8 ms·

I wish I could laugh at this, but watching institutional racism come roaring back to life over the last decade has been extremely depressing. Is there any doubt

I wish I could laugh at this, but watching institutional racism come roaring back to life over the last decade has been extremely depressing. Is there any doubt that the goal of this change is to make it easier for them to reject Asian students? The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians.

slavboj 5y ago
A quarter of Harvard's entering class is Asian (vs about 6% of the US population and less in the youth bracket). What proportion would you like?
- kaczordon 5y ago
  And it’s stayed this way for years. Odd no? Just look at Caltech with its over 40% Asian student demographic. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/caltech-college-admissions-asians-11639431134 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/caltech-college-admissions-...
- chii 5y ago
  a proportion that reflects the meritocratic criteria that university admission was founded upon (or at least, was sold as).
  - markdown 5y ago
    Meritocracy might be great for the high achievers, but it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values. It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism. If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society. That might mean some high achievers losing out on their first choice college, it might mean affirmative action, etc. Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
    - kaczordon 5y ago
      Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness. The ideology of Equality of Outcome has literally lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people worldwide(Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot).
    - jkestner 5y ago
      Meritocracy is a fine ideal, but in practice is based on selection algorithms, and like any algorithm it can be and is used to launder whatever biases you like. Who decided what was meritorious? who wrote the tests? Given what you're replying to, it sounds like you're suggesting that Asian Americans dominate power in this country, which I must be misinterpreting because that's ridiculous. I do agree with the general sentiment that what high achievers deserve is not necessarily what's good for society, but I'd say we should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        Something I never see people talk about is the difference between: (1) each job being filled by the person who's better suited for it than any other person *versus* (2) each job being filled by a person who's better suited for it than for any other job I think this is where narratives and assumptions about "meritocracy" and free markets fall down. You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict. And it's hard to be honest from the point of view of hiring people, that (1) is basically not a realistic option. Everybody says their goal is to hire the best person for a job without acknowledging that the best person is not, and should not, be available. Is (2) optimal for society? I'm not sure, but I think society is closer to that than (1). But "meritocracy" sounds more like (1) to me.
        rsj_hn 5y ago
        > You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict.? They are not in conflict at all, this is what the basic welfare theorems of economics say. It's just that #2 and #1 are impossible to achieve because it requires perfect information about each person and each job, and a unified labor market, which just isn't realistic, as information has a cost and labor markets are fragmented. In the real world, we are lucky to get some aspects of both #1 and #2, in the sense that people do search for jobs best suited for them, but imperfectly, and employers do search for workers best suited for each job, but imperfectly, and you kinda meet in the middle. If you want, you can call "meritocracy" the freedom of the employer to hire the best worker available, but I'm not sure of a snappy phrase to describe the freedom of the worker to search for the best job available. Maybe someone came up with a label for that. But really they are flipsides of a process that leads to an optimum, they are not two opposing forces where one makes the other impossible. It is like buying and selling, the supply curve does not make the demand curve impossible; both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet. If you mess with either the demand curve or the supply curve, you do not end up at the optimum price, you end up losing welfare somehow. Obviously anything that can reduce frictions helps you get closer to the meeting of 1 and 2. For example, greater availability of job boards and pay transparency, working condition transparency to get information about available jobs to workers, or things like more accurate information about worker skills and talents to employers (e.g. meaningfulness of degrees play a role here as do rigorous interviews). Really both worker and employer are facing a murky question trying to figure out "how good is the other side here?". Both need as much information as possible. It is the costliness of information that keeps us away from 1 and 2 simultaneously.
  - troutmskreplica 5y ago
    Sorry, but I don’t think your idea of meritocracy is very much in line with what most Universities are looking for. That’s why they have things like essays and consider extracurricular activities. Most of the selective Universities specifically exclude people with high grades and very little else that they were involved in. Moreover, I recall reading at some point that at least some of the Ivy’s, during at least the first half of the 20th century, specifically avoided students with the highest grades in favor of those who were more like a B+ average and were more social, which they determined through the very subjective means of interviewing students on campus. (I’m old enough that I recall some of my friends visiting Universities for such meetings, but I have no idea if they still meet prospective students like this).
    - chillacy 5y ago
      Afaik they do this because they wanted to avoid admitting so many Jewish students in the 1900s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/14/before-asian-americans-sued-harvard-the-school-tried-restricting-the-number-of-jews/?noredirect=on https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/14... https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
      - troutmskreplica 5y ago
