At the very top, the US excels at math. We consistently place at the top or near the top in the IMO for instance (https://maa.org/news/usa-first-at-imo/). Yes the team is largely children of immigrants, but they are Americans, too.

No difference between them and any other American. Congrats to the team.

> At the very top, the US excels at math.

Did you assess every other school system "at its very top" and compare? This seems to be very clearly a double standard. Consider that IMO numbers are going to be biased due to the US's larger population compared to other highly developed countries.

Aren't those prodigies who get identified and given special education that is not available to most? They may not be all the useful for judging the quality of math education in general in the US.

Yes, but the ability to identify prodigies and give them the resources to realize their full potential is part of an education system, too. I don't know the full details of the IMO participants, but the team is geographically diverse.

Of course, another aspect of the education system are the resources given to the average student, and I don't think there is much debate that the US could do better here.

From 2022 stats: Roughly 4 million students in each grade in the US.

8th,9th,10th,11th & 12th graders = 20 million.

So 20 million students are eligible for AMC10/AMC12

Of them, only 300K took the AMC10/AMC12

Of them, only 10K were invited to take the AIME

Of them, only 500 were invited to take the USAMO

Of them, only 50 went to the MOPs

Of them, only 6 went to the IMO & won.

The article is about 4th & 8th graders, of which we have 8 million.

Now, suppose those 4th graders get to 8th grade, then the 8th graders would be in 12. That makes both cohorts eligible for AMC10/12. At that point, they become 8 million out of the 20 million. So 120K of them take the AMCs, 4K take the AIME, 200 get into USAMO, 20 get invited into the MOPs, and best case 2 kids make it into the IMO.

So from this grand experiment, 2 kids will emerge the victor, and we are supposed to back-extrapolate that 8 million kids do ok. Aaalright then.../s

It's ironic that your comment includes immigrants to show that America is great, while other comments exclude immigrants to show that America is not so bad.

US has excellent education by the standard, commonly used international measures. In PISA, for example, white American children score better than any European country, and are only outscored by a handful of East Asian countries. These are all in turn outscored by US Asians, putting US on top yet again. US has a bunch of lower-performing population groups, who bring the overall average down, but even these perform better than their foreign counterparts. US blacks perform better than blacks in any African country, immigrants from South America perform better than kids in the countries they came from etc.

> For the rest, do you have any evidence for the statements, or that the outcome depends on race

Not sure what you’re asking for. Did you not know that there are large differences in means of test scores between various ethnic and racial groups in US? This is a commonly known fact, I don’t think really require me to provide specific evidence.

> And blaming the immigrants for undermining 'white' people is also part of a hateful disinformation campaign, so I think we should be very careful with statements that might be used to spread that hate.

Not sure what you’re talking about, but I get the feeling that you’re trying to smear me with allusions and innuendos.

> US has excellent education by the standard, commonly used international measures. In PISA, for example, white American children score better than any European country, and are only outscored by a handful of East Asian countries. These are all in turn outscored by US Asians, putting US on top yet again. US has a bunch of lower-performing population groups, who bring the overall average down, but even these perform better than their foreign counterparts. US blacks perform better than blacks in any African country, immigrants from South America perform better than kids in the countries they came from etc.

Wow. I‘m really impressed with your skill to interpret the data and build a narrative from it. However, let’s face it, it is just a convenient narrative with a faulty logic. You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain advantaged subgroups. It’s logically incorrect and not how efficiency of education system is defined.

It is also wrong to compare black Americans and Africans and generally use non-scientific racial divisions which do not exist elsewhere in the world. Most of black Americans are no more immigrants than white people. They are simply Americans and should be compared to Europe the same way as whites.

> You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain advantaged subgroups.

To the contrary, you could totally conclude from this that US has excellent educational system at least with respect to these, as you call them, “advantaged” groups. At best you could argue that the system is not so excellent for other, less well performing groups. However, these less well performing groups still perform better in US system than matched groups outside the US, so it is indeed the case that for both higher and lower performing groups, US educational system beats all other systems around the world.

