China's schoolchildren are now the smartest in the world

[Long Dark Blues]

To be fair, the US is dragged down by all the deadbeat states. If the Northeastern US were its own nation, it would be near the top of almost all quality of life and performance metrics.

- It'd have a population of about ~55.94 million.
- It'd have a GDP of about ~$3.422 trillion, and a GDP per capita of about $61,172.
- The current GDP of the US is $17.3 trillion, with a GDP per capita of about $54,746.
- Without the Northeast, the US' GDP would fall to $13.91 trillion, with a GDP per capita of $44,018. ($17,154 less than an independent Northeast!)
- It'd be the 5th largest economy in the world

The Northeast is far different from the rest of the US. The culture is completely different, the emphasis on urban areas is different, etc. I mean, I'd say we're far closer (politically and culturally) to Canada than to Texas or Alabama.
I imagine that an independent Northeast would be a much fairer society, with an emphasis on social liberalism and multiculturalism. We'd be a secular country, with respect for irreligious people.
We'd probably have comprehensive environmental protection measures like a carbon tax or a cap and trade scheme. We already get significant amounts of our power from renewable sources.
We'd have universal health care. A woman's right to choose would never be taken away, and the rights of the LGBT community would be protected.
We'd follow states like NJ and Rhode Island and provide paid parental/family leave, paid sick leave, etc to all residents.
We'd respect our immigrants and multiculturalism, and actually reform the immigration system.
Our borders would be the US, Canada, and the Atlantic Ocean. No threats at all.
We'd have great schools - for example, Massachusetts, if it were its own country, it'd be ranked within the top 10 countries in the world for education (PISA). We'd have amazing universities (I mean, we have the whole Ivy League, SUNY system, etc).
Our poverty rate would be far lower than the current USA's.
Our obesity rate would be 20-25%.
Our crime rates would be far lower, with far less gun violence.
We don't have a racist culture.
We'd have some of the highest average incomes in the world.
I hate to say it, but the Northeast is almost "held back" in a way by parts of the rest of the country. There are very few areas in which we do not exceed the rest of the country in rankings and statistics. (except for maybe our cold winters)

Politics are one of the biggest things - we've voted Democrat consistently for the past 20 years. We are the most politically liberal areas of the country. Even our Republicans are moderate. (We lack a Tea Party base.)​

So, the Northeast is considerably different - and dare I say better - than the rest of the US. (Yankee pride?)

(c&p'ed from here)​

I agree, the Northeast is fucking great.

But as an independent nation, we'd get our shit pushed in because we don't have enough farmland to feed the population.

We absolutely need the "flyover states", as some like to call them, or else we'd starve.

 

[Mendacious]

The stats in a lot of Asian countries are deceiving. Rote memory is how many learn. So what you get are a bunch of people that are professional test takers, but don't know how to create new things, or apply what they've learned in situations that aren't exactly how they studied it.
You got people studying English since they were in the 1st grade until university, and still not being able to hold a basic conversation.
Test scores don't tell the full story.

And I wouldn't believe shit from China. China is notorious for shady shit when it comes to stats, plagiarism, etc.
America definitely does need to put more focus on math and science, but liberal arts are a big part of our success as well.

Chinese statistics are institutionally corrupt.

the CCP has a “meritocratic” system in which you get promoted for having good numbers. The problem is the CCP is corrupt as shit, and inflating your numbers is accepted.

It’s unlikely for example that the CCP themselves are aware of what Chinese growth rates actually are, since provincial leaders inflate numbers in hopes of getting promoted.

That’s the beauty of having a “merit” based system but no transparency.

 

[dissectingaorticaneurysm]

The Northeast is white as hell. It has nothing to do with multiculturalism and immigrants for goodness sakes.

NYC is the greatest city in the western hemisphere and it is the second most diverse in the US (following Houston). NYC's diversity has actually increased in the last 10 years as there is less balkanization of ethnic enclaves and more intermingling of populations.

Yes, New England is very white. But the bulk of the population and money in the Northeast is concentrated in the NY metro area.

