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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Why are Americans falling behind in “brain-y” competitions? Or, if we haven’t fallen behind, why have we always been bad at them?

League of Legends is holding their Worlds competition, and most of the North American region teams did not make it past the first stage. The performance of NA teams has been poor compared to Chinese and Korean teams. The one NA team that has done okay is mainly comprised of non-Americans. The NA region actually has more players than the Korean region, and there are serious incentives to get a high-performing team together.

I have also noticed that in the chess world, most of the top grandmasters are first or second generation Americans. Despite only comprising 25% of Americans, they make up 19 of the top 20 players (only Sam Shankland afaik is the exception). It is not as if the immigrant competitors are all from the former Soviet Union or another chess-heavy region, either, but you find Italy, the Philippines, Japan, and China represented too. (Possibly, because Hispanics are so much of 1st/2nd gen but not represented in chess world, it could be more like 5% make up 95%.)

What explains the loss of American high achievers in intellectual competitions? Google Code has similar results, as does Overwatch. Could there be an environmental cause?

Spoilers! I'm disappointed. Are there rules about this?

The NA region actually has more players than the Korean region, and there are serious incentives to get a high-performing team together.

Where are you getting this stat? It was never true during the Korean heydey a couple of years ago. Particularly when comparing ranked play.

America's computer game mediocrity is mostly attributable to console-culture (Japan also lags) and geography. The first means the American playerbase for most computer games is small compared to other countries, or is on the casual console version. The second means the average American has shit ping in online play. Back at launch, LOL's servers were in LA, which meant 80% of the US population was on over 70 ping.

I’d blame incentives. The market for entertaining English-speaking LOL streamers outcompetes the LCS ecosystem so high-ELO NA games have lower stakes than scenes where all the money comes from getting a spot on a team. Also, on the margin, the median IQ of Korea and China are meaningfully higher than the US, so maybe the peak ELO is just higher over there despite the smaller player base.

NA has been a laughingstock in league for years. 0-9 is a new low, but most of the NA teams are full of imports - there are only 3 actual 'north american' players among the 15 players on NA teams. The most likely explanation is that we just don't have as large a playerbase, and also nebulous criticisms of NA 'culture' where washed up euros and koreans come over to get big paychecks and not try that hard.

Do you have historical data to indicate America is "falling behind" and not placing at the same level it has in those competitions previously?

It is certainly possible we’ve been consistently far behind, but the question of the cause remains

There are different priors embedded in "we were once Xth place but now are X+Nth place" than "we have always been Xth place but should for reasons be Yth place". The latter embeds a lot of notions of value that are not necessarily shared. Even if there were a decline it would have to be evaluated if it was simply relative performance loss or raw performance loss. Performing to the same technical level but other countries improving themselves to a higher level is different than declining in raw ability. Lots of unstated shoulds that come with unaccounted cost that have not been balanced against other needs and desires.

What explains the loss of American high achievers in intellectual competitions?

Does video/computer games count as an intellectual competition? I think cultural differences may explain this. Competitive computer games are very popular in Asia.

Call of Duty and CounterStrike, no IMO. But MOBAs require quick, intelligent application of pattern-matching.

That's just what AIs are good at right now, don't confuse it with intelligence.

Who would win, a team of 20 APM guys who know what all the abilities do or a team of 200APM former starcraft players that have never played a moba before? Similarly, is a clock win in bullet chess a good measure of chess skill? Kinda right? But in both cases being quick is more effective than being smart for the majority of the bell curve.

20 APM is a bit low, but at 50 APM (reasonable for average players) the people who know the game would win 99% of the time if the 200APM people had literally never played a MOBA before (talking about DOTA here). We even have empirical proof of this because pros sometimes play on far away servers with 150ms+ ping and they still destroy average players.

If you want a real life example recently Grubby (a former WC3 pro) with excellent micro skills picked up DOTA and despite extensive coaching when he calibrated for ranked matchmaking he was put into Herald 5, roughly at the 10th percentile, and this was with hundreds of hours of play too, not "just picked the game up" noob level.

Fair, i did pick a ridiculously low APM to make my argument sound better. Going off of what coffee said upstream though, all of the gamesense/pattern matching stuff matters in CSGO as well, its just that the mechanical floor for when it starts mattering thats different.

