What makes this especially bad isn't that they're trying to correct an underrepresentation of certain groups by giving them a boost when evaluating candidates; it's that they're making up false "personality traits" based on stereotypes to demote Asian applicants. They'd be on much firmer ground if they just said "we feel we should have more African American candidates and we'll alter our selection criteria to get them by increasing our ratings for them."
Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
151–160 of 259 posts
Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
#152I'm a Chinese American and I have experienced this type of behavior during the college admissions process, and during the hiring process with larger companies. During the college applications process, I noticed I was receiving vastly different responses than my girlfriend (wife now) who was African American. Perhaps you could chalk it up recommendations or personal projects. But my girlfriend and I were both A studen…
> The goal should be equality of opportunity and evaluation rather than equality of outcome.
In general, that will still require taking race into account. https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02413 "Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning" discusses various fairness measures in the context of deciding loan applications based on credit scores. The issue is that you only know whether someone was qualified once they pay the loan back, and credit scores are not a perfect predictor of that, which on top of that is differently imperfect for different races. If you want equal opportunity (defined as "the probability of a qualified application being accepted is equal independent of race"), you need different thresholds to compensate for the different prediction error rates.
Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
#153To get past the affirmative-action-is-reverse-racism argument that often frame these discussions, I'd recommend checking out this thoughtful breakdown of the case from Metafilter: Yeah, debates over affirmative action are just one of many situations where the Asian American "model-minority" mythos gets used in service of anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, and I encourage other Asian Americans to resist being used as…
Affirmative action is racism, not "reverse-racism". "reverse-racism" is a racist term since it is used to dismiss prejudice against certain races. Racism is racism, no matter the race of the target or the race of the perpetrator.
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Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what GP was referring to, but those issues are related. If Asian-Americans were 40% of Harvard (as they should be based on merit), instead of 17% (as they are now) then that would mean fewer spaces for everyone else. In particular, it would make achieving the goal of affirmative action - proportionate representation for black and Hispanic students - much harder.
Asians are around 60% of the world population, no? So I'm not sure how a rise to 40% of Harvard inhibits "proportionate" representation. Edit: I'm not pretending to be obtuse here - I'm actually questioning why an elite university should be representative of US demographics rather than the world.
Because the vast majority of Harvard students are from the USA?
Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what GP was referring to, but those issues are related. If Asian-Americans were 40% of Harvard (as they should be based on merit), instead of 17% (as they are now) then that would mean fewer spaces for everyone else. In particular, it would make achieving the goal of affirmative action - proportionate representation for black and Hispanic students - much harder.
Asians are around 60% of the world population, no? So I'm not sure how a rise to 40% of Harvard inhibits "proportionate" representation. Edit: I'm not pretending to be obtuse here - I'm actually questioning why an elite university should be representative of US demographics rather than the world.
To make it even more complicated, majority of those asian kids are either from abroad (not US citizen), or born to wealthy and/or highly educated asian families (due to selective immigration policy).
I don't know how anyone can come up with a racial quota and call it fair.
Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Race blindness isn’t the end goal, the goal is racial equality. Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Because we must assume black people are intrinsically just as capable as white people, the goal must be to drive that disparity to zero. With that in mind, it makes no sense from a scientific/engineering perspective to ignore race. No scientist or engineer looks at a situation, sees a…
>Race blindness isn’t the end goal, the goal is racial equality. Says you. The whole concept of race is an aritifical construction, a barbaric vestige of the past that should be rightfully recognized for what it is, and cast off. >Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Even if society were totally race blind, some of that disparity would remain—it would be the legacy of when society wa…
Do you believe in evolution and genetics? Different races have various different afflictions, sickle-cell, tay-sachs, cancer rates, etc. Different facial structure, average height, body fat distribution, muscle mass, limb length, etc.
You would have to deny evolution and genetic inheritance to think that different groups of people living apart for tens of thousands of years in vastly different environments didn't result in selection via external forces to better survive in those environments. Just look at the body type difference between an eskimo and a sub-Saharan african.
Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
#157Thought experiment: if you made all admission decisions by lottery, by randomly admitting a previously decided, fixed number of n applicants out of all valid applications received, and the resulting cohort of admitted individuals was later found to significantly differ in demographic composition from both the local and nationwide composition of population, would that be discriminatory? If not, would it at least be pr…
On face value this system seems fair, the most capable students get accepted, regardless of ethnicity or race. The problem with this is that a lot of students from disadvantaged minorities don't get the same opportunities growing up. They might be just as capable as non-disadvantaged students, but get worse grades because they had to work after school to help pay the bills, or didn't have internet access at home, or…
Factor parents income into the equation instead of race.
Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
First of all, principle and ideology are very different things. Secondly and more to the point, there is no reason to privilege race over any other of the millions of filters with which to slice up society to find inequalities of outcome. And even if there was, showing a correlation between one of those filters (race) and an inequality does in no way show injustice 'based on race' no matter how emphatic the assertion…
Pretending that income, one of the most important things in American society, is merely one of the “millions of ways” to classify people, and that a persistent large disparity between racial groups in that metric is mere “correlation” is intellectually dishonest.
That is literally the definition of the word correlation. Claiming 'intellectual dishonesty' is a nice rhetorical move but doesnt actually show anything. The point remains.
A second point above which needs addressing is that it simply does not follow logically that differences in outcome must be a result of 'social inefficiencies and failures.' Culture and biology are some other obvious causative factors, but there are others. There is no reason to adhere to a reductionist view in which everything is caused by social pressures.
Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
#159An anecdote about the evolving value of higher education: I received a resume recently for a junior software engineer role. Under the 'Education' section was a paragraph that listed a prestigious university and entrance year, but under it stated something like, "I was accepted to this university, but rather than attend and go over $100,000 in debt, I taught myself computer science and coding for 3 years with online t…
I've had much success with approach though I'm open to it. I'd much more success with those who had a degree but later switched to software development.
Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Race blindness isn’t the end goal, the goal is racial equality. Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Because we must assume black people are intrinsically just as capable as white people, the goal must be to drive that disparity to zero. With that in mind, it makes no sense from a scientific/engineering perspective to ignore race. No scientist or engineer looks at a situation, sees a…
Ofcourse all types of people are likely intrinsically pretty close to everyone else, but you can't underestimate the effect of culture. Roughly speaking, alcohol is legal worldwide if you're above the age of 18 or so. So why do alcoholism rates vary massively between countries? It's largely 'culture'. Black american culture has been pretty self-destructive these last hundred years. Look at rap music videos, thug cult…
>Black american culture has been pretty self-destructive these last hundred years.
This is entirely your own subjective opinion and a very racist one. Except you can provide definite proof that show that rap music, jazz music etc somehow lead to 'self-destruction' (or even that single motherhood is some deliberate part of the culture) all you're doing is revealing your personal dislikes and biases. It is also a very selective statement - no one conflates the behavior of say redneck Americans or free love hippies with the self-destructive culture of white America.