‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#181

Post by creaghpatr » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #92

speedplane wrote: post #23

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental…

It's a private university. Why shouldn't you be able to buy your way in?

Given the sheer amount of taxpayer dollars they absorb via tax breaks etc they should be subject to oversight. Harvard costs taxpayers billions of dollars, perhaps with good ROI given their stature but at a huge cost.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#182

Post by darwin142 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #148

verylongname wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See CalTech for an example of an elite school that has race-blind admissions. As far as I can tell, it hasn't put any pressure on the Ivy's to change. Incidentally, Caltech's latest class is roughly 50% Asian and about 30% white.

Do you know how much is black? If it's less than 8% (or whetever the US average is), then it's literally "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

Less than 1%.

https://mic.com/articles/7995/caltech-s-shocking-lack-of-div...

Yet there's 0 manufactured outrage about this?? Maybe the SJWs of Silicon Valley just haven't found out yet.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#183

Post by darwin142 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

throwa_way_ wrote: post #9

chevman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I graduated from highschool 20+ years ago (1997, holy smokes!) and it was the same deal then. There were about 25 of us in my graduating class that ran the table with perfect SATs, 5s on all our APs, perfect GPA, etc and we all applied to pretty much all the Ivies. It was arbitrary who got in where, no rhyme or reason as far as we could tell then. Sounds like it hasn't changed much.

Except for if you read the article you would see that it's not arbitrary, but based on racial discrimination.

So you are saying Affirmative Action should be illegal?

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#184

Post by bytematic » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

When will people understand that “We do have some very affirmative goals though that I think are important to understand. That when we talk about diversity of backgrounds and experiences, it includes different academic interests. It includes different occupations of parents. It includes socioeconomic differences. It includes different viewpoints on issues.” is a good thing. This always gets me a negative reaction, people want college admissions to be straight top scorers, job prospects to be picked as the people with the top qualifications. I don't get it and it doesn't benefit anyone.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#185

Post by droopyEyelids » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:20 PM UTC

gammateam wrote: post #174

speedplane wrote: post #23

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental…

> We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. Or were sold a merit based social contract and it has always been an ineffective set of rules that has no bearing on the way goods and resources are apportioned. Your cognitive dissonance comes from how you expect goods and resources to be apportioned. How you expect people should "earn" access, when the elites/oli…

Your point sure makes me angry, but I see the logic to it.

Positions based on merit may be the aberration!

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#186

Post by kough » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

bytematic wrote: post #184

When will people understand that “We do have some very affirmative goals though that I think are important to understand. That when we talk about diversity of backgrounds and experiences, it includes different academic interests. It includes different occupations of parents. It includes socioeconomic differences. It includes different viewpoints on issues.” is a good thing. This always gets me a negative reaction, pe…

Most people understand this. The lawyer bringing the suit has chosen to do so in order to help abolish affirmative action.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#187

Post by vinceguidry » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:28 PM UTC

johngalt wrote: post #180

vinceguidry wrote: post #84

This sort of thing reminds me of the process to select and promote generals. With veritable mountains of qualified candidates, the selection process has to invariably use political methods in order to produce a desired outcome. These processes were completely political until the ancient Greeks, who experimented with things like randomness to grant power to lower-class citizens. Some of my favorite videos on YouTube d…

You are talking about a fairly elite team here. Tossing in a few average/random people via sortition would only be a humiliating waste of time. Could you imagine a few random people in an NFL game?

Well, they call up Minor League players to Major League games all the time, the farm system is a fascinating window into that kind of world if you should ever want to dive into it.

But now that I've had a bit more time to think about it, the gap between inner circle will and the number of candidates has a better solution than mere randomness. Corruption. Decisions on who gets accepted get farmed out to subordinates and allies.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#188

Post by BeetleB » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:29 PM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #23

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental…

>We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit.

The argument cuts both ways. The reason there is this lawsuit is because many came to accept that merit provides access and opportunity. Both views are extremes.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#189

Post by mikec3010 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:31 PM UTC

betterunix2 wrote: post #128

IvyAdmisions wrote: post #68

From an earlier thread: I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies. The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply. You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect tes…

"What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all?" Sorry but what makes you think students with stellar grades have no social life? My memory of my four years at an "elite" NYC high school is that the students with the best grades (I was not even close) were just as social as the rest of us and participated in plenty of after school clubs and whatnot (more than…

> The simple version of that sentence would be of the form, "I am not racist, but [racist statement]."

So regardless of intent, it's conclusively, unequivocally "racist" if the outcome of a selection process doesn't fall perfectly within a normal distribution?

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#190

Post by BeetleB » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:31 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #92

speedplane wrote: post #23

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental…

It's a private university. Why shouldn't you be able to buy your way in?

I do not know specifically about Harvard, but generally when you receive a lot of federal money, you have to comply by certain rules. I don't know if there are existing rules that govern this, but if not, I'm sure plenty are trying to create those rules.