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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   28434 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Yay it's now a tiny bit easier to be hired at Facebook (if you're white)

At least for engineering, the bar was never raised or lowered to actually get hired, they just fucked with the top of the pipeline. So for what they called under-represented minorities the standards were lowered to get a call back on your resume and to get to the first set of screening interviews performed by engineers. But once you reached that point the pipeline didn't differentiate.

I'm sure given the size of the company and how so many are outwardly ideological on these issues that there was some very concious bias being applied by interviewers, but that won't change because we're done with the company officially endorsing DEI.

The pipeline absolutely differentiated. Maybe URMs didn't formally have to meet a lower bar, but if one of them failed the bar, recruiting would send them back through the loop to collect more "signal" until that URM passed. Given that interview performance has a random component, what tech did is statistically indistinguishable from lowering the bar for URMs.

Why? The white percentage will stay exactly the same or decline slightly, the black and Hispanic numbers will go down, the Asian numbers will go up. That’s how it works everywhere that “stops” DEI / affirmative action.

Not much room for the Asian numbers to go up at Meta in particular, frankly.

It depends. For example, when affirmative action was banned in the UC system, both Asian and white numbers went up at UCB and UCLA, and black and latino numbers down, although I forget if it was acceptances, enrollments, or both.

That was in 1996 though, plus the numbers crept up over time (and the white numbers declined significantly) since then despite the ban remaining in place.

The percentage of "white" people has dropped by large amounts in that time, partly because of mixed race people choosing to self-identity as non-white to get a leg up.

At the extreme edge, see Elizabeth Warren who self-identified as Native American because of a 1/1024 share or something.

She identified as a Cherokee because her grandparents(from Oklahoma) told her that's what they were; that it turned out not to be true is unsurprising. There are a lot of white people in Oklahoma who call themselves Cherokee, and sometimes they have Cherokee ancestry and sometimes they don't. Either way, you can't visually distinguish Cherokee Indians from regular white southerners; my grandpa believed that this was because the Cherokee's eager adoption of civilization caused their skin to lighten, but other elders have told me that they have weak genes and a Cherokee woman was provided a dowry by the government at some vaguely defined point. Basically, though, Cherokees are the US equivalent of, like, Argentines. It's not implausible that a random white-looking person from the appropriate part of the country be Cherokee, and this is common knowledge for a certain generation.

my grandpa believed that this was because the Cherokee's eager adoption of civilization caused their skin to lighten

Was he a Mormon, by any chance? Back when they considered dark sin to be a curse from God, the LDS church officially taught that Native Americans’ skin would lighten if they became Mormon. I haven’t heard of any similar beliefs outside of that group.

No, he belonged to the church of Christ, scientist. He didn’t go to doctors and believed that personal physical health and appearance were downstream of attitude and closeness to God. To him, study, virtue, and prayer made a person healthy, strong, wise, successful, and physically perfect. He was a true believer in that stuff.

I don’t know how far off base he was from official Christian Scientist teaching. But it seems like a connection that someone of a certain age could easily make from dogmatized faith healing.

Christian Scientists make more sense when you look at the state of medicine in the 19th century when it was founded.

Bedrest and avoiding any concoction doctors tried to sell you wasn't a bad idea.

Things changed obviously. But heroin was being sold as a cough suppressant up until 1910. Penicillin was first mass produced for the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

Effective medicine is fairly recent.

The most likely reason for that is they came up with ways around the ban.

The percentage of Asian students kept climbing at places like UCB, but white enrolment is essentially the same as it was before prop 209 passed in ‘96. All the data is publicly available.

According to the interactive graph at kidsdata.org, the proportion of young (<18 years old) white persons in California has fallen from 40% in 1995 to 28% in 2010, and still remains under 30% as of 2021. The percentage for Asian increased slightly from 2000 to 2021. Latino went from 41% to 51% from 1995 to 2010. Perhaps it's partially a flight from white as @jeroboam suggested, but likely it's mostly just the Great Replacement doing its thang.

So if percentage of enrolled students at UCB being white is "essentially the same" in 1995 as it is now, that does imply affirmative action was disadvantaging whites prior to the 1998 admission class (first class in which the ban went into effect).

This graph, for UCLA, also suggests affirmative action disadvantaging both whites and Asians. In the first admission year after the affirmative action ban went into effect (1998), the percentage of UCLA acceptances that went to whites increased from about 29% to 31%, and the percentage of acceptances that went to Asians went from 37% to 40%. Latino decreased from 20% to 10%, and black from 7% to 3%.

However, one can Notice that the percentage of Unknowns going way up from 1995 to 1998 (from 6% to 15.5% or so), before decreasing thereafter. Possibly, with affirmative action in the spotlight in California, due to Asians and white applicants going "oh shit" and selecting "Unknown" or "Prefer not to disclose" on their applications. Adjusting for this, the percentage white increases from about 31% to 37% from 1995 to 1998, and Asians 39% to 47%. Latinos decrease from 21% to 12%, and blacks 7% to 4%.

This reinforces my earlier recollection that the affirmative action ban led to UCB and UCLA white and Asian numbers spiking up, and latino and black numbers going down, the effects receding only slightly in the years thereafter. It does however look like, at least for blacks, UCLA found some way to increasingly put their thumbs on the scale starting around 2005.

The line graph I have in mind went quite a few years into the 2000s—it showed that Asian and white numbers spiked up after the ban, then decreased slightly each year for a few years (as the admission committee tried to pull different non-explicitly racial levers to decrease the white + Asian rate [and increase the black + latino one]), before plateauing for the years thereafter (there’s only so much blood you can squeeze from a stone). During the plateau period both the Asian and white numbers were still noticeably higher than pre-ban.

As it should be tbh, and what we would expect if the previous status quo was a world where Asians were being hurt even worse than white people because of DEI (it was).

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