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Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

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Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#161

Post by temphn »

cousin_it wrote: post #138
temphn wrote: post #49

According to PBS, Race is an Illusion: http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm Jared Diamond concurs: http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/0... If you believe their arguments, there is no scientific basis for categorizing someone on the basis of race. Appearance is particularly hazardous. Therefore, why can't Asians mark black on the application? Who is to say they are not black if t…

> According to PBS, Jared Diamond, and many sociology departments, it is impossible to administer a genetic test that distinguishes African Americans from Asians Are you sure Jared Diamond actually made that statement? It seems weird. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering mentions a study where genetic markers were found to predict self-reported race/ethnic group with a discrepancy of onl…

Of course Jared Diamond was wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Human_genetic_diversity:_Lew...

But many people accept his premises.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#162

Post by temphn »

narkee wrote: post #136
temphn wrote: post #49

According to PBS, Race is an Illusion: http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm Jared Diamond concurs: http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/0... If you believe their arguments, there is no scientific basis for categorizing someone on the basis of race. Appearance is particularly hazardous. Therefore, why can't Asians mark black on the application? Who is to say they are not black if t…

I haven't read much on the subject, but the idea that races can't be separated based on genetics is either false, or due to the fact that we don't have enough sensitivity in the measurement. Phenotypically, I can easily identify a black person vs. an asian person, with nearly 100% accuracy. What I'm seeing are phenotypic differences in hair type, skin colour, facial structure, etc. that are all defined by genetics. I…

You are 100% correct, and anyone can verify for themselves that you can predict geographic ancestry from saliva to an incredible level of detail:

https://www.23andme.com/ancestry/origins

Nevertheless, if you take for the sake of argument the fallacious concept that "geographic ancestry has no connection to genetics", then there is and should be nothing stopping an Asian American (or a European American for that matter) from self-identifying as an African American. Is a university going to start administering blood tests?

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#163

Post by doktrin »

sirclueless wrote: post #154
narkee wrote: post #8

I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to population averages. They don't reject high-performance black athletes for lower performing, asian athletes. I've never once heard anyone complain that their university's football team had a disproportionate number of non-asian people. Serious double standard there.

When someone offers the opinion that rejecting high-performing Asians is a "serious double standard" I ask myself a few questions. Do Asians have considerably higher academic performance than most other ethnic groups? Yes, they do. Do I believe Asian people are inherently more intelligent and capable? No, I do not. Do I think that colleges should admit students based on academic performance or intelligence and capabi…

This is plain silly.

How do you plan to measure "intelligence and capability"? By this logic, a brilliant-slacker-underachiever should be the most sought after candidate. Who cares about results, after all, when all that matters is someone's raw intelligence (regardless of whether or not it has been or will be applied to anything at all).

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#164

Post by rdl »

jpdoctor wrote: post #36
anatoly wrote: post #32

I was 13, I think, when I went to compete in the all-Ukrainian math olympiad, back a bunch of years ago when it was called a "republican" olympiad because Ukraine was a republic in the USSR and not a separate country. It was a long event: delegations from all the regions came and were housed in a sort of summer camp for two weeks. As we were getting registered, one of the organizers who was getting everyone's details…

It reminds me: I believe in Feyman's day, Jews were fighting a similar problem to Asians now. I'm pretty sure that SAM (a Jewish frat?) was gone by the 80s at MIT, as a calibration point. Edit: I was a little confused, he was turned away from Columbia for being Jewish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota

SAM disappeared at MIT due to reasons specific to the chapter; it got overrun with non-frat members living there, and various other weirdness in the 1970s, and the house voted to leave the fraternity, then become an MIT co-ed independent living group, Fenway House. It sort of became the GLBT place at some point too, and was generally both small (15-30 students) and weird.

I lived there as an undergrad in the 1990s. The most famous alum is probably Lori Berenson, who was held by the Peruvian government for years for (maybe inadvertently) supporting a terrorist organization.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#166

Post by Atropos »

sirclueless wrote: post #154
narkee wrote: post #8

I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to population averages. They don't reject high-performance black athletes for lower performing, asian athletes. I've never once heard anyone complain that their university's football team had a disproportionate number of non-asian people. Serious double standard there.

