11 ms·

According to the Microsoft 2021 Annual Diversity And Inclusion report, 34.9% of employees identified as Asian in the US, far exceeding their overall representat

According to the Microsoft 2021 Annual Diversity And Inclusion report, 34.9% of employees identified as Asian in the US, far exceeding their overall representation in the US population. Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? And doesn't trying to hire more of other races imply that mathematically speaking, fewer Asians must be hired and promoted to achieve greater equality? Please help me understand if I'm missing something obvious.

pengaru 4y ago
> Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? Parents matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting
- killjoywashere 4y ago
  In that case, systemic racism matters too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I actually don't think Tiger parenting is more special than, say, just investing in your kids more broadly. You don't have to be an authoritarian and still get excellent results by caring about the success of your children in society and also having the resources and means in which to perform that investment. More likely is that filters for immigration are very high, which means the average immigrant is more educated, wealthier, dedicated, etc. than the average born-citizen.
  - darkwizard42 4y ago
    While parent's comment was certainly to some degree tongue-in-cheek, they are likely agreeing with you. Investment in your parents AND likely a higher than average weight on "a good life" being grounded in employment, education, and certain values are contributing factors to the end results
  - chimineycricket 4y ago
    Tiger parenting is one way of investing in your kid. I agree, there are multiple ways to invest in your kid. >More likely is that filters for immigration are very high Don't agree with this, there are lots of ways to immigrate and I don't think most of them have a sort of wealth/education filter. For example refugees.
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      Self selection among immigrants is easily the largest factor behind their higher rates of success. Even as a refuge, there were tons of applicants, there is almost surely a reason you are the one who made it. It's in no way an easy process.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Refugees are pretty much the only category that doesn't have some kind of wealth filter, if only because immigration paperwork costs a fair bit of money (esp. when you look at it from the perspective of someone in a country where cost of living is much lower than in US). And the majority of immigrants in US aren't refugees.
googlryas 4y ago
I think an important question is how many of those Asians are drawn from abroad, vs our American homegrown Asians? If they're homegrown, then clearly they're over-represented. But if they're poached from abroad, they are actually under-reprsented. One would assume 60% of employees of a global workforce would be Asian.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  If you're assuming a global workforce this would mean the representative share of African Americans would be 0.5%
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Sure, but a black percentage of ~13%, which is actually exactly in line with the ratio of black americans to americans.
    - JamesBarney 4y ago
      One of the biggest arguments for DEI is to undo the damage the US government and culture has done to it's own black citizens. I don't think filling a bunch of VP positions with highly qualified African immigrants does that.
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        A cynical person would think DEI was invented precisely because solving that would be hard but treating everyone the same by skin color allows for easier solutions such as simply importing non-aggrieved people to replace our marginalized ones.
CurtHagenlocher 4y ago
At least in the parts of the company I've worked -- always on product teams -- the majority of my coworkers were not born in the United States. Given that, even if all the other parts of the world were represented proportionally you'd expect a large percentage of people from China and the Indian subcontinent.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
Asian parents give a shit whether their kids show up for school.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  Down voted for this but it's really a reality. Talk to teachers, if the parent doesn't value school then it takes a truly exceptional kid to direct themselves through it.
  - Jcampuzano2 4y ago
    Anecdotal of course but I believe this is very much true. I'm Latino if it matters much. I'm the oldest of three brothers and was the one who was most pushed/expected to excel in education. My parents became a lot more lax on my younger brothers because they thought they pushed me too hard growing up. I think they changed in part because our relationship was very strained as I was growing up and even today isn't anywhere near as close as my two siblings are with my parents. But on the other-hand, we're all adults now and I am the only one to graduate college and have a career in a typical "high-paying" profession/job. I don't fault my brothers for this and am close with them, but it is pretty stark the difference in career path/"traditional success" between the three of us simply based on this emphasis/value.
- outworlder 4y ago
  'asian' parents from which country? They are not all the same. It's a huge chunk of the planet.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    But it is true. Chinese and Indian people have nothing else in common but their parenting styles are the same. Historical accident maybe, but it's true
kazinator 4y ago
