Apparently you
That isn’t proof of me caring about whatever silly semantic quibbling you guys are involved with. That’s between you and antibob.
I was asking about your stance on this entire topic at large.
Oh, it seemed to me that you were asking about our “quibble”
As far as the entire topic goes, am I correct in understanding your position is as follows: University admissions departments engage in activities designed to promote various kinds of diversity in their classes; these activities have the effect but not the purpose of limiting the number of Asian students. Is that basically your position?
They can have that effect, depending on circumstances, but yes.
The idea is that there is no proof that colleges are trying to discriminate against any one particular group. We don’t have all the data we need.
Well, it’s not as if colleges are going to come out and admit that their purpose is to limit the number of Asian students. What data would satisfy you that elite colleges are intentionally discriminating against Asians?
Besides which, as a practical matter, I don’t see that it makes much difference since the goal of promoting diversity necessarily entails opening the door wider for people from lower achieving groups and doing the opposite for people from higher-achieving groups.
Whether they discriminate or not, whether they admit it or not, etc, however you want to slice it, there’s no proof. We’d need a LOT more data before we could normalize against the race variable to see if there was any systematic discrimination.
As a practical matter, I personally don’t think diversity admissions helps more than in hurts. URM’s are a very small percentage of the overall base, really. I also think it’s very justifiable to want a study body full of skilled, diversified people. Otherwise your schools become filled with the same type of student through-and-through, and this has all sorts of problems.
I think it’s laudable that schools try to focus on a core academic strength but with an emphasis on doing what you do best as your own person. There are many ways to be a successful student and many different possible walks of life to come from, and it’s good that colleges are recognizing that.
So I mean I have no sympathy for guys like Jian Li who feel entitled to a seat at the Ivy League just because they’ve focused way too much on their GPA/SATs, especially when they blame their race for it. He comes across as bitter, arrogant, whiny fellow to me, and his peers seem to think so too. Seems pretty open-and-shut to me.
Jeez I typo’d that sentence hard. Should be “I personally think diversity admissions helps more than it hurts.”
Again my question: What data would satisfy you that elite colleges are intentionally discriminating against Asians?
That’s a different question, and the answer depends on your personal values.
What problems? From what I hear, in the 50s and 60s, CCNY did admissions strictly by test scores. There ended up being a lot of Jewish students but the sky didn’t fall.
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Again, as I said earlier in the thread, admissions requires a lot of information. Grades, EC’s, rec letters, school info, geography and all inclusive demographics, athletic status, legacy status, essays, class types, rank, SATs, type of SAT2s taken, etc. I would want access to a fair chunk of this kind of data before I was reasonably confident that discrimination was going on (after baselining for race).
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I agree.
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In general, you widen socioeconomic gaps by creating criteria that is more easily leveraged by people with certain types of advantages (esp. money). You also make for a more homogeneous school environment, which means less cross-pollination between different backgrounds and ideas. I can tell you from my experience at Harvard that I learned a ton from people of different backgrounds that I wouldn’t have learned had everyone been the same.
Listen you waste of sperm, you act like I’m this lonely voice in the wildness yelling conspiracy theories. Media outlets from National Review to USA today to the Washington Post and the NY Times have all had articles on this subject and the issue does not seem nearly as clear to them as it seems to you.
If you want to keep pretending that there is no real room for reasonable people to disagree on this topic and that’s your choice but credibility is earned not shouted into existence.
ALL you have on your side are statements by the same admissions committees (some of whicha re under federal investigation for discrimination) that “they didn’t do it”
Now tell us your SAT scores again.
Well I would submit that say comparisons to birthers carries baggage. Its a form of Godwinization.
I could say that you have been just as immune to logic, facts and cites and simply choose to believe your preferred conclusion. I asked you what would convince you that you were wrong and you said a fwe more studies and a confession. A FUCKING CONFESSION!!! SO I showed you where these schools had confessed to this sort of shit in the past when their stated policies were almsot exactly the same. And your response has been somewhere in the neighborhood of “well, maybe back then but certainly not now” :rolleyes:
Its more than you got.
I’m not ALLEGING ANYTHING. The disparities exist. You’re saying that discrim iantion doesn’t exist bdespite the disparity because, well, you know, “soft factors”
And conspiracy is not necessary for discrimination to occur.
Because each university can independently reach the conclusion that they have too many Asians for their taste.
Is there a conspiracy to increase the black population at these schools?
I don’t think your arguments are nearly as convincing as you have convinced yourself that they must be.
If the shoe fits… and by the way, I didn’t make the comparison.
You have, several times. I am not going to bother to find the quotes again. Just as you said you never claimed the evidence of discrimination was irrefutable, you are now gonna change your position when confronted with the absurdity of it.
Geez. The fact that you keep saying this must come down to soft factors indicates to me that you not only did not read what I have said, but that you also didn’t read your own cite. Espenshade did not even look at all the quantitative factors. Many things that are evaluated in the admission process were not included.
Again, it would be to achieve the sorts of disparities you are alleging exist. Explain to me how you can limit Asian enrollment without the coordination and, at the very least, tacit agreement of large numbers of people all working toward that goal?
