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I don't mean to be edgy here, but this is necessarily true in service of affirmative action. It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the c

I don't mean to be edgy here, but this is necessarily true in service of affirmative action. It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members. Although it's perplexing just how...nasty?...the discrimination against Asians is. I can't imagine ever trying to justify that "all Asians" have personality defects that make them disproportionately bad candidates for college, as is proven to be what the colleges are doing here. Utterly unacceptable, IMHO.

ggggtez 6y ago
>proven Nothing was proven. This is just an allegation right now. Wait until the court date. And then the SCOTUS overruling the decision, because like you said: discrimination is required for affirmative action. And universities like Yale are specifically allowed to discriminate for that purpose. For any allegation to stick, the Feds will have to show that the reason was not for diversity. Which, obviously, it is.
throwaway189262 6y ago
I may get a lot of hate for this... But I think affirmative action has opposite the desired effect. The majority groups are dicriminated against by design. I don't think this does anything to fix the tensions causing racism in the first place. I think it makes them worse. The government should find a way to benefit minorities without outright descrimination against those that doesn't fit their definition. My personal favorite idea is improving schools. If we diverted enough money and resources to primary schools in poor areas, we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action without just switching the groups we discrimate against.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >My personal favorite idea is improving schools. If we diverted enough money and resources to primary schools in poor areas, we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action without just switching the groups we discrimate against. The problem is student outcomes aren't linked to how much money and resources the school has, they're linked to how much money and resources the parents (and the network of the parents) of the children have. Networking is the primary benefit of top tier schools, and so unfairly giving a chance to those without the network is the only way for them to move up the ladder as a group. This will necessarily displace individually who might deserve to be there more, but the problem is an intractable one due to the outsize gains of being part of that network. I am not endorsing affirmative action, or discrimination against certain "successful" minorities, simply offering a chain of reasoning for it.
  - throwaway189262 6y ago
    It would probably be more than schools. We would have to divert significant amounts of money to helping poor communities. I think the government adopted affirmative action instead because it was a much cheaper way to placate the masses
    - thrav 6y ago
      Or what we realized was the right idea a long time ago... mixing everybody up by force. (Busing) I believe it has been proven that as communities become more integrated, outcomes improve for all parties — and not just academically. One Source, since people seem to disagree: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/23/forced-busing-didnt-fail-desegregation-is-the-best-way-to-improve-our-schools/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/23/... Something more academic: https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_schooldesegregation_NBERw16664.pdf https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_schooldesegregat...
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        But the problem we realized, after trying out forced busing, was that in the long term all parents with resources would simply opt out of the public school system to avoid it.
        neutronicus 6y ago
        Practically, going a long way to school on a bus every morning blows
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        LorenPechtel 6y ago
        Because schools are a reflection of the students they get. Private schools do better not because they teach any better, but because they keep out the ones that aren't there to learn and thus the teacher can actually spend their time teaching a group of kids at the same level.
- nickff 6y ago
  Increased spending does not seem to help much; perhaps the money is not being well allocated.[1][2][3] [1] http://www.npri.org/imgLib/20110228_Fed_ed_spending_vs_results.jpg http://www.npri.org/imgLib/20110228_Fed_ed_spending_vs_resul... [2] https://rogerkerr.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/derugy-column-chart2.jpg https://rogerkerr.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/derugy-column-... [3] http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html
- jpxw 6y ago
  Not only that, but it becomes impossible to tell whether someone in a group benefited by AA is in a given position because of AA, or because of their merit. This is harmful to people in those groups.
  - Larrikin 6y ago
    It's only harmful when people assume that they couldn't have gotten the job or in the school without it and don't look at their merit.
    - loco5niner 6y ago
      Which is what naturally ends up happening when affirmative action gets out of hand.
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    I worry about this a lot - my kids are Hispanic (inherited from their Mexican mother), and I honestly don’t know what to tell them when it comes time to check the “race” box for college admissions in a few years. Do they check the “hispanic” box and always wonder if they were just admitted to meet some quota? And no matter what they do, as soon as somebody realizes they have a Hispanic parent, they’ll (reasonably) assume that they did check the Hispanic box.
