4 ms·

Harvard which has access to a very large pool of candidates so would be in a good position to take the best candidates in each racial pool has admitted in court

Harvard which has access to a very large pool of candidates so would be in a good position to take the best candidates in each racial pool has admitted in court to having different SAT cutoffs for different races. https://nypost.com/2018/10/17/harvards-gatekeeper-reveals-sat-cutoff-scores-based-on-race/ https://nypost.com/2018/10/17/harvards-gatekeeper-reveals-sa... Let's say we lived in a world where racial spoils were being used as a way to distribute contested goods and services. How could I differentiate between this world and the world of affirmative action? In both places the defenders claim to me all the candidates were otherwise identical in aggregate and race was only used as a tie breaker in order to better represent demographics. I put forward some objective measures that show candidates did not appear to be equal in aggregate and they claim these are not a complete measure and once you include a more holistic evaluation then the non-AA candidates were either equal or less good.

joshuamorton 7y ago
> SAT cutoffs for different races. Correct, and this might be meaningful if there wasn't racial bias encoded in the SAT. Just as a guidinf question here, what does the SAT measure?
- disagreeabletot 7y ago
  What is the racial bias encoded in the SAT? Is it possible for a world to exist where an objective test showed different performance for different racial subgroups? I'm not saying we are in this world. But it looks to me that if we were in this world people would just complain that all tests were biased.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    > Is it possible for a world to exist where an objective test showed different performance for different racial subgroups? Maybe. But I think that world would be very different than ours today. > What is the racial bias encoded in the SAT? I can't find a source for this now, but I recall reading that if you give versions of reading tests to black students that use AAVE instead of common English, the racial gap in reading performance mostly disappears. In other words, something like the SAT measures, at best a sort of confirmative intelligence and not an objective one (if that's even a thing. I'd suggest that intelligence is always relative to society). So institutions looking to influence society can't simply use a test that measures in part how well one conforms.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      How does that get reconciled with the consistently reproduced [0] ~15 point racial IQ gap in the US, since I was under the impression that the SAT was mostly a shitty IQ test only valid for HS graduates? I find it hard to believe that a test like Raven's Progressive Matrices [1] would discriminate against people more familiar with AAVE, even if the others would. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#United_States_test_scores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#United_S... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        Indeed, AAVE is just sort of an egregious example, for the pattern matching tests, men score better than women. Is this because men are smarter than women? Or is it because performance on Raven's progressive matrix tests are essentially spacial reasoning tests[1], and thus. Similarly, western women have better reasoning about color than western men (I can't remember exactly where I found this, but it was probably an article about the World Color Survey controversy), and western cultured-people score better in pattern recognition tests compared to people from cultures that have fewer color words. Such motifs are similar: people from cultures whose languages don't express numbers (1, 2, many) or express time[2] differently have more or less trouble reasoning in those contexts. Even formal logic can be culturally tied[3] (and that article also mentions certain forms of spacial reasoning being culturally tied too), which is weird (you can think of this as an extension to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis[4]: language and culture influence how we think, and thus trying to judge intelligence across-culture will run into...issues). tl;dr: Fairly judging "general intelligence" in any way is difficult. We continually find that we're really bad at it. Something like IQ is useful in certain contexts: an individual with a much higher IQ is probably going to perform better in US life than someone with a comparatively lower IQ, but when you try to make strong conclusions about intelligence, especially about group-levels of intelligence, from something like IQ scores, you're veering off into pseudoscience. [1]: (pdf) https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/45855297/Sex_differential_item_functioning_in_the20160522-30824-bpwk8l.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DSex_differential_item_functioning_in_the.pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20200112%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20200112T233026Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=2e26c804d400158360ffd5ac919c9dba1978e68aa7d8ab0601024b2b73c9f751 https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/45855297/Sex... [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21564254 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21564254 [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/science/how-culture-molds-habits-of-thought.html https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/science/how-culture-molds... [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6eXw0AAKZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6eXw0AAKZ8
PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
It's entirely possible, given the fallibility of both huamsn and human systems, that the claim "all the final candidates were equally well qualified" is not true. That doesn't change the original definition of AA. Neither does a demonstration that any specific institution does things differently. If you want to change your claim to "the first sentence precisely matches what Harvard does for undergrad admissions", I'm not going to disagree with you. But that's a very different claim than the one you made.
- disagreeabletot 7y ago
  From my perspective I feel proponents of AA are doing the bait and switch. I think a lot of 'AA' in practice is similar to what is done with Harvard admissions either by deliberate design or poor incentives. For example say a business notices an incorrect distribution of employees and then decides to introduce the steelman AA policy in order to try and fix this disparity. Businesses prefer to measure outcomes over process so you end up having either implicit or explicit racial proportions as goals instead of having the 'steelman AA' process being the goal. This ends up leading to explicit racial preferences and the strawman AA as the implementation.

