6 ms·

I want to comment on the anti Affirmative Action arguments here. I went to a really prestigious high school in New York City. For the summer of my junior year,

I want to comment on the anti Affirmative Action arguments here. I went to a really prestigious high school in New York City. For the summer of my junior year, our AP Computer Science teacher hooked up a few of us with internships at the finance firms, specifically in tech (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.). Now, sure, I did really well and studied really hard to get into my high school. However, I did practically nothing to earn that internship besides taking AP Computer Science. My Computer Science "expertise" was hardly valuable. I knew just about as much as any other AP CS kid in the country. In the end, that internship did wonders for me getting into college and getting future jobs. And plus, I made 3k that summer. And yes, I finished a useful project at the firm. But the reason I had that opportunity was totally orthogonal to earning the opportunity. I know we like to boast about being a meritocracy and all that, but this is one of those cases where it was correlation, not causation.

vostok 10y ago
> I knew just about as much as any other AP CS kid in the country. I think you do your high school a disservice. Almost everyone I have interviewed from your school has done better than average.
- misterbowfinger 10y ago
  Doubt it. We're all idiots :-P After graduation, sure we probably do better than average. But at the moment I received the internship, my skills were no more or less qualified than any other CS student. And, at the end of the day, am I really that much better of a developer than most people? I really doubt that.
reader5000 10y ago
Because you're not the person AA hurts. AA doesnt hurt top 1% people, it hurts say top 10% people who are in the wrong ethnic group and lose out to people in the correct ethnic group. Just ask a lower class Asian person with top 10% MCAT scores, and why he lost a med school spot to a middle class URM person with top 20% scores.
- cercatrova 10y ago
  But isn't that how you achieve systematic equality? For example, say there are two races X and Y. X is the overachiever (doesn't even have to be a majority, there could be a 50/50 population), while Y is the underachiever, for whatever historical reasons these two groups faced. So, to get Y on the same level as X and restore a meritocracy, you must admit more of Y, even if X does better in some cases. Meritocracy only makes sense if everyone starts off with the same advantages. Otherwise, the populations must converge until such a point is reached. It becomes an argument for shortchanging certain populations for the greater good of society, to undo the disparity of the past. Is that not why AA exists?
  - srssays 10y ago
    It's absolutely fine to give extra advantages to people with low incomes. That's economic progressivism. It's wrong to give extra advantages based on genetics, essentially saying that some people "genetically poor" or "genetically rich", which is what Affirmative Action does.
    - laurencerowe 10y ago
      There are clearly multiple axes of inequality in our society beyond the economic, including race and sex. A fair and equal admissions policy should account for all of those.
      - FT_intern 10y ago
        Affirmative action is quantifiable and blatant racism/sexism. > multiple axes of inequality in our society beyond the economic, including race and sex is not clear or quantified at all. Since affirmative action is provably bad because it is literal sexism/racism, the supposed inequality that AA offputs must be proven and quantified
    - tomlock 10y ago
      That's exactly why affirmative action exists: It's wrong to give extra advantages based on genetics. Therefore, giving an extra advantage to someone who is not given those other extra advantages, evens the score.
FT_intern 10y ago
The test to get into the prestigious high school is orthogonal to race. Given that the top percentile of the test takers are the children of immigrant parents who don't understand American culture and whose primary language is not English, the tests appear to be very objective.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  The way I see it is if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there. I'm not sure affirmative action is the right move but I don't know how you can deny a selection bias against certain groups (racial or otherwise) and I think that we need some way to try to correct for it
  - SamReidHughes 10y ago
    The Asian:Black ratio at Stuyvesant is 2743:21. Say you bring in all the black kids from the lower-tier Bronx High School of Science (72), Staten Island Technical (13), Brooklyn Technical (390), Queens High School for the Sciences (25), High School for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at City College (41). Now you've got 562 black kids at Stuyvesant. Still too low. Bring in the rest of the non-science-oriented specialized schools (High School of American Studies at Lehman College (14), Brooklyn Latin School (105)). Now you're at 681. Still too low. (Note that Laguardia's admissions are by audition, not examination, so I omitted that. Still 2:1 Asian:Black.) Now you're pulling kids out of regular high schools. Are they going to be able to keep up with the other Stuyvesant kids? Should we slow down others' education so lower performing students can keep up? How does this help these lower performing students? Note that these are individual people we are talking about who are getting thrown into classes that are difficult for them. You could create programs designed to help underprivileged students that are close to the cutoff, to help them get admitted. NYC created that, but, you know, it helps asian kids too. Another problem with doing corrections for population ratio is that NYC attracts top professionals, highly intelligent people that are having children. Even if you believe all races are geneticulturally identically distributed globally, or in the country, you can see that the high income professionals are mostly non-black, and their kids are going to monopolize Stuyvesant seats. The high IQ black/Latino kids that aren't getting into Stuyvesant are the ones whose parents never moved to NYC in the first place.