    - throwaway189262 6y ago
      I would check it. It's a free advantage in a competitive application process. The government has plenty of misguided programs that people take advantage of. The law is blind to morals and it's clearly a stupid system, so just close your eyes first if it makes you feel better :) You shouldn't feel any worse than when you try to minimize your taxes. In a broken system there are no bad actors
    - travisoneill1 6y ago
      Check the hispanic box. The system is unfair and racist, but it makes the most sense to take advantage of it.
- ggggtez 6y ago
  Why not both? Give more money to public schools, and support affirmative action until those network effects start occurring naturally.
  - jpxw 6y ago
    Because it isn’t fair.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  I don't think this does anything to fix the tensions causing racism in the first place. The purpose of affirmative action isn't to cure racism, broadly defined as racial animosity or something similar. The purpose of affirmative action is to correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias (edit: a given institution previously systematically excluded a group and now is making up for that exclusion). Racial animosity and so-forth should be dealt with in other fashions.
  - _wt8k 6y ago
    If the justification of affirmative action is to "correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias," how is it justified that it discriminates against Asian-Americans when we've never held institutional power in America? (I'm not sure if you're defending affirmative action or if you're just outlining its supposed purpose.)
    - joe_the_user 6y ago
      If the justification of affirmative action is to "correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias," how is it justified that it discriminates against Asian-Americans when we've never held institutional power in America? There is zero way in which may post claims discrimination against Asians is justified by purpose of affirmative action and implying that I am doing so is a despicable bad-faith troll. Of course, the truth of the Federal Government's claim various colleges are discriminating against whites and Asians is a different corner of this debate, which is to say it's the thing looking at this would argue.
  - icelancer 6y ago
    >> The purpose of affirmative action is to correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias (edit: a given institution previously systematically excluded a group and now is making up for that exclusion). Asian-Americans were broadly excluded as enshrined by law in Korematsu v. United States, to say nothing of the discrimination that Chinese-Americans dealt with. So... kinda odd that it is correct to continue to discriminate against them in higher education... isn't it?
- coredog64 6y ago
  AIUI, it’s even worse, as the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action are well off members of the minority group (e.g. the kids of doctors and dentists) rather than students whose SES would be significantly improved by a degree from a prestigious institution. This is because admission is the first hurdle, not the last, and being well off removes potential sources of stress.
  - swimfar 6y ago
    AIUI: As I understand it SES: Socioeconomic status/situation
  - fmajid 6y ago
    I recently learned most Ivy League African-Americans are either biracial like Obama, or from Caribbean parents.
    - crocodiletears 6y ago
      I've been catching whiffs, of a cultural tension between descendants of black families that immigrated from places like Africa and the Caribbean in the mid-20th century, who in my experience seem to benefit those most from affirmative action policies, and black Americans whose families either arrived decades before the civil rights movement, or descended directly from black slaves, and bore the brunt of America's apartheid policies. I wonder if we'll see a major political bifurcation along those lines in the next decade.
      - skissane 6y ago
        Some have been advocating "American Descendants of Slavery" (ADOS) as an identity specifically for those whose ancestors were victims of slavery in the United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...
      - zozbot234 6y ago
        The Caribbean has a history of African slavery not unlike the U.S.
- leereeves 6y ago
  > The majority groups are decriminalized against by design I think autocorrect failed here. Did you mean to say "discriminated against by design"?
  - throwaway189262 6y ago
    Haha yeah stupid autocorrect
- Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  I happen to agree: the worst penalty is in schooling, and the most bang-for-interventionary-buck is also in schooling. It's also not visible to peers in adulthood, and thus not a source of jealousy or mistreatment or suspicion, as many AA recipients detail experiencing. It's also the most moral way to address something which - IMO - deserves addressing, but which currently is addressed quite immorally. See: the OP article.
- jayd16 6y ago
  If you assume all groups are on average equal but certain groups are underrepresented you must assume that the selection process is flawed. If the process is flawed than correcting the process can be seen as removing bias, not adding it. Do you feel like any correction at all is discrimination, the correction of is flawed in some specific way, or do you feel like its a matter of overcorrection?
  - lliamander 6y ago
