Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

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Do you have any basis on which to claim that Asian students are less creative than your idealized American one?

Standardized education in Asia has a very long history, and given the many achievements of Asian civilization, it seems quite fantastical to claim Asians are less creative than <insert culture here>.

If anything, the countries of Asia must necessarily be more creative, because they often have less to work with. Countries like Singapore and Japan have very few natural resources but can still hold their own economically against America or any other Western power. Meanwhile, without diminishing the amount of hard work undertaken, America's economic success historically is due in large part to the wealth of geographic resources and the successful extraction and marketing of those resources. While lucrative, and a great example of what the American work ethic can accomplish, I'm not sure I'd label this as particularly creative.

Ultimately, the drive to label Americans as creative and Asians as non-creative is simply moral positioning in order to maintain some kind of perceived superiority over cultures rather than admit they may have a better system.

Whoa there.

I never said Asians in general or Asia as a whole weren't creative. That was not even remotely stated, implied, or even in my thoughts when writing that comment.

What I said was that the strength of the American system, for decades, was that it seemed to foster and encourage creativity - and that is being destroyed by the pursuit of standardized objectives.

I didn't say a thing about the other systems' creativity or the students' ability to be creative.

I made a comparison of the levels of stress experienced in the two.

Korean students have ENORMOUS pressure placed on them was my experience. And in the US we pulled THAT experience from their system. We seemed to have taken all of the bad with none of the good.

Relax.

I think of it more as appetite for risk than creativity. The US system encourages and rewards taking risks more so than others. Failure is forgiven and sometimes even celebrated. I worked in Japan and found its famously risk-averse culture way more intense than Western descriptions make it out to be (and those descriptions are not kind to begin with.) This component of their culture absolutely acts as a headwind to entrepreneurship. On the other hand, some of the most dynamic risk-takers I've met recently are young Chinese kids from Beijing and Shanghai who grew up in very traditional formal educational pathways.

That's fair, and makes a ton of sense.

I think maybe it's a chicken and egg problem with the standardized tests, and we are 'measuring' out our stomach for risk as a society.

Hmm, gp poster did say "but our creativity was our strength" which I interpreted as "we comforted ourselves with the belief that our creativity was our strength and that we were superior in that regard"

I hope nobody actually believes one group of people is inherently more creative than any other. But it is true that east and south asian schooling systems are typically value memorization over creativity. You can see how that can happen too: huge, high stake exam systems are easier to implement in that fashion, in which case the educational system will adapt to match. In that regard I share the gp poster's concern that this approach appears to be increasingly dominant in the US (as it has been in earlier eras in the US btw).

My mother is a product of such a system and she very much watched her kids' grades like a hawk, valuing just the numerical result. But she was able to enrol her kids in a more "creative" program than she had had access to herself.

Why does it strike you as wildly implausible that different groups of people might differ in their (average) levels of creativity, and that the differences might be partly heritable (a better word than inherent when referring to average differences)? We know that many group differences exist, e.g., men are taller than women, people of African ancestry are darker-skinned than people of European ancestry, etc. Given that sex differences and racial differences clearly exist, what reason is there to believe that they only occur along dimensions that society doesn’t place value on?

Because most people saying that one race is smarter or otherwise better than another race are simply repeating debunked racist talking points.

Variation within a group almost always overwhelms variance between groups - but many people saying something like "Asians are less creative" are trying to make sweeping statements about how white people are better.

It is possible to lie only using truths, if you arrange them in a deliberately misleading way.

Here's a different way to look at it:

In a culture where memorization and concrete thinking is used to compare $n people within that culture, creativity is inherently more risky, thus less utilized. Poverty in many Asian countries is worse than poverty in the US. With more to lose (and gain), it creates peace of mind to walk the smooth stone road to comfort.

The US on the other hand has had a lot of money to play with for quite awhile. Most poor people have enough food (and a variety of it at that), a modern home, and basic health care. It is very doable to be comfortable on a $12/hr job in many places in the US. ($1,650 per month after tax) (of course, many people choose to live above their means due to societal pressure). The point is, we can/could be more risky (read: more creative) with less to lose, so it's utilized more.

> In a culture where memorization and concrete thinking is used to compare $n people within that culture, creativity is inherently more risky

Yes, but the "culture where memorization.." is the culture of school. Says nothing about the culture of the larger society.

Here's a different way to look at it:

In a society where there is a lot of poverty, quite a bit of creativity is required to just get by. You can see this in poverty-stricken societies everywhere from rural China, India, Nigera, and poverty-stricken parts of the USA. Everything from crazy inventions/repairs to innovation in ways of living, getting some cash, stretching bills, toys and games, helping each other... Tontines and savings clubs have been re-invented all over the planet, yes, even in Brooklyn.

Whereas in parts of the US, on the other hand, many people have a lot of money to play with for quite a while and are perfectly happy to have others do their cooking, singing, storytelling, and manufacturing. To discard something malfunctioning and simply buy another.

The point is, people all over the world can afford to be less risk-taking (read: less creative) when they have more less to lose and can afford to throw assets at the problems.

I think the culture of school has a meaningful impact on the culture as a whole, as does the culture as a whole have an impact on the culture of school. i.e., the two are not that separated from each other.

The creativity I was talking about is different than what you're talking about. That creativity is used in survival, yes. But the path to success is controlled by gatekeepers. There is little cross over between the creativity used to survive on the lower tiers of Maslow's HoN and the path to the middle class, where there's expectations in place and paths to follow, where diverging from them creates risk.

