Which is a great argument in support of making immigration easier for the highly intelligent and highly educated. Selfishly, enabling the best and brightest in the world to relocate into your country is a win. Particularly if those people were educated at US universities, taking internships at US companies, or doing US research.
Nothing is gained by opening the floodgates to average and below average intelligence people, who we have already have a native surplus of.
Of course, the modern welfare state cuts against that, as do the harmful externalities imposed by (eventual) voting. But the humane solution here - which might be politically impossible - is to allow immigration while eliminating the welfare state and making the newcomers into a permanent non-voting underclass.
It's true that rent seekers who currently use state-sanctioned violence to prevent economic competition might be harmed in a visible manner.
But factory workers are consumers too and gain (less visible) benefits from immigrants. I.e. if you work at factory X but consume goods produced at factory Y, you benefit from cheaper labor at factory Y. If you work at factory X but consume medicine, you benefit from having an Indian doctor and a Filipina nurse.
> but consume goods produced at factory Y, you benefit from cheaper labor at factory Y
Assuming the savings are passed on to the consumer.
I think it's more important that the owners vastly benefit, and may manage to push down wages across more than just one industry by leveraging economic differences between nations that only they can take advantage of.
I think it would be reasonable to claim that the larger the proportion of smart people in your population, the better. If that's true, than any number of below average intelligence people would be a surplus.
I get your point, but I think what your describing isn't particularly meaningful. By definition, nearly 50% of any population is categorically an undesirable surplus.
Yes, you could argue that. But a _nation_ could improve its proportions by restricting immigration to a subset of the _global_ population.
To a certain extent, this principle is applied today. But I imagine it could be scaled up to something akin to highly selective university admissions process (e.g. interviews, standardized testing, resume critique, references). If a country starts with sufficient desirability, this could result in a positive feedback loop -- an increasingly competent and productive society.
I agree with you there. Unfortunately, the greatest motivation to bring in someone outside the country is rarely for their exceptionalism, its usual about making/saving money. And at most institutions, its far more cost effecting to get individuals who are just sufficient and will accept a substantially lower compensation than their domestic peers. The individuals who are exceptional have loads of options/opportunities in their own homeland.
The part of Appalachia I grew up in for example, in Maryland, had among the best public schools in the state, and had among the highest testing outcomes in the state. That's still true to this day.
I'd like to see you prove your claim and define what a surplus of below average intelligence people means.
Given the small population base of Appalachia, you're not providing meaningful evidence of anything by referring to that location. The median standard of living in Appalachia is higher than that of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Russia, China, Latin America, and so on.
What I see, is that the intellectual floor for high-quality employment that results in traditional middle-class security continues to rise. In my grandfather's generation, somebody who could chew gum and walk at the same time could get a decent union industrial job and live the proverbial "two cars and a picket fence" lifestyle. In my father's generation, you had to at least graduate high school, and odds are, you needed your wife to work as well. In my generation, a college degree is table-stakes, and really, you need a degree from one of the places that has more legitimacy, and really, a degree in one of the harder, more intellectually demanding subjects. Roughly, at every generation here, I'm approximating the floor of intelligence and ability to increase at around one standard deviation.
> The median standard of living in Appalachia is higher than that of Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy.
Fuck, that's bad news for Europe, I suppose. I knew people that had dirt floors and no indoor plumbing.
> I knew people that had dirt floors and no indoor plumbing
That isn't a very strong data point. The median household income in Appalachia - which also includes eg Pittsburgh - is above all but a dozen or so major nations, and is above that of the EU and Eurozone. The unemployment rate there is also lower than the EU and Eurozone (in fact, it's about ~45% lower).
Including Pittsburgh in Appalachia is being very generous. You're way too far west there.
Unemployment numbers are mostly bullshit, to boot. Depending on which set of them you are using, that can have huge discrepancies with the actual labor force numbers percentages, since after so many months of a hopeless situation, people drop off the unemployment rolls and into the masses of the long-term unemployed.
It's like you're dangling a pinata and yanking it away at the last second. If you want to talk about your particular backwoods place, name it with greater specificity. If you want us to focus on labor force participation rates vice unemployment stats, offering those up would be similarly wise.
For the record, my Appalachia town also had good schools, though we had more than our fair share of meth and poverty as well.
>For the record, my Appalachia town also had good schools, though we had more than our fair share of meth and poverty as well.
Good on you. We had the poverty, although weed was the favorite cash crop, rather than meth. Growing some plants out in the woods is easier to hide than a lab that might blow up and catch the double-wide on fire...
Well, when comparing Appalachia with some countries, does that include HDI? Some of those "poorer" states might be welfare states that don't have the "benefit" of some large US corporation being located there and skewing statistics.
