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China win 2019 IMO

Actually many pioneers of PRC's scientific studies were founded by those who studied in US and came back to China, over 80% of Chinese students are coming back to China comparing to less than 30% a decade ago, cause China offers better pay and opportunities now, your mind is in 1980's when China was just as poor as India.

Today's Chinese students that go abroad are VERY VERY different compared to those that went in the 80s.

Today many Chinese students who go abroad are actually not good students. Many of them can't even do well in Gaokao and want to escape. Also, earlier almost everyone went for a STEM degree, while today many of them are heading for business and arts degrees.

So there is ABSOLUTELY no similarity between Chinese students that go abroad today versus that went abroad in the 80s.

In fact, if you look at the students that went abroad for studying STEM, and went abroad to good universities, then very few of those students actually come back. It has increased a bit, but still a vast majority of them DO NOT come back.

And obviously most of the pioneers of PRC STEM fields have studied abroad.
 
. .
Also Korea vs Korea, or even better as seen from a larger perspective: Sinosphere vs Sinosphere vs Sinosphere vs Sinosphere vs Sinosphere!

Koreas Finish 3rd And 4th At Math Olympiad

2019-07-22 17:36:07 / Update: 2019-07-22 19:40:55

South Korea finished third in the international math olympiad, while North Korea trailed right behind at fourth.

The Ministry of Science and ICT on Monday announced that all six South Korean delegates won a gold medal or more at the 60th International Mathematical Olympiad which took place in the United Kingdom between July 11th to the 22nd.

It is the third time that all the South Korean participants have brought home a gold medal from a math olympiad, after 2012 and 2017.

The United States and China shared the top position with 227 points in total, only one point ahead of South Korea. It is the highest number of points South Korea has ever earned at a single math Olympiad, with the previous record of 209 set in 2012.

North Korea garnered 187 points, two points more than fifth-place Thailand.

http://world.kbs.co.kr/service/news_view.htm?lang=e&Seq_Code=146846



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:enjoy:


:cool::smokin:8-)
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Congrats!

Vietnam ranks relatively high at both IMO 2019 (7th place) and IPhO 2019 (4th place) and none of contestants are of Chinese descent (and perhaps there has been none of Chinese descent since we participated IMO in 1971). I believe the same with Russian (6th and 3rd) and Korean (3rd and 2nd) teams.

Other than racial issue, there must be something good in former socialist countries education systems, with regard to training top scientists (East European countries used to rank high during 1960 - 1980 as well and many gold medalists have become well-known scientists, but working in the West)

Can anyone tell about ethnicity of Thailand contestants? Thailand has received good results in IMO in last few years, while their education system (both for the mass and for the elite students) seems not so good.

Congrats to Thailand ... and Viet students (hoping they are not Chinese bashers when growing up!)

@Bussard Ramjet

how do you evaluate the indian IMO teams over the years?






In fact there are unprecedent no. of student returnees from overseas, particularly in recent years:

China sees influx of professional overseas returnees
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2018-06/19/content_52667824.htm


It not correct to say the Chinese Team is the B team of the USA. A complete BULLSHIT as usual from an indian like you.

Who can say their future of these top kids of the world? They can be educating in many of the top universities in the world like Tsinghua, Peking, Zhejiang, HIT, SJTU, Fudan, USTC, SYSU, and also Wuhan, Nanjing, SUSTech, Huazhong UoS, SCUT, Tongji, Beihang, HKUST, HKU, CUHK, HKPU, Nankai, Xiamen, Tianjin, West Lake U ...
Oh My God the list just grow longer each passing day and I dont know how to stop it.


v
v



Our Physics Team also shine brightly in the IPhO held in Israel:


Highest overall score: Xiangkai Sun, China
Highest score in Theory Exam: Xiangkai Sun, China
Highest score in Experimental Exam: Yifan Sun, China

https://www.ipho2019.org.il/results/

List of GOLD medallists: (ethnic Chinese)

Rank Name Country
1 Xiangkai Sun China
2 Yifan Sun China

3 Grigorii Bobkov Russia
4 Xiaoxun Gong China
5 Soojung Bae Korea
6 Vincent Bian USA
7 Aleksei Shishkin Russia
8 Yongkang Li China
9 Nishant Abhangi India
10 Kyeongjin Jung Korea
10 Xuan Tung Tran Vietnam
12 Soo ho Choe Korea
13 Junhao Chen China
14 Vladimir Malinovskii Russia
15 Xinghong Fu Singapore
15 Wei-En Wang Chinese Taipei
17 Tevž Lotrič Slovenia
18 Andrei Panferov Russia
19 Aviv Tillinger Israel
20 Eyal Shlomo Walach Israel
21 Ryotaro Chiba Japan
22 Archit Bubna India
23 Hoo Yun Korea
23 Abdurrahman Hadi̇ Ertürk Turkey
25 Jin Quan Matthew Chia Singapore
26 Cheng-Hao Yang Chinese Taipei
27 Konstantin Dukatš Estonia
28 Yauheni Dziadkou Belarus
29 Sean Chen USA
30 Thanawat Sornwanee Thailand
31 Xuan Ung Nguyen Vietnam
32 Khanh Linh Nguyen Vietnam
33 Taeyoon Lim Korea
34 Aleksi Kononen Finland

In fact and on a similar vein as in the IMO, Team USA can also be called the "B" team of China as you can find an overwhelming number of bright ethnic Chinese students in the usa Team:

https://www.aapt.org/physicsteam/2019/team.cfm?year=2019


Look at the members of the Canadian Team also.

List of silver medallists:

Silver
Rank Name Country

35 Dhruv Arora India
36 Ching-Yu Yao Chinese Taipei
37 Sze Chun Lau Hong Kong

38 Chun Wang Chau Hong Kong
39 Edward Lu USA
39 Chin-Yi Lin Chinese Taipei
41 Harshvardhan Agarwal India
42 Viet Hoang Le Vietnam
43 Richard Luhtaru Estonia
44 Sanjay Raman USA
45 Passakorn Potanunt Thailand
45 Aleksa Milojevic Serbia
45 Koki Ikeda Japan
45 Omri Reved Israel
45 Nixon Widjaja Indonesia
45 Guilhermo Cutrim Costa Brazil
51 Yeu-Guang Tung Chinese Taipei
51 Elisei Sudakov Russia
53 Patrick Winter United Kingdom
54 Yunus Emre Parmaksiz Turkey
54 Georgi Miroslavov Aleksandrov Bulgaria
56 Stephen Catsamas Australia
57 Siripong Chayanopparat Thailand
58 Theodor Iosif Romania
59 Eran Mann Israel
60 Ionel Emilian Chiosa Romania
61 Elias Hohl Austria
62 Dimitrije Pavlov Serbia
63 Gaurav Arya Hong Kong
64 Punnatorn Punya Thailand
65 Albert Qin USA
65 Stefan Dolteanu Romania
65 Ivander Jonathan Marella Waskito Indonesia
68 Duy Hieu Trinh Vietnam
69 Kaustubh Dighe India
70 Alkin Kaz Turkey
70 Max Schneider Germany
72 Luca Muscarella Italy
73 Zhening Li Canada
74 Yuwanza Ramadhan Indonesia
75 Tat Sang Li Hong Kong
76 Tamon Suehiro Japan
77 Shu Ge Singapore
77 Antonio Italo Lima Lopes Brazil
79 Ronald Doboš Slovakia
80 Jonáš Dujava Slovakia
81 Oliver James Breach United Kingdom
81 Isaac Chi Ying Liao Canada
83 Tomasz Slusarczyk Poland
84 Hiroto Sasaki Japan
84 Gusti Putu Surya Govinda Atmaja Indonesia
84 Fabien Roger France
87 Janis Huns Latvia
88 Xiaorui Zhang Singapore
89 Steven Reyes Philippines
90 Jindřich Jelínek Czech Republic
91 Christopher Lotery United Kingdom
91 Jonathan Alexander Graefe Germany
93 Ariana Dalia Vlad Romania
94 Yuheng Xu Canada
95 Roman Hubenko Ukraine
96 Akira Yamada Japan
96 Leong Chit Jeff Kwan Hong Kong
98 John Ivar Oliver Lindström Sweden
98 Samuel,Aimé Vivien France
98 Ivo Vladislavov Petrov Bulgaria

