It may be worth analyzing the ethnicities of the Asians taking the LSAT — most of the higher-achieving American Born Chinese try to steer their children away from law and towards medicine. Indians, on the whole, are less impressive test-takers (and lower-order intellects, frankly) than their EA counterparts.

Steve,

It’s because when they take the LSATs and the MCATs they no longer live under their parent’s roof. It’s just like how in every state the select high school orchestra is all Asian, but as soon as they all go to college they throw that sh*t away and never pick up the violin again.

I was talking to a Korean young man who had gotten into Boston College, and he told me he had a perfect score on the SATs. I said why didn’t you go to Harvard. He said, “We all get perfect scores.” He had been a semi-famous pianist in high school, but absolutely refused to even touch a piano now.

Yeah, (East) Asians are better at these tests. We’re running out of them, though–more recent Asians, whether from China, India, or Israel are less good.

It could be that the SAT is offered throughout the world for all of the tiget mom driven upper class students in South Korea, Singapore, or China. Whereas after four years at an American university without the tiger mom around, the Asian students jus are not that good. It could also be that the college students in South Korea or China are not covering as much as the American students in selective universities.

Self selection. The bell curve for undergrads is shifted to the right for Asians versus Caucasians. The bell curves for graduate applicants overlap.

Broken SAT is probably most of it, but more dumb kids of other races taking the test helps.

The superiority of east Asians, that is, in the main, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans in IQ tests vis-à-vis persons of European ancestry has been known for an awfully long time, and is hardly controversial. Indeed, it has been known for at least 60 years.
We must add to this other character and personality traits, also liable to be hereditary in character, of which east Asians surpass Europeans in positive scores, eg, conscientious, application, discipline, focus, obedience, conformity etc. As an aside, one theory is that positive selection for these traits is correlated with historic high population densities in east Asia, Malthusian selection pressures and the reality of ever present death through starvation.

As for the apparent discordance between east Asian SAT scores and graduate program test scores as compared to Europeans, I cannot venture an answer. I can only conjecture that the self selected cohorts taking these tests cannot be compared to the SAT pool in terms of motivation and IQ.

Its a selection story. Asians in US are a selected bunch, selected for IQ, worth ethics, ambition, etc. These families and their kids are doing well. “Excellence” is less in vogue within all other ethnic groups in US. So gaps increasing at SAT level. When you’re conditioning on other ambitious students (such as by looking into people who took the MCAT), the gaps are lower.

I have a prediction for you : gaps in GRE would be somewhere in between and a similar gap in GRE among students who want to study STEM or Economics at PhD levels.

Similarly Jewish academic achievement used to be much more apparent in the hard sciences but today it’s shifted massively to the humanities and isn’t all that apparent in general compared to what it was. Too much out marriage or too much prosperity?

Is the vapidity of upper middle class and beyond children nature or nurture? (Do people who value money and status do better at getting it and produce children as vapid as them)

This also raises a broader question in society if certain people aren’t just better at pushing others out of the way but do not have any actual better performance once in those positions or even worse. (Though one could say the same for poorer Asian post-grad work in terms of them being less aggressive in chasing positions or proposing projects) I think about this often in professional sports, particularly in coaches/managers, lots of big personalities but only a very few actually produce the results with the rest simply getting a good crop of players to ‘manage’ to victory.

In general you can’t ever discount life scripts and culture contexts in terms of controlling what people do and spend their time on. Asians do comprise still a distinct cultural and social paradigm.

I suspect too that just as girls are better at studying than boys so too are East Asians better at studying than others and this conscientiousness along with a cultural paradigm and belief that they need higher scores than other races (Which in it’s impact just leads to even more aggressive Asian quotas wrt SAT scores) leads to them spending more time on it. Though it suggests itself as being a test you can’t study for, the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

The kind of Asians/Whites that go to grad school may already be on par.

While the kind of whites that go to undergrad is a much broader cohort vs the self-selected group of Asians going to an American university.

We know that SAT plus HS grades provide a decent level of predictive power for college. Does anybody know if the predictiveness is the same for all races and whether or not there are any trends for that metric?

This also raises a broader question in society if certain people aren’t just better at pushing others out of the way but do not have any actual better performance once in those positions or even worse.

Is it in the best interests of Whites to have Asians and Jews replace Whites in historically White universities? That entails that Asians and Jews will go on to replace Whites in the economy’s higher paying or most influential occupations (finance, academia, tech, law, medicine, government). And is that in the best interests of Whites? At least as concerns White men, it puts Asians and Jews at an advantage over White men in attracting White women as mates. Asians and Jews will make more money than White men and will therefore have more resources with which to provide for a family.

Whites can look for work in the trades, but there is increasing competition there from Latinxes.

The classic pattern in Japan is that you study really hard to do well on your college entrance exam and get into a top college. And then once you get there, you can goof off (at least in comparison to before). Maybe this explains the SAT- grad school test gap in part.

It’s also possible that the grad school tests (esp. the LSAT) tap different strengths and weaknesses or that Asians have figured out more strategies for gaming the SAT vs. these other tests.

The SAT has been dumbed down so much over the years (in order to make you know who not look bad) that it’s just not that hard a test anymore for an intelligent, studious person. Asians are still intelligent and studious while the rest of the population increasingly appears like the cast of Idiocracy so they have pulled away from the pack. LSAT and MCAT have not been dumbed down to the same extent.

I suspect the main difference is whether cash is available for grad school study. Asians are not as rich as some people think they are, and medical school and law school are very expensive. I think Asian parents will provide for an undergraduate education, but many of them don’t think graduate school is worth paying for.

Secondly, how many Asian doctors and lawyers can you think of? Those are both fields Asians tend not to enter.

Similarly Jewish academic achievement used to be much more apparent in the hard sciences but today it’s shifted massively to the humanities and isn’t all that apparent in general compared to what it was.

I’m not too sure about that.

Now, as I write, ethnic Jews are- I think; it’s just an impression- over-represented in the fields of fundamental physics & mathematics (I don’t know about chemistry and biology), more than in the Golden Age from 1910 to 1950 (give or take).

But there are no spectacular cognitive successes in the past 30-40 years, so what we’re witnessing is a spectacle of depression Lee Smolin has described:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/first-2021-nobel-awarded-will-the-hard-science-nobels-finally-go-woke/#comment-4939558

Thus, by 1981, physics had enjoyed two hundred years of explosive growth. Discovery after discovery deepened our understanding of nature, because in each case theory and experiment had marched hand in hand. New ideas were tested and confirmed and new experimental discoveries were explained in terms of theory. Then, in the early 1980s, things ground to a halt.

I am a member of the first generation of physicists educated since the standard model of particle physics was established. When I meet old friends from college and graduate school, we sometimes ask each other, “What have we discovered that our generation can be proud of?” If we mean new fundamental discoveries, established by experiment and explained by theory—discoveries on the scale of those just mentioned—the answer, we have to admit, is “Nothing!”

In the field of humanities, serious thinkers were almost exclusively Gentiles, with a smattering of German Jews (Erich Auerbach) or sometimes Russians (Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky). Then, in the past 30 – 40 years, serious scholars are even less Jewish (litcrit, linguistics, parts of philosophy, ..), the only exception of truly encyclopedic scholars being late musicologist Richard Taruskin. 

They don’t make euro-Jews as they used to.

But they don’t make euro-Gentiles, either.

Do the populations taking the LSAT and MCAT (and what about the GRE?) have the same racial demographics as the population taking the SAT?

In contrast, Asians have been increasingly outscoring everybody else on college admissions tests in this century, but less on postgrad admissions tests,

Are there vastly more Asian grad students per capita compared to whites? Maybe something like 20 out of 100 versus 10 out of 100? Is this taken into account when looking at average applicant scores?

The more you study, the higher you score. It holds true even for undergraduate mathematics and physics.

Maybe this reflects the amount of test coaching: lots of coaching when the kid is still at home and under the thumb of his tiger mom, less coaching after four years of cultural assimilation to the more easy-going American norm and having gained some independence from said tiger mom.

The rewards for acing the MCAT or LSAT are significantly higher than the SAT.

Getting into an elite (sic) school is not what it used to be, especially for white males who, you know, and good at noticing such things.

The SAT compares a wide range of dopey high school students while the postgrad exams compare people who are 1) reasonably successful college students and 2) some four years older and supposedly more mature.

So these Asian kids are like top athletes moving up to the SEC after starring at Lee’s Summit High School. They might find the competition a little tougher. Or maybe leaving a strict Tiger Mom Asian-American home and going to an American university has a dumbing-down effect

Supposedly the MCAT is now more geared toward reading comprehension and less oriented towards math and science compared to the past. The LSAT has always been geared towards reading. This would give nerdy whites more of an advantage, or less of a disadvantage.

People tend to forgot (or just never mention) that Asians cheat the most.

a top college

You’d have to look very specifically at what the test questions are to make an assessment. In the olden days it was basically logic problems involving simple math and geometry and some vocabulary analogies and reading comprehension. It was basically an IQ test. And of course the results correlated highly with later college success.

My understanding is that they changed the format a few years ago and that’s when Asians (who aleady did best) really pulled away from whites. I dont know what they changed. But to really understand what’s going on you would have to know what the change was and have some data on how different groups score on each question or question type. The SAT people certainly have that data. Does anybody else?

My guess is that they made it more about knowledge and subject matter memorization than g-loaded IQ type questions. They probably did this in the hope that it would raise up the sores of lower IQ groups. But instead it rewarded lots of hours of studying and thus Asians benefitted most.

This would count as being “broken” if the higher Asian scores were not adding extra information about predicting their college grades. Nobody but the SAT people would have access to that data I assume.

The SAT designers only think the test is “broken” insofar as white males score too high. So they have been systematically trying to keep their scores down by throwing out any questions they do better on. I doubt they care about “too-high” Asian scores (except insofar as Asian males are doing better than females).

Aristotle said that the greatest mental ability that exists is to be good at metaphors. Someone else said that metaphor ability is the only thing that cannot be taught to a person by another person. Metaphors are all around us, and add interest and fun to life. This is bidirectional; that is, recognizing one when you see it, and also, coming up with one, which is the most fun. Hah! Take that, Chinese high-SAT guy. Is that your best shot, SafeNow? No, I’ve got creativity, but that one has been observed a lot.

Blacks sexually mature more rapidly than other Races, on average. Asians mentally mature more rapidly than other Races, on average. An 18 year old Asian taking the SAT may be where a Caucasian is at 23. Problem is, Asians plateau and they are done, Caucasians continue developing for a variable amount of time. In any case, imagination is a valuable, not easily testable, skill dominated by Whites.

As to SAT scores……. I hate to harp on the subject, but cheating is rife. Go to tests that have extreme anti-cheating protocols in place ( in my case, A+, CCNA, and so forth) and there is no Asian test advantage. Coincidence, I am sure.

Agree, or possibly there is cheating going on by ‘international’ Asian students who want to go to US colleges for undergrad that drags the average score up higher than would normally be the case.

I went to a university that had a famously large Asian undergraduate population, 30-40% possibly. Surprisingly, the law school was only 5-10% Asian, with the rest of the class mostly White. Quite the contrast when leaving the law building and walking around campus. A sizeable percentage of the Asians were Indians. There were also almost as many Koreans as Chinese, which is surprising given the relative size of their populations. As other commenters on Twitter have pointed out, Koreans seem to prize law unlike Chinese, at least that was my impression based off Netflix, where there seems to be quite a lot of Korean shows on lawyers. In contrast, most Chinese seem to have a disdainful attitude of lawyers. It’s very much “you become doctor”, whereas in White families it’s “you become doctor or lawyer”, with White families tending to equate doctor and lawyer as equally good professions. Asians tend to be less confrontational as well, which is a hindrance in the law field. Koreans seem unique among the NE Asians for being quite combative. Maybe because of their history of being caught between their much larger neighbors China and Japan. So I think there is some selection bias with dumber Asians and more atypical Asians going to law school.

The contrast between the SAT and MCAT result can’t be explained because of Asian selection bias because Asian families really do push their kids to become doctors. One thing I’ve noticed is that on TikTok there seems to be a lot of smart, rural, White doctors. I guess the algorithm has figured out I enjoy watching videos on medical advice. I wouldn’t be surprised if smart, rural, White kids are more likely to go into medicine rather than law because of law’s general snobbiness and having to move to a big city to practice BigLaw. I don’t think the effect is big enough to explain most of the MCAT vs SAT discrepancy, but maybe these neglected brains, as Steve has rightly pointed out, are providing a slight White selection bias on the White MCAT scores relatively.

Other than medicine, Asians these days are focused on engineering and finance. These fields require spatial and quantitative abilities that are better suited for their attitudes. They also pay extremely well. Law and medicine don’t pay as well as they used to. Even if they do pay well, it’s a lot of hard work, and you’re probably making less per hour than you could have in Tech or finance. Asians also go into these fields because they don’t require a graduate degree. Many Asian families discourage their daughters from going to graduate school, even medical school, because they will be too old to have a good marriage after a Masters + PhD or medical school + residency.

Presumably the grad school exam population is taken from the top of the college exam population. The example I’m most familiar with is the math subject GRE (the one that math PhD applicants take, not the general one). Something like 10-15% of takers get the maximum score on it.

Could also be some score compression issues as well, if the mappings from raw score to numerical score on the grad exams are significantly different from that of the SAT.

Maybe over-achieving accelerates brain maturation and asians have smaller standard deviation.
Whites reach their genetic potential later so the IQ difference could be smaller in adults.
Developmental noise fades away from 18 to 24 when liquid IQ usually maxes out.
Maybe this is enhanced by naturally smaller standard deviation of asians in the more selected post-grad Universities.

It’s all about g. The 1978 SAT and g had a 0.85 correlation coeffient. The 2022 SAT and g has a correlation coeficient of only 0.48. The MCAT and LSAT still robustly correlate with g, which is why Mensa presently accepts them as proof of intelligence while they no longer accept composite ACT scores after 1989 or SAT scores after 1994.

I think all of the other explanations so far are reasonable and generally agree with them, but one thing I’d like to know is if the smaller gap is because average White scores are relatively higher on MCAT/LSAT than SAT, or because average Asian scores are relatively lower, or both?

