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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31873 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst.

No, it isn't. And you clearly show in the rest of your post that you know this is not true. Harvard is not taking a ranked list of individuals and selecting the best N from the list and accepting them or trying the compute the equivalent. They are trying to select the best student body of consisting of N individuals. I'm sure they have some rather high minimum quality bar to be considered, but after that, they're optimizing for group dynamics and various axes of diversity.

Say Harvard switched to a meritocratic racial spoils system in which every year they accepted the top x% of black people on the SAT, the top x% of whites, the top x% of asians and so on. Is that preferable to the current system?

I would prefer it because it's more honest

It also obviates the need for racial trauma essays or remaking oneself as a victim.

Yes. I like discriminatory preferences to be as legible as possible. If Harvard is going to have a racial quota system (which they obvious do), I'd rather they just say so flatly.

If you want Harvard to be honest you have to start by making racial quotas legal, which seems like a terrible choice if the only benefit is a bit less hypocrisy.

I don't think the only benefit to free association is less hypocrisy.

It's not the only benefit to freedom of association. It is the only benefit to making a racial quota system legal (a prerequisite to Harvard admitting it uses a racial quota system).

People say that a lot here, but honestly illegible systems are better for having to acknowledge that the system is fundamentally wrong. Children who grow up in the system will naturally see it's immorality. Once you commit to the idea that discrimination is good, then you end up like India with riots every year over whether such and such caste or tribe deserves reservation benefits. People in India view the whole thing not as a matter of morality, but just a crass materialist way to get more for you and yours.

Forcing Progressives to say the quiet part loud on affirmative action is a victory in it's own right.

I disagree. This chart is nothing if not ranking people from best to worst along every relevant domain Harvard can muster. Axes of diversity go into their rankings within some of those metrics, but while their numbers may not match up to what you or I would rank as "best" or "worst", they are very much trying to select, and justify their selection as, the best.

This chart

Your link is broken since Twitter blocked non-logged-in users, so I can't use Nitter to view it. I did try to use a Twitter login I had lying around and the page wouldn't actually load.

It's the same set of 4 charts I embed towards the top of my article, showing the relative rankings of students of different races on academic, extracurricular, personal, and overall axes.

I'm able to see it fine and I don't have a twitter account; not sure what's going on

The chart demonstrates (to me anyway) that they're just plain lying about the personality dimension in order to use it as a proxy for preferred races, giving them the thinnest veneer of a defense rather than absolutely none. What, I'm supposed to believe that the black Harvard applications are actually just incredibly excellent personalities? KBJ's incessant babbling suffices to convince me that's not the case. Or that their Asian applicants are just lacking a certain je ne sais quois? That certainly doesn't match my experience with smart Asian-Americans, who seem to be basically just like other smart Americans. No, I think it's pretty obvious that they just plugged in personality values that lined up with the races they wanted to give bonus points to.

Well to be fair on the criteria shown in the above link it does reference overcoming obstacles &c., and it seems straightforwardly true that Black applicants are more likely to have faced more important obstacles given the average lower socio-economic standing of black families. Vice versa for Asian Americans.

In my mind, in support of this claim: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yjbefg/oc_how_harvard_admissions_rates_asian_american/

When looking at alumni interviews, which actually meet the applicant, Asian applicants do better overall and pretty much identical on "likability, courage, kindness." Asians only do worse when ranked by the committee that doesn't meet the applicant.

Oh, of course they're lying. To my eye, it's mostly kayfabe: they pretend to believe those things and other informed observers pretend to trust them. That's part of what makes holistic admissions so insidious to me, though: for uninformed observers, the kayfabe becomes real, and people start to accept that there must be sound, justifiable reasons for highly capable applicants to be rejected in favor of candidates with lower objective scores across the board.

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