    Genuine question: does it make sense to add bias to the selection process if group average differ?
  - RhysU 6y ago
    To your first assumption... It seems unlikely that anything can be subdivided, repeatedly, into arbitrarily many groups by arbitrary criteria whereby comparing all possible groups (i.e. comparing the non-empty members of the powerset) yields statistically insignificant differences for all discernable moments. Unless the thing is truly homogeneous. Which people are certainly not. For example, I clearly have less than average tact.
    - llamaz 6y ago
      I've taken courses is probability and topology where the power set is used, and am intimately familiar with it, but I have no idea what you're talking about
      - RhysU 6y ago
        Suppose S is the set of all people. The powerset of S is all possible ways to subdivide humanity into groups of individuals. Comparing two members of the powerset of S is comparing two groups of people. Any criterion by which you can divide people will produce elements of the powerset of S. For example, "people that like jazz" are in there. So too are "people who eat peas with a knife". I am saying that there are many ways to lump people into buckets. What defines the buckets does not matter. They are all in the powerset of S. If humans are equal, then comparing any two arbitrary groups in the powerset of S should always conclude in equality. At least in some statistical sense. I am giving a counterexample to equality across arbitrary divisions of humanity (members of the powerset of S). I claim that arbitrary groups of humans are not equally tactful. Because if you measure the tactfulness of any member of the powerset of S where I personally am present it will generally show less tact than members of the powerset where I am not present.
- lliamander 6y ago
  Regarding schools, I think there is evidence that charter schools and school vouchers have a significant positive impact for the most disadvantaged kids.
- arwhatever 6y ago
  The funding bill could be crafted so that disproportionately high, or nationally-leveling, funding could be sent to schools in ZIP codes with the lowest average incomes, and the law could exist in perpetuity such that it would always assist the most disadvantaged ZIPs without regard for the ebb and flow of various identity groups over time.
  - LorenPechtel 6y ago
    Except throwing money at the schools doesn't do much of anything about the problem. Schools reflect the students they get far more than they make the students.
- boogies 6y ago
  > we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action Hopefully much better, affirmative action harms even the minorities it attempts to help, let alone others like Asians: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  You are correct because it forms obvious common interest groups. That is at least one factor. Maybe I should scrap the "obvious" since it seems to be beyond elite university staff. My neighbor looks pretty similar to me but that doesn't mean we get along (My neighbor is pretty cool and doesn't look like me at all, but the concept should be clear).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
slg 6y ago
>I don't mean to be edgy here, but this is necessarily true in service of affirmative action. I think it depends on the goal. Is the goal to rank all students and then send the top X number of students acceptance letters? Or is the goal to set a baseline of what it takes to be an successful student at Yale and then select a diverse group of students that all meet that baseline criteria? The former makes it a direct competition between students. You have to choose if applicant A is better than applicant B. The latter instead looks at each applicant individually and whether they would be a successful student. They are now competing against the overall population of applicants instead of any other individual applicants. Considering the number of students who could be successful at a school like Yale is always going to greatly exceed the number of applicants who are admitted, the Asian student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against just like the Black student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against.
- googlryas 6y ago
  Even with the baseline+diversity system, you have a situation where people will be rejected because they are of race X - but if everything was exactly the same about them except they were of race Y, they would have been accepted. To me, that seems like textbook racism. Also, the diverse argument doesn't hold much water to me, because they basically only want a diverse group in terms of race, but not other factors such as income diversity, height diversity, ugliness/beauty diversity, national diversity, parental-scholastic-achievement diversity, athletic diversity, etc. Imagine if an NBA team said "Sorry, we can't hire you, we have too many black people playing right now"
  - Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
    You're not wrong, but you're taking the textbook definition too far. This whole topics rests on the premise that "positive discrimination" is acceptable or even necessary due to historical injustice. An analysis that reverts to "racism is always and everywhere bad" will fail to reconcile, even if you believe it.
    - 6y ago
keenmaster 6y ago
