3 ms·

You mean small selective sampling mixed with faulty reasoning. Immigrants are usually self-selected hard working, smart and relatively rich (otherwise you can'

You mean small selective sampling mixed with faulty reasoning. Immigrants are usually self-selected hard working, smart and relatively rich (otherwise you can't afford to emigrate), risk taking people - because you'd otherwise have a lot of trouble surviving in America. Stating "Asian-American" success, is like stating "Harvard-American" success - your sample is already biased. Reversion to the mean always kicks in. Give immigrant Asians 30 more years - and you'll see them well integrated and achieving the same as average Americans. People centric exceptionalism is vastly overrated - what's more important is the wind at their backs (cheap resources/labour/stable society/technology convergence) and the benefits they receive when they are born (rich/schooling/health/connections).

barry-cotter 14y ago
Reversion to the mean always kicks in. Give immigrant Asians 30 more years -and you'll see them well integrated and achieving the same as average Americans Yeah, just like Americans of Jewish ancestry! A group that came over most poor and not speaking the language very well and with low social capital and mostly did very well, and whose children did very well will revert all the way to average.
- confluence 14y ago
  The vast majority of that can be explained by randomness, the extreme variance of small samples and inappropriate use of the fundamental attribution error. Minorities live or die not because of anything intrinsic - but merely because of prevailing environmental forces. The "Jewish-success", like the article's "Asian-success", is merely a statistical fluke, just as is the failure of other oppressed minorities throughout the world. No group of people is better or worse than any other. They merely inhabit different environments. Thinking otherwise leads to fundamentally faulty thinking, inappropriate cultural stereotyping and general stupidity. Humans as a species are highly homogenous and population variances can usually be explained through environmental factors and random genetic mutation than by any inherent ability. > Long and Kittles show that indeed, African populations contain about 100% of human genetic diversity, whereas in populations outside of Africa diversity is much reduced, for example in their population from New Guinea only about 70% of human variation is captured. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation > While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way, i.e. that among humans, race has no taxonomic significance: all living humans belong to the same species, Homo sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_beings) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_b... So I call bullshit on biologically derived differentiation across human populations by people with poor statistical and genetic understanding. There are ~2 billion Asians - reversion to the mean works highly effectively in these cases as immigration pressures stabilise. Race violates my rule that if it's vague, it's bullshit. Hence racial/cultural/fuzzy explanations for differentiating phenomena are discarded for the crap that they are.
  - niete 14y ago
    Jews are over-represented in high status professions in every western county. They comprise ~0.2% of the world's population and have won 38% of Nobel prizes. That is not just a "statistical fluke". It is reasonable to believe that Asians will continue to outperform whites for an indefinite period of time, until some sort of demographic upset.

barry-cotter 14y ago

Reversion to the mean always kicks in. Give immigrant Asians 30 more years -and you'll see them well integrated and achieving the same as average Americans Yeah, just like Americans of Jewish ancestry! A group that came over most poor and not speaking the language very well and with low social capital and mostly did very well, and whose children did very well will revert all the way to average.

confluence 14y ago
The vast majority of that can be explained by randomness, the extreme variance of small samples and inappropriate use of the fundamental attribution error. Minorities live or die not because of anything intrinsic - but merely because of prevailing environmental forces. The "Jewish-success", like the article's "Asian-success", is merely a statistical fluke, just as is the failure of other oppressed minorities throughout the world. No group of people is better or worse than any other. They merely inhabit different environments. Thinking otherwise leads to fundamentally faulty thinking, inappropriate cultural stereotyping and general stupidity. Humans as a species are highly homogenous and population variances can usually be explained through environmental factors and random genetic mutation than by any inherent ability. > Long and Kittles show that indeed, African populations contain about 100% of human genetic diversity, whereas in populations outside of Africa diversity is much reduced, for example in their population from New Guinea only about 70% of human variation is captured. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation > While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way, i.e. that among humans, race has no taxonomic significance: all living humans belong to the same species, Homo sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_beings) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_b... So I call bullshit on biologically derived differentiation across human populations by people with poor statistical and genetic understanding. There are ~2 billion Asians - reversion to the mean works highly effectively in these cases as immigration pressures stabilise. Race violates my rule that if it's vague, it's bullshit. Hence racial/cultural/fuzzy explanations for differentiating phenomena are discarded for the crap that they are.
- niete 14y ago
  Jews are over-represented in high status professions in every western county. They comprise ~0.2% of the world's population and have won 38% of Nobel prizes. That is not just a "statistical fluke". It is reasonable to believe that Asians will continue to outperform whites for an indefinite period of time, until some sort of demographic upset.