Bronze medallists:

125 Simon Yung Australia
126 Roger Xiang Li Canada
143 Jessie Lum Australia
192 Andrew Kelvin Huang United Kingdom


Honourable Mentions:

202 David Li Kazakhstan
225 Zhuzhen Fan Macao, China
232 Honghao Liu Denmark
247 Franklin Hor Chung Yeung Macao, China
 
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Actually, the Chinese team should be called the B team of the USA.

Why?

Because eventually most of the Chinese team members will go and settle abroad.

US still gets all the top talent from China.



Instead of feeling happy, you should be sad.

The scale and enormity of brain drain from China is just enormous.

And it still continues even today.

Indians win last in math and science competitions.
 
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Vietnam ranks relatively high at both IMO 2019 (7th place) and IPhO 2019 (4th place) and none of contestants are of Chinese descent (and perhaps there has been none of Chinese descent since we participated IMO in 1971). I believe the same with Russian (6th and 3rd) and Korean (3rd and 2nd) teams.

Other than racial issue, there must be something good in former socialist countries education systems, with regard to training top scientists (East European countries used to rank high during 1960 - 1980 as well and many gold medalists have become well-known scientists, but working in the West)

Can anyone tell about ethnicity of Thailand contestants? Thailand has received good results in IMO in last few years, while their education system (both for the mass and for the elite students) seems not so good.
The topscore person's surname might have meaning 'China heredity'. I'm.not100percent sure.
 
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Indians win last in math and science competitions.

They are not the last but remain second or third or fourth tiered consistently.

Actually they are NOT doing well in open competitions in coding like the Code Jam.
In Code Jam 2019 which is entering into Round 3 now (last round b4 the Final), the lead scorer is the famous AC Rush, Chinese.

You cannot see an indian flag in the top 150 !!!
https://codingcompetitions.withgoogle.com/codejam/round/0000000000051707

Some indians are very sour-graped over our achievements though. Some have hidden behind their real identity to bash us for just a second of solace.

Pathetic!

The topscore person's surname might have meaning 'China heredity'. I'm.not100percent sure.

Wow that makes our presence even more prominent. I would guess the same in the Indonesian team as well.
How to tell from the Thai names of the people that they are of Chinese descent?
 
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http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1158653.shtml

US team is called the B team of China because out of the 6 members, 5 are ethnic Chinese!

This is the official site:

https://www.imo-official.org/results.aspx

"The Global Times' reporter found that five of the six US contestants were of Chinese descent, including the team leader and deputy leader. Five students of Chinese descent were also found in the Canadian team. "

Team China set the number 1 world record for 20 times!

Top 3 finishing 30 times! :china:
The same applies to the 30th International Biology Olympiad 2019, held in Hungary: top American competitors made of 3 ethic Chinese and one ethnic Indian. The first best non-sinosphere competitor ranking only at the 9th place.

1 China LINGFENG PENG
2 China HAOXUAN TANG
3 United States of America Christopher Wang
4 South Korea JAEHYEONG LEE
5 Singapore Zipei Tan
6 China YU MENG
7 China YIYUAN HUANG
8 South Korea YEON KYU CHUNG
9 Netherlands Ward Johannes Martinus de Ridder
10 Singapore Cameron Jinghan Goh
11 Turkey Sezgin Er
12 Chinese Taipei CHIH-CHEN TZANG
13 South Korea JIWOO NAM
14 Hungary Péter Vízkeleti
15 Indonesia Aditya David Wirawan

http://www.ibo-info.org/results/2019-IBO-Ranking_web.pdf
 
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They are not the last but remain second or third or fourth tiered consistently.

Actually they are NOT doing well in open competitions in coding like the Code Jam.
In Code Jam 2019 which is entering into Round 3 now (last round b4 the Final), the lead scorer is the famous AC Rush, Chinese.

You cannot see an indian flag in the top 150 !!!
https://codingcompetitions.withgoogle.com/codejam/round/0000000000051707

Some indians are very sour-graped over our achievements though. Some have hidden behind their real identity to bash us for just a second of solace.

Pathetic!



Wow that makes our presence even more prominent. I would guess the same in the Indonesian team as well.
How to tell from the Thai names of the people that they are of Chinese descent?
Cannot tell the difference by surname. Thai people you see today majority have some Chinese ancestors. Those without any Chinese ancestors are.minority. It's normal here.in.Thailand that Chinese.Descents dowell academically.
 
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The same applies to the 30th International Biology Olympiad 2019, held in Hungary: top American competitors made of 3 ethic Chinese and one ethnic Indian. The first best non-sinosphere competitor ranking only at the 9th place.

1 China LINGFENG PENG
2 China HAOXUAN TANG
3 United States of America Christopher Wang
4 South Korea JAEHYEONG LEE
5 Singapore Zipei Tan
6 China YU MENG
7 China YIYUAN HUANG
8 South Korea YEON KYU CHUNG
9 Netherlands Ward Johannes Martinus de Ridder
10 Singapore Cameron Jinghan Goh
11 Turkey Sezgin Er
12 Chinese Taipei CHIH-CHEN TZANG
13 South Korea JIWOO NAM
14 Hungary Péter Vízkeleti
15 Indonesia Aditya David Wirawan

http://www.ibo-info.org/results/2019-IBO-Ranking_web.pdf

Out of 15 persons, 8 are of Chinese (China, US, Singapore), 3 from Korea, 2 European and 1 Indonesian. And the Indonesian could be of Chinese descent, since some Indonesian Chinese do have surname like Wirawan for "Wee" (黄-闽南音).
 
.
Actually, the Chinese team should be called the B team of the USA.

Why?

Because eventually most of the Chinese team members will go and settle abroad.

US still gets all the top talent from China.



Instead of feeling happy, you should be sad.

The scale and enormity of brain drain from China is just enormous.

And it still continues even today.
Where's the indian team? Stuck in the toilet?
 
.
I think Asian.need more training on.problem formulation.
 
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Ok East Aseans are good in math. That’s too little. I am always the best in math in my class with my average IQ.

Good in math proves nothing!

On the contrary, leading in Math is of utmost importance, as it is the core that unlocks the leadership in all other scientific fields.

And in today's world where we live, that is totally dependent on high technology:


Kim Jong Un's aphorism

“In our society a poor man is not the one who lacks money but knowledge.”

