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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I’m glad that MIT is standing up for an evidence based approach to all this, as they did with reinstating the SAT. Skin color differences don’t make organizations or schools better or worse: https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p.... (Lack of diversity, of course, may be evidence of underlying race-based discrimination.) It was an idea that was developed in response to Supreme Court cases that prohibited using express racial quotas to eliminate the effects of past discrimination. So there was a need to come up with a different rationale for racial rebalancing.

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Its all well and good that MIT is now coming to it's senses, but they'd have earned much more of my respect if they had stood on evidence based approaches from the beginning.

Its easy to follow the crowd when popular opinion swings in a crazy direction. Its even easier to see the writing on the wall and be one of the first to swing back, claiming some kind of honor or bravery in doing so.

Its a win-win. Up front you don't get blasted for being racist because you don't fall in line, and on the back end you're held up as a hero when you respond to what everyone has already realized but few have adjusted to yet.

The SAT thing was wild. I have no idea why people thought making the admissions criteria more opaque and fudge-able would help prevent bias and racism.

I saw the same thing at a company I worked at where they found at that Black people were getting lower performance ratings and there were people in the Diversity interest group advocating getting rid of numeric ratings so, you know, instead of knowing there was bias we would… not know? Like maybe it was a management psy-op or something but that was insane.

> instead of knowing there was bias

Why do you automatically assume this? Might be related to why people wanted to hide these numbers.

I was surprised because the person suggesting it wanted to get rid of it even though it helped his case. His argument was literally that it would help Black employees advance to get rid of the numbers. I would have expected management to want to hide the numbers.

This feels like the "defund/abolish the police" issue again. "Please retire this particular testing regime which seems to game-able via wealth and which further entrenches existing disparities," gets turned into and mischaracterized as, "Get rid of numeric ratings," because it's easier to argue against AND allows for an even more incumbent-advantageous solution to be implemented if it happens to be toppled.

If we went with the actual recommendation (e.g., to complete the analogy sandwich, "dismantle the current institution and establish a new one with a fundamentally different structure which allows for security/investigation functions to be carried out without the baggage of the previous institution"), something might actually change for the better, and we can't have that.

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