581–590 of 684 posts
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An amusing contrast, the public high school where my mom taught, had a week off for deer hunting. It was that, or teach to an empty classroom.
Pennsylvania? First day of buck season was always a holiday for us.
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I'm experiencing this first hand. My family immigrated here from Bangladesh. Unlike much of my family, my dad had a college-degree required job lined up, and we ended up pretty comfortable with him on a GS-scale job and my mom selling furniture. Thanks to the SATs, my brother and I both ended up breaking into industries (banking, law) that until relatively recently were good old boy's clubs. Now that I have kids at i…
Lower middle class (and even uneducated pedigree upper middle class) is where the brutalism is for competitive schools, but lower middle class has state schools (if in California, Cal State schools) or community college- and almost always finishes high school with a middle-of-the-pack education, thanks both to average public scholar and average home lives. So, generally they are fine. I wish the obsession with top-ti…
Sure the elite schools matter because they control access to the levers of mass societal power but it seems to be a MAJORITY of what is talked about which seems disproportionate.
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Don’t you worry, they’ll come for you eventually.
One would hope so. Ideally, the people of the future will have progressed beyond the relative savagery of me and my peers and look upon us with disdain. Perhaps for how much I enjoy a good steak, or for the genital mutilation of our boys.
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One would hope so. Ideally, the people of the future will have progressed beyond the relative savagery of me and my peers and look upon us with disdain. Perhaps for how much I enjoy a good steak, or for the genital mutilation of our boys.
Or you could like... understand that people behave in the context of their time in history, be glad we've moved past that, and celebrate the contributions of the people that got us to where we are. I can celebrate George Washington as a founder of the country and also understand he was a slave owner.
It turns out even Gandi, Mother Theresa, etc had a pretty sketchy side, because shocker no human actually meets that bar. But since we're categorically unable to say someone did a great thing while actually being pretty immoral by that's standards, the only options that the university seem to have available to it are entirely condoning their unacceptable side or else disowning them.
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Don’t you worry, they’ll come for you eventually.
One would hope so. Ideally, the people of the future will have progressed beyond the relative savagery of me and my peers and look upon us with disdain. Perhaps for how much I enjoy a good steak, or for the genital mutilation of our boys.
I guess all of human civilization has just been a giant failure. The only chance we have is for us poor wretches to retroactively flagellate our ancestors and beg forgiveness from the gods of modern enlightenment, complete with the knowledge that we too will be flagellated in our own due time, and rightfully abhorred in the judgement of future generations, no matter our worldly achievements.
For all its supposed enlightenment, modern political correctness is really more akin to medieval Catholicism
Isn't this patently obvious that dropping the SAT is entirely about creating pretext for continued discrimination against Asian applicants? In 1996, California repealed affirmative action via Prop 209. At the UC Berkeley and UCLA, considered the 'best' of the UC system, Asians represented 25-30% of the student base. Studies and fear-mongering at the time showed that a repeal of affirmative action would imply that Asi…
Legacies and big donors are much more likely to not be Asian. The other well-off white upper class is getting admitted based off all the holistic extracurricular/volunteering/etc bullshit. And there are secret quota systems for other minority (not all racial) groups. Then there are athletes, needing representation across academic disciplines to match teaching capacity, etc.
Basically, I think middle class Asians and white people who fit the “high scores, want to study stem” paradigm are just figuring over a very small pie when it comes to selective university admissions. Within this group Asians dominate (because demographically they make up a large portion of high scorers) but outside of it they are not as likely to fit into any of the other admissions buckets.
If admissions were based purely on test scores and academic achievement, yes there would be more Asians and less underrepresented groups, but most importantly it would completely shake up which white people get admitted, which is what the admissions system cares most about.
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It sounds like you're buying into Harvard's argument that "asian applicants are systematically less likeable / weaker in intangible attributes" which is racist nonsense in my opinion.
