161–170 of 307 posts
One interesting example is the UT system. Because affirmative action was banned in Hopwood v. Texas, the UT system resorted to a program where they accept the top 10% of each high school's class into all UT schools. It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to…
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It's a good point. Does it go both ways? What if Sarah spoke at a women's only conference. At this conference, it's not just a "bias" towards women speakers, it's a downright rule. How do we regard Sarah's experience here?
Sure, goes both ways. But at scale would reflect systemic biases (which broadly lean to white men in many fields).
When I studied engineering, my university had a "women in engineering" club which did a recruitment evening and I went along. When I talked to an employer, they told me "this is really for women, you should go to the general one instead". From what I understand, that kind of bias is widespread in America too. Where is this male and white preference happening?
I know many fields are dominated by white men but that fact alone doesn't show that it's because of systemic bias. Wasn't that stuff mostly stopped in the 1960's which is before anyone working today got started?
Just the other day there was a story on HN about an AI fighter pilot beating a real pilot in a simulation. But the company that did it was given special priority for government work because it was owned by a black person! A white owned company doing the same thing might not have got that contract.
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"If someone could build a system that scoops up these people, they'd find quite a few gems in the pile." I was surprised at the amount of people that had aced the military ASVAB test when I showed up at basic training. Not that acing that is similar to acing the SAT, but it's not easy either. Some of them were signed up for pretty menial jobs too.
Really? I took the ASVAB when I was looking for ways to fund my college education and considered doing Army Reserve. The only question I had to pause on was one about manual transmissions (I'd never driven stick before and couldn't remember how the gears were numbered on my Schwinn). The recruiter claimed to be blown away by the fact that I scored so high on the test. I was never actually given my score. I wonder if…
I walked the dorms and saw ~5 aces or very near aces out of maybe 200ish total people's scores.
It's just somewhat odd because starting out as an E1 isn't terribly lucrative. It doesn't surprise me that 5 of 200 do that well. It surprises me that 5 of 200 that do so well actually enlist.
Top colleges should stop treating admissions like a limited release beer - driving up prices with intentional shortages - and build some damn classrooms.
Getting enough teaching staff and laboratory space is expensive and exponentially harder to manage. Plus you will need support such as cheap mass housing. Then on top of that, big mass transport. It's not insurmountable, and quite a lot a chicken and egg problem. The most important part is, what do you do with drop outs? Or with people who try and cannot find fit? How do you handle people who have to quit for persona…
Businesses that aren't based on restricted supply are often expanding. That's how you make more money!
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The concrete example I often give is that as a conference organizer we decide to be a meritocracy. Great! As a fair meritocracy, all else being equal between speakers a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done. Experience should count right? So let's look at it in detail. Fred and Sarah both submit great talk proposals. But Fred has done ten talks and Sarah has done nine, so he gets the slot. Looking back…
That’s a weird take though. >> a tie breaker is how many talks you have already done Why? That’s not a meritocracy, it is tenure based. Tenure does not always correlate with merit, so the basis of your example is moot.
A has a solid proposal and they're a known good quantity on the "speaker circuit"
B is a newcomer and their proposal looks really interesting too--maybe even more so--but we don't know them so maybe A is the safer choice
(I'd argue that this is the way that a lot of conferences have historically operated and many still do to some degree--which is OK to a point. You don't want to exclude traditional crowd-pleasers.)
But maybe if A's proposal is just solid, it wouldn't hurt to reach out to B for some additional information and to offer mentoring rather than just go with the safe easy choice.
Commenters bringing up "meritocracy" don't seem to realize that fair meritocracies rarely exist in society. Often, your merit allows your to accumulate more merit, making the merit function geometric rather than linear. When the merit function is geometric, all it takes is a small change of fortune to start a rapid rise or a rapid decline. "Turning 100 dollars into 120 is work. Turning 100 million into 110 million is…
Social justice and "fairness" is rarely one of the main goals of a meritocracy. The main goal of a meritocracy is peak performance. NFL teams select the "best" quarter-backs not because it's most fair, but because it will produce the most wins. Universities grant tenure to the most productive professors, because that will enhance the University's reputation. Hospitals hire the best doctors, because they can save the…
To put it more directly - why should someone on the floor staff of Wal-Mart care about how optimally Wal-Mart is ran? They get paid by the hour, they don't own any stock in the company - and if it collapses, they'd just find another crappy job in another crappy retailer that pays minimum wage.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the optimizations of society are directed at 'optimizing' the share of the pie that the small elite receives.
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Meritocracy does not require strict ranking of individuals. Selecting cohorts instead of individuals is still meritocracy. You could use weighted probabilities, with higher scores meaning higher probabilities but still short of certainty, and it would still be meritocracy. The OP's point is that when measurement error is as large as it is for college admissions, using a simple lottery to narrow the cohort is as good…
> The OP's point is that when measurement error is as large as it is for college admissions, using a simple lottery to narrow the cohort is as good as any other method wrt getting the best students Not really. Lets say every student scores within 10 percentage point of their true "merit". So if you only pick the top 1% scorers you actually could get students down in the top 11%. So why not just pick top 11% by random…
It could be true that there is no correlation between true "merit" and test scores when you get to, say, the 99%th percentile. Especially since the predictive ability of these tests must be suspect now that you can study strategies for them.
In that situation, Harvard shouldn't value a 1600 any more than a 1540.
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Really? I took the ASVAB when I was looking for ways to fund my college education and considered doing Army Reserve. The only question I had to pause on was one about manual transmissions (I'd never driven stick before and couldn't remember how the gears were numbered on my Schwinn). The recruiter claimed to be blown away by the fact that I scored so high on the test. I was never actually given my score. I wonder if…
They weren't claiming. Your scores are all posted on the wall in basic training. I walked the dorms and saw ~5 aces or very near aces out of maybe 200ish total people's scores. It's just somewhat odd because starting out as an E1 isn't terribly lucrative. It doesn't surprise me that 5 of 200 do that well. It surprises me that 5 of 200 that do so well actually enlist.
My distant understanding is that a not-insignificant number of people join the military because this will give them a full ride in college. They can't make much more than the Army pays with a high school diploma, and they can't afford college without either crippling debt or something like the GI Bill.
But I don't have any facts here, just going off what an old friend told me about how he ended up in Iraq in the first place.
One interesting example is the UT system. Because affirmative action was banned in Hopwood v. Texas, the UT system resorted to a program where they accept the top 10% of each high school's class into all UT schools. It's an interesting way of doing admissions, albeit not perfect. One critique that I'm anticipating seeing is that this encourages going to a mediocre high school. Except...getting good students to go to…
Where I live students don't have any choice in which high school to go to. You go to your local high school, unless your family is wealthy and you can afford private schools.
I would assume this is the case for 95% of Americans. You must have had a different experience?
My family was not wealthy so I did not get a choice whether to "play the game". Actually, I don't even know what game you are taking about.