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I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion. Now everyone is going to spend time writing knee-jerk responses to you.

At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.

I disagree. Were this an academic symposium I would agree. But this is the internet where folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon. Fortunately, I do appreciate the author's thought and contribtions to observation data, and, tongue in cheek, as a utility monster my appreciation more than negates your lack of appreciation.

Were this an academic symposium on lung cancer I would agree. But this is the internet where folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon. As a utility monster my appreciation reading about the author's grandma who lived 'til 90 smoking a pack a day more than negates your obsession with medical data.

The irony of this being every discussion of education on HN.

Must consume more utility, rawr.

There is nothing hn doesn’t understand. There are just a lot of juniors, which is important.

Was your comment meant for me or someone else? I don't follow.

Just responding to: “folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon”

There may be more folks on hn with said skills than you presume.

This may well be true in terms of absolute rate, but still satisfy "uncommon."

Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".

The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.

To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.

Anecdotes are not a very useful tool in discussions about generalisations. They provide little evidence aside from saying that it's a category of event that can exist. No one at any point has said citations are gospel. Just that anecdotes aren't adding much to the discussion at hand. If you've got issues with the cited data, be precise instead of casting general aspersions on academia.

Given that this is just a discussion between random strangers on an internet forum, I personally find both statistics and clear anecdotes, which GP provided, valuable in creating the richest perspective.

This isn't Proceedings of Hacker News or parliament: we're writing ephemeral internet words and trying to enrich each other.

Cited data on broad human population shows correlation at best, not causation.

I posited a cause based on the lived experiences people shared with me.

You're free to disagree with my conclusion, or to suggest an alternative cause. None of the cited data has actually done either of those things.

Then argue the methodology and data; anecdotes are great tools for sharing narratives, but a narrative based on bad data doesn't help anyone achieve good outcomes.

> Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".

The history of human civilization.

> I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion.

So does the linked PDF address this proposed "hopelessness" factor, or is it that once someone cites something the discussion becomes restricted to only things that have published study results?

Also, if someone were to cite https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094 on the effectiveness of parachutes, are other commenters then forbidden from citing anecdata that disagree with the findings?

The cited findings, don't refute the culture argument though, and maybe even reenforces it. In US culture being illiterate is bad, being bad at math is not looked down up on. The stats show good at reading and bad at math.

While there are STEM (Science Tech Engineering and Math) initiatives, I have yet to see one that actually includes math. You see results in science but not math.

The U.S. isn’t “bad” at math. I found some updated charts that break down the data for 2022 (the underlying data is all from OECD and NCES). White kids in the U.S. outperform non-immigrant kids from every European country except Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Estonia: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732244690408214720?s=4.... Though to be fair, the US and Europe are all notable behind the developed asian countries (Singapore, Japan, Korea) which may indicate a lesser cultural focus on STEM.

The parent commenter’s “source” makes no claims about race related performance whatsoever - it measures by just about everything but that, and then sorts by country. So maybe this is one of those darned reflexive knee jerk responses.

Pages 16, 32, 50 and 62 have breakdowns of mean score by ethnicity actually.

Ethnicity is way too coarse-grained to answer questions about culture and family wealth/connections. That’s lumping together a kid from an old-money family in New Haven with a kid from a trailer park in Virginia.

I'd say it's an incomplete measure, but it's far from useless given the US' continued statistically-significant disparities between ethnicity outcomes. The first step of solving a problem, etc. etc.

I do agree with the general sentiment though and think that too much research/news over the last couple decades has been exclusively ethnically segmented, given the economic segmentation that should always also be involved.

They're perpendicular questions and best triangulate the American experience in tandem.

E.g. what are outcomes for wealthy members of disadvantaged ethnicities? What are outcomes for poor members of advantaged ethnicities?

Those are interesting socioeconomic questions!

Test scores improve with income among all groups, but the gaps between groups remain relatively similar at each income level.

> They're perpendicular questions and best triangulate the American experience in tandem.

They are not perpendicular, which is why it's difficult to separate them. You even seem to know this intuitively, that's why they're "interesting socioeconomic questions".

They are perpendicular, in that one does not determine the other.

They may influence each other, but it's obviously physically possible to be a wealthy minority in the US.

It shows correlation, not causation. In the vein of this thread, it's not more or less useful than other anecdotes.

