Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

Looking at this from across the ocean this whole thing looks like it could be an onion article.

The society shouldn't be racist. The fact some people still are is not an excuse for rasism in the opposite direction. Those things don't cancel out

When I heard "US's supreme court decides race can't be taken into account for accepting university applicants" I thought good for them. And then comes the "onion" part. A president coming from a party that has been trying to champion equality for decades goes in front of the mic and says the most bizzare thing. That he is opposed to equality, he is for race metrics to remain and he even entertained a thought to undermine the authority of one of the most important bodies in the democratic system by saying " this is not a normal court".

Up until now I lived under a mistaken assumption a constitutional body is legal when it rules in our favor and lacks "the rule of law" when it rules against was a uniquely European thing. It would be funny if it wasn't sad.

View on HN

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. You managed to combine nationalistic flamewar with race war here. That's a big step in exactly the wrong direction.

I realize the topic is provocative but that's why the site guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

They also say: "Don't be snarky." and "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - so you broke a lot of them here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. We want curious conversation here, not indignant rhetoric, which is its polar opposite.

Who is "we"? Do you represent the site? It seems most of the readers of my comment took it as it was intended. Thought provoking, not flamewar inducing.

Would I say the same thing on YouTube or reddit? Of course not. That would end in a flamewar in milliseconds, but this is HN. I expect (and I wasn't disappointed) than HN readers can discuss divisive topics without any flames.

That's like saying it's ok to start a fire because the firefighters do such a good job around here.

HN is constantly at risk of going up in flames—it's a large, open internet forum! If that doesn't happen, it's because the mods and most of the community are working hard to prevent it. We need you to help with that, not take advantage of it—and in any case the rules are supposed to apply to everybody (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

You can't judge these things by whether a particular case turned into a flamewar. Not every fire burns the house down. It's a question of effects in the long run, and your post was way on the wrong side of that line; which is why the guidelines ask you not to post like that. Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of it, so this should be easy to fix.

Some people can't seem to come to grips that trying to counter injustice with injustice only compounds injustice rather than cancelling each other out. Enforcing racial diversity for the sake of racial diversity is equally as racist as enforcing racial segregation for the sake of racial segregation. Changing the ends does not necessarily justify the means.

> Some people can't seem to come to grips that trying to counter injustice with injustice only compounds injustice rather than cancelling each other out

It's always fascinating to me how the definition of "injustice" is so flexible to those espousing this view.

Do you also believe in eliminating, say, food stamps, which exclude people based on their income? After all, it's a program that doles out an economic benefit to some people but not others which seems like "injustice", yeah?

How about the ADA? Seems unfair that disabled people would get special accommodations over everyone else, right? Is that an injustice?

Food stamps are an injustice, however, the ends there justify the means, food stamps are so people don't starve. They aren't "luxury dinner at fancy restaurant stamps" in the same way admission to famous(ly expensive) universities is.

ADA measures (that affect individuals) are also very different in that existing and proven disabilities are the reason to alleviate problems from those exact disabilities. They aren't blanket bonuses for some races in the way university admissions were before the most recent supreme court decision.

> Food stamps are an injustice, however, the ends there justify the means

Thank you for so perfectly and succinctly illustrating my point for me.

You've apparently decided one "injustice" is okay and another one isn't, for reasons that are entirely arbitrary and based purely on your own personal value system.

But then, like the person I originally responded to, you dress it up like some kind of logical, philosophical argument, as though your personal opinion carries with it some kind of inherent truth.

You are right.

Justice and injustice are entirely subjective, there can be no objective measure of those. Why? Because they stem from an individual's value system. Which is the subjective measures (good, bad, nice, rude, just, unjust, ...) that the individual applies to objective facts (Jimmy getting a birthday gift, somebody starving, lion eating a zebra, drinking a glass of water...). A value system can try to be logical, consistent, aligned with certain goals, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes, it can't be. Society and especially "the law" try to institute common majority value system that is intended to be consistent, logical and aligned with certain goals, rooted in a few assumptions like self-preservation, equality, preservation of humanity, human-centricity, and others. Not all of those goals and assumptions are necessarily equally firm, established, or unchanging.

