Comment by skwirl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skwirl | Hacker News Reader

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"Orwellian" has become one of HN's least useful snarl words that now communicates nothing aside from "I disagree with this point of view and consequently the way it is framed."

If you were black, you might see it as "Orwellian" when someone claims an admissions policy is non-discriminatory when it results in a class that is 6% black and 29% Asian among U.S. students (this is CMU), while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and Asians make up 5.3%.

You are trying to cloak your subjective opinion in the veneer of science and objectivity with nonsense about "verifiable and falsifiable," but it doesn't work. In your example - "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media" - what would be a falsifiable and verifiable statement? "Republicans ARE treated poorly by the media?" How is that or any statement like it falsifiable or verifiable?

Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable? If one policy is "race blind" and results in some minorities being seriously under-represented, is it fair because of its "race blindness" or unfair because of its outcome? If another policy takes race into consideration, is it unfair because it takes race into consideration in admissions or fair because its outcome results in a proportional representation?

It's a question of values, not a question of science. Depending on your point of view you are going to see it very differently from someone else.

"To discriminate" means to draw distinctions and act upon them. Establishing a maximum quota of Jewish or Asian students at a university is, factually, discrimination. It may be morally justifiable discrimination, but it is discrimination.

If the freshman class at Harvard University ends up being 30% Asian and 10% Jewish, maybe it's because people in East Asian and Jewish cultures value education more than people in other cultures. In that case, why isn't it fair for an educational institution to cater to individuals who have been raised to value education?

If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty. It doesn't mean that Harvard is being racially discriminatory.

That's not a useful definition of discrimination, as it would also mean that students with low test scores are being discriminated against. In fact, the only way to not discriminate would be to simply admit everyone.

Well, if you begin from the premise that "discrimination" is first and foremost something bad, and only has any semantic content as a secondary affair, your comment might make sense. But usually you take words as you find them. Students with low test scores are being discriminated against, and everyone thinks that's fine. That's not racial discrimination, though -- a distinction which is specifically called out in the comment you respond to.

The alternative to admitting everyone, if you're determined not to discriminate along any dimension, is to admit by lottery. This will produce results which are biased in various ways, but not because of any distinctions you drew.

Hey that's not a bad idea. What if admissions were simply taken out of the hands of universities and conducted as a lottery by some independent third party. Then the purpose of universities is to simply educate those who come through their doors rather than engage in the business of trying to advance their position in college rankings through the admissions process.

I suspect that what you'd see is massive flight from the public system.

Students with low test scores are discriminated against. That's what the word means. It has a negative connotation because usually people use it to describe discrimination based upon things that are usually unjust to discriminate based on, like sex and race.

Isn't it in Harvard's self-interest, and the interest of its students, to have a diverse (racially and in many other ways) student body that prepares students for a diverse world?

My understanding of Harvard's point of view is they want a particular mix of strivers and old money. This is not the same thing as racial diversity.

It need not be mutually exclusive with racial diversity.

The point is that they are investing in the growth of their endowment by seeking to maximize future donations from successful alums. With that goal it is straightforward to select exclusively from the two groups most likely to meet it.

I'm sure Harvard has more than one goal to balance in their admissions process.

Harvard's interest lies in keeping itself as the power center of America: produce the future wealthy and powerful, eduate the kids of the current powerful and wealthy. If the current powerful and wealthy has diversity, it is good for them: that is, they would recruit a kid of Chinese billionaire, instead of the kid of City Wok in South park.

Are people who do not attend multicult schools really at a disadvantage in life? Who says Harvard and other elite schools have any interest in "diversity" in "many other ways" than racially? Do their admissions policies include quotas for different religions, political ideologies, professional interests, extracurricular interests, etc.? No, their interest in "diversity" ends at skin color.

A cynic might say that, since Harvard is part of the predominantly-WASP establishment it's in their self-interest to keep their student body predominantly WASPy, with a diverse smattering of minorities. If Harvard turned around one day and based admissions solely on academic merit, they would end up churning out lots of well-educated Asians and Jews, and let's face it, it's not like white people are going to let Asians and Jews run the country so Harvard loses its status as the academy of the nation's leadership.

>If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty.

This is only true if it is reasonable to expect similar performance and outcomes between different population groups. Is it? Why should we expect blacks to perform as well academically as Ashkenazim and east asians, two population groups with notably high average IQ?

