USA is rich in universities. I wish people would focus less on the rankings and looking good credential aspect of college, and more on using it as an opportunity to learn / actually getting good at something. If we did the latter, we’d realize that people could go to pretty much any university (or coursera!) and get a high quality education here.
You are absolutely missing one of the primary points of US universities, which is to maintain a social hierarchy.
I mean, if you just want to learn stuff and get a good education, there are loads of resources where you can do that, often for free or near free. College is about much more than just learning new things, and if that's the only framework through which you value a college education, you'll be doomed to misunderstand the institution.
Nonsense. Education is not about taking a course or reading bunch of books. The big part of education is being able to directly ask a knowledgeable person once you're stuck. You can ask the community of course but the quality of community answers is more than often just trash.
I think you’ve defined a tutor. Tutors cost less than college tuition. And top professors answer emails from non-students, sometimes they teach for free on MOOCs. Perhaps you’re on a very narrow field where knowledge is extremely scarce, but that’s atypical.
For the cost of a college education at some places you could likely hire a knowledgeable professor of the skill set you’re interested in to live with you for four years.
> The big part of education is being able to directly ask a knowledgeable person once you're stuck.
Stuck on what? For an undergrad, those problems can easily be solved by going online or to a tutor for a fraction of the cost. And that's for STEM based problems, humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds.
The best piece of advice I got was from one of my english highschool teachers who told me a story about how when he was in university he was getting graded really poorly on essays until he basically regurgitated what he thought the the professor wanted to hear.
It's been a while since I've been to university, but I think it probably still holds.
Another unique bonus of university education: in my undergrad one of the professors noticed that I cared about the subject material more than my classmates.
Due to this he gave me opportunities to perform research in areas that I didn't even know existed.
Had I not gone to a university I never would have been exposed to these areas of technology.
"humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds" - maybe at some universities, but not at a good liberal arts school.
Good liberal arts schools don't really exist in the US anymore, unless we're talking about something like St. John's College or maybe some Catholic universities. I believe the capture of university humanities departments by critical theory is pretty complete at this point, and the sciences are rapidly being colonized.
It seems possible to me that people of a less analytic personality type can improve learning using the cue, "imagine you wanted to socially impress a particular person, an academic". The same way a weightlifter who doesn't study the anatomy of external hip rotation can get good results with "screw your feet into the floor", or GPT-3 from "Let's think step by step". It leverages instinct to do what isn't understood consciously. I agree you're going to need originality to really excel.
You get 1000 resumes for a job. How do you drop 95% of the applicants. One easy way is to look at the University and GPA as a quick snuff test. After running that cheap low-pass filter you now only have 50 Resumes. You now spend ~3mins on each of those resumes to determine the 10 people you plan to interview.
That's why university matters, it helps you get past the first level of screening. It's also fair of employers to assume that the average Top 25 university graduate is better than the AVERAGE bottom 50% university graduate.
There are far more effective ways to stand out as an applicant than your GPA and university — in particular, by actually contributing notable work to the field, but also by making social connections and leveraging those into a job.
I didn’t even graduate from high school, but I’ve never struggled to find employment with the companies I wanted to work for.
The idea of a degree as a first-pass filter is oversold at best.
The highest quality education I received was at a community college. The undergraduate education I got after transferring to a well-regarded research shool was lower quality, with larger classes and professors who weren't incentivized to put effort into teaching.
Malcolm Gladwell explains why it's statistically FAR better to be among the smartest kids at a 2nd or 3rd tier school than struggling to get into some elite institution where you will be below average among your peers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc&t=220s
If you're borrowing money to pay for a degree, going to a school where you are not at the very top of the class is really taking a big risk.
Thank you for posting Gladwell's talk, which should be required viewing for any young, bright and hopeful high-school graduate. I wish all my nephews and nieces had watched it.
What! A 2nd tier school still has strong peers which you can surround yourself in. If you're at the top of a 2nd tier school you can push yourself to be near the PHD researchers and graduate students giving you similar academic peer rigor.
I agree with you from an academic standpoint! Maybe my comment was too harsh, I think surrounding yourself with PHD researchers and graduate students counts as challenging and pushing yourself.
But it's more fun when the people pushing you are your friends and peers. In contrast, how many PHD researchers with a spouse and kids want to study and get coffee with a 19 year old undergrad?
Given all the trash Gladwell has spouted as truth over the years, it's hard to take him seriously. Even if sometimes what he says has merit, it's hard to know when to believe him and when not to.
I especially cringe at the idea that Gladwell is saying it's statistically better to do something, when he has a known history of deliberately misinterpreting data and massaging numbers to get the result he wants.
While I think people should be much more accepting of 2nd- and 3rd-tier schools as options than they often are, kids should absolutely push themselves for the best-ranked school they can get into (assuming they also have a solid program for whatever field/major they're interested in). Not only is it beneficial to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are, there are also second-order effects to attending an elite university, like making connections that can help you along with your career later. Not to mention that if a recruiter sees two recent-grad resumes that are identical except for the name of the school, they're going to pick the candidate that went to the "better" school.
Certainly you don't want to set yourself up for failure; if that elite school is going to be such a struggle that you're eventually going to be washed out, that's probably not a good outcome, and a lower-tier school would have been a better choice. But, absent that, I think it's good advice to attend the best school you can get into.
I think with the rise of online communities, it's not as applicable anymore.
Gladwell says you're only comparing against yourself against your peers at your school, and not the world, but for me, I've absolutely compared myself from people from other universities (and for that matter, other countries).
For example, there are people 2-3 years younger than me who have a public output of projects/writing that is 100 times more than mine. I'm probably somewhat high up among in my own university in project output, but I still made this comparison, partially because online communities allow me to hear about these people.
It's all about margins. They want to squeeze teachers and get minimum-wage adjuncts to teach 1st years. At the same time, they want future rich people to be students, so they will donate back.
Harvard, MIT, and Oxford have no problem finding future rich people. Random schools can't compete for smart people, so it makes sense for them to try to find prospects based on alternative criteria.
far from a shortage, there’s a surplus of phds in almost every discipline. despite charging the highest tuition ever and sitting on massive endowments, the mbas in university administration don’t want to have to pay for them
I think you're misunderstanding the challenge. Teaching first year students doesn't require Ph.D.-level knowledge, but it requires more teaching experience and skills than teaching later levels: The classes are larger; the students are less experienced at learning on their own; the students are new to the environment and less familiar with how to navigate it.
Large classes of novices are particularly sensitive to logistical and teaching errors. You make a question on a homework or exam a bit confusing, you have 400 students utterly perplexed who may not have the domain expertise to know it's the question that's broken.
At Carnegie Mellon, our teaching-track faculty generally own the large intro classes for this reason. They're the best we have at the process of teaching & education. It's the exact opposite of a side job. You want people who are deeply expert and passionate about teaching so that you don't completely botch the job, because the opportunities to botch it are huge.
It also takes a lot of expertise to understand why certain subjects are introduced in intro courses, and to frame those ideas in a way that will help those students learn more advanced topics.
It doesn't require Ph.D. level knowledge, but it helps a lot, especially when you're talking to one of those few students with more and deeper questions about the subject.
If you’re representing the college, how do you know the individual you’re about to hire has sufficient knowledge to both teach the material and cover any questions on the material students may raise.
The local community college will have openings for adjuncts. You go first and teach a semester, then you'll have a better understanding of the problem field.
> I find it hard to believe there's a shortage of people capable of teaching 1st year students, so this seems like a problem of artificial scarcity.
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The supply is short because at least in the US, entry pay is low in higher ed.
"Colleges that ditched admissions tests have to actually holistically evaluate applicants rather than reduce them to two numbers"
No doubt that it's more subjective and more difficult; human beings are complex, multi-dimensional entities and I find it sad that in many of these selection processes, they are reduced to a few numbers for the sake of low effort filtering.
There is plenty of evidence to doubt the whole "holistic evaluation" line of thought, which is often a tool for subtle discrimination. And pretty much all of these schools already did "holistically evaluate" students; test scores were just one part of that evaluation.
Besides, at the end of the day everything boils down to a single number - applicants are ranked and those that make the cutoff get in, those that are below the cutoff don't.
Holistic evaluation in practice really means “present your best self in your application whatever that might be.” It allows for a range of impressive feats outside “was good at the arbitrary selection of school subjects and extracurriculars.”
I don’t really know what you do to combat this kind of thing because what would you do as an admissions officer trying to create a student body with a wide range of skills and experiences but you have thousands of applicants who are “focused on having perfect grades to the detriment of everything else and participated in the ‘look how smart I am clubs’.”
And I say this with full self-awareness that this was me. It’s probably the thing I regret most about my high school experience because of how unnecessary it was and how much it set me back on all the things that mattered.
I consider myself extremely lucky that any university took a chance on me because my application was 100% “I have no real interests except playing the game of school and winning by min-maxing the point system” which looking back is so obviously the worst applicant. I for sure lost out on my dream school because of it.
1. Have some minimum objective criteria (test scores, grades, class rank, etc.)
2. Accept students who meet that minimum with a lottery.
Of course, that would never happen at highly selective colleges, because it would shatter the notion that "only the best and brightest" got in and would ruin colleges' role as a maintainer of social hierarchy in the US.
I say this as a person who went to one of the most selective colleges in the world: the idea that colleges set up their application systems to build a "diverse" student body is complete and total bullshit. The reason being that some of the most important diversity comes from interacting with people of widely varying economic levels and intelligence levels. The idea that you can have a socially diverse student body, but only made up of people who got 4.0 GPAs and above, is bullshit on its face.
Exactly. Of course having numerical values you can directly compare is going to be the easiest way to select students, but it's only "fair" to the degree those numbers accurately reflect the relative academic performance and potential of the students.
I think the reason people so vigorously defend the use of standardized test scores in admissions is that we all have a built in bias towards viewing quantifiable comparisons as inherently more objective because it's easy to justify how you arrived at a decision. After all, who can argue with a decision based on one number being larger than the other?
The problem though is that this approach doesn't really remove the subjective, complex elements at all, it just moves them from the decision step to the measurement step. Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. And the value of a simple score comparison is only as good as the process of constructing the test, leaving you with the illusion of having made the decision simpler and more objective when you really just move the complexity behind a curtain.
In tech terms, I think the analogy is project managers trying endless different ways to measure software development performance. Number of tickets closed, "velocity", commits, releases, etc, (lines of code if you're very unlucky), all give you nice simple numbers to look at. And while they're not entirely useless, it's easy to become overly reliant on them and assume they are more objective measures than they actually are.
> But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated.
Is that done per student behind closed doors though, with the people calculating the score knowing who the student is and the ability to alter the scoring based on that knowledge?
Standardized tests are bad, but they're a giant step up from the corruption that is other forms of selection.
On the contrary, test scoring is the most objective thing we had to evaluate students based on the diligent work of a company whose entire business is maintaining that perception of objectivity. Sure, it's "the perception of", but if you think there aren't smart people analyzing college board exam scores across the country for signs of skewed testing so they can write an expose on it, you're far from reality.
Which is the first time that's been considered, because in the current climate - working extremely diligently to try to ensure that no particular student or group of students has an advantage, some students do have an advantage. They are smarter, or have better parenting, or better education, or their parents simply have more money to throw at tutoring
You can say "that's unfair! This is about selecting the best students and locks smart people from worse off backgrounds out of university!"
It does the second thing, sometimes, as a side effect - but it is also true that those students are still better students, regardless the path dependence.
Additionally, the primary winner of the policies this line of argument promotes are white women - with the primary loser being Asian men. Asian students in particular are bringing the suit against Harvard for these practices.
So while your epistemic humility ("is this REALLY objective? How do we measure that?") is well intentioned, it's the exact sort of reasoning used to cover up a strict ideology of "more black good, more women good, less white good, less men good" in universities, and the actual behavior of universities shoe that.
You’re glossing over the core issue which is that universities (and employers when hiring juniors for that matter) need to measure potential and many of the objective measures do correlate but do so weakly. It’s why we don’t hire based on Leetcode, whiteboard algorithms problems or GPA. Doing better on those is a positive sign but I can get a much much stronger signal through a conversation, probing to find out their strengths and passions and then setting them up to show off.
And look, race and gender ends up being a component but not in the way you’re describing. I’m not being like “woman good” it’s that a woman sitting across the table describing her technical achievements is made more impressive because I know first hand what women have to go in CS programs — you don’t put up with all the bullshit unless you’re really passionate. An example based on real life, a woman leading her capstone project group is unfathomably impressive because of how decisively strong her technical and communication skills have to be to earn the respect of the men in her class.
Men perform (slightly) etter on technical interviews when modulated as women, and women perform the same.
The idea that women are "putting up with so much more bullshit" when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested, sky high salaries, and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women in settings where gender is obscured is out of date at a minimum.
> when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested
I swear this is always at the core of it. Trust me it’s not as glamorous as you make it out to be. Yes tech companies are bending over backwards to find and hire competent women because we’re rare (and why!) but that statement is not at all the same as women have lower standards. You have to understand that literally no team ever is going to burn their hire on a perceived less qualified woman because she’s a woman. The desire to have the best person because the team is lazy and wants someone who will make their lives easier always wins. And not to put too fine a point on it but your average team of tech folks is pretty anti-woke liberal-tarian meritocracy so you’re not getting a whole lot social justice bias there. I guess this could happen if you have HR hiring in a vacuum but I’ve never seen a place where the team doesn’t have the final say.
> putting up with so much more bullshit
The bullshit is the culture. Look I wish this wasn’t true but it’s the unfortunate reality of being a woman in a CS major. Your male classmates do not see you as an equal. there is an in-built presumption that you don’t know what you’re doing; any normal mistake you make that guys make too just cements it. When you’re doing group work nobody listens to you and you get the “fun” experience of waiting for them to catch up and then having no recognition at all that you had already told them. Getting study groups together is awful one because guys will not let you join because they think you’ll be a drain, or they will let you join and then hit on you. Do you know how many fucking times I got told to go make me a sandwich? In more than one class I just asked the professor to do group projects alone. And that’s before dealing with how isolating it is to be the only girl in class and having the shock and head turns the first time you speak.
It’s not perfect by any stretch of imagination but I would have been driven out of tech had I not by chance landed at a few companies with older teams and realized that maturity makes a huge difference.
> and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women
Well yeah, of course you expect that. I just talked about a situation where a woman saying something is more impressive than a man saying the same thing. Context matters.
Removing SAT scores doesn't remove the subjective and complex elements, but it does give a measure that took more than 8 minutes to arrive at.
As a previous commenter mentioned, UW spends about 8 minutes looking at applications at first. This isn't nearly enough time to make a "holistic" decision, especially when the application is largely subjective.
SAT scores, on the other hand, take longer than 8 minutes to arrive at. The subjective evaluations that go into designing the test can be determined over the course of months, leading to a measure that is imperfect but likely better than 8 minutes of a grad student's time.
The larger point is that in order for "holistic" admissions to work, you need to design an admissions process that actually evaluates candidates holistically. Removing SAT scores doesn't automatically fix those issues, it just removes one more piece of data to aid the process.
> Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated.
But you’re ignoring the other side of that number. That test score provides a hell of a lot of information about the individual beyond just doing well on a single test.
With the 10s of thousands of applications top universities get, there isn't enough time to evaluate the "complex, multi-dimensional entities" behind each application.
