<p>And there are still URMs at Berkeley, am I correct? You’re making the enormous leap that “fewer” means “none”. It doesn’t.</p>
<p>And I shouldn’t have used Berkeley as an example, as the demographics of California are different than the demographics of the nation. And I should have simply said “smaller” instead of “much smaller”. But, my point still stands.</p>
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<p>By underemphasizing the role racial classification plays in admissions, you’re only weakening your argument that it’s unimportant. If the effect that affirmative action has on admissions is so trivial, why keep it at all? It just doesn’t make sense to fight tooth and nail to keep a policy that, as Exie so eloquently put it, “is dead.” It may, however, make a ton of sense to fight bitterly to keep a policy that prevents “Berkeleyesque” racial classification percentages.</p>
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<p>No, it’s not, because there are borderline URM applicants at Berkeley who are in a similar position as borderline URM applicants at top schools that practice AA. It’s just that at the schools that practice AA, the URM applicants are given a slight boost that causes them to be accepted.</p>
<p>And I implied a couple of times earlier that I was switching my argument for the sake of keeping the discussion from going stale. Earlier, I was arguing primarily on behalf of the colleges, whose views I mostly support, while now I’m arguing on behalf of the students who are benefited by AA.</p>
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<p>One of the many weaknesses of the “slight boost” argument is that it presumes that one point is one point, no matter where it goes. But, as any freaked out college freshman can tell you, there’s a huge difference between a 69 and a 70 cumulative average and a 99 and a 100 cumulative average. The one point difference in the latter case isn’t going to matter at all, but the one point difference in the former case is the difference between failing and passing.</p>
<p>If the “slight boost” is necessary for admission, then it’s not a “slight boost.” It’s a big one.</p>
<p>They took our jobs!!</p>
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<p>It’s a crapshoot for everybody else, so why should URM’s get boosts? Even with AA, it’ll still be a crapshoot. It’s not like Harvard accepts 10% of URM applicants; it accepts much less.</p>
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<p>So if AA did not exist, that something else will not push them over the edge anymore? So AA is still more important than that something else?</p>
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<p>Maybe I’m missing something here but what’s wrong with a Berkeleyesque racial classification breakdown?</p>
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<p>I don’t think there’s anyone wrong with UC Berkeley’s real diversity. That’s why I put “Berkeleyesque” in quotation marks; I intended to express my disagreement with Jaddua that there is anything wrong with Berkeley’s racial classification breakdown.</p>
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<p>It’s a slight but significant boost. Not a big boost (e.g. 10 points on that scale)</p>
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<p>You should probably go ahead and read the argument that occurred before you joined the argument.</p>
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<p>They could be of equal importance and add up to be important enough to push them over the edge.</p>
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<p>I covered this when I was arguing on behalf of the (private) colleges/universities.</p>
<p>Honestly, though, I’m confusing the two arguments I had before now and it’s just not working out as well as my prior argument worked, so I’m probably going to just refer you all to my responses to Jersey13 that occurred earlier.</p>
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<p>I can live with that designation. 69 to 70 is slight but significant for the student.</p>
<p>"A few weeks ago, I asked Shrinkrap if she would support AA even if it meant it came at her own race’s detriment.</p>
<p>She has yet to answer."</p>
<p>Didn’t I? When WAS that? I’ll look it up.</p>
<p>OMG! This is the popularity I never had in high school! And they thought I wouldn’t graduate!</p>
<p>Today I would say, who gets to measure “detriment”? If I got to measure “detriment”, and I felt me being “here” was all bad, I probably would say “no”. Not worth it. But today I can say I saw several patients, managed staff, interacted with the community, as did my husband, and I would say “detriment” is hard to measure.</p>
<p>I live in California. It’s hard for ME to imagine how this is an issue here, at least not at tax time.</p>
<p>And neither of my kids are likely to benefit from a UC. Does that help?</p>
<p>“She has yet to answer.”</p>
<p>Didn’t I? When WAS that? I’ll look it up."</p>
<p>I looked it up, </p>
<p>“You” said</p>
<p>“However, if what you want is “diversity,” and not benefits for African Americans, would you support an AA policy that seeked to raise Asian representation in professional California if it meant that it came at the expense of African Americans?”</p>
<p>I said</p>
<p>“Are those my only two choices? What is “Asian” anyway? Can I choose Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani? If “Chinese”, what part? last week someone asked me if I was from Fiji. Sigh. Well… I’ll take any pigment I can get.”</p>
<p>You said…</p>
<p>"How about this:</p>
<p>An AA policy that will raise representation of EVERY group except African Americans at the expense of African Americans.</p>
<p>Would you support it, if it helped diversity?</p>
<p>the NBA is at least 85% black. What if it started balancing the teams’ rosters out, for diversity’s sake?</p>
<p>It will increase diversity, sure, but it could also (and probably would) result in a decrease in quality. I’m not saying White players are inferior but…</p>
<p>The same thing happens in college admissions and employment, wouldnt you agree?</p>
<p>You could substitute any field in for the NBA.
