I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to population averages.
They don't reject high-performance black athletes for lower performing, asian athletes. I've never once heard anyone complain that their university's football team had a disproportionate number of non-asian people.
Asians are "overrepresented minorities", or ORM's, by admission standards because, in Princeton anyways, the ratios are nearly 4x the population average.
What I meant was why is that a problem? According to the article, that degree of over-representation (relative to population) is below what it would be, given a completely blind admissions process.
So why not have 25% asian population? What's the problem?
On the other hand, why isn't anyone saying there is a problem with ORM in football?
Basically social power and wealth is distributed in a top-down way based on which school you went to. "grades" don't actually mean anything they're just a social fiction created to justify why some people have greater shares of power/wealth/freedom than others.
Asian families, the pragmatic authoritarians they are, are very good at hacking this system of social sorting. The elite colleges know this. Elite colleges are n the business of creating and maintaining high status in the eyes of society. The highest status people are often not the best education-hackers. Therefore, the elite colleges don't sort solely or even primarily on the basis of grades. They want people who are going to rise to powerful, prominent, high status positions and they accurately recognize that hordes of Asian authoritarian parents are just hacking the system for their family's wealth.
They use racial profiling because it makes sense given their goals. Anyone who tells you it isn't racism is suffering from some kind of American myth of a post racial world.
Caltech is color blind because their goals are different. Caltech is for scientists and so they don't care what race you are. Yale is for leaders and good leaders usually don't get that way by being obedient violinists.
>> Asian families, the pragmatic authoritarians they are, are very good at hacking this system of social sorting.
>> Asian authoritarian parents are just hacking the system for their family's wealth.
Wow. I don't care what ethnicity your are, this is horribly offensive.
Most Asian cultures hold filial piety as one of their highest values. Parents wield tremendous power over their children and use well-established and ancient psychological ploys to control their kids and obtain obedience.
These are facts of Asian culture. The traditional Asian family is organized as a well-oiled, top-down controlled authoritarian hierarchy. Chinese and Japanese cultural norms today are patriarchal with men ruling over both their wives and children.
A huge portion of Asian immigrants have kept this authoritarian family structure. This is not controversial. The Tiger Mom is real.
Asians themselves who follow this strategy are not shy about its authoritarian nature. Their values hold that parents and elderly are wise and should be obeyed with little questioning. They believe children should have little self-direction for the benefit of the child.
In conclusion, you find it offensive because you're clueless. The Asian people I know who subscribe to this style of family structure are comfortable with it and aware that it is authoritarian. "Authoritarian" is only pejorative to those who find authoritarianism distasteful.
Read Tiger Mom - it's an accurate portrayal of cultural differences.
Both. His response is a proof by example (not a proof) and sounded a lot like, "Oh my black friends don't mind when I use that word". Counterexample... I am asian, my "pragmatically authoritarian" father did not encourage me to play violin in order to win money for his bloodline. Thus forensik is wrong. QED.
Also, I DO mind. I found what he said to be VERY offensive. My family is not some conniving, money-grubbing machine that was carefully molding me from the start to take the helm of our empire when my father dies. My parents are supportive of whatever I want to do. Additionally, Asia is huge. Really ridiculously huge. I cannot fathom how anyone can feel justified in casting such a narrow stereotype upon everyone who arrives to the USA from the East. Maybe before conducting a racial ethnography you could read the American Anthropological Association's statement on "race". Basically, race and culture should not be conflated.
http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm
I'm sure nobody is trying to be a bigot here but forensik is sure coming off that way.
> Counterexample... I am asian, my "pragmatically authoritarian" father did not encourage me to play violin in order to win money for his bloodline. Thus forensik is wrong. QED.
Oh please. Why even bother saying this? Apparently I claimed that all Asians are violinists! Wow!
You are trying to silence uncomfortable facts by appealing to simple populist thought-stopping cliches.
"Saying anything about race is racism!! Burn the witch!!"
Everyone on HN sees right through you. Culture is passed down generationally and culture is real. Culture is therefore linked to race. Cultural differences are real and anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists have all scientifically established that Asian-Americans are more collectivist than Euro-Americans. The collectivist values result in greater authoritarianism, less individuality, and more emphasis on conformity for the sake of maintaining group harmony. This is a rock solid scientific finding of the social sciences and you're in denial if you don't want to admit it.
