US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2502

On July 16 2020 02:48 Sermokala wrote:

He doesn't actually want to abolish the police...

On July 16 2020 02:05 Broetchenholer wrote:
There was a study lately that black sounding names on your application alone lower the chances of you getting a job. I don't have a link, so see it as anecdotal. Of course in jobs already dominated by white people, this is then completely turned around and the whites are discriminated.

On July 16 2020 02:59 GreenHorizons wrote:

I most certainly do.

On July 16 2020 03:06 Sermokala wrote:

You want to live in a world with no enforcement of laws or any semblance of order in society?

On July 16 2020 02:59 GreenHorizons wrote:

I most certainly do.

On June 06 2020 01:11 Simberto wrote:


Okay, i think i see where you are coming from, and also why people are really confused.

If i understand you correctly, when you say "the police", you mean the organisation which is currently called police in the US, with all its structural problems on so forth. So if you say "abolish the police", you mean to get rid of this organisation, and come up with another organisation without these problems to do law enforcement (but not some of the additional stuff that police in the US tend to do, and especially not the racist and/or overly violent parts)

Is that how you use that word?

Meanwhile, when people you are discussing with say "police", they mean "a law enforcement agency of some sort".

Which leads to lots of confusion, because a society without any law enforcement agency whatsoever sounds like a very utopian concept which doesn't really fit with reality very well. But getting rid of the currently problem-riddled US police organisations and replacing them with something else is not that absurd.

On July 16 2020 02:45 Sapaio wrote:
I feel it's a bit strange, if you want americans to have the oppotunity to study abroad and comeback with experiences. Then foreign students should be accepted. Also i don't see logic with the assumption that the number of students accepted would stay the same, if fewer or non foreign students would attend universitets.
One other point is that univerities complete to be the best in world, so by not takeing foreign students, the quality would decline and properly began to spiral down slowly.

On July 16 2020 03:14 Sbrubbles wrote:


Time to go into another 5 page tangent try to figure out what GH means by "abolish" and "the police".

Actually, let's just skip to the end

On July 16 2020 02:44 svl3 wrote:

1) You found that 81% of Professors were white (and apparently in total professors, not STEM). The current distribution of Whites in the US is ~70%. Most Professors are very old and have a lifelong tenure system, there is very low tenure so the hirings come from decades back. Looking it up, in 1990 80% of the US was white.

2) I already addressed the lack of black people in bio. 0.7% Professors is low, yet likely over-represented in terms of choosing the remotely qualified applicants available. Likely the problem is that they do not choose to follow the career path. Usually a 5-7 year PhD and 5-7 year Post-doc that should be avoided unless you deeply love the subject. Few people are willing to put up with it, and I imagine it is less so when someone has a poorer background because there are more lucrative alternatives. Maybe also black people do not particularly like Biology, I don't know. This matches my experience back in undergrad days, very few black people happened to choose this compared to other departments that had many ... I doubt it's because we were more racist than some sociology department in the same school. If there is racism involved, it happened long before candidates come to the point of job applications. It's like another example in your article, they mention women were lower in Math fields... maybe because they happen to like the topic less, on average, it doesn't mean nefarious discrimination was involved in the hiring of Profs there.

3) Professor salary depends on University (Harvard pays more than a 3rd tier, but it is not linearly related to any Uni ranking, eg affected by financial fluctuations for the vast majority... sometimes a mid-tier may pay more to try to improve their recruitment some years, so this will be a random effect on the variable with the data of the paper). Also as mentioned but apparently misused by the paper, the productivity. In reality it depends if the professor has a summer salary supplement from a research grant, and then promotion level. Bio promotion levels have nearly pure meritocratic criteria, 99% based on having ongoing funding, and 1% publications. Some schools are more tough than others, but within one school they have fixed standards. Funding is most important and is decided based on scoring during external review, but minorities get funded with favoritism, requiring substantially lower scores -- so this part is not due to racism. Altogether, pay is equal based on rank, which is almost entirely meritocratic, with up to 25% increases from research funding awards being used for "summer salary". When the paper you show looked at research productivity, they looked at publications. But publications have very huge discrepancies in objective ranking across fields (even within branches of Bio), and Universities do not include them in salary because they want to force you to bring external funding... they're completely cheap people... So the paper's use of the productivity metric appears absurdly flawed. I only looked at it quickly so maybe they adjusted this somewhere, correct me if wrong.

