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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/...

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.

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).

> 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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?