        Sorry I cannot tell what “this” is since that article neither mentions downplaying grades or interviewing students. I believe the specific things I am talking about were discussed in relation to introversion and The Ivy’s specifically wanting to lean toward extroverts who were well-rounded and had good social skills.
- headsupftw 5y ago
  Hence the need to lower the acceptance rate of Asian applicants even more?
- mbg721 5y ago
  "What proportion (of x ethnic group) would you like?" is a question that greatly devalues the contributions of the individual student. Would you say, "You're a great interview candidate, but we already have a tall guy,"?
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I was told a story about someone who applied to a school of engineering somewhere or other, in the latter part of the 1950s. She had a sterling high school record, but they wrote a rejection letter explaining that they already had a woman attending the institution. The punch line, as it were, as I recall it, was that "a woman" did not mean one undergraduate woman, but just one, period. So, she went to a much less prestigious and well-known school, majored in math, and ended up being a programmer instead of an engineer. I am not sure if she was bitter about it.
  - slavboj 5y ago
    Surely you're aware that this literally and explicitly happens in the context of college admissions. "We already have a couple tuba players, try Yale."
  - kenjackson 5y ago
    Happens all the time in sports. And really we do it for college too. Except it is “we already have enough comp science majors”.
    - thomasz 5y ago
      Discrimination happens when you treat equals as unequal, or unequals as equal. There is a world of difference between "we already have enough asian compsci majors", and "we already have enough compsci majors, but there is room for a sociologist".
- imgabe 5y ago
  Whatever proportion meets the admissions criteria.
- zthrowaway 5y ago
  Not caring about what people look like is a good start.
petilon 5y ago
> The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians. Just the Ivies? UW is explicit: they want racial "equity". Meaning they won't admit more Asians, as a percentage, than the population they are picking candidates from. And they promote it as a good thing: https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/diversity-and-equity-for-all/ https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/diversity-and-equity-f...
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  The page you linked to didn’t say they “wouldn’t be admitting more Asians than the population they are picking candidates from” nor did it even remotely imply that. The easiest way to get into UW is to be (graduate high school) from eastern Washington, they actually have a state mandated quota for that.
  - petilon 5y ago
    What do you think the words racial "equity" means?
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      Aspiration. But UW is not allowed to create quotas out of thin air to implement equity (like say the Eastern WA quota).
      - petilon 5y ago
        If they have that aspiration they have tools to implement it. The tool is called "holistic review", which opaquifies the admissions process. People who read college applications are "guided" by Universities using a system of feedback so they can get whatever outcome they want. Read more about that here: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-the-veil-on-the-holistic-process-at-the-university-of-california-berkeley.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
vmception 5y ago
Agreed, equally as much “safe spaces” are “separate but equal” race based segregation. If some people base their opinions this way for validation: I’m a minority. Nip it in the bud, take it to court, call it out for what it is. Race based discrimination has no place in this society, find another way, especially for any institution that takes any state or federal funding, you can totalllly curb stomp that approach.
- worker767424 5y ago
  The notion of "black spaces" is one two two logical jumps from Jim Crow. I don't see how more people don't realize the implications of that term.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  This needed to be rooted out at the legal level: civil rights laws need to be radically scaled back: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j... There's a reason why lawyers are the second biggest financial contributors to the Democrats among professions: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBwtxXnUUAIAm8W?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBwtxXnUUAIAm8W?format=jpg&name=...
  - vmception 5y ago
    Existing civil rights laws are the ones that will force integration. I think you’re conflating a conservative newscycle view of what happens in some universities with the supporting legality. That article doesn’t address safe spaces, it touches on a notion of privileging speech of a victim class at the expense of a different class and says thats rooted in the civil rights act. It says everything you want to be afraid of but I think its operating in a very distorted realm and should also hire its own lawyers and see what view federal court actually hold.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      The evidence the essay provides is compelling to me. This follow up article provides yet more evidence, including a recent $100 million + judgement against Tesla under Civil Rights Law: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta... Anti-discrimination lawyers are licking their lips at the prospect of sueing SpaceX next, this time for sexual harassment: https://www.space.com/spacex-sexual-harassment-allegations-lawsuits https://www.space.com/spacex-sexual-harassment-allegations-l... The explanation provided by the essays is coherent and resonates with I have seen. The Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use IQ tests to hire applicants. It is totalitarian in nature and needs to be scaled back to enable a free society where a sanctimonious elite is not using the force of the state to reshape private citizens.
unityByFreedom 5y ago
Possibly relevant: helping students cheat on the SATs is a whole industry in China, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-iowa/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
lozenge 5y ago
Roaring back to life? It's always been like this, it's public awareness that has improved.
unpolloloco 5y ago
It's not clear that they want to admit fewer Asians... That is unless those Asian families aren't massive donors to the University...

