[pumaontheprowl]

I wish I could laugh at this, but watching institutional racism come roaring back to life over the last decade has been extremely depressing. Is there any doubt that the goal of this change is to make it easier for them to reject Asian students?

The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians.

[vmception]

Agreed, equally as much “safe spaces” are “separate but equal” race based segregation.

If some people base their opinions this way for validation: I’m a minority.

Nip it in the bud, take it to court, call it out for what it is. Race based discrimination has no place in this society, find another way, especially for any institution that takes any state or federal funding, you can totalllly curb stomp that approach.

[worker767424]

The notion of "black spaces" is one two two logical jumps from Jim Crow. I don't see how more people don't realize the implications of that term.

[CryptoPunk]

This needed to be rooted out at the legal level: civil rights laws need to be radically scaled back:

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...

There's a reason why lawyers are the second biggest financial contributors to the Democrats among professions:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBwtxXnUUAIAm8W?format=jpg&name=...

[vmception]

Existing civil rights laws are the ones that will force integration. I think you’re conflating a conservative newscycle view of what happens in some universities with the supporting legality. That article doesn’t address safe spaces, it touches on a notion of privileging speech of a victim class at the expense of a different class and says thats rooted in the civil rights act. It says everything you want to be afraid of but I think its operating in a very distorted realm and should also hire its own lawyers and see what view federal court actually hold.

[CryptoPunk]

The evidence the essay provides is compelling to me. This follow up article provides yet more evidence, including a recent $100 million + judgement against Tesla under Civil Rights Law:

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...

Anti-discrimination lawyers are licking their lips at the prospect of sueing SpaceX next, this time for sexual harassment:

https://www.space.com/spacex-sexual-harassment-allegations-l...

The explanation provided by the essays is coherent and resonates with I have seen.

The Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use IQ tests to hire applicants. It is totalitarian in nature and needs to be scaled back to enable a free society where a sanctimonious elite is not using the force of the state to reshape private citizens.

[vmception]

Unappealed lawsuits and enforcement actions by employees and government agencies does not say thats the law.

Take it to federal court, then take it to federal appeals court. If the 9th circuit doesn’t match conservative land, do the same in another circuit.

You’re playing the helpless victim while having way more resources than the “protected classes” that you feel are oppressing your way of life, all because you (and the organizations that didnt appeal) are afraid of the PR. The protected classes dealt with way more than “potentially bad PR” to create this reality so just take the L and get the courts to correct it.

[CryptoPunk]

It's not the rich corporations vs the "protected classes". It's the rich corporations vs the civil rights institutions, which includes much of the legal profession, deep-pocketed and well-connected law firms and powerful government agencies, with indefinite taxpayer support to fund their activity.

The wokification of US law was established by the Civil Rights Act. As far back as the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that using IQ tests to vet job applicants is a form of prohibited discrimination under the CRA.

[unityByFreedom]

Possibly relevant: helping students cheat on the SATs is a whole industry in China,

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...

[lozenge]

Roaring back to life? It's always been like this, it's public awareness that has improved.

[petilon]

> The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians.

Just the Ivies? UW is explicit: they want racial "equity". Meaning they won't admit more Asians, as a percentage, than the population they are picking candidates from. And they promote it as a good thing: https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/diversity-and-equity-f...

[seanmcdirmid]

The page you linked to didn’t say they “wouldn’t be admitting more Asians than the population they are picking candidates from” nor did it even remotely imply that.

The easiest way to get into UW is to be (graduate high school) from eastern Washington, they actually have a state mandated quota for that.

[petilon]

What do you think the words racial "equity" means?

[seanmcdirmid]

Aspiration. But UW is not allowed to create quotas out of thin air to implement equity (like say the Eastern WA quota).

[petilon]

If they have that aspiration they have tools to implement it. The tool is called "holistic review", which opaquifies the admissions process.

People who read college applications are "guided" by Universities using a system of feedback so they can get whatever outcome they want. Read more about that here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...

[seanmcdirmid]

UW is still a state school controller indirectly and sometimes directly by the state government. The reason the Easter WA quota exists is a because of its charter. The administrators at UW can express whatever opinion they want but don’t rule by fiat, it would take probably a state legislative vote to implement the quota you imagine exists.

College admission officers don’t get access to race and such when reviewing applications. Yes, they can add points to it, but that happens after the rest of the application is reviewed, and can’t be done without explicitly saying they are doing it.