Intelligence can be measured separately from processing speed, but they are strongly correlated - processing speed explains 80% of the variation in intelligence. So to a first approximation the faster team is smarter. Edit: added link.

the way i see it for bullet chess at least, there's a skill/intelligence floor you have to clear so that you can see valid non disaster moves. Beyond that literally just moving the pieces faster is more valuable until you get to an Elo where people are actually trying to mate. Your point is true but mechanical speed seems like a distinct quality.

processing speed explains 80% of the variation in intelligence

Citation? This is equivalent to saying the correlation between IQ and reaction time is r^2=0.8. Studies I found with trivial googling suggest this claim if false:

Is general intelligence little more than the speed of higher-order processing?

Here we show in a sample of 122 participants, who completed a battery of RT tasks at 2 laboratory sessions while an EEG was recorded, that more intelligent individuals have a higher speed of higher-order information processing that explains about 80% of the variance in general intelligence.

Note that this is "speed of higher-order information processing" which is not the same as reaction time.

Ahh, fascinating - thank you!

I’m not sure what you mean. League is not a game of fast reflexes or spamming abilities. What separates good from bad players is prediction and calculation based on memorized patterns, similar to chess. In chess, all of the top players under 30 are also fantastic at bullet and blitz. Some of the top players in league have taken reaction time tests and aim tests, and they’re not an extreme outlier or anything.

I have a good number of friends who had pretty good results in programming competitions like Google Code Jam (think, top 5 scorers). They come from an Eastern European country, and, most probably, they are more intelligent than basically anyone you have ever personally met. Among them, they boast dozens of IOI/IMO/ICPC medals etc. Top tiers of sheer brainpower, by quote objective standards.

Here is something to understand about them: based on their individual background, those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time. After these competitions, they went on to become grad students at Harvard, Columbia, CMU and the like, and/or got a job at top FAANGs, making $500k today (roughly a decade after their competition successes). These options simply weren’t open (or even, for that matter, conceivable) to many of them when they were honing their competition skills way back in high school, or freshmen years at university, purely because your options are much more limited in second or third tier countries.

Now compare this to the options available to a highly intelligent and driven American young adult. Is try-harding at these objective merit-based competitions worth it? Not really: you will be competing against literally billions of people across the world, and your inborn advantage of being born in US, the land of many opportunities, will help you very little.

The more typical way of succeeding in current day America, which is getting to an elite college, are in fact conflicting with tryharding at competitions: practicing for those will take a lot of your time, which could be more effectively spent on honing items that will look better on your college applications. Quite simply, foundational Americans have better ways of enjoying success and status than these competition.

This is even better seen in those gaming competitions, which are dominated by lower class people from poor countries, as for them, spending 12+ hours a day playing video games have lowest opportunity cost. I would never allow my son to even try to get into that “career”.

This is also why Soviet science was such high quality: for the top people, there was little way to achieve success “in the industry”, and so the position of university professor was relatively really good compared to potential earnings and responsibilities you’d have at a high level position in some state owned enterprise. The wage and status differential was not huge. Compare this to today’s enormous differential between what you can make in US academia, vs the industry, and note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).

Is this a falsifiable hypothesis?

those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time

Korotkevich from Belarus dominates programming competitions — ostensibly he has already attained maximum status and opportunity many times over as he has been the winner for years for Google Code. This is weak evidence against the motivational theory, because he seems to just want to dominate the competition. And indeed, chess players too generally just like dominating the competition, as a reward in its own fight. The second and third math Olympiad winners are Chinese and immigrant Canadian, so they’re in the top 2% of world opportunity. If “desiring opportunity” were the motivator we would see more winners from India, Malaysia, Bangladesh. The only non-Asian American winner, Reid Barton, came from a wealthy well-connected family.

Sure, some indeed actually dedicate their lives to these kind of competitions, but this is not big fraction of the people partaking, and even their career is not that long. They usually move on from there to more typical places of status. I also think it's not instructive to focus on the actual winners, instead consider people in top 10, or even top 50.

note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).

I'd appreciate reading this if you do end up writing it. I presume you're in math/CS?

I am working in tech industry, and don't have much personal experience in US academia, so this will be mostly based on experiences of my friends and family, and my knowledge of intricacies of US immigration system (the legal one, that is).

