reiner tor comments:
Anyway, regardless of Nobel laureates, it’s pretty likely that East Asians are somewhat deficient in the nonconformism department, and so while they’re likely to excel (and overtake whites) in the “add together existing technologies and make them stronger” type of activities, not that many truly original inventions are likely to come from them.
However, I would argue that currently this is less of a disadvantage than would have been 100 or 50 years ago. There currently seem to be very few true original scientific or technological breakthroughs, and what there are, are relatively easy to copy, as long as the original content is merely an idea. For example smartphones, or even nuclear bombs: once you know it’s possible, and have an idea how to start, East Asians will get there and perfect it beyond what most Europeans (except perhaps the Swiss and Germans and a few other similar) are capable of. So, Japanese cars will always be more reliable than American cars, but they won’t invent the automobile. This is a big advantage for whites while things like the automobile are constantly being invented. It’s an advantage for East Asians after technological progress slows down and merely consists of perfecting existing inventions.
Also, achievement is usually 1% idea, 99% implementation. So being better at implementation (“add together existing technologies and make them stronger” is something like that) is actually not very bad. Anyway, whites are also very good at implementation, the East Asian advantage is not that big.
The big issue is the insanity of the Globohomo Empire, which is actively working on destroying whites anywhere. I wouldn’t bet on an empire intent on destroying its own core population. Immigration means lower fertility for whites, interbreeding with Chinese and upper caste Indian etc. immigrants (I’ve seen upper class whites with half-black children, though it’s not very widespread), so the white advantage might get lost even in terms of creativity.
Tl;dr
I’d bet on whites if it was a whites against Chinese struggle. As it is, I think the Chinese have a very good chance to at least become a peer of the Globohomo Empire, and longer term even defeat it.
This is a point I agree with, and have made myself here and there. After all, the very concept of a “high level equilibrium trap” was made up to describe China’s curious historical position as a rather economically efficient state coupled with general economic and technological stasis.
Consequently, to the extent that states as such will survive in the Age of Malthusian Industrialism scenario, we may confidently predict that China will be head and shoulders above everyone else.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Seems like they’re breaking out of the conformism thing. After all, it’s a long time since that was required to survive, and their breeding patterns have changed. With genetic modification to boot? Yep, they’re gonna overtake everyone, and then rip them off to get gene modded as well
Another point is that it was way easier for the creative races (NW-Europeans) to pull ahead while they were isolated. They invented the steam engine, but China or Japan had no idea of it. Then they invented railways and steam locomotives, but the Chinese and Japanese still didn’t know much. They invented steamships, but they still had very little ideas about it… until those steamships (equipped with multiple cannons etc.) suddenly arrived at their shores. Even then, it was difficult. Most Chinese and Japanese had zero idea how they were produced, what kind of societies it took to create the factories and industrial culture necessary to produce them, etc. etc.
However, with modern technology, inventions are noticed by others almost immediately, especially if they invest a lot of effort into finding out. So, if the Chinese invest a lot of effort into finding out what the Americans are up to (Emperor Xi: “Wow, they seem to be working on railguns… I want railguns, too! I want it mass produced before the Americans are ready with the first working prototype!”), they might be able to implement those inventions basically at the same time the original inventors implement them. At worst, the original inventors (who have a slightly lesser talent for implementation, and who are also hindered by their own crazy globohomo ideology and affirmative action etc.) might abandon the idea, or get delayed, while the Chinese will implement it. It seems to be happening with railguns.
So even a White Nationalist Empire might not have such a clear-cut advantage against the Chinese, because the inventions themselves could be quickly copied. Remember, it’s 1% idea, 99% implementation, and the idea itself is easy to copy… at least, in the absence of huge geographical barriers. Thanks to modern transportation and communications technology, those barriers are next to non-existent now.
Apologies to go a bit offtopic.
Anatoly as your Twitter is projected along the side of this article:
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1139130728803966976
This article from Tsargrad TV, based on Telegraph, does not represent very well what the source says. It seems like they are reading the least interesting parts of the column in the sources.
In 2015, Russian (which will be excluding Russians with Cyprus citizenship, et al) students are 3,611 in Independent council schools of the UK (2015 was the historic peak in numbers). In 2018, the number is 2,806.
Overall number has reduced by around 22% between 2015-2018. At the same time the proportion with parents living in UK increased from around 23% to around 40%.
So aside from an effect of the currency crisis (-22% total), it also seems to indicate an increase in absolute numbers (+33%) of Russian parents of those children with residency in UK, in 2018 compared to 2015.
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According to new student arrivals.
In 2015, 1,168 new Russian students whose parents live outside UK, while 226 whose parents live in UK.
In 2018, 535 new Russian students whose parents live outside UK, 269 new Russian students whose parents live in UK.
Currency devaluation and overall weak economy, has significantly reduced number of Russian students whose parents are paying in rubles. (But number from parents paying in other currencies, is unchanged), contributing to overall reduction of 22% by 2018.
Evidence of increased immigration from this demographic to the UK. In 2015, there are 816 Russian parents of children in these schools living in the UK, while in 2018 there are 1107.
In absolute numbers, 33% more Russian parents of students in independent council schools are living in the UK in 2018, than in 2015.
https://www.isc.co.uk/media/2661/isc_census_2015_final.pdf
https://www.isc.co.uk/media/4890/isc_census_2018_report.pdf
There’s not a very good reason to combine Japanese and Chinese together, and it’s somewhat offensive to the high achieving Japanese nationality, who have almost similar 19th/ 20th century achievements as Northern European country.
Their per person achievement in the modern world is highly divergent, and until recently the gap is makes inferring about Chinese from Japanese, like inferring about Brazilians from Canadians (or perhaps wider). .
The world is stuffed full of people who can implement and/or execute directives (e.g., programmers.) It is NOT full of people who can navigate to better modes of production, i.e., determine what is to be executed.
While innovations do not have the same splash right now as did the harnessing of steam, or electricity, or the invention of semi-conductors, I suspect that the cumulative effect of smaller, less-noticeable innovations still matters.
East Asians may well produce ever-better execution of, say, manufacturing automobiles. I do not think, however, that (absent industrial espionage on today’s mammoth scale) they’ll keep up by reverse-engineering the cumulative innovations of People of Mostly NW European Ancestry.
Cumulative innovation now seems to be the province of “right-brain,” creative people who also have the rare ability to accumulate the “left-brain” foundation necessary to navigate technological processes.
My guess is that only 1-in-5,000 or even 1-in-20,000 people have this rare combination, and essentially none of them are of Chinese or Japanese (or Indian) ancestry. At least, this is the view informed by people I know who are among the tiny few navigating in this arena.
Okay. How is that relevant to my comment?
Japan was propped up by the British to present a deterrent to the Russians. China was at the same time mercilessly ground down by a European coalition externally, and by the largest narcocartel that ever existed internally (Chapo and Escobar have nothing on the British opium trade).
Without enormous British investments, assistance and technology transfers, Japanese victories against the Chinese and Russians would not have been possible at all.
Armstrong, Vickers and Elswick Ordnance Company literally built the Japanese Navy and Army, along with a brief (counterproductive) input by the French and some crucial early Krupp purchases.
Do you honestly believe the Japanese came up with steam turbines, boilers, BL and QF weaponry, HE, optical rangefinders, calculators, cemented steel and alloy tech on their own, right from the feudal society? As late as 1915 the Japanese hadn’t built a capital ship on their own. As late as WW2, they were firing large caliber shells made by the British.
I was just responding to the conglomeration of Japanese and Chinese together in the beginning of your comment.
At the beginning of the 19th century, this could be adequate. But then there is a historical divergence, as Japan rapidly modernized (including technology importation from Europe), and became almost more like a European great power by the beginning of the 20th century.
Some of this is also only relevant for a limited historical era, and nationalities are almost more attached to historical stages, than to geography.
But this is because Japan was still not in the modern world, when the automobile was invented. It’s not because Japanese are less inventive. (Especially in engineering, they are one of the most inventive countries).
Automobile shows this as much as any industry for them. The most inventive automobile research, is often in Japan. For example, even with a small company – Mazda’s SkyActiv.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyActiv
We can’t really infer that Chinese are uninventive, as they’ve only recently been a third-world country. How inventive they will be when they have a developed economy – who knows?
Was non-conformism the advantage of the West?
Couldn’t one argue that the advantage was that certain parts of the West conformed to the scientific ideal? Also, conformity to monotheistic Christianity did away with much of occult and superstitious thinking.
West had a stronger sense of individualism, but it was within conformity to the core values and manners.
Sure, after Japan was shocked by Admiral Perry – Japan modernized by importing everything they could understand from the West.
Japan rapidly diverged from China, and became analogous to Russia’s historical stage at the end of the 19th century. And by Battle of Tsushima, was interpreted by Western observers, as indication Japan’s organized modernization process had already surpassed a more chaotic managed one in Russia.
(Compared to Russia, Japan had another advantage of greater cultural and linguistic isolation from the West: they could import Western products, without so much Western political ideology.)
But my point is, Japan and China have been divergent for more than a century. I don’t think it is very useful to combine them together, and infer about one nationality, from the other nationality.
It’s possible China in second half of the 21st century will be as innovative (even per person) as Japan was in second half of the 20th century. But there is no guarantee (their behaviour in the 19th century was already very different).
The real Asian advantage is implementation. A more disciplined workforce willing to hugely sacrifice personal time and pleasure for the good of the country (worker bees).
This is primarily cultural.
1) This Asian cultural advantage may well significantly erode – it is at least partly a product of the traumas of the 19th century, and an acute sense of inferiority with regard to the West. These effects will dissipate, leaving a population less willing to work the infamous Japanese long hours.
2) Jews experienced a similar boost in motivation early last century for similar reasons, and are now losing their momentum as that dissipates.
3) The West may recover a sense of collective purpose and willingness to sacrifice for the….nahhh, just kidding, that’s not gonna happen.
4) As Asian sense of humiliation and traumas from the 19th century dissipates, so will drive and ambition, and we will see a lowering of Asian IQ scores finally harmonizing with their real world competence level.
One thing we know – current trends don’t last.
Even historically, I think it’s underappreciated. There is an English poem (by Hilaire Belloc) from the 19th century that went “Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.”
European firearms were introduced all over the world, and in some cases given to natives in large numbers, but they were never able to reproduce them or supply their own ammunition (or be very effective in using them).
But when Portuguese matchlocks were introduced to Japan in the 16th century, the Japanese began copying them instantaneously and it only took 2 years for them start producing their own guns and ammo for themselves from a couple of Portuguese copies, and they completely reformed their internal warfare around implementing them.
Then they went into the isolation period which was also a period of peace, so no development was done and they went back to romanticizing swords and writing haiku.
Isolationism ended in 1853, during the civil war afterward every faction was all buying more modern guns from Europeans to use against each other, including rifles and state of the art gatling guns in the late 1860’s. The gatling gun was invented in 1861.
By 1880 they had produced their own domestic bolt-action rifle and abandoned all their older muskets.
The 1880’s was when the above mentioned Maxim invented the first recoil operated machine gun.
40 years later by the 1920s the Japanese started building their own domestically produced aircraft carriers and planes and machine guns.
It was lightning quick and no other country in the world in the colonial era ever did anything comparable. Lots of arab countries were still using matchlock muskets even after the Japanese were flying planes (they made their own muskets, most of the non-arab non-european countries were lucky to have bought or stole a few old european muskets). The Chinese also tried but their government was too dysfunctional and had to much inertia to pull off much modernization.
The “non conformism advantage of the West” is a stopgap invented to patch a glaring hole in IQ theory – namely, that whites outperform Asians in intellectual and economic accomplishment despite having lower IQs.
Of course its historically illiterate – 1) Germans, the most notoriously conformist people in Europe, were hugely creative 2) Chinese are famously anarchic, assertive, and rambunctious 3) Europeans were most creative during their periods of greatest discipline and conformity 4) the explicitly non conformist culture of today is also non creative
Obviously the theory is merely designed as an awkward patch on a gaping hole, and shouldn’t be taken very seriously.
Oh, and the Chinese loss of traditional culture and religion will follow the same arc as it did in the West – a huge burst of initial energy directed towards materialistic ends gradually petering out as the sources of motivation dry up, and all the mental diseases of materialism and modernity begin to take hold.
Japan is in a much better position here, as it has a much more robust traditional culture. Although it too is shaky.
Their behaviour was different because they faced very different situations.
One of them was just intimidated, the other one had to fight several wars against the foreigners.
From the 19th century, Japanese had always seemed quite exceptional for nationalities outside Europe/North America
They believed this about themselves, and it probably contributed to their shock in the middle 19th century after Perry’s Expedition, when they realized how technologically retarded they were compared to their self-perception of where they should be, and how dangerous this relative weakness was for them (in world of colonizing and colonized peoples)
They modernize in a very organized and rapid way – sometimes in comical way, trying to import the best of everything: importing army uniforms from Bavaria, trains from England (today reversed, as the English import Hitachi trains), and even the Japanese Navy copied eating Indian curry from the British Navy.
In the 16th-17th century, the Chinese and Japanese did quite effectively adopt European firearms and allegedly invented things like volley fire
It cannot be only circumstances, but even after opium wars and civil war, there seems a divergence of attitudes.
For example – see the different approach to the train in the late 1860s. British built a demonstration train in Beijing and the Chinese initially rejected it and took it down. While Japan in the same decade, imported hundreds of British engineers to build its train between Yokohama and Tokyo.
And the way Japan investigated the West as part of its modernization, is surely very different and more active than other countries. For example, these missions they send to investigate England
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/6908/1/The_Iwakura_Mission_in_Britain,_1872.pdf
In page 31 ^ they even send Japanese ship constructors to work in British ship factories according to this reason:
In general, a country has its greatest energy and potential right after it opens up and embarks on a new path. That’s when momentum is greatest.
Israel opened up economically in the 90s, and 10 years later, it demonstrated its distinctive capacities in an explosion of small but highly innovative tech companies.
It did not take 50 or 60 years. It took 10 years to show what kind of thing Israel is good at.
It’s the same with Japan. A short time after opening up, her distinctive capabilities – her signature abilities – were very evident. It was quite clear what kind of thing Japan was good at it very soon after it opened up.
So this idea that China will “unveil” new capacities many decades after it has opened up seems to get the sequence exactly backwards.
Chinese had variants of AL-31 for two and a half decades now, and still can’t produce an indigenous variant of comparable specs. In their civillian engine-building things are even worse. Same with reactors. Same with missiles.
Turns out implementation in actually technology-dense areas is very hard for asians as well lol.
The same is true of China. Only retards didn’t see already in the 1990s that they were on their way to becoming a superpower.
And it took half a century for Japan to produce things like capital ships. Its industry was still vastly inferior to Western industry in 1941. It took them literally one and a half centuries for its potential to be reached. And its aerospace industry still has to produce an indigenous passenger jet.
Circumstances like multiple wars against the British are what I was talking about.
Sounds like inefficient import substitution?
Why aren’t you arguing against that?
Yes, I was merely pointing out that expecting China to suddenly produce lots of genius mathematicians or scientists or computer engineers, or come up with the next big thing, or create a really excellent brand, is unlikely.
The likely scenario is that it will continue being what it is now, just more so – what you see is essentially what we will be getting from China, just more of it.
Until following the arc of modernity, it develops the diseases of materialism, at which point it will enter a decline.
But that is decades away.
Wow, you trolled my rather innocuous comment above 🙂
I think China is really a religion for you Tor – you are so sensitive!
You should be commenting on the Godfree threads.
Cioran was absolutely prescient when he said in the 1920s Europe yearns to act the female towards China. I scarcely realized! Well, I hope you get dominated the way your soul yearns for Tor 🙂
Why is producing a domestic passenger plane sign of modernization or technological level?
From aerospace engineering perspective, design of passenger planes has not changed since the 1960s.
You literally proposed that I (or any guy commenting here) nail you in the ass. What could I have done?
Well, we’re talking about reaching their full potential. It was merely an example that Japan still hasn’t reached it. Despite being significantly more developed than even in the 1980s.
The Chinese had the same perception of themselves, and made all the same realizations as the Japanese did, they just didn’t manage to do anything about it.
But my point about the Japanese is it wasn’t just the 19th century, if you go back before isolation in the 16th century there were brief hints of what they were capable of much earlier, with them copying matchlock muskets and having their swordsmiths produce them themselves. Not just the industrial tech but also working out the tactical maneuvers between themselves on the battlefield during the warring states period.
But before isolationism they ultimately opted to try and shut the foreign influence out, which is a far more normal a response then the realization they made after isolationism which was really quite astute. They took pretty much a perfect read on their international situation and the state of global affairs and what would be needed to change it.
