When asked to select his race, Ota didn't realize "Caucasian" applied to him – after all he's Czech, not from Caucasus! So he checked "Other" instead. An honest mistake.
As a result, he got in no problem.
[1] https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/yale-univer...
[2] https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co...
===
Columbia: ~1,500 of 6,298 undergrads (23%) ; ~3,500 of 22,861 graduates (15%)
Cornell: ~3,000 of 15,043 undergrads (19%) ; ~500 of 8,984 graduates (6%)
Pennsylvania: ~1,750 of 10,019 undergrads (17%) ; ~1,800 of 12,413 graduates (14%)
Brown: ~1,000 of 7,160 undergrads (13%) ; ~200 of 3,173 graduates (6%)
Yale: ~800 of 6,092 undergrads (13%) ; ~1,500 of 7517 graduates (20%)
Harvard: ~780 of 6755 undergrads (11%) ; ~2,500 of 4,698 graduates (53%)
Dartmouth: ~420 of 4459 undergrads (9%) ; ~100 of 2,149 graduates (5%)
Princeton: ~450 of 5,428 undergrads (8%) ; ~250 of 2,946 graduates (8%)
===
The eight original Ivy League universities in order of graduate %
===
Harvard: ~780 of 6755 undergrads (11%) ; ~2,500 of 4,698 graduates (53%)
Yale: ~800 of 6,092 undergrads (13%) ; ~1,500 of 7517 graduates (20%)
Columbia: ~1,500 of 6,298 undergrads (23%) ; ~3,500 of 22,861 graduates (15%)
Pennsylvania: ~1,750 of 10,019 undergrads (17%) ; ~1,800 of 12,413 graduates (14%)
Princeton: ~450 of 5,428 undergrads (8%) ; ~250 of 2,946 graduates (8%)
Cornell: ~3,000 of 15,043 undergrads (19%) ; ~500 of 8,984 graduates (6%)
Brown: ~1,000 of 7,160 undergrads (13%) ; ~200 of 3,173 graduates (6%)
Dartmouth: ~420 of 4459 undergrads (9%) ; ~100 of 2,149 graduates (5%)
===
https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/search#radius=null&sele...
https://www.mastersportal.com/articles/1958/what-are-ivy-lea...
- American Indian or Alaska Native 0.3%
- Asian 14.7%
- Black or African-American 5.8%
- Hispanic of any race 9.8%
- Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander 0.1%
- White 42.7%
- Race/ethnicity unknown 1.0
SOURCE:
Also are Jewish people considered White in this case? I simultaneously see that they are referred to as minorities but also don't see them represented in statistics such as these when comparing ethnicity in X with ethnic population in the US.
But if you want to judge it by looks, I look like an Arab. Like hundreds of thousands of other Jews.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23914667
שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ :-)
PS. do you have any opinion on סרוגים (the show)?
Why don't you think they should match up?
One particular cultural value is caring a whole lot about education and prestigious degrees (see the test prep industry in most of asia).
I have no problem with people who value education getting an edge in admissions. So even in a race-blind world, I am okay with outcomes not matching population statistics. Because in a world where you're solely judged based on your values that's exactly what you'd see.
But what's happening is that two different people can both adopt this same "education" value and have different outcome because of their race. The opportunities are not equal, not for blacks, not for asians.
Citation?
Is there an a priori reason they must?
Note that it's not strictly zero sum either. Huge grants by previous may have opened the university to more people than are admitted by legacy admissions -- yielding greater participation by non-legacy than previously possible.
People are choosing one small slice of what goes on with a university -- admissions right now. They are glossing over the fact that it is other people who made the university great over the years to the point that it is desirable at all. Those people made it great by donating money and going on to bring prestige to the university. Ignore them and lose the prestige and money.
Nobody is glossing over that fact. I am simply saying that if anything outside of a student's merit is "discrimination", then taking into account the alumni status or past contributions of [not that student] is also "discrimination".
They are not the student's merits to weigh, they are the relative's merits.
Not all selection criteria is "discrimination". Alternately, if it is, then there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination.
Again, these are private schools that everyone is talking about. The use of legacy admissions in a state school would be completely wrong.
Very much agree on these being private schools and playing by a different set of rules.
The Wikipedia article that you point to refutes it on almost every point... Please point me to the section that supports your claims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
>>> The concept of "race" is a social construct, and "intelligence" has no agreed-upon definition; the validity of IQ tests as a metric for general intelligence is itself disputed. In particular, there is no scientific evidence that the average IQ scores of different racial or ethnic population groups can be attributed to any claimed genetic differences between those groups.
What are these most studies that have been refuted? Can you tell me the number or the percentage or a big list of refuted studies along with a shorter list of non-refuted ones, or anything to show that's a real fact and you're not just repeating what activists have told you. Make sure it's not a trick like counting mostly 100 year old studies which could be greater in number allowing you to ignore everything from the last couple of decades. That might make true but also misleading.
Somehow the goalposts got reversed and I am now responsible for disproving your theory.
Let's go back to the original post. You made an assertion and I asked for a source because I was genuinely curious where you were drawing conclusions from. You then linked me to Wikipedia and I stated that all of the studies on that page are refuted (not abstractly... directly refuted in the Wikipedia article).
