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This article misses the point. It is partly America’s obsession with STEM diversity (and the resulting lack of purely meritocratic advancement) that has created

by avazhi 5y ago

This article misses the point. It is partly America’s obsession with STEM diversity (and the resulting lack of purely meritocratic advancement) that has created this current crisis. The Chinese certainly don’t delude themselves into thinking that gender or racial diversity are important for much of anything - access to Chinese university or employment is meritocratic. It’s true that China is not as racially heterogeneous as the US, but that fact doesn’t support the inference that you can’t compare the two. The fact remains that the world’s rising superpower is not concerned with diversity, human rights, or many of the other virtue signalling calling cards that are heavily prioritised in America and couched as sine qua nons of national success. Perhaps it’s time for America to grapple with which of either its superpower status or human rights record is more important to it. Prima facie it increasingly can’t have both. “The nation, it says, must sustain excellence in basic research; foster a scientific workforce more diverse in race, gender, and geography; and support high-quality precollege science and math education. The board also calls for forging closer ties between academia and industry, keeping borders open to promote international partnerships, and promoting ethical research practices.” Race, gender, and geographical diversity, and ethical research practice have nothing to do with advancing America’s research prowess. See: Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America, neither of which were concerned with diversity or ethics in research. And open borders is different of course from simply saying that America should have a robust visa system for qualified candidates. American bureaucrats seem to think that if they can only tick off all the buzzwords, GDP will rise and American innovation will soar.

lern_too_spel 5y ago
If one or more identifiable groups are underperforming and dragging progress, smart governments understand this is a problem to be solved instead of ignored. China gets many things wrong, but they are not wrong about this, as you presume. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20210723152007327 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20... https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3141834/gender-equality-china-will-give-female-scientists-priority https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3141834/gender... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China
- avazhi 5y ago
  I wasn’t attempting to criticise China’s treatment of minority groups. Perhaps ironically, while I find their particular methods of propaganda and pearl clutching to be painfully obnoxious, I respect their treatment of the Uighurs and I can understand why they are working so hard to preserve their cultural and racial homogeneity. If anything my remarks were more a criticism of the US, which is apparently willing to sacrifice itself on the altar of diversity and political correctness. My own view is that racial and ethnic groups (and genders, to a lesser extent) differ inter se in their average member’s cognitive capabilities and proclivities. China seems to accept that, while America’s obsession for 3 decades has been to prove that such racial determinism isn’t true. The legacy of that attempted proof is failure and a declining superpower.
  - lern_too_spel 5y ago
    My point was that China, like all other governments who have thought about it, knows your view is wrong and has policies based on the fact that your view is wrong, which I linked to. Your view goes against what Angrist has observed in Chicago, where black and white students at the charter schools he studied performed equally well on standardized tests after a few years of schooling (both better than matched public school cohorts), not to mention what Koreans have demonstrated, going from very poor education to arguably the best in the world. Good policy has been shown to make at least two standard deviations of difference in intelligence. Even mediocre policy, as in the US's case has significantly closed the gap between different groups in measured intelligence, with the gap between black and white Americans decreasing by one third between 1972 and 2002, so your claim that it's a failure is bizarre.
    - avazhi 5y ago
      This was linked elsewhere in the thread and is a response to your assertion about China’s knowledge and shame about its racial outlook. https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2013-anonymous-strategicconsequencesofchineseracism.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2013-anonymous... As far as I can tell you’re simply wrong, but I’m happy to see evidence to the contrary. As to the racial gap, I don’t doubt that gains have been made and that large gains could continue to be made with improvements in childhood nutrition, education, stimulation, etc. That, to me, is more a function of just how large the initial gap was than it is a suggestion that intellectual equality at the population level can be achieved. To piggyback off your comment about the Koreans, they very quickly indeed caught up to (and surpassed, in some respects) the Japanese and Chinese. Blacks have never surpassed intellectually either white or Asian populations, nor are they close to doing so anywhere (to my knowledge, but I’m happy to be proved wrong). That is so notwithstanding that societies have spent (in some cases) 70 years trying to do with blacks what took the Koreans less than a generation. At some point a rational society would make decisions based on the data - humans are not intellectually comparable racially. The early Asian-American populations were treated no better than African slaves, yet 150 years later the outcomes couldn’t be more different. At some point, blaming it on slavery, or Jim Crow laws, or white devil racism just tires the listener because of the plethora of obvious counter examples where chronic horrible mistreatment didn’t set an entire race back 20,000 years and render their collective IQ 1-1.5 standard deviations lower than the rest of the world (besides Australian aborigines): see, for example, the Jews up to 1945, or the American Chinese and Japanese up to ~1950.

