I don’t think I said that the disparity was conclusive proof of discrimination. I said it presented a prima facie case, a rebnuttable case that discrimination exists. You may have misread me to say these things (I don’t know how you would explain away by use of terms like prima facie or rebuttable presumption) but I think that the evidence is good enough to shift the burden of proof to the admissions committees to explain the disparities.
I keep asking you to exlpain to me the mechanics of how these other variable are causing this disparity (the way I did with the geographic diversity factors) but all I keep getting is “You stupid fuck, don’t you understand anything… soft factors and stuff… geez I don’t see why you just don’t get it”
And you claim in a very mgellanesque way, that you have already exlpained yourself many many times, explicitly no less and yet are not able to point to any post where you have broken it down beyond vague explanations and citing the admissions committees.
I could say the same thing about you.
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.
And yet this is exactly what happened in the past. Several top universities have confessed to non-malicious discrimination against Asians. But THIS time, you assure me it is different. So much so that I (and almost every journalist that has addressed the subject) must be a crackpot not to take their word for it.
Yeah because the only way someone could disagree with you is if they’re stupid. :rolleyes:
Wrong, there is no disparity in admission rates. Even if you stick to Espershade’s study, he is saying there is a disparity in the likelihood of admission when two people have the same scores. The reason this factoid is irrelevant is because (often) different scores are treated as basically the same by admissions people. Thus, basing your likelihood of admissions on factors with diminishing returns is foolish. I cannot explain this to you any clearer. Even if we ignored soft factors, and just looked at grades, the study would not back up any discrimination against Asians.
This is very very wrong. Just because you throw in some technical terms doesn’t mean you actually understand anything. Let’s make another painfully simply analogy. Although I am sure you will fuck it up somehow, I will try anyway. Say I do study that says on average Black students admitted to American University score 300 fewer points than Asians at AU. I find that in order for them to have an equal chance of getting in, the Asian student must score 310 more points. Now you tell me that that factoid speaks to AU’s discrimination against Asians, right? Here’s the problem with that. AU does not look at SAT scores, and thus those disparities mean nothing to them. Now how does that relate to the studies we are looking at? You cannot make any conclusions based on a disparity in quantitative metrics if you don’t know how they are used by the institutions. I repeat, YOU CANNOT MAKE ANY CONCLUSIONS BASED ON A DISPARITY IN QUANTITATIVE METRICS IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW THEY ARE USED BY THE INSTITUTIONS! Even if you think that it might represent a prima facie case, we are confronted with the UC stats that tend to go against the notion that Asians are actively being discriminated against. So it’s not only that the Espenshade data is not compelling wrt the case you are trying to make, it’s that we have other, natural experiments that do not confirm the initial hypothesis. Additionally, we have the testimony of several people in admissions denying that they discriminate, and the general unlikelihood that such large scale discrimination could continue unnoticed and independently.
They are not admitted at a 3-1 disparity. Let’s take Espenshade’s study at face value. We know that an Asian needs 140 more points than a White person to be admitted to an elite school at the same rate, based on a few quantitative metrics. We also know by looking at the UCs like Berkeley that Whites and Asian actually get admitted at the same rates (~30%). How do you reconcile the two things? You posit some bullshit about them changing their tune in the 1-2 years before the policies went into effect. A more logical conclusion is that the 140 points we saw in the study, do not translate into real life benefits. That the study overvalues the benefits of higher scores at that range.
Do you realize how stupid you sound by trying to allege this, but denying there is any conspiracy? You expect me to believe some guy at Harvard says, damn Princeton is capping Asian enrollment, we should get on that bandwagon too. That Harvard doesn’t really think there is anything bad about Asians, or that anything negative will come of admitting more of them, it’s just that Princeton and Yale are doing it, and we need to keep up.
