You keep using that word "meritocracy"

I work as a programmer, but my social circle is mostly semi-luddite radicals and hippies. Somebody got chocolate in my peanut butter.

Why this is happening is intensely interesting to me. Programmers have emerged as a highly visible priveleged social group, whose actions have huge and often unexamined social consequences. One example is the rising cost of living in San Francisco.

For a group that isn't used to considering itself "priveleged" in the usual sense, it must be disorienting to suddenly be scrutinized in this way. I wonder what the response from "hackers" will look like over the long term.

This is interesting, because it really does get down to the core of the argument: how do we improve the academic success of minorities?

Unfortunately, letting someone who can't do calculus into, say, Stanford, is not going to fix the fact that they will be WAY behind their peers. The psychological damage from this alone is tremendous. In fact, I believe there are some interesting studies done on this "mismatch" phenomenon, since racial minorities actually have a higher interest level in STEM careers, but are put at a disadvantage and become less likely to graduate as one due to being AA-ed into a student body where their capabilities are WAY below the mean of their classmates. This leads to an extremely high dropout rate which could have been avoided if they'd gone to a school that better suited their abilities. Instead, thanks to AA, the dropout rate for minorities in STEM departments is ridiculously high, and talented people who maybe just needed a less intense curriculum to adjust to instead end up becoming history or gender or racial studies majors or whatever major you can 4.0 in just for having a pulse.

Personally, whether it's harder or easier to do it at the pre-college level, I think it far wiser to leave the college admissions race-blind (to prevent discrimination) and focus on fixing the broken infrastructure that is failing our socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

That kid going to Stanford will do much better if he has AP calculus available at his high school, instead of just getting AA-ed in with an inferior skillset (which may or may not be their fault). We want people to be able to succeed, not set them up for failure. As a bonus, most people are fine with the idea of giving others an equal shot, but not so fine with the idea of race based discrimination. AA makes other groups resentful and suspicious of the AA-ed party, but helping people have equal access to preparation for college? Who's going to argue against that?

The best way to end discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

The costs (in time, money, and brain damage) associated with "factual" merit testing would be rediculous/uneconomic. We can verify this somewhat orthogonally, by looking at a couple different similar selection processees. eg. Job interviews. Same problem, same solution. 20 min resume screens. Next, we can compare a resource-unconstrained organization: How does it recruit top 1-5%'er? (special forces, test-pilots, and astronauts, etc): long, exhaustive, actual-failure-mode testing. No 20 minute skims.

If every job or educational credential was allocated in this manner (and you'd have to assume access to the test and test prep), it would be a more interesting test of "Merit". As a second best, it would be interesting if schools actually failed out their weakest students (ie, proving that only the best had a credential). But that is not how the world works. Merit is, rather, a politically correct (and practically expedient) heuristic for preferential treatment. And that is the main point of this post, I believe.

The fair debate, of course, is on the resolution and applicability of filters under various contexts. And if they are inefficient, are they remdiably so?. &tc.