To be clear, Yale absolutely does discriminate against Asian applicants. As far as I can tell, they justify it using the same language about "personality" that they used to justifying discriminating against Jews in the the first half of the 20th century.
What is most galling about this is that even if we assume that culture X yields candidates with personality characteristics undervalued by culture Y, _racial background doesn't indicate culture_. How should a second-generation Taiwanese American raised predominantly in American culture answer the race question on their application?
This. I remember an anecdote by Ota Ulč, a Czech writer who escaped communism to emigrate into the USA.
When asked to select his race, Ota didn't realize "Caucasian" applied to him – after all he's Czech, not from Caucasus! So he checked "Other" instead. An honest mistake.
Yale is 20-27% Jewish [1,2], while the US is just 1.7-2.6% [3]. Few other groups would have the gall to call 10x over-representation as being discriminated against.
That was exactly the same argument the soviet union had. So we have too much jews there, lets limit it. Its not discriminating, since there are already so much jews or asians in the universities (20%+). On the individual level a person get reject based on its race, that is sad.
I'm sorry, are you saying that Jewish students are currently, in the US, in Yale, being discriminated against in college applications? Despite the current and previous Yale presidents both being Jewish [1,2]? And that without that discrimination, they would be... what? 40% of all Yale students? More?
Just because Jews and Asians have high enrollment at a university doesn't mean the numbers are being suppressed. It's pretty trivial to show wrt quantitative methods that it is clearly true that it's happening... hence the OP.
Not sure what assumptions are to be made by comparing this with US population by ethnicity except that they should be match up - which I don't agree with.
Also are Jewish people considered White in this case? I simultaneously see that they are referred to as minorities but also don't see them represented in statistics such as these when comparing ethnicity in X with ethnic population in the US.
Are you non-white according to the classification system commonly used by the US government and universities though? In the US, everyone who lives in Mexico and almost everyone who lives in Iraq is white.
No idea. Why should I care what the US government thinks white equates to. Having zero "white", "caucasian", or similar ancestry other than Jewish and from Arab lands for hundreds of years makes me very non-white.
But if you want to judge it by looks, I look like an Arab. Like hundreds of thousands of other Jews.
That's fine. I'm sorry if I've offended you. I meant that for the purpose of these discussions about US university racial demographics, Arabs are white.
No worries, I wasn't offended! I just think it's insane that a group of people other than my own can even think to tell me what my ethnicity is. As an example, it would be utter hubris were I to say the same to Black Americans, so I'm not sure why it's randomly okay to do this to other groups.
> Not sure what assumptions are to be made by comparing this with US population by ethnicity except that they should be match up - which I don't agree with.
Different race happen to be correlated with different cultural values.
One particular cultural value is caring a whole lot about education and prestigious degrees (see the test prep industry in most of asia).
I have no problem with people who value education getting an edge in admissions. So even in a race-blind world, I am okay with outcomes not matching population statistics. Because in a world where you're solely judged based on your values that's exactly what you'd see.
But what's happening is that two different people can both adopt this same "education" value and have different outcome because of their race. The opportunities are not equal, not for blacks, not for asians.
The demographics of the US population may differ from the demographics of the college-age US population, or the demographics of the population of high-achieving high schoolers who want to go to Yale, or the demographics or the population of those people plus international students.
Alternately, it rewards those who made the school great in the first place -- by admitting their children.
Note that it's not strictly zero sum either. Huge grants by previous may have opened the university to more people than are admitted by legacy admissions -- yielding greater participation by non-legacy than previously possible.
People are choosing one small slice of what goes on with a university -- admissions right now. They are glossing over the fact that it is other people who made the university great over the years to the point that it is desirable at all. Those people made it great by donating money and going on to bring prestige to the university. Ignore them and lose the prestige and money.
==They are glossing over the fact that it is other people who made the university great over the years to the point that it is desirable at all. Those people made it great by donating money and going on to bring prestige to the university. Ignore them and lose the prestige and money.==
Nobody is glossing over that fact. I am simply saying that if anything outside of a student's merit is "discrimination", then taking into account the alumni status or past contributions of [not that student] is also "discrimination".
They are not the student's merits to weigh, they are the relative's merits.
Ok, but "discrimination" is a loaded word and definitely not neutral. It has implications. It implies a right to admission that ignores the desires of those who built the school to what it is now (which would be that their heirs get to attend as well).
Not all selection criteria is "discrimination". Alternately, if it is, then there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination.
Again, these are private schools that everyone is talking about. The use of legacy admissions in a state school would be completely wrong.
Google? I know that sounds rude, but since it's well established, not some fringe theory, it's trivial to find out yourself. Wikipedia has a page on it with references you can dig into. Google also shows a Forbes article if you want lighter reading.
I asked for your source because most studies have been refuted and I was curious if you found a legitimate one. Pulling up a random link on Google is not helpful to the discussion.
>>> The concept of "race" is a social construct, and "intelligence" has no agreed-upon definition; the validity of IQ tests as a metric for general intelligence is itself disputed. In particular, there is no scientific evidence that the average IQ scores of different racial or ethnic population groups can be attributed to any claimed genetic differences between those groups.
I didn't say it was attributed to genetic differences, nor that IQ is a good measure of general intelligence. I didn't even use the word "race" that you're concerned about the definition of. You might be arguing a different point.
What are these most studies that have been refuted? Can you tell me the number or the percentage or a big list of refuted studies along with a shorter list of non-refuted ones, or anything to show that's a real fact and you're not just repeating what activists have told you. Make sure it's not a trick like counting mostly 100 year old studies which could be greater in number allowing you to ignore everything from the last couple of decades. That might make true but also misleading.
I am not concerned about the definition of race - that was a direct quote from the Wikipedia article that you pointed me to.
Somehow the goalposts got reversed and I am now responsible for disproving your theory.
Let's go back to the original post. You made an assertion and I asked for a source because I was genuinely curious where you were drawing conclusions from. You then linked me to Wikipedia and I stated that all of the studies on that page are refuted (not abstractly... directly refuted in the Wikipedia article).
The same article says "In the US, generally individuals identifying themselves as Asian tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians" Where does it say that it's refuted?
"The IQ debate became worldwide in scope when it was shown that East
Asians scored higher on IQ tests than did Whites, both within the United States and in Asia, even though IQ tests were developed for use in the Euro American culture" https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense... You might not like the author of that one but it's in term cited to someone else.
"The top 10 countries by average IQ are:
1. Hong Kong (108)
2. Singapore (108)
3. South Korea (106)
4. China (105)
5. Japan (105)
6. Taiwan (105)"
[7+ is where non-Asian countries appear.]
https://www.healthline.com/health/average-iq#average-iq
I can't actually find anything saying there are no such differences, whether for Asians or anyone. Can you? For something that's so refuted, why didn't even The Guardian bother to mention it when they're trying so hard to oppose that kind of idea?https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-gen...
Remember, your claim is that all of these are wrong and most of the studies they're based on have been refuted.
There is disagreement among researchers about the causes of the differences, but not about their existence. I think you're confusing the two.
No - I can't say that I agree with the way you are using this data.
Your original comment implied causation - that different races have different intelligences BECAUSE of their race. You are hiding behind a technicality of never explicitly saying "causes" in your posts.
The sources you posted are all correlational - and indeed each goes on to explain in great detail why they are not causal. You are literally using articled that disagree with your initial implication to try to prove some technicality and twist data.
It is no better than stating "black people are dangerous" and then providing articles that show per-capita crime rate. The data without context (socioeconomic forces, etc) is useless. Using it blindly hurts people.
