If Caplan feels so strongly about this he should edit the Wikipedia entry; it’s not like Title 9 where he’s powerless to do anything. As far as “woke” moderators go, at least he won’t be preaching to the choir. Hell, the exchanges he would have with them would probably be highly entertaining.
Having tried to “fight the power” when Mika Tosca made despicable anti-Semitic comments after the Oct 7th Hamas murder, rape and hostage-taking atrocities - indisputably the most noteworthy thing Tosca has ever done - but there was no mention of the comments on Tosca’s wiki page 5 weeks later, the cost/benefit for Caplan in terms of his time would almost certainly be exceedingly poor.
However, I agree 10,000% that the talk page exchanges would be highly entertaining!
I’ve tried editing trans-related pages. It’s impossible - there are a few people who are essentially Wikipedia lawyers who exploit every trick in the book to keep the pages as they are.
Forty years ago, Thomas Sowell skewered the "model minority" rhetoric by stratifying the racial datasets by other social factors, demonstrating the inconvenient truths about how racial disparities (including the relative success of Asians) disappear when these other factors are taken into account. Contemporary collectivists don't want to face the fact that racial disparities are largely caused by governmental failures and by cultural differences affecting different racial groups unequally, not by "micoraggressions" and institutional cultures.
I once taught at an Asian cram school. Whenever you combine "Asian values" with a student that doesn't have the IQ to achieve what those Asian values think they should achieve...it's fucking ugly. Nothing gets accomplished beyond sheer misery, it's actually very tragic to watch.
Even when they have the IQ, it seems to be toxic past a point. Koreans are going extinct so they can go to cram schools and Red Queen Race each other.
Given blacks IQs, it's not like these people are going to get much out of Asian style academic prep regimens. Most would have happier and more fulfilling lives playing hoops rather than trying to master academic skills that are probably beyond their ability.
"Just act Asian" is kind of like "learn to code". It's a thing you say to blame someone for not doing something that is probably beyond their reasonable accomplishment sphere. And when someone tries and fails they start looking for some explanation as to why (they do not want to accept "because you're dumb and it was hopeless to begin with").
Asians study because with their higher IQs they get more out of it. All that cram school shit might in theory help them get better careers one day. If you don't have the IQ, you are going to realize pretty quick you aren't making progress or making the grade, and you are going to stop banging your head into a brick wall.
"Yet ironically, shining a spotlight on model minorities is one of the best ways to defuse the twin social evils of antipathy and self-pity. Once you realize that prudence is a reliable unilateral path to prosperity, you won’t just stop unjustly blaming others for your own failures. You’ll also be motivated to start improving. If no one else is holding you back, the only person you need to win over is yourself."
This is Bryan's conclusion. But it's the opposite of what someone who knew about IQ would say. IQ, not antipathy or self pity, is indeed what is holding you back. Motivation can't get you a higher IQ. Spending your time in an Asian cram school wouldn't be a prudent use of such a persons time.
Asians performing well is a great vindication of IQ as an explanatory factor over oppression, but the conclusions drawn here are literally the opposite of Bryans normal advice on this matter (where he tells parents they shouldn't waste time being Tiger Moms).
Here’s a metric for prudence: prior to 1955, fewer than 20% of black American children were born to unmarried mothers. By 1970, that rate had more than doubled, to 40%; today it’s 70%, and the effects of children growing up in communities in which absentee fathers are the norm have been shown to be disastrous.
Asian Americans have never had more than 20% of their children born to unwed mothers. The current rate is 11.7%.
There’s no narrative here about slavery and Jim Crow and yadda yadda. Black folks were doing just fine in this metric back in the Bad Old Days — they had rates as low as Asians. Since the 60s, the rates have skyrocketed for black folks and dropped modestly for Asians. You want to pin this piece of social dysfunction on “systemic racism”? Great, let’s hear it.
This is prudence. Everyone reading this has a pretty good sense of the cultural factors that distinguish black American from Asian American culture in this respect. It has nothing to do with cram school.