What you're missing is that a company cannot just hire to meet racial quotas which reflect population percentages in order to be free of bias. That's not what bias means. What bias means is that if there are two equally qualified candidates (as in almost exactly, so that it's a coin toss between them), then one from a certain background is consistently chosen. If more applicants are available that happen to be from a certain ethnic group, and tend to be better qualified, then that's what the organization has to work with. That is a societal problem; you can't just dump it onto the shoulders of an organization and require hiring quotas: "please fix the decades-long problem which brought these people to your door, with the qualifications they have, in the proportions you see".
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I think your statement is the issue. If you have two equally qualified candidates - one anglo saxan male from boston, and one african american female from georgia - at many places, one is going to be consistently chosen. I agree - that is absolutely bias based on protected characteristics. Do you?
  - ryan93 4y ago
    Evidence that one is going to be consistently chosen?
    - dvngnt_ 4y ago
      there's a few studies regarding resume names and getting call backs
    - commandlinefan 4y ago
      Written, documented company policy?
    - rjbwork 4y ago
      While I do think GP is correct at many places, my team literally hired a black woman from Georgia and turned down a white dude from Boston, lol. I am not a fan of the overbearing top down policies like Microsoft is talking about, but I have become friendly with aforementioned hire, and some of the stories of discrimination and just people being really rude to her in the professional world are mind blowing to me. I can definitely believe that a lot of workplaces do actively discriminate against various minority groups.
outworlder 4y ago
> Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? What _are_ the groups? "Asian" can mean anything. From India, China, Japan, many countries in Oceania, etc. I think the classification is fundamentally flawed.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  As an outsider, it's obvious looking in that racial classification in the US is just crazy -- they took some racial stereotypes from 100 years ago, gave them neutral sounding names, and started pretending it's not racist to group everybody south of Texas as "hispanic". And then build official policy on top of these simplistic classes that fail to describe reality in any meaningful way, only serving to reveal to everybody else in the world what the people in the US think about them. At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are being sincere in their ignorance.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    I myself have to mark a checkbox saying "Hispanic OR Latino". I'm Latino, but NOT Hispanic. But I can also check "white". One is a skin color, another is ancestry, and yet another is geographical location...
    - killjoywashere 4y ago
      My (least?) favorite anecdote on this was when we were running stats demographics and found there was one more African American than Black. Turns out it’s a rich white kid who was born in South Africa. He’s not wrong…
      - glandium 4y ago
        Elon Musk and Charlize Theron are African Americans too.
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
heavyset_go 4y ago
US immigration policy selects for high earners, the highly educated, the highly skilled and experienced, and the already wealthy. My guess is that there are a lot of immigrants from Asia that fall into any of those camps.
- Qtips87 4y ago
  In theory it is, in practice it is not. The intention is to let in talents that the US native population otherwise cannot provide. The reality is that the US tech visa have been heavily abused and let in people that shouldn't be let in.
orangepurple 4y ago
The South Asia Subcontinent has about 2 billion people. A different part of Asia has more than 2 billion people. Identifying as Asian is utterly meaningless, except to perhaps generalize as (non-white & non-black). Madness.
Manuel_D 4y ago
> Why are Asians doing so well? "Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the potential for generalization. Two main reasons that are given: Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per the study, Asians study about twice as much as white students and this shows in grades, SAT scores, and college admissions. Second, a culture that places higher prestige on meritocratic and high-paying jobs. This is obviously a coarse-grained generalization of a very diverse set of cultures, but there's some truth to the stereotype that Asian kids have 3 career choices: doctor, engineer, lawyer. My impression is that this isn't disrespect for artistic and cultural jobs, but rather a realistic assessment of the chances of success in these fields. You want to get into art, fashion, photography, or journalism? It takes a lot of connections, luck, or both to land a good job in these fields. Doctor, lawyer, or engineer is a more reliable path to success.
- bjt2n3904 4y ago
  There's a third you're completely missing. Present fathers that raise and discipline their children.
- tylerhou 4y ago
  Please don’t reduce Asian-Americans to the myth of the model minority. The truth is more nuanced. The income gap between poor and rich Asians in the US is the highest out of any ethnic group. One reason for this is that recent Asian immigration has selected for largely been wealthy and/or well educated populations. So what you call “Asian culture” will have a natural bias towards the preferences of people who value money and education. Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education. I don’t think you were intending this, but it can be viewed as veiled white-supremacist rhetoric.