You might say you wouldn’t have a problem with the NBA implementing such a policy because it neither benefits nor hinders you directly.</p>
<p>But then you refuse to let AA die in the college process because it benefits your daughter directly and does not hinder her at all.</p>
<p>Is it really for diversity’s sake?"</p>
<p>I said…</p>
<p>"I’ll take increased NBA diversity for $400. "</p>
<p>Shrinkrap I didn’t say that African Americans were a detriment to society.</p>
<p>“…at African Americans’ detriment” means that if California were to implement such an Asian boosting policy, it would cause a decrease in African American.</p>
<p>And apparently, you’re fine with that with the “any pigment I can take” statement.</p>
<p>So why does AA exist again? If any pigment is just as valuable as any other pigment, why aren’t Whites and Asians included in AA, thereby eliminating AA altogether?</p>
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<p>Though I haven’t been following this thread as diligently as I had done before, I know many arguments and from what I collect, I know what you are trying to argue for in terms of the campuses’ benefits.</p>
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<p>So that something else by itself will not be ‘important’ enough to push them over the edge? They need that something else in conjunction with AA to push them over? I thought they didn’t need AA?</p>
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<p>Without searching through my past posts, I can say that I remember your response. I also said that there was no need to edit that allusion in because it did not make your response any more cogent.</p>
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<p>What if colleges decided that Asians were also underrepresented because Caucasians make up too large of a portion of the student demographics?</p>
<p>With Asian as valuable of an race/ethnicity as either Hispanic or African American, Harvard might then be moving in the Berkeley direction.</p>
<p>But it does increase representation right? And as you’ve said, any pigment is fine by you, so you would still support it even though it will come at African Americans’ detriment.</p>
<p>Right?</p>
<p>“Shrinkrap I didn’t say that African Americans were a detriment to society.”</p>
<p>Duh. Of course not. </p>
<p>I’m saying I think an “SAT boost” MAY not be of detriment to society.Who cares what I think?</p>
<p>You said “She has yet to answer.” I say I did.</p>
<p>One thing I have learned from living in California, is that lumping “Asians” together is uninformed, and that I like “diversity”. Not as sure that it’s a good business or “entitlement” model.</p>
<p>You responded by waffling.</p>
<p>The NBA does not affect you or your children directly. I should’ve picked a better example.</p>
<p>So how about college?</p>
<p>If waffling means it’s not “black and white”.</p>
<p>What ABOUT college? Do you realize how few people care about elite admissions? </p>
<p>I don’t.</p>
<p>But yeah, worked out for my daughter, if worked out means me paying $200,000.00+, instead of paying for UC. Thanks CC. </p>
<p>What can “you” do for my son?</p>
<p>Well considering we’re on a college forum, my guess would be that almost everybody here cares.</p>
<p>Worked out also means that she’s going. I don’t know the strength of her application but try to be objective in answering that, were AA eliminated, would she still have been accepted?</p>
<p>If so, then she does not need AA, and so it should be eliminated.