slavboj 5y ago

A quarter of Harvard's entering class is Asian (vs about 6% of the US population and less in the youth bracket). What proportion would you like?

kaczordon 5y ago
And it’s stayed this way for years. Odd no? Just look at Caltech with its over 40% Asian student demographic. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/caltech-college-admissions-asians-11639431134 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/caltech-college-admissions-...
chii 5y ago
a proportion that reflects the meritocratic criteria that university admission was founded upon (or at least, was sold as).
- markdown 5y ago
  Meritocracy might be great for the high achievers, but it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values. It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism. If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society. That might mean some high achievers losing out on their first choice college, it might mean affirmative action, etc. Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
  - kaczordon 5y ago
    Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness. The ideology of Equality of Outcome has literally lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people worldwide(Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot).
  - jkestner 5y ago
    Meritocracy is a fine ideal, but in practice is based on selection algorithms, and like any algorithm it can be and is used to launder whatever biases you like. Who decided what was meritorious? who wrote the tests? Given what you're replying to, it sounds like you're suggesting that Asian Americans dominate power in this country, which I must be misinterpreting because that's ridiculous. I do agree with the general sentiment that what high achievers deserve is not necessarily what's good for society, but I'd say we should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      Something I never see people talk about is the difference between: (1) each job being filled by the person who's better suited for it than any other person *versus* (2) each job being filled by a person who's better suited for it than for any other job I think this is where narratives and assumptions about "meritocracy" and free markets fall down. You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict. And it's hard to be honest from the point of view of hiring people, that (1) is basically not a realistic option. Everybody says their goal is to hire the best person for a job without acknowledging that the best person is not, and should not, be available. Is (2) optimal for society? I'm not sure, but I think society is closer to that than (1). But "meritocracy" sounds more like (1) to me.
      - rsj_hn 5y ago
        > You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict.? They are not in conflict at all, this is what the basic welfare theorems of economics say. It's just that #2 and #1 are impossible to achieve because it requires perfect information about each person and each job, and a unified labor market, which just isn't realistic, as information has a cost and labor markets are fragmented. In the real world, we are lucky to get some aspects of both #1 and #2, in the sense that people do search for jobs best suited for them, but imperfectly, and employers do search for workers best suited for each job, but imperfectly, and you kinda meet in the middle. If you want, you can call "meritocracy" the freedom of the employer to hire the best worker available, but I'm not sure of a snappy phrase to describe the freedom of the worker to search for the best job available. Maybe someone came up with a label for that. But really they are flipsides of a process that leads to an optimum, they are not two opposing forces where one makes the other impossible. It is like buying and selling, the supply curve does not make the demand curve impossible; both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet. If you mess with either the demand curve or the supply curve, you do not end up at the optimum price, you end up losing welfare somehow. Obviously anything that can reduce frictions helps you get closer to the meeting of 1 and 2. For example, greater availability of job boards and pay transparency, working condition transparency to get information about available jobs to workers, or things like more accurate information about worker skills and talents to employers (e.g. meaningfulness of degrees play a role here as do rigorous interviews). Really both worker and employer are facing a murky question trying to figure out "how good is the other side here?". Both need as much information as possible. It is the costliness of information that keeps us away from 1 and 2 simultaneously.
- troutmskreplica 5y ago
  Sorry, but I don’t think your idea of meritocracy is very much in line with what most Universities are looking for. That’s why they have things like essays and consider extracurricular activities. Most of the selective Universities specifically exclude people with high grades and very little else that they were involved in. Moreover, I recall reading at some point that at least some of the Ivy’s, during at least the first half of the 20th century, specifically avoided students with the highest grades in favor of those who were more like a B+ average and were more social, which they determined through the very subjective means of interviewing students on campus. (I’m old enough that I recall some of my friends visiting Universities for such meetings, but I have no idea if they still meet prospective students like this).
  - chillacy 5y ago
    Afaik they do this because they wanted to avoid admitting so many Jewish students in the 1900s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/14/before-asian-americans-sued-harvard-the-school-tried-restricting-the-number-of-jews/?noredirect=on https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/14... https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
    - troutmskreplica 5y ago
      Sorry I cannot tell what “this” is since that article neither mentions downplaying grades or interviewing students. I believe the specific things I am talking about were discussed in relation to introversion and The Ivy’s specifically wanting to lean toward extroverts who were well-rounded and had good social skills.
headsupftw 5y ago
Hence the need to lower the acceptance rate of Asian applicants even more?
mbg721 5y ago
"What proportion (of x ethnic group) would you like?" is a question that greatly devalues the contributions of the individual student. Would you say, "You're a great interview candidate, but we already have a tall guy,"?
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I was told a story about someone who applied to a school of engineering somewhere or other, in the latter part of the 1950s. She had a sterling high school record, but they wrote a rejection letter explaining that they already had a woman attending the institution. The punch line, as it were, as I recall it, was that "a woman" did not mean one undergraduate woman, but just one, period. So, she went to a much less prestigious and well-known school, majored in math, and ended up being a programmer instead of an engineer. I am not sure if she was bitter about it.
- slavboj 5y ago
  Surely you're aware that this literally and explicitly happens in the context of college admissions. "We already have a couple tuba players, try Yale."
- kenjackson 5y ago
  Happens all the time in sports. And really we do it for college too. Except it is “we already have enough comp science majors”.
  - thomasz 5y ago
    Discrimination happens when you treat equals as unequal, or unequals as equal. There is a world of difference between "we already have enough asian compsci majors", and "we already have enough compsci majors, but there is room for a sociologist".
imgabe 5y ago
Whatever proportion meets the admissions criteria.
zthrowaway 5y ago
Not caring about what people look like is a good start.

