Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions • Hacker News Board

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#301

Post by crackercrews » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:11 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #162

The 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? Who loses in this case?

Universities would do this instead of affirmative action if it would lead to the same result. But it wouldn't. It would help poor Asian students. And it would hurt the URMs who are not poor. They currently benefit from strong affirmative action programs but would fare much worse under a program like you describe.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#302

Post by scohesc » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:11 PM UTC

dudul wrote: post #244

skrebbel wrote: post #162

The 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…

European naturalized American here and yes I do agree with you. In the few EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies. Just help poor people and that's it. I'll put on my tin foil hat here, but I genuinely believe that "race" (and now "gender") is being weaponized by the American elites/politicians to form nice clear camps/teams for voters. People ne…

I've heard people make references to the Occupy Wall Street protests a decade+ back being the catalyst for corporations and governments to start using "diversity" as a wedge issue to distract and divide people into groups to keep people from organizing. (Further down the conspiracy rabbit-hole, the CIA has been known to work with entertainment and critical industries to push opinions and ideas to sway the populace)

It really does feel like people weren't at each others throats as much 10 years ago as they seem to be now. It's almost like it's being used as a wedge to divide and distract from more important issues.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#303

Post by jeltz » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:12 PM UTC

MockObject wrote: post #216

kneebonian wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

An alternative one: A culture which has a history of structural racism due to slavery which therefore still thinks about many topics through the lens of race despite it often not being the best suite lens.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#304

Post by 93po » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:12 PM UTC

omginternets wrote: post #235

bouncing wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has long had most of the best universities in the world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.

[flagged]

In terms of reputation, name recognition, notable people who come out of them, publishers of leading research, and advancers of technology? If you looked at a list of the top 20 I would bet more than half are in the US.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#305

Post by earthboundkid » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:12 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #162

The 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…

Because we did harm to African Americans and Native Americans as groups, so the remedy has to be to them as groups.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#306

Post by Bo0kerDeWitt » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:12 PM UTC

solardev wrote: post #120

I often wished universities (and other organizations) would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" to determine someone's background difficulties. Like okay, you get X points if you're this race, Y points for that. Z points if your parents were poor. Or if you grew up in these bad zip codes. Or if your dad was gone and mom was an addict. Whatever. As an Asian American of relatively privileged (middle class) upb…

This idea of a "matrix" often occurs to me when such topics are discussed. What attributes would you add to the matrix? You've suggested race, family wealth, zip code, whether a parent was an addict. You could also have height, physical beauty, IQ, degree of disability, sporting aptitude. Perhaps even degree of neuroticism or autism. The problem is, the matrix quickly gets bigger and bigger. The number of unique matrices starts to increase exponentially. What you end up with is a unique matrix for each individual. So why not do away with the matrix altogether, and just treat people as individuals, without fetishizing one or a couple of the attributes?

Also the weight you assign each attribute is a subjective judgement. Who do you trust to make such a judgement? For example, what bestows more "privilege", having a pretty face, or being from the middle class? And by how much? I don't know.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#307

Post by lotsofpulp » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #255

pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia ), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether peopl…

Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those descendants are very successful now and some descendants of slave owners are probably very poor now. And some people are descendants of both. And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people,…

> You've got to try to make things right.

The issue is this has nothing to do with the goal of educating someone in a certain subject based on their academic proficiencies.

Go ahead and give poor people money, but no reason to make other processes and institutions less meritocratic. I know legacy/bribed via donation admissions exist, and those are obviously also a problem too.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#308

Post by nradov » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #151

azinman2 wrote: post #93

Earlier 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.

Something else that isn't really factored into most of these conversations is the level of gatekeeping around professions and schools where a much larger group of people can succeed or even flourish, yet never get the opportunity due to limited class sizes. Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as w…

The supply of physicians is artificially limited by Medicare funding for residency programs at teaching hospitals. This shortage will only get worse as the population ages.

https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate...

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#309

Post by MisterBastahrd » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

Maxion wrote: post #220

jlawson wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rac…

If it were absolute, then affirmative action would never have been necessary in the first place.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#310

Post by zuminator » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #162

The 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…

One of the issues with the US is not just that certain races are more likely to be poor but they are segregated as well, meaning that there are counties, neighborhoods, and school districts where minorities are concentrated, at levels sometimes approaching 90% or more. And as a result of that, historically the residents of those neighborhoods weren't just economically deprived, but cut off from power, and influence. People lived in dilapidated housing. They couldn't afford to repair because banks wouldn't issue loans. They couldn't afford good schools because schools are funded by county or district in the US and so a poor local population means underfunded schools. They couldn't get good jobs because they had a poor education. All of their friends, family and neighbors were similarly dirt poor. In other words there was a cycle of pervasive generational poverty which didn't exist in the mainstream culture. Even if they scrimped and saved to try to move to a better neighborhood, they were often either entirely excluded on the basis of race, or faced rampant and sometimes dangerous discrimination upon settling in the new neighborhood.

Anyway, so the goal of affirmative action was to try to break that cycle, by essentially awarding the best and brightest from those segregated communities opportunities they could never achieve otherwise.

There was also maybe a sense of society thinking (at least in the case of blacks and maybe indigenous americans) "We owe them because we put them in this situation by kidnapping/enslaving or massacring their ancestors." Whereas with just generic poor people, to say that we owe them anything (as in "we owe them because our economy requires a pool of desparate labor") would be an indictment of capitalism, which is not an acceptable thought pattern in the USA.