[Wutang]

From the failing NY Times but still interesting:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opini...ntage.html

Quote:

Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology who has written an excellent book about intelligence, cites a study that followed a pool of Chinese-American children and a pool of white children into adulthood. The two groups started out with the same scores on I.Q. tests, but in the end 55 percent of the Asian-Americans entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of the whites. To succeed as a manager, whites needed an I.Q. of 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of only 93.

So the Asian advantage, Nisbett argues, isn’t intellectual firepower as such, but how it is harnessed.

Quote below is something that I can relate to in my personal experience as it's what my own Asian parents had told me:

Quote:

There’s also evidence that Americans believe that A’s go to smart kids, while Asians are more likely to think that they go to hard workers. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but the result is that Asian-American kids are allowed no excuse for getting B’s — or even an A-. The joke is that an A- is an “Asian F.”

I was never educated in Asia myself (unless you count pre-school) but from hearing about the experiences of my parents and also of relatives my age, it's a grinder with lots of rote learning and endless memorization and repetition - not exactly something that will produce lots of independent free-thinkers but it does at least build up mental fortitude and grit that can substitute for natural talent.

Laziness is the enemy of natural talent and the Asian form of education does a lot of mitigate that and pushes for people to fulfill the most of their potential even if their potential isn't exceptional. Being able to harness 90% of 10 units of intelligence > harnessing 50% of 15 points of intelligence.