 

[Mendacious]

What little I've read on the subject isn't abot brain structure but about language. Many Asian languages are symbol based so learning the language requires memorizing large numbers of symbols, something north of 2000 (I think literacy is measured by knowledge of some 1500 symbols in China). By comparison, languages like English and the Romance languages, have far fewer symbols (26) which are then combined to generate the numerou different words.

So, from a reading perspective, Westerners have to combine their limited number of symbols in various and unexpected ways to learn new words, so a greater emphasis on analyzing and combining. Asians have to memorize new symbols so a greater emphasis on memorization and long term retention.

That's just at the linguistics level but obviously, the brain develops in relation to what it's expected to do. Also, not my area, so there are probably some errors in the above.

I’m sure if I spent time googling it I could find it but years ago I read about how studies have been done that being raised as a Chinese language speaker makes you inherently better at math

So for control they used Chinese students who were not raised with a Chinese language and the Chinese students who weren’t fluent in a Chinese language scored lower.

 

[Satsui Ryu]

I feel like TS has made many variations of this Americans are weak types of threads and gets proven wrong everytime.

 

[dissectingaorticaneurysm]

I agree, the Northeast is fucking great.

But as an independent nation, we'd get our shit pushed in because we don't have enough farmland to feed the population.

We absolutely need the "flyover states", as some like to call them, or else we'd starve.

This is where the ingenuity and innovation of the Northeast will shine.

These are already popping up in NJ and costs will go down as time goes on. Ending our reliance on the flyovers. And we've got DARPA to develop drones so we won't even need Southern bodies for infantry.

Patience, my friend. Once the tech matures a bit more we can finally seize independence.

 

[Mendacious]

This is where the ingenuity and innovation of the Northeast will shine.

These are already popping up in NJ and costs will go down as time goes on. Ending our reliance on the flyovers. And we've got DARPA to develop drones so we won't even need Southern bodies for infantry.

Patience, my friend. Once the tech matures a bit more we can finally seize independence.

How are you guys going to deal with winter without your 2nd home in Florida? Are you going to annex us and bring down your quality of life?

 

[panamaican]

I’m sure if I spent time googling it I could find it but years ago I read about how studies have been done that being raised as a Chinese language speaker makes you inherently better at math

So for control they used Chinese students who were not raised with a Chinese language and the Chinese students who weren’t fluent in a Chinese language scored lower.

I've read some similar stuff. That because of how Mandarin represents its number system that it promotes better overall cognitive development than the Arabic system that Western kids are exposed to. Additionally, that the method of writing the symbols engages more of the brain than our normal writing system (the use of up, down left and right strokes compared to our mostly linear, left to right, system). It's probably similar to why writing in cursive is considered more cognitively beneficial than printing for development.

 

[Lord Coke]

Canada doing pretty well for ourselves.

It's the immigration bringing in more asians that is raising test scores

 

[Renard]

Anyone trying to extrapolate this into some racial hierarchy thing should recognize that there is no scientific basis for the concept of race. It's a social construct. Eugenics is pseudoscience and dangerous to traffic in.

You don't know that. The subject is incredibly controversial, no one can get funding for studies on the subject and the mere attempt would be met with condemnation and shunning from peers. So we've established the subject is socially unacceptable in society (a sentiment you're parroting) and we won't know anything more about it, for the moment. And it's not so much about race, as it is about the clustering of certain traits in geographically delineated areas due to different evolutionary pressures.

 

[Gunny]

NYC is the greatest city in the western hemisphere and it is the second most diverse in the US (following Houston). NYC's diversity has actually increased in the last 10 years as there is less balkanization of ethnic enclaves and more intermingling of populations.

Yes, New England is very white. But the bulk of the population and money in the Northeast is concentrated in the NY metro area.

Respectfully, I think you're fundamentally misrepresenting the true culture of the northeast in these posts. Focusing on all these lofty, sophisticated, erudite traits seems to me like describing a beer by praising its frothy head and ignoring the entire brew on which it floats and from which it emanated. All the positives you've put forth are the fruits of 400 years of cultural development and I don't recognize that culture in your description.

