You're applying the math brain wrong by using the "single counterexample invalidates whole article" mode, rather than just inserting the words "most" or "on average" or "in general" where necessary.

A specific kid will have individual behaviors. A group of kids will have behaviors that can be averaged. Different samples will have different outcomes.

I know sociology has poor reproducibility, but cultural and behavioral differences are definitely a thing.

I used to have a Korean colleague who'd moved to the UK specifically because he did not want his kids growing up in the Korean school system. They will always be ethnically and "genetically" Korean, and I would assume he would teach them the language, but he wanted them to be less culturally Korean because he thought they would be happier that way.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-born_confused_desi

Where do you think that math brain came from?

There are only three factors that could really influence it:

1. The way you were raised.

2. Your genes.

3. Some metaphysical explanation.

I'm going to set #3 aside for a bit because there's no way to test that hypothesis. That leaves the way you were raised and genes.

What correlates with the way you were raised? Culture. Your parents' culture is tightly correlated with the way they raised you, and when speaking about groups and averages it's fair to say that in general affects outcomes. So if you take this explanation, TFA is not wrong to say that culture would affect outcomes.

What correlates with your genes? Your ancestry, which is (imperfectly) correlated with race. So if you take this explanation, OP would not have been wrong to say that on average race would affect outcomes. (That said, I don't think they actually do—they strictly mention culture!)

Rejecting the premise that the environment shapes who we are and the type of people we become sounds extremely ignorant of the realities of history.

No, I reject that you can tell anything meaningful about the environment by country. Or even state. Or even neighborhood!

Japan itself could fit into the US 25 times by area.

Are kids raised in SF the same as those raised in Alabama? Or NY vs Phoenix? It'd be insane to make any generalities about a country so large and diverse, IMO.

Heck, kids in Loudoun county grow up completely differently than kids in Baltimore county. What does that tell us about the US, if anything?

I'm guessing Japan is the same, but I'm not educated enough to speak to it.

When considering the US as a whole then Loudoun county will get the appropriate weight in the resulting number. If you zoom out to see the map of the world and no longer see your street, it doesn't mean the map is wrong. It's perfect for the purpose of visualizing the world.

I'll bet you're fine with "the US people are richer than the Burundi" or "Dutch people are taller than US people". These also don't tell you anything about the short Dutch people or ultra-poor in the US. But you accept them because you don't feel slighted by them.

Or else you reject the premise because you zoomed in on a place which is not right on that average so the whole concept gets thrown out the window.

They took the very reasonable "you're not allowed to talk about black people liking watermelons" and applied it to every statement about every minority, disadvantaged or not, ethnically defined or not, whether offense was taken or not. Generalization was relabelled a microaggression, and avoiding them (or calling them out) became an urgent imperative, whether or not you're a member of the group in question. Whether or not you take offense personally, it became a Duty To Police this sort of speech.

This alienates one from the vast majority of humanity, which uses generalizations about people and things every day as a cognitive & social necessity. It makes it impossible to communicate or organize, because some sort of nitpicking about social equity, even purely semantic equity, is always prioritized over topical action in SJW-oriented leftist conversation. The rally for women's rights is cancelled because the committee spent all day deciding whether to use the term "women" or some alternative.

It also makes one less effective as a thinker, because there are statements that you can make about cultures and people's background that are statistically very likely, or which indicate a very real difference in the center of different bell curves.

Personally I blame autism for much of it but that's another can of worms.

No, more so it's at the root of crippling all online discussions.

I know in the US “liberal” is the “radical left” which is unfortunate as hell.

This recent "woke" trend originates from leftist impulses in a society where the fall or even moderation of neoliberal capitalism is 'harder to imagine than the end of the world'. A society where Reaganomics has been adopted wholesale by Third Way Democrats who still control the political discourse because that's what effectively fundraises from billionaires. Politicians who try to satiate their political base by promoting diversity initiatives that will make zero dent in the economy or institutions of state. "Social Justice" as explored on Tumblr by people still in university (isolated from economics) is largely orthogonal to that, and it wouldn't be possible for people exposed to more of the diversity of society and the exigencies of life to ruminate on the subject, absent economic concerns.

