese don't have to surpass each other to reap the American bounty if they can surpass the whites.

    Not sour grapes, one of the children got into an Ivy League on close to full scholarship.

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  99. In some cases "everyone does it" can have unfortunate consequences.

    I was in Bangkok recently and travelling on one of their raised expressways.

    It was marked for two lanes, but there was an impromptu third lane in use with lots of cars in it.

    I sure hope that the designers of that expressway anticipated the approximately 50% extra load that it would be required to bear.

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  100. Not sour grapes, one of the children got into an Ivy League on close to full scholarship.

    The Ivy League doesn't give scholarships - academic, athletic, or any other kind of scholarships. It gives financial aid to all admitted students based on need.

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  101. No, the valedictorian in my son's class, an academic superstar from a wealthy WASP family, got a gigantic merit scholarship to Yale to win him away from Stanford.

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  102. how much time does china need? how much of a numerical advantage does china need? 40 times more people? 50 times? 100 times as many people as south korea, before they can build ONE CAR good enough to be sold in the US?

    when is china going to show us ANYTHING? for 1 billion people who are supposed to have an IQ above 100, they sure don't do much. i remain as skeptical as ever that they are just as smart as the japanese and south koreans.


    Apparently American contractors have been importing Chinese steel for American bridge repair and construction due to the decline in American steel manufacturing capacity and engineering staff:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324049504578545431938331880.html

    I don't believe Korea or Japan have significant space programs. I think China's space program is 3rd best in the world after NASA and the Russians. They're active in the commercial space industry and have launched satellites into orbit for Nigeria, Venezuela, Pakistan, Turkey, Argentina and Ecuador recently. I think that's harder than making cars.

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  103. No, the valedictorian in my son's class, an academic superstar from a wealthy WASP family, got a gigantic merit scholarship to Yale to win him away from Stanford.

    Are you sure it wasn't from outside Yale or need-based aid?

    http://www.yale.edu/sfas/finaid/outside-scholarships.html

    "While Yale does not award merit-based awards, our students often qualify for merit awards from other organizations."

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  104. The Ivy League policy against scholarships is based on the philosophy that all admitted students are supposed to be equal in merit. Academic or athletic merit based scholarships would imply some students have more merit than others, and thus there's only need-based financial aid.

    http://www.yale.edu/sfas/finaid/finaid-information/philosophy.html

    "All financial aid at Yale is need based and this policy helps to ensure that Yale will be accessible to talented students no matter what their resources. There are no athletic or merit based awards."

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  105. FWIW, I have heard people refer to their own or someone else's financial aid at Ivy League schools as "scholarships" as a euphemism.

    Also, some families are wealthy but have relatively low income - they own a lot of land, say, but the parents have low salaries working at non-profits or something. I think the "need" in need-based financial aid is generally primarily or solely determined by parental income.



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  106. Perhaps the Yale admissions department told some Yale alumni foundation to offer the kid a big scholarship to keep him away from Stanford. I don't know.

    His father is a partner in a big law firm.

    Yale, Harvard, etc. belong to a cartel (the Overlap Committee?) that got sued by the first Bush Administration for meeting in a hotel to fix prices (i.e., discounts, i.e., scholarship offers), but that doesn't mean they don't compete for far right edge students (this student had both the highest grades and highest intelligence -- consensus of teachers and other students -- of a school that has 8 to 16 National Merit Semifinalists each year).

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  107. Perhaps the Yale admissions department told some Yale alumni foundation to offer the kid a big scholarship to keep him away from Stanford. I don't know.

    I imagine that would be it, then. A scholarship that's affiliated but technically not part of the Yale admissions dept.

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  108. south koreans had SAT cancelled last month.
    as for only Shanghai being tested for PISA, it has way more people than some high-performing countries like finland put together, so that "oh no you only tested a city" isn't a good defence.

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  109. Immigrant from former USSR6/23/13, 1:05 AM

    query wrote:
    "The Space program, both Russian and American, was largely a construction of ex-Nazi (?) Germans, after WWII, in Operation Paperclip."

    My anecdotal evidence confirms this.
    To the contrary, nuclear programs had markedly j**sh participation: in original research in US, and in duplication of US design by Soviets, and in the UK development of the program. No info about French program.
    Happy approaching 4th of July.

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  110. no cheating! no peace!

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  111. @hardly said:
    "Intellectual consistency by anyone who opposes PC would recognize any moral system that impedes personal success as mental weakness."

    No it wouldn't.

    Group synergy > Nietzschean BS as will be shown when the carrying capacity of the planet plummets after the exceptional level of group synergy in the USA breaks down.

