"people are more complex than cultural caricatures. You can’t just map behaviors onto someone because of where they’re from. Understanding generational differences, personality, and professional context matters just as much, if not more, than making broad cultural assumptions."
But the rest of this article literally does nothing but make broad cultural assumptions
Many cultural assumptions are accurate on average, at the population level. It's nevertheless important to remember that they're mostly uninformative regarding individuals.
This is an article about population level statistics.
What's the alternative? I strongly doubt there are large population level differences in intelligence/whatever you want to call what is needed to succeed, which leaves culture and geography/population distribution. They are talking about south asians outperforming indexed against east asians so that eliminates geography/population distribution mostly. The only thing left is culture.
I hate this line of thinking. The truth is in the middle - you can and should do generalisations because patterns do exist in real life. Indians do behave meaningfully differently than other races. And it is okay to notice those differences.
There's a new trend to oppose any pattern finding in races. The retort is always "we are so diverse that no pattern exists at all". I don't agree at all.
So averages and social dynamics map exactly to individuals?
"Race" is so undefined it's just silly to argue about. We are tremendously more similar than different. We have a visual bias, so a difference in skin color will dominate all other similarities. Then we go and theorize about other differences when we start our division from this arbitrary difference. This is lazy thinking. And a lot of the time is used for hate mongering against some "other".
Of course cultures have different set of values, and this influences the aggregate decisions of the individuals, but taking the next step and forecasting and analyzing a single individual by projecting sociatal bias on them is dehumanizing, and as recent history taught us, is dangerous.
I'll use all the information provided and form an opinion. It doesn't matter what category American as, as long as I understand the patterns an American exhibits.
The correct word here is cultures, not races. South Asians of European ancestry (like one side of my family) are still culturally south Asian (albeit a particular subculture in our case). I know lots of people of non white ancestry who are culturally British (I mostly am myself).
I think culture is also a lot less dehumanising than race because it is complex and therefore less prone to grouping people in the same stereotyped way. Not all South Asian cultures are the same - there is a huge difference between, for example, an urban Sri Lankan (as I was born) and a rural Pakistani. Much as there are huge cultural differences within Europe (e.g. between Wales and Albania).
I do agree that stereotyping leads to dehumanisation, but I also think cultural differences are worth talking about. I also strongly agree that thinking in terms of race rather than culture is very damaging and encourages racism.
there are obviously drawbacks, but generalisations and assumptions are literally how we naturally store knowledge. its the quality of the information that is the problem not the generalisation.
Hmm. Aren't the East Asian CEO class off being CEOs in East Asia? Whereas, for jurisdiction arbitrage reasons, it's a much better environment for CEOs in India to leave India and work in the US than to try to build in India.
I'm always mindful of the quote "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops" from Stephen Jay Gould. If we assume that CEO-ness, whatever that property actually is, is evenly distributed among people at birth, it becomes a question of opportunity. It seems that the business culture in Japan, Singapore, possibly Korea, post-90s China, and some other places is pretty good compared to India.
I don't think you have to assume that CEO-ness is evenly distributed.
I can even believe that kids born in Singapore have more CEO-ness in them on average than kids born in eg Indonesia or PR China. Even if for no other reason than that Singapore is the kind of place that's comparatively more tolerable / less horrifying for the kind of people with CEO-ness traits. (It's also pretty expensive, so only rich people can really afford to have kids here.)
(I'm assuming here that CEO-ness runs in families.)
In any case, the rest of your argument still makes sense, even if someone born in Singapore statistically has a 3% higher chance of becoming a CEO than someone born in Portugal or whatever.
- H1B visa share: 70% india, 10% china (2022). So that's 7x more Indians meaning even a random choice will likely end up with an Indian.
This is 80% of the reason. Remaining 20%:
- Assorted cultural reasons
People make a huge deal about how making "broad cultural assumptions" is wrong but the fact is they play a role contextually. "As broad as the context, and no broader". Here's the logic behind it. Most of the things people do in their life they do not do because they innately want to do it, rather it is because they are expected, or incentivised to. Culture, when it is strong, sets a lot of incentives and expectations. Broad cultural assumptions in $CONTEXT work accurately when(and only when) said culture sets expectations and incentives that result in behaviours overlapping with those displayed in $CONTEXT.
What I have heard from someone with 1st hand experience: For Indian/chinese culture, set CONTEXT=board_room, you will find a difference.
Edit: it's important to add that these cultural differences are observable at the population level and not the individual level. i.e Akash Patel won't necessarily get the CEO position more often than Lee Wei. However, in a population of 100 Akash Patels and 100 Lee Weis, a larger fraction of Akash Patels will end up as CEO. Stereotypes are probabilistic information and thus lose their error bars as you take more and more samples.