> It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members. Not true. There is a third way. This is a problem of artificially induced scarcity. Instead of recognizing the problem for what it is, we are creating a false dichotomy of choice between merit and justice. We sacrifice one for the other, blind to the possibility that we can have both. I will use a metaphor comparing seats at great universities to slices of pie: When a bakery finds that customers are routinely fighting to buy the last few pieces of pie, it should simply bake more pie. The U.S. government isn't just one of the biggest pie bakeries around, it also subsidizes all the other bakers and loans money to their customers. No one has more leverage than them. If they say "you must make more pie," the other bakers must fall in line, or else they stand to lose a lot of money and decline relative to their peers. If X # of university applicants are admitted due to affirmative action, the government should mandate that the university expand its capacity by X students. Otherwise, the government should threaten to remove all subsidies (including loans to students pursuing an education at that institution). For its part, the government should also fund an increase in capacity at the best public universities. Perhaps it should even create new universities to help solve this problem. While people deserve the best education they can get, private universities do not deserve public monies if they refuse to increase positive externalities at the perceived expense of their prestige.
hogFeast 6y ago
Yep, I am somewhere else in the world but benefited (although somewhat indirectly) from a similar kind of process and it is ludicrously unfair, arbitrary, and there is almost no oversight of how decisions are actually being made. The only effective system is one that is fair to all. You can't make up for socioeconomic differences this way. College isn't a magic pill if you are disadvantaged. And I would be genuinely surprised if it actually helped the people it is aimed to help because unfair systems are always co-opted by the people who have advantages. Also, I went to school in the West with many students from Asia. They worked harder. That is it. It wasn't a fair sample, the school attracted kids who wanted to work and attend university in my country. But they out worked everyone else bar one or two people. I am not sure exactly what the allegation is here: that working harder is cheating?
norswap 6y ago
The article mentions the law makes allowance for this: > The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity and should be limited in time. Schools also bear the burden of showing why their consideration of race is appropriate. Apparently the accusation is that Yale goes beyond what is reasonable.
skywhopper 6y ago
What are you referring to? I've not seen the claims you describe, and they aren't mentioned in this article. From what I've heard the main datapoint in support of the claim that Asians and whites are being discriminated against is the average SAT score and GPA of successful applicants. But even if you don't believe that those numbers are inherently biased, I hope no one would claim they represent the totality of a person's qualifications for attending college, or their value to the institution and their fellow students.
clairity 6y ago
the point is that the group that should be taking the hit from affirmative action is (wealthy) white people, who have been disproportionately benefitting from an unfair system for the history of the country, not asians, who, while more successful than average, have also experienced discrimination and unfairness through most of that history.
foogazi 6y ago
> It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members. Can be done with increasing seats, so same count of existing racial profiles + additions for the affirmative actioned populace
- lopmotr 6y ago
  The end result would be indistinguishable from excluding those others. They could even just do it with words on paper with a statement like "We're accepting 100 fewer students next year." followed the next day by "We're accepting 100 extra students from our preferred races next year".
s1artibartfast 6y ago
I don't agree with with Yale's position, but I also didn't see anywhere that they make your statement: >"all Asians" have personality defects that make them disproportionately bad candidates for college I think it is important to accurately reflect their position if we, as a society, want to have a rational discussion about the role race should play in college admission. A more accurate characterization of the Yale claim is that asians, on average, have personalities which detract from their application. This is a much more complicated assertion to refute, because differences between races can and do exist, as demonstrated by above average test scores among asians.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Have you met an Asian American? Would you or Yale repeat that ridiculous slur of personality ("asians, on average, have personalities which detract...") about any other racial group? How do you feel about the "Karen" phenomenon? Test scores are problematic because tests have some measurable level of bias. The answer to that isn't to codify drastically more bias into the process.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Are you denying that this is the jist of Yale's position? I'm not sure what your point is or how it relates to mine.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      You're trying to make something of a supposed difference between the proposition "members of set A have quality P" and the proposition "on average, set A has quality P". When P is something as subjective, ill-defined, and capricious as "personality defects", especially when said of a group of students who on all other measures qualify for admission to "elite universities", there is no difference between the two propositions. How do we even calculate an average personality? I doubt that even Yale people would stoop to such sophistry.
      - 6y ago