Can you provide a source?
The same article says "In the US, generally individuals identifying themselves as Asian tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians" Where does it say that it's refuted?
"Do the differences in I. Q. scores between blacks and whites have a genetic basis?" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/intelligence-and-...
"Yes. there are differences in measured IQ between various ‘races’." https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2019/08/14/statistics-sho...
"Generally, Black people, White people, and East Asian people have different average IQs, but the specific reasons for this remain controversial." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526420/
"The IQ debate became worldwide in scope when it was shown that East Asians scored higher on IQ tests than did Whites, both within the United States and in Asia, even though IQ tests were developed for use in the Euro American culture" https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense... You might not like the author of that one but it's in term cited to someone else.
"The top 10 countries by average IQ are: 1. Hong Kong (108) 2. Singapore (108) 3. South Korea (106) 4. China (105) 5. Japan (105) 6. Taiwan (105)" [7+ is where non-Asian countries appear.] https://www.healthline.com/health/average-iq#average-iq
I can't actually find anything saying there are no such differences, whether for Asians or anyone. Can you? For something that's so refuted, why didn't even The Guardian bother to mention it when they're trying so hard to oppose that kind of idea?https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-gen...
Remember, your claim is that all of these are wrong and most of the studies they're based on have been refuted.
There is disagreement among researchers about the causes of the differences, but not about their existence. I think you're confusing the two.
Your original comment implied causation - that different races have different intelligences BECAUSE of their race. You are hiding behind a technicality of never explicitly saying "causes" in your posts.
The sources you posted are all correlational - and indeed each goes on to explain in great detail why they are not causal. You are literally using articled that disagree with your initial implication to try to prove some technicality and twist data.
It is no better than stating "black people are dangerous" and then providing articles that show per-capita crime rate. The data without context (socioeconomic forces, etc) is useless. Using it blindly hurts people.
You are dog whistling here.
You people really need to stop hunting for racists under every rock! It blocks your ability to think as well as everyone else's when they're at risk of being attacked for failing to write the equivalent of "praise the Lord" at the end of every sentence to demonstrate their faithfulness.
Hypothetically, if I commented on a fashion blog "people that wear blue shirts are more intelligent" and then pointed to an article stating that doctors often wear scrubs and score higher on intelligence, my original comment - while technically true - is worthless - it adds nothing to the discussion. Worse, my comment implies the wrong thing - color of shirts is independent - the true causal variable is a person's profession
I asked for a source for your statement. Why was it so hard to provide that? Instead we had to go through this huge ordeal to discover that you were making a weak correlational observation. Was it because you knew that your articles didn't support the claim you made?
But it turns out you didn't want a source for my claim, you wanted a source for a different claim that you didn't state. Your mind is so bogged down in racism that you can't read people's words objectively.
No, it's not like your blue shirt example. Many people credit race-IQ differences to fairly common differences in upbringing and treatment by others, not the existence of some small but very uniform sub-group. A better example would be "people wearing t-shirts are less intelligent than people wearing buttoned shirts". That might actually correlate with the jobs of a wide range of people.
But at the end of the day, it's very clear:
My claim: "those different ethnic groups have different average IQs"
Your interpretation: "different races have different intelligences BECAUSE of their race"
That is clearly a misunderstanding, so you misunderstood me. The difference between causation and correlation exists and you conflated the two.
- Black or African American alone, percent(a) 13.4%
- American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent(a) 1.3%
- Asian alone, percent(a)5.9%
- Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, percent(a) 0.2%
- Two or More Races, percent 2.8%
- Hispanic or Latino, percent(b) 18.5%
SOURCE:
It's apples vs oranges when we compare to the US population.
- White alone, percent 76.3%
And I'm sure there are many world-class universities in India, China, Japan, Egypt, Turkey... Are they pretty close to proportional if you look at global numbers? For example, Kyoto University or Peking University, both world class institutions, does their student body reflect the global population, or the Japanese/Chinese population?
Or...
I expect the demographics of hn users to be more similar to global demographics rather than us demographics.
The percentages at the link above are labeled as "University-wide Enrollments," which seems to mean that they account for graduate students as well as undergraduates. But the DOJ finding is only about undergraduate admissions.
what does that even mean, exactly? I fail to see how can it be defined to be non-intersecting with the other categories.
>One of the most striking revelations pertains to Harvard’s consideration of applicants’ soft skills—things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”—in determining their acceptance. Despite boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits, according to a statistical analysis conducted on behalf of SFFA of more than 160,000 student records. This emphasis on personality, the analysis concludes, significantly undermined otherwise-qualified Asian Americans’ chances of getting in.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/harvar...
Combining standardized tests along with bias-ridden subjective measurements may just be the best solution among lots of imperfect solutions. We try to address egregious abuses when we find them, but "fair" will always be a goal, not a destination.
As opposed to a generation of people highly optimized for a fuzzier metric that nevertheless exists. I know a bunch of graduates from elite universities who all just happened to be really into debate/mock trials/mock UN, competed at the national/international level at obscure sports, founded a school newspaper (we had five new school newspapers every year because everyone wanted to be a founder, few of them last once the founder graduates), "founded" a "business", etc in high school[1]. They're all in consulting/banking/law/ML now. Mildly obfuscating the metric doesn't actually make Goodhart's law go away, it just means you have to be in the right crowd to game the metric.
