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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

To quote from the brief.

Unlike applicants whose identities have been affected mainly by their socioeconomic or geographic circumstances, applicants whose formative experiences relate to race or ethnicity would be denied the opportunity to convey their full, authentic selves when competing for admission to selective schools like Amici.

And so we guarantee that millions of Americans will have a formative experience that THEIR race (various Asian groups) are allowed to be discriminated against. Instead of being rewarded if they follow every rule on how to fit in and succeed.

Let's be clear. The schools are literally fighting to let them continue excluding the grandchildren of people who were put in a camp for being the wrong race (Japanese in WW 2). Separately those same teenagers have to deal with a world where hate crimes against Asians just jumped. Locally in Orange county it is up over 100%.

This is just wrong. And that people who support the policy claim to be for "tolerance" is just hypocrisy.

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This is the danger of focusing on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. In my opinion, the former is not possible anyway, it's not a good goal. People are different and they're going to have different outcomes, even if only considering chance. But they should have the same opportunities regardless of race, gender, etc. Making policy to address this is tackling the root of the problem instead of the symptoms.

To go with your analogy, when I am sick, I want both the root of the problem dealt with along with the symptoms. I don’t see why you would not attack things from both angles.

> when I am sick, I want both the root of the problem dealt with along with the symptoms

Society isn't conscious and people aren't microbes. The analogy of a cytokine storm taking out healthy cells to drive off infection becomes grim when the "healthy cells" are people.

> Society isn't conscious and people aren't microbes.

Maybe, maybe not :P

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...

To understand that, you really have to go beyond the analogy. I think trying to address differences in outcome by discrimination is morally dubious and potentially could backfire and make things worse.

I largely agree, but here's an attempt at a "steel man" of the opposing point of view:

Unjust discrimination is complex, often subconscious, and deeply rooted in institutional structures and culture. It's too complex and elusive to address directly beyond the obvious removal of explicit regulations (desegregation) and finger wagging. Those things have already been done and yet extreme inequalities persist, so addressing outcome is the only way people can think of to go any deeper.

But what’s missing from your steelman is why returning to racial discrimination will solve the problems of past racial discrimination — rather than making them worse, by teaching a whole new generation to be racists.

Forget making it worse as the primary concern. I am concerned about fascism emerging as a backlash to anti-White discrimination. People are pissed that their society has turned against them and will abandon democracy to fix the situation.

But people love it when the other side gets “pissed”, even if it’s mostly in their imagination. Social media is almost full of schadenfreude, with no system in place to dampen it. On the contrary, any attempts at understanding the other side is called “defending them” or “weakness”.

BS.

It starts at kindergarten and before. Minority children should enter schools where they have a chance, with the resources to take advantage of that chance. But we don't. And here in California, blacks graduating high school on average only read as well as 8th grade blacks.

Attempting to create equality of outcome after that is a lost cause.

I can think of a dozen policies that would be more effective at helping blacks than discriminating against Asians at elite universities. My favorite example is that research says that homework provides little net benefit on average, but specifically hurts children in disadvantaged families where parents themselves lack the skills to help their children understand the material. Therefore dramatically reducing homework will help blacks. (And will also make families with teenagers much less stressful places.)

I wonder why reading Anglo-gibberish is a standard?

Does a bridges proper engineering rely on detailed emotional understanding of Shakespeare?

Human language is only 5,000 years old they say. Leaving human intuition for quantity millions of years to fine tune itself; enough food, enough heat, to prevent biological death.

Nothing about human biology is fueled or relies upon grammatically correct English and everything to do with correct use of mathematical measurement.

^ why reading Anglo-gibberish is a standard

Because of the internet and the vast amount of knowledge accessible in English only.

Even you, who is calling it "gibberish" is forced to use it to participate in these thread.