> It sounds like you're buying into Harvard's argument that "asian applicants are systematically less likeable / weaker in intangible attributes" which is racist nonsense in my opinion. Please don’t put words into my mouth that I did not say (and certainly don’t think). Note that I had a positive experience living in Asia for 9 years, and I am currently active in Asian communities in Asia as well as the Asian-America…
It is, and if it isn't, then it's discrimination based on heritage.
>note that if the Supreme Court overturns these decisions, it will be based on labeling affirmative action policies as being actively discriminatory against Asians and Whites, not actual direct discrimination against Asian applicants
No, it will be that they found affirmative action policies as discrimination against Asians, and that is direct discrimination against Asian applicants. Saying "well you were just a box I ticked the wrong way because you are Asian" does not make it less discriminatory.
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> I still don’t see how it’s discrimination against White students. This actually looks more like discrimination against Asians, with Whites being the biggest beneficiary of the discrimination based on the numbers. Because you are looking at it through the lens of total student makeup of certain top universities. If Whites need 100 points higher on SAT than some others, then Whites are being discriminated against. Th…
> If you look at the overall college system, there's something like 35% of undergrads that are Black/Hispanic and 5% for Asian so in the overall system Whites net benefit more from no discrimination than Asians do. I don't understand this. The vast majority of colleges are uncompetitive. If you apply and can afford it, you get in. Affirmative action is only relevant at competitive colleges. For example, at the totali…
If the idea is that current test scores without affirmative action represent true ability, then nobody took eachothers spot, what you describe is true fairness, only 22.2% of whites and 4.5% of blacks deserve to be in school.
Is the idea that blacks deserve affirmative action, and Asians do, and Hispanics do, but whites don't, so any instance of them benefiting from AA is whites stealing from blacks? I just don't quite follow.
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One would hope so. Ideally, the people of the future will have progressed beyond the relative savagery of me and my peers and look upon us with disdain. Perhaps for how much I enjoy a good steak, or for the genital mutilation of our boys.
So your idea of societal progress is one that believes all history is worth looking down on, that there's nothing in the past worth celebrating because every figure acted distasteful or had views distasteful to modern eyes? I guess all of human civilization has just been a giant failure. The only chance we have is for us poor wretches to retroactively flagellate our ancestors and beg forgiveness from the gods of mode…
Yes, I even consider the Nazis terrible people no matter how widespread antisemitism was at the time and no matter how much public support they had. I have that view simultaneously with the understanding that there is no German my age who engaged in any of that.
There is nothing wrong with understanding and making moral judgements about people. I can look at a painting in a museum that has someone enslaved in the picture and both understand the context and be repulsed by the depiction.
It's proper for people to make moral judgements, and to understand both past injustices and contemporary injustices that one implicitly (one hopes not explicitly!) supports.
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we have no data either way that can even begin to address whether one group is innately better than any other Does all of world history count as data? What should we go by? Propose a test.
Given that I said we have no data that can begin to address this question, it is at best disingenuous. Because how can I offer a test without data? It is true that all of world history is data, but it is not necessarily data that can answer any particular question. The problem is the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Both genetics and environment are important to IQ. Both generally affect IQ through long, convolu…
World class sprinters have an over-representation of individuals descended from a specific region of Nigeria - you can't generalize that to "Nigerians sprint faster than Europeans",or "Black people sprint faster than white people" the way people do with IQ. It is also prudent to note that Kenya has a whole ecosystem nurturing long distance runners; with a wealth of scouts, academies, and trainers available to the young who show some talent, so ascribing Kenyan's prowess to nature alone is incorrect.
Nutrition and IQ are correlated independent of race; especially early-childhood nutrition. Standardized testing is further compounded by test prep and tutors (proxy for wealth). Wealth in a family correlates to parents' education level. The lack of education in older African Americans has an obvious historical explanation. Most black Americans are descended from slaves from West Africa, but don't do as well as recent West African immigrants - 29% of Nigerian-Americans have advanced degrees; more than any other immigrant group. The vast chasm between the academic outcomes of two groups that are both largely of west African descent disproves "nature" is the sole determinant of poor outcomes for African Americans.