Asian Americans

What Hacker News says

1. queensnakeAug 2009
   Chinese' success is an example: http://www.amazon.com/Asian-Americans-Achievement-Beyond-Iq/...

   Note that Flynn (yes, that one) is no racist.

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2. tokenadultJul 2009
   I buy into the conclusion that immigration is good for the United States in general and particularly good as a source for innovation. Having lived overseas, in one of the countries that is a big source for immigrants to the United States (Taiwan), I have to respectfully disagree with the idea that what is going on here is mostly selection of people from very high-IQ echelons of source countries, and those people then doing things that lower-IQ people INHERENTLY can't do.

   Most human beings don't come close to maximizing the realization of their potential. And many of the countries that are the biggest sources of immigrants to the United States have very much of a "growth mindset"

   http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...

   in general in their cultures, and particularly in the subcultures that supply most of the immigrants to the United States, such that those immigrants, whatever their IQ scores, do more to realize their potential than people with "fixed mindset." Indeed, there is a whole book on this subject, James R. Flynn's Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ.

   http://www.amazon.com/Asian-Americans-Achievement-Beyond-Iq/...

   The IQ threshold for eminent achievement and even "genius" (as carefully defined by psychologists) is not particularly high, but is only about 120 on a currently normed IQ test. That, by definition of IQ standard scoring, is less than two standard deviations above the population mean.

   Follow-up comments to this by request.

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