[1] I, on the other hand, actually liked maths and became one of your "highly optimized test takers". Funnily enough, all the elite American schools said no, while Oxford said yes. I am now a PhD student (in maths) at one of the elite American institutions that rejected me as a high school student.[2] If you have a scarce resource, and a system that distributes it, people are going to game the system. The trick is to have better tests so you can't study to the test without actually, you know, learning.
Take a look at the SAT (subject) math section. That's the test that should be distinguishing between the student that goes to Harvard and the student that "merely" goes to Georgia Tech. Obviously it can do no such thing, it's way too easy. This is by design. The American system does not want to distinguish between the top 3% and the 0.5%, because then Harvard would have to take the poor genius over the solidly talented but unexceptional rich legacy kid whose dad is worth billions and will donate tens of millions.
Now take a look at the MAT, the maths test that tells you if you'll be going to Oxford or Imperial. Or the STEP, the analogous test for Cambridge.
[2] Disclaimer: I may be a little bitter to this day. In my defence, I teach the wannabe consultants now, and while some of them are legitimately very competent, boy does the system have false positives.
Everything else is just a new set of rules to game.
* edit: typo on mobile :)
They were such classic Oxbridge style questions, sure you can probably game them but as you say, once you've done the graft to game those types of questions, you're pretty much qualified to be there because the rest of your degree will just be more of the same.
I feel like you're expecting some sort of clear stack ranking of students. Even if you take tests at face value, do you accept the student who aces math but bombs literature, or the student who is merely above average in both? See also: computer science, chemistry, biology, physics, history, physical fitness, social sciences, languages, music, art...
We have examples of test-regime-driven educational advancement in Asia. From what I've read, it doesn't seem very appealing to me, either as a student or as a parent.
This is the kind of tradeoff I'd be happy to see colleges worried about. Complicating the fact is that US universities generally don't expect students to be set on a specific major while European ones do, making the US problem a bit harder. But I don't think this is what US unis are trading off on. I think they're trading off merit for parental wealth + future wealth (which is greatly effected by parental wealth).
Re: your comment about different unis with different criteria, I'd be a lot less worried if the diversity was evenly distributed geographically. I had the privilege of being able to choose from multiple countries. For the vast majority of high school students, studying abroad is not an option.
"US unis" don't seem like a homogenous block to me. But then, I went to a state school and received a fantastic CSc education that I would not trade for ivy league at any price. I've also interviewed/hired countless people and never even noticed what school they came from. I guess the policies of Yale don't bother me that much either way.
In all seriousness it works well if you have a pool sufficiently quality homogenous but would tend towards the mean of the pool.
However it can help us evaluate who is able to perform in a higher learning environment and that they have the knowledge to study advanced degrees. I had 4 standardized tests in my educational career, 4th grade state test, 10th grade state test, ACT and GRE. Only 2 of those were non-repeatable. How many do students take these days?
That's why I don't like standard tests. When I was studying, entrance exams were oral. You were given three problems (chosen at random), had some time to solve them, then presented your solutions to the examiner. Examiner would then ask follow-up questions.
There is no way to prepare for such test other than to learn the subject. No multiple-choice questions you can Kaplan.
It is simply wrong to evaluate and condemn a person based on race. To justify any kind of discrimination on the idea that you are helping one person, you are hurting another. This an equally problematic, it’s taking us back to times before equal rights and for people to be judged on their abilities.
Hoping a brilliant student will apply to a university twice and deepfake their race in one of their admission interview videos.
Why don’t we prefer hard working students or students that played the most sports? There’s nothing inherently special about being a good student.
When I buy elite golf clubs, it means the clubs are elite not other people who buy it are.
Now you can argue part of the reason to attend college is because of your classmates. And then I’d ask is the best experience a bunch of kids who are simply good at school?
I totally agree, this reminded me of culture fit interview questions as well. I think the evidence is very strong that almost any subjective evaluation is going to devolve down to the evaluator picking whatever confirms their subjective biases, then coming up with ex post facto rationalizations.
"boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits"
The outcome was to move the bar to soft skills:
things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”
This has happened to minority groups of all backgrounds in this country since its inception.
I am glad I studied in France, where admission to elite schools is based purely on objective entrance exams (emphasis on Math). It’s not a perfect system, rich parents can afford tutors and teachers can tutor their kids, but it’s a hella fairer than the system in the US, corrupted by legacy admissions, sports scholarships and racial quotas that purposefully ignore socioeconomic disparity, because it’s easier for the powers-that-be to throw poor rural white kids under the bus than something that might adversely impact their own children.
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/print/land...
I don't see any evidence either that most people believe that or that it's true.
I personally find it more likely that high school grades and extracurriculars are probably the most biased portions (grades because a large portion of them usually depends on assignments with loose grading rubrics, which are empirically linked to greater racial and other bias for otherwise similar responses, and extracurriculars because both access and evaluation of them is impacted by cultural factors of both the student, the evaluators, and other members of society.
Determined by who?
UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ, along with the UC system’s chief academic officer, Provost Michael Brown, said Friday that research has convinced them that performance on the tests is so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race...
> UC should keep SAT and ACT as admission requirements, faculty report says
> University of California faculty leaders are recommending the continued use of the controversial SAT and ACT as an admission requirement for now, citing UC data showing the standardized tests may actually help boost enrollment of disadvantaged students, according to a highly anticipated report released Monday
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-03/uc-shoul...
"The new yearlong faculty review found evidence that most UC admissions officers offset much of the bias against disadvantaged students by evaluating standardized test scores in the context of their high schools and neighborhoods."
"Among students with SAT scores of 1000 — the 40th percentile — half of Latinos were admitted compared to less than one-third of whites."
I've heard the claim that the SAT is biased against lower SES for a while now, but more on the left than the right, and I've never heard "most" biased.
Even the whole argument about success rates of assimilation aside, this doesn't seem to check out.
How does this whole "assimilation doesn't work" argument even flow from the statement? Asian Americans referenced were all born in the US, grew up here, went through the education system here, etc. There is nowhere they need to assimilate to, they were born Americans and grew up here. This is their primary culture, not that of a country where their ancestors were born.
I am leaving a big possibility that I completely misunderstood your comment, so please correct me if my interpretation of it was incorrect.
When I was in university I remember being somewhat intimidated by the asian students because I knew that while other white students had an even chance of being smarter or dumber than me, the asian ones were all probably smarter than me just to get in.
The OP said Yale. I know they are both Ivy league schools but you can't just lump them together when you are accusing one of wrongdoing.
Less than 14.5% of the total seats are available for the general category students.
The total category wise distribution in the IIT’s for academic year 2019–20 is as follows
* OBC-NCL – 27%
* Scheduled Caste (SC) – 15%
* Scheduled Tribe (ST) – 7.5%
* Persons with disability (PwD)- 5% in each category (namely OPEN, GEN-EWS, OBC-NCL, SC and ST)
* 2 seats in each institute for ‘Defense service candidates’ Foreign nationals- up to 10% (supernumerary)
* Female candidates- 17% (supernumerary)
* Economically weaker section- 4% currently(It will go up to 10% in a couple of years)
Total percentage of reserved seats - 85.5%
This quota system is present in all govt funded and public sector jobs and colleges.
https://nvshq.org/article/obc-non-creamy-layer-income-limit-...
A lovely piece of divergence between the Indian and British Englishes!
That takes your general category availability to much higher number than 14.5% that you believe.
It reminds me of an other story of my parents. As Lenin came into power they took all the land from rich farmers and killed a lot of them. Since they were privileged and all the prosperity belongs to the people. The result was that bad skilled farmers took over and that led to more poverty.
Is it discrimination if the decision is based on intelligence alone?
For every similarity you might imagine there are 1,000 more important dissimilarities. Surely if you are sincere about reducing discrimination "around the globe" you wouldn't be doing this kind of stylized generalization.
There are Asians out there that have put in enough effort to get into Yale (which is quite a high bar) and then been excluded because ... well, they're Asian. That isn't going to compare to anything positive or pleasant. Racism should be condemned in strongest possible terms.
> The experience of Jews in the Soviet Union...
True, but horrific ideology in the government is a totally different kettle of fish than that ideology in a non-government organisation.
If my neighbours don't really believe in property rights, I'll call them hippies and laugh about their eccentric antics. If my government doesn't really believe in property rights I'd give serious thought to fleeing the country.
Same ideology, but different levels of power.
a take on this problem by an asian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8VP_873kA4
How exactly are you going to do that?
The situation of Jews in the Soviet Union's does not apply too well here because the real vs. stated reasoning behind it were very different. But I see a lot of parallels with the gender and racial discrimination in the workplace in current times. So there is precedent on legally using race or gender in a selection process.
When it comes to fixing past discrimination in the workplace it is already considered legally acceptable to have quotas until the situation is brought back to balance. Such a quota all but guarantees that at some point some candidates will have to be rejected based on gender or race even if they would be otherwise accepted. The split was set around the actual gender/race split of the population. For example California's gender or racial diversity bills proposed that at least at Board of Directors level although I don't know if they were ever passed into law. Needless to say, with or without such a law companies all over the world publicly advertise their equality focused hiring targets so I must assume they're not just outing themselves as breaking the law.
Is this the case here? The article doesn't really provide that many concrete details and I can imagine a lot of implications coming out of this. Is Yale doing this to have a balance of races based on the split in the population? Are they just arbitrarily picking a ratio for this? What impact will a decision here to eliminate any race criteria from the admission have on already established measure to explicitly consider race or gender as part of the process? What happens if one group ends up naturally being over-represented?
We'll have to start paying more attention to equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. And whatever is decided at some point we'll also have to start being consistent, not just chase conflicting targets based on what each administration sees as a priority at the time.
1. If you reject someone based on race, no matter which, it is racism 2. Those that got in due to quotas, even if they are the most qualified are gonna be having doubts about if they only got in through the quota and are in reality not good enough. 3. There is a stark difference in the percentage of male/female/black/white/etc that go into different fields. Basing it on the wider population would not even be close to approaching a representative percentage. Also: local differences, which basically makes the whole attempting to represent the percentage of the population moot.