If not, then AA undermines the strength of the institution that accepted her.</p>
<p>That’s about as blunt as one can get.</p>
<p>If Harvard’s percentage of African Americans were 5% instead of 10%, then by definition, Harvard’s student body is still not uniform.</p>
<p>My question is, do you think Harvard’s African American population would decrease from 10% to 5% if AA were eliminated?</p>
<p>If AA is the only reason they’re in, then that says some things about the applicants, don’t you think?</p>
<p>“almost everybody here cares.”</p>
<p>Maybe about college, but not only “elite admissions”. If we are JUST talking about college, the plight of URM’s would have a different focus. Is there a place for that here? Would you care? I don’t think so. Would I? Absolutely.</p>
<p>“were AA eliminated, would she still have been accepted?”</p>
<p>I don’t know. Maybe not. And I’d be $ 100K richer, her school would be down one full pay, very active, and able URM poster child, and I think I wouldn’t care. So?</p>
<p>So… you wouldn’t care if AA were eliminated?</p>
<p>Why are we still arguing then?</p>
<p>Am I arguing? You mentioned my name. Peace out.</p>
<p>“hopefully one day rendering all races equal.”</p>
<p>What is this nonsense? You know, can we have affirmative action in the NBA as well? Will that make all races equal? </p>
<p>John Derbyshire speaking to the Black Law Student Association at UPenn.</p>
<p>I am here this evening in the capacity of a wet blanket. I am here not to take one side or the other on the topic under debate, but to say that the topic, as written, is based on a false premise, and therefore has no satisfactory answer. I don’t believe the disparities under discussion can be eliminated. Debate about whether government should play a greater or lesser role in eliminating them is therefore, in my opinion, otiose.</p>
<p>When the organizers first emailed me to suggest I appear on the panel, I told them that this is my view of the matter. I said that I was flattered to be invited to speak at such a prestigious institution, and that, having two teenage children, I am always glad to get out of the house for a few hours; but that racial disparities in education and employment have their origin in biological differences between the human races. Those differences are facts in the natural world, like the orbits of the planets. They can’t be legislated out of existence; nor can they be “eliminated” by social or political action.</p>
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<p>That there are natural, intractable differences between the human races seems apparent to me on both rational and empirical grounds.</p>
<p>First, the rational grounds. If a species is divided into separate populations, and those populations are left in reproductive isolation from each other for many generations, they will diverge. If you return after several hundred generations have passed, you will observe that the various traits that characterize individuals of the species are now distributed at different frequencies in the various populations. After a few ten thousands of generations, the divergence of the populations will be so great they can no longer cross-breed; and that is the origin of species. This is Biology 101.</p>
<p>Our species separated into two parts 50, 60, or 70 thousand years ago, depending on which paleoanthropologist you ask. One part remained in Africa, the ancestral homeland. The other crossed into Southwest Asia, then split, and re-split, and re-split, until there were human populations living in near-total reproductive isolation from each other in all parts of the world. This went on for hundreds of generations, causing the divergences we see today. Different physical types, as well as differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality, are exactly what one would expect to observe when scrutinizing these divergent populations.</p>
<p>Now, the empirical grounds. We all notice the different physical specialties of the different races in the Olympic Games. There was a run of, I think, seven Olympics in which every one of the finalists in the men’s 100 meters sprint was of West African ancestry — 56 out of 56 finalists. You get less pronounced but similar patterns in other sports — East African distance runners, Northeast Asian divers, and so on. These differences even show up within sports, where a team sport calls for highly differentiated abilities in team members — football being the obvious example.</p>
<p>We see the same differences in traits that we don’t think of as directly physical, what evolutionary psychologists sometimes refer to as the “BIP” traits — behavior, intelligence, and personality. Two of the hardest-to-ignore manifestations here are the extraordinary differentials in criminality between white Americans and African Americans, and the persistent gaps in scores when tests of cognitive ability are given to large population samples.</p>
