[bitbang]

Some people can't seem to come to grips that trying to counter injustice with injustice only compounds injustice rather than cancelling each other out. Enforcing racial diversity for the sake of racial diversity is equally as racist as enforcing racial segregation for the sake of racial segregation. Changing the ends does not necessarily justify the means.

[BaseballPhysics]

> Some people can't seem to come to grips that trying to counter injustice with injustice only compounds injustice rather than cancelling each other out

It's always fascinating to me how the definition of "injustice" is so flexible to those espousing this view.

Do you also believe in eliminating, say, food stamps, which exclude people based on their income? After all, it's a program that doles out an economic benefit to some people but not others which seems like "injustice", yeah?

How about the ADA? Seems unfair that disabled people would get special accommodations over everyone else, right? Is that an injustice?

[ori_prior]

Food stamps are an injustice, however, the ends there justify the means, food stamps are so people don't starve. They aren't "luxury dinner at fancy restaurant stamps" in the same way admission to famous(ly expensive) universities is.

ADA measures (that affect individuals) are also very different in that existing and proven disabilities are the reason to alleviate problems from those exact disabilities. They aren't blanket bonuses for some races in the way university admissions were before the most recent supreme court decision.

[BaseballPhysics]

> Food stamps are an injustice, however, the ends there justify the means

Thank you for so perfectly and succinctly illustrating my point for me.

You've apparently decided one "injustice" is okay and another one isn't, for reasons that are entirely arbitrary and based purely on your own personal value system.

But then, like the person I originally responded to, you dress it up like some kind of logical, philosophical argument, as though your personal opinion carries with it some kind of inherent truth.

[ori_prior]

You are right.

Justice and injustice are entirely subjective, there can be no objective measure of those. Why? Because they stem from an individual's value system. Which is the subjective measures (good, bad, nice, rude, just, unjust, ...) that the individual applies to objective facts (Jimmy getting a birthday gift, somebody starving, lion eating a zebra, drinking a glass of water...). A value system can try to be logical, consistent, aligned with certain goals, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes, it can't be. Society and especially "the law" try to institute common majority value system that is intended to be consistent, logical and aligned with certain goals, rooted in a few assumptions like self-preservation, equality, preservation of humanity, human-centricity, and others. Not all of those goals and assumptions are necessarily equally firm, established, or unchanging.

Now in the foodstamps example, the two goals of self-preservation of an individual and the preservation of humanity are valued higher than the more abstract goal of equality. Which is why I, in my value system, see the choice as an obvious one. Of course others might disagree, but I've assumed this (without pointing it out) to be the majority consensus. Sorry. There are even societies where the majority value system is different in that one need not or should not help a starving individual. Because they do deserve their suffering as (carmic, divine) punishment, or that society is made stronger by culling the weak.

[the_gipsy]

> trying to counter injustice with injustice only compounds injustice

Sometimes, yes. Too many times? Show me. "Only"? Cannot be true.

[ttfkam]

And yet never the same energy and ire toward legacy admissions, athletic scholarships, Dean's choice carve outs, and donors buying their kids in who couldn't get in on their own academic merits.

Somehow legacies "belong" at Harvard but the black girl who is obviously brilliant at a chronically neglected public school instead of Exeter getting recruited by Harvard is obviously wrong.

What does performance at lacrosse have to do with math and communication ability? Why does someone who worked really hard on their math homework every night have to be excluded from the finest academic institutions in favor of someone who can pull a canoe oar really hard?

How is any of that more fair when the exclusion basically targets black and brown folks?

[plagiarist]

"For sake of diversity." If you take a slice of the smartest and most capable Americans, do you expect to see that it roughly matches American demographics? If college acceptance doesn't look like that, is there a problem?

[raxxorraxor]

I don't think that is what anyone could call sufficient evidence.

But even if the reason is economic disparities, which might be a consequence of past discrimination, it is still questionable if that alone can justify discrimination today. You are in any case discriminating innocents in that case and you just found another reason to discriminate on the basis on skin color.

I heard arguments that the absence of women in computer science would be an indication of discrimination and the prevalence of sexism. A similar case of insufficient evidence and one that lead to false accusations. Accusations that could have convinced a few women to look into other industries for that matter.

I believe the case for racism is much stronger, but I still disagree with the means if it could be proven without any doubt.

[Balgair]

The law of large numbers would indicate that yes, a cross section of the 'smartest' should have the same racial make-up as the population. If it doesn't, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak.

[david38]

This is absolutely false. Cultural upbringing isn’t uniform across all cultures. This has more to do with higher education than anything else. Look at the percentage of Nobel prize winners who are Jewish. Look at the Jewish population.

[dazilcher]

If the applicant pipeline does not match such an idealized distribution and you attempt to fix it at this stage, would "the smartest and most capable Americans" still apply to the admitted cohort?

[antisthenes]

Genetics and childhood.

So no, I wouldn't expect it to match American demographics.