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by Total_Meltdown
4129 days ago
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> They were, of course, uniformly non-white, non-Asian girls. > The poor students weren't poor students because they were female, or because they were non-white, but because they were unintelligent and/or uneducated. And why is that? If you reject the absurd notion that there's some causative relationship between technical ability/intellect and gender/race, what's the explanation, other than the possibility that those people didn't have the same exposure to the subjects that you did? And that's not even including the confidence factor: Of course a white dude can do this stuff, they do it all the time. Your story seems to suggest we should actually be doing this long before university. I would agree with that. This part will probably be unpopular, but I'll say it anyway: What makes you so special, that your life is the one that gets to be changed? If we were all on equal footing, who says you're even good enough for your university geek-kid program anyway? Or me, for that matter - I was part of a similar program in high school[1]. What if we could be fifty years ahead of where we are now, if only we had an environment that was actually competitive across the whole breadth of our society, rather than jokers like you and me running the ship? [1] http://www.usfirst.org/ |
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For purposes of admitting students to special programmes, who cares? The only thing the admissions staff should have considered was admitting the most qualified applicants to the programme.
And anyway, you're ignoring the fact that intelligence is in part hereditary. It's not those students' fault that they had poor intelligence any more than it's my fault that I make a poor athlete; admitting them to a competitive academic programme was as foolish as admitting me to the Olympics.
> What makes you so special, that your life is the one that gets to be changed?
I was better-suited to that program that the ill-suited students admitted ahead of me were.
> If we were all on equal footing, who says you're even good enough for your university geek-kid program anyway?
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Maybe some of those ill-suited students were more innately intelligent than those who were unfairly rejected, and had simply had poor upbringings, but that doesn't matter: they were, at the point of admission, profoundly less-qualified than the rejectees.
And what was the point of admitting them in the first place? They were not helped by it: they had a horrible experience of unmitigated humiliation and failure. They didn't benefit, and others suffered.
All you can do is take everyone on his own merits, as he is. It doesn't matter what sex or colour someone is: if he's the best candidate, take him for the job or the codeathon or whatever; if not, don't.
> What if we could be fifty years ahead of where we are now, if only we had an environment that was actually competitive across the whole breadth of our society, rather than jokers like you and me running the ship?