Sheer numbers. In Singapore there is more chinese ceos than indian.
I am not american so i wonder what is the situation like in US but in Singapore it is very visible that each race stick to its own and pushes its own up. Indians to indians, chinese to chinese, filipinos to filipinos.
SG is touted to be multicultural but what is the true meaning of this?
Singapore has government enforced racial quotas, both in housing policy and in PR/citizenship grants with the goal of maintaining a stable 75/15/7.5. So it's really not a good example of merit based
Being 'Multicultural' means keeping the peace between cultures. As much as the government loves to tout that they are a 'melting pot' where innovation happens, there isn't much going on there that is particularly attributed to being multicultural. Generally in companies you're either in the chinese culture or the western one.
I think it also speaks to the fact that without forced integration people will naturally converge to whatever is familiar to them, eventually forming enclaves.
But my impression is that Chinese Americans are pretty much white biologically and culturally by the third or fourth generation because of the high rates of interracial marriage.
And specifically one aspect of it - language. English for Indians is like a first language.
And being myself from USSR, i think there is another cultural aspect - that coming from former socialist country impact Chinese somewhat similar to how it impacts Russians.
"There are far fewer East Asian CEOs in the Fortune 500, and most of them are the founders of their companies like Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Tony Xu (DoorDash), Lisa Su (AMD)"
I think the author has been using an LLM to extend the text or get facts and it's making weird phrases and/or mixing statements together. It's specially visible on the 'The Costs of Conflict Avoidance' section when the theme changes for no reason and it starts listing "things to do to avoid conflict".
In the case you're mentioning, in the Indian CEO list he lists FORMER Indian CEOs:
> Among the Fortune 500, the CEOs of Alphabet/Google (Sundar Pichai), Microsoft, (Satya Nadella), Adobe (Shantanu Narayen), Chanel (Leena Nair), IBM (Arvind Krishna), Micron (Sanjay Mehrotra), Palo Alto Networks (Nikesh Arora) and former CEOs of Mastercard (Ajay Banga) and Pepsi (Indra Nooyi) were all born in India and were appointed the CEO position.
In the East Asia CEOs list, he mixes together the "founders" list with others, misses a bunch of East Asia CEOs and creates a weird phrasing:
> There are far fewer East Asian CEOs in the Fortune 500, and most of them are the founders of their companies like Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Tony Xu (DoorDash), Lisa Su (AMD) and Hock Tan (Broadcom). Three of these are in the semiconductor industry and two of them founded their companies. This is just a list of the Fortune 500 CEOs [...]
> You have to be willing to be direct and to the point. Beating around the bush only shows you don’t believe that what you need to say is valid or worthy. Stuttering or dancing around the topic at hand conveys uncertainty and undermines your position. You must be intentional and explicit in what you say, if you want the other party to fully grasp where you are coming from.
I don't know about the premise of the article but this suggestion definitely resonates with me. It's easy enough for misunderstandings to arise even when people are trying their best to communicate what they mean. Once you start beating around the bush it's almost guaranteed the other party is going to hear something completely different than what you intent.
The article is based on stereotypes, not research. It confuses people and organizational cultures.
Research on organizational cultures confirms some stereotypes about China, like high power distance between people, low individualism, and high self-restraint.
What it misses are some very positive straits;
- very high task-orientation (versus person-orientation)
- very high tolerance to uncertainty (much higher than US or never mind Germany)
- very long term oriented (equal to Germany, much higher than the US)
ps. China and India are about the same in individualism and most other issues. China is slightly better at uncertainty tolerance and much better in long term orientation.
If by "South Asian" he means "Indian", I think there are more Indians than East Asians in US tech in general, so it's not surprising they're more of them in CEO positions.
Immigration patterns 50 - 20 years ago, Japan and WW2, Vietnam war, modern American attitudes to China and "they all look the same" takes care of the rest.
I think there are a lot more sides to this. I also think the mentioned paper has been extrapolated a bit too much for this substack article. It's from almost 10 years ago, and it's mostly centered in India's population.
For reference, it's titled "Boomers Like to Confront, Generation Y Is Okay with Withdrawal, But They All Love to Negotiate in India" in March 2016 "Conflict Resolution Quarterly". DOI:10.1002/crq.21163
But I'm surprised how it just passes over the language (English is an official language in India), that also have lead to India having lots of business relations with the USA due to offshoring. And, of course, how Chinese nationals are seen as a risk in any meaningful position in American companies, specially in the last ten years.
From my experience percentage of Indians with good English exceeded that of Chinese in Silicon Valley, I always thought this observation was due to that fact.