Now in the foodstamps example, the two goals of self-preservation of an individual and the preservation of humanity are valued higher than the more abstract goal of equality. Which is why I, in my value system, see the choice as an obvious one. Of course others might disagree, but I've assumed this (without pointing it out) to be the majority consensus. Sorry. There are even societies where the majority value system is different in that one need not or should not help a starving individual. Because they do deserve their suffering as (carmic, divine) punishment, or that society is made stronger by culling the weak.

> trying to counter injustice with injustice only compounds injustice

Sometimes, yes. Too many times? Show me. "Only"? Cannot be true.

And yet never the same energy and ire toward legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, Dean's choice carve outs, and donors buying their kids in who couldn't get in on their own academic merits.

Somehow legacies "belong" at Harvard but the black girl who is obviously brilliant at a chronically neglected public school instead of Exeter getting recruited by Harvard is obviously wrong.

What does performance at lacrosse have to do with math and communication ability? Why does someone who worked really hard on their math homework every night have to be excluded from the finest academic institutions in favor of someone who can pull a canoe oar really hard?

How is any of that more fair when the exclusion basically targets black and brown folks?

"For sake of diversity." If you take a slice of the smartest and most capable Americans, do you expect to see that it roughly matches American demographics? If college acceptance doesn't look like that, is there a problem?

I don't think that is what anyone could call sufficient evidence.

But even if the reason is economic disparities, which might be a consequence of past discrimination, it is still questionable if that alone can justify discrimination today. You are in any case discriminating innocents in that case and you just found another reason to discriminate on the basis on skin color.

I heard arguments that the absence of women in computer science would be an indication of discrimination and the prevalence of sexism. A similar case of insufficient evidence and one that lead to false accusations. Accusations that could have convinced a few women to look into other industries for that matter.

I believe the case for racism is much stronger, but I still disagree with the means if it could be proven without any doubt.

The law of large numbers would indicate that yes, a cross section of the 'smartest' should have the same racial make-up as the population. If it doesn't, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak.

This is absolutely false. Cultural upbringing isn’t uniform across all cultures. This has more to do with higher education than anything else. Look at the percentage of Nobel prize winners who are Jewish. Look at the Jewish population.

If the applicant pipeline does not match such an idealized distribution and you attempt to fix it at this stage, would "the smartest and most capable Americans" still apply to the admitted cohort?

Genetics and childhood.

So no, I wouldn't expect it to match American demographics.

>The society shouldn't be racist. The fact some people still are is not an excuse for rasism in the opposite direction. Those things don't cancel out

The problem is, of course, that society still is racist.

Multiple states currently have lawsuits in process against them alleging that they created voting district maps specifically to devalue the vote of black people. Another state just had the Supreme Court rule against them for the same thing.

I don't think the system of affirmative action was well designed or worked particularly well, but it's not true that in the US just saying 'everything is equal now' is going to be enough.

> Multiple states currently have lawsuits in process against them alleging that they created voting district maps specifically to devalue the vote of black people. Another state just had the Supreme Court rule against them for the same thing.

I don't think that's actually true, at least not in the current century. What happened is they created maps to advantage Party A, and black people tend to vote as a near-monolith for Party B, which had the side-effect of electing fewer of black people's preferred Party B candidates.

I'm pretty certain that there would be no gerrymandering with racial side-effects today if different races had roughly similar partisan makeups.

>I don't think that's actually true, at least not in the current century. What happened is they created maps to advantage Party A, and black people tend to vote as a near-monolith for Party B, which had the side-effect of electing fewer of black people's preferred Party B candidates.

You are free to think that. You need to remember, though - Alabama only had its first black representative in 1992, and that only happened because of a lawsuit reorganizing districts. In a non-racist system this would be a surprise because the black population is over 1/4th of the state and is geographically compact.

