But the rest of this article literally does nothing but make broad cultural assumptions
This is an article about population level statistics.
There's a new trend to oppose any pattern finding in races. The retort is always "we are so diverse that no pattern exists at all". I don't agree at all.
"Race" is so undefined it's just silly to argue about. We are tremendously more similar than different. We have a visual bias, so a difference in skin color will dominate all other similarities. Then we go and theorize about other differences when we start our division from this arbitrary difference. This is lazy thinking. And a lot of the time is used for hate mongering against some "other".
Of course cultures have different set of values, and this influences the aggregate decisions of the individuals, but taking the next step and forecasting and analyzing a single individual by projecting sociatal bias on them is dehumanizing, and as recent history taught us, is dangerous.
I'm always mindful of the quote "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops" from Stephen Jay Gould. If we assume that CEO-ness, whatever that property actually is, is evenly distributed among people at birth, it becomes a question of opportunity. It seems that the business culture in Japan, Singapore, possibly Korea, post-90s China, and some other places is pretty good compared to India.
I can even believe that kids born in Singapore have more CEO-ness in them on average than kids born in eg Indonesia or PR China. Even if for no other reason than that Singapore is the kind of place that's comparatively more tolerable / less horrifying for the kind of people with CEO-ness traits. (It's also pretty expensive, so only rich people can really afford to have kids here.)
(I'm assuming here that CEO-ness runs in families.)
In any case, the rest of your argument still makes sense, even if someone born in Singapore statistically has a 3% higher chance of becoming a CEO than someone born in Portugal or whatever.
Indian CEOs are choosing between climbing the ladder in India or the US, and all tech opportunities are much more plentiful and lucrative here.
We are brain-draining India to a greater degree than we are China.
- H1B visa share: 70% india, 10% china (2022). So that's 7x more Indians meaning even a random choice will likely end up with an Indian.
This is 80% of the reason. Remaining 20%:
- Assorted cultural reasons
People make a huge deal about how making "broad cultural assumptions" is wrong but the fact is they play a role contextually. "As broad as the context, and no broader". Here's the logic behind it. Most of the things people do in their life they do not do because they innately want to do it, rather it is because they are expected, or incentivised to. Culture, when it is strong, sets a lot of incentives and expectations. Broad cultural assumptions in $CONTEXT work accurately when(and only when) said culture sets expectations and incentives that result in behaviours overlapping with those displayed in $CONTEXT.
What I have heard from someone with 1st hand experience: For Indian/chinese culture, set CONTEXT=board_room, you will find a difference.
Edit: it's important to add that these cultural differences are observable at the population level and not the individual level. i.e Akash Patel won't necessarily get the CEO position more often than Lee Wei. However, in a population of 100 Akash Patels and 100 Lee Weis, a larger fraction of Akash Patels will end up as CEO. Stereotypes are probabilistic information and thus lose their error bars as you take more and more samples.
I am not american so i wonder what is the situation like in US but in Singapore it is very visible that each race stick to its own and pushes its own up. Indians to indians, chinese to chinese, filipinos to filipinos.
SG is touted to be multicultural but what is the true meaning of this?
I think it also speaks to the fact that without forced integration people will naturally converge to whatever is familiar to them, eventually forming enclaves.
Lisa Su only joined AMD in 2012?
In the case you're mentioning, in the Indian CEO list he lists FORMER Indian CEOs:
> Among the Fortune 500, the CEOs of Alphabet/Google (Sundar Pichai), Microsoft, (Satya Nadella), Adobe (Shantanu Narayen), Chanel (Leena Nair), IBM (Arvind Krishna), Micron (Sanjay Mehrotra), Palo Alto Networks (Nikesh Arora) and former CEOs of Mastercard (Ajay Banga) and Pepsi (Indra Nooyi) were all born in India and were appointed the CEO position.
In the East Asia CEOs list, he mixes together the "founders" list with others, misses a bunch of East Asia CEOs and creates a weird phrasing:
> There are far fewer East Asian CEOs in the Fortune 500, and most of them are the founders of their companies like Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Tony Xu (DoorDash), Lisa Su (AMD) and Hock Tan (Broadcom). Three of these are in the semiconductor industry and two of them founded their companies. This is just a list of the Fortune 500 CEOs [...]