Yes but by the 1860s, China knows more than anyone the danger of the West and of its own retarded economic and military level – and it’s still not acting with emergency speed to modernize like Japan
If these particular ships were built for economic enrichment, rather than military ones which may include against countries which are producing them – and they were expected to cost more and have no better features than the imported ones. Then it would sound like an inefficient import substitution.
If the aim is military, then there are a number of strategic reasons for import substitution.
However, if we look in this era, the British are still supportive of Japan and see them as an export opportunity. From the same text:
Obviously, in two generations, a very different situation. (And military build up of Japan, and desire to be an imperial power, even seems to be an unfortunate choice).
The USA was even contracting some of this work for Japan’s navy development – which seems ironic in the historical perspective.
You are vastly overstating Japanese capabilities.
In WW2, they suffered badly due to technological inferiority – from pistols which were most dangerous for their users, over underpowered average, common aeroengines and unreliable 1000+ kW aeroengines to 10 round tray-fed machine guns and atrocious 25 mm AAA, right up to archaic artillery and tank equipment. Like all Empire’s enemies, they were presented as a larger threat than they actually were. Zero was a one trick pony – hopelessly outclassed by post-1940 US planes, just like Ki-43.
Regarding Al-31 and aerospace industry, it’s not the implementation which is the problem. Cutting edge, military jet engines utilize monocrystalline, special blade coatings and complex cooling conduits inside fan blades – how do you think a blade operates in temperatures above the melting point of an alloy it is made of?
It is not just alloy chemical composition and specific part dimensions that matters, so reverse-engineering is nowhere near as simple as in some other sectors.
Have you ever wondered why China was unable to purchase modern armament, for example QF tech guns from EOC or Krupp, modern AP and HE naval shells the same way Japan did?
I mean, they obviously had the cash, since they paid Japan 30 000 000 £ indemnity which Japan promptly spent in British shipyards and arsenals, ordering pre-dreadnoughts and armoured cruisers, guns and ammunition. Back then, a capital ship was priced less than a 1 000 000 £.
This is quite correct.
When America was in crisis and truly motivated, she was capable of creating better technology than the Japanese.
The military arena is the best test of a nations peak technological capability, because survival is at stake, and one truly mobilizes one’s resources.
When the pressure is off, not every nation wishes to invest in the discipline and sacrifice needed to create the best engineered products, but war has a way of concentrating the intellect.
Also in military performance, Japan was outclassed by America. Germany would have been no contest.
So Japan tends to get exaggerated, for sure – but compared to the rest of Asia, she is supremely impressive – and quite reasonably impressive even compared to the West, if not top tier.
A difference with China is its size of population, which is immediately forgotten when we discuss it like it is “just another country”.
China is more than 9 times more than population of Russia. And Russia is already the huge, almost incomprehensible population size (by far the largest European population), where it is difficult for an individual to conceive of such numbers of people.
China is the same population as 23 UKs.
Imagine, 23 UKs.
And yet just 1 UK, can dominate some fields of technology and science, and control much of the world in earlier eras.
So even if the average Chinese human capital level would be mediocre or lower than that, we should expect China to have enough population to dominate at least many fields of science and culture in the future (after their population are living like people in a developed country).
This appeal to unmeasured things like Asian “lack of creativity” and “conformism” is where you see that for a lot of people HBD is simply a cover for white nationalism and not empiricism. Where’s the evidence? The numbers? In my experience Germans and Scandinavians are the most conformist peoples on earth, certainly more so than Chinese people, yet the German speaking world was the scientific innovation leader of the world just a century ago.
I think the crucial thing is first mover advantage in credit for achievements. We all remember the first man in space. How about the second man? (I Googled it and wow this guy is forgotten compared to some astronauts with later firsts.) Third man? The 20 next ones? Were they somehow less brave and capable than Yuri Gagarin? No, it’s just that the credit goes to the first so a slight lead in any field turns into a massive lead in credits for inventions. Can you name some people who worked on the Manhattan project? Most nerds can. How about the Soviet bomb? Russian nerds, maybe. The British bomb? The Chinese bomb? Only the first thing counts.
Modern theoretical advancements tend to come on top of technological progress. Unexplained phenomenon shows up when you’re experimenting with the latest gadgets, theorists get on the job, more tinkering produces more data to guide theorists etc. A slight lead in technological progress means a massive lead in scientists credited for inventions because in inventions ONLY being first matters and even a slight lead means you’re getting there first.
Out of non-white countries only Japan has so far closed the gap on technological progress and even they only got there around two generations ago. And now they’re bringing home science Nobels at a good rate, consistent with the delay that people get Nobel credit late in life.
The creativity difference is still pretty confusing to me. I wonder, whether you could see the difference if you were to grade essays by Asian and White kids. Mostly, at least in technological areas, creativity is difficult to disentangle from intelligence. You either understand the structure of a problem deeply and then you can come up with a solution or you don’t.
The conformism difference is similarly strange to me. In Western societies the range of what is seen as acceptable is so narrow, it seems really weird to claim that Whites are non-conformists. My feeling is that conformism, creativity, individualism probably have different aspects that vary between populations. The vocabulary doesn’t seem quite suited to describe the differences in a way that makes unambiguously sense.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/noosphere/
They’re more conformist on queueing, for instance. But less so on actually important matters. On the tactical level in both World Wars, less so than the Brits, for instance.
British trains in Beijing could also have been used to invade the Chinese capital. Again.
What China needed was allies, not relying on enemies.
https://archive.fo/NwWuQ/71e7ed3dda6c48415b8585a64fdbb51711cbce17
So, aren’t they a case of “inefficient import substitution”?
After all, the main alternative was buying them from the Japanese ally Britain who would not need that much time to complete the ordered ships.
In some ways, Japan seems to achieve more in their own country than America. And they achieve it despite the earthquakes and tsunamis (which many countries would never return from).
I’ve only been in Tokyo and Osaka, but my tourist impression of Japan is more impressive than American cities, certainly more than Californian cities – and apart from Manhattan and some parts of Washington (although personally, I like America a lot for tourism).
Equally compared to Germany – I was generally impressed by Japan (including impressive civil engineering), while from the few cities of Germany I have visited, I didn’t receive any special impressions.
And German army, being completely demolished by USSR by 1945. However, the Germans of today build better cars and washing machines. There exists also comparative advantage between countries.
The same can be said of Asians in general – conformist in some areas and extremely nonconformist in others.
Since this is so, it makes no sense to define Asians as being innately predisposed to conformity.
And in war, if anything, the Chinese have been too anarchic and undisciplined, not too much.
The whole conformism schema needs to be abandoned.
Japan had become more developed than China economically by the mid-18th century (proxying by things like interest rates).
It also had much greater human capital.
Chinese literacy rate in 1900 – 10%. I don’t have the figures off the top of my head, but Japan was at around 30% or 40% at around the time of the Meiji Restoration.
This must have been the key factor that allowed them to modernize more effectively.
Sweden (9M) and Switzerland (8M) have about the same number of Nobel Prizes as Japan (127M).
I think that’s a reflection of priorities, where Japan is far more willing to invest in public infrastructure – for which I applaud them.
We’ve discussed the horror that is the NYC subway, and this is obviously not the result of lack of ability.
The last time America was at the forefront of investing in public infrastructure was the early 20th century, when they produced impressive works like the Hoover Dam.
I also think the West is aesthetically ambivalent about technology – where its prized but seen as ugly, and the old is embraced – whereas Asians in general seem to have embraced the aesthetics of technology more and incorporated them into its cityscape.
The ideal American city block is Victorian housing next to a beautiful park – the ideal Asian city dwelling is gleaming high rise.
What I found pleasantly surprising about Japanese cities is that they are not the modems of crisp efficiency I had been led to expect – but rather chaotic and shambolic, with buildings jumbled together chronically.
On the other hand, I didn’t like the lack of architectural distinction you find in Western cities.
From the military view, there are advantages and disadvantages of import substitution (and these are different from only economic considerations).
If you are preparing for a large war, there is a strategic advantage to use of domestic military industrial complex, even if this is more costly than importation, as it will allow for producing ships to match for particular needs and for secure supply of the armaments independently of policy instability of supplying countries.
A benign example is the situation of the Mistral class ships from France (which Russian Navy is about to receive before unpredicted events of 2014). Although in this case, only France has lost economically as a result of its immediate cancellation – the future import substitution will add more than a decade and a lot of additional costs in Russia.
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We know now – in the case of Japan, – it would have been better for them if they hadn’t gone crazy into building military ships and militarizing in the early 20th century. Not because of economic reasons, but because of where this process eventually resulted politically.
Theoretically, yes. China nay dominate some fields in the sense of producing the largest output in them, but probably won’t produce the best minds in them or the best products in them.
That’s the kind of thing China can do, volume, mass, and reasonable but unxceptional quality.
With enough volume, this is formidable, but I don’t think we should get carried away
Thanks for confirming rT’s thesis.
Mongoloids are better at maximizing existing potential, including making the nicest looking cities. But European cities will have more varied music scenes, and more futurist discussion clubs.
What Anatoly answered.
But my thinking is that this supposed lack of Asian creativity is not a very serious theory, merely a kind of working hypothesis. For example, some troll proposed that HBD predisposes Europeans to submission to Asians, because it postulates that they are superior. Which is not the case: IQ is just one (easy to measure) component of success. It’s possible within the HBD framework that Asians lack some other component. They certainly didn’t manage to start the industrial revolution. So, there’s something to be explained here: Asians have higher IQs, but somewhat lower achievements.
Since we know, that IQ is not the be all & end all of innate abilities, a serious possibility is that they lack in some other component, for example creativity or curiosity or non-conformism. It’s not necessarily non-conformism, it’s not a very serious theory. But there could be something. (Another explanation is historical accident, like culture and then suddenly meeting Europeans with superior technology, who defeated them in multiple wars.)
So, don’t take the non-conformism part that seriously.
However, when talking about whether China could become a fully fledged superpower, and I’m arguing that yes, it could, then I’m basically being prudent here: I argue that, even if they are less creative, they will be able to master all important technologies, and since major new, game-changer technologies are now unlikely to come, they might actually be leading the pack. Like they do with 5G. It would actually strengthen my case if it turned out that the Chinese don’t have any issues, that they are really superior all-around. (Though, I’m not really sure I’d buy it at this point.) But as I wrote, it’s actually not that important even now.
I would advice you to visit Tokyo – it is very far from the “nicest looking city”.
It has great infrastructure, but its rather ugly and chaotic – which surprised me, although it’s charming.
It’s nothing like the futuristic tech dream you’re imagining – nor is any Asian city I’ve been to.
It just has clean and efficient infrastructure.
I think conformity has to be further subdivided to have any explanatory power. For example Germans and Scandis have more of a egalitarian conformism, everybody has to be “on board”, i.e. lot’s of ideological pressure, etc.
NE-Asians have more of a hierarchical conformism, i.e. the boss is always right. Obviously, the former is much more conducive for collective problem solving, because everybody can give input and errors are called out.
Considering that Japan was running out of money during the war against Russia, there is also an economic reason against “inefficient import substitution”.
The thing is that Japan’s best wars were short wars.
Based on that argument, (naval) import substitution was not needed.
It would be nice if our Scandinavian members shed some light on Law of Jante.
In the end, it’s less a matter of conformism vs non-conformism than what one conforms to.
The West developed the scientific method, and thinkers conformed to its ways.
One of the problems of the East, China and Hindu India, was that spiritually bound folks were unwilling to drop their superstitions and conform to the New Way of science.
Granted, the West valued youthful spirit more, but even youthful innovators had to conform to the narrow laws of science and math.
My impression of Japan – it is also reflection of higher cultural level of the overall population, more civil engineering, and quite a lot of intelligence in many things they do (even if their politicians – at the top level – are idiots).
In relation to the earthquake situation – many countries would not recover from this, but somehow they can adapt their cities and still flourish in these condition.
Similarly, with lack of natural resources, and distance from their historical export markets – and yet they still manage to dominate many industries.
Japanese cities have a very median position.
Modernist dystopian construction (from a distance), but everything quite clean, cozy and “designed for humans” when you enter inside the city.
But actually existing American cities, are often completely dysfunctional in design.
Tokyo and Osaka are kind of ugly from distance, from the train.
Any old buildings are constantly destroyed and replaced with blocks (partly because of the fear of earthquakes, and need to try to update the safety level of building before the next earthquake).
But they are very “hipster” cities, where are all kinds of cool little shops, cafes and restaurants everywhere. Probably they have futurist discussions and intelligentsia, if they have time from work.
Even they have a lot bookshops in English in Tokyo, selling 50 year old philosophy books (and you can see Japanese people buying these books, maybe more for decoration than because they will read them).
I think a lot of Japanese are very “pretentious” (have high cultural aspirations), and even for ordinary Japanese, there is also often obsession with clothes and fashion.
If you go to the business district in Tokyo in the morning. The businessmen and businessladies, investment bankers there – are very fashionable, wearing some kind of expensive Italian suits. They care a lot more about clothes even for the office.
On the other hand, in evening, businessmen often drunk and shameless on public transportation, and sleeping unconscious (where nobody stole their wallet).
Well hindsight is 20/20. But the Japanese saw themselves as global leaders and masters. They did not want to be subservient to anyone. They correctly realized what they were doing was the only chance they had to stay sovereign and independent.
The alternative is that would just relegate themselves to being a lapdog of some European power. They could have remained allies of the British but they recognized they would have been at the mercy of the British who didn’t have much mercy for foreign peoples. They could even end up colonized whenever the European powers felt like it, or have parts of their country traded away in European power deals. And they would be a satellite at best. And they would be contained.
That’s what broke their alliance with the British, unwillingness to be contained and constrained to something manageable. The British where never going to let them build up to the point of being their own threat or peer equal.
The Japanese played ball with european powers to get the tech they needed to ultimately stand up to them, getting what they needed to not be subservient to or at the mercy of colonial powers was the whole point of reaching out to those powers.
Ultimately I think they played the hand they dealt as good as anyone could play it, besides folding it and giving up on Japanese sovereignty. And to look at their ideology and culture from that period, they probably would have done what they did even if they knew how it would turn out. They would rather die fighting than give up and kneel to foreigners. It would have been a betrayal of their japaneseness to just give up and take second fiddle.
If they hadn’t built up militarily and just tried to toady around diplomatically, it still would have been the death of their former identity, of what they saw the meaning of being Japanese as anyway. So what they did was the only thing they could have done to try to preserve that.
There is also the most impressive engineering things I’ve seen in my life, in Tokyo as well. For example, did you go in the train into its bay? And see all the roads and buildings there.
I was on this train as a teenager. I was shocked when it starts to travel over the sea. This train has no driver, so you can sit in the front seat (I’ve also been on the viewing wheel in the bay – and we went to the shopping mall which looks like Venice, and a car museum in an artificial island somewhere there).
About Japanese. I read somewhere that they were well primed to industrialize. They had well developed proto industry (silk). They had really well developed road and canal network that was also being maintained. Plus when Japan was “opened” by that expedition they already had a college specialized in learning west’s technology and with one order that college spread to the entire country.
Side note.
I am starting to suspect that Asian’s lag in innovation may also be different preferences. A preference for the traditional is not necessarily bad. Japanese have well developed wood construction that needs to nails and can be maintained over long period of time. Something you would expect out of an island nation. West burns bright but also deal with consequences such as communisms, SJWs and etc.
Search commenter Thorfinnsson + Jante/Sweden/authoritarian/”New Totalitarians”.
Lack of curiosity would be a case of this.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, what causes it, as long as it’s impossible or near impossible to change.
“The big issue is the insanity of the Globohomo Empire, which is actively working on destroying whites anywhere. I wouldn’t bet on an empire intent on destroying its own core population. Immigration means lower fertility for whites, interbreeding with Chinese and upper caste Indian etc. immigrants (I’ve seen upper class whites with half-black children, though it’s not very widespread), so the white advantage might get lost even in terms of creativity.
Tl;dr
I’d bet on whites if it was a whites against Chinese struggle. As it is, I think the Chinese have a very good chance to at least become a peer of the Globohomo Empire, and longer term even defeat it. ”
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In my estimates, with current immigration policies, IQ in the US in 2100 will be 93, IQ in Western Europe will be 94. IQ in China will be around 103.
I do not see how the US will be able to compete with China with 10 IQ points gap (and further dropping).
How the fuck will the US be able to compete with China under such massive debt levels and with IQ of its population dropping? It is simply not possible.
The US is projected (by its own CBO) to have massive, crippling debt levels in 2050.
Debt to GDP 160 % and growing.
Budget deficit 10 % per anum and growing (do you have any idea what this means? It is a disaster! Imminent implosion. Hyperinflation). Budget deficit reaching 20 % by 2093. ???
6,2 percent of GDP going for debt servicing, debt interest spending crowding out the rest of spending, which in turn hits GDP further.