Another methodological problem is they appear to poorly choose to use averages rather than median throughout. That means the really old and rare professors with high salary are going to be outliers and throw off the average. Like those highly successful research professors with 4 large grants that get bid on by a competitive school.

I have never seen salary differences not explained entirely by the above occur for professors hired in the same school that stayed there the length of their career.

Anyway, your article said there was a lack of racism involved in hiring, which is what I meant and care about, though it likely misses the recent trend to even more highly weight "diversity" in new hires. Myself, I don't think diversity should be criteria at a professional level. I care about objective and meritocratic standards of performance. As I indicated before, the lack of black representation can't be helped by these programs, the issue either comes from a lack of interest or factors set in by other systems before getting to the point of applying for a Professorship in this field.
It seems the article thinks they should hire more people simply because they are diverse (and pay more for this "contribution", as they phrase it). That's just a subjective and controversial opinion, however. The value of such standards against productivity and talent in a field has not been objectively proven and it is not being exclusive or racist to choose these standards, as is consistent with the over-representation of Asians mentioned by your article. Of course, there are "newspeak" definitions of racism which make conversations difficult and might be at play here; I'm using the traditional and straightforward version.

On July 16 2020 03:01 svl3 wrote:


What does the last sentence mean, that white people dislike hiring other white people or there is some mandate to increase diversity if there were too many?

For the former part, I assume they used equivalent qualifications on the application. It seems a little bit suspicious. I think most businesses are dedicated to money and would choose whoever they think does the job best. Are there really businesses so masochistic that they would rather have their financials do worse in exchange for more of a certain race? I can see it happen with various hiring managers who go rogue, but I'd like to see data before accepting this is significantly practiced.

In the US all that I can easily find points to the opposite. Minority hires are often quite incentivized, if not mandated when it is a government job. As I mentioned earlier, some states, I believe MA and CA and maybe others, will require contractor job offers to be turned down by women/minorities before a white man has an opportunity for consideration. This is stretching into many corporations who are pressured into having some kind of diversity equity inclusion office.
Hence why I've known people pondering pretending to be trans these days.

Minority job applicants are “whitening” their resumes by deleting references to their race with the hope of boosting their shot at jobs, and research shows the strategy is paying off.

In fact, companies are more than twice as likely to call minority applicants for interviews if they submit whitened resumes than candidates who reveal their race—and this discriminatory practice is just as strong for businesses that claim to value diversity as those that don’t.

As 64,000 new U.S. coronavirus cases were reported Tuesday and states struggled to control the spread of the virus, the Trump Administration stripped the country's leading public health agency of the ability to collect hospitalization data on COVID-19.

Instead of patient information going to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it will now be sent to a central database in Washington, The New York Times reported. The unprecedented move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public, the newspaper said.

From now on, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will collect daily reports about cases, available beds and available ventilators, the Times reported.

But the HHS database is not open to the public, which could affect the work of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on CDC data to make projections and crucial policy decisions.

https://www.upi.com/2020/07/15/6281594819705/

On July 16 2020 03:24 EnDeR_ wrote:


According to Wikipedia: The White, non-Hispanic or Latino population make up 61% of the nation's total. So White people are significantly over-represented in academia, which should come as no surprise to anybody.

Just so I understand what you're saying: the reason you think under-represented groups such as black people have low representation in Biology is that they don't love biology enough, or because they're too poor?

It is true that there are very few black students undertaking STEM degrees, and the reasons for this are well-known. I'm not going to do your research for you, just do me a favour and actually google it.

