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Comment by raincom | Hacker News Reader

These private universities can come with a solution: remove legacy; add a new dimension, let's say X, to evaluate applicants. Hire legacies because they have higher X.

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This is how the insurance industry has operated for ages. They can't charge higher rates due to race, so they find ways around it: "credit-based insurance score, geographic location, home ownership, and motor vehicle records" [1]

1: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220310005380/en/NEW...

It is quite nefarious of these insurance companies to use measures of insurability for pricing insurance.

Well I think that insurance companies are predatory parasites and that the government should introduce more regulations to prevent them from profiting off of poor people, even if doing so reduces their profit margins.

Good news, California now regulates insurance companies in the way you want, so much so that most of them have now stopped writing insurance in the state.

Some geographical regions have higher rates of accidents and crime, if that region correlates with a larger number of minority inhabitants that is not racial bias. As long as the insurance is measuring rates of claims per geographical areas and not rates of minorities I don’t see a problem with that.

So you just keep cranking on the policy ratchet until you get the outcome you want. Loophole found? Loophole closed. Humans are tricky, and engineering around them is a never ending process. Certainly, the evidence shows that with sufficient incentives and punitive measures available, compliance is possible.

Exactly. I hate this defeatist attitude of "Well a 100% solution to the problem is impossible, so why even try?" So they find a loophole which allows them to continue wrongdoing. Great, resolve that loophole with another law, and repeat. Laws should have frequent patch releases to address zero-day exploits.

The issue is that they are not closing the loophole at all. It is the same loophole every time, and the workaround/update is just a wording change. Just make up some new arbitrary criteria on a whim in an instant, as a response to very slow and costly (state/legislator/activist time)new legislation changes.

A more fundamental broad fix is needed.

I guess what I'm saying is that minor legislation changes shouldn't be slow and costly. There ought to be a way to quickly "patch" exploits that were against the intention of the original law's writers. Lawmakers should be able to see people exploiting a loophole at 9AM, quickly debate over a fix, and roll out the fix closing the loophole by 5PM. It's only currently slow because voters allow it be slow.

They had a way to quickly “patch” things, the Chevron Deference, and it was found to be unconstitutional.

That's called administrative law. In the federal govt, Congress enacts a broad mandate as a law, and then individual agencies promulgate additional rules on top of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_administrative_l...

As a random example, we benefit as a society when ketchup isn't runny. Congress doesn't want to waste time on this, so the FDA is granted a broad mandate to define foods. The FDA uses this mandate to provide a definition of the viscosity that defines ketchup as well as a way to measure said viscosity.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/21/155.194

> The consistency of the finished food is such that its flow is not more than 14 centimeters in 30 seconds at 20 °C when tested in a Bostwick Consistometer

It goes on to define the flow-testing procedure in excruciating detail to prevent loophole abuse.

> Check temperature of mixture and adjust to 20±1 °C. The trough must also be at a temperature close to 20 °C. Adjust end-to-end level of Bostwick Consistometer by means of the spirit level placed in trough of instrument. Side-to-side level may be adjusted by means of the built-in spirit level. Transfer sample to the dry sample chamber of the Bostwick Consistometer. Fill the chamber slightly more than level full, avoiding air bubbles as far as possible. Pass a straight edge across top of chamber starting from the gate end to remove excess product. Release gate of instrument by gradual pressure on lever, holding the instrument down at the same time to prevent its movement as the gate is released. Immediately start the stop watch or interval timer, and after 30 seconds read the maximum distance of flow to the nearest 0.1 centimeter. Clean and dry the instrument and repeat the reading on another portion of sample. Do not wash instrument with hot water if it is to be used immediately for the next determination, as this may result in an increase in temperature of the sample. For highest accuracy, the instrument should be maintained at a temperature of 20±1 °C. If readings vary more than 0.2 centimeter, repeat a third time or until satisfactory agreement is obtained. Report the average of two or more readings, excluding any that appear to be abnormal.

I would recommend opening the federal register and just clicking on random pages. This is what regulators actually create. It's mindnumbingly boring and necessary work that allows you to go to the grocery store, buy a bottle of ketchup, and not have to worry about it slowly being enshittified to save money.

What do you make of Loper overturning Chevron?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...

I'm not a lawyer (I just read regulations for fun). My understanding is Congress can still explicitly delegate authority to agencies, but an ambiguity in the law is no longer treated as an implicit delegation of authority.

As an example, the authority to define foods is explicitly delegated by Congress.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/341

> Whenever in the judgment of the Secretary such action will promote honesty and fair dealing in the interest of consumers, he shall promulgate regulations fixing and establishing for any food, under its common or usual name so far as practicable, a reasonable definition and standard of identity, a reasonable standard of quality, or reasonable standards of fill of container.

The fundamental broad fix is to have state universities that are funded to the level where they don't need to charge for tuition.

We had that, then got rid of it because university students doth protest too much (as in, they protested the Vietnam war). Apparently an educated proletariat is "inherently Communist" or something?!

Anyway. The removal of public funding means that public universities had to beg at the trough of private capital. Which means they need to be able to sell them something in order to get that capital; and that something is usually an extreme appeal to vanity. Shit like entire buildings named after a particular investor who thinks they're suddenly a building architect; or letting all their failsons attend purely to save face.

This need for private capital is also why "publish or perish" became the law of academia - with all the scientific scandal and misconduct that comes with it. Keeping a high profile means more research grants and those grants may just lead to patentable inventions that universities can charge royalties on.

And of course let's not forget the endowments - the billion dollar tails wagging the university dog. Because the reason why most universities went along with this systematic defunding was that they got the ability to play capitalist themselves. Every university is effectively a private, for-profit business, even if they aren't run that way.

I'm not sure why you think, if they were fully funded by the public, that they would not also continue to go for private capital in addition to those funds. Anything extra they can juice out of alumni, corporations, and "donors" would be gravy for their endowments, and allow them to gold-plate their administrative salaries. The steeper the line goes up and to the right, the better for them. No organization, private or public, profit or non-profit, turns down money they could potentially get.

I don't see that he's saying it's not a reason to do it, but to expect that they will try to get around the rule.

Inconvenient fact for lots of commentators here is that at most Ivy Leagues, the legacy students generally have better scores across most stats than the median admit.

Maybe because many of the legacy students were born with a silver spoon in their mouth?

It's not a level playing field when it comes to the resources required to complete your studies. One student may have to commute for <2h per day to accommodation the can afford. The other can have a studio next to the campus and a car, both leased through their dada's company. One has to work part-time to bring food to the table. The other has extra time for sports and study.

This could also be simply due to the Ivy league institution providing the service being bought. In other words, the parents of Timmy might be fed up and stop being sponsors if he gets bad grades.

Of course in rigorous fields of study this is hard to do but if your rich kid is studying art, the grades are almost entirely arbitrary.

No - I mean this is also true for proctored high school exams like the SAT and AP scores. But also - no professor is changing grades based on who your parents are unless they are uber uber uber famous.

Then they should have no problem getting it without those legacy admission privileges, so why are those in place?

"disparate impact"

This is a known and solved problem for the most part.

> private universities can come with a solution: remove legacy; add a new dimension, let's say X, to evaluate applicants. Hire legacies because they have higher X

You'd have turned a toothless reporting requirement into criminal conspiracy and wilful intent to file false reports.

"Culture fit"

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