I love it. An American telling Americans are dumb and trying to use this fact in a way that makes it look bright to restrict US immigration. At least he started with "Selfishly" and warned users with his username.
You've misread/understood. They dont state or imply Americans are dumb. More recognise America (as do all countries) has a surplus of average, so points out why increase that.
Judging from their names, most of the US team members are of Chinese or Indian descent.
Would be interesting to note if they were US born/raised (i.e. educated under the US educational system), or recent immigrants (i.e. primarily educated in those countries).
American born Indians are very cut throat in their schooling. My cousin runs an after school supplementary program and their best students are all Indians. If an Indian student refuses to do homework they get scolded by their parents. If an American student refuses, their parents beg and plead and eventually pulls their student out of the program. Not all cases are like that, but most are.
And these are the exact kinds of people who have to work the hardest to get a US citizenship. On average it takes an Indian citizen 10 years more than immigrants from other countries to get a US citizenship. Its equally bad for people who are born in China too.
I would guess that they were born here, or came here as a very young child. You'd need to have fairly good mastery of English to correctly interpret those questions.
That's totally false. Plenty of Chinese and Indian researchers are reading math papers and books in English, which requires the same level of English skills.
I learned a foreign language to fluency at age 17, and math is one of the easiest things to read in the second language because the grammar is never very creative and the vocabulary is much more restricted than a novel or even a typical newspaper.
(Tangentially, a lot of people born in raised in India speak English at near-native levels. Especially the well-educated classes that would be likely to move to the US and participate in something like this.)
Maybe? The questions are translated into many languages, and many many non-Americans (especially well-educated non-Americans) learn technically capable English.
You must not know a lot of Chinese born Americans. English is taught in China starting at elementary school. Their literacy skills are higher than verbal, thus reading word problems would not be difficult.
I came here at 26. My English tests at native levels or above (it's been ~10 years since I took the test). Most people assume I'm a native speaker until they hear my accent and even that is going away.
I'm impressed when someone says English is not hard to learn. I'm a native English speaker now living in an Asian country where I have learned the language. When I view English from my new perspective it seems so much more difficult. Even just trying to explain to non-native speakers inconsistent pronunciations it seems ridiculous (how about these 4 words: rough, plough, though, through). I can't even get started on verb conjugations and all the irregularities
Just "bought" implies that the sale of the books is compassed in the past. It sounds strange because no explicit compass is mentioned and the reader suspects they are still for sale. I don't see anything wrong with "at least" though. Note that "over" changes the meaning (>= vs. >) and at least some prescriptivists obelize using "over" like that (I believe the AP Stylebook used to).
But in idiomatic spoken English, at least in the US, people omit that have. I agree that it's there for more formal or more British English.
Also, what you're describing goes beyond native level English and reaches the level of professional writer/teacher/linguist/editor/etc level English. I would expect many HN readers to have English proficiency beyond native level.
You have got to be kidding me. I'm a native English speaker and the sentence sounds totally fine the way he wrote it. Plenty of native speakers could have produced it and I'm not even totally convinced (though it might be true I guess) that the other two are statistically more common
Speaking idiomatic English is irrelevant in technical or professional discourse however. His point is clearly made, even if it is not the most natural syntax/semantics possible.
I think it has more to do with the fact that most of the develop world starts learning English before they're 10 years old. And a lot of the music/movies/internat is in English as well.
I'm sure it also has to do with what country you were raised in, your exposure to media etc, your educational and support system, your level of motivation and dedication, and your aptitude. I taught English for three years in a foreign country to many smart people who struggled to learn the language. Although English is apparently not difficult for you, the claim that "English really isn't that hard" is clearly untrue for a great many learners. (Also there are a few minor errors in the above post ;))
As with anything, it depends. It's never seemed hard to me and I'm sure we can all agree that it's among the easier languages for people to learn. At least people coming from indoeuropean languages.
As for errors, I've noticed that spending time in the US and using colloquial English a lot, has wreaked havoc on my English grammar. Or maybe it's the distance from schooling that did it.
I beg to differ. Math olympiad problems are typically short and concise, and mathematical phrasing, even when expressed in English, typically has clear bijections to equivalent terms in other languages.
Which is something America can be proud of. It could improve the ratio the whole society benefits from it though, when you look at what for example the Nordic countries are doing without all these rockstars at the top.
There seems to be very non-Bayesian updating that goes on around this issue.
When White people do well at something, people update their prior that White people experience White privilege that makes it easier for them to achieve these things.
When non-White people achieve something, or White people do poorly, people update their prior that diversity is important to achieving good results.
