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Comment by standyro | Hacker News Reader

We don’t live in a perfect meritocracy. Equal opportunity is difficult to achieve when education isn’t demonstrably democratized. On top of that, this argument is laughable when she has as much qualifications and experience as any Supreme Court candidate.

There’s a big gulf between the education that the average public school student in say the Oakland Unified school district receives versus wealthy California suburbs like Palo Alto. You’re living in a fantasy world pretending that we don’t need to do something to help settle the echos of America’s’s sin of centuries of discrimination and slavery.

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So fix the education system. That would make a real difference to millions. Restricting court appointments to individuals of a particular color is tokenism that helps no one except the person who gets appointed.

At the very least appoint them without announcing in advance that you're determined to appoint a black person. How shitty would you feel if you've worked your whole life at a very high level, and then the president announces that you're chosen not because you're the best of the candidates, but because you're a black candidate.

> How shitty would you feel if you've worked your whole life at a very high level, and then the president announces that you're chosen not because you're the best of the candidates, but because you're a black candidate.

This is an interesting point. One of the things that's been pointed out to me by women in my life is the psychological toll of repeatedly being in situations where you feel like you've been discriminated against but there's just enough ambiguity that you're not comfortable speaking up about it. E.g. being passed up for promotion in favor of someone who isn't blatantly less qualified, but is less qualified nonetheless, or being unsure if someone speaks to everyone in a condescending tone or just to women.

The case of the justice seems like the inverse of that. Do publicly advertised affirmative action or DEI programs have the side effect of causing qualified people to second guess whether their success was earned?

I do think there's a lot of value in such programs (that most likely outweighs the negatives, to the extent that they even exist), but I haven't heard anyone talking about whether such effects exist and if so how to handle them. Maybe it's not a factor at all, I certainly am not in a position to say.

> Do publicly advertised affirmative action or DEI programs have the side effect of causing qualified people to second guess whether their success was earned?

If you have status, you don't mind being known as a recipient of "affirmative action" i.e. "I picked you for supreme court justice cause your black".

If you don't have status, then you don't want it to be known you're a recipient of aa i.e. you won't see the POTUS go around to ivy-leagues and point out all the affirmative action students saying, "It's great all these students got into harvard because they're black."

I think that she is pretty aware of reality on which she is among best candidates. And the group of best candidates is larger then a single one person.

Yet also, precious candidates were less qualified but highly political, so it is not like anyone would think the selection is all about qualification.

> So fix the education system.

And, what, wait 50 more years before the education system, fixed by your magic wand, produces a judge that has never been done any favors, implicit or explicit, according to their race and gender?

One of the problems with this line of thinking is the baked-in presumption that a black justice on the SC is relevant for the lives of black kids in bad neighbourhoods.

I find this presumption rather suspect, because earlier heavily racialized schools of thought that assumed a deeper bond between people based on their skin color didn't achieve anything either. Ethnic groups are huge and thus very loosely connected, if at all.

The difference in outcome with this strategy is made obvious by contrasting Clarence Thomas with Ketanji Jackson. I agree with others in this thread that real reform must be via improving K-12 education for all students.

I think a great start would be for all schools to receive the same $ per student. There are still infinite questions about attracting excellent teachers, additional ways to ensure that rural schools can compete with urban schools, and that "inner-city" schools get good staff. Obviously there are tons and tons of pitfalls for a comprehensive education improvement effort, but at least starting with sharing funding among all students equally seems like it would have a large effect.

I do think each student should be educated to their individual capacity, although social mixing can also help. There are infinite philosophical and practical discussion that can be had about American education. Perhaps truly accepting or rejecting that its purpose is to do a lot of the child-raising could yield interesting system proposals. Kids spend more waking hours with teachers than they do with parents.

Bill Gates allegorically told Saudi Arabia[0] when asked whether the country could realistically become "one of the world's most competitive economies.":

> "I said, 'Well, if you're not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you're not going to get too close to the top,'" said Bill Gates.

