Good: race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc should not be used as an advantage, or disadvantage in totally unrelated matters (education, work, etc)
Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#132Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this has all underscored what has been true for a long time: Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them. (Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)
> Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. Perhaps, if there is no 75% majority of opinions at the supreme court, then the case is just put on hold indefinitely until new clarifying laws are passed?
I'm agree in essence, some kind of stipulation needs to be applied to supreme court decisions that incentivizes or outright requires the other houses to apply a more permanent solution.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree with legislation via judicial branch being a bad idea. However, affirmative action isn't legislation. This is judicial review striking down policy (executive branch interpretation and implementation of legislation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/af...
Judicial review has upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action policies for 40+ years, what changed is the composition of the Supreme Court and its related willingness to legislate from the bench -- abandoning stare decisis and judicial restraint. We saw this with Roe last year.
Striking down Roa v Wade was an example of undoing such “legislating from the branch.” The original Roe v Wade created in effect a new federal law, and last year’s decision struck that down.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your family benefited from it and taking it away is now 'good' then it sounds like you're saying you couldn't care less about any future generations who could've used this ladder to better their lives. As the immigrant, much like your father, whose father is a construction worker, that's how it reads.
This. “I got mine so no one else needs it”. And sorry GP but you absolutely got into MIT partly because of your ethnicity - along with your grades of course. I benefited from that as well and it was fairly clear.
Everyone obsesse about Harvard/MIT but AA affects every school and not all of them give you a fancy big name on a resume.
And if we are talking high end schools I've also read it's not simply a matter of getting admitted and that the rates of affirmative action candidates drops outs at much higher rates, which hurts/delays their chance to succeed in the future because they would have been better off dominating at a lower percentile school.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#135Good. I'd be sickened to hear I got a lucrative opportunity because of the colour of my skin (which incidentally is not white and I'm not oriental so I'd guess I'd have benefitted from affirmative action if it was present where I grew up).
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#136Yep.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#137I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept. You could have 10% or 20% percent of candidates chosen by lottery, or have a lottery for all candidates who have the minimum pre-requisites, etc. Some sort of randomness whould guarantee a diversity of candidates and would even span across dimensions which are not even considered currently.
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Acceptance into anything, beyond a table-stakes requirement of merit, is essentially a lottery. You work your ass off, you get an interview, your luck of the draw is someone having a bad day, is otherwise biased against you, or any number of other issues. It's naive to think that the people interviewing you are doing so solely on the grounds of your achievements on paper. This is true regardless of whether you're interviewing for an academic program, for a job, for a sale, for an investment...
Society can either do the healthy thing and accept this and embrace it (won't happen, because it's not "fair"), or not, and make the inherent lottery explicit.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#138Considering the failure and timing of prop 16 and overall makeup of the California electorate compared to rest of country, official discrimination on the basis of race likely won't return in higher ed. Also consider that prop 16 failed by double digits with the pro-discrimination crowd outspending the opposition 19x What I'm curious about is this: the Harvard decision is wrt a private entity, the court ruled that the…
> Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next?
I'm no fan of regulation and government intervention in private business, but its gotten out of control in tech and the corporate world. I've flat out heard hiring managers say they'll only hire a woman, lgbtq, or [certain minority] for certain roles. I've sat in hiring committees where candidates preform horribly, esp compared to others being reviewed at the same time, and get pushed through to offer stage just because of their inalienable characteristics. If these meetings were recorded and leaked to the press, there'd be outrage. These managers talk of human beings like people collect coins or action figures. And HR/Recruiting/C-suite is super complicit in all this, if not actively encouraging it.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#139Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this has all underscored what has been true for a long time: Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea. If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them. (Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)
But somehow, some people only feel the need to mention it when they don't like the result.
Yep. Roe vs. Wade was one of the most egregious examples of "legislating from the bench" in the latter 20th century? How many people who would hand-wring over recent SCOTUS decisions oppose Roe on these grounds? Or is this a convenient exception? Griswold? How about Lawrence vs. Texas?
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think you didn’t belong? I know a lot of white and Asian MIT grads and only one had perfect SAT scores. And several were valedictorian, but I’m not sure it was the majority. Curious how often you wonder if the white people you work with had an advantage by not being historically discriminated against? Probably never. And rightfully so. If people do wonder then that’s on them. There’s a lot of dumb stuff pe…
He wonders because there’s been systemic sustained racial discrimination for the benefit of people of his race. It’s one of the insidious and corrosive ways affirmative action undermines the accomplishments of its potential beneficiaries.
The opposite was true for the entire time affirmative action was not in place. Hindsight doesn't make history less relevant for our present for addressing intergenerational inequities, just like foresight-blindness doesn't make our present actions less relevant for our future.
It's a hard problem.