SCOTUS case: Fisher v. Texas (Affirmative Action) - Page 20

On June 25 2013 12:57 Signet wrote:

Yeah I was more interested in the philosophical than the practical

My philosophy is that we should try to take into account as many things as possible that can be fixed by their college (or whatever) going forward. So if, say, family income correlates highly with high school achievements, but when poor kids get into college they have similar success rates as rich kids, then economic factors should be taken into account. But if it were the case that, after getting into college, those poor kids performed roughly as badly as rich kids who had similarly low high school achievements (that is, they didn't do well), then it shouldn't be taken into account.

Using med school as a specific example, the goal should be to produce the best pool of physicians possible. Since it is almost surely the case that some of the people who would go on to become high-quality physicians were stuck in situations that artificially deflated their college resumes, it makes sense for med schools to try to adjust people's resumes to take this into account. On the other hand, while it isn't fair and sucks, it is true that a 22 year old who has had a life of advantages may not have been ideally more suited to become a physician than some other 22 year old who had a disadvantaged childhood, it is nevertheless the case that the first person might be so far ahead of the second by that point in their lives that he would go on to make a more effective doctor as a result of his cumulative years of advantaged upbringing.

If I had the power to do it, I'd have them do this via a massive applicant database creating a statistically sound model regressing actual future success against whatever relevant characteristics can be put on an application (including achievements/scores and socioeconomic/demographic). Since we now have several decades of affirmative action in admissions, we should have a large number of poor/minority/etc people getting preferenced admission... so, such a model would create a way to evaluate people that takes into account their disadvantages, but does so in a way that ensures that these are things which a preferenced admission would allow them to overcome.

Of course that is unfair because it means people's life outcomes are dependent on their starting conditions, but that is why we have social safety nets. Meritocracy is a good thing, but even if we were to achieve total meritocracy with minimal unfair influences, we still want less-productive people to have a decent life, right?

I also think we should seriously consider that the vast inequality of childhood experiences creates a horribly inefficient use of our nation's "human resources" that cannot be totally solved by applying adjustment measures later in life. There should be a much more urgent focus on creating a minimum standard for the developmental environment that our children grow up in. It would be a pretty crappy outcome if somebody's brain could have unlocked the cure for cancer, and he becomes a low-level worker as a result of a disadvantaged upbringing. (I realize this is politically unlikely in the near future.)


Very OT sorry...

On June 25 2013 10:22 Judicator wrote:


So, yeah. You should do some research before making claims about genetics and heritable traits. The stuff your spewing is pretty laughable among neurobiologists. Whatever revolutionary breakthrough you underwent while discovering behaviorism is what everyone already went through with Skinner, you aren't breaking any new ground, so slow down there.

Also, it would be wise to post actual decent evidence and not that pretty flimsy piece you posted earlier.

On June 25 2013 13:17 Livelovedie wrote:

Good post, I will try to reflect on it and my views to determine if social mobility is more important in my eyes or putting out the best professionals. There probably should be more studies to show which disadvantages can be overcame and use those but I just hate the idea that people would be confined to a second class status due to no fault of there own based off being born to the wrong family. I am a lot more interested in the real world outcomes after school is out and how the disadvantage did that were given that chance versus what their gpa was in college.

On June 25 2013 11:15 Darkwhite wrote:


I have read fairly reliable sources making roughly the same claims he does. To me, it seems he has done his research, and you haven't.

Some sources, if you find them reliable enough, are:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
- Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate

On June 25 2013 13:47 Judicator wrote:


Go for it, the heritability of IQ is a flawed argument simply because IQ is a questionable measurement of intelligence in the first place. Like I said before, the metric is a metric of necessity, and not efficacy. It's the best we got, but by no means is it free of problems. Testing itself is dumb as hell.

Also, I would highly recommend you actually read your sources. They're contradicting what he's claiming and the studies themselves leave much to be desired.

On June 25 2013 13:47 Judicator wrote:
In either case, the numbers are FAR lower than the numbers suggested by that bullshit Rushton article that bugsor posted, where the authors were throwing out 80/20 splits of genes/environment effect on IQ (jokes?).