A lot of the people who get the lowest SAT scores will, of course, not end up taking postgrad admissions tests at all. (Some of them don’t even bother to go to undergrad at all… shh…) This doesn’t really matter for Blacks and “Hispanics,” since they’ll always be bringing up the rear regardless.

But if more of the left half of the White SAT-taking bell curve is absent from the MCAT/LSAT test-taking group than their Asian equivalents, I’d think this would lower the gap, since their relative talent advantage (or whatever we ascribe their dominance on the SAT to) against the palefaces is depressed.

Being a current med student w/ a second-gen immigrant background, I think there is an element of how strong the self-selection is for the pools. I think a big part of the Asian/White gap has much more to do w/ conscientiousness(innate perhaps, but also greatly developed through cultural pressures). The IQ gap just doesn’t seem that huge. In the SAT-taking pool of generally HSers asians today are gonna dominate. However, suppose you can get through pre-med prereqs and are confident enough to take the MCAT and apply to med school. In that case, the differences in conscientiousness are significantly lowered in the pool that gets that far. I don’t know how much the MCAT correlates w/ g, probably a decent amount, but at the end of the day it’s a very content-heavy exam.

What all that means for the SAT is that the cultural values that would uphold academic rigor seem to have dissipated significantly in white America, which doesn’t seem to be a great development.

Perhaps the smarter Asians aren’t going into law or medicine.

Selection bias leading to restriction of range? The SAT is fairly common to take. The LSAT is presumably more restricted range where anyone less than (say 2/3) of an SD above average just doesn’t take it. That would compress differences down to being rather small.

Agree, or possibly there is cheating going on by ‘international’ Asian students who want to go to US colleges for undergrad

Whether they cheat or not, should international Asian students be allowed into US colleges? Universities exist to educate the populace of the nation. Bringing in these foreigners just creates more competition against Americans.

To continue on my comment:

I think a lot of smart Asians are not getting picked up by the LSAT, MCAT, GRE, etc. because of selection bias. But I also think test prep may explain some of the discrepancy.

I think there is still a ceiling based off your IQ, but test prep is necessary to maximize your score. I scored a 171 on the LSAT which I believe is 98%. I pirated some old tests, read a book on how to approach logic games, and took the LSAT twice. I probably could have boosted my score a little bit if I got some really good personalized tutoring to iron out my blind spots. But anyways, my first practice test without any test prep was atrocious, probably below 25%. There is a little bit of art to taking these standardized tests that you have to learn first to maximize your score.

In my opinion, the SAT is less g loaded than the LSAT and easier to prep for.

That being said, I’ve come around to the view that a good work ethic is more important than IQ. I was a “splitter”, high LSAT and low GPA, ie smart but lazy. Most highly successful and effective lawyers I’ve met aren’t geniuses, but they’re all very hardworking. So I don’t think it’s such a tragedy that you can get ahead with test prep.

Cheating is a different story, but I think it’s mostly cope that Asian-Americans are cheating more, although international students have wider variance. They can include some real bona fide geniuses, and also some scam artists. My rule of thumb, if they’re at a Tier 1 or maybe a Tier 2 institution, they’re probably the real deal. If they’re at a Tier 3 institution or lower, they’re probably trash and all their credentials are fake.

I dunno Steve, when I took the LSAT there were questions posed in terms of network diagrams. It wasn’t all reading comprehension. I didn’t prep for it and I didn’t do well.

The SAT is basically a spelling bee and Asians take prep courses for it. Anyone with an ounce of sense at least works through a prep book. Maybe they don’t take prep courses for the MCAT or LSAT?

The SAT designers only think the test is “broken” insofar as white males score too high. So they have been systematically trying to keep their scores down by throwing out any questions they do better on.

Aside from the fact that you are pulling this out of your ass without any proof that this is actually being done, what sort of questions would white males do better on than other groups (that do better than they – i.e. Asians)? The essence of g is that it stands for general intelligence or the ability to memorize data and process all sorts of problems. So it is pretty much impossible to design a test on which dumber people do equally well as smarter people. God knows that test writers have been trying for decades. There is a billion $ bill lying in the street for whoever can write such a test (in order to level the playing field for blacks) but it can’t be done. And for the same reason, it’s impossible to write a test that favors whites over Asians.

Even if you make it a test of SWPL stuff , Asians will just memorize those facts. Here is an analogy question (remember when the SAT had analogies): Blacks are to white people as white people are to ________.

Correct.

They tried to make the SAT more black friendly by reducing the g-loading, and instead made it more cram-school vulnerable to the advantage of Asians.

Asians are also pulling away because of state govs and charities pushing the SAT on lower IQ students.

Since fewer Asians than any other racial group are low IQ, the expansion of the testing population decreases their absolute performance the least, which in turn increases their normed performance.

“ The SAT designers only think the test is “broken” insofar as white males score too high. ”

Only thing I disagree with. The gigantic asian-black gap is the single biggest evidence against IQ egalitarianism. That is their single biggest issue. And the biggest HS AA flashpoints are pretty much all black v asian; Lowell, Boston Latin, Bronx Science, Thomas Jefferson HS.

To some extent the 2nd tier Cal State is Asian v Hispanic. Not many blacks or whites want to go to lower tier Cal publics, but Asians want a cheap education and more practical Hispanic parents know their kids can’t handle UCLA or Berkeley.

The SAT has been useful as an n=infinity large sample size, demographically representative, high stakes proxy for an IQ test. “All tests are IQ tests, with some noise.”

Is there data on Asian performance on low-stakes actual IQ tests, or do they even give those any more?

An idea might be for the College Board/ETS, given that the tests are given via computer now, to hide a real IQ test inside the SAT. They already hide test questions that are not scored but are being auditioned for future tests. They could add high g-loaded vocabulary questions and “racist” questions like the old analogy questions, which would not affect the score, but would create data for internal researchers to analyze.

OT: Sailer superfan Anna Khachiyan again mentioned Steve Sailer this week in her podcast, at two different places. She is impressed that Steve says what he thinks and has been able to do so without cancellation, and she says that she’d like to get a job in Tucker Carlson’s writer’s room, but fears she’d be fired for mentioning Sailer too much.

Is this freaking cool or what? Couple of Ukrainian cops firing Kalashikovs in SEMI-AUTOMATIC shoot down a Russkie suicide drone!

This video published by Oleksiy Biloshytskyi, first deputy chief of the patrol police, shows police officers downing a kamikaze drone with firearms during a Russian attack on central Kyiv on Oct. 17. pic.twitter.com/HuionBSpbz

— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) October 17, 2022

That’s an excellent observation IJ.

Tiger Mom on your ass, versus hanging out with your college peers (Asian and White).

I had this Asian kid in scouts–good kid, good attitude, enjoyed scouting. We had some cool, fun adventures lined up for the summer–rafting the mighty Salmon River. (Which btw is a hoot–recommend.) I noticed he wasn’t signed up–odd, he was active, doing stuff on the Eagle scout track. Man, you’re only going to be 16 once–nows the time to have these adventures. But no, he was going to be in some test prep camp all summer.

Just ridiculous.

Part of Nerfing the SAT was making it more of a robotic content drilling test.

Sure, like almost anything, you could say content drilling is “correlated to IQ.” Nonetheless, in the real world Asians are doing more superstudying.

Aside from the fact that you are pulling this out of your ass without any proof that this is actually being done, what sort of questions would white males do better on than other groups (that do better than they – i.e. Asians)?

Pulled out of his ass or not, the SAT designers have been trying to do this. Getting rid of the analogies–pretty core verbal logical reasoning, and very IQy–was done specifically to try to make the test “fairer” to women and minorities.

I believe that is a skill that more directly tests IQ, and would show a smaller, more accurate white-Asian gap (though I think there are some other things going on) than the current test.

I believe one aspect of the rising gap–I believe Twinkie has pointed at this–is simply more Indian.

Outside of Sikhs and some Gujus running hotels, there isn’t very much “normie” immigration from India (much less from the lowest castes). But there is a high influx of Brahmins and some elite merchant castes, who generally get here to work in tech, often by getting a masters in CS or EE or an MBA from American university.

I.e. Indians in America are a highly selected population and they tend to have kids who if not matching their parents are generally at least solidly “college material” and often quite sharp. (I know several in both categories.) So more of them relative to other groups pushes the Asian-white gap open wider.

Does Steve and the commenters realize what year this is????? Most colleges including the top 20 have made the SATs and ACTs optional. And the kids aren’t taking them and both private and prole high schools don’t emphasize them. The applicants and their high schools know what counts in college applications; the groveling sniveling admissions essay and race race race.

As I endlessly repeat, it’s 2022 not 1972 when the Men of UNZ applied to college. Do you all live on the internet? Do you know any high school counselors high school kids or their parents or the present day college admission process? Obviously not.

PISA scores for US Whites and US Asians shows a very modest gap. Nothing like the craziness you see on the SAT.

The test is famously hard – if not impossible – to prep for. So it isn’t just grad school tests where you see a much smaller difference than on the SAT/ACT.

In addition, only 1/3rd of PISA is dedicated verbal intelligence testing, with the other two thirds being maths and science. Some people explained away MCAT and LSAT for simply too geared towards verbal IQ but that doesn’t apply in this case.

—

On GRE; Asians aren’t pulling ahead either.

2016-2021: https://www.ets.org/pdfs/gre/snapshot.pdf

Trend seems mostly stable with Asians clustering fairly closely with Whites.

There was a one-off(?) unz.com claiming that Asians cognitively matured faster to roughly the same ability as whites. Don’t think he had much evidence. Asian boys can certainly sit still and pay attention as well as white kids a few years older, but is that personality or maturity?

Girls mature faster than boys. Do Asian PSAT/SAT to GRE/LSAT/MCAT/DAT test score pattern mirror women’s?

On the PSAT, has that changed a lot? If it hasn’t, it might be the best intelligence test for teenagers that we have, or at least will use.

If I remember correctly, Flynn had evidence that Asian IQ used to be lower in the US. But, Asian Americans must be getting better nutrition than Asians in Asia.

What have Brahmin Indians been selected for that could have made them smarter? They do religious ceremonies historically, right? Objectively, there’s no effect from doing a religious ritual badly, except for how the participants feel. Are they good at exploiting/giving people the positive psychological effects of religion? The Brahmins are certainly all-in on being the high priests of woke.

If you make a test more g loaded (more like an IQ test) then the higher IQ group will do even better. All evidence indicates that Asians are the (slightly) higher IQ group.

OTOH, the main goal of testing has been to dumb down tests so that blacks do better. The last thing they want to do is increase the g loading. This has had the side effect of causing many Asians to ceiling out on the test. 1600s were once rare but now there are thousands.

So I repeat my question – how would you construct a test that specifically harmed white males without harming Asians as well?

What have Brahmin Indians been selected for that could have made them smarter? They do religious ceremonies historically, right?

For one thing, clergy have to be able to read and write. Historically, in Europe the clergy were the best educated group. (Making them celibate in Catholic countries was perhaps not the best idea). In Ukraine, where Ukrainians were mostly peasants, Eastern Orthodox priests were just about the only Ukrainians who could read and were the leaders of the Ukrainian speaking community.

The SAT has been dumbed down so much over the years (in order to make you know who not look bad) that it’s just not that hard a test anymore for an intelligent, studious person. Asians are still intelligent and studious while the rest of the population increasingly appears like the cast of Idiocracy so they have pulled away from the pack. LSAT and MCAT have not been dumbed down to the same extent.

I don’t think this captures the issue – the SAT is supposed to be a “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” which was so reliable a proxy for an IQ test that MENSA would accept one’s SAT score in lieu of an IQ test.

In the naive but still optimistic 1990s when the mania for diversity really started taking off, the powers that be seem to have made the decision that it was necessary to “recenter” the SAT such that the falling average score (which was the result of expanding college as a middle class consumer good and having more non-Prep white male types taking the test) should be moved back to a 1,000. I recall it was actually admitted and spoken about openly at the time that this was because more non-traditional college aspirants were taking the test.

But I don’t think it had the desired effect of masking the underperformance of certain favored groups, so like in the children’s nursery song “The Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly,” the powers that decide these things swallowed a bird to catch the spider to catch the fly. My guess is that they thought that making changes away from a pure g-loaded objective test of colored ovals to a more subjective process eventually including study subjects and essays would help close the black-white gap. Since IQ isn’t real and humans are ever malleable for good ends, we could immerse blacks into an SAT preparation regime via urban public schools, while white suburban kids would be left to find their own SAT prep courses – the gap would therefore close and we could all finally realize MLK’s dream in full.

They didn’t account for Asian Tiger Moms, who found the less objective SAT infinitely more “hackable” via test prep and drilling and sample essay coaching and so forth. No longer a test of pure aptitude (viz, raw intelligence), the test was a test in the traditional sense of mastery of a universe of material which could be more readily accomplished through rote repetition as a stand-in for innate aptitude. If it wasn’t illegal you could probably measure the delta between the IQ of Asian test-takers and the SAT scores of the same Asian test-takers. You’re probably looking at a couple standard deviations between intelligence and test scores of Asians attributable to drilling and immersive test prep. In Steve’s graphs it was the mid to late 1990s when Asians started pulling away from everyone including the white population – a modest five to ten point intelligence premium should not have yielded this overperformance.

Additionally, I think it’s a sort of open secret in academia that foreign born students, particularly the Chinese, are beneficiaries of an espionage campaign to preview the SAT which is administered later in the year in China. But since Chinese students pay full freight tuition in U.S. colleges, there’s little impetus to root out industrial scale Chinese cheating at the expense of American applicants.

FYI the LSAT eliminated the verbal logic and reasoning; syllogisms and analogies decades ago and replaced them with something like sudoku. But not numbers pictures. And greatly reduced the reading comprehension part of the test.

It was done because although blacks failed reading comprehension and verbal logic they were hidden geniuses who would excel at pictorial sudoku.

Didn’t work at all. Turned out blacks were even worse at the new non verbal reasoning and logic sections. Even more failures than when reading comprehension was half the test.

The Supreme Court will do what it will about this case. As the Supreme Court has been doing since Marbury vs Madison 1804. If the naive Men of UNZ think that the abortion ruling means the court will rule favorably for conservative issues such as merit job hiring and college admission think again.

It’s the height of naïveté and ignorance for a White person to advocate for non Whites. The Asians have the Chinese government behind them. A far more powerful lobby than the blacks and Hispanics have. We idiot self destructive Whites being the only group in America that doesn’t lobby for itself.

