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No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites
1] From the moment of birth, Chinese-American infants show extreme acceptance to conditions that horrify European ones.
-Cover a European 40 hour old infants nose, either directly or by lying them face flat on the bed; and they'll struggle to uncover it. Chinese infants will breath through their mouth, otherwise remaining entirely motionless. Where European infants will become more aggressively distressed the longer you do this to them, Chinese infants will remain calm.
Study by Dan Freeman and his Chinese-American wife in Nature:
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0
2] Dramatic differences remain at four months:
REACTIVITY BATTERY RESPONSES: Exposed to a battery of tests designed to elicit reactions; moving, crying, fretting, vocalizing and smiling; Chinese infants are undeniably different.
For example, the most mobile Chinese infants are less than a third as mobile as the most mobile American ones and half as mobile as the Irish sample. In each area except for smilling, American and Irish reactivity can be expressed as multiples of the Chinese ones; with a degree of difference that would be shocking in a gender study! This is even after 32% of the Boston sample, but none of the Chinese sample, was excluded due to infant non-cooperation.
See the chart on page three. It's really, really dispositive.
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1037/0012-1649.30.3.342
CRYING IN RESPONSE TO INNOCULATION: Other studies involve observing differences in rates of crying upon childhood innoculations, and compare American infants to Japanese ones. Here, you get shocking differences like, 4 out of 26 Japanese infants crying in response to a shot where every single American infant did so. This, at least partially results from considerable differences in levels of cortisol production, both prior to and immediately after innoculation.
https://sci-hub.ru/10.2307/1131465
General Note: I tried to find East Asian American studies for the four month behaviour section, but couldn't. Readers of the papers will find that they appear to be well controlled as these things can be, with the Chinese sample being from the infants of students at China's top university.
3] Dramatic differences obviously remain in adulthood:
3.1 THE BAMBOO CEILING: There is asian overrepresentation in every field involving intelligence and a bamboo ceiling in every subfield requiring a personality. To give one example from reuters:
"Asian Americans comprise 13% of associates at major law firms, but just 4% of equity partners — the lowest ratio among minority groups, the report notes. Only one of the current 93 Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorneys is Asian American, and their representation among law clerks has been stagnant for the past 25 years."
The difference between associates, and partners/US Attorneys is of course, that the latter might occasionally try a case or engage in unmediated interactions with people who are not like them and need to build up a rappor.
3.2 MASKS PEOPLE, MASKS! Explain to me why, until perhaps the last two months, your average East-Asian American was more likely to be masked than blue-anon types. Isn't the parsimonious answer simply that infants who won't fight to uncover their nose, become adults that are indifferent to showing their face?
Do we realy have to litigate this one?
3.3 MUSIC: Asian parents sure as hell get their kids to play piano, and early, often similarly strict musical upbringings are common among music stars generally. Where then, are the distinguished East Asian-American popular musicians?
3.4 NOVELS: Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?
@sword-of-empire: I can be reached at lepidusian@protonmail.com
K-pop, or well-integrated into the U.S. music scene. E.g., Mike Shinoda, Steve Aioki, Far East Movement of "Like a G-6" fame, Dream Theater's bassist John Myung, Lawrence's guitarist Jonny Koh (okay, that's from my personal playlist and not from general prominence), the Disney/musical theater singer Lea Salonga, does Yo-Yo Ma count? It's not exactly popular music per se, but he's one of the greatest popularizers of classical music of the last 50 years...
And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there's other obvious ones I'm missing, as well as an at-least representative sample of backing musicians, producers, studio engineers, etc.
James Iha from Smashing Pumpkins etc. Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs (half Korean). Even the Van Halen brothers (part Indonesian) might count here.
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This seems like a good sell for Asian-Americans as the best possible integration case with the traditionally white United States of America. What we get:
High economic productivity
High compliance with local rules and social standards
Replication of our historic cultural traditions in music and literature
These are pretty strong benefits, and we don't even have to deal with the kind of sociopathic climbers that become partners in law firms! I have a hard time imagining a group of people that I'll tend to have more affinity for than those with the intellectual capacity to do high-level law and finance that choose tech and science at disproportionate rates instead.
I agree with the thesis that Asian-Americans are not just smart whites, but disagree with the implication that the outcome of that is negative. Instead, I think the Asian-American population synergizes with legacy Americans and is one of the few examples I can think of where diversity is our strength is more than a slogan.