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  112. It's unfair to compare automotive industries with space programs. One is a heavily state driven endeavor, whereas the other is mostly market driven.

    I can see why China hasn't pursued auto manufacturing with the same zeal that they have with their space program or even their nuclear program. Their infrastructure of highways and roads have only recently become sufficient enough to support a large domestic auto industry, not to mention a historical problem of access to affordable fuel.

    That said, by 2008, China's auto industry was the biggest in the world, with exports totaling over 1 million vehicles in 2012. Safety standards are expected meet parity with multinationals by 2018.

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  113. Everyone likes to think that their ethnic group is the smartest and it had been a long and painful process to come to the realization that mine is not. However, if the figures used to make that chart are true (and they may well not be) then the sudden rise in scores by Asians are too sudden to be accounted for by cultural factors.

    If Hubei's scores were fishy, then so is the Asian surge.

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  114. The idea that Asians are smarter than whites is a rather new idea. Rushton had pushed that notion probably because it tended to support the validity of all IQ tests. In the seventies and eighties Marxist scientists like Steven Jay Gould routinely wrote essays in which they explained that whites did best on these white invented tests because of unconscious racism.

    But if Asians scored higher than whites that would trump that argument.

    There are a couple other things to keep in mind. The first of which is that East Asians are not better on all the subtests - only the math and performance parts. European whites do better on the verbal subtests.

    La Griffe du Lion finds a better fit between national prosperity and verbal IQ that non-verbal IQ. Maybe that means something.


    There is also the claim that the Japanese have a standard deviation in IQ scores of only 13 as opposed to the white European figure of 15. If this is true - and I'm not sure it is - the crossover point is a little north of 2 SDs above the mean. That means that a population of Japanese will have slightly more people with IQs of 130 but fewer at 145 and up.

    If any of this is true it means that Asians and whites will have about the same number of people at around the 130 mark but Asians will have fewer at 145 and above. In whites a 130 IQ is what we expect from physicians and corporate CEOs. 145 is about the average for Nobel Prize winners.

    A commenter named Jody seems to think that the Chinese can't be all that smart because they don't manufacture cars. Jody should get out more. The British car show 'Top Gear' did an episode recently in which they all predicted that they would soon be driving Chinese cars. BTW Top Gear is the number one reality show in the world. All 'gear heads' expect China to very shortly produce most of the low cost cars made in the world.

    The ability for a nation to make a world class car is not the function of a few men. It seems to require the whole economy or indeed the whole society.

    At the height of the Cold War the Soviet Union had half of the world's engineers but never could make a decent car. The USSR would buy an entire manufacturing plant from FIAT but every year it operated the cars were more and more defective., until they would have to close it down and buy another car plant from the West.

    The Hyundai and Kia were started the same way. Korea bought complete plants from Mitsubishi but in every subsequent year the Korean version grew more different and better than the original.

    Communism is a very bad system for auto manufacturing.

    If you read Chinese technological history you find that for millennia they have made new inventions but those inventions didn't stick. The principal reason I think has been the absence of intellectual property rights.

    Intellectual property rights were invented in the West by one Italian in the Renaissance. No not Da Vince but Brunelleschi. Brunelleschi insisted on getting credit for his inventions. He got the world's first patent. He guarded his achievements fiercely.

    Meanwhile in China they had the Sung Clock. A great invention but who was Sung? Sung wasn't an individual it was a whole dynasty. The genius inventor is unknown to history. When the great clock finally broke down it was abandoned - no one remembered how to fix it.

    We know that Brunelleschi created the Duomo in Florence even if we don't know how, in China no one got credit and inventions faded.

    My impression is that China over the last two thousand years has created more innovations but kept fewer of them until recently. They seem to be changing. If so we all will be driving Chinese cars.

    Albertosaurus

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  115. I'm not a longtime reader and I'm Asian, btw.

    Every time there's an Asian-themed blog post, it seems deliberately trollish. Or is that just my bias? How selfish of me.

    I suppose a careful consideration of the intended audience is in order. Keep up the good work.

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  116. Every time there's an Asian-themed blog post, it seems deliberately trollish. Or is that just my bias?

    Yes, it's just you. There's nothing wrong with that, though. Only European/American whites think there's something wrong with wanting to defend one's own people.

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  117. Anonymous wrote:

    "I'm not a longtime reader and I'm Asian, btw.

    Every time there's an Asian-themed blog post, it seems deliberately trollish. Or is that just my bias? How selfish of me.

    I suppose a careful consideration of the intended audience is in order. Keep up the good work."

