Not commenting on the substance but critiquing some bad math:
"<1% of Black students score over 700 in the maths SAT. Black people make up 12.4% of the population. This means that Black students are much more than ten times as unlikely to score over 700 than would be representative of their population share."
Pause here. By this logic, since whites are over 50% of population, over 50% of whites should score over 700. Non-sensical. Instead what you need to do is compare % of blacks over 700 with % of total over 700. Or if you insist of using % of population, % of people over 700 who are black vs total % of students who are black.
The actual numbers: 1% of blacks who take SAT score over 700 on Math, vs 9% of total test takers. Same general ballpark you discussed. But just correcting the framing.
This is mistaken wording on my part, with the conditional probability statement reversed (1% of Black students score over 700 instead of 1% of over 700 scorers being black) but my maths is correct. 1% of those scoring over 700 are Black, and they are thus underrepresented by a factor of more than ten:
"Of those scoring above 700, 43% are Asian and 45% are white, compared to 6% Hispanic or Latino and 1% Black. Meanwhile, among those scoring between 300-390, 2% are Asian and 23% white, compared to 43% Hispanic or Latino and 26% Black."
I don't totally disagree with this, but a few points:
1. As we've seen at elite high schools in the US, if you make the selection process purely based on test scores, likely the winners will be majority Asian. In one sense it is very good that you have families coming in as immigrants, easily understanding how to get ahead in society, and then working hard to do so. That said, in the mode of pure politics, majority Asian institutions are very vulnerable politically, which is why many notable elite high schools are being reformed to deliberately have their Asian share reduced.
2. Holistic admissions and ALDC biases would exist without affirmative action, and schools do then because they want to have the biases these processes create, not by accident. I'm very much of the view that, as stated by now-ignored SCOTUS precedent, schools should have to take all other measures to raise class diversity before going to affirmative action, and thus should be forced to scrap ALDC biases before affirmative action goes in place, which is currently not what almost anyone asks of them.
3. Our current system for racial sorting in the US is a kludge. It would advantage the children of Nigerian oil barons but a refugee from Afghanistan or Palestine would likely register as white, and a low-caste Indian immigrant would be treated as Asian, the worst penalty that can be earned. Meanwhile, there's no formal accounting for socioeconomic class, so poor whites typically don't benefit at all.
4. This post is focused on elite institutions, but affirmative action is everywhere. Outside of elite institutions, my impression is that there is more evidence that affirmative action pushes some portion of students into academic challenges they aren't prepared for, leading people who could have been successful graduates to drop out.
5. It's fundamentally strange to me that these schools have been caught engaging in pretty bad discrimination, e.g. the quite offensive texts between NC college admissions officers about Asian students, and yet there is not widespread condemnation of this from the left, and everyone has just accepted that the schools will try to breach the law as much as possible without being in active contempt of court, which is something we accept for few other institiutions.
1. If, as a society, we want to reduce the Asian share (something I'm pretty damn uncomfortable with for obvious reasons) then we should have the guts to do it quantitatively, through bonuses to all other groups or penalties rather than sneakily. This might make people face up to what they're doing more clearly;.
2. Absolutely agree that various biases, including ADLC bias, and pro-wealth bias would be built into the process by colleges even if there was no attempts at 'sneaky' as opposed to 'open' AA. Still, adding vagueness to enable AA has, I think, probably worsened these trends.
3. I think we can, and should, demand AA for groups not traditionally covered by AA, and forms of disadvantage that may not be immediately visible. These include socioeconomics and invisible disabilities- although I'm conflicted about the topic. I'm writing a post on this at the moment.
4. Agree that the elite institutions focus of the debate is tiresome, this is part of why I find the debate so boring, and it partly lead to the mental sigh of exasperation which made me write this.
5. I think part of the reason this is accepted is because everyone, except a few dyed in the wool conservatives, implicitly grasps something like the logic of this post- one just can't have an elites production factory that doesn't at least make an effort at racial inclusion, in a society like America. Even the courts get that on some level I suspect.
If top universities don't accept top students, they'll cease to be top universities.
Green Berets and Navy SEALs don't produce cream of the crop by forcing unfit, low-quality soldiers into their ranks. They take only the best that knock on their door and continue to build them up.
