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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index
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To: fatty who wrote (16747)2/5/2004 5:52:00 PM
From: GraceZRead Replies (1) of 306849
 
I was right, you can't solve a simple probability problem even though clearly you agree that US students are over represented in US graduate programs based on population and normal distribution. But you don't even know that you agree because you got lost in the assumptions I asked you to make.

Let's review the problem:

Ywiu had stated something to the effect that foreigners were better at engineering, math and science than US students and the way she backed this up was to say that foreigners held almost half of all the advanced graduate positions here in the US at our top Universities with science and math specialties. She backed it up with the stats that my post was in response to and the gist was that the US remained at the top by cherry picking from the whole world and foreigners represented 44% or so.

I looked at her stats and knew without even looking up world population figures that foreign students were under represented by a large margin and admission was either strongly biased towards US born students (for whatever reason) or US students were in fact more likely (probability again) than their foreign counter parts to enter into advanced science and math degrees because US born represent an outsized proportion of students in the programs based on population and normal distribution (of those who might be good at math and science).

I arrived at this observation considering the US comprises 6% of the world's population while it also has a lower percentage of graduate school aged students than most other large industrialized countries and considerably less than the under-developed ones. This is the exact opposite of what she was contending. I told her she could go a long way towards proving to me that Asians were in fact superior at math if she could show me the math behind my statement.

I didn't intend to prove that US students were in fact more likely to attend graduate school in these disciplines, I only attempted to prove that her statistical method for making her claim was flawed.

Now the reasons that US students are over represented in their own Universities may in fact be for some of the reasons you give, but when one is handed a probability problem that starts out with assuming x and assuming y, you have to use those assumptions to solve the problem. Ywiu used probability incorrectly in her "proof" that US students were somehow inferior to their foreign counter parts because foreigners comprised a very large proportion of the programs. Neither of you understands my statement or can frame the problem in a manner which could "prove" anything.

Furthermore:

So if we hold a math & science family feud between the US and Chindia, we would probably lose the game

You can't make such a claim based on the present situation. Probability would suggest that we should get creamed, yet we remain grossly over represented even while they chip away at our lead.
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