Yes, it is. The only reason it doesn’t fit the legal definition in most cases nowadays is because they are not breaking any laws. But, there are clearly groups of people in admissions and at universities working in coordination with the specific purpose of increasing the numbers of under-represented minorities. Aren’t you a lawyer? Why is it so hard for you to understand what a conspiracy is?
Besides, your own author even admits it’s an oversimplification and that it doesn’t even remotely prove what you are trying to prove here, and he explicitly says so. There’s a lot of quantitative and qualitative data not being accounted for.
You don’t even seem to acknowledge that your “irrefutable, factual” disparity doesn’t necessarily even imply that whites are admitted at three times the rate. All you have is a differential in admission rates when you hold scores constant. This has its own set of hugely obvious problems which has been explained to you already.
To do a proper study, you would first need to have a randomized sample of people to test in to avoid systematic bias. Cardinal rule of statistics, here. If your product really did cause cancer, you should be able to show that you can predict rates of cancer that aren’t attributable to chance alone in the group that took the drugs vs. the group that did not.
However, pointing to people who get cancer from using the drug is not necessarily conclusive proof, especially if you could point to some obviously common trend/bias among those that take the drug (e.g. people who take your drug are also much more likely to be heavy chain smokers or alcoholics, etc).
The fact that the company has proven itself capable of releasing cancer-causing products in the past doesn’t necessarily mean as much if their methods of production and standards have changed quite a bit since then. It’s always possible, sure, but you still need to fulfill the burden of proof.
If you were to do this with your discrimination study, you would have ridiculously poor prediction rates if all you went from was the data Espenshade used because his model is vastly oversimplified.
AGAIN, it’s like my super easy analogy I brought up way, way back. If I am only hiring people based on dark skin color (which is highly correlated with dark eye color), and you measure hiring acceptance rates versus eye color, you’d incorrectly assume there was a disparity that was evidence of eye-color discrimination. The reality is that eye color is completely irrelevant and that if you had a big group of white people with dark eyes apply, your model would fail miserably as they’d all get rejected.
It’s simply correlation vs. causation, which you claim to understand and yet fuck up every time you say anything.
Prima facie evidence has its own set of problems. In this case, your “obvious prima facie evidence” has obvious counter-points that render it not-so-obvious, and thus a much weaker form of prima facie evidence. Even if it’s enough to justify taking a peek just to double-check and make sure, it’s a far cry from claiming “You can’t pretend that whites don’t enjoy a 3 to 1 advantage in the admissions process when you look at objective critieria.”
When you have to start supporting your “prima facie”-based hypothesis with really improbable scenarios like mass-discrimination-without-conspiracy, it’s no longer “self-evident” but just crackpottery.
Seriously, how do you not know this shit? Going to post it here explicitly so you can’t pretend like you “missed it” as you did before:
Prima facie evidence doesn’t mean you can point to any random-ass circumstantial evidence you want and claim it fulfills burden of proof.
Besides, you’ve been bouncing all over the place with inconsistencies just so you can go back and say “But I said X!” in the past. Yes, you’ve said you’re only offering prima facie evidence. But you’ve also said you could “prove” discrimination statistically. You’ve also said you had “irrefutable evidence.” You’ve said you haven’t “backed away from the notion that the disparity is evidence of discrimination” on this very page. Seriously, if you don’t see why this is inconsistent word choice, god help you.
At this point it’s fairly clear that your entire stance is weak. Your study is missing too many pieces, real-life examples do not even fit your expected conclusions, and your stance requires really unlikely scenarios to have taken place. It’s a huge mess of untenable, inconsistent garbage.
I’m almost afraid to ask what you think the difference is between disparity admission rates (between students with the same score/gpa) and disparity in likelihood of admission (between students with tehs ame score/gpa. Is this what your argument has come to?
There is a disparity all up and down that spectrum. While we have been focusing on the 750 student versus the 800 student, we are talking about range between 630 and 800.