The problem with this argument is it assumes the differences are due to discrimination, but when we try to measure that we almost can't detect the effect of discrimination because it's so small. The differences are not skin deep like that, but usually have deeper roots. To be clear I'm not saying there are no biases like racism, but that it doesn't seem to be the dominant factor causing differences in outcome. Often the roots are deeper, like higher divorce rates, worse schools, differences in parents' socioeconomic status. Between men and women the salary difference is almost entirely a difference between women with children and men and women without.

it's turtles all the way down. people will simply say the roots of the other problems that cause disparities are discrimination. And if you try to disprove that.. you see where this is going.

Deeply rooted institutional and cultural discrimination can only exist if discriminating behavior is acceptable when it done against the right target. Changing which demographic is permitted to discriminate (and hate) against only changes the smallest amount of variable, which is the opposite strategy of going deeper in the effort to eliminate discrimination.

It is very similar to violence. People abhor violence when it done against the wrong person and love violence when it feel justified against the right target. This is why laws regulating violence is often written to be as broad as possible. If you give people the right to turn to violence when they feel its justified, you get mob justice which only create spirals of more violence.

When people feel extreme inequalities persist even when laws should prevent them, people reach for mob justice. Riots, occupations of buildings, looting and shooting. The result is rarely that the extreme inequalities goes away. The cure is almost always the same, which is restricting violence even further and working directly at removing violence from institutional structures and culture.

To continue the steel manning, here's a thought experiment:

What if a large percentage of people decided to exclude you from everything for some arbitrary reason. Just you.

People know who you are and pass you up for jobs, promotions, home loans, value your contributions less, etc.

The reasons don't make sense. They're impervious to argument. In some cases people deny that they're doing it, or seem genuinely unaware, but they're doing it just the same.

To you. Only to you.

Nobody is initiating violence. Nobody is actively stealing from you or harming you. They're just boycotting you, excluding you, assuming the worst about you by default...

What would you do? How long would this have to go on for you to turn to violence if nothing else made any difference?

First off, I would define that as violence if it came to an extreme. Imprisoning people is to exclude people from everything, including space to move around. Society in general define that as violence. So following this thought experiment we must then enter the philosophical discussion to define what violence is.

Excluding people from everything in modern society causes harm. Starvation, exposure to the environment, psychological harm, atrophy of muscle and body. Excluding people from health care lead to further harm and eventually death. Taken to the extreme and we got murder.

If a majority of people voted to allow murder and violence then the most likely outcome is a civil war, but if in this thought experiment we are talking about only allowing murder and violence towards a single person, the best strategy would be to flee and seek asylum.

If we however limit this thought experiment to an degree which isn't murder and violence, and within the already set limits that government laws has specified (such as the European law of human rights), then if a large percentage of people decided to exclude me from a limited number of things, the best approach would be to political active to make the law even better while at the same time personally avoiding those people. No violence required. Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolent resistance is a good model when laws are unjust and need changing.

> This is the danger of focusing on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. In my opinion, the former is not possible anyway,

For this statement alone the left can label you as far right. In the past 10 years or so, I repeatedly hear a consistent message: we fight for equal outcome. And of course, identity is a critical factor, if not the only factor, in this fight. I'm actually very curious how the American elites reach this conclusion, and how they reconcile the bloody history of people pursuing equal outcome (or in the name of it).

It's just reconcile.

Reconciliate is a post construction of 'reconciliation'

thanks! updated.

I always thought of myself as quite left of center. Now I find myself on the right, and I don't understand if I became more conservative as I got older, or if the center moved past me to the left.

You are far from alone.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144 is relatable for a lot of people.

The center has not moved as much as the willingness of journalists and news organizations to ignore their duties to provide a truthful and unbiased service to their readers and constituents. Allowing their built-in left-leaning biases to affect their mission has given the impression that the population has shifted left.

The next few elections will possibly shake some of this out. I just hope it doesn’t swing too far the other way.

It's not Asians primarily. They are discriminated against more stiffly, but are far outnumbered in the US by Whites, who also get the thumb placed on the wrong pan of the scale.

The focus on Asians is because of a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it.

