Nope. Most of the world’s people are Asian. To generalize about Asians beyond basic geographical facts is absurd.
Not to mention that more than one in twenty Americans themselves have some form of Asian ancestry. There is no meaningful way to compare the intellectual “adeptness” of “Americans” as a group with that of “Asians” as a group.
Well, you could take the 1/20 that is Asian/Asian-American and compare it (and the population of Asia) against the 19/20 that is not Asian.
There’s no scientific basis for race, if there is any difference is due to social norms, opportunities, and cultures.
As others have mentioned the social-construct racial category of “Asian” is too broad to even be molded into a grouping which could possibly have meaning under an attempt to justify a belief in a biological basis for “race”
:dubious: How would you control for the multitude of confounding factors involving socioeconomic status, language, family educational background, educational resources in the community, etc.? And that’s if you’re just comparing Americans to Americans, not even counting the far more significant non-genetic differences between the US and Asian countries as well as between different Asian countries themselves.
Like I said, there’s no meaningful way to make such a comparison. If you can think of a detailed plan for such a study that you believe would be meaningful, though, then by all means let’s hear it.
I agree with all that. I think the reasonable area of disagreement is where the burden of proof should be set.
- If a convincing study can’t be done proving any relevance of group genetic factors in the distribution of intellectual ability, to everyone’s satisfaction, treat there being none as a fact. And base real public policies on that. For example attribute any difference in representation in desirable fields requiring exceptional intelligence to some kind of unfairness that can be and must be fixed by collective action.
- If a convincing study can’t be done, then we don’t know. If we don’t know, we shouldn’t have heavy handed policies based on the assumption we do know.
I’d go with 2.
But nobody is really answering this question by just insisting over and over ‘it’s all culture’, nor needless to say by giving individual anecdotes. not mining the ambiguity of the OP to say it’s a yes/no on the all people’s of the whole continent of Asia taken as a whole. Again IMO it’s obviously partly culture, but not clear that’s all there is to it.
Some statistics:
As to that last, I’d also suggest that it’s quite possible that the government of China could have massaged the numbers. Or, simply, didn’t send the test out to the Uighurs and into the rice patties, etc.
In general, we should expect the larger countries to end up more towards the middle. Smaller countries should be towards the top and bottom, because a smaller sample size allows for greater deviation from the mean. Of course, you also have impacts like nutrition and access to brain challenging puzzles and the like at an early age, which could cause the global average to be below 100 in most cases.
I’d dispute that characterization. I don’t personally think it’s all culture and nobody has claimed (read them carefully, mind) that performance is entirely a matter of culture. What has been claimed is that cultural factors can be used to largely explain the differences in certain (but not all) performance metrics between population groups, i.e. take two similar kids and push the value of education and hard work on one and not the other and you’ll see a difference when they grow up.
As a matter of fact (though still anecdotally), I noted that most of the members of my family are more intelligent than average and that most immigrants tend to be more intelligent than average since they have to go through a selection process. And that, on average, it appears the ones who were pushed harder on education tended to do better, i.e. there’s innate ability but cultural factors do come into play.
The most educated immigrant group on average happens to be Nigerians. Yet that doesn’t seem to lead to the same questions about the innate intellectual superiority of Nigerians vs the stereotype of inherently tech-capable Asian kids (I wonder why? 
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While anecdotes aren’t good for proving Asians are innately better at science and technology, they can absolutely be used to at least strongly suggest they innately aren’t - by anecdotally noting the billions of Asians who aren’t. And by noting that certain classes of Asian immigrants (refugees vs other) have markedly different outcomes in the US. And repeatedly stating the obvious fact about selection bias.
To the extent we see anything here at all, it’s that from the POV of the US, Asian immigrants and their children appear to bias towards STEM more heavily compared to native born Americans and that Asian countries appear to put a heavy focus in that area. Tying that to some kind of innate ability in the area is a rather extreme claim and requires extreme evidence.
I don’t see why it would have to be so either/or, though. It is perfectly reasonable to say that our statistically appropriate null hypothesis is to assume there is no significant genetic difference in broadly-defined “intellectual ability” at the level of racial groups or national/continental populations. And that in the absence of reliable scientific studies demonstrating the existence of such genetic differences, our policy approaches should default to measures consistent with that null hypothesis.
