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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> So, an individual Asian student needs to score much higher to have a chance at Harvard, compared to students of other ethnicities. That's very blatantly racial discrimination.

> This amounts to, "sorry, we have enough people of your color, so we're gonna make it harder for you to get in." That's wrong. Period.

"The law of unintended consequences" ... what are they going to do if the target demographic (in this case Asians) start their own merit-based and academic-based colleges and universities?

Sure, it's not cheap, but large communities have done much more expensive things in the educational space before, and of course being pure merit-based means that the graduates will (eventually) be more sought after than the standard colleges[1].

Will someone then cry racism then?

[1] Maybe not to the level that Harvard grads are.

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If you're saying that we should allow individuals and companies to create their own identity policies free from government oversight, then we should allow individuals and companies to discriminate any way they want. Don't want to hire blacks, gays or Jews? Allowed. To be honest, there is a legitimate argument that this type of discrimination would be better handled through the free market. But I doubt the people who support Asian discrimination in academia would support this.

Is creating a purely merit-based institution really an identity policy though? I see it as an identity-blind policy, unless you define identity to include merit.

The fallacy of meritocracy. You stand on the shoulders of your parents. If you come from a family of crackheads on the bad side of the rail tracks you already lost the race long before 8th grade.

Spending extra time reading to your kids, sending your kids to tutors, paying for summer programs, sweating over neighborhood to move into for their good schools...many of these things are now considered “inter-generational privilege transfer”. But not long ago, they were simply called “good parenting”.

Why even bother doing good parenting when the ideologues in charge want to “fallacy of meritocracy” away any advantages you have given to your kids?

I used to be pretty annoyed by conservatives boasting about "family values". I thought it was just performative virtue signaling. But looking at how the far left views the hard work of parenting as something that ought to be "equalized away" has me thinking maybe the I was wrong.

Indeed we would have to make everyone completely equal. Mao tried to achieve this with the abolishment of the family.

While this is very true, you cannot force all parents to become crackheads, so you will always have different outcomes. We have the same problem with wealth in that regard.

You can only improve education in a way that is offers support for people in difficult homes. Perhaps their difficult childhood will ultimately hinder them from becoming the best. But then perhaps their children will fare better.

This is why we can do things to make up for the fact that society has failed these children.

If you make it so that only “merit” is considered - you’re only gonna get rich kids. (And I see this already through SV - it’s nothing but rich or well educated parents for the children here)

What is the argument against letting children who have had a rough lot in their life get a slight lessening of their handicap when applying for colleges or other life changing scenarios that could pull them out of their rut for future generations?

If you don’t and are unwilling to address the root cause (and we aren’t willing to address that in the US - we don’t even have universal healthcare yet guys) then you’re gonna keep having this shit continue.

The merit-based school such as Styuvesant in NYC and Lowell in SF are both filled with rather poor Asian kids.

The demographic profile of these two schools are substantially lower income than the very expensive cities they reside in.

Edit: Got the names of the schools wrong.

You know that isn't an argument against what I said, right? Like, at all. It completely supports what I said.

> You know that isn't an argument against what I said, right? Like, at all. It completely supports what I said.

It's literally the opposite of what you said, unless you suddenly changed your mind and agree that the merit-based schools are the best option for poor kids.

You said:

> If you make it so that only “merit” is considered - you’re only gonna get rich kids.

He said:

> The merit-based school such as Styuvesant in NYC and Lowell in SF are both filled with rather poor Asian kids.

> The demographic profile of these two schools are substantially lower income than the very expensive cities they reside in.

It couldn't possibly be further from supporting what you said.

Since people here are often ESL. I'll put it this way: "English is a rich language."

Please try to think about how the context of what I said could be interpreted. If you take literally everything at face value - you're truly not thinking critically about anything.

Not sure why you keep arguing against yourself. Many immigrant Asian families have households which are not English-fluent.

Agreed that there is a need of support system. Disagreed on making the denominator racial, religious or cultural. That is particularly evading the root causes in my opinion.

You can't force parents to do anything, but you can structure public policy to include recognition that some people get benefits of circumstance others don't.

As analogy: we won't (and we shouldn't) stop billionaires from making money as fast as they (legally) can, but we can sure as hell tax them proportional to their success at it.

