
America's Problem: The World is Beating Us in a Battle We Don't Want to Win - noble12
http://www.undeferredliving.com/americas-problem-how-the-world-is-beating-us-in-a-battle-we-dont-necessarily-want-to-win/
======
victork2
Ah... trying to apply entrepreneur spirit everywhere, how could it go wrong?

Okay so let's recap, we are shown a table showing the PISA score of a lot of
countries and we see the US in a very bad position. Great. Now let's look at
the countries which are at the top, and weirdly these countries apply
principles that are totally the opposite to what the author is trying to
propose. China, France ( where I come from), Korea, Taiwan propose heavily
standardized education. Specialization and choice comes very very late in
education in the countries at the top. The best results on these tests should
not be the ultimate goal of education in a country but they are an indicator
of deep issues in the system.

I think one the problem in the US is the perception of education and the bad
reputation is gaining over the years is not helping it: paradoxically by
pointing out the real of imagined flaws of the system, you discredit it and
lower the test scores because parents are blaming the system rather than the
kids. HN is a great example with every week yet another "I was too smart for
school, so they crushed me".

Please stop trying to fix it with entrepreneurial methods, it's an over
simplified solution to a huge problem with many factors: financial,
sociological, historical.

Oh and if we want to emulate the spirit in the silicon valley we have to
remember that the vast, vast majority of projects FAIL. So maybe it's not so
ideal.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
In quality assurance, you need to be very careful what you measure, because
you will always optimize towards what you do measure. As I've watched my kids'
schools deal with crap like No Student Left Behind, I'm completely convinced
we are not optimizing for learning or creativity in any way.

When you look at how well kids can learn when they are interested and curious
and how little our schools use that curiosity, there is no question that
things can be better. Just because we've done it for 100 years doesn't make it
the right or best way (especially when schools became factory training grounds
in the late 19th/early 20th centuries). Test scores are a horrible way to
measure success in education because it fails to show anything about
creativity and ability to continue learning, which are the things a knowledge-
based economy need more than anything.

There are a lot of really good teachers out there who are completely hobbled
by the structure of the system. It's a complex problem, but that doesn't mean
we shouldn't try to come up with better solutions.

FWIW, I think we should start smaller. I would like to see students move
through their education not with an age-based cohort, but rather a capability-
based cohort, and they can get pushed back to a lower cohort if they aren't
achieving (my understanding is this is how China's system works; if I'm wrong
here, _please_ correct my knowledge). That would remove the "bored smart kids"
that cause problems in class and who fail out as soon as they hit something
hard (that almost happened to me in college) and it would remove the
"frustrated dumb kids" who give up on being "able" to learn from the equation.
Both of these groups would just be challenged at their level, and the teacher
would be able to focus the lesson plan around it.

~~~
moxie
I think you nailed it: school isn't optimized for creativity, it's optimized
for creating workers. But I don't think that just applies to the factories of
the 19th century.

The highest institutional rewards are given to the students who most
effectively suppress their own desires, just like in the workplace. The
students I knew in school who excelled at school didn't enjoy going to class,
doing homework, or the challenge of memorizing answers for a test that they
would forget as soon as the test was over. Most of them were smart, but the
key ingredient was their ability to suppress their own desires. And I have no
doubt that they have been successful in the workplace for the exact same
reason.

------
MetricMike
So I get that American education tends to create "interchangeable cogs", but
I'm dubious that "applying the Lean Startup methods will fix it". America
doesn't just dominate the web just because of Silicon Valley - giant
corporations like Microsoft and IBM and the baby Bells had a great part in it
as well (and still do).

Does individualized attention towards each student's strength and passion
scale to a nation? Shouldn't the focus of a national education system be to
provide everyone with a solid base and then from there allow them to explore
and develop their dreams?

I'm quite biased towards incrementalism, but I think the problem (defined as
Americans emerging from the education system with no passion or creativity)
would be better addressed by decreasing or removing the incredible burden it
takes to get specialized, formal training in graduate school not by trying to
get the Department of Education to attempt to pivot (expensively) towards
focusing on each individual in an already chronically underfunded industry.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Aargh. Microsoft didn't become Microsoft because of cogs. Microsoft is DYING
because of cogs.