And of course the results of the study supports what I am saying, you may choose to minimize the importance of those results or even wave them away as not taking “soft criteria” into account but its silly to say that a study that says that whites with the same scores/gpa are three times more likely to be accepted than an asian with the same scores/gpa.
Technical term? You mean sample size? I didn’t think anyone would be confused by that term.
How the hell is that a useful or even appropriate anaology. EACH of the schools in question say that SAT scores and GPA are factors in the admissions process so they are relevant vectors. If the school does not select for GPA/SAT then it is not a useful vector to determine discrimination.
Yes and i have provided an explanation for that. California UC schools had already undergone a lot of scrutiny for discrimiantory practices before and therefore the discrimination was mostly gone by the time the law was passed.
In 1998 the Asian acceptance rate went from ~30% to ~32% A 7.5% increase in the acceptance rate.
You will also note that in 1998, the number of applicants who declined to disclose their race went from 956 to 3592 a 350% increase in people who declined to disclose their race. I’m not saying that these folks are Asian and of course its not “conclusive proof” but I suggest that a lot of these people thought that discrimination existed in the admissions process.
And yet several top schools admitted to such discrimination in the recent past. They said the same things about not discrimianting back then too. Why would you expect anyone to believe them now?
No, I think that all these admissions committees saw a dramatic shift in the demographics of their entering class and independently decided that they wanted to maintain a racial balance that wasn’t so heavy on the Asians. They excuse their behaviour by tellinng themselves that Asian applicants are more fungible than applicants of other races. They don’t see Asians as individuals the same way they see other minorities or whites as individuals.
Why would a lawyer be able to read your mind through the internet better than anyone else (tax lawyers are smart but we’re not fucking psychic)? The word conspiracy has a very negative connotation to me. Lets see what dictionary.com has to say:
The first one is obviously a throwaway. and three of the ermaining four have fairly negative connotations. You might notice that conspiracy in the legal sense means “crime, fraud, or wrongful act” So tell me again why a lawyer would have understood conspiracy to mean what you said? For a guy that gets his panties in a twist about the use of the difference between the use of the words disparity versus disadvantage, you seem awfully loose with YOUR use of words.
That sounds like an opinion (based on wishful thinking).
I don’t see how your cite supports the notion that discrimination against Asians is not taking place.
now theres a problem with standardized testing. gee where have I heard this excuse before? Are the whites now bemoaning the unfair advantage Aisans have at standardized testing? Did all the Asians come over to the states on regattas?
I suspect that the acceptance rates are fairly predictable but that proves nothing other than suggest that the admissions criteria isn’t changing very much. And I don’t claim that the disparity is conclusive proof, but I do think its bullshit that you don’t consider it proof at all.
Yeah, but it still makes an argument that is based on denials by that company less convincing.
I’m still trying to figure out how your analogy is even relevant. In your analogy, it is apparently a secret that you are selecting for skin color, in this case, we have a better idea what thes chools are supposed to be selecting for. Or are you denying that SAT scores and GPA are a selection critieria?
I don’t think you understand the concepts of correlation and causation.
Prima facie evidence has its own set of problems. In this case, your “obvious prima facie evidence” has obvious counter-points that render it not-so-obvious, and thus a much weaker form of prima facie evidence. Even if it’s enough to justify taking a peek just to double-check and make sure, it’s a far cry from claiming “You can’t pretend that whites don’t enjoy a 3 to 1 advantage in the admissions process when you look at objective critieria.”
When you have to start supporting your “prima facie”-based hypothesis with really improbable scenarios like mass-discrimination-without-conspiracy, it’s no longer “self-evident” but just crackpottery.
Seriously, how do you not know this shit? Going to post it here explicitly so you can’t pretend like you “missed it” as you did before:
Prima facie evidence doesn’t mean you can point to any random-ass circumstantial evidence you want and claim it fulfills burden of proof.
