[cortesoft]

The irrationality is assuming that you are able to be an impartial observer who can 'regularly' notice 'Chinese students sitting in the back of class openly whispering during exams' and that means that Chinese people cheat more.

We have so much evidence that these sorts of observations can so often be wrong. You are likely to not notice all the majority group people doing this, or at least not connect it as a pattern. Once you have an expectation that Chinese people are cheating, you are more likely to see innocent behavior as cheating, or even if they ARE cheating, more likely to catch them than the white guy sitting next to you also cheating (because you are paying more attention to the person you EXPECT to be cheating)

Now, of course, this could be wrong and your observations could be right. The irrationality comes in assuming you are right just because you observe something.

[allthenews]

[flagged]

[dang]

You started this wretched flamewar and now have taken it to an even lower level. We have a high tolerance for assuming good faith on HN, but the stench of prejudice here is acrid.

If you do race war or nationalistic flamewar on HN again we will ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[thr912]

the problem isn't the collective observation. The problem is that there is no symmetrical collective observation that is even possible.

it's not common to see similar anecdotes and think "we" are cheaters:

https://www.plagiarism.org/article/plagiarism-facts-and-stat... https://www.quora.com/Everyone-is-cheating-in-my-AP-Chemistr... https://abc13.com/education/nearly-entire-class-caught-cheat... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfqFEiP10_E

people cheat. wells fargo, mlb, cycling, track and field, doctors, prosecutors.

not only the employees, athletes, and students, but the ceo's, refs, judges, coaches, and the teachers cheat too:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/why-te...

none of these examples are isolated incidents, and are patterns in our own culture. And if you live in this system, and the one pattern you observe is that Chinese students cheat, then there is probably some bias in your thinking.