You can’t really be this stupid.
Careful. Even a backhanded “you can’t be . . .” sort of insult tends to annoy the Mods.
Affirmative Action is not a zero-sum in almost any sense. First, there is not a major university that I know of that has a hard cap on the number of students that get in. Just because some Black kid is admitted and some Asian kid isn’t doesn’t necessarily mean one is related to the other. Furthermore, since higher education is not based solely on any one university, there are are more win-win opportunities for the hypothetical students mentioned above. For example:
Black kid gets in to Harvard, Asian kid gets rejected, so he goes to Princeton instead. Win-win situation.
Affirmative Action is not zero-sum.
Maybe. Depends on the situation. They already do that at some HBCUs and I don’t see too many people complaining.
Wanna make a bet that the next anti-AA thread that goes up mainly–if not totally–will be focused on black people?
I’m not a gambling woman, but that’s a bet so sure I wouldn’t even consider it a gamble.
Now don’t go starting a thread called “Affirmative Action and Women” just to prove me wrong.
Just because some Black kid is rejected and some white kid isn’t doesn’t necessarily mean one is related to the other. Furthermore, since higher education is not based solely on any one university, there are more win-win opportunities for the hypothetical students mentioned above. For example:
White kid gets in to Harvard. Black kid gets rejected, so he goes to a HBU instead. Win-win situation.
Taken to its extreme, of course, it winds up saying “all the seats on the bus get there at the same time, more or less. Why the hell are you complaining about whether your seat is in the front or the back?”
Depends on who’s doing the counting.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve been reading recently about my family tree. I had not realized that my great grandparents started out married life traveling around to work on farms. They saved their money and eventually became farm owners and even owned businesses. They were not the first generation here in the USA, but apparently they started with very little and ended with a huge family and hundreds of decedents most of whom seem to be living comfortably.
I don’t think that a black couple would have had the opportunities that my great-grandparents did. The times and culture was such that a black person would not have been allowed to settle where they did or send their children to the same schools. I think a black couple would face many, many barriers that my great-grandparents did not, no matter how otherwise equal this hypothetical black couple would be.
Now, affirmative action purports to be able to consider something that would have raised barriers, and instead, lower them, a little. I like that thought.
And then there is another. I like working with a diverse group. I like that not everyone has similar backgrounds. I suspect that it is good for business. I think we should do what we can do to make sure that we have a diverse workforce on every level. If this means that we need to actually look at the race of college applicants and help diversity by giving extra points to an applicant the same way we do for applicant whose parents when to the school, then so be it.
In my experience, most people choose people for a position who fit their image of someone in that position. his is difficult to overcome, even if you don’t mean to let it, irrelevancies can cloud your judgment. I have found that in businesses, people often get hired in a department often look like those already there. This is not limited to race, and I don’t think it is entirely conscious. Now for generations, the vast majority or people who worked in business were white men, and so it would follow that many people think of white men first when thinking of certain jobs. We need someway to get away from that perception. If this means we need to pay attention to race and gender more for some time before we can overcome this, than that is what we need to do.
Ok, then you won’t mind giving me heavy odds. Here’s the deal: We look at the next thread about AA that doesn’t solely mention blacks in the OP. If 8 or more of the first 10 anti-AA posts in that thread focus on blacks (unless they are responding to pro-AA posts that focus on blacks), then you win the bet and I will donate one dollar to the charity of your choice. If I win the bet, you can choose between paying my subscription fees for the next 5 years or donating $100 to the charity of my choice.
The person who wins the bet may give a psuedonym to the loser so that the donation can be verified without spoiling anybody’s anonymity.
Although the idea of collecting $1 to feed the Sudanese refugees is deliciously tempting–and I’m quite tempted to take you up on your offer if only for the thrilling albeit remote possibility that $100 of my money will go to charity as well --how about the prize simply be the satisfication of saying “told ya so”? Not that I need that kind of validation to keep believing what I believe, but it would be fun nonetheless.
It’s worth pointing out, again, since despite that the issue keeps getting raised (with the new invention that it hasn’t actually been addressed :rolleyes: ) : the major reasons why this thread has presented AA as a ‘black issue’ is that the people in this thread who’ve been supporting it have cast it in that light. Supporters of that position have included but not been limited to numerous pro-AA posters in this thread, as well as a pulled quote from Jesse Jackson.
It is not at all wrong to ignore a fallacy.