    Yeah, but what exactly do you want anyone to do with that statement?

    Are the facts in error? It doesn't take much for me to imagine Chinese and Koreans cheating like crazy on the SAT.

    Heck I don't think they need to cheat, though I can readily imagine it. Why does everyone think this thing is an IQ test by proxy? I'm sure it does to a certain extent at the very high end, but you can easily prepare for that test, and I took it before the change in the 90's.

    Most people (at least the bulk of US takers) don't prep for it at all. Getting comfortable with the format, practicing answering questions and learning to toss in the towel on ones that are too sticky and come back later, learning the kinds of questions they ask, memorizing greek and latin prefixes and suffixes...

    I'm convinced that if you prep it will make a big difference. Maybe you do need a high IQ to go much past 700, but I think there are a whole lot of people who could score score say 1400 as opposed to 1200 if they prepped. And I think most of the elite schools Asians we are discussing do prep.

    In particular I think the math portion is much easier to do well on than the verbal. In retrospect I did much better on the verbal, but I could have better on math than the verbal if I had seen more questions of the sort they ask beforehand.

    All that is about the pre 90's test, the one that for some reason is considered to be an IQ test proxy.

    Now if you are Asian, answer this for me. Picture California and it's ethnic mix circa 1970. Compare that to the mix now, and the heavy Asian component, particularly at the UC schools and Stanford.

    Give me a reason to prefer the way it is now to the way it was then.

    California to me is just... I don't know how to phrase it properly... Mega Uncool or something is as close as I can get. All the music, the pop culture, the books, the movies..

    They still make that stuff, but it sucks now. It didn't use to.

    So what happened? Asians are a big part of new California. You guys doing anything I should value? Literally I'm drawing a blank. Manga sucks. Anime sucks. Tentacle porn sucks. I've never heard Asian music that I thought was any good, and have never even seen as Asian American musician (except for some guy in an orchestra or something).

    To quote a campaign slogan, "Where's the beef?"

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  118. Anonymous 6/22/13, 7:37 PM --

    One could argue that scientists of Jewish ancestry had begun to reach full potential in late 19th century Germany. That is the period when people like Hermann Minkowski, Heinrich Hertz (half-Jewish), Ferdinand Cohn (microbiologist), F.G.J. Henle (anatomist known for "loop of Henle" in the kidney), and Julius Cohnheim (experimental pathologist) were doing their best work or were well on their way. Many more Jewish scientists "came of age" there and in Hungary in the early 20th century. It is not as if the Jews accomplished nothing prior to arrival in the U.S. But your main point that the modern world was developed before the Jews became involved is. quite valid. The yeshivish Orthodox religion trapped the minds of European Jews for centuries. Only the aftershocks of the Eurpoean Enlightenment brought them out of that.

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  119. You're showing your musical philistinism, sunbeam. Classical music may not be cool, but it is artistically substantive in a way that the vast majority of recent pop culture is not. How much of the "cool" stuff will still be performed 100 years from now?

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  120. Anonymous wrote:

    "You're showing your musical philistinism, sunbeam. Classical music may not be cool, but it is artistically substantive in a way that the vast majority of recent pop culture is not. How much of the "cool" stuff will still be performed 100 years from now?"

    Eye of the beholder (or ear in this case). I know what I like, and what I don't.

    I've heard Ode to Joy, and a number of other classical works. Means nothing to me. I get more of a charge off of something like The Time of the Season by The Zombies than anything I've ever heard in classical music.

    I like folk and bagpipe music much better if I am going back a few centuries. I am also impervious to being impressed by someone who does like classical music. That is fine, but it doesn't mean much of anything, let alone that they have outstanding math abilities for example (though I understand there is a correlation..)

    Also I think you might be picking the wrong survivor. What makes you so sure classical will still be played in one hundred years, as opposed to Elvis?

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  121. re: "...the SAT is supposed to be a large-sample IQ test." nooffensebut

    Before the 1970s this was true but re-norming of the SATs and dropping IQ markers such as the analogies along with the entrance of the subjective essay have made the SATs a very weak IQ surrogate.

    I have been experiencing bright individuals at the university and corporate level for over 50 years and the really, really smart ones have been white males almost to an exclusion of any other. As a start get a copy of Nyborgs "The Scientific Study of General Intelligence" and learn why.