As an example: There are barely any women working in sewers, should they have quotas for getting about 50% of the sewer workers to be female?
In short: Quotas are bad for everyone, are especially hurting those they claim to help and are completely misguided anyways.
My main point focused on something that I find more important: will we end up in a situation where both views are considered equally legitimate even if they are conflicting?
> will we end up in a situation where both views are considered equally legitimate even if they are conflicting?
I personally can't see the standpoints being equally legitimate due to my above problems with it. But for the general population? I think that both can be legitimate in their eyes.
I took your point. I was thinking of legitimate as in official decisions. There are already laws that implement gender or racial quotas in a work environment. Many companies already advertise this [0] and even public institutions were discussing it at least as far back as a decade ago [1]. One would logically have to assume that they're equally valid for a university. If the issue is indeed that Yale is using such quotas to maintain a certain balance between the different groups based on the population ratios but the courts agree with the Feds that this is illegal then we'll be left holding 2 equally (il)legitimate but contradictory views on the problem: quotas are legal, positive measures to achieve balanced participation and representation [2] but at the same time they are illegal because they discriminate against the other groups.
Since the details of the Yale case aren't all that clear right now we'll have to wait for the judgement. They may actually do something more onerous than that I assumed above.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgenehuang/2017/02/14/seekin...
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/SPEECH...
And Asian Americans have an 8% admit rate going back to 1995, the lowest of all ethnicities.
You'd think I'm going to be downtrodden for life because I went to a state school.
[0]https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/michigan/university-o... [1]https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/connecticut/yale-univ...
Because it is a statistical observation, it does not necessarily have any bearing on your outcomes as an individual--though it seems likely that it does.
If you are precise, and nuanced, you can say something similar without being a racist shitbag about it. The following things are all true, and probably drove the GP to his statement:
* We're largely talking about Asian-Americans, not Asians.
* Most Asian-American families have a strong focus on academics and education, from a young age
* Most Asian-American families have the socio-economic status and familial support that allows them to focus on academics and education in the first place
* Because of the environmental and cultural aspects mentioned above, Asian-Americans, in aggregate, score disproportionately higher on standardized tests than other groups, in aggregate
Nothing racist about any of the points above but they could absolutely drive someone to say "Asians are smarter" if they're willing to ignore the nuance.
Kind of sad to see how many people use throwaway accounts to comment on this thread. My previous comment is flagged.
The scarier thing is that the researchers themselves are also subject to this policing, though with a little more leeway allowed. But they can still get ostracized for making the wrong findings and you get ridiculous cases where the published data from a study clearly shows the opposite of what the conclusion says because the authors are scared of punishment from their peers. In one case, an author openly admitted this was his reason after people were confused about the apparent contradiction.
But I'm not sure how you square the argument that intelligence is mostly genetic with population-level shifts in intelligence such as that of the Jewish-Americans that someone else brought up in this thread. The only thing I could see is those populations begin selecting for intelligence with regard to reproduction, but a couple hundred years is an extremely short period of time for something like that to happen at the population level if it's mostly genetic.
Economic and sociological factors make a massive difference to population IQ scores and are very difficult to control for because we don’t know what all the factors that influence it are.
I don't see why we should be blinding ourselves to any difference that happens to fall along racial lines. It seems like an overwhelming majority of the time once the issue is studied we find out it has nothing to do with genetics or race anyway and that it's something socioeconomic and cultural that applies to everybody and it happens to correlate with race for historical reasons. We have no problem studying mostly isolated cultures (e.g. the Amish, some tribe in the Amazon, etc) in a clinical manner without people getting their panties in a knot. Why is this not true for big groups?
Put simply, some populations have physical adaptations that make them better at certain things - be it lung capacity from ancestry in bolivia, lighter / skinnier legs from ancestry in kenya, or whatever. That's uncontroversial.
Why do we all accept without question that population genetics play a somewhat key role in athletic pursuits, but insist that intelligence or mental acuity is distributed perfectly evenly across the entirety of humanity? It doesn't really pass the smell test to be honest.
Physical challenges are unevenly distributed. Some places are very hot and others are very cold. Some places are high elevation. Bodies have adapted to these differences to produce the physical differences across races. The brain solves for the challenge of life and life is difficult everywhere. What the brain adapted to is evenly distributed.
However, I'd like to play devil's advocate with a thought experiment. Specifically, I'd like to address your fundamental assumption of equally distributed evolutionary pressure. It's true of our ancient history (which covers most of human existence), but it feels premature to ignore the potential impact of modern human societies over the last few millenia.
Imagine two identical human groups, one which spends 1000 or so years in an urban or quasi-urban setting, and one which spends the same time as hunter gatherers. Seems like some traits would be self-selected more heavily in one group vs the other based purely on environmental pressure. I.e. someone gifted with an above-average capacity for abstract modeling, but with - say - severe myopia, would find it easier to procreate in an environment where their skills are valued and their physical limitations negated, and vice versa.
Human history is long, but reproductive pressure can have a discernible impact on a population even over the relatively short time scale covered by human civilization. It's an imperfect analogy, but for instance new dog breeds only require a handful of generations (<10) to be both physically and behaviorally discernible. Why should reproductive pressures applied by different social environments, stretched over millenia, not have an impact on human populations?