>>> anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists have all scientifically established that Asian-Americans are more collectivist than Euro-Americans
Oh yeah, all the social scientists are in agreement about the problem with the Asians? Hm, I see that you are shifting away from the race to racial ethnicity in your terminology (Asian-American). Like, I know you read (at least a review of) Tiger Mom but do you have a real source for this stuff that isn't a single autobiographical account and your own experience? This really makes you sound like you're full of shit.
>>> You are trying to silence uncomfortable facts
I'm really not uncomfortable with the fact that some of the Chinese-American friends I have are pushed really hard to "excel". What I am offended by is that you extrapolate from a similar experience to talk about all Asian people in America, "Asian values", "Asian ethics", and the "Asian mindset".
>>>"Saying anything about race is racism!! Burn the witch!!"
"She is Asian." -- Not racist.
"Her family is very patriarchal." -- Not racist.
"A lot of my Asian friends have overbearing fathers." -- Almost...
"Asian families are very patriarchal." -- Racist.
If you can't tell the difference, then quit talking about my race, fucker.
>>> Everyone on HN sees right through you.
I doubt anyone else is reading this. I just wanted to let you know that the way you speak about THE "Asian Culture" and "Asians" really offends me. Is it still unclear why? Is it clear to you why anthropologists do not produce ethnographic accounts of RACES.
>>> rock solid scientific finding of the social sciences
Collectivist vs. individualist is one of the most extensively researched concepts in the social sciences with respect to cultural differences. Everyone knows it's real. You might as well argue the Earth is flat.
Asia is simply way more collectivist than the West, and this cultural difference holds for Asians immigrants throughout the world.
You're trying to bully me with the race card into shutting up. Decades of high quality research on individualism-collectivism is not racism. It's just a genuine cultural difference that can be measured in a million ways.
By the way, black people also score lower on intelligence tests than other races, women are more enraptured by cute babies than men are, and republicans score higher on measures of magical thinking than democrats.
Hope these statements of fact help you with your witch hunt.
Succint and straight to the point. You should give a course in "social demythification"... I am serious a lot of people suffer because in such a pragmatical way. I 'll just add that rising to top position is more often than not a question of "hacking a system" and if some institutions are really in the business of selecting people that will secure prominent position, they should reward greatly those who have proven they possess plenty of "hacking" skills. It follows that if those institutions don't follow this logic, it's not because they "anticipate" who will hold power position in the future but because they actively decide on which bias it will be decided.
Ah okay, I fully agree then. One issue is that you want a "diversity of interests" on a college campus, but there is no evidence to convincingly say that schools would be more or less diverse if we admitted people in a race-blind manner.
Diversity of interests wasn't always a priority in college admissions though. Malcolm Gladwell has a good piece on how the current Ivy League admission focus on non-academic indicators was originally a racially driven policy. One could make a good case that "diversity of interests" is a policy put in place to ensure that highly performing performing demographic can dominate admissions. I imagine colleges con't want that to happen because it would jeopardize the long-term health of their institution.
> I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to population averages.
Thank god, I hope it means the world is a different place.
First, I'm guessing you're about 30 yo. (Sorry if I'm way off.) When I applied to colleges in late 1981, there were still some dumbass amounts of discrimination for being black. Affirmative action occurred in the 60s/70s to try and rectify some of that.
It was a given back then that admissions would overlook somewhat lower SATs if you were otherwise promising, and if you could be identified as being from a disadvantaged background. The downside was that some completely kickass guys I knew felt that they had been admitted because of their skin color.
I assume there's still discrimination out there, but perhaps it's a lot less than 30 years ago.
First a bit of background. I come from India where they practice reservation which I think would be considered much "worse" than affirmative action over here. The way the system works is that a certain percentage of seats are reserved for people from certain (usually lower castes). So for my engineering examination, I wrote a common exam conducted by the government along with about 80,000 other students from my state. Among the 80,000 about 35k or so did well enough to be given a "rank". The rank means exactly what you think it means.