I posited a causation based on how the anecdotes countered the general trends in the data. I welcome counter arguments better than "I'm ignoring you because you don't have numbers".

Were I being paid to research this more deeply, I would. I'm not, and if someone doesn't like my argument, they're free to find one of their own.

"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.

Sadly, there are a variety of such family, community, and social and peer group motivations and behaviors -

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality#See_also

It's not the poverty; it's the learned helplessness.

The causal direction from poverty to learned helplessness is pretty much established, though

Learned helplessness is poverty+some other things, though. Otherwise no one in poverty would ever leave it. Just talking about causal direction elides reality.

Rural low population states actually have pretty good test scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...

That's an understatement. Sort that by at or above basic and the top 5 states in the US are: North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Utah, Wisconsin.

Even in those states you mention, the number of students managing basic proficiency in maths fell by over 10 percentage points in the past 10 years. You can use the year selection on the site to see the picture change over the years. Texas dropped by over 20 points.

Nationally, seems to be mostly demographic change plus covid. For white 13 year olds, NAEP reading and math scores dipped a point from 2012-2020. Then they dipped 5-6 points from 2020-2023: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/

Interesting! Yeah, this is a significant decline across the board. I'm curious what it is in the US in particular that's driving such sharp declines. Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID, have internet/social media, ongoing obesity epidemics, major immigration from low education sources, demographic/fertility issues, and so on. Yet somehow looking at the latest PISA (2022) [1], the US now sits between Malta and Slovakia in math. And if these scores are any indicator, we're probably looking at a further decline in the next PISA results, which should be released this year.

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...

> Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID

Most of the EU/lots of Europe focused on getting the kids back in school before the US did. I personally think that was the right trade-off, but obviously people differ.

Pupil teacher ratios in rural states are insanely low. That would impact the below basic group presumably.

Edit: to say pupil teacher ratios are low, not high.

You can almost guarantee test scores in Minnesota and Wisconsin are being carried by the cities and suburbs, not rural areas. They have some of the best (and most expensive) schools in the country, and the highest test scores.

> Skin color isn't it, actually.

Is contradicted by this

> My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.

Unless you are taking skin colour very literally, which is obviously not it (someone's academic performance is not going to change if they get a heavy tan or use s kin whitening cream or take a drug that changes skin colour etc.).

I interpreted "white" to mean an ethnic identity, not a literal description.

>"acting white"

Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile. That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.

Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.

They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.

The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

Lack of role models, right? What men do they look up to?

I guess primary school teachers in the US are predominantly women as they are in most countries? So boys without intellectually inclined men at home or in their social circles do not have role models for educated masculinity.

I’m not sure if the gender of teachers is so much a factor as class identity.

Young French author Édouard Louis has written about his experience growing up in an extremely anti-intellectual working class milieu in France. It’s a country where school teachers are traditionally men, and discipline is stricter than in America or the Northern European countries. But that seems to go together with a class separation where the working class boys don’t see the male teachers as role models but more as representatives of the distant authority.

The lack of US male teachers (as well as non-white teachers, especially at higher grade levels) is born out by the numbers: https://usafacts.org/articles/who-are-the-nations-teachers/

The share of male teachers has trended downward in the 80s and 90s (by ~ -1%/yr), then slowed in the 00s+ (to ~ -0.5%/yr), and now sits at 22.4%.

The share of white teachers sits at 80%+ for post-kindergarten grades.

So if teachers represent academic achievement, then there are certainly a lot of kids (especially male minorities) who don't see themselves in their teacher (ethnically and gender-wise).

Both will play a role, and it will differ between societies.

Boys from more intellectually inclined backgrounds will have the role models outside school and that correlates with class (as do attitudes to authority, of course).

> This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

Absolutely not, this is hilariously wrong. I invite you to find any male role models in China and India (or just outside the Western hemisphere in general, for that matter) pushing such anti-intellectualism.

The male influencers here may misguide on communal lines, but you won't find anyone looking down on studying or considering it "unmanly" in any context.

> Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.

"Everywhere" as in "across the world and across time", "because testosterone/teen boys will be boys"?

If so, then I can give you an emphatic no, this is not at all true. It is, as with 99% of things, a cultural phenomenon. The degree to which the "bias against putting in the effort to get good grades" exists varies enormously depending on subculture and time. You may have personally only experienced cultures where this is the dominant case, but that does not make it indicative of immutable nature.