That's not a list of Fortune 500 CEOs.
I don't know about the premise of the article but this suggestion definitely resonates with me. It's easy enough for misunderstandings to arise even when people are trying their best to communicate what they mean. Once you start beating around the bush it's almost guaranteed the other party is going to hear something completely different than what you intent.
Research on organizational cultures confirms some stereotypes about China, like high power distance between people, low individualism, and high self-restraint.
What it misses are some very positive straits;
- very high task-orientation (versus person-orientation)
- very high tolerance to uncertainty (much higher than US or never mind Germany)
- very long term oriented (equal to Germany, much higher than the US)
ps. China and India are about the same in individualism and most other issues. China is slightly better at uncertainty tolerance and much better in long term orientation.
For reference, it's titled "Boomers Like to Confront, Generation Y Is Okay with Withdrawal, But They All Love to Negotiate in India" in March 2016 "Conflict Resolution Quarterly". DOI:10.1002/crq.21163
But I'm surprised how it just passes over the language (English is an official language in India), that also have lead to India having lots of business relations with the USA due to offshoring. And, of course, how Chinese nationals are seen as a risk in any meaningful position in American companies, specially in the last ten years.
From there, statistics comes into play. There's just a bigger pool of Indians to select CEOs from.
> Much of East Asian culture is rooted in the teachings of Confucius.
Really?
Interesting topic at the very least. Any time there's a big population disparity in selective groups it's usually worth investigating how that disparity came to be to see if we can learn something from it and potentially equalize it (if it exists for a bad reason).
(and look: less than 4 minutes my comment is downvoted. Talk about serious debate when an East Asian actually has an informed opinion on this.)
1) get angry because they personally put catsup on their hot dogs,
2) argue with people about the math, but without actually pointing out any problems with the math other than it is being bigoted against people who like catsup and wants to "erase" people who put catsup on their hot dogs.
3) If they can manage to find somebody with the credentials that they deem important enough, and can leverage their complaint about the study to somehow guilt that person into wasting their time responding to their empty objection, they finally accept that the math works.
4) Now that they accept the math, they stop putting catsup on their own hot dogs, and only use mustard from now on. They ridicule and attack catsup users at every social opportunity, and brag about their contact with the credentialed person.
The word salad is just a necessary tool for expressing empty approval or disapproval, borrowed from 8th generation pseudo-Freudian European literary critics. It supplies a lot of words with no meaning, so you can use them to talk over people. It explicitly centers associative logic and magical thinking as its most innovative tool, and the interpretation of the actual world as if it were a literary fiction.
There's superficial recognition, of course, but it's difficult to even begin to have conversations when so much effort is spent in every interaction confirming, validating, or outright missing critical aspects of each other's ideologies. And it's usually more one way than the other.
On a different note, it started as a joke, but I've found it helpful to give out copies of "The Xenophobe's Guide" to people I'm going to be working closely with. They're not perfect, but they're short, hilarious and humanizing. The books, I mean.
That’s like complaining that the 100 yard dash decides whether more or less speed is good. ‘Capitalism’ (really, the free market) is just a voting and sorting system. Cultural norms which produce more value outcompete those which produce less. That’s part of why Protestant Europe (with fewer feast days) outcompeted Catholic Europe (with many more). That’s why blue laws in the U.S. have faded out. Does that mean that days off are bad? No, it just reflects that a day spent not working is a day spent not producing.
Chasing economic value is what has created the entire modern world: science, medicine, an economy in which farmers are less than 1% of the population.
> This paragraph expresses a strong critique of a particular argument or philosophy — though it's not explicitly stated what that argument is — and frames that critique through the lens of someone with a bicultural identity and a background in STEM.
lol.
And yes, while LLMs shouldn't be used as a benchmark for general intelligence problems, I think that written communication (especially for a wider audience like on HN) should be simple enough that an AI can understand it.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Genetic_...
What the 'East Asian personality'?
And when you say 'whites' do you include Irish and Italians? They only recently became 'white'. (And a bit earlier Benjamin Franklin didn't even include Germans amongst the properly 'white' people.)
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