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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?
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.
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
Why would it be strange?
Because Russia has half the population of America, and is poorer. “Why do native-born Americans not perform as well as either newer immigrants or Russians?” is the strange phenomena.
Being poorer is an asset, not a drawback, at competing in things which most wealthy people dont find worth doing. It drives down your opportunity cost.
This is a just-so story. Most poor nations do not perform very well. India, Malaysia, Bangladesh. And in America the poor do not perform well. Korea and China are not particularly poor, if we’re looking at math Olympiads. The greatest chess players right now (Carlsen, Nakamura) all had wealthy families and opportunity.
The implied point is that given same IQ, poverty is advantage for math contests.
Math is low, very low status.
America-born individuals very much prefer going into positions where they can exploit value of labor by foreign-born high IQ individuals. They don't need math.
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