Virtually the only students in college libraries Friday nights are Asians. It's not just being smart, but working hard also.
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Years ago, when I was tech writer for weird magazines such as Signal and for other more-normal techish pubs, Jews littered the intellectual landscape. They were all over high-end research, such as Bell Labs. The big names were often Jewish, Einstein, von Neumann, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Minsky.
The staff list for the Manhattan Project read like a Yeshiva yearbook. The same happened in the arts.
Bernstein, Landowska, Rubinstein, Stoppard (“Maidens in search of Godhead…and vice versa.”)
Jews were smart, most people figured, not necessarily liking it. I wondered why without great interest. Genetic determinists of course cooked up evolutionary explanations involving undiscovered genes acted upon by unquantifiable selective pressures to produce assumed results not correlatable with the pressures. Business as usual.
Later I began to notice without thinking about it that the Jewish names were growing thin on the ground. These were not systematic observations. But Asian names were becoming prominent almost everywhere. The Feinsteins seemed to be in recession, if only anecdotally.
Something odd was happening, I barely noticed.
Then Ron Unz published The Myth of American Meritocracy, documenting a stunning turnaround of which I had been only vaguely aware. The book deals substantially with corruption in admissions to Ivy schools, with some (I think) good ideas for reform. It also charts the sharp decline in Jewish achievement and the meteoric rise of the Asians. (Actually I think falling is more what meteors do, but cliches are cliches.)
More@ Fred On Everything
I also noticed this. Hard to know why.
ReplyDeleteThey who try the most certainly have an advantage.
DeleteYou nailed it. I saw this in high School. The drive to succeed in the hard sciences was absent. The recognition that this is good thing had disappeared.
ReplyDeleteWhen was that?
DeleteIt is no wonder the absence of Jewish names in the authentic sciences. With no will or desire to succeed, failure is guaranteed..
ReplyDeleteI was kind of a newcomer to Beverly Hills. I had grown up in Newport Beach CA. But the attitude towards the hard sciences that I saw was a surprise to me. With my Dad and his friends working on SDI Star Wars and the U-2, and the kind of success the USA had had in WWII, I thought it was clear that the authentic sciences were understood to be good things.
Little did I know. Among Jewish people it was the phony sciences of psychology and other delusions that had all the prestige. Whatever recognition of the importance of the real sciences the immigrants from Eastern Europe had brought with them, had disappeared.
I had grown up in Newport Beach CA.
DeleteI lived in San Clemente from the fall of Saigon until 1995 and had a cab company that covered Camp Pendleton north through Laguna Beach.
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Among Jewish people it was the phony sciences of psychology and other delusions that had all the prestige.
Do you know why?
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Whatever recognition of the importance of the real sciences the immigrants from Eastern Europe had brought with them, had disappeared.
Again, I wonder why.
No idea. The best idea I can come up with is ignorance of Maimonides. The Middle Ages had a kind of balance between Reason and Faith. When that balance was rejected people lost their bearings. But that is my off hand answer right now. This is an interesting question that requires more thought.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
Delete