It's the way of the world - and not only is nobody entitled to anything, but entitlement is dangerous. Think back to your men/bears post: what sort of men are most dangerous to women? Not the elite, overachievers, but the low-status entitled men. Elite, high-status men don't freak out and kill their wife or girlfriend if she decides to leave - they just find a new woman. It's low-status, entitled men who lose their minds and kill them. "WHAT?! You're going to leave ME?! I'll show you!"
Entitlement is one of the greatest dangers a society can let in - it can and should be squashed in the first and every instance.
> If top universities don't accept top students, they'll cease to be top universities.
...but is that really true? Take India's case, for instance; yes, it *is* an underdeveloped country so even its "top colleges" are nowhere near Ivy League (in terms of budget and world rankings), but IITs (considered the best in India) have not lost their reputation despite their *50% reservation*. You may argue that actually it's *because of* reservation that they aren't as good as Ivy League, but there are other good colleges in India which don't have reservation and as far as I can tell they aren't close to being as good as the IITs. Besides, really good colleges let rich kids enroll not because they are smarter than the kid with less money or decided to apply for a need-based scholarship, but because they can pay more. This has not made any of those really good colleges... uh, cease to be really good.
> Green Berets and Navy SEALs don't produce cream of the crop by forcing unfit, low-quality soldiers into their ranks.
This is a false example. Affirmative action in Navy Seals does not matter as much as affirmative action in Ivy Leagues. People in the Navy Seals don't... really have all that control in society. Yes, they protect the country or whatever, but reservation isn't important there precisely because it doesn't help protect the country. In colleges, however, it is important because, as the post says, "The Ivy League universities are sites of elite reproduction. They are where we sanctify and bless the next class of ruling brats, or at least a big portion thereof. They are not, primarily, sites of education."
Reservation in Ivy League is not about "entitlement" but a way to make sure that the "seggregationist's dream" does not come to fruitition.
> Ivy League universities are massively entrenched in favor of existing rich families, but you know what is even more entrenched in favor of existing rich families: every other available system of selecting elites in our society.
> So we are left with affirmative action. Now there are two ways to do affirmative action, sneakily and openly.
Technically, there are actually many other options. Here's one: start drawing up the plans for an educational institution that isn't *an obvious fucking joke*, like the majority of the constituent components of the majority of our institutions, educational or otherwise.
Humans are already highly skilled in precision engineering, the main problem is that it seems to have never occurred to anyone to apply these skills to non-purely-materialistic (ie: anything metaphysical) domains *at the public institutional level* (all sorts of people do it behind the scenes in marketing, politics/"PR" (propaganda), etc....to which we whine endlessly, and accept as "nothing can be done, that's just the way it is").
This planet is full of a bunch of hypnotized, cognitive lightweights (but only because of the hypnosis, I boldly and optimistically proclaim). Maybe it's time to get our shit together.
> Affirmative action and minority rights. I don’t trust people on this blog to think clearly about any actual minority group, so let’s pretend we’re worried about affirmative action for Martians, who have been a disempowered underclass ever since their giant heat-ray-bearing tripod machines broke down.
Modern affirmative action says that given the choice between a Martian or an equally qualified Earthling, one must hire the Martian. One big obvious problem here is that “equally qualified” is a matter of opinion. It may be that a boss is prejudiced against Martians, and so tells an excellent Martian candidate that ve is underqualified for the position – the Martian may never know. Or a Martian who was genuinely underqualified may paranoidly believe ve was denied out of prejudice and start a costly lawsuit.
There are other problems as well. Some jobs may have legitimate reasons not to hire Martians – maybe Martians make lousy pilots because their single lidless eye gives them terrible depth perception. Certainly a Martian actor is unqualified to play Abraham Lincoln in a historical biopic. One could offer to let these jobs apply for exemptions, but this means a costly bureaucratic process, and is likely to end with large companies with good lawyers obtaining the exemptions, small companies with poor lawyers not obtaining the exemptions, and no concern about fairness to Martians in any case.
In the worst possible situation, a non-prejudiced boss may decide not to hire Martians because it would be harder to reprimand or dismiss a Martian when they could threaten to sue the company or start a viral Tumblr post accusing the company of speciesism.
Compare a market-informed solution: run a bunch of controlled studies in which bosses get identical Earthling and Martian resumes, find out exactly how strong the prejudice against Martians is, then levy an appropriate tax on hiring Earthlings (or give a subsidy for hiring Martians). Maybe hiring Earthlings costs 5% extra, which is funnelled into scholarships for impoverished Martian larvae.
