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A real meritocracy would have to weigh SAT scores by temperament and cultural values because these two qualities work in tandem with intelligence to produce meritorious results. I doubt Alex Berenson was the smartest person at Yale by testing, but his temperament enabled him to confront the establishment on COVID, making him more valuable than his peers. The reporter who pressed on the Epstein story, Julie Brown, is an old woman and attended Temple University, but for some reason was the only one of her journalistic peers to pursue something which many of them hid. Edward Snowden went to community college. Andrew Norfolk, who uncovered the grooming gang scandal, went to Durham University.
With every job there are moral decisions that require certain values and temperamental qualities. If these are lacking then there are huge civilizational costs. I don’t know if a Vivek Ramaswamy has these optimal qualities. I don’t know if Asian students are temperamentally or culturally disposed to risk their reputation to fight against a corrupt power structure or official. I would argue that their culture is too credential-oriented, results-oriented, and conformist for that. There should be more studies so that we are absolutely sure that “relatively new” immigrant groups have the inner qualities that are required for influential positions in society. Maybe the studies will show that Asian students are actually more likely to have these qualities, I have no idea, but I’m sure the SAT doesn’t measure them.
That is by definition not a meritocracy.
Nothing in the definition of meritocracy says that the only merit to be considered is standardized test scores.
No, of course not. But temperament and cultural values are not part of academic merit, and therefore have no place in a meritocracy for academia.
Standardized test scores are also not really a part of academic merit, they are just a proxy for academic merit. The only actual metric for academic merit would be one that measures the extent to which someone produces actual academic results like innovating new historical approaches or proving a math theorem, etc.
Sure, that's certainly a fair criticism of standardized tests. But whatever their faults, they are at least trying to measure academic merit. "Does this person have good values" type questions are not.
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At the undergraduate level, academic merit is about learning, not developing new stuff.
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But that's true only if you think of academia as solely focused on raw intelligence -- and it isn't. Even restricting ourselves to traits that provide success in raw academic pursuits, it's totally necessary to evaluate someone's conscientiousness, grit, and mental stability. In fact, I would argue evaluating these things is the whole point of college, in addition to helping meritorious students learn something.
I know no shortage of incredibly smart people with high test scores who underachieve, in both academic and professional pursuits, because of low conscientiousness or mental health problems. Any definition of academic merit that doesn't account for them in some way is of little value.
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Merit:
I would also argue that a demonstrably non-corrupt disposition would fall under ability’s “competence in doing something”.
This is just sophistry. The criteria for merit in an academic institution does not include culture and the like. Meritocracy in college admissions can include academic merit besides SAT scores, but it cannot include the criteria you are asking for.
It most certainly does, which is why basic liberal arts has always been part - even if only perfunctory - of any degree program.
The fundamental expectation of college has always been to produce a new gentry, which is why community involvement and a solid personality is still part of the admissions process. "Genius asshole who is hated by everyone but still has a career because he's just that brilliant" is much more common in fiction than reality. Even the shift to "meritocracy just means SAT scores, stop discriminating agains Asians" is fairly recent, and largely a consequence of the rapidly increasing social atomization of the modern era, and the rapid increase in credentialism.
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Not necessarily; it depends on your definition of merit.
By way of analogy (which sadly is no longer on the SAT), we can say highest-SAT-score-ism : meritocracy :: utilitarianism : consequentialism
Consequentialism says that one should act so that the consequences/outcomes of one’s actions are maximally good, but does not itself define what it means for an outcome to be “good”. Utilitarianism is one specific form of consequentialism in which “good” is defined as “utility (of all people in the world, e.g.)”
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You know that you sound exactly like the woke left when you're making excuses for why we shouldn't just use SAT scores in admitting people. It's the whole "Asians have bad personality" thing again. With a few rounds of find/replace we can turn your post into something only a highly woke left winger would agree with.
Are you familiar with the studies on why East Asians are less likely to be CEOs, and that the prevailing theories involve personality? Who is your favorite Asian comedian? Asians should be overrepresented among comedians because of their high IQ, unless, of course, there are personality differences and comedy revolves around challenging social convention in novel ways. If I were to say that certain African ancestry populations commit more crimes because they have a MAOA gene linked to aggression which then influences their temperament, would you consider me “woke left” because it doesn’t show up on an SAT?