entee 10y ago
I think what you're saying is a great way to describe what advantages accrue with wealth, even middle class wealth. Essentially you had the system work in your favor and in turn knew how to work to system. You got a warm intro into an internship, this helped you get into college afterwards. These kinds of subtle boosts are mostly a function of being in the right place within the system and knowing how to pull the right levers, and if you don't know to look for those levers, you'll never know they're there and be disadvantaged as a result. In your case, it was being in the right place and having the flexibility to take that internship. For someone else it might be knowing how to work the college financial aid system, or something else. I look back and see that throughout my academic career, if I didn't have people who knew how the system worked telling me, "you should do this, and this is how", I don't think I'd have gotten where I am. Essentially, I got a better shot at things even though I was no more qualified on a purely intellectual basis. AA is an imperfect tool to give people some of those same advantages, and I'm a little ambivalent about it. But I think it or something like it is probably necessary to give everyone an equal shot.
- misterbowfinger 10y ago
  Another thing to consider is that I worked the system in New York City. And the system in NYC has a fair amount of access and resources, if you work it right. Why not create a similar amount of access and resources at Howard University? I don't see that as traditional Affirmative Action, which we primarily think of happening during an admissions process. This is just creating more channels to resources in tech, which is entirely reasonable, even from a conservative economics perspective.
- pm90 10y ago
  I have mixed feelings about AA as well. All of these subtle boosts as you call them come from more than just being in a school, although I agree that helps a LOT more than not being in the school. There is the obvious advantage of living in a culture that values such things as education, career progress etc. The most important is probably encouraging and supportive parents. In short, I think we need to do more than just let people from other communities simply join our prestigious institutions but to recognize that these institutions need to be changed to help these students achieve what students from other backgrounds get as well. I know all the meritocracy crowd here will come after me with pitchforks for saying this, but I do think it is justified in putting all that effort into helping people that are born in disadvantaged families. Is it fair to the other kids who may have worked really hard but get less attention simply because of their family background? Maybe...but they were lucky to be born in a great family in the first place... I too got very lucky by being born in a great family.... I'm eternally grateful for it having helped me to have a happy and fulfilling life. I hope others can have a shot at such a life as well.
kukac 10y ago
Not all white people are as privileged as you.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
_dps 10y ago
> However, I did practically nothing to earn that internship ... As someone who spends a lot of time in Europe, I find this exclusively-individualistic view of "earning advantage" to be too limiting, and characteristic of US ideas about class and privilege (Europe has its own, different problems). Yes, you personally didn't earn that specific thing. But there's a very high chance that your family unit earned itself into being in a position to collect that "free" (at the point of accrual) benefit. I think the most fundamental problem we face right now in terms of equalizing the game for historically disadvantaged people (an important goal worthy of some sacrifices) is how to square that with the very natural, and IMO totally fair, desire for parents to be able to pass some forms of fairly-earned advantage on to their children.
jza00425 10y ago
If you were the one who gets screwed by AA, you would have told another story. This is what liberals do. Already have your piece of pie and play the moral high ground. How about you giving your spot to a black kid?
- misterbowfinger 10y ago
  Arguably I did get "screwed over" by Affirmative Action in terms of what college I got into (still salty about it). But this program with Howard University is really different than traditional, admissions-based Affirmative Action. It's increasing the supply, not lowering it or putting a quota on it. I'm not saying I didn't earn my spot at my school, but I definitely got lucky with that internship, which I don't feel like I earned. I was making a simple point about the side effects we get as "hard workers" that have much deeper benefits than we tend to think. And I'm not sure those side effects are always deserved.
- sctb 10y ago
  Please don't start flamewars with unsubstantive personal accusations like this.
oh_sigh 10y ago
What does that have to do with affirmative action though? It sounds like you are advocating that we should be improving our high school curriculum, not using race as a basis for admissions to certain programs. If you ever bring up the point about, say, how the rate of criminality among blacks in America is so much higher than whites/asians/latinos, you'll frequently hear a response about the lurking variable of poverty(poor people are more likely to be criminal -> blacks are over-represented among poor people). So, why doesn't that same logic carry over to affirmative action? If you made the test about income levels, and not race, it seems like some of the absurdity of the system that people hate would be lessened. Right now with AA, we implicitly say that a black kid from a multi-millionaire family is disadvantanged, and needs help, relative to the son of a poor Chinese immigrant.