Either way, the effect of the districting is to dilute the voting power of the black population in favor of the white population. That's not legal to do, for good reason; states in the 20th century masked racial gerrymandering to hide their intent. See City of Mobile.

Alabama is particularly egregious, and we, as a society, should keep trying to fix that, but does that mean California and New York should try to do the opposite to cancel it out? No, that would be wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say...

I think systems that fix racial inequality and lack of opportunity are generally good but agree that where they verge into potentially discriminatory themselves we need to be very careful with them and design them in a manner that prevents them from deviating from their purpose and allows us to remove them when that purpose is accomplished.

Affirmative action, as it was, deviated from the original purpose into discrimination against Asian students.

There are a few other ways in which it failed, but a lot of it was because it was a general principle rather than a narrowly tailored, well structured initiative.

I'd like to see that kind of carefully built system proposed to fix issues more, but with the political system we have I do not believe it will happen publicly.

American society aspires to be classless. Harvard wants its mini society to be classless, too. If it uses strictly objective, quantitative standards like SAT and GPA in its admissions process (in addition to legacy admissions), then it will have a mini-society that consists almost entirely of rich white and Asian kids. Since this looks like racism, they take the easy way out and use racial quotas to nudge the admission demographics in the right direction. Since this is literal racism, we find ourselves in today's situation: how do you untangle the societal damage done by enslaving a single race for hundreds of years?

The answer is that admission standards need to be changed to focus on the human qualities that schools are seeking in a way that is race-blind and does not give rich families a way to game the system. Doing so will be difficult, and there may be a few years of adjustment before they get it right, but it will get sorted out.

The problem for Harvard, and the reason this case [1] was brought in the first place is that the admissions staff were singling out Asian American students for exclusion. Despite having the highest test scores and extracurricular activities, Asian American students were given the lowest “personality” scores, making them the least likely to get in. This despite the fact “alumni interviewers (who, unlike admissions officers within Harvard, actually met individual applicants) gave Asian Americans personal ratings comparable to white applicants.”

I don’t know how to characterize this as anything other than a racial bias against Asian American applicants [2]. This is old hat for Harvard, which previously used antisemitic quotas to keep Jewish students out of the school [3]. This gives a lot of weight to the argument that you can’t solve racism by putting your thumb on the other side of the scales. That all discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, regardless of who you’re trying to help.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

[2] https://archive.is/2023.06.29-203214/https://www.nytimes.com...

[3] https://www.timesofisrael.com/harvards-jewish-quotas-cited-i...

I bet that if they really wanted to try to maintain what they have while not basing it on race specifically they could just base it on zip code or poverty metrics and still predict race correctly about 80-90% of the time.

I'm not sure places like harvard want rich families to not be able to game the system, in some ways I think that's why they exist. I think rather it's closer to how pay-to-win mechanics work in games, if people can realistically earn what was paid for many will confuse their spending for skill, if it can only realistically be achieved via payment then it becomes a thing to mock because the only way it translates to success was by opening the wallet and there is no skill to be praised. By making an ambigious merit based system that can also be gamed by the wealthy it makes the wealthy seem they are entering due to merit rather than wealth, thus making it praisworthy while also meeting the needs of the wealthy, and in many ways I think that's the real point of most colleges.

Not sure there is a way out through admissions policies alone. Those with more resources are always going to be better able to game the metrics.

It seems like the way to solve it is at the societal level, by policies that favor those with fewer resources (e.g. progressive taxation, social safety net programs, etc.).

There is cause to say that affirmative action is still very much in place at universities in the form of legacy admissions and those enabled by donors, they just eliminated affirmative action for people who aren't rich and white

Not in most universities, especially public ones. You don't get admitted to University of Texas or Texas A&M because your dad went there, that's against state law! You don't see the legacy nonsense much outside of private universities that cater to the 1%. I'm for abolishing legacy admissions, but really it affects only a tiny fraction of people.

Affirmative action didn't apply to most universities, anyway. It was mostly universities that catered to the 1%.