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i guess clarification is needed given "-american." i thought it was apparent. OP is talking genetics, HBD. "-american" is in this context meaningless, it is only present to avoid the obvious absurdity of wondering why 1.5 billion east asians aren't producing great english novels. but it is even more absurd to use this framing as the gotcha for "where are their great novels--they aren't particularly creative--they aren't particularly intelligent" when east asian storytelling in the west has success ranging from merely incredible in video games to total domination of the market in comics and animation.
yukio mishima
yasunari kawabata
kazuo ishiguro
haruki murakami
that's poetry and prose. beyond that, japanese creatives apropos manga and anime are the most successful and among the most interesting storytellers in the world. i consider pure prose as incomparably above illustrated stories, so the great mangaka do not compare with the great authors of the last 150 years, but below the likes of hemingway, mccarthy, faulkner, rushdie, coetzee, updike and of course mishima/kawabata/ishiguro/murakami, and above almost all other living english language authors, are katsuhiro otomo, akira toriyama, hiromu arakawa, masamune shirow, kentaro miura, and also sunrise/"hajime yatate".
ref. above. when adapted, many of those iconic japanese series have iconic scores by japanese composers.
one of the greatest living producers is the filipino chad hugo. the biggest japanese artist in pop right now might be rina sawayama, i don't know, i don't listen to much. steve aoki is successful, mike shinoda extremely so. the popular lofi owes much to the various -waves, especially vaporwave, which itself pulls heavily on work like tatsuro yamashita/japanese citypop. but these aren't straight causal lines, music is collaborative, between partners like hugo and williams and between generations like yamashita to macintosh plus, and that's ignoring everything else vektroid worked off. i'd sooner criticize pop anyway for lagging behind, all the brilliant producers work in hip hop and electronic. what's popular on the radio today uses techniques kanye worked out 20 years ago.
great artists often have troubled childhoods where their creative expressions go from psychological escape to literal escape. i think this is why the US black community produces so many singers and musicians, and this could explain why the asian community of the US, half as a whole (which it certainly is not) as large as the black community and far more economically successful, seemingly produces fewer great musicians. forcing a kid to play piano or violin for 13 years isn't going to turn them into a superstar, they have it or they don't, they'll be exposed and fall in love or they won't. how many white kids play instruments in school but never do anything beyond orchestra or band?
and again to close . . .
many, varied, and incredibly easy to find. the concluding point of your short essay was to discredit yourself with profound cultural illiteracy. you should consider this an opportunity to reexamine how you think about the world, as you are wrong.
Ishiguro is British, not American.
OP argues from genetics, legal nationality is immaterial. pointing out the immense success of east asian creatives answers the substance of his essay.
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Don't forget video games; the stories contained within their media are probably even more popular than their works of written and televised art.
Nearly everyone on the face of the Earth has heard the compositions of Koji Kondo in some form or another. Sure, you can argue that the reason for that is circumstantial, yet I don't believe any other composer has the same distinction.
i thought about editing my comment or posting a reply mentioning video games but figured someone else would. sure enough.
it is especially laughable to asperse creativity when the juggernaut of manga/anime still strides inside the footfalls of the behemoth called NINTENDO
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Sounds pretty great for the people around them.
yeah. quiet neighbors, quiet well-behaved kids
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You were warned the last time you engaged in literal Chinese cardiology that you are allowed to develop weird theses, but it can't just be cherry-picked examples of why your target group is bad.
Yes, if you are going to offer anecdotal observations as "evidence" that the Chinese are lizard people, you have to actually justify your just-so stories.
This kind of manifesto-posting is not desirable. Lots of people come here with very particular ideas about certain racial and ethnic groups, and as you are no doubt aware, we don't prohibit that, but you actually have to make a well-founded argument, not just "Look at how obviously alien and inhuman these people are." We have rules against weakmanning, and rules about writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
Just to take an obvious example, we have several posters with very obvious antipathy for Jews. Yet when they go off on their favorite topic, they usually manage to post in such a way that there is at least something to engage with, it's not just "Jews bad." Complaining about Holocaust memorials or the amount of dollars that go into funding Jewish NGOs might be a veneer over their real agenda, but it's a veneer that allows even Jewish posters to argue at the object level.
What you offer a hypothetical Chinese poster to engage with is "true or false, you are an alien bugman of a hostile alien species."
