I personally find AA to be a flawed approach, one which will quickly fade out as more useful approaches take shape. I would, for instance, favor an approach centered around economic status than any racial measurement, which is inherently repugnant.
I also think the whole “fresh off the boat” snide is nativist cant. It is no more important how long one has been an American than how long one has been alive. Does a recent immigrant owe some debt to the native born, some apology to be rendered?
Yep, you are.
And since you are obviously missing the point of the definitions that you, yourself cited (one of which is a horrible definition)?
I’m going to make this real quick and not respond again unless you have something of substance to post.
You’ve quoted a definition without understanding what the heck it means.
Chess is a zero sum game though there is no “hard” cap on the number of games a series of matches can include. But chess games, like admissions slots, are always finite. Thus, resources are always limited. And resources one person wins (eg. a game of chess or one of a finite-series of admissions slots) cannot possibly be won by someone else.
If there is one spot that we’re looking at, and more than one person applying for it, then a win for one is a loss for the others.
This is undeniable. Except, I suppose, if you don’t know what a zero sum game is.
Bullshit. There is always an upper bound, slots are not infinite, and infinite slots are the only possible scenario which would mean that you weren’t blowing smoke.
As there is no possible, conceivable, or arguable scenario where a university has decided on X number of slots, 2X candidates are applying for them, and X candidates’ wins don’t mean X candidates’ losses.
You don’t understand what a zero sum game is.
Your ignorance is showing. Badly.
There are roughly 16.5 applicants for every Harvard admissions slot. That means if Person A gets in, Person B, Person C, Person D, Person E, Person F, Person G, Person H, Person I, Person J, Person K, Person L, Person M, Person N, Person O, Person P, and Person P-Q all don’t get in.
If persons 1 through 1650 get in, then persons 1651 through 27. 278 do not get in. In order for someone to win, others must lose. That is the definition of a zero sum game.
The Principia Cybernetia’s definition is sloppy, and you’ve glommed onto a particularly sloppy phrase, showing that you don’t grok the actual issues involved. The number of grams of bananas that a tree can grow isn’t on a “hard” cap, either. You can add fertilizer. You can graft on more tree limbs. You can jump up and down and do voodoo rain dances for all I care. But if, at the end of the season, nobody shares a banana and one person getting a banana means that another (or more than a dozen) didn’t get one, it’s a zero sum game. Or more accurately a negative-sum game.
Just like college admissions. Or employment.
Again, you show that you have no clue what zero sum games refer to. Just because you can construct another game which also has a number of slots that cannot possibly be shared does not mean that each game isn’t a zero sum game. Your argument is exactly identical to arguing that Chess isn’t a zero sum game, because you can play checkers. And if you lose those checkers games, you can play Risk. And if you lose the Risk games, you can play Go Fish. And if you lose the Go Fish games…
Or like claiming that running a race isn’t a non-zero sum game, because if you lose in the Olympics, you can go to the nationals, and if you lose at the nationals you can go to the regionals, and if you lose at the regionals you can go to the states, and if you lose at the states you can go to the counties, and if you lose in the counties you can go to the towns, and if you lose in the town races you can always go find a five year old and see if you can run faster than him.
You don’t get games theory, at all.
Any game in which winning for one person means that another must lose is, by definition, not a non-zero sum game.
In the case of Harvard’s admissions, actually, it’d be a negative sum game, because for every winner, there are more than a dozen losers, who lose because the winner took a finite and limited spot in a finite and limited series of spots.
That there are other games that can be played does not change something that isn’t a non-zero sum game into a non-zero sum game. Otherwise, the Prisoner’s dilemma couldn’t possibly be played as a zero sum game, because you could always get arrested again. :smack:
Facts say one thing, you say another.
I’m having such trouble figuring out who to believe.
Oh… wait, wait… no
Facts still win.
Maybe if you hold onto your ideology really, really strongly, the actual statistics will change and we won’t see that as soon as merit based programs replace race-based programs, those who were being discriminated against get the slots based on merit.
I wouldn’t hold my breath though, were I you.
Facts have a notorious anti-bullshit bias.
It is a fantasy. Just like how AA “destroys” people’s lives.
Coincidentally, they’re also both fantasies that you made up and used as strawmen rather than discussing the actual claims.
And just to point out one more absurd argument:
No. But that is a nice fallacy of false analogy.
It’s the difference between racism against protected classes, and racism against non-protected classes. Discriminating based on race is racism, you’ve simply said that some racism is "good’ and other is “bad”. That some folks will go to great lengths to rationalize racism isn’t surprising. That they’ll rely on subjective definition of what’s best is, likewise, unsurprising.
