I very rarely post on Twitter (actually mostly as a vague reply girl to you, lol), but I had to get involved in the second round of Odyssey discourse about woke translations of Homer. So much ignorance about iambic pentameter!
The original tweet to kick it all off was actually very funny: someone who had to google the Odyssey because he didn’t know what it was when he heard that Christopher Nolan was adapting it for the screen. And, then was amazed that Nolan had found such an obscure and esoteric ancient text for his next film.
The “there will be no coffee under socialism” discourse is insufferable because the only way you can disprove the argument is by citing evidence that runs straight into other dumb online leftist discourse. If you try and point out that even if the Global South was very developed, they’d still grow coffee because of specialization, they’ll tell you that the supply and demand theory of value is fake and right-wing and if you try to point out that a place like Hawaii still grows coffee then you’ll run into people with crazy Hawaii takes (worst mistake of my life is ever talking about Hawaii on Twitter). Many such cases!
Just as an fyi but I’ve recently noticed that twitter makes the site almost unusable if you’re not logged in so appreciate all the screenshots even more
The Indian immigrant drama started because many people on the more nationalist right didn't approve of the new Trump administration having a lot of Indian-Americans. There's a whole group of right wing commentators who simultaneously launched a campaign in favor of Indian immigrants to try to change the discourse. This happens every now and then and it's planned, these commentators are part of or connected the same institutions and think-tanks. Same thing happens across the political spectrum
Huh. And here I thought it was because the tech industry runs on Indian labour to the point that “Desi guy/girl with 3 passports, assets in several countries and a very busy multi currency account” is its own stereotype.
In the context of elite college admissions, 1450 is actually a bad score. I scored 1540 (780 M, 760 V) when I took it in 2012 (not including writing because that’s no longer a section), and the only top 20 I got into was Vanderbilt (I was rejected from 8 other schools at that level, with top grades and decent but not wow-inducing ECs), which I ended up attending since I got a complete full ride, including room and board, from them due to low household income. At that level, having a 1500+ score is table stakes, and the true heart of the application is the strength and depth of your extracurriculars. Whether you got into one of these schools and whether you got into a top 20, top 10, or HYPSM depended entirely on your ECs and how impressive they were, and each of those tiers demanded a different standard that isn’t as perceptible to a typical high schooler but is very perceptible to those near that level. Despite being an Asian-American and affirmative action being in force at the time, which I was glad to see abolished, I thought my outcome was mostly a fair reflection of my ability. I do remember having to, when selecting my target and reach schools, consider that I’d have to be higher in academic performance than the posted median, to account for my lukewarm ECs and all the legacy/athletic/AA/“kid of donor” admits.
As for Vivek’s remark, he merely said out loud what my parents' generation of Asian immigrants said amongst themselves about white parents. I heard it all the time growing up in Chinese-American circles (he grew up in the 90s, I grew up in the 00s), and Vivek just broadcast it for the MAGA audience to see. I despise that smarmy son of a bitch, but he's mostly right. (Though, I have some reservations about fully Asianizing American educational culture like he wants, and I'm sure he and the other "tech right" folks also want to import 996 work hours.) That tweet torched his political career though. He not only said the quiet part out loud about how he, Elon, the rest of the "tech right", as well as JD Vance (he wrote an entire book making this exact point, remember?) and likely Trump himself really think about the MAGAs, he blasted it in their face. It was absolutely delicious to see that meltdown from Catturd, Cernovich, etc. They were long overdue for that lecture given how much they're willing to dish it out to blacks and Latinos (not to say that it's completely wrong - I'm sure Mona Charen would say the same), and it very much applies to them, and quite honestly, many of the liberal white parents too.
If you want my honest opinion, the educational system here in the US is way too easy, and grades are too easily handed out. We really don't value intellectual achievement enough. Our AP exams, for example, are nothing compared to the JEE, Gaokao, or the A-levels from Hong Kong and Singapore. Like I said, the only reservation I'd have is tiger parenting, but I wasn't tiger parented academically and yet mostly outperformed (or at least kept level with, with a few exceptions) the children of tiger parents - it took a lot of effort on my part though, as well as a competitive spirit. I remember that my mom didn’t have the time to monitor me like that, for which I’m extremely glad, but was met with skepticism from other Chinese moms. And I also agree with the "tech right" on the broader point - wanting to shut the country off to immigrants is one of the worst forms of DEI/affirmative action you can think of.
Maybe I grew up in an upper middle class bubble, but the part of the US I grew up in had lots of very academically focused white kids and parents. Everyone was expected to go to college (and at minimum a flagship public university), and lots of kids were planning on becoming engineers or programmers. So I never really understood this idea that America celebrated mediocrity.
I suspect that when the tech edit: right talks about there being a shortage of talented American tech workers, what they really mean is there’s shortage of talented American tech workers who want to work 50-70 hours per week for mediocre pay. Elon specifically said the shortage was of talented and “motivated” workers.
Note I support high skilled immigration, but I also oppose the kind of workaholic culture you see in parts of Silicon Valley.
You grew up in an upper middle class bubble. With Asians, even the poorest of Asians expect college, and ideally a state flagship or above. I was raised by a single mom who made not too much above the poverty line and even she expected a state flagship at least. Unlike the wealthier Chinese tiger parents whose kids I competed with, she couldn’t monitor me nor did she have the money to buy expensive prep classes and fancy extracurriculars (I did study for the SAT and did participate in ECs to a large extent through school), but I was self-motivated to not only match the minimum expectation, but to exceed it and beat the tiger parented kids to show them up and prove that you don’t need to be tiger parented to beat them.
A poor single mom who’s not an immigrant likely wouldn’t be nearly as insistent on that high level of educational achievement. To be fair, I think it’s largely because my mom knew I had the IQ for it, but still, this is a routine expectation of even poor Asian parents but not as much non-immigrant parents. It is a category difference in culture and is reflected in the outcome gap between Asians vs. whites even controlling for SES.
Also, I’ve met upper middle class white kids at Vanderbilt, and while there was that expectation, they were not treated like the kids of tiger parents. They were given the room to explore themselves, to have playtime, and often were much more outgoing, confident, and athletic. Again, it is a category difference - they felt much more relaxed relatively speaking compared to Asians, and didn’t have nearly as much pressure placed upon them and thus had much more of a playful vibe. I was quite high-strung like my fellow Asians, but that is more due to my own neuroses, my autism/neurodivergence, and desire to fulfill the ultimate immigrant narrative than direct parental pressure. Other Asians had more direct parental pressure.
