I speak mandarin…but I suck at math (in that I really really have to work at it to get it).

But I AM postbac in science…..and with my current understanding of biology and genetics, I really find his argument to be suspect.

Nobody really understands the science behind intelligence. And more importantly, a lot of our mental capabilities predate farming of any kind. For whatever unknown reasons, for most of humanity’s time on earth, we lived very primitively in spite of having great capacity for intelligence. And that’s why I find his whole “rice paddy” argument suspect.

I mean, rice cultivation isn’t just a Chinese thing. How come Chinese kids are stereotyped as math whizzes while Filipino kids are mocked as sneakerheads? Doesn’t jive, man.

Someone above me wrote about Jews and IQ, which makes more sense – Ashkenazi Jews couldn’t own land and were forced into knowledge work – finance if dealing with non-Jews, and being a scholar/rabbi (the Ashkenazic ideal was a man educated in the Scriptures.) Those values put a premium on brain work.

What does rice have to do with calculus?

Of course, I’d have to read the book before I made a definitive decision, so all this is provisional.

didn’t some white dude just stepped into IKEA and said the modern Chinese are good at taking naps and learning Swedish interior decorating?

anybody can take a trip for themselves and see that China isn’t a country of math geniuses scribbling away in their rice paddies all day.

just more of the stereotyping to whatever is convenient to serve the “model minority stereotype”

in fact, there’s now another “model minority” of Africans and Afro-Carribbean immigrants who are supposedly even better at math…

But he ignores the fact that schools in Singapore teach math in English, not Chinese, which purportedly gives Chinese speakers an advantage on math study. Also, he conveniently omits other rich-farming Asian countries that aren’t good in match. Laos and Cambodia, for examples, aren’t exactly math powerhouses.

More ludicrously, he suggests that Northern Chinese, who have a history of farming wheat, may not be as good in match as Southern Chinese. Alas, not all the Southern Chinese are good in math, either. People descended from Sze Yup, Canton(Xinhui, Taishan, Kaiping and Enping in the Pearl River Delta) aren’t as good in math as other Cantonese because their ancestors didn’t have a lot of good land to farm rice. He offered no solid evidence or whatsoever to back up this assertion.

Then, as other commentators have pointed out, Gladwell fails to distinguish the difference between Asians and Asian Americans. There are many obvious reasons as why so many Asians or Asian Americans excel in math other than the exotic “rice culture” and “language” theory, which doesn’t hold and water under further examination. But then again, if he illustrated the obvious, his book wouldn’t have sold as well as it did.

I think the 2nd comment about parents pushing their kids into fields where English is not required hit the nail on the head. All throughout my education my parents would tell me careers in, say, writing would doom me to a life of poverty. Which is not entirely untrue, in retrospect.

I agree with the monosyllabic counting, it certainly helps to memorize. I learnt the multiplication table when I was 5 years old, sure the naming system helped a lot, but only did it cause I was somehow encouraged.

Don’t think it could be called and “built-in advantage”, I would say “head start”, cause when equations get harder, the field is pretty much leveled.