I would say the disparity in IQ scores is another symptom of the same problem rather than a fundamental cause. I don't think black people are fundamentally stupider than Chinese people, for instance.

Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable?

Straightforward: "Do American universities routinely intentionally discriminate against Asian applicants as a consequence of formal policies designed to ensure that happens?" Binary question with a single, verifiable answer.

The objective, verifiably true answer to that question happens to be "Yes." You can be in favor of it, if you like, but disagreeing that it is actually policy beggars the imagination.

Straightforward: Do you think the SAT and high school GPA are excellent metrics (note that I'm not asking are they decent metrics that measure something, I'm asking do you believe they are excellent metrics)? It seems to me that the SAT is a gameable system and that some groups (people who are wealthy, people inclined to spend money on education) are more likely to spend money on the types of things that help them game the system (SAT courses that guarantee certain score improvements because they teach the student how to game the system). If one group has less money they are less able to game the system. Or if you are from a less affluent family that doesn't even realize there are New England, SV, NYC & LA parents paying for multi-thousand dollar SAT prep courses that your child is competing with.

And high school grades are subjective evaluations, often from mediocre teachers, that are likely to themselves be subject to bias because the subjective evaluators have many of the same biases as the culture at large.

I agree that SAT/GPA are gameable. Can you find an alternative that is not gameable, but which is better than the blacbox of HYP admission machine? If you can't, what is there to argue, except to favor the blackbox policies of HYP.

Flipping that argument:

Do American universities routinely discriminate against African Americans and Latinos as a consequence of reliance on standardized tests and curricula on which they are known to receive lower scores?

Adjustment for the bias in these measures might correct for discrimination, not create it.

The purpose of admissions testing for almost any organization (businesses for prospective employees, military for recruits, schools for students, basketball teams for players) is to find those who are most likely to succeed at what they will have to do if admitted.

The only question is whether these measures are good or bad at predicting who is likely to succeed. In the university case, that means do well in classes and graduate. If they are bad predictors, they need to be replaced with good predictors. If they are good predictors, the problem for groups who are "known to receive lower scores" is not the measurement.

The fact that Massachusetts routinely receives lower temperature scores than Florida is not evidence that thermometers are bad.

A college's ultimate goal isn't for their students to get good grades and test well.

A college's promise is to prepare students for life, and at present that means life in a diverse world.

Success beyond academia may be predicted well by SATs and high school grades in some fields, but certainly not all.

You just completely missed the entire thrust of my argument, which is not whether something meets patio11's criteria of discrimination, but the very question of what constitutes discrimination, and how your point of view and cognitive biases lead you to your own criteria, and not anything "objective" or "logical" or "scientific."

Your response to my point - "It's a question of values" - was to simply re-state your value.

If you grew up black in a black community, black piato11's straightforward definition would probably be: "Do American universities engage in recruiting and admissions practices that ensure that black students are significantly underrepresented among the student body?" This is also a binary question with a single, verifiable answer. At may elite U.S. universities, the answer is a resounding "yes," whether or not the "yes" is intentional.

You are operating at a level where not only do you believe the question itself has already been decided, but it doesn't seem to even have occurred to you that the question itself was ever in question, and that anyone might have a different view at all.

>If you were black, you might see it as "Orwellian" when someone claims an admissions policy is non-discriminatory when it results in a class that is 6% black and 29% Asian among U.S. students (this is CMU), while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and Asians make up 5.3%.

That is not logical at all.

How can it be discrimination when 2 racial groups are admitted in opposite class-to-population ratios?

Blacks at 6% < 13% AND Asians at 29% > 5.3%?

The AND conjunction is key. It would be clear discrimination if both groups' percentages were less than the representative population.

And by the way, if such a hypothetical black person didn't know: the Asians are already an "undesirable" applicant group. It's somewhat of an open secret in admissions that "we don't want anymore Asians."[1] That the maligned group still gets 29% in the uphill battle against that condescension is astounding.

Also, I'm not sure where the logic of blacks as 13% of population should or would translate to ~13% of Harvard student body. Let's look at each layer of qualifications for an elite school:

Of the students that achieve SAT scores of ~2200+, are 13% of them black?

Ok, let's pretend Harvard removes SAT scores from consideration and only looks at GPA. Out of all the valedictorians at high schools, are 13% of them black?