You’ve also been kind enough to refute your own argument. Justifiable homicide and murder are both killing a human being, although we say one is good and one is bad. The motive only matters as to whether or not the killing is legally justified. Discriminating against a protected group based on race, and discriminating against a non protected group based on race are both racism, even if you say one is bad and one is good. The motive only matters (to you and your ideological fellow travelers) if you’re deciding on whether or not it’s “good” racism or “bad” racism. But it’s still racism.
So we’re pretty much done here, eh?
How about the way most of the posters in this thread are defining it?
As you so often do, you are attempting to establish a stark duality where it does not apply. One’s definition of racism is seldom as cut and dried as you would like to pretend.
For instance, lets take someone who sincerely believes that another “race” is inherently inferior, and makes every effort to discriminate against such persons and to encourage others to do so. Clearly, a racist.
But what if someone sincerely believes that “race” exists, but refuses to accept discrimination on such a basis? There are those who suggest that simply accepting race as a reality is sufficient ground for that label. By a strict definition, I would agree, such a person is a racist. But not in the most widely understood meaning of the word, with its pejorative connotation of injustice and discrimination.
Is a racist invariably a bigot? And is it not bigotry and injustice that is the true enemy?
You try and impress upon us a definition that fits snugly to your agenda, but it is simplistic. If you can prove that any consideration of race is “racism”, then you think you prove that all racism is bigotry, and this is not necessarily so.
I think the goals of affirmative action would be better served with a focus on economic factors for such action, to provide the opportunity we claim to cherish. In that, I disagree with many of my leftish cohorts and co-conspirators. But AA is a good thing in that it resolves some of the issues, it just isn’t good enough. I should like to see AA disappear one of two ways, best, because it is no longer needed, second best, because we have a better way of going about it.
But your nimble leaps from race to racism to bigotry simply don’t work.
I hate to pick on you sometimes, Finn, but your stridency tempts me. You clearly do not get game theory either.
A zero sum game has a strict, formal definition that you are either abusing or unaware of.
A game is zero sum when the payoffs of all players sum to zero. In other words, one player’s loss is exactly balanced by another player’s gain. Let’s see how that works in college admissions. Furthermore, the idea of each admission as a separate one-shot game is nonsensical.
Suppose one student who applies to Harvard and to East Assfuck State. Let’s pretend the student is academically capable of getting into both schools. Suppose further that Harvard is his first choice, and EAS is his second. Suppose admissions is a one-shot zero sum game.
Harvard accepts 1 out of 16. The student who gets in receives a payoff of x, everyone else receives a payoff of -x/15.
EAS accepts 1 out of two. The student who gets in receives a payoff of x, everyone else receives a payoff of -x/2.
Suppose the student, a white male from Greenwich, CT, doesn’t get in to either school. He receives a -x/15 disutility from failing to get into Harvard, but a -x/2 disutility for getting rejected by EAS. This is not consistent with his preference ordering over the two schools in the first place.
In reality, the admissions process is highly strategic and involves not just admission to one school, but a strategy designed to maximize admission to a set of schools. Focusing on the dubiously zero sum properties of getting into only one school (when in reality, competitive students apply to a dozen or more) is irrelevant at best and misleading at worst.
Yes, but in chess there is one winner and one loser. In admissions, there is no set number of winners or losers.
Jobs, at any given time, are finite too. Microsoft will only hire a certain amount of people every year. So will every other tech firm. If one person gets an engineering job at Microsoft, someone else doesn’t get it. Does that mean jobs are a zero-sum game?
A situation with winners and losers is a GAME, not necessarily a zero-sum game. Every competitive situation produces winners and losers.
Really? Give me an example of something that is truly infinite at a defined time?
Cite? Show me any definition of a zero-sum game that states, “n order for someone to win, others must lose”. I’ll be waiting.
Remind me what we are arguing about then? So you agree it’s not a zero-sum game?
I did study game theory in college, and I think that as a technical, formal matter, college admissions are not a zero sum game. However, the phrase “zero sum game” has leaked out into common parlance and people have an informal understanding of what it means – a situation where one person winning means that somebody else will lose.
So earlier in this thread, I stated the following:
The response was this:
I understood the poster to be using the informal meaning of “zero sum game” rather than the formal meaning. So the real question is whether a benefit to one individual under AA is necessarily a detriment to somebody else.