I agree with your assessment of Elon, however, and I think immigrants should be treated much more humanely. He and the other tech right folks love the Chinese 996 system, and I think that’s what they really mean.
Right, but as you are alluding to, I don't think the extremely high pressure East Asian system is something to emulate; it's terrible for kids' mental health and development. The U.S. school system could definitely make a lot of improvements, but I actually think it's biggest mistake in the past 25 years has been trying to emulate the Asian model more re: testing, STEM focus, decreased play and recess etc., not less.
I think it’s a matter of directionality. I don’t think kids who are already motivated and high-performing need to have their educational culture further Asianized. I do think for everyone else, a dose of Asianization in the culture would be helpful. School, however, needs to get more difficult across the board. At the elite level, the arms race is in the extracurriculars mainly, and that’s a direct result of our system having such a low ceiling that a lot of kids hit it and ECs are what are used to separate them. Ironically I think making school harder and placing greater weight on academics and exams will tamp down on the EC arms race we’ve been seeing there. So in that sense, I think the *system* could be a bit more Asianized especially at the top, since I think the EC arms race is even worse for mental health than just pure academics (I could be biased as an autistic though), since it demands extreme levels of multitasking and spreading yourself throughout a lot of different activities.
Your suspicion is correct. Tech companies abuse H1B visas to get cheaper workers who depend on the company for their visa and will stick around longer.
I saw a lot of people using terms like "cheaper" "low paid" "replacing you" in this tech worker discourse and I think this is very misleading to people who don't know what tech industry pay is like. It can certainly be boom and bust (right now is a mini-bust) but it's rarely /low paying/ unless you think $150k/year is low paying.
Also, H1Bs can change companies when hiring is easy, though it's true they can't simply quit and stay unemployed. I think the reason they get hired is simply because there's a lot of them and tech companies are bad at hiring and don't put any effort into finding even slightly off-track people.
Yep. It’s about wanting workers who will have nothing in their lives but work, and who will seek no personal fulfillment beyond bigger numbers on the paycheck. That isn’t American culture, nor should it be.
I feel kind of bad for that poster’s son, blasting his SAT score all over Twitter for everyone to pick apart. I agree with your analysis (I also kind of wonder, with such a perfectly round number, if that isn’t the exact score…).
I guess in her defense, she says he had applied to “mid tier” engineering schools, not top schools. Also, they hadn’t even heard a response yet, so not sure why she was in such a tizzy already.
I suspect she’s either a liar (she’s a big-name tradcon after all) or her son has bad grades or minimal ECs. I agree that what she did was completely stupid though, given that most college discourse focuses on top-tier schools. A 1450 is a great score for any school *outside* of the top 25-30 schools and is 96th percentile nationally. If she’s telling the truth, her son’s problems lay elsewhere. Since she mentioned UCs, it has to be that or she’s lying. You can’t tell me you can’t get into Riverside and Merced with those scores. With his scores and assuming a decent resume otherwise, he’s competitive for anything besides Berkeley and LA. Like, people like that are commonplace at UCSD, Irvine, Davis, etc., which is the tier of schools that such a score and a typical resume accompanying that score would merit.
The thing is that having amazing AP scores doesn’t actually correlate with economic success as much as you might expect, Singapore does just fine but would you rather have its economy or America’s? While I hate the overemphasis on extracurriculars in college admissions, I think there is something to the American desire for “well-rounded” students, there is plenty of time in college to learn complicated math concepts and it seems like the overemphasis on cramming at an early age kills off the entrepreneurial spirit.
Honestly, the extracurricular part of the elite college rat race was much more stressful than the academic part. School is too easy here, the ceiling is too low, and that leads to a bunch of nearly perfect academic performers having to find ways to differentiate themselves. I coined a saying in high school: "you derive your power from your extracurriculars" - I (correctly, I think) judged that the key difference-maker in who attends what school at that level is the depth and time commitment of their extracurricular involvements, not their academics beyond a certain point. Colleges should, ironically, weight academics and test scores to a higher degree to tamp down on this - it would also improve socioeconomic diversity, as grades/scores are harder to buy than extracurriculars.
Also, I don't think the college definition of "well-rounded" is the same as actually being well-rounded. Elite colleges' definition of "well-rounded" means "excellent at everything - school, ECs, social, athletic" and honestly, it's way more stressful to keep up than merely being a one-dimensional stereotypical nerd. Maybe my autism biases me, but I don't think elite American "well-rounded" norms are healthy either, and are in fact perhaps just as bad if not worse than the Asian "do well on one test which determines your life" culture. I think the mix should be primarily academic, with a few ECs here and there more for fun instead of as resume builders. Maybe at the top level, there should just be a lottery.
I think to the extent that the educational *culture* should be more Asianized, that should be applied more towards the bottom and middle. To the top, I say the *system* should be *more* Asianized directionally, but the *culture* less so (for most people, where you go to school doesn't matter that much as long as the school is reputable - there are certain prestige professions where it matters, but those professions also have terrible work-life balance and such).
Yeah the elite colleges are awful, maybe one of the things that America gets right is that you can still get a quality education at the non-exclusive land grant colleges. Eg I went to a state college but I have done just fine. I don’t know how other countries work but for example India puts way too much emphasis on the IITs.
The thing I worry about is bit about is that DEI seems to be pushing elite colleges admission standards into the public universities, in order to have back door affirmative action systems like California appear to have a special shadow system for Asian kids which requires them to have Harvard-like ECs whereas in my day the state schools all had a pretty simple SAT/grades lookup.
That said I wonder how low birth rates are going to affect college admissions, is a school like Berkeley going to be able to continue discriminating against mathematically-inclined Asian kids to the same extent when there are half as many kids applying?
Regarding the Asian test-based system, I wonder if one thing America historically got right is relying on the SAT which is more of a general IQ test instead of advanced subject tests for college admissions to identify smart kids that don’t have parents pushing them into tutoring.