    Dan Kurt

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  122. "I don't believe Korea or Japan have significant space programs"

    japan has a bigger, better space program than china. far ahead in everything, except for plans and programs to put lots of people into space, which they have less interest in.

    south korea does not have a space program, nor do they need one. small nations do not need manned space programs or even much launching or satellite construction ability. that's better left to bigger nations.

    are we really going to argue the relative technological levels of japan and south korea versus china? they are both so far ahead of china, in almost every industry, with 20 times less people. next we'll be arguing that malaysia is just as advanced because a couple nations put some fabs there. trust me, japan and south korea are FAR, FAR ahead of the chinese in semiconductors, robotics, you name it.

    "I think that's harder than making cars"

    it's not. russia does it better than the US, in fact, russia does it for the US now, since obama gutted NASA launch capabilities. yet russia still can't make a car for sale in the US.

    launching stuff into orbit, that's 40 years ago technology. re-using rockets designed decades ago.

    "It's unfair to compare automotive industries with space programs. One is a heavily state driven endeavor, whereas the other is mostly market driven."

    this is why third world nations like india and paksitan can have ICBMs and nuclear fusion devices, but can't design and manufacture a car for sale in the first world. it's state funded defense industry engineering. copying stuff the europeans were doing 50 years ago for defense purposes. but the car industry is ruthlessly cut throat and requires constant tech improvment. and china, india, russia, brazil, pakistan can't hang there.

    it's not hard to make a car that sucks. russia does. china does. brazil does. even small nations in europe do. spain makes cars. the czech republic makes cars. it's another thing to compete internationally. and they don't. because they can't. it's NOT harder to have ICBMs and nukes. that's EASIER than building a good car.

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  123. re: "Hong Xiuquan flunked the civil service exams twice." Albertosaurus

    My recollection is that he flunked the exam FIVE times. BTW, I visited the building in the forbidden city where the BEST of the BEST were tested. This was in the early 1980s before tourism commenced in earnest. My unofficial guide was a cultured, well educated ( German Doctorate from the 1930s for which he payed dearly for during the Cultural Revolution ), and one who gave me a strong nudge to study the history of the Chinese exams. I tracked down a book, the original was in Japanese, that gave the exam history. I got it by inter-library loan, alas. I really should have bought it as I can't remember the title or author. I remember I got the lead for the book on Compuserve, on a discussion group long lost in the ether.

    Dan Kurt

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  124. "But if Asians scored higher than whites that would trump that argument."

    european men devised both the intelligence tests, as well as every sport in international play today.

    if these tests of ability were rigged, why do they show a spectrum of performance? that they show a spectrum of performance proves their validity. rigged tests would show european men as the best average performers in every measurement. they don't.

    the argument that africans in the US do not do well on intelligence tests, aptitude tests, or academic tests, because the tests were devised by european men, who rigged the tests, comes crashing headlong into the fact that every sport which africans play...was also devised, from scratch, by european men. africans were not involved in the development of any sport which they hold dear to their hearts.

    why aren't those tests rigged? why is the lie group and tensor math test rigged, but the put the ball in the hoop test is not rigged? it can't be both ways.

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  125. "A commenter named Jody seems to think that the Chinese can't be all that smart because they don't manufacture cars."

    a commenter named jody knows a lot about a lot of industries and wonders where the chinese are in ANY of them. if they can't copy and make a lower priced version of something which is not too complicated, it seems like don't exist in the space.

    1.3 BILLION people. supposedly, average IQ over 100. WHERE IS ALL THE STUFF? WHERE ARE ALL THE SUPERSCIENCE PROJECTS?

    for every ONE huge, superscience project the US has, china SHOULD HAVE FOUR. WHERE ARE THEY? where is the chinese supercollider? where is the chinese fusion reactor? where are the chinese stealth bombers? where are the chinese autonomous robots? where is the chinese railgun? where are the chinese CPUs?

    china seems to be limited to brute force construction of huge supercomputers. just making a bigger one and getting the top spot on the ISC list. using CPUs not made in china, of course. that's almost as bad as some saudi having the world's largest collection of ferraris because he wants to buy that many.

    how about this - when was the last time you played even a VIDEO GAME that was developed in china. not only do they not develop ANY important software in worldwide use, they can't even develop, program, and publish ONE single title that sells 1 million copies. what's this? they can't even program a video game? THAT'S RIGHT. THEY CAN'T. even POLAND can do this. even THE UKRAINE does this!

    even indians develop SOME software, and they don't develop much. china develops ALMOST NOTHING. it's a staggering, mind boggling state of affairs for supposedly such a gigantic pool of "high IQ" people.

    "The ability for a nation to make a world class car is not the function of a few men. It seems to require the whole economy or indeed the whole society."