So you do agree but just misunderstood me. You should have made this post about your assumptions up front instead of asking for evidence of the wrong claim.
You people really need to stop hunting for racists under every rock! It blocks your ability to think as well as everyone else's when they're at risk of being attacked for failing to write the equivalent of "praise the Lord" at the end of every sentence to demonstrate their faithfulness.
I never said that I misunderstood. I said that your comment was implying other things. You are hiding behind technicalities, knowing full well what you had implied.
Hypothetically, if I commented on a fashion blog "people that wear blue shirts are more intelligent" and then pointed to an article stating that doctors often wear scrubs and score higher on intelligence, my original comment - while technically true - is worthless - it adds nothing to the discussion. Worse, my comment implies the wrong thing - color of shirts is independent - the true causal variable is a person's profession
I asked for a source for your statement. Why was it so hard to provide that? Instead we had to go through this huge ordeal to discover that you were making a weak correlational observation. Was it because you knew that your articles didn't support the claim you made?
I was reluctant to provide a source because it was trivial to do so yourself. I found 7 just from the first page of a couple of quick Google searches.
But it turns out you didn't want a source for my claim, you wanted a source for a different claim that you didn't state. Your mind is so bogged down in racism that you can't read people's words objectively.
No, it's not like your blue shirt example. Many people credit race-IQ differences to fairly common differences in upbringing and treatment by others, not the existence of some small but very uniform sub-group. A better example would be "people wearing t-shirts are less intelligent than people wearing buttoned shirts". That might actually correlate with the jobs of a wide range of people.
But at the end of the day, it's very clear:
My claim: "those different ethnic groups have different average IQs"
Your interpretation: "different races have different intelligences BECAUSE of their race"
That is clearly a misunderstanding, so you misunderstood me. The difference between causation and correlation exists and you conflated the two.
It’s hard to find global numbers by these categories, but I think world class universities should look at global numbers rather than usa only numbers... if they are going to look at demographics at all. if you look at global numbers, caltech demographics may be pretty close to being proportional representation.
The US makes up about 4% of the global population. So it would only makes sense to expect Yale to be close to global representation if only about 4% of its students were from the US.
And I'm sure there are many world-class universities in India, China, Japan, Egypt, Turkey... Are they pretty close to proportional if you look at global numbers? For example, Kyoto University or Peking University, both world class institutions, does their student body reflect the global population, or the Japanese/Chinese population?
What I mean is us is a melting pot / magnet for upward social mobility. So I expect in the long run, the annual cohort of bright children would be proportionally represented here in the top Private universities / companies.
Or...
I expect the demographics of hn users to be more similar to global demographics rather than us demographics.
Note: these do not add up to 100%, because they are ignoring international students. So whatever comparison you're trying to do with US demographics needs to be normalized.
The percentages at the link above are labeled as "University-wide Enrollments," which seems to mean that they account for graduate students as well as undergraduates. But the DOJ finding is only about undergraduate admissions.
Source for the "personality" language? In everything I've seen from US universities, they justify race-based admissions policies primarily with language about "diversity".
>One of the most striking revelations pertains to Harvard’s consideration of applicants’ soft skills—things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”—in determining their acceptance. Despite boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits, according to a statistical analysis conducted on behalf of SFFA of more than 160,000 student records. This emphasis on personality, the analysis concludes, significantly undermined otherwise-qualified Asian Americans’ chances of getting in.
This is the problem with assigning weight to subjective, hand-wavey categories. It becomes an easy way for bias (conscious or unconscious) to creep in. The same thing happens with "culture fit" evaluations at tech companies.
The alternative isn't that rosy - if you judge everyone by (objective) standard tests, Goodhart's Law takes effect, and we breed a generation of highly optimized test takers. Maybe I'm just exposing my Western bias, but I have a child and I don't want his adolescence to be continuous preparation for one academic test after another. Mine wasn't.
Combining standardized tests along with bias-ridden subjective measurements may just be the best solution among lots of imperfect solutions. We try to address egregious abuses when we find them, but "fair" will always be a goal, not a destination.
> if you judge everyone by (objective) standard tests, Goodhart's Law takes effect, and we breed a generation of highly optimized test takers.
As opposed to a generation of people highly optimized for a fuzzier metric that nevertheless exists. I know a bunch of graduates from elite universities who all just happened to be really into debate/mock trials/mock UN, competed at the national/international level at obscure sports, founded a school newspaper (we had five new school newspapers every year because everyone wanted to be a founder, few of them last once the founder graduates), "founded" a "business", etc in high school[1]. They're all in consulting/banking/law/ML now. Mildly obfuscating the metric doesn't actually make Goodhart's law go away, it just means you have to be in the right crowd to game the metric.
[1] I, on the other hand, actually liked maths and became one of your "highly optimized test takers". Funnily enough, all the elite American schools said no, while Oxford said yes. I am now a PhD student (in maths) at one of the elite American institutions that rejected me as a high school student.[2] If you have a scarce resource, and a system that distributes it, people are going to game the system. The trick is to have better tests so you can't study to the test without actually, you know, learning.
Take a look at the SAT (subject) math section. That's the test that should be distinguishing between the student that goes to Harvard and the student that "merely" goes to Georgia Tech. Obviously it can do no such thing, it's way too easy. This is by design. The American system does not want to distinguish between the top 3% and the 0.5%, because then Harvard would have to take the poor genius over the solidly talented but unexceptional rich legacy kid whose dad is worth billions and will donate tens of millions.
Now take a look at the MAT, the maths test that tells you if you'll be going to Oxford or Imperial. Or the STEP, the analogous test for Cambridge.
[2] Disclaimer: I may be a little bitter to this day. In my defence, I teach the wannabe consultants now, and while some of them are legitimately very competent, boy does the system have false positives.
Rice University had about 600 freshmen when I matriculated over 2 decades ago and they rejected 16 perfect SATs that year. I feel for you, though I know that if you really are so into math then maybe this was a much better path for you than doing undergrad at an American institution where the goals in undergrad are usually broader and fuzzier. Contrast that with grad school where I’d be more inclined to be biased for the top student in the specific subject. My alma mater is a top-20 school and as unfair as it might seem, I appreciated the fruit of their quest for diversity among matriculants. Not only ethnic diversity, but people of a slightly wider set of interests too. I felt interacting with the other students was the best part of my college experience. It’s true I don’t know all the stories of the people who weren’t admitted, but when dealing with such tiny acceptance percentages it really feels more like a lottery for a very scarce resource. So it’s definitely not fair, and they’re deliberately not always choosing the highest scores. My mother always said life isn’t fair and I’m not sure if the outcome would be what you or I would hope for if the process was made more “fair” for undergrad selection.
I remember looking into the STEP after graduating for "fun".
They were such classic Oxbridge style questions, sure you can probably game them but as you say, once you've done the graft to game those types of questions, you're pretty much qualified to be there because the rest of your degree will just be more of the same.
Playing devil's advocate a little... it seemed like it worked out ok for you? There are different universities with different selection criteria, and any particular university might have multiple selection pools. There's room for rich scions and math geniuses at Harvard. And in your case, Harvard's loss was Oxford's gain.
I feel like you're expecting some sort of clear stack ranking of students. Even if you take tests at face value, do you accept the student who aces math but bombs literature, or the student who is merely above average in both? See also: computer science, chemistry, biology, physics, history, physical fitness, social sciences, languages, music, art...
