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Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this what we effectively do in America with affirmative action?

Affirmative action programs seek to increase representation of minorities and to optimize the ethnic diversity of a program. They don't selectively retard admission from a particular ethnicity or gender based on a perceived substantive deficiency of people of that ethnicity or gender. Whatever else there is to say about the issue, the two practices are not the same.

Tell that to the asian students suing harvard.

Isn't that a non-sequitur response? Isn't Harvard doing what I'm saying all affirmative action programs do? I'm not demanding that you be ok with affirmative action.

They don't selectively retard admission from a particular ethnicity or gender based on a perceived substantive deficiency of people of that ethnicity or gender.

Harvard is systematically penalizing Asians on the grounds that they have lousy personalities. Of course this is almost certainly a scheme to implement affirmative action without publicly admitting to it; whether that makes it better or worse is debatable.

If that's actually the reasoning they're using, I strongly agree with you. But my understanding was that they, like most universities, are optimizing for ethnic diversity.

They're referring to this lawsuit: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/29/us/harvard-admissions-asi...

That article says that Harvard tends to describe Asians as "industrious" but "indistinguishable". That's bad! But that's not the same thing as having a formal standard that Asians, as a class, are indistinguishable, which is what the Japanese medical school did with women. The rest of their admissions program just aims to optimize ethnic diversity.

Again: while I am personally fine with affirmative action and see the rationale for it, my argument doesn't demand that you be OK with it. All I'm arguing is that it isn't the same as what this Japanese school did.

No. The "points system" has specifically been ruled unconstitutional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger

Side topic: how do law schools do it then? They have lower score requirements for under represented minorities.

(I work in LSAT prep, and need to know a bit about admissions. But I'm not american, so I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the system.)

I said "effectively". There are other ways of implementing a racially discriminatory policy than explicitly adding 20 points for minorities.

Let me put it this way: Tokyo Medical University was rejecting women who it would have accepted if all other things were equivalent except their reported gender was male.

Don't some US universities do that with Affirmative Action? Reject Asians or whites that it would have accepted if all other things were equal except their reported race was black?

Except all other things are not equal. Someone who has achieved at the same level while also fighting sexism/racism has had to work harder and be better to get there. They’re playing on hard mode.

Except that you make a HUGE generalization based on the gender and the race. You expect Everyone in that group to have to work harder, and you expect that everyone not in that group to have it easy.

Stereotyping people based on their race//gender is exactly what we should not do, but exactly what most simple affirmative actions are aiming at.

What really matters is socio-economic background.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that life is harder (on average) for minorities.

Ignoring the role of racism and sexism to try to put all the blame on socio-economic background is a gross oversimplification. The NYtimes had a really nice infographic [1] showing the racial disparities in class mobility. tl;dr - white folks who are born rich tend to stay rich more often than black folks, and those who are born poor are more likely to move upwards.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...

It is not a stretch, racism exists of course.

But as you say, it is on average. And you are entirely basing this assumption on the external skin//gender attributes. When you are doing decisions on the "Average" of a specific group, you are misrepresenting people that do not fit in the stereotype.

Do you believe asians Americans face less racism than white Americans?

I don't think it's really relevant to my point above, but no, I think on average asian americans face more racism than white americans.

I took from your post that affirmative action is defensible because it helps those who had a harder time due to racism or sexism.

But you admit asians who affirmative actions hurts the most face more racism than whites.

Did I misunderstand?

I think deciding how best to counteract systematic bias at earlier stages of the pipeline is difficult, and I don't think we should accept widespread collateral damage. That said, I don't think we should use that as an excuse to blow up the whole idea and ignore the bias (I'm not saying that's what you're advocating, just expanding my point).

Why is this being downvoted? Isn’t that exactly what happens?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/18/harvard-ad...

Yes, but not with modified test scores, as that is explicitly illegal. Instead, schools consider softer criteria which leave wiggle room for race to be de facto weighted as a factor:

https://www.npr.org/2015/06/23/416736883/race-conscious-admi...

Okay, so the end result is the same, in that some applicants have their outcomes flipped from accepted to rejected(or vice versa) due to no other factor than their race. That is what I meant when I said 'effectively' in my original comment.

you are being downvoted even though you are saying it the way it is.

I always find it interesting to see how people that want to use affirmative actions are in denials on the actual mechanics that are used in order to make it work.

How about the recent lawsuit about Harvard and Asian candidates scoring lower in a subjective criteria?

Yes, that’s also a good example of obfuscated racial preference in college admissions (assuming the case has merit, and looking at the numbers I’m under the strong impression that it does).

It's similar, but the bias here is against women having children and the effect is applied against the test output. In the US the most severe cases have been things like Harvard deciding there too many Asian people and creating a 'personality test' specifically designed to have Asians perform lower, ie modifying the test itself.

Potato potato. They could modify the test by adding the question "What is your gender?" where the only correct answer is "male", à la "literacy tests" in the US.

No.

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