>The focus on Asians is because of a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it.

Maybe. I think it's because they are a small population being discriminated against heavily, versus a much larger population being discriminated against mildly. It seems far more egregious in the case of Asians when you look at the disparities in test scores required for admissions to these institutions by race.

Yet Asians earn more than all other ethnic groups, even the “mildly” discriminated whites, and Asians are far from a small population amongst those applying to these schools. This is another reason why picking and choosing admissions by race or even just test scores is nonsense.

Create a minimum criteria to succeed in a program and simply randomly choose the students from that pool is a reasonable solution that avoids much of the discriminatory issues and likely results in a more diverse student body.

The focus on Asians is because the group that brought this group is mostly Asian-American. And that is true because, as you admit, Asians are being discriminated against more stiffly.

Now it is necessarily true that if we try to discriminate in favor of some group (eg blacks), we must necessarily give them an advantage over another group (eg whites). But the motivation there is arguably to help the historically disadvantaged, and not specifically to hurt whites.

But there is NO argument for doing what these universities are doing. To identify racial groups that they want to discriminate against because they are too good. I see no difference between policies to discriminate against Asians today and historical policies to put quotas on how many Jews got accepted. And I doubt that there is much coincidence about which universities engaged in both policies.

"the motivation there is arguably to help the historically disadvantaged, and not specifically to hurt whites."

Although this is what they claim, it's hard to believe sometimes. Look at the meltdown that accompanied some smart alecs putting up posters that said nothing beyond "It's OK to be white". Wokesters went mad and started tearing them down anywhere the posters were found, implying that in their mind it is actually very much not OK to be white.

Of course, the problem here is that the woke aren't actually using race words to mean the actual skin color. It's all coded speech to hide the true target of their hatred - anyone who isn't as far left as they are. That's why they go nuts when they encounter black conservatives, or why you see white people are perfectly OK criticizing things like "whiteness". They aren't engaging in self criticism there, they've just established a convention amongst their community that "white" is coded speech for conservatives.

Scott Alexander has a great essay that examines this in depth:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

> a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it.

This is an argument put forth in bad faith. The thought - agree or disagree - is white individuals in America have systemic advantages that persist due to historical social practices the manifest across many years of education and just existence in life in America. It's not about "deserving less" but about acknowledging they nudges in their favor many had along the way.

I'm not going to debate the veracity of that thought on a forum, but it's not some sort of punitive belief.

How does acknowledgement of favor manifest if not by punitive discrimination? Is a simple admission of favor sufficient, or must corrective action be taken?

It seems that this is simply the argument for why the punitive belief is just.

I had another response to a now-deleted reply, but I'll put it here. Ultimately, there are policies and practices in place that try to mitigate documented structural disadvantages for underrepresented groups using a counterweight of procedural advantage. There is a debate to be had here (though I won't have it online), but the reality is true fairness and justice cannot occur without an intentional efforts to redress systemic structural unfairness because by it's very nature it won't "just work out eventually" for those affected. At least not on a reasonable timescale.

In other words: in some decision-making settings non-White groups have a procedural weight in their favor to minimally counterbalance the way society has objectively and still measurably disadvantaged them for generations. If you want to call that "punishment" because White people "deserve it" then fine. However, I personally think that's semi-dishonest semantics that may be technically correct in the most literal sense of the word, but is not expressed in a way commensurate with the parlance of our times.

Independent of supporting justification, I think that denying the concept of procedural disadvantage while proposing procedural advantage is also dishonest semantics. In a zero-sum competition like hiring or admission, adjusting the criteria to give advantage to one is identical to giving a disadvantage to the other. Any denial of this fact taints the credibility of the speaker.

I fully agree that certain individuals face significant structural disadvantages. I actually think that most people, including those seeking social justice, are blind to many of those structural disadvantages because they find them distasteful to admit, and too adjacent to racist talking points.