As not all blacks are actually from low SES districts, then assigning ‘points’ based on race is a dodge.
If the actual point of your plan is to remedy disadvantages caused by low SES school districts, then the answer is to give preferential treatment to students of those low SES districts.. That, at least, is an operational definition. 100% of students from low SES distrcts, come from low SES districts, which some butnot all blacks come from low SES districts.
Looking at a sample of some, but not all blacks, and generalizing that to a ‘black issue’, and then treating any random black applicant as an exemplar of that ‘black issue’ commits the fallacies of composition and division, in tha order.
If your real issue is helping low SES students, then that’s who you should help. If your real issue is boosting black applicants, then you should state that’s your goal, without muddyng the waters by talking about SES.
Is a black doctor or lawyer less likely to face hostile police officers in a racist town? Is there any proof that having a good education or a good job has effected the frequency of “driving while black” traffic stops? And, what’s more, how do we decide what disadvantages merit preferential treatment? Jews were, for a long, long time, explicitly discriminated against by colleges with quota systems. Jews also can’t perform the social networking that goes on in many churches. Do Jews now get preferential treatment? Does anybody who’s ancestors faced hardship and who currently face prejudice deserve preferential treatment? Russians dealt with oppression for a long, long time. Many Arabs dealt with oppressive regimes and are now often looked at with distrust and suspicion. Armenians have been massacred by Turks. Chinese by Japanese. Black Sudanese by Arab Sudanese, Hutsus by Tutsis, Tutsis by Hutsus, and any number of balkanized tribes by each other, themselves, and various outsiders. Including but not limited to white/Arab Christians in the ME.
Which they deserve preferential treatment? Why or why not?
Numbers don’t tell us anything without some real analysis.
And, of course, just for the sake of intellectual honesty:
So, the counter argument that is provided specifically argues that “race-conscious admissions” benefit minority groups at the expense of whites and Asians.
It certainly stands to reason that once merit-based applications are used instead of race-conscious admissions, and we see that based on merit, more of one ‘group’ gets in than was otherwise allowed, that the race-conscious policies have been keeping them out. After all, that’s the only real factor that changed. This by the way keeps us out of the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy ,a fallacy that “we had AA start decades ago, and since then, we see more women in the workplace, so AA has helped” falls into.
Likewise, mean family income tells us nothing without analysis. Just because ‘average Asian income’ is greater than other averages, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be even higher without discriminatory admissions programs.
Those groups are not at all easily defined.
What you seem not to understand is that since race has no scientific validity, and an amorphous definition even in cultural contexts, that it’s useless as a descriptor, let alone a divider.
You might as well break people up into the “blond haired race”, “brown haired race” and “red haired race”, and be surprised that someone objects to using those categories as if they had any operational definition.
Much like people use definitions while pretending that they’re certain “everybody in the “community” benefits”, so too do people pretend that we all know what the heck we’re talking about when we talk about race. We don’t.
Etc, etc, etc…
Pretending that race is a meaningful distinction, that people mean the same thing when they talk about race, or that ‘race’ is, in any way, a predictive or objective definition, is simply wrong.
Pointing out facts is hardly a ‘gotcha’.
It’s a strawman as much when you repeat it as when she uses it. Of course application processes require interpretation. But that’s a huge amount of daylight between adding ‘points’ for writing talent in an essay, proven leadership skills, community service, having overcome adversity… and skin color. Any quality that actually means something can be acted on with no problem. But acting as if someone’s ‘race’/ethnicity/culture/etc… does is race-based decision making. What we used to call racism because it became racism for the ‘right’ cause.
If you don’t know how it is likely used, how can you judge whether or not something isn’t how it’s likely used?
Again, if equality of opportunity is your real goal, than make sure that everybody has an equal opportunity based on their merits. But equal can’t be used, with Orwellian flair, to mean “non-equal”. If preferential treatment is given to some, not based on merit but ancestry, then you are not calling for opportunities to be as accessible as possible for everybody, you’re calling for them to be more accessible for some but not others.
Again, if this discrimination was for whites, it’d be called racism. If it was for white-men, it’d be called racism and sexism. When it’s for non-whites and non-men, it’s justice.
There’s a lot more evidence to be provided before we can say that a ‘group’ is disenfranchised, let alone clearly so. Let us say, just for instance, that X percent of women, all on their own, decide that engineering, medicine and law aren’t the careers for them. That’s their choice. Maybe their parents helped them make that decision, maybe their peers, maybe just them on their own, who knows? But, without them putting the applications in, themselves, to those engineering, medical and legal programs? They’ve not been disenfranchised, they’ve chosen not to participate.