This is what leftists complain about with the pejorative "liberals", a distinction that half of the country appears to be completely unaware of because every pejorative means the same thing on Fox News.

This tendency to substitute diversity messaging for systemic material solutions appears to have zero appeal left to the American people. No, the American people do not want to send the gender noncomformists to the gas chamber, but if that's all you talk about, it does not add up to a political platform that people vote for. The "Black Lives Matter" protests demanded dramatically reshaping the way criminal justice works, not wearing kente cloth for an afternoon. The last Democratic presidential candidate scrupulously avoided social justice, but they didn't actually substitute any sort of populist left-wing economic ideas because the donors wouldn't allow that.

It seems to be to be a common failing in the west to underestimate just how big differences are between themselves and other cultures. The two cultures I have lived in, despite being Britain and one of its former colonies (and therefore partially anglophone, similar political system, lots of other influences) are quite substation, and noticeable even in the (heavily westernised) circles I socialise in there. The differences would be even bigger if you compare to an East Asian culture like Japan.

Things that are regarded as fundamental concepts, or universal values are often not share (some values are pretty much human, some are not).

That's not true. To use the examples in the thread, a patient American kid will be much more patient than an impatient Japanese kid.

"Europe is diverse enough that you need to split it into quadrants to decide what countries are relatively similar"

The same is true for South Asia, but if you look at it from a western perspective you see the similarities.

There are plenty of similarities across Europe. Shared attitudes to sex, politics, religion..... things like freedom of worship and separation of church and state (laws restricting freedom of worship even in secular democracies like India, let alone the Middle East or China), attitudes to sex and sexuality (and ideas and definitions and identities linked to them - although this is changing because of Western influence, historically the idea of people having a fixed sexual orientation is a modern western one, for example)....

Correct. I just picked those two because of stark differences of two well known areas close to each other. But it can go down to even neighborhood, or even street in said neighborhood.

Sorry if my rambling seems confusing. I'm not against the idea that environment affects children. I'm against broad brush stroke categorization about how different countries behave.

Or even one individual on different days. It should be all chaos and noise and yet it's not because these "general" numbers get translated to a realistic "it's more/less likely" not "it's guaranteed".

You're arguing against comparisons you don't like, or feel make you look worse than others. In other words you want to get to arbitrarily define the brush width presumably based on where you feel you sit in the comparison.

Ok - pick any conservative country (say India or Indonesia). Now tell me that the chances of an average Indonesian woman wearing a bikini to a beach (pretty normal in most Western countries) is same as an average French woman?

Or for a less gender-charged example, chances of an average Saudi eating Pork vs an average American.

Note that I didn't say "every", I said "average".

The strongest predictor for both the French and the Indonesian is almost certainly going to be the individuals physique and and the second is probably going to be the country and prevailing culture in which the beach is located (i.e. what everyone else is wearing).

This kind of illustrates the point you're trying to disagree with. You can't just look at some sort of demographic based average and shoot from the hip and expect to hit anything.

I take it that you have either never been to a beach or the one you have been to is only open to athletes and supermodels.

> the second is probably going to be the country and prevailing culture in which the beach is located (i.e. what everyone else is wearing)

So you haven't had the chance of seeing Indonesian woman wearing full headgear and clothes covering their body having fun at a beach far away from Indonesia? Not joking, they were having a genuinely good time - from direct experience.

The world is much bigger and has far greater variety of people, customs and norms than you can imagine.

Have you been to the beach in the last 10yr. All manner of 1-pc swimsuits are arguably the default style for women.

>So you haven't had the chance of seeing Indonesian woman wearing full headgear and clothes covering their body having fun at a beach far away from Indonesia? Not joking, they were having a genuinely good time - from direct experience.

My mistake, I mixed up Indonesia and the Phillipines in my mind. No surprise muslim women will not be wearing bikinis. But the Westerners will also be far more modest in a setting where that is the prevailing default so....

>The world is much bigger and has far greater variety of people, customs and norms than you can imagine.

If looking down one's nose like that is what it takes to be cultured I'm glad I'm not.

They say that there are differences between even children living on two different roads in the same town, and these differences matter more than differences between countries, and therefore we should not make any kind of arguments based on nationality at all.