We have examples of test-regime-driven educational advancement in Asia. From what I've read, it doesn't seem very appealing to me, either as a student or as a parent.
> Even if you take tests at face value, do you accept the student who aces math but bombs literature, or the student who is merely above average in both?
This is the kind of tradeoff I'd be happy to see colleges worried about. Complicating the fact is that US universities generally don't expect students to be set on a specific major while European ones do, making the US problem a bit harder. But I don't think this is what US unis are trading off on. I think they're trading off merit for parental wealth + future wealth (which is greatly effected by parental wealth).
Re: your comment about different unis with different criteria, I'd be a lot less worried if the diversity was evenly distributed geographically. I had the privilege of being able to choose from multiple countries. For the vast majority of high school students, studying abroad is not an option.
I'm venturing off into speculation here, but I don't think there's anything so organized or homogeneous about college admissions. Probably there are thousands of judges across various universities, each with their own biases, each trying to pick a hundreds of candidates among tens of thousands of applicants.
"US unis" don't seem like a homogenous block to me. But then, I went to a state school and received a fantastic CSc education that I would not trade for ivy league at any price. I've also interviewed/hired countless people and never even noticed what school they came from. I guess the policies of Yale don't bother me that much either way.
Added wrinkle is that for Oxbridge you'll get interviewed as well. I recall being asked interesting things that they didn't cover in class, things that are more deep understanding than parroting syllabus materials.
Certainly the test is not the be all end all, other factors are important. Grades, recommendation letters, activities, and an understanding of the students background.
However it can help us evaluate who is able to perform in a higher learning environment and that they have the knowledge to study advanced degrees.
I had 4 standardized tests in my educational career, 4th grade state test, 10th grade state test, ACT and GRE. Only 2 of those were non-repeatable.
How many do students take these days?
> if you judge everyone by (objective) standard tests
That's why I don't like standard tests. When I was studying, entrance exams were oral. You were given three problems (chosen at random), had some time to solve them, then presented your solutions to the examiner. Examiner would then ask follow-up questions.
There is no way to prepare for such test other than to learn the subject. No multiple-choice questions you can Kaplan.
What do you want your child selected on for an elite school then? The bedrock reality is that most children, by definition, won't make it into an elite school. How do we pick?
This question is phrased oddly. I want my child to enter an educational environment where he will flourish. It's not obvious to me that having the brand of an 'elite' school is all that significant.
We’re about to see an end to standardized tests for college admissions. This is paving the way for discrimination against good students who wish to attend elite universities. Currently elite universities ideas of diversity and “personality” are more important than upholding educational standards.
It is simply wrong to evaluate and condemn a person based on race. To justify any kind of discrimination on the idea that you are helping one person, you are hurting another. This an equally problematic, it’s taking us back to times before equal rights and for people to be judged on their abilities.
Hoping a brilliant student will apply to a university twice and deepfake their race in one of their admission interview videos.
How do you differentiate a good student as in a bright individual who has good grades but who doesn't "prepare" continuously versus a very good test taker and ambitions in this test taking sense and who is also able to prepare for any type of standardized test and ace them but, not as bright as the former? Surely not by race, that's no fun but standardized tests can be gamed and that was not their intention.
But how can they ensure that part cannot be gamed though? By choosing something non objective, this giving a little opening for inept but rich students? I understand that their funding is needed so why don’t they make a clear standard as in 1M donation or whatever is expected of these silverspoons?
Because it can't be elite its filled with people who are mediocre. It's in the name... elite. Everytime you just let someone in on some flimsy diversity grounds you debase degree.
It’s not in the name. The presumption is that elite means other good students, and not the school itself.
When I buy elite golf clubs, it means the clubs are elite not other people who buy it are.
Now you can argue part of the reason to attend college is because of your classmates. And then I’d ask is the best experience a bunch of kids who are simply good at school?
> The same thing happens with "culture fit" evaluations at tech companies.
I totally agree, this reminded me of culture fit interview questions as well. I think the evidence is very strong that almost any subjective evaluation is going to devolve down to the evaluator picking whatever confirms their subjective biases, then coming up with ex post facto rationalizations.
This to me says that assimilation doesn't work. The article states:
"boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits"
The outcome was to move the bar to soft skills:
things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”
This has happened to minority groups of all backgrounds in this country since its inception.
Except when alumni interviewed candidates, there was no such difference, only when university staff did. A pretty convincing smoking gun if you ask me.
I am glad I studied in France, where admission to elite schools is based purely on objective entrance exams (emphasis on Math). It’s not a perfect system, rich parents can afford tutors and teachers can tutor their kids, but it’s a hella fairer than the system in the US, corrupted by legacy admissions, sports scholarships and racial quotas that purposefully ignore socioeconomic disparity, because it’s easier for the powers-that-be to throw poor rural white kids under the bus than something that might adversely impact their own children.
I think you got just about everything correct except for just one nitpick —- the alumni actually interviewed the candidates in person, and the university staff did not and assigned personality score purely based on the application.
I'm from the Netherlands. I feel like the US admission proces is more like job interview, while in Europe it is more like multi year internship. Secondary education is divided into levels. If you pass all classes on the highest level and pass the final exam, you are guaranteed university admission. If you were a late bloomer and you started at a lower level, there are of course proceses to go up.
> This is ironic because in the U.S. most people believe the S.A.T. is the most biased portion of the college entrance criteria.
I don't see any evidence either that most people believe that or that it's true.
I personally find it more likely that high school grades and extracurriculars are probably the most biased portions (grades because a large portion of them usually depends on assignments with loose grading rubrics, which are empirically linked to greater racial and other bias for otherwise similar responses, and extracurriculars because both access and evaluation of them is impacted by cultural factors of both the student, the evaluators, and other members of society.
Do you have a link to the this study? All I can find is this 2019 quote from the UC commission investigating this that indicates otherwise:
UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ, along with the UC system’s chief academic officer, Provost Michael Brown, said Friday that research has convinced them that performance on the tests is so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race...
The Chancellor and chief academic officer are politicians not academics. The academics voted to keep the SAT and ACT.
> UC should keep SAT and ACT as admission requirements, faculty report says
> University of California faculty leaders are recommending the continued use of the controversial SAT and ACT as an admission requirement for now, citing UC data showing the standardized tests may actually help boost enrollment of disadvantaged students, according to a highly anticipated report released Monday
From the article you posted, the faculty senate found that it was fine to keep the SAT and ACT because admissions officers were already correcting for racial and socioeconomic bias, not that bias doesn't exist. It says nothing about a study that finds no racial bias in the test, which is what I'm asking for.
"The new yearlong faculty review found evidence that most UC admissions officers offset much of the bias against disadvantaged students by evaluating standardized test scores in the context of their high schools and neighborhoods."
"Among students with SAT scores of 1000 — the 40th percentile — half of Latinos were admitted compared to less than one-third of whites."
Perhaps the current SAT is, but remember SAT I and the "oarsman–regatta analogy" question? That could explain why some people continue to suspect it's racially biased against non-whites.
To make a target race to score higher, fill the test with things the target race tends to be disproportionally familiar with (owing to culture, relative affluence, etc.) To bump up the average Black score, for instance, fill the test with word problems involving rappers.
1) Is that actually "most" people?
2) Is the belief that it's the "most" biased?
I've heard the claim that the SAT is biased against lower SES for a while now, but more on the left than the right, and I've never heard "most" biased.
We need to intervene much much earlier than college admissions if we want to fix that. But it's a really difficult problem because cultures in low SES areas like where I grew up tend to shame and beat the shit out of smart kids, and one culture's "intervention" is another's "unwelcome interference".