At University of Washington, applications are not reviewed by "admissions people". They hire temporary workers (grad students, retirees etc.) to review applications, and give them 8 minutes per application [1]. And this is typical of most universities.
But at highly competitive schools you still have several times more students with 1500 SATs than you have available spots. So you eventually need to use holistic judgement anyways.
So no cutoff, just an SAT score? And then a cutoff based on that? What about GPA? Weighted GPA? AP tests matter? Creating a cure for COVID matter?
I think for the very top schools they care about the intangibles. For mid-tier schools the SAT cutoff lottery is fine. But the cut off is probably like 1150, and these arguments aren’t about those schools.
That’s an interesting race to the bottom for those schools. They’d end up with kids who basically ditched studying advanced math, physics, research, etc and just a lot of kids who prepped for the SAT for four years.
The “advanced math, physics, research, etc” in high school is all just college admissions prep too. When you major in math you have to take an analysis sequence starting at the beginning because AP calculus isn’t actually math. It’s just memorizing and learning to execute some math related algorithms.
It’s all just signaling. Let’s be open about that instead of hiding the ball.
Again there’s levels to this. Harvard Math 55 is filled with exceptionally strong math students. I’m a 1500 SAT student, but not a Math 55 student. Them not being able to differentiate these classes of students seems problematic.
Problematic is such a vague word. Connect the dots for me.
The top N schools in the nation, collectively representing enough seats to account for 5% of SAT takers, all change their admissions policies to select randomly among applicants in the top 5% of SAT scorers.
After ten years of these policies being in place we will likely see the following negative effects:
Here are some of the connection. The SAT is a basic test where strategy can come into great affect. And honestly, it's surprising how little some of the strategy is talked about -- but I suspect amongst the wealthy it's well known.
But back to the topic. A 1550 on the SAT says very little about your mathematical ability. The test just doesn't measure your ability to do more than basic algebra and has no real measure of writing ability. And honestly probably has a somewhat inverse relationship on your ability to read nuance into text (which is one of the first strategies I teach -- this isn't English class -- there's no nuance in anything you read on the SAT).
On advanced college math -- kids who are actually good at math likely have a high math SAT score, but their verbal score can vary a fair bit. I regularly see kids with 1400-1450 SATs, with perfect math scores who are Math Olympiad stars.
The likely end game of this though is that schools REALLY start teaching to the test. Why even offer AP tests if they don't help admission? Why even teach biology or physics at all? Simply teach SAT math, reading comprehension (which is comprehension of the worst kind) and what the SAT calls writing. So no more calculus or statistics. Even most of what is taught in algebra II is thrown out the window.
Today the 95%ile of SATs is around 1440. It would probably move up to around 1550, once schools teach to that test year around for four years. And any actually advanced undergrad courses are tossed because they can't get enough students to fill them.
And other countries will realize that the US left a huge gap -- the ability get students who strong in like areas and train them. They'll target the best math students, the best programmers, the best artists, etc...
Interestingly, the best meritocracy we have in society is sports. And in sports they recruit holistically -- that is they don't exclusively use HS stats (these are generally worthless) or combine numbers (these have some value, but limited). They use scouting services. And the very best athletes tend to congregate in programs that will develop them the best. Many hold up sports as a great example of meritocracy, yet it actually doesn't rely solely on measurables (in fact they are moving further and further from it).
What sports has though is a good objective function. What is the objective function of school? Answering that question will greatly help determine what the best path forward is.
It's not that it's not possible but rather we've simply been so lazy that we don't have the right heuristics.
No; I don't have the answer. I'm not an economist nor an admissions expert. But I've qualified and hired software engineers over the years and my process never focuses on a score or outcome of an assessment.
How likely is it that this holistic evaluation will end up preferring individuals conforming to the current Zeitgeist (e.g. using all the momentarily popular buzzwords in their applications) rather than truly talented candidates? Thus contributing to further ossification of current elites?
An academic institution shouldn't only be about picking truly talented candidates; that's the exact opposite of holistic.
My take is that part of the function of an academic institution is to help individuals discover and develop talents.
A good teacher isn't one that helps A students get A's but one that can develop any student into an A student.
To merely select and propel those who already have the talent rather than select for the capacity to grow and develop talent is precisely why score based systems are biased in the first place.
Yeah, I almost felt like flagging this submission. It's taking something that on its own could be interpreted in many ways and giving it a strong political spin.
For the sake of argument, let's imagine a college doing the opposite: admitting students solely on the basis of a standardized test score. You submit your SAT score, and everyone above a certain percentile is admitted. People below the threshold are not. Many of the comments here seem to think this is optimal.
In that scenario, there wouldn't be any complaints from admissions committees at all about them having to put effort into the situation, because they wouldn't be involved at all. So is it being difficult a sign that reality is more complex than suggested by a test score, or that they've lost an objective indicator?
Most of the statistics thrown around in the article could also be turned on their head. For instance, just hypothetically, if getting rid of the test isn't changing the student body, what's the point of the test?
Having an objective number is useless on its own. Even if it's roughly correlated with the outcomes you desire, if it's that roughly correlated with outcomes, and subject to biases, there's no point in having it.
I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone. Sure, it's probably correlated with satisfaction and resell value, it's an objective indicator that involves some measurement, and so forth, but no one would buy a house that way. It's subject to all sorts of manipulation and fuzziness, and doesn't tell you anything about the architecture, lot, or anything else. And yet that's kind of how standardized tests are used.
I'm fine with using standardized tests in theory, but they're far too abused and misused. It's not so much the tests I have problems with, as it is how it seems once you introduce them, it seems they can't be interpreted rationally in making any sorts of decisions about human beings. It's like people take something that has a sliver of information value with all sorts of limitations, and then treat it like an infallible signal just because it's easy to use.
Its ease of use could be seen as a problem, not something desirable.
> I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone
Great analogy.
Buying a house is about far, far more than just the square footage. How are the neighbors? How's the walkability? Noise levels? Schools? Access to transport routes? Access to jobs? Property taxes? HOA fees? Access to activities of interest?
There are so many factors to buying a house that it would be ridiculous to look at any single dimension alone and make a determinate based on that one dimension.
> There are so many factors to buying a house that it would be ridiculous to look at any single dimension alone and make a determinate based on that one dimension.
But that's not what they've been doing. Standardized tests played a role, but were not the only factor.
To continue the house analogy: look at everything _but_ square footage before you make an offer.
I’m looking at this and thinking: Did the colleges have no forsight, at all? Why did they think admission tests existed? Did they honestly think, “wow, the tests are flawed, so get rid of them, problem solved?”
I think it’s more complicated than that because the students expect to get jobs after completing the degree, if they even can complete the degree.
For example, Im not great at art and don’t really have a passion for it. Should an art school accept me even though I’ll never have a career as an artist? Keep in mind I’d be taking a spot from someone who could. I have no doubt they’ll be able to improve my abilities but that’s not why many students apply.
I wonder what percentage of people work in the field their degree is in. I suspect it’s very high for some (law, pilot, doctor) and very low for others (history).
Who could have seen that coming? The whole point of ditching quantitative tests is to empower the bureaucrats who want to make qualitative judgements based on their personal whims and biases. "Holistic" my ass.
Shaping the ethnic demographic of the school is a big component of the modern intent as well. Particularly, these "holistic" admission standards are designed to facilitate discrimination against Asian Americans. This is justified with transparently racist bullshit claims about Asian American students being too focused on academic performance, not "well rounded" whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. They reduce Asian American students to the stereotype of dull people with no personality because they spent too much time doing homework and learning piano, and use this stereotype to justify discriminating against them. Flagrantly racist.
A more charitable interpretation is that a student body made up of too much of any one thing is not good. Part of the value proposition for going away to university for four years is to spend that time surrounded by diverse and interesting people.
That doesn't excuse the actual racism that we've seen in admissions, of course.
In that case, maybe some universities could specialize on having racially diverse student bodies, and others on other attributes (say, political diversity, or something completely different). This way, everyone could choose their preferred institution according to their wishes and values.
> Are schools in India or China or Israel inherently worse than those in America because those schools have “too much” of a single race?
Both China and India are countries with a number of different races, some/most of which are represented at the top schools (I imagine all of the large racial groups). I’m not sure about Israel, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true there as well.
That said, the prestigious schools in these countries (not sure about Israel) heavily use tests as an admission standard to the best schools. I think that this is part of what makes them less prestigious than their American counterparts.
Elite American universities use social capital as part the admissions criteria, with a reasonably broad definition of social capital. I think that this social capital along with intellectual capital (not always in the same student) is part of what makes the magic work at these schools.
Notes:
- In China (and probably other places), historically the admissions exam was a proxy for social capital, since families with high social capital could prepare their kids better via tutors. This is still somewhat true today, but it’s not as powerful as it was in the distant past.
- State schools in the US, which seem to be the focus of this article since they don’t have a history of holistic admissions, should probably stick with a grades-test score combo for most admissions, and maybe add some “social capital” admits (similar to athletes, who also fall into the social capital category, with the extent of exceptionalism required being equivalent).
- Schools that admit based on tests alone without having some sort of built-in social capital component will end up defaulting towards the creation of a lot of middle management drones rather than future leaders of the country. Many people seem to wish that social capital is not the primary driver of success, but results (historical and anecdotal) seem to suggest otherwise.
There’s infinite ways you can define diversity. Choosing to define it in the way you’re referring to (skin color, sex, sexual orientation) is just discrimination.
Colleges should be about furthering academic knowledge and preparing our best and brightest to make the world a better place. Diversity for diversities sake harms that.
Believe parent's point was that "spend[ing] that time surrounded by diverse and interesting people" is an effective way of "preparing our best and brightest to make the world a better place".
"Skin color, sex, sexual orientation" all drastically impact an individual's experience in our world. Therefore, having interactions with someone with different varieties thereof increases the diversity of ones experience.
> Do the best&brightest from one community or circumstance always have the same traits as the best&brightest from another community or circumstance?
Can the answer to this question be "yes"? In the same way that the best NBA players share traits, I don't see any reason why the best physicians, engineers, etc. also wouldn't share traits across cultures/backgrounds.
Going further, can't we measure these traits with outcomes of standardized testing? Given you agree these traits exist, can you propose an better alternative?
By that logic if it’s okay for 60% of the student body to be white because 60% of the United States is white then you are explicitly saying it’s okay for the university to be 60% of the same race which means it should be equally acceptable for the university to be 60% Asian regardless of them being x% of the United States and merit based admittance should be acceptable.
The only logical reason for discriminating against so many Asians in our current setup needs to be attempting to mirror the population statistics of the United States. I don’t approve of that logic to be clear and think the universities will be issuing apologies to the Asian American community in X years similar to the ones they just made to the Jewish American community recently.
In that case shouldn't they also diversify the administration, and say that the university president should be Asian (or Black or Hispanic) x% of the time?
I don’t know, universities in Israel seem to keep magically pumping out geniuses that invent all sorts of incredible technologies despite not being particularly diverse.
At UW they call it "race equity" [1]. Meaning that you can't have more than x% of Asian Americans in the UW if the percentage of Asian Americans in the community is x%. The Supreme Court will soon decide if this practice is legal [2], and it is going to be interesting either way!
Arguably there you have an exterior reliable measurement of ability (and if there was inappropriate discrimination against Asian basketball players, you should expect a team to realize it and get a winning team for cheaper).
But somehow we can't have an exterior reliable measurement of intellectual ability? And have no controversy testing for it across ethnic groups? Oh wait..
Of course there is objective measures, that’s the point. And it’s why no sane person thinks the race inequity within the NBA player pool is a problem. The problem lies in the hypocrisy of crying about systemic racism or sexism as the reason for inequity when talking about college admissions or C level jobs but never talking about the same inequities in nursing or iron workers or NBA players.
Here's a question to those in control of these so-called "equity" rules at UW: do these also go for e.g. sex? In other words, if the percentage of women in the population is 49% there can not be more than 49% female students? If not, why not? The answer is already clear of course given the data but it would be interesting to hear their defence of their untenable position.
I think that's why the idea of a protected class has typically been central to US legal definitions of equality: application to every individual characteristic is untenable, but blindness to all impinges on justice too.
Or in essence, how to address the historical inequities of racism and sexism, without also ushering in something ridiculous like "mentalism" that attempts to help people who are "bad at tests and grades."
The idea of a “well rounded student” reflects the WASP roots of these elite institutions. The ideal “Harvard man” was a well bred WASP who didn’t appear to try too hard (which would be unseemly) and balanced academic pursuits with sports and social activities accessible to people who had connections and didn’t work for a living. That’s who you wanted running your Wall Street banks, corporations, etc. Holistic admissions is just the modern incarnation of that.
In slight defense, if you must hand the keys to the kingdom (or a substantial amount of power) to one person, you can do worse than putting them through a battery of enculturation that reduces their inclination to abuse it.
And an effective part of that litmus test could be 'already has substantial power, but is able to self-restrain their abuse of it.'
It’s really disappointing that many recent attempts of progressivism have just turned into new sexism and racism but defended as “the correct” versions of those. It erodes the intellectual validity of these institutions.
Maybe I'm in a bubble, but every anecdote I read online in the past year or two is someone royally fed up with liberal politics. On Twitter, Reddit, and real life, the majority of people keep complaining about crime, drugs, homelessness.
Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.
> Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.
The conservative groundswell is because generations of conservatives have already been getting elected, especially in less flashy positions that wield influence. Conservatives have really played the long game, at least since the New Deal.
"change things" vs "change things but ostensibly back to the way they were before".
For instance, ruling against Roe v. Wade. Regardless of what you think of that, it, such a ruling was a deviation from the status quo. It was "changing things" as surely as the original ruling changed things.
Putting things back where they were depends on our recollection of the past, which is imperfect and subject to various biases and confusion with myth. But even ignoring that, the circumstances of the present are different than the circumstances of the past so past laws won't work the same in the present as they did in the past. Even if you could perfectly replicate past laws in the present, you couldn't get the same effect out of those laws because the inputs (the state of society) have changed.
Nobody can roll back the clock. What conservatives actually do in fact is propose ways to change things going into the future.
> depends on our recollection of the past, which is imperfect
We do have pretty good records to help us sort it out, especially for recent history.
> the circumstances of the present are different than the circumstances of the past
Surely some circumstances, such as human nature and social biology, have not changed. I'm not sure that "the state of society" is the primary differentiating factor in the effectiveness of laws, particularly laws relating to fundamental human behaviours like violence or reproduction.
> I'm not sure that "the state of society" is the primary differentiating factor in the effectiveness of laws, particularly laws relating to fundamental human behaviours like violence or reproduction.
I think it is, since there is great cultural variation in the ways humans think about violence and sex. Monogamy or harems; human sacrifice or the abolition of the death penalty. Any combination of these can be "normal" to people raised in that context, there is little which is fundamental about the way human societies are structured with respect to these subjects.
And yet, some things are near universally constant amongst large scale agrarian civilizations. For instance the confinement of violent criminals or the institution of marriage.
You're right in that there is some variation, but there do actually seem to be some choices in this regard that are more conducive to a stable, prosperous, society. Just like there are many ways to run a company, but only some of them lead to success. Point being that if you live in such a society, "changing things" may lead you off the golden path that brought you where you are. It's true that some change is inevitable, but any operator of any system that prioritizes stability above all is always wary of any unnecessary change.