[unpolloloco]

It's not clear that they want to admit fewer Asians... That is unless those Asian families aren't massive donors to the University...

[slavboj]

A quarter of Harvard's entering class is Asian (vs about 6% of the US population and less in the youth bracket). What proportion would you like?

[mbg721]

"What proportion (of x ethnic group) would you like?" is a question that greatly devalues the contributions of the individual student. Would you say, "You're a great interview candidate, but we already have a tall guy,"?

[perl4ever]

I was told a story about someone who applied to a school of engineering somewhere or other, in the latter part of the 1950s.

She had a sterling high school record, but they wrote a rejection letter explaining that they already had a woman attending the institution.

The punch line, as it were, as I recall it, was that "a woman" did not mean one undergraduate woman, but just one, period.

So, she went to a much less prestigious and well-known school, majored in math, and ended up being a programmer instead of an engineer.

I am not sure if she was bitter about it.

[kenjackson]

Happens all the time in sports.

And really we do it for college too. Except it is “we already have enough comp science majors”.

[thomasz]

Discrimination happens when you treat equals as unequal, or unequals as equal. There is a world of difference between "we already have enough asian compsci majors", and "we already have enough compsci majors, but there is room for a sociologist".

[slavboj]

Surely you're aware that this literally and explicitly happens in the context of college admissions. "We already have a couple tuba players, try Yale."

[kaczordon]

And it’s stayed this way for years. Odd no? Just look at Caltech with its over 40% Asian student demographic.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/caltech-college-admissions-...

[imgabe]

Whatever proportion meets the admissions criteria.

[chii]

a proportion that reflects the meritocratic criteria that university admission was founded upon (or at least, was sold as).

[troutmskreplica]

Sorry, but I don’t think your idea of meritocracy is very much in line with what most Universities are looking for.

That’s why they have things like essays and consider extracurricular activities. Most of the selective Universities specifically exclude people with high grades and very little else that they were involved in.

Moreover, I recall reading at some point that at least some of the Ivy’s, during at least the first half of the 20th century, specifically avoided students with the highest grades in favor of those who were more like a B+ average and were more social, which they determined through the very subjective means of interviewing students on campus. (I’m old enough that I recall some of my friends visiting Universities for such meetings, but I have no idea if they still meet prospective students like this).

[chillacy]

Afaik they do this because they wanted to avoid admitting so many Jewish students in the 1900s.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/14...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...

[troutmskreplica]

Sorry I cannot tell what “this” is since that article neither mentions downplaying grades or interviewing students.

I believe the specific things I am talking about were discussed in relation to introversion and The Ivy’s specifically wanting to lean toward extroverts who were well-rounded and had good social skills.

[markdown]

Meritocracy might be great for the high achievers, but it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values.

It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.

If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society. That might mean some high achievers losing out on their first choice college, it might mean affirmative action, etc.

Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.

[causi]

it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values

Sure, go ahead and see what happens when you disconnect negative behavior from negative outcomes. I'm sure that has no long-term consequences for your civilization.

[markdown]

That's a straw man you've constructed. I've never said that negative behaviour is going to be rewarded.

Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent. You seem to be suggesting that they'll be accepting slackers and truants.

[causi]

Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent [citation needed]

[polski-g]

> Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent

Now. Once they start admitting students absent an IQ test, don't be surprised when it's prestige and the assumed quality of it's graduates is diminished.

[logicchains]

>Meritocracy might be great for the high achievers, but it's bad for multicultural societies where some cultures are significantly more conscientious and dutiful than others, or simply have different values.

>It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.

By that logic, the alternative is you get more people in government, commerce etc. who are significantly less conscientious and dutiful? That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.

[markdown]

> significantly less conscientious and dutiful?

Not significantly so, no. These are still cream of the crop within their group.

> That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.

It's not ideal, but far better than the alternative.

[chii]

> it leads to greater equality and happiness.

"greater equality" is tautological when you have instituted equality of outcome, but does it produce greater happiness? I don't believe it to do so. It reduced overall outcome - as those who are forced down will not produce as much as they could've.

[jkestner]

Meritocracy is a fine ideal, but in practice is based on selection algorithms, and like any algorithm it can be and is used to launder whatever biases you like. Who decided what was meritorious? who wrote the tests?

Given what you're replying to, it sounds like you're suggesting that Asian Americans dominate power in this country, which I must be misinterpreting because that's ridiculous. I do agree with the general sentiment that what high achievers deserve is not necessarily what's good for society, but I'd say we should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.