Exactly. However, the level of financial aid is god-awful at the state schools. I was discussing UGA with Himani in this thread; they gave me scholarships such that the cost would be roughly $5k/year but even that wasn't as much as what Vanderbilt offered me (100% aid, including room/board). For poor kids, getting an acceptance from a top 20 is hitting the jackpot - you get to go for free or almost free, but you have to play by their ridiculous rules about what counts as "well-rounded", which are so astronomically tilted towards the rich. If those DEI-crats think the SAT is tilted towards the rich, wait until they hear about what rich kids do with essays, extracurriculars, etc. It also, even more so, systematically selects against neurodivergent smart kids. Having to juggle multiple activities at a high level is much more difficult on an autistic kid as compared to doing academics really, really well. I guess to an extent, it makes sense though - the goal of these schools is to develop the leaders of society, and by definition, the leaders of society in a place like America have to be smart social butterflies. Vanderbilt was a very poor cultural fit for me and I went purely because of the financial aid. I would have felt much more at home at Georgia Tech but like I said, state school financial support is god-awful. If we had more functional governments, we could fund our public universities much more so that bright students have the opportunity to get a free to low-cost education.
The UCs (by which everyone mostly means Berkeley and LA) are kind of a special case, and that is because of the prestige. They are elite universities, period. And no, they can't - DEI effects on admissions were far less pronounced at schools with higher acceptance rates after all when affirmative action was still in legal force. It is in super-selective schools where the tiniest margins matter that DEI was such an outsized effect on the outcomes.
As for the SAT, the current version is complete rubbish. It has neither the g-loading to make it an effective IQ test, nor the difficulty to make it a good subject-matter test. If you must have a test like that that selects for intelligence as opposed to knowledge, bring back the pre-1994 SAT. I was able to find one from 1980 online and scored a 1470 on it (730 M, 740 V) when I took it just for fun. The ceiling is considerably higher than the current test as evidenced by the lower score that I got as compared to when I took the 2005-2016 version, and thus can separate kids out better. The math part should have visual-spatial and pattern-recognition built into the problems, though I remember that was the case in the old SAT, and the verbal section should bring analogies and synonyms/antonyms back, with enough care to not introduce words that select too much for social class (like, for example, any references to rowing, golf, etc.). And most of all, that test should be highly valued in admissions, not exclusively so (I think grades and academic prep still matter), but enough that it can compensate for things that are more SES-coded.
Did you have a HOPE scholarship? I went to Georgia Tech and iirc it covered 100% tuition for some time, but I was in state.
I did leave with student loans but it didn't take me long to pay them off - having to buy a new car because California had no cheap used cars was more of a burden.
Yes, I did, but tuition-free isn’t the same as free-free. Vanderbilt gave me free-free, including all fees, room/board, etc. My mom was poor at the time.
I kind of agree. I have worked in admissions for the Honors program and the top full-ride merit scholarship for a flagship state school (T20 tier among other public schools, so not one of the most competitive). 1450 is certainly not enough to get admitted to the Honors College - which I’d say is on par with a more competitive school admissions - let alone the academic scholarship, which is harder than HYPSM in terms of acceptance rate and on par with them in terms of caliber of students.
I didn’t even look you up until you replied, actually! I just guessed because it sounded a lot like UGA. I’m impressed that you’re a Foundation Fellow; I didn’t get that or Ramsey, but got into Vanderbilt so got a free education that way. I went to GSMST and the valedictorian my year (c/o 2013) was a Foundation Fellow. He was way smarter than me (I was merely in the top 5%, albeit at GSMST), was the president of Science Olympiad, etc. Among the elites, he got into Chicago but the financial aid wasn’t good enough. It’s always nice to meet a fellow Georgian, especially one as high-performing as yourself, here.
1450 is 96th percentile. It should absolutely get you into a mid-tier engineering program. Not an Ivy, sure (at least not without something else in your favor) but “smarter than 96 out of 100 students who take the SAT” is definitely not “retarded”.
You grew up in an era several generations after mine. I grew up in the 50s and early 60s. I attended an entrance-exam-required school in NYC. The school had a disproportionate number of Asians and Jews. I am neither. NYC being a highly diverse ethnic city, resulted in a ethnically rich attendance at advanced high schools. At the time, it was underrepresented by African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. At the time this was an all male school. You had to be in the upper 10% of the class to get on the honor roll (grade average greater than 85%). We were all taking college level courses throughout most of our high school careers. There was a time, when it actually graduated engineers prepared to work as such.
I'm retired now, but I've subbed in local high schools. Today, most of the class is on the honor roll (grades above 3.0). The material is simplified so that no one gets lost, and everyone graduates. The effects of this obvious grade inflation benefits the poorer student (not economically poor). Greater attention is paid today to the individual student. In my time, there was virtually no interaction between the teacher and student. Even in grade school, they intentionally separated the better from the poorer students. No apologies necessary.
Because, or so it seems, people are wealthier than I or anyone I knew at the time, there is today a lot more emphasis on EC's, outside tutoring and SAT preparation courses. Such things didn't really exist in my day. It was more of an adult-oriented culture, with high expectations on the children, without much support. Parental involvement in every aspect of a child's life is pretty much of a very recent event, as far as I can tell. Some parents were more involved - mom probably a teacher - mine weren't, unless I received a bad report (not uncommon - it took me a long time to think school was as important as sports).
So, I don't remember there being any tiger-moms (what, no dads?). You probably had to be better off than anyone I knew to do that. No one in my family had ever gone to college. They only people I knew that had gone to college were our family physician, pastor, and teachers, and I probably wasn't fully cognizant that they had even gone to college. My mom, growing up during the Great Depression, left school to work after the 8th grade. My dad was working all through high school to help support the family. I had no idea what college was about. Despite the fact that almost everyone in my high school went to college, I don't remember there being anything like career counselors. As I said, kids were pretty much on their own. It was the American way.
I think the increased focus on ECs is a direct result of the grade inflation you saw, and by the time I was in high school (2009-2013), it was well-known that it actually ended up overshadowing the academics among the top students. They did the minimum to get an A, then put all their effort into extracurriculars. It was what was incentivized, and I can't blame us for following that.
My mom was someone who expected me to perform as a matter of course due to my intelligence and what I could do if I applied myself, but was struggling so hard to financially support me that she couldn't monitor me doing so. But I was convinced enough that it was in my self-interest that I made it easy for her and excelled on my own. It was a very difficult slog to compete with the kids of tiger parents, but ultimately, I was able to be in their league through sheer intelligence alone, and to this day I'm still proud of that, as much it makes me sound like someone stuck in past glories. (I'm now a STEM PhD, so I don't think I'm exactly the "gifted kid who never reached his potential".) To be able to be self-motivated to compete against the products of what I see as one of the most abusive and cruel forms of parenting meant to "optimize" their child for getting into a top-tier college and end up with an acceptance with a top 20 all the same is something that is no easy feat.
