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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept. You could have 10% or 20% percent of candidates chosen by lottery, or have a lottery for all candidates who have the minimum pre-requisites, etc. Some sort of randomness whould guarantee a diversity of candidates and would even span across dimensions which are not even considered currently.

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> I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept.

Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist and the proponents "enemies of excellence" in precisely the same way that they did for the eventually implemented system. A similar response would happen if applied to universities.

I think that merit lotteries are excellent and work much more effectively than the ordinary things people to do increase diversity (which often focuses on aesthetics rather than actually changing things). But we are kidding ourselves if we think that they won't face precisely the same resistance.

  Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist

This is an uncharitable interpretation. AIUI part of the motivation for overhauling the admissions system was precisely to reduce the proportion of Asian Americans admitted, in order to satisfy some diversity goal set at the state level.

So, even if the new admissions system wasn't racist on its face, it was introduced for the purpose of racial balancing.

This is exactly what I mean when I say that merit lotteries will get exactly the same reaction where people just say "this is racist, you want to oppress Asian Americans."

I'll say it again: in the TJ case, there was significant evidence that the motivation for abandoning the old system was racial balancing.

You can read about in the ruling here:

https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalitio...

I suggest you read pages 11 and 12 for context, but I'd like to specifically draw your attention to the first full sentence on page 14:

"Here, no dispute of material fact exists regarding any of the Arlington Heights factors, nor as to the ultimate question that the Board acted with discriminatory intent."

For specific evidence of that discriminatory intent, start at page 17.

For more evidence, see pages 53-56 in the appeal dissent: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23821588/tjca4opn0523...

Again, I don't understand how this is relevant.

People will oppose merit lotteries, like I said.

And the system that is part of the suit isn't the merit lottery, btw.

You said "Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist".

I responded by explaining why the 'Conservative advocates' were correct.

Do you deny that the changes were racially motivated?

I'm not interesting in talking about whether or not they were correct.

I'm saying that conservatives aren't going to get on board with merit lotteries any more than other proposals.

The issue is that the lottery is never enough. Effectively, the lottery percentage is removed from discussions and the fight moves on to the non-lottery percentage where the same arguments of diversity come back to the non-lottery percentage. This is not hypothetical, this is how the US immigration system is currently. There is a diversity lottery, which is a mostly foregone conclusion right now. And yet, there is race/country based quota in the skill based categories and proponents want quotas despite it being a skill being category. Once you create a lottery, you can't say, "Go do your thing in the lottery, this lane is for merit". So the lottery is a waste. Several attempts to phase out caps/quotas from skill based categories through legislature have failed so far. In the most recent case, the congressional black caucus opposed it as it would disadvantage the currently advantaged immigrants from African countries.

> Some sort of randomness would guarantee a diversity of candidates and would even span across dimensions which are not even considered currently.

It wouldn't create as much randomness as you think. For example, nearly 90% of student who score 1500+ on the SATs are Asian or white. [1] It's nearly the same for 1400+. If an Ivy set its lottery cutoff to be at a level that kept its average and interquartile range the same as it currently is, their admitted class would follow this pattern.

1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-an...

A lottery doesn't guarantee randomness at all because the population is not evenly distributed. If you have 99 people apply who are white and 1 person apply who is black, the lottery is going to naturally favor white candidates by virtue of # of applicants.

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