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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#501

Post by dmvdoug »

Georgelemental wrote: post #443
dmvdoug wrote: post #431

Regardless of what your take is on the substance, as a former lawyer, I was really struck at the language in the various concurrences and dissents. They are very clearly pissed and/or disgusted with each other in a way that is very not-normal, even for hot button cases.

This issue is personal for justices Thomas, Jackson, and Sotomayor especially. I think that is reflected in their opinions.

Sotomayor as well. What fascinates me about Thomas’s dissent is towards the end he talks about HBCUs and how effective they are. You’ll find language of his in a lot of places suggesting black separatist—type sympathies. He was a genuine radical in his college years in that respect, and he’s still clearly sympathetic to sone extent.

Cards on the table: I think Justice Thomas has a genuinely nutty jurisprudence. Like way out there nutty. And I disagree with him about virtually everything. But he’s much more complex than the standard caricatures allow for (even when they come from fellow-travelers, like the people who thought Thomas was just Scalia’s lapdog; wrong; Scalia was nakedly unprincipled when compared to Thomas).

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#502

Post by Kye »

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,…

Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations was widely dismissed for the title in 2014, but it's a chronicle of this sort of thing, and it's very much ongoing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#503

Post by nyolfen »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #275
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.

Do we need race based affirmative action though? Couldn't we have needs based discrimination? What makes a poor hispanic immigrant more deserving of a hand up than a poor ukranian immigrant?

people vote in racial/ethnic blocs, so spoils are doled out on those terms

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#504

Post by sanderjd »

blagie wrote: post #353
mtklein wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress. Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out: 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universitie…

> 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity.

This is how I've always felt when I'm involved in hiring (especially when I was at Google). I don't relate to the whole "nobody can do fizzbuzz" thing at all. There are so many ridiculously smart and talented people out there, and so many bottlenecks letting fewer of them through than would actually be capable of succeeding. I think it ends up being almost entirely luck who gets through these bottlenecks and who doesn't, because of this. I have found it very dispiriting to see candidates who I felt were definitely better than me be rejected by hiring processes that I made it through, and realizing that I was just lucky and they were just unlucky.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#505

Post by thegaulofthem »

pjc50 wrote: post #222
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…

> 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…

> (It could be worse: Haitians who had freed themselves from slavery by the mass murder of their oppressors were made to pay a huge amount of compensation to them!)

At risk of starting a fun flame war, it’s more complicated than that.

Outside of a contingent of Polish mercenaries, whom were deemed something to the effect of honorary blacks, the new former slave regime effectively genocided the whites of the island. Men, women, children, the works. Not only that, but they threw in the mixed as well. Then went about taking all of everyone’s property.

I don’t know where the exact reasonable line is for revenge when you’ve been enslaved, but I’m certain they went well and unquestionably over it.

To that end, I don’t know where the reasonable counter-balance is for France to make claim against the former slave colony for its crimes against humanity but the idea that they have clean hands and or are owed something is an appalling revisionist history of the country.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#506

Post by TMWNN »

Lendal wrote: post #154
cpascal wrote: post #118

I think universities can probably come up with a different set of non-protected criteria to lift underrepresented communities out of social/financial oppression. This might even provide greater access to some equally needing students that are looked over by racially-based criteria. In a perfect world, everyone would have equal opportunity and support throughout their primary education, and college admission could be…

Yeah, and I think it will be pretty simple to do. Just switch over to looking at what district the applicants graduated (or what neighborhood they grew up in) from and try to equally represent all school districts over time. For instance, if you have a poor high school that's never had anyone admitted to your university, then try to choose the next outstanding applicant coming out of that high school. That promotes d…

>Just switch over to looking at what district the applicants graduated (or what neighborhood they grew up in) from and try to equally represent all school districts over time.

This is basically what the University of Texas does; the top x% of applicants from each Texas high school is admitted, with other applicants competing against each other. I think it's a good way for a state school with the duty to educate its citizens to do so without using race as the determinant.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#507

Post by naasking »

BobbyJo wrote: post #457
spacephysics wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying important question is what do you define as equality? Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? This is a very slippery slope when some definitions are not equal, or stated, as we’ve come into a recent crisis of definitions being rewritten unnaturally (I understand the meaning of words change over time, but there have been recent inorganic changes, I’d argue) The classic opportunity of outcome…

>The underlying important question is what do you define as equality? Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? On an individual level, the obvious answer is opportunity, but how do you measure that? Generally via outcomes. If two groups are equally capable and have equal opportunity, you would expect similar outcomes.

> If two groups are equally capable and have equal opportunity, you would expect similar outcomes.

No, because this assumes that different groups have equivalent values. This is plainly false. There are some broad similarities for sure, but each gender, ethnicity and culture values different things which will inevitably produce different outcomes.

This is why obsessing over outcome equity is doomed from the start. It implicitly relies on either enforcing homogeneity, thus erasing cultural uniqueness, or outright discrimination in preferring some groups over others to overcome any cultural values that might impact outcomes so the final numbers look pretty.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#510

Post by parineum »

kllrnohj wrote: post #192
mucle6 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The court changing their mind feels like a feature not a bug. The court represents people, and those people change their mind from generation to generation. I don't want to live in a world where we can't overturn bad decisions. Would America be better off if we legalized slavery 300 years ago, and could never undo it?

There's a process for overturning "bad decisions" it's called passing legislation. There's a reason Stare Decisis is supposed to be a thing, after all. But if the Supreme Court doesn't have to listen to itself, then does any court? Should every minor court just decide SC precedent was bad & overturn it?

No two cases are the same. Often, a unique situation can highlight why a previous decision was erroneous.
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