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Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

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Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#121

Post by acchow »

downandout wrote: post #113

Programs like this promote the very discrimination that they are intended to counteract. People of all other races will see this and argue - correctly - that black students at Howard now have an advantage over them at one of the premier employers in the tech industry. This is wonderful for Howard students, and probably for black CS students looking for employment at Google in general, but not so great for everyone el…

Very few engineers in Silicon Valley interact with black engineers. That's a problem. You can't have positive experiences to remove your bias if you have zero experiences.

Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#122

Post by downandout »

burkaman wrote: post #116
downandout wrote: post #113

Programs like this promote the very discrimination that they are intended to counteract. People of all other races will see this and argue - correctly - that black students at Howard now have an advantage over them at one of the premier employers in the tech industry. This is wonderful for Howard students, and probably for black CS students looking for employment at Google in general, but not so great for everyone el…

The point of affirmative action is that it's impossible to remove race from the hiring equation, because race affects your applicants right up to the point they send in an application. If you say "I'm colorblind", you're also pretending that everyone else in the world is colorblind, and race had no impact on your applicants' resumes. Race is a society-wide issue, and it's not possible to solve without recognizing and…

By the time anyone of any race becomes a viable Google candidate, they have excelled in both high school and at elite universities, earned advanced degrees, and in many cases have already done interesting things in their field. Their socioeconomic background is irrelevant by that point in their lives. People wind up in Google interviews because they have earned the right to be there with the best and the brightest. At that level of competition, it would truly be a shame for race to play any part in a hiring decision.

Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#123

Post by thex10 »

FT_intern wrote: post #65

I think we are in need of an open discussion on redefining "diversity". Race is not a good metric for diversity. Nationality completely trumps it. People of the same nationality with the same primary language have much more in common with each other. You can actually see this dynamic play out at work where people hang out with others from the same nationality. Americans hang out with Americans, Mandarin Chinese hang…

> African Americans generally have family whose native language is English and who understand American culture and can impart these skills and knowledge to their children. They have the language and cultural knowledge to fight for their interests and a powerful organization (NCAAP) to back them up. With these advantages, African Americans are basically seen as honorary Americans similar to white Americans.

This is laughably inaccurate. Try again after you've met and spoken with at least _several_ African American families from each class stratification, education level, and region of the country.

Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#124

Post by 67726e »

acchow wrote: post #121
downandout wrote: post #113

Programs like this promote the very discrimination that they are intended to counteract. People of all other races will see this and argue - correctly - that black students at Howard now have an advantage over them at one of the premier employers in the tech industry. This is wonderful for Howard students, and probably for black CS students looking for employment at Google in general, but not so great for everyone el…

Very few engineers in Silicon Valley interact with black engineers. That's a problem. You can't have positive experiences to remove your bias if you have zero experiences.

> You can't have positive experiences to remove your bias if you have zero experiences.

Who is to say they have any? You're implying they're somehow racist because they haven't met a black engineer? Just because of their skin color you're gonna judge 'em? Well sounds like you're the racist.

Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#125

Post by downandout »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #118
downandout wrote: post #113

Programs like this promote the very discrimination that they are intended to counteract. People of all other races will see this and argue - correctly - that black students at Howard now have an advantage over them at one of the premier employers in the tech industry. This is wonderful for Howard students, and probably for black CS students looking for employment at Google in general, but not so great for everyone el…

A thought experiment. You have a program that costs $5. You collect that $5 at the door. In order to get to your program, participants must walk down a corridor. In that corridor there are people who will, at gunpoint, take all the money, except $2, from ethnic group A, but not ethnic group B. There is no way to ask for the money later. You can do nothing about the gunmen in the corridor. You cannot move. Its a thoug…

>This will backfire on Google in the same way that the "But they ask algorithms questions in their interviews" will backfire on Google: they'll attract smart people who can do the job.

No, it will backfire on them by discouraging people of other races from even applying because they know they are starting with a disadvantage.

Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#126

Post by dikdik »

djtriptych wrote: post #98
dikdik wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in some areas. I grew up in one of those flyover states, according to wikipedia the demographics of my town were 97% white while I was a teenager (~94% white now). I much prefer being in more diverse areas, but I don't think where I grew up was somehow bad or wrong. It is a very middle class place, so it's not like the minorities were being pushed out, there just weren't many non-white people that wanted/want to…

The history of housing discrimination in the US would challenge the notion that a middle class suburb would not push out minorities. This practice was rampant in the period after WW2 and continued into the 70s and 80s. It has little to do with notional affordability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Interesting. I suppose that could have some effect, but I was not even born until housing discrimination was over with and when I moved into my small town it was largely farmland and not much of a suburb until a decade later.

Further, if housing discrimination was still going on in the 90's and 00's, I have no idea where these people were being "pushed out" to. The closest towns/cities with significant racial minority populations were at least 250 miles away...the city I grew up outside of was 90% white (currently 82% white) and there were/are plenty of undesirable locations there. It's middle America, there are just a ton of white people (sorry?).

Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#127

Post by HillaryBriss »

Google is trying to bring good jobs to people in the US who need good jobs by helping to develop their talent and match it to a role within the company. i don't think that's a bad thing. i think Google will be happy to see how well this approach works.

Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#128

Post by SamReidHughes »

tdb7893 wrote: post #76
FT_intern wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The test to get into the prestigious high school is orthogonal to race. Given that the top percentile of the test takers are the children of immigrant parents who don't understand American culture and whose primary language is not English, the tests appear to be very objective.

The way I see it is if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there. I'm not sure affirmative action is the right move but I don't know how you can deny a selection bias against certain groups (racial or otherwise) and I think that we need some way to try to correct for it

The Asian:Black ratio at Stuyvesant is 2743:21. Say you bring in all the black kids from the lower-tier Bronx High School of Science (72), Staten Island Technical (13), Brooklyn Technical (390), Queens High School for the Sciences (25), High School for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at City College (41). Now you've got 562 black kids at Stuyvesant. Still too low. Bring in the rest of the non-science-oriented specialized schools (High School of American Studies at Lehman College (14), Brooklyn Latin School (105)). Now you're at 681. Still too low. (Note that Laguardia's admissions are by audition, not examination, so I omitted that. Still 2:1 Asian:Black.)

Now you're pulling kids out of regular high schools. Are they going to be able to keep up with the other Stuyvesant kids? Should we slow down others' education so lower performing students can keep up? How does this help these lower performing students? Note that these are individual people we are talking about who are getting thrown into classes that are difficult for them.

You could create programs designed to help underprivileged students that are close to the cutoff, to help them get admitted. NYC created that, but, you know, it helps asian kids too.

Another problem with doing corrections for population ratio is that NYC attracts top professionals, highly intelligent people that are having children. Even if you believe all races are geneticulturally identically distributed globally, or in the country, you can see that the high income professionals are mostly non-black, and their kids are going to monopolize Stuyvesant seats. The high IQ black/Latino kids that aren't getting into Stuyvesant are the ones whose parents never moved to NYC in the first place.

Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#129

Post by whack »

tdb7893 wrote: post #76
FT_intern wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The test to get into the prestigious high school is orthogonal to race. Given that the top percentile of the test takers are the children of immigrant parents who don't understand American culture and whose primary language is not English, the tests appear to be very objective.

The way I see it is if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there. I'm not sure affirmative action is the right move but I don't know how you can deny a selection bias against certain groups (racial or otherwise) and I think that we need some way to try to correct for it

> "if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there"

That's an extremely strong statement to make. The proportion of Asians in professional soccer is substantially lower than the population distribution. Are you claiming that the main reason for this is selection discrimination?

Re: Howard University opens a new campus at the Googleplex

#130

Post by laurencerowe »

srssays wrote: post #114
cercatrova wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that how you achieve systematic equality? For example, say there are two races X and Y. X is the overachiever (doesn't even have to be a majority, there could be a 50/50 population), while Y is the underachiever, for whatever historical reasons these two groups faced. So, to get Y on the same level as X and restore a meritocracy, you must admit more of Y, even if X does better in some cases. Meritocracy onl…

It's absolutely fine to give extra advantages to people with low incomes. That's economic progressivism. It's wrong to give extra advantages based on genetics, essentially saying that some people "genetically poor" or "genetically rich", which is what Affirmative Action does.

There are clearly multiple axes of inequality in our society beyond the economic, including race and sex. A fair and equal admissions policy should account for all of those.
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