And this rising debt is already under the condition that the US will have to cut military spending by from 3,1 to 2,5 % of GDP, non-discetionary spending again from 3,1 to 2,5 % of GDP, and allow the current Trump tax cuts to expire during the 2020s. Which will of course hit the economy and the military standing of the country.
So the US will have to cut far more than this Including a pension cut by 20 % in 2030, that is already baken in. I can tell you one thing. Americans won’t be able to collect their promised pensions. Not possible at all.
http://www.crfb.org/sites/default/files/fig%201%2075%20year.JPG
https://www.crfb.org/papers/75-year-budget-outlook
Then there is the issue of city and state debt. The biggest US cities (New York, LA, Chicago) are broke.
In my estimates, in order to simply stop the debt from increasing , and keep it at dangerous 160 % (a financial crisis at 160 percent will be horrible and could even cripple the country if it is a large crisis), by 2050 the US will have to cut 27 % of its spending. This means a 27 % Pentagon cut at 2050 will be needed. Plus Pentagon spending will have to be further decreased due to the massive debt service spending on interest. Those cuts will have to start from already all time low military spending of 2,5 % of GDP. So you will have a military spending of probably 1,5 % of GDP. At such numbers, say good buy to US military hegemony.
So the US will have to massively cut spending and will still be in very bad position. Because those cuts will be needed to simply stabilise the debt at 160 percent. And what happens if a big economic crisis hits at those long term debt levels? Very bad things will happen.
Thus the numbers show that under current projections China will dominate the US by the 2050s and will be indisputably bigger military power by that time. The US will be in very bad position.
Moreover, my demographic estimates show that the IQ of the US population will drop by 2 IQ points by 2050, thus the US population will be dumber. And since it is mostly young people in the military, it means that the US military will be a majority minority by 2050. Do you think that 90 IQ hispanics (the predominant young population by 2050) would make good soldiers? No.
Have you seen the military test scores for hispanic soldiers? The difference between white and hispanic soldiers on the Air Force AFOQT qualification test, as well as on the military ASVAB test is 0,8 SD (12 IQ points). This is massive difference.
How the fuck will the US military be able to operate with such soldiers?
All of these numbers simply show a significant decline coming for the US military.
Moreover: about hispanic population: whites are declining in Latin America too. This means that Latin American migrants after 2050 will be overwhelmingly non-white. Good luck with that.
Dollar world reserve currency status? It looks like it will be gone by 2050.
PWC estimates are currently for China having 1,5 bigger economy (and 1,7 times bigger in PPP) and India having an economy bigger in PPP but a bit smaller in nominal compared to the US. Combined with continuously dropping US share as part of the world economy. Now combine this with the huge US debt levels by 2050.
As far as the EU is concerned, there will be large numbers of muslims there. Very bad for stability. IQ of euro immigrants is prettty low, lower than in anglo countries. By 2100, western europeans will be minorities in their own countries. Some countries, such as France, the UK, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain etc. already have large debt levels. So you will have countries with lots of young non-whites and muslims (probably at least 30 % muslims by 2100) and lots of very old whites, many of them with high debt levels. Also PWC estimates even bigger decline as share of world GDP for Europe than for the US. I do not see how this will work for Europe. It is going down.
So, we’re looking at a stagnant world that is led (but not necessarily dominated in the traditional sense) by China. That’s pretty much how I see it as well.
Anatoly, does the idea that East Asians are better at implementation than at innovation also apply to Russians/Eastern Slavs? I mean, obviously Russians/Eastern Slavs appear to have a lower genetic ceiling for their average IQ in comparison to East Asians (plus Vietnamese), but the Russian/East Slavic average IQ is still pretty high.
Technology is driven by reaching the new requirements first. This means already being the wealthiest and in combination the most advanced society in the first place. Buenos Aries is not going to be the world technology leader soon. The requirements differ by society so there are multiple centres, perhaps not centres but zones. Europe’s Blue Banana being the main one. It lost ground to the US Mid West after WW1 but has caught up since WW2.
Were the Confucian cultures ever close enough in terms of concentrating wealth? The capital cities kept wandering around. China and Korea were disturbed by alien invasion. Europe had plenty of wars but not alien invasions. The Muslims blended the Persian and Greek cultures. They had a spectacular flourishing of trade, wealth and science which led to nothing. If anything there was regression, even in India.
I vote for institutions. My own relatives made a fortune trading with India which was reinvested in canal building just in time (but the events were connected) to transport South Wales iron from the mountains to the sea. Their Indian trading partners had no protection for their private property (this is still true in China and Russia) and no financial structures (Banks, Joint Stock Companies) to reinvest it. Japan is limited to perfecting technology trends defined elsewhere by the relics of the Zaibatsu system of large conglomerates. This is excellent for producing high speed trains but the real running is now in other places like medical devices (Olympus has been completely eclipsed by EU, North American and Israeli companies for example). South Korea is now the East Asian front runner but the Chaebol do the same job of overshadowing small and middle sized firms that the zaibatsu did in their day. Both Japan and Korea have excellent large firms in established industries and flourishing (or at least state supported) artisan traditions but the €100m engineering firm is not typical in the way it is in the US or Europe.
Meanwhile, the big new problems are amongst other places in medical devices and pharmaceuticals to support ageing populations. Japan is there with the science, leading edge with stem cells indeed but this is not being turned into international trade. The EU and the US make the rules for new technologies China is not there yet. Japan and Korea and Taiwan and Malaysia etc need their own EU if they are ever to compete in the regulatory space. Regulatory institutions frame the space for technical advance. This is true for aerospace, healthcare, telecoms, green energy, transport, waste management and other industries. The also rans speak English, French, Spanish or Russian not a variant of Chinese. The EU and the US will still be setting enough rules to keep their advantage for a long time.
A current example of this is Trump’s effort to stop the UK adopting 5G technology from Huawei. If the UK App development industry gets 5G first, the next Facebook could be British not American. (The last Facebook understands this and is now recruiting 500 people for its new London development team).IT is also the case that Huawei devices are stuffed full of British technology not just old favourites such as ARM chips and transputers but recent developments in say, base station technology, designed for Huawei by the large design consultancy firms around Cambridge. Huawei has had close technical ties with the UK since 2002 when it won a major contract with BT. Using UK technology for future products was part of the deal. Huawei products meet the regulatory requirements set by EU (mostly British and Finnish) regulators. Not by accident, Nokia is #2 in 5G just now. Well defined EU regulations producing results.
Muh. Brexit!
Who needs soldiers when you have AI assisted drones?
I notice that the globohomo rhetorical meme is popping up everywhere on the right these days, and I am gladdened and encouraged by this. Globohomo is a meme that will drive our enemies to distraction. Of course they will yell “homophobe”, but that will only demonstrate that they don’t get the point. So, happy GloboHomo month.
There is actually eleven commandments in the Jantelov.
The night time stories HBDers and IQists tell their children as vanguards of approaching yellow peril can be heard. An exercise in consolation Onanism. Typical for reiner Tor.
A lot of this is just because there’s a fear of criticism and challenging authority in China. A ton of new ideas never get expressed by young people because they’re afraid the boss would be offended, since proposing something news implies that the old thing is bad, and that’s criticism.
This probably sets the difference between China and Japan’s modernization. Some Chinese must have realized the utility of western technology, but few if any were brave enough to tell the emperor that his stuff was not as good as the foreigner’s. This bullshit has gone on since forever.
What China needs now is leadership that can distinguish between constructive criticism and treasonous dissent. Encourage the former and crack down on the latter. The CCP’s fear of losing power is causing it to grip society too tightly, which ironically just makes it more likely to lose legitimacy in the eyes of average people.
“European firearms were introduced all over the world, and in some cases given to natives in large numbers, but they were never able to reproduce them or supply their own ammunition”
i’ve made the same observation on isteve a few times over the last 20 years. but on a more recent historical timeline.
almost everybody uses US, soviet era, or EU manufacture small arms. whenever you see a conflict around the world on television, that’s what they’re using. i would say anything made outside of those places accounts for like 10% of the small arms around the world at most. and that’s mainly equipment made by europeans in other places. taurus stuff made in brazil. denel stuff made in south africa. IMI stuff made in israel.
that 90% of the humans around the world can’t even make their own small arms, in volume, with reliable designs, after 100 years of time in which to copy existing stuff, really shows the huge intelligence and ingenuity deficit we’re working with here. that’s rubber to the road, push comes to shove type of stuff that the jared diamonds of the world can’t explain.
the chinese have a lot of copied small arms, but they do manufacture in china. so that’s your minimum standard of intelligence. they can copy most of what somebody else comes out with. that shows they have some brainpower. the rest of the humans can’t even do that. after a century. so there’s NO chance of them ever having first world nations with electricity, running clean water, functioning republics, and so forth.
a good basic, jared diamond level test: can they copy existing tech? if they can’t even copy the 100 year old tech, they’re hopeless. initial technological deficits are irrelevant in 2020. just copy what the europeans came up with in 1920. can’t do that? then jared diamond explanations are wrong.
I will just throw the bomb here by mentioning that i found that japanese and south koreans do have smaller SDs than europeans/westerners, according to the PIAAC.
PIAAC has good sampling methodology plus good, highly representative samples. It is the PISA study for adults. The data is modern – from 2013.
PIAAC data has been used in the past in various studies to estimate IQ and G.
The japanese/south korean SD is smaller in reading comprehension, numeracy, and problem solving in technology rich environments. One exception is PSTRE, where japanese, but not south koreans, have similar SD to OECD countries.
I do not know about the quality of studies that found that japanese do not have smaller SD than whites, but this is recent high quality international study. I don’t know why nobody up to now managed to find this interesting east asian SD data.
all accurate. been posting on here for 20 years about all these exact same topics with about the same mathematical take on the situation.
the future is china and the muslims battling for control of the planet.
in 2100 school children won’t believe their ebooks that europeans utterly dominated the earth 100 years ago. and dominated it for 500 years. it would be like a 14 year old mumble rap listener on youtube seeing these videos of van halen, ACDC, guns n roses, led zeppelin, metallica dominating the entire planet and filling stadiums for decades. “No way anybody ever listened to that. I never even heard of this stuff.”
all just a passing biological time period, like an outbreak of beetles or cicadas 12 years ago that the earth barely noticed. oh yeah, right. forgot about that one summer where there were all these moths flying around. they came, peaked, and left. a blink of an eye in geological time scales.
i’ve posted before about how john calhoun’s experiments with rats explains current human behavior a lot better than most stuff. the europeans had their time. now it’s coming to an end. they’re going to voluntarily disappear, with a little help from their (friends).
Thanks. Do you have links?
The creativity thing is like an IQ-subgenre. When we talk about IQ, we have the tests at least and by and by there’re genetic stuff emerging. When we talk about creativity and conformity, what people have are circular arguments. So, what exactly are we talking about?
As if it’s not the same everywhere? At least people can come up with some metric/measurement if one’s so interested?
This is the old traditional view of the past ~200 years. People just carelessly ignore the size differences between Japan & China. The difference in distances from British India (for example, Opium was banned in Japan and the ban was agreed by Britain). And the fact that, for example, Chinese were making naval ships in Fujian and having their factory destroyed by the French around 1870.
Frankly if Japan didn’t disrupt the Qing modernisation by mid 1890s, China would’ve being very different. Or, if the Japanese didn’t disrupt the KMT/Chiang modernisation by their ever more brutal war 1937~1945, China would’ve being very different. Or, if some crazy German didn’t invent some crazy ideology by the aid of some British gentleman, China might still fall to the hands of Mao, but he might as well be just another emperor instead of the crazy shit he actually was.
What I mean is that, on one hand you have an undefined IQ-subgenre, while on the other you have historical contingencies.
Yup. Use the data explorer to get the data and compare the different countries. Btw i just checked out and US whites also generally have larger SDs than japanese and south koreans in most tests.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/ideuspiaac/
Many thanks. I’m curious how the comparison looks look over time.
Well, unfortunately Japan and South Korea did not participate in the 1994 and 2003 studies.
2006 PISA per https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/asian-white-iq-variance-from-pisa.html
OECD AVG=500 SD=90
Finland AVG=548 SD=80
NE Asia (HK, Korea, Taiwan) AVG=548 SD=95
So, this guy does to agree with you and unlike you he produced some numbers.
It is not that he “does not agree” with me, he simply checked a different study. From what i heard though, it is not a good idea to compare children’s IQ between races and sexes. The best way is to compare adults. There are lots of changes happening during growing up and they certainly affect cognition. For example i heard that racial and sex differences are higher among adults.
As far as numbers are concerned, i already produced them, in the form of link. It is not my problem that you are unable to deal with a data explorer. But ok, i will give you numbers if you are too lazy or unable to check them yourself.
PIAAC 2013 reading comprehension
All jurisdiction AVG=267 SD=47
Finland AVG=288 SD=51
Japan AVG=296 SD=40
Now, does this mean that east asians have lower variance? Maybe yes, maybe not. I just said that i never saw anyone else mention this data, that’s it. I will be more than happy to see more high quality data on this issue, because i’m interested in this myself.
Races have different schedules for puberty with blacks hitting it earliest, whites in the middle, East Asians latest. That’s going to influence results for teenagers.
This tends to lead to a lot of bafflement for white do-gooders who start up multiculti projects, black kids will be doing fine in early grades so they think they’ve found the magic recipe to close the gap and then the black students just fall far behind as teenagers.
Привет Анатолий,
I sincerely believe any discussion of Japan should start with its host stating categorically for the record that at no point, at no point, in Japan’s [modern] history, was more than 25% of the country’s workforce comprised of the [in]famous salarymen. Not much different from any high-achieving western economy – and that is at the all-time peak. It’s also worth mentioning that things like overtime or contractual hours do not exist in legal form in many countries to this day. Look at the labor conditions in Chile for a perfect example, where the expectations of employees, in the white collar sectors, make America’s look like northern Europe’s. I believe Japan has the best PR of any country in human history, everything “you” [generic] think you know about it is likely not wholly correct – the situation is rather similar to the reality of Slavic nations in comparison to the Western, specifically handshake-worthy-Western, perception. Beware of all armchair Japan historians who speak suspiciously natural English! It is the soft power superpower, and as Steve has said, so much of the Japanese doom-saying is really more like a clever real estate ploy – if it’s really so awful, why is precisely no one dying to leave? In exchange for working “long” hours at demanding jobs, they get to live a solidly middle class life in a solidly homogeneous society which is among the most functional, with among the most-high-standard-of-living, in existence. If there is a possible less-than-entirely-dystopian iteration of postmodernity, we can surely agree Japan is it.
Пока
I went to https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/idepisa/report.aspx and got report on means and SDs for 2015 PISA.
The following countries have lower SD than Japan:
Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Mexico, Norway, Spain,
The following countries have the same SD as Japan:
Canada, Poland, USA
The top 5 countries with the largest SD:
Israel, Korea, Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland
Are you one of those whose theories are ahead of data? Quite common among the IQists.
Start from the link, then add adults 16-65, then move to step 2 – select variables – PIAAC literacy, numeracy and problem solving, and so on. I don’t think it is so hard, another guy before you made it, so you should be able too. I don’t see why you have so much trouble.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/ideuspiaac
I did it for PISA using the link you listed. And PISA data contradict your theory about low SD for Japan.
Many in this scene are aware of the PISA children data on asian variance, first this was mentioned by Steve Hsu even back in 2008 and you already linked to him.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/asian-white-iq-variance-from-pisa.html
His post on this issue is pretty popular and i saw it once, before years, too. I even thought that the issue on asian variance was settled.
But recently, after studying PIAAC data about adults, something that i was doing for another purpose by the way, i found new adult population data that contradicts the PISA children data on east-asian variance. And as far as i know no one is aware about this data on this particular issue.
So i decided to mention about this here, so that people know about it.
As far as this (lower japanese and south korean variance) being my “theory”, no it isn’t – it is simply what the PIAAC data for adult populations shows. Adult South Korean and Japanese populations have lower variance than almost all other studied countries. Are you able to access the data it or you still have trouble?
I do not have trouble getting data but you have trouble with methodology, cherry picking and jumping to conclusions.
PIAAC 2012/2014 Literacy
SD range: 40-53
Japan 40, Czechia 41, Korea 42, Austria 44, Estonia 44, Turkey 44, Italy 45, Germany 47, Greece 47, Ireland 47,…, USA 50, Canada 50, Chile 53
PIAAC 2012/2014 Numeracy
SD range: 44-64
Czechia 44, Japan 44, Estonia 46, Korea 46, Slovakia 48, Austria 49,…, Chile 59, Israel 64
PIAAC 2012/2014 Problem Solving TRE
SD range: 37-52
Slovakia 37, Austria 38, Korea 38, Ireland 40, Norway 40, Finland 42, Denmark 42, Japan 44,USA 44,…, Poland 48, Chile 49, Israel 52
You cherry picking, right? IN PISA Japan is doe snot sends out in terms of SD. And here in PIAA there are European countries that in Literacy and Numeracy are very similar to Japan in terms of SD. And in Problem Solving Japan is in the middle in terms of SD.