    LOL is this guy serious? so a nation with ONE BILLION people ISN'T big enough to build an international class car? the second largest economy IN THE WORLD is not enough of an economy? yet crappy spain can do it. spain, in economic dire straights, designs and builds their own relatively decent automobiles at SEAT.

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  126. The whole idea that the country is some sort of educational-pyramid--based meritocracy is deeply anti-American. Not that there shouldn't be educational pyramids, but there should be many of them and the ability to enter (and exit) a given hierarchy should be fluid and based on specifics of individual dynamically-changing situations and the times. The idea of these big gateways that get you into the emperor's system is medieval, to say the least.

    The idea that unless you get into the right university at 18 you have no future in elite circles is simply not American.

    The problem with the one big pyramid is that when it gets it wrong (and it will), it sometimes can never recover. Or it can't recover fast enough. Instead of empowering it becomes a prison.

    We say decentralized economic organizations (capitalism) are superior to centralized economic organizations. Why isn't decentralization better for politics and education as well?

    Decentralized systems scale much better than centralized ones. Centralized systems become bottle-necked, they are full of choke points. One error can gum up the whole works. The decentralized system explores the world for things that work in parallel. It advances faster. Sometimes the system, not just the individuals, matters.

    Instead of one big pyramid, you need something more like the interstate highway system. Lots of on-and-off ramps. A uniformity and scale that cannot be achieve by a pyramid. A certain level of competition between would-be pyramids to maintain power balance.

    Automation may soon mean the economy will never be able to readily employee all the available population. (We already might be there.) So more adults are going to be in-and-out of higher education. This, combined with increasing effectiveness of distance education, means there's probably room for lots of changes in the current system. The current system probably reflects, what, the needs of the early 1900s with post WW2 and Sputnik adaptations layered on top?

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  127. it's not. russia does it better than the US, in fact, russia does it for the US now, since obama gutted NASA launch capabilities. yet russia still can't make a car for sale in the US.

    launching stuff into orbit, that's 40 years ago technology. re-using rockets designed decades ago.


    It's not true that launching things into orbit reliably, safely, and consistently is easier than manufacturing cars.

    Russia is a world leader in space and military tech. It's laughable to claim that they're technologically backward because they don't sell a lot of cars.

    this is why third world nations like india and paksitan can have ICBMs and nuclear fusion devices, but can't design and manufacture a car for sale in the first world. it's state funded defense industry engineering. copying stuff the europeans were doing 50 years ago for defense purposes. but the car industry is ruthlessly cut throat and requires constant tech improvment. and china, india, russia, brazil, pakistan can't hang there.

    it's not hard to make a car that sucks. russia does. china does. brazil does. even small nations in europe do. spain makes cars. the czech republic makes cars. it's another thing to compete internationally. and they don't. because they can't. it's NOT harder to have ICBMs and nukes. that's EASIER than building a good car.


    This is just stupid. Countries like India and Pakistan don't do much or any of their ICBM or nuclear fusion device development domestically. They buy it from other countries. Countries like India and Pakistan don't offer commercial launch services, because they can't do it. They can make cars, though. When private clients or governments want their satellites launched into orbit reliably, safely, and at a low cost, they go to Russia or China.

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  128. Yes, it's just you. There's nothing wrong with that, though. Only European/American whites think there's something wrong with wanting to defend one's own people.


    Fair enough... It is what it is. But, correct me if I'm wrong. It seems to me (I'm a relatively new reader) that many, if not most, of Sailer's Asian-themed posts are about things that happen in Asia and a leap, however small, is expected of the reader for it to be relevant to America or Americans. Whereas, in general, most of his posts are about events that are happening in the US and have a direct relevance to America and Americans. Even if true, I don't believe it to be deliberate, just interesting. Asian-Americans probably haven't been as post-worthy as all of Asia or other groups in the US, for that matter.


    @Sunbeam

    I, too, can imagine Korean and Chinese students cheating on the SAT. In fact, cheating by ambitious students is to be expected, hence the proctor system and the lack of the honor system at most schools. Did the word "cheating" originate from Europe's contact with Asia? Give me a break.


    So what happened? Asians are a big part of new California. You guys doing anything I should value? Literally I'm drawing a blank. Manga sucks. Anime sucks. Tentacle porn sucks. I've never heard Asian music that I thought was any good, and have never even seen as Asian American musician (except for some guy in an orchestra or something).

    It almost sounds like you're saying that contributions by a few would justify the existence of millions. Thank goodness you don't actually believe that. Btw, all of the things you mentioned are from Japan, not new California.


    Give me a reason to prefer the way it is now to the way it was then.

    To be honest, I can't give you one. Practically everyone, minus Hispanics, probably would have liked it better in 1970, including myself.