<p>There is a huge academic literature on the gaps in cognitive test results, practically all of it converging on the fact that African American mean scores on cognitive tests fall below the white means by a tad more than one white standard deviation. There is in fact so much data on this now that we have meta-studies — studies of the studies: the one best-known to me is the meta-study by Roth et al. in 2001, which covered 39 studies involving nearly six million test-takers. That one standard deviation on cognitive testing has been so persistent across so many decades, a friend of mine, an academic sociologist, calls it “the universal constant of American sociology” — it’s like the speed of light in physics.</p>
<p>To see whether that universal constant appears in the study of law, I looked up the LSAC database before coming here tonight. LSAC — the Law School Admission Council — publishes splendid statistical tables on the results of the LSAT exam, broken out by sex, region, race, and so on. The last figures I could find were for 2007-08. In that year, 117,530 students took the LSAT at least once. Of these persons, 69,792 identified themselves as “Caucasian.” Their mean score was 152.56, standard deviation 8.96. In that same year, 12,152 test-takers identified themselves as “African American”; their mean score was 142.15, standard deviation 8.40. That’s a difference between the means of 10.41 points, which is 1.16 times the white standard deviation. So perhaps my sociologist friend is on to something.</p>
<p>Should you want to say at this point that these so-called tests of so-called cognitive ability measure nothing important, you had better go and argue with the authorities here at the University of Pennsylvania law school. They have carefully recorded, and posted on the internet, that half their student intake, second and third quartiles, falls between LSAT scores 166 and 171.**</p>
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<p>Thus there are both rational and empirical grounds for believing in intractable group differences between the big old inbred paleolithic populations of Homo sapiens. In the context of this discussion, there are two things that need saying about these differences.</p>
<p>First, the differences are statistical. Any population contains variation. Variation within a population is the essence of biology. Those of you familiar with Charles Darwin’s great classic On the Origin of Species will recall that three of the first five chapters have the word “variation” in the chapter title. Any population will contain individuals who are fat, thin, fast, slow, tall, short, and so on.</p>
<p>And in the grand biological scheme of things, human population divergences are slight, the populations overlapping massively on most kinds of traits. To go back to that “universal constant of sociology,” for instance: Given a one standard deviation gap between black and white means, one thing we can deduce from pure mathematics is that around six million African Americans score higher on cognitive tests than the average white test-taker. In LSAT terms, over 1,300 African American test-takers in 2007-2008 scored above the white mean.</p>
<p>Second, the differences are abstract. Group differences are statistical truths. They exist in an abstract realm quite far removed from our everyday personal experience. They tell you nothing about the person you just met.</p>
<p>Group differences are, for example, one degree more abstract than individual differences. We all acknowledge individual differences all the time: she’s fat, he’s thin, she’s shy, he’s outgoing, she’s smart, he’s dumb.</p>
<p>We are all, to various degrees, aware of our own individual strengths and limitations. Certainly I am aware of mine. For example: My wife is a keen ballroom dancer. Because I love my wife, I did my best to become a ballroom dancer myself. For two years — two blessed years, ladies and gentlemen — I went along twice a week with her to the local Arthur Murray studio to take instruction. At the end of it, I still had two left feet. The instruction I received was like water poured on to a sheet of glass.</p>
<p>Even at the things we are good at, most of us are not very good. I make my living by writing; yet I can name, in my own small personal acquaintance, a dozen people who are better writers than I am. That’s not even to mention the Shakespeares and Tolstoys. Most of us are hopeless at most things, and mediocre at the rest.</p>
<p>And yet — look! We don’t lose sleep over this. We don’t sink into rage and frustration at our own individual differences, or agitate for politicians to put balm on our psychic wounds. We accept our individual shortcomings with remarkable equanimity, playing the cards we’ve been dealt as best we can. That is the attitude of a healthy human being. To do otherwise would, most of us I’m sure would agree, be un-healthy. How much more unhealthy, then, to fret and rage and agitate about mere statistical abstractions?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/elsewhere/mind-the-gaps/#dsq-comments[/url]”>http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/elsewhere/mind-the-gaps/#dsq-comments</a></p>
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<p>Food for thought.</p>