Keep mind that estimates of SD are prone to be very sensitive to outliers even when samples are large. There are non-parametric method that are insensitive to outliers but I do not know if they were applied in this case.
Note that confidence level of SD value is rather low. So if two countries differ in SD by, say 20%, of the SD range it means really nothing.
Anyway your thinking that you have discovered something by focusing on Japan’s SD in literacy while overlooking other data like PISA might be a sign of impaired judgments fueled by delusions of grandeur that usually lead to serious methodological difficulties.
you have to hand it to utu. he tries.
I do not see what i’m cherry picking – i already said that PISA children data shows higher SD for east asian countries, and that this is already well known. The new thing here is that among adult populations, studied by PIAAC, (the PISA for adults), variance is lower in South Korea and Japan.
Overall, as i said, Japan and South Korea have lower variance of their adult populations compared to the big majority of countries as well as the average of all jurisdictions. This is the case, as mentioned above, in Literacy and Numeracy for both countries, as well as in Problem Solving for South Korea.
Well, maybe PISA data then is bs too and it can not be taken seriously as well. Therefore no one knows whether east asians have larger variance or not.
I will say that PIAAC and PISA are one of the highest quality available studies, these are large international studies that beat almost everything else.
So if you think that PIAAC, in the case of adult populations, offers low quality data, then good luck to you.
Seems like the article is regurgitating from the echo chamber with plenty of hand waving and no concrete data.
The OECD PISA survey has a special study different from the standard more academic survey on “CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING” with large sample size supervised by OECD conducted by another European research institution different from the standard PISA survey (thus if there is any bias it is not systematic) using problems that are vaguely defined with no complete data provided for solving where the students needs to know what are needed and how to find those data, i.e. ROTE LEARNING WILL NOT HELP. The creative problem solving ability can be characterized by the ability to utilize (existing) knowledge and the ability for new knowledge acquisition.
http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/pisa-2012-results-skills-for-life-volume-v_9789264208070-en
The test is based on objective interaction with computers (to take out the human element) which present the fuzzy and ill defined novel problems with inadequate (not all required) knowledge supplied, and additional info will be given only when the candidate intuitively know what additonal knowledge are required and ask/search for them. Significant number of students just stared blankly at the screen. Rote learning does not help.
However they frame the requirements, creative problem solving score is still strongly correlated to the standard PISA score. A plot of the PISA CPS vs the standard PISA scores to find the general relationship between the standard PISA and the CPS scores,
http://i63.tinypic.com/v666fc.png
Singapore, Korea, Japan, HongKong, Macau, Taiwan and China did score very well. Though China is about the same level as HongKong, Taiwan and Macau on CPS scores, it scored higher on the standard PISA test which might be there were some element of rote learning, but China’s CPS score is still higher than those from western countries. From the CPS results, rote learning or not China still seems to be more creative than those from the western countries. It is worth reminding that the CPS test was designed and conducted by a western country. The results show that there is a gap where the EastAsians are better than the Western countries in new knowledge acquisition. Contrary of the usual echo chamber narratives, the AUS and CAN are actually better than the Chinese in existing knowledge utilization which might be from rote learning.
http://i68.tinypic.com/dfwxzm.png
The plot to see the interplay of knowledge utilization and acquisition skills. Singapore and Korea are highly skilled for new knowledge acquisition whereas Japan is better at knowledge utilization which might be related to rote learning to have a larger knowledge base. The Han Chinese regions are quite good new knowledge acquisition and not as good as knowledge utilization and thus they are prone to re-invent the wheel which is the reverse of common biased narratives. Still there is a gap between the new knowledge acquisition skills for the East Asians and the Westerners.
You failed to mention that Japan and South Korea had lower variance on both problem solving PISA tests, though. As far as China is concerned, only several (biggest and most affluent) cities were tested, so the results are not representative of the country. The whole of China will participate only in PISA 2018. I suspect that averages will be considerably lower, no idea what will happen to variance.
I did a twitter thread about how, despite the Soviet Union sending up the first satellite and first man into space, that the USA was always ahead of them in the technical skills needed for space flight. The Soviets got glory for being first, but the American spacecraft sent up shortly after each of the Soviet accomplishments were much better. The first Soviet cosmonauts had to eject from their spacecrafts (was the plan) because the Soviets had yet to figure out how to slow them down to safely land. The Soviets never landed a man on the moon, not because they didn’t want to, but because their project kept failing.
My thread:
https://twitter.com/PALE_Primate/status/926065061885632512
That’s no “bombshell”. I expected to find an IQ study when you mentioned you were about to “drop a bombshell”
In 1860 there was no “China”, only the Qing Empire. That is, a shameful “empire” of horse-riding stone-age Manchu barbarians. I doubt they were the people to really care one way or the other about “China”. (Whatever that is.)
Japan is literally dying out, on the road to hell in a literal country-wide suicide pact.
So, no.
a) This is a bald-faced lie. USA space tech was always behind. Still is today.
b) The USA never landed men on the Moon. Robots and probes – sure. But not men.
P.S. Robotics was always the crown jewel and only real achievement of the USA space program.
Chinese men cannot play football. Great mystery. Seriously.
As economy develops, Chinese sports competence improves generally. But not Men’s football. I mean soccer. Chinese men’s team’s current international standing is worse than in the 1980s.
But, as the topic of this article says, it probably doesn’t matter. 😀
I mean, this really is confusing. I’m not suggesting comparing to Brazil or anything but to Thailand for example. The national U18 team of China lost big to Thailand’s recently.
Not that I care about football, I mean, soccer. But then how much do I care about Chemistry Nobels?
The manchu rulers did say something like, they rather lose parts of the country to western powers than gave it to Han Chinese.
But Japan also got her share of internal turmoil before they settle down on econ development.
But then, the size difference of the two “countries” does matter now in this regard, does it not?
it’s comical actually
I don’t think IQ can explain this.
Have you ever read descriptions by creative people of how their ideas come to them?
Some famous mathematicians, scientists, and others have given us detailed descriptions.
Basically, it is entirely outside their control – they work and work on their problem and nothing happens, they can’t solve it. Then one day, often after a period of relaxation, it “comes to them” from the outside. The experience is one of the ideas coming from the outside without their control.
In other words, they do not set out to be “nonconformost” and break taboos or whatever – they work on a problen trying to find a solution.
In fact, what does nonconformist even mean with math and science? You are not breaking any social conventions by coming up with the right mathematical solution or inventing something new – you are not destroying the family or disrespecting parents or whatever. The social dimension doesn’t even exist in these abstract problems (although unanticipated social effects may appear later).
Can anyone explain in detail how conformity might operate here?
The only thing I can think of is that a scientist may not wish to outshine the boss – OK, but there are plenty of ways to publish anonymously or even attribute ideas to your boss. But such a rigid social structure would not even allow effective engineering among groups – can an underling offer an engineering solution his boss didn’t think of first? And we know japanese companies encourage contributions from their lowest level employees, and that’s part of their success.
Clearly, this is not operative here.
So, appealing to a social mechanism – conformity – to explain an intellectual limitation is not convincing.
That sounds really cool – no, I did not take that train.
Maybe next time.
The Japanese do have cool engineering and infrastructure, that’s for sure.
“China’s curious historical position as a rather economically efficient state coupled with general economic and technological stasis.”
Not curious at all. You see, Malthus was right. When people breed like rodents, they and their children will live and die like rodents.
It is indeed true that, for long historical periods of time, China’s economy was very efficient. Using only primitive technology, they supported populations of many hundreds of millions of people. In bare subsistence poverty. So yes, efficient, but also pointless, as almost all of the economic output was used to sustain a vast malnourished peasantry. In such conditions, there is very little surplus to reinvest. There is also crushing corruption and nepotism, as people on the edge of starvation are by nature selfish and cautious.
After Mao’s initial policy of ‘strength through numbers’ was shown to be a fiasco, and China’s rate of population growth slowed down, then China started to acquire real wealth. Note how India, with continued high fertility rates, has not. If China continues on its present path, it has a chance to really become a true power – and as the United States continues to force population growth ever higher, while starving the real economy of investment, it will likely start to go the other way.
I have opposed some hostile ideas about China before (such as Xinjiang, muh democracy, the non-existent colonisation of Siberia) but I am beginning to find the value judgement-embedded China-boosting on Unz a wee bit vexatious.
I wouldn’t compare postwar Japan to the 1920s-30s version that was completely lacking in industrial capacity (I think most munitions were produced by households). And a large part of the US’ success was due to breaking their codes, we would have won anyway, but that greatly shortened the war
The Soviet R7 rocket was an objectively far superior space launch vehicle than the US redstone rocket that put Alan Shepard in space a few months later .The US could only manage a sub orbital flight in the immediate aftermath of Yuri Gagarin.
The US beat the USSR to the moon because of much greater money and the complete authority given to Werner Von Braun.
After Sergei Korolev (who was basically a one man NASA) died there were atleast 3 rival teams Chaemoli,Yangel and Mishin competing for very scarce funds and two rocket engine designers Glaushko and Kuznetsov all with sky high egos,their own design bureaus and very different ideas of going to the moon.
After the dust settled after about 15 years after Apollo the Soviets could land on the moon using the Energia rocket which was technically superior to the Saturn V and had a superior space program overall except in the field of long range space probes as the US is still the only country to have sent probes beyond Mars.
Idk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera
“Dying out” with the highest life expectancy in the world…that makes a lot of sense….
Yes the Soviet probes to Venus were very impressive but their probes to Mars decidedly less so and they never attempted sending anything beyond Mars like the Voyager probes hence my assertion that the US had overall superior space probes.
i reckon it was much like Christiaan Barnard and the first heart transplant, or Legendre and the first publication of least squares.
the competitor was far ahead, and more developed, but was waiting until they were finished with a complete work before appearing in public, while the other guy had a less developed version and just wanted to rush to be first.
the soviets were doing a minor version of what the chinese do all the time. the soviets were way less bad or annoying about this stuff, the space race mattered a lot so they’d take any ‘first’ they could get regardless of it meaning less technically or being unsafe. russians don’t do that kind of stuff often. the chinese are by far the leaders in such things and will push to the next unsafe, unproven step in any tech as soon as possible.
the soviets also ‘got’ to the moon first by just launching some dumb probe straight into the surface. the US also could have done that, but didn’t, since there was not much point. after the US got humans to the moon, the soviets didn’t want to spend the money on that project anymore, so they did do useful projects like landing on venus. and some dangerous projects like launching nuclear reactors into orbit. some of which crashed into canada later.
less clear is stuff like frank whittle and hans von ohaine.
As long as they have people who are willing to make children they will be fine. There are more Japanese now then in the past. They seem to be doing fine by that metric.
What do you find vexatious. I think most commenters here who are experts on technology do acknowledge that china does not really have that big of an innovative flair.
https://twitter.com/PALE_Primate/status/926080813799759872
Another irony of life – how people writing about who is smart, always seem the most stupid ones.
ESA has gone beyond Mars.
Oh bullshit. The Soviets never got their moon rocket to work. Kept blowing up.
Problem about PISA is that it mainly does not test correlates of intelligence or academic ability in children, but rather cultural conformity to the expectations of the test designers (who are educational consultant companies, working for a contract for the OECD).
The exam not only has little academic content, but questions are often technically incorrect, or with more than one correct answer. In many cases, more intelligent children will be score false, while stupider but more conformist children score correct.
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PISA is all without harm, until you learn that countries (especially third-world countries) are investing to try to improve their PISA score. As PISA test is without much academic content, they will simply waste the children’s time, when they should be learning real knowledge and skills.
OECD are experts about economic policy, but teaching children real knowledge – is clearly not their area.
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If you are interested in the e.g. maths level, of children in different countries – there is a real way to know this.
You simply look at the maths exam, what kind of topics are introduced in the exam, and the proportion of children who pass the exam. (And if you really want, the scheme for scoring maths exams). This allows quite easy comparisons between countries and across time.
In Russia, children have the highest, or one of the highest, levels of maths, as the proportion answering difficult questions (around 60%). For example, in UK – only around 15% of children are answering questions in equivalent topics, in their final exam before they go to university.
However, after educational reforms in 2015 to the exam in Russia – which introduced the separate higher option exam (which includes topics which used to be the part C of the exam), proportion of children answering the difficult questions is already falling.
Yes in collaboration with NASA Cassini Huygens probe…NASA provided the nuclear thermo electric generators(solar doesn’t work beyond Mars) and the deep space network for guidance and control and iirc footed most of the cost of the project..
The Energia rocket which was flown successfully twice in the 1980s had the payload capability for a moon mission…
What you are referring to is the N1 rocket which failed 4 times and was then cancelled…
And the most eccentric.
At 2:00 in video below how track is switching on Osaka monorail
It is not so much this specific post, but based on Karlin’s general comments – I think Karlin is beginning to fall in love with an idealised version of China.
It is not nearly as bad as Fred Reed or Godfree Roberts, but none the less it seems to be going further than merely saying that China as a country should not be underestimated.
You seem to think that you are smarter than OECD in sampling theory, are you? And who are you? Go read up on statistical sampling theory on how to create representative samples. OECD has the data on the cognitive demographics of all the countries involved. They dictate which schools and which students are to be tested so as the samples are representative. Though the country involved can have some leeway to decline some of the specific selections, all those data are transparently reported. For example it was reported that Canada declined the selection of all Native Indians in the sample, UK had higher decline rate than China, etc. OECD has the targeted sample demographics and the data on the percentage of those targets that had been achieved. You dont know what you are talking about.
There are many other OECD facts that contradict the echo chamber narratives, for example some claimed that their low scores were because their students were not “motivated” to take the PISA tests. That were totally wrong on both counts, e.g. the 2015 PISA tests were accompanied with the student well being studies of which motivation was studied. The OECD results showed that the East Asians were moderately “motivated” where as the Americans were highly motivated.
“Motivation” is also correlated with many other factors and cannot be studied in isolation. There is the myth that higher “motivation” will give higher performance but that have to be tested with numbers. There was also study on “anxiety”. In the “real world” rather than the fictitious bubbles in their minds, the OECD data showed that in the real world in general high “motivation” induces high “anxiety” which reduces the cognitive performance under competitions, especially for those snowflakes. It seems that only 25% of those countries with Viking, AngloSaxon/Celtic or EastAsian ancestries can thrive under competitions. Thus in general both assumptions for the echo chamber narrative were wrong. If I have time I can dig out the data to show that.
Another false echo chamber narratives is about prep classes or after school tuitions which UNESCO and OECD also have data on. The OECD data showed that East Asians except Koreans were only moderately involved with that and the levels were only slightly above that for USA. Those whinging lusers abut EastAsians in prep classes seem to be only projecting “their laziness” on the rest of the Americans.
Completely agreed except for this:
Have not heard of this before. Any stats to back it up?
I agree with you that romanticising China too much might be a bit silly even if what Karlin writes is generally accurate. A multi polar world is better than one superpower imposing its norms and governing style across the rest of the world. We wouldn’t want China telling the rest of the world what cultural values they must have anymore than the USA. However as of now China is the only economic superpower right now which has the strength and ability to stand up to the insanity of the American globohomo empire and its attempts to turn the whole world into one giant deracinated mass.
You simply look at the… – Writng your thoughts is simple. In reality nothing is simple.
In Russia, children have the highest, or one of the highest, levels of maths…. – on paper only. IMO 80% of kids can be taught various tricks and mnemonic devices by learning to identify to which category a given problem belongs and then apply learned template they were taught and trained to solve it. Only 20% of kids can think outside of the box and when given a problem that is formulated in a new unknown to them way will be table to translate it into a know to them problem and then solved it.
These 80% of kids will never encounter problems they trained to deal with in school after they graduate.
IMO pumping up kids with math they do not need is waste of time. It does not teach them creativity or independent thinking.
Exactly. That’s why variance estimates are suspect and most likely not representative. And this Passer by character tries to blow out of proportion the fact that in LITERACY Japan has the lowest SD though similar to that of Czech Republic and in NUMERACY it has SD as low as Czech Republic while he conveniently forgets that in PROBLEM SOLVING its SD is in the middle and furthermore conveniently forgets that in PISA Japan’s SD is also in the middle. What was his point? What was this discovery everybody missed? That Japanese score high but they are just noncreative automatons all thinking alike? Another after reiner Tor character practitioner of consolation Onanism? AaronB wrote something about it up the thread.
Concentrate on Czechia. Why Czech Republic has low SD? Should Czech Academy of Science call for a special task force to study this great national ‘problem’ of low SD? Perhaps there is something in Czech beer? Perhaps Czech Academy of Science could consult Passer by who has a special knack for making sweeping theories based on one data point.