And if the Supreme Court rules that Harvard discriminated against Asians it doesn’t mean affirmative action discrimination against Whites will ever end.

So I repeat my question – how would you construct a test that specifically harmed white males without harming Asians as well?

What would happen if you did not test for creativity, organizational acumen, sense of fair play?

Asians love to cheat.

I tend to think most of the commentators (above) are on the right track.

More test prep courses (back in my day, there were none where I lived) and more studying in general. Parental involvement.

Perhaps someone in the vast, mostly useless or harmful “education establishment” can or will do a rigorous study on the time usage by high school students on a daily basis, seven days a week.

How much time spent on cell phone gaming, TikTok, various other teen oriented sites, gabbing and texting back and forth? How much on reading text books and doing homework, and doing all the problems? Reading for extra credit (or for own personal interest?)

Then of course just routine like extra curricular activities (sports, music, theater, cheer, debate, etc.) and transit time to school (bus, walk, being driven) and “hanging out”. Etc.

I suspect that high achieving groups would show far more study than the non achieving groups. No “midnight basketball” etc. Also more likely two parent households with at least one parent holding a college degree, not divorced, etc. Having jobs, being sober and no criminal record.

Asians tend to have (like other races) peer groups of similar background/race. You tend to compete with your friends. Also important “future orientation” values. “What do you plan to do in five years?” etc.

Even moderately intelligent kids can benefit from solid parental guidance. Those who lack that (“who’s your daddy?) will have to rely on pure IQ, which is hard in test scenarios.

I suspect “family values” are at least half of the reason for higher test scores. This includes living in a good school district, being sober and disciplining your kids. Controlling time waste.

A simpler marker might be “how many books have you read in the last six months?”

While they probably can no longer speak openly or honestly about this, I suspect school counselors know these things already.

Superstudy tests. More asians cram thanks to asian parents.

Spelling tests are IQ-correlated. That’s not the reason why EVERY finalist is Indian. Indian-American parents have a thing about forcing spelling bee prep on their kids. It’s part of the culture now.

The LSAT is less amenable to prep but insofar as there is prep white college students who choose to take it may practice about as much as Asians. The parents aren’t in charge anymore.

I expect Asians do better on GMAT because they’re more likely to take math classes in undergrad than whites.

They’ve made the SAT more content-laden and less of an IQ test. That along with the weaker scoring makes the SAT more of a box to tick off well-prepared smart kids, like getting a 5 in AP History, than a test to identify raw talent that hasn’t had a place to shine in a random public school system in this giant country.

Maybe this is just pure ignorance, but one thought that occurs to me is that the SAT et al may have been made teachable, and as a consequence, Asians are able to teach themselves to do well on it.

Back in the day, when I took these things (1974-75), you pretty much got what you got. There was only so much you could to prepare.

But of course the problem there was that blacks did very badly. Already, back then they were trying to get around that.

So did they alter the tests make it possible to learn how to do well on them in an effort to overcome that? And were Asians rather than blacks the beneficiaries of that change?

Endless comments about high caste Indians immigrating, actually fleeing to America. And none of the Men of UNZ know why. Because the men of UNZ are ignorant of affirmative action favoritism for Dalits and other low castes in India. Affirmative action for the low castes and discrimination against the higher castes was enacted into law decades ago.

But it didn’t affect the higher castes till the technology revolution arrived. No longer were good careers limited to the family businesses and clan networks. But tech careers depended on university tech education. And the higher castes were severely discriminated against in India.

But in America Indians managed to switch their race from Caucasian to non Caucasian. And the bonanza of affirmative action opened up for them.

I’ve always suspected the big tech companies had a lot to do with the EEOC and the feds switching Indians from Caucasian to non Caucasian affirmative action beneficiaries.

Every industry in America is under the gun to discriminate against White American men. Every industry in America rejoiced when affirmative action became the law of the land. Got rid of all those pesky White man labor unions the 40 hour work week and paid overtime laws made by White men labor union members.

And opened the flood of Hispanics for low skill jobs and Indians and Asians for medical and tech jobs.

That’s why the high caste Indians leave India. To get the education and jobs they can’t get in India because of caste discrimination. White men are the best in medicine and STEM. But between the government and the capitalist pigs they can’t be hired because they are White American men.

Education Realist looked at the GRE gap in 2012.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/the-gap-in-the-gre/

This post has a graphic I think worth including here.
https://u.osu.edu/scintrohumanities/2020/10/21/dsi-showcase-the-inherent-bias-of-the-gre/

However accurate or otherwise, that’s definitely one of the sanest things I’ve seen you write.

So congrats, sort of.

OTOH, the main goal of testing has been to dumb down tests so that blacks do better.

And women. Pulling the analogies was absolutely driven by the relative skew on that section against both blacks and women. Analogies demonstrate actual verbal logical reasoning ability.

So I repeat my question – how would you construct a test that specifically harmed white males without harming Asians as well?

Note: I never said that was the goal. I don’t think anything about what they did had anything to do with Asians. It was trying to help blacks/Hispanics do better and women do better, which meant knocking down the g-loading.

What I am suggesting is that in making the SAT less g-loaded they also made it more subject to test prep. (I don’t know this. But I suspect it is true.) Asians are more like girls in being compliant and willing–at least with their Tiger Mom’s nagging them–to put butt in chair and do boring stuff like test prep.

The problem is we don’t have any direct measure of intelligence. All we can do have you do some work that indicates intelligence. But there is *no*–pencil and paper–test that you can’t get better on with practice. (Maybe some reaction time tests? Or something with evoked potentials.) You give me an IQ test and the 2nd time out I’ll probably do better. (The nature of intelligence is the ability to learn.)

But I suspect that practice is even more effective with the sort of dumbed down g-unloaded SAT they give now. Here’s the type of reading comprehension questions they’ll have. This is what to look to and how to attack them. Here’s the set of algebra problems they’ll have on the math section. Here’s what to look for and how to attack them.

I’m agnostic on the question of the whether the Asian-white gap is going up mostly because of
— Asian test prep really getting a number on the test, and more Asians test prepping harder
or
— HBD, smarter Asians from selective immigration of smarter Asian groups

I strongly suspect both are involved.

Secondly, how many Asian doctors and lawyers can you think of? Those are both fields Asians tend not to enter.

Don’t know any Asian lawyers but I do know tons of Asian doctors. In the practice I know best they are replacing white doctors one after another.

I believe Mensa accepts the LSAT but not the MCAT.
https://www.us.mensa.org/join/testscores/qualifying-test-scores/

What is your source for the SAT/g correlations? The numbers you give sound like Frey and Detterman 2004.
Scholastic Assessment or g?
The Relationship Between the Scholastic Assessment Test and General Cognitive Ability
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/ps/Frey.pdf?origin=publication_detail

ABSTRACT
There is little evidence showing the relationship between the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) and g (general intelligence). This research established the relationship between SAT and g, as well as the appropriateness of the SAT as a measure of g, and examined the SAT as a premorbid measure of intelligence. In Study 1, we used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Measures of g were extracted from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and correlated with SAT scores of 917 participants. The resulting correlation was .82 (.86 corrected for nonlinearity). Study 2 investigated the correlation between revised and recentered SAT scores and scores on the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices among 104 undergraduates. The resulting correlation was .483 (.72 corrected for restricted range). These studies indicate that the SAT is mainly a test of g. We provide equations for converting SAT scores to estimated IQs; such conversion could be useful for estimating premorbid IQ or conducting individual difference research with college students.

Meredith Frey did an update in 2019.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337711376_What_We_Know_Are_Still_Getting_Wrong_and_Have_Yet_to_Learn_about_the_Relationships_among_the_SAT_Intelligence_and_Achievement
What We Know, Are Still Getting Wrong, and Have Yet to Learn about the Relationships among the SAT, Intelligence and Achievement

But I am not seeing data about more recent SATs there.

Sounds legit, which also explains the usual suspects taking issue with it.

I agree with you, but the higher ed industry loves foreign students whose parents will pay the full advertised tuition. Just one of many ways higher ed’s incentives work directly against the interests of most of American society.

These things are pretty much impossible to test for on a paper and pencil test. In fact, they are difficult to objectively measure in any way because more often what is actually being measured are the unconscious biases of the observer.

OT: “Boston University CREATES a new Covid strain that has an 80% kill rate.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11323677/Outrage-Boston-University-CREATES-Covid-strain-80-kill-rate.html

At this point, we need to start pulling the funding of scientists who do this. Some Biden government weasel had to give the okay to this project to fund it. “Yeah, go ahead, go create a version of Covid that actually kills almost everybody. Peachy-keen idea!”

Why? Why did they bother? Funding cures for coronaviruses is okay, but anyone trying to make more lethal strains of Covid should be charged with a felony and locked up to protect humanity.

The childishness, irresponsibility, and idiocy of this is off the charts. The Biden administration deliberately funded this, which is why they must be kicked out of office before they do any more damage to the rest of the planet. They’re all massive retards.

For one thing, clergy have to be able to read and write. Historically, in Europe the clergy were the best educated group. (Making them celibate in Catholic countries was perhaps not the best idea). In Ukraine, where Ukrainians were mostly peasants, Eastern Orthodox priests were just about the only Ukrainians who could read and were the leaders of the Ukrainian speaking community.

Bingo! The answer is … “literacy”. Someone here understands HBD.

On the celibate priesthood, it’s a mixed bag. Some quality genes were wasted … on the other hand *not* letting a separate priestly caste develop was an enormously good thing. Feudalism/caste systems suck.

Since the priests were generally just spare sons of the nobility and gentry, European society really only had two “castes”–the nobility and commoners. And the nobility was continually sucking up the attractive and/or rich girls from the upper gentry.

So European nations really are quite one-peoplish which is a very good thing. Much, much, much, much, much better than the caste division you see in India–real endogamy–or the similar sort thing between Jews and gentiles in Europe.

The best program is no caste/tribal division and continual downward mobility. You have one people, less contention and genes from the most successful are continual flowing down through the population and the idiots, unhealthy, flakes, layabouts continually dying off. This is what enabled European peoples to get smart and breakout. (And seems to be the East Asian pattern as well.)

Of course, the problem we have now–beyond the obvious immivasion debacle–is that the downward mobility has stopped. Modernity and feminism/female careerism have destroyed the link between good-genes/success and fertility.

You’re probably looking at a couple standard deviations between intelligence and test scores of Asians attributable to drilling and immersive test prep.

I don’t discount that there is possibly some effect but 2 SDs of effect is a crazy amount and I think not possible. 2 SDs is 400 points on the 1600 point scale. You are telling me that if you take away test prep that Asians drop 400 points? If this was true then the converse would be true and you could RAISE your SAT score 400 points with test prep. This would mean the difference between getting into Texas Christian University with a 1200 and getting into MIT with a 1600. Look at the varsity blues scandal – rich parents were willing to pay hundreds of thousands just to get their kid into USC. A guaranteed 400 point prep course – you could charge millions. I don’t think there has ever been a prep course that could legitimately claim a 400 point boost. None of the studies have shown anything like that magnitude of effect.

Especially because of the ceiling effect, as you get closer to a perfect SAT score, it becomes incredibly difficult to shave off those last few points – 1 wrong answer can drop you 20 or 30 points.

O/T Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn’t seem to know how hydrogen bombs work:

What have Brahmin Indians been selected for that could have made them smarter?

Rob, Jack nailed it for you: “literacy”. Any group or community with a long history of literacy, being in occupations that require literacy will be smarter.

A close friend, super-sharp guy is a Marathi Brahmin. He’s from some community–if I understand what he told me–that traditionally made its living as basically scribes. Keeping the books, keeping the records and land titles that sort of thing. Ergo to excel–be a good husband prospect–in his community you had to be competently literate and on the ball. And that’s been the case for 100s or maybe a 1000 years. So the idiot genes tend to go unmatched, poorly matched and preferentially die out. And you end up with a community of non-idiots.

And yeah, his daughter is one of those Asians who pushed up the Asian-white gap.

Now, as I write, ethnic Jews are- I think; it’s just an impression- over-represented in the fields of fundamental physics & mathematics (I don’t know about chemistry and biology)

Not in chemistry as far as I know, but I know much less about the history and major figures in it than biology or physics and math. But the preeminent chemists of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Dmitri Mendeleev and Linus Pauling, were not Jews. Biology, they’re probably over-represented for their fraction of the population but I think not as strikingly as with physics and math.

I am a member of the first generation of physicists educated since the standard model of particle physics was established. When I meet old friends from college and graduate school, we sometimes ask each other, “What have we discovered that our generation can be proud of?” If we mean new fundamental discoveries, established by experiment and explained by theory—discoveries on the scale of those just mentioned—the answer, we have to admit, is “Nothing!”

True enough I gather for particle physics, but there’s so much more to the field. For example machines to make semiconductors and the whole process depend on optics etc., and while not as dramatic as a nuclear explosion or power plant, they’re very important. See the discussions in previous recent iSteve topics on the hammer blow “Biden” has delivered to the PRC/CCP in embargoing wafer fab equipment (WEF) including on-site support (in theory only the cutting/bleeding edge stuff, but that remains to be seen as licenses are granted or not). Getting back to high energy physics, EUV lithography machines start with a laser zapping droplets of tin … many other methods were considered, somehow this turned out to be the least worst.

Another factor could be attraction to other fields, in computers Jews are definitely underrepresented in many fundamental and important developments. Biology got a lot more exciting after DNA was figured out.

They don’t make euro-Jews as they used to.

But they don’t make euro-Gentiles, either.

“Good times make soft Jews.”

Increasingly lots of us euro-Gentiles don’t get an opportunity to become scientists, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about the economics of the academic path. You could even debate how “good” the times are for a very large fraction of us, while I grant you we aren’t starving like a quarter of Americans did by design under FDR (perhaps it’s not so bad farmers aren’t as politically powerful as they were back then).

Asian Girls

Get rid of Asian Girls from the subset and recalculate

Aside from the fact that you are pulling this out of your ass without any proof that this is actually being done, what sort of questions would white males do better on than other groups (that do better than they – i.e. Asians)?

Jack — Your overconfident ignorance schtick is wearing very thin. First, you flunk the reading comprehension part of the test because the whole point of my post is that “You’d have to look very specifically at what the test questions are to make an assessment.”