Honestly, this is probably the easiest and most accurate answer. India being a british colony for a long time means that the top 1% of Indians had a lot more exposure to English than the top 1% of Chinese people.
From there, statistics comes into play. There's just a bigger pool of Indians to select CEOs from.
This article feels like it generalizes quite a lot about a very, very large population. I'm always wary of pieces that try to put the vast majority of people from a given territory into some broad buckets in order to draw conclusions about them. There are a grand total of two citations in the whole thing unless I missed some, and they're not supporting most of the generalities.
> Much of East Asian culture is rooted in the teachings of Confucius.
Really?
Interesting topic at the very least. Any time there's a big population disparity in selective groups it's usually worth investigating how that disparity came to be to see if we can learn something from it and potentially equalize it (if it exists for a bad reason).
too small sample of represent the culture , I can also argue that south asian prefer climbing the ladder (traditional of social class) while east asian prefer to be their own boss (appears more east asian have their own business)??
As a bicultural Chinese Canadian with a fancy STEM background, this is a terminally flawed argument because it fundamentally allows capitalism to decide which cultural norm is socially valid. It is shortsighted, self-centered, and actually undermines itself because it is meta-conflict avoidant. Comply with capitalism or you're out. That's compliance with more steps; it talks about "embracing conflict" but its philosophy is essentially a broken one.
(and look: less than 4 minutes my comment is downvoted. Talk about serious debate when an East Asian actually has an informed opinion on this.)
What does this word salad even mean? The research mentioned in the article just says that Indians’ approach to conflict lines up better with the approach favored by Americans.
People with personal boundary issues see studies about how things currently are as prescriptive. They see a survey that says that most people put mustard on their hot dogs, then
1) get angry because they personally put catsup on their hot dogs,
2) argue with people about the math, but without actually pointing out any problems with the math other than it is being bigoted against people who like catsup and wants to "erase" people who put catsup on their hot dogs.
3) If they can manage to find somebody with the credentials that they deem important enough, and can leverage their complaint about the study to somehow guilt that person into wasting their time responding to their empty objection, they finally accept that the math works.
4) Now that they accept the math, they stop putting catsup on their own hot dogs, and only use mustard from now on. They ridicule and attack catsup users at every social opportunity, and brag about their contact with the credentialed person.
The word salad is just a necessary tool for expressing empty approval or disapproval, borrowed from 8th generation pseudo-Freudian European literary critics. It supplies a lot of words with no meaning, so you can use them to talk over people. It explicitly centers associative logic and magical thinking as its most innovative tool, and the interpretation of the actual world as if it were a literary fiction.
Be aware that many non-EAs have no model or context for interpreting East Asian culture or thought. Even amongst EAs, there's no firm mutual bond.
There's superficial recognition, of course, but it's difficult to even begin to have conversations when so much effort is spent in every interaction confirming, validating, or outright missing critical aspects of each other's ideologies. And it's usually more one way than the other.
On a different note, it started as a joke, but I've found it helpful to give out copies of "The Xenophobe's Guide" to people I'm going to be working closely with. They're not perfect, but they're short, hilarious and humanizing. The books, I mean.
> it fundamentally allows capitalism to decide which cultural norm is socially valid
That’s like complaining that the 100 yard dash decides whether more or less speed is good. ‘Capitalism’ (really, the free market) is just a voting and sorting system. Cultural norms which produce more value outcompete those which produce less. That’s part of why Protestant Europe (with fewer feast days) outcompeted Catholic Europe (with many more). That’s why blue laws in the U.S. have faded out. Does that mean that days off are bad? No, it just reflects that a day spent not working is a day spent not producing.
Chasing economic value is what has created the entire modern world: science, medicine, an economy in which farmers are less than 1% of the population.
I couldn't understand what the hell they were talking about so I put it into chatGPT as a last resort.
> This paragraph expresses a strong critique of a particular argument or philosophy — though it's not explicitly stated what that argument is — and frames that critique through the lens of someone with a bicultural identity and a background in STEM.
lol.
And yes, while LLMs shouldn't be used as a benchmark for general intelligence problems, I think that written communication (especially for a wider audience like on HN) should be simple enough that an AI can understand it.
This is a dangerous topic. If you change the races in the headline, the only acceptable answer becomes "racism", and the only acceptable debate becomes whether it's mostly racism today or racism historically.
You know that there's lots and lots of different Indian people, and even just going by skin colour, they have a lots of variation?
What the 'East Asian personality'?
And when you say 'whites' do you include Irish and Italians? They only recently became 'white'. (And a bit earlier Benjamin Franklin didn't even include Germans amongst the properly 'white' people.)
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But the rest of this article literally does nothing but make broad cultural assumptions