It is really a mystery. The Chinese played football during the the Han dynasty from about 200 BCE and FIFA recognized that, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuju
They are now hopeless in football, even with encouragement from the central government, i.e. Xi is a football fan and the Central Politburo has a sub-committee on football chaired by a Vice Premier and they have signed MOUs with various countries for the promotion football competitions. May be that is their self-deprecation soft power activity.
https://www.bundesliga.com/en/news/Bundesliga/agmd12-germany-and-china-sign-comprehensive-soccer-agreement.jsp
“Germany and China sign comprehensive soccer agreement”
https://www.scmp.com/sport/soccer/article/2101554/germanys-football-diplomacy-delights-beaming-xi-jinping-chinese
“Germany’s football diplomacy delights beaming Xi Jinping as Chinese president and Angela Merkel watch kids’ match in Berlin”
The important difference was how the Russian German rocket experts compared to the American German rocket expert.
It is pointless just focusing solely on the SD data for Japan and Korea as there are local pecularities. Both countries have significantly more aging populations which will be excluded, PIAAC only samples ages 16-65. The aged tends to have decreasing cognitive abilities thus the left hand side of the bell curve will be significantly thinned, reducing the SD. For Korea those 65+ are about 14.1% of the population.
PIAAC also specifically excludes military personel of which Korea has the world longest mandatory military service of about 24 months plus 6 more years of short duration annual retrainings, totalling may be 30 months of the male adult lives. The fraction of Korean male 15-24 (rather than the 16-25) is 13.3%, thus the upper limit of active male conscript periods could be about 4% of male lives. Those under IQ 85 might be reassigned to other non-military tasks and might be in the PIAAC sample. Those in active conscript periods most probably are on the right hand side of the bell curve and thinning it, reducing the SD further.
I am not familiar with military conscriptions but I will assume that most of the time they will be more physical than mental activities. Thus the cognitive development might be stagnate during those period. Those already out of schools for 2 years might not want to return to university thus thinning out the right hand side further, reducing the SD.
Military training is not walking in the park but really put them out of the comfort zones. Though there might be positive effects on the physical side, various studies have shown than on mental side there might be various negatives for 5% to 25% of those involved, such as PTSD, head/brain/mental damages, which last their whole lives, i.e. 5% to 25%. of 58.8% of the remaining male adult lives (say 25~64). Low IQ also tends to have PTSD. IQ test below 85 are less sensitive, more will hit the low floor cutoff rather than moving further to the left. Thus the left hand side is yet thinning down, reducing the SD. All these tend to thin out the right and left tails and relatively boost the central regions, thus reducing the SD.
On top of all these it is harder to recruit Japanese or Korean adults for testing as they usually have to work. It is different for USA where a large population are under-employed (graduates working in job that do not require any university degrees) or unemployed and might readily turn up for the psych tests. For PIAAC the min country sample size is only 5000. For PISA it is 6300 and can be readily obtained from participating schools.
I agree that “It is pointless just focusing solely on the SD data for Japan and Korea”. My point was that a singular data point like this from PIAAC for literacy and numeracy which is not replicated in Problem Solving part of PIAAC and is not replicated in PISA should not be used as a starting point to push cumbersome theories about East Asians conformism and lack of creativity.
NB: Since Japan and Korea have high scores there is more people hitting the upper cut-off which will reduce SD as well.
2015 PISA Graphical Summary
http://oi65.tinypic.com/2lkww3m.jpg
http://oi64.tinypic.com/t05gjm.jpg
Note:
(1) Japan and Korea in terms of standard deviation are close to the mean and median
(2) PISA-Math and PISA-Reading correlate well
(3) SD does not correlate with PISA score for either Math or Reading parts
(4) SD-Math and SD-Reading correlate well
(5) IQ country scores correlate well with PISA-Math and less well with PISA-Reading. About 64% and 40% of variance in PISA scores respectively can be explained by IQ scores.
It is not the OECD who told China what to test, dear dux.ie. It is China that decided that only few, richer cities/areas will be tested. It is not that hard to research the issue of PISA and China.
China’s participation in the 2012 test was limited to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau as separate entities. In 2012, Shanghai participated for the second time, again topping the rankings in all three subjects, as well as improving scores in the subjects compared to the 2009 tests. Shanghai’s score of 613 in mathematics was 113 points above the average score, putting the performance of Shanghai pupils about 3 school years ahead of pupils in average countries. Educational experts debated to what degree this result reflected the quality of the general educational system in China, pointing out that Shanghai has greater wealth and better-paid teachers than the rest of China.[31] Hong Kong placed second in reading and science and third in maths.
In 2018 the following four Chinese provinces participated: Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. In 2015, the participating provinces were Jiangsu, Guangdong, Beijing, and Shanghai.[32][33][34] The 2015 Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong cohort scored a median 518 in science in 2015, while the 2012 Shanghai cohort scored a median 580.
Critics of PISA counter that in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, most children of migrant workers can only attend city schools up to the ninth grade, and must return to their parents’ hometowns for high school due to hukou restrictions, thus skewing the composition of the city’s high school students in favor of wealthier local families. A population chart of Shanghai reproduced in The New York Times shows a steep drop off in the number of 15-year-olds residing there.[35] According to Schleicher, 27% of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds are excluded from its school system (and hence from testing). As a result, the percentage of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds tested by PISA was 73%, lower than the 89% tested in the US.[36] Following the 2015 testing, OECD published in depth studies on the education systems of a selected few countries including China.[37]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#China
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/01/04/are-the-pisa-education-results-rigged/#19df4f791561
So what i said is pretty clear – performance for China is overrated.
If variance estimates are suspect then the PISA estimates of of east asian children having higher SDs are suspect too. Then you should have told Steve Hsu that he is wrong and nothing conclusive can come from PISA data anyway.
If data is bad anyway and they can not properly estimate their SDs, then all results are suspect, including results where east asian countries have higher SDs.
Therefore no conclusion is possible on the issue of east asian variance.
But this is not what i’m hearing from you. You say that east asians have higher SDs based on PISA data, and thats Ok, and it shows that they don’t have low variance.
Then you turn and say that that in the cases when they have generally lower SDs based on PIAAC data, then the data is shit because they can’t estimate their SDs.
Well darling, this is not how it works. If PISA and PIAAC can not properly estimate their SDs, then all of their data is useless and no one really knows if east asians have lower variance or not.
I’m not blowing anything out of proportion. This is what i said and this is what the data shows.
On PISA problem solving tests for children, Japan and South Korea have lower variance than the vast majority of countries and the average of all countries.
On PIAAC tests for adults, Japan and South Korea have lower variance than the vast majority of countries and the average of all countries in 5 out of 6 cases.
Adults:
Japan Reading Lower variance.
Japan Numeracy Lower variance.
Japan Problem Solving – medium variance, similar to average.
South Korea Reading Lower variance.
South Korea Numeracy Lower variance.
South Korea Problem Solving – Lower variance
@dux.ie
Not an argument, South Korean adult population has low variance in all age groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Latin_Americans#Historical_demographic_growth
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/17/brazil-census-african-brazilians-majority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentines_of_European_descent#Genetic_research
You still do not get it. Concentrate on your argument and your motive. Why do you argue about it? Why did you bring up that SD for Japanese is lower in one particular survey of test and ignored the fact that Japanese SD is average or even higher in other surveys of different tests
All I wanted to point out that your are conclusion driven and not data driven. Your pet theory is that Japanese or East Asian in general are less creative, more rigid, and so on. Pretty much what this reiner Tor character wrote here. And you wanted to add your two cents. The question is why you had this urge to chip in your piece of misguided wisdom. Is it the issue of consolation Onanism that AaronB identified as a motive behind the never ending yapping by alt-righters about the lack of creativity in East Asia?
There can be many reasons why variances are as they are. Most important is sampling issue. Is sampling representative? Or is there some bias that affect variance? Perhaps schools selected are not representative. Possibly in some jurisdictions only “good” schools with “good” students were selected. Then there is a possibility of tweaking the results by filtering “outliers” which may involve different procedure in different jurisdictions. Then there might be beefing up of data by removing low end outliers which would be cheating.
But for you these issues do not enter your mind. You are a typical IQists who has infinite faith in numbers. You have a number fetish and do not question what did it take to create this number. You see a number and you think it must be real and must mean something particularly when it confirms you a priori bias.
Just let it go. Perhaps you have some talents. Have you tried pottery or gardening? Numbers are not your thing. You seem to be skewed towards autism and numbers will aggravate you OCD that usually comes with autism. Read some soothing novel that shows the richness of human actions and character. Try Tolstoy or Balzac.
It’s simple to compare exams of different countries, how they are scored and proportion who enter the exam.
If you want to know what the level the children are attaining between countries in a particular topic, and what proportion of children this is – there is the answer (and it’s easiest to compare between countries for mathematics, than for other topics).
Whether this information is useful or not, is another question.
More usefully, you can look between countries at number of university graduates in these topics, and whether the university curriculum was adequate.
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Usefully, here, you could see lack of matching between educational level and occupational level, in the same areas.
For example, in Republic of Ireland, there is higher proportion of occupations requiring certain skills and education, than education level of native population, and therefore a lot of importation of skilled gastarbeiters. In Russia, the situation is comparatively reversed.
A well designed exam for children should primarily testing basic knowledge and skill. In the end of the exam, there can be designed some more difficult questions to challenge the proportion of more knowledgable or talented children.
Creativity and independent thinking is expressed after a person has basic knowledge and skills in the topic, and it often a result of learning more knowledge, having more practice, and developing more understanding.
School can teach basic knowledge and skills. People may or may not express creativity in areas where they have more knowledge, and school cannot be a sufficient condition of this, but the school should provide the necessary condition.
This behaviour is more an expression of character types.
For some people, it is naturally far more exciting to project about future possibilities, than to think about current, already realized ones. In Jungian psychology, this would correspond to “intuitive personality types”.
For people with this tendency, developing countries like China, Brazil and India, will often seem far more interesting than developed countries. Although the interesting thing for them, is not current situation of the countries, but rather potentialities they perceive for their future – here there is a lot of space for fantasy, and also certain faculties of clairvoyance.
I sympathize with this view, – although I am more curious about India – and feel a little sad we might be old men before India starts “take off”.
If you have any specific issues with things in this or any other posts, name them. If you think the general description of the situation is significantly different, give us an outline of how things would look in your opinion.
BTW I don’t really get what do you mean by “falling in love” with China here – one major point made here was that despite the higher IQ, Chinese are lagging when compared to whites. The second major point was that this might matter less currently than it did a century ago. The third major point was that Globohomo ideology is a major weakness, which even raises the prospect of China dominating the US. (Without Globohomo, I’d expect some kind of Cold War II type situation, where neither would be strong enough to outright dominate the other. But it’s not hard science anyway.) Do you disagree with any of these? If yes, which? Do you think there are other major points which are overlooked by us? What would those be?
There are many points one can make, for example a Chinese world dominance might be worse than a US world dominance, or at least not much better. (We don’t know.)
I don’t really get what use it is whining about the supposed China-favoritism or certain authors or commenters.
I now realized you must be a Jewish woman. (Or at least a British word for cigarette, though your being Jewish is still very likely.) This kind of debating style (switching to ad hominem arguments about the supposed motives of the interlocutor) is typical of women, homos and Jews, for example AaronB.
Try to make substantive arguments about the issue at hand instead of thinking about the possible motives of the people with opposing points of view. Once you’ve defeated the substance of the argument, you can fantasize about what you think the reasons for the errors might be, but don’t switch outright to ad hominem “arguments” right in your second sentence, because it just destroys the purpose of the comment board.
The rest is for the benefit of the others, not this British word for cigarette.
Well, all the data points to them being less creative in recent history (i.e. last 500 years), so you need an explanation for that. The explanation might be historical contingency (i.e. they will converge or even overtake whites, just give them enough time), cultural (i.e. it might be more persistent, but the reasons are not genetic), genetic, or a combination of these.
I’m not even sure the commenter “Passer by” was strongly arguing for East Asians having a lower SD than whites. He simply raised the possibility. Sure, he only has one data point (or maybe six data points given the three different tests for both Japanese and South Koreans), so maybe later tests will have different results and then we’ll abandon the hypothesis, but it is nevertheless a possibility. Why do you think it’s impossible? He has already answered your argument based on PISA several times. (It’s based on children, so their SD might be somewhat different. But yes, those are contradicting data points, so maybe his hypothesis is not very strong.)
Tor has a Chinese boyfriend 🙂
And I think we know who the sub is lol….
Didn’t you say you are moving to Hong Kong, Tor, on another thread?
Don’t worry, you will be assigned a large Chinese dom that you will be required to service every day 🙂
Your fantasies will come true!
And you make a good point about debating styles – the passionless and “objective” manner that is the natural style of the cuck has indeed come to characterize the deracinated European as of late, while self respecting groups argue with passion.
And no, Tor, don’t ask me to be your dom – I don’t swing that way 🙂
In the same thread you begged Karlin and German_reader to nail you in the ass.
You mistake being a faggot for being passionate.
Yes. But one has to define what are the necessary conditions. Does teaching Zermelo Fraenkel axioms or Peano axioms in the third grade of high school to everybody is necessary? And what about variational calculus or functional analysis? Or group theory as the foundation of geometry?
I have been taught these things in high school and it was a waste of time for 90% of students.
There is no universal education. Yes to schools for everybody but different schools. German system that still operates in Switzerland where at age of 14 your career is decided students are put on different tracks: vocational school, technical school or high school. After vocational school you will never go to college. After technical school with lots of effort you may qualify to get to polytechnic university but not to university. Only high schools open door for you to higher educations. This system works though yes it breeds some resentment. But you can’t lie to people that there are equal chances to everybody all the time. This chances should stop at reasonable time like at age 14.
Chinese fighter jets are already flying with their own WS-10 engines. More powerful WS-15 engine for 5th gen. fighter J-20 and WS-20 high-bypass ratio engine for heavy transport Y-20 are in the pipeline and will be available in 3-5 years.
Only a few companies in the world can produce engines for civilian airliners that are commercially competitive on the international market. Even Russia has not been able to offer such an engine yet. China is developing CJ-1000A for its C919 airliner and CJ-2000, in cooperation with Russia, for their CR-929.
China’s Hualong One nuclear reactor is world-class, and is currently under evaluation by the British nuclear regulator for possible exportation to UK.
As for China’s missile technology, besides their strategic ICBM and SLBM, and all kinds of tactical ballistic missiles, including their exclusive anti-ship ballistic missiles, they are also at the final stage of the development of hypersonic missiles. China is also one of 4 countries and regime that deployed satellite navigational systems. Currently, China is 1 of only 3 countries that have their own manned space program. By 2024, China will be the only country that has a functioning space station. China may land a man on the moon by the 2030s.
Sure, classes can be separated by ability, and there can be modification of what you teach for each ability level. Moreover, especially talented student can be provided with additional tutoring in other areas (university level) – this is a good idea.
But there should be equal potential access for students to all important topics, and ability of children to move between lower and higher classes, if they change their attitude or improve their ability.
This is not a good idea. Talents of children often don’t emerge until at later ages than 14.
Moreover, intelligent children can sometimes (often?) develop later than stupider children.
What about reading some serious Western 19 century and early 20 century literature? Like H. Balzac, C. Dickens, F. Dostoyevsky, A. Tolstoy, T. Mann, R. Musil, M. Bulgakov, H. Broch, J. Roth, A. Döblin. I would add even J. Hašek.
White nationalists and HBD whites who claim they wish to defend the West are generally ignorant of Western culture and do not acquaint themselves with the great Western tradition.
It is this ignorance which makes them unaware of the fact that the Enlightenment is responsible for dissolving tradition, for instance.
In terms of creativity, we have some so-so theories such as conformity etc. Nobody has come up with even a so-so story regarding Chinese Men’s football. On the other hand, Chinese Women’s football seems to be normally performing.
Regarding Men’s football, there’s a large fan base. The economy is way better than in the 1980s. The physiques of men, the sports elites’ in particular, look like rather similar in comparison to Japanese, Korean, or Southeast Asians. Look at Track & Field performances, there’s no big difference. If any, Chinese Men seem not too bad. And there’re enough team sports where Chinese Men perform comparatively with East & Southeast Asians, and frequently favorably.
But not football.
Its because Chinese are not genetically adapted to use their feet. You see, Chinese evolved in a rather flat environment – the wide alluvial plains of the Yangtze basin.
By contrast, Japanese and Koreans evolved in a highly mountainous terrain, necessitating climbing and skilled footwork to avoid slipping down steep canyons. Those with bad footwork died, leaving a population evolved to be better at soccer.
HBD explains everything!