I wonder how much of our talent/population we are completely failing to utilize. Even without the extreme degree of sexism that Saudi Arabia suffers, I bet we're wasting far, far more than 50% of the USA's talent and "human resource" capacity.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”[1] I am sure that a massive number of USA's current Einsteins are stuck working at restaurants, amazon warehouse/fulfillment, supermarkets, and gas stations. These are not just black people, but indeed anyone not born into privilege, and also many who fell out of their privilege and cannot get back to work near their real potential economic value.

We may not be able to help the mathematical geniuses who could have been who are now serving tables at a restaurant, but as a society we can extract more value from their children by educating everyone much better than we do.

I personally believe there's little that's more "pro-business" than supplying a massive labor pool of top talent at deep, deep subsidies. It amazes me that the largest corporate tycoons don't wildly clamor for massive improvements in education.

From a national security standpoint, if we captured more value of 3x or 10x as many moderately competent and completely brilliant minds, no other country would ever be able to compete with us economically.

The only loss would be to _undistinguished_ authoritarians, who might lose power if the populace was well-educated. But effective authoritarians certainly could still thrive. This should be a widely supported strategic policy by people of most political ideologies.

0: https://www.salon.com/2007/01/29/gates_22/

1: Steven Jay Gould in The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

I try to frame thing this way to my private equity / hedge fund / golfing friends and they cannot accept it. they think the natural order is that ten thousand millionaires on each coast are all we need to keep things moving forward, and a couple million well paid people bellow them, and the rest dont matter.

I try to scare them by saying "country X is educating everyone" and they say be quiet liberal, everything is going to be fine.

Ketanji Brown Jackson was raised by well-off parents, attended a top high school in Miami, went to Harvard. She personally has not at all suffered from past injustices. If you think that society should be structured so as to remedy past injustices by helping the disadvantaged, then do that. But help the people who are actually disadvantaged, not those who happen to have the right amount of melanin.

I think you would be surprised by the treatment endured by even the most well-off people of color. I know a guy who's very financially successful, lives in an expensive neighborhood, drives a luxury car, wears expensive "professional" clothes, and so on. He still talks about repeatedly getting pulled over either for a clearly made up reason (e.g tail light being out when it's clearly not) or for no stated reason at all.

I don't think anyone is arguing she is not qualified, at least here, but if she is qualified, why did Biden make it all about race and gender which he also did to pick his Vice Presidential running mate? Let Judge Brown stand on her own merits against equally qualified peers. Restricting your search based on race and gender immediately lessens the pool of qualified peers.

Is she qualified? Yes. Was she the most qualified? We won't know because the pool of candidates was restricted to a certain subset of the population.

You cannot fix racism and sexism by using a different kind of racism and sexism. Why did he not pick an Asian woman to be his nominee? We have had two black Supreme Court justices: Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall. We have had no Asian Supreme Court justices.

Contrast to the previous president, whose appointments were all drawn from the Federalist Society. Were they the most qualified candidates? We won't know because the pool of candidates was restricted to a certain subset of the population.

Where did I ever agree that Donald Trump had a great policy for picking candidates?

His picks will influence American politics and society and law for years.

Yes. That is every Supreme Court nominee. I am not understanding how this conversation devolved into a discussion about Donald Trump and his nominees when we are discussing Biden and Kentaji Brown.

I have 0 interest in discussing Donald Trump anymore.

Point being that justices aren't picked on the basis of their qualifications, and haven't been in my lifetime. They're picked on the basis of the rulings they're expected to make. It's all politics, but you're out here playing the race card on a straw man.

Trumps nomines were good pick from his party point of view, because they decide based of their politics. It had nothing to do with qualifications, despite people pontificating about it now.

The requirements to be in the Federalist Society are relevant to how you'll do your job as a Supreme Court justice, and also aren't based on protected classes.

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