If not, then where and when is your "everywhere"?

That must be dealt with full spectrum crackdown on national level.

I'd like to see what a "full-spectrum crackdown" on anti-intellectualism in the US would look like, given that most of its population struggles to discern fact from fiction in the news cycle, healthcare and legal proceedings. The introduction of generative AI has only made that worse, pushing more distrust of any information that didn't come from a source counted among "one of us." Our problem stems from an intentionally poorly educated populace that still heavily relies on idolatry, allowing whatever demagogue with the means to rise and essentially manipulate the masses.

I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.

Banning TikTok could have been a great first step, but too may people were cooked by the algorithm to stop it.

FWIW, my friend was accused of acting white probably around the year 2000 or so, well before anything algorithmic.

Not to say that tiktok is innocent, but it certainly isn't the root cause.

The irony is that TikTok et al. could also be the very solution GP wants, depending on algorithm.

Imagine kids glued to an app that shows them engaging and intellectually-positive content. (Which at that scale could actually be inferred)

Fast social isn't intrinsically evil: recommendation algorithms that maximize engagement at the expense of other social goods are. (Or even that operate blind to them)

You're ignoring the effect of the medium itself.

Education requires sustained engagement. Books are conducive to that kind of deep engagement with the material. It requires perseverance, an ability to sit with a topic at the expense of indulging all the cheap distractions that may be available to them (the internet furnishes these gladly and easily). TikTok and bite-sized social media is certainly not conducive to that. The train never leaves the station. Social media's very form consists of feeding the impulsive indulgence of distraction. It only produces superficiality and trains the user's attention span to contract, or to never develop in the first place.

Gamifying learning is a fool's errand. Children are easily distracted, because they haven't yet learned discipline. They need something to counteract these urges, like removing the tempting distraction, an environment that is saturated with relationships and habits that enable good behavior and pursuits, or the threat of punishment for straying from good behavior.

Agreed in principle, but you're never going to substantially remove distractions from children, because school doesn't control them at home (nor should it) and most parents are too busy to be involved (DIWK).

They're going to be bathed in the omnipresent social environment radiation for a large portion of their time.

And they're going to form part of their self image and life goals from that.

Better to make it as positive as we can. Or at least prevent it from being explicitly anti-intellectual.

Burning books and censoring media has rarely been a path to fostering intellectualism.

You call it an app ban, but really it’s just press censorship.

Media from mainstream to alternative march in tune with pro intellectualism messages. Any works of art that espouse anti intellectualism would be swiftly and immediately canceled (including its authors) without hesitation. Do this for a generation or two minimum.

Get sydney sweeny to date alec radford, make sure there's lots of PDA.

Mandatory HRT to improve academic performance time.

Not t true. I don’t have the reference, but I read 10 or more years ago about an affluent community in the midwest whose black students greatly underperformed their white counterparts. The parents hired a black researcher and his final report said exactly that, that many black students didn’t want to appear white and also there were negative consequences for trying to do well. The parents thought it had to be racism and wouldn’t accept the results. The guy was a sociology professor at a college in CA.

For more annectdata, this same thing was happening at Berkeley High School around the same time. First hand knowledge from parents of students.

I have seen the pattern with latino students in SoCal as well.

Anecdotally the pressure can be worse with people who have a white parent (either mixed-race or through adoption); I am unsure if the cause more is internal (insecurity about self-image) or external (teenagers can be ruthless when they see differences).

How do you propose to do that?

I cannot think of any single ethnocultural group in the West that highly values education and, at the same time, has bad outcomes doing so. We have invested a lot of money and effort into our educational systems.

Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.

The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.

Jews were motived to achieve because they were oppressed.

How do Indian low castes do compared to higher castes in the same country? They often continue to suffer from discrimination from higher castes in the west. I can believe they do better than some other groups, but how to they compare to higher caste Indians?

I don’t know about low caste indians, but a good data point might be vietnamese. They are generally looked down on by other east asians. Their poverty rate in 1980 was higher than among black people. Today (where 60% are still foreign born) their median income and poverty rate is right around the national average, about 10% behind white americans.

How might we formalize these anecdotes and prove them out from a systemic issue?