ggggtez 6y ago

>proven Nothing was proven. This is just an allegation right now. Wait until the court date. And then the SCOTUS overruling the decision, because like you said: discrimination is required for affirmative action. And universities like Yale are specifically allowed to discriminate for that purpose. For any allegation to stick, the Feds will have to show that the reason was not for diversity. Which, obviously, it is.

throwaway189262 6y ago

I may get a lot of hate for this... But I think affirmative action has opposite the desired effect. The majority groups are dicriminated against by design. I don't think this does anything to fix the tensions causing racism in the first place. I think it makes them worse. The government should find a way to benefit minorities without outright descrimination against those that doesn't fit their definition. My personal favorite idea is improving schools. If we diverted enough money and resources to primary schools in poor areas, we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action without just switching the groups we discrimate against.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
>My personal favorite idea is improving schools. If we diverted enough money and resources to primary schools in poor areas, we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action without just switching the groups we discrimate against. The problem is student outcomes aren't linked to how much money and resources the school has, they're linked to how much money and resources the parents (and the network of the parents) of the children have. Networking is the primary benefit of top tier schools, and so unfairly giving a chance to those without the network is the only way for them to move up the ladder as a group. This will necessarily displace individually who might deserve to be there more, but the problem is an intractable one due to the outsize gains of being part of that network. I am not endorsing affirmative action, or discrimination against certain "successful" minorities, simply offering a chain of reasoning for it.
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  It would probably be more than schools. We would have to divert significant amounts of money to helping poor communities. I think the government adopted affirmative action instead because it was a much cheaper way to placate the masses
  - thrav 6y ago
    Or what we realized was the right idea a long time ago... mixing everybody up by force. (Busing) I believe it has been proven that as communities become more integrated, outcomes improve for all parties — and not just academically. One Source, since people seem to disagree: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/23/forced-busing-didnt-fail-desegregation-is-the-best-way-to-improve-our-schools/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/23/... Something more academic: https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_schooldesegregation_NBERw16664.pdf https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_schooldesegregat...
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      But the problem we realized, after trying out forced busing, was that in the long term all parents with resources would simply opt out of the public school system to avoid it.
      - neutronicus 6y ago
        Practically, going a long way to school on a bus every morning blows
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - LorenPechtel 6y ago
        Because schools are a reflection of the students they get. Private schools do better not because they teach any better, but because they keep out the ones that aren't there to learn and thus the teacher can actually spend their time teaching a group of kids at the same level.
nickff 6y ago
Increased spending does not seem to help much; perhaps the money is not being well allocated.[1][2][3] [1] http://www.npri.org/imgLib/20110228_Fed_ed_spending_vs_results.jpg http://www.npri.org/imgLib/20110228_Fed_ed_spending_vs_resul... [2] https://rogerkerr.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/derugy-column-chart2.jpg https://rogerkerr.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/derugy-column-... [3] http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html
jpxw 6y ago
Not only that, but it becomes impossible to tell whether someone in a group benefited by AA is in a given position because of AA, or because of their merit. This is harmful to people in those groups.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  It's only harmful when people assume that they couldn't have gotten the job or in the school without it and don't look at their merit.
  - loco5niner 6y ago
    Which is what naturally ends up happening when affirmative action gets out of hand.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  I worry about this a lot - my kids are Hispanic (inherited from their Mexican mother), and I honestly don’t know what to tell them when it comes time to check the “race” box for college admissions in a few years. Do they check the “hispanic” box and always wonder if they were just admitted to meet some quota? And no matter what they do, as soon as somebody realizes they have a Hispanic parent, they’ll (reasonably) assume that they did check the Hispanic box.
  - throwaway189262 6y ago
    I would check it. It's a free advantage in a competitive application process. The government has plenty of misguided programs that people take advantage of. The law is blind to morals and it's clearly a stupid system, so just close your eyes first if it makes you feel better :) You shouldn't feel any worse than when you try to minimize your taxes. In a broken system there are no bad actors
  - travisoneill1 6y ago
    Check the hispanic box. The system is unfair and racist, but it makes the most sense to take advantage of it.
ggggtez 6y ago
Why not both? Give more money to public schools, and support affirmative action until those network effects start occurring naturally.
- jpxw 6y ago
  Because it isn’t fair.
joe_the_user 6y ago
I don't think this does anything to fix the tensions causing racism in the first place. The purpose of affirmative action isn't to cure racism, broadly defined as racial animosity or something similar. The purpose of affirmative action is to correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias (edit: a given institution previously systematically excluded a group and now is making up for that exclusion). Racial animosity and so-forth should be dealt with in other fashions.
- _wt8k 6y ago
  If the justification of affirmative action is to "correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias," how is it justified that it discriminates against Asian-Americans when we've never held institutional power in America? (I'm not sure if you're defending affirmative action or if you're just outlining its supposed purpose.)
