Jephthah captured the shallow crossings of the Jordan River, and whenever a fugitive from Ephraim tried to go back across, the men of Gilead would challenge him. “Are you a member of the tribe of Ephraim?” they would ask. If the man said, “No, I’m not,” they would tell him to say “Shibboleth.” If he was from Ephraim, he would say “Sibboleth,” because people from Ephraim cannot pronounce the word correctly. Then they would take him and kill him at the shallow crossings of the Jordan. In all, 42,000 Ephraimites were killed at that time.

Reminds me of the old joke which I can't remember enough details of to preserve the humor, where a dumb FBI agent is given the task of hunting communists, and his boss gives him a test which he humorously misunderstands, and at the end of the week he proudly reports "I've already killed several thousand communists sir. And you sent me here just in time, the communists were really entrenched, I haven't found a single loyal american." Sorry I botched it.

But anyway, this is a fascinating archaeological record of a classic bias, where you assume your test was 100% accurate because the opposite would be horrifying...

Sort of the obvious thing would be to just ask questions about parts of the culture that Jews don't typically experience. But that is what it is - obvious.

And then, yeah, it would be interesting to see what they would have come up with instead. What kind of discrepancies there are between cultures.

I could for example imagine something like countries with big Jewish population often having currencies that don't deal with floating point numbers and then Jews on average being worse at that.

Or maybe revolutionary books not having Hebrew translations, therefore just not being as ingrained into the Jewish culture throughout the generations.

(Not white, Indian)

Can a White guy apply to the top CS program as a Black female, simply because he identifies as one? Where is the line drawn?

It's not a competition... To acknowledge one problem does not mean ignoring others. There is very real discrimination against people of Asian heritage in the US college system, with very similar parallels to discrimination against Jewish people in the past. To pretend this doesn't exist does all of the real individuals who've experienced it a disservice, as it would be a disservice to pretend that the extensive, institutional racism against black people is no longer an issue today when it clearly is. These are all problems worthy of attention.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/opinion/is-harvard-unfair... "A similar injustice is at work today, against Asian-Americans. To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers."

Edit to add: I don't know what the solution to this is, or what should be done. I just know if I was one of those people rejected, I'd feel pretty bad. And as a privileged majority, I want to be judged on my merits, I don't want to benefit from racism or xenophobia, if someone is better than me then they deserve my spot. And I've got to speak loudly about it (even though I'd much rather stay out of political discussions online), because to do otherwise is to passively accept the advantages given to me by this institutionalized racism, which is almost as bad as explicitly endorsing it. We've got to acknowledge it, talk about it ...

Second edit: One very actionable thing is to make clear issues of access and discrimination are important issues when your college comes calling for donations. Ask them for their statistics, what their plans and intentions are. If enough people did it, this would matter. It would make a difference.

Looking at LizzyM scores, for the most part Whites and Asians receive similar acceptance rates with similar scores, but in some cases Asians receive preference. You can see this w/ scores about 520 and 3.8(1).

However, Asians are admitted as a far greater proportion of their race than Whites. Asians are about 5% of US population, but can make up over 40% of incoming classes in med school, while Whites, who are over 60% of the US population, were only 37%, in this typical example at Northwestern(1).

Blacks, through affirmative action, enjoy a relatively equal proportion of matriculants as Whites, even though Blacks score on average many standard deviations lower than Whites and Asians. In many cases, a majority of Blacks are accepted with scores that Whites and Asians have, as data shows, a 0% chance of acceptance with.

So what is fair? Right now, it is hardest to get in to med school as a White, but that is so extremely politically incorrect that no one dare say it.

www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/admissions/how-to-apply/class-profile.html

https://schools.studentdoctor.net/lizzym_score

Isn't that the toughest question? I don't know what the answer is. I don't know where I stand on affirmative action: in any given instant, it seems unfair, but in a historical context it seems necessary that affirmative action should happen until the point where the damage done in the past has been undone, and we can have equal opportunities. LBJ's words resonate with me on this:

> That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society--to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

> But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

> You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

> Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=27021

Meanwhile there is enough injustice in the world right now make any good-hearted person's head spin.