The typical wage of US postdoc researcher (and these are the ones who do most of the actual work) is something like $50-60k. Entry level positions are often in low-to-mid $40k, and salaries below that are not unheard of. These are all people with PhDs, not necessarily extremely smart (like my friends I mention above), but nevertheless significantly more intelligent than an average person earning six figures, and at least as driven and conscientious. How is that possible?

The answer is quite simple: these position are filled with mostly foreign researchers. They come here on J1 or H1B visas (occasionally on O1, but that's less common among junior researchers), and are tied to their PI and their lab to a very high degree. On J1, they literally cannot change they job, and on H1B, they can only switch to another research job, they cannot leave and go writing ad targeting code for FAANG. Even if they want to switch lab, that's usually not very easy. The job market is much smaller, based on recommendations, so their PI can completely torpedo their career if they so choose, making them beholden to their whims. And I haven't even mentioned the two body problem, affecting the scientists very acutely.

This means that the foreign researchers are, to a large degree, indentured servants of the labs they work for. This is not to say that they are exploited: no, they are typically rather fine with the arrangement, given that they can always go back to their home country, but nevertheless chose it, being mostly aware of its realities, and stay here. This is rather similar to the original indentured servants back in the day. The point is that the realities of what awaits them back home, along with the incentives that the immigration temporary work authorization system (H1B and most other employment visas were not meant result in immigration, indeed, before the invention of the legal fiction of "dual intent" policy, applying for a green card while on H1B resulted in not being to return to US if you leave it before you obtain the GC) highly reduce the pool of options available to them once they're here, and make foreign researchers being highly attractive, captive workforce for the research organizations.

Because both Chess and LoL are far far down in popularity in the US?

I mean, does the US not doing well in Soccer mean that it isn't athletic?

The original comment suggests that the US playerbase for LoL is higher than other nations. I would imagine that Chess also has the largest number of players coming from the US compared to other nations. Both are different from football, in which the US playerbase is dwarfed by other nations

Chess, LOL, and Soccer are all examples of competitions the US is bad at for, IMO almost the exact same reason: They require very high investment from children and teens, and have almost no benefit to you if you don't make it.

Other countries have less high of an upside for a smart and talented people going a conventional direction (and obviously less of a downside of failure because of more generous welfare states and less college enrollment, which means white collar women can't turn their noses up at plumbers and truckers like they do in the US), like investment banking or tech. American football and Basketball are nowhere near the skill expression of soccer and tennis, demonstrated by the many many pros who picked up the sport at something like age 16, so they are much easier for the dumb, but athletic to get into at any age.

So yeah, I don't think these things matter much on the big stage.

American football and Basketball are nowhere near the skill expression of soccer and tennis, demonstrated by the many many pros who picked up the sport at something like age 16, so they are much easier for the dumb, but athletic to get into at any age.

Dexterity and coordination required to be skilled in these sports is not all that much related to intelligence iirc, but fast processing speed is a skill rewarded by team sports that is well correlated with intelligence.

True, but if you go by the Wunderlic which the NFL famously used to administer to all incoming rookies, the average NFL player is slightly above the American average, ~105 IQ. But there are several position groups like running back and cornerback where the average IQ is far below 100.

NA has a larger player pool than Korea in League, and it is the most popular American e-Sport. If popularity dictated chess GMs, I do not think we would see an Italian, Norwegian, Chinese, and Dutchman among top players.

On the other hand, the US does quite well in International Mathematical Olympiad, never coming up lower than 4th since 2009. Also 0 female competitors since 2008, which combined with mostly Asians being on the teams, shows that AA isn't yet enforced there.

This is why mediocre national test scores are not that big of a deal. What matters is the top .01% or so of talent, and that is where the US seems to excel in terms of absolute and total talent. America's schools and universities attract the best talent from all over the world even if most students are unexceptional, or wokeness not withstanding.

This is why mediocre national test scores are not that big of a deal. What matters is the top .01% or so of talent

Everyone gets one vote. I think a low-intelligence median voter is a BFD. It takes actually quite a lot of sophistication in the scheme of things to understand that, e.g., raising the minimum wage to $50/hr won't make everyone rich.

That’s remarkable that in 2021, Ukraine was not too far from America’s ranking.

https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2021

It’s also strange that Russia can beat America with their own population, eg no Koreans /Chinese

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