Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

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Affirmative action is about noticing that a system was biased against a particular group of people, and attempting to counteract the bias. For example: if Group X is historically discriminated against, and you can quantify the resulting bias (which may not be conscious) such that on a 100-point school admission scale it works out to on average a 5-point disadvantage, adding some points based on membership in that group is not "reverse discrimination" -- it is a correction for the known inaccuracy of the admission system (since in an unbiased system, candidates from that group would, on average, have scored higher).

And if you believe discrimination should be banished, when will you be showing up to protest schools which give preferential admission to "legacies" (descendants or other kin of alumni), to protest companies which preferentially recruit from only very specific schools, or other forms of admission/recruiting/hiring which give weight to factors other than pure individual merit?

> And if you believe discrimination should be banished, when will you be showing up to protest schools which give preferential admission to "legacies" (descendants or other kin of alumni)

I feel like this is a strawman - fossdev didn't say he agreed with such things.

fossdev didn't say he agreed with such things

And yet I find no evidence of concerted effort against those things, or even minimal effort to express disagreement with those things, on fossdev's part. Only their presence here.

It would have been easy to add a condemnation of those things in the original comment, too, in order to make sure nobody could read the lack of it as support or at least acceptance. But they didn't do that.

It's fair to see someone condemn what they believe to be one instance of a violation of a principle, and ask why they picked that one and not other, larger or more impactful, violations of the same principle.

Affirmative action is racist.

Accepting that, you can of course debate what sorts of racism we should allow, and perhaps even encourage. I probably disagree with you, but that's just my opinion.

Observing a bias, quantifying it as best as possible, and deploying countermeasures in corresponding degree to reduce its impact, is not racism.

But if you believe anything which assigns admission/hiring/recruiting scores on any basis other than objectively-measured individual merit is "racist", you cannot plausibly be in favor of current hiring, recruiting or admissions practices, and have far larger fish to fry than the relatively small number of people whose admission/hiring is solely due to affirmative action.

In all seriousness: look up the ratio of "legacy" admits to, say, black students admitted at top colleges, and then remind yourself that "black" is not synonymous with "affirmative action admit", and then ponder which of "legacy" and "affirmative action" would cause the greatest overall change toward fairness if eliminated. Then focus your efforts accordingly.

An extravertedness bias in underclass culture is the main reason people why people don't get into coding, which is historically more something for introverts and a "nerd thing". It's still in peoples minds, nobody in High School wants to be like Steve Urkel, it's a vulnerabilty in certain circles.

This can only be changed by changing the image of coders within mainstream pop culture, which in turn is mainly influenced by lower class culture, especially Hip-Hop culture in the last decades.

And round and round and round we go! Everybody has a convenient finger to point at someone else who's responsible, and if all else fails blame the people discriminated against and say it's their fault for not doing more to overcome the discrimination.

It's not a race or gender thing, but class struggle, dysfunctional families and problems that are passed on through generations. If your social group is basically your family, you can't afford to not fit in. It's a parallel society with its own rules.

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