None of that is in any way denying or refusing to acknowledge that we don’t actually know for certain whether that null hypothesis is true, because it’s so difficult to do reliable scientific studies on this subject. Nor is it an argument that we should address disproportionate representation by “fixing” hypothetical cultural problems if we don’t even know that such problems exist.
But in the many situations where we do know that unfair cultural biases are contributing to underrepresentation, while we don’t know of any solid evidence for group-based genetic differences contributing to underrepresentation, then yes of course we should focus our policies on correcting the unfair cultural biases. Concentrating on the problem that we know exists, while ignoring the problem that might theoretically also exist (and perhaps even be more significant than the known problem) but for whose existence there is no reliable evidence, is simply common sense.
Ever try using a Chinese patent for anything? Even giving the benefit of the doubt in that patents are written to leave whatever they can out and the vagaries of machine translation, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to successfully reproduce something out of a Chinese patent. I have had success with other patents, so it’s not just me.
Along those lines, I knew quite a lot of Indian and Chinese graduate students in the US on student visas. The Chinese in particular could be almost impossible to communicate with. Sure, they could study hard to pass the TOEFL with a high enough score, but in terms of actually using the language you couldn’t call them anywhere near fluent. Now, to be fair, those that managed to stick around for several years to get a degree (and the H1B coworkers I’ve had) did manage to improve their verbal language skills to the point where they were effectively fluent.
And, once again, define Asian. East Asian? Southeast Asian? South Asian? The various former Soviet countries in Central Asia? The countries that border Central Asia, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran? The eastern part of Russia? The Muslim parts of China? Mongolia?
Are you aware of the Flynn effect? Are you aware that poor countries that are rapidly developing have a faster Flynn effect? And all the other problems with simple paper IQ tests? Why would we assume that IQ tests are giving an accurate, objective assessment of aptitude differences between populations?
In fact, the brain stats data you linked gives additional reason to doubt such data. It finds massive IQ differences between countries with virtually identical ethnic groups and probable gene frequencies.
If someone was showing me data that showed Belgians’ IQ was barely above retarded but Luxembourgs’ was almost genius level on average I think it would be safe to assume the data is horseshit, or at least not showing us what some think it is.
You seem to be arguing against something I didn’t say.
Well you just said “some statistics” and then pointed out some reasons why eg China’s result might be misrepresentative – which I agree with.
However that suggests you’re implicitly saying that if not for the meddling (which we know China does) the data is otherwise meaningful, and accurate. And I disagree with that.
Actually I left my additional notes on the basis of looking at the full list of averages across all countries. I was expecting 100 to be the mean, with half above and half below, but most were below, so I had to quickly edit my post to clarify that besides the possibility of China cheating the numbers, there were also large aspects of nutrition, etc. that make it difficult to expect a normal distribution of IQ across nations. It also makes me even more suspicious of China’s numbers, since I would be relatively certain that the quality of nutrition is lower there than most Western countries for much of the population (though, I have not checked that) and with IQ being less affected by education than things like SAT scores, any cultural emphasis on education should be trounced by nutrition on the IQ score test.
I don’t understand your position at this point. Perhaps we’re talking past each other.
When I said I doubted the reliability of IQ tests and I think it’s fundamentally flawed to think we can compare countries in this way, you said I was accusing you of saying something that you had not.
But in your last post you seem to be saying exactly that IQ tests are reliable, accurate measures of mental aptitude, and it’s fine to use them to compare countries, just that the reasons for differences may be nutrition and not genetics.
There’s another good reason why migrants (from any country) have a bias towards the tech field specifically - it’s both high-earning and very transferrable. If you are a smart ambitious person whose life plan is to get educated and move to a first-world country then you probably don’t want to study law (ties you to your home country). You might try medicine (I hear the NHS is always recruiting) but recertification for your destination country can be a real bitch. Accountancy and Engineering also have professional boards you need to be certified by. But with a tech job, you just need a visa and an employer and you can start work straight away.