🙂
The funny thing is, if South Amer does not exist (let Columbus drown in the vast ocean), and if we can for a moment forget about the two outliers in Italy & Spain, then Men’s football correlates, if only intuitively approximately, with economic and scientific achievements.
If we think back about Renaissance & Einstein’s Italian mathematician friends or Enrico Fermi, then we can even aford to put Italy back into the data set.
On top of that, football, the modern form (let’s forget the Mayans and the original Han), was invented by the starter of Industrial Revolution.
Football == civilization & technological prowess
Xi and Putin seem to agree. Xi, I believe, really wants to have a World Cup in China, only Chinese Men’s team suck so much.
And that there must be a genetic angle can’t be disputed.
Within Africa, the hypothesis seems to hold too. USA is a bit odd, but, in terms of civilizational development, they’re always odd. I mean, which of the countries fond of Locke and Voltaire in the mid of 1800s had slaves?! Come on! It’s after Napoleon!
If it is so easy for China to pull wool over OECD’s eyes, why can’t India do the same to tell OECD which students to test instead of suffering the unpleasant event and had to pull out from future tests??
You are lying, your libs are moving. Directly from Andreas Schleicher himself.
https://oecdedutoday.com/are-the-chinese-cheating-in-pisa-or-are-we-cheating-ourselves/
The Shanghai sampling was validated by a US company Westat,
http://ncee.org/2013/12/response-to-the-brookings-institution-attack-on-pisa/
You are very very guilible to conspiracy theory, aren’t you??
China is also different from the Western schools in that there is no automatic grade advancement. While the smart students are in high school Grade 10, 44% of the Shanghai sample are 15 yo in Grade9 in middle school and that included the migrant students. In sampling theory weighting factors can be applied to obtain the appropriate demographic target.
Schleicher simply stated the data without offending China. To the Chinese parents test scores are secondary, the most important is their children can go to tier 1 universities. Those tier1 universities have regional quota and students studying in certain regions have better chances of being admitted. Just look at New York city, the parents usually were trying to get their children into the top 8 senior high school like Stuyvesant HS. Then NYC Mayor de Blasio instead of admission purely from the objective SHSAT scores, he threatened to spread the intakes to the top 7% of every junior high schools. Top feeder schools like Christa McAuliffe School which normally has 85+% of their students receiving the SHS offered places might be drastically slashed to 7%. The parents realized that and those that are smart and risk aversed sent their children to lesser performing schools. In three years the student numbers dropped 20+% and the SHS offer rates also dropped accordingly, i.e. even the smart students were fleeing. Those parents are smarter than you or NYT.
You are projecting your white privilege. Wealth does not produce better students. Take the Christa McAuliffe School again, the overall students’ family in poverty level is over 60% and it beats the second ranking the Anderson School with poeverty level of less than 10%. In Anderson School the smart less well off students had fled resulting in reduced SHS offer rate, the poverty rate and diversity index also decreased. Those rich students do not give a damn and they can always go to the private high schools. The performance of Anderson School is still below that of Christa McAuliffe School. de Blasi’s aim of ethnics de-segregation backfired by creating more segregation by wealth.
You are projecting conditions that are not even true in USA. In many countries the academic performance of the rurals and suburbans are higher than those in the cities, e.g. the US NAEP data, the England data, etc. For China the data presented from a Stanford researcher definately showed that the rurals performed better than the cities for mathematics, the combined scores and the composite scores,
http://oi64.tinypic.com/2ilhi83.jpg
Though the chart was label as the College Entrance Exam (CEE) scores, the data are more like the percentage distributions that passed the min college admission scores. The cities only scored better in languages but that did not change that much to the overall total or composite scores. Recently the weighting factor for languages were further reduced.
The top performers from the counties for both the Science and Humanity streams were higher than the respective scores for the cities.
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/917aaba497edfe6e-422×360.jpg
Most Chinese provinces have their own different CEE with different standard. Some top Australian universities accept the Chinese CEE scores for admission. The smarter Shanghai parents will send their children to remote Yunan where it is easier to score higher grades rather than slugging it out with the other fiercely competing local Shanghai students.
These results were from USA published by Brooklin itself. Are they also rigged??
https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ccf_20170201_reeves_2.png
East Asian teams in general are not great. They would probably have serious difficulties qualifying for the World Cup from Europe. Their very best players play in Europe, because their own clubs (or the Asian Champions League) don’t have much prestige. We’re talking about first world economies here, and still. But yes, China is the biggest anomaly.
By the way, Hungary has been somewhat similar in recent decades, a very shitty football team (and very few moderately outstanding players), but exceptional performance at the Summer Olympics. Even our performance in some popular individual spectator sports (like tennis or cycling) has traditionally been very weak. (Okay, these are expensive sports.) And our performance in other team sports is also lackluster.
Another oddity is that the Chinese women usually get better sooner than Chinese men do. It’s really a strange phenomena.
Even in things like Chess, Chinese women reached top level way before Chinese men did. Actually I can’t think of any Chinese men reaching top level in Chess.
I don’t think it’s so odd. Women’s sports are less competitive and thus a sustained government effort has a bigger chance of achieving success.
I think it’s actually illegal. I vaguely remember there was such a case just a few years ago some parents sent their kids to Xinjiang and somehow got caught. You can imagine that at least some of the local families do not like it.
If anything, the families which manage to bring their kids to Shanghai to be educated, the parents are not below average, IQ-wise, statistically speaking. It’s not as if you only get sweat jobs for under average semi dummies in the vincinity of Shanghai.
On the other hand, even if the average score of entire China is indeed exaggerated, the coastal China itself is not small. There’s hardly any solid reason that if England or Sweden can be considered separately for whatever purpose, that the coastal China cannot be measured separately accordingly. Only that they’re backed by the vast China heartland.
By your logic, do you want East and Central Europe separated from West Europe, England from Scotland and Ireland, or maybe City of London from rest of England even?
Or maybe there is a set of optimal conditions where you have an excellent population of certain size and stellar IQ and a level of cohesion? And then what? To the moon?
I honestly don’t think historical evidences support this line of thinking. After all, the NW Europe was pretty much garbage if it’s not for the Mediterranean input. And look at the UPs and DOWNs of various populations, eg the Jews.
What I mean is, shuffling is a very import part of this genetic thingy. After all, sex itself is pretty crazy mad shuffling. And who would’ve thought that the long suffering of the Jews might be exactly the reason for their high IQ recently?
And when you isolate a performing population, how can you be sure that it’s the NW Europe in the 1700s and not the Japan in that same time period?
If the goal is high IQ gene pool 100 years down the road, it does not automatically translate into idyllic life today for our preferred neighborhood. The selfish gene can be a crazy bitch.
I do not see where i ignored this, for example in one of the first comments i mentioned that this wasn’t the case in Japan PIAAC problem solving. Read carefully.
No, i mentioned that there is new data that condraticts the view that east asians have higher variance. I do not see what’s wrong with having more debates and clarity on this issue. I actually thought that the issue was settled by Steve Hsu and did not think much about it until i saw a new data.
As of now, the data for adult japanese and east asians shows that they have lower variance than the vast majority of countries in 5 out of 6 cases.
To me, adult data is more relevant to this debate than children data, because it is among adults where the real action is – this is where the professors, doctors, engineers, writers etc. are, as well as the actual labor force.
Nope, i mentioned that i’m also Ok with the view that all data is shit and no one can make conclusions from it anyway.
But if this was the case, why didn’t you make a similar scene to Steve Hsu and all those who claim that east asians have higher variance? It is because you are biased and bias clouded you mind.
If you were objective, you should have made the same criticisms to those who use PISA data to justify the view that east asians have higher variance. Sampling could be bad, maybe PISA did not estimate their SDs properly, etc. Therefore they should just shut up and do not think too much about it.
The fact that you did not do that shows that you do not care about what is acually going on, but only about your bias, which shows imo, unethical behavior.
You don’t get it apparently. A mere Shanghai sample is not representative of China. This is the largest and one of the most affluent cities in China, with very high scores, and large concentration of the nations’s elites. I do not see how you don’t understand this.
I can’t say for sure how sampling was done within that city, according to Wiki there is criticism about it.
But the important point is:
“China” in this case is simply its largest city, Shanghai. The rest of the country (with the exception of 2 other affluent cities, HongKong and Macao) was not tested in Creative Problem Solving 2012. Results are not representative of the country and i suspect significantly overrate China’s performance.
On the other hand, it’s possible that the data in general is largely reliable, but the SD is less so. Utu has a point that SD is more difficult to estimate from the same data than mean. So the SD estimate is more likely to be some kind of a fluke than the mean.
I’ve read many comments & agree & disagree. Three chief points:
a) most encyclopedic surveys on the Web don’t give precise data on many inventions. For instance, Sadi Carnot & Tesla are frequently omitted. This Anglo-centric bias tends to distort the picture; actually, NW Europe was, except the Netherlands, not such a big deal in technological-scientific progress until 1700.
b) (post)modern “invention” is something very different than anything seen in previous times. For instance, most fundamental changes are tied to quantum mechanics of 1920s-1930s, which was basically the revolution in a small circle. It now seems that QM (and its offshoots) is inadequate. What if some land, or group of countries, develops a radically new science & relatively speedily hugely overpowering technology based on it?
I don’t know if something like this is, in the modern world, possible at all- just speculating. But if yes- then such a country could easily become the world conqueror on an unprecedented scale. But this all is hypothetical.
c) what is not hypothetical is that all prognostications are worthless. For Muslims in their Golden Age, white Northerners were dumb as a sack of hammers; for virtually all Europeans, from ancient Greeks to mid-19th C Germans & French, Jews were incapable of rational & “noble” intellectual pursuits, just good at money-lending & fleecing, without science & arts in any form; for more than 500 years, say, 1100-1600, Italians (or their ancestors) considered northern peoples stupid barbarians incapable of anything other than superstitions & slaughter.
So, I would easily discard conformism, IQ,..as the central factor of anything. It is not anything “individualistic” that matters for a foreseeable future: it is a controlled freedom of expression where individuals & peoples trust their governments to work in their own interest; it is a functioning civilization.
In short, this is something that gives the edge to ethnically homogeneous whites & north Asians. Any group that imports Africans & Muslims & treats them as equal citizens will eventually- fall.
Of course, it all matters only if homo sapiens remains the unaltered norm & nothing earth-shattering happens (WW 3, extermination of parasitic billions of humans, new world religions, global dissolution of family unit,…).
The British did not provide any of this assistance for free. Japan had to pay for every weapon and every warship supplied by British yards. Its ability to do so came courtesy of its greater successes in governance and economic modernization relative to China.
European arms dealers and shipyards were every bit as open to business with the Chinese as they were to Japan. In fact, largest and most powerful battleships of the First Sino-Japanese War belonged to China’s Beiyang Fleet.
Not that it did them much good, because Japan succeeded where China failed by investing in the long-term development of institutional knowledge and its own national arms industry.
Japan invested not just in shiny new weapons but in the men who would use them. Japan spent hard currency to send officer cadets to study abroad in European naval academies, to keep observers aboard foreign fleets, and to maintain European military missions training its own sailors at home. These efforts paid off over time by creating a professional officer corps and pool of native military expertise.
Likewise on the industrial side of the military-industrial equation, where there was no direct leap from total dependency on British imports to building dreadnought battleships of their own. Building a native arms industry is a painstaking process that takes decades of sustained efforts and spending.
Japan started making those efforts in a way China never did until almost a hundred years later. They started off small, in the naval sphere learning just to do the maintenance work on the vessels purchased from Britain, then the repair work, then assembling minor components for them, then major components, ordering mostly completed vessels from foreign yards but finishing them off in their own, then building very small ships on their own, then working their way up to larger and larger vessels, building licensed copies or custom designs drafted to order by foreign naval architects. Finally, having accumulated decades of experience and practice in this way, by gradually expanding the share of work contracted to Japanese yards as well as sending observers to study at British shipyards, they were able make the leap to designing entire warships on their own and building them without any foreign assistance.
Japan started this process within years of the Meiji Restoration, and China made no comparable efforts until the latter half of the 20th century, which only began paying off in the last 10-15 years (in a very major way, nonetheless – China now holding third place as global arms producer, miles ahead of any fourth or fifth place contender, a rank Japan didn’t even come close to at its peak).
China’s arms production efforts were scattered, inconsistent, and half-hearted. The Japanese made conscious decisions to spend less on having the best fleet they could right now in order to set aside enough money to invest in being able to build and operate the best fleet 20-30 years from now. China had a similar, if not larger budget to work with than Japan throughout most of this time period – but never maintained as much of a priority on military development and modernization, and when it did it focused its spending on buying the shiniest and most prestigious new toys from abroad instead of investing in native capacity to build these modern weapons or operate them effectively.
To put this in more specific and concrete terms, China had one shipyard that saw any effort to turn it into a modern production center for warships, the Jiangnan Arsenal. For most of this period, operations at Jiangnan never went much farther up the chain of development I outlined above than being able to do maintenance and repair work or produce minor components for warships. Small, obsolete harbor gunboats were the only warships this yard was ever able to build from the keel up until the 1930s, when it was able to deliver its first and only major vessel, the Ning Hai, a small light cruiser that had been built to match its sister Ping Hai – which itself had been commissioned and built at Japan’s (!) Harima shipyard. Work on the Ning Hai was itself being completed overseen at Jiangnan by a team of Harima’s shipbuilders, and progress on the vessel more or less came to a halt once relations worsened and Japan withdrew these experts and their supervision.
Japan, by contrast, developed not just one but four major national yards to the point of being able to produce major warships – Kure, Yokosuka, Sasebo, and Maizuru. This in addition to several smaller yards assembling various weapons and components, not to mention several massive privately owned yards like those of Mitsubishi and Kawasaki which ended up capable of turning out dreadnought battleships of their own, as well as smaller private yards capable of producing lesser vessels as well – Harima, Fujinagata, Uraga, not even going to try listing them all.
Japan not only succeeded in producing a nationally owned and subsidized arms complex capable of producing modern weaponry across the full spectrum of arms, from a hand grenade to a capital ship (a major struggle for any up-and-coming nation), it even managed to develop a thriving system of competitive privately held firms alongside it.
This is not something the British could have just given to the Japanese, let alone something they would have wanted to give them. Vickers had no intention of being shut out of one of its most lucrative markets by creating Japanese competitors.
True, Japan still was dependent on the assistance it obtained from Britain at the time it overcame China and then Russia – but then again, China was just as dependent on European powers to supply its own warships, even more so in that it depended on European mercenary officers to actually run their ships for them, whereas Japan’s were merely manned by Japanese officers who’d been trained by Europeans.
Even Russia, too, was far from fully independent in supplying its own arms – most of the battleships sunk at Tsushima, as well as those commissioned to replace them, having been built in foreign yards or to foreign designs and relying on Britain, France, or Germany to supply critical compinents like their main armament.
What was different about Japan in this time period, however, as opposed to China, was that Japan kept a relentless and steady focus on self-strengthening, whereas China did not, and Japan took advantage of every opportunity that it saw, while China squandered most of its own.
Ah, but you say, Japan had more opportunities because those opportunities were just given to them, by the British, who needed a geopolitical partner in the region.
To that I counter that the Japanese not only proved better at taking advantage of opportunities, but also at creating these opportunities for themselves.
If you look at the bigger picture of British diplomatic history, the suggestion you’re making that the British took a backwater nation like Japan and deliberately turned them into a regional superpower just to have a counterweight to the Russians would be entirely unprecedented and out of character to how they always operated everywhere else.
Perhaps the nearest and closest example would be Britain’s defense of the Ottoman Empire against Russia in the Crimean War and at other times in its long decline. Yes, they did go to war for them – once, and regretted it afterwards. At no point however did they attempt to systematically modernize the Sultan’s armed forces and turn the Turks into a real great power again. On the contrary, they were all too happy take the lead in dismantling the Turkish Empire – shearing off Egypt, encroaching farther and farther in the Arabian Peninsula, and sponsoring the Greeks in the Balkan wars of independence.
This example illustrates a larger and consistent theme of British policy throughout the centuries – Britain had no use for weak allies, and would happily throw any of them under the bus or help themselves to the pickings if they proved too weak to stand on their own two feet.
The Confederate States are another prime example of this policy. Britain had the capacity to turn the course of the entire American Civil War by entering – the Royal Navy of 1862 was an order of magnitude stronger than the Union fleet, and the US arms industry was cripplingly dependent on British imports, down to the point of needing to import rifle barrels from Britain due to the lack of machine tooling capable of making them to a serviceable quality and quantity in the US. Most of the Union Army’s rifles were in fact manufactured in Europe outright, and a British blockade would have cut off these imports and allowed the Confederacy to buy them up instead, with its cotton able to reach the markets.