To me, it’s clear that the answer is “yes,” and for anyone to insist on the formal definition of zero sum game at this point is to throw up a red herring.
Now, one might ask about a hypothetical situation where a college sets up 100 new scholarships just for white people. One might argue that non-whites aren’t being hurt in any way, but I would say that they are. The money has to come from somewhere, and that money could have been used for the benefit of all students, not just whites. Certainly if Harvard announced that it was setting up a special fund to reduce tuition for white students, one could expect civil rights activists to object.
After criticism for unfairly limiting the admission of Asian students, Berkeley changed policies in 1989 to place more emphasis on academic achievement. In 1991, Asian students outnumbered White students, six years before affirmative action policies ended.
Disadvantaged students, for a plethora of reasons, will not have the same level of academic achievement as students from more advantaged homes. Since the highly competitive universities only consider tests scores above a certain threshold, the pool of disadvantaged students is narrowed down to extremely talented, high achievers. The top institutions are declining most applicants solely because of the sheer volume of qualified students seeking admission. People need to blame someone for the lack of jobs and increasingly limited slots in competitive universities. Exaggerating the influence of affirmative action seems like a scapegoat.
You might want to let your friend know that.
And your word games constitute a hijack to this thread.
I have not seen any serious poster to the SDMB deny that race is an actual category of examination in at least five years. What several of us need to keep reminding the uninformed is that the word race is an inexact (and too broad) descriptor that has no use in biology when describing or examining humans even when it remains a useful (although still inexact) description of social groups in particular societies.
As to your little game, the correct answer is that those persons whose ancestors were imported from Africa as slaves both have a history of suffering discrimination and oppression in the U.S. and also demonstrate an overall lower scores on standardized tests.
No one, however, has provided sufficient evidence to conclude the reason why such scores tend to be lower amonmg that group (which may be condsidered a socio-cultural race, but which does not constitute anything resembling a bologicial race in that (1) the group represents only a subset of people generally toosed into the vaguely defined “Negro Race,” (2) the group includes a very large numnber of people whose ancestry can be found in Europe and North America prior to 1492, and (3) no no has eliminated or even accounted for all the possible social constraints that could affect those scores (although the persecution and discrimination may play a role).
Now, if you have a contribution to this thread, fine, but take your game playing away.
I’m not sure what your point is. Do you deny that there was a huge jump in Asian enrollment at Cal after affirmative action was ended there?
And refusing to accept that some groups are negatively impacted by affirmative action seems like wishful thinking. Besides, it sucks to know that you are being treated worse because of your race or ethnicity.
Could I say the same about your choice of language in posting to Great Debates?
Knock it off.
= = = =
you with the face and brazil84, take your bet to e-mail. It is only tangential to this thread’s topic and it serves no real purpose, here.
= = = =
[ /Moderating ]
A valid category for what?
and WTF do the answers to those two questions have to do with whether there is such a thing as race.
But just to answer your questions:
Blacks as a whole suffered (and continue to suffer) racial discrimination and the lingering effects of past discrimination.
Blacks as a whole test one standard deviation below the average on tests that purport to measure a hypothetical value refered to as g.
Ermm can we stop referring to legacy admissions as affirmative action. Affirmative action is corrective, legacy admissions is the privelege of wealth.
There is about as much anti-black bias underlying the anti-AA movement as there is anti-Mexican bias underlying the anti-illegal immigration movement. Sure there is a problem with both of them but you are rubbing shoulders with good old fashioned racists when you go to rallies for either of these movements.
But does it really remain useful? If its inexact nature and lack of predictive/descriptive power renders it into something of a vague generality, what real use is it?
Yes, it is still useful in the sense that people discriminate based on those shifting categories, but I’m not totally sure discrimination charges couldn’t be centered around phrases like “didn’t hire so and so because of the color of his skin/national origin/accent” rather than “…because of his race.”
As I have, and will continue to argue, to the extent that we treat race as an accurate descriptor, as a valid category, as something that can in some way tell us about any random member of the ‘group’, then we have sown the very seeds of the racism that we are trying to deal with.
As long as it is intellectually acceptable to construct a statement like “Hispanics are X” or “Jews are Y” or “Women are Z”, then we can’t really be surprised when ideological opponents decide that X, Y and Z should be pejorative labels rather than positive ones.
And the fact that, even within the same society, definitions of race can differ, strongly suggests that its use, if not already totally gone, is almost done with. If we can’t even agree on who is “black”, who is “Asian” who is “native American”, etc… what use do the categories really have?
I haven’t met any reflexive opponents of AA, so I suppose one might object to your logic. It fails, however, on purely rational grounds.