Now, students are allowed to choose the college they want to go to in the order of their ranks. However, reservation means that people like me, who don't "have a reservation" have to choose seats from the general quota. The general quota was, believe it or not, 20% of all seats. Out of my class of 140 EE students, we had 29 students who came through the general quota. About 15 more seats were available to students who were willing to do without the government subsidy.
Side note: Because my education was subsidized by the state government, I paid about $300 dollars a year in fees. The ones who went without the subsidy paid about $1200 dollars a year. All
All the remaining 100 or so seats were reserved for people from one or another of the reserved castes. For people in the general quota, the lowest (highest numerically) rank admitted to my department was 114. For a person coming from a reserved quota, the lowest rank admitted was 29xx.
At the time I felt this was grossly unfair. I busted my ass to be ranked in the top 100 among 80,000 candidates to get into this place and these guys were admitting students who weren't even in the top 2000 simply because they were born into the right family.
Over time, I've come to realize that I enjoyed a great many privileges these other kids did not. I had sporadic access to the internet, I had parents who were reasonably supportive of my studies, I knew English really well. I didn't get the 90th rank simply because I was awesome. I got it because I was lucky enough to be born with (some) privilege in a third-world country.
Many of my classmates from disadvantaged backgrounds have gone on to become competent engineers. I realize now that they fully deserved their chance.
It's not clear to me that qualified people who lose out (i.e. not get a place anywhere) would be so greater in number that they would outweigh the doubts created about people who may or may not have had a helping hand through affirmative action. Those kinds of doubts are pernicious and likely affect that person's social groups and career for many years; while unambiguously able people would be held up a year at the very worst - but most likely just having to attend a different college than their preference.
I chose my above words carefully: It was an issue of SATs, not qualifications in general.
Prior to affirmative action, SATs were the be-all-and-end-all of equilibration for GPAs; A GPA of 3.9 at the Bronx school of science was not the same as 3.9 at Rural High. Along came some studies showing that the SATs (esp English) had some cultural biases.
The admissions depts were truly trying to figure out: Which candidates will have the biggest impact after graduation? SATs were called into question as a predictor of that, and that "standardized" tests were maybe not so standard after all.
Also which candidates have the greatest opportunity for growth by attending that school vs not. Global opitimization can mean admitting a slightly less accomplished student who will do better with that degree than without, where a more accomplished high school will end up at the same academic/professional outcome even without the special support from the institution.
Its easy to point out the EAP kid who can't hack it in college. But I've never heard of anyone bemoaning the "qualified" upper-middle class fratboy who flunks out of school in a drunken haze.
When someone offers the opinion that rejecting high-performing Asians is a "serious double standard" I ask myself a few questions.
Do Asians have considerably higher academic performance than most other ethnic groups? Yes, they do.
Do I believe Asian people are inherently more intelligent and capable? No, I do not.
Do I think that colleges should admit students based on academic performance or intelligence and capability? I think intelligence and capability are clearly more important qualities.
The only conclusion I can draw is that academic performance is clearly a bad indicator in some ways, if it so severely favors one racial group. Therefore colleges' unwillingness to judge Asians with the same standards of academic performance is a reasonable policy to me.
How do you plan to measure "intelligence and capability"?
By this logic, a brilliant-slacker-underachiever should be the most sought after candidate. Who cares about results, after all, when all that matters is someone's raw intelligence (regardless of whether or not it has been or will be applied to anything at all).
I somewhat agree with you, however I do not know the US system very well. In Germany university admission is done by grades alone; however we don't really have elite universities like the ivies, but all universities are at a rather mediocre level.
For example I could have easily gone to med school with my grades, which is one of the majors with the higher grade cutoffs, but it is maybe open for the top 10-15%? At this level I don't believe parental involvement matters too much, everyone at age 18-19 is mature enough to know: OK, if I want to study medicine, I should try to get these grades etc...
But if admission is based in the 99,99% area, I don't know if a system based on merit alone is "fair". If I look at areas like competitive sports or piano competitions etc., I would believe at least 2/3 of the contestants at the national stage had "helicopter parents" relentlessly pushing them, often against their own will...
So having a "tiger mom" simply gives you a huge competitive advantage over "normal" kids/families. So if your system is based on ideas like affirmative action, where people from disadvantage backgrounds get a boost, it seems sensible to give people from advantageous backgrounds a detriment.