Since you were already explicitly warned to stop posting like this, banned for three days. If you want to come back and keep riding this hobby horse, you will need to seriously up your game.
I'd like to make a meta-comment here; I got this thread in the daily volunteer janitorial duties. Without context, I see consensus building, cherry-picked (though not insufficient) evidence to support his claims -- No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites seems to be the one real claim of the entire post, which the subsequent evidence feels so disconnected from I almost forgot about it --, vague weakmanning.
That said, on a quick read, and without seeing his name, it wasn't even clear to me whether he was pro or anti East Asian. The first two sections seem to suggest that the babies are a lot tougher/more stoic than Europeans, not a priori a negative trait. The last section, without context, could read as evidence of East-West cultural incompatibility or discrimination. Initially, when reading the title, I thought he was going for Chinese don't just have higher IQs, they are more resilient/industrious in general. This falls apart in the third section, where he's hammering the trope of East Asians = seen by Westerners as emotionless/cold/disconnected, which I think vaguely passes muster? There's considerable asymmetry in general cultural exports between East Asia and the US after WW2/Korea.
He's begging the question with Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?, but taking a step back, my main exposition to Japanese/Chinese culture has been self-sought (barring reading Sun Tzu when I was a young teenager, who's become a ubiquitous prototype of eternal Eastern wisdom) and entirely autochtonous. I've briefly perused top 25 best books in Asian-American literature and don't recognize a single title (except for a Murakami book, whose inclusion I find borderline offensive).
I believe I rated this as Bad, maybe an extremely charitable Neutral, but I feel this showcases a shortcoming of the hyperlocal view the volunteer system offers: not only am I unable to immediately view his previous posts (which in my opinion are significantly easier to classify without context) -- they are two clicks away, context then profile --, but am also not necessarily aware that this is a toned-down/more indirect version of the usual manifesto, for which he was already warned.
I feel obligated to point out that Haruki Murakami is not Asian-American, he's just Asian (Japanese).
As for the meta-comment, @ZorbaTHut can comment further if he wishes, but I think it's by design that volunteers only judge posts in isolation, since it's just meant as a sort of triage system. I don't think the volunteer janny system is ever meant to replace moderators, because the mods see user histories and take that into account.
Adding to the meta comment: it would be nice when jannying to be able to go and see the context of a post, and then be able to give an opinion.
At least for me (on my telephone), if I leave the janny page for any reason, I forfeit the volunteering for 24h.
Tap the three dots below the post, hold the "Context" option which appears in the pop up and tap "Open link in new tab". At least that is how I do it on firefox on android.
Thanks! (I'm feeling rather embarrassed for not having found out myself)
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"whose inclusion I find borderline offensive" I wasn't offended at the quality of his writing :P
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Thanks. I could've sworn that this exact nonsense about Chinese babies was seen before on here, but I wasn't about to hunt down proof. I didn't engage either time because I'm not even sure what the point to all this is.
He doesn't seem to participate otherwise so it was just a profile check to see.
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It's not even a manifesto. The last time it was more well-formed but also fell short of our classical manifestoposters. It's «here are some reasons I find compelling to think that the Chinese are, essentially, yucky emotionally stunted robots. Amirite?» He suggested some racial struggle, but what's the struggle? Chinese babies are significantly more chill than other babies; Chinese adults tend to wear masks, excel at technical competence and fail at entering the PMC; a hundred years ago, Mainland Chinese elite women had their feet bound. Okay, I personally buy all this and much more.
Where's the thesis and its development? What is supposed to be or not be litigated, exactly? That a sovereign Chinese state is inherently a threat to Western values or something? This doesn't follow from the provided evidence, such as there is, and isn't even articulated.
Maybe I just lack the context of the Yellow Menace discourse and it's assumed to be self-evident the moment Chinese differences are established. I can certainly see how an intuitive antipathy for a racial Other can inform policies. But this is supposed to be a place for rational-ish discussion. You need to spell this stuff out.
I wish there was a Yellow menace. If I was to choose between the current woke pmc and ccp leadership I wouldn't blink before choosing them.
Are you really that bullish on the CCP after 2 years of zero-covid and rolling lockdowns? A consistent pattern over the last 3 years seems to be, America is retarded, but they consistently get outdone by the rest of The World. Russia started a full-scale war, China did zero-covid, Australia/NZ tried zero-covid, Canada went full authoritarian, Germany phased out nuclear... to go back to coal! The UK's economy stagnated. So many other countries got on the lockdown train. And the Third World, they are going to need a lot of IMF loans soon.
