Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!sun!livesey From: livesey@sun.uucp (Jon Livesey) Newsgroups: sci.misc Subject: Re: Bias on IQ tests Message-ID: <49945@sun.uucp> Date: 18 Apr 88 23:08:24 GMT References: <49690@sun.uucp> <111@avsd.UUCP> Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Mtn View, CA Lines: 74 In article <111@avsd.UUCP>, govett@avsd.UUCP (David Govett) writes: > > > Does anyone have a reference showing that Japanese, either as a race > > or as a culture "have a very bad problem with creativity"? Come to that, > > does anyone have a reference to Japanese acknowledging that? Unless > > they do, I am inclined to write this off as unthinking racism. Everything > > I have seen recently in science and engineering leads me to think that Japanese > > have absolutely no problem with creativity, and I think that the onus is > > on someone who thinks that they do to produce some evidence for it. > > > > Many Japanese have commented on the rigidity of the Japanese educational > system and the consequent lack of creativity. The Japanese are chronically self-deprecating. It's a quality they have in common with the British, and quite as deceptive. > It's difficult to discuss creativity objectively because it's difficult > to define and quantify. Let me see if I understand this. It is "difficult to discuss creativity objectively" and therefore we are entitled to made objective statements like "The Japanese have a very bad problem with creativity"? Can that really be what you are saying? If so, what it really boils down to is explaining away someone's objective success by appealing to some poorly quantified concept like 'creativity', asserting that objective statements cannot be made about it (so that you cannot be contradicted by evidence) and finally asserting that Group X has this and that negative quality as a result. > However, one can generalize in the area of science and technology. > It's difficult to think of many scientific "breakthroughs" or > technologies that originated in Japan. So what? That has more to do with how they spend their research money than with any quality of the japanese themselves, or of their education system. Almost all of their R&D is funded by companies, and so it concentrates on issues of design and production rather than what we call 'basic' research. For that reason, a growing number of US patents are actually filed by Japanese companies. Are you now saying that an advance in manufacturing technique is less 'creative' than an advance in micro-biology? If so, I would like to see some evidence that this is so, rather than a bald assertion. On the face of it, spending R&D money and accumulating a more efficient and reliable manufacturing process sounds just as creative as spending R&D money and finishing up with SDI or yet another programming language. It sounds as though you have simply redefined 'creativity' so that in addition to being hard to discuss, it also applies in only very narrow fields. Fields we happen to specialise in, at that. > Until that changes, Japan will remain subject to charges of freeloading > on the basic research of the U.S. and Europe. Which is exactly what Europeans said about the US before 1945. Although the US economy became very large in the second half of the last century US science was a minor force until well into this century. Of course, that is a huge 'so-what', and any European that comforted themselves in their decline with the thought that America did little science was simply whistling in the dark. No-one would seriously make conclusions about Americans' creativity based on how they chose to spend their R&D money a century ago. We think of people like Bell, Whitney and Henry Ford as being highly creative, even when they took existing science and created new products therefrom. The idea that creativity must be in the area of basic scence, and not in product- oriented areas is just made up for the occasion, I am afraid, and it invites the obvious rejoinder - "If Americans and Europeans are so all-fired creative, then how come we can't create an efficient manufacturing technology base?" jon.