Hacker News Reader

Comment by XCabbage | Hacker News Reader

I honestly can't tell if:

a) you've failed to parse the prose you quote and think that it's complaining outright about universities allowing in applicants from "disadvantaged backgrounds", when in fact it is complaining about allowing in applicants specifically because they are from disadvantaged backgrounds who would not meet previous merit-based admissions criteria, or

b) you genuinely mean to imply that advocating for the ideal of meritocracy is not merely flawed but somehow equivalent to supporting a policy of explicit racial segregation and class-based admissions, or

c) something else entirely

I'm downvoting, primarily because the ambiguity about what you're trying to say makes this comment impossible to substantively engage with.

View on HN

I'm arguing that it's suspicious to me that someone would say that things only started getting bad around the time where black people were allowed into white-only instutitions and had access to white-only environmnents, and before that time it was completely fair and should be returned to. That that was the point where I paused and decided maybe this person doesn't actually have much of merit to say and queried HN as to if the author has any actual, substantial points.

There were a lot of things going on in the world in the '60s. Whatever you think of TFA, it's simply arguing for more rigor in education. Unless you think racial minorities are less capable of rigorous study, there's no reason to assume the article is racially coded.

I didn't say that racial minorities were less capable of rigorous study, merely that the article did not actually functionally advocate for rigor with that statement, but instead is equating meritocracy with a time period that didn't have meritocracy because people were excluded based on race. Which is concerning.

The article isn't making any such equivalence. It doesn't so much as imply a pre-60s meritocracy. The fact that two things are contemporary doesn't suggest a causal relationship. Perhaps if the article mentioned desegregation, one could reasonably infer that the article was alluding to a causal relationship, but it doesn't even do that. The article (and indeed the specific sentences you referenced) is very explicit about the problem (decline of academic standards) and it offers an explanation (the rise in value of nonacademic standards).

If your subtext depends on ignoring everything about the original claims (fixating solely on a date), you're being libelous.

I was struggling to understand the GP as well. Thanks for articulating this question for me.

Curious - what does "GP" stand for in this context?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com