Estimates in the academic research of the heritability of IQ have varied from below 0.5[2] to a high of 0.9 (of a maximum of 1.0). IQ heritability increases during early childhood, but it is unclear whether it stabilizes thereafter. A 1996 statement by the American Psychological Association gave about .45 for children and about .75 during and after adolescence.[7] A 2004 meta-analysis of reports in Current Directions in Psychological Science gave an overall estimate of around .85 for 18-year-olds and older.[8] The New York Times Magazine has listed about three quarters as a figure held by the majority of studies.[9]

On June 25 2013 13:47 Judicator wrote:
The fundamental problem with these studies in the first place is handling of the counterfactual problem (really need to look at this) which is handled best by twin studies. Regardless of the outcomes/results (which doesn't support his claims once again) of those twin studies, you are basing your conclusions on an absolute scale which is problematic because most people don't reach their potential whatever that may be. In either case, the numbers are FAR lower than the numbers suggested by that bullshit Rushton article that bugsor posted, where the authors were throwing out 80/20 splits of genes/environment effect on IQ (jokes?).

Nobody's saying intelligence isn't gene-related, but bugsor's claiming that they're a huge, insurmountable determinant when we know next to shit about the biology of the human brain, then we are going to start making claims of how much gets passed on? Give me a break.

On June 25 2013 22:24 Judicator wrote:
You know what anyone thinks of when the variability between studies goes from below 50% to 90%? That nobody actually knows what's going on or at the very least the entire thing needs far more studies to figure out. The meta-analysis performed by Bouchard...makes me wonder. Using univariate analysis but admitting that multivariate is more useful to find interaction terms makes me wonder whether the results would be different if the latter was performed.

On June 25 2013 22:24 Judicator wrote:
Lastly, the general consensus in the neurobio field is that intelligence/behavior/learning is a combination of both. The reason I am skeptical of the evidence simply because the biological mechanism is pretty poorly understood since we have difficulty defining intelligence/cognition in the first damn place. Thus it stands to say any study or even group of studies can be overturned until we know. I find it quite hilarious that we can claim genetic heretibility and attach a number to it based when we don't know what is actually going on.

On June 25 2013 23:37 bugser wrote:

It makes me think of the fact that heritability is lower in childhood and raises by adulthood. But I guess that's just because I actually know something about the topic being discussed.

There are plenty of studies on this and they are more than enough to draw conclusions from. Some people do not like the results and want to pretend the ball is still up in the air, but that was played out decades ago.


"A person's intelligence can be defined in terms of the speed and efficiency with which he can execute a number of basic cognitive operations." (Vernon, 1981)

On June 25 2013 11:11 Livelovedie wrote:
The reason I support affirmative action is to remove the families and background from the equation in regards to determining what college someone goes to. Apparently you believe that a kid's parents should be a contributing factor in whether they get into a certain college. I disagree. A parents "laziness" should be all the more reason one kid gets admitted because of what they had to overcome. Some underrepresented minority isn't not qualified by getting into a certain school whether you believe it or not. There are more qualified people than there are spots. Harvard has stated before that it could make 5 classes that would be just as good as the class that it assembles. I don't understand how people in society can defend subjective criteria when it applies to rich kids but not generally disadvantage kids.

Racial and Ethnic Preferences and Consequences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine

• Black enrollees generally have much greater difficulty in medical school than do whites, Asians, and Hispanics, despite UMSM’s massive program of academic intervention and remediation specifically for “underrepresented minorities.”
• The median medical school GPA in the first two years was 2.50 for blacks, 3.00 for Hispanics, and 3.17 for Asians and for whites.
• The median medical school GPA for the third and fourth years is 3.29 for blacks, 3.50 for Hispanics, 3.50 for Asians, and 3.38 for whites.
• UMSM black enrollees perform considerably worse on the medical licensing exams than do their Hispanic, Asian, and white counterparts, again despite UMSM’s academic intervention and remediation for underrepresented minorities.
• More than a quarter of the black enrollees (7 out of 27) failed “Step 1” of the medical licensing exam on their first try. Two whites, one Hispanic, and no Asians failed. The median Step 1 score for black enrollees was roughly the same as that for Hispanics, but lower than that for 75 percent of Asian and white enrollees.
• About a quarter of the black enrollees (4 out of 15) taking “Step 2” of the medical licensing exam failed it on their first try. No student from another group failed.
• The four-year graduation rate for blacks was 68 percent. Blacks graduated at a higher rate than do Asians (63 percent), but at a much lower rate as compared with whites (82 percent). Hispanic graduation rates are not reported.