Eh… without linking to actual research or hard numbers, I’m not going to touch on abstracts. Nor, as I’ve pointed out, does not making measurably less money mean that people aren’t being held back from making even more money than they would have, otherwise. Artificially leveling out the set of outcomes does not mean that the playing field has been leveled, merely that the system of scoring been artificially homogenized.
All that aside, no, even if it’s done for good reasons, it still remains a race-based policy. Judging and discriminating based on race, even if you’re doing it for reasons that are, or are believed to be in society’s best interest, is a fundamentally racist (definition 2) position. That it may be argued to be useful, or justifiable racism is not the point. That it explicitly legitimizes racism as long as someone believes they can craft support for it, is.
Sorry, I do.
A rather good definition would be “If we add up the wins and losses in a game, treating losses as negatives, and we find that the sum is zero for each set of strategies chosen, then the game is a “zero-sum game.”” Or, perhaps " A game played by a number of persons in which the winner takes all the stakes provided by the losers so that the algebraic sum of gains at any stage is zero. It has been argued that many decision problems may be viewed as zero sum games between two persons."
But the colloquial definition, which is how both face and brick were using it would be:" of, relating to, or being a situation (as a game or relationship) in which a gain for one side entails a corresponding loss for the other side <dividing up the budget is a zero–sum game>"
Under that definition, employment and admissions are both clearly zero-sum.
(and we’re not even getting into the idea of non-constant sum games, or ways in which traditionally zero sum games can become non-zero sum games if other factors than the normally identified rewards are taken into account)
This still fits the colloquial understanding of a “zero sum” game, in which one can only gain advantage by harming others, and a gain by one necessitates a loss by one or more other players.
Nonsensical in that it’s, well, true.
In applying to any one school, you compete for a limited number of spots, and if you get one, someone else (or many other people) cannot get the same spot. Applying to a separate school is a separate game, just like another chess game is a separate game or an Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma is a series of individual games where memory of previous games is assumed.
Much like if you’re arrested for multiple crimes, with multiple accomplices, you can play out the Prisoners’ Dilemma multiple times, in multiple zero sum games.
No, it’s still a series of zero-sum games, just one in which you’re betting on winning at least one of them. Same as if I decided to play a dozen chess games. Each one would be zero sum, but I’d stand a decent chance of winning at least one of them.
But if we’re really going to quibble, Morgenstern and Von Neumann conceived of games as something different than the current vernacular meaning ascribed to ‘zero sum’ and ‘non zero sum’. Von Neumann’s concept of games wouldn’t apply to admissions or employment at all, as it presumes the ability of players to play against each other, when in most cases of employment or college applicants, candidates have no knowledge of their rivals and are only going for a ‘personal best’. Heck, Schelling applied zero sum games to everything from quitting smoking to raising children to MAD.
That the concepts of a zero sum and a non-zero sum game have become part of the common vernacular is beyond question. It was in that context that I was addressing them, and even in that context, that brick and face were utterly wrong. If you really want, I can see if my folks can dig up any of my boxed up personal library and send 'em to me, so I can fling cites and references from Games and Economic Behavior, etc…
I don’t really think that’s necessary though, do you?
Is that a threat?
“Nice little thread you’ve got going 'ere, be a shame if anything were to 'appen to it…”
Most of the rationale of AA opponents depends on the notion that the playing field is relatively level and that AA imbalances that playing field.
No, not necessarily. Some, if not many, argue as I do. There certainly exist disparities in the playing field, discrimination can and does occur, low SES school districts can and do negatively impact students’ early education.
However, the argument then continues to say that racist policies are wrong no matter who they’re directed at, that AA as it’s practices often uses the fallacies of composition and division, and often leads to less qualified candidates taking spots that, under merit-based programs, would have gone to more qualified candidates.
It also goes on to say that the best way to remedy low the burden of low SES schools is to weight academic performance from those schools more highly than comparative performance from higher SES districts. That, in my view and many others’, preserves fairness, justice, merit-based metrics, and avoids racist policies. After all, someone who manages to score 1300 on the SAT, hold down a solid B+ average and shows leadership/community service, and who lives in a neighborhood where they have to step over crack pipes on their way to school, has, at least in my estimation, shown much more innate talent and drive than someone who gets a 1400 on their SAT, a solid A-, and who is driven to school every day in a BMW, to use the school’s bank of 100 internet ready computers, before going home to study with a private Princeton Review SAT tutor.