I really believe the real problem was not fixed. We need to not just ensure, but try to maximize opportunity for all people, and not limit any group to it.

Instead, everything is focused on tail-end adjustments that are neither fair nor optimal for maximizing opportunity and prosperity.

I wanted MLK's idea of a colorblind world where no one is judged based on your skin, but we've gone so far down this rabbit hole that what we are in fact doing is this very thing! Yet no one dare say it as it is so incredibly politically incorrect to discuss it with honesty.

If you want honesty, look at banking, government, academia, and media, and see which race has orders of magnitude disproportionate representation.

I still believe this is possible, I just think we're one or two generations behind. I'm encouraged that the coming generation seems to understand fairness and equality much more naturally and intuitively than my own generation.

Where I still feel like I need to be vigilant against racist thought creeping in (simply from conditioning, stereotypes... I don't consider myself racist, but it's so easy to become tribal without realizing it), for people just a few years younger than me it seems it's just that much easier for them. And the next generation after will hopefully be better still. I have hope.

When you think about it, humanity went very quickly from largely homogenous, semi-isolated communities, to a global community, with lots of movement. It’s going a while for the system to equilibriate. And while there may be many little racist Maxwell’s demons running around doing damage in the short term, I have faith that in the long term we will get there.

How is it fair that I, a white guy from a poor family with no college connections, should have a harder time gaining entry to college solely because of the color of my skin for things I didn't even do.

And we don’t bear the sins of our forefathers. That doesn’t mean we don’t benefit from them. I worked hard, I got lucky, but I can’t pretend my priviledge doesn’t also exist. That a minority with my background wouldn’t have had to work even harder.

I’m not saying it’s fair. As I said, I don’t know where I stand on affirmative action. I think there’s a fundamental tension there. But what LBJ said in that speech feels true to me.

"Privilege" is an uncountable part of that "luck" everybody in our shoes needs to recognize exists. That's why the concept is a thing in the first place.

Isn't this because foreign students pay higher tuition?

University is a time to develop your thinking and students learn from their classmates arguably as much as they learn from their teachers. Studying slavery in an American History course was substantively different, for me, because I had African-American classmates that were able to comment on the lingering legacy of slavery from a perspective that I or any other white person could never get on our own. Had I only had white an Asian classmates, there would have been a far greater uniformity of thought and I would have had fewer of my preconceived notions challenged.

I will say that I find coarsely-grouped ethnicity to be a terribly reductionist way to achieve that diversity. That we group East Asians, South Asians and Southeast Asians together makes very little sense to me since I know these groups to have vastly different backgrounds, perspectives and opportunities. Grouping an American white person together with someone raised in Russia is also, similarly, nonsensical in my mind, as is grouping African-Americans with people born and raised in Africa. Genetic diversity is not the same as real diversity. But if Universities allow their enrollment to become 1 or 2 dimensional, they do a disservice not only to people who are disadvantaged by systemic challenges (the ones traditionally seen as the beneficiaries of affirmative action) but also to those in majority groups that would receive a more sheltered education.

Both major "sides" see themself as suppressed and the other as being in charge. That allows to throw tantrums without ever admitting of mistakes.

I wonder if it's universal in the age of learned helplessness.

It's nothing so new...

Consider for example this: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

There isn't a need to assume anything. To the extent it's possible to be in a social science, it is a fact that the connected elite (e.g. those who attend Ivy Leagues as a result of their wealth) is "in charge." It's debatable to the extent the data permit, but the "side" asserting the non-elite are "in charge" doesn't have much to offer on that front.

Having your house burgled pales in comparison to being in a high speed crash on a highway, but I still don't want either one.

Also, who are 'the powers that be', if not the federal and most state governments which endorses race based admission policy?

Oh, and one more thing: In 'civilized Europe', many countries have decided that affirmative action and race based admission standards are indeed racist, and are banned. Are 'the powers that be' operating over there too?