Yes. CCP Don't want to export their values unlike Brussels or Washington and them being the hegemon will allow to solve the two biggest problems facing EU - mass migration and inability of current migrants to culturally assimilate. Which requires some mild application of the stick not only the carrot.
Are we sure about that? Sure, China may not necessarily be interested in International Communism, but they seem to like asking their business partners (NBA, Disney, etc.) to make the right noises and not make the wrong noises. China's investments in African nations is also likely for a similar reason, to shore up international PR and UN support for the PRC.
Maybe it's just that being the hegemon requires or results in values spread--maybe material power is not enough without memetic power.
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I suppose Dase could repost that Russian "proverb" about the two chairs here...
Something something two chairs but one ass? Now sure how that applies here.
While I cannot know for certain, I think @HalloweenSnarry references the classical Prison Riddle, i.e. a shit test used as part of a «registration» rite for a new cell mate, popularized on Russian imageboards (this stuff was recently brought to the attention of Westerners by Galeev).
The riddle in question is a near-perfectly polished psychological attack against a relatively powerless newcomer in a honor culture setting; it's really pretty crude, but lazily googled translations are lacking, so here goes. «There are two chairs. On one, sharpened pikes. On the other, jerked [erect] cocks. On which one do you sit, on which do you put your mother?» As is common with riddles, it rhymes.
Supposedly, default passwords are:
«I'll take the sharpened pikes, cut down the jerked cocks, will sit myself and sit my mother».
«I'll sit on the pikes and sit my mother on my knees».
In principle, the universal counter «For what reason do you inquire?» (literally), or some blah like «We're fine with standing, thank you very much» are also valid, though I haven't had the opportunity to try it out.
There is a whole family of those riddles, sadly their charm is untranslatable. The most reductionist one is «Offer your ass vs. sell your mom?»
I like the trolley problem one:
Russian (and broader Russophone) culture pays a lot of attention to the problem of choosing between terrible options and false dichotomies, captured in the saying «horse-radish ain't sweeter than radish». E.g. the Escobar Axiom of Choice (Escobar is a Ukrainian black metal character):
Or in the original form:
Pelevin has developed this idea into a faux-dialectical method, e.g. in «Batman Apollo»:
And earlier, in «P5: farewell songs of the political pygmies of pindostan»:
But as for the CCP vs the Globohomo, I think another piece of imageboard fancy is more relevant – the 4chan «freedom is best, and hard choices» or maybe the Ben Garrison remake «the march of tyranny». If you don't have negotiating power except in the form of defecting in protest, and your defection threshold is only reached after both tyrants have curtailed freedoms of their subjects, just to a different extent (and that's still a better case than what we have here) – eventually both tyrants converge to absolute dominance and all subjects are maximally debased.
This reminds me of older discourse around powertalk(?), wherein enough people "leave" the game of producing to extort producers, that society begins to collapse. (I only briefly leafed through a decade ago and current perusal leaves me uncertain whether that was the source.)
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Yeah, that first one was what I was thinking of.
Your ending paragraph puts things a lot better, though.
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Password template seems to be any solution where you don't sit on the cocks and your mother is absolutely unharmed/uncocked. I did figure that out as much, but thought of retarded shit like placing the chairs sideways and both of us sitting on the side edge or something. I might just be too "neurodivergent" for Russian prison. That fails the "fuck you" criterion though.
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Exactly, I’d rather continue to take mandatory DEI trainings than be under the CCP.
‘Lies about how awesome Mao is’ are not a significant improvement on ‘lies about how awesome black supremacists from the 70’s are’.
It's not "the lies" that are the issue.
Pretending to think that declaring war on sparrows and killing 100 million people was a stroke of genius doesn't seem like a notable improvement on pretending to believe that black women have some kind of unique insight.
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Why? I feel the exact opposite way.
You’d rather take mandatory trainings on the party? Wear a loyalty pin?
For me zero COVID alone would be a nightmare. Hong Kong just dropped their mask mandate last week!
I suppose if I have to be ruled by tyrants, I'd much rather have the ones that don't change the rules constantly and look to permanent revolution.
At least with the CCP, you know what you're getting.
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The sense of unity though, of everyone of any religion, ethnicity and political persuasion coming together - from all over the world - to fight Winnie the pooh and friends, it would be such a relief.