I’ve never understood the argument about variance. The difference between two samples’ means can be statistically significant regardless of their respective variances.

> Why does it strike you as wildly implausible that different groups of people might differ in their (average) levels of creativity, and that the differences might be partly heritable (a better word than inherent when referring to average differences)?

Yes, I can admit to the very low possibility that such a difference could exist, but indeed I would call it "wildly implausible." Here are some example reasons why:

Nobody can even define creativity in any formal way, so any impartial analysis seems impossible. It's a "know it if I see it" issue.

Certainly people from all "racial" backgrounds exhibit plenty of creativity ("know it if I see it"). Indeed, if you want to extend this to cultural practices, plenty of folks from (somewhat) "rote" school backgrounds have been quite creative, won various international awards, etc.

Alleged biomarkers of cognitive issues are notoriously uninformative. For example Han people tend to have more white matter in their brain and some people in China consider that a sign of superior intellect. But it's more likely a side effect of the writing system as it is perhaps part of the visual pattern recognition process. But such beliefs are little different from 19th/20th century European/American phrenology which also produced whatever results the "scientist" wanted.

Most sex and race differences get drowned out by cultural factors and fashions which themselves change over time.

I wish there was a way to flag comments. Maybe there is a way and I just haven't found it.

You are spouting racist pseudo-science. What evidence do you have that a particular group of people are genetically smarter than another group of people?

The idea that one race/group of people is inherently smarter than another group of people has been debunked time and time and time again. Any "evidence" you find that "proves" one race is superior to another in terms of intelligence is probably

1]false/misleading

2]at worse, can be explained by differences in educational systems, history, and other socio-economic factors.

I think the user gumby gave a more detailed explanation than me, I'm just here to say that you should stop propagating openly racist pseudo-science on HN.

It sounds like you have an irrational, faith-based belief in the absence of group differences. You’ve said that any evidence of their existence is probably bogus, which suggests that there isn’t any potential evidence that would change your mind. I started out not believing in the existence of group differences and changed my mind after looking at the evidence. Now I realize how silly it was for me to believe that groups with different ancestries differ only in superficial ways.

That doesn’t mean I hate any particular groups, or that I’m incapable of treating people as individuals.

It is clear that there are specific variances (e.g. albedo) which have had survival benefit in specific environments, but given that humans can reshape their environments so extensively and that in specific a human is a combination of genes + social interaction + managed environment it's pretty hard to imagine gross performance differences among groups in any meaningful metric that might somehow be entirely genetic. I am saying that

It's not like this issue hasn't been extensively studied either. It has been extremely difficult to find meaningful behavioural deltas that can be ascribed to genetics -- the other factors typically swamp them, so even if there were a signal always seems to be well below the noise floor.

Of course, it's possible that such evidence exists and we just lack the science and process to find it. But from what we know today, and even more so the more we learn about genomics and personal genomics, it is even less likely than would have been believed 50 years ago. I've probably got another 50 years in my lifespan and I seriously doubt the situation will change in that period.

Can you link to a meta-analysis or similar that supports your conclusion? I’ll read it with an open mind.

I would link to the studies I’ve read that support the opposite conclusion, but at this point I feel that I’d run the risk of being shadow-banned for linking to something that has been labeled—accurately or not—as “racist pseudoscience”.

Since these comments are not dominant I think it's OK to have them on the site since they get responded to. Perhaps it could change their minds.

American isn't a race

My post had nothing to do with 'inherent' differences. While the asian education system (which is certainly not inherently asian) may seem less creative, I often see this 'fact' bandied about with no supporting data.

All i ask for is proof that the intense asian education system stifles creativity. I argued it does not by pointing out the success of certain asian coubtries against all odds via innovative business and industry.

> But it is true that east and south asian schooling systems are typically value memorization over creativity

Perhaps, but the burden of proof is on you to show that 'valuing creativity' leads to more creativity. It is certainly possible that emphasizing sheer technical prowess leads to higher creativity. That this possibility is not even considered says more about the writer than asian pedagogy.

The TL;DR: I think you and I both agree, actually, that the half-racist/half-defensive meme of "asians uncreative/US creativity is a fundamental asset" is utter nonsense.

I think my message you're replying to might not have been clear, and I'm sorry if so.

I agree your post had nothing to do with inherent differences between people (and I don't believe such differences exist either) and I was myself trying to contradict the lazy trope (and poor grasp of logic) that says "that system is more rote-oriented than ours, thereby ours must be more creative."

Western schools were also pretty rote oriented until the early 20th century when Europeans like Steiner and Montessori tried to develop alternatives. Those alternatives had some influence on schools in Europe, Australia, and America (but there's plenty of rote learning still in US schools). Those movements have had less influence in Asia until perhaps the 21st century.

NOTE: I myself didn't attend school in Asia, so my exposure is indirect (through parents, grandparents, relatives and friends).

I could probably make an argument that it was more about communism removing creativity and individualism than asian countries not being as creative as Americans.

Good point! These issues are so vague that in reality the “arguments” are simply assertions in favor of whatever point you want to claim.

"The nail that sticks out shall be hammered down"

...and yet the country from which this aphorism comes paradoxically values creativity! Nice example!

I think this movie is a really good take on the relationship between the Japanese education system and "creativity":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_of_the_Heart

A 14 year old girl struggles between doing the socially expected thing and study to do well on her exams and get into a good university someday, or do what she really wants, which is to write. She is inspired by other creative people, outside the Japanese mainstream, and eventually receives her parents' blessing to take a different path.

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