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    If the justification of affirmative action is to "correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias," how is it justified that it discriminates against Asian-Americans when we've never held institutional power in America? There is zero way in which may post claims discrimination against Asians is justified by purpose of affirmative action and implying that I am doing so is a despicable bad-faith troll. Of course, the truth of the Federal Government's claim various colleges are discriminating against whites and Asians is a different corner of this debate, which is to say it's the thing looking at this would argue.
- icelancer 6y ago
  >> The purpose of affirmative action is to correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias (edit: a given institution previously systematically excluded a group and now is making up for that exclusion). Asian-Americans were broadly excluded as enshrined by law in Korematsu v. United States, to say nothing of the discrimination that Chinese-Americans dealt with. So... kinda odd that it is correct to continue to discriminate against them in higher education... isn't it?
coredog64 6y ago
AIUI, it’s even worse, as the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action are well off members of the minority group (e.g. the kids of doctors and dentists) rather than students whose SES would be significantly improved by a degree from a prestigious institution. This is because admission is the first hurdle, not the last, and being well off removes potential sources of stress.
- swimfar 6y ago
  AIUI: As I understand it SES: Socioeconomic status/situation
- fmajid 6y ago
  I recently learned most Ivy League African-Americans are either biracial like Obama, or from Caribbean parents.
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    I've been catching whiffs, of a cultural tension between descendants of black families that immigrated from places like Africa and the Caribbean in the mid-20th century, who in my experience seem to benefit those most from affirmative action policies, and black Americans whose families either arrived decades before the civil rights movement, or descended directly from black slaves, and bore the brunt of America's apartheid policies. I wonder if we'll see a major political bifurcation along those lines in the next decade.
    - skissane 6y ago
      Some have been advocating "American Descendants of Slavery" (ADOS) as an identity specifically for those whose ancestors were victims of slavery in the United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      The Caribbean has a history of African slavery not unlike the U.S.
leereeves 6y ago
> The majority groups are decriminalized against by design I think autocorrect failed here. Did you mean to say "discriminated against by design"?
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  Haha yeah stupid autocorrect
Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
I happen to agree: the worst penalty is in schooling, and the most bang-for-interventionary-buck is also in schooling. It's also not visible to peers in adulthood, and thus not a source of jealousy or mistreatment or suspicion, as many AA recipients detail experiencing. It's also the most moral way to address something which - IMO - deserves addressing, but which currently is addressed quite immorally. See: the OP article.
jayd16 6y ago
If you assume all groups are on average equal but certain groups are underrepresented you must assume that the selection process is flawed. If the process is flawed than correcting the process can be seen as removing bias, not adding it. Do you feel like any correction at all is discrimination, the correction of is flawed in some specific way, or do you feel like its a matter of overcorrection?
- lliamander 6y ago
  Genuine question: does it make sense to add bias to the selection process if group average differ?
- RhysU 6y ago
  To your first assumption... It seems unlikely that anything can be subdivided, repeatedly, into arbitrarily many groups by arbitrary criteria whereby comparing all possible groups (i.e. comparing the non-empty members of the powerset) yields statistically insignificant differences for all discernable moments. Unless the thing is truly homogeneous. Which people are certainly not. For example, I clearly have less than average tact.
  - llamaz 6y ago
    I've taken courses is probability and topology where the power set is used, and am intimately familiar with it, but I have no idea what you're talking about
    - RhysU 6y ago
      Suppose S is the set of all people. The powerset of S is all possible ways to subdivide humanity into groups of individuals. Comparing two members of the powerset of S is comparing two groups of people. Any criterion by which you can divide people will produce elements of the powerset of S. For example, "people that like jazz" are in there. So too are "people who eat peas with a knife". I am saying that there are many ways to lump people into buckets. What defines the buckets does not matter. They are all in the powerset of S. If humans are equal, then comparing any two arbitrary groups in the powerset of S should always conclude in equality. At least in some statistical sense. I am giving a counterexample to equality across arbitrary divisions of humanity (members of the powerset of S). I claim that arbitrary groups of humans are not equally tactful. Because if you measure the tactfulness of any member of the powerset of S where I personally am present it will generally show less tact than members of the powerset where I am not present.
lliamander 6y ago
Regarding schools, I think there is evidence that charter schools and school vouchers have a significant positive impact for the most disadvantaged kids.
arwhatever 6y ago
The funding bill could be crafted so that disproportionately high, or nationally-leveling, funding could be sent to schools in ZIP codes with the lowest average incomes, and the law could exist in perpetuity such that it would always assist the most disadvantaged ZIPs without regard for the ebb and flow of various identity groups over time.
- LorenPechtel 6y ago
  Except throwing money at the schools doesn't do much of anything about the problem. Schools reflect the students they get far more than they make the students.
boogies 6y ago
> we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action Hopefully much better, affirmative action harms even the minorities it attempts to help, let alone others like Asians: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
raxxorrax 6y ago
You are correct because it forms obvious common interest groups. That is at least one factor. Maybe I should scrap the "obvious" since it seems to be beyond elite university staff. My neighbor looks pretty similar to me but that doesn't mean we get along (My neighbor is pretty cool and doesn't look like me at all, but the concept should be clear).