Just think - no wondering if that person I just met at work is a monster obsessed with killing black/white people - not having to wonder about anyone who isn't Chinese at all at the start (not to mention how much easier it would be to score a cute Chinese girlfriend when everyone is terrified of them - sure you can spy on me sweetie, I know less than nothing). It sounds like bliss.
Note that I read the scenario here as things are exactly the same as they are now but the ccp are in charge, and people aren't saying they wish the last 20 years were rewritten so that the ccp steamrolled the world and everywhere now looks like China, because I can't imagine either IGI-111 or Lizzardspawn going for that based on previous conversations, and because that would require a lot more set up to engage with hypothetically.
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Yeah I don't think anyone saying they would love to be under the ccp lived in a place that "took covid seriously", my country dropped their mask mandates mid-2022, by god I was going insane, if I was in China where they have stricter covid rules and lockdowns, I would have probably jumped out of the window by now.
US Red State residents have no idea how good they had it the last two years.
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My favorite part was where he implied that 3-chord overproduced popular music is better than classical music.
Better or worse is purely subjective in art. I won't call pop music the pinnacle of music, but I personally would rather listen to pop than to classical music.
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Yeah popular music is trash. East Asians contribute (or at least K-pop and J-pop do), but it's just more slop.
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I for one would like to welcome our new stoic Asian overlords.
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I'd rather have people with hard skills in my country than 'soft-skills' people. Better to have rule by high-INT than high-CHA. Nobody's ever denied that East Asians are clever, they make contributions in technology. If they've all joined the Democratic/leftist mainstream media ideological consensus, then that's really more our fault for founding it in the first place.
So what if they're a bit less creative and more disciplined? It's not a highly significant effect, there's plenty of start-ups and development in China. They lead in many sectors of technology: https://twitter.com/scienceisstrat1/status/1557866377486245889 How is this possible if they're not significantly creative?
Discipline can also be good in certain circumstances, if you've got a soldier who'll fight to their last breath, that can be useful. The conditions China fought under in Korea were horrendously bad, they had no air cover, negligible artillery/armour and their logistics were minimal. They could only move at night lest they get found and pummeled by the US air force. The mountains of Korea are immensely cold and tens of thousands of them died of frostbite. But they fought the UN forces to a standstill with skillful infiltration tactics and night fighting, using infantry alone. In terms of generalship and valor, they outclassed us as much as we outclassed them in firepower and materiel. Surely such feats deserve respect!
I really liked the Three Body Problem series, it was thought provoking. I also liked Reverend Insanity, which is very unlike other books and webnovels in various ways. Both are from mainland China. And there are considerable political problems in the mainstream publishing industry in the US, there is a tendency to market various politically-correct literature, from authors of favored ethnicities.
Anyway, of all the ethnic groups in the US, you're finding problems with the East Asians? The ones with the lowest crime rates and highest incomes? The ones who are getting lumped with whites in terms of anti-meritocratic discrimination?
Have they? Every Asian-American I meet is grounded in traditional responsibilities of the nuclear family & boomer era conservative society.
Natalists:
Have children....and live for your children
Take care of your old parents.... and they will do the childcare while you work
Pay for your child's education...which comes with the implicit expectation of getting grandchildren.
Merit & work ethic based values
Pull yourself up by your bootstraps --> go to school & get a job
Excuses like 'I do not have privilege' are never tolerated
Anti illegal-immigration --> pro skills based immigration
Emphasis on their culture's preservation
Take pride in being the race & culture they hail from
Kids are expected to come home for special events celebrated in a historically faithful manner
Defer to elders continues to be the norm.
Jadedness around blank-slatist neo-ideologies. The great leap forward and the general failure of neo-systems across Asia has made them quite resistant to 'brand new ideas that will fix everything'. There is a 'you have no idea how good things in the 1st world are, do not fuck this up' belief that pervades the culture. (I'd say this applies to 1st and 2nd gen immigrant culture at large)
There are 2 reasons that Indians and Chinese aren't solidly red-coded.
First is because of the Republican's insistence on 'Whiteness & Christianity' being core to the platform. If it gets reframed as 'protestant values & religiosity', then people-of-color would be more likely to associate with the group. Trump and more concretely: DeSantis, has already started this process by capturing Cubans & religious Hispanics. The model clearly works.