Diversity legally cannot be a hiring criteria. This would be unlawful under the 'Civil Rights Act' which clearly states that there cannot be discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. You cannot discriminate against white people by listing 'diversity' as a hiring criteria.

Edit: I should actually amend the last paragraph because there are exceptions to that. Those exceptions do not include professors.

On July 16 2020 03:21 GreenHorizons wrote:

What "replacing them" means is what Wegandi and I were discussing.

On July 16 2020 04:20 svl3 wrote:
Sigh, way to dodge what I said to address this exact issue, though it is true I was off on the current %. Most people were hired decades ago. Tenured professors almost never leave their job until they retired for good.

I'll obviously decline to go googling.

I meant in the same context, not for salaries negotiated decades ago (and are outside of STEM). As I mentioned, research grants favor minorities. Research funding is the primary variable in determining a salary for bio professors (and any field where external funding is common). In fact, when applying for funding, even non-black people are desperate to write paragraphs about diversity and mention they had a black summer student one time and so on, because without it you'll lose to a similar candidate who has it... But anyways, I think the salary for a professorship has little room for negotiation (can be pre-determined before candidates apply) outside of the influence of existing funding which comes from external reviews, and in that underrepresented minorities are held to a lower standard to get the same funding.

Welcome to America, where the Civil Rights Act has not been followed according to that clear statement in numerous cases.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/columbia-professor-who-fled-communism-resigns-says-university-is-becoming-communist/


' "Serban, who was the director of the hiring committee, says that he was told that it could not be someone like him because he is a man that has been “married, a heterosexual man who has children.”

The professor says that he then asked if they could choose a straight white male if the most qualified candidate happened to be so, and was promptly told that they could not. “I felt like I was living under communism again,” he said ' That contains an explicit discrimination claim.

But we can't really say affirmative action is not going to have a similar effect with discrimination, especially when there are so few positions in this field. It's all subjective. If you hire an 18 year old black high school graduate because you allege the diversity weight is very valued, against some suitable Asian male candidate, who gets to say when it is discrimination or not? I'm of the view that Asians are discriminated against very plainly in college admissions cases, it is only willful deceit to pretend otherwise that the country arbitrarily says is OK.

Regardless of disagreement on that off-topic principle, the point in contention was about the ease of getting a job as a minority. Both discrimination and affirmative action-like cases are relevant there, whatever the status of any law. If you think diversity is not weighted as a criteria you probably have not looked for a job in academia in recent years.

A second incident involving a male-to-female transgender student was the final impetus for Serban to resign, according to the translated video.

While reviewing applicants to the theater school, the transgender student prepared Juliet’s monologue from “Romeo and Juliet.”

Serban says that he could not believe that this person could become Juliet. After his colleagues expressed displeasure with him for stating as much, Serban resigned, saying that he could not violate his principles.

On July 16 2020 05:24 JimmiC wrote:

This totally seems like it is on the up and up the day after he complains that they wouldn't have so many positive tests if they did less testing!

"If we did half as much tests we would have half as much positives and half again, well you get the math" yes president I do do you? Less testing would also Jean kuch higher rates of positives.


We really need to get this guy a iq test, I'm sure it would be impressively low.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/markets/trump-says-us-would-have-half-the-number-of-coronavirus-cases-if-it-did-half-the-testing/ar-BB16JSJe?li=AAggFp5

On July 16 2020 06:00 Nevuk wrote:
I think it'll be a pretty ineffective method to manipulate data. It's not like the hospitals won't report the numbers to their own state, or that manipulation won't be discovered very quickly. These are numbers being examined every day by thousands of people.

On July 16 2020 06:02 JimmiC wrote:
I dont get what he is hoping to accomplish

On July 16 2020 02:47 mahrgell wrote:


This is still the US politics thread, yes?
The US is certainly not supporting the "monopoly of violence" idea. You could almost call this idea unconstitutional in the US. The most cited reasons for the 2nd amendment are to oppose any state monopoly of violence.