I disagree though, I do think that there are significant statistical differences growing up between, say, Afghanistan or Sweden. That does not mean that you can make claims about specific children in either country, but you can make generalizations about the population as a whole.

Well then it's kind of a strange coïncidence that there is a high correlation between population density and political leaning/voting:

* https://dailyyonder.com/distance-and-density-not-just-demogr...

And not just in the US:

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00104140231194...

* https://macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/338canada-the-urban-rura...

This. The standard deviation is too damn high to make predictions. You might as well toss a coin.

Even at 6 there is a major difference between boys and girls that I just don’t see anywhere else.

The thing is you won’t even realize that’s what’s happening, and you just feel that the way you think is right and proper the rest of your life.

It’s honestly pretty anazing because people can be incrediy dissatisfied with how their neighbors are parayzed by social constraints while being bound a hundred times more strongly influenced by their own expectations.

Sometimes I can't tell when people are pulling chains, so in the interest of charity ^

You can reject all you want but your [personal, anecdotal] data point is irrelevant.

It takes a village to raise a child.

[rejecting an analysis because you disagree with the premise is unscientific - this analysis exposes a trend - it does not make a prediction - but gives pointers for further analysis]

Behavioral patterns and personality traits have been pretty conclusively proven to be genetically inheritable. "Behavioral Genetics and Child Temperament" (Saudino) investigates this, as does "A genome-wide investigation into the underlying genetic architecture of personality traits and overlap with psychopathology" (Priya Gupta, et al).

There's no doubt that nurture and culture play a massive role in one's later personality and behavior as an adult, but it's incorrect to disregard genetics in this conversation. Some people are predisposed to be shy, some people are predisposed to be aggressive. Smart, critical people are able to appreciate genetic differences amongst broad human groups without letting that lead to unsavory viewpoints.

Sorry dude cultural differences are real. When I got married to my American wife, my Bangladeshi mom pulled her aside and said, “you know, we don’t get divorced.”

In any discussion of this sort of thing, what people are saying is that different circumstances lead to different distributions in outcome.

Does that really seem surprising to you? To me it would be very surprising if wildly different characteristics turned out to have identical distributions across every metric.

But this constantly gets lost because some people want to ignore that distributions differ, and other people want to ignore that the distribution is not destiny for any individual.

You are making several jumps in logic to get from A -> B.

Japan has an education system which teaches the importance of certain values, patience and self-discipline among them.

Here is the short-film "Instruments of a Beating Heart" currently on the Oscars shortlist about this very point -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRW0auOiqm4

Not "bad" , but less fully invested... Maybe? It's isolating being the only non-Mandarin-speaking family at a math people gathering. It's quite striking in the high-level math community.

I'm saying the same thing, applied to a wider level.

I agree that it is weird. And I did not read the article. But I would assume that this is not the point it was trying to make when referring to race or location backgrounds.

When remarks like these are made, I would think they usually refer to a neighborhood. For instance, a well-groomed neighborhood at a good location vs. a slum at the outskirts of town, perhaps without electricity or even without running water. The race is mentioned in that context often not because it would have a direct impact. But because there is, unfortunately, a correlation between people living in poor neighborhoods and people of racial minorities.

I would think that the implication then is that a bad neighborhood is one of the factors which drive bad social behavior.

Except they do matter, unless you're going to "raise" a child by locking them in the apartment until they turn 18. Otherwise, as soon as they go to kindergarten[0], it's entirely out of your hands.

They say[1] that minimum viable reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a village. And the corollary to that is, the village will find our child, whether you want it or not, and they will have as much say in their mindset and values as you do. You can influence that, but only so much, and not everywhere all at once[2].

(Also obligatory reminder/disclaimer that group-level statistics are not indicative of any individual's character; individual variance in-group is greater than variance between groups, etc.)

EDIT:

> Should she instead be bad at math because the Chinese value that more? Should I have stuck to teaching her big macs and bald eagles instead?

No, you do you - and I respect you for passing on your interest in maths to your daughter, and I hope it'll stick. The point is, whatever the culture you're embedded in, she will be exposed to its tropes in aggregate. It doesn't mean she'll turn into a stereotype; no one ever does (see the disclaimer above); it's just that when someone doesn't like some aspects of their culture, "shopping for a village" that isn't reputed for those traits is one of the historically tried and true methods of reducing the risk.

