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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26211 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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That’s a lot of words to basically say “merit wasn’t being properly measured and when properly measured for it Asians don’t measure up.”

Now whether it is true is a different matter.

I think the confusion is between merit vs potential. Merit would seem to measure how qualified someone is based on the usual objective things like GPA. potential is what happens after graduating.

That's a few words to express a fairly unjustified level of disrespect.

No, Asians really are meritorious as far as potential for educational and professional attainment goes. They get high scores, and those scores translate into life outcomes. A 99.9th percentile SAT taker comes in, a 99.9th percentile employee comes out and waves a diploma proving his or her value to the employer. This is a perfectly reasonable meritocratic system, as meritocracy has been defined for a very long time.

BAP is a romantic who believes that merely excellent outcomes are not what elite education is about; that the objective of such institutions is finding and riding the coattails of geniuses and heroes. Glory isn't just a better-ascertained «merit».

His whole point seemed to be “sure they come out and do perfectly respectable nice upper middle class jobs but they arent doing something great or amazing”

He is saying greatness is the goal which means merit is how great could you become

This would be fine if he had anything to back it up, but his only "evidence" is complaining that there are no Chinese Feynmans... but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century.

Incidentally, by my count 7 of the last 50 Nobel laureates in Physics and 3 out of 16 Fields Medal winners were Asian.

It's worth noting that this is roughly inline with Asian representation at Harvard today (14%) and most Nobel laureates were born before 1950 -- research labs weren't really accessible to a billion Asians then. So not sure how meaningful those numbers are in either direction.

(Side note: interestingly, Fields Medal winners cannot be older than 40).

but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century

This is cope, of course. Our Feynmans are called names like «Ilya Sutskever» and «Noam Shazeer», or if you want a Gentile, «Alec Radford». The focus of frontier research has shifted from bits to bytes and from public institutions to for-profit companies, while professional celebs have picked up the slack of mental representation for heroic figures. But sci-fi valorization of flashy fundamental physics results, partially driven by military agendas of the XX century and purely aesthetic raygun gothic midwittery, persists; and so people try to explain the non-real phenomenon of our era lacking Feynmans.

  1. I noted that there is the question of whether he is right.

  2. I guess the question so what is the right denominator for determine over or under representation.

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