What I want is for parents and kids, collectively, to decide to value education and reach for the top, but you can do it without tiger parenting. What you need is for the right values to be set and for the kid to be sufficiently self-motivated.
I also have a PhD (mine in physics). My "success" was not a smooth trajectory. I had a long period of emotional/psychological struggle, which essentially delayed any "progress," if that is what it might actually be called, for almost ten years, a long period of pursuing vocational careers and even homelessness.
What turned me around, the second time I made a run at college, was some kind of maturing, most especially learning how to and being able to concentrate for long periods of time. As such, I never credit my accomplishment, something of a minor miracle, made possible by an American education system that is tolerant of failure, to intelligence. People often assume that having a PhD and working for 25 years at National research laboratory, is evidence of some kind of superior intelligence. I deny this. There are people in such fields that are truly very intelligent. I don't believe I am one of them. My super power, if I am to have one, is a persistent, enduring ability to concentrate on complex material, even if I don't immediately grasp it. It's an ability that itself is rare. I've been telling people for years, "Anyone can get a PhD," but you've got to be willing and able to sacrifice the enormous hours required.
Yes, I would agree that a PhD is more about persistence than intelligence. But my intelligence was my competitive advantage over the kids of the tiger parents who worked as hard as I did (albeit under compulsion). I would learn resilience as well in the sense that I had an extremely difficult home life that I had to deal with on top of a whole bunch of other issues such as my autism and mental health problems. Ultimately, I credit my intelligence not because it was the only characteristic required, but rather because I would be a fool to deny that it was one characteristic out of many.
I’m trying to remember what my SAT score was back in 2003/2004 - I think 13-something? I got into a Seven Sisters school, although that was when they took around forty percent of applicants. Now they take around twenty. Either way, 1450 is clearly a fantastic score that all but the most competitive colleges would find very impressive.
Stuff like this is why my husband and I have decided that we’re not really too concerned about whether our kids go to a “prestigious” college or not. Don’t need that stress in our lives!
I have to say, I kind of agree with the people criticizing the church decor. It looks like a minority of the criticism was about Catholic vs. Protestant, and most of it was pointing out that a church that looks like a movie theater is one, tacky, and two, exactly the sort of place where you’d expect to see a backwards baseball cap.
That guy who said his school had dozens of perfect scores is full of crap, there are only around 300 perfect scores per year across the entire country and there’s no way one boarding school for rich people managed to concentrate all of them (you’re going to say “oh it’s because their curriculum was so amazing” but the SAT is more about how many books you read as a kid than whether you got to take Calculus II in 12th grade).
My family has always done Christmas lists. I sympathize with OP but am not sure I understand why it’s a specifically autistic thing to not like receiving gifts you don’t want? There’s still plenty of room for fun and surprises with lists. You can pick a fun/nice version of what the person asked for. Or if you’re like me and make a really long list (expecting only to get a small fraction of it of course) you can still be surprised because there are so many possibilities!
My mom can get weird about my kids’ wishlist, so now I give her something vague that she can’t mess up and I get the specific stuff my kids actually asked for. It’s annoying, but it’s not related to neurodivergence!
I need more information about why that mom is so certain that her son’s going to be rejected from all those “mid-tier” engineering programs.
His SAT results are in the top 4% of test takers (controversial take: this is not a bad score.) Does he have terrible grades? Has he been convicted of a crime? Did he list the KKK as one of his extracurriculars? Is her idea of a mid-tier engineering program Caltech or MIT?
Assuming that his grades are decent and there’s no major red flags on his applications, I’d have a little faith in him. I hope the son hasn’t found out about his mom’s tweet, as I could see that being really discouraging.
Apparently the UCs don't take standardized tests anymore. If her son doesn't have a high GPA and good ECs, that could be a problem. As for 1450, I'd have considered it not a great score, but that's because I could and did score higher than that and I was aiming for the top schools so I could get a financial aid full ride, which I managed as well.
It's more likely, though, that she's just a liar. She's a big tradcon account on Twitter/X after all.
I was enjoying the H1b drama on Reddit, where thanks to Elon's involvement they managed to somehow become wokishly anti-immigration.
I'm generally on the pro- side myself but I'll confess there's straightforward "they're taken' our jerbs!!" case to be made against. But Reddit unveiled an angle I had not considered: H1b is bad because it allows Elon to exploit Indians by giving them $150k jobs.
I saw a thread like that - all those people forgot the most important principle of politics which is that conservative economics is wrong about everything.
(Theoretically immigrants raise natives' wages because of the positive demand shock and their differing/complementary skills to natives. Instead they're most likely to compete with other immigrants.)
I think Trump has come down on Elon's side of the HB1 thing in comments on some show. Looks like MAGA is going to learn the hard way that the populist never stays populist for very long...if he ever was.
The thing is, H1Bs have nothing to do with “meritocracy” and everything to do with packing low to mid level IT positions with cheap labor willing to trade shit pay and working conditions for a visa. Are there some real geniuses that make it in on H1Bs? Sure, but on average you’re looking at a warm body that can semi-competently do basic software maintenance. The majority of H1B applications come from a handful of contract (temp) labor firms that literally exist for the sole purpose of importing and hiring out cheap Indian tech workers.
Musk is, bluntly, full of shit on this. He wants cheap labor because his companies are the engineering equivalent of a sweatshop. Vivek is full of shit too, whatever cultural differences may be, they don’t turn your average H1B into a hardworking genius superstar. It’s also ironic to wring hands about racism on this one because, bluntly, Indians can be pretty damn racist (and classist to boot, the caste system dies hard).
EDIT: I should add, my comments aren’t directed at Indian Americans - to the extent you can ever generalize such a diverse group, they tend to be very successful, assimilate quickly, and take education seriously.
I very rarely post on Twitter (actually mostly as a vague reply girl to you, lol), but I had to get involved in the second round of Odyssey discourse about woke translations of Homer. So much ignorance about iambic pentameter!
The original tweet to kick it all off was actually very funny: someone who had to google the Odyssey because he didn’t know what it was when he heard that Christopher Nolan was adapting it for the screen. And, then was amazed that Nolan had found such an obscure and esoteric ancient text for his next film.
Also, I don’t know if reply girl has a good connotation; hopefully good!