    White dispossession is a sad reality. I won't deny that.

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  129. how long do we have to wait for the chinese to, say, design and manufacture a car for sale in the US? cars are well understood, 100 year old technology. no new technology, breakthroughs, or innovative thinking is necessary to turn out a basic, capable car. if you want to get in the game, copying established industry standards and principles is all you have to do when you're starting out.

    ...

    launching stuff into orbit, that's 40 years ago technology. re-using rockets designed decades ago.

    Right. Car manufacturing is older and easier than rocketry, especially launching into orbit reliably, regularly, and safely. Russia and China don't sell cars internationally, but they sell launch services around the world, a much more difficult industry and business, and one based more on engineering and operations reliability than marketing.

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  130. @jody

    Everything you're saying about China, Japan, and Korea is true at the moment. But, considering that China has been more advanced than Korea and Japan in every way for most of recorded history, minus the last 150 years, I think there are many more variables to consider than current status to predict what will likely happen in the future. Simply put, I find China scary.

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  131. " I've never heard Asian music that I thought was any good, and have never even seen as Asian American musician (except for some guy in an orchestra or something)."

    The name Eddie Van Halen ring a bell? I assume the Yellow Peril crowd on this board applies the one-drop rule, correct?

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  132. re: "I think there are many more variables to consider than current status to predict what will likely happen in the future. Simply put, I find China scary." ANON

    1) I had a friend during the Carter years who was a "White Russian." He grew up in China and spoke fluent Russian, Chinese and Japanese. He lived through the Sino-Japanese war in the 1930s and through the Japanese occupation of WWII. He escaped with his mother on the "last boat" out to get to the USA. He did a stint in the US Army and graduated from UCLA with a graduate degree, worked for IBM for years, and when last I heard was living and working in Japan. He had a saying that I cannot forget to describe for shoddy work: A Chinese Job.

    2) Watch the following YouTube showing China at work or
    [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tPzRPga6uDg]
    Anonymous you have little to fear with China. Fear more the smart fools behind Obama really screwing things up.
    Dan Kurt

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  133. God bless 'em. They have a point. Since everyone else cheats in China it is just gosh-darn unfair to single them out for special treatment.

    Everybody knows the Chinese and Indian exam results and essays are fraudulent, so why pick on this one school?

    Their kids get screwed, yet the corruption and fraud continue at a national level competely uninterrupted.

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  134. Anonymous wrote:

    "The name Eddie Van Halen ring a bell? I assume the Yellow Peril crowd on this board applies the one-drop rule, correct?"

    Well this thread is dead, might as well send it off the rails.

    Of course I recognize the name. But I was never a big fan of that group or him in particular. I appreciate the Kinks songs they cover, but otherwise not a big fan of theirs.

    Diamond Dave was always the heart and soul of that band to me. Without him mugging on stage, they don't have anything much to interest me.

    And there are a whole lot of people I like better as guitarists.

    A lot of people are fans though. I kind of associate Van Halen fans with people that think Budweiser is the sh*t.

    (I drink prole beer, but I have to have Pabst or even Old Milwaukee)

    Are you saying he he is Asian? At least partially? I never knew that. Really all I know about him is he has/had a righteous mane of hair, was married to Valerie Bertinelli, had a brother named Alex, and their dad was a big band musician.

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  135. Anonymous wrote:

    "It almost sounds like you're saying that contributions by a few would justify the existence of millions. Thank goodness you don't actually believe that. Btw, all of the things you mentioned are from Japan, not new California."

    I'll answer with a line from a Johnny Cash song:

    "I don't like it but I guess things happen that way.
    (Ba-doop-adoo, ba-doop-adoo.)"

    Anime and manga have invaded a lot of media, if you look at it.

    But if I take "Btw, all of the things you mentioned are from Japan, not new California." at face value, then things are worse than I thought.

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  136. "My impression is that China over the last two thousand years has created more innovations but kept fewer of them until recently. They seem to be changing. If so we all will be driving Chinese cars.
    "

