How do you factor in cultural differences? Music is a part of culture. The idea that a couple of people playing in an orchestra could meaningfully change an entire culture seems highly unlikely.
If the ranks of the highly skilled orchestra players is already so packed that their are so many more perfect applicants than jobs, encouraging young people of any race to devote their lives to mastering an instrument for a slight possibility of one of those jobs seems like poor plan.
It earned me a warning too, I probably won’t last very long here.
You could, for example, ask the community whether they are interested in careers as orchestra members, and you could ask people why they don’t pursue that career. If it turns out that a significant number of Black people are scared off by the total absence of Black people in orchestras (“the way I see it, a Black person has no future in orchestras”), that’s something you can fix with a quota. If it turns out that Black people are just less likely to appreciate classical music, that’s out of your hands and you would reduce the quota accordingly.
You misunderstand. The point isn’t to oversaturate the job market, that’s just a side effect. The point is to remove unfair bariers in an already oversaturated job market. The assumption is that there is a significant number of people who really would prefer to devote their lives to mastering an instrument for a slight possibility of one of those jobs, if only they weren’t so underrepresented in that field.
~Max
Are you offering a “quota” for black people in orchestras for real? From my point of view, any “quota” based on race is the evidence of racism itself. That’s what happenned to the Oscars.
Since when the fact that some people do not have enough courage to do what they like became “unfair barier”? Why then should they be encouraged and not me?
I just provided you with the example of where racism comes from.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
I admit it. I reject the notion that race-based discrimination is necessarily wrong. I also admit that quotas are unfair to individual applicants; I said ‘the social good of having an orchestra reflect its community demographics outweights the top-tier applicant’s individual right to a fair but random chance’.
I also want to point out that racial quotas, as I have proposed for orchestras, are blatantly illegal under current law.
~Max
I think this question is best answered from a historical perspective. Under what circumstances did the orchestras emerge, that they underrepresent certain groups? I’m not prepared to make the full argument, but I think the barrier is the unjust product of past racism (be it in music education or in orchestras themselves), and it has survived through the present day by self-perpetuation.
~Max
Until he admits his error, I feel pretty good about pointing it out to him.
I absolutely think he had at the very least a brain fart and doesn’t want to admit it because admitting brain farts in his mind undermines his credibility. The humans among us know that mistakes happen.
He continues to pretend that I am the one that made the error and not him.
And when they say average, I think they were talking about median. What makes you think they were talking about mean? The median lsats at stanford and touro are the averages cited above, 171 and 148.
(Link deleted by raventhief)
Unless he didn’t make an error, in which case you are just pointing out your own ignorance. But feel free to feel good about that.
I agree that you probably think that. But you would be wrong.
Because when pretty much anyone uses the term “average” they are speaking of the mean. If you are talking about the median (or the mode, but who ever uses that?), then it is actually on you to define that, not to assume that your audience is aware that you are using the less common usage.
So, this was really your mistake, in not defining the less common usage. When someone says average, but is referring to the median, they are either in error, or trying to be deceptive.
That’s what I learned in grade school, but I remember learning in statistics that it could be any of the three (or mid-extreme). Perhaps the dictionary you referenced is talking about colloquial usage, and not academic usage.
~Max
The problem is how to separate meritocracy as a method for allocating decision-making power from meritocracy as a method for allocating social and economic rewards.
My memory is that although “average” can refer to any of the three, even in academic usage it’s made clear ( at some point) which of the three is being referred to. In fact, I don’t recall seeing average used all that often in academic writing - mostly I see either mean or median . And this message board is not academic writing - if someone refers to “average” here, most people are gong to take it to be referring to the mean,
You’re probably right, and that’s as far as I’m going to wade into this particular tangent.
~Max
How would this “deception” benefit me? This is argument getting stupid.
The lsat scores for stanford and touro are publicly available. If asl had done a simple google search before declaring victory because I didn’t know that law schools use medians not averages [/boggle], I doubt he would have made such a silly post.
Yes, of course we agree. I also think that black parents love their children as much as white parents, just as asian parents love their kids too.
I didn’t think I was promoting living in a harrison bergoron world, I was saying that focusing on equality of results rather than equality of opportunity could very well lead to a harrison bergereon dystopia.
I am trying to isolate out arguments about slavery and genocide because all too frequently slavery is used to justify preferences to people who have nothing to do with slavery and it muddies the waters in these sort of discussions generally. Hispanics are the most obvious population that comes to mind.
