Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

I was an ivy league admissions officer for a few years after college.

Race is only a proxy for what really happens in these admissions processes. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 20,000 students who apply.

You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club doesn't cut it), play an instrument (well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med.

Their grades and scores are STELLAR! But if you admit these students your campus is fucked. Half the freshman class can't do pre-med. Once the pre-med spots fill up what will the rest do? That seems like a very horrible situation to put students in. There's just not enough spots.

What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all? Who's going to produce art and go into politics? Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?

So you work your way through them and try to take the very best of them. The rest of them you reject. They'll get into fine schools and be successful, there's just only so many slots of students like that in the class.

This cohort of students happens to be massively asian. No one was out to discriminate against asian people when I worked where I worked, their applications were just very problematic at scale.

Capability is only 1 factor and it alone does not define earnings (which seems to be the only metric you mentioned). Skills, education, interests, motivations, family, and more, make much bigger differences in careers. It is not as simple as what you make it out to be.

And yes, the only way to remove discrimination is to eliminate it completely. Anything short of that is still just discrimination by a different name.

The fact that you feel so comfortable saying something that sounds so vicious and dismissive of many many years of students' hard work and aspirations is pretty disconcerting. But even if what you say is true, isn't it a university's mission to expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends? Any university worth its salt should be able to mold and guide a proven high-performer quite easily. Finally, if you actually believe what you say, then just admit race-blind and name blind. I'd bet a lot of money that many of your "boring Asians" wouldn't seem quite so boring to you if you didn't know their ethnic makeup.

Unlikely, expert systems outperform doctors at diagnosis already. Nursing, perhaps not yet. There are supposed to be exams not requiring education, but internship is still a prerequisite and hard to get. Engineering is mostly mathematics and physics. Doable by machines. You probably meant design instead. Psychologist, well, first they have to actually be good at it...

Who decides on society ? Priests or tests ? That's the choice here.

So how are we "raising quality" ? Easy: this is raising quality in this way. We have collectively decided what quality is (ie. "perfect" equality). We have also extensive data that reality ... just doesn't match our quality metric (different subgroups in society are ... different. In pretty much every factor you might use. Including of course in IQ, in how much they work, how they dress, who they marry, in height (which might matter to the NBA), in width, in health, in skin tone, in religion ... So we've decided on morality, and we've found that reality doesn't match morality ... (and we're conclusively ignoring that morality is nothing but a fashion-like set of ideas that moves around randomly even within supposedly constant religions, so you can imagine just how random and inaccurate it'll be under Hollywood's/Reality/outrage media/breitbart's/... guidance)

So we've gone the way of the flat earthers. Reality doesn't matter our opinion of what is just so we are going to ... (take a wild guess)

Cheat and fake and force and ... until reality matches our sense of justice.

Now I get it. It's really sad that reality just isn't fair. Really sad.

Another little tidbit is that humans, individuals, also just aren't fair. Giving specific humans the right, even the duty, to correct the unfairness of reality therefore merely results ... in abuse of that system. That system is especially vulnerable because it must be designed so that administrators cheat, after all, that's exactly what a racial quota does : it cheats "on behalf of the just cause X". Needless to say, I consider cheating putting the worse student ahead of the better student. If you think individual administrators aren't going to use this to cheat on behalf of their family, ideological side, race, religion, ... you just haven't been paying attention.

Of course the system itself is highly selective. Observant Christians, for instance, are severely underrepresented at universities. That's apparently not worthy of affirmative action. Why ? Because there's no public outrage on this subject (besides observant Christians will just think they need to work harder). Palestinians are actually overrepresented at universities. Ok, also not a problem apparently. Too few self-described African-Americans ? Huge problem.

Not that anybody can even state a consistent vision of what the goal is. The problem lies in which groups have the right to have perfect representation, because for obvious reasons, that can't be all possible groups. Imho that, in itself is discrimination. Very postmodern, of course. You can't expect anyone to pin down the policy ... that by itself is racism. (of course the real problem is that a pinned down policy, whatever it is, would open them up to criticism)

In a sense this is about who gets to decide what is the top of society : performance/"reality" ... or the priest class. Affirmative action, of course, is a firm choice for the priest class (weak counter: but it's not ! "We're atheist". Needless to say, today's priest class isn't even the first atheist priest class. See how society worked in ancient Athens, or even the Roman Republic. Priests decided outcomes, but "not on the basis of religion, as there were no gods invoked (except in jest in the Roman case). Or you could invoke various communist societies that also were very strongly classist, with atheists "priests" essentially selecting outcomes for individuals "to make things fair" (hah !))

And why ? Because "reality" is racist (that, of course, is the reason evolution works, but let's just ignore that).

But of course, THIS version of morality is the be-all end-all final version of morality that is going to treat everyone fairly ! Every last other one is/was an abomination, but THIS TIME .... this time we got it right, and we're going to be destroying people's lives with no recourse for them at all because THIS TIME we know what's right !

Let's rejoice in our just outcomes ! Let's call it the "final solution".

(that last sentence is a joke, as that term served as Nazi Germany's euphemism for the holocaust)