Why would you compare the advantaged US groups versus the entirety of other populations?

Can you clarify what you mean by “advantaged”? I am not exactly sure what you are talking about.

I am talking about the leading group, whatever that may be, why would you split only the United States by a certain dimension and compare it to the entirety of other populations?

Ah, I get it now. Yes, it would be more apples-to-apples to, for example, compare white Americans with ancestral Europeans, by disaggregating scores in European countries by ethnic/ancestral group of origin. However, this would not affect comparison greatly, because in European countries, the children of ancestral Europeans comprise 80-90% of the total, compared to <45% in US, so taking the whole aggregate instead of this 80-90% doesn’t change that much. Same is true for East Asian countries: immigrant population in Japan or Taiwan is pretty negligible, as these countries are fairly homogenous. Finally, for countries with highly heterogeneous populations, like eg India or Indonesia, none of the large ethnic groups is ahead of US whites.

I think I've found the answer and it's simpler than that. There is no analysis splitting whites or other ethnic groups because PISA has national variations of questionnaires (source on the US one below), and in all likelihood no other country splits by race.

It's still weird, probably lacking rigor and methodological soundness, to split American races out and compare them to the bulk of other populations.

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/pisa/...

There are regularly PISA reports on European countries that split the data by natives (n-generation Turks are usually counted here) and immigrants. Sometimes all the immigrants are in one single group, sometimes there is fine-grained data (Somalis do very poorly, probably to nobody's surprise).

It might not be super sound methodologically to only do it for US in PISA, but I don’t think that it affect results significantly. Other high performing countries have highly homogenous populations, so the aggregate score of the entire country is very close to the score of the top performing group. On the other hand, in countries with heterogenous populations like India, Indonesia, Afghanistan or Nigeria, even the top groups are not performing very well. If you know of a country other than US, where the top performing group does significantly better than country average, and their performance is on the level of, say, European average, I’d be very curious to learn about it!

The main methodological problem is how one can leave out like 40% of the United States, and say that the US comes on top (which it still doesn't!). Like, I'm not even questioning the racial split data, but selecting the two groups and saying that the US is the best is a weird flex that wouldn't pass muster in Stats 101.

I’m not leaving out anyone. What I’m saying is that each American group individually comes out out of top, relative to matching groups elsewhere, and the fact that overall we don’t, is just an example of Simpson’s paradox. American blacks and Hispanics are ahead of foreign blacks and Hispanics too, it’s not just whites and Asians.

> However, these less well performing groups still perform better in US system than matched groups outside the US

If you pick random data points you can support with them any theory. Comparing white Americans (a random group of people defined by a subjective criteria, rather than by anything scientific) to a whole European country is random.

Now, speaking of the choice of subgroups. If you select best performing subgroups to see which country can support the best talent, why are you not looking at the results of international olympiads?

IOI - China, Russia, then USA. IPhO - China dominates the list of winners. IMO - USA has some wins, but China won more.

> Comparing white Americans (a random group of people defined by a subjective criteria, rather than by anything scientific) to a whole European country is random.

“White Americans” is very much not a “random group defined by subjective criteria”. Self-identification as white is extremely highly correlated with objective, measurable metrics like percent of European ancestry, and this also makes US whites directly comparable to population of European countries, which as it happens still are overwhelmingly comprised by people of European ancestry.

I am not selecting best performing group for the sake of comparison, I’m just comparing various natural and obvious population clusters that have been understood and distinguished by everyone completely unrelatedly to the discussion of educational outcomes. The category of white Americans has not been invented to show how great US education is. I am totally interested in comparing educational outcomes of white Americans with other major ethnic or ancestral populations in other countries, it’s just white Americans come out ahead almost every single time.