I disagree with several points made here. Firstly, I would question your reasoning behind the prerequisite of the population being "small", because in fact larger societies face different and more complex challenges than small ones, which in turns favors the ability to navigate the challenges of large human groups. More to the point, environmental pressure is applied regardless of a group's size.
Secondly, an isolated population does not eliminate the vast majority of humanity - far from it. While there's always some form of mobility between societies, until very recently that was a relatively rare phenomenon. By and large people lived and died within artillery distance of where they were born.
> including any racist notions like "asian" or "black."
This is actually the first time I've heard those designations described as 'racist', but that's somewhat orthogonal and more of a passing observation
> In your dog metaphor, it's like looking at a dachshund and then saying "all dogs with short hair are also have short legs."
I don't follow this extension to my analogy, which is probably a reflection of the problems of using analogies as a discussion aid in the first place
> Between the occasional plague and the occasional famine, you have times of war and times of peace. You have changing aesthetics, shifting cultures, values gained and lost.
Yes, but at its core an urban, even if premodern, existence places emphasis on different skill sets than a hunter gatherer lifestyle. This goes back to my point above about the social challenges of navigating large human groups - aesthetics can change, but figuring out how to grapple with complex social dynamics, as opposed to taming nature, is a constant (and one closely correlated with the evolution of human intelligence to boot)
Species can and do evolve different adaptations to the same evolutionary pressures. Bret isn't convincing.
First, because minds are tremendously complex and much less well understood than things like fast and slow twitch muscles. That we see different distributions in one does not imply different distributions in another.
Second, because we have tremendous evidence of clear bias, discrimination, and oppression of certain groups and a direct link to confounds that make claims about people of certain races just being genetically smarter amazingly messy.
Third, because for physical characteristics we don’t use broad racial categories but instead use ethnicities. “Black people” don’t have the specific physical characteristics that enable the absolute peak of running capabilities. Specific subgroups do. Expanding to racial categories (that were invented by humans to justify slavery and colonialism) is fraught with peril.
Fourth, because discussion of physical traits usually looks at the very very very peak while discussion of intelligence is usually a broad claim about all members of a race. This is not the same thing.
And finally, because these arguments have been used for centuries to justify literal enslavement. To justify denying voting rights. To justify all manner of horrors because it was just obvious to eugenicists that black people were less developed. And we should be extra careful of claims that, if followed carelessly, lead to genocide.
The second one, I don't think anybody says that there is no nurture component. Acknowledging theoretical possibility of a nature component via genetics is not saying that there is no nurture component, and that it does not confound any test. We would need to design better tests.
For third, that is just a definition issue. You're saying that it is wrong to investigate differences between races, but fine to do so for ethnicities. So, let us look if there are cognitive differences between different ethnicities?
Fourth is just downright false. Subgroups living in Africa are generally darker, taller, and better runners. Subgroups in east Asia generally shorter. None of the statements about physical characteristics or intelligence are about extremes or broad strict inequalities about all members. They are always statistical distributions over the whole population.
Fifth is the crux of the matter. Are we going to stop scientific inquiry because of that? Instead of trying to stop scientific inquiry, we should debate why our liberal values are useful and should hold even if there are genetic components that determine intelligence.
Intelligence is just one small aspect out of many of what it means to be a human. It isn't special any more than having freckles is. We really need to dissolve the cult we have created around it.
Nobody is forbidding mention of modified Newtonian dynamics, just pointing out all the evidence against it.
The idea of differences in intelligence between ethnic groups, regardless of whether it is true or not, is not one that our society is currently able to discuss in a productive way. So, we very sensibly keep quiet about it for now.
In which case it stands to reason that it's something that the things that make this or that race "superior" at this or that metric can be emulated by people regardless of race to everyone's benefit.
yep, you just need money.
On your second point, I don't believe that is true. Not the 100% part. I am sure they play a big part, but a Kenyan Olympic runner doesn't win (only) because of environmental factors.
Do you know how we discovered that causation goes in that direction?
To the extent that IQ means anything at all (it doesn't, past about 100), there are much greater inter-personal differences than inter-group differences, except when one of the groups is explicitly disadvantaged by the test (e.g. the test is administered in the first language of one group and the second language of the other).
Care to substantiate that claim?
Are you even aware of the influence of black people on ancient history? Of the black Roman emperors? Of the black Egyptian Empire, one that was looked at in awe for 5 thousand years?
Are you aware of the inspiration the founding fathers took from the Hodenoshone (Iroquois)?
And in general, are you even slightly aware of how much circumstance and happenstance impact big historical moments?
Either way, you are a perfect example of the kinds of people who invented IQ, and exactly the reasons why it was invented - scientistic veneer to justify racist beliefs, not much better than phrenology before it.
And I sincerely hope you'll get to experience how the kind of policing you praise feels on you own skin. It will hurt, but perhaps it will help you grow as a human being.
Edit: the above comment was heavily edited after my response, removing everything except a link to 1 study.
Meanwhile you ahbe neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists arguing against the plausibility of differences in intelligence in large ancient groups a priori. You have people like Stephen Jay Gould arguing against the idea that IQ is a measure of general intelligence at all.
