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Comment by P5fRxh5kUvp2th | Hacker News Reader

You opened your post with the following quote:

> this is not a good criticism of affirmative action programs.

I then pointed out we have statistics showing affirmative action unfairly disadvantages Asians and that the supreme court is going to hear arguments about it.

"but but ... I was talking about ECONOMIC discrimination!".

No, you're just a fan of weasel words.

What you were trying to imply with your comment about "other factors" is that these asian students have less soft skills than other ethnicities (I know because this is a common defense). Apparently citing standardized test scoring as a reason for accepting less black applicants is racist, but citing soft skills as a reason for accepting less asian students isn't.

discrimination for me, but not for thee?

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I see your point, and I apologize for not being as clear as I could have been. I do still think that "this could make a poor, hardworking Asian kid not get a college position because of a rich Black kid" is a very bad criticism; it conflates some very emotionally resonant topics in a way that isn't justifiable. I also think that this conflation was done for ideological reasons.

I do want to respond to this, though:

> What you were trying to imply with your comment about "other factors" is that these asian students have less soft skills than other ethnicities

No, I wasn't. By other factors I meant the other things the GP brought up: economics (" born in poverty"), being 'weird' or just not fitting in (which I felt was implied by "got bullied in school"), and nationality ("a rich black American kid" implies, at least to me, that our hypothetical Asian student isn't American). All of these have significant impacts in school admissions, especially nationality, which can make prospective students ineligible for some kinds of aid.

> a rich black American kid" implies, at least to me, that our hypothetical Asian student isn't American

blink

Well, why call that out in a hypothetical if it's not a difference? If GP had called out the hypothetical Asian student's height or weight or video game preference but not the hypothetical black student's, I would have assumed that was significantly different as well.

There's no way you seriously used the existence of a rich black family in the same locale as an asian as evidence that it wasn't in the US.

Indeed, there is no way that I did that. GP specified that one of the two was American, and didn't specify that the other was, so I assumed it was a relevant difference.

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