Is tolerance intolerant?

[bennyboy]

I'll respond to your post later, if at all, but off the top I'll note two things.  First, you didn't provide citations for all the claims that they were requested for.  And second, you claimed that Asian test scores were an order of magnitude better than that of black affirmative action recipients, not that it is only a fair bit better than those recipients.  So, first of all, you've moved the goalposts.

Unless you really think I was saying Asian scores are 10x better than those of black students, then it should have been pretty clear that I was just emphasizing that the scores are very different. If your kid said, "OMG I have a million pages of homework!" would you accuse them of lying?

And second, it's not clear that the facts in the Harvard case are a consequence of an explicit or even implicit program of affirmative action.  More troubling is the fact that African-American acceptance rates being high is not necessarily related to the average SAT score of African-American applicants as a whole, so your citation doesn't even show us what you apparently think it does.  The question is whether affirmative action recipients at Harvard have substantially lower scores than Asian acceptees, not whether the average[b] applicant of Asian descent has a higher SAT score than the [b]average applicant of African-American descent.  It would appear that, at first blush, you have some reading comprehension issues.

Apparently I'm not the only one with a reading problem. I said the AVERAGE APPLICANT of Asian descent has better scores than the AVERAGE ACCEPTEE of African-American descent, by about 20 points. If you compare acceptee to acceptee, the difference is 63 points.

So in the span of two posts, you've dishonestly and disingenuously challenged me to respond to your questions when you already knew that I had an interest in, and reasons for not responding.  Then we get this scatter shot response which, from my skimming, seems to cherry pick what it responds to, moves the goalposts, doesn't answer relevant questions posed (the lacking citation), and provides a citation which doesn't show what you seem to be claiming it shows.

Needless to say that I'm far from impressed.  I may go back and read your response, and, having read it, I may respond to your arguments, though if I do, that will come later.  Probably after I'm done flossing my toes and picking lint out of my belly button, or whatever other higher priority tasks are on my busy schedule.

I'm not sure what makes you act this way, but I've already told you I'm not willing to interact with you like this. I don't believe an online forum thread needs this level of drama, and I'm certain that I don't.

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It's not arbitrary in the least, benjamins can..and indeed are, counted.  Nobody is "shoeing in" black kids..how many times do you have to be told this?  That's the white supremacist myth of affirmative action..not the reality.

Harvard's position as I see it is that there's a ceiling effect-- that the scores of so many students are sufficient to demonstrate they can complete the Harvard program, that the extra 60 points can be safely disregarded.

This is a perfectly understandable.  If we need a vehicle capable of doing 60mph to qualify to drive on a freeway properly, and your car does 65, and mine does 90, then there's no reason to exclude you from participating in driving on the freeway because I'm "more qualified."

I do the exact same thing in hiring-- to apply you need a bachelor's degree.  However, once that criterion is met, I go to personality traits as revealed in a job interview-- smiling, asking the right kinds of questions, and so on.  Someone having a Ph.D is completely irrelevant to me, because the fairly basic work we're doing doesn't much benefit from the kinds of extra things you're likely to have done at that level.

That being said, I would go with almost any metric under the sun than that of accidental demographic membership.  If the cut-line SAT score for acceptance is 600, okay.  You can use that to filter out the poor readers who won't be able to handle the classes, and go with the next metric.  But blackness is a shitty metric for a few reasons.  First of all, do you measure degree of blackness?  Do you consider rich Nigerian international students in the same light as kids from Compton in that regard?  What about black kids from predominantly white middle- or upper-class neighborhoods, or those who went to private schools?

Here's something to consider-- 4.5% of Harvard students come from families in the lowest income bracket, but 15% of Harvard students are black.  Even if ALL those 4.5% are black, that means that most of the black students are from families that are doing fine.  That's why race-based affirmative action works better than SES-- because the black applicants schools chose to accept aren't necessarily the poor ones who had it hardest growing up.  Affirmative action gave them a convenient out-- find enough upper-crust black kids, and you can avoid any of those undesirable ghetto rats ever coming within a mile of your campus, while looking great on paper.