Sorry, you're right -- I may have lost the thread. I think the cultural shifts we've seen on this issue point to something more complicated than the IQ story (on its own) or any story about some sort of intractable, intransigent cultural determinism. I may be off on a tangent.
I guess his defense would be that he’s trying to improve things at the margins for blacks. I’m sure there are some gains to be made there. I don’t know how much though. I agree with you that “just try harder!” without taking IQ into account will mostly end in disappointment.
73 year old first generation (Jewish) American here, fan of Asian American (and all other) success, fan of most of what I read here, but frustrated that someone with your intelligence can be blind or ignorant of the history of African Americans. When I grew up, not that long ago, African Americans were not permitted in my school, on the beach where I swam, on the boardwalk where I vacationed, or in my neighborhood. When the Supreme Court and the Civil Rights Act forced some level of equality, funding was cut to public schools and private academies arose, and public accommodations such as public pools were closed rather than integrate. If you think that Asian-Americans experienced that history in the last half of the 20th century, you are factually wrong. It's wonderful that America has over and over again been a land of opportunity, and, in time, I believe that it will be so for African Americans. But holding one ethnic group up against another in a wholly different category is ignorant.
He’s relying on data from when he was in his 20s or 30s, when it was true. Schools used to be funded almost entirely by local taxes, so black kids living in poor districts had under funded schools. Since the 80s, these disparities have been more than offset by federal and state level funding. Majority black and Latino districts are now funded more generously per student than majority white districts. This excuse has played itself out and can be added to the pile of discarded and discredited explanations for disparities in outcomes.
Your point about the under-funding of black school districts was true for much of your life. But it hasn’t been true in about 40 years. Nobody under the age of 55 or so can rely on this excuse to explain their academic and professional trajectory.
At the national level, the average school funding per black student in a school is about 5% higher than the funding per white student. This general pattern holds in each region of the U.S., with slight variations. This has been true for decades. Please retire this talking point; it is untrue and unhelpful.
Social justice is basically epistemological, an attack on the focused mind, not basically politics. Man's focused mind discriminates things as better or worse for your life. The deliberately unfocused mind of social justice only knows differences as equal, with no discrimination. Social justice reduces man to an animal (without instincts). Social justice is a rejection of mans free will mind for mere perception or mindless sensing. Social justice rejects man as an individual to man as merely a part of an unchosen, multi-generational , social group, eg, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, nationality. For social justice, you are not you. You will be punished or rewarded because your ancestors oppressed or were oppressed. And oppression is claiming or enforcing better or worse. Thus the model minority is oppression.
We need more of this. Do racism and discrimination exist? Yes, but they don't cause failure or prevent success for individual. Avoiding failure requires self-discipline, work ethic, and adherence to societal norms. Achieving success requires all that + much more work, focus, determination, and self confidence.
The fashionable protected class groups love to portray themselves as the Cinderella of American Society, which perhaps they once were. In the last 40 years they look a lot more like Janice Soprano.
Fundamental bias as a function within Wikipedia articles is a bit of a hobby horse of mine. I believe both that WP is a marvel of the modern era and a fundamentally flawed mechanism for current-year sense making.
Numerous commentators say you should adjust the WP article but that belies a deep ignorance of how the platform works. In order to submit a change that will not be immediately removed, prior to any discussion, the article must be printed in an accepted journal of note. This is the fulcrum upon which ideological capture functions on WP as the list of acceptable sources is highly biased lacking both nuance and a mechanism for determining truth. Substack is specifically noted as a non-secondary source and is de facto not accepted, regardless of the source or quality of the publication.
I wholeheartedly agree with the arguments against this trash article; it’s transparently based on opinion pieces (using the Guardian as a source is a huge red-flag and should have your article banned outright). However for Prof. Caplan to have his say, this piece needs to be published in an accepted journal. I think it would be worth the effort as a small pushback like this might negate the entire claim and bring WP one article closer to the grand-unified truth.
I would LOVE to have a deeper conversation on the problems with WP and how to address them. Claims of, “woke bias,” or, “ it’s untrustworthy hogwash,” are simply not good enough. WP is too important to sacrifice and I would be glad to make the arguments and seek solutions.