vostok 10y ago

> I knew just about as much as any other AP CS kid in the country. I think you do your high school a disservice. Almost everyone I have interviewed from your school has done better than average.

misterbowfinger 10y ago
Doubt it. We're all idiots :-P After graduation, sure we probably do better than average. But at the moment I received the internship, my skills were no more or less qualified than any other CS student. And, at the end of the day, am I really that much better of a developer than most people? I really doubt that.

reader5000 10y ago

Because you're not the person AA hurts. AA doesnt hurt top 1% people, it hurts say top 10% people who are in the wrong ethnic group and lose out to people in the correct ethnic group. Just ask a lower class Asian person with top 10% MCAT scores, and why he lost a med school spot to a middle class URM person with top 20% scores.

cercatrova 10y ago
But isn't that how you achieve systematic equality? For example, say there are two races X and Y. X is the overachiever (doesn't even have to be a majority, there could be a 50/50 population), while Y is the underachiever, for whatever historical reasons these two groups faced. So, to get Y on the same level as X and restore a meritocracy, you must admit more of Y, even if X does better in some cases. Meritocracy only makes sense if everyone starts off with the same advantages. Otherwise, the populations must converge until such a point is reached. It becomes an argument for shortchanging certain populations for the greater good of society, to undo the disparity of the past. Is that not why AA exists?
- srssays 10y ago
  It's absolutely fine to give extra advantages to people with low incomes. That's economic progressivism. It's wrong to give extra advantages based on genetics, essentially saying that some people "genetically poor" or "genetically rich", which is what Affirmative Action does.
  - laurencerowe 10y ago
    There are clearly multiple axes of inequality in our society beyond the economic, including race and sex. A fair and equal admissions policy should account for all of those.
    - FT_intern 10y ago
      Affirmative action is quantifiable and blatant racism/sexism. > multiple axes of inequality in our society beyond the economic, including race and sex is not clear or quantified at all. Since affirmative action is provably bad because it is literal sexism/racism, the supposed inequality that AA offputs must be proven and quantified
  - tomlock 10y ago
    That's exactly why affirmative action exists: It's wrong to give extra advantages based on genetics. Therefore, giving an extra advantage to someone who is not given those other extra advantages, evens the score.

FT_intern 10y ago

The test to get into the prestigious high school is orthogonal to race. Given that the top percentile of the test takers are the children of immigrant parents who don't understand American culture and whose primary language is not English, the tests appear to be very objective.

tdb7893 10y ago
The way I see it is if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there. I'm not sure affirmative action is the right move but I don't know how you can deny a selection bias against certain groups (racial or otherwise) and I think that we need some way to try to correct for it
- SamReidHughes 10y ago
  The Asian:Black ratio at Stuyvesant is 2743:21. Say you bring in all the black kids from the lower-tier Bronx High School of Science (72), Staten Island Technical (13), Brooklyn Technical (390), Queens High School for the Sciences (25), High School for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at City College (41). Now you've got 562 black kids at Stuyvesant. Still too low. Bring in the rest of the non-science-oriented specialized schools (High School of American Studies at Lehman College (14), Brooklyn Latin School (105)). Now you're at 681. Still too low. (Note that Laguardia's admissions are by audition, not examination, so I omitted that. Still 2:1 Asian:Black.) Now you're pulling kids out of regular high schools. Are they going to be able to keep up with the other Stuyvesant kids? Should we slow down others' education so lower performing students can keep up? How does this help these lower performing students? Note that these are individual people we are talking about who are getting thrown into classes that are difficult for them. You could create programs designed to help underprivileged students that are close to the cutoff, to help them get admitted. NYC created that, but, you know, it helps asian kids too. Another problem with doing corrections for population ratio is that NYC attracts top professionals, highly intelligent people that are having children. Even if you believe all races are geneticulturally identically distributed globally, or in the country, you can see that the high income professionals are mostly non-black, and their kids are going to monopolize Stuyvesant seats. The high IQ black/Latino kids that aren't getting into Stuyvesant are the ones whose parents never moved to NYC in the first place.

