Raising Kids Part Two, Making Good Decisions

"I am the decider."

                   -- George W Bush

Life is about making good decisions.  Making good decisions takes a lot of practice. Our own biases and the biases of our family and friends all conspire to cloud our decision making process. Kids need to do things on their own early on. They need to learn to make their own mistakes and live with the consequences. By making choices and seeing how they pan out, they learn to make better choices. By making more decisions early on, kids also become more comfortable and resilient with the decisions that they make, even if the outcomes are not all favorable. Not all our choices will have good outcomes. We need to have the courage to continue to choose even after some choices turn out badly. kids will be more comfortable in taking on new challenges in life on their own term if they dealt with life on their own terms as young children. When everything is arranged by the parents, kids never got to chart their own courses while they were young. Even when they got to the best colleges, they seem bewildered and unsure of themselves, lacking in direction in life at the stage of their lives when they should be pursuing their dreams.

We never have all the information needed to make decisions. We fill in the blank with our gut instincts and feelings. In some cases, it is about learning who to trust(presumably someone with more information). In other cases, it is about learning to read people. Reading the body language and what is not said. Reading between the lines.

Howard Stringer of Sony and Carlos Ghosn of Nissan are two examples of none Japanese hired to run big Japanese companies. With an average IQ higher than their white counter-parts, the Japanese was unable to find someone with the talent to run these companies. I suspect at least partly this has to do with the way we East Asians raise our kids. Being a CEO is the ultimate decision maker. No amount of tutoring and prep school can prepare one to sit in that chair. They got there by making a lot of decisions early and learn from their mistakes. Once they make better choices in life, it carries over to their profession and they climb up the corporate ladder.

In my life, I was made witness to a scene where an East Asian mom was preparing her adult son in his thirties on his business trip. She brought him a jacket and told him that there are four pockets in the jacket. She coached him how to wash his underwear in the sink, something a White child would have learned in his childhood. The East Asian culture, being more paternalistic, wants to make virtually all the decisions for our kids well into their teenage years, sometimes well into their adulthood. No wonder we come out weak in this area.

On the other end of the spectrum are the Spartan soldiers. When he is three years old, he is taken out of his family and trained. Contrary to what most people think, the training is not about how to sacrifice himself in the battlefield. A dead soldier is a useless soldier. Instead, he is trained to use every part of his guile to stay alive and evade capture. At one part of the training, he is expected to sneak inside a camp for the slaves and kill one of them. Now this is against the law and if he is caught while doing this, he can lose his life. So in essence he is asked to risk his life by breaking the law. The training of commandos all over the world, especially the Israeli commandos are also similar. They are given a mission but must make their own decisions to plan and carry out the mission. If their contingency plans failed, they must come up with a different way to carry out the mission on their own, or if they completed the mission, extract themselves to safety.

Teaching kids to make good decisions does not mean condoning everything kids do. There must be a way to feedback the information if a bad decision is made. I have seen many cases where doting parents tell a kid, even in very young age, everything she does is OK. Children raised this way while they were young almost never turn out well. While a child is young, she needs guidance and a firm hand. In fact, a firm guidance helps the child by giving her a frame of reference. As she grows older, we need to learn to let go and allow her more and more room to make her decisions. If she makes decisions that are different then how we would decide, we need to respect her and allow her to learn the consequences. Finally, as she develop good judgement as a late teen, we get to become cheer leaders for her.

Making good decisions is an important skill that must be developed by allowing young kids to do it and learn the consequences of their actions. Only when kids learn how their decisions succeed and fail at a young age would they develop the skill and toughness to continue to choose wisely, even if some of their choices have bad outcomes.

Raising Kids Part One, Passion

"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it"

                                                                                             -- Michelangelo 

In the year 1642, in a little hamlet in England, a little pre-matured, under-weighed boy was born. With his illiterate father passed away before his birth, his mother re-married when he was three and placed him with his grandmother. At 1653, he was taken out of school to be a farmer. Failing as a farmer, he returned to school to prepare for college. He was a lackluster student at school. Up to this point, there was nothing remarkable about the boy. Nothing from his heritage nor his work in life suggest that he would amount to much. It was when in college that he really caught the bug of learning. While in college, in addition to studying the prescribed courses, Isaac studied many of the important works on his own time and initiative. While he was just twenty four, he studied lights and colors with prisms to come up with the foundation for what would become the modern theory of light waves. While doing so, he found that the math in his day was not adequate to do his work, so he invented a math which later became calculus.