Even the whole argument about success rates of assimilation aside, this doesn't seem to check out.
How does this whole "assimilation doesn't work" argument even flow from the statement? Asian Americans referenced were all born in the US, grew up here, went through the education system here, etc. There is nowhere they need to assimilate to, they were born Americans and grew up here. This is their primary culture, not that of a country where their ancestors were born.
I am leaving a big possibility that I completely misunderstood your comment, so please correct me if my interpretation of it was incorrect.
so you meant to say assimilation doesn't work for them ? Makes me see your statement in a completely different light so you may want to qualify that :)
The most obvious course of action would be to deny the school any knowledge of an applicants race. Assign them a random number instead of a name and only conduct text-based interviews.
When I was in university I remember being somewhat intimidated by the asian students because I knew that while other white students had an even chance of being smarter or dumber than me, the asian ones were all probably smarter than me just to get in.
That does not show, however, that "personality" is used as a "cover" for discrimination. That argument, in fact, implicitly assumes equalism (i.e. that all groups have equal distributions of traits), which in turn justifies representation-based admissions. It is self-defeating in that regard.
Essentially "personality" appears a very pretextual criteria along with the goalposts mounted on rails. It is an infamous pattern of behavior of bigots that when they present some nominal objection they keep on changing it whenever it can actually be fulfilled. If they keep on changing the game it becomes clear that they just don't want to let them win no matter what and aren't acting in good faith.
Would be interested to see if Asians whose families have been in the USA for many years get in at different rates to e.g. immigrants or the children of immigrants. It would indicate that perhaps Yale et al. really do care about "personality", and aren't just being racist.
It reminds me a bit what my parents told me about the soviet union. So basically it was kind of the same. Too much jews in the universities, so lets discriminate them. The same is going on here, as far as race plays any role.
Kind of sad to see this kind of decision making around the globe.
How does "Scheduled Caste" work? Generally matters of caste are mysterious in the west, since they're rarely (in my experience) discussed with non-Indians.
Russian empire had the same policy. They justified it by the fact that unversities were financed by public money, and it would be unfair if most of the student, who this money would go to, turned out jews due to "this group's propensity" to education.
Of course that is the point. Also in yale. They want diversity. Even so, in such case the decision is based on race or let say gender and that alone is discriminating.
It reminds me of an other story of my parents. As Lenin came into power they took all the land from rich farmers and killed a lot of them. Since they were privileged and all the prosperity belongs to the people. The result was that bad skilled farmers took over and that led to more poverty.
These are loathsome comparisons. The experience of Jews in the Soviet Union in 1991 and before are not comparable to the experience of east Asians in America in 2020.
For every similarity you might imagine there are 1,000 more important dissimilarities. Surely if you are sincere about reducing discrimination "around the globe" you wouldn't be doing this kind of stylized generalization.
There are Asians out there that have put in enough effort to get into Yale (which is quite a high bar) and then been excluded because ... well, they're Asian. That isn't going to compare to anything positive or pleasant. Racism should be condemned in strongest possible terms.
> The experience of Jews in the Soviet Union...
True, but horrific ideology in the government is a totally different kettle of fish than that ideology in a non-government organisation.
If my neighbours don't really believe in property rights, I'll call them hippies and laugh about their eccentric antics. If my government doesn't really believe in property rights I'd give serious thought to fleeing the country.
> There are Asians out there that have put in enough effort to get into Yale (which is quite a high bar) and then been excluded because ... well, they're Asian.
> Yale uses race as a factor in multiple steps of the admissions process and that Yale “racially balances its classes.”
The situation of Jews in the Soviet Union's does not apply too well here because the real vs. stated reasoning behind it were very different. But I see a lot of parallels with the gender and racial discrimination in the workplace in current times. So there is precedent on legally using race or gender in a selection process.
When it comes to fixing past discrimination in the workplace it is already considered legally acceptable to have quotas until the situation is brought back to balance. Such a quota all but guarantees that at some point some candidates will have to be rejected based on gender or race even if they would be otherwise accepted. The split was set around the actual gender/race split of the population. For example California's gender or racial diversity bills proposed that at least at Board of Directors level although I don't know if they were ever passed into law. Needless to say, with or without such a law companies all over the world publicly advertise their equality focused hiring targets so I must assume they're not just outing themselves as breaking the law.
Is this the case here? The article doesn't really provide that many concrete details and I can imagine a lot of implications coming out of this. Is Yale doing this to have a balance of races based on the split in the population? Are they just arbitrarily picking a ratio for this? What impact will a decision here to eliminate any race criteria from the admission have on already established measure to explicitly consider race or gender as part of the process? What happens if one group ends up naturally being over-represented?
We'll have to start paying more attention to equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. And whatever is decided at some point we'll also have to start being consistent, not just chase conflicting targets based on what each administration sees as a priority at the time.
I personally think that anything but basing it on merit is wrong due to X factors:
1. If you reject someone based on race, no matter which, it is racism
2. Those that got in due to quotas, even if they are the most qualified are gonna be having doubts about if they only got in through the quota and are in reality not good enough.
3. There is a stark difference in the percentage of male/female/black/white/etc that go into different fields. Basing it on the wider population would not even be close to approaching a representative percentage. Also: local differences, which basically makes the whole attempting to represent the percentage of the population moot.
As an example: There are barely any women working in sewers, should they have quotas for getting about 50% of the sewer workers to be female?
In short: Quotas are bad for everyone, are especially hurting those they claim to help and are completely misguided anyways.
I wasn't here to make a value judgement on either option because I know how polarizing the topic is and there's very little room to objectively argue any side before you're drowned by the other.
My main point focused on something that I find more important: will we end up in a situation where both views are considered equally legitimate even if they are conflicting?
I took your comment as a chance to share my thoughts on it.
> will we end up in a situation where both views are considered equally legitimate even if they are conflicting?
I personally can't see the standpoints being equally legitimate due to my above problems with it. But for the general population? I think that both can be legitimate in their eyes.
> I personally can't see the standpoints being equally legitimate
I took your point. I was thinking of legitimate as in official decisions. There are already laws that implement gender or racial quotas in a work environment. Many companies already advertise this [0] and even public institutions were discussing it at least as far back as a decade ago [1]. One would logically have to assume that they're equally valid for a university. If the issue is indeed that Yale is using such quotas to maintain a certain balance between the different groups based on the population ratios but the courts agree with the Feds that this is illegal then we'll be left holding 2 equally (il)legitimate but contradictory views on the problem: quotas are legal, positive measures to achieve balanced participation and representation [2] but at the same time they are illegal because they discriminate against the other groups.
Since the details of the Yale case aren't all that clear right now we'll have to wait for the judgement. They may actually do something more onerous than that I assumed above.
You can find here https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 infamous "Jewish Problems" that were given to select applicants during entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. They were designed to prevent Jews from getting a passing grade.
I’ve heard the same thing regarding the SU. If you were the wrong ethnicity even if you got the right answer and showed all your work the professor could say, “yes, but you used the wrong solution” and other such nonsense.
On the bright side, we now have collections of "coffins" [1] - problems that have a simple solution that is difficult to find. Those were given to undesirable applicants to justify weeding them out.
This seems like a disingenuous comment at best. For example, Harvard's incoming class was something like 25% Asian-American, which I think is probably the highest it's been (compared to Asian-American's probably being like 5% of the population). Whatever the policy is, it is not trying for "equality", nor is it really anything close to what happened in the Soviet Union. My grandparents lived there; some relatives were killed in the middle of the night because of their ethnicity. Nowadays, someone gets turned down by Yale, and these BS comparisons start up. Come on.