The myth of equality of opportunity is indeed to be protected; but it is a myth, because uncountably more opportunities are afforded to the children of the privileged - things like affirmative action are tiny in the overall scale.
I really don't like what you are insinuating. You appear to be implying that some people are inferior due to the ancestry of their parents, or the daily practices of their parents.
You should learn something: that variance within groups is far larger than variance in the averages of groups; and thus race and culture are poor signals for use in judgement. To protect against this bias, we do hold to equality across racial and cultural lines; to do otherwise, is to be racist and simply morally wrong.
Indeed, the myth of equality across racial and cultural lines must be protected at any cost.
and trying to tease out its meaning in the context at hand.
The context at hand appears to be in making decisions about people's lives. I don't see how to read it in any other way than "people should discriminate on the basis of race and culture"; and given reinhardt's previous comment against positive discrimination, he can only mean negative discrimination. Statistical equality does not seem relevant at all; I don't know why you brought it up. I'm suspicious that you are dissembling.
I interpreted "equality" in reinhardt's statement to mean statistical equality. Statistical equality is an empirical claim - if people wrongly believe it to be true, it would be a "myth".
> You should learn something: that variance within groups is far larger than variance in the averages of groups; and thus race and culture are poor signals for use in judgement. To protect against this bias, we do hold to equality across racial and cultural lines; to do otherwise, is to be racist and simply morally wrong.
I don't want to take sides in this debate, but I often see your above post appearing on debates about this issue.
Can you explain what your first three sentences even mean? It is basically vague, ambigiuous and devoid of any meaning (while sounding academic - perfect for online debates).
That spiel is known as Lewtonin's Fallacy (please look it up).
I really don't like what you are insinuating. You appear to be implying that some people are inferior due to the ancestry of their parents
Is this just willful blindness? Do you really believe all ethnicity are perfectly matched in their potential?
It's hard to study academia because we don't understand the brain well enough, but do a little reading about ethnicity and genetics as it relates to sports.
"In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us."
"Do African immigrants make the smartest Americans? The question may sound outlandish, but if you were judging by statistics alone, you could find plenty of evidence to back it up.
In a side-by-side comparison of 2000 census data by sociologist John R. Logan at the Mumford Center, State University of New York at Albany, black immigrants from Africa average the highest educational attainment of any population group in the country, including whites and Asians."
First, there's already an established Asian community that has been here for a long town. There are old Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, etc. There's no Little Nairobi that I've ever heard of. So many Asians aren't actually recent immigrants.
Second, regarding those who are, many Asians aren't here by merit alone. Sure, there are some (like my parents) who came from a poorer background and managed to make it to the US. But increasingly they are supplemented by people who were born into rich families (fu er dai, "second generation rich people"). Now, I don't have statistics to back this up, but this seems to be more prevalent now because of China's recent economic boom. It's just my own theory, anyway.
Also, if you were to visit some Chinese social event (church for example), there are distinct groups of people. It's not just middle class white collar workers, there are also lower class people and older people. There are multiple generations, from the older people (mostly Cantonese speaking, at least where I live), to the middle aged people, to the young people (either ABCs or international students).
I don't mean to make any particular assertions about one ethnicity or another. My point is simply that, given the (genetically driven) physical variance between ethnicities, I expect there is a reasonable chance of (genetically driven) mental variance as well. In what way? I have no idea, and no opinion.
I don't think "all ethnicity are perfectly matched in their potential" is an interesting statement one way or the other. I believe individuals are more interesting than arbitrarily chosen groups. I believe we should judge people on their own merits, rather than choosing groups, taking averages of those groups, and then using those groups to make judgements.
Perhaps in an ideal world, but for better or worse we're currently stuck with everyone looking at ethnic distributions and being really upset about them. Affirmative action, for example, is probably the counterpoint to admissions being about individuals...
I don't want to take either side, but it sounds like you have a huge taboo that you want to put to bed by saying 'I don't like what you are insinuating'.
I'm not taking neither reinhardt's nor your side. But this 'don't touch this subject because it's sensitive' strategy is getting old and pretty ridiculous to resource to.