Besides, you’ve been bouncing all over the place with inconsistencies just so you can go back and say “But I said X!” in the past. Yes, you’ve said you’re only offering prima facie evidence. But you’ve also said you could “prove” discrimination statistically. You’ve also said you had “irrefutable evidence.” You’ve said you haven’t “backed away from the notion that the disparity is evidence of discrimination” on this very page. Seriously, if you don’t see why this is inconsistent word choice, god help you.
At this point it’s fairly clear that your entire stance is weak. Your study is missing too many pieces, real-life examples do not even fit your expected conclusions, and your stance requires really unlikely scenarios to have taken place. It’s a huge mess of untenable, inconsistent garbage.
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Aaaaand you can’t read, apparently. I gave you that cite to show that others agree that your cite is an oversimplification. The notion is supported by the fact that you have a hugely incomplete model and thus no real proof. Again, your own cite author doesn’t even agree with you.
This has got to be the strangest response I’ve ever heard in regard to the basic, fundamental principle of random sampling (esp when I was explaining how to handle your hypothetical drug product scenario, there). I have no fucking idea where on earth you were smoking when you wrote this.
I never said it wasn’t “proof at all.” I’m saying it’s incredibly weak proof. It is not very good proof of anti-Asian discrimination in the same way that a smoking gun is not very good proof that Joe shot John especially if they are in a crowded shooting range.
This is serious contender for the Top Three Most Retarded Things Damuri Has Said list.
You’re arguing that race is being discriminated against in secret, retard! Remember your own quote? They’re “pretending” to have holistic admissions? Anti-Asian discrimination? Any of this ring a bell? LOL.
It can’t be made any clearer to you: The point of the analogy is to show a fallacious example of assuming causation from a particular set of data when the data is explainable through other means (dark eyes vs. dark skin).
How it’s relevant: You’re looking at some data (“SAT disparity herpderp!”) and assuming it’s because of anti-Asian discrimination when the data is explainable through other means (higher Asian averages + diminishing returns of SAT scores).
Yeah, you don’t understand correlation vs. causation. Sorry.
LOL. LOL. There are no words for this kind of hilarious baiting.
He was making the example to illustrate how you can point to a variable and think it matters based on the data, when in reality, it doesn’t.
I think you’re being intentionally obtuse. I refuse to believe anyone is this stupid. Every single time a simple analogy is given to you, you find a way to ignore the underlying point and make some unrelated comment about something we’re obviously not arguing. You’ve been going out of your way – hard – to play dumb and miss the point.
Most people will understand just fine, and that’s fine by me. There’s plenty of good information in these threads here for those who happen to Google up this subject, and they’ll see how ridiculous the counter-position has to get.
As far as I’m concerned, you’re either a troll or an idiot beyond help. Either way, I’m not going to waste any more time.
And it not really a useful vector wrt to elite universities because, by and large, they do not select for it either. I don’t say that because they don’t look at it, I say that because the vast majority of people they are looking at have scored high enough that their scores don’t make them differentiable to them.
What a crock of shit that is. You have no evidence of that whatsoever. It was just a fantasy you cooked up in order to justify your conclusion.
And the White rate went up a similar percentage. That does not speak to any discrimination against Asians.
And? They were not using race in 98, so even if they had said they were Asian, we would not have seen discrimination.
I don’t not take their word as gospel, but when the evidence backs them up, I see no reason to doubt them. Besides, the people making the decisions now are generally not the same people who did it then. You keep throwing around these accusations like it’s nothing. By saying these schools are discriminating against Asians, you are accusing many hard working people of subverting the system and acting with racist intent. That’s why I find what you say, frankly, kinda despicable given that it has been explained to you several times why your thinking is fallacious.
Right :dubious:. I know you don’t realize how stupid that sounds but rest assured that it does.
If schools were deliberately discriminating against Asians the way you allege they are, they would be committing a crime. But again, this exercise is becoming pretty tedious given that you are too stupid to get it. That’s all I will say on the matter. I recognize that you are not worth the time and energy.