Just like the majority of teachers are women. Many men simply decide that teaching isn’t for them. But that doesn’t mean that men are being “disenfranchised” from teaching, merely that many choose not to be teachers. If you never submit the application, if you never enter the course of study, how can you claim any sort of discriminatory policy? “I bet if I’d applied those sexists wouldn’t have hired me?”
Interesting, isn’t it, that when a government program benefits certain minorities at the exclusion of others, certain ineffable intangible considerations are alleged… but when percentages don’t match up to demographics, discrimination is alleged?
It is in every sense unless you’re also making up your own definition.
It doesn’t matter if a university can expand the size of their class if they want, they most certainly have a cap, resources are not unlimited. Thus, there must be competition for those limited resources.
That’s what zero-sum means.
Your argument is like saying chess isn’t a zero sum game because if you lose at chess, you can always go beat someone else at checkers.
Ah well, in after the edit: “What we used to call racism because it became racism for the ‘right’ cause.”
Should be 'What we used to call racism before…"
And for the record, I wonder if any supporter of AA can give a logically coherent answer as to why discrimination based on race is racism when some people are the target, but progressivism/justice, or what have you, when others are the target.
Is the idea that it’s wrong to discriminate based on race, or it’s wrong to discriminate based on race if it’s the “wrong” group that’s benefiting? That is, is race-based discrimination ok as long as it serves a favored political agenda?
If, in 100 years, things get to the point where people with white skin (women, men, or women and men) are under represented in certain fields, would it be okay to discriminate against people who are, now, considered minorities?
How about certain fields today, like sports? Should we act aggressively to make sure that the number of black men in the NBA isn’t significantly higher than their demographic percentage in the nation?
If not, why not?
And who gets to decide?
Gotta wonder why you want to exclude threads like this from the bet, brazil84. I mean, threads that focus on blacks without even mentioning all the other AA benefactors are my gripe, right? So why ignore threads that make it clear from jumpstreet that they are entirely too fixated on blacks. That makes no sense.
The thing is, I agree that (for a lot of reasons) people are more likely to think of blacks when affirmative action is discussed. I disagree it happens 100% of the time. So I won’t take the bet unless I get heavy odds.
Well, if tonight somebody starts a thread called “Affirmative Action; Women; and Engineering”; and most of the anti-AA posts in the thread don’t mention black people, would you consider that your claim has been disproved?
Is that your final answer? I’ll repeat my question, just in case it isn’t.
Why shouldn’t they?
You clearly think the answer is self-evident. But you’re wrong.
Wrong on so many levels. First let’s get a good definition:
1. “Zero-sum games are games where the amount of “winnable goods” (or resources in our terminology) is fixed. Whatever is gained by one actor, is therefore lost by the other actor: the sum of gained (positive) and lost (negative) is zero. This corresponds to a situation of pure competition.”
Analysis: Is the amount of “winnable good” fixed? No, it is not. If you wish to cite examples of universities with hard caps on the numbers of students feel free to do so. I doubt you will find many, if any, at all. If Person A gets in to Harvard, will it always be at the expense of Person B? The answer is clearly no. And thats even being extremely generous to you with how we define “winnable goods”. The real “goods” are a good education. Not a good education and a specific university at a specific time. With such a narrow definition, many more things could be made to seem like the are zero-sum when they are not.
2. “A zero-sum game is a game in which total winnings and total losings sum to zero for each possible outcome.”
**
Analysis:** Again, this is not the case.
Find me any definition of zero-sum that would apply in this case.
No, its like saying outsourcing is zero-sum because some support-tech guy loses his job to a guy in India while ignoring that that action has created several jobs elsewhere, one of which might be available to that initial guy.
The reality of college admission on that level is that is produces very few “losers” in the traditional sense. Every guy that is rejected from Harvard, in 99% of situations, has a chance to go a good school if they desire. Beyond this whole semantics discussion, the real is issue is a pathetic emotional appeal on the grounds that AA is directly destroying other “more qualified” people’s lives. Zero-sum or no zero-sum, that is not the case. You are trying to create victims where there are none. I’m not saying that to argue for the correctness of AA, just to say that these vast swaths of Whites and Asians who’ve had their lives turned upside down by these policies are a fantasy.
To repeat my question from yesterday:
To what extent is AA currently practiced in the US?