[perl4ever]

Something I never see people talk about is the difference between:

   (1) each job being filled by the person who's better suited for it than any other person

     *versus*

   (2) each job being filled by a person who's better suited for it than for any other job

I think this is where narratives and assumptions about "meritocracy" and free markets fall down.

You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict. And it's hard to be honest from the point of view of hiring people, that (1) is basically not a realistic option. Everybody says their goal is to hire the best person for a job without acknowledging that the best person is not, and should not, be available.

Is (2) optimal for society? I'm not sure, but I think society is closer to that than (1). But "meritocracy" sounds more like (1) to me.

[rsj_hn]

> You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict.?

They are not in conflict at all, this is what the basic welfare theorems of economics say.

It's just that #2 and #1 are impossible to achieve because it requires perfect information about each person and each job, and a unified labor market, which just isn't realistic, as information has a cost and labor markets are fragmented.

In the real world, we are lucky to get some aspects of both #1 and #2, in the sense that people do search for jobs best suited for them, but imperfectly, and employers do search for workers best suited for each job, but imperfectly, and you kinda meet in the middle. If you want, you can call "meritocracy" the freedom of the employer to hire the best worker available, but I'm not sure of a snappy phrase to describe the freedom of the worker to search for the best job available. Maybe someone came up with a label for that. But really they are flipsides of a process that leads to an optimum, they are not two opposing forces where one makes the other impossible. It is like buying and selling, the supply curve does not make the demand curve impossible; both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet. If you mess with either the demand curve or the supply curve, you do not end up at the optimum price, you end up losing welfare somehow.

Obviously anything that can reduce frictions helps you get closer to the meeting of 1 and 2. For example, greater availability of job boards and pay transparency, working condition transparency to get information about available jobs to workers, or things like more accurate information about worker skills and talents to employers (e.g. meaningfulness of degrees play a role here as do rigorous interviews). Really both worker and employer are facing a murky question trying to figure out "how good is the other side here?". Both need as much information as possible.

It is the costliness of information that keeps us away from 1 and 2 simultaneously.

[vmception]

And plus these 300 year old Ivy League universities existed before the educated workforce … existed ... and will to continue survive long after the workforce thinks Ivy League has anything to do with on the job performance.

It is purely happenstance that these institutions have even had to consider caring about how they gatekeep genpop’s upwards mobility for the last half a century.

They literally have no reason to care. They believe attendees want higher education for the pursuit of academic knowledge and are so disconnected from the desperate reality. And they’re right, they can weather this fad.

The ombudsman closes the thick book in the monestary, blows dust off the back, walks outside and says “there are third generation people with Asian heritage in this country? huh, how about that.” Goes back into their monk quarters after replacing the wax, lights another candle and goes back into the books. This is how these institutions function. They don’t know anything about how passionate, desperate or how much energy has been put into simply getting in, they don’t know why its important to people except for them loving the attention and pride and money.

[hcurtiss]

I would like to see some evidence that this is how you create a “healthy” society. Excluding high achievers on the basis of factors beyond their control is how wars are started.

[crocwrestler]

Wouldn't that breed resentment amongst high achievers who get excluded by arbitrary factors beyond their control though?

[TeeMassive]

> If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society.

That's fine, but the question is, who gets to decide? Individuals.

> Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.

Receiving unearned money doesn't lead to happiness due to lack of fulfillment. Having earned money taken away doesn't lead to happiness due to a lack of reward. Equality of outcome always ends up killing the initiative and freedoms needed for prosperity to support such a society to begin with.

[seandoe]

> Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.

"Equality of outcome" == "greater equality"... Well yea, assuming outcome is definable and changing those outcomes to be "equal" is possible, by definition, things would be more "equitable" by that same definition.

"Greater happiness" - I assume you mean greater overall societal happiness. That's quite a subjective claim. I'm not sure that's even a measurable thing, but do you have any evidence of this?

[deepsun]

I disagree with you but upvoted, because you gave me some things to think about.

That's what votes are for on this site.

[boppo1]

I think this is a bad way to choose who gets to be a doctor, because if it is common knowledge then some demographic classes of doctors will be viewed as sub-par, regardless of individual merit.

[kaczordon]

Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.

The ideology of Equality of Outcome has literally lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people worldwide(Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot).

[zthrowaway]

Not caring about what people look like is a good start.

[headsupftw]

Hence the need to lower the acceptance rate of Asian applicants even more?