My understanding is that they changed the format a few years ago and that’s when Asians (who already did best) really pulled away from whites. I don’t know what they changed. But to really understand what’s going on you would have to know what the change was and have some data on how different groups score on each question or question type. The SAT people certainly have that data. Does anybody else?

So I post that only the SAT people have the data and you come back dunking on me for not having access to the SAT’s secret database with demographic crosstabs. Brilliant. Give yourself a pat on the back.

Next, you say the SAT people aren’t changing up the questions in an effort minimize demographic score gaps. But then you immediately contradict yourself by admitting “God knows that test writers have been trying for decades” to design tests in exactly this way. Duh. (Do you think they are ever going to reuse the word “regatta” on the SAT.) Then you say:

The essence of g is that it stands for general intelligence or the ability to memorize data and process all sorts of problems. So it is pretty much impossible to design a test on which dumber people do equally well as smarter people.

No shit. That’s a pretty dumb straw man point. No one is saying every test taker is supposed to get the identical score — that really would be useless. The point is whether you can shave off or add a few points to compress the score gaps while still keeping whatever minimum test validity the designers are willing to live with. But again give yourself another “F” in reading comprehension, because my point is exactly that moving away from g-loaded tests is what you would do if you wanted to raise the scores of low-IQ demos.

My guess is that they made it more about knowledge and subject matter memorization than g-loaded IQ type questions. They probably did this in the hope that it would raise up the sores of lower IQ groups. But instead it rewarded lots of hours of studying and thus Asians benefitted most.

Then you say:

And for the same reason, it’s impossible to write a test that favors whites over Asians.

Wrong. Different demographic groups have different strong suits in terms of work ethic, subject matter knowledge, and even sub-elements of g. Women do better on verbal tests and tests with less time pressure. Men do better on visual/spatial tests and tests with more time pressure. Groups with higher proportions at the right tail can score higher on tests with harder questions. Subject matter knowledge undoubtedly varies by group. Even when I took the SAT every third reading comprehension passage was about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Perhaps blacks do better on subject matter about blacks — I don’t know, but the SAT designers clearly think so.

It’s child’s play to design a test that favors one group over another when you have the granular data to do so. Especially if you are willing to sacrifice or redefine test validity, which is another thing I said you’d have to look at closely. Indeed, the whole point of Steve’s post is that, as compared to the (newly redesigned) SAT, the MCAT and LSAT apparently do favor whites over Asians. Furthermore, unless your hypothesis is that Asian IQs suddenly increased when the SAT was redesigned, then the old test disfavored Asians compared to the new test.

As to your analogy, I get it: You fancy yourself as a super-smart member of the super-smart tribe.

1,000% off topic, but I think of interest – some people may be aware that Russia has been trying to take Bakhmut/Artemovsk for three months now – it’s a must-have if they want the whole Donbas (officially a part of Russia as far as the Russian State is concerned) as it’s key to the last two Donbas towns of any size, Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.

Obviously the Ukrainian defence has been impressive, but most of the images/videos of the fighting I’ve seen still leave the impression of a green and pleasant land. The town centre was still immaculate five or six weeks ago, when Russia started to get closer and the Bakhmut cam was taken off air.

But this looks more like the Somme or Verdun – blasted, skeletal trees, no green to be seen. Fighting must be like WW1 trench warfare – but that was broken by tanks, which both sides have here.

Must be a hell of a scrap. The head of the private Wagner group, doing most of the Russian fighting, said of the defenders – “they have balls, as we do”.

Бахмутський напрямок, обстановка pic.twitter.com/zHDDNyhvdB

— IgorGirkin (@GirkinGirkin) October 15, 2022

Israelis are not Asian but are considered non-Hispanic whites (along with the rest of the middle easterns and North Africans (MENA). I love the universities that have added the MENA category not to give them any benefit in admission but to lure them away from claiming to be African and getting affirmative action. (See UMich).

Is this freaking cool or what? Couple of Ukrainian cops firing Kalashikovs in SEMI-AUTOMATIC shoot down a Russkie suicide drone!

Semi-auto and at least one guy using his sling I think, also note the lower rate of fire from the guy in front (there were a total of three) … these are the only things that make this feat credible. Along of course with the system we’ve already head of that allows men on the ground with MANPADS to be ready to engage higher heat signature cruise missiles.

OK, one other and probably big thing: not familiar with 5.45×39mm ballistics which they were perhaps using, but I’m pretty sure their rapid fire started before the drone was in truly effective range. That gave them some seconds to settle down and potentially more accurately aim their final shots which were at a slower pace nine seconds after they started, I’d bet one of them did the trick.

Indeed amazing, especially since I assume wing shooting is not a common sport or recreational activity in the Ukraine.

Does Steve and the commenters realize what year this is????? Most colleges including the top 20 have made the SATs and ACTs optional. And the kids aren’t taking them and both private and prole high schools don’t emphasize them. The applicants and their high schools know what counts in college applications; the groveling sniveling admissions essay and race race race.

You’re on target with this “man of Unz”. I am not “in the game”, my kids are all post-college and only one is still in grad school.

But I strongly suspect the “no test” option only works for NAM kids who are obvious AA candidates with a strong resume of grades , achievements. Or kids with exceptional resumes–excellent grades and activities achievements that absolutely shout both “winner” and “believer to the narrative!”, will sell out grandmother if asked.

My guess is the merely really smart Asian/white kid must still take the SAT/ACT do really well and have the activities/story that suggest a winner/go-getter and demonstrate fealty to the establishment’s narrative. Just as before.

And, count me as skeptical the post-Floyd-OD era is going to last. Maybe the policy of nominally being “test optional” can last, but only select AA admits can get in under it. Or … the elite schools will have to make their own test. There’s simply no way around the fact you need some sort of IQ-like screen, if the elite colleges are going to keep their elite status. If they are no longer associated with “the best students” …. it will be a downhill slide.

Are you sure they took it down? Sounds (and looks) more like “an arrival” to me. Maybe the Ghost Of Kiev was guiding their aim.

When a drone commits suicide, does it risk damnation for its immortal soul?

Also, these kamikaze drones, do they scream “banzai!” before impact?

Or are “suicide” and “kamikaze” just propaganda buzzwords put in by The Associated Pederasts and the rest of the LSM to rile up the gullible? Ie., we use “smart bombs” while those devils use “suicide drones”.

Getting into an elite (sic) school is not what it used to be, especially for white males who, you know, and good at noticing such things.

My older son is 15. He appears to have very high expectations for where he goes to college in a couple of years, but even with my legacy Ivy League status, his odds just are not very good.

I have explained to him – and his 13 y.o. brother – that their only chance of getting into a prestigious out of state school is going to be by maintaining the high qualifications and then getting recruited for sports and bypassing the regular admissions process, like I did.. and my grades weren’t excellent at all 30+ years ago like they’ll both need to have nowadays.

Luckily, they both are talented athletes and they both are honor students, so they might have a chance at something like track or baseball or (maybe) football.

As much as their mother doesn’t like the idea of either of them staying in state, they both will be ranked high enough in their class to take advantage of guaranteed admission to UT Austin if it comes down to that.

[…] I strongly suspect the “no test” option only works….

Flip this around. The SAT especially lost a great deal of its predictive value when it stopped mostly being an aptitude test as others have detailed with dates, g-loading, etc. Sometime in the last couple of decades MIT discovered the previously less respected ACT had better predictive value of success at MIT than the SAT of the time.

MIT has other details to help with admissions starting with extreme self-selection in applicants, and is mightily motivated to make sure everyone they make an offer to can do the work of the core science and math curriculum. Also no legacy admits per se, they have to pass that competency evaluation first and reversion to the mean is no friend to these applicants.

There’s simply no way around the fact you need some sort of IQ-like screen, if the elite colleges are going to keep their elite status. If they are no longer associated with “the best students” …. it will be a downhill slide.

The theory of social justice convergence says these schools will find it difficult to impossible to even realize this Officially ugly truth or to do something about it. And what defines “the best students?” Diversity that makes your corporation’s ESG scores higher? Too many of these firms are also social justice converged, even if it’s going to kill them like Intel shows every sign of (there’s more to the story but that’s a big part).

I guess the only advantage they’ve got is that the admissions office can be run as a conspiracy … really, it has to be given all the constraints involved. And we know they’re up for much greater levels of conspiracy from the cabal that made sure no one would make a decision amongst them based on financial aid.

Even when I took the SAT every third reading comprehension passage was about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Perhaps blacks do better on subject matter about blacks — I don’t know, but the SAT designers clearly think so.

Do blacks do better on subject matter about blacks? I doubt it. Reading about MLK instead of LBJ does not increase your reading comprehension one bit.

Why do they do it then? Because it’s cheap and easy virtue signaling. Because they don’t know what else to do because nothing seem to work to close the Gap.

The SAT is a pretty easy test and little bit of prep can increase scores.

As I endlessly repeat, it’s 2022 not 1972 when the Men of UNZ applied to college.

…And that is the young-whipper-snapper cohort of Unz.com

If the gap in SAT scores derives from Tiger nurture, which is not present in college, then Asians’ SATs should over-predict their college performance. Smart colleges should track and know this.

An 18 year old Asian taking the SAT may be where a Caucasian is at 23.

Thanks, I didn’t know that. A neat explanation. Got a cite?

Smart colleges also hold Asian applicants to a higher bar, so maybe you’re right and they know it — and they act on it.

The SAT takers would include all potential academic fields of study— to include the hard sciences and math— while the LSAT and MCAT would be just for people interested in law and medicine.

So let’s say you don’t have an interest in fields with a lot of speculating and bullshitting but you have an interest in Infinite-time Exponential Growth of the Euler Equation on Two-dimensional Torus. Then you’re not going to be taking the LSAT or MCAT. And your fellow grad students will look like this:

MIT Women in Mathematics

What would happen if you did not test for creativity, organizational acumen, sense of fair play?

These things are pretty much impossible to test for on a paper and pencil test. In fact, they are difficult to objectively measure in any way because more often what is actually being measured are the unconscious biases of the observer.

Why can’t creativity, organizational acumen, or sense of fair play be tested for objectively?

Whites have an especially good track record with creativity.

OT – Steve favorite NASCAR driver of color is back in the news as he assaults another driver after a crash:

https://vidmax.com/video/215407-hate-crime-hoaxer-bubba-wallace-shoves-kyle-larson-after-the-two-crashed-in-vegas

Btw, approximately 65% of the of females in that MIT math department photo are bespectacled. Take that Pol Pot! 🥊

also OT – When the coalition of fringes collide:

Three negresses take on a tranny. Who is the who and who is the Whom?

https://vidmax.com/video/215401-trans-fella-threw-a-shoe-at-a-pregnant-black-woman-oh-boy-was-that-a-bad-idea

I think the discrepancy between the groups on professional tests can be explained by routine selection and self selection considerations. The group of whites entering college and taking demanding courses is a cohort selected on high school grades and tests to be similar to the Asians. Once in college, students practice some degree of self selection for professional school. People who see they are clearly weeded out of premed classes, eg can’t pass organic chemistry, look for other options. So a selected, self selected group of whites are competing with Asians on the professional tests, hence the gap between the groups is narrowed considerably. Also, lsat is a verbal test, which also minimizes Asian advantage in the analytical sciences. Also true of the mcat which has both verbal and biology. I think that explains it satisfactorily.

Not in chemistry as far as I know,

You don’t know much, then.

Jewish Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry

2013 Karplus, Martin
“for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems” Austria
2013 Levitt, Michael
“for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems” South Africa
2013 Warshel, Arieh
“for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems” Israel
2012 Lefkowitz, Robert J.
“for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors” USA
2011 Shechtman, Dan
“for the discovery of quasicrystals” Israel
2009 Yonath, Ada E.
“for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome” Israel
2008 Chalfie, Martin
“for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP” USA
2006 Kornberg, Roger. D.
“for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription” USA
2004 Ciechanover, Aaron
“for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation” Israel
2004 Rose, Irwin
“for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation” USA
2004 Hershko, Avram
“for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation” Hungary
2000 Heeger, Alan J.
“for the discovery and development of conductive polymers” USA
1998 Kohn, Walter
“for his development of the density-functional theory” Austria
1994 Olah, George A.
“for his contribution to carbocation chemistry” Hungary
1992 Marcus, Rudolph A.
“for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems” Canada
1989 Altman, Sidney
“for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA” Canada
1985 Hauptman, Herbert A.
“for their development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures” USA
1985 Karle, Jerome
“for their development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures” USA
1982 Klug, Aaron
“for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes” Lithuania
1981 Hoffmann, Roald
“for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions” Poland
1980 Gilbert, Walter
“for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids” USA
1980 Berg, Paul
“for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA” USA
1979 Brown, Herbert C.
“for their development of the use of boron- and phosphorus-containing compounds, respectively, into important reagents in organic synthesis” Ukraine
1977 Prigogine, Ilya
“for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures” Russia
1972 Stein, William H.
“for their contribution to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the active center of the ribonuclease molecule” USA
1972 Anfinsen, Christian B.
“for his work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation” USA
1962 Perutz, Max F.
“for their studies of the structures of globular proteins” Austria
1961 Calvin, Melvin
“for his research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants” USA
1943 de Hevesy, George
“for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes” Hungary
1918 Haber, Fritz
“for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements” Germany
1915 Willstatter, Richard M.
“for his researches on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll” Germany
1910 Wallach, Otto
“for his pioneer work in the field of alicyclic compounds” Germany
1906 Moissan, Henri
“for his investigation and isolation of the element fluorine, and for the adoption in the service of science of the electric furnace called after him” France
1905 von Baeyer, J. F. W. Adolf
“for his services in the advancement of organic chemistry and the chemical industry, through his work on organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds”

One thought: intensive training at an early age can boost performance, but over time these effects tend to decline and everyone with the same native ability tends to end up in the same zone.

OK what am I talking about: many decades ago when I was an undergraduate at MIT, I noticed that a lotof the foreign students had an edge on us Americans at least in some areas. I think that the elite foreign high schools were probably just tougher and had a lot more rote memory, esp. in math. But at the end of four years, I think these differences had flattened out. It’s not like the initial boost stayed as a constant increment of performance.