The low tier public university I went to explicitly stated that if you were a member of certain races the SAT requirements were reduced by ~200 points. They may be less blatant about it now, but from what I've heard affirmative action is still widely practiced. That's why you hear about white kids pretending to be other races(see Elizabeth Warren), but never the other way around.

By 2015, apparently in Texas really only UT Austin considered race in admissions. Under 20% of public schools did nation-wide.

For Elizabeth Warren, she didn't get into school on the back of that claim, I think it was more a social kudos thing.

You’ve actually seen Asian kids claim they are white as the standard is lower in many cases.

When you see the test results needed by Asians vs other races it’s jaw dropping.

I have a good mechanic. A bunch of locals discovered we have a good mechanic in the neighborhood, and the guy got too much work and had to stop taking new customers. As an old customer he still works on my vehicles, after a month or so on his schedule. So for this one small business I'm a legacy admission.

So say I call him up as a new customer. Scenario 1: Sorry, we can't take new customers, we're full up. Scenario 2: Sorry, we don't accept customers of your race/ethnicity/religion/sexual-orientation.

These scenarios feel very different to me.

If you're going to construct a weird strawman argument you have to at least attempt to reflect what is actually happening. It's easier to knock over when you conveniently fail to mention you and your neighbors are majority white and the mechanic still fits your family members into his schedule. And that most good mechanics in the city have the same situation.

> The fact some people still are is not an excuse for rasism in the opposite direction.

i think this is where the base assumptions diverge.

affirmative action is not meant to address individual person-to-person acts of racism, but the systemic institution-against-class racism that is still rooted in society; the cumulative effect of lots of little factors, where each individual factor is seemingly harmless, difficult to even pinpoint, perpetuated largely unnoticed, but the cumulative effect creates more or fewer opportunities for success in life depending on the color of your skin.

i know very few people who i would accuse of being racist. yet, everybody i know (of all races) participate in institutions that perpetuate systemic racism because it is impossible not to. affirmative action is an acknowledgement of, and attempt to balance, very real data-backed disparities in privilege.

> he even entertained a thought to undermine the authority of one of the most important bodies in the democratic system by saying " this is not a normal court".

If you think that is bad, wait until you find out what the previous guy did.

Here is the problem we are in.

We are playing a game of Monopoly (or some other game, like Ticket to Ride). I go first. I get 100 turns, free. You get to sit there and wait. Finally, you say, hey, that's not fair, and I go okay, and now I let you go. But when I do, you play by different rules, and it takes another 100 turns for you to finally convince me to let you play by the same rules.

Now, we go to turn 201, and you look at a board that I control and I say to you "you can't complain, it's equal now".

So, the point of all this is: how do we move past that? How do we improve the situation for you? How do we make it equitable? That's the question, and the answer for some was affirmative action.

And to be clear, nowhere did I ever see a case where a white person was denied a college because their spot was taken up by a minority. Every one of those schools had other ways of letting students in that ignored academic merit (such as Legacies).

The flip side of the coin is believing our country should not fix the mistakes of its past. Bad things happened, and we should not strive to repair the damage.

Of course, the final belief is that our country didn't do anything wrong, but then at that point, our conversation is over as I have no desire to engage with things that believe that.

>That's the question, and the answer for some was affirmative action.

Affirmative action on very superficial traits. White man A is not the same as white man B. Of course you're going to get backlash from 'whitey' who came from the boonies, had to work their way up and is potentially losing his chance over affirmative action against some vague 'beneficial treatment' they haven't experienced their entire life. Nor does that 'whitey' feel like they have anything in common with the rich kid who got to breeze through life into those privileged circles, regardless they share the same skin color or not.

The most astoundingly racist thing is how everyone is so eager to reduce individuals to their race, no matter their background, whether it be to victimize or villainize them. Meanwhile the corporate fatcats are chilling on the side while the next generation gets to carry the burden of their shenanigans along with the losers of their own generation. Sure they are okay with it, they are nigh-on untouchable anyway.

> Affirmative action on very superficial traits.

Group A, B, and C are being targeted by Group D.

We have a solution that helps Group A.

Group B and C are still suffering.