金正恩名言集 1 ; "在我国社会,贫困者不是没钱的人,缺乏知识的人才是贫困者。”; p52; 朝鲜·平壤 ; 主体105年(2016年) ; 外文出版社; 朝鲜民主主义人民共和国印刷 ; ᄀ-6830137
http://www.korean-books.com.kp/KBMbooks/ch/book/politics/00000228.pdf



Proof, the same assessment can be repeated with the 30th International Biology Olympiad 2019 as posted previously, and again with the 2019 International Physics Olympiad:


1 Xiangkai Sun (People's Republic of China)
2 Yifan Sun (People's Republic of China)
3 Grigorii Bobkov (Russia)
4 Xiaoxun Gong (People's Republic of China)
5 Soojung Bae (Republic of Korea)
6 Vincent Bian (United States of America)
7 Aleksei Shishkin (Russia)
8 Yongkang Li (People's Republic of China)
9 Nishant Abhangi (India)
10 Kyeongjin Jung (Republic of Korea)
11 Xuan Tung Tran (Vietnam)
12 Soo ho Choe (Republic of Korea)
13 Junhao Chen (People's Republic of China)
14 Vladimir Malinovskii (Russia)
15 Xinghong Fu (Singapore )
15 Wei-En Wang (Taiwan)

Although external environmental factors might in some cases totally ruin one's natural genetic advantageous endowment:

XXIII International Astronomy Olympiad


I Diploma

Group Alpha

Artem Gordeev (Russia)
Chahel Singh (India)
Harabor Daria Teodora (Romania)
Tanawan Chatchadanoraset (Thailand)
Wasawat Jirasuviboon (Thailand)

Group Beta

Aleksei Shishkin (Moscow Land)
Li Junlin (China)
Suleiman Kazimov (Russia)
Turturean David Corneliu (Romania)


And here is the culprit, not something to boast about:

scr.png

https://archive.fo/dJUgF/c03c94c85e059c7a6b2be21de4ef0c2be7ae2e27/scr.png ; http://web.archive.org/web/20190727...PollutionMap-DarkSiteFindercom.1564212183.png ; https://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html#3/38.20/-315.09
1. Light pollution map, ruining astronomical observations.

:cool::smokin:8-)
cool_thumb.gif
 
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Cannot tell the difference by surname. Thai people you see today majority have some Chinese ancestors. Those without any Chinese ancestors are.minority. It's normal here.in.Thailand that Chinese.Descents dowell academically.

Thank you for your reply.

The same applies to the 30th International Biology Olympiad 2019, held in Hungary: top American competitors made of 3 ethic Chinese and one ethnic Indian. The first best non-sinosphere competitor ranking only at the 9th place.

1 China LINGFENG PENG
2 China HAOXUAN TANG
3 United States of America Christopher Wang
4 South Korea JAEHYEONG LEE
5 Singapore Zipei Tan
6 China YU MENG
7 China YIYUAN HUANG
8 South Korea YEON KYU CHUNG
9 Netherlands Ward Johannes Martinus de Ridder
10 Singapore Cameron Jinghan Goh
11 Turkey Sezgin Er
12 Chinese Taipei CHIH-CHEN TZANG
13 South Korea JIWOO NAM
14 Hungary Péter Vízkeleti
15 Indonesia Aditya David Wirawan

http://www.ibo-info.org/results/2019-IBO-Ranking_web.pdf

Thank you. Very informative. Wish your country and students do well.

On the contrary, leading in Math is of utmost importance, as it is the core that unlocks the leadership in all other scientific fields.

And in today's world where we live, that is totally dependent on high technology:

Kim Jong Un's aphorism

“In our society a poor man is not the one who lacks money but knowledge.”

金正恩名言集 1 ; "在我国社会,贫困者不是没钱的人,缺乏知识的人才是贫困者。”; p52; 朝鲜·平壤 ; 主体105年(2016年) ; 外文出版社; 朝鲜民主主义人民共和国印刷 ; ᄀ-6830137

http://www.korean-books.com.kp/KBMbooks/ch/book/politics/00000228.pdf

Proof, the same assessment can be repeated with the 30th International Biology Olympiad 2019 as posted previously, and again with the 2019 International Physics Olympiad:


1 Xiangkai Sun (People's Republic of China)
2 Yifan Sun (People's Republic of China)
3 Grigorii Bobkov (Russia)
4 Xiaoxun Gong (People's Republic of China)
5 Soojung Bae (Republic of Korea)
6 Vincent Bian (United States of America)
7 Aleksei Shishkin (Russia)
8 Yongkang Li (People's Republic of China)
9 Nishant Abhangi (India)
10 Kyeongjin Jung (Republic of Korea)
11 Xuan Tung Tran (Vietnam)
12 Soo ho Choe (Republic of Korea)
13 Junhao Chen (People's Republic of China)
14 Vladimir Malinovskii (Russia)
15 Xinghong Fu (Singapore )
15 Wei-En Wang (Taiwan)

Although external environmental factors might in some cases totally ruin one's natural genetic advantageous endowment:

XXIII International Astronomy Olympiad


I Diploma

Group Alpha

Artem Gordeev (Russia)
Chahel Singh (India)
Harabor Daria Teodora (Romania)
Tanawan Chatchadanoraset (Thailand)
Wasawat Jirasuviboon (Thailand)

Group Beta

Aleksei Shishkin (Moscow Land)
Li Junlin (China)
Suleiman Kazimov (Russia)
Turturean David Corneliu (Romania)


And here is the culprit, not something to boast about:

scr.png

https://archive.fo/dJUgF/c03c94c85e059c7a6b2be21de4ef0c2be7ae2e27/scr.png ; http://web.archive.org/web/20190727...PollutionMap-DarkSiteFindercom.1564212183.png ; https://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html#3/38.20/-315.09
1. Light pollution map, ruining astronomical observations.

:cool::smokin:8-)
cool_thumb.gif

" leading in Math is of utmost importance, as it is the core that unlocks the leadership in all other scientific fields. "

Math is the language of science.
 
.
Cannot tell the difference by surname. Thai people you see today majority have some Chinese ancestors. Those without any Chinese ancestors are.minority. It's normal here.in.Thailand that Chinese.Descents dowell academically.
I heard is easy to tell, just look at last name. Thai Chinese have ridiculously long names (last name) and nonsensical to the native speakers. Although some have short names.

http://www.unz.com/article/iq-or-the-mathverbal-split/
IQ or the Math/Verbal Split?
Intelligence
As someone who’s been following HBD for the past 10 plus years or so, I’ve simultaneously been amused and enlightened by the passionate feelings the topic often engenders. The general conceit of the HBD crowd is that they possess deep insight into a body of scientific truth opening up new avenues of understanding entirely shut off from those cloistered in the comforting myths of PC. For the most part I’m sympathetic towards this sentiment. Rather than challenge the established tenets of HBD, this article is meant to clear up some of the conceptual muddle surrounding various HBD related discussions that I’ve been a part of over the years, whether directly or indirectly. I hope that my layman’s intuition might inspire others to think about the topic a bit differently. To my surprise, I’ve found that oftentimes people far smarter than myself still tend to think about the subject matter in rather rigid and constrained ways.

