This is nonsense, in any moral framework worth its salt.
Consider a simple situation:
1. Lying is wrong.
2. Someone's running from a mob that wants to kill them. They went right.
3. The mob stops, and asks you if the person in question went right.
4. Two wrongs don't make a right, so you tell the truth. Or don't say anything, and let the mob go off in the correct direction and chase that person down.
So in arguing for two wrongs are OK, you are suggesting you'd direct the mob to the person running away (maybe they were a person you didn't like, or were of privilege you resent).
Lying is wrong! Except, according to you, when it leads to good outcomes!
It sounds like outcome-driven morality is what you're pushing for..? Then what's the problem with AA? Not using it to compensate for structural disadvantages is being in the wrong in its case...
>Then what's the problem with AA? Not using it to compensate for structural disadvantages is being in the wrong in its case...
AA fails on that criteria as well. It isn't compensating the people who were wronged and the burden falls on people didn't do the wrong. Poor asian immigrant gets kicked out so Harvard can virtue signal and put a black face on their web page and course catalog. Never mind that kid is a wealthy immigrant from Kenya.
And to make it even worse, the AA admits do worse, drop out at higher rates, and drop down to lesser majors because many aren't academically competitive. They would have done better if they were matched on merit to schools.
> Berkeley and UCLA, the most selective public universities in the state, saw a declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment of about 40% immediately the year after the Proposition was implemented. There was no net change in black and Hispanic enrollment at less selective California universities because while some black and Hispanic students lost access to those schools because affirmative action ended, they also gained Black and Hispanic students from more selective schools like Berkeley and UCLA that those students could no longer get into.
> seems like these very selective public universities in California just provided greater value to relatively disadvantaged Black and Hispanic students who came from lower-income neighborhoods, had poorer job networks, relatively less access to otherwise successful peers, and who were thus able to better take advantage of the resources provided by these super selective universities than the white and Asian students who took their places.
Moreover, we can examine the data directly at Berkeley and realize that the only demographic that has “plummeted” long term is whites. Immediate enrollment percentages may have dropped for black and Latino students but it has recovered and it seems like Berkeley has been able to somehow return to their previous highly consistent proportion of Latino and black students. UCLA is the same.
It’s almost uncanny how the racial percentages at top schools stay so consistent over the years.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...
Pick literally any other action that you think is always wrong. I'll give you a counterexample where failing to do it is wrong.
"Two wrongs don't make a right" is the 5-year old-level morality platitude that you should be turning your ire against. Because, as you're demonstrating, "Wrong" is entirely contextual. A 'wrong' that mitigates another wrong can make a right.
And I tuned out. I’m not paying for the sins of our fathers.
As far as I see, the argumentation isn't particularly novel or unusual either. It's a pragmatist take, discounting methodological concerns in favour of expected outcomes.
I think that take probably summarizes a quarter of the current debate.
I guess this is an example of how little personal brand visibility HN provides next to the comments itself.
A decade sure does change a person, especially when their kids start to demand college money in lieu of merit scholarships.
What pushed me over the edge was facing these policies from the receiving end. I now routinely have to explain my “diversity” to white decision makers in a business context. And my kids—I’ve had three since I wrote that post—are being encouraged to identify as “people of color.” So they can spend the rest of their lives writing diversity essays and trying to persuade white people to pick them.
College racial preferences aren’t the only problem here, but I’m convinced that—given how influential higher education is in American society—they’re the root of the problem.
It's not surprising or idiosyncratic that an Asian's viewpoint on race has evolved as they've spent more time being exposed to America's racial hypocrisy and experienced more and more of this in-betweenness.
And now, Asians are racialized from both sides. And on the left, it’s this pernicious sort of racialization where we’re “people of color” when they’re trying to show how big their coalition is, but expected to “check our privilege” like white people and defer to the interests of black people and Latinos.
Growing up as someone who wasn’t racialized and then becoming racialized as an adult is something most people don’t experience. That is idiosyncratic, sure, but that’s the reason my view on racial preferences changed, not the reason I oppose them now.
Make whichever argument you like. I'll only object to your use of the rhetorical frame that implies surprise that someone else would disagree with you. You disagreed with you until recently, as I do now.
The argument I’m making about why a system of racial preferences is bad is the standard conservative argument against racial preferences. It reinforces the racialization society and perpetuates it to the next generation. “The only way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
But the question you asked me above was different: why my view changed. The reason for that may be idiosyncratic and non-obvious—I didn’t appreciate color blindness as a social norm until it wasn’t my reality anymore—but that’s a different issue than the first point.
It’s like if someone is a pro-taxes and regulation Democrat and then changes his view because he inherits his dad’s small business when he passes unexpectedly. The reason for the change in view might be idiosyncratic, but the reason for opposing taxes and regulation is standard.
(Again, I agree with Rayiner Classic on this point, and not with New Rayiner, but that's neither here nor there.)
>race is such a pernicious concept
>even the good white people
...
