Like all observations, they are reflective only of the individuals observed, even if a pattern emerges. 17% of all people in the world are Indian, India alone has 1.4B people, and that doesn't even count the hundreds of millions of Indians in the diaspora around the world. Nothing you could possibly say about Indians is true for every person in that group, because the group is so large that it necessarily includes every possible facet of humanity, good, bad, or otherwise.
I say all that to say, that I stand by the truth of my observations, but I do not intend for those observations to in any way imply that it would be acceptable to discriminate against people from India, or anywhere else, on the basis of their origin or ethnicity. I do not discriminate in this manner, as it is just as ethically reprehensible, incorrect, and dishonorable as the behavior I was pointing out in my original comment. I have worked with many Indian colleagues throughout my career that were excellent engineers, managers, and otherwise decent people.
Just to clearly state it, I do not in any way think that any individual person I meet from India is any more likely to cheat or otherwise be dishonest than any individual person I meet from anywhere else. India is far from the only low-trust society in the world, and in general most of the countries in the world qualify as low-trust societies. These are academic terms, and it is entirely expected that there is a higher variance in behavior for individuals in low-trust societies versus high-trust societies, so if anything honestly referring to India as a low-trust society implies within it that there is a higher variance of individual behavior and it's even less accurate to generalize about the behavior of Indian people.
I would be happy to work with anyone who loves computer science and embraces the cool things that we can do with technology to reshape the world and improve the human condition, no matter where they originate from.
It doesn't invalidate the easily observable phenomenon of widespread cheating in low trust society like India. This is also a huge problem for universities around that accept students of wealthy parents from these countries which cause grade inflation. Multiple articles have been written around this in mainstream publications.
> It doesn't invalidate the easily observable phenomenon of widespread cheating in low trust society like India.
Agreed. I am very carefully saying that I stand by my own observations as well. The point is that, while these behaviors may be commonplace in a particular society, it does not mean any given individual person from that society engages in these behaviors. We should always be careful of the heuristics we apply to people and work to treat every individual as an individual.
Not being careful here can actually create a form of category error. It's similar to the expectations of visitors to the US that everyone is walking around openly carrying guns and shooting each other constantly due to what's in the news or the statistical probability of a shooting occurring compared to other countries in the world. If you have a 4x higher chance of being involved in a shooting per capita in the US vs a random Western European country, both numbers could be minuscule chances (and are). Just because this type of dishonest behavior is more commonplace in low trust societies, and in this case in India in particular, the population is so large that it still represents a small fraction of the total number of people and you have to be careful not to indict everyone within the society on the basis of the behavior of a few. 15% of the Indian population would be the same as half or more of the US population, but there's a very big difference in categorization between something that is the behavior of a minority of a population vs half or more of the population.
That's all I'm saying. Treat individuals as individuals.
I say all that to say, that I stand by the truth of my observations, but I do not intend for those observations to in any way imply that it would be acceptable to discriminate against people from India, or anywhere else, on the basis of their origin or ethnicity. I do not discriminate in this manner, as it is just as ethically reprehensible, incorrect, and dishonorable as the behavior I was pointing out in my original comment. I have worked with many Indian colleagues throughout my career that were excellent engineers, managers, and otherwise decent people.
Just to clearly state it, I do not in any way think that any individual person I meet from India is any more likely to cheat or otherwise be dishonest than any individual person I meet from anywhere else. India is far from the only low-trust society in the world, and in general most of the countries in the world qualify as low-trust societies. These are academic terms, and it is entirely expected that there is a higher variance in behavior for individuals in low-trust societies versus high-trust societies, so if anything honestly referring to India as a low-trust society implies within it that there is a higher variance of individual behavior and it's even less accurate to generalize about the behavior of Indian people.
I would be happy to work with anyone who loves computer science and embraces the cool things that we can do with technology to reshape the world and improve the human condition, no matter where they originate from.