So if asians are getting drilled in high school, they will blow the SAT etc. away compared to non-asians playing video games. But by the time you get to taking the MCAT, that initial boost is gone and whites and asians have dropped back to their more ‘natural’ relative levels.

I mean, you can take an average kid, and through rigorous training get their math scores up a lot, but when they turn 24 will they be Einstein? For that matter, you can take an average kid and with a lot of athletic coaching you can boost them way above average – but at 22, will they be a superstar professional athlete?

No statistics on this, just anecdotal. There is probably a specific term for this but I can’t think of this.

Whereas after four years at an American university without the tiger mom around, the Asian students just are not that good.

Maybe they’re just fucking tired…….”Thank fucking god I’m out from under that bitches thumb” ……maybe I can grab a cocktail and get laid now!

I had this Asian kid in scouts–good kid, good attitude, enjoyed scouting. We had some cool, fun adventures lined up for the summer–rafting the mighty Salmon River. (Which btw is a hoot–recommend.) I noticed he wasn’t signed up–odd, he was active, doing stuff on the Eagle scout track. Man, you’re only going to be 16 once–nows the time to have these adventures. But no, he was going to be in some test prep camp all summer.

Just ridiculous.

It has set off a race to the bottom. Whites are forced to change their way of life in order to compete with Asian and Jewish grinds. The alternative is ending up in the lower classes with the illegal immigrants and Blacks.

To succeed at the English portion of the GRE you have to be a native speaker, as well as have studied plenty of grammar and reading comprehension.

Lots of foreigners are taking the GRE without enough English skills and doing poorly on it. They are all Asians since having a graduate degree is a fierce status marker for them. So I’d be careful about “which” Asians are skewing the GRE scores. Are they American-born or recent imports?

As to the SAT, those are heavily prepped, American-born Asians who are still trying to please their parents at 17 years old.

The federal government will pay full freight in the form of loans for anyone with “need.” There’s not a greed explanation for colleges preferring international students to the domestic middle class.

wouldn’t SAT standard deviation/skew kind of imply that test is being gamed and performance is deviating away from natural patterns of IQ variation when adjusted for selection biases? What is the racial difference in SD for SAT scores?

When whites do better than blacks, I remember the argument was that there’s no way to game the tests even with study. When Asians pull away from whites, there’s a lot of copium with explanations that now the test IS gameable, but only when Asians do it. And no evidence is provided or pointed to that backup the essentially random explanations. The fact that Asians score better on LSAT at all, when it is English heavy and there are still many Asian parents that don’t speak English natively isn’t discussed.

The numbers coming in should be tiny, if not stopped altogether. I don’t care how much they pay, it’s not fair to native citizens whose parents have been investing in the community or state for their whole lives.

I’d say the same for the out-of-state students who also pay full tuition. These entities exist for the purpose of educating the kids of that state, not some other locale. I pay taxes directly and indirectly for the community/state/university schools in my area, and they’re chock full of people from all around the world. screw that.

Yes and no. The College Board stopped letting the test be administered in China in 2016 due to rampant cheating and lax proctoring. However, they’re still cheating (e.g. body doubles).

TWBT, don’t bait Jack like this, unless you’re looking for a list. When it comes to the positive side of Jewish achievement, he’s on it.

~

BTW, recommend Olah’s book on the “methanol economy”. His bailiwick, but a reasonable approach to future energy distribution.

Really ‘smart’ colleges decline to know or track anything which might prove politically inconvenient.

The applicants and their high schools know what counts in college applications; the groveling sniveling admissions essay and race race race.

This has been going on for at least 50 years. Which means the quality, first of the student body, then eventually of the faculty, must have been tanking for decades. Even if the faculty remains top-flight, thanks to remuneration, they’d have to be frustrated teaching increasingly dumber students.

So why all the focus on getting into schools that are by now pretty much 💩? Wouldn’t at least a few once-lower-tier colleges have resisted this corruption, or at least suffered less of it, and thus be better deals?

Even if you’re just there to get a mate, your odds of getting a good one have sunk along with everything else. The old saw about a rising tide works in the other direction, too:

The modern SAT is fairly basic, akin to the SOLs on steroids. A simple achievement test with the addition of a timed aspect. You can even use your advanced graphing calculator on it as opposed to the ASVAB. It shouldn’t be a surprise that kids with higher IQ of any race or sex would do well on it if they sat through their entire childhood for hours a day learning what was on this test. What is more surprising is that a substantial part of the population does relatively poorly on it. What are their brains doing while wasting a good portion of their life to learn this material, with the more diligent types also spending hours after classes on homework? The standardized test industry seems a fairly back asswards implementation of a selection process that occurs in no particularly sensible order. Why waste kids’ lives pumping them with information they are at pains to or don’t want to absorb? The system is a failure if learning is the objective of the millions of child- and man-hours being used. Of course some believe public schooling is little more than a massively subsidized day care program.

At least as concerns White men, it puts Asians and Jews at an advantage over White men in attracting White women as mates. Asians and Jews will make more money than White men and will therefore have more resources with which to provide for a family

That hypothesis has been floating around for over a hundred years, and despite making no sense, and failing comedically every time, it just never dies for some reason.

Asian men are less likely to marry a white woman today than they were 30 years ago. Same goes for Jewish men.

First of all, you’re assuming these men, and white men, are even competing for white women in the first place. They’re not. Their sights are aimed at Asian women.

And the thing is, women just don’t do Asian men. A few years ago, a professor pointed out that the data shows how white women require an Asian man to earn $247,000 more than their average white male suitor, in order to be considered on equal footing with that white man.

https://dioknoed.blogspot.com/2018/11/professor-asian-men-have-to-make-247000.html?m=1

A PROFESSOR teaching a course on race and culture at Penn State put what many Asian Americans men unfortunately know into stark terms.

Asian American men need to make a boat load more money to be equal in the eyes of women when compared to White men. Next Shark reports Professor Sam Richards has quantified the difference into dollars and cents.

The professor picked out an Asian male student identified as handsome by other students. He then chose a white male student. “In spite of how handsome he is,” Richard said pointing to the Asian student, “for him to compete with an average White guy with equal handsomeness… for Andy to compete with Chris on the dating market, Andy has to make $247,000 more per year than this dude right here,” Richards told hundreds of students in a packed lecture hall.

The data he’s referring to is from about 12 years back, so adjusting for inflation I would assume the figure is around 500,000 or more by now.

The average Harvard grad doesn’t earn over $150,000 a year, so the effect of education on husband value is going to be nil for Asian men.

People tend to forgot (or just never mention) that Asians cheat the most.

Asians made a cottage industry out of sending people in to take the tests and remember the questions. That way, they can sell the Q&A. Seems obvious that they must also be the group most willing to pay for the answers.

Does Steve and the commenters realize what year this is????? Most colleges including the top 20 have made the SATs and ACTs optional. And the kids aren’t taking them and both private and prole high schools don’t emphasize them. The applicants and their high schools know what counts in college applications; the groveling sniveling admissions essay and race race race.

I have kids who have recently gone through college admissions and are doing it right now.

“SAT optional” is not optional if you’re white or Asian without some truly amazing sob story (even if you’re a recruited athlete). The various college ratings entities require that that least X% (usually 80%) of all students submit standardized tests if they are to be included in rankings. So schools are very careful to get the bottom 19.9% of SAT scorers that they want to admit (ie, most blacks and some other NAMs) to avoid submitting standardized tests. If you’re anybody else, you’re not getting in without them. The only places where they don’t matter is where they will not accept them from any applicants –the UC system being the prime example.

Nationally competitive private high schools that send a large fraction of their graduates to top 10 colleges (my kids are in one) care a huge amount about SATs / ACTs, typically organizing material in-school support and counting on the fact that more or less every student is doing private coaching. They just understand the zeitgeist well enough to not trumpet this.

A simple achievement test with the addition of a timed aspect

I picked a test randomly:

https://images.collegedunia.com/public/college_data/images/entrance/sample_paper/1603855990SAT%20Math%20Level%202.pdf

My guess is more than 90% of working Americans would likely not answer 20 of the 50 questions correctly in 60 minutes. Would you describe the test as simple?

“As to SAT scores……. I hate to harp on the subject, but cheating is rife.“

This

400 points is not plausible on average, but at least 200 is, and maybe more.

The key issue is your comment “A guaranteed 400 point prep course – you could charge millions.”

Unless you’re willing to cheat a la Varsity Blues, the problem is that “prep course” isn’t Mackenzie working with a tutor each Saturday and doing 20 minutes a day in between for 3 months — it starts in literally 8th grade and involves over 1,000 hours of raw ass-in-chair grinding over that period. There is, for example, a finite list of vocabulary words, and if you devote enough time to it over years, you can memorize the definitions of every one of them and drill for comprehension.

Asian med school applicants are only outscoring white ones by like 1.1 points, which is a ninth to an eighth of a standard deviation

The variance of the sample mean is not the same as the variance of the observations.

StdDev of mean is σ/√N where σ is the sample StdDev.

This is Grade 11 maths – or at least it was when I did Grade 11 (in 1981).

The formula for the test of two means is some basic shit.

Twitter is dumber than reddit, but seriously this innumerate shit has to stop. Regurgitating it means you didn’t immediately see the problem… MBA-quant detected.

i do have a new hypothesis about handedness. every NFL quarterback had been right handed for like a decade, until Tagovailoa. what are the odds of that? that’s 32 starters, 32 backups, and so on. even with this Tua guy, he’s still the only lefty. and he’s not even left handed. he just grew up throwing left handed for some reason. before him, Vick was the only lefty among 60 other right handed throwers.

i used to think this was because there was something about a right handed spiral. better for rolling out and throwing? easier to catch? left footed punters produce kicks that are harder to field, this is known for sure, so maybe the opposite effect is in operation here for throwing. indeed, perhaps this is WHY nature picked right handed for humans instead of left handed.

but now i wonder if ALL the left handed throwers are throwing baseballs, because it’s MUCH less difficult to have a baseball career as a left handed thrower than it is to have any football quarterback career. i haven’t looked at handedness in track & field, but i doubt there were many world class throwers that were left handed.

Sorry buddy, those are all white guys.

there’s no way to game the tests even with study

That’s just nonsense. I’m not suggesting that its your opinion, but it’s really, seriously stupid.

It’s like saying that practicing a thing doesn’t improve performance at that thing.

Practice tests/exams are really important – especially at university level.

That’s before considering that academics are lazy… so if the subject has a Prof of long-standing, the past 5 exams equips a student with a small-σ estimate the full range of questions that will be asked on the currentYear exam.

Through my uni career I never went into an exam without having done the available past exams – the past exams were held in the library. It was rare to get 5 years’ worth (this was the mid-1990s).

Our study group – 5 of us who had a bunch of subjects in common – did them once untimed, and once to time. We even strategised on time-budgeting – getting the quant questions squared away to save time for the waffly ‘essay’ questions.

There arent [m]any waffly essay questions in Econometrics – but in Economics subjects the exams were structured so that the ‘Stats’ majors were forced to answer at least one long-answer essay question (“Section D”), and the Essay-writer majors couldn’t avoid at least one moderately-difficult Quant question (“Section C”). Sections A and B were short-answer – usually 10 questions in each.

It was usually 25% on the line for each of “C” and “D”, and Essay-writers generally knew by the end of the exam that their ‘ceiling mark’ was 75%. Especially in Macro (which was taught out of Blanchard & Fisher, so the Section C was derivations).

KEK.

Best scorers on the Putnam exam are math geniuses (and probably just geniuses). Look at the top scorers from the last year: https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/member-communities/maa-awards/putnam-competition-individual-and-team-winners

Everyone who does well preps for it. But prepping isn’t enough.

Maybe we’re seeing ‘Spandrell’s IQ Shredder’:

The fact that Asians score better on LSAT at all, when it is English heavy and there are still many Asian parents that don’t speak English natively isn’t discussed

This stands out to me — it’s not surprising that White performance catches up to Asian performance on something like the MCAT, given that Whites taking the MCAT have pretty much all passed through a highly selective filter (O-chem, as was in the news recently, along with other premed science courses, etc.). Sort of like Army Blacks scoring much closer to Army Whites on account of the selection filter. I’d expect something similar with Asian/White GRE scores going into graduate programs in the hard sciences.

LSAT is surprising to me not just because of the language issues, but because law is kind of where the leftover Asians who are too thick to go into medicine or science (e.g. people like me) end up. If we were really smart we wouldn’t be lawyers — we’d be medical researchers or working at Google or in private equity or solving cold fusion or something. But it may just be that it’s sort of the same for Whites. Law picks up the people who are a bit smarter than average, but . . more glib than intelligent. And so the test scores even out in the end.

My best friend is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her father immigrated to Oklahoma during WWII. He opened a very successful Chinese Restaurant. Her mother and brother remained in China during the Japanese invasion. Her father sent money home to support them.

Over 20 years later, her mother informed her father that she was coming to Oklahoma. By that time, her father had a Japanese mistress, who was the waitress at his restaurant and the only Asian in town, besides himself. A lot of drama ensued, but as a result of her mother’s immigration, my friend was born in 1966. She grew up as the only Asian in her school and thrived. She worked at her father’s restaurant.

Her father sold his restaurant and moved to California, so my friend could attend college here. Her scores were not high enough for UC Berkeley, so she was admitted to Cal State Hayward, now, known as, Cal State East Bay. Her scores were, most likely, higher than other minorities who were admitted to UC Berkeley.

She is down with Covid right now, along with her white husband, although having been vaxxed and boosted to the max, and always double masking. I admire her tremendously!

I don’t think Asians are really smarter. They’re more diligent generally and have better quantitative skills, but are weaker in other areas.

A potential reason for their outperformance on standardized tests is that for 2000 years the society has selected for that attribute. (At least in China, not sure about Japan or Korea). I’ve read that China has been using standardized tests since before Christ to screen for beauracratic jobs, which led to a very comfortable lifestyle given the corruption in government. Interestingly, this is said to have led to China having much greater social mobility than the West up until the Scientific Revolution.

“The federal government will pay full freight in the form of loans for anyone with ‘need.’ There’s not a greed explanation for colleges preferring international students to the domestic middle class.”