It could have been that easy for them, and any far-sighted strategists would have recognized the advantage of fracturing the emerging American empire and keeping the US tied down with a neighboring rival. They didn’t do it though, because the Confederacy couldn’t win on its own, and Britain wasn’t a nation in the habit of putting its own interests at risk to do charity for the weak (the Crimean War being a recent and rare exception that was still leaving a bad taste in their mouths).
Likewise with the Dutch, an on-again, off-again ally that had fought several naval wars against Britain but were their key partner in numerous wars against France. The Dutch were eventually conquered and subjugated by Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. When France was defeated, the British had the chance to restore the Dutch as a bulwark against the French once more (which eventually might have turned into more of a bulwark against Germany).
Instead they took the opportunity to throw the Dutch out of Ceylon, South Africa, and Malaya, and several years later joined the French in preventing the Dutch from putting down the Belgian separatist uprising.
The British don’t get sentimental when it comes to alliances. Their oldest and most famous one is with Portugal. See the Pink Map dispute for how much that counted – Britain threatened Portugal with war over some remote and completely undeveloped wastelands in the center of Africa. Most countries are self-centered and bullying like that when it comes to dealing with their lessers, but have one or two little favorites they’ve got a soft spot for, who they might actually go out of their way to do a favor for. The French had the Poles. The Russians had the Serbs. The British had no one.
Now you’re trying to tell me that these same Brits would go and turn the Japanese into a major power at their own expense, just so they could have an ally against Russia? Ridiculous. Throughout its history, Britain would make alliances wherever it saw an advantage in doing so – but never did they go and try to turn weak nations into strong ones just for the sake of having an ally. They were happy to use the American Indians as allies when they found themselves at war with the Americans, but had no qualms about leaving them to the mercy of the US once that was no longer the case. They never tried to cultivate the Confederacy or Mexico into being long term allies against the US (and in their contingency plans for the case of an early 20th century war against the US, no British army would have been sent to fight in Canada). The Dutch were pilfered of half their colonies and deliberately hobbled from becoming a major power again, the Portuguese were shouldered aside in Africa, the Austrians were thrown under the bus in the War of the Austrian Succession (the Austrians bring ready and more than willing to continue fighting but the British calling it quits first and suing for peace before they had a chance to win back Silesia), and the Turks were plundered and short of various territories by the British, who only acted to keep Russia from seizing its own share of the spoils from them, not to arrest their decline or reverse it.
If you need yet another example, consider the case of Persia, another battleground of British and Russian influence in the same time period as the rise of Japan. Russian expansion into China was indeed a major British concern, but second to that of Russian expansion into India. Persia, then, would have been the more relevant bulwark against the Russians in Asia than Japan, the Royal Navy being more than capable of containing any seaward threat from the Russian Far East.
Why then, was Japan given the privilege of alliance with the British Empire, while Persia was treated like any other third world nation and carved up into spheres of influence with the Russians?
Because the Persians were weak, and the Japanese were strong. Same story for why the Chinese were treated one way and the Japanese another. Japan showed strength, determination, and unity, China showed weakness, vulnerability, and division. The Japanese envisioned a future of themselves as a modern power and worked diligently to build toward that goal. The Chinese mostly imagined the more glorious days of their past, and dithered and quarreled internally.
In Japan the priorities of the state and the people and between all the factions of the elite were in harmony with one another, as they all shared the same goal: make our country rich and strong (and when this happens, I too will then become rich and strong). This is much the same as the case of China today, in the midst of its own comparable golden age of prosperity and development.
In the China of over a century ago, however, this was not the case. Where there was a fundamental divide between the state and the people, as the state was dominated by a minority ethnic caste, where the factions of the elite were united only in the fact that they remained rich and strong by keeping the country as a whole poor and weak, and where the masses hardly had any stake in whether their country won or lost because either way, their lives would still be just as miserable.
Sounds all too much like the America of today, doesn’t it? Complete with the both of them having a massive opium crisis, going hand-in-hand with a failed war on drugs. They do differ in the details; after all, the Russians never sank the US Navy and unloaded crates of Afghan poppies on our shores, instead we invaded Afghanistan ourselves and put the poppy farmers back in business…
But there’s the same fundamental failure dooming the efforts of the China of over a century ago and the America of today to escape these death spirals, which is a failure of the national spirit and will.
Yes, the Chinese were outgunned in the Opium War, on a technological level. They were never going to defeat the British at sea. But that alone doesn’t mean they couldn’t have won the war. Think back to what caused the war in the first place. Britain and Europe had a massive demand for Chinese goods, but China didn’t need anything the British were producing. Pay up in silver or take a hike, you’re the ones who need to trade, not us. Opium was how the British turned the tables, by finding something the Chinese would want from them (and soon, need from them).
The point is, China was self-sufficient. All the British could do with control of the sea was cut China off from foreign trade – and China didn’t need that foreign trade at all. That and the British could sail up and down the rivers and lob shells at all of China’s cities.
There was no stopping that either…but what could that have accomplished, if the Chinese really were determined to carry on the fight? Think about the Vietnamese in their war with the US. There were individual towns in Vietnam that were hit with more firepower by the US Air Force in a day than every British gunboat could have brought to the shores of China in a year. But the Vietnamese persevered through it, year after year, until the Americans got fed up and went home.
Consider the losses that Soviet Russia was willing to endure to win against Nazi Germany, the worst any army has suffered in all human history. Or the Germans themselves, and their Japanese allies, fighting on and on after Allied bombers had burned dozens of their cities to the ground. The Taliban in Afghanistan, who’ve now spent an entire generation fighting the American empire, with no sign of slowing down. The Houthis in Yemen. The Dutch in the Eighty Years’ War. The French in the Hundred Years’ War. Paraguay in the Triple Alliance War. Too many examples to count throughout the ages of people who fought on past the point any sane person would’ve given up hope, because their hearts were set on it. Fight on, no matter what the cost.
The Japanese of this time were a people who had that kind of heart. They only lost it in 1945, once their entire navy was sunk, once every city in Japan was burned to the ground, once the entire nation was brought to the brink of starvation.
The Chinese of this time were not. China lost the Opium War because China as a nation never had its heart set on winning it. They took a few punches to the chin and threw in the towel in the third round. “Oh well, we tried.”
A failure of will that ran from the top of the nation to the bottom of it. A government too detached and alienated from the people to inspire them to make any sacrifice it would take. An elite that stood to gain more from being the middlemen of the drug trade destroying their nation than trying to fight against it (and were ready to quit in any case when a few of their expensive boats and palaces got blown up). A people who had no reason to throw their lives away for a state that if anything despised and abused them far more than the British did.
A system that is rotten like this from the top to the bottom will collapse under pressures that even a far smaller, but more spiritually healthy society, could find a way to endure.
That was China then, that’s America right now. You really believe the country with the most invasive and sophisticated surveillance system in the history of man, satellites in space, and troops in over 120 vassal countries around the world couldn’t figure out where all the heroin is coming from and stamp it out if it wanted to? The fact is though, it doesn’t happen. The elites who aren’t profiting from the situation themselves have more important things on their minds than the millions of people miserable enough to poison themselves for a brief escape from the world they’re stuck in, and the same goes for pretty much everyone else. Ask anyone who pays taxes if they’d pay more if they knew it would go to solving the opium crisis. Okay, you might get a lot who say they would. Then try asking how much more they’d pay for it. Put a price on halting the slow death of their nation. $5000? $2000? $1000? $500? $100? Odds are, not as much as they’d spend on buying a new TV.
If Japan had been as weakened, corrupted, and decayed a society as China, the British would have never offered them an alliance or assistance of any kind. They’d have found it more profitable to run the same scams on Japan and subjugated it in the same fashion as China.
Conversely, if it had instead been China that was powerful and modernizing, the British wouldn’t have hesitated to make an alliance of convenience against Russia with them instead of Japan. If push came to shove, the arms manufacturing lobby had far more clout with the British government than the opium growers in India, and Britain would have more than made up on its losses in the drug trade by selling the Chinese battleships instead.
Great comment.
Some good lessons for the despairing HBDers ready to give up at the drop of a hat.
The British did not provide any of this assistance for free. Japan had to pay for every weapon and every warship supplied by British yards. Its ability to do so came courtesy of its greater successes in governance and economic modernization relative to China.
European arms dealers and shipyards were every bit as open to business with the Chinese as they were to Japan. In fact, largest and most powerful battleships of the First Sino-Japanese War belonged to China’s Beiyang Fleet.
Not that it did them much good, because Japan succeeded where China failed by investing in the long-term development of institutional knowledge and its own national arms industry.
Japan invested not just in shiny new weapons but in the men who would use them. Japan spent hard currency to send officer cadets to study abroad in European naval academies, to keep observers aboard foreign fleets, and to maintain European military missions training its own sailors at home. These efforts paid off over time by creating a professional officer corps and pool of native military expertise.
Likewise on the industrial side of the military-industrial equation, where there was no direct leap from total dependency on British imports to building dreadnought battleships of their own. Building a native arms industry is a painstaking process that takes decades of sustained efforts and spending.
Japan started making those efforts in a way China never did until almost a hundred years later. They started off small, in the naval sphere learning just to do the maintenance work on the vessels purchased from Britain, then the repair work, then assembling minor components for them, then major components, ordering mostly completed vessels from foreign yards but finishing them off in their own, then building very small ships on their own, then working their way up to larger and larger vessels, building licensed copies or custom designs drafted to order by foreign naval architects. Finally, having accumulated decades of experience and practice in this way, by gradually expanding the share of work contracted to Japanese yards as well as sending observers to study at British shipyards, they were able make the leap to designing entire warships on their own and building them without any foreign assistance.
Japan started this process within years of the Meiji Restoration, and China made no comparable efforts until the latter half of the 20th century, which only began paying off in the last 10-15 years (in a very major way, nonetheless – China now holding third place as global arms producer, miles ahead of any fourth or fifth place contender, a rank Japan didn’t even come close to at its peak).
China’s arms production efforts were scattered, inconsistent, and half-hearted. The Japanese made conscious decisions to spend less on having the best fleet they could right now in order to set aside enough money to invest in being able to build and operate the best fleet 20-30 years from now. China had a similar, if not larger budget to work with than Japan throughout most of this time period – but never maintained as much of a priority on military development and modernization, and when it did it focused its spending on buying the shiniest and most prestigious new toys from abroad instead of investing in native capacity to build these modern weapons or operate them effectively.
To put this in more specific and concrete terms, China had one shipyard that saw any effort to turn it into a modern production center for warships, the Jiangnan Arsenal. For most of this period, operations at Jiangnan never went much farther up the chain of development I outlined above than being able to do maintenance and repair work or produce minor components for warships. Small, obsolete harbor gunboats were the only warships this yard was ever able to build from the keel up until the 1930s, when it was able to deliver its first and only major vessel, the Ping Hai, a small light cruiser that had been built to match its sister Ning Hai – which itself had been commissioned and built at Japan’s (!) Harima shipyard. Work on the Ping Hai was itself being completed overseen at Jiangnan by a team of Harima’s shipbuilders, and progress on the vessel more or less came to a halt when relations worsened and Japan withdrew these experts and their supervision.
Japan, by contrast, developed not just one but four major national yards to the point of being able to produce major warships – Kure, Yokosuka, Sasebo, and Maizuru. This in addition to several smaller yards assembling various weapons and components, not to mention several massive privately owned yards like those of Mitsubishi and Kawasaki which ended up capable of turning out dreadnought battleships of their own, as well as smaller private yards capable of producing lesser vessels as well – Harima, Fujinagata, Uraga, not even going to try listing them all.
Japan not only succeeded in producing a nationally owned and subsidized arms complex capable of producing modern weaponry across the full spectrum of arms, from a hand grenade to a capital ship (a major struggle for any up-and-coming nation), it even managed to develop a thriving system of competitive privately held firms alongside it.
This is not something the British could have just given to the Japanese, let alone something they would have wanted to give them. Vickers had no intention of being shut out of one of its most lucrative markets by creating Japanese competitors.
True, Japan still was dependent on the assistance it obtained from Britain at the time it overcame China and then Russia – but then again, China was just as dependent on European powers to supply its own warships, even more so in that it depended on European mercenary officers to actually run their ships for them, whereas Japan’s were merely manned by Japanese officers who’d been trained by Europeans.
Even Russia, too, was far from fully independent in supplying its own arms – many of the battleships sunk at Tsushima, as well as those commissioned to replace them, having been built in foreign yards or to foreign designs and relying on Britain, France, or Germany to supply critical compinents like their main armament.
What was different about Japan in this time period, however, as opposed to China, was that Japan kept a relentless and steady focus on self-strengthening, whereas China did not, and Japan took advantage of every opportunity that it saw, while China squandered most of its own.
Ah, but you say, Japan had more opportunities because those opportunities were just given to them, by the British, who needed a geopolitical partner in the region.
To that I counter that the Japanese not only proved better at taking advantage of opportunities, but also at creating these opportunities for themselves.
If you look at the bigger picture of British diplomatic history, the suggestion you’re making that the British took a backwater nation like Japan and deliberately turned them into a regional superpower just to have a counterweight to the Russians would be entirely unprecedented and out of character to how they always operated everywhere else.
Perhaps the nearest and closest example would be Britain’s defense of the Ottoman Empire against Russia in the Crimean War and at other times in its long decline. Yes, they did go to war for them – once, and regretted it afterwards. At no point however did they attempt to systematically modernize the Sultan’s armed forces and turn the Turks into a real great power again. On the contrary, they were all too happy take the lead in dismantling the Turkish Empire – shearing off Egypt, encroaching farther and farther in the Arabian Peninsula, and sponsoring the Greeks in the Balkan wars of independence.
This example illustrates a larger and consistent theme of British policy throughout the centuries – Britain had no use for weak allies, and would happily throw any of them under the bus or help themselves to the pickings if they proved too weak to stand on their own two feet.
The Confederate States are another prime example of this policy. Britain had the capacity to turn the course of the entire American Civil War by entering – the Royal Navy of 1862 was an order of magnitude stronger than the Union fleet, and the US arms industry was cripplingly dependent on British imports, down to the point of needing to import rifle barrels from Britain due to the lack of machine tooling capable of making them to a serviceable quality and quantity in the US. Most of the Union Army’s rifles were in fact manufactured in Europe outright, and a British blockade would have cut off these imports and allowed the Confederacy to buy them up instead, with its cotton able to reach the markets.
It could have been that easy for them, and any far-sighted strategists would have recognized the advantage of fracturing the emerging American empire and keeping the US tied down with a neighboring rival. They didn’t do it though, because the Confederacy couldn’t win on its own, and Britain wasn’t a nation in the habit of putting its own interests at risk to do charity for the weak (the Crimean War being a recent and rare exception that was still leaving a bad taste in their mouths).
Likewise with the Dutch, an on-again, off-again ally that had fought several naval wars against Britain but were their key partner in numerous wars against France. The Dutch were eventually conquered and subjugated by Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. When France was defeated, the British had the chance to restore the Dutch as a bulwark against the French once more (which eventually might have turned into more of a bulwark against Germany).
Instead they took the opportunity to throw the Dutch out of Ceylon, South Africa, and Malaya, and several years later joined the French in preventing the Dutch from putting down the Belgian separatist uprising.
The British don’t get sentimental when it comes to alliances. Their oldest and most famous one is with Portugal. See the Pink Map dispute for how much that counted – Britain threatened Portugal with war over some remote and completely undeveloped wastelands in the center of Africa. Most countries are self-centered and bullying like that when it comes to dealing with their lessers, but have one or two little favorites they’ve got a soft spot for, who they might actually go out of their way to do a favor for. The French had the Poles. The Russians had the Serbs. The British had no one.
Now you’re trying to tell me that these same Brits would go and turn the Japanese into a major power at their own expense, just so they could have an ally against Russia? Ridiculous. Throughout its history, Britain would make alliances wherever it saw an advantage in doing so – but never did they go and try to turn weak nations into strong ones just for the sake of having an ally. They were happy to use the American Indians as allies when they found themselves at war with the Americans, but had no qualms about leaving them to the mercy of the US once that was no longer the case. They never tried to cultivate the Confederacy or Mexico into being long term allies against the US (and in their contingency plans for the case of an early 20th century war against the US, no British army would have been sent to fight in Canada). The Dutch were pilfered of half their colonies and deliberately hobbled from becoming a major power again, the Portuguese were shouldered aside in Africa, the Austrians were thrown under the bus in the War of the Austrian Succession (the Austrians bring ready and more than willing to continue fighting but the British calling it quits first and suing for peace before they had a chance to win back Silesia), and the Turks were plundered and short of various territories by the British, who only acted to keep Russia from seizing its own share of the spoils from them, not to arrest their decline or reverse it.
If you need yet another example, consider the case of Persia, another battleground of British and Russian influence in the same time period as the rise of Japan. Russian expansion into China was indeed a major British concern, but second to that of Russian expansion into India. Persia, then, would have been the more relevant bulwark against the Russians in Asia than Japan, the Royal Navy being more than capable of containing any seaward threat from the Russian Far East.
