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Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

If students of Asian origin outperform the whole student body, can we conclude admissions folks are biased against students of Asian origin?

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That's possible. Without concrete data to give you, there are some suspicions that because of the much better performance of Asian students, they're being limited in the admissions process. Otherwise, Asian students would make up the vast majority of the students admitted. This would crowd out the non-Asian students accepted for admission. In this case, it would be more accurate to say that admissions officers limit the number of Asian students accepted instead of saying admissions folks are biased against Asian students.

>admissions officers limit the number of Asian students accepted instead of saying admissions folks are biased against Asian students //

The effect is the same isn't it? Less chance for a student with ancestors from a particular geographic locale getting a placement.

The effect would result in the same situation, but the cause is much different.

Alternately, you could conclude that instead of "mediocre" Asians being excluded by bias, Asians have an external advantage that makes them perform better. Maybe it's cultural, since most Asians are taught a very strong work ethic and heavy emphasis is placed on formal schooling, succeeding, and fitting in. Maybe Asians are physically better adapted to that type of work, with brains that retain information more easily or buttocks that don't get sore from sitting in a chair all day.

The "high performance means there's a bias" theory only works if you assume that everyone is starting from the same social, cultural, and physical baseline. They aren't.

Maybe a better metric would be if there were no mediocre data points among a certain group; that would be more evidence (but still not necessarily good evidence) that you have to exceptional to get attention and overcome the "bias barrier", not simply that most of a certain type of performer does better than a different type.

Even if Asians perform better for external reasons, the selection process should account for that before the selection is made, and the admitted class should be roughly equal performers, as a group. Unless Asians have a very lumpy shaped performance curve across the group

This presupposes that we should not accept unequal representation among groups. I don't believe that, and I don't think it's an implicit Western value. People should be allowed to flourish according to their natural advantages. The value is to try not to make an early judgment and exclude people based on assumptions about their group's capability, whether that exclusion is based on the group's perceived disadvantage or advantage. The idea is that the individual shouldn't be held accountable for things he had nothing to do with, and shouldn't be assumed to be automatically compliant with stereotypes. I don't see a need to start throttling groups that are doing "too well".

You misunderstood what I wrote. I didn't claim that a high performing subgroup should be throttled, I claimed that the Asians that pass an unbiased bar would be roughly as successful as the non-Asians that pass the same bar. I

That doesn't actually have a large effect. An example in numpy:

    In [14]: x = norm(0.0,1).rvs(100000)
    In [15]: mean(x[where(x > 2.0)])
    Out[15]: 2.3774795090391301
    In [16]: y = norm(0.5,1).rvs(100000)
    In [17]: mean(y[where(y > 2.0)])
    Out[17]: 2.4372124830289557

I.e., a difference in the mean of 0.5 sigma corresponds to 0.06 in Graham's test statistic.

Graham is a little bit off - a better place to look for bias is the bottom of the accepted distribution than at the mean.

At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483861 gizmo shares an intuitive anecdote that matches your math.

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