Self-identification on the basis of race is not objective. Races do not exist, it is a scientific fact. There are many other more reasonable ways to cluster American population. Ancestral angle is important, but only from cultural proximity perspective if you talk about people who are 5-10th generation Americans. Black Americans that are descendants of slaves may have higher proximity to Europe than to Africa, so they should be included in the group that you compare to Europe and anyway that comparison must be based on some theory, otherwise it’s just cherry-picking for building a convenient narrative.

> Self-identification on the basis of race is not objective.

It correlates extremely closely with objective measures like percentage of genetic ancestry from a given continent or historical population, so close in fact that for statistical purposes, it is justified to regard these two as virtually identical.

> Races do not exist, it is a scientific fact.

I’ll happily use different term like “ancestral group” if you like it more, but the (scientific) truth of the matter is that it’s just splitting hairs. I know that in recent years activists worked hard to obfuscate and misinform people on these topics, so I will happily accommodate you.

> It correlates extremely closely with objective measures like percentage of genetic ancestry from a given continent

It doesn’t make this clustering less arbitrary.

> I’ll happily use different term like “ancestral group” if you like it more

I do not care what term do you use for it as long as I do not see any scientific argument for having it. Politics and whatever activism have nothing to do with it.

FWIW, American Descendants of Slaves (ADoS) have an average European genetic admixture of ~24%.[1]

1. https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5

I‘m talking about cultural proximity. The tragedy of American slavery is that it erased any links of slaves to Africa, so modern black Americans have barely any relationship to Africa, still carrying the pain but losing any cultural or ancestral connections. They were raised and educated in a culture that is mostly a product of Europe. It is wrong thus to compare them to African countries since it gives false impression that they are doing great.

> The tragedy of American slavery is that it erased any links of slaves to Africa, so modern black Americans have barely any relationship to Africa, still carrying the pain but losing any cultural or ancestral connections.

I don't know why you deny genetics.

Ancestral connection in the quoted sentence means knowing your ancestors, not genetic lineage. It must have been clear from this thread that I don’t deny genetics.

> Races do not exist, it is a scientific fact.

Races do not exist in the same sense that the periodic table does not exist. Both are constructs over reality, and they are both informative (i.e. science).

Periodic table uses objective criteria for categorization. American race classification is rooted in debunked theories and mostly meaningless today. One can say at least that there exists black subculture, black dialect of English etc among descendants of slaves. How much of that is related to 1st and 2nd generation immigrants from Africa, which have much stronger cultural links to their motherland, speak different languages and may even have different faith? Asian bucket is absolutely non-sensical — there’s either cultural proximity to America or to native Asian cultures, which are very different, so the people are very different. It is very hard to understand why Indians and Chinese should classify themselves the same way. This classification is imposed on them. How is this nonsense informative? It’s just some racist legacy.

In Europe we do not have that system and we don’t miss it.

It turns out that if you cluster people together by their genetic information, the clusters that form are pretty similar to the racial groupings that ordinary Americans would understand. See this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering#/medi...

The 4 clusters in the K=4 column are pretty much just Black vs White vs (east) Asian vs Amerindian

First of all, you quote an old study with a very small dataset. We already know by now, that before going out of Africa at least two major genetic branches developed in addition to early Eurasians. At K=4 and clustering by genetic distance, they would likely represent two clusters while the rest of Africa would fall into one of remaining two. Not even close to what average American would understand.

Second, even if in the study you use, it’s „east Asian“. Where you would put Indians? How about southeast Asian people with black skin? Why this clustering is even necessary when the rest of the world is doing fine without it?

> We already know by now, that before going out of Africa at least two major genetic branches developed in addition to early Eurasians.

Nice of you to acknowledge genetics.

> At K=4 and clustering by genetic distance, they would likely represent two clusters while the rest of Africa would fall into one of remaining two.

I suppose they would.

> Not even close to what average American would understand.

