Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com