The “there will be no coffee under socialism” discourse is insufferable because the only way you can disprove the argument is by citing evidence that runs straight into other dumb online leftist discourse. If you try and point out that even if the Global South was very developed, they’d still grow coffee because of specialization, they’ll tell you that the supply and demand theory of value is fake and right-wing and if you try to point out that a place like Hawaii still grows coffee then you’ll run into people with crazy Hawaii takes (worst mistake of my life is ever talking about Hawaii on Twitter). Many such cases!
Just as an fyi but I’ve recently noticed that twitter makes the site almost unusable if you’re not logged in so appreciate all the screenshots even more
You're so welcome!
The Indian immigrant drama started because many people on the more nationalist right didn't approve of the new Trump administration having a lot of Indian-Americans. There's a whole group of right wing commentators who simultaneously launched a campaign in favor of Indian immigrants to try to change the discourse. This happens every now and then and it's planned, these commentators are part of or connected the same institutions and think-tanks. Same thing happens across the political spectrum
Huh. And here I thought it was because the tech industry runs on Indian labour to the point that “Desi guy/girl with 3 passports, assets in several countries and a very busy multi currency account” is its own stereotype.
People interpreted this as a tech-right thing probably because big tech is backing Trump's campaign and Indian immigration benefits them
In the context of elite college admissions, 1450 is actually a bad score. I scored 1540 (780 M, 760 V) when I took it in 2012 (not including writing because that’s no longer a section), and the only top 20 I got into was Vanderbilt (I was rejected from 8 other schools at that level, with top grades and decent but not wow-inducing ECs), which I ended up attending since I got a complete full ride, including room and board, from them due to low household income. At that level, having a 1500+ score is table stakes, and the true heart of the application is the strength and depth of your extracurriculars. Whether you got into one of these schools and whether you got into a top 20, top 10, or HYPSM depended entirely on your ECs and how impressive they were, and each of those tiers demanded a different standard that isn’t as perceptible to a typical high schooler but is very perceptible to those near that level. Despite being an Asian-American and affirmative action being in force at the time, which I was glad to see abolished, I thought my outcome was mostly a fair reflection of my ability. I do remember having to, when selecting my target and reach schools, consider that I’d have to be higher in academic performance than the posted median, to account for my lukewarm ECs and all the legacy/athletic/AA/“kid of donor” admits.
Trump actually weighed in on the H-1B debate yesterday and he’s Team Elon: https://nypost.com/2024/12/28/us-news/donald-trump-backs-h-1b-visa-program-supported-by-elon-musk/
As for Vivek’s remark, he merely said out loud what my parents' generation of Asian immigrants said amongst themselves about white parents. I heard it all the time growing up in Chinese-American circles (he grew up in the 90s, I grew up in the 00s), and Vivek just broadcast it for the MAGA audience to see. I despise that smarmy son of a bitch, but he's mostly right. (Though, I have some reservations about fully Asianizing American educational culture like he wants, and I'm sure he and the other "tech right" folks also want to import 996 work hours.) That tweet torched his political career though. He not only said the quiet part out loud about how he, Elon, the rest of the "tech right", as well as JD Vance (he wrote an entire book making this exact point, remember?) and likely Trump himself really think about the MAGAs, he blasted it in their face. It was absolutely delicious to see that meltdown from Catturd, Cernovich, etc. They were long overdue for that lecture given how much they're willing to dish it out to blacks and Latinos (not to say that it's completely wrong - I'm sure Mona Charen would say the same), and it very much applies to them, and quite honestly, many of the liberal white parents too.
If you want my honest opinion, the educational system here in the US is way too easy, and grades are too easily handed out. We really don't value intellectual achievement enough. Our AP exams, for example, are nothing compared to the JEE, Gaokao, or the A-levels from Hong Kong and Singapore. Like I said, the only reservation I'd have is tiger parenting, but I wasn't tiger parented academically and yet mostly outperformed (or at least kept level with, with a few exceptions) the children of tiger parents - it took a lot of effort on my part though, as well as a competitive spirit. I remember that my mom didn’t have the time to monitor me like that, for which I’m extremely glad, but was met with skepticism from other Chinese moms. And I also agree with the "tech right" on the broader point - wanting to shut the country off to immigrants is one of the worst forms of DEI/affirmative action you can think of.
Maybe I grew up in an upper middle class bubble, but the part of the US I grew up in had lots of very academically focused white kids and parents. Everyone was expected to go to college (and at minimum a flagship public university), and lots of kids were planning on becoming engineers or programmers. So I never really understood this idea that America celebrated mediocrity.
I suspect that when the tech edit: right talks about there being a shortage of talented American tech workers, what they really mean is there’s shortage of talented American tech workers who want to work 50-70 hours per week for mediocre pay. Elon specifically said the shortage was of talented and “motivated” workers.
Note I support high skilled immigration, but I also oppose the kind of workaholic culture you see in parts of Silicon Valley.
You grew up in an upper middle class bubble. With Asians, even the poorest of Asians expect college, and ideally a state flagship or above. I was raised by a single mom who made not too much above the poverty line and even she expected a state flagship at least. Unlike the wealthier Chinese tiger parents whose kids I competed with, she couldn’t monitor me nor did she have the money to buy expensive prep classes and fancy extracurriculars (I did study for the SAT and did participate in ECs to a large extent through school), but I was self-motivated to not only match the minimum expectation, but to exceed it and beat the tiger parented kids to show them up and prove that you don’t need to be tiger parented to beat them.
A poor single mom who’s not an immigrant likely wouldn’t be nearly as insistent on that high level of educational achievement. To be fair, I think it’s largely because my mom knew I had the IQ for it, but still, this is a routine expectation of even poor Asian parents but not as much non-immigrant parents. It is a category difference in culture and is reflected in the outcome gap between Asians vs. whites even controlling for SES.
Also, I’ve met upper middle class white kids at Vanderbilt, and while there was that expectation, they were not treated like the kids of tiger parents. They were given the room to explore themselves, to have playtime, and often were much more outgoing, confident, and athletic. Again, it is a category difference - they felt much more relaxed relatively speaking compared to Asians, and didn’t have nearly as much pressure placed upon them and thus had much more of a playful vibe. I was quite high-strung like my fellow Asians, but that is more due to my own neuroses, my autism/neurodivergence, and desire to fulfill the ultimate immigrant narrative than direct parental pressure. Other Asians had more direct parental pressure.
I agree with your assessment of Elon, however, and I think immigrants should be treated much more humanely. He and the other tech right folks love the Chinese 996 system, and I think that’s what they really mean.