The traits that really distinguish the northeast from the rest of the country are: more confrontational, extremely sarcastic, lower in patience, rude, quick to violence, prone to extreme displays of anger. Remember, this is the region that rioted over taxation, touching of a war that expelled the largest and most powerful empire in the world at that time. And if it sounds like I'm dumping on my own people, let me add that all of the traits above are often, paradoxically, expressed in a way that's lighthearted and even friendly.

I think if people want to understand the Northeastern United States culture I'm describing, there is no better moment that this Bill Burr video from a show in Philadelphia (I think in 2005). You had a hostile an abusive, Northeastern crowd who had been shitting nearly every performer of the night. Introduce to that mix, the quintessential Boston rage comic and this is what you get (notice that everyone is laughing by the end).

 

[Renard]

There's no foundation in biological science for the concept of 'race'. We're all just people. No one ethnicity is any better or any worse than another. If you hold prejudiced beliefs against an ethnicity, its not justified through logic or science. It is what it is.

So when science discovers that the average Kenyan runs with a performance similar to the top runners of other countries, do you say it's racist or do you acknowledge natural selection in this area of the world selected for individuals that run faster because it provided a survival advantage?

 

[dissectingaorticaneurysm]

Respectfully, I think you're fundamentally misrepresenting the true culture of the northeast in these posts. Focusing on all these lofty, sophisticated, erudite traits seems to me like describing a beer by praising its frothy head and ignoring the entire brew on which it floats and from which it emanated. All the positives you've put forth are the fruits of 400 years of cultural development and I don't recognize that culture in your description.

The traits that really distinguish the northeast from the rest of the country are: more confrontational, extremely sarcastic, lower in patience, rude, quick to violence, prone to extreme displays of anger. Remember, this is the region that rioted over taxation, touching of a war that expelled the largest and most powerful empire in the world at that time. And if it sounds like I'm dumping on my own people, let me add that all of the traits above are often, paradoxically, expressed in a way that's lighthearted and even friendly.

I think if people want to understand the Northeastern United States culture I'm describing, there is no better moment that this Bill Burr video from a show in Philadelphia (I think in 2005). You had a hostile an abusive, Northeastern crowd who had been shitting nearly every performer of the night. Introduce to that mix, the quintessential Boston rage comic and this is what you get (notice that everyone is laughing by the end).

Philly and Boston sports fans have been at each other's throats forever. Culturally, I don't consider PA to be northeastern (they're more similar to their fellow rust belt states) but we'll include them because they have good farmland.

As for the confrontational nature of people from the region- you gotta remember that this is where immigrants landed for a century. So each new wave built an enclave nearby that had to fend off hostilities from existing populations while competing with subsequent waves of migrants. You can see why tensions were so high.

This mindset is slowly receding and communities are cooperating together to improve their neighborhoods. Especially among millennials/zoomers. That's also reflected in the demographics of tech companies and startups in the area. Much more diverse than say, the old finance firms. Though they're shifting too. And anyone who's been to a hospital in a major metro area knows that it's like the Star Wars cantina in there. The best and brightest minds from all over the world came here to seek fortune. On my last hospital stay, I had a latino anaesthesiologist, an Indian nurse, and a Ghanaian orthopedic surgeon.

 

[Chesten_Hesten]

Except that's not our policy. We devote a lot of resources at both ends of the spectrum. We recognize that if you want to maximize the returns from your population you have to maximize them individually. So getting your bottom portion up to snuff is extremely important. However, contrary to popular belief, we don't neglect our brightest minds. We wouldn't have the best college system in the world if that was true. The combination of the 2 means that we do a better job of finding all of our talent than some other countries do. Because we'll check the lowest performing kids for latent talent while they let that talent languish.

As for Chinese kids vs. American kids and mentalities, I agree with some of it but think some of it is like false hero worship (not you but society). We see the most motivated and driven Chinese people and then extrapolate that to the entire country. We discount the hundreds of millions of Chinese (the vast majority of China) that simply do not match that imagery. It results in a false impression of the country.

Think about all of the data we have about how the Chinese manipulate their economic numbers, their education numbers, their political numbers, etc. Then think about the reality that huge portions of their country are extremely rural and under-developed and then think about the fact that most of our impressions come those Chinese people capable of attending U.S. universities and ask yourself how those 2 images can co-exist? Which one is more likely to represent the norm? The hundreds of millions or the 10s of millions.