If one recognizes that structural advantage exist, as we do, the questions become the appropriate methods and timeline for resolving inequity. This last one is particularly complex, and almost never discussed in any context. The reality is that even in the best case scenario, true equality without a hand on the scale will be a multi-generational project.

Regarding methods, I think it is important to note that while racial groups share many similar experiences, suffering takes place at the individual level, and individual circumstances vary widely. Heavy handed policies that treat all blacks or all whites as equivalent to each other will always have a lot of inherent injustice and collateral damage baked into them. A poor white immigrant from Ukraine is not the same as a rich white bankers son. A rich black immigrant is not the same as poor inner city child with the baggage of 200 years of systemic racism.

When folk talk of procedural advantage based on race, what many people hear is "you are acceptable collateral damage".

I think the more the conversation admits who will suffer and benefit from efforts to reduce inequities of birth, the more honest and productive discussion we can have.

> Independent of supporting justification, I think that denying the concept of procedural disadvantage while proposing procedural advantage is also dishonest semantics.

I think this is a semantic distinction of your own making. I don't deny either exist, phrase it how you want. I said "procedural advantage", you can say "procedural disadvantage" if you must. It's "deserve" and "punishment" I have a problem with.

> Independent of supporting justification, I think that denying the concept of procedural disadvantage while proposing procedural advantage is also dishonest semantics.

Agree. And I believe we owe it to marginalized groups to put our hand on the scale. How hard we press I believe can and should be debated.

I generally agree with the rest of your statement. There is no way to have a perfect system, but that acknowledgement is usually used to justify doing nothing vs. doing something and thus reinforcing (and potentially worsening) the disparities.

If it's not obvious, I quoted the wrong part of your reply in my second quote.

Because schools withhold a large percentage of their spots for "legacy students", a White kid who isn't rich or well-connected is less likely to get into these elite schools than an Asian kid with the same grades. Half of the White students at Harvard are legacy students [1] and White students make up 44% of the Harvard student body. 50.9% of Gen Z is White [2], meaning that slightly less than 51% of the population is competing for 22% of the slots. The same numbers for Asian students are 5.3% of Gen Z and 25.9% of the spots at Harvard. Now, the proper numbers to use are probably SAT scores or some other "skill metric", but finding the proper stats to use is difficult since College Board locked them down, and in this case the population stats don't affect the conclusion because while more Asians have high scores as a percentage of their group than Whites do, it is canceled out by the difference in population sizes.

Assuming Affirmative Action is still in place, once the current generation of Asian Ivy League grad's kids start applying for schools, this issue will start to apply to Asian kids as well.

[1] https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/09/penn-upenn-philadelphi...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/less-than-half-of-us-chil...

Of the 44% white students, about 20% are ethnically Jewish. [1] Jewish people make up about 2% of the population, leaving even fewer slots, if you take that view.

However, nobody is entitled to a slot in a private university.

Public schools should optimize for equality of opportunity, but private schools should be free to use other measures as long as they dont go against civil rights act. This includes maximizing profit or legacy students.

https://www.chicagojewishnews.com/how-many-jewish-students-a...

Correction. About 44% of Harvard students are white, and about 20% of them are Jewish. Therefore Jews represent about 45% of the 44% that are white.

I really don't understand current progressive ideology. Apart from discrimination against Asians, there is also the whole "Hijab empowers women" nonsense. I come from a part of the world where women have to fight for the right to take off hijab. They are shunned socially for doing so. In worse places, they can be jailed or beaten.

Imagine coming from such a place to America, and seeing here women are wearing that symbol of oppression as a fashion statement. It just boggles the mind. Its analogous to if you were an American slave in 1800s, got your freedom and sailed to the UK. And on landing saw blacks in the UK wearing chains as a fashion accessory. It seems so disrespectful towards your struggle.

> Its analogous to if you were an American slave in 1800s, got your freedom and sailed to the UK. And on landing saw blacks in the UK wearing chains as a fashion accessory. It seems so disrespectful towards your struggle.

I would point out that chains are indeed a popular fashion accessory.