Merit, by definition, is what you deserve. I could see the case for merit-based applications that take into account how far you've come relative to where you started.

what is the fallacy exactly?

The fallacy that you went to that nice university because you're smart and not just lucky.

Do you mean that some people are lucky because they were born smart?

This is the real issue that no one wants to address.

Yeah I’m with you here.

Would it be reasonable to say that hard work should be rewarded? Well…ones propensity for hard work, it turns out, is highly heritable. Either from your genes or from your upbringing. You didn’t choose your parents, nor did you choose your upbringing. So your propensity for hard work is really just unearned privilege.

Same line of reasoning can be applied with future orientation, or smarts. People don’t deserve the fruits of their intellect, because they didn’t do anything to earn it.

I’m not sure if there is a name for this kind of absurdity, but “Achievement Fatalism” is a nice fit.

I can sympathize with people who are sad about the inequalities of biology. The trouble is that the best hope for “a rising tide that lifts all boats” is for the top crust of the IQ of humanity to be applied toward fixing real problems. Distracting smart people with stupid fake victim status games literally makes the rest of humanity poorer.

The smartest people I know simply don't find them distracting. They also don't consider them stupid or fake; they have better things to do than argue whether people deserve equal treatment with dignity and mostly do their best to just treat people with equal dignity.

In fact the Constitution insists on allowing exactly this kind of discrimination in the assembly clause of the first amendment.

The freedom of assembly is specifically the freedom that was curtailed by the Civil Rights Act.

Legally, it should be added... The freedom protected in the first amendment is the freedom of political assembly. The Civil Rights Act has been argued repeatedly in the Supreme Court, and the court has ruled repeatedly that the constitutionally protected freedom of assembly is not curtailed by requiring corporations, incorporated under the rules of the state, to be required to serve everyone in the protected classes.

Amazing that the first part of the first amendment does not only apply to political speech.

The court was wrong and will be wrong again.

I would ask how progressives square two contradictory interpretations of the first amendment but then I realized they don’t really support the freedom of non-progressive speech anymore.

Sorry, that was an error on my part: freedom of association (in the context of providing public accomodation) was curtailed by the Civil Rights Act, not assembly. And your beef isn't with progressives if that's something you're taking issue with; it's with a couple generations of the Supreme Court, which is considered a relatively conservative branch of the government.

(IANAL disclaimer) The freedom of association has been implied by analogy to be protected by the explicitly-enumerated freedom to peaceably assemble in the First Amendment, in some specific cases. But it's a loose protection by analogy; the letter of the First Amendment doesn't even mention a freedom of association. The SCOTUS has not ruled that the freedom of association extends to a freedom to exclude in public accommodation; in layman's terms, the reasoning is "You have the freedom to serve as many people as you want, but that does not imply a freedom to not serve other people if you want to operate under the corporate charter that the government grants."

This overview describes things much better than I can. https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/first-amendment-...

> The court was wrong and will be wrong again.

No doubt, but I don't think you'll find a receptive ear (in the public or in legal circles) to the notion that the Court has been wrong regarding upholding the Civil Rights Act.

> I don't think you'll find a receptive ear

Yes, anyone neutral or right of center knows all about that unreceptive ear.

I'd have to know what arguments you're thinking of in particular to have any opinion on why they don't find a receptive ear.

Without knowing that, broadly speaking: freedom of speech has never implied freedom to have people agree with you. And freedom of the press implies a lack of obligation to publicize information the owner of the press doesn't want to promulgate. It also implies an editorial right to modify published information, ideally with explanation but that explanation is not required (the back-stop on that right being if the public thinks the press's output is trash, they don't have to care what it has to say).

Some positions, you can argue until you're out of breath. If the position is bad, the argument won't win support no matter how much breath is put into it.

I appreciate your willingness to engage in good faith.

The argument is simple: people should be free to include or exclude others in their private business/university/home/club as they see fit, and suffer free market consequences for doing so. This freedom was taken away by the civil rights act and the supreme court.

It turned out, there weren't many market consequences for excluding black people in the American South because they lacked purchasing power (on account of the years of oppression leading to wildly-unequal amounts of resource ownership). There was just suffering and exclusion.

History suggests the market can't solve everything. History also suggests the majority is not always right, which is why the US government is structured as a system of checks and balances and not a simpler-to-implement mobocracy.