Why then, was Japan given the privilege of alliance with the British Empire, while Persia was treated like any other third world nation and carved up into spheres of influence with the Russians?
Because the Persians were weak, and the Japanese were strong. Same story for why the Chinese were treated one way and the Japanese another. Japan showed strength, determination, and unity, China showed weakness, vulnerability, and division. The Japanese envisioned a future of themselves as a modern power and worked diligently to build toward that goal. The Chinese mostly imagined the more glorious days of their past, and dithered and quarreled internally.
In Japan the priorities of the state and the people and between all the factions of the elite were in harmony with one another, as they all shared the same goal: make our country rich and strong (and when this happens, I too will then become rich and strong). This is much the same as the case of China today, in the midst of its own comparable golden age of prosperity and development.
In the China of over a century ago, however, this was not the case. Where there was a fundamental divide between the state and the people, as the state was dominated by a minority ethnic caste, where the factions of the elite were united only in the fact that they remained rich and strong by keeping the country as a whole poor and weak, and where the masses hardly had any stake in whether their country won or lost because either way, their lives would still be just as miserable.
Sounds all too much like the America of today, doesn’t it? Complete with the both of them having a massive opium crisis, going hand-in-hand with a failed war on drugs. They do differ in the details; after all, the Russians never sank the US Navy and unloaded crates of Afghan poppies on our shores, instead we invaded Afghanistan ourselves and put the poppy farmers back in business…
But there’s the same fundamental failure dooming the efforts of the China of over a century ago and the America of today to escape these death spirals, which is a failure of the national spirit and will.
Yes, the Chinese were outgunned in the Opium War, on a technological level. They were never going to defeat the British at sea. But that alone doesn’t mean they couldn’t have won the war. Think back to what caused the war in the first place. Britain and Europe had a massive demand for Chinese goods, but China didn’t need anything the British were producing. Pay up in silver or take a hike, you’re the ones who need to trade, not us. Opium was how the British turned the tables, by finding something the Chinese would want from them (and soon, need from them).
The point is, China was self-sufficient. All the British could do with control of the sea was cut China off from foreign trade – and China didn’t need that foreign trade at all. That and the British could sail up and down the rivers and lob shells at all of China’s cities.
There was no stopping that either…but what could that have accomplished, if the Chinese really were determined to carry on the fight? Think about the Vietnamese in their war with the US. There were individual towns in Vietnam that were hit with more firepower by the US Air Force in a day than every British gunboat could have brought to the shores of China in a year. But the Vietnamese persevered through it, year after year, until the Americans got fed up and went home.
Consider the losses that Soviet Russia was willing to endure to win against Nazi Germany, the worst any army has suffered in all human history. Or the Germans themselves, and their Japanese allies, fighting on and on after Allied bombers had burned dozens of their cities to the ground. The Taliban in Afghanistan, who’ve now spent an entire generation fighting the American empire, with no sign of slowing down. The Houthis in Yemen. The Dutch in the Eighty Years’ War. The French in the Hundred Years’ War. Paraguay in the Triple Alliance War. Too many examples to count throughout the ages of people who fought on past the point any sane person would’ve given up hope, because their hearts were set on it. Fight on, no matter what the cost.
The Japanese of this time were a people who had that kind of heart. They only lost it in 1945, once their entire navy was sunk, once every city in Japan was burned to the ground, once the entire nation was brought to the brink of starvation.
The Chinese of this time were not. China lost the Opium War because China as a nation never had its heart set on winning it. They took a few punches to the chin and threw in the towel in the third round. “Oh well, we tried.”
A failure of will that ran from the top of the nation to the bottom of it. A government too detached and alienated from the people to inspire them to make any sacrifice it would take. An elite that stood to gain more from being the middlemen of the drug trade destroying their nation than trying to fight against it (and were ready to quit in any case when a few of their expensive boats and palaces got blown up). A people who had no reason to throw their lives away for a state that if anything despised and abused them far more than the British did.
A system that is rotten like this from the top to the bottom will collapse under pressures that even a far smaller, but more spiritually healthy society, could find a way to endure.
That was China then, that’s America right now. You really believe the country with the most invasive and sophisticated surveillance system in the history of man, satellites in space, and troops in over 120 vassal countries around the world couldn’t figure out where all the heroin is coming from and stamp it out if it wanted to? The fact is though, it doesn’t happen. The elites who aren’t profiting from the situation themselves have more important things on their minds than the millions of people miserable enough to poison themselves for a brief escape from the world they’re stuck in, and the same goes for pretty much everyone else. Ask anyone who pays taxes if they’d pay more if they knew it would go to solving the opium crisis. Okay, you might get a lot who say they would. Then try asking how much more they’d pay for it. Put a price on halting the slow death of their nation. $5000? $2000? $1000? $500? $100? Odds are, not as much as they’d spend on buying a new TV.
If Japan had been as weakened, corrupted, and decayed a society as China, the British would have never offered them an alliance or assistance of any kind. They’d have found it more profitable to run the same scams on Japan and subjugated it in the same fashion as China.
Conversely, if it had instead been China that was powerful and modernizing, the British wouldn’t have hesitated to make an alliance of convenience against Russia with them instead of Japan. If push came to shove, the arms manufacturing lobby had far more clout with the British government than the opium growers in India, and Britain would have more than made up on its losses in the drug trade by selling the Chinese battleships instead.
One strange thing about China (comparing to USA) is that Shanghai & Beijing get preferable treatment in College Entrance Exams. That is to say, students A and B having same scores, but A is in Shanghai and B is in Jiangsu, and A is offered a chance to enter college and B is not.
I am not familiar with data sets, but this differentiated treatment is long being known. Notice that this is not the same thing as the, say, Uighur students get preferable treatment in CEE. I think Americans are familiar with this second kind, ie Affirmative Actions.
I am not exactly sure about official rationale for this.
So, without looking into the data, it is, I think, perceivable that Shanghai student quality is above average re entire China, but it is also quite plausible that they are not at the very top.
Just a small quibble here. If China is small and Japan is big, British and other powers would have eaten up China in no time, they will have plenty attention for Japan. But China is so big, it takes time. Of course they would leave Japan alone in the mean time. They also basically left Korea alone only for Japan, the crazy Japan, to gouge it up.
An equivallent thing can be said about India. If India is small and China is much closer to the Indian ocean routes, the imperialists would have wrapped up India much sooner and moved upon China much earlier.
China back then had many, many problems. But how good was a country of then Japan, a country so bend on invading and starting wars. Civilisation and technology to Japan elites back then mean only war. WTF
Now you showed your complete ignorance in statistical sampling theory. It is not testing the students from the whole region, just a sample of it. In sampling it is also sometimes not being able to get the exact composition of the targeted sample and “weighting factors” are applied to the “under-sampled components” such that the sample behaves as if they are representative. There are enough migrant students in the middle schools from all over China and scaled to be representative of the regional components or IQ ranges.
You do not seem to be qualified to comment on statistical sampling.
This is part of the descriptions of the data from an unrelated sampling from US Georgetown University Baker Center,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)#Sampling_frame
Using your logic the US sample might be also be rigged as it did not contain students from Puerto Rico.
There are loop holes. The best I have read was that a Han Chinese had a son with a Mongolian wife. When the son reach senior High School pre U he divorced his Mongolian wife and the son follow the mother and identified himself as ethnic Mongolian. Now the universities have quota for minority groups so he qualified as an AA student.
Some tried to go back a few generations and claimed that his ancestry is from certain village, and the ancestral temple for his family in the village has recorded in writing the name of his son so he is “local”. Some very footloose families have different generational ancestral temples in many provinces and they can take their pick.
Most westerners mostly only encounter the Cantonese whose average provincial IQ is below national average and is situated next to the Han majority province with the lowest average provincial IQ. They have not encounter those smart ones from Jiangnan around Nanjing or as the Korean/Hockien pronounced as Gangnam though the Korean Gangnam is a different region.
Tried leaving a response to this twice but it doesn’t seem to be making it past moderation. Too long?
EDIT: And now it appears, out of the blue, twice.
I did not say that all students from the region were tested, rather than that only sample from that region were tested. Don’t worry about me and concentrate on the issue at hand.
The problem remains, Shanghai data (biggest chinese city) is not representative of China. PISA and PIAAC in general do not test only 1 city per country, they test many cities and rural areas.
When sampling is done in a way that is generally representative of a country, it is not only sample from one (the biggest and one of the most afluent city by the way) city that is tested.
Sorry, but one city sample is not representative of a country and PISA and PIAAC do not operate in that way. No one does that. It is simply that China did not allow testing in other parts of the country.
I already mentioned that.
“if this was the case, why didn’t you make a similar scene to Steve Hsu and all those who claim that east asians have higher variance? It is because you are biased and bias clouded you mind.
If you were objective, you should have made the same criticisms to those who use PISA data to justify the view that east asians have higher variance. Sampling could be bad, maybe PISA did not estimate their SDs properly, etc. Therefore they should just shut up and do not think too much about it.”
What he’s saying is that it is possible to have an overview by only looking at one city’s samples if you can get your sampling/weight right.
If you want to refute him, you have to say more about the sampling method used rather than simply saying that it’s only from one city.
That aside. When reading James Thompson’s articles, I realized the Conformity Quotient is kind of like Rationality Quotient or Emotion Intelligence, only that it’s the anti-HBD guys making arguments about RQ or EQ, it’s HBD guys arguing with CQ. 🙂 All kinds of people find reasons to dislike IQ. This, again, is observed by JT.
Reiner Tor can reliably be counted on to distort data in favor of Asians – he is, after all, a member of the “White HBD movement” – which is the right wing equivalent of the leftist tendency to find unique virtue in non-white races.
Its called “leapfrogging loyalties”, where you develop loyalty to a foreign group and despise your own group.
Thorfinnson has a bad case of it with regard to the Japanese, and regularly distorts data in their favor. All white HBD people have leapfrogging loyalties, like the left.
I just call it cuckery 🙂
Homosexuals 1960: “Just don’t put us in jail.”
Homosexuals 2019: commenting under moniker “AaronB”
I don’t care what Steve Hsu is saying or writing, since I’m hardly familiar with his work. I never thought East Asians had a higher SD than Europeans (at least in relative terms, like maybe slightly higher due to the higher mean), nor did I think much about their SD at all.
I agree with you that our confidence in declaring higher SD for Asians should be equally low as it is for lower SD. Though the PISA data set is larger, so more likely to replicate.
However, it’s obvious that our confidence in the mean should be higher than in the SD, because it’s more difficult to estimate the SD correctly than the mean.
Just wanted to thank you for this very high quality comment.
Others have already mentioned that this really was a quality comment.
What is this infantile obsession for exact locations?? For the 2012 the US data it was only sampled from three states Connecticut, Florida and Massachusetts, no Puerto Rico, Mississippi, Louisiana, nor none of those mid west rural states, nor none of the Black dominant states, etc. So is the US sample also not representative?
When sampling there are tranches of constraints with respect to the students to be satisfied, like the SES, school quality, gender ratio, etc. When all those important tranches of constraints are satisfied, what is the difference between the sample of students from those particular locations with respect to the many equivalent migrant students from those locations in Shanghai??
Look at your self first before making all those assertions.
In the Georgetown Uni Baker centre sample with citizens eligible to vote, there are only 3 from middle east. If you want sample from each states, how do you find exactly 3/51 middle eastern people from each states??
It is not my obsession, PISA and PIAAC do not generally test only one (and its biggest) city per country. Testing only one city has nothing to do with normal PISA and PIAAC methods and this is not how the vast majority of other countries are tested.
@reiner Tor
Actually wrong SDs are going to mess up the means as well. Comparing mean differences between countries becomes harder if SDs are unclear.
Yes it is. PISA is not for ranking the performance of any country in isolation. It is for a given country’s (targeted and already previously indipendently validated) performance profile, create a sample to reflect that so that they can be calibrated/ranked on the same test material internationally. There are subtle diffrerences. The fundamental requirement is national cognitive profile. Only when they want to answer the secondary question of whether there are city/rural effects that location come in. The inclusion or exclusion of locational differences do not change the fundamental targeted country cognitive profile. If the city/rural effects are not to be studied then location differences are not required. A dumb student from Shanghai is as dumb as any equivalent dumb student in any other provinces, especially if he is the dumb migrant student from that particular province.
I don’t know what data the US Westat company is using or how fine grain their data are. The one I got is as follow,
Loc|IQavg|IQsd|%IQ60-|%IQ70|%IQ80|%IQ90|%IQ110|%IQ120|%IQ130+
Shanghai|115.3|14.1|0.2|0.4|2.2|33.2|26.1|20.4|17.4
China|103.4|17.7|4.4|6.0|10.9|42.3|19.2|12.3|4.9
Usually how big are those targeted sample size? Just for reference because it is at hand, the sample sizes for 2015 are,
Table A2.1 PISA target populations and samples
Region|Total in national desired target population|Number of participating students|Coverage of (targeted) national desired population||%sample
United States|4,220,325|5,712|0.967||0.1353%
United Kingdom|747,593|14,157|0.918||1.8936%
BSJG(China)|2,084,958|9,841|0.959||0.4720%
The US %sample is only 0.1353% of the target student population. For BSJG it is 0.4720%. The main thing is that very small sample size has been judged to be adequate for accurate prediction. Note the US sample is smaller than the nominal min size of 6300, dispite it had additional local requirements about ethnic groups effects. UK has many extra local effects to evaluate and the sample size is jacked up. With such small percentage there should be no problem constructing any representative target sample even when 50% of the desired population are not physically accessible.
The task for the sampling is not done by the host country, it is conducted and constructed by the OECD consultant and directly reported to OECD and to select from the Shanghai (including the migrant) student population such that the targeted sample profile matches the national profile. That means for the %IQ60- tranch it has to be over-sampled so that the percentage representation is 4.4% rather than the Shanghai 0.2% and the SD values also matches, etc. The Shanghai %IQ130+ tranch of 17.4% will be scaled down to 4.9% for the targeted sample. One of the international PISA secondary requirement is to check the city/rural effects, so the %IQ60- and all other tranches is further constrained to the national city/rural percentages. In the international PISA report there is no question asked about provinces. Thus provincial data distinction is not needed. Full stop.
In the US 2012 national PISA report it had additionally asked about state performances and there were only three states data, nothing from west coast, mid west rural or southern populus Black states. The US national PISA reported also wanted to show ethnic groups performances which is not need for the international PISA study. Thus the US sample also had finer grain ethnic contraints on the IQ tranches which is not needed in any other countries. Because of the way the sample can be constructed, even the direct data from populus Black states were not included, the Black performance can be determined from the targeted sample. And because there were too many international questions about Puerto Rico, the 2015 US sample did contain Puerto Rico, but again only containing two other states Massachusetts and NorthCarolina. Again no mid-west or west coast states. Using your infantile requirements then the US data is also very biased.
Dont get me started on the PIAAC.
So far messages from you are just hand waving, bull-shitting and plain lies. It is no point continuing.
Sorry, but PISA/PIAAC do not generally test only one (and the biggest) city per country. They test many cities and various areas from within a country, and not only one city, who also happens to be very large and affluent. This is how they operate. They do not agree with your view. They do not test one city per country.
The Chinese PRC elites are part of this Globohomo empire. The PRC is an experiment in Corporate Communism, a system they might eventually push on all of humanity.
And after the Whites, the GloboZiohomo elites are very likely gonna push mass immigration of black brown barbarians as well as large scale race mixing on the Yellows too, starting with Japan. Even now their fish-wrap mouthpieces propagandize about Japan needing immigrants, the Japanese are evil for not taking more brown black barbarian immigrants blah blah blah…… Singapore is already enriching itself with “talent” from the Indian subcontinent even though they have a very high IQ population at home.
I agree in part and I disagree in part . In India, the Brits have often helped the weak against the strong. The Rajputs against the Marathas, Lower castes against the upper castes in India to name a few. As far as the Native Americans go, there was little the British could have done to help them from the colonial settlers after the American revolution.
Of course the idea that the Brits created a powerful Japan is ridiculous. The truth is Japan had what it took to became an advanced modern country, the Ottoman Turks and the Persians did not. Turkey and Iran are still not first world countries.
This is similar to the theory that the USA was responsible for the development of Western Europe and Japan as a bulwark against the Soviets. But the truth is the West has sunk billions in Africa too. There was a cold war in Africa too. The West would have benefited to have a first world black African country as an ally of the Capitalist USA as an example to the other newly independent black African countries to permanently get them away from the Soviets. But unlike Europeans and the Japanese, the Africans did not and do not and will perhaps never have what it takes to be a first world country. Western Europe and Japan and South Korea already had the high quality population to build a first world nation, American money or no American money.