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Comment by mrcrumb1 | Hacker News Reader

Your comment (and the article) seems to imply that Asian Americans try harder than other immigrant groups and Black people in the United States. Do you think that is a foregone conclusion?

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Hi Mr. Crumb, why beat the strawman? He didn't say that and the article didn't either. All he is saying is that Asians try really hard, not that Blacks or other groups are not trying.

The narrative in the article is that race based admissions replaced meritocratic admission in this case, and the achievements that the Asian American students received were due solely to their hard work. If this is the case, then the obvious conclusion is that the black students (who sat at 2% admission) or the Hispanic students (who sat at 14%) were not hard-working enough, or at the very least, were not as hard working as the Asian American students.

That's not the obvious conclusion, it seems like you might be projecting. Immigrants are a biased sample (they have enough money to leave the country of their birth, enough education to get a visa, etc)

Nigerian immigrants have higher educational attainment when compared to Nigerian-Americans that were born citizens. It doesn't mean Nigerians born in the US are lazy, only that they are operating under different circumstances. The idea that Asians are just inherently good at math or whatever is incredibly offensive, these things are a product of nurture not nature.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that I was implying anything about innate characteristics of racial groups. I was trying to point out that the picture the article and the parent comment were painting was too simplistic. In general, I don't think any of those groups try harder than the rest and so saying something like "people shouldn't get butt-hurt over this unless they are willing to put the same time and effort in" is ignoring a lot of what goes into the dynamics at play here.

he specifically mentioned one thing and you drew your conclusion about the others.

i could say the sky is blue. that's one conclusion. you're saying in addition to that statement you can conclude that everything else is not blue. which is ridiculous because the ocean is blue too. the whole "the opposite is true" logic is a fallacy.

I don't see how it's a fallacy in this case; this is definitional in the construction of meritocratic admissions: the people admitted have more merit than the ones that are not. OP phrased it as a matter of effort, and I was just making explicit what he left implicit.

Do you think the opposite is true? That every immigrant or racial group places an exactly equal value on education, and any disparity we see is due only to systematic racism?

Personally, I think the answer is somewhere in the middle.

I tend to agree with you; I was pointing out that the comment I replied to was painting a pretty simplistic picture of why the admissions numbers might look the way they do, when in reality it's probably a more complicated picture.

Has anybody ever studied the success rates of (just) immigrant groups specifically by race? I seem to recall reading that Nigerian immigrants specifically track similarly to Indian immigrants.

Do you have a source for that? I've heard this same point made before about why Jewish people are so successful compared to other races.

Yes, that’s plainly obvious to anyone who pays attention.

I'm taking the bait and saying yes, this is absolutely a factor. I will gladly discuss more about why I say this and the underlying issues. Society had spent far too many years dancing around or burying the cultural aspects for fear of stoking "racism" and such. The "ignore it and it will go away" tactic isn't working.

On average, my experience suggests: yes, definitely.

Does your experience not suggest the same?

op didn't say that

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