> And yet, some things are near universally constant amongst large scale agrarian civilizations. For instance the confinement of violent criminals
Certainly not. Imprisonment for violent crimes is far from being a universal constant of human culture. There have been and are cultures in which violent criminals are only detained so they can be executed. Or beaten and then released. Or simply fined. Or not charged at all. What even counts as violent crime varies considerably even in developed countries today. Legal self-defense in one country may be murder in another.
Similarly, marriage is only culturally universal in a very abstract sense. Who are you allowed to marry? How many consecutive marriages are you allowed to have? Under what conditions can a marriage be broken? Can you be sold for marriage against your will?
> You're right in that there is some variation, but there do actually seem to be some choices in this regard that are more conducive to a stable, prosperous, society. Just like there are many ways to run a company, but only some of them lead to success. Point being that if you live in such a society, "changing things" may lead you off the golden path that brought you where you are. It's true that some change is inevitable, but any operator of any system that prioritizes stability above all is always wary of any unnecessary change.
I agree. My point is that liberals, progressives, conservatives.. pretty much everybody except the most apathetic, seek to make a change to society to turn society in a direction they think will be for the better. Each have different value systems and experiences, and accordingly have different opinions about what's wrong in society and what would constitute society being better. Conservatives frame themselves as apart from this by saying they don't want change, but "not change" is itself a change they want to impose on society to bring society back into line with their values.
I think that is mostly imagined. Lots of “conservative” positions involve deep societal change and lots of “liberal” policies maintain the status quo. The reverse is true as well.
I think you're conflating (US) "Republican" and "Democrat" with "liberal" and "conservative". Most dictionaries define "conservative" in contradiction to your comment.
I agree, I think it blinds people to the sort of problem that user macrolocal mentions in a nearby comment, rising illiberalism among both 'liberals' (more accurately called progressives, but this terminology is all twisted in America..) and conservatives. I'm concerned that both use the other to justify or rationalize their own declining liberalism.
> I think people’s need to frame seemingly every issue and even their entire worldview as liberal vs conservative is the biggest problem in politics.
I don't know if that was addressed to me for speaking of conservative political movements or to the conservatives, but it is not a label that I pin on an unwilling recipient; I am referring to a self-described conservative movement.
When someone points out something Democrats did and they say "that's why I'm conservative" then when you point out something Republicans did they say "We need more than two parties"
Yes, I agree. It's like sports teams now, where people cheer on whoever has the correct letter next to their name rather than bases on their actual personal policies or beliefs.
It's also resulted in an effect I've noticed in most debates now where people just shout the advantages of their position and the disadvantages of their opponents position at each other without any attempt at addressing what their opponent is counter-arguing, if that makes sense.
I'm not sure that's true at all. There have been many demonstrably effective short-term crime reduction strategies. Broken window theory being the most famous example. Shockingly, arresting and confining violent antisocial people reduces violence in society.
I think you're oversimplifying the complex nature of policing. If we want peaceful, stable, societies we should model our policing systems on the places that most effectively deliver peace and stability. Two notable examples being Israel and Japan. Both places give police wide latitude to accomplish their goals and punish criminals harshly. Is Israeli policing discriminatory against Arabs? Yes. Is it effective? Also yes. Is Japanese prison inhumane by US standards? Yes. Is it effective in preventing the establishment of a criminal culture? Also yes.
Violent antisocial behaviour presents itself in a small percentage of young (mostly) males. It can be predicted as early as age 4 and effective intervention is very difficult. Most people who present with it tend to age out of the behaviour by around 30. Therefore the only effective strategy to protect the rest of us from this tiny fraction of people is to confine them until they age out. This is basically what our criminal justice system does, however imperfectly.
If we were to design a system eyes-open, knowing these constraints, with the goal of minimizing violent crime, we'd:
1. Enact age-based confinement - teenagers who present with violent antisocialism are very likely to reoffend in their 20s. Violent teenagers and young adults should be confined until they've aged out.
2. Structure prison culture - prison should not be crime university. Criminals should not be permitted to form a culture. Violent antisocialism should not be tolerated in prison. Instead they should be given the tools to find a legitimate place in society upon their eventual release. Japan does this quite well.
3. Seal records after release - criminal records relating to youth-associated violent antisocialism should be sealed. People we release should have a clear path to reintegration without discrimination.
I actually think nordic countries do 2. and 3. quite well, and their crime rate has risen significantly due to the large number of migrants. The baseline number of violent antisocial people in a society also does vary - but avoiding the creation of these people is different that dealing with the ones who already exist.
Or maybe we try to actually fix the problems that cause people to turn to violence and crime. "It's the economy, stupid!" and all that. People who feel financially secure and can pay for more than just life's basics have less reason to commit crime. People who have mental health issues are less likely to engage in criminal activity if they have those issues treated.
That won't fix everything, of course. People will get involved in crime for other reasons. Obviously there are rich people who are criminals; financial security doesn't remove every temptation to do crime. But I think a lot of the people you label "antisocial" these days are people who have been left behind by society, people who have gotten crushed by wages that haven't kept up with inflation (even before the current inflation issues), by companies who raise CEO pay and send dividends to investors, while ignoring the wages of their employees. Why would anyone bother to be "social" if doing so doesn't solve their economic insecurity?
And sure, there are some people who just don't give a shit about living in polite society, who don't think twice about violating norms and taking what they want. I have no problem locking those people up. But I think those people are a much smaller percentage of people who commit crimes than you think.
I don't know much about policing in Israel, but as I understand Japan, there's rampant corruption and a lot of innocent people behind bars. A near-100% conviction rate is just too good to be true. If you get charged with a crime in Japan, you are screwed, even if you didn't do anything wrong. The only alternative explanation is that Japanese police are so afraid of losing a case that they only charge the near-certain slam dunks. But if that were the case, I think we'd see a lot more crime in Japan than we do. So the only realistic explanation is that a lot of innocent people get steamrolled.
I do absolutely agree with your points 2 and 3. Time spent in prison should not make convicts into better criminals! Hell, even sitting in pre-trial detention for a few months can harden minor offenders. And after a prisoner has served their time, they shouldn't have that history dragged into employment, housing, credit, etc. decisions. If we still feel like they can't be trusted in jobs without their employers knowing about their conviction history, then they probably aren't fit to be released from prison in the first place.
> actually fix the problems that cause people to turn to violence and crime
These are not mutually exclusive propositions. As I mentioned in my comment, there are two concerns here:
1. Reducing the number of violent antisocial people by reducing the number of people who are exposed to childhood circumstances that tend to produce them. This is complicated and entails dictating to parents how they raise their children to a much higher degree than most people are comfortable, and than our society's values permit.
2. Dealing with the ones who already exist. This is policing and justice.
> the people you label "antisocial" these days are people who have been left behind by society
> It's the economy, stupid
If only it were this simple. I'm referring to people who haven't been correctly socialized in their early childhood. Toddlers are all violent, self centered, assholes by adult standards. They learn not to be through appropriate socialization with their peers, through play. Children who are not given this developmental opportunity past a particular age tend to exhibit traits that strongly correlate with violence in early adulthood. This is exacerbated by numerous domestic factors, most importantly the absence of two parents in the household and the presence of violent antisocial adults in the household (not household income).
We can observe these same traits and behaviours develop in our ape relatives for the same reasons. We're not that different.
> I think those people are a much smaller percentage of people who commit crimes than you think
This just isn't true - this small percentage of people are the serial criminals responsible for most of the real danger in our society - shootings, armed home invasions, armed robberies, etc. These sorts of crimes are largely not committed by people who are "down and out", but by people who are in many ways fundamentally different from the average person. I'm not talking about petty theft here.
This can be most clearly illustrated by the phenomenon of college campus rape. The rapes themselves are committed by a tiny fraction of repeat offenders. "Teach men not to rape" doesn't work on them. They're just not like most people, mostly as a result of some combination of tragic childhood circumstances and poor socialization (again, not household wealth). The best solution is to identify these people and imprison them as efficiently as possible. To enact this solution effectively, the people we entrust with it need power.
This doesn't include the last two years, which I'm sure have gone up, but the crime rate for most types of crimes in NYC has gone down significantly for the last 50 years.
And why rural Appalachia and small, highly religious towns across America are absolutely ravaged by meth and fentanyl and the crime around it, which you really should not ignore.
You’ll find a lot of “lock em up and throw away the key! … But not my son. Or my daughter. Or my nephew and his children and my former coworker. Or my pastor’s children. But everyone else, yeah”
Overly-liberal cities (SF, Vancouver, LA, etc) are killing far more of their citizens with failed drug policies than COVID, and with circumstance they've engineered such as giving extra "safe" fentanyl to people, telling dealers they won't be arrested, and never institutionalizing against their wishes.
The difference between approaches isn't "lock them up / don't" or "my kids / their kids". It's not a left/right or conservative/liberal divide, it's on another axis - more about the philosophical difference of personal vs group responsibility and meaning vs nihilism.
We need to look at the path these front running cities are taking, and where everyone else will be dragged, to see the difference. The same cities which refuse to lock up a violent junkie will lock up a parent who complains too loudly to the school board. It's not that they aren't authoritarian, often more than conservatives. It's that they don't feel there's any degradation of the individual which is ultimately wrong. Like, an individual can "choose" to be a street whore and die painfully from heroin. That's valid. This is how all junkies eventually live and die, and without a strong moral consensus that this is all bad - for the junkie and society and that we must stop it, you can't make progress on the base issues.
Vancouver will leave a junkie in their own vomit, to continue hitting the drugs that almost killed them, because "nobody should be committed against their will" but it will fine or confine an otherwise fit college student who drinks in public, or who commits any of the other offenses the junkie is committing (littering, starting fires on the sidewalk, having a violent dog, openly carrying a weapon, and so forth). The junkie has somehow "chosen" his or her role and now it's a beautiful thing, like a butterfly, that should be left to unfold, unmolested, in the parks.
Portugal, often held out as a utopia for drug users, has a "not even once in public" policy where they will jail you and assign you to a multi-year rehab program. They know nobody wants to die in their own vomit, in the street.
We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress. Once we all look at things that way we can see that our policies won't actually be too different, or rather, it doesn't matter if they are and we can work in a spirit of cooperation from different angles rather than fighting about the issue itself.
Ultimately, Portugal is a more liberal society (for drug users) than Vancouver.
"and with circumstance they've engineered such as giving extra "safe" fentanyl to people"
Fentanyl is cut with other drugs and there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source? The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.
----------------------------------------
Here's a DEA warning about mass overdose events from Fentanyl
"Fentanyl-related mass-overdose events, characterized as three or more overdoses occurring close in time and at the same location, have happened in at least seven American cities in recent months, resulting in 58 overdoses and 29 deaths. Cities impacted include Wilton Manors, Florida; Austin, Texas; Cortez, Colorado; Commerce City, Colorado; Omaha, Nebraska; St. Louis, Missouri; and Washington, D.C."
I don't' see SF or LA mentioned here. I'm sure some of these are Democrat controlled but You are claiming that liberal policies cause an increase in overdoses. Do you have a source for your death rates?
"We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress."
Ant-conservative backlash? Republicans, as in elected officials, are calling their political opponents pedophiles and communists. They claim guns are going to be taken away for the last 40 years guess what actually gets banned? Abortion. Multiple Republicans are still lying about election fraud and you wonder why there's a backlash?
> Multiple Republicans ... and you wonder why there's a backlash
I'm generally not in the USA so I'm trying to speak of things more internationally, and broader than just the divisive Dem/Rep mob.
And no, the backlash I'm talking about is the last eighty or more years. The hippies are boomers, after all.
> Top 10 states by drug overdose ...
I'm not talking about deaths but deaths that society encourages. What would happen in that area if you tried to shoot up in front of a cop?
> there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source?
The programs aren't very well documented because they're "just" a doctor treating their patients, many of whom they never meet. The newspaper articles aren't great. Here's a transcript of the Alberta government examining Vancouver's drug situation for the purposes of setting their own policies. There are also other days of testimony and citizen input if you look around. https://docs.assembly.ab.ca/LADDAR_files/docs/committees/ess...
> The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.
Yeah. The dealers intentionally kill a few every now and then as an ad for their product and they manipulate the potency in competition with other dealers. The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago.
You provided a link to a Canadian program. If you don't have other sources then why do you think it happens in the us
"The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago."
This is a conspiracy theory. Evidence?
And about your first comment, I'm showing numbers of deaths, you're claiming that some part of that is encouraged and that percentage is higher for liberal cities. But the death rate doesn't correlate either way. So it doesn't make sense, even if it was encouraged apparently it's not making things worse
Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper in another country.
> You provided a link to a Canadian program. If you don't have other sources then why do you think it happens in the us
Because the cities literally follow the same public policy. Don't arrest for "simple usage", camping on the streets is allowed, etc. They're getting advice from the same people. But yes, the USA does not that I know, have vending machines for drugs yet, that's still afaik a Canadian thing. In the USA you have to go to a "clinic" and ask a worker for your dose by hand and generally they want you to consume the drug there.
> [Street doses growing in strength] is a conspiracy theory.
Not even a little. I'm not talking about the why or the who. When tested the bags sold contain more active drug and many first-time users are reported dying when generally opioids (read erowid, etc) don't do that.
> Evidence?
Your googling fingers are busted but the ones you use to complain are working?
> Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper
No, I've provided enough evidence to show that things are run by people who don't know what they're doing and are misrepresenting the studies to the city. If you can't find the public documents talking about your own cities you aren't trying hard enough.
> in another country.
Lol, so sorry the world doesn't end at your borders.
We're also discussing drugs and the lib/con divide which aren't in the article either. I didn't respond to you originally, you responded to me which means you adopt the discussion at that point - or did you intend to reply elsewhere?
Also, this is how you stay uninformed. Refusing to look to countries who are a few years ahead of you on a policy cycle. Drugs are drugs no matter the country.
> [not my job] to provide evidence for your arguments
You don't have to. I fully supported my argument, it's not my fault you can't read Canadian.
It's as valid for me to quote Vancouver as a model for SF and LA as it was for Vancouver to reference Amsterdam twenty years ago.
The usual ones: effective policing and punitive justice. It works pretty well actually if your goal is to keep law-abiding citizens safe without much regard for the fates of criminals.
Policing and crime are fundamentally local concerns. The main predictor of exposure to crime or likelyhood of police encounter is zip code. Some (local) policies are more effective at crime reduction than others. Among the most famously effective is the broken windows theory of policing. The basic principle being that arresting and confining antisocial people is an effective method of maintaining social order and stability. I'm not saying these ideas are "Republican", only that they are "conservative" in the sense that we've been practicing them for milenia.
Can you name any policies or bills that Republicans have to make this happen? Can you prove that social norms have an effect on crime or homelessness? Are you claiming gay people are more likely to be criminals because they don't?
Homeless:
"Research shows that, compared to homeless families, homeless single adults have higher rates of serious mental illness, addiction disorders, and other severe health problems."
How would social norms fix that? If an adult has a mental illness and can't afford care are you willing to have universal health care? You don't think if they had family that could take them in and they were willing they would do that?
"Promoting strong family structures and communities"
What does this actually mean in practice? This vague comment could mean anything from running for office, passing no laws and shouting "Hey don't get divorced" to passing laws making it illegal for anybody to get divorced.
"Supporting social norms that dissuade destructive behavior"
Nobody is for "destructive behavior". What is "destructive behavior" and what changes does this vague comment mean in practice? It could mean anything from passing no laws and shouting "don't do drugs" to dissuading homeliness by throwing all homeless people in jail.
> Promoting strong family structures and communities.