I was of course talking about the great Sir Isaac Newton, who went on to make other major contribution to science, including gravity and laws of motion.

Craig Venter was also a lack luster student in his early years. According to his own biography, he was getting Cs and Ds into eighth grade. He spent most of his youth playing water sports. During the Vietnam war, Craig was working at the intensive care ward of the U.S. Navy. Depressed by the maiming and death that he saw daily, he once tried to commit suicide by swimming out to the sea, but fortunately for humanity, he changed his mind about a mile out. It was what he saw in Vietnam that got him interested in medicine and later biology. Craig started out his college career in the College of San Mateo, a community college. He went on to earn BS  in Biochemistry and PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology, both in U.C. San Diego. Craig went on to become the giant of genetics. Beating out the U.S. government in sequencing the first human genome. 

If you care to study the greats, past and present, you will find repleted examples where people who started out as mediocre zoom past everyone and became great in their field. What they all have in common are two things. First, they must have great intellects. Most of these people have IQs that are off the charts. But what really set them apart from other people who also have high IQ's is their passion. Once they found their passion, their IQ drove them past their peers and they did great things with their lives.

Many of the great minds, like our two examples here, were raised very different from the way a tiger mom would raise her kids. Unlike a tiger mom, who arranged every minute of her kid's life with practices, tutoring and books, these two were left alone and neglected as children. They went through life on their own terms and found something that they were passionate about.

Passion is very powerful. While we all can't have the IQ and talent of Issac Newton or Craig Venter, we can all find out what in life we are good at and enjoy doing. Passion helps us make the most of our talents, and if we are fortunate to be endowed with great talent, passion helps us achieve great things.

To develop passion for something, a kid must be given the freedom to explore and find out what they like to do in life. Most tiger moms have a preconceived idea of what they want their kid to be. Basically, what they want is everything that confer high social status and make money, becoming a doctor, a lawyer etc. They never took the time to discover, as Michelangelo did, what the statue look like inside the block of stone. They also see college as the end goal in life itself. A kid's entire life was to study and try to get into a good college, in a field that is high social status. If this robs them of their childhood, their motivation and it push them in an area that they are not interested in, a tiger mom is blissfully blind to these shortcomings of their actions.  

I am old enough to witness the tragic results of such narrow minded way of raising kids. I can point to multiple members of my wife's family who went to great law schools, passed their bar exams and never practice law because this is not what they enjoy doing. Their parents pushed them to do it. One of them is currently unemployed and the salary of his wife supports him. With their talent, they could have gone to another field that they enjoy and do very well. I also saw many doctors who are miserable in their jobs because, again, they got into the field by taking cues from their family. One of them, whose has a pediatric practice, is struggling. Sensing his antipathy towards them, the patients have either left him or at best fail to recommend their friends. Here is a guy, who got into UC Berkeley and finished medical school, practicing medicine, making less money than someone working as an assistant manager at McDonalds. His temperament was more suited to be a software engineer. had he follow his own voice and pursue that instead, he would have been making far more money, higher status and been happier.

The biggest part of our job as parents is not to get our kids into college to become a doctor. It is to help them discover their passion and encourage them to follow their dreams. Our kids will be more successful in life, they will be happier and they will thank us for it.

Culture

"Traditions decay when the reality facing the new generation changes. "

                                                                                      --Charles Murray

We Chinese have a reverence for education. When I first came to the U.S., I had high school classmates that had to put themselves through college. One of them was working at a grocery store to earn money to pay for his tuition and living expenses. This was an alien concept to me at the time. In a Chinese family, it was an assumption from day one that the family would somehow scrape together the money to pay for a kid's college, no matter how poor. Such is the power of culture, things just get passed down and you intuitively know that you have to do it, even if you don't understand the reason. If you ever looked down from a high place and the fear of falling pulled you away, it was not an analytical or deliberate sort of decision, it was your gut reacting. It was hardwired into your brain. In a way, culture is like that. We accumulate culture because things worked in the past and it enhanced our survival. By following the successful habits of our forefathers, culture allowed us not having to analyze everything we do and still get it right most of the time.

Least we think that our culture and morality represents a permanent and fixed set of values, nothing can be further from the truth. Two sets of people, under very different circumstances, will come up with cultures and moralities that are very different. For example, If I go to another man and proposed that I share his wife, he would most likely be outraged. In Western culture as well as most of the world, this is the morality that we live under. You don't share your wife with another man. However, there are at least two places that I know of that have different outlooks, and for good reasons.

