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I wasn’t attempting to criticise China’s treatment of minority groups. Perhaps ironically, while I find their particular methods of propaganda and pearl clutchi

by 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.
  - lern_too_spel 5y ago
    > As far as I can tell you’re simply wrong, but I’m happy to see evidence to the contrary. I posted three links to the contrary in my first comment showing that not only does the CCP think as the US does on this issue, but they implement largely the same policy to try to fix it, with affirmative action implemented before the corresponding US policy. > 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. That large gap was not genetic but environmental, as the closing of the gap demonstrates. > Blacks have never surpassed intellectually either white or Asian populations, nor are they close to doing so anywhere I just told you that they closed the gap entirely in the charter schools Angrist studied. Educating blacks better than whites would be racist. > The early Asian-American populations were treated no better than African slaves, yet 150 years later the outcomes couldn’t be more different The descendants of those early Asian-American immigrants are still largely poor (and poorly educated). Similarly refugee Asian immigrants test poorly, with poor Hmong performing worse than poor blacks on standardized tests. More recent Asian immigrants got here through visas for highly educated workers, and their children are unsurprisingly also highly educated after their parents drill into them that the only reason they're here is due to education. The Jews in Europe, though suffering immense oppression, benefited educationally from a Christian ban on modern finance (any interest was considered sinful usury), which the scholars of the Talmud deemed acceptable as long as the loan was to non-Jews. This, together with the emphasis on studying the Talmud throughout history meant that European Jews always valued education, both as a means of making money and for religious observance. American blacks were prevented from learning to read during slavery, and in the Jim Crow era, they were prevented from getting jobs that could use an education, so a culture of education would have been detrimental to develop. Now that they can benefit from education, we observe a steady closing of the education gap.
    - avazhi 5y ago
      The links you provided relate to China’s PR releases about female Chinese scientists and researchers. Whether they’re true or not (that is, China’s actual intentions and thoughts about gender equality), I submit that the Chinese are highly xenophobic, racist, and insular. That is a positivist statement and I make no negative normative claim about it - as I said, if anything I can understand why the Chinese are that way, and it appears to be paying off. The fact is, China is one of the most racially homogenous countries on earth. I’m not even sure how a China committed to racial diversity would differ from how it looks now, except that it would allow immigration from other countries (which it almost invariably does not, currently). As to blacks, the latest data I saw (a few weeks ago) showed that blacks had fallen even further behind whites and Hispanics during the pandemic in terms of education. I suppose you will reply by saying that’s because it’s reported at the population level instead of in a study, and that it isn’t a fair comparison. The logic would be that if blacks are already disadvantaged, then the pandemic would affect them even more. I will do some research before I say anything else.

by avazhi 5y ago

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.
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  > As far as I can tell you’re simply wrong, but I’m happy to see evidence to the contrary. I posted three links to the contrary in my first comment showing that not only does the CCP think as the US does on this issue, but they implement largely the same policy to try to fix it, with affirmative action implemented before the corresponding US policy. > 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. That large gap was not genetic but environmental, as the closing of the gap demonstrates. > Blacks have never surpassed intellectually either white or Asian populations, nor are they close to doing so anywhere I just told you that they closed the gap entirely in the charter schools Angrist studied. Educating blacks better than whites would be racist. > The early Asian-American populations were treated no better than African slaves, yet 150 years later the outcomes couldn’t be more different The descendants of those early Asian-American immigrants are still largely poor (and poorly educated). Similarly refugee Asian immigrants test poorly, with poor Hmong performing worse than poor blacks on standardized tests. More recent Asian immigrants got here through visas for highly educated workers, and their children are unsurprisingly also highly educated after their parents drill into them that the only reason they're here is due to education. The Jews in Europe, though suffering immense oppression, benefited educationally from a Christian ban on modern finance (any interest was considered sinful usury), which the scholars of the Talmud deemed acceptable as long as the loan was to non-Jews. This, together with the emphasis on studying the Talmud throughout history meant that European Jews always valued education, both as a means of making money and for religious observance. American blacks were prevented from learning to read during slavery, and in the Jim Crow era, they were prevented from getting jobs that could use an education, so a culture of education would have been detrimental to develop. Now that they can benefit from education, we observe a steady closing of the education gap.
  - avazhi 5y ago
    The links you provided relate to China’s PR releases about female Chinese scientists and researchers. Whether they’re true or not (that is, China’s actual intentions and thoughts about gender equality), I submit that the Chinese are highly xenophobic, racist, and insular. That is a positivist statement and I make no negative normative claim about it - as I said, if anything I can understand why the Chinese are that way, and it appears to be paying off. The fact is, China is one of the most racially homogenous countries on earth. I’m not even sure how a China committed to racial diversity would differ from how it looks now, except that it would allow immigration from other countries (which it almost invariably does not, currently). As to blacks, the latest data I saw (a few weeks ago) showed that blacks had fallen even further behind whites and Hispanics during the pandemic in terms of education. I suppose you will reply by saying that’s because it’s reported at the population level instead of in a study, and that it isn’t a fair comparison. The logic would be that if blacks are already disadvantaged, then the pandemic would affect them even more. I will do some research before I say anything else.