The average American would understand if those two branches lived among us today. The value of science is to inform us of what is occurring now and to predict what will occur next, including the impact of immigration on test scores.

> The average American would understand if those two branches lived among us today

Shall I break the news or you find out yourself?.. ok, I will do it.

Those two branches do live among Americans. Afro-American people have the biggest genetic diversity in America and their genetic subgroups are so distinctive that they require separate testing in clinical studies. I bet you won’t be able to tell the difference between them from their appearance though. Now good luck redefining the concept of race with this knowledge.

> Those two branches do live among Americans.

If you were not referring to extinct branches I don't know why you thought "they would likely represent two clusters" if they did not already in the clustering given.

> Afro-American people have the biggest genetic diversity in America and their genetic subgroups are so distinctive that they require separate testing in clinical studies.

Yes, and?

> I bet you won’t be able to tell the difference between them from their appearance though.

Maybe, and?

> Now good luck redefining the concept of race with this knowledge.

Good luck trying to deny biological race when you've just listed more evidence for it.

>I don't know why you thought "they would likely represent two clusters" if they did not already in the clustering given.

Read the study with the clustering. I did it, so you should too.

This is my last reply to you. If you need more answers, there’s already more than enough facts for you here to verify and learn something new in the process.

So you're just full of shit. Good bye.

Races are also based on objective criteria: physical characteristics, which convey information about ancestry and genetics.

I don't know why you're talking about "culture"?

You cannot be serious. It is very well established by science that biological races do not exist. They remain in the mostly American conversation as sociocultural constructs.

Maybe you at least read Wikipedia to educate yourself?

> It is very well established by science that biological races do not exist.

Biological race models are informative (i.e. scientific). See "The Ideological Subversion of Biology" for an overview.

> They remain in the mostly American conversation as sociocultural constructs.

What the American conversation will tolerate is not relevant to the reality.

> Maybe you at least read Wikipedia to educate yourself?

Wikipedia LOL

This is just obfuscation. The population clusters will still exist even if we don't use the word "race" to describe them, and they can be described in biological terms that will overwhelmingly overlap with the sociocultural construct.

You continue repeating this without any scientific evidence, yet any modern source points that racial theories are not supported by genetic research. There‘s no such overlap.

I'm with you (just to be clear): the educational system is perfectly fine in the US. The problem is that the educational system in the US is designed to be fine for the subset of kids who come from families that 1) speak English, 2) are educated themselves, 3) hold full time employment.

Whenever these debates about the US education system arise it's important to clarify that when people who complain about the system do so, they're really complaining that the lack of a social safety net is keeping the doors open in public schools for kids whose families (and themselves) don't see value in formal education, can't maintain daily attendance for various reasons, may not have internet access at home, don't have food safety, may have health and developmental issues, and may not even have one parent caring for them.

I don't care whether science shows a differentiation in IQ between racial groups, because that is so much less important than addressing how well a kid will be able to learn when they are being raised in poverty by a single parent without a college education who doesn't speak English natively and may not even be in the country legally. That is the problem.

> The problem is that the educational system in the US is designed to be fine for the subset of kids who come from families that 1) speak English, 2) are educated themselves, 3) hold full time employment.

I think that, to the contrary, the US educational system goes to great lengths to accommodate students for whom English is a second language. Second, I can scarcely think of a way the US education is designed for the children of educated parents. Obviously they do better than children of uneducated parents, but it is hard to even imagine the system where this would not be true; certainly it’s not true anywhere else in the world. Finally, I think that regarding the full time employment of the parents, literally the opposite is true: it’s designed with the opposite assumption. For example, elementary school is not 10 hours long, as it would have been if it assumed that both parents are occupied for 8 hours every day.

> To the contrary, you could totally conclude from this that US has excellent educational system at least with respect to these, as you call them, “advantaged” groups

Wouldn't the educational system being geared towards these groups be an advantage granted to those groups?

