Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans • Hacker News Board

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#61

Post by reader5000 » Sat, May 16, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

American uni system is so incredibly obsolete.

95% of why a college degree is valuable is for the signal "hey I went to uni of X degree of prestige [and therefore am probably of Y degree of intelligence/ambition]".

Why do young Americans need to spend $100k just to signal their iq level to employers?

Why do young Americans need to compete with each other to do so?

Maybe to get into Harvard you need iq > 130. As the population grows, there are more kids with iq > 130, but # of Harvard seats does not increase.

There needs to be a low cost and widely accepted way to signal iq that does not create unnecessary competition and cost for people starting out.

Also with AI coming along the corporate obsession with iq will be obviated as well. Nobody gives a shit how well you did on the SAT when goddamn Skynet can diagnose 5000 medical conditions per second with quadruple human accuracy.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#62

Post by madengr » Sat, May 16, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

Go to any engineering school in the US, especially grad school, and it's almost all Asian. Out of 28 students in my DSP class, 25 were Asian, and that was 20 years ago, although maybe it has changed.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#63

Post by cbd1984 » Sat, May 16, 2015, 2:40 PM UTC

calibraxis wrote: post #29

adventured wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point of affirmative action was to provide unearned opportunities based on the color of your skin. With the theory being that over time it would help boost the well being of minorities (at the time mostly African Americans). That by forcing open opportunities, the next generation would do better, and the generation after that would do even better, and so on.

"Affirmative action programs" differ. But in general, they're to control the racism of gatekeepers, these bureaucrats who choose who gets a decent education. There are better solutions. For instance: free lifelong quality education to all. But naturally, elites would rather waste society's wealth on wars (international killing) and prisons (the most jailings in the world)... than silly things like knowledge and healt…

> Naturally, many try to attack it to claw back more unearned white privilege for themselves.

Since when do Asians have white privilege?

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#64

Post by alextgordon » Sat, May 16, 2015, 2:46 PM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #45

nodiscpls wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discrimination is a bad thing that should be rooted out and stopped. The most insidious is of course the very PC "positive or affirmative discrimiation" - where a group of people decide discrimination is now ok, just because. It ends up with parody situations, like here in the UK, there is the joke about a lady making an absolute fortune, companies being desperate to hire her, because she is disabled, ethnic, lesbian…

> Discrimination is a bad thing that should be rooted out and > stopped. The most insidious is of course the very PC "positive > or affirmative discrimiation" - where a group of people decide > discrimination is now ok, just because. Seriously? "Just because?" The ignorance here is staggering. Or there is dishonesty. There's lots of room for arguing the theory what should be done about America's racism problem, or wh…

Racism is intrinsically wrong because it is discrimination for discrimination's sake. Races don't exist, they're a fiction.

Ethiopians and Papuans are both "black", Japanese and Indian people are both "asian", Spaniards and Bosnians are both "white", and nobody can agree on what the hell "hispanic" means.

None of these people have anything in common, culturally, genetically, linguistically, you need a bogus concept like 'race' to do that.

It's fine for universities to use a form of affirmative action to correct society, they're called grants.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#65

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, May 16, 2015, 2:47 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #41

Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level. So you don't get into Harvard and you have to go to a state school or whatever, that's not really an impediment to your life and career unless you want to become a congressman or a supreme court justice or whatever. Where it does bother me is med school. I've seen several of my Asian friends who were just ridiculously obviously great applicants eithe…

Data on MCATs agree with your anecdote - Asians seem to need to meet a higher bar to be accepted into med school.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080801022539/http://www.aamc.o...

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#66

Post by msabalau » Sat, May 16, 2015, 2:48 PM UTC

nodiscpls wrote: post #33

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #23

Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-American === Harvard Accused of Favoritism towards African-Americans/Latinos/etc. The former just has a sexy title. The latter we've known all along because these schools openly state that they embrace affirmative action. The matter of fact is that the school is incredibly strategic in how it makes its admissions decision, taking into account not only race, but geography, and a w…

Discrimination is a bad thing that should be rooted out and stopped. The most insidious is of course the very PC "positive or affirmative discrimiation" - where a group of people decide discrimination is now ok, just because. It ends up with parody situations, like here in the UK, there is the joke about a lady making an absolute fortune, companies being desperate to hire her, because she is disabled, ethnic, lesbian…

The actual purpose of Harvard is to mix the children of the elite (regardless of their ability) with talented children of a broad cross section of the rest of society. One can observe this directly by searching "harvard" on wikileaks: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/04/20/deborah-friedell/how-to...

or by, say, observing the life of Barack Obama.

