261–270 of 286 posts
The oral arguments are an excellent listen: - https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/live.aspx (live) - https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_audio/2... (recorded)
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. So we're talking about race as a determining factor in admission to Harvard.
MR. WAXMAN [representing Harvard]: Race in some -- for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor...
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> if you mean poor, say poor I literally said "poor" in my example in the second paragraph. Also, "socio-economic status" is a spectrum between poor and wealthy, including all of them. Just like "race" includes all races. We don't call it "non-white-and-asian-based affirmative action", so i dont see why you have an issue with me not calling it "poor-based affirmative action". It is a sliding scale, with all groups wi…
> Also, "socio-economic status" is a spectrum between poor and wealthy, including all of them. Just like "race" includes all races. We don't call it "non-white-and-asian-based affirmative action", so i dont see why you have an issue with me not calling it "poor-based affirmative action". It is a sliding scale, with all groups within it having different weights attached. So calling it "poor-based affirmative action" m…
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> This court has been shredding the rule of law in this country for the last year, and is systematically replacing our democracy with fascism. If you think that, it's probably a sign you need to come up for air. What you write is simply not true unless you're examining things with a partisan funhouse mirror that shows myside as righteous and true and the otherside as cartoon villians. Admittedly, those mirrors are ge…
I got this from reading Supreme Court rulings.
No, you didn't. You got that from "reading Supreme Court rulings" with your funhouse mirror.
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Expanding the size of enrollment isn't just something that can flipped like a switch. One cannot simply build a high-rise dormitory without increasing the capacity of all other facilities in lockstep - and a university designed to be fully walkable can only accommodate so much simultaneous construction. And more generally, you have the use of applicants' race backwards - the entire point of affirmative action is to t…
> A university designed to be fully walkable can only accommodate so much simultaneous construction. Well, your implication here is that accessible, affordable colleges are clearly a second-rate experience. I'm not necessarily disagreeing here, but it's something academia themselves have not admitted. Your example forgets that they are still allowed to look at financial/hardship data to determine merit. So presuming…
I'd certainly like to live in a world where students of the same age, with the same family income/savings etc., with the same teachers and classrooms, with equally supportive parents, would have equivalent opportunities throughout their K-12 careers. In such a world, I would indeed be the one "perpetuating bias" with my comment. But we live in a world where the race of those students, controlling for everything else, is statistically shown to have an impact on things we'd generally agree are an important part of a child's learning experience.
Now, we might reasonably disagree on whether admissions departments are overreaching in trying to ensure that their merit-based decisions take these factors into account. And we might reasonably disagree as to whether the government should have the ability to intervene if such overreach were found to exist. But the idea that any of this is only being done to perpetuate bias, ignores the fact that bias already exists.
I look at this through the lens of the San Francisco public schools. When I went to the magnet high school there, Lowell, they had explicit race based standards. We all got scores out of 70 based on our standardized tests and middle school grades. The differences were pretty stark. Chinese kids needed a 68, which could mean they got just one B. White kids needed a 62, black and latino even lower. So I totally get why…
At least since 2007, that sort of explicit race based discrimination undertaken voluntarily is not legal in public school districts, see PICS v. Seattle.
Tutoring for African-American SFUSD Students Citywide
Posted on September 23, 2021
The Citywide Tutorial Program is partnering with after school programs
across San Francisco to offer homework help and tutoring
for African-American students enrolled in SFUSD schools,
kindergarten through 12th grade.
SFUSD Access and Equity Department and SFUSD State and
Federal Programs Department provide a SFUSD credentialed
teacher to tutor African-American students at each location,
with a virtual option:
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The system developer has to look at race to de-bias a system, but the system shouldn't take race as input, unless it's somehow able to de-bias itself. In this example, I'd wonder why ZIP code is even an input.
So I'd consider that part of the system. You could also train your model to debias by using a cost function that incorporates race and minimizes the KL divergence between different ethnicities. (Obviously it would be best to use interpretable models and/or causal ones) A Mahalanobis distance might also be good here. But when training your model you might want to PCA it and if race isn't an included factor then you ca…
All I'm saying is at the bare minimum, don't feed race as an input. It's a vague factor that the applicant has zero control over, and a model (or human reviewer) making any assumptions based on race would be inherently racist, which is unjustifiable. Another bad example is how UCSD asks how feminine (rate 0-5) the applicant considers themselves. Only use factors that have some legitimate purpose; at least the high school matters because of grade inflation, but standardized tests are actually fairer. US hiring is this way, where many companies consider it an unwanted risk to even know about protected categories (age, race, religion, marital status, etc). It's far from an airtight solution.
This isn't really about science, and the article is off-topic for HN.
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> anti-meritocratic How do you measure merit, though? People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason. I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair? People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defi…
> People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Both of those have predictive value for success in university. So if "merit" means "well prepared to learn the material in a university curriculum", these are both useful measures for predicting it.
Yes, of course it makes sense to accept people who most likely to be successful. But what then, after that?
Everyone’s got an opinion, but what’s the use of that if no one understands the problem? Oh well.
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At least since 2007, that sort of explicit race based discrimination undertaken voluntarily is not legal in public school districts, see PICS v. Seattle.
What about this, which has been on SFUSD's web site for the past 12 months? Tutoring for African-American SFUSD Students Citywide Posted on September 23, 2021 The Citywide Tutorial Program is partnering with after school programs across San Francisco to offer homework help and tutoring for African-American students enrolled in SFUSD schools, kindergarten through 12th grade. SFUSD Access and Equity Department and SFUS…
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What happened to it refers to a concept called the meritocracy trap.
Let's say you need open heart surgery. Doctor one has a 3.9 GPA from Harvard medical. Doctor two barely passed your state's medical school Which do you want doing your operation? The "meritocracy trap" often caves into "wealth and privilege" and this is not meritocracy.
The meritocracy trap obviously does not imply that competence/merit does not matter: it implies only that we should be much more careful and critical about whether we measure competence/merit fairly and properly, especially a posteriori.
I would say that your example illustrates a very shortsighted conception of competence/merit.
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What happened to it refers to a concept called the meritocracy trap.
Let's say you need open heart surgery. Doctor one has a 3.9 GPA from Harvard medical. Doctor two barely passed your state's medical school Which do you want doing your operation? The "meritocracy trap" often caves into "wealth and privilege" and this is not meritocracy.