    Intellectual property rights as an invention to promote inventions? Necessity is the mother of invention. Apparently only Europeans saw promoting and protecting inventions as necessary. That in itself is an invention.
    While I'm sure the Chinese are very smart people, certainly industrious, I don't see where they were going anywhere without outside intervention. The only thing forced them to stop footbinding was fnally seeing the ghastly things bared in photos, late 19th c. Seeing themselves as outsiders saw them, shook them up.
    Aside from that, they were not innovating or inventing. If the "West" had stayed well away from them and they from us, with no "cultural" exchange, do you really think they'd have changed? There was no evidence of that. The "West" for good or bad was the catalyst for change virtually everywhere. I am aware of some movements in Asia towards more humanitarian behavior (Brahmo Samaj in India, and various movements in China) but these were western and Christian influenced, though native in origin and impulse. But they would not have changed these countries to what they are today. It was also not till they adopted Western ways that their populations burgeoned. One old woman, in an on-line interview, spoke of her early 20th c. childhood in China and how most children died young. Then later -- like magic I guess -- it changed and most lived.
    The magic was Western style civilization.
    One more thing. The Chinese number a billion. It goes to show you that a billion industrious, disciplined people can do what a few million in, say, Germany, were able to do 100 years ago.
    All due respect to the Chinese (and Koreans, etc.) but, they're not THAT much better. There's just so many more of them and they don't worry about "diversity."

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  137. "
    I've heard Ode to Joy, and a number of other classical works. Means nothing to me. I get more of a charge off of something like The Time of the Season by The Zombies than anything I've ever heard in classical music.
    "

    I'm a Hans Zimmer/Enya/Lisa Gerrard sort of fan myself. Celtic music has a certain universal appeal too.
    But classical music--particularly Baroque, and late 18th c., but also certain 19th c. compositions--has certain properties that promotion brain functio, according to the authors of Superlearning 2000. It has to do with type of beat. I can't explain it, not being a musicologist, but classical music has an "up" beat at the end of each set of beats, while popular music of the sort that has dominated the 20th c., has a "down" beat at the end of each set of beats.
    I've probably mangled the explanation, but it does help one's cognitive functioning and mental poise, to be exposed consistently to various forms of classical music. The authors of Superlearning were aware of "cultural" relativity arguments and did experiments using other forms of music from other cultures, and I think there were some other kinds that were pretty good, but European classical far and away was the best for improving cognitive functioning. Oh, and setting the standard pitch to 432 megaherz as opposed to the standard 440 hz set during the 1940s, was extremely helpful. The longer rhythym is more natural.

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  138. "Anime and manga have invaded a lot of media, if you look at it."

    Directly no. Though there are cult fandoms, most Americans are not into anime and manga. However, many top filmmakers clearly were inspired by anime and manga. There is Lasseter who considers Miyazaki his master.
    And superhero movies owe as much to anime aesthetic as to classic American comic tradition.

    Of course, anime and manga owe much to Western stuff. It goes back and forth.

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  139. The name Eddie Van Halen ring a bell? I assume the Yellow Peril crowd on this board applies the one-drop rule, correct?

    I think it more likely that he got his musical ability from his European side than from his Asian ancestors.

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  140. as for only Shanghai being tested for PISA, it has way more people than some high-performing countries like finland put together, so that "oh no you only tested a city" isn't a good defence.

    Defence against what? Shanghai is not representative of the Chinese as a whole, as the smarter Chinese tend to end up in places like Shanghai and HK. Finland is representative of the Finns as a whole.

    How is this hard to understand?

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  141. Directly no. Though there are cult fandoms, most Americans are not into anime and manga. However, many top filmmakers clearly were inspired by anime and manga.

    There are influences that aren't noticed by most people since most people don't seek out Asian cinema since it's too exotic for most people. Many people have heard that, say, Star Wars was influenced by Joseph Campbell, but they generally won't know that Star Wars was also influenced by Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. Many filmmakers though tend to be nerdy or obsessed and have more eclectic tastes and thus seek out more exotic fare.

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  142. As I was reading this post, I kept waiting for a link to The Onion, but it never came.

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  143. Zoink:

    "Unlike NE Asians, Ashkenazi seem to overperform gentiles all the way to the top of the intellectual spectrum. Just as you'd expect if they have a mean of around 112 and SD of 15, they are somewhat overrepresented at the local junior college faculty, even more overrepresented at the fancy liberal arts college, and their overrepresentation peaks when you get up to senior ivy league faculty, top hedge fund managers, and nobel prize science winners."

    Do they really overperform? We are all well aware of Jewish overrepresentation in professions where there are barriers to entry and they themselves can maintain the barriers and limit entry by others - medicine, law, politics, professorships, finance, corporate executives, etc.

    Jews seem to avoid like the plague working in farming, construction, engineering, K-12 education, public safety manufacturing, mining, lositics, military officer corps, and a number of other lines of work and professions. Perhaps they look great in the handful of fields they are dominant in less because of inate ability and more because of exclusion and use of resources at their disposal to foster the future success of other members of their tribe at the expense of others, and the concentration of their members in fields where public notoriety for "success" is easy to achieve and can in fact be drummed up by other members of the tribe in the PR game.