And then, just to prove a point about how warped your perspective is, you cite James Damore as an argument for a basic statistical fact. You really should avoid citing beligerantly misogynistic and/or racist people when you're trying to claim that science is on your side.
Not to mention that large scale aptitude tests (rather than 'general intelligence' tests) do NOT show a normal distribution of aptitudes, rendering Damore's claims statically correct but un applicable anyway.
And definitely not "The Bell Curve".
Also, separating outcome and opportunity is tricky because it's a feedback loop.
I don't disagree with you, I just want more precision [edit]: and nuance.
Is it just me or has the quality of commentry on political topics gone substantially downhill on HN in the last five years?
To expound on my previous comment, those on the left calling for ‘equity’ should be viewed critically. The calls for ‘removing barriers’ should alarm everyone, because ultimately it only serves to control and dumb everyone down. The alternative is to encourage public policies that seek the empowerment of all individuals and groups. One concrete example is the debate in NYC schools that math and honors courses are ‘inequitable’ and racist. Voices on the left are calling for the abolishment of such classes, thereby denying students the opportunity to be challenged according to their ability. The other undiscussed side of this issue is that such calls for ‘equity’ result in basically giving up on poorer students who won’t be given the support they need to meet the higher standards. In short, anything involving ‘equity’ should be viewed as a race to the bottom for everyone.
But really, it does nothing to enforce your argument. You complain about 24 hour news and social media eroding Democracy (and presumably discussions about the politics of Democracy), yet you use these terms so loosely and end up reducing anyone Left of you to some or other policy you deem to be essential to that position.
This is kind of an outside perspective - America as seen through the news - but I would say that a lot of the stuff I see espoused by the Left and Right in the US is much more extreme than in Germany for example. Germany has laws that allow for positive discrimination, but I can't think of any such extreme measures as in the US here, where chances are diminished for one race by a factor of 10. Even having race on the application form would be unthinkable here.
On the other hand we have many more social programs that would be unthinkable in the US. We have 4+ (usually 5-6) weeks vacation per year, etc.
The American Right on the other hand is also in many ways more extreme than in Germany, nobody would consider Republicans as right-leaning centrists here, e.g. building a wall would be a bit taboo, although maybe more due to historical reasons. Denying people health-care, because they're poor would also probably not count as centrist here.
I don't think positive discrimination laws in the US has as much to do with an embrace of Leftist ideology as it does with an attempt at attracting previously disenfranchised voters. I realise this seems very cynical, but my argument is that having a few policies that seem Leftist doesn't mean that the underlying ideology behind those policies is; correlation does not imply causation etc. So I'd argue those laws are reactionary, much in the same way they are in Germany and also in places like South Africa, to varying degrees of course. They're exactly the kind of toe-dipping you'd expect of parties who are more driven by quests for power than ideology. That's why, even with several Democratic presidents, for instance, the US still doesn't have proper vacation and parental leave: it's bad for business.
If I had to plot it, I'd say Germany's political landscape is also quite huddled up around the Center, but slightly Left (with more outliers than the US), where the US is huddled around the Center and slightly Right. This would explain why the Right in the US feels further Right than in Germany. These configurations are probably not even that strange for developed and developing Western nations, though most have more outlier parties than the US even if they're not generally in contention during elections.
I just feel that the binary-narrative - even though the spectrum is quite large and nuanced - is something that has spread from US political commentators to other nations and is watering down the discourse.
- the New Deal excluded black people
- The GI Bill excluded black people
etc...
Slaves built a huge part of the economy for free and americans benefit from that work for which they were not compensated, so yes there absolutely should be reparations. I think this should be done in several ways:
- monetarily: by funding scholarships and other projects to remedy the injustices perpetrated and help black americans accumulate some of the generational wealth they have been denied. Although at the end of the day, no amount of money will ever compensate for the hurt, death and atrocities, its a start.
- education: teaching kids at school what slavery was really like, instead of what some of the schoolbooks teach (that slavery wasn't that bad for example). Teaching kids about systemic racism that persists to this day.
- policing, housing, prisons: watch 13th documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8) its free on netflix
(edit: spelling and formatting)
Reparations within a country between different ethnicities a good way to increase animosity. Because people would complain rightfully, that the wealth transfer is unjust.
I doubt you find any book in education that says that slavery wasn't bad. Every ethnicity on the planet has suffered from it and < 1% were slave owners. Yes, I know the argument that people profited passively... it isn't too convincing given the huge wealth distribution discrepancies western nation exhibit.
I don't think you are advocating for justice or equality here.
That’s almost certainly not the case.
Any economic gains from slavery were more than wiped out by the civil war.
Does that mean white Americans and Black Americans were on economically equal after the civil war?
Where are you going with this line of questioning?
They aren’t economically equal now in 2020.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-ec...
Even if it was the case that the civil war wiped out the gains from slavery, it doesn't change the case for reparations as well as the other injustices that were being committed are are still being committed to this day
I wasn't talking about wealth transfer. I was mainly talking about stopping discrimination and providing loans and scholarships to a section of the population that has been discriminated against to redress centuries of oppression.
"Reparations" is basically code for wealth transfer. If you mean crafting a more just, fair society, you probably want a different word.