Greed is overrated in explanations these days.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38

Long-term trends in reading and mathematics achievement

Average reading and mathematics scale scores on the long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): Selected years, 1971 through 2022

Test scores are not declining for the general population. When you control for ethnicity, it’s likely that test scores have improved.

Secondly, how many Asian doctors and lawyers can you think of? Those are both fields Asians tend not to enter.

I have encountered a lot of Vietnamese, Indian and Pakistani doctors.

Explanations.

1. Increasingly selective mass migration from Asian countries.
2. Intensive “Tiger Mother” parenting strategies, which are not practiced by other races.
3. Graduate students are a selective subpopulation of the overall population.
4. Asians understand that affirmative action is keeping them out of competitive universities, so
they must work even harder to gain admission.
5. Sophisticated test prep centers.
6. Sophisticated cheating strategies. This may be more applicable to testing that happens overseas.

Republicans should have blocked Ketanji Brown’s nomination to the Supreme Court on the grounds that we’ve already had two black Justices but zero Asian ones.

Let Dems argue blacks should go up 3-0 over Asians, who have judges who could qualify on merit alone.

Secondly, how many Asian doctors and lawyers can you think of? Those are both fields Asians tend not to enter.

In the United States, Asians are taking over medicine and law.

“It’s the height of naïveté and ignorance for a White person to advocate for non Whites. The Asians have the Chinese government behind them. A far more powerful lobby than the blacks and Hispanics have. We idiot self destructive Whites being the only group in America that doesn’t lobby for itself.”

That’s why I found Kanye West’s recent stunt underwhelming.

The impression of Indians as a group when there are so many sub groups of this category is hilarious. Or laziness.

On the Asian test question, I speculate that the bottom of the Asian test takes (say bottom 1/2 and bottom quintile) is much higher than the other groups. Often times the poorest and least privileged Asians work much harder than those who are inclined to wallow in the woe ie me/us oppression Olympics (and that includes low performing whites in Appalachia)

A breakdown would be nice by quintile if available

The first observation is absurd to anywho who knows the contours of recent immigrants and the ratio of 2nd and 3rd generation Asian in relation to the FOB Asians.

Aside from getting Ted Kennedy to take their SAT, how do Asians cheat?

Steve, you reasoned about this in May 2015 while dissecting an NYT op-ed signed by the infamous Richard C. Atkinson which called for further dumbing-down of the already-debilitated SAT. You pointed specifically to Chinese and Chinese-adjacent-ethnicities Tiger-Mom history with test-prep. You noted that earlier g-loaded versions of the SAT had been resistant to coaching, but that re-architecting the SAT into a test of fixed-curriculum memorization (which is what Atkinson and chums had been demanding and doing for over three decades) was catnip to Tiger Moms.[1]

I had the privilege of sharing some info about Atkinson and his war on the SAT in the comments then. However, I wonder now whether I missed something important at that time, something your remarks should have prompted me to recognize, especially since in 2014 you had already asked “How is the New SAT Not Going to Help Asians the Most?”

Atkinson had a long history of collaboration with the Chinese government and Chinese academics. Per Atkinson’s official biography at the National Science Foundation:

Atkinson made history by negotiating the first memorandum of understanding between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, which opened the door for major exchanges of scientists and scholars between the two nations. His efforts contributed to a comprehensive agreement between China and the United States on science and technology that was signed in January 1979 by Chairman Deng Xiaoping and President Carter.

From the same NSF document:

When Atkinson left NSF in 1980, he became chancellor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), leading the university through its biggest growth period. During his 15-year tenure as chancellor, UCSD rose to “top five” status in acquiring federal research funding and was ranked among the top ten graduate programs in the United States by the National Research Council. In 1995, Atkinson became the University of California system’s 17th president, a position he held until 2003. During this period, Atkinson initiated national reforms in college admissions testing and spearheaded new approaches to admissions and outreach in the post-affirmative action era at the university. [emphasis added]

Of course, “the post-affirmative action era” means “the era after 1996, when California’s voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 209 to outlaw (again) racial discrimination in public university admissions, but were thwarted by university administrators’ massive resistance.” Atkinson’s “new approaches to admissions” were deliberate subversion of Prop. 209 that reinstated stiff racial preferences under a veil of bafflegab (“eligibility in the local context,” etc.). Atkinson’s “reforms in college admissions testing” were specifically intended to halt the accretion of objective evidence that racially-preferred candidates were less qualified academically. Test scores are the bane of college administrators facing “reverse racism” lawsuits (like the critical 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke)— just look at the Harvard admins squirming in the witness box recently.

From 1980 to 2000 California experienced exponential growth in its Chinese immigrant population. In 1994 Atkinson coerced the removal of analogies from the SAT and got it “recentered.” In 2001 Atkinson launched a new war against the SAT which lead to the huge dumbing-down of 2005. Atkinson himself called this “revolutionary change” which was “very much in accord with my [Atkinson’s] original proposal” of 2001.

Based on his remarks at the time, I believed (along with most analysts, I think) that the chief goal of Atkinson’s war on the SAT was to hide “the gap” which is so familiar to readers here, in support of race-preferences in admissions.

But perhaps there was another motive lurking in the background. Atkinson knew that a dumbed-down SAT would be more coachable and so did his Chinese friends, including the famous Chinese-American Chancellor of UC Berkeley (1990-97) Chang-Lin Tien, well known as an outspoken advocate of both racial preferences— Tien loudly opposed Prop. 209— and increased Chinese enrollment at UC. Maybe Atkinson wanted to help the children of powerful Chinese get admitted to American colleges and universities by making the SAT more amenable to Chinese-style test-prep— a speculation for which I have no direct evidence. Tien seems to have thought that anti-white discrimination would favor Chinese applicants. His personal campaign against Proposition 209 is widely credited with producing a 70-30 vote against Prop. 209 by Chinese and East Asian voters in California. (Twenty-three years later it appeared that Chinese and East Asian voters likely gave only about 55-45 support to 2020’s attempt (“Proposition 16”) by California’s left-wing leadership to repeal Prop 209, so perhaps Tien’s influence faded after he died in 2002.)

I should point out that Atkinson did credit American of Japanese extraction Pat Hayashi, in 2001 his assistant as Associate President of the University of California and a member of the College Board’s Board of Trustees (and former long-serving UC Berkeley admissions officer) with helping Atkinson attack the SAT. Hayashi was in fact Atkinson’s proud hatchet-man for the UC’s evasion of Proposition 209. He personally led the creation of new schemes for racial discrimination in admissions. Hayashi later boasted of terminating in 2006 (when Atkinson had been gone for a few years) the UC’s participation in the National Merit Scholarship program specifically because it used test scores (the PSAT, a miniature version of the SAT) to choose scholarship recipients. I have no basis to suggest that Hayashi’s views were Tiger-Mom friendly, quite the opposite: the National Merit Scholarship program he killed had been instituted in 1990 at UC Berkeley by Chinese-American Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien while Hayashi was Associate Vice-Chancellor for admissions there. I don’t know whether Hayashi favored Chang-Lin Tien’s test-friendly policy at that time, but I’m pretty confident Tiger Moms did. There was certainly no dispute between Hayashi and Tien over racial preferences in admissions. In 2018 Tien recounted that he “felt I could not really in my conscience work with the new rules [non-discriminatory admissions from 1996], but later on I changed my mind. I felt I had to work some program out to sustain, to help affirmative action, although we are not allowed to use race and religion, color, as a criterion for admission.” Hayashi and Tien found multiple proxies for race and used them to obfuscate their reimplementation of all the racial discrimination they had previously practiced openly.

Anyway, according to a 2018 report from the Migration Policy Institute:

Chinese immigrants have considerably higher levels of educational attainment […] compared to the overall foreign- and U.S.-born populations. […]

This high educational attainment is linked to the specific channels through which Chinese immigrants enter the United States. In recent decades, many Chinese immigrants arrived either as international college students or high-skilled H-1B temporary workers (generally requiring a university degree). China is the leading sending country of international students in the United States: In the 2018-19 school year, close to 377,000 students from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau were enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions, according to the Institute of International Education. They accounted for about one-third of the 1 million international students studying in the United States.

U.S.-China relations were normalized in 1979 [with significant involvement by Richard C. Atkinson, as noted above —Veracitor], beginning a second wave of Chinese migration to the United States.

The number of immigrants from China residing in the United States nearly doubled from 1980 to 1990, and again by 2000. Since then the population continued growing but at a slower pace…

China is the main source of foreign students enrolled in U.S. higher education…

As of 2014-18 (per US Census ACS data analyzed by MPI), 32% of Chinese immigrants to the USA resided in California.

Think of all the Tiger Moms in China and in the USA trying to test-prep their kids into the University of California as well as the Ivy League schools. The Urban Dictionary has a cite for “UCLA” standing for “University of Caucasians Lost among Asians” back in 2004 (before the huge SAT dumb-down of 2005) and the quip probably goes back further. Atkinson was not likely to be unaware of the existence and predelictions of these fine people.

Keeping all that in mind, it’s curious that the most visible SAT “reform” only lasted a single decade: the SAT essay portion, worth 800 out of 2400 total SAT points during its era, abolished in 2016. Atkinson had pushed hard for that essay portion.

Like many people, I had thought the SAT essay portion had two motivations: first and most important, to dilute the influence of the objective portions of the test; and second, to allow essay-readers to award extra points to students who wrote racial appeals.

I don’t think any scheme to give extra points to racially-preferred students worked out; the official scoring rubrics could not emphasize it (too much danger of negative publicity) and it was dangerously coachable– any test-taker could write in racial stuff and the graders had no way to check for Dolezality.

Diminishing the effect of the objective portions on the overall score worked well enough to disguise the traditional American racial gap, but I think the essay portion annoyed Chinese test-takers, who average less English proficiency than other immigrants, let alone American natives. Per the MPI report linked above:

Chinese immigrants are less likely to be proficient in English and speak English at home than the overall U.S. foreign-born population. In 2018, about 58 percent of Chinese immigrants ages 5 and over reported limited English proficiency, compared to 47 percent of the total foreign-born population. Approximately 11 percent of Chinese immigrants spoke only English at home, compared to 17 percent of all immigrants.

In the years after the essay portion was introduced in 2005, MIT’s Les Perelman discovered that the College Board’s chintzy essay grading meant that Atkinson’s vision of a “predictive” essay test was not achieved. SAT essay graders had only about 2 minutes per test to look for sheer length, the use of fancy words, and the inclusion of some formal quotation (even if it had little relevance to the assigned subject).

That meant the essay portion was quite coachable (Perelman himself proved that by coaching kids to get high scores on it by literally writing down a bunch of nonsense!) but prepping for it cost time Chinese students and their parents would rather have spent test-prepping math. Worse, many Chinese students resented having to prep on material their logorrhea-afflicted Jewish and even American black competitors seemed to have more innate talent for. Chinese (and related East Asian) students are notorious for talent skewed toward the mathematical and away from the verbal.

By 2013, Steve, you were writing about how the incoming David Coleman was under pressure from lots of folks to scrap the essay portion. Coleman told Inside Higher Ed that he would create “a new kind of test, one that would promote educational values.” You quoted part of the story you were analyzing for the cloud around that silver lining:

Another question [to Coleman] — from someone who used to work in admissions at an elite university — highlighted how challenging that may be. The questioner said that his instructions at the university — straight from the president’s office — were to increase average SAT scores and to increase minority enrollments. He said that he found it impossible to do both.

On the other hand, the 2005 SAT had brought Algebra II questions into the math portion. Though very coachable, those seemed likely to trip up American-minority test-takers (I’m not aware of public data on this point). The new questions probably boosted the scores of Chinese test-takers because they replaced more g-loaded items.

Abolishing the SAT essay portion pulled the maximum overall score back from 2400 to 1600 and refocused the test on the material most amenable to Chinese-style test-prepping. Of course the essay had not worked well as a counterweight to test-prepping, but rather than restructure it, Coleman just removed it. All other g-loaded questions had been removed already or were openly targeted for removal by Coleman, so after 2015 the SAT was gelded shorn of every item which could possibly discomfit test-preppers. Since “Asians” as Americans call them are the champion test-preppers of all time, the SAT is now their lap dog.

(An optional essay test offered along with the SAT for a few years after 2016 was discontinued in 2022.)

[1] In 2015, Steve, you questioned the then-86-years-old Atkinson’s grasp of statistics, suggesting he was too stupid to realize what neutering the SAT would do. Although I suggested at that time that Atkinson’s intellect might indeed have faded a bit with old age, I thought then and now that Atkinson understood statistics very well indeed during his active career and was simply an expert and aggressive political liar. Seriously, look at Atkinson’s CV. He was a much acclaimed math professor and statistics expert. When he promoted claptrap like S. J. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man in the mid-2000’s to bolster his war on the SAT, Atkinson knew full well that it was garbage. That was why he promoted it. Atkinson’s personal writings about his campaign against the SAT are filled with misdirection and evasion easily detected by students of the issues.

OT – Boston University and other researchers develop hybrid Corona virus with an 80% lethality rate in “humanized mice”:

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/boston-university-engineers-sars-cov-2-chimera-80-mortality-rate-mice

This research was funded by NIAID, among other organizations. I’m guessing that NIAID was the principal sponsor.

And yet Mr. Science, Anthony Fauci, assured us that his shop doesn’t support Gain of Function research.

The point is not how many Asians are interested in law and medicine (and I think they are about the same as whites here), but rather why the reported mean LSAT and MCAT scores for self-identified East Asians (this is not the UK, dot-Indians are not Asian here) are so low relative to Asian performance on there SAT. There’s no reason why only the smarter Asians would skip law and medicine. They’re professions that pay a lot but require Asian-style hard work and long hours (so—stereotype trigger alert—blacks might avoid them or bail out to another profession after a couple of years).

Steve is pointing out that the notorious dumbing down of the SAT has changed it from a prep-resistant test to a prep-rewarding test. The LSAT and MCAT are also beginning to dumb down, but the SAT was the pioneer in that respect.

Bardon Kaldian wrote to Altai:

I am a member of the first generation of physicists educated since the standard model of particle physics was established. When I meet old friends from college and graduate school, we sometimes ask each other, “What have we discovered that our generation can be proud of?” If we mean new fundamental discoveries, established by experiment and explained by theory—discoveries on the scale of those just mentioned—the answer, we have to admit, is “Nothing!”