Are you arguing that ending Constitutional protections for minorities to freely associate was necessary to preserve the freedom of minorities?

Nobody ended those freedoms categorically. Those freedoms still exist in the context of personal association and most group associations.

But (like any business owner) if a minority business owner wants to incorporate and exchange money with the public for goods and/or services, their rights are curtailed like everybody else's are regarding who they may not refuse service to. For example, a black business owner isn't allowed to kick white people out. They are allowed to kick Klansmen out (as per federal law; states may place additional restrictions).

It is the nature of societies that we give up some rights to protect others. The law is one long, ongoing conversation on what that trade-off looks like. And in the specific case, I'm of the opinion that we tried it the other way (refraining from curtailing the right for a business to refuse service universally) for at least a hundred years and found that it didn't make a good society.

> what are they going to do if the target demographic (in this case Asians) start their own merit-based and academic-based colleges and universities?

I would expect setting up Asian-American universities in which non-Asians need not apply to be highly illegal due to the Civil Rights Act.

> I would expect setting up Asian-American universities in which non-Asians need not apply to be highly illegal due to the Civil Rights Act.

Who said anything about non-Asians? I said "merit-based" and "academic-based".

Is it inconceivable that a university that accepts only on academic performance and focuses only on academic performance will end up disproportionally Asian?

[EDIT: Actually, they can make it so that the "merit" test is not in English, but a selection of Asian languages. That'd very quickly make it into an Asian-only university without specifying Capital-R Race]

Well, if you first racially discriminate against a subset of the public, then propose they can set up their own structures at great expense (which only will become similarly prestigious after decades if not centuries, even if they somehow manage to churn out nobel prize winners and presidents almost immediately), it may be a tall order to also demand they be "racially fair".

At the same time you will push out Asian kids from regular Ivy-League school admission processes, after all "they can go to that Asian school".

If you promote the parallel polis, you will get more segregation, not less. That's the very reason you create a parallel polis.

Such universities already exist, for example Howard University and Albert Einstein. Just not for Asians yet.

> "The law of unintended consequences" ... what are they going to do if the target demographic (in this case Asians) start their own merit-based and academic-based colleges and universities?

You're asking what people would do if those who couldn't get into university address the issue by building a new university, thereby increasing supply?

"Celebrate," I'd assume.

> You're asking what people would do if those who couldn't get into university address the issue by building a new university, thereby increasing supply?

No, I am asking what you would do if the people discriminated against built their own power structures (out of necessity) that, due to merit, was disproportionately made up of members of their community AND produced superior results for their graduates.

Right now many people are basically ranting that Asians are performing too well, leading them to succeed well above other $GROUP.

What do you think those people will say if the discriminated group sets up structures that further reinforce their success in succeeding generations?

Segregation resulting from discriminating against a particular minority to the level that they go ahead and establish their own structures can backfire immensely.

I've seen this (and currently living it firsthand) happen, to the point that the minority group is around 1.5% of the population but holds around 10% of executive and corporate positions[1].

And of course, the 90% majority is baying for blood...

> "Celebrate," I'd assume.

Segregation is never a reason to celebrate.

[1] Last I checked, anyway, which was about a decade ago.

> What do you think those people will say if the discriminated group sets up structures that further reinforce their success in succeeding generations?

"Congratulations on achieving the American Dream."

The NAACP already exists. What you're describing as a nightmare scenario is basically the way this has been done historically in America. It's part of the "rugged individualism" mythology that a group that feels marginalized organizes to take care of itself.

One of the reasons why MIT has the reputation it has, is because MIT admitted lots of smart Jewish students who couldn't get into Harvard... because they were Jewish. (Keeping the Jews out was once largely the point behind Harvard's selective admissions process.)

If, today, Harvard is keeping Asians out, it means more smart, eager Asian students to be recruited by other universities, which just might rise in status for admitting those students.

100%. So many people in this thread are out here acting like going to an Ivy League school is a guaranteed right afforded to those who score well on tests. That’s never been the case. These institutions have been discriminatory from the start and IMO more or less historically exist to provide a path to success for privileged, mediocre, old money scions.

Just saw your nick. Hack the planet!

hack the planet!!!!!

Would they though? I suspect they would want to apply non-merit/academic based policies to the new institutions too.

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