> the educational system being geared towards these groups

What does that mean?

> You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain advantaged subgroups.

This is not what he did. He just explained to you that the outcomes for all those subgroups are basically better in the US than elsewhere.

Even that is a moot point though, because the aggregate US score is already perfectly comparable to e.g. EU level. Even if you cherry-pick EU nations for GDP/capita (Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark), you can see that they are pretty much exactly on US level (with the EU leaning a bit more toward math).

This also tracks with anecdata I have from family (central europe) that did a year at a US highschool (east/west) and both described the math curriculum as "joke".

To reiterate: Describing the US education system as "bad" (=> compared to peer-nations) is just objectively wrong.

> This is not what he did. He just explained to you that the outcomes for all those subgroups are basically better in the US than elsewhere.

He literally said that USA has excellent educational system. The explanation with statistical gerrymandering and random comparisons followed.

>Even that is a moot point though, because the aggregate US score is already perfectly comparable to e.g. EU level

EU level isn’t great. Besides, EU recently experienced major influx of immigrants (on the scale of millions). USA is #18 in the latest rating, 7-15% difference in the score with top 5%.

And yes, American math curriculum is indeed a joke.

> Describing the US education system as "bad" (=> compared to peer-nations) is just objectively wrong.

I didn’t say it is bad. You are replying to my comment where I basically say that you cannot say it’s excellent based on THAT data.

>You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain advantaged subgroups.

If group B has characteristics that make education more difficult relative to group A (e.g. lower mean IQ), then if there are two countries with identical educations systems, the one with more students of group B will end up with worse educational outcomes, just because group B are harder to educate regardless of the system.

Sure, but that's a lot of "if"s, which are not applicable to USA vs most of other developed countries situation.

I knew that you were going to get attacked because someone would take your statement as hateful. Unfortunately, it takes longer to collect data than it does to write a dumb comment. They took your factual statement of Simpson's paradox being able to drive one global summary (lower overall scores - a bad thing) counter to the local summaries (increased scores by all groups - a good thing) explained by shifting population proportions as you "blaming immigrants" for the bad outcome when the logical extension of your statement is "hold on, we may have a good thing going on". Ignore @mmooss.

Have to admit the immigration comment also triggered my "blaming immigrants" radar. After a careful reading it was an honest attempt for more information or clarification on how the details might be better interpreted. Something people should do more of when statistics are used as evidence. Actually a very good question.

What is the source on this?

All I can find is this Twitter thread, and reposts of this from Reddit. I cannot find any official sources.

https://twitter.com/ideafaktory/status/1732095406891282603

The image in this thread you linked has the information about the data source in the bottom right corner.

The source he cites is himself, other than the PISA data.

I cannot examine the entire dataset right now, but from reading the questionnaires I cannot find a single question on race. The only resembling question is on the birthplace of the parents [1], but you cannot infer the race from that, can you? How would you separate blacks then, most of whom would probably have American parents?

How much do you trust the author of this data?

[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/pisa/...

I have known Cremieux for a long time, and trust him a great deal when it comes to handling and presenting data. In any case, I don’t know what standards you’d find satisfactory. He made the graph out of data he listed on the graph. Anyone can go and verity its accuracy. It being materially wrong would be devastating to his reputation. Thus, if you still don’t trust it, you should just do your own leg work to verify it, instead of asking others, whom you probably don’t trust any more than you trust Cremieux, to do it. Anything more would be unusual and unreasonable, even formal academic peer review does not involve verifying that the graphs are accurately representing underlying data.

If you mention any hate facts without immediately blaming white people, colonialism, or trump then you will be called racist.

First, where is the evidence for all of that?

Second, other than racism, I don't see why we would distinguish between the 'race' of the Americans. The US average is the average. People are no more or less American based on their skin color.

Unless you make the racist claim that math skills biologically depend on race, there is no reason to compare some Americans with people in Africa because they have similar skin color - it's absurd.