If you believe in human biodiversity then it is reasonable to assume that different populations have different temperaments, because temperaments are simply general behavioral tendencies informed by genes x culture. East Asian conformist-collectivist culture, for instance, developed alongside rice cultivation and collective waterway management which induced different genes and cultural values than wheat cultures:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44770-w
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014292121001318
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8371358/
This is a generally unexplored area. India is corrupt as hell, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that it is corrupt because the people there are corrupt. If the people are corrupt then this indicates temperamental or cultural value differences. Just from the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India
In the absence of any good studies on this topic (or that I simply don’t know about them), for now I’ll trust my instincts for determining people that I think are trustworthy and virtuous. Someone like Tristan Harris has facial expressions, gestures, and intonation which immediately convey trust to me. I can feel that he genuinely feels for others, and it’s no surprise to me that he was our best whistleblower for social media algorithms despite most employees at FAANG being Asian. Patrick Bet David, Ramaswamy, and Siriam Krishnam… not so much.
Don't many comedians come from broken homes? Maybe Asians have less broken homes and don't feel the need to put themselves on the line in front of a crowd every week.
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I mean, normie upper middle class women are also underrepresented among successful comedians. Entirely possible this is just culture(no coincidence the first really successful woman comedian was Ellen, not exactly a proper lady).
I don't follow how pointing out to a difference between men and women lends itself to the argument "it's just culture".
There are successful women comedians- they’re just not proper ladies.
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I guess you're not familiar with Phyllis Diller... or any number of others.
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Carol Burnett and Joan Rivers both have her beat by decades. (Whoopi Goldberg also found massive success several years before Ellen did.)
Lucille Ball's zombie waves hello. Although she never did standup.
Right, I was sticking to standups. If we’re expanding it to women who got famous doing comedic acting, I’m sure there were others before Lucy. I’m not super familiar with the big stars of vaudeville and radio, but I imagine there were women among them. (Gracie Allen comes to mind.)
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East Asians and South Asians are on opposite ends of the verbal IQ spectrum. For example, South Asians are overrepresented among comedians and in Hollywood, increasingly in journalism and literature too. The higher castes appear to have very high verbal IQ, as @BurdensomeCount suggests.
Speaking as an East Asian - in my experience our verbal abilities as a group are so strikingly poor that I sometimes wonder that people don't generally think that we are kinda dumb. All the more so since verbal intelligence is the most apparent form of intelligence; you generally aren't going to be able to judge someone's math skills in casual conversation. In the workplace, among friends, at school, I find it hard not to notice the general inability of otherwise competent Asians (including myself) to put together coherent, grammatical sentences on the fly like everyone else does. Sometimes one has the pleasure of meeting startlingly articulate people. They are never East Asian. I'm not sure I can name a single very articulate East Asian. Even writers I enjoy, like Dan Wang, turn out to be not great at speaking. On the other hand there are plenty of very articulate black public intellectuals, for instance (and I say that not in a condescending way).
Interesting thought, though I want to defend our East Asian's "verbal abilities" here.
First question, are we talking about East Asians or American East Asians?
If it's American East Asians, I think there are plenty of famous American East Asian comedians (Ronny Chieng, Troy Iwata, Jimmy Yang, Ali Wong) . And yes, I am using "famous comedians" as correlation for "verbal abilities".
If it's East Asians, then maybe more exposure to more East Asian media might show that there can't possibly be a lack of good writing or verbal spars in East Asia. We have Nisio Isin whose entire career spanning novels and manga is built on Japanese wordplay (notice how his pseudonym is a palindrome). Chinese couplets, especially the combative kind (where one writer challenges and another respond) are to me essentially proto-rap battles. But I especially adore the subversive ways Chinese netizens subvert censorship
Second question, are we talking about American humor / verbal abilities in English?
I think we have to take into account that maybe the humor is just different. I was born and grew up in an East Asian country until I'm 18 (albeit at an international school). But after nearly a decade in the US, I can't really enjoy the humor of my home country the same way when I watch their TV anymore. We definitely can't really say that there is lacking in "verbal abilities" when examining historical works or contemporary entertainment industries for countries like China/Japan/Korea. The professionals in those countries are definitely not out of work or love from their audiences (love Stephen Chow).
On the other hand, I do think East Asia's general culture of being deferential means less biting comedy and a general tendency to follow well-worn life paths (doctor/lawyer/engineer) means there are less going into the "chatty" careers (journalism, comedian, writers, youtubers).