If you agree that the New Deal and GI bill helped spur economic development (though they were not perfect) and lifted poor white people out of poverty, why not do that today for black people? Black people were systematically left out of that help, so time to give them the help they are owed.
I have listened to people explain how Fox News is “liberal” and “true conservatives” must watch OANN.
The only ppl I see aim for that are republicans that don’t know the difference.
Unless you're saying that the USSR's underlying philosophy comes from somewhere other than Marx or Lenin, in which case I'm curious as to what philosophy, and originated by whom, you're talking about.
It was. There was affirmative action for "ethnic minorities" too. Source: born and raised in the USSR.
Can you please link an authoritative source for this?
Edit: found an authoritative source, no air quotes. https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/rightsviews/2017/11/07/sovie...
This is not the kind of equality the poster was talking about. Forcing equality at government level does not mean forcing everyone to have equal IQ and work ethic. It means ignoring those differences and forcing everyone to get the same benefit in life even though some are less productive than others ("to each according to his need"). "Equality of outcomes" as another poster put it.
and this is why communism fails, because an external entity cannot possibly know the true needs of the individual, and cannot act in the best interest of every individual. Unless somehow they are a benevolent god.
I'm not convinced. The slogan specifically recognises differences in needs, and therefore differences in 'income' under a socialist system. This is concordant with Marx's other writing on the matter. It means that in terms of what people need, they'll have access to it. But people have different needs. How can the 'outcomes' possibly be equal if the outcomes are a result of concrete, different needs and life situations? The outcome of a mother of three being given what they need is different from the outcome of a single civil engineer. Both the inputs (based on what they need) and the outputs (the outcomes) vary between each person.
Further, in every society as Marx notes, there is some amount of surplus. If everyone's needs are covered, Marx argued for an allocation based on contribution, at least in the lower phase of Communism (sometimes called socialism). Let's go into what Marx actually said:
>Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. [0]
So it seems that Marx proposes a system, his 'lower phase of Communism', which Lenin took to mean 'socialism' - in which people get out what they put in, accounting for deductions (which Marx enumerates as deductions for health care, education, care for those who cannot work, provisions in the case of disaster, and expansion of production). In what possible way does "everyone get the same outcome" here? More,
>Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on.
Does this sound like 'equality of outcome'?
[0] Karl Marx - Critique of the Gotha Program (Part I, 1875).
The USSR was not in the Communism, it had Socialism (which is not "a lower phase" but a "transitional state on the way to the Communism" as same as Capitalism, Feudalism, Slavery etc.). However, as far as equality goes, they subscribed to the French Revolution's "liberty,equality,fraternity" with a huge emphasis on "equality", "fraternity" meaning that Soviet people had to help other peoples ("fraternity of peoples") and "liberty" meaning "absence of slavery".
Consider the phrase also said to have been popular in the USSR, "Everything Marx said about Capitalism was correct, but everything he said about Communism was wrong."
You're talking about Marx and Lenin, but one of the first deep changes in USSR history was Stalin's raise to power - and with him, complete rejection of the "world revolution" and nationalistic "socialism in one country", up to re-establishement of orthodox church in the 40s.
Sovient Union was a completely different country with every decade of it's existence. In a dogmatic system it was not openly articulated, and leaders continued to pay lip service to "Marx and Lenin", but their real economic and political decisions were often in complete odds with the original values.
Cannot laugh more at that.
The Union has never been, or at least not the union my father's memory, about that.
It was strongly regimented, rigid, very hierarchical, caste society. The communist fraternity has been a model aristocracy, with its primary imperative being maintenance of party member's status, and privilege.
This practice was supposed to end with sovient union — but my school, which always had a fair share of jews that applied to math department in MSU, taught those in 00s, and athough discriminiation wasn't as blatant then, I'm not sure that it completely went away.
edit: typo
There are citations for that point specifically in this article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions...
> Harvard itself found a bias against Asian-American applicants in an internal investigation in 2013, but had never made the findings public or acted on them.[1] Plaintiffs and commentators have compared thetreatment of Asians with the Jewish quota in place in the early 20th century, which used deficient personalities as the reason for excluding Jews in elite universities.[4][1]
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-asian-quotas-repeat-an...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Lawrence_Lowell#Admissions_...
Lowell wanted a quota, but couldn't get it and introduced this well-roundedness thing and weirdly and totally coincidentally Jewish people found themselves unable to match up. Turns out they were all one-dimensional human beings less skilled at all those other things White Americans were capable at. It is sheer good fortune Lowell was there to rescue us from these nerdy egg-heads. Close one.
>UCSF upcoming class reveals heavily shaped racial mixtures. Other schools will probably follow? “The stats are in: @UCSFMedicine's Class of 2024 is 23% Hispanic/Latinx, 22% Asian, 20% White, 19% Black, and includes 4 Native Americans” (twitter.com)
https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/hkvv6r/ucsf_upcomin...
More on this, although it's about Harvard not Yale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
Or do they measure someones eye shape to "detect" Asian people?
How about Jews, is nose measurement sufficient (they need to dig really hard in their archives to find some Nazi "scientific" statistics on that...) or they just ask to take off pants during interview to check if someone is not hiding his race?