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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20934 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Quelle surprise, just as everyone remotely intelligent predicted, the SCOTUS case did nothing.

It is well past time to end the tax exempt status for these universities. If anything, I want to see a higher tax rate…

With Trump coming into office, won’t he now have ammunition for his justice dept to go after them? Will he? Maybe we need to send in the National Guard so that Ivy leagues will respect Civil Rights if whites and Asian students

On what basis? The ruling said they can’t nakedly discriminate against Asians on the basis of race, it didn’t demand that they only consider meritocracy (in any case they still clearly have legacies, athletes etc). If Harvard wants admission to be dependent upon some nebulous character assessment that is completely legal unless there is recorded evidence that the assessors involved openly and explicitly discriminate, which there certainly won’t be from now on.

To stop it congress would have to pass a law mandating (for example) that all colleges that receive federal funding must use solely x meritocratic test to determine admissions. I have my doubts that would pass in any event, regardless of what happens with the filibuster.

it feels weird because this the whole point of 'disparate impact' decisions from the courts in the past. apparently, some groups were coming up with proxies to derive their desired racial preferences instead of using explicit discrimination but now Harvard and other universities are doing exactly that and its magically ok. its even more messed up because i'm pretty sure i've seen them make statements into the public record saying this was exactly what they were planning to do.

Disparate impact is very powerful in Title VII cases that govern employment issues (hence why justice can sue police departments for using IQ tests to hire cops). When it comes to colleges it’s more vague, because the ‘purpose’ of admitting a student isn’t clear (is it to have a diverse class, is it to create the most successful professionals, to produce the highest quality academics, to have a good time and make friends).

it feels weird because this the whole point of 'disparate impact' decisions from the courts in the past. apparently, some groups were coming up with proxies to derive their desired racial preferences instead of using explicit discrimination but now Harvard and other universities are doing exactly that and its magically ok.

No, this isn't the case. The court in Griggs explicitly accepted that Duke Power was NOT using proxies to derive their desired racial preference. That would have been illegal without accepting "disparate impact" as being a violation in itself.

The Court of Appeals held that the Company had adopted the diploma and test requirements without any 'intention to discriminate against Negro employees.' 420 F.2d, at 1232. We do not suggest that either the District Court or the Court of Appeals erred in examining the employer's intent; but good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as 'built-in headwinds' for minority groups and are unrelated to measuring job capability.](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Company/Opinion_of_the_Court)

The court in Griggs explicitly accepted that Duke Power was NOT using proxies to derive their desired racial preference

"If the court accepts that, than the court is a ass — a idiot."¹

The Wonderlic test was first written in 1939; Duke Power Co. only adopted it as a requirement on the same day they could no longer legally discriminate directly on the basis of race.

The case should have fallen under the doctrine of noli meiere in cruro et dicere pluviam.

¹Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.

The Wonderlic test was first written in 1939; Duke Power Co. only adopted it as a requirement on the same day they could no longer legally discriminate directly on the basis of race.

...So on the day the law said they could no longer screen by race, they stopped screening by race and started screening by IQ test. And this proves to you that they were still screening by race, because they... complied with the law to stop discriminating by race?

What screening method should they have switched to, in your view?

...So on the day the law said they could no longer screen by race, they stopped screening by race and started screening by IQ test. And this proves to you that they were still screening by race, because they... complied with the law to stop discriminating by race?

The fact that they explicitly discriminated by race as long as they could legally do so indicates mens rea; that they sought to exclude Black Americans for being Black Americans.

What screening method should they have switched to, in your view?

The same method they used to screen white people prior to the Civil Rights Act.

@The_Nybbler:

Ass or not, the court accepted it. Perhaps they felt Duke Power was not using the Wonderlic as a proxy for race, but had been using race as a proxy for what the Wonderlic measures.

That would have been somewhere in the vicinity of a plausible conclusion if, sometime between 1939 and 1964, Duke Power Co. had started requiring an IQ test for all applicants and stopped considering their race. The fact that they made the change not when the Wonderlic test was introduced, not when overt racial discrimination was becoming frowned upon, not when the Civil Rights Act passed Congress, but at the very last moment they thought they could get away with, points toward the grown-up equivalent of hovering one's finger 5 mm from someone's face while saying "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!".

"I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!".

In law it should probably actually matter if they're touching you.

The fact that they explicitly discriminated by race as long as they could legally do so indicates mens rea; that they sought to exclude Black Americans for being Black Americans.

No, mens rea does not work that way. That you were doing something now-illegal before it was illegal is not an element of any future offense. In any case, it does not matter; the reasoning of the decision was based on the judges' conclusion that they were not, in fact, intentionally discriminating. Griggs found that disparate impact was illegal in itself, not because it was evidence of disparate intent.

The fact that they explicitly discriminated by race as long as they could legally do so indicates mens rea; that they sought to exclude Black Americans for being Black Americans.

"They explicitly discriminated by race as long as they could legally" applies to anything they did after the ruling as well.

The same method they used to screen white people prior to the Civil Rights Act.

So any other method of screening that someone might want to try out is outlawed?