I have no idea how to address the problem - and my hat’s off to you if you can, and I’ll tip my hat to you for even trying - but suggesting that there is *not* heavy “woke bias” in WP topics that have any relation to politics is beyond naive.
I didn’t suggest that. I said the claim of “woke bias,” is insufficient toward finding a solution. The bias could easily roll in some other direction because the entire edifice of WP is based on a shaky foundation of “accepted sourcing.”
One thing that I believe will happen to WP if it survives another 50 years is what happens to all history: it will be reviewed and the obvious bias will be noted and identified. For example, the propaganda of the Tudor dynasty was not something people in 1600’s England could dispute, but is uncontroversial and clearly understood in the 21st century. But a belief that our foibles will be obvious to future generations doesn’t help us today wherein we see WP used as the go-to source for current-year biographies, politics, culture war, etc.
Ok, apologies that I seem to have misinterpreted your assertion that claims of “woke bias” are not good enough.
It may be that until recently “we see WP used as the go-to source” was a true statement, but just as trust in the mainstream media has gone down enormously in lockstep with their overt leftist bias, trust in WP is going down, too. As it should.
Speaking personally, for topics with no obvious political connections, I tend to trust WP, but for ones with any political connection at all, I now trust it even less than I do the mainstream media (by contrast, for topics even without obvious political connections I am still skeptical of what comes out of the MSM, because I know that the entirety of the decision-making body has a leftist agenda).
Overall trust in WP is further reduced by articles like Caplan’s. And that IMO is a very good thing. As well as being a *partial* solution to the problem.
I think all of that is fine…like, we probably shouldn’t trust WP for <current year> anything. The platform may simply be unable to handle the cognitive load.
But I think the genius of WP lies in the fact that the metadata, the ‘talk’ pages, history and sourcing are not merely generating content but also tracking what we care about, why we care about it and how difficult it is to determine truth from opinion. It has operationalized a philosophy of knowledge that shouldn’t be understated.
The mere fact that WP is biased towards woke in 2024 is an interesting topic for future historians. The rise of the phenomenon, the methods it uses to creep through institutions, the ways people battled over it, what was deleted, who had the keys, what came next—all of these things will inform people long after our present becomes petit. This is what I find really interesting about WP. If it survives, what it actually tells us about ourselves will be incalculably precious.
I think your 2nd paragraph makes a good point. Though what you label as “genius” I would label as “fortunate historical accident”.
Re: future historians, given that in aggregate historians today rank Biden 14th!!! on rankings of presidents tell me everything I need to know about the political bias of the average historian, and the worthlessness of listening to the average historian. I Let alone Trump being last when objectively his accomplishments were far from that even for someone with an “ordinary” left-of-center viewpoint.
For an extra layer of brutality to cap(lan) this all off, on the Talk page it notes this article was the “subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment between 21 August 2023 and 1 December 2023.” Links back to Sidney Lu at Rice University. T’would be interesting to see what his take is on this article.
1) Asian Americans can in fact be seen as a minority that has been able to overcome discrimination
2) There are still quite a few Asian Americans that aren’t successful and live in poverty and end up being ignored by people that think all Asians don’t struggle financially
So while “model minority” isn’t a myth, it does become one when applied to all Asian Americans rather than simply indicative of a group pattern.
Maybe Wikipedia editor should clarify that the MMM is not intended to accurately describe a social reality. MMM is a creed that can be used to signal one's allegiance to CRT dogma. The more outlandish the claims, the better you show you're a True Believer.
Well written!
You should edit the Wikipedia entry to reflect most of your points.
But of course the chances that the woke moderators of Wikipedia pages like this one will allow this are slim at best…
…despite the myth that Wikipedia is not leftist biased 🙄
If Caplan feels so strongly about this he should edit the Wikipedia entry; it’s not like Title 9 where he’s powerless to do anything. As far as “woke” moderators go, at least he won’t be preaching to the choir. Hell, the exchanges he would have with them would probably be highly entertaining.