> Here's how Karabel sums up the new changes approved in 1926, which would effectively allow the Harvard administration to limit its Jewish student population:

> The committee decisively rejected an admissions policy based on scholarship alone, stating that "it is neither feasible nor desirable to raise the standards of the College so high that none but brilliant scholars can enter" while stipulating that "the standards ought never to be so high for serious and ambitious students of average intelligence."

> When the faculty formally approved the report eight days later, Lowell was further elated, for they also approved measures making the admissions process even more subjective. In particular, the faculty called on [Committee on Admissions chairman Henry Pennypacker] to interview as many applicants as possible to gather additional information on "character and fitness and the promise of the greatest usefulness in the future as a result of a Harvard education." Henceforth, declared the faculty, a passport-sized photo would be "required as an essential part of the application for admissions."

> Elite colleges also began to use legacy admissions during this period — giving preference to children of alumni — in order to maintain a predominantly Protestant student body, Karabel explains.

1. http://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-univ... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews

I wrote "For decades there was a policy" and if you follow and read the link the immediately following text is "These policies eventually died out in the 1950s, as World War II veterans began to enter college on the GI Bill."

Since you brought up "the narrative", you must certainly know that narratives change over time.

I mentioned this to show that the narrative which once excluded Jews from the Ivy League has indeed changed, and Jews are now treated more "white" than they used to be.

For that matter, Finnish people are now treated as 100% white, when a century ago many Europeans and Americans considered them to be Mongolians and thus Asian - "China Swedes" in American slang - and some wanted them to be subject to the Asian Exclusion Act.

At minimum, as an Asian person that did not go to a top school, it feels very elitist.

Yes, taken in isolation it is discrimination - but a lot of good things taken in isolation seem like bad things. Prision seems barbaric without taking the crime into account.

First, test prep has only a modest effect on test scores, on the order of 20-40 points combined ...

The average SAT score among those with a family income of $20,000-$40,000 is 1402 while the average score among those with an income $100,000 higher, $120,000-$140,000, is 1581 for a 179 point difference. Even if every rich family had a private tutor and none of the poor families had any test prep whatsoever, test prep would explain only 20% of the difference 37/179. If rich families rely on tutors and poor families rely on high school courses, the difference in test prep would explain only 6% (11/179) of the difference in score.

The second surprising fact about test prep is that it doesn’t vary nearly as much by income as people imagine. ...

The third fact is that test prep varies by race in the opposite way that people imagine. In the quote above, Chris Hayes suggests that whites use test prep much more than blacks. In fact, blacks use test prep more than whites ...

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/the...

For example, Kaplan training offers 4-8 (you can pay for more) fully proctored fake SATs, written, tested and graded 100% in the style of the SAT, which they then use to tell you all the answers that you got wrong, where you lost points, what subjects those points were lost in, and then gives you test prep books specifically for the microtopics you don’t know, AND THEN gives you the books most people associate with test prep, AND THEN connects you with a group class, (AND if you wanted to pay for one) a private tutor. The tutors are trained on the subjects, are there to track your progress, and to teach speed tricks.

And if it’s still at all a possibility it doesn’t work, they guaranteed a refund on anything less than a 40% point boost on points you didn’t score or an 80% final score on someone untested.

My point is, test prep as I saw it for the wealthy is not just books, or a tutor, its a vast network of trained practitioners and materials which probe at your weaknesses and give feedback at a rate books or tutors alone could never match. Test prep between the poor and rich looks fundamentally different.

THAT, aside from all of the benefits of economic stability and the educational support parents making 100k+ can provide, is where you get these differences in outcome.

(Fairly fascinating, though packed sufficiently with examples of its topic to make it painful to watch.)

http://www.earthprotect.com/index.php/media-gallery/mediaite...

>This documentary about stupidity tells us the history of the word "moron" ...

That's so relevant now that we all know the Secretary of State called the President of the United States a "Fucking Moron", and nobody challenged or disagreed with him, because they all knew he was right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raingutter_regatta

But the elite catamaran style tends to dominate over the standard design.