Ok, let's eliminate SAT and GPA. Just evaluate students on course workload. Of the students that took AP (Advanced Placement) classes such as AP Calculus, AP English, etc, are 13% of those enrolled black?

How is it Harvard's problem of discrimination if their student body doesn't happen to have ~13% blacks? The only way to do that would be to relax the tough academic standards until it's meaningless. No SAT, GPA, or course transcripts.

I can't see how a black person with any dignity would feel pride about being "accepted" into Harvard with less qualifications than his peers of the last 100 years. The 6% blacks at an elite school may be low but hopefully, the vast majority of those 6% actually belong there by genuine academic qualifications.

[1]http://cornellsun.com/blog/2011/11/14/no-asians-need-apply/

Posted this elsewhere in the thread but I'll say something similar again: I love that here on HN, where from working in the industry I can sensibly assume the posters are mostly white and Asian, no one questions whether the metrics are of any quality. Is SAT really a good measure of your talents as a human being? Are high school grades? Two things that vary based on your education before the moment of the test and the grades. The grades themselves being subjective evaluations from thousands of people with different standards. If the quotas were swapped and whites and Asians were getting the "bonus", how quickly would the arguments shift to the idea that the metrics aren't any good in the first place? You probably took the SAT, do you honestly think its' a great talent indicator or a mediocre one? How many courses are out there that promise to improve your score and how much money do they cost? Ask an SAT tutor and they'll tell you it's easy to take someone from a decent score to a good one. Is that a great metric to decide people's futures. Who has access to SAT prep courses? Wealthy people (and people who know the system well and budget to game it).

Grades? You want to talk about grades? If the culture is overall discriminatory, how can we trust subjective evaluations from that culture?

Not to mention if you approach the admissions officers at Ivies, particularly at Harvard, Princeton & Yale, they say that they easily could fill 3 freshman classes or more with the applicants they receive. That even most of the rejected applicants could succeed academically at their schools. So yes, I think it's okay to select for diversity. If the system is gameable why should we take its metrics seriously? And if we can't take the metrics seriously we shouldn't be upset about ignoring the metrics and making subjective choices.

I worked in standardized testing for ten years for SAT's competitor and am very familiar with the SAT as well, and phenomenal effort was made detect and correct for racial, gender and cultural bias. I cranked out crates of statistical analysis using SAS analyzing every demographic breakdown looking for statistical anomalies in answers so they could be excluded from scoring (and mainly preventing pretest items from ever being scored items in the first place.) If blacks (or whites, or women, or Eskimos) performed statistically significantly worse on a question, then it was thrown out of scoring.

> Ask an SAT tutor and they'll tell you it's easy to take someone from a decent score to a good one.

Yeah, they have a financial interest in promoting their snakeoil. They teach you how to not be a fuckup before you take the test (get good sleep, don't go drinking) and a few general facts about the test to minimize wasting time, they don't teach you how to "beat" the SAT/ACT, that hasn't been a thing since the 80's.

I didn't say cultural bias was an issue, you're twisting my words. And the people I know who vouch for the effectiveness of test prep classes don't even teach them anymore, they taught them mostly as a summer jobs or jobs out of college before they found more of a career path job. They have no reason to vouch for the effectiveness of the classes, they are speaking about personal experience.

And you honestly don't think the classes help at all? Seeing sample questions, taking sample tests, and learning strategies to handle questions you don't know. You might as well say structured practice doesn't help. And sure you could say "why don't the kids from less affluent families practice just as much?" but if your parent doesn't know how the game is played the sixteen year old kid still isn't as prepared as the kid who has affluent parents. And the scores aren't going to reflect ability as much as they reflect whether you come from a household that prepares you for standardized tests.

The demographic information collected for the test is a proxy for culture, since we really don't have any idea. We just detected if individual test items were gotten wrong substantially more often for any individual demographic categories. In the end it really doesn't matter why people got it wrong, just that statistically it's a strong sign it's a bad question.

Yes, the tests help. But they just help you reach your maximum potential. You're not hacking the test, you're hacking yourself. You can get basic prep courses for not much money. Yes some people cannot afford that, but that is a problem with secondary education that test prep even exists. There is no way you can make a test that doesn't discriminate against people that don't get enough sleep or show up hung over or the person didn't figure out the basics of taking standardized tests through primary and secondary education.