petilon 5y ago

> The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians. Just the Ivies? UW is explicit: they want racial "equity". Meaning they won't admit more Asians, as a percentage, than the population they are picking candidates from. And they promote it as a good thing: https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/diversity-and-equity-for-all/ https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/diversity-and-equity-f...

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
The page you linked to didn’t say they “wouldn’t be admitting more Asians than the population they are picking candidates from” nor did it even remotely imply that. The easiest way to get into UW is to be (graduate high school) from eastern Washington, they actually have a state mandated quota for that.
- petilon 5y ago
  What do you think the words racial "equity" means?
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    Aspiration. But UW is not allowed to create quotas out of thin air to implement equity (like say the Eastern WA quota).
    - petilon 5y ago
      If they have that aspiration they have tools to implement it. The tool is called "holistic review", which opaquifies the admissions process. People who read college applications are "guided" by Universities using a system of feedback so they can get whatever outcome they want. Read more about that here: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-the-veil-on-the-holistic-process-at-the-university-of-california-berkeley.html?pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...

vmception 5y ago

Agreed, equally as much “safe spaces” are “separate but equal” race based segregation. If some people base their opinions this way for validation: I’m a minority. Nip it in the bud, take it to court, call it out for what it is. Race based discrimination has no place in this society, find another way, especially for any institution that takes any state or federal funding, you can totalllly curb stomp that approach.

worker767424 5y ago
The notion of "black spaces" is one two two logical jumps from Jim Crow. I don't see how more people don't realize the implications of that term.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
This needed to be rooted out at the legal level: civil rights laws need to be radically scaled back: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j... There's a reason why lawyers are the second biggest financial contributors to the Democrats among professions: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBwtxXnUUAIAm8W?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBwtxXnUUAIAm8W?format=jpg&name=...
- vmception 5y ago
  Existing civil rights laws are the ones that will force integration. I think you’re conflating a conservative newscycle view of what happens in some universities with the supporting legality. That article doesn’t address safe spaces, it touches on a notion of privileging speech of a victim class at the expense of a different class and says thats rooted in the civil rights act. It says everything you want to be afraid of but I think its operating in a very distorted realm and should also hire its own lawyers and see what view federal court actually hold.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    The evidence the essay provides is compelling to me. This follow up article provides yet more evidence, including a recent $100 million + judgement against Tesla under Civil Rights Law: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta... Anti-discrimination lawyers are licking their lips at the prospect of sueing SpaceX next, this time for sexual harassment: https://www.space.com/spacex-sexual-harassment-allegations-lawsuits https://www.space.com/spacex-sexual-harassment-allegations-l... The explanation provided by the essays is coherent and resonates with I have seen. The Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use IQ tests to hire applicants. It is totalitarian in nature and needs to be scaled back to enable a free society where a sanctimonious elite is not using the force of the state to reshape private citizens.

unityByFreedom 5y ago

Possibly relevant: helping students cheat on the SATs is a whole industry in China, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-iowa/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...

lozenge 5y ago

Roaring back to life? It's always been like this, it's public awareness that has improved.

unpolloloco 5y ago

It's not clear that they want to admit fewer Asians... That is unless those Asian families aren't massive donors to the University...