Hear, hear.

I think this whole debate is irksome and I won't be wading into it except to make some clarifications.

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'Asians aren't strivers, they're actually just better. The evidence? They do more sports and other extracurriculars, too.'

This does not indicate being better or a lack of striving. Everyone knows that schools look at criteria besides your grades and test scores, including extracurriculars, so striver students invest in those things, too.

If you need any proof that these are not an invariant comparison, look at the data from SFFA v. Harvard: despite their allegedly higher rates of engagement in athletics, Asians were accepted less on athletic scholarships. So, either they do worse in sports, they do different sports, or Harvard was discriminating in sports, too.

The truth is likely about mix and discrimination (although there's no race interaction apparent in the data).

Asians stereotypically participate in sports that are less lucrative for schools, but which are good for resume-padding, such as tennis. They are also often pushed to play an instrument, like the violin or piano, and this usually doesn't result in anything impressive, but it is another element of resume-padding.

Noting these things does nothing to militate against the notion that Asians are involved in perpetuating grindset culture.

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'No one hates on Tom Brady or Michael Jordan for being obsessed with the game. People are just being anti-Asian.'

Tom Brady and Michael Jordan were at the bleeding edges of their respective fields. Their striving pushes the quality of the game along, it is not zero-sum in the same sense that striverism is.

Striverism has to do with the zero-sum competition that happens in education, where people are working towards a fixed model of perfection rather than innovating. Striverism is not synonymous with 'trying hard/harder', it is putting your nose to the grindstone when we all already know the epitome of achievement.

Think of it this way: Feng Zhang is obviously Asian, and he innovated at the bleeding edge. Do people revile him because he strived for excellence? No. They recognize that sleeping in your lab to discover CRISPR is not the same as memorizing your textbook for ten hours a day.

People do not hate innovators or people who are just generally committed in their studies and work, they hate people who seek to achieve a set norm and are competing in a necessarily completely zero-sum way.

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Absolutely no one is saying Asians are bad because they work hard or because they succeed in their studies. That's a red herring and it distracts from the genuinely valuable things that can be said in this discussion, the real criticisms and defenses of potentially stifling, striver cultural values and the ways they impact the world (which are often very bad! See: Gaokao cheating; academic fraud rates; etc.).

Let's remember some ancient Chinese wisdom on this topic:

"Those who write today write solely for examination success, without any concern for moral principle." - Han Yu

"I urge Heaven to rouse itself again and send down talent without fixed patterns." - Gong Zizhen

"The examinations select officials only for their ability to memorize phrases and passages." - Huang Zongxi

"The imperial examination system poisoned the Chinese spirit more deeply than anything else." - Lu Xun

"The eight-legged essay is worse than the book burning of Qin Shi Huang and his burying alive of 460 Confucian scholars." - Gu Yanwu

"A healthy society cannot come about when people study not for the purpose of gaining wisdom and knowledge but for the purpose of becoming government officials." - Ye Shi

"Virtue could not be assessed by examinations." - Cheng Hao (Side note: though exams are cont…]

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