That's not actionable. What does that even mean? What law or laws would you want proposed and passed that would accomplish that? Are there any political candidates that have a list of these laws, justifications -- with hard data -- why these sorts of laws will fix the stated problems, and a plan to get them put into place?
I'm angry about the loss of abortion rights federally, the rise of Christian nationalism, politicians lying about election fraud, people calling their enemies pedophiles and communists, politicans not knowing what those words mean, and facism
What is this center you think we are going back to because all I see are far right politicans and the end of American democracy
Granting all the problems you've cited, things have still been much worse in the past than they are today. Maybe not in the recent past, the 90s and 00s look quite rosy today in some (not all) respects, but think a bit further back. America has gone through civil war, anti-communist witch trials, frequent politically motivated bombings and assassinations, etc. Throughout all of that, people have remained hopeful that things could get better.
The greatest threat facing America today is demoralization. The belief that demise is inevitable and cannot be prevented could do America more permanent harm than anything else.
So people don't trust the government and the election system. Could that is why they think demise will occur? That's the doing of the republican party.
Trump is constantly saying America is a failed state. A democracy fails because people don't believe it works. All of this is republican
It's weird how the "Christian nationalism" meme has been pushed by the usual suspects when US church attendance is at an all-time low, and religious influence on politics is a shadow of its former self. My guess is it's a mixture of obsession with The Handmaid's Tale, and the need for an alternative pejorative term that can be applied to black and Hispanic conservatives.
Evangelicalism is now a meaningless term with the nyt even claiming it’s largely an identity that does not practice in any form. It’s just a default conservative term for whose who can’t admit they are atheists.
By the way, I don't know where you're from, but I bet it isn't currently fascist. In the same vein, most leftists shouldn't be called communists. Examples of fascism are the Nazis, Mussolini, that Spanish chap, and apartheid. The only modern incarnation that springs to my mind is the Phillipines.
I'm not saying I like the American right with their religion and their fixation on abortion (I do agree with them on some other things). I'm saying maybe there's a growing trend to the right, globally, and if there is, I hope it stops in the center and stays there for a long time, because I am a centrist.
That's... actually a really good question. I expect you are perhaps trying to push the idea that Republicans are more centrist than Democrats, but I don't think I'd agree with that.
If you were to suggest that your average Republican US citizen is more centrist than your average Democrat US citizen, I would probably agree. But when it comes to the politicians and the people running the parties, I think the GOP is much farther right than the Democrats are far left.
> Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.
The problem is that conservatives (at least in the US, though this is happening in Europe too) have been swinging even farther to the right than most liberals have been swinging left.
I think we're in for some bad times if the leftists don't stop stepping all over their own feet, causing a backlash (that we're already seeing to some degree) that puts the autocrats in power irrevocably.
Liberal has been somewhat taken over by a cross of libertine and anarchist, who say basically that liberalism is liberal it can't be exclusionary and therefore they're as valid a liberal as Locke. They've then used "liberal" as a rallying cry and a shield while they push a lot of illiberal policies.
Actual liberals need to field a bit of a defense against this encroachment, and in language the public can understand. "No, XYZ is not [a liberal action] because ..."
I fear this more than a backlash because it speaks in our name. Our usual political opponents reacting to us at least openly enact their own policies and messages and leave our voices and our message unmolested.
I'd guess people are rejecting neoliberalism more than Locke.
But if so, it's curious that the vocal left had shifted their attention from the disparity between people living in huts and palaces, to making sure that the people living in palaces are appropriately representative. That's a surprisingly conservative project (for better or worse).
Less-powerful people tend to appeal to principles more, because principles tend to align with their benefit. You don't know whether the principles really exist until you see currently-powerful people hold themselves to the principles.
I suspect nearly all people would fail this test, execpt those who've been on both sides (at least in small ways) enough times.
Very insightful. This gets to the root of power and how different moral truths are advocated by different positions with both saying how they are universal. I wish we could admit that as progressives and have a better conversation around the motivations of certain policies.
It is also a weird kind of neo-feudalism, excluding outsiders that cannot or won't fit the expected mold. In the court of Versailles, you had to behave according to a certain stiff etiquette. If the same is required in institutions of higher learning, how many really creative people will be willing to put up with it?
Fair point. The 60s wouldn't have happened without the 50s. The 90s without the 80s.
Artistic creativity brews strongest when there's an omnipresent dogma to reject, and the current pastiche of thoughtlessly-implemented progressivism is fertile ground.
It's been bubbling up in standup comedy for a while, but that tends to be the quickest turnaround on cultural commentary.
No nuanced good idea ever survives contact with a brainless bureaucracy.
Tech companies have crazy stiff etiquette and at its worse point hr people were butting into meetings on demand and correcting behavior in real time. It was … creepy.
As a society we got ourselves into a situation where ignoring race now I promotes inequality as it helps those that have benefited from racism in the past. And doing ANYTHING proactive now is racism not.
The question is just — what type of injustice do you prefer?
I think the argument goes something like: if racial groups and socioeconomic outcomes are correlated due to previous inequalities, and social mobility is limited, then doing nothing further entrenches the inequalities.
Then discriminate on the socioeconomic inequalities. A poor white person and a poor black person should get aid. Obama’s daughter (black, but rich and powerful) doesn’t need any aid or discrimination in her favor.
Discriminating on the basis of race for these programs is so stupid. Ask why and people say “because socioeconomic status”, but then why don’t you discriminate on that? I think people know this but it’s a political move (black people vote for democrats for the vast majority, so making it means tested instead wouldn’t be popular with them).
I disagree that poor whites are specifically against welfare because they think it helps black people more. That’s just another way of saying they are all racist.
Ive grown up around poor whites and dislike for welfare among them was pretty much always a dislike of government generally, and the perception that welfare makes people lazy (often because they knew other poor people who would take advantage of welfare. One of whom got their kids taken away because they couldn’t financially support them, were told they could get them back if they could hit some financial milestones, then proceeded to use their tax return to buy a used mustang).
But isn't that really the issue at hand? You have different data points from the person you replied to. That means that you are both correct, for some subset of people. But do your data points generalize to the larger population, or does the other person's?
I don't think these conversations need to devolve. Where are the large-scale studies that show that your data point is the one that's the most common? I'm willing to believe that it is, but everyone seems to just prefer to assume their data point is the one we should be acting upon.
The problem is you have people who have anecdotal experience that says whites don’t act in racist ways. I have a bunch of data that I could drop here (100s of sources that say otherwise). I’ve seen these debates online before and I’ve never seen a single opinion changed.
The problem is the things being challenged for many (of not most or virtually all) people is their identity and morality. Not simply an experiment about if blueberries have more antioxidants than blackberries. Data and evidence simply don’t matter in these sorts of discussions. And that’s why they tend to devolve quickly.
Of course there are whites that act in racist ways, but it is a very significant accusation that all white act in racist ways, are driven by racist motives, or even that a significant fraction of whites are (poor whites).
When you make such a significant claim denigrating an entire people, you better have evidence. For example, in recent studies I’ve seen, whites have the LEAST in group bias (bias towards their own race), and blacks have the most BY FAR. Whites were the only group that even showed net out group bias (white liberals). At a glance, that suggests to me that whites are the least likely to be racist across the board, often to the point of racism towards their own race.
This is a much longer discussion and one that tends to devolve. And there is a camp that believes that black peoples have it better than whites people today. I find it hard to believe, but they exist.
You made a statement that clearly begged the question, and now I see that you’ve made this comment twice to try and stop further discussion and examination of your claims, and yet I see a perfectly fine and interesting discussion has continued below and hasn’t devolved at all.
Might be time to check more than one of your assumptions, but more importantly, stop trying to police what I and others here say. I’m an adult, if you don’t wish to engage further that’s up to you but I and the others on these boards can make our own decisions, and there are moderators for when things get out of hand. Thanks.
I pointed out that it hasn't devolved. If you think people calmly and rationally discussing and disagreeing with your assumptions and claims is devolution then you have a further claim to back up.
Go read what you wrote about policing and other stuff. It was demeaning and clearly not my intent. Apparently you’re an adult, so yes, have whatever discussion you like. I’m just saying I won’t be apart of it, unless you plan to force me.
The answer is really simple: discrimination not on race, but on inequalities. Don’t discriminate because someone is black or white, but give due consideration to factors like family situation/income/legacy/etc
This seems like the most reasonable solution. If you believe that systemic racism exists in the background, then this corrects for its real effects. If you don’t, I’m sure you at least accept that all else equal, a smart poor person will have accomplished less than a smart rich person due to lack of resources, so if you can correct for that in admissions you better identify smart people.
Need-oriented discrimination, with no accounting for race, is the answer
You should apply some second order thinking on this argument.
In the welfare days, those that were in more need were women with children where the man ditched the family. So more effort and money was applied there which seems totally reasonable.
But it also incentivized men to leave their families to qualify, and they did in high numbers.
These type of things made to correct something in the past also have a tendency to incentivize something bad in the future.
This is part of why these things are so difficult in practice.
Or we could acknowledge that society functions best when the most qualified people are chosen and decide to only discriminate on merit.
These selection criteria are meant to match students with schools filled with students of the same ability level. Of course there will always be factors in life that make it harder or easier for people to succeed.
Having had exceptionally difficult life circumstances doesn't somehow change the fact that you need to have already mastered Algebra to succeed at MIT for example.
We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.
> We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.
This is harder, but I agree the right place to focus our energies. The problem is that the people that want to solve the problem are those in higher education. The people at the root of the problem are probably the same ones that don't want to solve it. A bit of a catch-22.
To be clear, this is about university admissions where their goal is to identify the most capable people for the school, and a smart but poor person might very well be the most capable (even if it’s not clear on paper given their previous lack of resources). This IS merit-based, but it’s an attempt to find the diamonds in the rough.
Someone with an IQ of 140 but poor might not have accomplished as much as a rich person with an IQ of 100, so on paper the rich person looks better, but correcting for circumstances the poor (smart) person is wayyy better. This is meritocratic.
And I’m certainly not suggesting you take the objectively worst person, especially in a job market. Universities are given public money to provide societal benefits. If they aren’t properly able to give people opportunities, they don’t deserve my tax dollars.
> Or we could acknowledge that society functions best when the most qualified people are chosen and decide to only discriminate on merit.
The problem is that we have never actually done that. "Legacy admissions" is a fine example of that failure. Large donations influence admissions decisions. Biases (unconscious or conscious) can take two people of equal merit and cause an admissions officer to prefer one over the other.
There have already been studies showing that simply changing a person's name (either to present a different gender or race/national origin) on a resume can result in a different hiring decision.
A purpose of all of these equity initiatives is to compensate for the reasons why we already suck at giving people opportunities based on merit. Some of them are ill-advised and end up not working, but that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and accept the status quo.
And I certainly don't expect us to wave a magic wand and turn ourselves into perfectly rational, unbiased robots who actually do select purely on merit. Which wouldn't even fix the problem, anyway. But I feel like people like you who tout this "merit" thing are also pushing something impossible to accomplish.
The problem with "quantitative" tests is that they are not without their own bias - they select for students that had the luck (or the right parentage) to go to either a private school or to a public school in a well-funded school district. The result is that the student base will be overwhelmingly white rich kids, which is pretty problematic (see e.g. [1], fresh out of the press).
Additionally, at least when one goes by the original purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead of yet another way for employers to bypass ADA and other anti discrimination regulations - it should be the way that qualitative judgements by humans prefer the academically gifted and interested!
> they select for students that had the luck (or the right parentage) to go to either a private school or to a public school in a well-funded school district
You're not wrong, but I interpret this as evidence that the problem is earlier in the pipeline and trying to fix it here is a hack.
Families with more resources are going to be able to use those resources to game anything. The question is then, which metrics have the most resistance to gaming? Testing would seem more resistant to gaming than extracurricular activities or how well "you" write essays.
> they select for students that had the luck (or the right parentage) to go to either a private school or to a public school in a well-funded school district.
They select for math ability, it just so happens that students with access to great resources get better at math than those without them.
> The result is that the student base will be overwhelmingly white rich kids, which is pretty problematic
Pretty clearly not true. It is overwhelmingly asian kids and while wealth plays a factor, poor asians still do exceptionally well (IIRC poor asians do better than rich whites). This can never be acknowledged because it makes people less sympathetic to your point.
> purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead
A students innate ability is irrelevant for college admissions. What matters is what are your actual capabilities. Are you capable doing mathematics at the highest level or are you not? An innately talented student who is bad at math due to life circumstances out of their control is still bad at math.
> They select for math ability, it just so happens that students with access to great resources get better at math than those without them.
So we just throw our hands up and lament that those without preexisting opportunities stay down?
I completely disagree. Colleges should be looking for high ceiling students who have the potential to do great things if the college throws their resources at the kid for four years.
> A students innate ability is irrelevant for college admissions. What matters is what are your actual capabilities. Are you capable doing mathematics at the highest level or are you not?
Last time I checked, the whole point of college is to develop these skills!
Should every single person who didn't get to take advanced math in high school be immediately disqualified from studying high level math, even if they have the potential to do incredibly well given the tools? This isn't to say that students who have the foundation should be kept down, more that those without it shouldn't be excluded if they have the potential to succeed.
> The whole point of ditching quantitative tests is to empower the bureaucrats who want to make qualitative judgements based on their personal whims and biases.
I can completely believe that this is the result, but I find it very hard to believe that it is (at least in all cases) the point. At my university, the decision to stop considering some standardized tests came from the department and college level, where we don't even make the decisions, not from the admissions department. While it is easy for me to believe that there were unintended consequences, I can say for sure that what you describe was not our goal.
This is why, in the UK system, you're only allowed to apply to five or fewer universities in the same academic cycle. (It's possible to enforce this because all applications go through the same centralised system.)
You're also not allowed to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year - otherwise both universities would get twice as many applicants.
Honestly it wouldn't be as big of a deal if colleges accepted more applicants than they have seats for. The UofMN does just that and has a 70% acceptance rate and is a top public school. They have yet to run into any problems by doing so. While this might not work for colleges in say California or Ivy Leagues, for competitive and selective schools it's definitely an option almost none of them do.
It's suboptimal. It involves a lot of guessing on the applicant's part as to which university is suitable for them. There is a huge possibility for mismatch
> “I think the students that do have the strong test scores still do have that advantage, especially when you have a student that has strong test scores versus a student who doesn’t have test scores and everything else on the academics is more or less the same,” an admissions officer
Why would we expect this to not be the case? It’s literally additional evidence of scholastic aptitude and, if you want it to not have any effect on admissions, you have to prevent its inclusion* rather than making it optional, as optional means “those with strong scores submit those scores.”
* Or, accept them in the application but prevent their inclusion in the admissions process and use them only for research/analytics and only after the fall semester starts.
They are very upfront in terms of rhetoric about wanting more black and Hispanic students, but their policies are a lot of shuck-n-jive, trying to get that result while pretending to be fair. Nothing has worked so far. The pretending-to-be-fair sure hasn't either.
So, one thing that will work and keep it all simple: Just establish quotas. "We will admit the highest scoring black students until we hit x%." But I suppose that would make legal challenges easier.
A better alternative is to fix the problem upstream. Push much more test taking prep for poor students. And reevaluate the SAT. It’s well known the stories of the SAT not including questions blacks score higher on and using questions that whites score higher on. Try to remove the bias from the test even if that gives surprising results.
