Hacker News Reader

Comment by evanlivingston | Hacker News Reader

You understand the problem with color-blindness, yes?

Blind-hiring worked to remove the gender gap in orchestras. Why wouldn't it be good to use in college admissions?

http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact....

Because the input of applicants is the original problem. Affirmative action is intended to select more from the limited applicants, which in the end is a small effect in comparison to getting more black/hispanic students who are able to go college at all. Solving that takes a lot more, and affirmative action is attempting to stopgap for that.

Of The cuff; a whole slew of reasons.

Entry into an orchestra isn't something that is cost prohibitive for an economic class of individuals.

Applicants to orchestras likely enjoy a certain level of affluence given how demanding the required practice is for performers. Musical performers enjoy slightly less systematic discrimination throughout their careers and technkal musical ability is something that is largely self-taught meaning that the applicants to orchestras are more likely to share similar levels of abilities at the stage of auditioning for an orchestra whereas college applicants are more likely to express difference at the time of application due to systematic discrimination throughout their educational trajectory.

Playing in an orchestra doesn't share the same grave weight of attending college in careerist society where college is increasingly necessary. The demand is higher for college, and the supply can reflect that.

Orchestras arnt a part of a massive industry tied to sports, science, defense, state subsidies etc...

None of those are reasons not to try it. It worked well on a smaller scale and hasn't been tried on any sort of larger scale.

Maybe I just hold the value of having an objectively fair playing field higher than some others here. I personally love the idea of bling hiring in orchestras, in technology jobs, and in college admissions.

People's upbringings are never going to be fair. Nor is their potential, if we're being honest. But moving the admissions goalposts all over trying to make everything more "diverse," when that's really just a racist codeword for "skin color," is not a valid answer to me.

This is simplistic, but a weighted average of standardized test scores + being in a top percentage of your graduating class (regardless of school quality) is already going to give you a lot of genuine diversity.

> Maybe I just hold the value of having an objectively fair playing field higher than some others here. ...People's upbringings are never going to be fair.

Maybe you value it less than others, and that's why you're willing to give up on a whole section of the playing field so easily?

It takes wisdom to know what things you can fix and what things you cannot.

If you don't think a fair playing field is achievable then why pretend you care more and are working harder to achieve it than others, instead of admitting that you're focusing your energy elsewhere?

A fair starting point is not achievable without everyone being clones, and very likely not even then.

I care more about equal opportunity than others, because equal opportunity means truly treating people fairly and in a standardized way at a policy level, rather than discriminating based on skin color, gender or ethnicity.

Equal treatment is in no way the same thing as equal opportunity or a level playing field. So you care deeply about equal treatment and think that a level playing field/equal opportunity is unimportant. I disagree, but you might have more productive conversations if you use the terminology correctly.

No man, its not going to give you genuine diversity. It's going to give you a bunch of people who score well in classes and according to standards that the standard creators determined. The standards are often blind to the cultural nuances of the questions themselves and often reward those who belong to the normative culture. It's the same problem with IQ tests. I don't want the people in college to be all the people who scored top of their class in AP history and AP econ, I want to also see the kids who struggled through the extreme boredom of those classes while having underground poetry meetings after school or having other interests other than those rewarded by the schoolastic institution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com