For anyone to answer this question you would need to be more specific. Do you mean official or unofficial? Does AA in you mind include outreach programs, scholarships, set-asides, etc.? Does AA in your mind apply to athletes, legacies, minorities, women, people from certain geographical areas, etc.?
Of course not. Just because one thread out of millions is directed towards women, that doesn’t disprove my point. But sure, it might mean I’d lose our bet. Depends on what the subsequent posts looked like, right?
All I’m saying is that if the next slew of anti-AA threads have OPs that express variations of the “Affirmative Action: The Nigras Are Taking All Our Jobs and Invading Our Schools!” theme, I should think I’d earn me the right to say “told ya so”.
I’m no reflexive supporter of affirmative action, but this does not seem like a very difficult question to answer. All the same, I would be surprised if any reflexive AA disliker will find my logic convincing. Here’s a stab.
We are always going to discriminate for one reason or another. Someone will be accepted into college; another won’t. We disciminate on bases that are not objective. Individuals who do not attain their dream college/job/whatever are always going to be “hurt” in some way, be it psychic or otherwise.
We should all be able to agree that discrimination is based on two binding constraints: fairness to each individual and general welfare. Everyone ought to get his due. What each person is due is in part driven by our commonly held values. Good jobs ought to go to individuals with the most merit. We allocate these jobs this way because we as a society value hard work. Ultimately, everyone reaps the benefits of skill and productivity and as such, we want to encourage everyone to be skillful and productive. While many people reify “merit”, I would see it here as purely instrumental. In this context, I contend that it has no value for is own sake. Merit does not make you happier; it certainly does not make you more virtuous.
I argue (uncontroversially) that as a society, we want to maximize both fairness and welfare when we make discrimination decisions. I would even add a pareto constraint: if we want to increase one, we cannot decrease the other. Increasing welfare has to be done by creating efficiency, not by decreasing fairness.
According to one of the abstracts I linked above (and to a fairly robust volume of other research), affirmative action recipients may be slightly less “qualified” but are not making measurably less money than their non-AA colleagues who graduated from the same colleges. Since income is a pretty good proxy across the board for individual welfare, I would conclude that small differences in pre-admission credentials are an insufficient basis on which to conclude that one candidate is more “deserving” than the other, since everyone is doing about as well after they graduate. This conclusion is especially relevant when categories of people have been systematically denied advantages that other categories have had access to and are starting from a deficit.
There is an enormous literature that demonstrates empirically that the single biggest predictor of a person’s income is his parents’ incomes. As such, recipients of affirmative action who can “get out of the ghetto” are not only bettering themselves, they are decreasing the likelihood that society will have to subsidize their lifestyle or the lifestyles of their children.
Affirmative action increases social welfare by raising the incomes of those who benefit and decreasing the future social burden that would be accrued by them and their descendants. Affirmative action also does not appreciably decrease fairness, since minor differences in credentials have no meaning post-graduation. I would further argue that any post facto “test” for undeservedness based on measurable post-graduation indicators would reveal more variation among populations of AA and non-AA beneficiaries than between them. If you cannot induce from the data which students were “deserving” of admissions and which weren’t, then no systematic undermining of the principle of fairness can be proved to have occurred.
So while it sucks to not get into the college of your choice, perhaps you didn’t deserve it any more than the incrementally less credentialed woman/latino/black/eskimo/pacific islander, whether fresh off the boat or not.
There is only a logical inconsistency in your mind. It’s the difference between killing in self-defense and murder.
First, let me say that discrimination is not always bad. People discriminate all the time on perfectly valid grounds. Discrimination in the case of AA is done ideally for a few reasons:
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To correct, and account for past and continued discrimination done in bad faith and/or based on false pretenses.
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To gain the benefits of diversity.
These, IMO, are noble, progressive goals. What often makes discrimination done in bad faith, racism, is that the underpinnings of their arguments are often based in the implied inferiority of those being discriminated against.
Take the same actions in two different scenarios. Segregation in the '60’s on buses, and segregation of race-based gangs in prisons today. Both actions, segregation based on race, are the same, but the motivations are very different.
You are not considering the motivations of why people want to discriminate based on race. Those who apply AA, in good faith, try to do so in a way that is the most beneficial to all involved. It doesn’t matter who is being discriminated against if the motivations are noble (see white, HBCUs). Of course, we can get into an argument about what is noble and whats not, but thats another discussion