--end quote--
...which honestly just feels like affirmative action with extra steps. I still think his solution is better than the traditional method of practicing reservation, and I felt it was worth discussing here.
Bless Scott's little heart and remaining (undonated) kidney. The Rationalist conceit that they can say anything meaningful about complicated social problems using pure abstraction, combined with being utterly resistant to any historical awareness as an impure distraction from the purity of their theorizing, is a strong argument that they actually make people less intelligent.
Can you elaborate on how Scott's solution is too simple to solve the complicated problem and history of affirmative action? Other than the fact that it wouldn't fix everything, I mean.
Well, I can go into a sentence or two, but I don't want to write a whole essay. Scott is nice person, but he is extremely ignorant on certain topics, and gets defensive when people point this out to him (granted, it's understandable, he's usually getting a lot of nastiness which buries the careful refutations).
Take just the first sentence "... think clearly about any actual minority group ..." - this is like the old joke about studying cows, but for real: "I don't want to deal with any actual cows, so let's pretend we have a frictionless spherical cow which is a point-mass ...". For any "actual minority group" there's an entire history, which if you blithely abstract away because it's messy and yucky and *NOT CLEAR THINKING*, the result is you're almost guaranteed to be talking nonsense - because you're not dealing with the real world, but a fantasy of your own devising. In that real world, you absolute must deal with aspects such as the sentiment bluntly summed up by Lyndon B. Johnson, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.". If trying to handle that causes you to recoil as an improper appeal to emotion, well, it's a problem with your framework, not reality. If you can't stand the sight of blood, don't try to be a trauma surgeon.
That is, people aren't spherical point-mass atoms in society, and proposing some sort of scheme of taxing and scholarships as a cure-all fails immediately, because it doesn't take into account all the real-world reasons for one group to disadvantage another group.
Sigh, that was explaining one sentence. Forgive me, it's too much to do more.
Not commenting on the substance but critiquing some bad math:
"<1% of Black students score over 700 in the maths SAT. Black people make up 12.4% of the population. This means that Black students are much more than ten times as unlikely to score over 700 than would be representative of their population share."
Pause here. By this logic, since whites are over 50% of population, over 50% of whites should score over 700. Non-sensical. Instead what you need to do is compare % of blacks over 700 with % of total over 700. Or if you insist of using % of population, % of people over 700 who are black vs total % of students who are black.
The actual numbers: 1% of blacks who take SAT score over 700 on Math, vs 9% of total test takers. Same general ballpark you discussed. But just correcting the framing.
This is mistaken wording on my part, with the conditional probability statement reversed (1% of Black students score over 700 instead of 1% of over 700 scorers being black) but my maths is correct. 1% of those scoring over 700 are Black, and they are thus underrepresented by a factor of more than ten:
"Of those scoring above 700, 43% are Asian and 45% are white, compared to 6% Hispanic or Latino and 1% Black. Meanwhile, among those scoring between 300-390, 2% are Asian and 23% white, compared to 43% Hispanic or Latino and 26% Black."
See:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-and-maintain-racial-inequity/
I have now corrected the text to reflect the intention. Thanks for pointing it out.
I don't totally disagree with this, but a few points:
1. As we've seen at elite high schools in the US, if you make the selection process purely based on test scores, likely the winners will be majority Asian. In one sense it is very good that you have families coming in as immigrants, easily understanding how to get ahead in society, and then working hard to do so. That said, in the mode of pure politics, majority Asian institutions are very vulnerable politically, which is why many notable elite high schools are being reformed to deliberately have their Asian share reduced.
2. Holistic admissions and ALDC biases would exist without affirmative action, and schools do then because they want to have the biases these processes create, not by accident. I'm very much of the view that, as stated by now-ignored SCOTUS precedent, schools should have to take all other measures to raise class diversity before going to affirmative action, and thus should be forced to scrap ALDC biases before affirmative action goes in place, which is currently not what almost anyone asks of them.
3. Our current system for racial sorting in the US is a kludge. It would advantage the children of Nigerian oil barons but a refugee from Afghanistan or Palestine would likely register as white, and a low-caste Indian immigrant would be treated as Asian, the worst penalty that can be earned. Meanwhile, there's no formal accounting for socioeconomic class, so poor whites typically don't benefit at all.
4. This post is focused on elite institutions, but affirmative action is everywhere. Outside of elite institutions, my impression is that there is more evidence that affirmative action pushes some portion of students into academic challenges they aren't prepared for, leading people who could have been successful graduates to drop out.