> Not sure what you’re talking about

I don't believe that you are unaware of the hate and discrimination against immigrants and minorities, justified by these same and similar arguments. If you said that was not your intent - well, your intent or not, it has the same effect. But to say you don't know is not credible.

Fortunately for you, if you don't want to use race to distinguish you can instead use these characteristics to define your subgroups:

1) kids with two married parents at home

2) kids of parents with a college or professional degree

3) kids of parents who work white collar salaried jobs

4) kids of parents who are native English speakers

If you check all those boxes you're going to see that the resulting subgroup does very well on all standardized tests, including PISA. It will also be predominantly white/European-American & Asian/Asian-American. Those four attributes make the biggest difference in educational attainment, and brown & black families are the ones who are being left behind.

For the next thought exercise, consider what can be done to address this shortcoming in our political, social & education systems.

Isn't this just delineating by wealth? i.e. race and/or those 4 other categories are just correlations.

I'd be willing to bet most of these still hold once you control for wealth.

> First, where is the evidence for all of that?

Sorry, what do you mean by “evidence”? I clearly said that I am talking about PISA results, and described what these look like. You can look these up yourself if you are curious about more details.

> Second, other than racism, I don't see why we would distinguish between the 'race' of the Americans.

For better or worse, this opinion is not shared by the mainstream American culture and policy-making circles. We take great efforts to distinguish between these groups in the context of educational outcomes. It is not surprising, because these different groups very much exist in very objective sense, and quite objectively have different educational outcomes, which makes it useful to distinguish between them for the purposes like the original question, which was whether the educational quality went down recently. My original point that in order to answer this question, you have to distinguish between these groups so that you don’t fall victim to composition fallacy, is largely orthogonal to any discussion about the causes of these disparities, because it still stands regardless of whether the causes are 100% biological or 100% cultural or 100% result of systemic discrimination or whatever.

> Unless you make the racist claim that math skills biologically depend on race, there is no reason to compare some Americans with people in Africa because they have similar skin color - it's absurd.

You are creating a really weird straw man, because I don’t think that even extreme KKK-style racists have much of an issue with skin color per se. Who are you arguing against here? I am extremely confused.

> I don't believe that you are unaware of the hate and discrimination against immigrants and minorities, justified by these same and similar arguments.

Ah, here comes smears and innuendos that by open discussion of clear, objective facts that are relevant to policy making, I’m causing some kind of nebulous harm to some unnamed people via some proxies. Just stop it, I don’t care, and nobody cares anymore either.

> Unless you make the racist claim that math skills biologically depend on race, there is no reason to compare some Americans with people in Africa because they have similar skin color - it's absurd.

Math skills correlate with IQ, and average IQ varies by racial groups.

Calling facts you don't like racist doesn't erase them, and coming into discussions just to accuse everyone of heresy has gotten pretty old for most people.

These may be uncomfortable facts, but pretending they don't exist and brow beating people for discussing them keeps us from understanding the world more fully.

While IQ may vary by racial groups, overall math attainment not at the very top couple of percent has far more to do with socioeconomic circumstances & parental education than it does any inherent potential.

This is almost certainly an SES effect; the evidence for biological causation is weak and has gotten drastically weaker with each successive GWAS study. Either way: it's a race war point, and those are unwelcome on HN.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I think the opposite is true. There is large gap between educational outcomes of white and black Americans even if you match them on SES, and every successive GWAS increases the amount of variance in outcomes explained by variants, despite the input data only allowing for extremely crude metrics like years of completed education instead of actual test scores.

Literally the opposite thing, to what you just said, is true: GWAS studies have slashed heritability estimates (which beg the question of biological causation, but also establish a ceiling to it), by something like 80%. To say that this wasn't the outcome biological determinists expected from GWAS would be an understatement.

There is clearly a cohort effect, of students we identify as Black, with markedly lower educational success. Again: that's almost certainly an SES effect. Which shouldn't surprise anybody, given all the other SES effects that apply to that same cohort of people.