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  144. "Many people have heard that, say, Star Wars was influenced by Joseph Campbell, but they generally won't know that Star Wars was also influenced by Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress."

    Lucas got some ideas from HIDDEN FORTRESS, but most of the stuff in HF is standard adventure fantasy stuff. It was Kurosawa's treatment that was original, not so much the material itself.

    STAR WARS borrows from everything. Kurosawa, Kubrick, Tolkien, Riefenstahl, WWII dogfight footage, westerns, Flash Gordon, etc, so I wouldn't say it owes anything particular to Kurosawa.

    Anime was influential in its reveling in massive destruction.
    Hollywood made massive destruction films too, but they tended to be moralistic, like the first WAR OF THE WORLDS from the 1950s. It was BAD stuff, something grave and not to be taken lightly.
    Anime, in contrast, had a more nihilistic and stylistic attitude toward massive destruction. AKIRA begins with a nuke destroying Tokyo, quickly followed by dazzling neo-Tokyo. That kind of sensibility was generally alien in Hollywood movies, but now it's the norm, with so much going kablooey for effect.

    HK cinema revolutionized action choreography and editing, and its influence can be seen in films like MATRIX. It was fresh at the time but has been overdone since, and I wanna gag when I see yet another wire-fu crap.

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  145. I was wrong when I attributed the Western pattern of affixing personal identity to inventions to Brunelleschi in the Italian Renaissance. He was indeed the great hero of personal credit in world history but he was by no means the first.

    I was just reading about Roman slavery this morning and I read that most of the bricks and lead pipes found in Roman buildings and under roman streets bear three names; the name of the Emperor, the owner of the factory or workshop, and the man who made it. In that last case it is the name of the slave or freedman who crafted it with his own hands.

    It's hard to know much about Chinese technology history because so much of it comes from the unreliable Joseph Needham but personal identity seems to have been suppressed throughout China's long history.

    China and Japan seem to be traveling the same path with Japan about a century and a half ahead. Modern Japan began with Perry's Black Ships in 1854. Modern China began with Lord McCartney's expedition about fifty years earlier. Japan gained access to Western markets by making cheap junk. Then they shifted to making high quality merchandise. China is now in their own cheap junk phase. I don't think anyone should expect China to stay in the cheap junk phase forever.

    Albertosaurus


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  146. The Hyundai and Kia were started the same way. Korea bought complete plants from Mitsubishi but in every subsequent year the Korean version grew more different and better than the original.

    Korean cars are not known for their reliability, they are known for being cheap. If you want a reliable car, buy Japanese. Toyota, Nissan, etc.

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  147. 50's-70's Japanese was synonymous with cheap tinny products including cars. They also had a US market courtesy aftermath of Word WarII.

    Chinese/Indians never really had a domestic market for their cars till about at best 10 years ago. i.e to develop before hitting export market.

    Google Mahindra Tractors USA

    Mahindra tractors are fast emerging as a leading player in the US market, providing stiff competition to established names.

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  148. Anonymous said:

    Korean cars are not known for their reliability, they are known for being cheap. If you want a reliable car, buy Japanese. Toyota, Nissan, etc.

    You are, I'm afraid, living in the past. Toyotas are indeed reliable - that's why I drive one - but the Korean cars are coming on fast. Both Kelly Blue Book and JD Powers list Hyundai among their most reliable cars. There is no mention of Citroen, Volvo, Jaguar, Saab, Renault, Fiat, Pontiac, Volkswagen, Cadillac or many many others.

    Albertosaurus

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  149. "Just as widespread cheating by blacks boosted their voter participation percentage above whites in the last election."

    This is one of the current conservative delusions: that Romney lost because of fraud.

    It's more likely that blacks did vote a higher rates than whites.

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  150. Regarding Star Wars, it borrowed from a movie called The Dam Busters, with some lines of dialogue copied word for word. Star Wars also borrows concepts from Larry Niven's "Known Universe" science fiction stories, and, of course, the Lensman series by E.E. Smith.

    As for why Asian SATs are increasing in the U.S., it is probably due to the immigrants from the last generation bringing their kids up to middle or upper middle class income bracket. This wasn't much the case in the 1980s, but it is the case now; and higher SAT scores correlate with higher economic bracket. There is also a well-known, strong, cultural and social impetus to maximize educational scores and education level in some Asian cultures. For all the effort some parents put into getting their kids into football practice and football camp, Asian parents devote compatible effort to improving their kids' math and reading skills.

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