Understanding "equality of opportunity" to be literal and absolute is nonsense, because to do so would require hobbling people with natural talent (for instance), since not all people have the opportunities created by those talents (there's a famous sci-fi short story about that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron).
IIRC, rejecting "equality of outcome" in favor of "equality of opportunity", means rejecting explicit policies to pick winners and losers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity
Equality of opportunity doesn't mean hobbling talented people or enforcing that everyone be given identical opportunities. It simply means that people regardless of talent (in a given ability) ought not be restricted from an attempting to take an advantage of an opportunity should they happen to have it.
AA increases how much innate talent matters vs some peoples social position. It’s the same outcome as removing legacy admissions, just with a slightly different set of beneficiaries.
Collages have many leavers to get these kinds of outcomes. Favor elite prep schools and suddenly you have a surplus of high income families etc.
I say this as a legacy admit
To start, in America I believe that most of us believe that the "default" behavior should be to avoid unfair discrimination, especially for protected classes. I think most people would agree to at least this, it's a pretty generic and obvious statement.
Therefore, when we deviate from this for some reason, generally, it REQUIRES a healthy amount of thought: the baseline should be at least a strong hypothesis to begin the conversation. The world is very complicated, so simply assuming something does what you expect it to because it intuitively sounds like it does is generally not a reasonable position.
And of course, the idea behind affirmative action, hopefully put into words that people feel is fair, is a sort of discrimination, but the intention is of course to try to adjust for past disgressions and injustice to try to "re-balance" opportunity. So unlike the four-letter-word that was discrimination in historical contexts, it is not based on racism[1], for example.
So does affirmative action work? It seems to do roughly what it is supposed to do, although honestly a huge problem is that it's sort of tautological. Of course it works, at doing what it's meant to do. Some have argued that it could potentially harm students by leading to a "mismatch", but the evidence is mixed and in any case it probably causes more good than harm in terms of outcomes. I am not an expert on this though, and I have not been into the studies for a while.
The real question that I think causes so much strife and pain is the one that hurts to try to answer: is it worth it? And that is not easy to answer, nor does it have an obvious objective answer. I truly believe that most of this argument boils down to proxies for this particular question. Some people who have a particular egalitarian bend to their views on life and society might blanket oppose such a policy on an ideological basis, whereas someone who is strongly anti-racist is highly likely to prefer such policies even at high cost.
Cost? By that, in this case I mean in terms of going against the basic belief of not discriminating. Ideology is important to people even when there isn't a discrete cost, but in this case the micro and macro views are very different. On the micro level, someone who is less qualified will be preferred over someone who is more qualified, on the basis of factors outside of their control. On the macro level, population demographics change, generally reducing biases.
There's a lot of finer points. Like clearly, on the micro level, when someone "less qualified" according to some criteria passes due to affirmative action, the idea is that it was beyond their control in the first place that they were less qualified, which may very well be true. And on the macro level, statistics may not tell the full story: demographics are a measurement of people, and people are not fungible. The numbers surely look better on paper, but one must wonder sometimes if it's actually doing what it looks like it's doing.
You might think that I am staunchly opposed to affirmative action based on my framing of this, and the truth is, I simply don't know. I think that it's potentially very powerful, but it also is damn scary to wield institutional discrimination even if it's supposed to be a force for good. This isn't exactly a slippery slope situation, of course, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I've personally flip-flopped probably a lot of times. All I can say is that I sort of hope people don't just assume this is the right way to solve all of the problem of injustices, or maybe even more importantly, that merely instituting policies like this doesn't "solve" America's history with racism and sexism; and I don't think most people believe that it does. For some of those things, I think only a lot of time will truly be able to heal most of that, and it's going to leave a pretty nasty scar.
Of course, beyond the fairly straightforward debate is the culture war bullshit surrounding it, but to me it's mostly noise. I look forward to a future with less influence from Twitter and news organizations so that people can go back to discussing things at least slightly more like human beings.
[1]: Using racism in this context to refer to the fairly strict definition of being related to beliefs about races rather than about discrimination.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36796543
To go on a bit of a rant unrelated to your comment, but I think what I'm proposing will be very effective, assuming that the focus on education is held in poorer communities. Culture is a touchy subject. Anyways, education has been shown to be an empowering force, and what better way to eradicate racism to the fringes of society than to bring everyone to the same level? Intentional or not, the feasibility of racism would become less as the prevalence of undeniably qualified minorities grows. Affirmative action gets the goal right but not the method. Even if what I'm proposing is somewhat incomplete, it would be a lot better as a starting point of discussion. Surely there must be other people who have thought similarly.
A fairly meaningless distinction when beliefs about races drives the discrimination.
Affirmative action is just racist, it just is, it’s grounded on the idea that a racial group which outperforming another is in of itself proof of that group advantaging itself via racism and justifying racial discrimination to countervail this. People bought that for Whites, the same logic being applied to Asians broke the system because people find it appallingly racist and divorced from reality.