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    The "model minority myth" occurs when someone takes population-wide trends and applies it on an individual level: e.g. "he's Asian, so he must be good at math". That's stereotyping. Pointing at demographic trend in academic achievement isn't the model minority myth, it's an empirical observation. Conflating objective facts with the model minority myth is perhaps well intentioned, but it comes off as a shallow attempt to deny real world observations. Asians Americans, on average do spend more time on academics, and do enter fields like medicine and engineering at higher rates. This is an empirical observation, not the model minority myth. Similarly, there's nothing racist or white supremacist about examining disparities in time spent on academics. If someone takes this data and then judges individuals for population-wide averages, then that's stereotyping and I do not condone that. I'm not sure what your intent was with your last paragraph, but it comes off as an overzealous attempt to portray any analysis of time spent on academics as racist. I certainly wouldn't want someone to assume I'm personally less intelligent than my Asian co-worker because I'm Cuban. But I trust that most people are able to understanding that averages are not the same as individuals. And I find the pattern of people being worried that I'd be offended by data on Latin americans' academic achievement condescending. I am smart enough to understand that data saying Latin Americans on average spend less time on academics than whites or asians is not an attack on me personally, thank you very much.
skrbjc 4y ago
Who's "WE" in your view? There was not top-down effort to get Asians to excel in the US, it was due to their own desires and efforts. I think it also explicitly proves the point that companies in the US are not racist. If they cared so much to only promote whites, why do they promote Asians?
dddaaa34 4y ago
intelligence doesn't have the same distribution across groups.
screye 4y ago
> Why are Asians doing so well? Are they ? Or is it merely a reflection of statistics and biased sampling ? ~50% of the world's population lives in Indian subcontinent + China. Ofc they represent a majority of skilled immigrants in the western world. The reason Indians and Chinese are the most accomplished immigrants in the US is because the US does not allow any Indians or Chinese to immigrate unless they are already on-track to be highly accomplished. The Indians that aren't doing well are all back in India. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the US raises the standards for the kinds of Indians and Chinese that can immigrate to the US, you are sampling from smarter and smarter sub-groups. This leads to soft-eugenics where children of Chinese and Indian immigrant groups will inevitably be smarter than resident populations. Additionally, because only certain kinds of Indians and Chinese are allowed to succeed in this country (high skilled STEM immigrants), it forms insular elite-STEM peer groups and resulting relationships mimic eugenic patterns that would make Hitler proud. (This would be valid for both nature and nature proponents) > Why can't we replicate this for other groups? Assuming that this is some combination of nature and nurture, it must first start at trying to observe these with some level of granularity. Is there anything noticeably different in the 'nature' side of Indian and Chinese immigrants? Yes, the US only allows incredibly high-IQ Indians and Chinese immigrants to come here. Have we tried observing how similar filters have worked out for immigrants from other racial groups ? Indian and Chinese families in the US have well known group-level differences in how children are nurtured. Have we tried observing success rates for low-achievement immigrant groups with similar nurture methods ? The answer for both is a big 'No'. If you don't try to run even the most basic of controlled studies across groups, then how can you ever observe correlations let alone causality for differences in group level performance ? Good faith social studies on group level differences must go into with the intellectual curiosity to allow for outcomes that violate the current academic ideological status-quos. I suspect that no one in academia wants to risk their careers by doing a study that might report: "differences between groups persist even after accounting for systemic differences in opportunity". So they just refuse to do the research instead. On the other hand, genomics keeps quietly trudging along with society-altering results, while pretending as if there is nothing to see here.
- Qtips87 4y ago
hintymad 4y ago
"So well" as in academically or in STEM fields, right? One reason is the selection process. Or put it bluntly, genes matter. Asians, at least the FOBs in the STEM fields, mostly came to the US for graduate degrees first. They are, statistically speaking, already the top students who have a knack in STEM. If you are a techie in the Bay Area, try to count how many people are PhDs in a social gathering. I have yet encountered anyone in my circle in the bay area who had any difficulty with high-school math, and none who did not excel at least most of college-level STEM classes. On the other hand, many of my coworkers are medalists in national or international competitions of maths/physics/chemistry/informatics, or they were in the top 2% for those college entrance exams. The bias was so strong that I used to think that tutoring was useless and the education in the US was pathetic because many high school students couldn't understand simple things like factoring polynomials. So, of course they do well, statistically speaking. On the other hand, not all Asians do well in other fields, especially in business and politics. Indians are more diverse in that regard, but people from mainland China didn't have a large enough presence, partly because only universities in China tended to select the nerdiest people for STEM, or so per my China friends.
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> Why are Asians doing so well? What is the average household income of the parents of these Asian people that comprise those data points? Did they grow up in apartments or homes? What quality was their elementary and high schools?
lenocinor 4y ago
For black people, at least, they were enslaved in the US in much larger numbers than any other ethnic group. This is bound to hurt their opportunities relative to other ethnic groups, among many other problems.