I often hear people talk about IQ as though it were some monolithic thing. No doubt this has been in large part due to the phenomenon of general intelligence or g, which supposedly explains why people’s performance on various mental subtasks seem to be correlated. If you’re above average in one cognitive area, you’re likely to be above average in others.[14] I want to argue for a different way of thinking about intelligence and HBD, one that doesn’t deny the importance of general intelligence but instead argues that for elite performance, math/verbal split probably matters more. Math/verbal split is simply the phenomenon that some people are cognitively lopsided in favor of either mathematical or verbal reasoning and thus their real-life pursuits mirror their cognitive profile. In particular, understanding the importance of the math/verbal split can illuminate potential differences between East Asians and Europeans or more generally between East Asians and non-East Asians, differences which I’m surprised are often not well noted even by supposed devotees of human biodiversity.

Smart East Asians
East Asians, those of Chinese, Korean, or Japanese descent, are often stereotyped as being smart by American society. They excel academically relative to members of other ethnic groups in the United States and disproportionately dominate real life STEM, whether at elite companies in Silicon Valley or in top science labs around the country. A 1987 Times article discussed the disproportionate success of East Asian immigrants, in particular in math and science, and suggested that this was because “Asian-American students who began their educations abroad arrived in the U.S. with a solid grounding in math but little or no knowledge of English. They are also influenced by the promise of a good job after college. “Asians feel there will be less discrimination in areas like math and science because they will be judged more objectively,” says Shirley Hune, an education professor at Hunter College. And, she notes, the return on the investment in education “is more immediate in something like engineering than with a liberal arts degree.”[1] Proponents of HBD will surely point to IQ as the ultimate underlying explanation rather than culture or other such factors. They’re mostly right, but I want to emphasize that East Asians are fundamentally characterized by what I refer to as the math/verbal split. People often casually note the affinity that East Asians have for math, without necessarily taking that understanding to its logical conclusion.

That East Asians skew towards math and away from verbal has long been documented in the psychometric literature. In their infamous book the Bell Curve, Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein note that East Asians tended to be much stronger at non-verbal as opposed to verbal reasoning. One study by Vernon that they reference suggests that Chinese Americans had an average performance IQ of 110 and an average verbal IQ of 97.[2] This was based on testing done in 1975 on Chinese children in San Francisco’s Chinatown using the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test.[3] Various other scholars such as Richard Lynn have also consistently noted that East Asians exhibit a pronounced math/verbal skew. Lynn proposes that Mongoloid intelligence is fundamentally characterized by “high general intelligence (Spearman’s g), high visuospatial abilities and low verbal abilities.”[4] Thus, relative to Europeans, East Asians tend to average lower on verbal intelligence but excel significantly at quantitative and spatial reasoning.

Murray suggests that this math/verbal split explains why East Asians are underrepresented in the social sciences, humanities, and law and skewed towards science and engineering fields.[2] As I’ll argue later on, the skewed cognitive profile of East Asians not only explains why they avoid the non-sciences, but also why even within natural science, East Asians exhibit a clear preference for the quantitative physical sciences over the verbally loaded life sciences. The math/verbal split also illuminates East Asian performance in elite academic competitions in the US. For instance, East Asians are heavily overrepresented in math competitions such as MATHCOUNTS or AIME/USAMO/IMO, but have a relatively minimal presence in the Spelling Bee, which as of late has been dominated by verbally fluent South Asians.

A back of the envelop estimation based on surnames suggests that somewhere around 64% to 65% of 2016 USAMO qualifiers were East Asian.[5] By contrast, since 1980 only one person with an East Asian name has won the Spelling Bee, while the last 10 winners or co-winners all are South Asian.[6] Similarly, an analysis of the names and pictures of the 291 Spelling Bee finalists from 2017 who made it to Washington DC suggests that conservatively estimating, there were about 25 or so full-blooded East Asians, a ratio of only about 8.6%.[7] (Some of the East Asian surnames were actually Vietnamese, a group which I’ve currently excluded from my definition of East Asian.)

Further evidence in support of the thesis that East Asians are cognitively skewed towards mathematical reasoning comes from Asian American scores on standardized tests. Although the data is over decade old, blogger Steve Sailer highlights performance by race on major standardized tests such as the GMAT, GRE, MCAT, and LSAT.[8]

[39])

Lopsided Geniuses and Spearman’s Law of Diminishing Returns
The importance of the math/verbal split becomes clear when we read about historical lopsided geniuses. Numerous such examples abound. I want to focus on two in particular, Richard Feynman and Terence Tao, to illustrate the point that brilliant people aren’t necessarily equally brilliant in all aspects of life. Sure, general intelligence or g suggests that they’re likely to be above average in most if not all areas of cognitive ability, but I believe this misses the point.

[img src="http://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Yan-2.jpg" alt="The late Richard Feynman, a lopsided genius" >
The late Richard Feynman, a lopsided genius
Richard Feynman is legendary not only for his contributions as a theoretical physicist but also for his supposedly modest IQ of 125.[9] (I suppose as well for his generally good sense of humor and zany love of life, and if one believes the apocryphal stories, for a rather brutal physics beatdown laid upon our good host himself, Ron Unz.)[44] This was supposed to be a critical data point refuting the general utility of IQ testing as a useful predicator of real life accomplishment. If even an intellectual giant like Feynman tested at a modest IQ of only around 125, how useful could IQ testing actually be, the argument went?

In actuality, Feynman exhibited a clear math/verbal split and the modest IQ score of 125 often reported may simply have been the result of the test being verbally loaded. For instance, Wikipedia notes that “in 1939, Feynman received a bachelor’s degree and was named a Putnam Fellow. He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics, an unprecedented feat, and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions.”[9] Likewise physicist Steve Hsu doubts that“Feynman would have scored near the ceiling on many verbally loaded tests. He often made grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes (even of words commonly used in physics), etc. He occasionally did not know the meanings of terms used by other people around him (even words commonly used in physics).”[10]


Terence Tao, another lopsided prodigy
Another prodigy Terence Tao, one of the most preeminent mathematicians today, also mirrored Feynman in exhibiting a pronounced cognitive skew. As noted by those who studied him during his youth, “there’s no doubt that Terry Tao reasons almost incredibly well, mathematically, and learns mathematics and related subjects astonishingly fast. His performance in mathematics competitions in Australia and on the mathematical portion of the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT-M) at age 8 is phenomenal. He was taking the 60-item 60-minute multiple-choice SAT-M for the first time. On it, only 1 percent of college-bound male 12th-graders in the United States score 750 or more (College Board, 1985). He scored 760. Only one other 8-year-old of whom I am aware has done as well. That boy, who lives in a suburb of Chicago, was taking the test for the fifth time! He managed to score 800 before becoming 10 years old. Terry was not retested on SAT-M at age 9, because that seemed unnecessary.Yet at age 8 years 10 months, when he took both the SAT-M and the SAT-Verbal, Terry scored only 290 on the latter. Just 9% of college-bound male 12th-graders score 290 or less on SAT-V; a chance score is about 230. The discrepancy between being 10 points above the minimum 99th percentile on M and at the 9th percentile on V represents a gap of about 3.7 standard deviations. Clearly, Terry did far better with the mathematical reasoning items (please see the Appendix for examples) than he did reading paragraphs and answering comprehension questions about them or figuring out antonyms, verbal analogies, or sentences with missing words.”[11]

A 2007 New York Times article also notes of Tao that “at age 5, he was enrolled in a public school, and his parents, administrators and teachers set up an individualized program for him. He proceeded through each subject at his own pace, quickly accelerating through several grades in math and science while remaining closer to his age group in other subjects. In English classes, for instance, he became flustered when he had to write essays. “I never really got the hang of that,” he said. “These very vague, undefined questions. I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.” Assigned to write a story about what was going on at home, Terry went from room to room and made detailed lists of the contents.”[12]

As suggested above, most likely Tao and Feynman both skewed significantly away from verbal in favor of spatial/quantitative ability. Geniuses can certainly be lopsided in their cognitive profile and are not necessarily equally gifted at everything. Indeed, a failure to appreciate this fact probably resulted in one of psychometrics’ greatest false negatives. Around 1920, psychologist Lewis Terman famously attempted to search for bright youths in the state of California by administering to them IQ tests. Those who scored in the top 1% were tracked for further longitudinal study. Despite being future Nobel Prize winners in physics, both William Shockley and Luis Alvarez failed to make the initial cut.[13] Like Feynman’s infamous IQ score of only 125, this was once again held up as evidence of the limitations of intelligence testing. How could Terman have failed to identify these two budding prodigies?