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Ass or not, the court accepted it. Perhaps they felt Duke Power was not using the Wonderlic as a proxy for race, but had been using race as a proxy for what the Wonderlic measures.

What I would give to see the president of Harvard standing in the schoolhouse door to block qualified Asians from enrolling

Makes me wonder- if you just show up at university classes, what would happen?

Nothing. You are fundamentally misunderstanding what universities do. The classes themselves are borderline useless. You are paying in time and money for a credential, which they will deny you in this scenario.

So you’re saying that if I want to improve gaps in my math skills, I should just show up to university math classes and follow along?

That would work for a motivated individual with a decent amount of background. The real students will even happily let you do their homework for them further improving your skills even more!

Generally you can just show up and attend most classes. A lot of the time they even upload lectures online so you can go through them at your own pace as you wish. Very good way to learn a new topic you were always interested in (this is how I learned about optics).

This was the premise of the 1965 TV comedy Hank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_(1965_TV_series)

(This was one of my favorite shows that year.) (Yes, I'm old.)

If there's space for another person to sit and you give the professor a head's up that you wish to attend because of your interest in the material, he or she will likely be thrilled that you may very well be increasing the population of such attendees in the class by a factor of infinity.

In a big lecture? Almost certainly nothing, assuming you can get into the building without a student ID. In a small class? You’d probably get found out because your name wouldn’t be on the attendance sheet. But even then, I wouldn’t be surprised if a passionate instructor turned a blind eye out of respect for your dedication to learning for its own sake.

The reason why approximately no one does this is that you don’t get a diploma out of it at the end.

Some older people do this, it’s called ‘auditing’ officially but in practice if you email the professor and they’re not super famous they’re usually happy to just invite you as a guest, you get a visitor’s badge and then walk in. Until the post-9/11 security state and the rise of the ubiquitous security door pretty much every college lecture hall in the West was completely open and you could just walk in, as I understand it.

More accurately, some schools are openly defying SCOTUS, others not as much.

At MIT, black admissions dropped from 13% to 5%. This is still evidence of a significant thumb on the scale, but it's not nothing.

More accurately, some schools are openly defying SCOTUS, others not as much.

It’s like some kind of... “Massive Resistance”

I think bringing back standardized test score requirements also played a role

Hmm, what was the black percentage before they went test-optional (which was of course also pre-SFFA v. Harvard)?

It worked on MIT though, they went down to like 5% black. Yale just needs some federal encouragement.

Harvard's law school made more of an effort to appear to comply as well, although they still seem to be discriminating.

The LSAT is a near-pure verbal IQ test, their options after the ruling were limited but I imagine it will still creep in more over time.

Black people don't do much, if at all, better on the SAT than on the LSAT. Harvard undergrad made an explicit choice to continue discriminating enough to get a class that's 14% black, but their law school has not. This is an HLS thing, not a general law school thing: Yale Law school is clearly discriminating as hard as ever.

Logic games involve some non verbal thinking. I miss the lsats.

I heard they abolished the logic games?

They did? That’s disappointing. It’s been a long time since I took the LSAT.

Someone on Reddit said it was because it was impossible/unreasonably difficult for blind candidates.

That sucks for them but you can’t let a small minority dictate to the vast majority

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Logic games were the best part of the LSAT, distinguishing the truly smart from those who merely had very good reading comprehension. This is just the general miasma of enshittification seeping into where ever it can get to.

Logic games were easy and consistently the section where the better candidates were most likely to score 100%. Much like the GMAT, it’s the verbal section that captured the tails of the IQ range, as befits a test to determine who would be a good lawyer, rather than a good accountant. It’s actually hard to design g-loaded non-verbal tests that don’t merely devolve into tests of mathematical knowledge, which isn’t really the same thing. Reading comprehension and the word substitution questions (ie verbal IQ tests) are smarts, and it’s increasingly clear that the most successful people are luckier on the verbal IQ front than on the spatial one.

Interesting, I've never taken the LSAT personally but distinctly recall Logic Games as being the section that prompted the most complaints from people, which made me think they were the hardest part on the real test because they caused so much uproar (most I've done is a bunch of practice questions online to get an idea of what the test is like and yes on those the games weren't particularly hard compared to the other stuff, but I attributed that to the sorts of questions I like rather than as commentary on their objective difficulty). You can absolutely make logic games very hard, back in the day some newspapers in their daily comics and puzzles section had logic games esque problems that could take up to hours to solve.

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The test I took had a ridiculously hard logic game that I am convinced was an unscored test question. It wasn't hard in an absolute sense, I think most people with decent intelligence given infinite time could eventually solve all the questions. But it had way more rules than any of my practice questions. I think I got most of them right because I accurately recognized it as very time consuming and skipped the question section, then went back at the end. And I usually finish standardized tests with 50% of the time to spare, give or take 10%. So I basically spent 50% on this silly figurines on a bookshelf subset, and aced the logic section (but I still think I could have scored zero and gotten that score because I dont think that section counted).

Anyways, I agree that the logic games were a good part of the LSAT, much like analogies on the SAT. As is par for the course, modern DEI is bad for quality.

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