Wow flagged within 30 mins before people could even start having a discussion. HN audience is wild.
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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
211–220 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#212Whatever 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)
This also works in the opposite direction though:
New York has a right to shelter law because of the judicial branch of government. Basically, a pro bono lawsuit and a judge forced NY to have enough shelter space for all people sleeping in the street.
Compare and contrast that to San Francisco (and more broadly California) - where everything can be decided on at the ballot box (like kidney dialysis staffing levels) - which has more people sleeping on the street than all of the UK, and has a wait list of each night of 1000+ for a shelter spot.
Everything has advantages and drawbacks.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#213The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people…
> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? This is what I will never understand, why don't we focus on just helping the poor instead of based on race. If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race. However in…
Because divide and rule works way better in America based on race and not class…
It’s intentional. These political footballs are half real, half tactics.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I went to MIT ... I was valedictorian [presumably in high school] and had a perfect score on the SATs > I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishmen…
>The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. But his dad did use it to their advantage. OP then gets to grow up in an upper-class city with a great school district. Meanwhile some white or asian person gets bumped off, and instead of their kids growing up in that area, they grow up in a worse school district.
> Meanwhile some white or asian person gets bumped off, and instead of their kids growing up in that area, they grow up in a worse school district.
Because if someone can't go to MIT, they're doomed to a life of abject poverty? Really?
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.
Using parental income as well as parental education level in admissions would have helped GP's father just fine without any need for race-based affirmative action.
> parental income as well as parental education level in admissions
But that leads to the same fundamental problem - somebody who was "unfortunate" enough to be born into decent circumstances but _who was actually more qualified_ than the diversity admit gets rejected.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#216The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people…
> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? This is what I will never understand, why don't we focus on just helping the poor instead of based on race. If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race. However in…
> However in my more conpsiracy minded moments I can't help but wonder if the focus on race is designed to keep the power and the middle class fighting each other over things like that rather than fighting against the people that have the power.
But is there really any better explanation?
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
The judicial branch does not make laws. You're implying that the judicial branch legislated in this case. They did no such thing. They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law. Indeed, legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea, and so it's a good thing that they do not and are not able to.
This is a legal fiction. Both abortion and affirmative action were legislated from the bench. That's how they came to be. It's a classic thing. Having come to the conclusion that some thing should be law, the composition of the bench determines whether sufficient justification can be found. Then these decisions have the weight of law. It is a defacto Politburo - a long lived legislative body of ultimate authority tha…
> the composition of the bench determines whether sufficient justification can be found.
You're under the mistaken impression that justifications are a prerequisite. Any court can find justification for any ruling in whatever way they see fit. Yes, lower judges have been remove for questionable decisions. SCOTUS is above that, as a lifetime appointment. Sometimes rulings come with no justification at all. SCOTUS has been trying to explain itself via these public "opinions", but is not required to do so.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#218As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor. But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my back…
Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us.
Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We all knew those few incredible superstars who could run laps around us, but that doesn't mean you're not a star too.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#219The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people…
The intent is to factor in some unknown "racism" value. Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average, so if you naively stratified by income, you'd still wind up with a mostly white and Asian student population.
There are a lot of reasons Black and Hispanic kids underperform, and it's just easier for the school to short circuit all that and choose based on race rather than incorporate all those other factors. It might not even be viable to incorporate all those other factors.
We really only have two choices:
1) Wait out the effects of racism, historic and contemporary, which will take hundreds of years.
2) Sacrifice some of our "individual determination above all else" principles to reach some palpable level of racial equality.
I think both are flawed in their own ways, but the world is always imperfect, so pick your side.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.
It's worth bearing in mind that if affirmative action helped his father become a doctor, it also prevented someone else's father from becoming a doctor. I wonder what that person could have achieved.
As someone not from the US, this whole Affirmative Actions seems to just be reversed racism. I.e. in the end more-or-less still unfair.
Better to just remove race all together, and e.g. require college admissions by law to be judged without knowing the applicants name or ethnicity.
To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race. Race really does not matter, and no matter how much the US claims to be racism free, the degree to which it is focused on just proves that the US isn't free of racism. Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.
Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.