I also come from a similar background, and his points also seem poignant to me -- the first, in my reading, is about the lottery of birth; would he or I or you have been successful (with presumably our predisposition to succeed in academia) in China merely 70 years ago? Perhaps not. The second, related, is that we should be grateful for the achievements which might naturally appear as the product of our own labor, and (I think) also to forgive others for the achievements that appear to be the product of their labor.
Though implicit, I think this article actually makes an interesting implication about jealousy. What exactly is there to be jealous of in another person if luck, and randomness plays so much in our fortunes?
This article is also a warning against self-help. So much determines our fortunes besides the advice we can take or the effort we make. The best is what -- rolling with the punches --
I agree with your points, except the part on jealously and warning against self-help. I view his life similar to investing, as he mentioned: being "long term greedy." I thought him and his parent's story illustrated this. It is unlikely that his parents had the best schooling in the world, but they were successful financially somewhat. When their son struggled in school, they enrolled him somewhere else and gave him more resources. He used that and achieve more by attending the most prestigious institution in the world. While it is likely that luck played a huge role, ie. China's market liberalization and growth, U.K. schools wanting to make more revenue, his stint at GS. He and his parents needed to be there in position the first place to take advantage of all of that. I do not think this is his point to warn against self help, rather than an examination of why and how he got to where he did.
Luck only comes when you are in position to seize it. Yes despite your best efforts, it might never come. But it can come when you never expect it because you are in the right place and the right time.
As a non-native speaker I say that there is a huge difference between speaking/writing fluent English and doing this in a way that satisfies "unwritten cultural conventions".
For my English, for example, native speakers tend to say that it is actually quite correct, but I have a tendency to use words in a specific way in which few native speaker would use them.
I am a non-native english speaker too; I guess I bristle at the the reading that this man isn't in control of his english when he writes with obvious proficiency, a reading I suspect, would not at all be in question were his name John Foster Edwards, or Henry Wickham or whatever Anglo-Saxon name you wish to replace his name with.
I see your point though. I think he does use words in ways that native speakers do not use, but in his anecdotes -- I think he's actually playing up his Chineseness for the comic effect, and he's very much aware of what's happening.
The argument I find most compelling for learning the memory palace technique is that building a memory palace is a creative act (Yes, like Picasso). One must be creative to construct a memorable palace for something as mundane as a grocery list, and what's vivid works. (Joshua Foer argues just this, persuasively too, in his book "Moonwalking with Einstein").
(begin sort of random tangent)
I've tried using the memory palace technique to memorize poetry, and I found the clashing images somewhat disconcerting. On the one hand, there was the imagery of the poem, and on the other, there was the image I had created. Often times, I had to create completely new images, totally unrelated to the substance of the poem, in order to remember it. And well, somehow the images I created always involved a lot of...boob.
I don't think the author means to justify age discrimination so much as to use it to underscore a point, which is that programming knowledge is something that takes (on the order of) 5 years to acquire rather than 40 years to acquire. Whether this is true, I am not sure. I don't really have enough experience to justify making any claims like that.
I think what he's really saying, to make an analogy, is that a programmer is more like a black smith than like an alchemist. A blacksmith is concerned with his tools and his technique, an alchemist is on a search for truth (or permanence or glory). Now he's also saying that being a blacksmith sort of sucks: your tools get old, you are smelly, it probably hurts more to pound your anvil when you're 50 than when you're 22, etc. Whether you believe that depends on your taste, whether you care about creating a good product or embarking on a potentially (very likely) fruitless search for truth.
The thing is, admissions to elite universities is almost never about test scores. Immigrant parents from countries like China and India are used to test scores mattering a lot. In those countries, your absolute score on the National Exam determines not only your placement into a university, but also what fields are available to you for study.
The SAT is nothing like that. If you walk into Harvard or Princeton, you'll find that most of the kids got above 2300 on the SAT, and a ton had perfect scores. If you tried using the SAT to distinguish between members of the student body at either place, you would have little success. The admissions committee has the same problem, so, kids are not selected based on SATs. You get in because you're good, or at least, you show a lot of promise, not because you can study for a test.
So yeah, maybe asians have higher test scores as a cohort, but maybe they also have less other things that are equally important -- sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc. These things count just as much in admissions decisions.
It's possibly to argue that selecting for these things is inherently racist, but I mean, what isn't? The SAT itself privileges a white collar suburban education. Who's to say it's more valuable to be able to memorize vocab, or do arithmetic than to run or paint?
People involved in college admissions (as you said you are in another comment) love to say things like this. If I based my understanding of the world solely on statements by college admission officers at, say, Duke, I would guess that thousands upon thousands of high school students each year get literally perfect scores (cumulative score of 2400 across three sections of the test) each year. In fact, only a few hundred do, not even enough to fill the entering class at Harvard each year.
Literally "perfect" scores are still quite rare. Caltech is just about the only college small enough to enroll only perfect scorers on the SAT (but not all perfect scorers apply to Caltech). As a consequence of this, all United States colleges without exception, by the pigeonhole principle, admit students with less-than-perfect SAT scores.
Your point is well taken that college admission offices look for student characteristics other than test scores. They always have, and they always will. But if a college is found to practice racial discrimination, it is violating the law, period. If a college claims, in response to a Department of Education inquiry, that it is looking for some other student characteristic that just happens to disfavor students from [insert race or ethnicity category here], it had better be able to identify that characteristic with specificity and not simply ASSUME that students of one category or another have more "sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc." than other students.
I would say just because one culture is more inclined to sports and social activities doesn't mean it is racist to use these things as a discriminating factors. I don't think it's possible to argue that a selection criteria is racist unless the color of your skin is the sole discriminator.
On the other hand, it bears mentioning that you can be racist in your choice of selection criteria, if you choose criteria based on their ability to produce a certain racial outcome.
The use of a poll tax people have to pay in order to vote isn't racist per se, but in the segregationist south, poll taxes were used as a mechanism to suppress black votes because they knew (disproportionately poor) black people would have a harder time paying it, and this use was racist.
That's one of the first hypothesis discussed in the article: our brains aren't getting smaller because we are getting dumber, but because the wiring is becoming more efficient.
I think the most interesting part of the article comes at the end, where the author points out that while brain volume has decreased since prehistoric times, it's recently been on the rise. That trend corresponds well with the availablity of protein in human history. Since farming began, protein has been a privilege of the rich. Only recently has it been widely available, and in such quantities. Hence, modern Americans are something like 3 inches taller than their ancestors 150 years ago.
Though implicit, I think this article actually makes an interesting implication about jealousy. What exactly is there to be jealous of in another person if luck, and randomness plays so much in our fortunes?
This article is also a warning against self-help. So much determines our fortunes besides the advice we can take or the effort we make. The best is what -- rolling with the punches --