5. It's fundamentally strange to me that these schools have been caught engaging in pretty bad discrimination, e.g. the quite offensive texts between NC college admissions officers about Asian students, and yet there is not widespread condemnation of this from the left, and everyone has just accepted that the schools will try to breach the law as much as possible without being in active contempt of court, which is something we accept for few other institiutions.
1. If, as a society, we want to reduce the Asian share (something I'm pretty damn uncomfortable with for obvious reasons) then we should have the guts to do it quantitatively, through bonuses to all other groups or penalties rather than sneakily. This might make people face up to what they're doing more clearly;.
2. Absolutely agree that various biases, including ADLC bias, and pro-wealth bias would be built into the process by colleges even if there was no attempts at 'sneaky' as opposed to 'open' AA. Still, adding vagueness to enable AA has, I think, probably worsened these trends.
3. I think we can, and should, demand AA for groups not traditionally covered by AA, and forms of disadvantage that may not be immediately visible. These include socioeconomics and invisible disabilities- although I'm conflicted about the topic. I'm writing a post on this at the moment.
4. Agree that the elite institutions focus of the debate is tiresome, this is part of why I find the debate so boring, and it partly lead to the mental sigh of exasperation which made me write this.
5. I think part of the reason this is accepted is because everyone, except a few dyed in the wool conservatives, implicitly grasps something like the logic of this post- one just can't have an elites production factory that doesn't at least make an effort at racial inclusion, in a society like America. Even the courts get that on some level I suspect.
If top universities don't accept top students, they'll cease to be top universities.
Green Berets and Navy SEALs don't produce cream of the crop by forcing unfit, low-quality soldiers into their ranks. They take only the best that knock on their door and continue to build them up.
It's the way of the world - and not only is nobody entitled to anything, but entitlement is dangerous. Think back to your men/bears post: what sort of men are most dangerous to women? Not the elite, overachievers, but the low-status entitled men. Elite, high-status men don't freak out and kill their wife or girlfriend if she decides to leave - they just find a new woman. It's low-status, entitled men who lose their minds and kill them. "WHAT?! You're going to leave ME?! I'll show you!"
Entitlement is one of the greatest dangers a society can let in - it can and should be squashed in the first and every instance.
I think you have an unreasonably high opinion of the rationality of elite, overachieving, entitled men.
They're just better at covering their tracks than the losers, and can afford better lawyers.
> If top universities don't accept top students, they'll cease to be top universities.
...but is that really true? Take India's case, for instance; yes, it *is* an underdeveloped country so even its "top colleges" are nowhere near Ivy League (in terms of budget and world rankings), but IITs (considered the best in India) have not lost their reputation despite their *50% reservation*. You may argue that actually it's *because of* reservation that they aren't as good as Ivy League, but there are other good colleges in India which don't have reservation and as far as I can tell they aren't close to being as good as the IITs. Besides, really good colleges let rich kids enroll not because they are smarter than the kid with less money or decided to apply for a need-based scholarship, but because they can pay more. This has not made any of those really good colleges... uh, cease to be really good.
> Green Berets and Navy SEALs don't produce cream of the crop by forcing unfit, low-quality soldiers into their ranks.
This is a false example. Affirmative action in Navy Seals does not matter as much as affirmative action in Ivy Leagues. People in the Navy Seals don't... really have all that control in society. Yes, they protect the country or whatever, but reservation isn't important there precisely because it doesn't help protect the country. In colleges, however, it is important because, as the post says, "The Ivy League universities are sites of elite reproduction. They are where we sanctify and bless the next class of ruling brats, or at least a big portion thereof. They are not, primarily, sites of education."
Reservation in Ivy League is not about "entitlement" but a way to make sure that the "seggregationist's dream" does not come to fruitition.
Related, with discussion of more vs less opaque selection methods: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PTC7bZdZoqbCcAshW/changes-in-college-admissions
> Ivy League universities are massively entrenched in favor of existing rich families, but you know what is even more entrenched in favor of existing rich families: every other available system of selecting elites in our society.
> So we are left with affirmative action. Now there are two ways to do affirmative action, sneakily and openly.
Technically, there are actually many other options. Here's one: start drawing up the plans for an educational institution that isn't *an obvious fucking joke*, like the majority of the constituent components of the majority of our institutions, educational or otherwise.