You can:

1) Help Group B.

2) Help Group C.

3) Help Group D by removing the help provided to Group A.

We went with 3.

> The most astoundingly racist thing is how everyone is so eager to reduce individuals to their race, no matter their background, whether it be to victimize or villainize them.

I don't see this happening, at least not in my bubble, which is admittedly on the left.

It could be happening with centrists or people on the right, but I'd be an outsider looking in, which makes my pov biased and unreliable, so I can't say.

Disadvantaging Asian Americans to provide restitution to African Americans for the past sins of white Americans is plainly unjust. No amount of rhetoric can cover that up.

It is truly bizarre to me that anyone could watch the machinations of the last decade (the Federalist Society has been at it much longer, but it has certainly been ratcheted up recently) to engineer the Supreme Court to make certain decisions and then pretend that the court just naturally emerged as a far-right ideological body. That the court is at a low point in public trust suggests that I'm not the only one who understood that though.

People are fine with it because 1) they benefit from it and 2) have no empathy or 3) are ignorant of the realities. Equality sounds good on paper when you ignore history.

"Everyone has the same opportunity" can be technically true but still practically false. e.g., If you want to disagree with me, you can, but you have to reply 1 minute after I post this comment. But a reply any time other than exactly 1 minute after supports me.

Everyone has the same opportunity here: to express their support or disagreement.

I can’t help but think that Americans are so deeply and inherently racists that they are only capable of fighting racism by building another racist framework to do it (and, of course, fail).

A symptom is that the most visible so-called anti-racist people just won’t shut up about the very concept of race, as if they are okay with it, they just want their particular flavor of people to be up top and oppress the living shit out of their former oppressors, that should show ‘em.

Eh, I visited Europe and the first question everyone asked me:

"Where are you from?"

It was unanimous.

In the US, I usually hear "Where do you work?" or lesser: "What are your Hobbies?"

The US judges people on how much money they make, primarily. I've heard in Europe you are judged based on your position. In Japan, based on where you are on the ladder.

When I went to Mexico, I stuck out like a sore thumb. There was no hiding I was an outsider. In the US, you could not figure out if someone has lived next to you for 10 years based on their ability to speak english, let alone skin color.

I wouldn't confuse people with good intentions with racism. I think in the future, we will have something like this, but more income oriented.

I don’t think that “Where are you from?” has anything more in it than a conversation piece. Some people like traveling, you know, and share experiences. But I’m European myself, so dunno.

But the megaphones of anti-racism keep wielding the concept of race itself as a sword, they just think that since they are the good guys, nothing could possibly go wrong.

I don’t think there’s good physiognomics or bad physiognomics, is all. The whole thing is flawed. If you keep sitting on “race, race, race” all the time, no matter the intentions, instead of canning the whole concept as a harmful curiosity from the past which we don’t use anymore, you’re just going to promote it and get people to stay in the same freaking framework that enabled all sorts of crimes against humanity.

Americans are racist - all of them - in my opinion...

Their enthusiasm for tracing their own ethnicity 3-4-5 generations back will put German Nazis to shame... And US diversity craze is just Nuremberg laws in reverse.

Burning books, censorship and self-censorship, thought control, creation of new language, new human and new society. Questioning the verdicts of Supreme Court if it does not adhere to ideological agenda...

This is well known in Asia and Europe from XX century...

Nine times out of ten, genealogical research often reveals that (distant) family of, or location of, origin are not what you thought they would be. It is both humbling and gratifying to find that connectedness with others-quite different in outcome than a racist eugenics exercise.

Do feel free to paint all Americans with the same ratty brush at your own peril.

I don't see how the desire to trace back your lineage and know your family tree automatically translates to being a racist.

For Americans, who, dwindling Native Americans population excepted, are all immigrants' descendants, curiosity about where their families actually come from is only natural.

> Up until now I lived under a mistaken assumption a constitutional body is legal when it rules in our favor and lacks "the rule of law" when it rules against was a uniquely European thing. It would be funny if it wasn't sad.