I can't see how a black person with any dignity would feel pride about being "accepted" into Harvard with less qualifications than his peers of the last 100 years.

As a black person who was accepted to (and graduated from) MIT, and had SAT scores less than my peers (but excellent grades and extracurriculars) allow me to respond: I feel fine.

If you had "excellent grades" (GPA), you're not the example of watered down academic standards for admittance that I was talking about. Your MIT peers had excellent grades and so did you. You got admitted without some artificial lowering of standards to mirror a 13%-black-ratio of the population at large. I'm sure some Caucasian MIT students had lower SAT scores than you as well. As a whole, all the students at MIT had legitimate academic chops to get admitted. MIT doesn't have football scholarships like the University of North Carolina academic scandal.

you're not the example of watered down academic standards for admittance that I was talking about

At tend to give as much credence to those "example[s] of watered down academic standards" at elite universities as I do to welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

MIT doesn't have football scholarships like the North Carolina academic scandal.

Interesting fact: MIT coaches do have input into the admissions process.

The NC scandal was not about reducing admission standards in the name of discrimination, it was about stacking athletic teams. That's a whole different (and real) topic than this thread, especially since your post referred to Harvard.

>At tend to give as much credence to those "example[s] of watered down academic standards" at elite universities as I do to welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

Understood. However, you're addressing something I didn't say. I wasn't accusing elite universities of dumbing down existing standards. I was talking about about how the universities would hypothetically have to lower the academic thresholds to fulfill someone's idea that 13% of Ivy Leagues should be black to mirror the 13% in the general population.

>, it was about stacking athletic teams.

Right. But, what's the reason-behind-the-reason that it gets framed as "stacking athletes" so that it looks like it has nothing to do with academics?

In reality, it's the academics (or fiction of it) that made it a scandal in the first place.

Let's remember that it's a football scholarship. It's supposed to be scholars who go to school and happen to use football participation to pay for tuition. For many reasons (societal, circuses & bread, etc), it has mutated into athletes who need to fake the academic process to play for the school. Since society has not embraced an alternative structure for 19-year olds to play televised minor-league football outside of college institutions, that's how academics got twisted to fit a non-educational agenda. Football isn't getting in the way of school; it's school that is getting in the way of football.

As for making the black percentages at ivy leagues match the population at large, I'm not exactly sure what the other posters who dismiss SAT + GPA + AP course transcripts are proposing. If elite schools are academic institutions (instead of unpaid football teams), and SAT+GPA+AP classes are cultural discrimination, what do they propose the schools look at? The color of the skin? If football doesn't have much to do with academic qualifications, the amount of pigment in the skin doesn't either.

You're black -- and you got into MIT. You had the academic qualifications. Is there something you're debating that I missed or are we agreeing?

A local news station recently did a piece on a former basketball player brought in on scholarship to the local big U who was functionally illiterate. He seems to have had enough resolve to turn himself around but it baffles me how someone like that could be expected to be a "scholar athlete" when they are incapable of college level scholarship. It also speaks to the failure of secondary education that high schools will issue diplomas to unprepared students solely to keep their graduation rates up.

You're black -- and you got into MIT. You had the academic qualifications. Is there something you're debating that I missed or are we agreeing?

I know of students with better grades and SAT results that were not admitted to MIT. I know of students with worse grades than me that were admitted to MIT. MIT considers many factors. Based on my experience there, that is a good thing, YMMV.

> I know of students with better grades and SAT results that were not admitted to MIT.

Were they Black, Asian or White?

> I know of students with worse grades than me

Were they Black, Asian or White?

Were they Black, Asian or White?

Asian and white.

Were they Black, Asian or White?

All of the above.

I don't know what "stacking athletic teams" means, but the NC football scandal that I'm familiar with involved the school providing fake classes for their football players, to maintain the illusion that they were "student-athletes" instead of just "athletes".

Your response was on point, concise and well made. I was going to craft a many paragraph response but yours summed up the essence of mine in far fewer sentences. Well done.

How would you feel if Asian claimed to be African-american (in order to get bonus points)?

If said Asian did it in an attempt specifically to bolster his/her admissions chances, I'll feel the same way I would feel if that applicant reported a fraudulent extracurricular activity on their application.

Why do you think it would be a fraud?

Isn't race self-reported anyway?

What exactly qualifies you as an African-american that people who you or I qualify as Asian - can not legally claim?

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