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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Most of programs that could be described this way are about giving underprivileged people a better chance. For example by reaching out to specific groups to bring more applications, or funding scholarship to allow poorer people to attend. They're rarely about strictly changing passing scores to adjust the balance. Yes, I know there are exceptions like this one.

You can still fight for adjusting chances (what people also describe as positive discrimination) and criticise this idea.

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This is objectively incorrect. Multiple lawsuits have shown that most affirmative action measures directly lower the required test scores for “disadvantaged” groups significantly, and discriminate against so-called “model minorities” by raising their entrance requirements.

Affirmative action is simply discriminating against groups society cares less about in favor for groups society cares more about. As shown here, where men are valued over women. As shown in the US, where AA/LatinX have a higher cultural value and far more positive cultural portrayal than Asians. So on and so forth. It comes down to who you can devalue enough to deem an “acceptable casualty” in favor of the “greater good” of promoting your preferred racial/gender/other group.

Never mind the children whose adolescences were wasted as they poured countless hours into a struggle to reach asymptotically high admissions thresholds, because they were binned by affirmative action policies before they were even born. Acceptable casualties, according to the promoters of AA.

No, if you want to bring certain groups out of poverty, spend tax dollars on that pre-admissions instead of placing the burdens of your historical societal failures disproportionately on the shoulders of my people’s children.

I have personally been in hiring meetings where we explicitly chose a weaker candidate who was a woman or POC specifically because they were from that group over a candidate with a strong background in the area. There was a lot of pressure from the company to do so.

Same here. The reason was that the weaker and less privileged (female) candidate would have more to gain from getting the job; the stronger candidate would have no problems getting a job elsewhere anyways.

How do you argue against this? At the end of the day the job was just CRUD-glue work, so strong or weak didn't matter so much.

It can be more insidious than this. I have seen cases where candidates are not considered because the range of applicants is not yet diverse enough. By the time the interviews happen, those initial candidates are, of course, no longer be available.