The second is the tricky one. Both Indians and Chinese diaspora really value social acclaim through institutional success. So as long as the institutions are coded left, they will continue to pretend, and eventually believe themselves to be coded left. It is a very Scott-Aaronson-ian approach to the world. Unless Republicans can tie themselves to being high status, they will never be able to pull Indians/Chinese towards them.
But going by values, Asian-diaspora embodies more of the boomer-era values that Republicans claim to stand for than Republicans themselves.
This is simply false and has been false for decades. Here's what George W. Bush said about the topic on Sept 17, 2001 for example:
Leftists insist that Republicans are racist, and push this meme by misleading media stories. A Bush II example of this was James Byrd (black guy) getting murdered by racists in Texas while Bush was governor. Leftists who oppose the death penalty wanted a hate crime law, Bush said such a law was unnecessary because Texas has strict laws against murder. Texas eventually executed the killers based on those laws.
A Trump example of this is creatively editing a statement to imply Trump described white supremacists as "fine people" when he explicitly said he wasn't referring to them. (Full quotes here: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/ )
Now I fully believe that Indians and Chinese believe this to be true - but their belief has nothing to do with any actual mainstream Republican views. Your second reason explains quite well why Indian and Chinese Americans believe this, regardless of how true it is.
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This may be true of the immigrants themselves, but I'm not so sure it still obtains among the second- and third-generations; particularly those growing up under contemporary socio-cultural conditions.
In my experience, second-generation Asian Americans are divided between a vocally woke minority of mostly women and a quiet majority of mostly men who don't care about politics and just want to earn a living and be left alone.
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Let's assume that your poorly-developed, unsourced arguments are all 100% true. They're not, and throwing music and novels in there is almost absurd enough to suggest parody, but I don't want to deal with your Gish gallop, so I'm going to use my imagination.
Why should I care?
If, as you seem to think, Asians are unfeeling automata who may neither comprehend art nor build genuine rapport...I'm not seeing the problem. Explain to me why the existence of such people is a bad thing.
Some people seem to think that you need to have a "personality" in order to have a right to live.
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Some of the arguments are sourced, some are not. I think, as poorly argued as the position is, there are undeniable expressed differences between divergent population groups. I don't know on what basis anyone can deny this considering the widely divergent cultural norms and expressions. Let alone physical and psychological differences. I also, like you, don't know exactly what the person is arguing towards. It reads similar to anti-China CIA threads on /pol/, without the industrial accident webm's.
I think there is an undeniably obvious problem to develop between two people, one an unfeeling automata and another who deeply feels and sympathizes with everything around him. Now neither the Chinese nor European live up to those descriptors, but I think the principle holds firm regardless. That there is a clash of 'values' there.
I think a lot of the world has been playing by western rules for a while now. And I see no reason to assume that any country anywhere in the world would continue to do so if the west fades as a power. I don't see it as a ridiculous deduction to say that this potential loss of power, coupled with different values of a rising power, represent a threat to the people who value all the things the 'west' has stood for internationally.
I don't think you necessarily need to demonize the Chinese to make this argument, but there does seem to be a numbness to the western population when a threat is proposed that is anything other than the media flavor of the month. A sort of automatic assumption that, no matter what, the status quo established by White expansion and global dominance throughout the recent ages is a universal that was always the case and that it will hold no matter who is 'in charge'. I think that assumption is obviously faulty. But, again, I don't think you make those arguments literally, like is being tried here. I think you just show a Chinese person boiling a dog alive and let the 'visceral logic' do the speaking for you.
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Calling a series of factual statements a “gish gallop” is basically telling on yourself. There’s no argument here, but you’re admitting the conclusion you would draw is uncomfortable ergo assuming bad intentions.
It is interesting to try to compare the reaction of this site to this poster to the common reflexively hostile one most reddit subs have to HBD in general (which this site doesn't share and/or looks down upon)
There seems to be some history I'm missing with the user that might explain it though. Maybe.
His post a week ago started with "Our struggle with China is racial", focused on the supposed inherent cruelty of Chinese people rather than something more supported like East Asians being higher conformity/conscientiousness, and was poorly argued and focused on anecdotal evidence. So there's some carryover, where people take this post as a continuation of the same argument rather than just being the (quite plausible) assertion that East Asians have personality differences separate from the higher intelligence. Obviously "this race is so incompatible that we're destined for racial conflict" is a much more dubious claim, especially when the argument isn't even about the resentment that flows from differing capability or from violent crime but vague personality differences. And as I pointed out in response to his original post, he's focusing on Chinese people but they don't have that much genetic separation from other East Asians, most of which do not have China's reputation for low empathy or its political antagonism with the U.S.