There are several obvious reasons for that:

First, we now know all of the fundamental physical laws that govern the everyday physical world: from chemical bonding to solid-state physics to stellar structure. We have plucked the (relatively) low-hanging fruit.

Second, the huge influx of money from 1945 through 1980 let us go for broke without worrying about developing experimental technology along a path that could be sustained long term. I remember around 1980 attending a summer school at SLAC that featured discussions of what to do when just building larger and larger particle accelerators would become obviously impossible. Interesting discussions, nothing much came of them.

Perhaps most important, it is really tough to get tenure by pursuing the deep issues that still plague fundamental physics — notably the foundational problems of quantum mechanics. This year’s Nobel prize is really important because it awards people who did just that — notably Clauser and Aspect — but they were taking a real risk with their careers.

I’m actually working on some of those issues, but I am not part of the academic mainstream, competing for tenure and grants. Similarly with my friend Sabine Hossenfelder.

In another thread, someone suggested that sometimes fields of endeavor simply require a period of going fallow.

On the other hand, batting lefty probably gave John Elway an edge over other right-handed quarterbacks. He was used to looking over both shoulders.

I believe one aspect of the rising gap–I believe Twinkie has pointed at this–is simply more Indian.

Kudos to you! Despite all the digital ink spilled in the commentary here, not one person but you remembered a very salient point I made repeatedly here – that the demographics of “Asians” in American has undergone a dramatic change in the recent decades.

In 1940, there were fewer than 2,500 Indians (dot, not feather) in the United States. In contrast, the number of Chinese in the country the same year was 77,500. Meanwhile the overall Asian number was 255,000. In other words, Indians were less than 1% of the Asian population in America (and about 1/30th of the Chinese population)

By 1980, Indians numbered over 361,500, Chinese 806,000, out of overall Asian-American population of 3,500,000. (So Indians were over 10% of Asians here).

By 2000, Indians were 1.7 million, Chinese 2.4 million, out of nearly 12 million Asians in America (Indians were over 14% of Asians).

By 2020, Indians numbered 4.46 million, Chinese over 5 million, out of 24 million Asians (Indians being close to 19%).

Today – as of 2022 – Indians are estimated to have exceeded the Chinese in population as the largest Asian group in America due to the fact that they are the largest legal immigrant group in the U.S. and account for somewhere between 20-25% of all Asians in the U.S. They now significantly outnumber non-Chinese East Asian groups such as Japanese and Koreans who used to outnumber Indians. (These numbers are all from Wikipedia.)

“Asians” in America today are increasingly less “yellow” and more “brown,” less East Asian (especially non-Chinese East Asian) and more South Asian.

Now, Indian immigrants in the U.S. are enormously more selected educationally than other Asians, let alone non-Asians in the U.S.: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/

In the first place, unlike other Asian groups (except perhaps Filipinos), they arrive with a very high level of English proficiency. And they have an incredibly high fraction of college graduates and holders of post-graduate education at 75% and 43%, respectively. The comparable numbers are 33% and 13% for all Americans and 54% and 24% among all Asians in the U.S. This means a substantially higher fraction of Indians in America have graduate degrees than ordinary Americans have college degrees.

This alone is bound to have a sizable impact on how “Asians” perform educationally in the U.S. (and there is evidence that non-Asian, especially Chinese, immigration in the recent decades has been more highly selective as well, if not quite to the same extent as that of Indians). Yet so few people (including Mr. Sailer) seem to acknowledge or understand this dramatic demographic transformation of “Asians” in the country in their discussions on Asian-related issues.

The Asians have the Chinese government behind them.

You are so delusional, it’s hilarious. You think the Chinese government is behind Indians who are now the plurality of “Asians” in America?

The solution seems obvious: everybody from goofball to genius takes college entrance exams these days. No wonder Asians walk away with higher scores. But college weeds out the idiots and the otherwise ill-suited, so post grads tend to be more the cream of the crop and thus the gap between Asians and others is smaller.

If Bushes are Arab agents, Obama is a Kenyan agent, Trump is a Russian agent, why can’t Indians be Chinese agents? It is all due to Quantum Entanglement. They even gave a Nobel Prize for that recently.

The SAT may be easier to cheat on.

The SJWonkers are trying to do the reverse by sabotage the next PISA survey that favour White and harm Asian scores with Responsive Social Equality SRE of outcomes, the new PISARSE framework, by emphasizing on the Big 5 Openness personality trait, trying to turn OECD into Organization for Equity and Class Diversity, and PISA survey into personality survey. Of cause US is higher in B5Openness score than the Asian countries.

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA-2021-Creative-Thinking-Framework.pdf
Framework for the Assessment of Creative Thinking in PISA 2021: Third Draft

creative thinking has 6 dimensions: (1) feel, empathise, observe, describe relevant experience and information; (2) explore, seek and generate ideas; (3) make connections, integrate other disciplinary perspectives; (4) stretch and play with unusual, risk or radical ideas; (5) envision, express, produce, prototype new product (or solution or performance); (6) appreciate the novelty of solution and or its possible consequences.

Further down the draft,

Page 13 Openness to experience and intellect:
Kaufman et al. (2009[31]) found that openness to experience was the only one of the ‘Big Five’ personality dimensions that was significantly and positively correlated with creative achievements across all domains. The study was then repeated with Chinese participants, who recorded similar results (with the exception of creativity in the maths/science domain) (Werner et al., 2014[63]).

Who will set the creative thinking questions?? The US ACT Inc. that set the US ACT test.
https://leadershipblog.act.org/2018/09/oecd-selects-act-to-develop-pisa-2021.html .

Similarly with my friend Sabine Hossenfelder.

You’re friends with a YouTuber with over half-a-million subscribers? I’m impressed. How does she survive off it? Patreon? “Merch”? Her video on the diesel controversy admits she can only afford to drive used, so her think tank stipend can’t be that much.

Her interests overlap with Steve’s, but, being German, she makes things more complicated rather than simpler. Here she is on a common topic:

She says the sexes were separated in sport because otherwise it would be predictable and thus boring. Predictable, yes, but boring? Sporting competitions in ancient Greece were held in the nude!

We probably need a conceptual revolution like in the first 30 years of the 20th C.
Just- there are no new puzzling & inexplicable experimental data….. except a few of them, possibly.

OT: Another problematic Steve S.

U regent Steve Sviggum wonders if UMinn-Morris campus is ‘too diverse’

Minnesota Public Radio News Staff
October 17, 2022 12:48 PM

A member of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents is coming under fire for a suggestion he made that the Morris campus is “too diverse” and that diversity might be making it harder to draw students there.

Vice chair of the board Steve Sviggum asked the question Thursday during a discussion about enrollment.

“Is it possible that at Morris, we’ve become too diverse? Is that possible, all from a marketing standpoint?” Sviggum asked Janet Schrunk Ericksen, acting chancellor of the Morris campus.

Sviggum, a former Republican speaker of the Minnesota House, told the meeting he’d received a “couple of letters” from friends whose children chose not to go to Morris because they considered it “too diverse …. they just didn’t feel comfortable there.”

What!?!?

The Morris campus in western Minnesota has seen enrollment decline from the years before the COVID-19 pandemic — from 1,554 in the 2017-18 school year to 1,024 in the current year, according to data collected by the U’s institutional research office.

The white student population, however, has stayed relatively stable in that period. White students made up about 58 percent of the enrollment in 2017-18, compared to about 54 percent this school year.

The Morris campus includes buildings that once served as an American Indian boarding school. Qualified Native students today attend the U campus tuition-free. About one-third of the students attending this school year are of Native ancestry. The number has stayed relatively stable, or somewhat lower than a peak of 356 in the 2020-21 school year.

Non-Native, U.S.-born students of color — including Black students and those of Hispanic and Asian ancestry — make up about 10 percent of the current student body at Morris, unchanged from 2017-18.

Morris saw its enrollment this century peak in the 2013-14 school year at 1,846 students with two-thirds of them white.

Systemwide, white students make up about 62 percent of the degree-seeking University of Minnesota student body currently, according to U data. They make up about 55 percent of the Rochester campus enrollment, which is about the same as in Morris.

Sviggum did not detail the specific concerns around diversity in Morris during the regents meeting Thursday, and several at the meeting pushed back on the assertion that diversity was a hindrance.

“I think that they would be shocked that anyone would think our campus was too diverse,” Ericksen told the regents, citing a recent meeting with members of the campus Black student union. “They certainly at times feel very isolated where they are located.”

In an interview with MPR News Monday afternoon, Sviggum said he doesn’t regret asking the question and has not decided whether the campus is too diverse.

How is it even possible to be too Diverse?!? That’s just crazy talk.

“You’re seeking information. Why would you see that as being wrong? For those that do, or would see it as being offensive, I apologize to them. It was certainly not meant in that way, in either a racist or sexist form.”

But DIVERSITY is our strength.— Vice President J. Danforth Quayle, Constitutional Scholar of note.

Responding to Sviggum’s comments before the regents, Dylan Young, president of the student associations on the Morris campus, said diversity on campus was a school …

[drum roll]

strength that needed to be embraced.

Yes, yes and YES!!!

In an open letter to Sviggum, Young, of Native ancestry, offered to buy the regent dinner at Morris and invite a diverse cross-section of students “to let your two friends and their children know that diversity should be embraced — not feared.”

Pithy.

If Bushes are Arab agents, Obama is a Kenyan agent, Trump is a Russian agent, why can’t Indians be Chinese agents? It is all due to Quantum Entanglement. They even gave a Nobel Prize for that recently.

It’s a lot more likely that the Bushes are in league with Saudi royal family than Indians in America are backed by the Chinese government.

Alden is deranged. She thinks that the educational and professional achievements of Asians in America are all propaganda and that most Asians live in flophouses in San Francisco and such.

A sizeable percentage of the Asians were Indians.

That’s because Indians are now the largest Asian group in the U.S., with an extreme educational immigrant selectivity to boot as I have noted repeatedly.

Koreans seem to prize law unlike Chinese

In Korea itself, engineering was the most desirable college major until the 1980’s. For the past decade or two, it’s been law (which tells you about the transition of the Korean economy to a more service-oriented one). Now it’s increasingly computer science and finance. A cousin of mine went to a Korean equivalent of a podunk college and majored in some random thing, but got himself a bunch of computer certifications. He is now a mid-level manager at a tech firm and got himself a wife who graduated from Yonsei University (equivalent to Yale locally) who is more attractive than he is.

Koreans seem unique among the NE Asians for being quite combative. Maybe because of their history of being caught between their much larger neighbors China and Japan.

That’s not the reason. It’s because, in the aftermath of the Korean War, the South Korean government militarized the society and turned the country into a garrison state, in which elementary school kids learned to march in formation in gym class and martial arts were taught in school, and middle school kids learned to disassemble and assemble M1 carbines. You hardly see drunks brawling in Tokyo or even Shanghai, but it’s a common occurrence in Seoul. Drunk salarymen will even fight with cops. Very “Irish of the Orient.”

It’s not for random reasons that there were “rooftop Koreans,” but no “rooftop Chinese” or “rooftop Hindus” in America and for many years 70-80% of Asian cadets at West Point were ethnic Koreans.

Asians these days are focused on engineering and finance. These fields require spatial and quantitative abilities that are better suited for their attitudes. They also pay extremely well. Law and medicine don’t pay as well as they used to. Even if they do pay well, it’s a lot of hard work, and you’re probably making less per hour than you could have in Tech or finance

This. Being a doctor these days is long years of studying, a huge debt, lots of regulations, hard work, disgruntled patients, and less pay than going into tech and financial services. I knew lots of East Asian doctors growing up, but very few of their children have followed. Meanwhile, medicine is increasingly dominated by foreign medical graduates, an overwhelming majority of who are from India.

Reg Cæsar asked me:

[Dave] Similarly with my friend Sabine Hossenfelder.

[RC] You’re friends with a YouTuber with over half-a-million subscribers? I’m impressed. How does she survive off it? Patreon? “Merch”?

Well… perhaps I should have said “friendly acquiantance”: we have had a number of conversation online on her blog. Alas, since I am in Sacramento and she is on the Continent, we can’t just “do lunch”!

As to how she survives, she is married (to another physicist, as I recall), so the family does have another income (she also has twin daughters, by the way). She has managed to get short-term funding from various sources in Europe over the last few years, but that seems to have dried up. And she has said that her books, though quite successful for books on physics, do not bring in much money.

I think she is managing to monetize her Youtube channel, but, again, I doubt it brings in that much.

So, the short answer is that it is financially tough for Sabine. It would be less tough if she had been willing to jump into every fad as it passes in physics, but she chose not to do that.

By the way, I strongly recommend her book Lost in Math: I think the title is a bit misleading, but she did a great job interviewing a bunch of well-known physicists about the state of fundamental physics. Two of the people she interviewed I myself knew fairly well — Weinberg (from whom I took a year-long class) and Polchinski (we were undergrads together at Caltech) — and I could actually “hear” the tone and cadence of their voices in her interviews. Sabine really captured their personalities as well as their perspectives on physics.

As a lefty, left handed QB’s are extremely impractical in an NFL offense. The left tackle is the highest paid lineman specifically because his job is to protect the blind side of a right handed QB in pass protection. So conversely, a LH QB needs the right tackle to be the best pass blocker on the team. Further, everything else has to be reversed to accommodate the lefty: Rollouts, waggles, bootlegs, draw plays, RPOs, blocking schemes for the running backs, and all of the wide out patterns that go with those changes.

Somewhere in the organizational brain stem it is known that wide receivers and running backs aren’t going to be lighting up any cities with their mind power. NFL offenses are pretty complicated – throwing a lefty into the equation basically doubles the number of plays DeyShawntey Jenkins has to remember. Best to keep it simple.

Still, we see more lefty QB’s than we do lefty 3B’s, SS’s, 2B’s, and catchers. This longstanding tradition that lefty’s are not fit to play those other infield positions is one of the stupider ones clung to by baseball people.

OT Must-hear interview regarding Floridian recovery after Ian: Schlichter talks to DeSantis. Absolutely presidential.
https://hughhewitt.com/florida-governor-ron-desantis-on-managing-the-recovery-after-ian/

And at the end of that time, you’ll have a really kick ass vocabulary. How do you distinguish preparation from getting a good education (one that our schools are not providing)?