In the rugged mountains of the Himalayas, people practice polyandry. Two or more men will marry the same wife. They live in a farming community, but the environment is harsh. A family consists of the couple, two or three of their kids, and one or two grand parents live in a farm, one out of a handful of farms. The farm is barely able to sustain the people currently living there. There is no place to expand since they are surrounded by mountains. For the next generation, if they have two or more males and they each take a wife, the farm will have to be split. Both families will starve to death. Marrying the same wife allows the farm to be kept in tact and limits the number of offspring. It also concentrate all the labor on the same farm to ensure success.

In northern Siberia, the Inuits that herd Reindeer have the tradition of offering their wives to other men in exchange for access to their wives. A sort of wife swapping. In some instances. they will even offer their wives to strangers traveling to their homes. Reindeer herding supports a very low density population as a small tribe will need a large territory for their Reindeer. A problem associated with this is inbreeding. Chances are, the husband and the wife are genetically related. Sharing wives minimize genetic related illnesses for the next generation. The husband does not mind as much since he already share many genes with the wife. It is far more important that the next generation be healthy giving the high likelihood of genetically related illnesses due to inbreeding.

In each of the two cases above, if we impose our morality on them, all else being equal, they will perish. Their cultures and moralities, very different from ours, served a vital function for their survival.

Many people, mostly Western liberals, will say that all cultures of the world are equally valid. No one single culture is superior to another. This is patent nonsense. We wouldn't say Albert Einstein and Charles Manson are equally good human beings. Cultures should be judged the same way. How much does the culture contribute to humanity. A little common sense would say that Western Culture, which invented everything from double ledger accounting to space flight, has contributed far more to humanity than, say, the reindeer herders in Siberia. In nature, genetics of a specie go through violent selection. Only the fittest survives. Cultures are also under going the same selection. Only when some cultures are more superior and displace the inferior ones would there be progress.

Since we have accumulated our culture over a long period of time, there are parts of the culture that no longer work very well. If they are relatively harmless, they sometimes stay on long after they ceased to be useful. A friend of ours had a kid a few years back. Following the Chinese tradition that was passed down to her, she ate a concoction that was pigs feet and eggs cooked in ginger and vinegar. She also did not bath for a full month. Now that ginger and egg thing is a great tradition. You take what would have been a low cut of the pig, the feet, and cooked it in vinegar. The acid in the vinegar leach out the calcium from the pig feet and the egg shells, softens up the tough tendons, and turns it into vital and absorbable nutrients in great need by the mother and the kid. What about the part of not bathing for a month? This probably came from back when the Chinese lived in the northern plains of China. In a bitterly cold climate, malnourished and with less than ideal sanitation, bathing after a woman gave birth and sustained trauma might cause infections that could be lethal, either to the mother, or the kid. If it saved the lives of just one in a hundred people, then it is a tradition that is worth carrying on. In the hot San Jose climate with first world sanitation and modern medicine, this tradition had outlived its usefulness. While it won't kill the mother or the kid, it had became a drag to the ones carrying the tradition.

Sometimes, what started out as a good culture can go bad if people take it to the extreme. Back to our reverence for education, this tradition helped lifted the Chinese (from China and abroad) out of poverty. With the tiger moms now controlling every moment of their kids' lives, pressing their kids until many had nervous break downs and in some cases, suicides, what was once a good thing has now gone out of control and became a drag to the family that carries this tradition as well.

We need to constantly evaluate our culture to remove the bits that no longer apply, like not bathing for a month after giving birth, otherwise our culture will act as a anchor and weigh us down. Even for the parts that are working, we should constantly evaluate it and see if it could be improved upon. In some cases, as conditions change and there is no precedence, we may even have to create new ones.

Implications of a Hereditarian World

"God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can; 
and wisdom to know the difference"

                                --Reinhold Niebuhr

Opponents of the hereditarian view like to use the racist card. Somehow, being aware of how genetics affect various abilities of the different races was suppose to turn people into uncaring racist that lynch Black People. For me at least, the opposite happened.