Increasing underrepresented minority (URM) admissions to medical schools has been a major project of the academic medical establishment for many years. The late Bernard D. Davis, Emeritus Professor at Harvard Medical School, recounts his firsthand experience of how Harvard began to award racial and ethnic preferences in admissions to medical school. Davis pointed out that, after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Harvard Medical School decided to admit a substantial number of black students who otherwise lacked the requisite qualifications. Not surprisingly, they performed poorly. Rather than abandoning preferences, Harvard Medical School chose to lower classroom standards. The decision was made with no open faculty debate. Departments were required to allow failing students to retake exams until everyone passed, letter grades were replaced by a pass/incomplete system (and, once a student had passed, he or she retained no trace of the incompletes), the number of required courses was reduced while the number of electives was substantially increased, passing scores on the national licensing exams were lowered, and one minority student was even allowed to graduate from Harvard after having failed the required medical licensing exam five times.

On June 25 2013 13:17 Livelovedie wrote:

Good post, I will try to reflect on it and my views to determine if social mobility is more important in my eyes or putting out the best professionals. There probably should be more studies to show which disadvantages can be overcame and use those but I just hate the idea that people would be confined to a second class status due to no fault of there own based off being born to the wrong family. I am a lot more interested in the real world outcomes after school is out and how the disadvantage did that were given that chance versus what their gpa was in college.

On June 25 2013 11:00 Phael wrote:


First of all, I never alluded to any extracurricular activities. Secondly, yes, of course rich kids are going to be more advantaged than poorer kids, that's how the world works. The question is though, are poor kids and their families are given enough of an opportunity to succeed? and my answer is overwhelmingly - yes.

My parents are immigrants. Until I was in high school, my dad worked as a post doc for about $20k a year. My mom can't speak English and it's fairly difficult to get a job as anything other than a salary-less waitress at a Chinese restaurant. They worked hard enough to afford a half million dollar house in one of the better school districts by the time I hit high school to give me the opportunity there.

In that school district, I've had friends whose parents made even less, as free-lance janitors/handymen. We're talking way-below-poverty level, as in the entire family probably brought in under $10k a year. They somehow managed to scrounge and save enough to afford an overpriced apartment in the area, and could send their kid to $2000 SAT classes.

This requires hard work and dedication on the behalf of the entire family. Your one line of "The problem with just going on different socioeconomic backgrounds alone is it does not take into cultural considerations like Asian parent's focus on education even in poorer income levels" completely invalidates all this hard work. I mean, WTF? "sure, lets help out the people who could do it but were too lazy to try, and screw those who worked their asses off for it."

I don't have a problem with allowing everyone who wants to go to college, go to college. I'm almost certain that if you wanted to go to school, you can. I took community college classes in high school for $10 a semester at the local CC. The problem starts to occur when you're giving limited positions to those who are unqualified for them at elite schools.

On June 25 2013 14:48 Darkwhite wrote:


The post you directly quoted makes two factual claims, namely:
- The IQ of African-Americans does not improve at all when adopted by middle class White families.
- Adopted children actually have no correlation at all to their adoptive parents. Their correlation to their genetic parents is just as strong as it would be if they were actually raised by them.

Both of these claims are somewhere in between entirely true and mostly true. He doesn't mention that the adoptive family affects the child's IQ in the early years, but that the correlation is mostly gone by adulthood

If you actually want to read sources - one would assume, seeing as you ask for them, but then again, you somehow failed to find all the sources on Wikipedia - check out “The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study: A Follow-Up of IQ Test Performance at Adolescence,” by R. A. Weinberg, S. Scarr, and I. D. Waldman. It isn't even a twin study, it followed white, mixed black/white and black children adopted by white parents, and also Korean and Vietnamese children adopted by white parents.



Note that the source you accuse of me of not having read, already in the third paragraph, states this:



You're not only disagreeing with bugsor and his Rushton article, but you are also ridiculing the APA, peer reviewed publications and New York Times. Which is fine, but you should probably show your own scientific credentials first.



So, a few posts ago, you complained about a lack of sources and that his claims were in stark contradiction with the whole community of neuroscience. Now, you are simply refuting all serious research which has been done on this topic and claiming the topic is too complicated to trust the science. But - you're still throwing your personal opinion around as if though it carried any weight. Of course, without referencing any sort of sources yourself.