A few lines after you wrote this
__You should learn something: that variance within groups is far larger than variance in the averages of groups; and thus race and culture are poor signals for use in judgement.__
So, race and culture are poor signals for use in judgement, but you still admit that they are signals (poor or not) and that their averages does vary, even if less than within the group.
All I can conclude is that you are afraid to touch the subject. You start by saying that it doesn't exist then you prove it is not relevant. That is not coherent, you can't believe them both because they are exclusive.
Not saying that I agree or disagree with you, but if we're going to have discussions about this topic we're getting nowhere if we're stuck to the old taboos.
I think taboos exist for very good reasons. The fact that something is a taboo does not, in and of itself, mean that it needs to be challenged. The problem is that very few people are rational. There are a lot of people who gain courage to do very unpleasant things once they've heard arguments that they can use as internal justifications, when they are not themselves sophisticated enough to understand how sound the arguments are.
I live in a poor area of London. Racism isn't an abstract taboo; it's a daily sight, and it's disturbing to hear the rationales some people come out with. It's clear they didn't come up with it themselves.
Basing your values on provably incorrect myths is building a house on the sand. Values must be fundamental and universal. They must be ends in themselves. They should not be based on trivia. They definitely should not be based on provably incorrect non-facts unless you plan on those values crumbling.
Good Value: All human beings deserve a basic, dignified standard of living regardless of their intelligence, who their parents are, or what their culture is like.
Stupid Value: All races deserve a basic standard of living because they have the same intelligence.
Fact: Jews score higher on intelligence tests than other races. Society widely agrees that intelligence tests measure intelligence. Therefore, Jews are more intelligent than other races.
If you base your values on stuff like "all races being the same" you are basing your values on non-truths and those values will crumble when faced with reality. Not all humans are the same. Not all cultures are the same. Not all biology is the same. Values should transcend petty questions about biology - they should be ethical value statements that recognize the value of all human life.
We should give minority groups fair treatment and a helping hand not because they "deserve" it but because it is fair and because we believe in the values of fairness and equal treatment for all human beings. Because we believe in the inherent value of human life - the sanctity of human life - and want to promote human life regardless of which culture it comes from, regardless of what biological quirks it displays.
I completely disagree with you. You might want whatever taboos you like, I'm ok with that and won't challenge them.
But heck, if you are going to discuss something then you must be free of taboos in that particular mater, or else your opinion is just bananas. I mean, of what value is your opinion on something you're afraid of talking about?
EDIT: I don't want to be a downvote bitch. But it I am noticing my comments on this thread are all downvoted. I guess some people has the taboo so strongly imprinted on their minds that they don't even want me to mention it.
A taboo is a means of enforcement of a group norm. I don't think supporting or opposing a taboo prevents you from having a valid opinion on the group norm itself.
For example, talking to children about sex with children is a major taboo. Supporting this taboo doesn't mean an opinion on the immorality of sex with children is automatically invalid.
That's not really a good comparison. In both cases they're trying to put together the best team. Right or wrong, the idea is that having diversity of experiences improves the academic experience for everyone. I don't know why people have such a hard time understanding this. It's fair to disagree with the idea, but it's completely different from racism.
In this case, the assumption is that asian are a homogenous group, and that having a class full of asians in necessarily not diverse. That's in line with the "violin playing automatons" perception of asian students.
Why is it not possible to have diversity of experience without artificially restricting access by race. The assumption that people of a certain race are defined by the same experiences is exactly racism.
>The assumption that people of a certain race are defined by the same experiences is exactly racism
That's not what's being implied, nor is that implication racist. What's implied is that people of a similar ethnicity who have similar profiles on a college application probably have a similar backgrounds. This is both logical and entirely not racist.
Professional sports leagues aren't the keys to wealth and power in this country. That's why there's a big fuss over college admissions and not about sports.
I'm failing to find a more colorful way to put this so here it is plainly:
One becomes an affirmative-action-privileged race precisely because there are systematic barriers to the keys to wealth and power. If sports were that, and there were systematic barriers to it, we would be having this same discussion about Asians. Being good at sports is overall irrelevant to wealth and power in this country.
They don't reject high-performance black athletes for lower performing, asian athletes. I've never once heard anyone complain that their university's football team had a disproportionate number of non-asian people.
Serious double standard there.