Before I was aware of the extensive implications of genetics, I often looked at Blacks and to a lesser degree Hispanics with a combination of disdain and puzzlement. The basic things that we Chinese people do, like study hard, show up to work every day, don't do drug and don't break laws seems to be something that Black people were unable to follow. For the Hispanics, I admire their work ethic, but was puzzled at why they were unable to lift their circumstances using the great school system in the U.S. like all other immigrants that came before them and some that came after them. Of course I am biased even as a Chinese because surely there are Chinese people who are in gangs and there are Chinese people who also can't do these basic things, but my anecdotal evidence suggest that they are a small minority. The equality warrior in me was also mad that the Chinese seems to be bad at certain things, like climbing up the management ladder of corporations. I chalked this up to racism.

Once I learn about HBD, I have become much more tolerant of differences in abilities of the different races and between individuals. Now, I have adopted a sort of live and let live attitude. Often times, things that persist for decades have a large part of the origin in biology. For example, we Chinese People have done well with school going way back. Back at the time when we were treated as outsiders by the vast majority of the U.S., we were doing well in the engineering fields. The East Indians have consistently won spelling bees contests in recent years once they arrive in the U.S. in numbers. I also look at my own achievements(or lack of) and my kids achievements with the understanding that we were all very fortunate to be endowed with good genes. I am less inclined to attribute these successes to my own hard work and drive and more aware of my responsibilities to care for my brothers and sisters that are less fortunate to be born without these endowments, although I would have like to be able to play basketball well.

If you care to read the writings of the HBD community, you will also find that most people who hold hereditarian views are not angry KKK members, though there are overlaps. The feelings that I get from reading them is that they are mostly nice people.

For society in general, instead of doubling down on the social engineering policies that failed us for decades, we should adopt the motto of equality in opportunities, not in outcomes. In a way, this has already happened to some degree. I don't see a lot of Asians protesting in front of NBA and NFL demanding equality in hiring.

With the current trend in technological development, jobs that require more intelligence have ballooned and is outstripping the supply of smart people. This is the main reason for high salaries for the high tech field and the H1-B visa from which many of my colleagues from mostly India, Iran and China starts their first job in the United States. At the same time, the low skill jobs are increasingly being automated away. A good example that everyone sees is the cashier position. This evolved from one that calculates the prices by hand, to mechanical cash registers to electronic scanners to finally self checkout isles. In the future, we might be able to take stuff from the stores and just walk out. The bio-metric scanner will identify us and automatically charge the items to our accounts. We have a responsibility toward those whose only crime was to be born with less genetic endowment, whose job prospects have shrunk relative to their smarter counterparts. At the same time, we should expect the less able segment of the society to be law abiding, live within their means and to contribute to society in whatever capacity they can. There is plenty of scope for help.

For the West, with all our social issues, we need to reduce the immigration flow from countries that have low IQ's when our own low IQ citizens are already having a hard enough time.

For the Tiger Moms who think that they do their kids a favor by driving them to the brink of suicide, they should understand a couple of things. First, IQ is relatively fixed well before any education can have effect. The Chinese have a saying, When you are three years old, the die is cast for til you are 80. There is a lot of wisdom in that. Second, while IQ is a prerequisite, passion is what is needed for the kid to succeed. Passion cannot be beat into the kid, it must come from within and it comes when a kid is not under duress and have time to explore what makes him tick. I will have more to say about this in later posts.

Finally, for the rest of the world, genetics is the most convincing explanation that could explain why centuries after the Industrial Revolution, when knowledge and capital now so widely available, that vast majority of countries outside the Western European and East Asian states have been unable to industrialize. It also explains why many non-European countries that adapted Western Liberal Democracy and Market systems have fared so badly. I think the lesson here is that we should not blindly export our system to other countries because humans everywhere are not the same, down to the genetic level. That each country must be allowed to experiment and find their own way and we should not meddle in their affairs. Perhaps out of different experimentation, there will come a winning formula that fits some sub-group of countries that are currently struggling.

Race And the World IQ Map

"Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;"

                                                           --Reinhold Niebuhr

For those that pay attention to professional sports in the U.S., there is a general hierarchy where Black people are the most athletic, then Whites, then Asians. In the universities, there is still a hierarchy, only in reverse. If you look at the admission based on SAT scores and GPA for the United States, especially California, East Asians face the strictest admission criteria(highest minimum SAT score and highest GPA), then Whites, then Blacks. I am simplifying this, as there are other races and ethnic groups which are left out of the picture, but the pattern is what is important.