“Oh no! I’m not trolling blah blah,” alright whatever.
I think, though, he started out seriously arguing this position but decided to have fun and go into troll-mode halfway through when he started to realize his position wasn’t defensible. It’s certainly a lot more fun for some people than simply conceding points and having a fruitful debate. Nope. Gotta drag this shit out to the point where people char-broil you in the BBQ Pit. Oh well.
Even if you claim to not be a troll, Damuri (as most trolls would), your actions are still the same as one. Constantly ignoring vital counterpoints, never conceding bad points made, countless hollow justifications without proof, seemingly failing to understand the most basic of concepts, wasting as much time as possible, asking for citations constantly even though you disregard them, attack strawmen arguments, use inconsistent language, backtrack on various points all the time and act like you’re being consistent, assert something even if it hasn’t been shown, cherry-pick irrelevant details you can build off of instead of addressing the meat of the argument, etc.
For those reasons alone, I defecate in your general direction and piss through your nostrils.
FACT: Whites are three times as likely to be accepted to top schools as Asians with the same GPA and SAT scores. The disparity between whites and Asians exist at every level.
FACT: Ivies have admitted to discrimination against Asians in the past.
FACT: GPA and SAT scores are not the only thing considered in the admissions process but they are in fact significant factors. There is enough variance in the GPA/SAT score of the Ivy League entering class that there is meaningful differentiation at least along SATS scores, the Ivies are not choosing their entire entering calss from folks who have SAT scores between 750 and 800 (I think the bottom of the 3rd quartile drops below 650).
Given these facts, noone has shown me how these “other factors” would skew the results so heavily on favor of white applicants (other than geography). Your argument has simply come down to "you don’t have ALL the information so you can’t possibly reaqch a conclusion. You keep claiming that you have explained it all when I look back at the original thread and at this one, the only thing you seem to keep repeating is “other factors” and "the admissions committees say they aren’t discriminating. Fucking man up and just admit that your trying to leverage the fact that discrimiantion “may not exist” into, “you’re crazy if you think discrimination exists”
Its more like Joe is the only one there but Joe swears that he just got there and saw someone run out the door.
WTF? Are you just trying to point out that correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation? because if that was the point of making that retarded analogy then OK I agree and i have said as much. I assumed that SAT scores were eye color while skin color was “soft factors” If all you are trying to say is that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation then you have been spending a lot of time trying to tell me water is wet by using an analogy instead of repeating water is wet, when I never argued otherwise.
If your argument comes down to the fact that correlation isn’t conclusive proof of causation then I am pretty sure that I conceded that point on pretty early on. I seem to have trouble getting you to admit that sometimes correlation IS indicative of causation and if you can’t explain it away by identifying the real causation (skin color in your case) then it takes some pretty bad faith to pretend that only a crackpot could believe that the correrlation is indicative of causation.
So show me the factor that is the equivalent of the skin color in your analogy and show me how that factor explains away the correlation we have here. I did it for geography in a weay that makes sense. You have not been able to do so for any other factor that makes a signficant dent in explaining away the 3 to 1 disparity.
I am assuming that he is not trying to establish something that was established several times in the previous thread. Are you under the impression that I think that NOTHING could possibly explain away a 3 to 1 disparity? I even GAVE YOU the best fucking explanation that anyone has presented for SOME of that disparity. I want to see you come up with the rest.
I’m pretty sure that people will conlude exactly the opposite.
Oh yeah you will, you can’t help yourself. Fools never can.
So it sounds like you are saying that for you to be convinced, all possible missing variables must be eliminated. Is that right?
Well let me ask you this: Does the “all sorts of problems” you referred to mean any problems besides the ones I listed in Post #113? If so, what problems?