I think that telling people what to wear removes power from them. It isn't contradictory to believe that telling people that they must wear something and telling people that they must not wear that thing can BOTH be dis-empowering.

So while I think you should absolutely share your experiences and the feelings you get when you see others wearing a hijab, I absolutely do not think you should push for laws that make it illegal to wear one.

> I think that telling people what to wear removes power from them.

Indeed, it does remove power from them. It is also something which every country, every culture, and every religion has in common. They all put in rules about what people are allowed and not allowed to wear. The support for those are also quite high when people are forced to think about them, but since they are such an omnipresence, it like talking to fish about water.

It is a rare event that I find a person who honestly believe that people should have an inalienable-right to decide from themselves what to wear with neither government, culture or religion being able to overrule that decision.

The ubiquity and normalization of dress codes doesn't mean that they are fair or just. There is both a long history and plenty of contemporary controversy over very unfair dress codes.

When a more powerful group imposes a dress code on a less powerful group, it absolutely behooves us to second guess ourselves.

> people should have an inalienable-right to decide from themselves what to wear

It seems pretty evident that dress and style is a form of self expression is is thus part of our right to free speech, and sometimes also protected by freedom of religion.

Both of those "inalienable rights" are subject to abrogation in specific contexts and so is the right to dress how you like, but that doesn't mean it isn't a fundamental human right.

What is a fair or unfair dress code is determine by culture, religion and governments, which simply create a circle. The culture, religion and political majority determine what dress code is used, and the same one determine if it is fair. Unless the law, culture or religion is lagging behind political majority it will always be a minority that will view a dress code as being unfair.

Similar is the specific contexts which such rules may be broken. Nudists are generally only permitted in very narrow defined and small nudist zones, like say a specific beach behind a hill and behind a forest on the outskirts of a city. If the same would be applied to Hijab so that it would only be allowed in small and special Hijab zones located out of sight of everyone in the furthest located place, would it feel fair or unfair?

We have situation like, should a male buss driver be allowed to wear shorts, or is it fair that the company dress code say that men should were suits and women skirts regardless of hot it is?

I know a person who had to quite his job because wearing socks hurt his feet so much and the dress code strictly required socks. Fair? Unfair?

Some people has been fired because they refused to remove jewelry where the dress code forbid it. Those jewelry was religious in nature and such the wearer felt they deserved an exception. Fair or unfair?

The list goes on and on. Depending on a person cultural, religious and political views people will think some of those are fair and others not. Very few find all of them unfair and want to give people the right to determine that themselves, which is why finding such person is such a rare event for me. Personally I think people should have the right to wear or not wear what ever they want as long it doesn't cause physical harm to an other person, but that is me.

> What is a fair or unfair dress code is determine by culture, religion and governments, which simply create a circle.

This is BS relativism and you seem to be attempting to dismiss any culpability for cultures that impose unfair dress codes that primarily impact those who aren't making the dress codes and are less power or out groups.

> Nudists are generally only permitted in very narrow defined and small nudist zones, like say a specific beach behind a hill and behind a forest on the outskirts of a city. If the same would be applied to Hijab so that it would only be allowed in small and special Hijab zones located out of sight of everyone in the furthest located place, would it feel fair or unfair?

I think nudist are often treated unfairly, but there are different degrees to that unfairness in different areas. Other there are still default nudist spots in areas where nudism is legal since there are also community aspects.

I think allowing hijabs in some areas only or banning them in some areas only is less unfair than a blanket ban, but is still unfair unless there are legitimate safety concerns and the laws cover the entire class of headwear.

I would say that laws against nudism seem less targeted at a low power out group than laws against hijabs so seem like a greater abuse of power.

> We have situation like, should a male buss driver be allowed to wear shorts, or is it fair that the company dress code say that men should were suits and women skirts regardless of hot it is?

I think the company should be legally required to allow/offer uniforms that work in the environmental conditions their employees face. I don't think gender based clothing restrictions are ever fair.

