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Comment by Danihan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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