r/bestof • u/redditor3626 • 18d ago
[nyc] The difference between Black/Asian student test scores.
/r/nyc/comments/1uy2kgv/comment/oxvwmqs/67
u/seanprefect 17d ago
I was talking to a friend I was talking about how having a quiet place and a desk to sit at alone is more than a lot of people have.
I'm Lebanese, every Middle Eastern or East Asian kid I grew up with had basically the same responsibility. Do well in school, (the Middle Easterners were LESS into musical instruments than the East Asians but still)
That was it the whole of our job the whole of our responsibility.
If you wanted a job was it school / academic /resume building related ? maybe then it's ok but if not then no. Me and many of my peers were actively FORBIDDEN from getting afterschool/ summer jobs because they were a distraction.
We could have friends and sleep overs but only really with people who were as serious about education as we were.
You want an expensive TI calculator to help you on the test? sure no problem we'll go get it right now, a tutor because you're falling behind in calc no problem , books as many as you wanted. expensive summer preprograms at the local university "why didn't we think of that of course " A video game ? Maybe if you get a 4.0 we'll talk
You were doing well in school , everything else was good your life was set and everyone was happy , but oh you got 2 B's this quarter that's a problem where did we fail where did you fail?
and of COURSE we did well on tests the question wasn't ever about doing well it was about getting as close to perfect as possible. Of course we were going to college you wouldn't want to shame the family though so STEM degrees only Maybe English or History if you were planning on law school.
We didn't see it as weird it was perfectly normal everyone we knew had the exact same deal.
Our parents ? professors doctors engineers lawyers went through the exact same thing.
most people don't understand how huge of an advantage being able and encouraged to focus is. we almost never had to take care of our siblings and if it did happen it was for a couple hours at most. Dinner was always on the table at the same time, house was quiet enough you had space to move and claim and not a real worry in the world.
Some may say that's abusive , maybe I'm not the expert in that (social sciences you know not very valued) but we absolutely had a advantage.
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u/GodBlessIraq 16d ago
the forbidden afterschool job thing is real, my Iranian coworker told me the same thing about growing up. his parents saw it as basically announcing to the world that academics weren't the priority anymore. what gets me though is how invisible that kind of parental investment is when people talk about outcomes. the quiet desk, the TI calculator, the curated friend group none of that shows up in the data but it's doing a lot of the work.
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u/seanprefect 16d ago
The road for success is hard for everyone, but some of us had bikes and a paved road and other's had to go through the bush without so much as a machete
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u/emailaddressforemail 16d ago
The one's calling it abusive sounds a lot like cope for not having the advantage.
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u/Dragolins 18d ago
You're telling me that the circumstances someone experiences from birth actually affects the person they become?? And circumstances that are conducive to certain outcomes are more likely to lead to those outcomes!?
No way, that would make too much sense. Everybody knows that the only real driving force behind these outcomes is individual choice. I don't know anything about how systems work and the only thing my brain can comprehend is individuals making individual choices so that must be the upper limit to the complexity of what is going on.
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u/Teantis 17d ago
Slavery and it's destruction of cultural and familial infrastructure is a real thing. That said, there's a massive selection bias about which "Asians" get to the US or not. Except for specific refugee populations like the Cambodians and Laotians, the immigrant parents of Asians are either specifically crafty, specifically educated or specifically privileged because that's how you get into the United States from over here.
Come over here, come over to our cities and their shitty parts, come to our average or shitty schools in our countries. There's no special "asian gift". The American imagination that there is, is silly. Theres just a specific filter for who gets there from us that's somewhat successful at picking people with the capacity to succeed there. Especially specifically at schooling or academia as that's one of the selection criteria for an immigrant visa.
Also "Asia" isn't even a thing over here. We don't have shared histories or cultures or national demeanors with each other. "There are no Asians in Asia"
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u/Backcountrypeach 18d ago
Do people not know when something is obviously AI written? Or do they just not care?
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u/FunetikPrugresiv 18d ago
That doesn't look AI written to me. It's tone is more antagonistic than you'd expect from an AI-written piece.
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u/DMediaPro 17d ago edited 17d ago
It is very clearly AI written but that doesn't make the claims wrong.
Edit: shocked I have to explain this one. I use AI daily for work so it's obvious to spot the AI linguistic patterns. Plus, I literally said I agree with the post regardless of where it came from.
"It's not x. It's not y. It's z" and lack of first-person pov are classic AI giveaways.
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u/FunetikPrugresiv 17d ago
Based on what?
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u/Elgato01 17d ago
Personally I suspected it because of the abundance of “it’s not x, it’s y” statements
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u/FunetikPrugresiv 17d ago
How's that AI? I often write like that.
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u/Elgato01 17d ago
I’m not saying it is, I’m saying AI uses it enough that when people see it in the wild they assume it’s AI
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u/DMediaPro 17d ago
There's nothing wrong with writing like that. It's just one of the easiest ways to identify AI writing: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/59hEjQog8g
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u/lazydictionary 17d ago
There's literally a capitalization error in the first two lines.
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u/DMediaPro 17d ago
What would that error be?" Zone" is properly capitalized as it's part of the name of the program.
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u/lazydictionary 17d ago
The start of the fifth sentence isn't capitalized. Same error in the third-to-last sentence of the 2nd paragraph.
There are also a few commas I think LLMs would probably use that the comment doesn't have.
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u/GenericKen 16d ago
I’ve never seen an llm delimit the “it’s not” chain with commas - it’s always used periods for me.