Right, but as you are alluding to, I don't think the extremely high pressure East Asian system is something to emulate; it's terrible for kids' mental health and development. The U.S. school system could definitely make a lot of improvements, but I actually think it's biggest mistake in the past 25 years has been trying to emulate the Asian model more re: testing, STEM focus, decreased play and recess etc., not less.
I think it’s a matter of directionality. I don’t think kids who are already motivated and high-performing need to have their educational culture further Asianized. I do think for everyone else, a dose of Asianization in the culture would be helpful. School, however, needs to get more difficult across the board. At the elite level, the arms race is in the extracurriculars mainly, and that’s a direct result of our system having such a low ceiling that a lot of kids hit it and ECs are what are used to separate them. Ironically I think making school harder and placing greater weight on academics and exams will tamp down on the EC arms race we’ve been seeing there. So in that sense, I think the *system* could be a bit more Asianized especially at the top, since I think the EC arms race is even worse for mental health than just pure academics (I could be biased as an autistic though), since it demands extreme levels of multitasking and spreading yourself throughout a lot of different activities.
Your suspicion is correct. Tech companies abuse H1B visas to get cheaper workers who depend on the company for their visa and will stick around longer.
I saw a lot of people using terms like "cheaper" "low paid" "replacing you" in this tech worker discourse and I think this is very misleading to people who don't know what tech industry pay is like. It can certainly be boom and bust (right now is a mini-bust) but it's rarely /low paying/ unless you think $150k/year is low paying.
Also, H1Bs can change companies when hiring is easy, though it's true they can't simply quit and stay unemployed. I think the reason they get hired is simply because there's a lot of them and tech companies are bad at hiring and don't put any effort into finding even slightly off-track people.
Yep. It’s about wanting workers who will have nothing in their lives but work, and who will seek no personal fulfillment beyond bigger numbers on the paycheck. That isn’t American culture, nor should it be.
I feel kind of bad for that poster’s son, blasting his SAT score all over Twitter for everyone to pick apart. I agree with your analysis (I also kind of wonder, with such a perfectly round number, if that isn’t the exact score…).
I guess in her defense, she says he had applied to “mid tier” engineering schools, not top schools. Also, they hadn’t even heard a response yet, so not sure why she was in such a tizzy already.
I suspect she’s either a liar (she’s a big-name tradcon after all) or her son has bad grades or minimal ECs. I agree that what she did was completely stupid though, given that most college discourse focuses on top-tier schools. A 1450 is a great score for any school *outside* of the top 25-30 schools and is 96th percentile nationally. If she’s telling the truth, her son’s problems lay elsewhere. Since she mentioned UCs, it has to be that or she’s lying. You can’t tell me you can’t get into Riverside and Merced with those scores. With his scores and assuming a decent resume otherwise, he’s competitive for anything besides Berkeley and LA. Like, people like that are commonplace at UCSD, Irvine, Davis, etc., which is the tier of schools that such a score and a typical resume accompanying that score would merit.
It’s 96th percentile for people who take the SAT, which makes it 99th percentile overall (https://research.collegeboard.org/reports/sat-suite/understanding-scores/sat). It’s two standard deviations above average IQ!
The thing is that having amazing AP scores doesn’t actually correlate with economic success as much as you might expect, Singapore does just fine but would you rather have its economy or America’s? While I hate the overemphasis on extracurriculars in college admissions, I think there is something to the American desire for “well-rounded” students, there is plenty of time in college to learn complicated math concepts and it seems like the overemphasis on cramming at an early age kills off the entrepreneurial spirit.
Honestly, the extracurricular part of the elite college rat race was much more stressful than the academic part. School is too easy here, the ceiling is too low, and that leads to a bunch of nearly perfect academic performers having to find ways to differentiate themselves. I coined a saying in high school: "you derive your power from your extracurriculars" - I (correctly, I think) judged that the key difference-maker in who attends what school at that level is the depth and time commitment of their extracurricular involvements, not their academics beyond a certain point. Colleges should, ironically, weight academics and test scores to a higher degree to tamp down on this - it would also improve socioeconomic diversity, as grades/scores are harder to buy than extracurriculars.
Also, I don't think the college definition of "well-rounded" is the same as actually being well-rounded. Elite colleges' definition of "well-rounded" means "excellent at everything - school, ECs, social, athletic" and honestly, it's way more stressful to keep up than merely being a one-dimensional stereotypical nerd. Maybe my autism biases me, but I don't think elite American "well-rounded" norms are healthy either, and are in fact perhaps just as bad if not worse than the Asian "do well on one test which determines your life" culture. I think the mix should be primarily academic, with a few ECs here and there more for fun instead of as resume builders. Maybe at the top level, there should just be a lottery.
I think to the extent that the educational *culture* should be more Asianized, that should be applied more towards the bottom and middle. To the top, I say the *system* should be *more* Asianized directionally, but the *culture* less so (for most people, where you go to school doesn't matter that much as long as the school is reputable - there are certain prestige professions where it matters, but those professions also have terrible work-life balance and such).
Yeah the elite colleges are awful, maybe one of the things that America gets right is that you can still get a quality education at the non-exclusive land grant colleges. Eg I went to a state college but I have done just fine. I don’t know how other countries work but for example India puts way too much emphasis on the IITs.
The thing I worry about is bit about is that DEI seems to be pushing elite colleges admission standards into the public universities, in order to have back door affirmative action systems like California appear to have a special shadow system for Asian kids which requires them to have Harvard-like ECs whereas in my day the state schools all had a pretty simple SAT/grades lookup.
That said I wonder how low birth rates are going to affect college admissions, is a school like Berkeley going to be able to continue discriminating against mathematically-inclined Asian kids to the same extent when there are half as many kids applying?
Regarding the Asian test-based system, I wonder if one thing America historically got right is relying on the SAT which is more of a general IQ test instead of advanced subject tests for college admissions to identify smart kids that don’t have parents pushing them into tutoring.