Conveniently, the year that Harvard was sued for discrimination against Asians, the % of admitted Asians skyrocketed to 25%. Previous years it was about 33% lower.
And Asian Americans have an 8% admit rate going back to 1995, the lowest of all ethnicities.
According to this random site[0][1], the income difference between Yale undergrads vs. those from a top Public school like Michigan is 44K in income per year (10 years after graduation). Obviously there is a good bit of selection bias at play, but I can't imagine the true 'cost' of being denied Ivy admission is trivial monetarily, not to mention the social/interpersonal boost that would come along with it.
I see. Do you think I'm permanently setback because of this? What can I do if I can't get into grad school with a 3.92 GPA and just 2 2nd author papers?
I'm suggesting that you are statistically likely to miss out on a significant monetary 'Ivy League premium' over your career, and that you will certainly miss out on a social 'Ivy League premium', which could affect your social status, mating opportunities (as silly as that sounds), and more.
Because it is a statistical observation, it does not necessarily have any bearing on your outcomes as an individual--though it seems likely that it does.
Saying "Asians are more intelligent" is absolutely, objectively racist, and also incorrect. It's the same as saying "Blacks are dumber than other races," the fact that it's a "good thing" is irrelevant.
If you are precise, and nuanced, you can say something similar without being a racist shitbag about it. The following things are all true, and probably drove the GP to his statement:
* We're largely talking about Asian-Americans, not Asians.
* Most Asian-American families have a strong focus on academics and education, from a young age
* Most Asian-American families have the socio-economic status and familial support that allows them to focus on academics and education in the first place
* Because of the environmental and cultural aspects mentioned above, Asian-Americans, in aggregate, score disproportionately higher on standardized tests than other groups, in aggregate
Nothing racist about any of the points above but they could absolutely drive someone to say "Asians are smarter" if they're willing to ignore the nuance.
Both here and in the general western society, there's a vicious policing of certain taboo ideas about psychology, even ideas that are well accepted by the researchers. Being anti-science is seen as a good thing here because the truth might turn us all into Nazis! It reminds me of religious people who oppose education and scientific knowledge because it might weaken people's faith in God which would turn them into immoral criminals.
The scarier thing is that the researchers themselves are also subject to this policing, though with a little more leeway allowed. But they can still get ostracized for making the wrong findings and you get ridiculous cases where the published data from a study clearly shows the opposite of what the conclusion says because the authors are scared of punishment from their peers. In one case, an author openly admitted this was his reason after people were confused about the apparent contradiction.
At the individual level of course there is a huge genetic component to intelligence. Even with the perfect environment and all the money in the world you might just be a dummy.
But I'm not sure how you square the argument that intelligence is mostly genetic with population-level shifts in intelligence such as that of the Jewish-Americans that someone else brought up in this thread. The only thing I could see is those populations begin selecting for intelligence with regard to reproduction, but a couple hundred years is an extremely short period of time for something like that to happen at the population level if it's mostly genetic.
In the 1920s and 1930s Jewish Americans scored very poorly in IQ tests. Since WW2 they have rapidly risen up the ranks and now as a group score among the highest of any ethnicity.
Economic and sociological factors make a massive difference to population IQ scores and are very difficult to control for because we don’t know what all the factors that influence it are.
To give benefit of the doubt, the comment that spawned this thread didn't make any claim as to why Asians are supposedly more intelligent. If it's from social and economic factors then that it stands to reason that it's something worth studying so that the knowledge gained can be used over time to make everyone more intelligent.
I don't see why we should be blinding ourselves to any difference that happens to fall along racial lines. It seems like an overwhelming majority of the time once the issue is studied we find out it has nothing to do with genetics or race anyway and that it's something socioeconomic and cultural that applies to everybody and it happens to correlate with race for historical reasons. We have no problem studying mostly isolated cultures (e.g. the Amish, some tribe in the Amazon, etc) in a clinical manner without people getting their panties in a knot. Why is this not true for big groups?
Socioeconommic conditions are themselves not independent of race though. It's not so long ago that it was perfectly legal to discriminate who got a job on the basis of Race, and it was commonplace for people to do so.
It's interesting that it's not the considered least bit controversial to speak about certain ethnic groups being physically genetically gifted, or statistically over-represented in certain athletic endeavors. Perhaps the most obvious examples are black athletes who dominate popular American sports, or east Africans being superb long distance runners, but the same extends to free divers, mountain climbers, and more.
Put simply, some populations have physical adaptations that make them better at certain things - be it lung capacity from ancestry in bolivia, lighter / skinnier legs from ancestry in kenya, or whatever. That's uncontroversial.
Why do we all accept without question that population genetics play a somewhat key role in athletic pursuits, but insist that intelligence or mental acuity is distributed perfectly evenly across the entirety of humanity? It doesn't really pass the smell test to be honest.
Sibling comment did a great job and I want to add one more thing. Paraphrasing the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein from a podcast I listened to a couple of years ago:
Physical challenges are unevenly distributed. Some places are very hot and others are very cold. Some places are high elevation. Bodies have adapted to these differences to produce the physical differences across races. The brain solves for the challenge of life and life is difficult everywhere. What the brain adapted to is evenly distributed.
I think that's a very interesting and concise formulation, that I'll probably refer to when having similar discussions in the future.
However, I'd like to play devil's advocate with a thought experiment. Specifically, I'd like to address your fundamental assumption of equally distributed evolutionary pressure. It's true of our ancient history (which covers most of human existence), but it feels premature to ignore the potential impact of modern human societies over the last few millenia.
Imagine two identical human groups, one which spends 1000 or so years in an urban or quasi-urban setting, and one which spends the same time as hunter gatherers. Seems like some traits would be self-selected more heavily in one group vs the other based purely on environmental pressure. I.e. someone gifted with an above-average capacity for abstract modeling, but with - say - severe myopia, would find it easier to procreate in an environment where their skills are valued and their physical limitations negated, and vice versa.
Human history is long, but reproductive pressure can have a discernible impact on a population even over the relatively short time scale covered by human civilization. It's an imperfect analogy, but for instance new dog breeds only require a handful of generations (<10) to be both physically and behaviorally discernible. Why should reproductive pressures applied by different social environments, stretched over millenia, not have an impact on human populations?
Is the quasi-urban group modern, e.g. with technology and everything else? Even ignoring the fact that 1000 is not a long time evolutionarily - you'd get what, 15-20 generations? - a hunter-gatherer group is going to have a lot of evolutionary pressure that a modern technological group won't. You can have a physical injury or disability in the modern group and be fine, but without support that may not be there in the hunter-gatherer group, you will die quickly.
> First, this could only happen to small, isolated, and bottle necked populations. This on its own eliminated the vast majority of humanity
I disagree with several points made here. Firstly, I would question your reasoning behind the prerequisite of the population being "small", because in fact larger societies face different and more complex challenges than small ones, which in turns favors the ability to navigate the challenges of large human groups. More to the point, environmental pressure is applied regardless of a group's size.
Secondly, an isolated population does not eliminate the vast majority of humanity - far from it. While there's always some form of mobility between societies, until very recently that was a relatively rare phenomenon. By and large people lived and died within artillery distance of where they were born.
> including any racist notions like "asian" or "black."
This is actually the first time I've heard those designations described as 'racist', but that's somewhat orthogonal and more of a passing observation
> In your dog metaphor, it's like looking at a dachshund and then saying "all dogs with short hair are also have short legs."