No, you don’t need all of the missing variables to make for a convincing case, lol. That’s almost never fully possible (you could always ask for more). But having only a couple high-variance variables = not convincing, especially when there are easy, alternate explanations for the trends we see in those variables. In order to make a decent case for discrimination externally, you’d need enough variables to explain a great deal of the variance (which is something you can measure in a statistical test) where race’s significance is well above what we’d expect compared to the null after holding all else constant. As it stands, though, we don’t have anything really all that close.
Ok, and I think that’s part of the flaw in your reasoning. From other posters in the thread, I gather that Asian admittees to elite colleges have significantly higher SAT scores. It’s also pretty clear that the culture of elite colleges is absolutely obsessed with race and racial equality. And apparently (again, I’m just going by other posts), when certain colleges had to stop practicing affirmative action, the proportion of Asian admittees rose significantly. It seems to me that based on all this, the burden shifts to you to point to a missing variable and demonstrate that it’s the “real reason” for the apparent discrimination. Otherwise, you can just sit back forever and say “not enough data.”
What are the three most easy, alternate explanations here?
Dude, why are you evading my question? It’s a very simple yes or no question to make sure I understand your point. Does the “all sorts of problems” refer to any problems besides those I listed in post 113? A simple yes or no will do.
No. And a serious question: Do you make it a habit of intentionally ignoring simple questions about your position?
Asians have higher SAT scores, and race is important in terms of balance, but Asian admittees don’t necessarily go skyrocketing when you stop practicing AA at elite colleges.
The burden doesn’t shift to me because I’m not the one claiming that there’s discrimination. I’m claiming there’s not enough proof. Burden’s always on the person claiming that something exists.
The reason why people suspect discrimination is largely because we see really smart, 4.0 GPA, high-SAT-achieving Asians like Jian Li get rejected, and people have a hard time understanding how someone who gets a test score in the 99+ percentile can be unfit for admission at a top school. The answer is simple: Admissions is a lot more than just test scores.
I’ve already listed these earlier. A huge component is diminishing marginal returns of the SAT, and others would be things like geography-based diversity, non-Asian athletic recruits, and homogenous trends being selected against for the sake of diversity.
I don’t know why you wouldn’t prefer a more detailed explanation, but whatever floats your boat. Yes, “all sorts of problems” refers to more than what you had listed.
I’m not sure what your point is here. The claim is that the number of Asian admittees increased significantly, not that that the number went “skyrocketing.” Do you dispute this claim? A simple yes or no will do.
By the same reasoning, I could claim that there is insufficient proof that smoking cigarettes reduces life expectancy. After all, there might be some missing variable being overlooked by epidemilogical studies. And it’s your burden to rule out such a missing variable.
For me, that’s not the reason. For me, the reason is that (apparently) Asian admittees have significantly higher test scores than people of other racial groups. Just like people who smoke cigarettes (apparently) enjoy shorter lifespans than non-smokers. And it’s known that elite colleges are obsessed with race and racial equality, just like it’s known that cigarette smoke is full of harmful chemicals. And it’s (apparently) known that elite colleges which stop practicing affirmative action see an increase in Asian enrollment just like it’s known that people who quit smoking usually see an improvement in their health.
Of course none of this proves anything, but Occam’s Razor and common sense points strongly to one simple conclusion.
I don’t see why this would result in higher SAT scores for Asian admittees. Can you explain?
Would claim that the bar is roughly the same for Asians and non-Asians who are non-athletetic recruits and come from the same geographic area and socio-economic status?
Homogeneous in terms of race? Or something else?
What besides what I listed?
The fact that you need to start throwing personal insults at this point suggests to me that cognitive dissonance is starting to build in your mind.
I asked a yes or no question, and you did not give a yes or no answer. My question was not an unfair one; it did not contain any presuppositions.
Nice try, though. If you’re going to respond to “A huge component is diminishing marginal returns of the SAT” with “I don’t see why this would result in higher SAT scores for Asian admittees. Can you explain?”… lol.