~~~
rgraham
How exactly is the $263 billion dollar market cap company that pays dividends
and has $2 earnings per share with millions of customers dying? Slowed growth
at that scale is an artifact of size relative to market potential. It doesn't
mean the company is dying. Not even if you really dislike it.

~~~
guard-of-terra
I used to dislike it, but now I don't care. That's the "dying" part.

But you can just read Paul Graham - he's the thinker.

------
noonespecial
There's a lot of high minded stuff getting bandied about these days in regard
to education. I agree so much with the idea that Americas public schools are
no place for kids that my wife and I juggle our careers so that we can
homeschool.

But here's the thing. None of this matters if we fail to teach basic literacy
and numeracy. Spend a day at the DMV. People can't read. They can't add or
round numbers. Simple statistics? Forget about it.

Public school should be a place where even the poorest, most disadvantaged
kids can get these basic survival skills for the civilized world. To be blunt,
to both public and private thinkers, if your plan doesn't address this as it's
primary feature, sit down and shut up, we've got bigger problems to fix first.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
> I agree so much with the idea that Americas public schools are no place for
> kids that my wife and I juggle our careers so that we can homeschool.

It really depends on where you live. I will concede the vast majority are
likely no place for kids, but there are noteworthy exceptions. My personal
experience with being amazed by what public schooling _can_ do is from both
attending and observing school in Howard County, Maryland. They have
incredible opportunities for kids to get engaged in STEM fields and otherwise
customize their public school experience away from the "standard" curricula,
and those opportunities _aren't_ extra-curricular activities either. They're
as much part of the schooling as "standard" subjects and factor into
graduation requirements just as much.

I'd argue that unless you've got a good amount of money and time to invest in
setting up a warehouse full of equipment and hiring knowledgeable industry
veterans just for your kid(s), homeschooling can't come close to what a
program like the ARL can offer to kids.

<http://arl.hcpss.org/>

~~~
tokenadult
I know homeschoolers from Howard County, Maryland who are still far exceeding
the public school graduates in their achievement in higher education and
careers. Thinking just about the "M" (mathematics) part of STEM, I'm pretty
sure that in Maryland most of the county winners each year in the state
mathematics contest for high school students, and also the MATHCOUNTS winners
among middle school students, come out of an informal coaching program that is
run by a homeschooling parent. Maryland devotes an exceptional amount of money
(including federal money) to its public school systems, and has some great
public schools by the meager standards of the United States, but even at that
there are families that still find homeschooling a more challenging academic
choice for their children.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Mathematics is an example of one of the fields that doesn't require
significant investment to enable "hands-on" learning. Suppose your child's
interest is piqued by chemistry or engineering, though. Math is certainly
necessary there as well, but in order to explore concepts on more than a
theoretical basis, expensive equipment is usually required. Maybe hacker
spaces and similar community collectives that pool resources to obtain
otherwise prohibitively expensive equipment can help fill that void.

------
bwanab
When this issue comes up, I often hear the somewhat apologetic excuse that the
countries at the top are there because of some combination of 1) rote
memorization, 2) teaching to the test, 3) highly standardized systems which
generally don't apply to the U.S. systems. Since my children were educated in
the French system (in the US), I know there is some truth to these assertions.
But, while it may be true in some or most countries that perform well in
tests, I have read much about Finland's system that suggests in many ways the
opposite approach is taken and yet with obviously good results (e.g.
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/860...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8601207.stm)).

I'd be interested in hearing from Finnish HNers on their impressions of their
educational system.

~~~
grego
Well, the teachers usually have a masters degree and it is quite a popular
profession, so it is somewhat hard to get into the University to be a teacher.

Finland is also very egalitarian, or socialist if you will. This means that
there are not so many good or bad schools, all schools have pretty much the
same resources. Of course there are differences, but nothing as flagrant as in
the US.

Private schools are practically non-existent (less than 2%).

So while the Finnish system lifts the average, I'm not sure how much the top
performers benefit from it.

------
ZENmotherfucker
"Men have votes, so women must soon have votes; poor children are taught by
force, so they must soon be fed by force; the police shut public houses by
twelve o’clock, so soon they must shut them by eleven o’clock; children stop
at school till they are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty.
No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract
asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop
of mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution."

------
bluekeybox
Among dogs, some breeds are considered "smarter" than others. However, when
people talk about their dogs being smart, what they most often really mean is,
"my dog is able to understand and follow my orders". While that is one way to
measure intelligence, it is an extremely one-sided and perhaps somewhat
dishonest approach (only those behavioral traits are called "intelligent" that
are good for us, dog masters). Breeds of dogs that are genetically close to
wolves, for example, are considered by some as less intelligent than other,
more malleable breeds. However, as this experiment shows
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls3ZmwtaosY&t=23m22s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls3ZmwtaosY&t=23m22s))
(video in German), actual domesticated wolves are quicker at solving some
types of problems on their own, while dogs will give up after a few poor tries
and/or turn to humans for help.

------
ckayatek
I think this method of teaching cannot succeed without some dramatic shift in
the education system, which given its sheer size is nearly impossible.
Furthermore, it may not even be optimal. The basis of this change is
individualized education. Yet how can we teach students individually when
there are millions of kids that have to be taught? Where are the teachers to
facilitate this form of delivery? Who will pay for the increased cost in
education? How will we even classify children? It has been demonstrated that
children do better in school when they are placed in higher performing groups.
Should we put all of the underperforming kids in a class where they see no one
superior to them? Finally, I think there is a certain set of knowledge that
everyone should know and K-12 does a decent job of teaching that. We can
certainly improve the system without replacing it outright.