Regarding this post specifically, my largely uninformed impression of the infant studies is that they're small and potentially questionable for the usual replication crisis reasons, but unfortunately it's probably difficult to do an improved version of them for political reasons. (It's also harder to know what implications they have for adults.) It would make sense, but a lot of replication crisis stuff makes sense, that's why people were investigating the hypothesis in the first place. It's not comparable to intelligence research on population differences, where the state of the evidence is much firmer and more extensive.
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Not at all.
I think he’s wrong on the merits, such as with his inability to name Asian (-American?) authors or musicians. He’s also not making only factual statements. Part of what makes it a Gish gallop is mixing in assertions, like the claim that the gap between law associates and law partners implies Asians lack “personality.” He is throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
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What was the point of this fever dream rant? Did some Chinese guy steal your girl?
Good lord this got me. Thanks for the laugh.
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I don't think I've seen anyone make the claim that Chinese-Americans are just high IQ whites. Usually if someone has gone far enough down the HBD rabbit-hole to have this conversation they will bring up in the next breath the personality differences between East Asians and Europeans as an explanation for their underrepresentation at the highest levels of achievement.
Clearly there are differences, just as Indian Brahmins or unassimilated Ashkenazi Jews are not the same as White Americans, even if they all qualify for the high IQ 'club.' What we should conclude from this fact is unclear, but given intermarriage rates of 20% or more per generation and imminent catastrophic population decline in China cutting off the supply of new immigrants, I don't think you have anything to worry about unless you think that having a future white population with 5-10% Asian ancestry is some sort of disaster.
I think there are enough 'IQ nationalists', especially in the 'fringe rationalist world' to warrant some expressed reservations regarding the alleged supremacy of IQ.
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Where are any great novelists of the past 30 years?
Dunno, but ‘where are the great Asian-American novels’ is particularly dumb because Asian Americans A) haven’t been here as long as whites B) language barrier and C) don’t exactly have an industry dedicated to promoting them per their group(which is a partial explanatory factor to the over representation of blacks among the American literary canon) while also being a fairly small portion of the population.
I believe the point was that there haven’t been great novelists of any stripe or race in the last 30 years, so the problem is not solely a Chinese one.
Whether that is true I‘m not really sure.
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I agree with all those points!
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Do you suppose high-caste Indians and Jews have incredible personalities to go along with their intelligence, in the sense that there's «more» of a person there, or a better person? Might this word be deserving of some… scrutiny? This autistic Chinese American guy has an opinion to share:
I remember Lynn (probably) writing that black people, too, tend to have «winner personalities», just of a slightly more combative mold, which makes teachers intuitively assume that black students must be smarter than what those ignorant, culturally biased formal tests might indicate: always speaking up in class, not ashamed to ask questions, proud, undeterred by criticism or low-class background… basically model grinning Americans from cartoons and stock photos, who don't even need no Tony Robbins to coach them into success. The other side of that is surprising lack of real success, and probably stuff like this too. The Chinese are more known for videos of this kind. As you say, your struggle with China is racial. So, which way, Western man?
Aside from suggesting that the Chinese aren't full-fledged human beings because something something not emotionally reactive enough, do you have an idea of a perfect American? Less like the Chinese, more like Indians, Jews, Blacks? Or do you suppose that Whites are the only group that's properly balanced? I've criticized them the last time and could go on with mockery, but would you mind making a positive case?
Yes. I have anecdotal evidence generated by my lying eyes, but Indians tend to be prolific nepotists in my part of the world (Dubai). And given 35% of the population is Indian, I think I have a decent enough sample size to base this assertion on.
Anecdotes of an Indian from a specific village/township in India entering the management of a company and the company suddenly becoming a foreign outpost of that village is a dime and a dozen. In the West, Indians are probably less granular in their nepotism in that a manager might favor South/North/X Caste/{whatever tribalism you can conjure up} Indians over other Indians, or even other Desi's (Not Pakistanis) if they are proportionally not large enough yet, but the pattern will eventually lead towards the guy's village if not his extended family as they grow in numbers. The KPMG offices here had to purge their upper management and CEO a few years back because the Indian managers were doing what they do best. Unfortunately for KPMG they hired an Arab!! who did the exact same thing before half the company revolted against him and got him to step down.
