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> Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level. But if you accept it here, why not accept it everywhere? Either race-based discriminatio

> Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level. But if you accept it here, why not accept it everywhere? Either race-based discrimination is bad and should never be done or acceptable in some cases. If it's bad, Harvard (and others) should stop immediately. End of story. If it's acceptable in "some cases" the next question is: Who determines those cases? And then: Are there a set of fixed criteria or is it a case by case basis? If it's case by case, who empowers and chooses the group making the decisions? What oversight and rules are on this group? The "some cases" scenario is ripe for malfeasance and influence peddling.. which is just another "good old boys club."

streptomycin 11y ago
Harvard vs. state school is far less important than med school vs. no med school. The broader problem with med school is that we should have more med schools accepting more students, and then there wouldn't be such a stark "med school vs. no med school" scenario. So the root cause of that problem isn't racial discrimination, it's just that racial discrimintation in that context might have a much bigger impact due to some other unrelated factors. Beyond the med school issue, racial discrimination in college admissions is pretty far down the list of issues in society that I'm worried about, because it just doesn't have that big of an impact.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > Harvard vs. state school is far less important than med school vs. no med school. > The broader problem with med school is that we should have more med schools accepting more students, and then there wouldn't be such a stark "med school vs. no med school" scenario. Since the bottleneck is residency programs, not the number of people who receive MDs, all this would do is increase the number of people who have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt without being able to legally practice medicine. There are more people who graduate medical school than there there are residency slots available, and since residency slots are government-funded (through Medicare). Establishing new medical schools won't do anything.
  - streptomycin 11y ago
    I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing? Also, what do you mean residency programs are the bottleneck? Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine? Then we should increase residency programs. Whatever. I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand.
    - chimeracoder 11y ago
      > I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing? I never said that it wouldn't; I said that having more medical schools would have literally zero impact on the number of doctors practicing medicine. > Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine? Yes, because medical school isn't where you learn to practice medicine; residency is. > Then we should increase residency programs. There are so many political barriers to allocating the kind of funding necessary for this that it's not a realistic expectation anytime for the foreseeable future. > I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand. Sort of - but the medical field is rather complicated to a degree that would be tough to summarize in an HN comment. In short, yes, this general principle is true, but in the case of medicine, there are enough confounding factors that it's not as simple as "more residency programs → more and better care". If you could hold everything else constant, yes, that may be the case, but in practice, this wouldn't happen in isolation, and there would be a lot of other effects.
      - streptomycin 11y ago
        http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2014/05/26/Some-med-school-grads-fail-to-get-residency/stories/201405260083 http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2014/05/26/Some-med-... says this year there were 26,678 residency positions and 412 people who didn't match. Even if we opened more residency positions, we'd still need more medical schools too, right? Because 412 doctors isn't enough to make a dent in the status quo. I mean, we'll need another 412 doctors just to account for population growth in a couple years. But the whole system seems weird to me as an outsider.
Retric 11y ago
Pick your battles.
- notsony 11y ago
  True... but what if you are going to have to spend your whole life fighting against silent discrimination? Reddit CEO Ellen Pao says she is hiring for diversity. Google and IBM are putting hundreds of millions into diversity programmes for hiring and training. Twitter is publishing employee diversity reports. So if you're a coding genius but you're white or Asian, straight, male, not disabled, guess what? You're not going to be hired by tech start-ups and companies who are obsessed about showing how "diverse" they are rather than hiring the best candidate for the job.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    I don't think any tech firms that are concerned with diversity are not hiring "coding geniuses" that happen to be White or Asian. Diversity programs mainly attempt to increasing the number of members of currently-underrepresented groups in the entrance of the hiring funnel and reducing biases in the hiring process that select for currently-overrepresented groups over merit.
    - notsony 11y ago
      People should only be hired on merit. It should not be the job of human resources to resolve social issues.

streptomycin 11y ago

Harvard vs. state school is far less important than med school vs. no med school. The broader problem with med school is that we should have more med schools accepting more students, and then there wouldn't be such a stark "med school vs. no med school" scenario. So the root cause of that problem isn't racial discrimination, it's just that racial discrimintation in that context might have a much bigger impact due to some other unrelated factors. Beyond the med school issue, racial discrimination in college admissions is pretty far down the list of issues in society that I'm worried about, because it just doesn't have that big of an impact.

chimeracoder 11y ago
> Harvard vs. state school is far less important than med school vs. no med school. > The broader problem with med school is that we should have more med schools accepting more students, and then there wouldn't be such a stark "med school vs. no med school" scenario. Since the bottleneck is residency programs, not the number of people who receive MDs, all this would do is increase the number of people who have taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt without being able to legally practice medicine. There are more people who graduate medical school than there there are residency slots available, and since residency slots are government-funded (through Medicare). Establishing new medical schools won't do anything.
- streptomycin 11y ago
  I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing? Also, what do you mean residency programs are the bottleneck? Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine? Then we should increase residency programs. Whatever. I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand.
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing? I never said that it wouldn't; I said that having more medical schools would have literally zero impact on the number of doctors practicing medicine. > Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine? Yes, because medical school isn't where you learn to practice medicine; residency is. > Then we should increase residency programs. There are so many political barriers to allocating the kind of funding necessary for this that it's not a realistic expectation anytime for the foreseeable future. > I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand. Sort of - but the medical field is rather complicated to a degree that would be tough to summarize in an HN comment. In short, yes, this general principle is true, but in the case of medicine, there are enough confounding factors that it's not as simple as "more residency programs → more and better care". If you could hold everything else constant, yes, that may be the case, but in practice, this wouldn't happen in isolation, and there would be a lot of other effects.
    - streptomycin 11y ago
      http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2014/05/26/Some-med-school-grads-fail-to-get-residency/stories/201405260083 http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2014/05/26/Some-med-... says this year there were 26,678 residency positions and 412 people who didn't match. Even if we opened more residency positions, we'd still need more medical schools too, right? Because 412 doctors isn't enough to make a dent in the status quo. I mean, we'll need another 412 doctors just to account for population growth in a couple years. But the whole system seems weird to me as an outsider.

Retric 11y ago

Pick your battles.

notsony 11y ago
True... but what if you are going to have to spend your whole life fighting against silent discrimination? Reddit CEO Ellen Pao says she is hiring for diversity. Google and IBM are putting hundreds of millions into diversity programmes for hiring and training. Twitter is publishing employee diversity reports. So if you're a coding genius but you're white or Asian, straight, male, not disabled, guess what? You're not going to be hired by tech start-ups and companies who are obsessed about showing how "diverse" they are rather than hiring the best candidate for the job.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  I don't think any tech firms that are concerned with diversity are not hiring "coding geniuses" that happen to be White or Asian. Diversity programs mainly attempt to increasing the number of members of currently-underrepresented groups in the entrance of the hiring funnel and reducing biases in the hiring process that select for currently-overrepresented groups over merit.
  - notsony 11y ago
    People should only be hired on merit. It should not be the job of human resources to resolve social issues.