7 ms·

To quote from the brief. Unlike applicants whose identities have been affected mainly by their socioeconomic or geographic circumstances, applicants whose form

• eloff 4y ago
  This is the danger of focusing on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. In my opinion, the former is not possible anyway, it's not a good goal. People are different and they're going to have different outcomes, even if only considering chance. But they should have the same opportunities regardless of race, gender, etc. Making policy to address this is tackling the root of the problem instead of the symptoms.
  • rileymat2 4y ago
    To go with your analogy, when I am sick, I want both the root of the problem dealt with along with the symptoms. I don’t see why you would not attack things from both angles.
    • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > when I am sick, I want both the root of the problem dealt with along with the symptoms Society isn't conscious and people aren't microbes. The analogy of a cytokine storm taking out healthy cells to drive off infection becomes grim when the "healthy cells" are people.
      • ModernMech 4y ago
        > Society isn't conscious and people aren't microbes. Maybe, maybe not :P http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.htm http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...
    • eloff 4y ago
      To understand that, you really have to go beyond the analogy. I think trying to address differences in outcome by discrimination is morally dubious and potentially could backfire and make things worse.
  • api 4y ago
    I largely agree, but here's an attempt at a "steel man" of the opposing point of view: Unjust discrimination is complex, often subconscious, and deeply rooted in institutional structures and culture. It's too complex and elusive to address directly beyond the obvious removal of explicit regulations (desegregation) and finger wagging. Those things have already been done and yet extreme inequalities persist, so addressing outcome is the only way people can think of to go any deeper.
    • zmgsabst 4y ago
      But what’s missing from your steelman is why returning to racial discrimination will solve the problems of past racial discrimination — rather than making them worse, by teaching a whole new generation to be racists.
      • hackerlight 4y ago
        Forget making it worse as the primary concern. I am concerned about fascism emerging as a backlash to anti-White discrimination. People are pissed that their society has turned against them and will abandon democracy to fix the situation.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • teddyh 4y ago
          But people love it when the other side gets “pissed”, even if it’s mostly in their imagination. Social media is almost full of schadenfreude, with no system in place to dampen it. On the contrary, any attempts at understanding the other side is called “defending them” or “weakness”.
    • btilly 4y ago
      BS. It starts at kindergarten and before. Minority children should enter schools where they have a chance, with the resources to take advantage of that chance. But we don't. And here in California, blacks graduating high school on average only read as well as 8th grade blacks. Attempting to create equality of outcome after that is a lost cause. I can think of a dozen policies that would be more effective at helping blacks than discriminating against Asians at elite universities. My favorite example is that research says that homework provides little net benefit on average, but specifically hurts children in disadvantaged families where parents themselves lack the skills to help their children understand the material. Therefore dramatically reducing homework will help blacks. (And will also make families with teenagers much less stressful places.)
  • hintymad 4y ago
    > This is the danger of focusing on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. In my opinion, the former is not possible anyway, For this statement alone the left can label you as far right. In the past 10 years or so, I repeatedly hear a consistent message: we fight for equal outcome. And of course, identity is a critical factor, if not the only factor, in this fight. I'm actually very curious how the American elites reach this conclusion, and how they reconcile the bloody history of people pursuing equal outcome (or in the name of it).
    • upsidesinclude 4y ago
      It's just reconcile. Reconciliate is a post construction of 'reconciliation'
      • hintymad 4y ago
        thanks! updated.
    • slashdev 4y ago
      I always thought of myself as quite left of center. Now I find myself on the right, and I don't understand if I became more conservative as I got older, or if the center moved past me to the left.
      • btilly 4y ago
        You are far from alone. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144 is relatable for a lot of people.
      • cudgy 4y ago
        The center has not moved as much as the willingness of journalists and news organizations to ignore their duties to provide a truthful and unbiased service to their readers and constituents. Allowing their built-in left-leaning biases to affect their mission has given the impression that the population has shifted left. The next few elections will possibly shake some of this out. I just hope it doesn’t swing too far the other way.
• Gunax 4y ago
  That is their stated reason, because the only legally acceptable discrimination is for bona fide educational purposes. That is, they cannot discriminate to right historical wrongs, but only because having a diverse student body is part of the education. I have doubts that this is the real reason, but legally they need to cloak it as that.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
  I really don't understand current progressive ideology. Apart from discrimination against Asians, there is also the whole "Hijab empowers women" nonsense. I come from a part of the world where women have to fight for the right to take off hijab. They are shunned socially for doing so. In worse places, they can be jailed or beaten. Imagine coming from such a place to America, and seeing here women are wearing that symbol of oppression as a fashion statement. It just boggles the mind. Its analogous to if you were an American slave in 1800s, got your freedom and sailed to the UK. And on landing saw blacks in the UK wearing chains as a fashion accessory. It seems so disrespectful towards your struggle.
  • shkkmo 4y ago
    > Its analogous to if you were an American slave in 1800s, got your freedom and sailed to the UK. And on landing saw blacks in the UK wearing chains as a fashion accessory. It seems so disrespectful towards your struggle. I would point out that chains are indeed a popular fashion accessory. I think that telling people what to wear removes power from them. It isn't contradictory to believe that telling people that they must wear something and telling people that they must not wear that thing can BOTH be dis-empowering. So while I think you should absolutely share your experiences and the feelings you get when you see others wearing a hijab, I absolutely do not think you should push for laws that make it illegal to wear one.
    • belorn 4y ago
      > I think that telling people what to wear removes power from them. Indeed, it does remove power from them. It is also something which every country, every culture, and every religion has in common. They all put in rules about what people are allowed and not allowed to wear. The support for those are also quite high when people are forced to think about them, but since they are such an omnipresence, it like talking to fish about water. It is a rare event that I find a person who honestly believe that people should have an inalienable-right to decide from themselves what to wear with neither government, culture or religion being able to overrule that decision.
• samatman 4y ago
  It's not Asians primarily. They are discriminated against more stiffly, but are far outnumbered in the US by Whites, who also get the thumb placed on the wrong pan of the scale. The focus on Asians is because of a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it.
  • rjbwork 4y ago
    >The focus on Asians is because of a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it. Maybe. I think it's because they are a small population being discriminated against heavily, versus a much larger population being discriminated against mildly. It seems far more egregious in the case of Asians when you look at the disparities in test scores required for admissions to these institutions by race.
    • cudgy 4y ago
      Yet Asians earn more than all other ethnic groups, even the “mildly” discriminated whites, and Asians are far from a small population amongst those applying to these schools. This is another reason why picking and choosing admissions by race or even just test scores is nonsense. Create a minimum criteria to succeed in a program and simply randomly choose the students from that pool is a reasonable solution that avoids much of the discriminatory issues and likely results in a more diverse student body.
  • btilly 4y ago
    The focus on Asians is because the group that brought this group is mostly Asian-American. And that is true because, as you admit, Asians are being discriminated against more stiffly. Now it is necessarily true that if we try to discriminate in favor of some group (eg blacks), we must necessarily give them an advantage over another group (eg whites). But the motivation there is arguably to help the historically disadvantaged, and not specifically to hurt whites. But there is NO argument for doing what these universities are doing. To identify racial groups that they want to discriminate against because they are too good. I see no difference between policies to discriminate against Asians today and historical policies to put quotas on how many Jews got accepted. And I doubt that there is much coincidence about which universities engaged in both policies.
• treis 4y ago
  When juxtaposed with their legacy preferences the hypocrisy is obvious and quite rank.