deleted 6y ago

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slg 6y ago

>I don't mean to be edgy here, but this is necessarily true in service of affirmative action. I think it depends on the goal. Is the goal to rank all students and then send the top X number of students acceptance letters? Or is the goal to set a baseline of what it takes to be an successful student at Yale and then select a diverse group of students that all meet that baseline criteria? The former makes it a direct competition between students. You have to choose if applicant A is better than applicant B. The latter instead looks at each applicant individually and whether they would be a successful student. They are now competing against the overall population of applicants instead of any other individual applicants. Considering the number of students who could be successful at a school like Yale is always going to greatly exceed the number of applicants who are admitted, the Asian student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against just like the Black student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against.

googlryas 6y ago
Even with the baseline+diversity system, you have a situation where people will be rejected because they are of race X - but if everything was exactly the same about them except they were of race Y, they would have been accepted. To me, that seems like textbook racism. Also, the diverse argument doesn't hold much water to me, because they basically only want a diverse group in terms of race, but not other factors such as income diversity, height diversity, ugliness/beauty diversity, national diversity, parental-scholastic-achievement diversity, athletic diversity, etc. Imagine if an NBA team said "Sorry, we can't hire you, we have too many black people playing right now"
- Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  You're not wrong, but you're taking the textbook definition too far. This whole topics rests on the premise that "positive discrimination" is acceptable or even necessary due to historical injustice. An analysis that reverts to "racism is always and everywhere bad" will fail to reconcile, even if you believe it.
  - 6y ago

