Question for the race supremacists...

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Do you have a cat ? Proper villains have cats

I have two. That explains a lot!

You mean people who will perform "less ably." There is a difference between a slightly degraded competency and a total lack of ability. Also, their descendants will perform more competently because some of the environmental conditions causing incompetence (namely resource scarcity and everything that comes with it) have been addressed.

I'm going to assume your point on the lottery is sarcasm. These systems don't work in practice the way you are satirizing it. You're not going to be hired to meet [insert any corporation]'s diversity standards in high level representation if you have a couple felonies and dropped out of high school. They'll hire someone who displays sufficient competency, even if that competency is lower than some other qualified candidates.

Unfortunately between cats at the moment. Used to have a proper fluffy white one.

It's my opinion that affirmative action harms those it's supposed to help. It creates a stigma towards minorities that is more damaging than the "benefit" of going to a slightly better college, or getting a slightly better job.

I've already cited Sowell twice in this discussion, but here is some more from his column:

"I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell University, and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.

These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.

Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there — including mine — moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students."

Full column: http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell121515.php3

I think I could sense you were between cats i.e not very villainous

I have a roomba. That's sort of like having a robot servant...

Then you will pay the ultimate price when your Roomba becomes sentient

I reward its loyalty richly. I expect not to be put against the wall when the revolution comes.

No, I mean people who will not perform to the best of their abilities by choice -- the slackers, the do-nothings, the lazy people, and so forth. They don't deserve the same "prizes" that the rest of us have earned.

Don't be so presumptuous as to tell me what I mean. I know what I mean, and I say it.

This quote is insightful and is a good demonstration of the limitations of redistributing advantage.

A student/employee/applicant should not be given opportunity for which they display incompetence. As I mentioned with Fnord, it is useful to note degrees of competency rather than using stark contrasts with these examples.

I would say, based upon the information you submitted, that Cornell should have instead lowered their standards for disadvantaged applicants to a rate below the usual acceptable standards in a way that was carefully measured to permit those students to perform adequately even if not exceptionally. It should not accept students which are likely to display incapability to properly meet the institution's minimum standard.

Over time, with properly scaled affirmative action style measures, demographics would slowly arrive towards parity, at which point equitable representation in societal institutions ought to occur more naturally.

Edit: Let's take the MIT example cited in the article. They should not have admitted 90th percentile students. Their standard should have been higher than that but still slightly lower than the usual standard. If this means no or minute minority representation, I would find this acceptable. Representation would occur as the coming generations ascend to greater affluence due to other reasonable and scaled affirmative action standards at somewhat less rigorous institutions.

Last edited by dyadiccounterpoint on 03 Jun 2019, 11:54 am, edited 3 times in total.

In the context of this conversation, are you suggesting that "slackers, do-nothings, and lazy people" are qualities innate to certain large demographics? We're discussing affirmative action style measures and the impact of historical misfortune on current inequalities of the achievement of these large demographics in a "merit based" system.

You're making it sound like I'm criticizing merit from a "let anyone do the job no matter what their competency is" position. I've made it clear that I am not doing that.

I used to agree pretty wholeheartedly with this, although with slightly different reasoning - I don't think the stigma is remotely significant (certainly compared to the negative stigma that black people have to put up with anyway) but it could be argued that coming top in your class at a less-prestigious college is better for your prospects than scraping through an Ivy League school.

I've seen some more evidence recently and I'm not sure that my preconceptions were valid. We have several natural experiments to draw upon - in the late 90s, California, Washington, and Texas all scrapped affirmative action. There doesn't seem to have been any benefit to black and Latino students as a result of this. Furthermore, the best evidence supporting the mismatch hypothesis comes from studies of law schools (so not colleges in general), and have been much more heavily questioned than I had realised. There does seem to be a broad agreement that the evidence shows that the long-term prospects of black students would be harmed without affirmative action, and that I was putting undue weight on some outlying dissenters because I found them interesting.

This is doubtless a very complicated topic (see for example this article from the Boston Review: https://bostonreview.net/law-justice/an ... fight-over ) but I'm now much less certain of my beliefs.

Also worth noting that by far the bigger issue in admissions is the bias of many US colleges towards athletes and the children of alumni and donors, which put a lot of underqualified (and mostly white) individuals into colleges they are underprepared for. That seems to invite much less hand-wringing though.

Anecdotal evidence, but in my experience as a student at two of the more prestigious institutions in this country is that the stigma to minorities in those schools is in large part due to affirmative action. There is a real resentment (particularly by asian-american students that feel they get screwed over by all of the above policies) towards minority students for "not having to work as hard." Maybe this attitude is not as widespread and say at a state college in the south the stigma is more based on general resentment than specifically towards affirmative action.

As for the actual mismatch theory I'd have to look at it more closely. My point is not whether it is real or not, but whether it creates a perception that is real. That is if people believe minority students are inferior because of affirmative action whether that is the case or not.

Is it not significantly more important whether it is actually real or not? The question of whether affirmative action works doesn't hinge upon the mechanism (whether it's an inevitable consequence of boosting people above their past performance or whether it prompts an unjustified discriminatory backlash), only upon the results.

Ah, pragmatism ... where the end justifies the means.

The end result was that my son was bumped from a private school (under Affirmative Action) and had to earn his degrees from a state-funded school. I don't know if the person who took his place was non-white, disabled or a woman, but the simple fact that he was bumped for being a white, able-bodied man means that the system is prejudiced against white, able-bodied men. Had he been admitted under a merit-based system, he would now have a more prestigious degree, and a better-paying job.

Who knows if the person who bumped him even graduated?