William Shockley and Luis Alvarez. Both famously failed to make the initial cut on Terman’s IQ testing.
Although this skepticism is superficially plausible, a more convincing explanation is offered by psychologists David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow, who argue that “many items on Terman’s Stanford-Binet IQ test, as with many modern assessments, fail to tap into a cognitive ability known as spatial ability. Recent research on cognitive abilities is reinforcing what some psychologists suggested decades ago: spatial ability, also known as spatial visualization, plays a critical role in engineering and scientific disciplines. Yet more verbally-loaded IQ tests, as well as many popular standardized tests used today, do not adequately measure this trait, especially in those who are most gifted with it.”[13]Had Alvarez or Shockley been administered a spatially or quantitatively oriented test of aptitude, it’s hard to imagine that either one of them would’ve failed to make Terman’s cut. This anomaly was simply the result of the intelligence community failing to adequately appreciate the math/verbal split.

None of this of course implies that notions of aggregate IQ or general intelligence aren’t meaningful concepts. Rather, I suspect that overall IQ is more useful for analyzing the greater population at large, while math/verbal split is more useful for understanding the performance of individuals at the right tail of the cognitive distribution. As has been argued by psychologists like Linda Gottfredson, the usefulness of general intelligence lies in the fact that “half a century of military and civilian research has converged to draw a portrait of occupational opportunity along the IQ continuum. Individuals in the top 5 percent of the adult IQ distribution (above IQ 125) can essentially train themselves, and few occupations are beyond their reach mentally. Persons of average IQ (between 90 and 110) are not competitive for most professional and executive-level work but are easily trained for the bulk of jobs in the American economy. In contrast, adults in the bottom 5 percent of the IQ distribution (below 75) are very difficult to train and are not competitive for any occupation on the basis of ability.”[14]


From[14], illustrating how outcomes in life are correlated with IQ.
When it comes to analysis of tail end talent though, I argue that most likely specific cognitive subfactors play a more important role. Indeed, Spearman’s law of diminish returns suggests that “the proportion of variation accounted for by g may not be uniform across all subgroups within a population. Spearman’s law of diminishing returns (SLODR), also termed the cognitive ability differentiation hypothesis, predicts that the positive correlations among different cognitive abilities are weaker among more intelligent subgroups of individuals. More specifically, SLODRpredicts that the g factor will account for a smaller proportion of individual differences in cognitive test scores at higher scores on the g factor.”[15]

Commenter Gwen on the blog Infoproc hints at a possible neurological basis for this phenomenon, stating that “one bit of speculation I have: the neuroimaging studies seem to consistently point towards efficiency of global connectivity rather than efficiency or other traits of individual regions; you could interpret this as a general factor across a wide battery of tasks because they are all hindered to a greater or lesser degree by simply difficulties in coordination while performing the task; so perhaps what causes Spearman is global connectivity becoming around as efficient as possible and no longer a bottleneck for most tasks, and instead individual brain regions start dominating additional performance improvements. So up to a certain level of global communication efficiency, there is a general intelligence factor but then specific abilities like spatial vs verbal come apart and cease to have common bottlenecks and brain tilts manifest themselves much more clearly.”[10] This certainly seem plausible enough. Let’s hope that those far smarter than ourselves will slowly get to the bottom of these matters over the coming decades.

In conclusion, the point I want to make here should be clear. Many people have fairly lopsided cognitive profiles. History provides us with illuminating examples of intellectual giants who were cognitively lopsided. Being a genius in one area doesn’t necessarily imply that you’re equally ingenious in all other areas. SLODR suggests that general intelligence is less relevant in explaining total cognitive variation the smarter the subgroup under consideration is. While g may be useful for aggregate broad stroke analyses of the larger population along the lines of the studies referenced by Linda Gottfredson, elite performance is probably more dependent upon specific cognitive subfactors. Indeed, ignoring the math/verbal split probably led to one of the most infamous false negatives in the field of psychometrics, when Lewis Terman failed to flag either Alvarez or Shockley as cognitively elite youths.

Having discussed the importance of the math/verbal split in understanding the trajectories of historical prodigies, let’s now turn to the topic of how this phenomenon can illuminate in general the trajectory of a rising modern day East Asia.

China’s Rapid Scientific Rise and East Asian Science
One of the most interesting phenomenon of the 21st century has been China’s rapid rise in science and technology. After the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, China has been making rapid investments in S&T for the past few decades. It was estimated that during 2017, China had spent roughly $279 billion USD on R&D, an increase of 14% over the prior year and the culmination of a couple decades of rapid R&D growth from an extremely low starting base.[16]

However, as has been clear to those most carefully following the rise of China in S&T, the country exhibits a clear preference for quantitative fields, in particular physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, and computer science. As noted by Australian academic Simon Marginson, “in 2000 China authored just 0.6 percent of chemistry papers ranked in the global top one percent on citation rate in the Web of Science. Only 12 years later, in 2012, China published 16.3% of the leading one percent of papers, half as many as the US- an astonishing rate of improvement. There were similar patterns in engineering, physics and computing- where China publishes more top one percent papers than the US- and mathematics (NSF, 2014.) China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and to some degree Singapore, have concentrated research development in the physical sciences and related applied fields like engineering, computing and materials. In Korea and Japan this supports advanced manufacturing. China also emphasizes research that supports accelerated modernization: energy, urbanization, construction, transport, and communications. At this stage medicine and life sciences are much weaker.”[17]

Similarly, in 2014 Nature noted that a whopping 90% of China’s WFC came from the fields of physical sciences and chemistry, as opposed to life sciences.[18] China’s most recent output in 2017 in Nature essentially exhibits the same skew.[46] This contrasts with the scientific output of countries such as the United States or the UK, which tend to gravitate towards life sciences and medicine. For instance, UNESCO reported in 2010 that while Japan had strengths in physics, chemistry, engineering and technology, the United States and the United Kingdom tended to specialize in biomedical research and clinical medicine.[19]


From[46], China’s output in Nature is clearly skewed towards physical sciences and chemistry and away from life sciences.
Further evidence supporting the claim that East Asian countries clearly skew towards quantitative fields in their scientific output lies in the Leiden Ranking, which utilizes bibliographic data from the Web of Science produced by Clarivate Analytics to determine which institutions published the most high-impact papers in various fields.[20] Leiden categorizes papers into five broad areas, biomedical and health sciences, life and earth sciences, mathematics and computer science, physical sciences and engineering, and social sciences and humanities.

