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The US director inviting the other people from around the world is brilliant. A great way to train your team by helping others. And the dominance of Asians is

by socrates1998 10y ago

The US director inviting the other people from around the world is brilliant. A great way to train your team by helping others. And the dominance of Asians is interesting. It's a very cultural thing. I can't remember who proposed it, but the idea that East Asian languages are much easier to learn basic counting is interesting. The idea is that Chinese, Korean and Japanese all have easier languages for counting. This gives young Asian students a small, but real advantage when first learning math that accelerates as time goes on. I would be interested to see how many of the top math Asian-American or Asian-Anglo students know one of those three languages or not. If a lot of them have zero knowledge of Chinese, Japanese or Korean, then clearly this idea is dead.

_nothing 10y ago
I first saw it discussed in either Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" or Dubner and Levitt's "Freakonomics". They sort of blend together in my head because I read them both over the span of a couple days and they touched on really similar themes (which I hadn't expected), but I suspect it was the former. Wherever I read it, they listed it as just one of several reasons Asians tend to be good at math, with cultural factors being another important factor. Something about how, while Westerners generally had to just plant wheat and similar crops at a specific times and they would grow fine with a base amount of effort, the yield of a rice paddy was directly related to the effort put into maintaining it. According to them, this ingrained (hah, grain) into Asian societies the idea that your success is directly proportional to the effort you put into something. I haven't studied it myself, but I thought that theory was interesting.
- socrates1998 10y ago
  Yeah, I don't really by the "they planted rice and it was tedious, therefore they are good at math." For a long time, Westerners were dominant in math. It's only very recently that we have seen East Asians doing well. And, I don't know that it persists at the graduate/top level, it may only be at the high school and undergrad level. I mean, East Asians have been growing rice for a really long time, so why does it mean now they are good at math. Who knows, it's an interesting phenomena.

_nothing 10y ago

I first saw it discussed in either Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" or Dubner and Levitt's "Freakonomics". They sort of blend together in my head because I read them both over the span of a couple days and they touched on really similar themes (which I hadn't expected), but I suspect it was the former. Wherever I read it, they listed it as just one of several reasons Asians tend to be good at math, with cultural factors being another important factor. Something about how, while Westerners generally had to just plant wheat and similar crops at a specific times and they would grow fine with a base amount of effort, the yield of a rice paddy was directly related to the effort put into maintaining it. According to them, this ingrained (hah, grain) into Asian societies the idea that your success is directly proportional to the effort you put into something. I haven't studied it myself, but I thought that theory was interesting.

socrates1998 10y ago
Yeah, I don't really by the "they planted rice and it was tedious, therefore they are good at math." For a long time, Westerners were dominant in math. It's only very recently that we have seen East Asians doing well. And, I don't know that it persists at the graduate/top level, it may only be at the high school and undergrad level. I mean, East Asians have been growing rice for a really long time, so why does it mean now they are good at math. Who knows, it's an interesting phenomena.