by avazhi 5y ago

lern_too_spel 5y ago

If one or more identifiable groups are underperforming and dragging progress, smart governments understand this is a problem to be solved instead of ignored. China gets many things wrong, but they are not wrong about this, as you presume. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20210723152007327 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20... https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3141834/gender-equality-china-will-give-female-scientists-priority https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3141834/gender... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China

avazhi 5y ago
I wasn’t attempting to criticise China’s treatment of minority groups. Perhaps ironically, while I find their particular methods of propaganda and pearl clutching to be painfully obnoxious, I respect their treatment of the Uighurs and I can understand why they are working so hard to preserve their cultural and racial homogeneity. If anything my remarks were more a criticism of the US, which is apparently willing to sacrifice itself on the altar of diversity and political correctness. My own view is that racial and ethnic groups (and genders, to a lesser extent) differ inter se in their average member’s cognitive capabilities and proclivities. China seems to accept that, while America’s obsession for 3 decades has been to prove that such racial determinism isn’t true. The legacy of that attempted proof is failure and a declining superpower.
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  My point was that China, like all other governments who have thought about it, knows your view is wrong and has policies based on the fact that your view is wrong, which I linked to. Your view goes against what Angrist has observed in Chicago, where black and white students at the charter schools he studied performed equally well on standardized tests after a few years of schooling (both better than matched public school cohorts), not to mention what Koreans have demonstrated, going from very poor education to arguably the best in the world. Good policy has been shown to make at least two standard deviations of difference in intelligence. Even mediocre policy, as in the US's case has significantly closed the gap between different groups in measured intelligence, with the gap between black and white Americans decreasing by one third between 1972 and 2002, so your claim that it's a failure is bizarre.
  - avazhi 5y ago
    This was linked elsewhere in the thread and is a response to your assertion about China’s knowledge and shame about its racial outlook. https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2013-anonymous-strategicconsequencesofchineseracism.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2013-anonymous... As far as I can tell you’re simply wrong, but I’m happy to see evidence to the contrary. As to the racial gap, I don’t doubt that gains have been made and that large gains could continue to be made with improvements in childhood nutrition, education, stimulation, etc. That, to me, is more a function of just how large the initial gap was than it is a suggestion that intellectual equality at the population level can be achieved. To piggyback off your comment about the Koreans, they very quickly indeed caught up to (and surpassed, in some respects) the Japanese and Chinese. Blacks have never surpassed intellectually either white or Asian populations, nor are they close to doing so anywhere (to my knowledge, but I’m happy to be proved wrong). That is so notwithstanding that societies have spent (in some cases) 70 years trying to do with blacks what took the Koreans less than a generation. At some point a rational society would make decisions based on the data - humans are not intellectually comparable racially. The early Asian-American populations were treated no better than African slaves, yet 150 years later the outcomes couldn’t be more different. At some point, blaming it on slavery, or Jim Crow laws, or white devil racism just tires the listener because of the plethora of obvious counter examples where chronic horrible mistreatment didn’t set an entire race back 20,000 years and render their collective IQ 1-1.5 standard deviations lower than the rest of the world (besides Australian aborigines): see, for example, the Jews up to 1945, or the American Chinese and Japanese up to ~1950.