This is highly disturbing to some of us and we would be tempted to dismiss our lying eyes. Richard Lynn, a professor of Psychology at Ulster University, was wondering about the same thing. He went out and compiled IQ test for different group of people around the globe and indeed confirmed that the pattern that we see at the universities are real. In fact, the following map of the IQ scores of the world population are compiled based on the data that he collected.

Over the decades since this findings first came out, the mountains of data that came out have only confirmed the pattern. While unable to deny the existence of the data, people still argue over what it means. The The blank slate people believed IQ is malleable, that we all start off the same but ended up different only because of our circumstances. Many people became rich and famous advocating this position. At the end, their argument did not stand up to water and some of them, such as the famous Stephen Jay Gould, have been found to be down right frauds. The hereditarians argue that while environment does play a part, it was genetics that explain the majority of the IQ differences among the different races and indeed difference between individuals. This is not a popular position since our society believe that everyone should be able to do anything. People who advocated this position have been attacked and in many cases their careers ruined, often by people who are not even familiar with their work. At the end, like Galileo, it was the ones that are excommunicated by the church of of the political correct that turned out to hold the truth. Blogger Steve Sailer was one of the early ones to advocate this position outside of the esoteric field of Psychrometrics. Jayman, another blogger who is Black, also has a very good write up on this topic. My favorite one came from Greg Cochran.

I was once a liberal, so I can understand the impulse to invalidate the hereditarian explanation, or even the data itself. Before you go down that path, please keep the following in mind.

1.  The data set collected was very extensive. As time goes on, new data that came up have only conform to this picture. Example of these more recent data include world ranking of TIMSS scores and PISA score broken out by country. The data is also multifaceted. For example, people have examined brain size and found that the average brain size of the world wide population correlating to the IQ data from Richard Lynn.

2.  There is a strong correlation across time, within each ethnic group and between different ethnic groups. Over decades of data that were collected, the picture did not change much. Within each ethnic group, there is a strong correlation. For example, the Chinese could be found all over the world, regardless of the environment, from third world Africa to United States, the Chinese score similarly across these very different environments. The hierarchy of the different ethnic groups also remain remarkably constant. The staff that worked on the PISA tests has an ongoing game. After scores came out each year, someone would separate the score from the countries. The rest of the staff will try to guess which score goes with which country. Due to the remarkable consistent hierarchy order, they were all able to guess which score belong to which country. What is more, since we are now able to establish genetic relatedness of different groups based on DNA, we can see that people who are genetically related scored similarly in the IQ tests. For example, the North Africans and South Asians form a genetic cluster. They also score in the same range.

3. Since we now know a lot more about genetics, the findings from genetics and other information strongly suggest a very large genetic component to the difference in IQ. For example, large part of the mutation for those of us that came out of Africa also happened to the genes that are related to the brain. Indeed, we may soon be able to pin point the exact alleles (variation of the same gene) that are responsible for IQs in all of us. The fact that different groups have different brain size (on average) also suggest a strong genetic component to IQ.

Since the work of Richard Lynn has been around for decades, many people have come forward with the blank slate arguments and even try to refute the data. I will leave you to look through the writings of my fellow hereditarians to see how they refute these arguments. Here I want to present one of the argument for the hereditarian side.

When a specie split into breeds (races) or even two or more species, it was driven by environmental pressure. All attributes of the animal change due to the environmental pressure, this includes intelligence. Intelligence is very costly. Our brains, for example, while only 2% of the body weight, consumes 20% of the resting calories. Large brain in babies cause women to have wide hips, which is sub-optimal for walking. We take longer to mature than most other animals, lengthening the reproductive cycles. Due to the exorbitant cost of the brain, nature allow just enough of it for the animal to function and no more. It would be nice for a bird to have the same intelligence of a cat, which preys on them. Unfortunately, a bird would not be able to fly with a brain the size of the cat and would be eaten anyways. We humans, spanning the entire globe, encountered vastly different environments. All aspects of our body change to adapt to the different environments. To expect our brains to end up exactly the same defies logic and common sense. It reflects our social values more than the reality of evolution. Just look at dogs, after a few hundred years of different environmental pressure (created by us), from a very small number of breeds, they evolved into dizzying array of bodies, capabilities, temperaments and of course, intelligence. Any dog owner/trainer can tell you that a German Shepard is likely to be more intelligent than a Bulldog.

IQ varies from individual to individual and between different races. Large volumes of data have been compiled and all the signs point to genetics as by far the biggest contributor to these differences.