Huh? This is how it works everywhere. Do you think Americans are somehow different from our other humans. The court is "activist" or "partisan", until it makes decisions you agree with, even if this is a huge departure from president.

You're acting like it's absurd to question the legitimacy of a court that had the majority stolen using underhanded political tricks. This is not a constitutional body. In a way it never was, but it hasn't operated on sane or fair rules for some time.

The fact is that the authority of the court has been undermined by power hungry, treasonous republicans. It's fair to question the legitimacy of the illegitimate.

Do you take issue with the legal reasoning delivered by the court?

The facts of the case are pretty damning anyway.

Harvard comes up with a tentative list of admitted students, then cuts based on just four factors: legacy, recruited athlete, financial aid status, and race.

Ah, yes, now that racism is gone all the people whose ancestors were enslaved, then segregated, then bombed, then redlined will magically be able to achieve the same results as families who have been collecting money for decades to centuries without significant opposition. The country is a pure meritocracy so only the smartest children will receive our precious and (not artificially) scarce tertiary education, everything is as it should be.

Big lol at "undermining authority." It's not a normal court. They've been accepting massive gifts without recusing themselves for quite some time. 1/3 was appointed by a traitor who attempted to extort a foreign government, committed an insurrection, then stole classified information. People are saying he sold nuclear secrets to the Saudis.

Ever notice how the same folks who loudly claim race-based affirmative action is obviously wrong never have the same energy for legacy or athletic scholarships?

Take Harvard. A large chunk of Harvard's white admissions are based on legacy (my dad went there, so I get to go), athletics (I can lacrosse like nobody's business!), donor (my grandfather paid for this building, so you gotta let me in!), and Dean's choice (my family knows the right people). Of the (overwhelmingly) white folks listed above, 75% of them would not have been accepted to Harvard based on their academic performance. 75%!

But whenever conservatives talk about unearned access to higher education, they ALWAYS mean black and brown folks. It's a curious thing, isn't it? I mean, it's not like Harvard is mostly black and brown. Not even close. What could the motivation be, I wonder?

Truth is, one party talks about equality and currently has SCOTUS backing them up, but really doesn't care about it. Just that white folks remain in a position of privilege.

> "Ever notice how the same folks who loudly claim race-based affirmative action is obviously wrong never have the same energy for legacy or athletic scholarships?"

Legacy or athletic admissions are not against the law or violations of civil rights. Displaying bias against Asian-Americans in college admissions is a violation of civil rights law and reprehensibly racist on top of that. One doesn't have to be a conservative to see that that's true.

The real question one should ask is why so many progressives are speaking out in support of Harvard policies that were naked racism against Asian-Americans? They're making it pretty clear that they're no allies of ours.

Legacy and dean admissions heavily bias toward white students as well, which disadvantages Asian applicants to a greater extent than affirmative action policies. If taking away race-based bias is your goal, you're focused on the wrong parts.

>The fact some people still are is not an excuse for rasism in the opposite direction. Those things don't cancel out.

What if being amoral now causes a more moral society in the future? What if unfairly forcing equality now creates actual unforced equality in the future?

That's always been the bet. But it's been decades now and what are the results ? Your society seem more polarized than ever before.

Biden seems like a classic politician.

I was a big fan of him in 2021, ended the Afgan war(he followed through with the contract signed with the Taliban) + gave daycare deductions. Sure his free money was unnecessary as the economy had already bounced back, but Trump had given away free money and it would have been a bad look for a democrat to not do similar.

Then 2022, yikes. Student Loan Forgiveness is straight buying votes, terrible policy, and generally agreed upon by anyone who knows. CHIPS/Zombification of tech companies was a yikes move as well.

2023, seems to be phoning it in and doing PR. With basic GOP control of congress, Biden has to use mostly soft power and is mostly campaigning for 2024. These kind of things are supposed to be pandering to donors, dem loyalists, and minority voters. He has almost 0 power here, so these are cheap words that pay well.

except for those on the other side of said ocean, "the most important bodies in the democratic system" has been grossly politicized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com