~~~
wpietri
I really don't like arguments of the form "It's hard and I can raise some
questions, so we should stop thinking about it."

Also, it's generally unhelpful to say "solution X is totally wrong" without
then offering a concrete solution yourself. Poking holes is certainly fun and
satisfying on some level, but really, the status quo doesn't need a lot of
help.

------
numeromancer
I was first put off by the talk of what “we” do, and “our” successes, which is
the usually way of talking from someone who wants to make big pronouncements
but doesn't know enough to say anything. Then was put off by the shiny chain
of platitudes he offers in exchange for control over the education of “our”
children ( “...following orders, obeying protocol...”; _thats_ what they're
“training” them to do? _That_ 's the problem in schools? Has he been in a
public school lately?). And the solution to the failure of American students
to meet undemanding standards on basic literacy is to drop testing altogether?

“Entrepreneurship! That's the answer! I'm so excited about it that I can't be
wrong!”

Then again, perhaps the article is more subtle than that. Perhaps it's an
attempt to demonstrate how far our standards have fallen by showing what pap
some people will accept as proposals for school reform.

------
learc83
It's funny no one ever mentions the fairly recent trend to tie driver's
licenses with school attendance.

When i was in school I knew many kids who kept attending just so they could
drive, and many of them never graduated, despite attending for 4 years.

I was in honors and AP classes, so I never had general education classes with
these students, but on the occasion when I had elective classes with them,
they were _very_ disruptive.

I'm also sure they lowered our overall average scores as well.

------
pfortuny
A pity the Silicon Valley view is not the path to happiness, as far as I know.

Teach the children to be able to be really free. This means: reading and
writing and the five rules above all.

BUT (big but): writing is NOT just being able to write down a dictation.
Reading is NOT just reading aloud.

The rest is mostly crap. [OK I may be biased because I am a maths professor,
so the five rules might be reduced to the four ones, just in case].

~~~
snogglethorpe
"The five rules"

?

------
saalweachter
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

This programming mantra is applicable to a much wider range of problems -- or
rather, proposed solutions -- than just optimization because what it is really
saying is, _don't try to solve a problem without first understanding what that
problem is._

Education reform is lousy with this. There are probably more armchair
education reformers than armchair generals, prescribing sweeping changes to
our education system based on their own narrow prejudices. I myself am not
qualified to diagnose the various problems we face, but I'm pretty sure that
most of our proto-innovators are making it out of high school without being
soul-crushed into little automatons. If anything, putting in the minimal
effort to excel in a boring environment while doing more interesting things in
your copious free time -- which is I'm pretty sure how most of us spent K-12
-- is great preparation for doing the same thing in the real world.

------
ArbitraryLimits
The reason the US always ranks at the bottom of standardized test scores has
nothing to do with _how_ our education system works and everything to do with
_who_ it educates.

In virtually every other industrialized country, students are split into two
educational tracks, one vocational and one for "real education" which roughly
corresponds to the split in the US between kids who go to college and those
who don't.

Standardized tests (like the ones whose scores are reported on here) are only
given to the kids on the "real educational" track in other countries, while in
the US they're given to everyone, and the inevitable result is that scores
from the US take a big hit because of the non-college bound kids.

Once in a while you see a report where someone filters the test results for
only honors or AP students in the United States before comparison, and in
these comparisons US scores are pretty much the same as other industrialized
countries.

~~~
streptomycin
> the US always ranks at the bottom of standardized test scores

We don't, we rank about in the middle when compared to other Western
countries.

> Once in a while you see a report where someone filters the test results for
> only honors or AP students in the United States before comparison, and in
> these comparisons US scores are pretty much the same as other industrialized
> countries.

Or when you filter by race: [http://super-
economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...](http://super-
economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html)

------
svachalek
When reading the part about how standardized and identical schooling is, I had
this weird vision related to how some RPGs work. 4-5 years focused on the
basics, reading, writing, PE (really necessary now that kids spend all their
time in front of a screen), and math (elementary math needs a lot of updating
but that's another issue). Then splitting into just a few different focus
areas, maybe 3-4 like technical, communication, business, arts, etc., that
still enhance those basics but in a way that orients around the student's
strengths and interests.