But yes, there are concepts that allow a single question to be preferential to people of specific backgrounds.

(There's a Dingle Regatta in Ireland, there's a famous dance tune named after it but I've not been to Dingle and don't know what their regatta is actually like.)

Come to think of it, for all the talk of recognizing the word as a class thing, isn't it much more likely to be an "old coastal area" thing? You might need to be fairly rich to have a sailboat to race, but every place I've been around boat races it's been a huge party environment with very broad appeal and probably 100% local recognition. They're just not called regattas in Michigan...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_St._John%27s_Regatta

For example, imagine if you (or many HN readers) took a test with questions framed around coding ('I'm going to own this', I'd be thinking), or the same questions in an abstract sense but framed around the details of working in an oil refinery. Now add that you are 16 or 17 years old, from a family where nobody has taken SATs or gone to college before, wondering whether you belong, and under enormous pressure to do well enough to get a scholarship. Your future - whether you live as a college-educated professional or as a career Amazon warehouse picker and Uber driver - depends on it.

A major reason kids like that drop out of college at high rates is that they feel isolated and like they are living in a foreign culture with no other 'ex-pats' around. College is a big step for affluent kids but everyone they know has gone, and the campus and town are built around their culture; few or no college environments are like the poor side of town. The non-affluent kids feel like they don't belong, even that they are imposters (and when they go home, their new experiences make them fit in less and less, and people there question why they are wasting time and money). Now imagine those same kids taking the SAT.

I didn't even take the SAT. I took the ACT, I have no idea how I did on it. I dropped out of college. And yet somehow I'm still making six figures at a technology company in Denver. And want to talk about coming from rough backgrounds? I'm totally blind. This, among other things, means that I never had math books I could use, often times having to have classmates read me the material so I could even try to do the homework. It means that my top reading speed in Braille is something like 90 words a minute, absurdly slow. But yet, somehow, that one test didn't ruin the rest of my life. survivership bias you might ask? Why certainly. But if I was able to make it through, maybe the tests in question don't act as quite the filter function you're indicating.

It sounds like a kind of Italian cheese to me.

As an elementary school child, I couldn't understand a word problem about baseball that used terms like "hit a double" and "hit a triple," because I didn't give a shit about baseball.

If more recently I read a word problem about rugby that used the term "scrum", I would understand it to mean the players were having a stand-up meeting.

The question I couldn't understand discriminated as much against girls who don't give a shit about baseball as it did nerds who don't give a shit about baseball.

University is about a rounded education not just memorising text books - even more so in the USA with 4 year courses and major /minor.

As someone said its passing the airport test - high school should make this clear to students just be thank full its not like the UK when until fairly recently you had to have done Latin at school to get into Oxbridge

My point is to give but one concrete example of some trivial cultural knowledge that was actually required in a real mathematical test, which some people (like you, for example) assume everyone knows the answer to, but that other people (like 9-year-old me, for example) don't, which could cause someone to fail to understand a mathematical question which they were otherwise capable of answering.

I learned a lot about software development from my Gesture Drawing and Rock Carving classes at university (they complemented each other: one was additive, the other subtractive). Gesture Drawing taught me to get something bold and energetic down immediately that captures the overall flow, then iterate quickly and fluidly to incrementally refine it. Rock carving taught me to imagine something hidden deep inside that's solid and tangible, and keep chipping away at it with little nicks and scratches over a long period of time, until it finally reveals itself and becomes smoothly polished.

(And the comment about "scrum" was a joke. Can you imagine a team of rugby players standing up together in front of a dry-erase board before a game, sticking post-it-notes with user stories about tackling and passing scribbled onto them? Isn't that how it works?)

I went through the PDF going "what kind of advantage does a christian or otherwise non-jew has here?".

Then I started looking at the problem wondering how I'd go at solving them!

In this case, the title was misleading, but genetic heritage does impact cognitive ability, otherwise we'd have no cognitive advantage over our Great Ape distant cousins.