joshuamorton 7y ago

> SAT cutoffs for different races. Correct, and this might be meaningful if there wasn't racial bias encoded in the SAT. Just as a guidinf question here, what does the SAT measure?

disagreeabletot 7y ago
What is the racial bias encoded in the SAT? Is it possible for a world to exist where an objective test showed different performance for different racial subgroups? I'm not saying we are in this world. But it looks to me that if we were in this world people would just complain that all tests were biased.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > Is it possible for a world to exist where an objective test showed different performance for different racial subgroups? Maybe. But I think that world would be very different than ours today. > What is the racial bias encoded in the SAT? I can't find a source for this now, but I recall reading that if you give versions of reading tests to black students that use AAVE instead of common English, the racial gap in reading performance mostly disappears. In other words, something like the SAT measures, at best a sort of confirmative intelligence and not an objective one (if that's even a thing. I'd suggest that intelligence is always relative to society). So institutions looking to influence society can't simply use a test that measures in part how well one conforms.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    How does that get reconciled with the consistently reproduced [0] ~15 point racial IQ gap in the US, since I was under the impression that the SAT was mostly a shitty IQ test only valid for HS graduates? I find it hard to believe that a test like Raven's Progressive Matrices [1] would discriminate against people more familiar with AAVE, even if the others would. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#United_States_test_scores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#United_S... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      Indeed, AAVE is just sort of an egregious example, for the pattern matching tests, men score better than women. Is this because men are smarter than women? Or is it because performance on Raven's progressive matrix tests are essentially spacial reasoning tests[1], and thus. Similarly, western women have better reasoning about color than western men (I can't remember exactly where I found this, but it was probably an article about the World Color Survey controversy), and western cultured-people score better in pattern recognition tests compared to people from cultures that have fewer color words. Such motifs are similar: people from cultures whose languages don't express numbers (1, 2, many) or express time[2] differently have more or less trouble reasoning in those contexts. Even formal logic can be culturally tied[3] (and that article also mentions certain forms of spacial reasoning being culturally tied too), which is weird (you can think of this as an extension to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis[4]: language and culture influence how we think, and thus trying to judge intelligence across-culture will run into...issues). tl;dr: Fairly judging "general intelligence" in any way is difficult. We continually find that we're really bad at it. Something like IQ is useful in certain contexts: an individual with a much higher IQ is probably going to perform better in US life than someone with a comparatively lower IQ, but when you try to make strong conclusions about intelligence, especially about group-levels of intelligence, from something like IQ scores, you're veering off into pseudoscience. [1]: (pdf) https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/45855297/Sex_differential_item_functioning_in_the20160522-30824-bpwk8l.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DSex_differential_item_functioning_in_the.pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20200112%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20200112T233026Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=2e26c804d400158360ffd5ac919c9dba1978e68aa7d8ab0601024b2b73c9f751 https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/45855297/Sex... [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21564254 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21564254 [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/science/how-culture-molds-habits-of-thought.html https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/science/how-culture-molds... [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6eXw0AAKZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6eXw0AAKZ8

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago

It's entirely possible, given the fallibility of both huamsn and human systems, that the claim "all the final candidates were equally well qualified" is not true. That doesn't change the original definition of AA. Neither does a demonstration that any specific institution does things differently. If you want to change your claim to "the first sentence precisely matches what Harvard does for undergrad admissions", I'm not going to disagree with you. But that's a very different claim than the one you made.

disagreeabletot 7y ago
From my perspective I feel proponents of AA are doing the bait and switch. I think a lot of 'AA' in practice is similar to what is done with Harvard admissions either by deliberate design or poor incentives. For example say a business notices an incorrect distribution of employees and then decides to introduce the steelman AA policy in order to try and fix this disparity. Businesses prefer to measure outcomes over process so you end up having either implicit or explicit racial proportions as goals instead of having the 'steelman AA' process being the goal. This ends up leading to explicit racial preferences and the strawman AA as the implementation.