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Notes -
No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites
1] From the moment of birth, Chinese-American infants show extreme acceptance to conditions that horrify European ones.
-Cover a European 40 hour old infants nose, either directly or by lying them face flat on the bed; and they'll struggle to uncover it. Chinese infants will breath through their mouth, otherwise remaining entirely motionless. Where European infants will become more aggressively distressed the longer you do this to them, Chinese infants will remain calm.
Study by Dan Freeman and his Chinese-American wife in Nature:
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0
2] Dramatic differences remain at four months:
REACTIVITY BATTERY RESPONSES: Exposed to a battery of tests designed to elicit reactions; moving, crying, fretting, vocalizing and smiling; Chinese infants are undeniably different.
For example, the most mobile Chinese infants are less than a third as mobile as the most mobile American ones and half as mobile as the Irish sample. In each area except for smilling, American and Irish reactivity can be expressed as multiples of the Chinese ones; with a degree of difference that would be shocking in a gender study! This is even after 32% of the Boston sample, but none of the Chinese sample, was excluded due to infant non-cooperation.
See the chart on page three. It's really, really dispositive.
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1037/0012-1649.30.3.342
CRYING IN RESPONSE TO INNOCULATION: Other studies involve observing differences in rates of crying upon childhood innoculations, and compare American infants to Japanese ones. Here, you get shocking differences like, 4 out of 26 Japanese infants crying in response to a shot where every single American infant did so. This, at least partially results from considerable differences in levels of cortisol production, both prior to and immediately after innoculation.
https://sci-hub.ru/10.2307/1131465
General Note: I tried to find East Asian American studies for the four month behaviour section, but couldn't. Readers of the papers will find that they appear to be well controlled as these things can be, with the Chinese sample being from the infants of students at China's top university.
3] Dramatic differences obviously remain in adulthood:
3.1 THE BAMBOO CEILING: There is asian overrepresentation in every field involving intelligence and a bamboo ceiling in every subfield requiring a personality. To give one example from reuters:
"Asian Americans comprise 13% of associates at major law firms, but just 4% of equity partners — the lowest ratio among minority groups, the report notes. Only one of the current 93 Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorneys is Asian American, and their representation among law clerks has been stagnant for the past 25 years."
The difference between associates, and partners/US Attorneys is of course, that the latter might occasionally try a case or engage in unmediated interactions with people who are not like them and need to build up a rappor.
3.2 MASKS PEOPLE, MASKS! Explain to me why, until perhaps the last two months, your average East-Asian American was more likely to be masked than blue-anon types. Isn't the parsimonious answer simply that infants who won't fight to uncover their nose, become adults that are indifferent to showing their face?
Do we realy have to litigate this one?
3.3 MUSIC: Asian parents sure as hell get their kids to play piano, and early, often similarly strict musical upbringings are common among music stars generally. Where then, are the distinguished East Asian-American popular musicians?
3.4 NOVELS: Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?
@sword-of-empire: I can be reached at lepidusian@protonmail.com
The study…is that really the fully study, or just the abstract…has a total of 48 infants. And the primary criteria is quite subjective—besides blink rate, it was all unquantified “oh the baby struggled more quickly”. (And even the blink rate isn’t actually display in a table anywhere.)
And, it’s the least blinded study I could imagine. The authors quite obviously knew they were looking at white or Asian babies, so there’s a huge potential for bias…up to and including pushing some of the babies harder.
And with this small sample, they nevertheless got massively significant p-value of 0.0001. Small sample size makes it harder for p-values to reach significance.
That's why the discuss the reliability:
So, they are quite subjective, but the authors subjective judgements were in very high agreement.
I have no idea whether this study if correct or not, but why are you cherry picking the very lowest p-value of the several reported?
It's sufficient to dispose of the argument that the study should be discounted because of its low sample size (which is an innumerate argument that gets thrown around far too often on the internet). P-values are, in part, a function of sample size. They're the answer to the question "what is the likelihood of seeing a pattern at least this strong in a sample of this size under the null hypothesis?". Having a small sample size isn't some sneaky hack to get more statistically significant results - as wlxd points out, a smaller sample size makes it harder to find significant results (i.e. you need a stronger effect size).
A lot of people have this vague idea that a study needs thousands or tens of thousands of observations to get persuasive results about some statistical pattern, and it's just not true. As an intuition pump, imagine flipping a coin 48 times and getting 42 heads and 6 tails. Is that not enough to convince you that the coin (or flipping process) is rigged?
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