At my University, the official percentage of overseas students is about thirty-some percent (that’s from everywhere, but China and India are the biggest source countries). But it’s nothing like that in my courses specifically - graduate IT classes. Here it’s more like 80% international, at minimum (casual observation suggests that may hold at undergrad level also). IT is just a very international-mobility-friendly field
And it’s worth repeating again - out of around three or four BILLION residents of Asia, every year something less than 0.01% of the best educated, most ambitious and most adventurous of that group are setting off to migrate to wealthier countries. It’s really not very surprising that among that group you can find a number of very smart cookies.
Yep. When I started grad school in the US I was surprised to discover how low the level was. I only took one course which wasn’t a retake of stuff I had done as an undergrad (mostly in the 1st and 2nd year of 5+thesis); there simply wasn’t anything higher available. And as of last check, Spain isn’t in Asia.
We had to take three chemistry tests from the ACS once admitted, to see if anybody needed to take undergraduate courses. My lowest % was an 85% on Physical Chemistry (which I still hate thank you much); my 98% in Organic was bested by one of the two Koreans, with a 99%. The other Korean and the dozen of Chinese scored 80%+ on everything as well.
Not in Spain or France; the government certifies schools, schools certify their graduates. You need to have your degree transferred, that’s all: same as you’ve assumed every country has certification boards for those professions, countries which don’t never think others may. Some people are required to take a few college courses locally to get the local degree, as the original requirements are considered incomplete. I expect the same applies for many of our former colonies.
Finding out what’s the actual requirements for your chosen profession in your target country before moving there is a very good idea. Stuff such as choosing the right electives can save you years.
I missed your part about reliability. I was replying about Flynn effect and that there are varying reasons to take the results at face value.
But I wouldn’t say that the IQ test is “unreliable”. It’s somewhat like comparing homicide rates - at a large enough data size you can say which group is better/worse - but that doesn’t tell you anything about the underlying causes. In the case of homicide, you need to know more about the culture, climate, economic systems, environmental toxins, etc. In the case of the IQ you need to recognize that it’s not a test of Intelligence in that way that most people think of it, it’s not entirely immune to gaming, there are nutritional and cultural impacts on the results, and of course some governments will lie or only sample a preselected subset of their population.
But for what the IQ does test - effectively, ones ability to solve different types of puzzles - it does do that and, as I understand it, that is relatively consistent to an individual over time. It is, in that sense, a reliable metric. For a wider meaning if intelligence, it may or may not mean much. There are areas of STEM where puzzle solving aptitude is probably pretty well correlated to how well you will perform in that occupation. But not all of STEM, and almost not at all in any other job, including the managerial ladder.
But I do suspect that the IQ is saved by the puzzles it presents being new to the rest subject. If you used sudoku and other popular puzzles in an IQ test, I suspect that you would get a lot higher scores, on average, with a bimodal distribution. And I suspect that playing a lot of puzzles helps to build up the pathways to excel at an IQ test, so that you can create people who are good IQ test takers, but the result is quasi-artificial.
If you understand that there are factors of nutrition, exposure to puzzles at an early age, and understanding of what small domain of Intelligence the IQ actually tests, I think you can take IQ values and know how much credence to give them and in what domains that trust actually matters. Since it’s quite possible to gain that understanding, I wouldn’t view it as unreliable. It’s just something like Newtonian physics - useful within its domain and within limits that a knowledgeable person can consider when deciding whether to test the results - but not the whole not correct story, and largely misunderstood by most people.
Except that even that is problematic when it comes to trying to associate IQ with population-based genetic factors, because the mechanism by which genes influence IQ test answers is pretty darn opaque.
I mean, for example, we know how a particular gene mutation causes someone to be vulnerable to sickle cell anemia, because it’s a gene that regulates production of hemoglobin cells and the mutation causes the hemoglobin cells to be misshapen and consequently interfere with the smooth passage of red blood cells through blood vessels.
But when an IQ test subject sees the question “Book is to Reading as Fork is to (a) drawing (b) writing (c) stirring (d) eating” and selects “c” as the answer, what was the mechanism by which some gene hypothetically caused that mistake? We all know that intelligence is to some extent dependent on genes, but AFAICT it’s still entirely up in the air which genes they are, and how they operate to produce the differences in test results that we assign to different intelligence levels.