> I know a person who had to quite his job because wearing socks hurt his feet so much and the dress code strictly required socks.

Unfair, unless there are safety concerns.

> Some people has been fired because they refused to remove jewelry where the dress code forbid it. Those jewelry was religious in nature and such the wearer felt they deserved an exception.

Unfair unless the rule was motivated by safety.

> Personally I think people should have the right to wear or not wear what ever they want as long it doesn't cause physical harm to an other person, but that is me.

I think there are other legitimate reasons to impose dress codes (safety, reputation, etc.) but what those codes are, how they are targeted and how they impact those effected all matter when it comes to justifying those codes.

I disagree strongly with your accusation. I suspect that you simply don't recognize less power or out groups where I see them.

Take nudist. When did you last time hear about a nudist politician that advocated for nudists rights. Would you disagree that being openly nudist would harm a politician chance of getting elected? That to me is a rather clear definition of a less powerful out group being openly discriminated against.

Similar, male buss drivers are a typical lower class worker group. You don't see many of those becoming politicians. Classism is often said as being the biggest cause for discrimination, especially when in combination with racism which itself can be a proxy for class. This is how companies can get away with dress code that actually cause directly bodily harm (overheating).

Some groups receive more sympathy, and which one those are is based one culture. It the same reason why some religions get more respect than others. A common argument I see when people justify this exceptionalism is when the religion is one of the big ones. Majority religions get more sympathy than minority religions, and the smaller a religion is the less their views get respected.

As an example, Muslim cultural behavior get more respected than practitioners of Wicca, Satanism, Missionary Church of Kopimism, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. How would you rank those in term of power/out group definition?

> I would point out that chains are indeed a popular fashion accessory.

The chains of a chattel slave are popular fashion accessory where now?

In the culture wars, it's all about positioning yourself as being of higher moral standing. If you position yourself as being for the downtrodden, you get higher social status. For historical reasons, this can't be done with poverty any more in the US so the playing field is selected race and gender groups.

You don't understand it because your understanding of it is wrong.

The point isn't that the "hijab empowers women." The point is that a woman should be able to choose for herself whether to wear the hijab or not. Autonomy, and all that.

Telling a Muslim woman she can't wear a hijab is just as oppressive as telling one she must wear it.

Nobody is talking about a ban. I'm talking about there being no backlash in America against hijab in liberal circles. A hijab and a confederate flag are equally symbols of oppression but only one is frowned upon in liberal circles. Why?

Again, you're just arguing at strawmen of your own creation.

A hijab is a religious garment. The confederate flag is a symbol of treason and slavery. Liberals leave it up to the individual to practice their own faith as they wish, so it's not frowned upon any more than a rosary is.

So, if the effective slavery of women is part of a religion, it is ok?

A hijab is not "effective slavery" of women. It is a religious garment that a woman can choose to wear, in America at least.

Unless you're also now telling the Amish and Orthodox Jewish communities how they have to dress? While we're at it, Mormons also have religious dress codes for women. And Hindus.

These leftists (there's nothing progressive in them) are the good old priesthood. They invent dogmas that mock logic to control the crowd, and they do it by fear, but they are keenly aware of the real power - the royalty - so when the roylaty wants something that contradicts the existing dogmas, the priests swiftly invent a new dogma.

> Its analogous to if you were an American slave in 1800s, got your freedom and sailed to the UK. And on landing saw blacks in the UK wearing chains as a fashion accessory.

https://genius.com/8720933

> Most black men couldn't balance a checkbook / But buy a new car, talkin' 'bout, "How my neck look?" / Well, it all looks great / Four hundred years later, we buyin' our own chains

That is their stated reason, because the only legally acceptable discrimination is for bona fide educational purposes. That is, they cannot discriminate to right historical wrongs, but only because having a diverse student body is part of the education.

I have doubts that this is the real reason, but legally they need to cloak it as that.

When juxtaposed with their legacy preferences the hypocrisy is obvious and quite rank.

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