Exactly. However, the level of financial aid is god-awful at the state schools. I was discussing UGA with Himani in this thread; they gave me scholarships such that the cost would be roughly $5k/year but even that wasn't as much as what Vanderbilt offered me (100% aid, including room/board). For poor kids, getting an acceptance from a top 20 is hitting the jackpot - you get to go for free or almost free, but you have to play by their ridiculous rules about what counts as "well-rounded", which are so astronomically tilted towards the rich. If those DEI-crats think the SAT is tilted towards the rich, wait until they hear about what rich kids do with essays, extracurriculars, etc. It also, even more so, systematically selects against neurodivergent smart kids. Having to juggle multiple activities at a high level is much more difficult on an autistic kid as compared to doing academics really, really well. I guess to an extent, it makes sense though - the goal of these schools is to develop the leaders of society, and by definition, the leaders of society in a place like America have to be smart social butterflies. Vanderbilt was a very poor cultural fit for me and I went purely because of the financial aid. I would have felt much more at home at Georgia Tech but like I said, state school financial support is god-awful. If we had more functional governments, we could fund our public universities much more so that bright students have the opportunity to get a free to low-cost education.
The UCs (by which everyone mostly means Berkeley and LA) are kind of a special case, and that is because of the prestige. They are elite universities, period. And no, they can't - DEI effects on admissions were far less pronounced at schools with higher acceptance rates after all when affirmative action was still in legal force. It is in super-selective schools where the tiniest margins matter that DEI was such an outsized effect on the outcomes.
As for the SAT, the current version is complete rubbish. It has neither the g-loading to make it an effective IQ test, nor the difficulty to make it a good subject-matter test. If you must have a test like that that selects for intelligence as opposed to knowledge, bring back the pre-1994 SAT. I was able to find one from 1980 online and scored a 1470 on it (730 M, 740 V) when I took it just for fun. The ceiling is considerably higher than the current test as evidenced by the lower score that I got as compared to when I took the 2005-2016 version, and thus can separate kids out better. The math part should have visual-spatial and pattern-recognition built into the problems, though I remember that was the case in the old SAT, and the verbal section should bring analogies and synonyms/antonyms back, with enough care to not introduce words that select too much for social class (like, for example, any references to rowing, golf, etc.). And most of all, that test should be highly valued in admissions, not exclusively so (I think grades and academic prep still matter), but enough that it can compensate for things that are more SES-coded.
Did you have a HOPE scholarship? I went to Georgia Tech and iirc it covered 100% tuition for some time, but I was in state.
I did leave with student loans but it didn't take me long to pay them off - having to buy a new car because California had no cheap used cars was more of a burden.
Yes, I did, but tuition-free isn’t the same as free-free. Vanderbilt gave me free-free, including all fees, room/board, etc. My mom was poor at the time.
I kind of agree. I have worked in admissions for the Honors program and the top full-ride merit scholarship for a flagship state school (T20 tier among other public schools, so not one of the most competitive). 1450 is certainly not enough to get admitted to the Honors College - which I’d say is on par with a more competitive school admissions - let alone the academic scholarship, which is harder than HYPSM in terms of acceptance rate and on par with them in terms of caliber of students.
That sounds a lot like UGA (I grew up in the Atlanta area), its honors college, and the Foundation Fellows scholarship. Do you work at UGA?
Lol good detective work! I am not an employee but have done admissions work for them as an alumni of those programs.
I didn’t even look you up until you replied, actually! I just guessed because it sounded a lot like UGA. I’m impressed that you’re a Foundation Fellow; I didn’t get that or Ramsey, but got into Vanderbilt so got a free education that way. I went to GSMST and the valedictorian my year (c/o 2013) was a Foundation Fellow. He was way smarter than me (I was merely in the top 5%, albeit at GSMST), was the president of Science Olympiad, etc. Among the elites, he got into Chicago but the financial aid wasn’t good enough. It’s always nice to meet a fellow Georgian, especially one as high-performing as yourself, here.
1450 is 96th percentile. It should absolutely get you into a mid-tier engineering program. Not an Ivy, sure (at least not without something else in your favor) but “smarter than 96 out of 100 students who take the SAT” is definitely not “retarded”.
You grew up in an era several generations after mine. I grew up in the 50s and early 60s. I attended an entrance-exam-required school in NYC. The school had a disproportionate number of Asians and Jews. I am neither. NYC being a highly diverse ethnic city, resulted in a ethnically rich attendance at advanced high schools. At the time, it was underrepresented by African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. At the time this was an all male school. You had to be in the upper 10% of the class to get on the honor roll (grade average greater than 85%). We were all taking college level courses throughout most of our high school careers. There was a time, when it actually graduated engineers prepared to work as such.
I'm retired now, but I've subbed in local high schools. Today, most of the class is on the honor roll (grades above 3.0). The material is simplified so that no one gets lost, and everyone graduates. The effects of this obvious grade inflation benefits the poorer student (not economically poor). Greater attention is paid today to the individual student. In my time, there was virtually no interaction between the teacher and student. Even in grade school, they intentionally separated the better from the poorer students. No apologies necessary.
Because, or so it seems, people are wealthier than I or anyone I knew at the time, there is today a lot more emphasis on EC's, outside tutoring and SAT preparation courses. Such things didn't really exist in my day. It was more of an adult-oriented culture, with high expectations on the children, without much support. Parental involvement in every aspect of a child's life is pretty much of a very recent event, as far as I can tell. Some parents were more involved - mom probably a teacher - mine weren't, unless I received a bad report (not uncommon - it took me a long time to think school was as important as sports).
So, I don't remember there being any tiger-moms (what, no dads?). You probably had to be better off than anyone I knew to do that. No one in my family had ever gone to college. They only people I knew that had gone to college were our family physician, pastor, and teachers, and I probably wasn't fully cognizant that they had even gone to college. My mom, growing up during the Great Depression, left school to work after the 8th grade. My dad was working all through high school to help support the family. I had no idea what college was about. Despite the fact that almost everyone in my high school went to college, I don't remember there being anything like career counselors. As I said, kids were pretty much on their own. It was the American way.
I think the increased focus on ECs is a direct result of the grade inflation you saw, and by the time I was in high school (2009-2013), it was well-known that it actually ended up overshadowing the academics among the top students. They did the minimum to get an A, then put all their effort into extracurriculars. It was what was incentivized, and I can't blame us for following that.
My mom was someone who expected me to perform as a matter of course due to my intelligence and what I could do if I applied myself, but was struggling so hard to financially support me that she couldn't monitor me doing so. But I was convinced enough that it was in my self-interest that I made it easy for her and excelled on my own. It was a very difficult slog to compete with the kids of tiger parents, but ultimately, I was able to be in their league through sheer intelligence alone, and to this day I'm still proud of that, as much it makes me sound like someone stuck in past glories. (I'm now a STEM PhD, so I don't think I'm exactly the "gifted kid who never reached his potential".) To be able to be self-motivated to compete against the products of what I see as one of the most abusive and cruel forms of parenting meant to "optimize" their child for getting into a top-tier college and end up with an acceptance with a top 20 all the same is something that is no easy feat.