pengaru 4y ago

> Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? Parents matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting

killjoywashere 4y ago
In that case, systemic racism matters too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I actually don't think Tiger parenting is more special than, say, just investing in your kids more broadly. You don't have to be an authoritarian and still get excellent results by caring about the success of your children in society and also having the resources and means in which to perform that investment. More likely is that filters for immigration are very high, which means the average immigrant is more educated, wealthier, dedicated, etc. than the average born-citizen.
- darkwizard42 4y ago
  While parent's comment was certainly to some degree tongue-in-cheek, they are likely agreeing with you. Investment in your parents AND likely a higher than average weight on "a good life" being grounded in employment, education, and certain values are contributing factors to the end results
- chimineycricket 4y ago
  Tiger parenting is one way of investing in your kid. I agree, there are multiple ways to invest in your kid. >More likely is that filters for immigration are very high Don't agree with this, there are lots of ways to immigrate and I don't think most of them have a sort of wealth/education filter. For example refugees.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    Self selection among immigrants is easily the largest factor behind their higher rates of success. Even as a refuge, there were tons of applicants, there is almost surely a reason you are the one who made it. It's in no way an easy process.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Refugees are pretty much the only category that doesn't have some kind of wealth filter, if only because immigration paperwork costs a fair bit of money (esp. when you look at it from the perspective of someone in a country where cost of living is much lower than in US). And the majority of immigrants in US aren't refugees.

googlryas 4y ago

I think an important question is how many of those Asians are drawn from abroad, vs our American homegrown Asians? If they're homegrown, then clearly they're over-represented. But if they're poached from abroad, they are actually under-reprsented. One would assume 60% of employees of a global workforce would be Asian.

JamesBarney 4y ago
If you're assuming a global workforce this would mean the representative share of African Americans would be 0.5%
- googlryas 4y ago
  Sure, but a black percentage of ~13%, which is actually exactly in line with the ratio of black americans to americans.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    One of the biggest arguments for DEI is to undo the damage the US government and culture has done to it's own black citizens. I don't think filling a bunch of VP positions with highly qualified African immigrants does that.
    - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      A cynical person would think DEI was invented precisely because solving that would be hard but treating everyone the same by skin color allows for easier solutions such as simply importing non-aggrieved people to replace our marginalized ones.

CurtHagenlocher 4y ago

At least in the parts of the company I've worked -- always on product teams -- the majority of my coworkers were not born in the United States. Given that, even if all the other parts of the world were represented proportionally you'd expect a large percentage of people from China and the Indian subcontinent.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

Asian parents give a shit whether their kids show up for school.

thatguy0900 4y ago
Down voted for this but it's really a reality. Talk to teachers, if the parent doesn't value school then it takes a truly exceptional kid to direct themselves through it.
- Jcampuzano2 4y ago
  Anecdotal of course but I believe this is very much true. I'm Latino if it matters much. I'm the oldest of three brothers and was the one who was most pushed/expected to excel in education. My parents became a lot more lax on my younger brothers because they thought they pushed me too hard growing up. I think they changed in part because our relationship was very strained as I was growing up and even today isn't anywhere near as close as my two siblings are with my parents. But on the other-hand, we're all adults now and I am the only one to graduate college and have a career in a typical "high-paying" profession/job. I don't fault my brothers for this and am close with them, but it is pretty stark the difference in career path/"traditional success" between the three of us simply based on this emphasis/value.
outworlder 4y ago
'asian' parents from which country? They are not all the same. It's a huge chunk of the planet.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  But it is true. Chinese and Indian people have nothing else in common but their parenting styles are the same. Historical accident maybe, but it's true

kazinator 4y ago

What you're missing is that a company cannot just hire to meet racial quotas which reflect population percentages in order to be free of bias. That's not what bias means. What bias means is that if there are two equally qualified candidates (as in almost exactly, so that it's a coin toss between them), then one from a certain background is consistently chosen. If more applicants are available that happen to be from a certain ethnic group, and tend to be better qualified, then that's what the organization has to work with. That is a societal problem; you can't just dump it onto the shoulders of an organization and require hiring quotas: "please fix the decades-long problem which brought these people to your door, with the qualifications they have, in the proportions you see".