Based on the number of papers in the top 10% of citations, East Asian universities clearly excel at mathematics and computer science and physical sciences and engineering relative to the other three categories. For the time period of 2012-2015 and ranked by total number of top 10% papers based on citation rate, East Asia had 5 of the top 10 universities in physical sciences and engineering and 8 out of the top 10 universities in mathematics and computer science.


Top schools based on number of top 10% papers for the field of mathematics and computer science for 2012-2015 in Leiden.

Top schools based on number of top 10% papers for the field of physical sciences and engineering for 2012-2015 in Leiden.
By contrast when looking at total top 10% papers in the field of biomedical and health sciences, the highest ranked East Asian university was Shanghai Jiao Tong at 48th. For life and earth sciences, the highest ranked East Asian university was Zhejiang at 20th. And in social sciences and humanities, the top rated East Asian university was National University of Singapore at a fairly low 80th place.[20] The difference in high impact work produced between quantitative and verbal fields for East Asian universities could hardly be clearer. Conversely, Western countries tended to excel at life sciences, medicine, social sciences, and humanities. This is further reinforced by the performance of the UK on the latest QS World University Rankings by Subject, which as noted was “heavily concentrated in Arts & Humanities subjects, the Life Sciences, and Social Sciences and Management.”[43]

A couple of caveats apply. First, compared to the rest East Asia, Japan publishes more high impact work in the life sciences. It has pockets of strength in various areas of the biological sciences ranging from immunology to cell biology to regenerative medicine, as anyone familiar with names such as Yoshinori Ohsumi, Kazutoshi Mori, Shimon Sakaguchi, Tasuku Honjo, or Tadamitsu Kishimoto can attest. Most famously, Shinya Yamanaka invented iPS cells back in 2006, giving birth to a whole new field of regenerative medicine in which Japan has established itself as a world leader.[21]


Shinya Yamanaka, the scientist who first created induced pluripotent stem cells in 2006.
China on the other hand publishes more high impact work in mathematics and computer science compared to Japan or Korea. For instance, US News Global most recently ranked Tsinghua University as the number one computer science program in the world.[22] Apart from that though, in general all East Asian countries tend to prefer fields such as physics, chemistry, materials science, and engineering.

My main prediction here then is that based on HBD, I don’t expect China or East Asia to rival the Anglosphere in the life sciences and medicine or other verbally loaded scientific fields. Perhaps China can mirror Japan in developing pockets of strengths in various areas of the life sciences. Given its significantly larger population, this might indeed translate into non-trivial high-end output in the fields of biology and biomedicine. The core strengths of East Asian countries though, as science in the region matures, will lie primarily in quantitative areas such as physics or chemistry, and this is where I predict the region will shine in the coming years. China’s recent forays into quantum cryptography provide one such example.[40]

Thus, while some point to overall scientific output across a full spectrum of fields in the physical sciences, life sciences, and social sciences as proof that East Asians aren’t as well represented as they should be, a more nuanced understanding suggests that in actuality East Asians are merely gravitating towards what they’re naturally good at. That countries like China and Japan excel at fields like physics or chemistry relative to say psychology or clinical medicine and disproportionately publish in the former as opposed to the latter is hardly a mystery. It’s merely a reflection of underlying HBD.

Beyond Science: Technology and Engineering
East Asia also clearly excels in technology and engineering. East Asian countries are international patenting powerhouses and in case you hadn’t noticed, virtually every bit of advanced modern-day consumer electronics hardware is manufactured in East Asia. This is a point often ignored in HBD related discussions.

The Financial Times notes that “Japan remains an innovation powerhouse, according to a geographical analysis of patenting that shows Tokyo-Yokohama is much the largest such cluster in world. The study comes from the World Intellectual Property Organization (Wipo), based in Geneva, which analyzed the addresses of inventors named in all 950,000 international patent applications published between 2011 and 2015 under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. Two other Japanese clusters, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto and Nagoya, are in the global top ten. The results also show strong inventive activity elsewhere in east Asia, with China’s Shenzhen-Hong Kong taking second place in Wipo’s rankings, ahead of California’s Silicon Valley in third and Seoul in South Korea. European clusters appear lower down the rankings, with Paris at number 10 and Frankfurt-Mannheim at 12. The UK does poorly, with London at 21, Cambridge at 55 and Oxford at 88.”[23]

In fact, as anyone who’s been paying attention has noticed, modern day tech is essentially a California and East Asian affair, with the former focused on software and the latter more so on hardware. American companies dominate in the realm of internet infrastructure and platforms, while East Asia is predominant in consumer electronics hardware, although as noted, China does have its own versions of general purpose tech giants in companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. By contrast, Europe today has relatively few well known tech companies apart from some successful apps such as Spotify or Skype and entities such as Nokia or Ericsson.[24] It used to have more established technology companies back in the day, but the onslaught of competition from the US and East Asia put a huge dent in Europe’s technology industry.

An old 1991 article from the Washington Post during the height of Japan bashing in the West notes that “the “Nippophobia” phenomenon has gathered momentum largely because there appear to be no easy answers to prevent the likelihood that European unemployment, already much higher than in the United States, is about to increase, or that if protectionist measures are invoked to save jobs, prices will have to soar and thus hurt the European consumer. Europe’s computer industries are on the verge of collapse because they cannot compete with Japanese and American companies that adapt more quickly to swiftly changing technologies. The Netherlands’ electronics giant Philips, Italy’s Olivetti and France’s Bull have been forced to slash thousands of people from their employment rolls this year. Even with more billion-dollar bailouts from governments, their survival prospects are bleak.”[25]

Indeed, the association of East Asia with high tech is fairly evident when one considers the most well-known brands in each global region. A large share of the most famous East Asian brands are tech companies. By comparison, well-known European brands generally tend to be luxury fashion or car companies.[26] Quick, name the most prominent East Asian companies that come to mind. My guess is that you probably threw out names like Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony, Lenovo, BYD, DJI, or Huawei. Now, name the most famous European brands you can think of. Here, my guess is that you probably first thought of brands like Gucci, Burberry, Versace, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Armani, Chanel, or Prada.


From[47] BrandZ data shows that top Chinese brands generally tend to be tech related

From[48], BrandZ data shows that France lives up to its reputation as a world capital in luxury fashion
Although many will point to institutional factors such as China or the United States enjoying large, unfragmented markets to explain the decline of European tech, I actually want to offer a more HBD oriented explanation not only for why Europe seems to lag in technology and engineering relative to America and East Asia, but also for why tech in the United States is skewed towards software, while tech in East Asia is skewed towards hardware. I believe that the various phenomenon described above can all be explained by one common underlying mechanism, namely the math/verbal split. Simply put, if you’re really good at math, you gravitate towards hardware. If your skills are more verbally inclined, you gravitate towards software. In general, your chances of working in engineering and technology are greatly bolstered by being spatially and quantitatively adept.