Having tried to “fight the power” when Mika Tosca made despicable anti-Semitic comments after the Oct 7th Hamas murder, rape and hostage-taking atrocities - indisputably the most noteworthy thing Tosca has ever done - but there was no mention of the comments on Tosca’s wiki page 5 weeks later, the cost/benefit for Caplan in terms of his time would almost certainly be exceedingly poor.
However, I agree 10,000% that the talk page exchanges would be highly entertaining!
I’ve tried editing trans-related pages. It’s impossible - there are a few people who are essentially Wikipedia lawyers who exploit every trick in the book to keep the pages as they are.
As well as non-trick pure power. They simply keep changing their argument, but refuse to allow anything that doesn’t aid their narrative.
Forty years ago, Thomas Sowell skewered the "model minority" rhetoric by stratifying the racial datasets by other social factors, demonstrating the inconvenient truths about how racial disparities (including the relative success of Asians) disappear when these other factors are taken into account. Contemporary collectivists don't want to face the fact that racial disparities are largely caused by governmental failures and by cultural differences affecting different racial groups unequally, not by "micoraggressions" and institutional cultures.
I once taught at an Asian cram school. Whenever you combine "Asian values" with a student that doesn't have the IQ to achieve what those Asian values think they should achieve...it's fucking ugly. Nothing gets accomplished beyond sheer misery, it's actually very tragic to watch.
Even when they have the IQ, it seems to be toxic past a point. Koreans are going extinct so they can go to cram schools and Red Queen Race each other.
Given blacks IQs, it's not like these people are going to get much out of Asian style academic prep regimens. Most would have happier and more fulfilling lives playing hoops rather than trying to master academic skills that are probably beyond their ability.
"Just act Asian" is kind of like "learn to code". It's a thing you say to blame someone for not doing something that is probably beyond their reasonable accomplishment sphere. And when someone tries and fails they start looking for some explanation as to why (they do not want to accept "because you're dumb and it was hopeless to begin with").
Asians study because with their higher IQs they get more out of it. All that cram school shit might in theory help them get better careers one day. If you don't have the IQ, you are going to realize pretty quick you aren't making progress or making the grade, and you are going to stop banging your head into a brick wall.
"Yet ironically, shining a spotlight on model minorities is one of the best ways to defuse the twin social evils of antipathy and self-pity. Once you realize that prudence is a reliable unilateral path to prosperity, you won’t just stop unjustly blaming others for your own failures. You’ll also be motivated to start improving. If no one else is holding you back, the only person you need to win over is yourself."
This is Bryan's conclusion. But it's the opposite of what someone who knew about IQ would say. IQ, not antipathy or self pity, is indeed what is holding you back. Motivation can't get you a higher IQ. Spending your time in an Asian cram school wouldn't be a prudent use of such a persons time.
Asians performing well is a great vindication of IQ as an explanatory factor over oppression, but the conclusions drawn here are literally the opposite of Bryans normal advice on this matter (where he tells parents they shouldn't waste time being Tiger Moms).
That conflates prudence with Asian cram school.
Here’s a metric for prudence: prior to 1955, fewer than 20% of black American children were born to unmarried mothers. By 1970, that rate had more than doubled, to 40%; today it’s 70%, and the effects of children growing up in communities in which absentee fathers are the norm have been shown to be disastrous.
Asian Americans have never had more than 20% of their children born to unwed mothers. The current rate is 11.7%.
There’s no narrative here about slavery and Jim Crow and yadda yadda. Black folks were doing just fine in this metric back in the Bad Old Days — they had rates as low as Asians. Since the 60s, the rates have skyrocketed for black folks and dropped modestly for Asians. You want to pin this piece of social dysfunction on “systemic racism”? Great, let’s hear it.
This is prudence. Everyone reading this has a pretty good sense of the cultural factors that distinguish black American from Asian American culture in this respect. It has nothing to do with cram school.
Maybe I misunderstood your comment. What is pointing at IQ as the answer?
How does IQ explain the rapid change in unwed births you mention?
Why mention cram school at all, if prudence, which does not benefit from cram school in an obvious way, is what makes the real difference?
Sorry, you're right -- I may have lost the thread. I think the cultural shifts we've seen on this issue point to something more complicated than the IQ story (on its own) or any story about some sort of intractable, intransigent cultural determinism. I may be off on a tangent.