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
I think your statement is the issue. If you have two equally qualified candidates - one anglo saxan male from boston, and one african american female from georgia - at many places, one is going to be consistently chosen. I agree - that is absolutely bias based on protected characteristics. Do you?
- ryan93 4y ago
  Evidence that one is going to be consistently chosen?
  - dvngnt_ 4y ago
    there's a few studies regarding resume names and getting call backs
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    Written, documented company policy?
  - rjbwork 4y ago
    While I do think GP is correct at many places, my team literally hired a black woman from Georgia and turned down a white dude from Boston, lol. I am not a fan of the overbearing top down policies like Microsoft is talking about, but I have become friendly with aforementioned hire, and some of the stories of discrimination and just people being really rude to her in the professional world are mind blowing to me. I can definitely believe that a lot of workplaces do actively discriminate against various minority groups.

outworlder 4y ago

> Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? What _are_ the groups? "Asian" can mean anything. From India, China, Japan, many countries in Oceania, etc. I think the classification is fundamentally flawed.

TremendousJudge 4y ago
As an outsider, it's obvious looking in that racial classification in the US is just crazy -- they took some racial stereotypes from 100 years ago, gave them neutral sounding names, and started pretending it's not racist to group everybody south of Texas as "hispanic". And then build official policy on top of these simplistic classes that fail to describe reality in any meaningful way, only serving to reveal to everybody else in the world what the people in the US think about them. At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are being sincere in their ignorance.
- outworlder 4y ago
  I myself have to mark a checkbox saying "Hispanic OR Latino". I'm Latino, but NOT Hispanic. But I can also check "white". One is a skin color, another is ancestry, and yet another is geographical location...
  - killjoywashere 4y ago
    My (least?) favorite anecdote on this was when we were running stats demographics and found there was one more African American than Black. Turns out it’s a rich white kid who was born in South Africa. He’s not wrong…
    - glandium 4y ago
      Elon Musk and Charlize Theron are African Americans too.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago

heavyset_go 4y ago

US immigration policy selects for high earners, the highly educated, the highly skilled and experienced, and the already wealthy. My guess is that there are a lot of immigrants from Asia that fall into any of those camps.

Qtips87 4y ago
In theory it is, in practice it is not. The intention is to let in talents that the US native population otherwise cannot provide. The reality is that the US tech visa have been heavily abused and let in people that shouldn't be let in.

orangepurple 4y ago

The South Asia Subcontinent has about 2 billion people. A different part of Asia has more than 2 billion people. Identifying as Asian is utterly meaningless, except to perhaps generalize as (non-white & non-black). Madness.

Manuel_D 4y ago

> Why are Asians doing so well? "Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the potential for generalization. Two main reasons that are given: Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per the study, Asians study about twice as much as white students and this shows in grades, SAT scores, and college admissions. Second, a culture that places higher prestige on meritocratic and high-paying jobs. This is obviously a coarse-grained generalization of a very diverse set of cultures, but there's some truth to the stereotype that Asian kids have 3 career choices: doctor, engineer, lawyer. My impression is that this isn't disrespect for artistic and cultural jobs, but rather a realistic assessment of the chances of success in these fields. You want to get into art, fashion, photography, or journalism? It takes a lot of connections, luck, or both to land a good job in these fields. Doctor, lawyer, or engineer is a more reliable path to success.

bjt2n3904 4y ago
There's a third you're completely missing. Present fathers that raise and discipline their children.
tylerhou 4y ago
Please don’t reduce Asian-Americans to the myth of the model minority. The truth is more nuanced. The income gap between poor and rich Asians in the US is the highest out of any ethnic group. One reason for this is that recent Asian immigration has selected for largely been wealthy and/or well educated populations. So what you call “Asian culture” will have a natural bias towards the preferences of people who value money and education. Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education. I don’t think you were intending this, but it can be viewed as veiled white-supremacist rhetoric.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  The "model minority myth" occurs when someone takes population-wide trends and applies it on an individual level: e.g. "he's Asian, so he must be good at math". That's stereotyping. Pointing at demographic trend in academic achievement isn't the model minority myth, it's an empirical observation. Conflating objective facts with the model minority myth is perhaps well intentioned, but it comes off as a shallow attempt to deny real world observations. Asians Americans, on average do spend more time on academics, and do enter fields like medicine and engineering at higher rates. This is an empirical observation, not the model minority myth. Similarly, there's nothing racist or white supremacist about examining disparities in time spent on academics. If someone takes this data and then judges individuals for population-wide averages, then that's stereotyping and I do not condone that. I'm not sure what your intent was with your last paragraph, but it comes off as an overzealous attempt to portray any analysis of time spent on academics as racist. I certainly wouldn't want someone to assume I'm personally less intelligent than my Asian co-worker because I'm Cuban. But I trust that most people are able to understanding that averages are not the same as individuals. And I find the pattern of people being worried that I'd be offended by data on Latin americans' academic achievement condescending. I am smart enough to understand that data saying Latin Americans on average spend less time on academics than whites or asians is not an attack on me personally, thank you very much.