When someone offers the opinion that rejecting high-performing Asians is a "serious double standard" I ask myself a few questions. Do Asians have considerably higher academic performance than most other ethnic groups? Yes, they do. Do I believe Asian people are inherently more intelligent and capable? No, I do not. Do I think that colleges should admit students based on academic performance or intelligence and capabi…

I somewhat agree with you, however I do not know the US system very well. In Germany university admission is done by grades alone; however we don't really have elite universities like the ivies, but all universities are at a rather mediocre level.

For example I could have easily gone to med school with my grades, which is one of the majors with the higher grade cutoffs, but it is maybe open for the top 10-15%? At this level I don't believe parental involvement matters too much, everyone at age 18-19 is mature enough to know: OK, if I want to study medicine, I should try to get these grades etc...

But if admission is based in the 99,99% area, I don't know if a system based on merit alone is "fair". If I look at areas like competitive sports or piano competitions etc., I would believe at least 2/3 of the contestants at the national stage had "helicopter parents" relentlessly pushing them, often against their own will...

So having a "tiger mom" simply gives you a huge competitive advantage over "normal" kids/families. So if your system is based on ideas like affirmative action, where people from disadvantage backgrounds get a boost, it seems sensible to give people from advantageous backgrounds a detriment.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#167

Post by tokenadult »

temphn wrote: post #161
cousin_it wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to PBS, Jared Diamond, and many sociology departments, it is impossible to administer a genetic test that distinguishes African Americans from Asians Are you sure Jared Diamond actually made that statement? It seems weird. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering mentions a study where genetic markers were found to predict self-reported race/ethnic group with a discrepancy of onl…

Of course Jared Diamond was wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Human_genetic_diversity:_Lew... But many people accept his premises.

That is one of the worst entries on all of Wikipedia, and misrepresents what the sources say by undue weight. The clean-up of Wikipedia on these issues

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...

will take a long time.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#168

Post by dapyx »

chegra84 wrote: post #93
sliverstorm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't like what you are insinuating. You appear to be implying that some people are inferior due to the ancestry of their parents Is this just willful blindness? Do you really believe all ethnicity are perfectly matched in their potential? It's hard to study academia because we don't understand the brain well enough, but do a little reading about ethnicity and genetics as it relates to sports.

"In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07kristof.html?_r=... "Do African immigrants make the smartest Americans? The question may sound outlandish, but if you were judging by statistics alone, you could find plenty of evidence to b…

"black immigrants from Africa average the highest educational attainment of any population group"

-- this is because of selection bias: only the brightest Africans get the chance to immigrate to the US.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#169

Post by chegra84 »

dapyx wrote: post #168
chegra84 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07kristof.html?_r=... "Do African immigrants make the smartest Americans? The question may sound outlandish, but if you were judging by statistics alone, you could find plenty of evidence to b…

"black immigrants from Africa average the highest educational attainment of any population group" -- this is because of selection bias: only the brightest Africans get the chance to immigrate to the US.

So, isn't it also so with Asians?

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#170

Post by ethnomusicolog »

forensic wrote: post #120
narkee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand they're overrepresented. What I meant was why is that a problem? According to the article, that degree of over-representation (relative to population) is below what it would be, given a completely blind admissions process. So why not have 25% asian population? What's the problem? On the other hand, why isn't anyone saying there is a problem with ORM in football?

Basically social power and wealth is distributed in a top-down way based on which school you went to. "grades" don't actually mean anything they're just a social fiction created to justify why some people have greater shares of power/wealth/freedom than others. Asian families, the pragmatic authoritarians they are, are very good at hacking this system of social sorting. The elite colleges know this. Elite colleges ar…

Succint and straight to the point. You should give a course in "social demythification"... I am serious a lot of people suffer because in such a pragmatical way. I 'll just add that rising to top position is more often than not a question of "hacking a system" and if some institutions are really in the business of selecting people that will secure prominent position, they should reward greatly those who have proven they possess plenty of "hacking" skills. It follows that if those institutions don't follow this logic, it's not because they "anticipate" who will hold power position in the future but because they actively decide on which bias it will be decided.
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