I don't follow this extension to my analogy, which is probably a reflection of the problems of using analogies as a discussion aid in the first place
> Between the occasional plague and the occasional famine, you have times of war and times of peace. You have changing aesthetics, shifting cultures, values gained and lost.
Yes, but at its core an urban, even if premodern, existence places emphasis on different skill sets than a hunter gatherer lifestyle. This goes back to my point above about the social challenges of navigating large human groups - aesthetics can change, but figuring out how to grapple with complex social dynamics, as opposed to taming nature, is a constant (and one closely correlated with the evolution of human intelligence to boot)
If that’s true then in today’s society with abundance and pervasive entertainment will we see a cleavage between the academic class and those who gravitate toward leisure and entertainment?
Evolution doesn't distinguish between physical and mental challenges and organs aren't the unit of evolution. They don't survive or reproduce in isolation.
Species can and do evolve different adaptations to the same evolutionary pressures. Bret isn't convincing.
Have we actually had much in the way of mental challenges on an evolutionary timescale? It would appear to be a reasonably recent phenomenon. I think I heard Jordan Peterson comment that a couple of hundred years ago, most people were piss poor working in fields, so a high IQ didn't actually gain you very much.
First, because minds are tremendously complex and much less well understood than things like fast and slow twitch muscles. That we see different distributions in one does not imply different distributions in another.
Second, because we have tremendous evidence of clear bias, discrimination, and oppression of certain groups and a direct link to confounds that make claims about people of certain races just being genetically smarter amazingly messy.
Third, because for physical characteristics we don’t use broad racial categories but instead use ethnicities. “Black people” don’t have the specific physical characteristics that enable the absolute peak of running capabilities. Specific subgroups do. Expanding to racial categories (that were invented by humans to justify slavery and colonialism) is fraught with peril.
Fourth, because discussion of physical traits usually looks at the very very very peak while discussion of intelligence is usually a broad claim about all members of a race. This is not the same thing.
And finally, because these arguments have been used for centuries to justify literal enslavement. To justify denying voting rights. To justify all manner of horrors because it was just obvious to eugenicists that black people were less developed. And we should be extra careful of claims that, if followed carelessly, lead to genocide.
The first one is indeed true. But i hope even acknowledging the theoretical possibility is not mistaken/admonished as racial supremacy and scientific inquiry gets hurt.
The second one, I don't think anybody says that there is no nurture component. Acknowledging theoretical possibility of a nature component via genetics is not saying that there is no nurture component, and that it does not confound any test. We would need to design better tests.
For third, that is just a definition issue. You're saying that it is wrong to investigate differences between races, but fine to do so for ethnicities. So, let us look if there are cognitive differences between different ethnicities?
Fourth is just downright false. Subgroups living in Africa are generally darker, taller, and better runners. Subgroups in east Asia generally shorter. None of the statements about physical characteristics or intelligence are about extremes or broad strict inequalities about all members. They are always statistical distributions over the whole population.
Fifth is the crux of the matter. Are we going to stop scientific inquiry because of that? Instead of trying to stop scientific inquiry, we should debate why our liberal values are useful and should hold even if there are genetic components that determine intelligence.
nutrition and environmental nurture account much more for intelligence than race. Genetics, at most, account for a tiny difference, and is only barely visible at the very top level of competencies - and even then, those differences are massively dwarfed by environmental factors.
I was under the impression that every year we discover more genes tied to "educational attainment" so the assumed heritable % for g increases. In another comment you mentioned 100% environmental--If you have a study, please link to it. Granted, you are correct at the other end, where if one grows up malnourished and lives in a war zone, this will have a oversized negative impact on intelligence potential, but the overall context of this discussion is admittance to Yale.
Intelligence is just one small aspect out of many of what it means to be a human. It isn't special any more than having freckles is. We really need to dissolve the cult we have created around it.
it's taboo because there is no real scientific basis for one race being more superior. The differences can almost 100% be entirely traced to environmental factors like wealth, nutrition, nurture and community support.
No, we don't make things taboo because they're wrong, we make them taboo because they're dangerous.
Nobody is forbidding mention of modified Newtonian dynamics, just pointing out all the evidence against it.
The idea of differences in intelligence between ethnic groups, regardless of whether it is true or not, is not one that our society is currently able to discuss in a productive way. So, we very sensibly keep quiet about it for now.
I think it's taboo because certain segments of society secretly think there might be an element of truth and are disturbed by the implications and potential ramifications if the theory was proven to be true.
>it's taboo because there is no real scientific basis for one race being more superior
In which case it stands to reason that it's something that the things that make this or that race "superior" at this or that metric can be emulated by people regardless of race to everyone's benefit.
On your second point, I don't believe that is true. Not the 100% part. I am sure they play a big part, but a Kenyan Olympic runner doesn't win (only) because of environmental factors.
Since all of the studies in this area have essentially been done by racists with obvious flawed methodology, yes.
To the extent that IQ means anything at all (it doesn't, past about 100), there are much greater inter-personal differences than inter-group differences, except when one of the groups is explicitly disadvantaged by the test (e.g. the test is administered in the first language of one group and the second language of the other).
Wow... Hard-core racism, here on HN? And connecting 'accomplishments of races' with modern day policing practices...
Are you even aware of the influence of black people on ancient history? Of the black Roman emperors? Of the black Egyptian Empire, one that was looked at in awe for 5 thousand years?
Are you aware of the inspiration the founding fathers took from the Hodenoshone (Iroquois)?
And in general, are you even slightly aware of how much circumstance and happenstance impact big historical moments?
Either way, you are a perfect example of the kinds of people who invented IQ, and exactly the reasons why it was invented - scientistic veneer to justify racist beliefs, not much better than phrenology before it.
And I sincerely hope you'll get to experience how the kind of policing you praise feels on you own skin. It will hurt, but perhaps it will help you grow as a human being.
Edit: the above comment was heavily edited after my response, removing everything except a link to 1 study.
A published study doesn't make the theory mainstream. This study is heavily criticised in the field, for p-hacking amongst other things. Also their conclusion is about IQ, which itself isn't seen in the mainstream as an indication of general intelligence, so they're really reaching from the get go. You have to have a serious agenda to read this paper and sincerely think the conclusion correct...
Sure, one of the least reliable fields of science mostly believes this effect exists. They also have one of the worse reproducibility crises, and a history of fraudulent but widely believed studies (Stanford Prison Experiment, to name just one), and entire schools of thought defeated by a priori arguments (behaviorism as a theory of the human mind).
Meanwhile you ahbe neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists arguing against the plausibility of differences in intelligence in large ancient groups a priori. You have people like Stephen Jay Gould arguing against the idea that IQ is a measure of general intelligence at all.
And then, just to prove a point about how warped your perspective is, you cite James Damore as an argument for a basic statistical fact. You really should avoid citing beligerantly misogynistic and/or racist people when you're trying to claim that science is on your side.
Not to mention that large scale aptitude tests (rather than 'general intelligence' tests) do NOT show a normal distribution of aptitudes, rendering Damore's claims statically correct but un applicable anyway.
Anti-Jewish philosophy in the Soviet Union was not 'equality at all costs' it was 'jews are thieves' and other horrible racist beliefs, same as in most of Western Europe before.
The buzzword now is “equity.” The left now seeks equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. All such initiatives are oppressive should be rejected outright.
The human potential lost to poverty is heartbreaking. Unfortunately, it seems like the political toolbox we’ve been bequeathed is filled with wooden spoons instead of scalpels. Open to ideas.