EDIT2: To add another personal anecdote, there was a defining moment in my life early on, that I'm certain changed my entire life's trajectory. In my primary school, I ended up in a class with some rather unruly, mischievous kids, under a walking pathology of a teacher; by the time I was 12 and it was time to switch to secondary school, I already picked up on some of the bad behaviors. My mom went through some extraordinary effort to get me placed in a math-profile class[3], despite me not showing much aptitude or interest in sciences, just so I get away from the rascals. It paid off. I may have started as the dumbest kid in the group, but this group wasn't into mischief, and instead was supportive to intellectual pursuits; I ended up befriending a bunch of nerds, and quickly becoming the nerdiest of them all. I can't imagine that happening if I stayed with my primary-school crowd. In fact, they'd probably bully my fledgling interest in programming out of me, so I pretty much owe my entire career and the shape of my life to that one choice by my mom, to move me to a different "village".

--

[0] - And maybe earlier, if they go to daycare, or you're socially active and they tag along; and no later than when they go to school - unless, again, zip-ties and a radiator are a major part of the upbringing approach.

[1] - Well, someone on HN says that; I think they may have even coined it. Either way, it's true.

[2] - I grew up in a Christian offshoot that's a borderline cult. I can tell first-hand that, no matter how hard they try, even a strong fundamentalist culture that works hard on staying true to its values and pretty much defines themselves in opposition to "the world", can only do so much to resist the local culture in which people are embedded. And, when they try too hard, they just end up bleeding members.

[3] - A brief moment in time in Poland where we had 3-school system and profile classes in the secondary school.

> People mechanically can have kids, physically, before they're mentally able to take care of them. The [village] elders would raise and teach the children while the adolescents worked at things adolescents do better than elders

So "it takes a village" used to be literal, and as we in this part of the west started to isolate and nuclear family the whole idea that the elders should have plurality input to the neuroplasticity kinda went wayside.

I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. They all died when I was young but my sister was younger yet. I moved all our kids to be within 15 minutes of their living grandparents. They werent teens when we got here. My youngest spends 3/7th of their time at grandma's house.

I'll let you know how all this works in like 30 years.

I think a large, maybe even the main part of why community of family and close friends raising children together works: humans are uniquely motivated by shame and pride, and having that many eyes on you leads to quick corrections before bad habits take root.

There's arguments about in groups and globalization and if it's better to amalgamate and if so, community based child raising has gotta go. Please do not ask me to spell this out as I won't be.

From this POV, the "village" is still there, it's always there. It may not be a literal village, and you and me might both be pretty much alone except for our partners, when it comes to parental responsibilities. However, the modern "village" is the society we live in - our neighbors, our friends, co-workers, the market economy as represented by people selling good and providing services we need to survive; later, also parents of children our kids go to school with. These are all people we interact with daily, share the same material and social environment, and we all influence each other.

There's no way to avoid that influence (in fact, if you try, the "village" will start getting worried, possibly to the point social services might get involved). It's always there, and once your kids start education, they'll be interacting with other members of society unsupervised - this is what I mean by "village finding your child".

> I think a large, maybe even the main part of why community of family and close friends raising children together works: humans are uniquely motivated by shame and pride, and having that many eyes on you leads to quick corrections before bad habits take root.

I 100% agree with that. I think it's fundamental. But it works only up to certain size; it's not that globalization is in opposition to that, it's just that to form societies larger than ~150, you need replacements for "shame and pride" as behavioral regulators to keep a group from self-destructing. Hence leaders and rules - and applied recursively a couple times, you end up with presidents and districts and rule of law and bureaucracy and all the staples of modern life, existing next to and on top of groups of families and friends.

to reiterate, i wasn't arguing or debating anything you said. More of a tangent, because i've read a few books that talk about this exact thing, albeit a quarter century ago and things are hazy.

It is like abit of good influence outweights alot of bad influence.

You could make an analogy with dogs. There you have plenty of examples of what can happen in isolation. A functional collective will in most cases manouver you out of parenting in part or fully with soft or hard means if you are bad enough since you will indirectly wreck havoc otherwise.