High school is already more flexible and college is of course wide open so it
would basically change the flexibility-vs-time curve from something of a
trumpet shape now to something more like a cone.

In an ideal world this make school more relevant and interesting for the
students and businesses alike. But I have to admit Morloks and Eloi are a
distinct possibility.

------
saraid216
It's interesting that the title is actually ambiguous.

The "battle we don't want to win" could be read as a race to the bottom, as
the writer means it, but it can also be read as "America doesn't _really_ want
to win" or "America doesn't really believe in education". I was sort of
expecting the latter meanings when I went into the article.

------
yread
In Opera I only see this <http://i.imgur.com/o3O8K.png>

~~~
rwmj
Indeed -- the page seems broken even when I enable top-level Javascript.
Whatever happened to just using HTML to present your ideas?

------
ryangallen
"We are moving into a future where entrepreneurial minded people will be the
only kind of worker that have Real Value."

I certainly hope so. It is so excruciatingly frustrating to go to a job
everyday where that trait is inhibited by a 'just do your job and shut up'
environment.

~~~
Spooky23
That extreme is frustrating. Working with a bunch of characters who all want
to be in charge and change the world is irritating as well.

~~~
ryangallen
I agree, there has to be a balance in any work atmosphere. I just think
individuals with ideas for improving a company should not be resisted, but
valued and encouraged to share their thoughts. In my opinion, a good business
should be thought of as a team of professionals operating harmoniously, not a
monarchial society where leadership makes the decisions for everyone and there
is a constant 'climb the ladder to the top' philosophy. I suppose it's
essentially a debate of forms of government.

------
ollysb
I absolutely love this vision. I'm curious about what happens when you have a
workforce made up of leaders though. My first thought was that it couldn't be
practical, surely we need some people to be led. But then, working in an
information age why not? A workforce that can dynamically reorganise itself
down to the level of individuals could be extremely successful.

~~~
ori_b
The cynic in me says that you will never have a shortage of people who are
willing to be led. It's less work, less responsibility, and less blame when
things go wrong. All other things being equal, there will be plenty of people
willing to take the path of least resistance.

~~~
shmageggy
If you are right, and I'm inclined to believe that you are, the problem then
becomes how to educate such people so that they are useful in an increasingly
high-tech world. Anyone who is content doing the low-responsibility grind is
very unlikely to take entrepreneurial-level initiative in their own education,
so the best method of training them really is the cog-in-the-machine style
system that we have in place. The problem is not the existence of our meat
grinder education, but the lack of existence of any alternative for people who
don't fit in it (entrepreneurs, the terminally curious, smart people in
general). Ironically, the author bemoans our one-size-fits-all approach and
then proposes replacing it with another of the same characteristic. Really, we
need both.

------
ilkandi
In summary "This is a problem. Somebody out there should figure out some way
to fix it." No insights here.

------
thuffy
Why does no one ever state the real facts on this issue? (Well, that is
obvious, the truth is censored, oops, I mean politically incorrect.)

American's score better than everyone else, or at worst, second or so. What am
I talking about?

...

To appreciate how an average can obscure huge variations in academic
performance, just subdivide US test scores by race and ethnicity (for these
data, see here). In the 2009 PISA reading scores for fifteen year olds from 65
nations and regions the average score is 500. The United States as a nation
scored 500, a result hardly befitting a world power committed to educational
excellence. The top scores come from Shanghai, China (556). But in second
place are American students of Asian ancestry (541) who even out-perform
students in Korea, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong. In 7th place are US whites
whose test scores exceed those in every European nation except Finland! Far
down the ranking list are Hispanics (466) and near the bottom are US blacks
(441). The 2007 TIMMS math results show nearly the identical pattern. Here in
both 4th and 8th grade, US students of Asian ancestry cluster near the top
together with Asians in Asia but close by are white Americans and further
below are Hispanics and, near the bottom, American blacks.

[http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/03/academic_excellence_a...](http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/03/academic_excellence_and_the_mi.html)

~~~
tokenadult
I call this out as a crap link because the Hacker News welcome letter
specifically says, "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote
crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

<http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>

Not to be rude, I'll assume that you are posting that link in good faith. Now
I will discuss for you and for onlookers why I don't think that link is a
thoughtful comment on school performance in the United States. The link is
full of logical errors.

First, the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the
same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as
the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country."