The argument also continues that as racism is deplorable, and racist discrimination unacceptable, strict and vigilant enforcement of anti-discrimination laws is what’s necessary to combat racial discrimination. Not racial discrimination for another group, instead.
Fallacy of composition I’m afraid.
A black, Kenyan woman, who’s never stepped foot in America may very well not have suffered a day of racial discrimination in her entire life.
A black, Zaireian man who hops off a plane tomorrow at Newark Airport has probably not suffered any racial discrimination.
Even some American blacks now most likely do not suffer lingering effects of past discrimination.
While it would certainly be interesting to find out what percent do, and in what circumstances, it’s not accurate to make sweeping generalizations. In what context and to what degree are we even looking at 'lingering effects?" If we’re talking about average income, do Bob Johnson or Oprah count? If we’re looking at social factors, would blacks in a city with excellent ‘race relations’ count?
Yes, a huge percentage of American blacks (not “blacks as a group”) suffered discrimination, slavery, violence, etc… in the past. Yes, a non-zero percentage still suffer discrimination and/or the economy legacy of having ancestors who were kept from improvg their financial lot in life, or their children’s.
But to make sweeping statements about “blacks as a group” are simply unfounded. Almost nothing happens to any bunch of people “as a group”. Hell, the Nazis didn’t even exterminate the Jews as a group. Liminal bits of a situation often do much more to show us the error of certain conceptual patterns than statistical trends do to set firm, verifiable categories.
Do they, as a whole?
Or does the average of people who, by (current) classification schema in America fall into the “black” category test as such? I’d put money, for instance (not literally tom), on Ralph J. Bunche being someone who most certainly would ruin the concept that ‘blacks’, “as a whole”, tested at any specific level of intelligence at all.
Quibble: legacies don’t necessarily reflect the privilege of wealth. Despite anti-Jewish quotas of the time, my grandfather (who certainly wasn’t rich), got into Yale Medical. Even if he’d never made a dime, my father, and my brothers (along with myself) would all benefit.
Quibble the second: It’s also be nice if face would admit that there’s nothing to object to about legacies or connections because while they happen to run afoul of demographic percentages, there’s nothing actually wrong or racially based about them. A black woman who gets into Harvard will have children who can benefit from legacy status, and contacts that will help her and her children with social networking. It’s the same fallacy we’ve seen all through this thread, that’s never actually been dealt with, only repeated ad nauseum: just because the people who benefit from a policy aren’t representative of demographic percentages does not mean that anything wrong has actually occurred. You have to do a hell of a lot more to prove that injustice is occurring than to show that the world around us doesn’t map to demographics as if individuals were totally randomized bits of data.
With all that about legacies and networking aside, AA, on the other hand, is immutable in some of its racist dimensions as it stands currently, white males or many Asians will never be helped, and only harmed. Alleging racism on the part of those who do not want racist policies while championing those racist policies yourself is just… odd.
It’s also more than a little bit wonky to claim that looking at the issue as a “black program” is a racist behavior, when numerous AA supporters, themselves, frame it that way. It seems like a very untoward tactic to claim that when Jesse Jackson claims that AA was created as a “black program” and that its intent should be preserved as such, that responding to the scope of his claims (or similar claims by other AA advocates) somehow makes one a “racist”.
It’s a very odd tactic where one’s allies get to set the scope and dimensions of the discussions, and those who respond to that become ‘racists’.
Err…I read your response early today and wrote a response tonight without rereading what you wrote. My point was addressing what I thought you wrote. :smack:
So, in response to your actual post:
My guess is that Stanford is cost prohibitive for most people and the reason more Asian American students attend Berkeley or any other UC school over Stanford. There is inordinate competition in the top ranked public universities because of the rising cost of higher education.
I agree. I certainly don’t condone caps or any other form of exclusion for any group.
The white construction crew I was inspecting a couple of years back did not make jokes about the fact that the neighborhood in which we were working had people whose skin color was darker than xA0522D, they joked about the “niggers.” The lady from whom I rented an apartment, years ago, who asked if I knew anyone interested in renting my unit as I left did not ask if I knew anyone with a complexion lighter than that of a paper bag, she asked if I knew any white people who were looking. (Homer Plessy was understood to be black under a “one drop rule” despite thefact that he could pass for white if he chose to, I agree that it is problematic to set laws based on some assigned value of race, but this society has assigned a(n arbitrary) value to “race” in a social context and pretending that those people who use that construct really do not have an image of what they perceive as race simply bogs down any discussion in semantic games if we pretend that there is no concept held by some large number of people.