Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination • Hacker News Board

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#481

Post by bradlys » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

notSupplied wrote: post #422

AniseAbyss wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fallacy of meritocracy. You stand on the shoulders of your parents. If you come from a family of crackheads on the bad side of the rail tracks you already lost the race long before 8th grade.

Spending extra time reading to your kids, sending your kids to tutors, paying for summer programs, sweating over neighborhood to move into for their good schools...many of these things are now considered “inter-generational privilege transfer”. But not long ago, they were simply called “good parenting”. Why even bother doing good parenting when the ideologues in charge want to “fallacy of meritocracy” away any advant…

No post body was provided.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#482

Post by someguydave » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

AniseAbyss wrote: post #476

someguydave wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the fallacy exactly?

The fallacy that you went to that nice university because you're smart and not just lucky.

Do you mean that some people are lucky because they were born smart?

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#483

Post by ww520 » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

SyzygistSix wrote: post #330

ww520 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asians are way under represented in sport teams. Who will be held accountable?

They are trying to. Right now their kids supposedly spend all their time working on their GPA and SAT scores.

Colleges admitting Asians with on sport scholarship is very low. By your logic, colleges should take away sport scholarship admission for other groups and grant them to Asians so that 1. fixes the low admission of other groups based on academic performance, and 2. fixes the under representation of Asians in sport teams.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#484

Post by abhink » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #445

abhink wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct to some extant, and not just for getting education. As an example, in many competitive exams conducted by universities etc. to select students, the selection cutoff marks clearly show this pattern of intentional discriminatory admittance. For someone belonging to "general" category, anyone designated to an upper caste, the cutoffs percentage for selection could be as high as 97-99%. For "reserved" cat…

> This means someone scoring 95% would not get get an admission offer while someone else scoring 15% would. Sounds entirely made up. All these exams generally have a minimum clearing criteria at 60-65%

I mean the data is one google search away (granted, if you know some of the official caste related terms)

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/educa...

Also, the example I have provided are from 15 years ago, when I appeared for these exams. I'm not going to bother finding verifiable information from back then but the figures I mentioned are pretty much what I saw.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#485

Post by notSupplied » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

bradlys wrote: post #479

raxxorrax wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is very true, you cannot force all parents to become crackheads, so you will always have different outcomes. We have the same problem with wealth in that regard. You can only improve education in a way that is offers support for people in difficult homes. Perhaps their difficult childhood will ultimately hinder them from becoming the best. But then perhaps their children will fare better.

This is why we can do things to make up for the fact that society has failed these children. If you make it so that only “merit” is considered - you’re only gonna get rich kids. (And I see this already through SV - it’s nothing but rich or well educated parents for the children here) What is the argument against letting children who have had a rough lot in their life get a slight lessening of their handicap when appl…

The merit-based school such as Styuvesant in NYC and Lowell in SF are both filled with rather poor Asian kids.

The demographic profile of these two schools are substantially lower income than the very expensive cities they reside in.

Edit: Got the names of the schools wrong.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#486

Post by mbg721 » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

pyronik19 wrote: post #434

mbg721 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not everybody can go and be slavemasters, so if you're going to pick arbitrarily who can do it, why not use race in the criteria? Everybody can know how atoms work, and read Cicero, and figure out where on the shore a boat traveling diagonally will land if the wind is picking up at a given rate. Increasing the human knowledge pie in that way is what universities claim to do.

> why not use race in the criteria? We used to do that, wasn't it called Jim Crow?

Only by those who didn't benefit from the arrangement.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#487

Post by whatshisface » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

DebtDeflation wrote: post #360

whatshisface wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We think universities are trying to solve the trolley problem of whether egalitarianism means letting people rise as high as they can or if it means compensating for all the circumstances of their birth, but they're probably solving the problem of how to admit the student with the highest donation expected value first, then the student with the second highest, then the third...

>or if it means compensating for all the circumstances of their birth If this is the objective, then we need to start a lot earlier than the point of university admissions. Also, "circumstances of their birth" would need to be broadened to encompass quite a bit more than just race.

>we need to start a lot earlier than the point of university admissions.

Everyone agrees with this, on all sides. That's why we have highschool and grade school for example.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#488

Post by mbg721 » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #477

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though these startup founders are both directly and indirectly funded by the power structures (investment firms, think tanks, the government) maintained by these Ivy League school graduates. Think how all these startups are getting loads of "trickled-down" money from the Fed's money printer. Look at the list of chairs of the Federal Reserve and most of them are from prestigious Ivy League schools, you get what I mean…

The take that the economic elite are mostly from Ivy League schools feels markedly different than the take that most people who found startups are from Ivy League schools.

Startup founders are more likely to be here than old-money elites are.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#489

Post by mollerhoj » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

You have to turn the argument on its head: We're not trying to achieve equality of representation of races because it would be racist not to do so (if anything its actually racist to admit entrance based on race). We're trying to achieve equal representation because not having it feeds rasist thinking (its becomes too easy to assume peoples level of education based in their race).

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#490

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

raxxorrax wrote: post #393

AniseAbyss wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fallacy of meritocracy. You stand on the shoulders of your parents. If you come from a family of crackheads on the bad side of the rail tracks you already lost the race long before 8th grade.

While this is very true, you cannot force all parents to become crackheads, so you will always have different outcomes. We have the same problem with wealth in that regard. You can only improve education in a way that is offers support for people in difficult homes. Perhaps their difficult childhood will ultimately hinder them from becoming the best. But then perhaps their children will fare better.

You can't force parents to do anything, but you can structure public policy to include recognition that some people get benefits of circumstance others don't.

As analogy: we won't (and we shouldn't) stop billionaires from making money as fast as they (legally) can, but we can sure as hell tax them proportional to their success at it.