If we only measured Ivy League graduates, our intelligence and our "mentality" would look very different as well.

Numbers certainly matter. I won't disagree with that but it's important to measure all of the numbers. Here's some to help put this in context:

China has 6 million students attending college. The U.S. has 20 million.

The mythos surrounding China needs to be balanced by the reality. We saw the same thing with the Japanese in the 80s. Fast forward a decade or two and Japanese isn't the hot language anymore, the Japanese economy is stagnant and has been for years, they never took over the world with their "efficiency" and now they're trying to deconstruct aspects of that culture for population preservation purposes.

Let's pump the brakes on China. Watch them, be cautious about them because they are an enemy, but not elevate them to a pedestal they haven't earned yet.

Sorry too busy at work to give descent reply right now.. I don't think we're really in any major disagreement, (except for US education and attention to brightest minds. I work in public education and I'm not seeing the same emphasis, (resource-wise) placed on the high achievers as low. This can looked at and argued about from many different angles so its not worth another internet debate, with the time I don't have. Perhaps the Can do more with less help, perhaps that's a good thing in some cases? It likely varies from District to District, so I'm looking at it through a local lens. ) Rest is just variables and facets of the same overall equation.

Cheers.

 

[panamaican]

So when science discovers that the average Kenyan runs with a performance similar to the top runners of other countries, do you say it's racist or do you acknowledge natural selection in this area of the world selected for individuals that run faster because it provided a survival advantage?

Presumably you would acknowledge that there's a social pressure on being a better runner in Kenya. That it's not all of Kenya but a small region, a single tribe - the Kalenjin, within the country.

None of which contradicts his point about race being a social construct. If we use the KEnyan example, we would have at least 2 different "races" in Kenya. THe Kalenjin race, with it's predisposition to distance running, and a separate Kenyan "race". But that's not what you're referencing when you say "race". If you're saying black as a race then you're lumping in the distance running Kenyans with the non-distance running Kenyans with the distance running Ethiopians and the non-distance running Ethiopians and the short distance running Ghanians and the non-short distance running Ghanians. The East Africans being better distance runners and the West Africans being better sprinters are as different as night and day...but still the same race? Tall people and short people. The Nordic groups are distinctly taller than other Western European groups...different races?

They're all the same "race" despite the massive differences between them in abilities because when they say "black" or "white" or "Asian" all of the intragroup differences suddenly don't matter? But when it comes to skin color, suddenly that one adaptation is enough to claim that there are distinct races? How can that be anything except social construction?

Either these group differences mean different races or they don't. Science has not established a genetic cut off for where one group of people suddenly becomes a different race from another group of people. They've established that everything exists on a spectrum and that intergroup differences are often less pronounced that intragroup differences. You might counter with "Well, they can determine place of origin..." Very true. They can determine Northern Europe from Southern Europe from Western Europe and the same with North, South, East and West Africa. We can determine place of origin down to relatively small geographic regions - then why would the concept of "race" remain a continent level delineation when science goes so much more precise than that?

 

[JoeyJoeJoeJr]

You don't know that. The subject is incredibly controversial, no one can get funding for studies on the subject and the mere attempt would be met with condemnation and shunning from peers. So we've established the subject is socially unacceptable in society (a sentiment you're parroting) and we won't know anything more about it, for the moment. And it's not so much about race, as it is about the clustering of certain traits in geographically delineated areas due to different evolutionary pressures.

Do we really need studies to show there are differences in IQ based on race? It would be nice for true verification, but I already know that there is. People can stick their heads in the sand and ignore it if they want, but for me personally, its obvious.

Being more intelligent doesn't necessarily make you a superior person, as intelligence shouldn't be considered the measuring stick for superiority.

However, we need to acknowledge the fact that just as certain subspecies of animals vary in average intelligence, we too vary.