You should read that post again. He was complaining that I used the word average to describe lsat scores when the schools actually use medians because they are interested in usnwr rankings or something like that. I pointed out that I was also talking about medians.
I can only judge them by what they write. And there was no actual argument there that I could decipher other than some version of “if you look at what they do scores, you will see that I am right” It seemed to me that he has no idea what he was talking about. Law school admissions are holistic but at the best law schools lsat scores are pretty important and at the not so good ones, they are a lot less important. That is why I was comparing the stanford last to the touro lsat.
Are you saying that i should treat him more kindly or something? Is he a kid? I think there was another poster with some mental issues that I didn’t know about until later. If asl is a kid or vulnerable in some way that might justify kid gloves, just tell me.
The american dream for a lot of immigrants isn’t to become rich, it’s to become not poor. The horatio algers stories were about achieving middle class not wealth.
The hope is that your middle class children will provide a platform for your grandchildren to do something more meaningful.
This country is pretty partisan. Each side thinks the other side is evil, stupid or both. This place has picked its side and is no longer in search for the truth, it is in search for the most liberal position that the facts can support. At least it tries for the most part to tie its positions to the facts but its a daily struggle. Most liberal sites don’t even pretend anymore.
The same can be said for conservative sites. Most of them don’t care about the truth anymore. Only a few of them try to tie their positions to the truth and most of them are now pariahs in the mainstream conservative movement which has drunk the koolaid on trump.
So another school that also uses a more "holistic meritocratic admissions method might be going to a lottery as part of its admissions process.
I don’t agree with asra 100% but…
Is this just an interesting link you want me to read, or are you going to explicitly tie it in with the discussion we were having?
(I read it, and it is interesting, thank you)
~Max
Sure, but immigrants aren’t really the issue here, are they? I mean, having grown up and lived in areas with a lot of immigrants (primarily Asian, but also a lot of Hispanic ones), they’re not the ones permanently mired in poverty in the US. I mean, look at SW Houston for an example of how immigrants can do well in the US despite racism and no money. And I don’t actually have a lot of citations, but ISTR that Hispanic immigrant families usually move up the socioeconomic ladder to middle class after a generation or two, which is what I’d note is the case in the Hispanic families I know.
I’m saying a child born into poverty in the US isn’t necessarily imagining the end product of all that effort as having a working class job, so that their children can have a middle class job. That’s not what they hear about as the end goal in music, movies, etc… And I can see how it’s kind of bleak if you’re the guy struggling to manage working class instead of poor. Or even their child, trying to manage middle class rather than working class.
It takes education, foresight, and other intangibles to get there- my suspicion is that each generation shoots as high as they can, but only manages one hop. That’s how my family did it, FWIW. Each one did a little better than their parents and tried/tries to set their kids up to do better than they did. But it takes a recognition that you’re not in it to be rich, but rather for the express purpose of setting your children up. I suspect that’s what’s lacking, either in the desire, or in the execution, especially when you have single-parent homes as the norm, and they’re just struggling to keep above water, never mind actually getting ahead a little bit.
It’s just interesting. They seem to want to adopt a lottery mechanic to try and achieve diversity.
I will note that a similar effort in NYC resulted in a lot of asian kids at predominantly black/hispanic schools getting in. They effectively replaced poor asian kids from asian neighborhoods with poor asian kids from black/hispanic neighborhoods. However there was a small improvement in black/hispanic admissions mostly at the expense of poor white kids.
TJHSST is different because fairfax is a suburb and while there is poverty in the county the school is fairly affluent. Only 2% of TJHSST students qualify for free or reduced lunch. At stuyvesant about 45% of the kids are eligible for free or reduced lunch. 90% of the kids eligible for free or reduced lunch are asian (about 75% of the student population as a whole are asian).
I think a lot will depend on how virginia manages the cutoffs for eligibility for the lottery pool. We have state testing here in virginia so maybe we can bake that into the formula.
I agree with all this. However what I have heard in response are cries of racism and bigotry. How dare you blame them!
A secondary question, whatever we are doing in the social sphere to help, isn’t working.
So in my mind, it is due to 1 of 2 things or a combination of both:
I actually think it is a combination of both. But listening to the divisive politicians (that we allow) we have one saying it is all no. 1 and one side saying it is all no 2.
Why should they have to claw their way out? My white ancestors didn’t have to claw their way out of a multi-century long campaign to deprive us of our rights, political power and economic opportunity.