No, you are completely misunderstanding what GWASes show. The previous estimate of heritability of things like intelligence are entirely unaffected by GWAS results. That existing GWASes explain small percentage of variance is the problem with the GWASes, not with the preexisting, giant, extremely well replicated heritability literature.

Assume for the sake of argument that intelligence is 100% heritable, and is a result of additive heritability of thousands of variants. Pre-GWAS tools would in that case find something like 0.9 heritability (due to attenuation because of measurement error). Now imagine you run a GWAS that includes only 1% of SNPs of the entire genome, and your intelligence proxy is “has any university diploma”, instead of more accurate measures like eg IQ. In that scenario, you would never expect the GWASes to get even close to actual heritability.

This is where we are today: our genome coverage is relatively low (especially around rare variants), while the metrics we have are crude. Of course we are not even close to heritability estimates! If someone told you that low explained variance of GWASes is consequential for classical heritability estimates, they were either confused themselves, or deliberately tried to misinform you (extremely common problem in the field, with a long tradition from people like Lewontin and Gould back in the day, to people like Gusev today).

> Again: that's almost certainly an SES effect.

You just repeat it this without in any way substantiating it, despite me being very clear that the effect does not disappear even when you match by SES.

No, that's not all the recent studies do; they also attempt to separate inherited environment, and estimate direct vs. indirect heritability.

It's funny, I can point to comments from IQ-fixated people on this site from 10 years ago saying that GWAS was going to settle heritability stuff. All that's gone now, of course. Now the work is apparently fatally flawed.

Please, tell me which GWAS study is claiming to estimate entire heritabilty. I am not aware of any. This is because their methodology simply does not allow it. They by design are going to miss some heritability, and the methodology is not powerful enough to be able to tell us how much they are missing. If you don’t understand this, I think you are very confused about what these studies actually say.

> It's funny, I can point to comments from IQ-fixated people on this site from 10 years ago saying that GWAS was going to settle heritability stuff.

Please, do, and bring receipts! You should refresh your memory as to where the whole debate was 10 years ago. At the time, many people still hopelessly argued that intelligence have nothing to do with genes, and the “IQ-fixated” people replied that GWASes will conclusively show that they do. Now that they have, the goalpost has shifted, and people who argued that intelligence has nothing to do with genes are, similarly to you, arguing that it doesn’t have as much to do as “IQ-fixated” people have claimed. Of course, in 10 years, the goalpost will move again.

I haven't spaced on this, but I'm going to take a beat to generate a more rigorous reply. In the meantime: I think the evidence, both from twin studies and from genomics, for genetic determination of intelligence is very weak, has gotten weaker, and describes an effect too small to be relevant to the gaps we're discussing in this story; bringing racial IQ science into a discussion like this is arson.

I'll do my best to back those points up tomorrow.

It's a little weird that you called out Gusev, above; on this topic Gusev, though a geneticist himself, seems more like a popularizer of current research than someone going out on a limb with his own. But check his references: the scientists whose studies he cites seem to be saying the same thing he is.

I was waiting for the reply, but I realized that you might not be able to send one or edit your comment anymore, so here is one from me to give you opportunity to do so. I’m really curious what you found about GWASes or the state of debate around them 10 years ago.

Different "racial groups" have different average brain sizes. They vary exactly as you would think they do. Seems very biological to me.

How is this "race war"? No one is saying people should be punished or are inferior. We're talking about why schools perform the way they do in the US, not some "war".

Look at the antecedents to the 'dang comments I just linked you to.

It looks like he's mostly concerned with flame wars and slurs, which makes sense since they destroy conversations driven by curiosity and turn them into bitter fights. That's not at all what is going on here.