I’m not a fan of quotas, but I do think taking race into account up until a point is reasonable. It’s just a really tricky line.
Discrimination is an interesting thing, look hard enough and you'll find it whether or not it exists.
An alternate explanation for what they are finding in that paper: The creators of the test favor questions whose response correlates well with how the person scores overall. A question that low-scoring people are more likely to get right is a bad question.
What the researchers should have done is looked at racial differences in answering questions given the same overall score. Of course, that won't find discrimination so they're not going to publish it.
Your explanation could also be true and at the same time feeding into the same problem if the people that have done well historically have done so because of test bias.
Your proposed experiment doesn’t test what you think it does. Since we are trying to determine if the test is biased you can’t control using the score on the test that might be biased.
Hard quotas were already tried, litigated, and declared illegal by the Supreme Court - in the very same decision that allowed affirmative action in general.
It reminds me of European universities switching from selecting on humanities to selecting on maths a century ago.
The idea was to remove the social upbringing's impact on test scores, as candidates from higher socioeconomic status are heavily advantaged from using a larger vocabulary from birth.
A PhD friend who studied this told me it had no measurable impact. Put aside raising math tutors salaries of course.
I'm from a former socialist european country, and we use grades + standardized tests results to get into most colleges (art, music and acting colleges are an exception, due to obvious reasons). Everybody has to pass a standardized test at the end of highschool, 5 subjects, for most, the first three are slovene (our native language), english (second language) and math + two subjects chosen by the student (eg. physics and sociology, or chemisty and informatics, or whatever).
The colleges just give out rules how to calculate "points" (usually 40% are the grades, 60% is the test score, but some (eg medicine back in my time) require you to choose chemistry or biology as one of your subjects and that is worth 20%, next to 40% for the other ones and 40% for the grades).
Students know those rules, apply for a college they want, finish the year, do the standardized tests, get the results, colleges calculate them into points, and if there are 60 spots for that study course, top 60 students are accepted... you don't even have to wait to get your letter, colleges publish that the cuttoff was 82 points to get accepted, and if you're above that, you're in, if not, you compete in other colleges/programmes that still have open spots left over.
No races, no letters, no subjective stuff, no problems with -isms.
Grades for each subject are calculated into end-of-year grades (for that subject), and a final "total" grade is calculated (some special formula, not a pure average). A mix of those is then calculated into those 40%... I can look up the formula, but yeah, the grades are used too.
I actually think this would be a good way to run admissions at ultra-selective elite universities - places like Harvard or Oxford where getting in or not can make a huge impact on the entire rest of your life. Everyone knows the evaluation process is bullshit and highly dependent on luck, so why pretend otherwise? Just discard those applicants who don't meet some minimum objective standard (SAT scores or whatever) then pick the remaining names out of a hat.
It's never going to happen, but still. If people don't like it then maybe the solution is to improve the quality of other universities so that getting rejected from Harvard isn't such a big blow in the first place.
It’s often not the quality as it is the network. It’s well known that many state schools have excellent business programs (think MBA) but that you should only ever go to your local one, because the network you get will be limited to that locality.
Whereas NYU Stern or whatever is a world-wide network.
Thomas suggested this as an alternative to using race as a plus factor in Grutter v. Bollinger. He claimed the existence of this alternative meant that the schools use of race was not narrowly tailored even if one conceded the compelling government interest in diversity.
I'd have them selected randomly from those that clear the standardized testing bar. Otherwise, without selecting for academic performance, universities become a continuation of highschool where high achievers are surrounded by riffraff who don't really want to learn but rather spend a few years partying with student loans before hitting the workforce.
The solution is to make high school more selective - which is done in some countries. Around 12 it is determined if you’re on the college path or the tradeschool path and you go from there
Then suddenly you have the ability to boot non-performers on the college path into something else.
You really think we can accurately determine people's paths by age 12?? It's more likely the determination ends up as a proxy for whose parents were rich enough to [stay at home to / pay for someone to] train their kids to get onto the college track.
continuation of highschool where high achievers are surrounded by riffraff
One of the best things about adulthood is no longer spending every day with what one teacher called "the peanut gallery" hooting and squawking from the back of the room.
A selection process based on academic achievement alone yields a graduate more highly valued by corporate America [1].
Private universities should be able to use whatever criteria they want (as long as there is no illegal discrimination) including "building communities" and "shaping the student body". (It's a free country after all!) But public universities must use objective criteria. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That's a basic principle of fairness that should apply in this land of opportunity. No "shaping" of the student body by universities that receive funding from taxpayers, because that is unfair to students. Imagine being denied admission by the only good public university in your state, not because your grades or test scores are not good enough, but because you didn't fit in whatever "shape" the university decided is appropriate for that year! For more on this see [2].
I very much agree on the shaping your own destiny part. How can anyone subject themselves to a committee of random bureaucrats deciding their future? Even if they were 100% fair and impartial, does it not take away your agency in choosing your own fate?
And let's not pretend that they are 100% fair and impartial. We know for a fact that they are racially biased against different races depending on the time period. And maybe the one who rejected you didn't like how you name sounded. It's not as though the process is transparent, and they're only making it a 100 times more opaque as people catch on to them.
This Holistic Admissions nonsense has always been a scam just like Holistic Medicine
In time, maybe universities will collapse under the weight of their own idiocy. I went back to school to finish my degree for fun at 25 t a top school. To my dismay, many online courses were better taught.
In retrospect, the only courses in I enjoyed were small seminar passion projects.
The headline says it was easier to fairly choose students with the exams, and I'm calling bullshit on that assumption. It implicitly assumes that selecting for standardized test scores is more fair.
College admission has been unfair for generations. TBH I'm not sure "fairness" is even a good metric. Is it fair that I didn't have to work after school to support my family? No. Is it fair that my parents have advanced degrees and read to me as a young child? No. Is it fair that I got to take the SAT twice, because I wanted a higher math score? No. None of that is fair, and all of it helped me get into highly selective colleges.
I thought that was the actual point of ditching admission testing. They wanted to return to the pre-SAT days when they could just admit any legacy, no matter how unacademically suited an alumn(us|a)'s progeny was.
Matt Parlmer on Twitter recently stated it this way:
> The university is primarily for theological indoctrination and secondarily for rich kids to get the same credentials as smart kids so they can maintain their status
> This has not changed one iota since Oxford was chartered, it's what the system is for, take the Caplanpill
Admissions tests are the best tool to fight racism, specifically institutionalized racism, that we have in our tool kit. When racism increases in the future the tests will be ushered back in with great urgency, but because institutionalized racism takes decades to slowly grind away at, I think we’ll be doomed to such cycles. On some level it’s hard not to see that process play out, notice that it benefits the elites by acting as a sort of moat around their comfy middle class lifestyle while hurting racially marginalized groups, and also hurting groups which are rapidly closing the gap like Asians, and not see it as at least potentially misguided.
> One college purchased a data service that ranked high schools and factored those high school rankings into each application. Students from underserved high schools received a lower ranking, an admissions officer explained. It wasn’t a fair process.
This is the crux of the affirmative action fascists. They picked what they thought was a “fair” set of criteria and it didn’t produce the outcome they wanted. They concluded it wasn’t “fair” because it didn’t produce they wanted. That’s garbage.
Backing into an outcome simply based on skin color that they want is racist and truly unfair.
If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas. No one does this. South side Chicago and St. Louis Missouri and Baltimore aren’t filled with stupid people. They are filled with people who have suffered generational poverty, living in some of the most violent areas of the world. If you dump money into schools, jobs, and police in those areas, you will produce a thriving middle class in a single generation and from there you can create hundreds of thousands and millions of educated “underrepresented” people that are COMPETITIVE.
> They picked what they thought was a “fair” set of criteria and it didn’t produce the outcome they wanted. They concluded it wasn’t “fair” because it didn’t produce they wanted. That’s garbage.
No, that's science. If your goal is "more racially- and background-diverse admissions", and you set up a process to achieve that, and then find that your new process didn't work, then the process was wrong. So you come up with a new process.
> If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas.
The problem is that universities don't really have the ability to invest in education and safety in lower income areas. As rich as many top-tier private universities are, they don't have the resources to make a dent in this problem. So you have a chicken-and-egg problem: you can't fix the inequity that causes some kids to get a worse primary education, but you can't give them a better secondary education and allow that to flow back into their communities.
You have to break the cycle somewhere, and it seems pretty obvious that US federal and local governments have been failing miserably at improving education and safety in underserved communities. So you decide that you're going to find kids that your regular admissions practices would have rejected out of hand, but have the potential to learn and be successful at your school, even if there are gaps in their education. No, it's not a perfect plan, but what had been going on before wasn't working either. And maybe this won't work. But I think it's a worth trying.
No it is not science. If the objective is to be “fair” then they don’t like the outcome then that’s not science.
If the objective is to increase the amount of certain skin colors, then fine. But call it that. Don’t be racist and then wrap it up in a lie saying that it’s to be “fair”. “Fair” in the way it’s used in the article is entirely subjective, which is not scientific.
When the system is as obviously corrupt as it is now, people lose faith in the system entirely and that’s what’s happened.
> The problem is that universities don't really have the ability to invest in education and safety in lower income areas.
I wasn’t talking about the universities, I was talking about the government. If the government is willing to dump hundreds of billions into Ukraine, I’d rather see that money going into creating businesses, schools and safety in the most egregious areas of our own country and build them up. Create competitive applicants by destroying generational poverty.
Not by bending admission standards and lying to everyone’s face as if we are racist for pointing out their racism. I would much rather see my tax dollars funding this rebuilding of the worst parts of the country than war. And if it produces hundreds of thousands of competitive students one generation from now, we all benefit because they won’t be as underrepresented and we can get rid of these racist policies by radical left fascists that believe that more racism is the answer for racism.
It seems like modern wokeism was designed to make it easier for rich elites to exploit their privilege. Stuff like this makes it easier for lazy kids with rich and connected parents to get into best colleges/universities. All the talk about race and gender also conveniently turns attention away form real solutions that could help the underprivileged, like progressive taxation, which the rich elites oppose.
At least Marx was smart enough to understand that ultimately who has the money/assets is the key, unlike modern progressives and their obsession with other less relevant qualities. We should tax the rich and fund the poor regardless of their ethnicity or identity.
It wasn't designed for this, but you're correct in that, so long as existing structures of economic power remain as they are, the rest is mostly just virtue theater.
Maybe the "minorities" are actually smarter than you think, do they actually want to study there? What were rejection rates for minorities?
In many cases college is a scam, investment is simply not worth the money (future earnings). Diversity studies referenced in article were mostly performed on "liberal arts colleges". Maybe this type of study is good hobby for rich white kids. But most normal people will not throw away their future on such schools!
From what I’ve seen interviewees hate it (this is dumb busy work) but interviewers love it because of the absolute deluge of incredibly inappropriate candidates they receive.
Leetcode easies are fine, and that's all most companies outside of FANG ask in my experience. I've done interviews myself, and atleast 30% of candidates fail a problem that simply required a for loop to solve (no trees, no algorithms, just simple loop through list and do x).
And if companies dropped the degree requirement and only asked leetcode mediums, I'd consider that fine honestly. Most of what I learned through college was useless to my career, 6 years out of college and I think I'd struggle to name even 25% of the classes I took.
I don't expect my employees to solve problems on the spot, why would I expect it of interviewees? I give them a short take-home challenge, and it has worked well so far - I have a great team.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadI mean, if you just want to learn stuff and get a good education, there are loads of resources where you can do that, often for free or near free. College is about much more than just learning new things, and if that's the only framework through which you value a college education, you'll be doomed to misunderstand the institution.
Nobody will loan you money to do that, howvevr.
Stuck on what? For an undergrad, those problems can easily be solved by going online or to a tutor for a fraction of the cost. And that's for STEM based problems, humanities is all about flattering whatever opinions the professor personally holds.
The best piece of advice I got was from one of my english highschool teachers who told me a story about how when he was in university he was getting graded really poorly on essays until he basically regurgitated what he thought the the professor wanted to hear.
It's been a while since I've been to university, but I think it probably still holds.
Now back to my TPS reports.
Due to this he gave me opportunities to perform research in areas that I didn't even know existed.
Had I not gone to a university I never would have been exposed to these areas of technology.
That's why university matters, it helps you get past the first level of screening. It's also fair of employers to assume that the average Top 25 university graduate is better than the AVERAGE bottom 50% university graduate.
I didn’t even graduate from high school, but I’ve never struggled to find employment with the companies I wanted to work for.
The idea of a degree as a first-pass filter is oversold at best.
If you're borrowing money to pay for a degree, going to a school where you are not at the very top of the class is really taking a big risk.
It's just more fun, and it also puts me on my best game.
edit: I agree that the first part of this comment is too harsh, see child thread
But it's more fun when the people pushing you are your friends and peers. In contrast, how many PHD researchers with a spouse and kids want to study and get coffee with a 19 year old undergrad?
I especially cringe at the idea that Gladwell is saying it's statistically better to do something, when he has a known history of deliberately misinterpreting data and massaging numbers to get the result he wants.
While I think people should be much more accepting of 2nd- and 3rd-tier schools as options than they often are, kids should absolutely push themselves for the best-ranked school they can get into (assuming they also have a solid program for whatever field/major they're interested in). Not only is it beneficial to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are, there are also second-order effects to attending an elite university, like making connections that can help you along with your career later. Not to mention that if a recruiter sees two recent-grad resumes that are identical except for the name of the school, they're going to pick the candidate that went to the "better" school.
Certainly you don't want to set yourself up for failure; if that elite school is going to be such a struggle that you're eventually going to be washed out, that's probably not a good outcome, and a lower-tier school would have been a better choice. But, absent that, I think it's good advice to attend the best school you can get into.
Gladwell says you're only comparing against yourself against your peers at your school, and not the world, but for me, I've absolutely compared myself from people from other universities (and for that matter, other countries).
For example, there are people 2-3 years younger than me who have a public output of projects/writing that is 100 times more than mine. I'm probably somewhat high up among in my own university in project output, but I still made this comparison, partially because online communities allow me to hear about these people.
Harvard, MIT, and Oxford have no problem finding future rich people. Random schools can't compete for smart people, so it makes sense for them to try to find prospects based on alternative criteria.
Large classes of novices are particularly sensitive to logistical and teaching errors. You make a question on a homework or exam a bit confusing, you have 400 students utterly perplexed who may not have the domain expertise to know it's the question that's broken.
At Carnegie Mellon, our teaching-track faculty generally own the large intro classes for this reason. They're the best we have at the process of teaching & education. It's the exact opposite of a side job. You want people who are deeply expert and passionate about teaching so that you don't completely botch the job, because the opportunities to botch it are huge.
It doesn't require Ph.D. level knowledge, but it helps a lot, especially when you're talking to one of those few students with more and deeper questions about the subject.
The supply is short because at least in the US, entry pay is low in higher ed.
- $25/hour w/ benefits for semi-skilled labor
- $42k/year no benefits for adjunct
Going test-optional was a capitulation to social pressure, not a deliberate decision made for its benefits.
Besides, at the end of the day everything boils down to a single number - applicants are ranked and those that make the cutoff get in, those that are below the cutoff don't.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
And I say this with full self-awareness that this was me. It’s probably the thing I regret most about my high school experience because of how unnecessary it was and how much it set me back on all the things that mattered.
I consider myself extremely lucky that any university took a chance on me because my application was 100% “I have no real interests except playing the game of school and winning by min-maxing the point system” which looking back is so obviously the worst applicant. I for sure lost out on my dream school because of it.
