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It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

chronicle.com

311–320 of 379 posts

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#311
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College admissions' treatment of Asian American applicants is the most explicit form of institutional racism in the US today. It's the kind of racist discrimination that, if applied against any other group, would get the perpetrator sued to oblivion.

And somehow, bullshit notions like systemic racism, which could for once be used for real, is suddenly not used at all. This shows what "anti-racism" really is: a political discourse serving the interests of a few groups, to the exclusion and detriment of others.

Wait ... is it a bulshit notion, or real?

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as an Asian person: surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism, no?

You can only believe this if you've fallen for the spin perpetrated by media outlets. The number of unarmed Black civilians killed by police each year is so small that you can fit the entire list of names and details since 2014 (31 total) on a few pages of generously-spaced HTML table rows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ... . This is against approximately 10 million arrests per year and…

No, sounds like you’ve fallen for the spin. Not the other way around.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. A lot of people who’ve been hurt by racism in the past, engage in loose pattern matching. If the story is a police officer shot a black person, to many it’s automatically racism, despite whatever the facts are. That said, I’m black btw, the problems in the black community are not down to any one thing, but certainly the lack of two parent households is a biggie. I was fortunate to grow up in California with two…

You raise a very important point and one that is difficult to discuss. I'm Asian and I grew up with parents who hewed rather closely to Asian culture. There are two values they championed essentially above all others, well known to most: devotion to family and the intense pursuit of academic achievement. I do feel like I've been a direct beneficiary of that cultural impulse. Much like yourself, I did my best to lever…

A lot of words to explain away your racism.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#314
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if I'm the only kid who expressly did not do what their parents did in this thread. Of course I also sit in a cluster, knowing several other kids who also did not want to become restaurant workers. It was simple really, our parents would say "I'm serving fried rice to people so that you won't have to." None of my family friends have taken over the family business. It's nearly an insult to suggest it, I remem…

> I wonder if I'm the only kid who expressly did not do what their parents did in this thread. My father and my father's father were both anesthesiologists. I'm a software developer with a degree in mechanical engineering. Growing up, I saw a lot of my dad's frustration butting his head against hospital and regulatory bureaucracy and decided to steer clear. (His biggest headaches came because it's not uncommon for on…

>rather than risk a jury trial pitting "rich doctors" against a government program for low income folks, over ambiguous wording.

Well, were they following the standard of American healthcare in price-gouging patients because it was technically legal to do so? Which would not necessarily be a strike against your dad, but simply an acknowledgement of the way health care costs are "managed" in this country.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#315
the main thesis of this piece as far as I can tell is that Ivy League schools and similar institutions are harmful in their outsized concentration of wealth, ability to set the cultural narratives, dominate the social elite, etc. all while act hypocritically advancing many "leftist" ideas

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a proven role of genetics here or is this pseudoscientific determinism?

It is pretty well established that educational attainment is significantly heritable [1]. Although less studied, there is evidence of significant heritability of interests as well [2] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0005-6 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8407707/

Heritability is not necessarily genetic, which is probably what he was getting at.

Behavioral genetics is fairly controversial for being an entire field which begs the question.

https://www.wichita.edu/academics/fairmount_college_of_liber...

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/my-problem-...

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are Ivy League universities really that much better at training people or is their success mostly due to skimming from the top of the applicant pool? If the latter, then it seems like those students would do just as well if they didn't exist and nothing's really lost or gained either way by their exclusivity. If they have a magic recipe for creating success, why can't other universities copy it? Does it depend on…

Their magic recipe is putting a bunch of smart, mostly rich, people in one place and then telling them they are part of an exclusive community. Then they give them access to the older successful members of the community and constantly remind them that once they are the older successful members they need to help out the recent grads.

You could also use the formula, "rich, mostly smart".

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science needs to advance more so that we can determine nature vs. nurture. It's all genetic (nature) in the end - but I think being able to say "x lacks the genetic makeup to dunk a basketball" vs "x was malnourished as a child so they wont grow enough to be able to dunk a basketball" is useful. I think articles looking at outcomes of the children of successful people are unhealthy and will focus too much on environm…

I think it's been fairly well established that genetics determines the max values -- max IQ, max height, max athleticism, etc. and then nurture determines if you reach the max.

This seems overly reductionist. You have at least two cases that contradict:

1) The fact that biological processes tend not to have hard limits and "kill switches" at those limits, but rather feedback loops which increase or decrease in efficacy due to a number of factors, which are themselves factors for further downstream processes

2) The tendency towards physiological plasticity to facilitate functional homeostasis (e.g., there was a case of an athlete whose smaller blood vessels enlarged in order to maintain blood flow following an embolism; this was disabled athlete who walked on her hands in lieu of her non-functional legs)

I think what is more likely is that that there is a level of a given quality which your genes will have you tend toward (with environment determining how much you will overshoot or undershoot it), but also that the human form is very adaptable and will often respond to pressures by routing around lower-functioning systems, which may require unconventional support but also create unconventional and exceptional achievement (the aforementioned athlete is a paralympian with arm-based muscular strength and endurance - a neurological matter - which outpaces most abled athletes).

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#319
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty well established that educational attainment is significantly heritable [1]. Although less studied, there is evidence of significant heritability of interests as well [2] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0005-6 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8407707/

Heritability is not necessarily genetic, which is probably what he was getting at. Behavioral genetics is fairly controversial for being an entire field which begs the question. https://www.wichita.edu/academics/fairmount_college_of_liber... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/my-problem-...

Twin studies, adoption studies, and now GWAS studies are quickly putting an end to the idea of some significant but elusive environmental effect that accounts for heritability measures in exclusion to genes. Regarding the articles, I don't find them compelling. The author of the first one identifies himself as an emergentist, which is conceptually vacuous. The critique in the second article doesn't target the strongest of heritability studies regarding IQ, educational attainment, etc, which have been widely replicated.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone I know is an illegal immigrant from Central America. She cleans houses for a living. Her husband is also illegal immigrant and he paints houses. Her daughter is going to one of the top private schools in SF, on a full scholarship. She dreams of Yale, and I would bet that she gets it easily. If you are dedicated to education, there is plenty of opportunity to succeed. It’s sad that some bloodlines don’t make i…

> It’s sad that some bloodlines don’t make it out of poverty easily, but that’s just how the world works. Right, right, my mistake, this is nothing like the Varana system.

It’s only varnana if you think of yourself as a victim. Those that choose to not think of themselves as victims can succeed unfettered if they focus their efforts in the right direction.
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