entee 10y ago

I think what you're saying is a great way to describe what advantages accrue with wealth, even middle class wealth. Essentially you had the system work in your favor and in turn knew how to work to system. You got a warm intro into an internship, this helped you get into college afterwards. These kinds of subtle boosts are mostly a function of being in the right place within the system and knowing how to pull the right levers, and if you don't know to look for those levers, you'll never know they're there and be disadvantaged as a result. In your case, it was being in the right place and having the flexibility to take that internship. For someone else it might be knowing how to work the college financial aid system, or something else. I look back and see that throughout my academic career, if I didn't have people who knew how the system worked telling me, "you should do this, and this is how", I don't think I'd have gotten where I am. Essentially, I got a better shot at things even though I was no more qualified on a purely intellectual basis. AA is an imperfect tool to give people some of those same advantages, and I'm a little ambivalent about it. But I think it or something like it is probably necessary to give everyone an equal shot.

misterbowfinger 10y ago
Another thing to consider is that I worked the system in New York City. And the system in NYC has a fair amount of access and resources, if you work it right. Why not create a similar amount of access and resources at Howard University? I don't see that as traditional Affirmative Action, which we primarily think of happening during an admissions process. This is just creating more channels to resources in tech, which is entirely reasonable, even from a conservative economics perspective.
pm90 10y ago
I have mixed feelings about AA as well. All of these subtle boosts as you call them come from more than just being in a school, although I agree that helps a LOT more than not being in the school. There is the obvious advantage of living in a culture that values such things as education, career progress etc. The most important is probably encouraging and supportive parents. In short, I think we need to do more than just let people from other communities simply join our prestigious institutions but to recognize that these institutions need to be changed to help these students achieve what students from other backgrounds get as well. I know all the meritocracy crowd here will come after me with pitchforks for saying this, but I do think it is justified in putting all that effort into helping people that are born in disadvantaged families. Is it fair to the other kids who may have worked really hard but get less attention simply because of their family background? Maybe...but they were lucky to be born in a great family in the first place... I too got very lucky by being born in a great family.... I'm eternally grateful for it having helped me to have a happy and fulfilling life. I hope others can have a shot at such a life as well.

kukac 10y ago

Not all white people are as privileged as you.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

_dps 10y ago

> However, I did practically nothing to earn that internship ... As someone who spends a lot of time in Europe, I find this exclusively-individualistic view of "earning advantage" to be too limiting, and characteristic of US ideas about class and privilege (Europe has its own, different problems). Yes, you personally didn't earn that specific thing. But there's a very high chance that your family unit earned itself into being in a position to collect that "free" (at the point of accrual) benefit. I think the most fundamental problem we face right now in terms of equalizing the game for historically disadvantaged people (an important goal worthy of some sacrifices) is how to square that with the very natural, and IMO totally fair, desire for parents to be able to pass some forms of fairly-earned advantage on to their children.

jza00425 10y ago

If you were the one who gets screwed by AA, you would have told another story. This is what liberals do. Already have your piece of pie and play the moral high ground. How about you giving your spot to a black kid?

misterbowfinger 10y ago
Arguably I did get "screwed over" by Affirmative Action in terms of what college I got into (still salty about it). But this program with Howard University is really different than traditional, admissions-based Affirmative Action. It's increasing the supply, not lowering it or putting a quota on it. I'm not saying I didn't earn my spot at my school, but I definitely got lucky with that internship, which I don't feel like I earned. I was making a simple point about the side effects we get as "hard workers" that have much deeper benefits than we tend to think. And I'm not sure those side effects are always deserved.
sctb 10y ago
Please don't start flamewars with unsubstantive personal accusations like this.

oh_sigh 10y ago

What does that have to do with affirmative action though? It sounds like you are advocating that we should be improving our high school curriculum, not using race as a basis for admissions to certain programs. If you ever bring up the point about, say, how the rate of criminality among blacks in America is so much higher than whites/asians/latinos, you'll frequently hear a response about the lurking variable of poverty(poor people are more likely to be criminal -> blacks are over-represented among poor people). So, why doesn't that same logic carry over to affirmative action? If you made the test about income levels, and not race, it seems like some of the absurdity of the system that people hate would be lessened. Right now with AA, we implicitly say that a black kid from a multi-millionaire family is disadvantanged, and needs help, relative to the son of a poor Chinese immigrant.