Shift Happens - Mind Candy

People can post presentations on Slideshare.net to share with others. My 11 Fold Way to Venture Capital Funding presentation is posted there. Like other Web 2.0 services, Slideshare enables participants to indicate their favorite presentations. In looking through the list of "appleseed," who included the 11 Fold Way, I found this presentation: Shift Happens, which was done by Jeff Brenman of Apollo Ideas based on fascinating data and thoughts from Karl Fisch. Brenman's contribution is in design.

This very readable presentation is in part about discontinuities, tipping points, and future shock. For example, some of Fisch's points suggest that our century will be the century of Chindia [my term, not his]. A couple of bullets:

• The 25% of the people in China with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of North America
• In India, it's the top 28%
• Translation: They have more honor kids than we have kids.

NetNet: well worth a quick read - lot's of mind candy.

Comments

[James]

@Bob:

Yeah, the math is straight forward, but using statistical representation of IQ and saying that the bottom line is that they are all honors students? That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. The "translation" line is just a neat way of scaring people.

Look at it this way, it fails to address a lot of things, such as what the IQ of the top 25% of people in China are, how many kids in each, and how things such as honors students are calculated. It's a statistic that means virtually nothing.

Another way to put it is, saying 25% of people with the highest IQs is just trying to place an unwarranted emphasis on the intelligence of people in China. He could have said the top 25% of people with the lowest IQs and the number would have been the same, because what is important is the 25% part, not the IQ part. The intelligence aspect is thrown in there to make the numbers seem more important and relevant.

The presentation is scaremongering at its best. The first question anyone should ask when seeing a group of statistics presented like this is, where are the sources? I see only one source, and that's the authors' blog. He didn't have the decency to link to individual posts, original sources, anything.

Is it thought provoking? Sure. Is it relevant statistics that mean anything? Not even a little.

[Josh Milane]

It certainly DOESNT mean they have more kids than we have kids. Period. And you might want to take a peek at

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000828.html

Beyond the simple facts, there is the structure of the statement (nonsensical).

Thanks,

J

[Josh Milane]

But that isnt what it means or what it says. If he said, "25 percent of China's population is bigger than the population..." then he would be saying what you are. But he doesn't. He says, "The 25 percent of the people in China with the highest IQs." Maybe their highest IQ is 110? Maybe it is 190? Maybe he is only taking a percentage from those who have had their IQ assessed? It doesnt mean anything as written. I can concur, 25 percent of China's population is more than the whole population of the USA. But so what? There is a bigger labor pool? Not necessarily. What kind of labor? What kind of education? It is purely nonsensical. All this says is that there are four times more people in China than the USA. We already knew this. It is not a shift of any sort.

[Bob Weber]

The math is straight forward: 25% of 1.3 billion (325 million) is roughly the same as the current U.S. population (302 million) plus Canada (32 million). If one includes Mexico (100 Million) the percentage is off. But if one acknowledges some rhetorical excess and compares China to the US, the point seems valid.

What is the point? One implication is that they have a vast reservoir to draw on as higher education is expanded. The people reservoir also can feed an expanding manufacturing sector. Both possibilities seem to bode well for national competitiveness in this century.

[josh milane]

"The 25% of the people in China with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of North America"

Can you explain what this means? Does the sentence even make sense to you? It's nonsensical.

Josh

[Art Hutchinson]

More mind-candy:

According to the CIA, 51.5% of China's population is male (53% of those under 15 years old). India's proportions are similar. The mechanisms for this coming about are well documented and rather unpalatable to contemplate.

Historically, societies skewed in this direction or otherwise having lots of un-marriageable men kicking around have become unstable--dangerous to themselves and their neighbors. The Islamic world has this problem via another avenue: polygyny. See: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.xml

There are routes out of this pickle that are only temporarily and locally dangerous (think Wild, Wild West leading to Silicon Valley a century later) but IMHO they are the exceptions that prove the rule.