The fourth comment down, and this is sorted by date not relevance, is almost isomorphic to this thread. I believe you didn't intend to start a "race war" (that's Dan's term, not mine), but the big subtext of HN's norms is being responsible not just for your intentions but for the effect your comment has on the thread.

It is not at all established that there are meaningful, coherent IQ differences between "races", and the process of hashing that out on this thread will be an attractive (and tedious) nuisance that will attract awful comments --- for instance, like one suggesting "brain size" differences between races are explanatory.

So how do you stop this from happening?

The OP pointed out a highly informative and important point and the majority of the negative responses to it have been from people who want to bash the American education system.

They are using cries of racism and bringing in irrelevant topics like IQ intentionally so that they can shut down legitimate conversation because they want to continue to bash the American education system.

It's not a highly informative point; it's a deeply contentious one that revolves around a narrow(ing) and disputed finding that is drastically smaller than the educational gap we're discussing.

> In PISA, for example, white American children score better than any European country,

European countries also have better scores if we disregard the immigrants. Well, mostly certain immigrant groups. Others do fine.

And those groups that do bad do bad everywhere. Those that do well do well everywhere. It's almost as if something else matters more than the local educational systems.

The pre-college US education is not excellent. I know because I went to a US public high school. Here are some of my observations:

1. The standards are low. Here are some examples:

- My high school calculus class went at half the speed of a college calculus class. Some of the students still complained it went too fast!

- I took Spanish for 3 years. Native Spanish speakers laugh at my Spanish because it is extremely poor (poor pronunciation and I cannot read a Spanish newspaper).

2. Students and parents are more concerned with grades than with learning.

3. I know of teachers who have been punished because they had high standards. I know of one English teacher who was made a librarian because he failed half of his class. He was the best English teacher in the school, and he had high standards. I know he was good because I had him.

4. When I went to high school, I was surprised at how many students could not write a coherent argument in English.

5. My physics and chemistry classes in high school looked nothing like the classes in college. Basically, they were relatively easy, and I did not learn a lot. In the case of physics, the textbook also did a poor job of explaining concepts.

My main point is my experience with US public education was poor. Classes were easy, students were not pushed, and concepts were not taught. I don't think you can call a school which cannot teach physics, chemistry, or Spanish a good school. I also do not think my experience was unique.

> The pre-college US education is not excellent. ... The standards are low.

If so, might still be a lot worse elsewhere. Maybe the US is not good, but less bad?

As an extreme example, think of Haiti for example.

> Not sure what you’re talking about, but I get the feeling that you’re trying to smear me with allusions and innuendos.

To be fair:

>> Americans, so as the composition changes, and the whites become less of a statistically dominating factor, the scores are expected to go down, even as the education quality improves.

Reads a lot like "Our scores are going to go down because there are more brown people, even when we try so hard to help them.", and without further explanation, suggests a predicate of "brown people are inherently dumber". I understand that you're more likely suggesting that the immigrants are coming from a place with lower educational quality, which means they have a weaker educational background. Particularly though its a litte odd when the only called out groups are "white people" and "immigrants" with no mention of other groups like non-white natural born citizens (not to mention confusing when trying to consider white immigrants). It has a lot of the elements you'd find in dog-whistles:

* the immediate framing of results in terms of race/ethnicity

* setting up a whites vs the undifferentiated others.

* a declaration that white people are propping up the others and describing whites as dominant. (I know you said statistically dominant, but the word dominant has a lot of connotations no matter how it's prefixed).

* the use of flat, statistical wording around a seemingly odd juxtaposition (the first point).

Doubly so on the internet where it's extremely common to find the person who said the original to be spewing overt racism a bit down-thread.

I don't know if you are racist, and I don't think you intended racism in your comment. I'm just pointing out that it's not surprising someone read bigotry into it.

How insightful could this possibly be if socioeconomic variables are not controlled for? Clearly the socioeconomic makeup of "US Asians" is not the same as, say, the entire population of Korean students.

Also, "US Asians" is a silly grouping..