Humans are already highly skilled in precision engineering, the main problem is that it seems to have never occurred to anyone to apply these skills to non-purely-materialistic (ie: anything metaphysical) domains *at the public institutional level* (all sorts of people do it behind the scenes in marketing, politics/"PR" (propaganda), etc....to which we whine endlessly, and accept as "nothing can be done, that's just the way it is").
This planet is full of a bunch of hypnotized, cognitive lightweights (but only because of the hypnosis, I boldly and optimistically proclaim). Maybe it's time to get our shit together.
Scott Alexander frequently derides affirmative action in most of his culture war / feminism topics. His solution to the problem of representation?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/
> Affirmative action and minority rights. I don’t trust people on this blog to think clearly about any actual minority group, so let’s pretend we’re worried about affirmative action for Martians, who have been a disempowered underclass ever since their giant heat-ray-bearing tripod machines broke down.
Modern affirmative action says that given the choice between a Martian or an equally qualified Earthling, one must hire the Martian. One big obvious problem here is that “equally qualified” is a matter of opinion. It may be that a boss is prejudiced against Martians, and so tells an excellent Martian candidate that ve is underqualified for the position – the Martian may never know. Or a Martian who was genuinely underqualified may paranoidly believe ve was denied out of prejudice and start a costly lawsuit.
There are other problems as well. Some jobs may have legitimate reasons not to hire Martians – maybe Martians make lousy pilots because their single lidless eye gives them terrible depth perception. Certainly a Martian actor is unqualified to play Abraham Lincoln in a historical biopic. One could offer to let these jobs apply for exemptions, but this means a costly bureaucratic process, and is likely to end with large companies with good lawyers obtaining the exemptions, small companies with poor lawyers not obtaining the exemptions, and no concern about fairness to Martians in any case.
In the worst possible situation, a non-prejudiced boss may decide not to hire Martians because it would be harder to reprimand or dismiss a Martian when they could threaten to sue the company or start a viral Tumblr post accusing the company of speciesism.
Compare a market-informed solution: run a bunch of controlled studies in which bosses get identical Earthling and Martian resumes, find out exactly how strong the prejudice against Martians is, then levy an appropriate tax on hiring Earthlings (or give a subsidy for hiring Martians). Maybe hiring Earthlings costs 5% extra, which is funnelled into scholarships for impoverished Martian larvae.
--end quote--
...which honestly just feels like affirmative action with extra steps. I still think his solution is better than the traditional method of practicing reservation, and I felt it was worth discussing here.
Bless Scott's little heart and remaining (undonated) kidney. The Rationalist conceit that they can say anything meaningful about complicated social problems using pure abstraction, combined with being utterly resistant to any historical awareness as an impure distraction from the purity of their theorizing, is a strong argument that they actually make people less intelligent.
I agree Rationalists ~always fail, but do you believe it to be impossible?
Can you elaborate on how Scott's solution is too simple to solve the complicated problem and history of affirmative action? Other than the fact that it wouldn't fix everything, I mean.
Well, I can go into a sentence or two, but I don't want to write a whole essay. Scott is nice person, but he is extremely ignorant on certain topics, and gets defensive when people point this out to him (granted, it's understandable, he's usually getting a lot of nastiness which buries the careful refutations).
Take just the first sentence "... think clearly about any actual minority group ..." - this is like the old joke about studying cows, but for real: "I don't want to deal with any actual cows, so let's pretend we have a frictionless spherical cow which is a point-mass ...". For any "actual minority group" there's an entire history, which if you blithely abstract away because it's messy and yucky and *NOT CLEAR THINKING*, the result is you're almost guaranteed to be talking nonsense - because you're not dealing with the real world, but a fantasy of your own devising. In that real world, you absolute must deal with aspects such as the sentiment bluntly summed up by Lyndon B. Johnson, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.". If trying to handle that causes you to recoil as an improper appeal to emotion, well, it's a problem with your framework, not reality. If you can't stand the sight of blood, don't try to be a trauma surgeon.
That is, people aren't spherical point-mass atoms in society, and proposing some sort of scheme of taxing and scholarships as a cure-all fails immediately, because it doesn't take into account all the real-world reasons for one group to disadvantage another group.
Sigh, that was explaining one sentence. Forgive me, it's too much to do more.
Have you actually thought your theory through with any level of seriousness?
I'll note that if math SAT was the metric for entry to elite colleges whites would also be a very small minority; mostly Asian.