Thus, HBD ultimately explains where a non-trivial percentage of East Asian cognitive capital is allocated to. Besides being skewed towards the mathematical and physical sciences, many East Asians end up working in practical technology and engineering. This means that merely considering science and in particular the full range of scientific fields, misses out on the fact that many East Asians gravitate towards the middle two letters of the STEM acronym. Having pointed out that modern day consumer electronics is essentially an East Asian industry, I also want to highlight the obvious fact that East Asian Americans are vastly overrepresented in the tech industry in Silicon Valley and have made many important contributions there as well. One good example is modern day computer graphics, which is basically dominated by Nvidia and AMD, which bought ATI Technologies back in 2006 and incorporated it into its own graphics division. Jen Hsun-Huang was one of the co-founders of Nvidia and today remains its CEO and primary spokesperson. ATI Technologies, which would later become the Radeon graphics division of AMD, was founded by four Chinese Canadians, Lee Ka Lau, Francis Lau, Benny Lau, and Kwok Yuen Ho, back in 1985 in Ontario, Canada.[28] East Asian Americans are also undoubtedly over-represented among the technical workforce at prominent tech companies such as Nvidia or the likes.[31]

Indeed, despite oft repeated claims by progressives that Silicon Valley is so, so white, at many of the elite tech companies in the Bay Area, whites are actually under-represented along with blacks and Hispanics. The general picture from diversity numbers released by many of the top companies such as Google, Facebook, or Uber shows that whites tend to be slightly underrepresented overall, more underrepresented in technical roles, and overrepresented at the executive level relative to their total percentage amongst the general population.[27][45] This seems to jive with my own personal impressions as well from having worked in the tech sector the past number of years. In general, the more technically and quantitatively demanding the role, the greater the degree of Asian American overrepresentation. It’s not a huge surprise that the whitest parts of most tech companies tend to be in areas such as marketing, product, sales, design, or at the executive levels.


From USA Today. Breakout of employees by race in technical roles at Uber
Let’s take a moment then to appreciate the role that East Asians and East Asian Americans play in modern day tech and engineering. Just think of all of the accoutrements of modernity such as smartphones, flat panel TVs, tablets, and SSDs that we purchase from East Asian companies like Samsung, Sony, or LG that have become part and parcel of our 21st century lifestyle. It’s good stuff, so keep that shit coming and let’s bring on those bendable OLED screens![29] (Before anyone makes the usual arguments, let me point out that the father of the OLED is typically considered to be a Chinese American Ching-Tang, who did his work while at Eastman Kodak in the 1980s. It would hardly be surprising given his various accolades if a Nobel Prize in chemistry was also in the offing.[30])


Ching Tang, considered to be the father of the OLED
Conclusion
I hope I’ve convinced you that the correct way of thinking about HBD is fundamentally along the lines of the math/verbal split more so than along the lines of overall IQ or g, not that those concepts don’t have their relevant areas of use. Once math/verbal split is taken into account, I believe certain things become less mysterious, so to speak. Of course, this isn’t to say that proponents of HBD have never discussed the math/verbal split before. For instance, blogger Steve Sailer once noted that major race differences tended to mirror sex differences and that in particular the Japanese possessed cognitively masculine skills such as excelling at mathematics and the 3-D rotation of objects, which contributed to their technological and manufacturing prowess on the world stage.[32]. Very rarely though have I seen this understanding taken to its logical conclusion, with all of its attendant empirical predictions. I hope that this article is a step in that direction.

If my assertions here are correct, I predict that over the coming decades, we’ll increasingly see different groups of people specialize in areas where they’re most proficient at. This means that East Asians and East Asian societies will be characterized by a skew towards quantitative STEM fields such as physics, chemistry, and engineering and towards hardware and high-tech manufacturing, while Western societies will be characterized by a skew towards the biological sciences and medicine, social sciences, humanities, and software and services.[41] Likewise, India also appears to be a country whose strengths lie more in software and services as opposed to hardware and manufacturing. My fundamental thesis is that all of this is ultimately a reflection of underlying HBD, in particular the math/verbal split. I believe this is the crucial insight lacking in the analyses others offer.

So maybe it’s less that East Asians are significantly smarter than other ethnic groups and more that they’re significantly more quantitatively inclined. Being good at math is only one kind of intelligence, so to speak. A philosopher like Daniel Dennett may be no Terence Tao, but based on anecdotal evidence of Tao’s somewhat modest verbal abilities relative to his preeminent mathematical talents, it’s safe to say that neither is Tao Dennett. Rather, they’re two men with differing cognitive profiles and different strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately each pursued a career most suited to his innate talents. One became a philosopher and the other a mathematician. Like they say, to each his own.

In light of all this then, why does American society consistently characterize East Asians as exceptionally intelligent rather than adopt perhaps a more nuanced perspective? It probably has to do with the enormous prestige that mathematical aptitude commands. Even if one isn’t good at much else, as long as you’re good at math, people usually still associate you with brilliance. We often hear jokes about how math and science are the real subjects compared to the social sciences or humanities. And even within the natural sciences, it’s often assumed that physics is a more preeminent and senior science relative to say biology. This implicit intellectual hierarchy was more explicitly stated in Jerome Kagan’s book The Three Cultures, where he described physics as the sun and mathematics its core, with various other lesser subjects as planets increasingly distant from and in orbit around the sun.[33]Indeed, apart from the obvious utility of the life sciences, many other fields relying mostly upon verbal aptitude often seem to deliver questionable value, while math seems to be almost universally useful. In particular, modern day psychology, social sciences, and humanities often seem to be beset by ideological biases and suffer from a clear lack of replicability.[34] Social science might better be described these days as social justice, as so-called scientists often merely reinforce their ideological priors and preach politically correct, sanctimonious bullshit. Ideology masquerading as science, alas.

In contrast, mathematics is beautiful, elegant, and seemingly the language of the universe. An intelligent extraterrestrial species will almost certainly not read or write English or any of the current extant languages of planet Earth. But it almost certainly will possess many of the same fundamental mathematical concepts that we homo-sapiens possess. It’s hard to see how it could otherwise be. As physicist Steve Hsu opines, “high verbal ability is useful for appearing to be smart, or for winning arguments and impressing other people, but it’s really high math ability that is useful for discovering things about the world- that is, discovering truth or reasoning rigorously.”[35] Indeed, there’s much to the idea that deep mathematical understanding unlocks a realm of knowledge beyond what can merely be articulated through verbal concepts alone. In reference to physicist Eugene Wigner’s remarks about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, physicist Steven Weinberg wrote about the equally unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, suggesting that no physicists he knew of in the post-WW2 era meaningfully benefitted in their work from philosophy in any way.[36]

It truly is remarkable then how mathematics not only helps us to unlock a deep understanding of nature, but also allows us to become nature’s master as well. Blogger Lion of the Blogosphere, aka The Artist Formerly Known as Half Sigma, puts it thusly. Mathematical ability is highly conducive to value creation, while verbal ability is highly conducive to value transference.[37] Mathematically adept nerds are the real value creators, while their more extroverted, socially dominant, and verbally glib counterparts transfer that underlying value to themselves as business executives. Engineers are great at creating things for value for others to consume. Lawyers and businessmen on the other hand seem mostly proficient at extracting wealth created by others for themselves.