keenmaster 6y ago

> It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members. Not true. There is a third way. This is a problem of artificially induced scarcity. Instead of recognizing the problem for what it is, we are creating a false dichotomy of choice between merit and justice. We sacrifice one for the other, blind to the possibility that we can have both. I will use a metaphor comparing seats at great universities to slices of pie: When a bakery finds that customers are routinely fighting to buy the last few pieces of pie, it should simply bake more pie. The U.S. government isn't just one of the biggest pie bakeries around, it also subsidizes all the other bakers and loans money to their customers. No one has more leverage than them. If they say "you must make more pie," the other bakers must fall in line, or else they stand to lose a lot of money and decline relative to their peers. If X # of university applicants are admitted due to affirmative action, the government should mandate that the university expand its capacity by X students. Otherwise, the government should threaten to remove all subsidies (including loans to students pursuing an education at that institution). For its part, the government should also fund an increase in capacity at the best public universities. Perhaps it should even create new universities to help solve this problem. While people deserve the best education they can get, private universities do not deserve public monies if they refuse to increase positive externalities at the perceived expense of their prestige.

hogFeast 6y ago

Yep, I am somewhere else in the world but benefited (although somewhat indirectly) from a similar kind of process and it is ludicrously unfair, arbitrary, and there is almost no oversight of how decisions are actually being made. The only effective system is one that is fair to all. You can't make up for socioeconomic differences this way. College isn't a magic pill if you are disadvantaged. And I would be genuinely surprised if it actually helped the people it is aimed to help because unfair systems are always co-opted by the people who have advantages. Also, I went to school in the West with many students from Asia. They worked harder. That is it. It wasn't a fair sample, the school attracted kids who wanted to work and attend university in my country. But they out worked everyone else bar one or two people. I am not sure exactly what the allegation is here: that working harder is cheating?

norswap 6y ago

The article mentions the law makes allowance for this: > The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity and should be limited in time. Schools also bear the burden of showing why their consideration of race is appropriate. Apparently the accusation is that Yale goes beyond what is reasonable.

skywhopper 6y ago

What are you referring to? I've not seen the claims you describe, and they aren't mentioned in this article. From what I've heard the main datapoint in support of the claim that Asians and whites are being discriminated against is the average SAT score and GPA of successful applicants. But even if you don't believe that those numbers are inherently biased, I hope no one would claim they represent the totality of a person's qualifications for attending college, or their value to the institution and their fellow students.

clairity 6y ago

the point is that the group that should be taking the hit from affirmative action is (wealthy) white people, who have been disproportionately benefitting from an unfair system for the history of the country, not asians, who, while more successful than average, have also experienced discrimination and unfairness through most of that history.

foogazi 6y ago

> It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members. Can be done with increasing seats, so same count of existing racial profiles + additions for the affirmative actioned populace

lopmotr 6y ago
The end result would be indistinguishable from excluding those others. They could even just do it with words on paper with a statement like "We're accepting 100 fewer students next year." followed the next day by "We're accepting 100 extra students from our preferred races next year".

s1artibartfast 6y ago

I don't agree with with Yale's position, but I also didn't see anywhere that they make your statement: >"all Asians" have personality defects that make them disproportionately bad candidates for college I think it is important to accurately reflect their position if we, as a society, want to have a rational discussion about the role race should play in college admission. A more accurate characterization of the Yale claim is that asians, on average, have personalities which detract from their application. This is a much more complicated assertion to refute, because differences between races can and do exist, as demonstrated by above average test scores among asians.

jessaustin 6y ago
Have you met an Asian American? Would you or Yale repeat that ridiculous slur of personality ("asians, on average, have personalities which detract...") about any other racial group? How do you feel about the "Karen" phenomenon? Test scores are problematic because tests have some measurable level of bias. The answer to that isn't to codify drastically more bias into the process.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Are you denying that this is the jist of Yale's position? I'm not sure what your point is or how it relates to mine.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    You're trying to make something of a supposed difference between the proposition "members of set A have quality P" and the proposition "on average, set A has quality P". When P is something as subjective, ill-defined, and capricious as "personality defects", especially when said of a group of students who on all other measures qualify for admission to "elite universities", there is no difference between the two propositions. How do we even calculate an average personality? I doubt that even Yale people would stoop to such sophistry.
    - 6y ago