The Census Bureau says

"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines
provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are
based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census
questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this
country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or
genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race
item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may
choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as
'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic,
Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm>

A similar statement is found as footnote 7 in the Census Brief 2010 "Overview
of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010"

<http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf>

"The race categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a
social definition of race recognized in this country and are not an attempt to
define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it
is recognized that the categories of the race question include race and
national origin or sociocultural groups."

Second, anyone who thinks that United States "black" persons in general
receive a primary and secondary education just like United States "white"
persons is profoundly ignorant of life in the United States. Mathematician
Patricia Kenschaft's article from the Notices of the American Mathematical
Society "Racial Equity Requires Teaching Elementary School Teachers More
Mathematics,"

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf>

reports on her work in teacher training programs for in-service teachers in
New Jersey. "The understanding of the area of a rectangle and its relationship
to multiplication underlies an understanding not only of the multiplication
algorithm but also of the commutative law of multiplication, the distributive
law, and the many more complicated area formulas. Yet in my first visit in
1986 to a K-6 elementary school, I discovered that not a single teacher knew
how to find the area of a rectangle.

"In those innocent days, I thought that the teachers might be interested in
the geometric interpretation of (x + y)^2. I drew a square with (x + y) on a
side and showed the squares of size x^2 and y^2. Then I pointed to one of the
remaining rectangles. 'What is the area of a rectangle that is x high and y
wide?' I asked.

. . . .

"The teachers were very friendly people, and they know how frustrating it can
be when no student answers a question. 'x plus y?' said two in the front
simultaneously.

"'What?!!!' I said, horrified."

Until provision of primary education is brought up to the best standard
achieved anywhere in the United States for ALL pupils in the United States, of
course there is more to do to improve schools here. And no one who is
knowledgeable about schools in the United States claims that all teachers
teach effectively in the core subjects of primary schooling.

Third, the statement in the link ignores the better performance of several
other countries by comparing only population means rather than comparing
national score distributions with interquartile ranges. That how-to-lie-with-
statistics trick doesn't fool me, because I have seen the national score
distributions.

[http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/TIMSS2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1....](http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/TIMSS2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf)

(See Exhibit 1.1 for country distributions of scores in mathematics.)

Although the United States is above the international average score among the
countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development
in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed,
which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile
level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in
the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore.
I've been curious about mathematics education in Singapore ever since I heard
of these results from an earlier TIMSS sample in the 1990s.

The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS"

<http://www.merga.net.au/documents/RP182006.pdf>

by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore
mathematics materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for
later mathematics study. I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my
generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely
poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s
Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a
foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been
English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese
languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Austronesian languages like Malay
or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in
mathematics. It would be good for the United States to take advantage of its
greater degree of linguistic unity and childhood wealth to reach the
educational standard of the top-performing countries in other parts of the
world.

<http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/9/49685503.pdf>

<http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf>

Specifically, the idea that we do well by able students is directly disagreed
with by scholars who have spent years studying the issue.

<http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/>

"Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of
2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries
with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of
the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International
Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s
industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the
international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."

Fourth, the statement that the United States does as well as any country of
the world, ancestry group by ancestry group, is blatantly false on its face,
as I know from my own experience. I run an ongoing course in advanced
mathematics (prealgebra mathematics for elementary age pupils) that draws
clients from throughout the native-born and immigrant community in Minnesota,
a state with strong public schools. My course location is in one of the very
best school districts in Minnesota. But parents who are American-born and
graduates of MIT, and first-generation immigrant parents from China, from
India, from Poland, from Romania, from Ghana, from Korea, from Pakistan, from
the Philippines, from Egypt, and from other countries I may have forgotten
sign up their children for my courses, even though they already live in school
districts that are considered good school districts, because they know very
well that American schools don't do as good a job teaching foundational
mathematics as schools in many other countries.

<http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf>

<http://www.math.wisc.edu/~askey/ask-gian.pdf>

I learned this in Taiwan, where the school system in general does better at
lest cost than in the United States. It is the basis of my current occupation
that people living in the United States who are actually aware of the
situation in other countries seek mathematics education besides that which is
poorly provided by United States public schools.

~~~
thuffy
Your post completely fails to counter what I said or what the link I provided
exposes.

You start off by dismissing my only point with nothing but an assumption.
Basically, the only thing you state in your post that you don't back up with a
link is the one single point you try to make that would actually affect what I
said.

Self identified race almost perfectly matches biological race. Thus, your
first point, the only point that would counter the link I provided, is
invalid.

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics#Self-
identif...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics#Self-
identified_race.2Fethnic_group)

Everything else you said is either irreverent, based upon your faulty premise
of self identified race being meaningless, or some anecdotal evidence you
claim to have experienced.

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macavity23
Spot on. I really can't think of anything to add; I agree with every word.