I guess his defense would be that he’s trying to improve things at the margins for blacks. I’m sure there are some gains to be made there. I don’t know how much though. I agree with you that “just try harder!” without taking IQ into account will mostly end in disappointment.
73 year old first generation (Jewish) American here, fan of Asian American (and all other) success, fan of most of what I read here, but frustrated that someone with your intelligence can be blind or ignorant of the history of African Americans. When I grew up, not that long ago, African Americans were not permitted in my school, on the beach where I swam, on the boardwalk where I vacationed, or in my neighborhood. When the Supreme Court and the Civil Rights Act forced some level of equality, funding was cut to public schools and private academies arose, and public accommodations such as public pools were closed rather than integrate. If you think that Asian-Americans experienced that history in the last half of the 20th century, you are factually wrong. It's wonderful that America has over and over again been a land of opportunity, and, in time, I believe that it will be so for African Americans. But holding one ethnic group up against another in a wholly different category is ignorant.
When/where has funding to public schools been cut?
He’s relying on data from when he was in his 20s or 30s, when it was true. Schools used to be funded almost entirely by local taxes, so black kids living in poor districts had under funded schools. Since the 80s, these disparities have been more than offset by federal and state level funding. Majority black and Latino districts are now funded more generously per student than majority white districts. This excuse has played itself out and can be added to the pile of discarded and discredited explanations for disparities in outcomes.
Robert,
Your point about the under-funding of black school districts was true for much of your life. But it hasn’t been true in about 40 years. Nobody under the age of 55 or so can rely on this excuse to explain their academic and professional trajectory.
See, eg:
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-disparities-public-school-funding
At the national level, the average school funding per black student in a school is about 5% higher than the funding per white student. This general pattern holds in each region of the U.S., with slight variations. This has been true for decades. Please retire this talking point; it is untrue and unhelpful.
Social justice is basically epistemological, an attack on the focused mind, not basically politics. Man's focused mind discriminates things as better or worse for your life. The deliberately unfocused mind of social justice only knows differences as equal, with no discrimination. Social justice reduces man to an animal (without instincts). Social justice is a rejection of mans free will mind for mere perception or mindless sensing. Social justice rejects man as an individual to man as merely a part of an unchosen, multi-generational , social group, eg, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, nationality. For social justice, you are not you. You will be punished or rewarded because your ancestors oppressed or were oppressed. And oppression is claiming or enforcing better or worse. Thus the model minority is oppression.
Multiculturalism & Anti-Conceptual Mentality-PeterSchwartz
Multicultural Nihilism-Peter Schwartz
Diversity Delusion-Peter Schwartz
We need more of this. Do racism and discrimination exist? Yes, but they don't cause failure or prevent success for individual. Avoiding failure requires self-discipline, work ethic, and adherence to societal norms. Achieving success requires all that + much more work, focus, determination, and self confidence.
The fashionable protected class groups love to portray themselves as the Cinderella of American Society, which perhaps they once were. In the last 40 years they look a lot more like Janice Soprano.
Fundamental bias as a function within Wikipedia articles is a bit of a hobby horse of mine. I believe both that WP is a marvel of the modern era and a fundamentally flawed mechanism for current-year sense making.
Numerous commentators say you should adjust the WP article but that belies a deep ignorance of how the platform works. In order to submit a change that will not be immediately removed, prior to any discussion, the article must be printed in an accepted journal of note. This is the fulcrum upon which ideological capture functions on WP as the list of acceptable sources is highly biased lacking both nuance and a mechanism for determining truth. Substack is specifically noted as a non-secondary source and is de facto not accepted, regardless of the source or quality of the publication.
I wholeheartedly agree with the arguments against this trash article; it’s transparently based on opinion pieces (using the Guardian as a source is a huge red-flag and should have your article banned outright). However for Prof. Caplan to have his say, this piece needs to be published in an accepted journal. I think it would be worth the effort as a small pushback like this might negate the entire claim and bring WP one article closer to the grand-unified truth.