1. Have some minimum objective criteria (test scores, grades, class rank, etc.)
2. Accept students who meet that minimum with a lottery.
Of course, that would never happen at highly selective colleges, because it would shatter the notion that "only the best and brightest" got in and would ruin colleges' role as a maintainer of social hierarchy in the US.
I say this as a person who went to one of the most selective colleges in the world: the idea that colleges set up their application systems to build a "diverse" student body is complete and total bullshit. The reason being that some of the most important diversity comes from interacting with people of widely varying economic levels and intelligence levels. The idea that you can have a socially diverse student body, but only made up of people who got 4.0 GPAs and above, is bullshit on its face.
This is about as silly as dating app profiles that cut off at 6'.
But it's reality. Women extremely rarely think of men under 6' as ideal mates.
I think the reason people so vigorously defend the use of standardized test scores in admissions is that we all have a built in bias towards viewing quantifiable comparisons as inherently more objective because it's easy to justify how you arrived at a decision. After all, who can argue with a decision based on one number being larger than the other?
The problem though is that this approach doesn't really remove the subjective, complex elements at all, it just moves them from the decision step to the measurement step. Sure, an SAT score is just a simple number. But how the test is constructed to arrive at that number is much more complicated. And the value of a simple score comparison is only as good as the process of constructing the test, leaving you with the illusion of having made the decision simpler and more objective when you really just move the complexity behind a curtain.
In tech terms, I think the analogy is project managers trying endless different ways to measure software development performance. Number of tickets closed, "velocity", commits, releases, etc, (lines of code if you're very unlucky), all give you nice simple numbers to look at. And while they're not entirely useless, it's easy to become overly reliant on them and assume they are more objective measures than they actually are.
Is that done per student behind closed doors though, with the people calculating the score knowing who the student is and the ability to alter the scoring based on that knowledge?
Standardized tests are bad, but they're a giant step up from the corruption that is other forms of selection.
In fact - the line that you're walking is the reason there was briefly a suggestion of an "adversity score": https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/college...
Which is the first time that's been considered, because in the current climate - working extremely diligently to try to ensure that no particular student or group of students has an advantage, some students do have an advantage. They are smarter, or have better parenting, or better education, or their parents simply have more money to throw at tutoring
You can say "that's unfair! This is about selecting the best students and locks smart people from worse off backgrounds out of university!"
It does the second thing, sometimes, as a side effect - but it is also true that those students are still better students, regardless the path dependence.
Meanwhile, universities are enacting racial and gender preference schemes, Cites: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Additionally, the primary winner of the policies this line of argument promotes are white women - with the primary loser being Asian men. Asian students in particular are bringing the suit against Harvard for these practices.
So while your epistemic humility ("is this REALLY objective? How do we measure that?") is well intentioned, it's the exact sort of reasoning used to cover up a strict ideology of "more black good, more women good, less white good, less men good" in universities, and the actual behavior of universities shoe that.
And look, race and gender ends up being a component but not in the way you’re describing. I’m not being like “woman good” it’s that a woman sitting across the table describing her technical achievements is made more impressive because I know first hand what women have to go in CS programs — you don’t put up with all the bullshit unless you’re really passionate. An example based on real life, a woman leading her capstone project group is unfathomably impressive because of how decisively strong her technical and communication skills have to be to earn the respect of the men in her class.
Literally every major tech company hires on effectively leetcode alone.
https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...
Men perform (slightly) etter on technical interviews when modulated as women, and women perform the same.
The idea that women are "putting up with so much more bullshit" when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested, sky high salaries, and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women in settings where gender is obscured is out of date at a minimum.
I swear this is always at the core of it. Trust me it’s not as glamorous as you make it out to be. Yes tech companies are bending over backwards to find and hire competent women because we’re rare (and why!) but that statement is not at all the same as women have lower standards. You have to understand that literally no team ever is going to burn their hire on a perceived less qualified woman because she’s a woman. The desire to have the best person because the team is lazy and wants someone who will make their lives easier always wins. And not to put too fine a point on it but your average team of tech folks is pretty anti-woke liberal-tarian meritocracy so you’re not getting a whole lot social justice bias there. I guess this could happen if you have HR hiring in a vacuum but I’ve never seen a place where the team doesn’t have the final say.
> putting up with so much more bullshit
The bullshit is the culture. Look I wish this wasn’t true but it’s the unfortunate reality of being a woman in a CS major. Your male classmates do not see you as an equal. there is an in-built presumption that you don’t know what you’re doing; any normal mistake you make that guys make too just cements it. When you’re doing group work nobody listens to you and you get the “fun” experience of waiting for them to catch up and then having no recognition at all that you had already told them. Getting study groups together is awful one because guys will not let you join because they think you’ll be a drain, or they will let you join and then hit on you. Do you know how many fucking times I got told to go make me a sandwich? In more than one class I just asked the professor to do group projects alone. And that’s before dealing with how isolating it is to be the only girl in class and having the shock and head turns the first time you speak.
It’s not perfect by any stretch of imagination but I would have been driven out of tech had I not by chance landed at a few companies with older teams and realized that maturity makes a huge difference.
> and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women
Well yeah, of course you expect that. I just talked about a situation where a woman saying something is more impressive than a man saying the same thing. Context matters.
As a previous commenter mentioned, UW spends about 8 minutes looking at applications at first. This isn't nearly enough time to make a "holistic" decision, especially when the application is largely subjective.
SAT scores, on the other hand, take longer than 8 minutes to arrive at. The subjective evaluations that go into designing the test can be determined over the course of months, leading to a measure that is imperfect but likely better than 8 minutes of a grad student's time.
The larger point is that in order for "holistic" admissions to work, you need to design an admissions process that actually evaluates candidates holistically. Removing SAT scores doesn't automatically fix those issues, it just removes one more piece of data to aid the process.
But you’re ignoring the other side of that number. That test score provides a hell of a lot of information about the individual beyond just doing well on a single test.
At University of Washington, applications are not reviewed by "admissions people". They hire temporary workers (grad students, retirees etc.) to review applications, and give them 8 minutes per application [1]. And this is typical of most universities.
[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/a-look-inside-admis...
I think for the very top schools they care about the intangibles. For mid-tier schools the SAT cutoff lottery is fine. But the cut off is probably like 1150, and these arguments aren’t about those schools.
It’s all just signaling. Let’s be open about that instead of hiding the ball.
The top N schools in the nation, collectively representing enough seats to account for 5% of SAT takers, all change their admissions policies to select randomly among applicants in the top 5% of SAT scorers.
After ten years of these policies being in place we will likely see the following negative effects:
But back to the topic. A 1550 on the SAT says very little about your mathematical ability. The test just doesn't measure your ability to do more than basic algebra and has no real measure of writing ability. And honestly probably has a somewhat inverse relationship on your ability to read nuance into text (which is one of the first strategies I teach -- this isn't English class -- there's no nuance in anything you read on the SAT).
On advanced college math -- kids who are actually good at math likely have a high math SAT score, but their verbal score can vary a fair bit. I regularly see kids with 1400-1450 SATs, with perfect math scores who are Math Olympiad stars.
The likely end game of this though is that schools REALLY start teaching to the test. Why even offer AP tests if they don't help admission? Why even teach biology or physics at all? Simply teach SAT math, reading comprehension (which is comprehension of the worst kind) and what the SAT calls writing. So no more calculus or statistics. Even most of what is taught in algebra II is thrown out the window.
Today the 95%ile of SATs is around 1440. It would probably move up to around 1550, once schools teach to that test year around for four years. And any actually advanced undergrad courses are tossed because they can't get enough students to fill them.
And other countries will realize that the US left a huge gap -- the ability get students who strong in like areas and train them. They'll target the best math students, the best programmers, the best artists, etc...
Interestingly, the best meritocracy we have in society is sports. And in sports they recruit holistically -- that is they don't exclusively use HS stats (these are generally worthless) or combine numbers (these have some value, but limited). They use scouting services. And the very best athletes tend to congregate in programs that will develop them the best. Many hold up sports as a great example of meritocracy, yet it actually doesn't rely solely on measurables (in fact they are moving further and further from it).
What sports has though is a good objective function. What is the objective function of school? Answering that question will greatly help determine what the best path forward is.
No; I don't have the answer. I'm not an economist nor an admissions expert. But I've qualified and hired software engineers over the years and my process never focuses on a score or outcome of an assessment.
How likely is it that this holistic evaluation will end up preferring individuals conforming to the current Zeitgeist (e.g. using all the momentarily popular buzzwords in their applications) rather than truly talented candidates? Thus contributing to further ossification of current elites?
My take is that part of the function of an academic institution is to help individuals discover and develop talents.
A good teacher isn't one that helps A students get A's but one that can develop any student into an A student.
To merely select and propel those who already have the talent rather than select for the capacity to grow and develop talent is precisely why score based systems are biased in the first place.
For the sake of argument, let's imagine a college doing the opposite: admitting students solely on the basis of a standardized test score. You submit your SAT score, and everyone above a certain percentile is admitted. People below the threshold are not. Many of the comments here seem to think this is optimal.
In that scenario, there wouldn't be any complaints from admissions committees at all about them having to put effort into the situation, because they wouldn't be involved at all. So is it being difficult a sign that reality is more complex than suggested by a test score, or that they've lost an objective indicator?
Most of the statistics thrown around in the article could also be turned on their head. For instance, just hypothetically, if getting rid of the test isn't changing the student body, what's the point of the test?
Having an objective number is useless on its own. Even if it's roughly correlated with the outcomes you desire, if it's that roughly correlated with outcomes, and subject to biases, there's no point in having it.
I feel like these tests are kind of like buying a house based on nominal square footage alone. Sure, it's probably correlated with satisfaction and resell value, it's an objective indicator that involves some measurement, and so forth, but no one would buy a house that way. It's subject to all sorts of manipulation and fuzziness, and doesn't tell you anything about the architecture, lot, or anything else. And yet that's kind of how standardized tests are used.
I'm fine with using standardized tests in theory, but they're far too abused and misused. It's not so much the tests I have problems with, as it is how it seems once you introduce them, it seems they can't be interpreted rationally in making any sorts of decisions about human beings. It's like people take something that has a sliver of information value with all sorts of limitations, and then treat it like an infallible signal just because it's easy to use.
Its ease of use could be seen as a problem, not something desirable.
Great analogy.
Buying a house is about far, far more than just the square footage. How are the neighbors? How's the walkability? Noise levels? Schools? Access to transport routes? Access to jobs? Property taxes? HOA fees? Access to activities of interest?
There are so many factors to buying a house that it would be ridiculous to look at any single dimension alone and make a determinate based on that one dimension.
But that's not what they've been doing. Standardized tests played a role, but were not the only factor.
To continue the house analogy: look at everything _but_ square footage before you make an offer.
This article demonstrates that the theory was wrong, but the intention was opposite of what you describe.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-us-colleges-are-...
For example, Im not great at art and don’t really have a passion for it. Should an art school accept me even though I’ll never have a career as an artist? Keep in mind I’d be taking a spot from someone who could. I have no doubt they’ll be able to improve my abilities but that’s not why many students apply.
[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
That doesn't excuse the actual racism that we've seen in admissions, of course.
So what would you say is “not good” about a “student body made up of too [many]” Indians? Or Jews? Or Chinese people?
Are schools in India or China or Israel inherently worse than those in America because those schools have “too much” of a single race?
Both China and India are countries with a number of different races, some/most of which are represented at the top schools (I imagine all of the large racial groups). I’m not sure about Israel, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true there as well.
That said, the prestigious schools in these countries (not sure about Israel) heavily use tests as an admission standard to the best schools. I think that this is part of what makes them less prestigious than their American counterparts.
Elite American universities use social capital as part the admissions criteria, with a reasonably broad definition of social capital. I think that this social capital along with intellectual capital (not always in the same student) is part of what makes the magic work at these schools.
Notes:
- In China (and probably other places), historically the admissions exam was a proxy for social capital, since families with high social capital could prepare their kids better via tutors. This is still somewhat true today, but it’s not as powerful as it was in the distant past.
- State schools in the US, which seem to be the focus of this article since they don’t have a history of holistic admissions, should probably stick with a grades-test score combo for most admissions, and maybe add some “social capital” admits (similar to athletes, who also fall into the social capital category, with the extent of exceptionalism required being equivalent).
- Schools that admit based on tests alone without having some sort of built-in social capital component will end up defaulting towards the creation of a lot of middle management drones rather than future leaders of the country. Many people seem to wish that social capital is not the primary driver of success, but results (historical and anecdotal) seem to suggest otherwise.
Colleges should be about furthering academic knowledge and preparing our best and brightest to make the world a better place. Diversity for diversities sake harms that.
Who are the best and brightest? How do you determine that?
Do the best&brightest from one community or circumstance always have the same traits as the best&brightest from another community or circumstance?
My understanding is diversity initiatives attempt to address the latter part (effective or not).
Can the answer to this question be "yes"? In the same way that the best NBA players share traits, I don't see any reason why the best physicians, engineers, etc. also wouldn't share traits across cultures/backgrounds.
Going further, can't we measure these traits with outcomes of standardized testing? Given you agree these traits exist, can you propose an better alternative?
The only logical reason for discriminating against so many Asians in our current setup needs to be attempting to mirror the population statistics of the United States. I don’t approve of that logic to be clear and think the universities will be issuing apologies to the Asian American community in X years similar to the ones they just made to the Jewish American community recently.
[1] https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/
[2] https://edsource.org/2022/as-supreme-court-considers-affirma...
Or in essence, how to address the historical inequities of racism and sexism, without also ushering in something ridiculous like "mentalism" that attempts to help people who are "bad at tests and grades."
And an effective part of that litmus test could be 'already has substantial power, but is able to self-restrain their abuse of it.'
Caligula vs the recent British monarchy, etc.
Sounds like a perfect environment for a generation of conservatives to get elected. Hopefully they stay close to the center for a long time.
The conservative groundswell is because generations of conservatives have already been getting elected, especially in less flashy positions that wield influence. Conservatives have really played the long game, at least since the New Deal.
For instance, ruling against Roe v. Wade. Regardless of what you think of that, it, such a ruling was a deviation from the status quo. It was "changing things" as surely as the original ruling changed things.
Nobody can roll back the clock. What conservatives actually do in fact is propose ways to change things going into the future.
We do have pretty good records to help us sort it out, especially for recent history.
> the circumstances of the present are different than the circumstances of the past
Surely some circumstances, such as human nature and social biology, have not changed. I'm not sure that "the state of society" is the primary differentiating factor in the effectiveness of laws, particularly laws relating to fundamental human behaviours like violence or reproduction.
I think it is, since there is great cultural variation in the ways humans think about violence and sex. Monogamy or harems; human sacrifice or the abolition of the death penalty. Any combination of these can be "normal" to people raised in that context, there is little which is fundamental about the way human societies are structured with respect to these subjects.
You're right in that there is some variation, but there do actually seem to be some choices in this regard that are more conducive to a stable, prosperous, society. Just like there are many ways to run a company, but only some of them lead to success. Point being that if you live in such a society, "changing things" may lead you off the golden path that brought you where you are. It's true that some change is inevitable, but any operator of any system that prioritizes stability above all is always wary of any unnecessary change.