Otoh, I can't speak for the entire world, but no one comes second in nepotism to the Lebanese. The "Lebanese Mafia" as they are called here have taken over just about entire industries to the point that people joke you are better off having gone to "AUB" than Harvard if you want to work in Media/Consulting here.
This is true for most immigrant ethnic groups, though. It's no secret that up until the 60's and 70's policing, municipal waste management, and teaching were all ethnic patronage jobs in most major American cities, with the specifics of which group got what depending on the particular ethnic mix of the region (e.g. Polish ethnic interests mattered in Chicago, but not NYC.) Germans also were famously ethnocentric in the midwest up until about WWI (when it became very politically touchy to speak in German or be overly-sympathetic to the Kaiserreich) however, the fact that they were largely in farming and small communities limited their reach.
I don't think this is really comparable to the «Indian Cordyceps» so aptly described by Moldbugman.
Related take from Razib.
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The study…is that really the fully study, or just the abstract…has a total of 48 infants. And the primary criteria is quite subjective—besides blink rate, it was all unquantified “oh the baby struggled more quickly”. (And even the blink rate isn’t actually display in a table anywhere.)
And, it’s the least blinded study I could imagine. The authors quite obviously knew they were looking at white or Asian babies, so there’s a huge potential for bias…up to and including pushing some of the babies harder.
That poster has made top level posts mentioning these unresponsive Chinese babies twice now. Those claims were based on this study? That's how far they strained themselves in searching for sources?
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I looked around for copies in other aggregators and it seems to me that is actually the entire study. It's less than 1 page! Being a researcher in the 60's must've been fun.
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And with this small sample, they nevertheless got massively significant p-value of 0.0001. Small sample size makes it harder for p-values to reach significance.
That's why the discuss the reliability:
So, they are quite subjective, but the authors subjective judgements were in very high agreement.
I have no idea whether this study if correct or not, but why are you cherry picking the very lowest p-value of the several reported?
It's sufficient to dispose of the argument that the study should be discounted because of its low sample size (which is an innumerate argument that gets thrown around far too often on the internet). P-values are, in part, a function of sample size. They're the answer to the question "what is the likelihood of seeing a pattern at least this strong in a sample of this size under the null hypothesis?". Having a small sample size isn't some sneaky hack to get more statistically significant results - as wlxd points out, a smaller sample size makes it harder to find significant results (i.e. you need a stronger effect size).
A lot of people have this vague idea that a study needs thousands or tens of thousands of observations to get persuasive results about some statistical pattern, and it's just not true. As an intuition pump, imagine flipping a coin 48 times and getting 42 heads and 6 tails. Is that not enough to convince you that the coin (or flipping process) is rigged?
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Oh please that was the lowest…but barely.
I suppose it’s a bit cherry-picking to point out the lowest p-value, but all of the subjective observations were in that teeny tiny range.
Well, no, not barely. It was the lowest by a lot. The other p-values were small, but nowhere near that small (they were from .005 to .06). Besides, if they were all about the same, then why not cite the highest? That's what people do when they argue in good faith.
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Because they have a conclusion they need to support. This isn't complicated.
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Isn't this subject to the college admissions counterpoint: i.e. that, just like colleges use "soft skills" to discriminate against otherwise intellectually overachieving Asians - and Jews before them- to serve other ends , so do businesses (or businesses downstream of this tendency pick it up as a result)?
Thus Asians may funnel themselves more into fields with more objective criteria to avoid this issue? (or the downsides of not having social connections)
More likely, the bamboo ceiling just reflects generational effects. East Asians flooded elite law schools only in recent years, it's basically a decade to make partner at most big firms and then you stay for life, so what you're seeing isn't really underrepresentation (though Asian associates will claim it is hoping to get some help) it's just the difference a decade makes.
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Yes, it could be. Depends on your priors on the prevalence of bigotry. Is Harvard is just saying Asians have no personality to justify excluding them or is Harvard is excluding them because they have no personalities? That's why I selected Law as a comparative example, where to the extent that soft metrics are being used for evaluation, those doing so are personally acquainted with those they are judging. If an admissons officer says, this kid has no personality, maybe he's meeting a quota. If your boss that's seen you grind for six years before partnership consideration time says, he's cool and all but God I'm not gonna put him in front of clients or juries - this is far more dispositive.
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