 

[panamaican]

Sorry too busy at work to give descent reply right now.. I don't think we're really in any major disagreement, (except for US education and attention to brightest minds. I work in public education and I'm not seeing the same emphasis, (resource-wise) placed on the high achievers as low. This can looked at and argued about from many different angles so its not worth another internet debate, with the time I don't have. Perhaps the Can do more with less help, perhaps that's a good thing in some cases? It likely varies from District to District, so I'm looking at it through a local lens. ) Rest is just variables and facets of the same overall equation.

Cheers.

I get what you're saying and with respect to your time constraints, I think it's largely a perception issue. Your brightest children really do get attention, the situation is that it doesn't look like the attention given to the less bright. A bright kid can skip a grade or get subject matter acceleration. Most states, to my knowledge, have gifted IEP's. There's early college enrollment opportunities. Similarly, there's plenty of scholarships and grant opportunities for the very bright.

It's out there, it just looks different.

But I am drawing a difference between your brightest kids and your generic "smart" kids. Your smarter than average kid gets the same attention as your dumber than average kid. When people talk about low achievers, they're often talking about kids in the bottom of the classroom, the bottom 10% or so. Those kids get a lot of resources directed at them.

The kids in the middle 80% generally get treated the same. The social issue is that parents of kids in the slightly dumber than average group don't want the distinction and so don't complain about the resources. While the parents of the slightly smarter than average want resources directed at their kids to the same degree as the exceptionally bright. It's a bit of self-delusion, I'm sure you've seen the range of parents who insist that their kid truly "gifted" because they were reading at 5 without realizing the gap between them and the parents whose kids were reading at 2-1/2.

 

[Renard]

Presumably you would acknowledge that there's a social pressure on being a better runner in Kenya. That it's not all of Kenya but a small region, a single tribe - the Kalenjin, within the country.

None of which contradicts his point about race being a social construct. If we use the KEnyan example, we would have at least 2 different "races" in Kenya. THe Kalenjin race, with it's predisposition to distance running, and a separate Kenyan "race". But that's not what you're referencing when you say "race". If you're saying black as a race then you're lumping in the distance running Kenyans with the non-distance running Kenyans with the distance running Ethiopians and the non-distance running Ethiopians and the short distance running Ghanians and the non-short distance running Ghanians. The East Africans being better distance runners and the West Africans being better sprinters are as different as night and day...but still the same race? Tall people and short people. The Nordic groups are distinctly taller than other Western European groups...different races?

They're all the same "race" despite the massive differences between them in abilities because when they say "black" or "white" or "Asian" all of the intragroup differences suddenly don't matter? But when it comes to skin color, suddenly that one adaptation is enough to claim that there are distinct races? How can that be anything except social construction?

Either these group differences mean different races or they don't. Science has not established a genetic cut off for where one group of people suddenly becomes a different race from another group of people. They've established that everything exists on a spectrum and that intergroup differences are often less pronounced that intragroup differences. You might counter with "Well, they can determine place of origin..." Very true. They can determine Northern Europe from Southern Europe from Western Europe and the same with North, South, East and West Africa. We can determine place of origin down to relatively small geographic regions - then why would the concept of "race" remain a continent level delineation when science goes so much more precise than that?

I've always been in favour of classifications that adequately divide ancestry into rich and accurate categories that reflect the underlying genetic clusters, with meaningful differences between each one. Making the argument that our racial categorisations are overly simplistic and rely too much on appearance is a very different argument than pretending all human populations are the same on all characteristics, which is nonsense yet something that people repeat over and over in our culture.

 

[K-Bag]

 

[panamaican]

I've always been in favour of classifications that adequately divide ancestry into rich and accurate categories that reflect the underlying genetic clusters, with meaningful differences between each one. Making the argument that our racial categorisations are overly simplistic and rely too much on appearance is a very different argument than pretending all human populations are the same on all characteristics, which is nonsense yet something that people repeat over and over in our culture.

But that wasn't what he said, he said that race was a social construct and, based on the way that the general public throws around the concept, I would say he's right. But that's very different from claiming that there are zero differences between clusters of people. The issue, in my opinion, is that people create artificial clusters - the social construct. They group the Nords and Celtics in the same cluster when there's plenty of evidence that they're as distinct from each other as any other 2 clusters.