Certainly not. Imprisonment for violent crimes is far from being a universal constant of human culture. There have been and are cultures in which violent criminals are only detained so they can be executed. Or beaten and then released. Or simply fined. Or not charged at all. What even counts as violent crime varies considerably even in developed countries today. Legal self-defense in one country may be murder in another.
Similarly, marriage is only culturally universal in a very abstract sense. Who are you allowed to marry? How many consecutive marriages are you allowed to have? Under what conditions can a marriage be broken? Can you be sold for marriage against your will?
> You're right in that there is some variation, but there do actually seem to be some choices in this regard that are more conducive to a stable, prosperous, society. Just like there are many ways to run a company, but only some of them lead to success. Point being that if you live in such a society, "changing things" may lead you off the golden path that brought you where you are. It's true that some change is inevitable, but any operator of any system that prioritizes stability above all is always wary of any unnecessary change.
I agree. My point is that liberals, progressives, conservatives.. pretty much everybody except the most apathetic, seek to make a change to society to turn society in a direction they think will be for the better. Each have different value systems and experiences, and accordingly have different opinions about what's wrong in society and what would constitute society being better. Conservatives frame themselves as apart from this by saying they don't want change, but "not change" is itself a change they want to impose on society to bring society back into line with their values.
But why does it even matter, other than setting things up as “us” vs. “them”?
I don't know if that was addressed to me for speaking of conservative political movements or to the conservatives, but it is not a label that I pin on an unwilling recipient; I am referring to a self-described conservative movement.
When someone points out something Democrats did and they say "that's why I'm conservative" then when you point out something Republicans did they say "We need more than two parties"
It's also resulted in an effect I've noticed in most debates now where people just shout the advantages of their position and the disadvantages of their opponents position at each other without any attempt at addressing what their opponent is counter-arguing, if that makes sense.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment but in the US, these issues are the result of conservative politics.
Additionally, politics and policies exist at the national level as well and can influence what happens in even liberal cities.
The ‘clearances paradox’: could less policing actually reduce gun violence in New York?
Your over simplifying the complex reasons behind crime.
Violent antisocial behaviour presents itself in a small percentage of young (mostly) males. It can be predicted as early as age 4 and effective intervention is very difficult. Most people who present with it tend to age out of the behaviour by around 30. Therefore the only effective strategy to protect the rest of us from this tiny fraction of people is to confine them until they age out. This is basically what our criminal justice system does, however imperfectly.
If we were to design a system eyes-open, knowing these constraints, with the goal of minimizing violent crime, we'd:
1. Enact age-based confinement - teenagers who present with violent antisocialism are very likely to reoffend in their 20s. Violent teenagers and young adults should be confined until they've aged out.
2. Structure prison culture - prison should not be crime university. Criminals should not be permitted to form a culture. Violent antisocialism should not be tolerated in prison. Instead they should be given the tools to find a legitimate place in society upon their eventual release. Japan does this quite well.
3. Seal records after release - criminal records relating to youth-associated violent antisocialism should be sealed. People we release should have a clear path to reintegration without discrimination.
This is a tired trope.
That won't fix everything, of course. People will get involved in crime for other reasons. Obviously there are rich people who are criminals; financial security doesn't remove every temptation to do crime. But I think a lot of the people you label "antisocial" these days are people who have been left behind by society, people who have gotten crushed by wages that haven't kept up with inflation (even before the current inflation issues), by companies who raise CEO pay and send dividends to investors, while ignoring the wages of their employees. Why would anyone bother to be "social" if doing so doesn't solve their economic insecurity?
And sure, there are some people who just don't give a shit about living in polite society, who don't think twice about violating norms and taking what they want. I have no problem locking those people up. But I think those people are a much smaller percentage of people who commit crimes than you think.
I don't know much about policing in Israel, but as I understand Japan, there's rampant corruption and a lot of innocent people behind bars. A near-100% conviction rate is just too good to be true. If you get charged with a crime in Japan, you are screwed, even if you didn't do anything wrong. The only alternative explanation is that Japanese police are so afraid of losing a case that they only charge the near-certain slam dunks. But if that were the case, I think we'd see a lot more crime in Japan than we do. So the only realistic explanation is that a lot of innocent people get steamrolled.
I do absolutely agree with your points 2 and 3. Time spent in prison should not make convicts into better criminals! Hell, even sitting in pre-trial detention for a few months can harden minor offenders. And after a prisoner has served their time, they shouldn't have that history dragged into employment, housing, credit, etc. decisions. If we still feel like they can't be trusted in jobs without their employers knowing about their conviction history, then they probably aren't fit to be released from prison in the first place.
These are not mutually exclusive propositions. As I mentioned in my comment, there are two concerns here:
1. Reducing the number of violent antisocial people by reducing the number of people who are exposed to childhood circumstances that tend to produce them. This is complicated and entails dictating to parents how they raise their children to a much higher degree than most people are comfortable, and than our society's values permit.
2. Dealing with the ones who already exist. This is policing and justice.
> the people you label "antisocial" these days are people who have been left behind by society
> It's the economy, stupid
If only it were this simple. I'm referring to people who haven't been correctly socialized in their early childhood. Toddlers are all violent, self centered, assholes by adult standards. They learn not to be through appropriate socialization with their peers, through play. Children who are not given this developmental opportunity past a particular age tend to exhibit traits that strongly correlate with violence in early adulthood. This is exacerbated by numerous domestic factors, most importantly the absence of two parents in the household and the presence of violent antisocial adults in the household (not household income).
We can observe these same traits and behaviours develop in our ape relatives for the same reasons. We're not that different.
> I think those people are a much smaller percentage of people who commit crimes than you think
This just isn't true - this small percentage of people are the serial criminals responsible for most of the real danger in our society - shootings, armed home invasions, armed robberies, etc. These sorts of crimes are largely not committed by people who are "down and out", but by people who are in many ways fundamentally different from the average person. I'm not talking about petty theft here.
This can be most clearly illustrated by the phenomenon of college campus rape. The rapes themselves are committed by a tiny fraction of repeat offenders. "Teach men not to rape" doesn't work on them. They're just not like most people, mostly as a result of some combination of tragic childhood circumstances and poor socialization (again, not household wealth). The best solution is to identify these people and imprison them as efficiently as possible. To enact this solution effectively, the people we entrust with it need power.
https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm
You’ll find a lot of “lock em up and throw away the key! … But not my son. Or my daughter. Or my nephew and his children and my former coworker. Or my pastor’s children. But everyone else, yeah”
The difference between approaches isn't "lock them up / don't" or "my kids / their kids". It's not a left/right or conservative/liberal divide, it's on another axis - more about the philosophical difference of personal vs group responsibility and meaning vs nihilism.
We need to look at the path these front running cities are taking, and where everyone else will be dragged, to see the difference. The same cities which refuse to lock up a violent junkie will lock up a parent who complains too loudly to the school board. It's not that they aren't authoritarian, often more than conservatives. It's that they don't feel there's any degradation of the individual which is ultimately wrong. Like, an individual can "choose" to be a street whore and die painfully from heroin. That's valid. This is how all junkies eventually live and die, and without a strong moral consensus that this is all bad - for the junkie and society and that we must stop it, you can't make progress on the base issues.
Vancouver will leave a junkie in their own vomit, to continue hitting the drugs that almost killed them, because "nobody should be committed against their will" but it will fine or confine an otherwise fit college student who drinks in public, or who commits any of the other offenses the junkie is committing (littering, starting fires on the sidewalk, having a violent dog, openly carrying a weapon, and so forth). The junkie has somehow "chosen" his or her role and now it's a beautiful thing, like a butterfly, that should be left to unfold, unmolested, in the parks.
Portugal, often held out as a utopia for drug users, has a "not even once in public" policy where they will jail you and assign you to a multi-year rehab program. They know nobody wants to die in their own vomit, in the street.
We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress. Once we all look at things that way we can see that our policies won't actually be too different, or rather, it doesn't matter if they are and we can work in a spirit of cooperation from different angles rather than fighting about the issue itself.
Ultimately, Portugal is a more liberal society (for drug users) than Vancouver.
Fentanyl is cut with other drugs and there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source? The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.
----------------------------------------
Here's a DEA warning about mass overdose events from Fentanyl "Fentanyl-related mass-overdose events, characterized as three or more overdoses occurring close in time and at the same location, have happened in at least seven American cities in recent months, resulting in 58 overdoses and 29 deaths. Cities impacted include Wilton Manors, Florida; Austin, Texas; Cortez, Colorado; Commerce City, Colorado; Omaha, Nebraska; St. Louis, Missouri; and Washington, D.C."
I don't' see SF or LA mentioned here. I'm sure some of these are Democrat controlled but You are claiming that liberal policies cause an increase in overdoses. Do you have a source for your death rates?
https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2022/04/06/dea-warns-incr...
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Top 10 states by drug overdose in 2020 (latest year for this source)
West Virginia 81.4 1,330 Kentucky 49.2 2,083 Delaware 47.3 444 Ohio 47.2 5,204 Tennessee 45.6 3,034 Maryland 44.6 2,771 Louisiana 42.7 1,896 Pennsylvania 42.4 5,168 Maine 39.7 496 Connecticut 39.1 v1,371
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...
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"We need to regain the compassion we've thrown away in the "everything is okay!" anti-conservative backlash such that we can help people in obvious distress."
Ant-conservative backlash? Republicans, as in elected officials, are calling their political opponents pedophiles and communists. They claim guns are going to be taken away for the last 40 years guess what actually gets banned? Abortion. Multiple Republicans are still lying about election fraud and you wonder why there's a backlash?
I'm generally not in the USA so I'm trying to speak of things more internationally, and broader than just the divisive Dem/Rep mob.
And no, the backlash I'm talking about is the last eighty or more years. The hippies are boomers, after all.
> Top 10 states by drug overdose ...
I'm not talking about deaths but deaths that society encourages. What would happen in that area if you tried to shoot up in front of a cop?
> there's no fentanyl distribution that I can see. Care to provide a source?
The programs aren't very well documented because they're "just" a doctor treating their patients, many of whom they never meet. The newspaper articles aren't great. Here's a transcript of the Alberta government examining Vancouver's drug situation for the purposes of setting their own policies. There are also other days of testimony and citizen input if you look around. https://docs.assembly.ab.ca/LADDAR_files/docs/committees/ess...
> The drug is extremely potent to be consumed alone.
Yeah. The dealers intentionally kill a few every now and then as an ad for their product and they manipulate the potency in competition with other dealers. The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago.
"The police warn non drug users that a cheap street dose is many times more likely to kill an inexperienced user than a similar dose from a decade ago."
This is a conspiracy theory. Evidence?
And about your first comment, I'm showing numbers of deaths, you're claiming that some part of that is encouraged and that percentage is higher for liberal cities. But the death rate doesn't correlate either way. So it doesn't make sense, even if it was encouraged apparently it's not making things worse
Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper in another country.
Because the cities literally follow the same public policy. Don't arrest for "simple usage", camping on the streets is allowed, etc. They're getting advice from the same people. But yes, the USA does not that I know, have vending machines for drugs yet, that's still afaik a Canadian thing. In the USA you have to go to a "clinic" and ask a worker for your dose by hand and generally they want you to consume the drug there.
> [Street doses growing in strength] is a conspiracy theory.
Not even a little. I'm not talking about the why or the who. When tested the bags sold contain more active drug and many first-time users are reported dying when generally opioids (read erowid, etc) don't do that.
> Evidence?
Your googling fingers are busted but the ones you use to complain are working?
> Most of what you said is speculation and you haven't provided meaningful evidence besides linking to a paper
No, I've provided enough evidence to show that things are run by people who don't know what they're doing and are misrepresenting the studies to the city. If you can't find the public documents talking about your own cities you aren't trying hard enough.
> in another country.
Lol, so sorry the world doesn't end at your borders.
It's not my job in a debate to provide evidence for your arguments
"Lol, so sorry the world doesn't end at your borders."
We are discussing American politics
We're also discussing drugs and the lib/con divide which aren't in the article either. I didn't respond to you originally, you responded to me which means you adopt the discussion at that point - or did you intend to reply elsewhere?
Also, this is how you stay uninformed. Refusing to look to countries who are a few years ahead of you on a policy cycle. Drugs are drugs no matter the country.
> [not my job] to provide evidence for your arguments
You don't have to. I fully supported my argument, it's not my fault you can't read Canadian.
It's as valid for me to quote Vancouver as a model for SF and LA as it was for Vancouver to reference Amsterdam twenty years ago.
Here's just one set of statistics-Most Murders 2022
St. Louis, MO (69.4)
Baltimore, MD (51.1)
New Orleans, LA (40.6)
Detroit, MI (39.7)
Cleveland, OH (33.7)
Las Vegas, NV (31.4)
Kansas City, MO (31.2)
Memphis, TN (27.1)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...
https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...
Here's an npr article showing that the effects in nyc were overstated
https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-poli...
Can you name any policies or bills that Republicans have to make this happen? Can you prove that social norms have an effect on crime or homelessness? Are you claiming gay people are more likely to be criminals because they don't?
Homeless: "Research shows that, compared to homeless families, homeless single adults have higher rates of serious mental illness, addiction disorders, and other severe health problems." How would social norms fix that? If an adult has a mental illness and can't afford care are you willing to have universal health care? You don't think if they had family that could take them in and they were willing they would do that?
https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-ho...
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Here's some GOP news about social norms
1.https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/29/cawthorn-orgies-fre... 00021548
2.https://people.com/politics/madison-cawthorn-wife-cristina-d...
3.https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/09/29/marj...
4.https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/jd-vance-violent-mar...
"GOP SENATE CANDIDATE J.D. VANCE: IF PEOPLE LOVE THEIR KIDS, THEY’LL STAY IN VIOLENT MARRIAGES"
5.https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/23/matt-gaetz-sex-trafficking-p...
and you damn well I know go on
What does this actually mean in practice? This vague comment could mean anything from running for office, passing no laws and shouting "Hey don't get divorced" to passing laws making it illegal for anybody to get divorced.
"Supporting social norms that dissuade destructive behavior"
Nobody is for "destructive behavior". What is "destructive behavior" and what changes does this vague comment mean in practice? It could mean anything from passing no laws and shouting "don't do drugs" to dissuading homeliness by throwing all homeless people in jail.
That's not actionable. What does that even mean? What law or laws would you want proposed and passed that would accomplish that? Are there any political candidates that have a list of these laws, justifications -- with hard data -- why these sorts of laws will fix the stated problems, and a plan to get them put into place?
I feel like the "the left" is undergoing a purity spiral whereas other parties are scooping up everyone pushed out.
Think about how far we have swung in one direction. Its going the same distance in the other. May god help us.
What is this center you think we are going back to because all I see are far right politicans and the end of American democracy
Granting all the problems you've cited, things have still been much worse in the past than they are today. Maybe not in the recent past, the 90s and 00s look quite rosy today in some (not all) respects, but think a bit further back. America has gone through civil war, anti-communist witch trials, frequent politically motivated bombings and assassinations, etc. Throughout all of that, people have remained hopeful that things could get better.
The greatest threat facing America today is demoralization. The belief that demise is inevitable and cannot be prevented could do America more permanent harm than anything else.
Trump is constantly saying America is a failed state. A democracy fails because people don't believe it works. All of this is republican
Evangelicals are key backers of the republican party.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism
These "Christian nationalists" are not a majority in any shape or form, but the GOP as a party bends over backwards for them.