Perhaps I was too hasty in my comment. I am not partisan. The right has its own problems, obviously. I recently moved from deep red Georgia to deep blue Maryland, and the polarization is demoralizing. Even though the political climate is so caustic these days, there are reasoned arguments on both sides of issues that are worth listening to. Unfortunately, these voices are being drowned out by extreme views. Our democracy is being eroded by gerrymandering, 24 hour news and social media. Unfortunately, these sources of extremism and authoritarianism are extremely profitable for a very select few. I wish the bright minds that visit this site would work to create products that foster democracy rather than erode it.
To expound on my previous comment, those on the left calling for ‘equity’ should be viewed critically. The calls for ‘removing barriers’ should alarm everyone, because ultimately it only serves to control and dumb everyone down. The alternative is to encourage public policies that seek the empowerment of all individuals and groups. One concrete example is the debate in NYC schools that math and honors courses are ‘inequitable’ and racist. Voices on the left are calling for the abolishment of such classes, thereby denying students the opportunity to be challenged according to their ability. The other undiscussed side of this issue is that such calls for ‘equity’ result in basically giving up on poorer students who won’t be given the support they need to meet the higher standards. In short, anything involving ‘equity’ should be viewed as a race to the bottom for everyone.
You would lose nothing by omitting terms like "the Left" and "the Right" and gain not immediately baiting people into partisan flame wars. I find it baffling that so many Americans have an inability to discuss politics without invoking either of those terms, especially when your "Left" and "Right" are practically leanings of Centrism to most of the rest of the world.
But really, it does nothing to enforce your argument. You complain about 24 hour news and social media eroding Democracy (and presumably discussions about the politics of Democracy), yet you use these terms so loosely and end up reducing anyone Left of you to some or other policy you deem to be essential to that position.
I completely agree that adding these polarizing terms is not helpful in persuading anybody, however I think it's an extreme simplification to say the American Left and Right are leanings of centrism from the view outside the US.
This is kind of an outside perspective - America as seen through the news - but I would say that a lot of the stuff I see espoused by the Left and Right in the US is much more extreme than in Germany for example. Germany has laws that allow for positive discrimination, but I can't think of any such extreme measures as in the US here, where chances are diminished for one race by a factor of 10. Even having race on the application form would be unthinkable here.
On the other hand we have many more social programs that would be unthinkable in the US. We have 4+ (usually 5-6) weeks vacation per year, etc.
The American Right on the other hand is also in many ways more extreme than in Germany, nobody would consider Republicans as right-leaning centrists here, e.g. building a wall would be a bit taboo, although maybe more due to historical reasons. Denying people health-care, because they're poor would also probably not count as centrist here.
I guess Germany itself is kind of exceptional, given its past, but maybe I'm just moving the goalposts now, so let me try to substantiate.
I don't think positive discrimination laws in the US has as much to do with an embrace of Leftist ideology as it does with an attempt at attracting previously disenfranchised voters. I realise this seems very cynical, but my argument is that having a few policies that seem Leftist doesn't mean that the underlying ideology behind those policies is; correlation does not imply causation etc. So I'd argue those laws are reactionary, much in the same way they are in Germany and also in places like South Africa, to varying degrees of course. They're exactly the kind of toe-dipping you'd expect of parties who are more driven by quests for power than ideology. That's why, even with several Democratic presidents, for instance, the US still doesn't have proper vacation and parental leave: it's bad for business.
If I had to plot it, I'd say Germany's political landscape is also quite huddled up around the Center, but slightly Left (with more outliers than the US), where the US is huddled around the Center and slightly Right. This would explain why the Right in the US feels further Right than in Germany. These configurations are probably not even that strange for developed and developing Western nations, though most have more outlier parties than the US even if they're not generally in contention during elections.
I just feel that the binary-narrative - even though the spectrum is quite large and nuanced - is something that has spread from US political commentators to other nations and is watering down the discourse.
I consider myself left and i do not think that. I don't think this type of generic mud slinging adds anything to the conversation especially when it is not based on verifiable facts.
Its not just slavery, its jim crow, segregation, black people being systematically disadvantaged through racist policies like getting higher rates on loans despite having the same risk. Also:
- the New Deal excluded black people
- The GI Bill excluded black people
etc...
Slaves built a huge part of the economy for free and americans benefit from that work for which they were not compensated, so yes there absolutely should be reparations. I think this should be done in several ways:
- monetarily: by funding scholarships and other projects to remedy the injustices perpetrated and help black americans accumulate some of the generational wealth they have been denied. Although at the end of the day, no amount of money will ever compensate for the hurt, death and atrocities, its a start.
- education: teaching kids at school what slavery was really like, instead of what some of the schoolbooks teach (that slavery wasn't that bad for example). Teaching kids about systemic racism that persists to this day.
This is a real problem and it has to do that we try to quantify everything for risk assessments. This is a huge problem and the IT sector is a large part of that. A problem that should be discussed.
Reparations within a country between different ethnicities a good way to increase animosity. Because people would complain rightfully, that the wealth transfer is unjust.
I doubt you find any book in education that says that slavery wasn't bad. Every ethnicity on the planet has suffered from it and < 1% were slave owners. Yes, I know the argument that people profited passively... it isn't too convincing given the huge wealth distribution discrepancies western nation exhibit.
I don't think you are advocating for justice or equality here.
He's saying that if the economic gains where wiped out, then blacks and whites should have had equal economic standing after the war. But we all know that didn't happen, which is why he posed that question.
Even if it was the case that the civil war wiped out the gains from slavery, it doesn't change the case for reparations as well as the other injustices that were being committed are are still being committed to this day
I assume your interest in reparations is to create an even playing field. Reparations won't do that. It'll just create a lot of opportunities for capitalist predators to milk a poorly educated population that is now flush with cash. Once they've been squeezed dry, most of them will be in an even worse situation, because reparations will have assuaged the white guilt of their supporters while stoking the racism and anger of their opponents.
So you are assuming all black people are poorly educated and will suddenly be flushed with cash?
I wasn't talking about wealth transfer. I was mainly talking about stopping discrimination and providing loans and scholarships to a section of the population that has been discriminated against to redress centuries of oppression.
The average educational attainment of black people in the united states is lower, that's not racism, it's data. You can attach racial causes to it if you want, but it doesn't change my point.
"Reparations" is basically code for wealth transfer. If you mean crafting a more just, fair society, you probably want a different word.
Firstly, the milking you refer to is already happening, and has been happening for hundreds of years. Second, as i've already said, the way i see reparations is not a simple cash transfer. Its stopping the systemic injustices and having programes in place to help black communities in terms of loans, grants and educational scholarship.
If you agree that the New Deal and GI bill helped spur economic development (though they were not perfect) and lifted poor white people out of poverty, why not do that today for black people? Black people were systematically left out of that help, so time to give them the help they are owed.
I’m sure people were saying that and they can speak for themselves. The problem is with extrapolating that thought to “the left”. Now you’ve editorialized it to fit you political views.
While your point is valid, media outlets with known political biases to "the left" have been putting out a lot of pro-reparations stuff since the protests started. Regardless of what the people who are actually protesting want, white folks sure like to talk about reparations.
The difference is that political bias of news outlets is a matter of public record, as is the number of articles on reparations before and after the protests started. All objective.