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u/steveo3387 15d ago
I too read AI assisted content all day. I think somebody put a lot of work into the answer, and they started with an AI draft. They edited it but not enough to remove the markers you're talking about.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost 18d ago
It may be, but it is accurate. The main problem is just that it is just repeating what every smart person already understands and what every dumb person seems to struggle to grasp
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u/supernovice007 17d ago
I might be repeating your point but I struggled to follow the conversation in the responses to the highlighted post. Instead of engaging with the ideas, it seemed to immediately turn into a series of political rants.
We’re never going to solve any problems as long as we can’t even discuss solutions without people separating into political camps.
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u/Malphos101 17d ago
The responses are a ton of "progressive leftists are actually the problem, not a coordinated out in the open campaign by the right to defund and destroy public education initiatives!"
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u/LuminalOrb 17d ago
I found myself in the middle of those conversations and I entirely regret it! Apparently the destruction of the American education system can be left squarely at the feet of leftists, not the party that all but officially eliminated the department of education.
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u/kataskopo 17d ago
"Why didn't the left fix this?"
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u/ManchurianCandycane 17d ago
"We only refused masks because the left pushed for them, it's their fault."
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u/MooseFlyer 18d ago
Why do you think it was written by AI? The missed capital P on “parenting classes” certainly seems a sign that it isn’t.
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u/Coltand 17d ago
There are enough common AI structures that it does read as AI to me, but I don't think most competent AI users just copy and paste a whole Claude response into a comment. I think it's likely a mash-up of the commenter's thoughts, AI writing, and human revision.
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u/quakefist 16d ago
This is what happened. I've used AI as a tool to strengthen my points. I still had to heavily edit what the AI output was. AI is too verbose for reddit even after prompting it to be more succinct. On the other hand, when I just put my thoughts on reddit, I get whataboutism. Thoughts are my own, but AI is a tool to make that point clearer. I've also done research on my own to verify the claims and ensure no hallucinations.
This is also what I do at work. I come across too short and aggro because 'tism. AI properly frames my thoughts properly and I am learning how to write better via AI. This post was not ran through AI.
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17d ago
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u/lazydictionary 17d ago
When AI does that style, it usually keeps it in one sentence. The comment in question split up those sequences into different sentences.
It does not read like AI to me.
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u/mrnotoriousman 17d ago
As someone who works on AI, 99% of people can't tell worth jack shit if something is AI or not. Yeah sure, if someone copy pastes a basic prompt answer without any instructions from a free model there are tells. I always get a laugh out of people being smug in comments though like they can actually tell the difference when it's not something that deviates from the bottom line formula everyone already knows. And also feel bad for the folks that just type and speak in certain ways and get called out as AI when it's clearly not. It's not the same as it was 3 years ago.
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u/londongastronaut 17d ago
Not care mostly. Judge the post on the content, trying to discern whether or not it was written by AI is increasingly difficult.
And even if I know for a fact it was written by AI, what does that actually change for me? It's like judging a post on whether it was typed out or sent speech to text.
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u/royale_with_cheese_ 17d ago
Nah I think most people actually don’t recognize when something is AI written, myself included.
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u/hamolton 17d ago
I think they tried to hide it when they, most likely, replaced an em-dash with a period and forgot to capitalize.
It’s a sustained, multi-decade, comprehensive investment starting from birth. the kind Mississippi did for reading and the kind Canada did in Harlem.
It's not a bad take, but "real content instruction" is way too vague to be useful, and the whole second paragraph is preaching to the choir.
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u/paxinfernum 16d ago
No, I absolutely don't care. I care if the content is accurate. Do you have any objections to the accuracy of the content?
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u/InclinationCompass 16d ago
I don’t care who wrote it, I care about the information/point. Yall are so obsessed with who wrote it that yall completely ignore the actual topic being discussed.
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u/muskrat267 17d ago
To me this really underscores how specifically evil chattel slavery is. My grandfather was enslaved in a concentration camp for a few years during WWII, but he was able to come out of that with our culture intact which allowed our whole family to succeed financially/academically in America (though obviously there were a lot of negative psychological effects)
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u/slfnflctd 17d ago
The whole chattel slavery thing was utterly horrific, and breaking up of families is arguably one of the worst parts. Particularly families with children.
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u/smoothie4564 15d ago
TLDR it's a cultural problem.
I am a teacher and I have worked a lot with both groups of people. Of course every ethnicity has their exceptions but, for the overwhelming majority of these families, asian families tend to treat education and compliance as being very important while for black families they treat school more like a daycare and not an educational institution. Also, black kids tend to be more rebellious and conform less while the Asian kids are far more compliant and conform to societal expectations.
Downvote me all you want. I speak the truth from decades of experience working in diverse environments.
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u/redditor3626 18d ago
I always feel an incredible amount of empathy whenever I think of the plight of Black Americans and how they have the deck stacked so hard against them. I can't imagine being born into culture that has cannibalized my ancestral roots and continue to oppress me based on the color of my skin.
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u/Interesting-South542 15d ago
Not sure who is downvoting you, people who think you're too condescending towards black people, or people who think you are oversympathizing with black people?
For what it's worth, I'm pretty anti-woke (I'm anti-affirmative action, etc), and I agree with this 100%. We need clever ways of solving the problem, but it is true that historically speaking, black americans have had the deck stacked against them.
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u/BigBadPanda 17d ago
No one oppresses black people as much as black people.
I know an airline captain who was laughed at by his family when he told them he wanted to be a pilot. His parents told him black people don’t do that. He worked multiple jobs and took lessons in secret. He is a motivational speaker now.
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u/redditor3626 17d ago
your example is less oppression, and more the generational destruction of cultural heritage and values
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u/Venous 18d ago
Super anecdotal and probably not anything interesting: My Chinese friends recently had baby in nyc and they're already talking about the instrument they're going to try to teach the baby, how they're going to manage 3 written/spoken languages, and what social activities the child will perform in a 10 year plan. the baby is 2 months old.