Perhaps not surprisingly then, while modern day Japan is a high-tech engineering powerhouse exporting tangible things of value that others around the world want to buy, the field of law seems to be rather a bit of a dud in the country, with lawyers literally running out of things to do.[38] And perhaps equally unsurprisingly, the American economy was nearly wrecked by bankers and snake oil salesmen a decade ago, and in general the country seems to be run by a coterie of lawyers and TV stars, while in contrast Chinese leaders seem to disproportionately possess engineering degrees instead.[42]

In America, despite the enormous prestige that mathematics commands, there also seems to be a concurrent underlying math phobia. This strange love/hate relationship Americans have with math means that often those most lacking in mathematical acumen somehow convince themselves that being smart is merely a function of how loudly you shout over someone else or how articulate you are at voicing your own opinions. (Just look at all of the talking heads on opinion television today pontificating endlessly from their bully pulpits, if you don’t believe what I’m saying is true.) We often hear this expressed as clichés about how Americans are taught to embrace critical thinking. In contrast, motivated by HBD, I’ve long been espousing a philosophy that I’ve somewhat cheekily referred to as cognitive elitism. Perhaps though it’s better to refer to that ideology as quantitative supremacism instead. (Contrast cognitive elitism on the one hand with the philosophical worldview of well-known HBD commenter Whiskey on the other, whose passion for pointing out how much white women hate, hate, hate beta males and instead prefer tall, dark, and handsome men of color might instead be aptly referred to as cock-nitive elitism.)

Intelligence matters for the functioning of a modern-day STEM society and it matters quite a bit. The paradox of egalitarianism implies that as environments increasingly become equalized among disparate parts of the population, by definition a greater percentage of the remaining variance in life outcomes must be attributed to differences in innate intelligence instead. And as phenomenon like the math/verbal split or the asymmetry in usefulness between mathematical and verbal aptitude suggest, maybe we should appreciate and revere precisely those individuals and groups most adept at quantitative reasoning, who rather than merely engaging in cheap talk and empty braggadocio, quietly crank away behind the scenes, tirelessly powering the scientific and technological engine of modernity. So, shout it out loud with me my brothers and sisters. Shout it aloud from every street corner and mountain top, with the same relentless vigor and tenacity shown by our good friend John Derbyshire when it comes to tirelessly warning us about the perils of certain solar ethnic groups. Math is good. Math is useful. Math is sublime. Amen. We are all quantitative supremacists now!

And that’s the story. Human biodiversity simply means that different groups of people who evolved under differing conditions may possess different distributions of physical and cognitive attributes. Appreciating such nuances may prove to be best for understanding the future of the 21st century. I’m amazed by how often people far smarter than myself still discuss HBD solely in terms of overall IQ. The existence of the math/verbal split among East Asians has well been documented by scholars like Richard Lynn or Charles Murray for decades and yet in public discussions of intelligence, people invariably tend to fall back upon the usual talking points. Your humble correspondent hopes that by more forcefully articulating the established science of psychometrics, conceptual muddles can be dissolved and men and women alike awoken from their dogmatic slumbers, thereby allowing for what might ever so humbly be termed a Copernican revolution to blossom in our public understanding of intelligence and HBD.

References

[1] http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,965326-2,00.html

[2] Murray, C & Hernstein, R. J. (1996). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. 300-301.

[3] Flynn, J. R. (2007). What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect. 116.

[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886987901358

[5]https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/USAMO Qualifiers 2016_0.pdf

[6]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scripps_National_Spelling_Bee_champions

[7] http://spellingbee.com/meet-the-spellers/2017

[8] http://www.unz.com/isteve/scores-by-race-on-lsat-gre-mcat-gmat-and-dat/

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Education

[10] http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/09/feynman-schwinger-and-psychometrics.html

[11] http://www.davidsongifted.org/Search-Database/entry/A10116

[12] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13prof.html

[13] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recognizing-spatial-intel/

[14]https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1998generalintelligencefactor.pdf

[15]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Spearman’s_law_of_diminishing_returns

[16] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/china-spent-an-estimated-279-billion-on-rd-last-year.html

[17] http://www.researchcghe.org/perch/resources/publications/wp9.pdf

[18] https://www.nature.com/articles/515S73a

[19] Unesco (2010). UNESCO Science Report 2010: The Current Status of Science Around the World. 12.

[20] http://www.leidenranking.com/ranking/2017/list

[21] https://www.ft.com/content/254853b2-8f23-11e7-9084-d0c17942ba93

[22] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/computer-science

[23] https://www.ft.com/content/dbb3bc26-413b-11e7-9d56-25f963e998b2

[24] http://www.unz.com/akarlin/europe-cant-into-big-tech/

[25]https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/06/16/europes-new-rage-japan- bashing/0b9b1f7b-e578-4aae-926b-e2bdd6809f68/

[26] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/b...brand-iphone-7-google-coca-cola-a7345501.html

[27] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/29/how-the-asians-became-white/

[28] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Technologies#History

[29]

[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_W._Tang#Biography

[31] http://www.nvidia.com/object/fy15-workforce-performance.html

[32] https://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/rev-wright-on-black-white-cognitive.html

[33] Kagan, J. (2009). The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and the Humanities in the 21st century.

[34] https://www.theatlantic.com/science...eplication-crisis-cant-be-wished-away/472272/

[35] http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html

[36] http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Steven-Weinberg-“Against-Philosophy”.pdf

[37] http://halfsigma.typepad.com/half_sigma/2011/07/stem-majors.html

[38] http://www.unz.com/isteve/wsj-japans-lawyers-need-more-crime-and-bankruptcies/

[39] http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/02/test-preparation-and-sat-scores.html

[40] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...r-secure-video-conference-between-continents/

[41] https://www.theguardian.com/busines...ered-there-is-no-postindustrial-promised-land

[42] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Chines...-their-American-counterparts-have-law-degrees

[43] http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20180228175510534

[44] http://web.cos.gmu.edu/~vkunkel/feynman1.html

[45] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech...ts-shows-familiar-tech-deficiencies/99726318/

[46] https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/china

[47] http://www.wpp.com/wpp/marketing/brandz/china-50-2018/

[48] http://www.millwardbrown.com/brandz/top-french-brands/2018

 
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Ok East Aseans are good in math. That’s too little. I am always the best in math in my class with my average IQ.

Good in math proves nothing!

Good in math says everything.

The 31st International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI 2019) was held in Baku, Azerbaijan from 4 to 11 August 2019.

And again the same pattern:

1. Benjamin Qi (USA)
2. Ildar Gainullin (RUS)
3. Zixiang Zhou (CAN)
4. Ziqian Zhong (CHN)
5. Junzhao Yang (CHN)
6. Po-Hsuan Su (TWN)
7. Eric Zhang (USA)
8. Mahdi Jafari Raviz (IRN)
9. Angus Ritossa (AUS)
10. Arthur Léonard (FRA)
11. Shih-Yu Wang (TWN)
12. Eu-Shaun Leong (SGP)
13. Daniel Zhang (USA)
14. Nazarii Denha (UKR)
15. Nikoloz Birkadze (GEO)


In this regard, this is what Kim Song Ok has stated recently in Rodong Sinmun:


“The idea indicated by the Supreme Leader on making all the people well versed in science and technology is, in essence, to prepare all the members of society to be intelligent workers with the knowledge level of a university graduate and the main players for the development of science and technology.”

Wise Leadership of Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un in Making All People Well Versed in Science and Technology; Aug. 1, Juche 108 (2019) Thursday
rodong.rep.kp/en/index.php?strPageID=SF01_02_01&newsID=2019-08-01-0010



:cool::smokin:8-)
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