I would LOVE to have a deeper conversation on the problems with WP and how to address them. Claims of, “woke bias,” or, “ it’s untrustworthy hogwash,” are simply not good enough. WP is too important to sacrifice and I would be glad to make the arguments and seek solutions.
I have no idea how to address the problem - and my hat’s off to you if you can, and I’ll tip my hat to you for even trying - but suggesting that there is *not* heavy “woke bias” in WP topics that have any relation to politics is beyond naive.
I didn’t suggest that. I said the claim of “woke bias,” is insufficient toward finding a solution. The bias could easily roll in some other direction because the entire edifice of WP is based on a shaky foundation of “accepted sourcing.”
One thing that I believe will happen to WP if it survives another 50 years is what happens to all history: it will be reviewed and the obvious bias will be noted and identified. For example, the propaganda of the Tudor dynasty was not something people in 1600’s England could dispute, but is uncontroversial and clearly understood in the 21st century. But a belief that our foibles will be obvious to future generations doesn’t help us today wherein we see WP used as the go-to source for current-year biographies, politics, culture war, etc.
Ok, apologies that I seem to have misinterpreted your assertion that claims of “woke bias” are not good enough.
It may be that until recently “we see WP used as the go-to source” was a true statement, but just as trust in the mainstream media has gone down enormously in lockstep with their overt leftist bias, trust in WP is going down, too. As it should.
Speaking personally, for topics with no obvious political connections, I tend to trust WP, but for ones with any political connection at all, I now trust it even less than I do the mainstream media (by contrast, for topics even without obvious political connections I am still skeptical of what comes out of the MSM, because I know that the entirety of the decision-making body has a leftist agenda).
Overall trust in WP is further reduced by articles like Caplan’s. And that IMO is a very good thing. As well as being a *partial* solution to the problem.
I think all of that is fine…like, we probably shouldn’t trust WP for <current year> anything. The platform may simply be unable to handle the cognitive load.
But I think the genius of WP lies in the fact that the metadata, the ‘talk’ pages, history and sourcing are not merely generating content but also tracking what we care about, why we care about it and how difficult it is to determine truth from opinion. It has operationalized a philosophy of knowledge that shouldn’t be understated.
The mere fact that WP is biased towards woke in 2024 is an interesting topic for future historians. The rise of the phenomenon, the methods it uses to creep through institutions, the ways people battled over it, what was deleted, who had the keys, what came next—all of these things will inform people long after our present becomes petit. This is what I find really interesting about WP. If it survives, what it actually tells us about ourselves will be incalculably precious.
I think your 2nd paragraph makes a good point. Though what you label as “genius” I would label as “fortunate historical accident”.
Re: future historians, given that in aggregate historians today rank Biden 14th!!! on rankings of presidents tell me everything I need to know about the political bias of the average historian, and the worthlessness of listening to the average historian. I Let alone Trump being last when objectively his accomplishments were far from that even for someone with an “ordinary” left-of-center viewpoint.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/us/politics/biden-trump-presidential-rankings.html
Who will watch the watchmen has never been a truer idea…
For an extra layer of brutality to cap(lan) this all off, on the Talk page it notes this article was the “subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment between 21 August 2023 and 1 December 2023.” Links back to Sidney Lu at Rice University. T’would be interesting to see what his take is on this article.
Two things are true here:
1) Asian Americans can in fact be seen as a minority that has been able to overcome discrimination
2) There are still quite a few Asian Americans that aren’t successful and live in poverty and end up being ignored by people that think all Asians don’t struggle financially
So while “model minority” isn’t a myth, it does become one when applied to all Asian Americans rather than simply indicative of a group pattern.
Another grand-slam home run, Bryan!
Wikipedia is another institution run into the ground by leftism.
I always thought Model Minority referred to the fact that Asians didn’t commit crimes. Unlike the black minority.
Maybe Wikipedia editor should clarify that the MMM is not intended to accurately describe a social reality. MMM is a creed that can be used to signal one's allegiance to CRT dogma. The more outlandish the claims, the better you show you're a True Believer.
https://polsci.substack.com/p/the-true-believer