The stated mission of Harvard college is to "educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society"

In neither case is their any value is filling up the school with people with highest test scores. The primary use of the test scores is to select from the cream from a broad cross section of society, because the entirety of society is whom the graduates of are expected to lead (serve or exploit). A secondary use is to extort larger sums of money from the elite whose children score exceptionally low.

Working class whites complain that lower scoring african americans get jobs as police or firemen over higher scoring whites. They ignore that purpose of the tests is simply to weed out people who can't do the job.

Scholastic test scores serve a similar purpose. Harvard has an exceptionally high graduation rate. There is no reason to believe that Harvard is admitting students who can't benefit from what is offered. Even if it was, the children of tiger moms pursuing meaningless vanity metrics have no standing to complain about it.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#67

Post by shiven » Sat, May 16, 2015, 2:54 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #57

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #23

Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-American === Harvard Accused of Favoritism towards African-Americans/Latinos/etc. The former just has a sexy title. The latter we've known all along because these schools openly state that they embrace affirmative action. The matter of fact is that the school is incredibly strategic in how it makes its admissions decision, taking into account not only race, but geography, and a w…

That's not actually true. The majority of Harvard's class is white. Statistically, if they are biased against Asians, that seat is going to a white person, not a black or Hispanic person. The magnet school where I went to high school has median SAT scores comparable to one of the mid-level Ivies. They got rid of affirmative action. It is now 70% Asian. And that's without accepting any foreign or out of state students…

That's the end result schools like Harvard are trying to avoid.

Why? That is the worst kind of discrimination in my book. How is it my fault that I was born smart, worked hard to capitalize on my innate abities and then competed on a standardized test to perform better than folks who just happened to pop out of a different vagina or uterus? Nice way to fuck me for no fault of mine.

For those saying not getting into Harvard or MIT is no big deal, are either in the sour grapes camp or have never had to face opportunity costs arising from picking a non-exclusive-low-visibility-(but-great)-school.

I don't know what la-la-land they live in, but that Veritas stamp will open doors that no amount of effort, intelligence or other factors ever can.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#68

Post by streptomycin » Sat, May 16, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #59

streptomycin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wouldn't explain my observations, where excellent non-Asian applicants were shoe-ins on their first try and Asian applicants of the same quality had to try multiple times, some of them never making it in at all. If it was just a numbers issue and not everyone could make it in, you wouldn't expect such a clear racial difference. Of course my anecdotes could just be flukes or I could be misinterpreting the quality…

> Of course my anecdotes could just be flukes or I could be misinterpreting the quality of various candidates. The beauty of commenting on HN is that you don't need to provide data or citations, you can just write down anecdotes (made up or not), and you'll be upvoted by those who like what you say. And you can feel good about it, because the community thinks it has an intellectual side, engaging in deep conversation…

Yeah, real intellectuals only communicate by exchanging peer-reviewed publications. Besides that, they're basically mimes.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#69

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 16, 2015, 2:58 PM UTC

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #23

Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-American === Harvard Accused of Favoritism towards African-Americans/Latinos/etc. The former just has a sexy title. The latter we've known all along because these schools openly state that they embrace affirmative action. The matter of fact is that the school is incredibly strategic in how it makes its admissions decision, taking into account not only race, but geography, and a w…

[deleted]

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#70

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, May 16, 2015, 3:00 PM UTC

iaw wrote: post #5

Yeesh. The basis of their complaint seems to be rooted in test score (and possibly grade analysis) but they neglect the increased homogeneity that it represents. Asians may have a tighter distribution of metric based qualities with a mean at the higher end of the spectrum when you cut by race but it's quite possible that there are other deficits that cannot easily be highlighted through a metric based comparison alon…

Suppose black students were accepted at far lower rates than their SAT scores suggested they would be. Would you accept the argument that blacks are secretly deficient in some hard to measure way? I'd sure be suspicious of that.

In any case, it would be great if Harvard could provide some stats showing exactly how Asians are deficient. Will be interesting.