What I want is for parents and kids, collectively, to decide to value education and reach for the top, but you can do it without tiger parenting. What you need is for the right values to be set and for the kid to be sufficiently self-motivated.
I also have a PhD (mine in physics). My "success" was not a smooth trajectory. I had a long period of emotional/psychological struggle, which essentially delayed any "progress," if that is what it might actually be called, for almost ten years, a long period of pursuing vocational careers and even homelessness.
What turned me around, the second time I made a run at college, was some kind of maturing, most especially learning how to and being able to concentrate for long periods of time. As such, I never credit my accomplishment, something of a minor miracle, made possible by an American education system that is tolerant of failure, to intelligence. People often assume that having a PhD and working for 25 years at National research laboratory, is evidence of some kind of superior intelligence. I deny this. There are people in such fields that are truly very intelligent. I don't believe I am one of them. My super power, if I am to have one, is a persistent, enduring ability to concentrate on complex material, even if I don't immediately grasp it. It's an ability that itself is rare. I've been telling people for years, "Anyone can get a PhD," but you've got to be willing and able to sacrifice the enormous hours required.
Yes, I would agree that a PhD is more about persistence than intelligence. But my intelligence was my competitive advantage over the kids of the tiger parents who worked as hard as I did (albeit under compulsion). I would learn resilience as well in the sense that I had an extremely difficult home life that I had to deal with on top of a whole bunch of other issues such as my autism and mental health problems. Ultimately, I credit my intelligence not because it was the only characteristic required, but rather because I would be a fool to deny that it was one characteristic out of many.
I’m trying to remember what my SAT score was back in 2003/2004 - I think 13-something? I got into a Seven Sisters school, although that was when they took around forty percent of applicants. Now they take around twenty. Either way, 1450 is clearly a fantastic score that all but the most competitive colleges would find very impressive.
Stuff like this is why my husband and I have decided that we’re not really too concerned about whether our kids go to a “prestigious” college or not. Don’t need that stress in our lives!
I have to say, I kind of agree with the people criticizing the church decor. It looks like a minority of the criticism was about Catholic vs. Protestant, and most of it was pointing out that a church that looks like a movie theater is one, tacky, and two, exactly the sort of place where you’d expect to see a backwards baseball cap.
That guy who said his school had dozens of perfect scores is full of crap, there are only around 300 perfect scores per year across the entire country and there’s no way one boarding school for rich people managed to concentrate all of them (you’re going to say “oh it’s because their curriculum was so amazing” but the SAT is more about how many books you read as a kid than whether you got to take Calculus II in 12th grade).
My family has always done Christmas lists. I sympathize with OP but am not sure I understand why it’s a specifically autistic thing to not like receiving gifts you don’t want? There’s still plenty of room for fun and surprises with lists. You can pick a fun/nice version of what the person asked for. Or if you’re like me and make a really long list (expecting only to get a small fraction of it of course) you can still be surprised because there are so many possibilities!
My mom can get weird about my kids’ wishlist, so now I give her something vague that she can’t mess up and I get the specific stuff my kids actually asked for. It’s annoying, but it’s not related to neurodivergence!
The problem with baristas is the coffee bushes do all the real work but nobody gives them the credit.
I need more information about why that mom is so certain that her son’s going to be rejected from all those “mid-tier” engineering programs.
His SAT results are in the top 4% of test takers (controversial take: this is not a bad score.) Does he have terrible grades? Has he been convicted of a crime? Did he list the KKK as one of his extracurriculars? Is her idea of a mid-tier engineering program Caltech or MIT?
Assuming that his grades are decent and there’s no major red flags on his applications, I’d have a little faith in him. I hope the son hasn’t found out about his mom’s tweet, as I could see that being really discouraging.
Apparently the UCs don't take standardized tests anymore. If her son doesn't have a high GPA and good ECs, that could be a problem. As for 1450, I'd have considered it not a great score, but that's because I could and did score higher than that and I was aiming for the top schools so I could get a financial aid full ride, which I managed as well.
It's more likely, though, that she's just a liar. She's a big tradcon account on Twitter/X after all.
How is top 96% not a GREAT score??? . .JHC the standards on social media are melt-brain level insane.
Apparently the UCs don't take standardized tests anymore. If her son doesn't have a high GPA and good ECs, that could be a problem.
It's more likely, though, that she's just a liar. She's a big tradcon account on Twitter/X after all.
Thank you for doing this! I used to be extremely online, but a repetitive strain injury ended that. It’s nice to be able to catch up.
I was enjoying the H1b drama on Reddit, where thanks to Elon's involvement they managed to somehow become wokishly anti-immigration.
I'm generally on the pro- side myself but I'll confess there's straightforward "they're taken' our jerbs!!" case to be made against. But Reddit unveiled an angle I had not considered: H1b is bad because it allows Elon to exploit Indians by giving them $150k jobs.
I saw a thread like that - all those people forgot the most important principle of politics which is that conservative economics is wrong about everything.
(Theoretically immigrants raise natives' wages because of the positive demand shock and their differing/complementary skills to natives. Instead they're most likely to compete with other immigrants.)
I think Trump has come down on Elon's side of the HB1 thing in comments on some show. Looks like MAGA is going to learn the hard way that the populist never stays populist for very long...if he ever was.
The thing is, H1Bs have nothing to do with “meritocracy” and everything to do with packing low to mid level IT positions with cheap labor willing to trade shit pay and working conditions for a visa. Are there some real geniuses that make it in on H1Bs? Sure, but on average you’re looking at a warm body that can semi-competently do basic software maintenance. The majority of H1B applications come from a handful of contract (temp) labor firms that literally exist for the sole purpose of importing and hiring out cheap Indian tech workers.
Musk is, bluntly, full of shit on this. He wants cheap labor because his companies are the engineering equivalent of a sweatshop. Vivek is full of shit too, whatever cultural differences may be, they don’t turn your average H1B into a hardworking genius superstar. It’s also ironic to wring hands about racism on this one because, bluntly, Indians can be pretty damn racist (and classist to boot, the caste system dies hard).
EDIT: I should add, my comments aren’t directed at Indian Americans - to the extent you can ever generalize such a diverse group, they tend to be very successful, assimilate quickly, and take education seriously.