Was that really the philosophy of the USSR? Marx argued against the abstract notion of equality to begin with (and more concretely, the idea of equality between people) and Lenin explicitly rebuked the notion that equality means anything more than class equality for socialists. The whole phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is precisely against equality - it recognizes that people have different abilities, talents, capabilities, and things happening in the course of life, and it recognizes that people have different needs, wishes, and desires.
Unless you're saying that the USSR's underlying philosophy comes from somewhere other than Marx or Lenin, in which case I'm curious as to what philosophy, and originated by whom, you're talking about.
I actually meant AA similar to the American one, for the school admissions. I don't believe the US has reached the USSR level of D&I to set quotas of minority representatives in governments of various levels (yet). And sorry, there is no source for this - even Yale does not publish their minority quotas or even admits they exist, what do you expect from the USSR Ministry of Education?
> The whole phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is precisely against equality - it recognizes that people have different abilities, talents, capabilities, and things happening in the course of life, and it recognizes that people have different needs, wishes, and desires.
This is not the kind of equality the poster was talking about. Forcing equality at government level does not mean forcing everyone to have equal IQ and work ethic. It means ignoring those differences and forcing everyone to get the same benefit in life even though some are less productive than others ("to each according to his need"). "Equality of outcomes" as another poster put it.
> Would that not fall onto government in a communist state?
and this is why communism fails, because an external entity cannot possibly know the true needs of the individual, and cannot act in the best interest of every individual. Unless somehow they are a benevolent god.
Nowhere does Marx or any other 'communist' author claim that the state knows or pretends to know the needs and desires of the populace, or even an aggregation of their individual abilities. In fact, later 'communist' authors specifically say that it's up to the individual to sort out their needs and abilities, and to cultivate them.
Then you get back to the problem that I presented - who decides the needs and abilities? At least with a free market we can be honest about trying to do as little as possible in return for as much as possible, and let the market decide what your abilities are worth.
>It means ignoring those differences and forcing everyone to get the same benefit in life even though some are less productive than others ("to each according to his need").
I'm not convinced. The slogan specifically recognises differences in needs, and therefore differences in 'income' under a socialist system. This is concordant with Marx's other writing on the matter. It means that in terms of what people need, they'll have access to it. But people have different needs. How can the 'outcomes' possibly be equal if the outcomes are a result of concrete, different needs and life situations? The outcome of a mother of three being given what they need is different from the outcome of a single civil engineer. Both the inputs (based on what they need) and the outputs (the outcomes) vary between each person.
Further, in every society as Marx notes, there is some amount of surplus. If everyone's needs are covered, Marx argued for an allocation based on contribution, at least in the lower phase of Communism (sometimes called socialism). Let's go into what Marx actually said:
>Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. [0]
So it seems that Marx proposes a system, his 'lower phase of Communism', which Lenin took to mean 'socialism' - in which people get out what they put in, accounting for deductions (which Marx enumerates as deductions for health care, education, care for those who cannot work, provisions in the case of disaster, and expansion of production). In what possible way does "everyone get the same outcome" here? More,
>Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on.
Does this sound like 'equality of outcome'?
[0] Karl Marx - Critique of the Gotha Program (Part I, 1875).
This slogan describes the state of affairs in the society that Communists were aspiring to build, the Communism. It's a class-less and state-less (one and the same from their point of view) paradise, where nobody has to work and all needs are taken care of.
The USSR was not in the Communism, it had Socialism (which is not "a lower phase" but a "transitional state on the way to the Communism" as same as Capitalism, Feudalism, Slavery etc.). However, as far as equality goes, they subscribed to the French Revolution's "liberty,equality,fraternity" with a huge emphasis on "equality", "fraternity" meaning that Soviet people had to help other peoples ("fraternity of peoples") and "liberty" meaning "absence of slavery".
This short video[1] seems instructive in terms of norms in the former Soviet Union. These are named as bad things in that context: "career builder", "initiative at work", some specific Russian noun for "different thinker". Then punishments for "non-conformity".
Consider the phrase also said to have been popular in the USSR, "Everything Marx said about Capitalism was correct, but everything he said about Communism was wrong."
Philosophy of the USSR changed significantly over it's history, and it's actual philosophy, as applied in thinking and decision-making, was at times very different from the public image and propaganda.
You're talking about Marx and Lenin, but one of the first deep changes in USSR history was Stalin's raise to power - and with him, complete rejection of the "world revolution" and nationalistic "socialism in one country", up to re-establishement of orthodox church in the 40s.
Sovient Union was a completely different country with every decade of it's existence. In a dogmatic system it was not openly articulated, and leaders continued to pay lip service to "Marx and Lenin", but their real economic and political decisions were often in complete odds with the original values.
> It reminds you of the Soviet Union because the underlying philosophy is the same. Equality at all costs.
Cannot laugh more at that.
The Union has never been, or at least not the union my father's memory, about that.
It was strongly regimented, rigid, very hierarchical, caste society. The communist fraternity has been a model aristocracy, with its primary imperative being maintenance of party member's status, and privilege.
This practice was supposed to end with sovient union — but my school, which always had a fair share of jews that applied to math department in MSU, taught those in 00s, and athough discriminiation wasn't as blatant then, I'm not sure that it completely went away.
That a supposed lack of personality was used as cover for discrimination against Jewish applicants to universities is well-known. I’m not sure why you’d express concern over that reference being inflammatory ex nihilo.
> Harvard itself found a bias against Asian-American applicants in an internal investigation in 2013, but had never made the findings public or acted on them.[1] Plaintiffs and commentators have compared thetreatment of Asians with the Jewish quota in place in the early 20th century, which used deficient personalities as the reason for excluding Jews in elite universities.[4][1]
Lowell wanted a quota, but couldn't get it and introduced this well-roundedness thing and weirdly and totally coincidentally Jewish people found themselves unable to match up. Turns out they were all one-dimensional human beings less skilled at all those other things White Americans were capable at. It is sheer good fortune Lowell was there to rescue us from these nerdy egg-heads. Close one.
This years UCSF admissions also caught a stir. Asian admission cut in half from 40 in 2019 to 22% in 2020. Student demo suggest it was cut from 60% the years prior.
No, as referenced below, the original tweet by a first year student UCSF Med was removed. But original tweet and some of the drama from /r/premed below. Apparently figures were shared in privately in acceptance emails during height of protests. The rest of the numbers was Asian community extrapolating from acceptance and demographic data from past years. I guess we'll wait until official data updates to confirm.
>UCSF upcoming class reveals heavily shaped racial mixtures. Other schools will probably follow? “The stats are in: @UCSFMedicine's Class of 2024 is 23% Hispanic/Latinx, 22% Asian, 20% White, 19% Black, and includes 4 Native Americans” (twitter.com)
Definitely interesting. Only things I'd be concerned about when thinking about painting them with a racially biased admissions brush is that UCSF's class size is not large at 171 so a swing of 20% in 1 year is only 40 students. It would not be hard for me to believe that there are 40 Latino and black students who also scored 98%ile+ on the MCAT who equally "deserve" acceptance there, the med schools ranked #15-3ish all provide pretty much the same level of opportunity so the Asians missing from UCSF might have chosen a different top school. If it's a decline for 5 years straight I would be concerned about it but idk if 2 years is enough to state a trend.
I am really curious how those Yale guys check applicants race. Some kind of skin color pigment measurement (sorry, you are a bit too white to qualify as African American, next person please)?
Or do they measure someones eye shape to "detect" Asian people?
How about Jews, is nose measurement sufficient (they need to dig really hard in their archives to find some Nazi "scientific" statistics on that...) or they just ask to take off pants during interview to check if someone is not hiding his race?