Whether the schools are independent is irrelevant. The point is that you contend there is systemic racial discrimination at several schools. One school could be explain by some rogue, racist admissions officer, or a few bad apples. When you broaden your scope to include at least a dozen schools, you have a much larger burden of proof. If what you are alleging is happening, there must be dozens of people working in either small groups, or independently who have all decided not only to systematically discriminate against Asian students in the most ineffectual and ineffective way possible (prevent an extra 2% of students form being Asian), but to do so in predictable and consistent manner. All of these people would have to decide that the mild discrimination they champion is worth breaking the law, and risking substantial liability for their employer. Do you realize how unlikely that is?
Yes, there is. That is why many schools have outreach programs and summer programs to achieve those ends. Why is this so hard for you to understand? A conspiracy doesn’t need to be some shifty group meeting in a smoky room discussing world domination, it’s just a group of people deciding to engage in a particular act. There is NO WAY what you are alleging could occur without their being a conspiracy or conspiracies.
And generally speaking what pattern would you need to see in this data to satisfy you that colleges are intentionally discriminating against Asians?
Ok, so your position is that the “all sorts of problems” you referred to are primarily (1) the lack of opportunity to interact with classmates from different backgrounds and learn from them; and (2) the diminished chances for admission for students from relatively poorer backgrounds. Is that pretty much it?
There are a lot of people who aren’t alone in, for instance, believing that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. There are a lot of people who think Obama is some secret Muslim or that he wasn’t born in Hawaii. Doesn’t make them right, nor any less stupid. I’m not arguing that you’re some lone voice in the masses. I’m arguing that you’re an idiotic crackpot bullshitter who can’t generate a brain synapse to save his life.
AGAIN, you ignore why media outlets are not the best source of information on this matter. Media sources are rarely rigorous and tend to oversimplify complex issues. Remember WSJ’s article on Amy Chua? “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior?” Just because we can point to a bunch of articles from well-known sources doesn’t always mean they are necessarily beacons of truth (more hilariously, if you read her book, this is made even more true to form).
Just because an article raises questions about discrimination doesn’t necessarily mean there is discrimination actually happening. It just means a lot of people are confused about the admissions process and mistakenly think race is what’s keeping perfect-scorers like Jian Li out of the Ivies, and people want to understand why this sort of thing happens. A lot of people don’t fully understand holistic admissions and think scores matter more than they do. When you do a bit of digging, you find this line of reasoning to be misguided.
It’s amazing to me that you have this unwillingness to concede ANY point, no matter how badly I have to paddle your ass.
You can disagree on this topic all you want. Like brickbacon, I know plenty of people who hold your position. Except they actually do it intelligently and with a consistent position, and they don’t try to skew data to say things that it doesn’t or make assertions that are ignorant/without justification. They also aren’t so pigheaded that they refuse to concede points they are obviously misguided about. You fail on every mark, and that’s why you’re a waste of carbon.
You seem to forget that the burden of proof is on you. You are arguing that something exists. The burden is on you to prove it.
This is like if you were a dogsitter I accused you of fucking dogs behind closed doors. Your only response, really, would be “Hey, look man, I don’t do that! There’s no proof of that!” And yet imagine if my response was, “All you have are statements saying you didn’t do it! You keep dogs at your place well into the night – that is prima facie evidence that you fuck dogs! Dogfucker!”
So everyone involved in admissions just-so-happens to have a secret agenda to discriminate against Asians? And you’re wondering why I am calling you a crackpot?
This is just ridiculous. Do you have any idea how many top schools there are that use holistic admissions? You’re going to seriously take the position that each one of them decided to, independently, outwardly “pretend” to use holistic admissions but, without any smoking-gun evidence whatsoever, choose to break laws for the sake of oppressing Asians a few percentage points?
This has got to be the most asinine, vapid, thickheaded argument I’ve come across this year.
Yes, you moron, yes!
Except you HAVE alleged things. Constantly.
Your position is all over the place. You say your claims are only prima facie evidence, but then you say you can prove things statistically and that you’re sure discrimination going on. You act like you’re only saying the evidence is irrefutable (i.e. factual), but then act like your evidence is irrefutably supporting the conclusion of discrimination. You say you don’t think there’s a conspiracy, but then you refuse to trust anything coming out of the admissions office and think they’re all “pretending” to have holistic admissions across the board (your words!). You say you understand burden of proof, but then you don’t understand why people aren’t “proving you wrong” outside a confession, and you don’t seem to understand why your “3 to 1” disparity is such weak evidence. You say you understand the problems of correlation vs. causation, but then you commit those very same fallacies. You say you aren’t alleging anything, but then go on to do just that.
SMH.
You would need enough data to reasonably encapsulate most of the variance of an application profile. SAT and GPA alone don’t come anywhere close. With enough data you could take everything into account and be able to show that race matters more than what we’d expect under the null hypothesis.
