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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Underneath all of the various common jokes -- "Asians are good at math", etc. -- there is an undercurrent of discussion where other people are admitting their biases, too.

That's not a bias, it's simple fact. Asians have SAT math scores 72 points higher than average, TIMSS scores 74 points higher than average, and are disproportionately represented in professions requiring significant mathematical background.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883611.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...

Further, the top 5 nations on the math component of TIMSS have been the 5 first world countries in Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) in all years since 1995 (in 1995, Taiwan was not included, and Belgium was #5).

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The interesting point here is that people believe that if a fact has racist, sexist, or homophobic implications it must not be true.

Reminiscent of an earlier era in which any statements that contradicted church doctrine must simply be false. Indeed, the very concept of a "heretical but true" statement was impossible to comprehend.

While we're talking about simple facts, how about the simple fact that 70% of the population has an unconscious preference for whites over blacks? (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090617142120.ht... .) The hard truth is that even if you think you're unbiased, you're probably not. And brain research increasingly indicates that we simply don't know our own minds nearly as well as we think we do (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080414145705.ht...).

And worldwide Asians are underrepresented as Field's medalists. And Turning Award winners. And Nobel prizes in math intesive fields like Econ and Physics.

Give them a few more years.

There is a group with even higher SAT and IQ scores - the Jews. And they are way overrepresented in Field's, Turing, Nobel awards.

Well, it can be both a bias and a fact.

I did not go so far as to say that biases have no basis in fact, because that's an argument I'm neither prepared to make, nor want to make.

I was making the point that biases exist.

Some have coined the term "hatefacts" for these biased facts.

So? What are you going to do with that information?

What's a better way of figuring out if someone is good at math: give them a math test? Or look up their ancestry?

I didn't claim an immediate and obvious use for this info, I merely claimed that it was a true statement rather than a bias.

Is it a statement that will always be true, and that has always been true? If it may not be continuously true temporarily, can it still be described as a fact?

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