The British Army used to talk about the 7Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. It’s gone out of style, but it works.

Generally speaking, the Asian attitude toward education is that if you don’t get something the first time, that doesn’t mean you are dumb, it means that you didn’t study hard enough and you should study some more until you do.

Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to compare Chinese, Koreans and Japanese to, say, Italians, Germans, French, Swedes, Irish etc.? “Europeans” seems to cover too much ground, no?

Relatively speaking, there are quite a few left handed catchers in D1 women’s softball.

Good point. Would the fact that since most hitters tend to be righties and might inhibit a left-handed catcher from throwing out a runner trying to steal second (or even third) have something to do with it? Otherwise, no clue.

When whites do better than blacks, I remember the argument was that there’s no way to game the tests even with study. When Asians pull away from whites, there’s a lot of copium with explanations that now the test IS gameable, but only when Asians do it.

Konnor, I think you’re missing the key point. Asians are pulling away. I.e. there is change. That is the point. (In contrast, the white-black thing has not changed. The 1SD gap in … everything–except sports and crime–is like some sort of fundamental sociological constant. There is basically zero doubt about its cause at this point–genetics.)

But the Asian-white gap change suggests:
— Asians are getting smarter relative to whites. (Asians getting smarter and/or whites getting dumber.)
— Asians are getting relatively better at taking the tests.

(For the record–I think it is both. Asians better at gaming the tests, and smarter Asians–relatvely more Asians being children of selected came-via-US-college/grad-school immigrants, especially high caste Asian Indians.)

And for the record, no one–no one thinking logically–has ever thought the SAT isn’t “gameable”. On pretty much all tests, practice improves performance. On physical stuff there might be an immediate pretty hard limit. But we generally don’t test mental performance as directly–say reaction times or evoked potentials. We have people do some mental tasks. And the whole “learning” thing: if you know what those tasks are and practice them … you get better!

The College Board liked to claim back in the day that you couldn’t do much. But the general consensus was about 50 points (at the midrange) is just laying there if you just do thorough prep. But lots of Asians go well beyond thorough prep to making the test itself sort of actual subject of study, and “game” if you will where you get down all the hacks to get to the next level, and the next level. Becoming SAT “masters”.

I don’t discount that there is possibly some effect but 2 SDs of effect is a crazy amount and I think not possible. 2 SDs is 400 points on the 1600 point scale. You are telling me that if you take away test prep that Asians drop 400 points? If this was true then the converse would be true and you could RAISE your SAT score 400 points with test prep. This would mean the difference between getting into Texas Christian University with a 1200 and getting into MIT with a 1600.

If I recall correctly, two standard deviations was the black applicant premium for Harvard and it was about 250 SAT Points. Are people paying millions of dollars in order to pretend to be black when applying to selective colleges? Pretending to be black of “BIPOC” seems to be more of a cottage industry for obsessives than a general strategy to hack admissions.

A guaranteed 400 point prep course – you could charge millions. I don’t think there has ever been a prep course that could legitimately claim a 400 point boost. None of the studies have shown anything like that magnitude of effect.

You’re right and you’re wrong – you probably could never realize a 25 point increase on a proper IQ test. But as others have stated if you have a fixed curricula and standard forms of questions, hundreds of hours of grinding preparation beginning at a younger age could very likely yield a 200+ point bonus on such a standardized test. The test is no longer a test of general intelligence and scholastic aptitude, but rather a test of endurance and diligence in preparing for the defined universe of matters which could be tested in the particular way in which they’re tested. It’s now a question of kids foregoing baseball and friends and reading for pleasure in favor of structured preparation. It’s a fine way of creating a managerial overclass of soulless humanoid insects to mash buttons for twelve hour days.

I think colleges and Universities have a point with regard to high scoring Asians – they’re not looking for candidates who have hit the ceilings of their academic potential by way of hundreds of hours of rote memorization. They traditionally sought out (or purported to) candidates with high native intelligence who would benefit from the teaching by the leaders of their academic disciplines. It’s just that their commitment to remaking America by boosting blacks and Hispanics reveals an irresolvable conflict – return the SAT to a general intelligence test to defend themselves against claims from Asians and whites (at least, whites without an “in”) would be the prime beneficiaries while the premiums given to blacks would be even more ridiculous. It’s whack-a-mole – hit the Asians and the blacks disappear too while many more of the hated whites pop up.

Second, the huge influx of money from 1945 through 1980 let us go for broke without worrying about developing experimental technology along a path that could be sustained long term.

Why did the funding boom end around 1980, rather than say around 1990 with the end of the Cold War?

Also, how skeptical are you of the high-concept superstring theories that have proliferated since the 1980s and which have (and maybe can have) no experimental validation?

My sense is that scientists are fairly honest with themselves and the public about the stasis physics is in now, and the failure of the Large Hadron Collider experiments to do more than merely confirm we’re on the right path and instead open up radical new directions of inquiry (which is my understanding of those results). It seems like they really don’t know how or when things will ever get moving again with groundbreaking experimental proofs that develop our knowledge in the revolutionary ways experienced during the 19th and 20th centuries. Would you say that impression is correct?

Nobody is sure why there hasn’t been a lefthanded catcher since the 1980s.

My guess is that the way that left-throwing, right-catching catchers would frame the zone, even as a mirror image of a left-catching catcher, would be confusing or unsettling for pitchers used to left-catching catchers. It’s probably also the case as it was when I was a kid that the catcher’s mitt was a league issued article of equipment – each team got one, and it was always for a right-throwing player. So if you threw left and wanted to be a catcher, your family would have had to take the financial risk of buying you a catcher’s mitt and hoping that you wound up behind the plate instead of in right field. Lefties therefore had a “structural” disadvantage when it came to playing catcher – no mitt, and therefore they wound up somewhere else in the field from day one.

It would be interesting to see whether Rawlings and the rest keep sale records for catcher’s mitts for left-throwing catchers though, and what the ratio is.

OT – Y’all goyim need Rabbi Yoran Reuven because he vindicates something Paul advised regarding Christian clergy. Whosoever can explain this will be rewarded.

Still, we see more lefty QB’s than we do lefty 3B’s, SS’s, 2B’s, and catchers. This longstanding tradition that lefty’s are not fit to play those other infield positions is one of the stupider ones clung to by baseball people.

I hardly think it’s stupid to think having to turn one’s body to make a throw would make an enormous difference in throwing out runners at first base.

Israelis are not Asian

Israel is in Asia.

Aristotle said that the greatest mental ability that exists is to be good at metaphors.

But what about similes? Are they sneeringly considered less nuanced second-class linguistic citizens?

Interesting.

When I asked the HS kids in our youth orchestra (white/Asian middle class) about taking the SAT, they all said they weren’t. Is that just CA? They all plan to go to college somewhere, and honestly, these kids are pretty accomplished and bright.

Asian men are less likely to marry a white woman today than they were 30 years ago. Same goes for Jewish men.

And yet more are mixing with White women than ever. See if you can figure out why, Einstein.

It’s possible that we are at the verge of a new Dark Age.

And for the record, no one–no one thinking logically–has ever thought the SAT isn’t “gameable”. On pretty much all tests, practice improves performance. On physical stuff there might be an immediate pretty hard limit. But we generally don’t test mental performance as directly–say reaction times or evoked potentials. We have people do some mental tasks. And the whole “learning” thing: if you know what those tasks are and practice them … you get better!

The College Board liked to claim back in the day that you couldn’t do much. But the general consensus was about 50 points (at the midrange) is just laying there if you just do thorough prep. But lots of Asians go well beyond thorough prep to making the test itself sort of actual subject of study, and “game” if you will where you get down all the hacks to get to the next level, and the next level. Becoming SAT “masters”.

The gain in points from prep on a pure IQ test would probably be a modest 20-50 points. Getting used to the forms of questions and pacing the test via practice is the main benefit of prep on such a test. But that’s probably a hard limit, and the “benefit” is likely largest in the mid range in terms of bringing someone up to a 1000 or 1050. That was the rather frank discussion given by the prep courses back in the early 1990s – they’re not going to take your mediocre student from a 920 to a 1300+ and dreams of the Ivy Leagues, but they’re going to make your mediocre student acceptable to Penn State Main Campus, or help the recruiting college coach get junior past admissions.

At the upper end the test takers were college bound and college “prepped” anyway, so the prep courses were a given for all test takers and would net out at that level. But once you shift from a test of pure general intelligence to a universe of subject matter that can be studied and mastered, preparatory courses now have an outsized effect in taking mediocre students and giving them an immense bonus.

A non-Brahmin friend of mine says he sees more anti-lower caste discrimination by Brahmins in the US than he did in India. What you said may or may not be part of the reason.

OT Must-hear interview regarding Floridian recovery after Ian: Schlichter talks to DeSantis. Absolutely presidential.

Who cares about “presidential”? Will he put a stop to immigration? That’s all that matters.

So if you are a 12 year old whose affluent dad buys you a left-handed catcher’s mitt, it’s probably because you are already a slow runner, while big league catchers were probably playing shortstop or centerfield at age 12 when not pitching?

I think what you’re looking for at Babe Ruth/Little League level first and foremost in a catcher is a player who can limit passed balls which can get out of hand at that level quickly. You probably try out the players who should be power hitters too – hence the stereotype of the husky lad behind the plate. My nephew was the catcher on his club and high school baseball teams and we got him a custom Nokona catcher’s mitt for Christmas a few years ago. But he was a good athlete generally, played tight end and center/power forward on his high school football and basketball teams too respectively, and now plays college football at the tight end position. The mitt only came when he had secured the position.

Also, the better bang-for-buck with such a kid would be a $500 Louisville Slugger – every player wields a bat, while only one needs a catcher’s mitt. A kid who can mash will get stuck somewhere on the field regardless of defensive ability, while catching is a more defined skill set and not really a glamorous position.

A surmise is that big league catchers got there because of hitting first, and the pitchers who have rarely seen throws left catchers dictate that the catcher be throws right.

with White families tending to equate doctor and lawyer as equally good professions.

…Or Engineer if their son is sort of a natural-born weirdo.

but no “rooftop Chinese” or “rooftop Hindus” in America

Chinese also, it least on the west coast, seemed to be a hellofalot more sophisticated about scamming the government, and would rather just get double back from an insurance company.

Still, we see more lefty QB’s than we do lefty 3B’s, SS’s, 2B’s, and catchers. This longstanding tradition that lefty’s are not fit to play those other infield positions is one of the stupider ones clung to by baseball people.

Is this a joke?

How is lefthanded middle infielder going to turn a double-play?

It’s not just modernity and feminism though, it’s also mass immigration which destroys the link between good genes and fertility.

Say you’ve made it across the Sahara, the Med and the Channel from the Central African state of Crapholunga – or maybe via Turkey and the Balkans from Shitholistan.

A minimum wage job and a council flat in the roughest part of town won’t seem like the best basis for starting a family if you’re a middle class Brit.

But to a young Shitholistana, it’s a relative paradise by comparison with the baked-clay place in the Crud Valley, with a 300 yard walk to the village well – owned by the village headman, who keeps reminding that your family owes him. Water comes out of taps! And it’s clean! You won’t lose three out of five babies! All five will live!

OK, there are African muggers, Roma thieves and Albanian drug dealers in the streets. But you have a tightly-knit expat community that can sort out its own street justice, without troubling the police or local councils except to ask for more money and council flats. And as we know, only racists will complain, and they can be ignored.

https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/crime/page-hall-rioters-fought-poles-and-golf-clubs-during-sheffield-brawl-3084565

My oldest son was a left-handed catcher until he decided to focus on football.

We once met Benny Distefano – the last lefty catcher to play in the majors – and he said that there was no logical reason why one would be better than the other. Right-handed catchers just became conventional wisdom and baseball being baseball, that was it. Nothing more than inertia.

You think Koreans are tough? Get to know some Mongolians.

These are example problems for the subject tests, which are different from the 2400 point three-section test that people commonly refer to as being the SAT proper. Yes, these problems are simple for people who have taken the courses that the test covers (algebra, etc.) and have learned the material. That is what I mean by an achievement test, yet the norms suggest achievement is very low regardless. The broader problem is not that anyone is gaming the test (by simply being forced to study or torturous rote learning), but that many simply do not or cannot even learn what is presented to them for years and years. It is a massive waste of life.

Koreans seem unique among the NE Asians for being quite combative. Maybe because of their history of being caught between their much larger neighbors China and Japan.

This is similar to the rather relaxed Danes, jammed in between the stuffy Germans and Swedes. The Danes are as hard-working and competent as their neighbors, but realize you don’t have to be a jerk about it.

The Dutch and Flemings are in a similar position. These three groups’ traditions are Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, respectively, so the difference isn’t rooted in (now-moribund) religion.

Perhaps flat land? Magic dirt!

“To succeed at the English portion of the GRE you have to be a native speaker, as well as have studied plenty of grammar and reading comprehension.”

The GRE used to be fairly similar to the SAT. The math on both is essentially highschool math. I honestly don’t know what you mean about the grammar or even vocabulary on the GRE; English has a grammar as do all languages and the low-frequency words are mostly the same low-frequency words on both exams. Besides, don’t plenty of foreign students take the SAT to go to US undergrad institutions?

Though I’m a little rusty on the vocabulary of statistics, I think “distribution” is the keyword here. Asian IQs are more heavily clustered around the average while whites have more IQs at the low and high extremes. Not only are the low-IQ types not taking graduate admissions tests, but many with more average IQs don’t take such exams either. In essence, the Asian higher average IQ of 105 confers no advantage when competing against the higher IQ white population especially when the exam is linguisto-logical rather than mathematical. Also, as Sailer has mentioned previously, it’s not in the realm of probability or possibility that Asians are rapidly gaining IQ points over the last few decades. Something else accounts for the increasingly better performance, like test prep.

In youth-oriented biographies, I’ve read that catcher was the first position for both Babe Ruth and Sandy Koufax on the playground. One dealt with the wrong glove, the other tore it apart to turn it inside out. Some of these bios aimed at kids can be fictionalized in parts, especially in opening chapters– one described Knute Rockne and his big sister swimming across a fjord back in Norway. At age four.

Does anyone recognize these incidents from more adult-oriented biographies? I always suspect we’re in cherry-orchard territory with these kids’ books.

white students make up about 62 percent of the degree-seeking University of Minnesota student body currently