I'm not saying I like the American right with their religion and their fixation on abortion (I do agree with them on some other things). I'm saying maybe there's a growing trend to the right, globally, and if there is, I hope it stops in the center and stays there for a long time, because I am a centrist.
If you were to suggest that your average Republican US citizen is more centrist than your average Democrat US citizen, I would probably agree. But when it comes to the politicians and the people running the parties, I think the GOP is much farther right than the Democrats are far left.
The problem is that conservatives (at least in the US, though this is happening in Europe too) have been swinging even farther to the right than most liberals have been swinging left.
I think we're in for some bad times if the leftists don't stop stepping all over their own feet, causing a backlash (that we're already seeing to some degree) that puts the autocrats in power irrevocably.
Actual liberals need to field a bit of a defense against this encroachment, and in language the public can understand. "No, XYZ is not [a liberal action] because ..."
I fear this more than a backlash because it speaks in our name. Our usual political opponents reacting to us at least openly enact their own policies and messages and leave our voices and our message unmolested.
But if so, it's curious that the vocal left had shifted their attention from the disparity between people living in huts and palaces, to making sure that the people living in palaces are appropriately representative. That's a surprisingly conservative project (for better or worse).
You said "countries that go to woke" then listed a bunch of horrible things.
The definition of woke is "alert to injustice in society, especially racism."
I suspect nearly all people would fail this test, execpt those who've been on both sides (at least in small ways) enough times.
It is also a weird kind of neo-feudalism, excluding outsiders that cannot or won't fit the expected mold. In the court of Versailles, you had to behave according to a certain stiff etiquette. If the same is required in institutions of higher learning, how many really creative people will be willing to put up with it?
Artistic creativity brews strongest when there's an omnipresent dogma to reject, and the current pastiche of thoughtlessly-implemented progressivism is fertile ground.
It's been bubbling up in standup comedy for a while, but that tends to be the quickest turnaround on cultural commentary.
No nuanced good idea ever survives contact with a brainless bureaucracy.
Can you give an example? At my colleges there were no rules about "stiff etiquette"
The question is just — what type of injustice do you prefer?
Does it?
Discriminating on the basis of race for these programs is so stupid. Ask why and people say “because socioeconomic status”, but then why don’t you discriminate on that? I think people know this but it’s a political move (black people vote for democrats for the vast majority, so making it means tested instead wouldn’t be popular with them).
I think a lot of bad faith prevarication prevents any improvement (such as the question I was replying to).
Elaborate, and make it good.
Ive grown up around poor whites and dislike for welfare among them was pretty much always a dislike of government generally, and the perception that welfare makes people lazy (often because they knew other poor people who would take advantage of welfare. One of whom got their kids taken away because they couldn’t financially support them, were told they could get them back if they could hit some financial milestones, then proceeded to use their tax return to buy a used mustang).
I don't think these conversations need to devolve. Where are the large-scale studies that show that your data point is the one that's the most common? I'm willing to believe that it is, but everyone seems to just prefer to assume their data point is the one we should be acting upon.
The problem is the things being challenged for many (of not most or virtually all) people is their identity and morality. Not simply an experiment about if blueberries have more antioxidants than blackberries. Data and evidence simply don’t matter in these sorts of discussions. And that’s why they tend to devolve quickly.
When you make such a significant claim denigrating an entire people, you better have evidence. For example, in recent studies I’ve seen, whites have the LEAST in group bias (bias towards their own race), and blacks have the most BY FAR. Whites were the only group that even showed net out group bias (white liberals). At a glance, that suggests to me that whites are the least likely to be racist across the board, often to the point of racism towards their own race.
Might be time to check more than one of your assumptions, but more importantly, stop trying to police what I and others here say. I’m an adult, if you don’t wish to engage further that’s up to you but I and the others on these boards can make our own decisions, and there are moderators for when things get out of hand. Thanks.
“unless you plan to force me.” Jesus wept.
This seems like the most reasonable solution. If you believe that systemic racism exists in the background, then this corrects for its real effects. If you don’t, I’m sure you at least accept that all else equal, a smart poor person will have accomplished less than a smart rich person due to lack of resources, so if you can correct for that in admissions you better identify smart people.
Need-oriented discrimination, with no accounting for race, is the answer
In the welfare days, those that were in more need were women with children where the man ditched the family. So more effort and money was applied there which seems totally reasonable.
But it also incentivized men to leave their families to qualify, and they did in high numbers.
These type of things made to correct something in the past also have a tendency to incentivize something bad in the future.
This is part of why these things are so difficult in practice.
These selection criteria are meant to match students with schools filled with students of the same ability level. Of course there will always be factors in life that make it harder or easier for people to succeed.
Having had exceptionally difficult life circumstances doesn't somehow change the fact that you need to have already mastered Algebra to succeed at MIT for example.
We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.
This is harder, but I agree the right place to focus our energies. The problem is that the people that want to solve the problem are those in higher education. The people at the root of the problem are probably the same ones that don't want to solve it. A bit of a catch-22.
Someone with an IQ of 140 but poor might not have accomplished as much as a rich person with an IQ of 100, so on paper the rich person looks better, but correcting for circumstances the poor (smart) person is wayyy better. This is meritocratic.
And I’m certainly not suggesting you take the objectively worst person, especially in a job market. Universities are given public money to provide societal benefits. If they aren’t properly able to give people opportunities, they don’t deserve my tax dollars.
The problem is that we have never actually done that. "Legacy admissions" is a fine example of that failure. Large donations influence admissions decisions. Biases (unconscious or conscious) can take two people of equal merit and cause an admissions officer to prefer one over the other.
There have already been studies showing that simply changing a person's name (either to present a different gender or race/national origin) on a resume can result in a different hiring decision.
A purpose of all of these equity initiatives is to compensate for the reasons why we already suck at giving people opportunities based on merit. Some of them are ill-advised and end up not working, but that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and accept the status quo.
And I certainly don't expect us to wave a magic wand and turn ourselves into perfectly rational, unbiased robots who actually do select purely on merit. Which wouldn't even fix the problem, anyway. But I feel like people like you who tout this "merit" thing are also pushing something impossible to accomplish.
Additionally, at least when one goes by the original purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead of yet another way for employers to bypass ADA and other anti discrimination regulations - it should be the way that qualitative judgements by humans prefer the academically gifted and interested!
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03251-0
You're not wrong, but I interpret this as evidence that the problem is earlier in the pipeline and trying to fix it here is a hack.
They select for math ability, it just so happens that students with access to great resources get better at math than those without them.
> The result is that the student base will be overwhelmingly white rich kids, which is pretty problematic Pretty clearly not true. It is overwhelmingly asian kids and while wealth plays a factor, poor asians still do exceptionally well (IIRC poor asians do better than rich whites). This can never be acknowledged because it makes people less sympathetic to your point.
> purpose of academia - that is, to provide education and research opportunities to the actually gifted instead
A students innate ability is irrelevant for college admissions. What matters is what are your actual capabilities. Are you capable doing mathematics at the highest level or are you not? An innately talented student who is bad at math due to life circumstances out of their control is still bad at math.
So we just throw our hands up and lament that those without preexisting opportunities stay down?
I completely disagree. Colleges should be looking for high ceiling students who have the potential to do great things if the college throws their resources at the kid for four years.
> A students innate ability is irrelevant for college admissions. What matters is what are your actual capabilities. Are you capable doing mathematics at the highest level or are you not?
Last time I checked, the whole point of college is to develop these skills!
Should every single person who didn't get to take advanced math in high school be immediately disqualified from studying high level math, even if they have the potential to do incredibly well given the tools? This isn't to say that students who have the foundation should be kept down, more that those without it shouldn't be excluded if they have the potential to succeed.
I can completely believe that this is the result, but I find it very hard to believe that it is (at least in all cases) the point. At my university, the decision to stop considering some standardized tests came from the department and college level, where we don't even make the decisions, not from the admissions department. While it is easy for me to believe that there were unintended consequences, I can say for sure that what you describe was not our goal.
-years later-
OH no, we're taking the pr hits for our disgustingly discriminative and biggoted admissions processes.
It's incredibly easy to fill it out once and then fire off a dozen applications in an afternoon.
You're also not allowed to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year - otherwise both universities would get twice as many applicants.
Every college predicts its yield and admits enough extra to get a full class. It’s basic college admissions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_(college_admissions) https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-yield-788445
Why would we expect this to not be the case? It’s literally additional evidence of scholastic aptitude and, if you want it to not have any effect on admissions, you have to prevent its inclusion* rather than making it optional, as optional means “those with strong scores submit those scores.”
* Or, accept them in the application but prevent their inclusion in the admissions process and use them only for research/analytics and only after the fall semester starts.
So, one thing that will work and keep it all simple: Just establish quotas. "We will admit the highest scoring black students until we hit x%." But I suppose that would make legal challenges easier.
I’m not a fan of quotas, but I do think taking race into account up until a point is reasonable. It’s just a really tricky line.
https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
There are some good snippets, but I’m on my phone. The whole thing is worth a read though.
An alternate explanation for what they are finding in that paper: The creators of the test favor questions whose response correlates well with how the person scores overall. A question that low-scoring people are more likely to get right is a bad question.
What the researchers should have done is looked at racial differences in answering questions given the same overall score. Of course, that won't find discrimination so they're not going to publish it.
Your proposed experiment doesn’t test what you think it does. Since we are trying to determine if the test is biased you can’t control using the score on the test that might be biased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...
The idea was to remove the social upbringing's impact on test scores, as candidates from higher socioeconomic status are heavily advantaged from using a larger vocabulary from birth.
A PhD friend who studied this told me it had no measurable impact. Put aside raising math tutors salaries of course.
The colleges just give out rules how to calculate "points" (usually 40% are the grades, 60% is the test score, but some (eg medicine back in my time) require you to choose chemistry or biology as one of your subjects and that is worth 20%, next to 40% for the other ones and 40% for the grades).
Students know those rules, apply for a college they want, finish the year, do the standardized tests, get the results, colleges calculate them into points, and if there are 60 spots for that study course, top 60 students are accepted... you don't even have to wait to get your letter, colleges publish that the cuttoff was 82 points to get accepted, and if you're above that, you're in, if not, you compete in other colleges/programmes that still have open spots left over.
No races, no letters, no subjective stuff, no problems with -isms.
taking grades into account seems weird as hell
It's never going to happen, but still. If people don't like it then maybe the solution is to improve the quality of other universities so that getting rejected from Harvard isn't such a big blow in the first place.
Whereas NYU Stern or whatever is a world-wide network.
??
Then suddenly you have the ability to boot non-performers on the college path into something else.
One of the best things about adulthood is no longer spending every day with what one teacher called "the peanut gallery" hooting and squawking from the back of the room.
Private universities should be able to use whatever criteria they want (as long as there is no illegal discrimination) including "building communities" and "shaping the student body". (It's a free country after all!) But public universities must use objective criteria. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That's a basic principle of fairness that should apply in this land of opportunity. No "shaping" of the student body by universities that receive funding from taxpayers, because that is unfair to students. Imagine being denied admission by the only good public university in your state, not because your grades or test scores are not good enough, but because you didn't fit in whatever "shape" the university decided is appropriate for that year! For more on this see [2].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-selection-method-can-bo...
[2] https://circles.page/5680a56b5c28af0998656e09/College-Admiss...
And let's not pretend that they are 100% fair and impartial. We know for a fact that they are racially biased against different races depending on the time period. And maybe the one who rejected you didn't like how you name sounded. It's not as though the process is transparent, and they're only making it a 100 times more opaque as people catch on to them.
This Holistic Admissions nonsense has always been a scam just like Holistic Medicine
In retrospect, the only courses in I enjoyed were small seminar passion projects.
Having test scores to fall back on is more useful as a CYA exercise than anything meaningful. "Nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey” indeed.
College admission has been unfair for generations. TBH I'm not sure "fairness" is even a good metric. Is it fair that I didn't have to work after school to support my family? No. Is it fair that my parents have advanced degrees and read to me as a young child? No. Is it fair that I got to take the SAT twice, because I wanted a higher math score? No. None of that is fair, and all of it helped me get into highly selective colleges.
> The university is primarily for theological indoctrination and secondarily for rich kids to get the same credentials as smart kids so they can maintain their status
> This has not changed one iota since Oxford was chartered, it's what the system is for, take the Caplanpill
This is the crux of the affirmative action fascists. They picked what they thought was a “fair” set of criteria and it didn’t produce the outcome they wanted. They concluded it wasn’t “fair” because it didn’t produce they wanted. That’s garbage.
Backing into an outcome simply based on skin color that they want is racist and truly unfair.
If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas. No one does this. South side Chicago and St. Louis Missouri and Baltimore aren’t filled with stupid people. They are filled with people who have suffered generational poverty, living in some of the most violent areas of the world. If you dump money into schools, jobs, and police in those areas, you will produce a thriving middle class in a single generation and from there you can create hundreds of thousands and millions of educated “underrepresented” people that are COMPETITIVE.
No, that's science. If your goal is "more racially- and background-diverse admissions", and you set up a process to achieve that, and then find that your new process didn't work, then the process was wrong. So you come up with a new process.
> If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas.
The problem is that universities don't really have the ability to invest in education and safety in lower income areas. As rich as many top-tier private universities are, they don't have the resources to make a dent in this problem. So you have a chicken-and-egg problem: you can't fix the inequity that causes some kids to get a worse primary education, but you can't give them a better secondary education and allow that to flow back into their communities.
You have to break the cycle somewhere, and it seems pretty obvious that US federal and local governments have been failing miserably at improving education and safety in underserved communities. So you decide that you're going to find kids that your regular admissions practices would have rejected out of hand, but have the potential to learn and be successful at your school, even if there are gaps in their education. No, it's not a perfect plan, but what had been going on before wasn't working either. And maybe this won't work. But I think it's a worth trying.
If the objective is to increase the amount of certain skin colors, then fine. But call it that. Don’t be racist and then wrap it up in a lie saying that it’s to be “fair”. “Fair” in the way it’s used in the article is entirely subjective, which is not scientific.
When the system is as obviously corrupt as it is now, people lose faith in the system entirely and that’s what’s happened.
> The problem is that universities don't really have the ability to invest in education and safety in lower income areas.
I wasn’t talking about the universities, I was talking about the government. If the government is willing to dump hundreds of billions into Ukraine, I’d rather see that money going into creating businesses, schools and safety in the most egregious areas of our own country and build them up. Create competitive applicants by destroying generational poverty.
Not by bending admission standards and lying to everyone’s face as if we are racist for pointing out their racism. I would much rather see my tax dollars funding this rebuilding of the worst parts of the country than war. And if it produces hundreds of thousands of competitive students one generation from now, we all benefit because they won’t be as underrepresented and we can get rid of these racist policies by radical left fascists that believe that more racism is the answer for racism.
At least Marx was smart enough to understand that ultimately who has the money/assets is the key, unlike modern progressives and their obsession with other less relevant qualities. We should tax the rich and fund the poor regardless of their ethnicity or identity.
Well, we need to make them understand that some ethical systems are better than others. Negative util is truthtil.
In many cases college is a scam, investment is simply not worth the money (future earnings). Diversity studies referenced in article were mostly performed on "liberal arts colleges". Maybe this type of study is good hobby for rich white kids. But most normal people will not throw away their future on such schools!
And if companies dropped the degree requirement and only asked leetcode mediums, I'd consider that fine honestly. Most of what I learned through college was useless to my career, 6 years out of college and I think I'd struggle to name even 25% of the classes I took.