skrbjc 4y ago

Who's "WE" in your view? There was not top-down effort to get Asians to excel in the US, it was due to their own desires and efforts. I think it also explicitly proves the point that companies in the US are not racist. If they cared so much to only promote whites, why do they promote Asians?

dddaaa34 4y ago

intelligence doesn't have the same distribution across groups.

screye 4y ago

> Why are Asians doing so well? Are they ? Or is it merely a reflection of statistics and biased sampling ? ~50% of the world's population lives in Indian subcontinent + China. Ofc they represent a majority of skilled immigrants in the western world. The reason Indians and Chinese are the most accomplished immigrants in the US is because the US does not allow any Indians or Chinese to immigrate unless they are already on-track to be highly accomplished. The Indians that aren't doing well are all back in India. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the US raises the standards for the kinds of Indians and Chinese that can immigrate to the US, you are sampling from smarter and smarter sub-groups. This leads to soft-eugenics where children of Chinese and Indian immigrant groups will inevitably be smarter than resident populations. Additionally, because only certain kinds of Indians and Chinese are allowed to succeed in this country (high skilled STEM immigrants), it forms insular elite-STEM peer groups and resulting relationships mimic eugenic patterns that would make Hitler proud. (This would be valid for both nature and nature proponents) > Why can't we replicate this for other groups? Assuming that this is some combination of nature and nurture, it must first start at trying to observe these with some level of granularity. Is there anything noticeably different in the 'nature' side of Indian and Chinese immigrants? Yes, the US only allows incredibly high-IQ Indians and Chinese immigrants to come here. Have we tried observing how similar filters have worked out for immigrants from other racial groups ? Indian and Chinese families in the US have well known group-level differences in how children are nurtured. Have we tried observing success rates for low-achievement immigrant groups with similar nurture methods ? The answer for both is a big 'No'. If you don't try to run even the most basic of controlled studies across groups, then how can you ever observe correlations let alone causality for differences in group level performance ? Good faith social studies on group level differences must go into with the intellectual curiosity to allow for outcomes that violate the current academic ideological status-quos. I suspect that no one in academia wants to risk their careers by doing a study that might report: "differences between groups persist even after accounting for systemic differences in opportunity". So they just refuse to do the research instead. On the other hand, genomics keeps quietly trudging along with society-altering results, while pretending as if there is nothing to see here.

Qtips87 4y ago

hintymad 4y ago

"So well" as in academically or in STEM fields, right? One reason is the selection process. Or put it bluntly, genes matter. Asians, at least the FOBs in the STEM fields, mostly came to the US for graduate degrees first. They are, statistically speaking, already the top students who have a knack in STEM. If you are a techie in the Bay Area, try to count how many people are PhDs in a social gathering. I have yet encountered anyone in my circle in the bay area who had any difficulty with high-school math, and none who did not excel at least most of college-level STEM classes. On the other hand, many of my coworkers are medalists in national or international competitions of maths/physics/chemistry/informatics, or they were in the top 2% for those college entrance exams. The bias was so strong that I used to think that tutoring was useless and the education in the US was pathetic because many high school students couldn't understand simple things like factoring polynomials. So, of course they do well, statistically speaking. On the other hand, not all Asians do well in other fields, especially in business and politics. Indians are more diverse in that regard, but people from mainland China didn't have a large enough presence, partly because only universities in China tended to select the nerdiest people for STEM, or so per my China friends.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago

> Why are Asians doing so well? What is the average household income of the parents of these Asian people that comprise those data points? Did they grow up in apartments or homes? What quality was their elementary and high schools?

lenocinor 4y ago

For black people, at least, they were enslaved in the US in much larger numbers than any other ethnic group. This is bound to hurt their opportunities relative to other ethnic groups, among many other problems.