I echo pretty much the sentiments expressed here: In Praise Of Holistic Admissions | MIT Admissions
Some quotes worth mentioning:
Let’s assume that there is “enough data.” What pattern would you have to see in that “enough data” to satisfy you that there is intentional discrimination going on against Asians? What pattern would you have to see in order to satisfy you that “race matters more than what we’d expect under the null hypothesis?”
Does that mean yes or no?
Yeah, it was your fellow traveler FMI.
I think you’re misreading me again. I’m not alleging that there is a disparity, its a fact. you can quibble about my intetrchangable use of teh words disparity and disadvantage but I don’t think I ever backed away from the notion that the disparity is evidence of discrimination.
Those were all described as “soft criteria” by your side in the past. Sure many things are not considered in the study but once you control of r test scorews and grades, with a large enough sample size you do not expect to see large disparities in acceptance rates unless you see some other difference in the qualifications between these populations. What are these differences that explain a three to one disparity. I keep asking this question and i keep getting bullshit answers. Just fucking come out and say why you think whites get admitted three times more frequently and then back it up with some cites.
If all the schools decide that they want to maintain some sort of racial balance. They look around at the Asian population at other schools and start to develop a sense of norms and try to achieve it.
I guess it depends. If alll teh schools that were the subject of teh Espenshade study had the same sort of disparity then I think that is evidence. Not conlusive evidence but still evidence.
So wait, affirmative action is a conspiracy?
- I already explained this. It’s just a matter of showing that race matters in a nontrivial way. This is just simple statistics, here.
Are some basic stat analysis methods, but you need to do them properly
Long story short, you would be able to look at how admission rates change as you shift from one race to another after determining the relative weights of all the variables involved.
It’s sort of like seasonal adjustment:
Only in this case you’re “adjusting” for a large number of variables to look at the underlying trends with respect to race and admission rates. Of course, to get a more accurate reading for this, you need to have enough to explain a good chunk of the variance. Generally speaking if you go by GPA/SAT alone, your prediction rates will be abysmally off when it comes to top schools.
- Sort of/yes and no – which is why I gave the more detailed explanation. I think the primary problem is that without diversity-based admissions, you are pretty much catering to rich people. You wind up with a class that is socioeconomically homogenous, and you don’t necessarily get an environment full of diverse ideas. Problemsolving in itself becomes tunnelvisioned. You also don’t necessarily get the types of students who will best contribute something back to the school/to society or who will be able to use the school’s resources to their fullest. Lastly, the process becomes flipped against those who are very bright and able but simply unable to attend because they can’t buy their way through.
By mixing together people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, you foster a lot more interpersonal learning, growth, societal health, critical thinking, communication, community, complexity, teamwork, mutual respect, etc. It also makes the process more accessible regardless of your origin. It’s not a perfect process (I still think there are many flaws) but I think it’s a huge step up from simply going by raw numbers alone.
And this is precisely the kind of crap I mean.
There is a difference between a fact and what that fact is evidence of. You’re saying “there is a disparity, it’s right here in the data, it’s irrefutable” but then turn around and say “therefore it’s irrefutable evidence of anti-Asian discrimination” and act confused when people call you out for making such an obvious fuckup.
Those two are completely different things and you don’t seem to understand why. I think you refuse to touch on this key point because you can’t do it without admitting how stupid your argument is here.
You’ve been given explicit answers to this question MANY times. You’re too thickheaded.
All you do is handwave the explanations away with “No, that’s bullshit. I don’t believe any of it.” Well, what the fuck do you expect when you have such blatant confirmation bias and just dismiss everything said to you? You’ve been given many good reasons. One of the biggest contributors is the diminishing marginal utility of the SAT coupled with higher Asian averages.
It’s just pure stupidity, lol. You’re bending the evidence to fit your bias and trying to think of any bullshit method you can think of that allows you to claim that admissions officers are discriminating, no matter how unlikely the methods would have to be.
Your stance has gotten to the point where now you’re accusing a huge number of people at a huge number of schools to all, indepedently, and silently, come to the conclusion that they must “pretend” to operate with holistic admissions policies and discriminate against Asians instead for a few extra percentage points. You just aren’t that bright, dude.
OK cite the Natioanal review articles, the USA today articles, the Washington Post articles and the NY Times articles that say that teh earth is a few thousand years old.
What is your reason to suspect dogfucking. This case is more like finding dogshit covered condoms containing your semen and dogs with prolapsed rectums and accusing you of fucking dogs up the ass.
I think that burden of proof was met with the Espenshade study.
You seem to be the only one (along with brickbacon) who thinks that a 3 to 1 disparity is weak evidence.
Itsw almost as if you think that correlation and causation are mutally exclusive.
What if I told you that people who consumed a product was 3 times more likely to get cancer and the manufacturer of the product told you that there were other variables that were not being considered but didn’t tell you how those other variables explained away this disparity. Then, I told you that the manufacturer in question had made the same claims 20 yearas ago about another product whereh they eventually admitted the causal link between their product and cancer. You seem to think we should just take the manufacturer’s word for it that it is these other variables that is causing teh cancer (in some unknown way) until you have conclusive proof of the causal link.