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Francis Fukuyama and John Yoo come immediately to mind.
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But (returning to the object-level) a genius verbal IQ is only meritorious if the person who has it also has prosocial genes and cultural values. As a thought experiment, we can imagine that a sociopath with a high verbal IQ can do a lot of damage to a country, and on the other end a person with a lot of empathy and a high verbal IQ can do a lot of good. The latter person is probably doing groundbreaking journalism, or explaining science to the masses, or taking corporations to court pro-bono, or is an incredible psychiatrist or Scott Alexander type. The former people are doing, I don’t know, political propaganda and “thank you for smoking” stuff and purposely not helping his psychoanalytic clients.
In between the extremes of “sociopath” and “the aunt you have who cried when looking at photos of refugees” (to pick a personal example) there’s probably an amount of prosociality which is greater than some quantity of IQ. I have no idea what the breakdown is, but thinking about it a little bit more, the emotional dimension to prosociality probably necessitates guilt. A person who is apt to feel guilt at their actions is more apt to behave prosocially, because guilt comes in regardless of external surveillance, and shame only comes in when there’s a risk of being caught. Although this wouldn’t explain Japan, which is presumably a shame culture, so maybe back to the drawing board…
I don't think you need to go back to the drawing board, I'd say you have nailed the prerequisite prosocial emotion of an honour culture and it necessarily works differently in a shame culture, where shame takes the top spot. It doesn't fully align, but honour cultures tend to privilege internal locus of control, while shame cultures privilege external locus of control.
But consider —
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200114-why-japan-is-so-successful-at-returning-lost-property
The study occurred in 2002, so before the surveillance state. The actions could not be purely motivated from the threat of social judgment. This seems to indicate that the Japanese internalize their shame/honor to such a high degree that it’s intrinsically motivated. But if shame can be so intrinsically motivated, then there are limited practical consequences to a guilt/shame distinction.
Cultural differences are real and meaningful, but in this case I wonder if the difference in honesty looks bigger due to a difference in norms about how to return lost property. Unless I were in a small town, handing a lost wallet in to the police probably wouldn't occur to me, and then it would likely be option two or three.
There are these tiny little police stations everywhere in Japan that have a well known function of being a place to return lost property to.
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I mean, if I didn’t know the person, that’s what I would do- the police should be able to look up the person’s phone number based off of their ID.
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Asian Comedian? Romesh Ranganathan fits the bill pretty well. The same reasons you give for why East Asians are less likely to be CEOs also apply to explain why high caste South Asians are more likely to be CEOs than whites, but the nativists don't then turn around and accept that as proof of their inferiority, even though they freely apply that logic to why East Asians are inferior.
Really? The first thing I thought of after seeing his oversized pointy ears and nose and those large round brown fully circular eyes was a partially shaved Macaque monkey, someone who's basically completely harmless. Now he's very intelligent based on the way he speaks, but I think you may be conflating intelligent + harmless for trustworthy which isn't the same thing. I don't get a trustworthiness reading either way (positive or negative) from the first few minutes of your linked clip beyond the fact that in the 5th minute he namedrops Marc Andreessen who is someone I'm positively predisposed to which makes me more likely to trust Tristan Harris.
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This is exactly why I think the term "woke right" has value. It perfectly describes the sort of person who'll make standard progressive arguments with one or two ethnicities swapped around.
See also people who are super hbd-based when it comes to explaining why black americans perform worse than white, but who immediately reinvent some form of systemic racism against whites when it comes to explaining the higher performances of asians/Jews (i.e. talking about "rote learning" or "in-group preferences").
Sure, for example it's easy to find Nazis who think that Jews aren't actually smarter than non-Jewish whites on average despite the overwhelming evidence for the fact that Jews actually are smarter than non-Jewish whites on average.
That said, I don't think talking about "rote learning" or "in-group preferences" of East Asians is necessarily the same phenomenon. With some commenters, it is, but not with all. There is a real phenomenon to be explained of why it is that East Asians are not more successful than whites despite testing higher on various measures of intelligence. Jews, clearly, are more successful than non-Jewish whites on average, so in their case there is no phenomenon to explain. The idea that standardized tests make East Asians seem smarter than they actually are in the real world seems like a plausible explanation to me. It's not necessarily just some systemic racism theory.
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