However, if they get sued, the burned of proof is on them to show that the people they didn't hire are in fact unqualified.

A perhaps more salient point to make here is whether or not "qualified" includes opportunity cost. Take recent firefighting anti-discrimination court cases as an example. The legally approved way to conduct promotion testing is to pass over 90% of the people, and then randomly select from everyone who passed. The legally disapproved way is to test everyone, keep the scores as numbers, sort them, and promote from the top of the list going down.

If you imagine hiring or promotion decisions as binary- "are we going to promote Bob or not"- the first view of qualification makes some sense. Bob doesn't have anything obviously wrong with him, so sure, we could promote Bob. If you imagine hiring or promotion decisions as multi-optional- "which of these firefighters are we going to promote"- then you're making n choose 2 pairwise comparisons. Is Bob a better or worse candidate than Tom? Joe? Sue? Under the second view, there isn't really such a thing as 'qualified'; there's the 'best candidate' and the 'not best candidates.'

(This maps pretty clearly onto whether you view the promotion decision from the employee's point of view- did I get promoted or not- or the employer's point of view- who should I promote.)

The US govt passed legislation that no one could argue for?

Can you elaborate? I can speculate, but I don't actually know much about India with regards to this problem.

Thankyou for that information. Note that I am arguing against the proposition. "The world is getting more irrational, which we can tell from the rise of affirmative action, which is clearly irrational.".

I don't have any strong commitment to AA. I only need to argue that it is not clearly irrational. It may nonetheless be mistaken in subtle way that takes decades of empirical evidence to detect.

If US AA had weak negative effect, as you claim, that would match the data.

If US AA had a weak positive effect, that would match the data.

If US AA had no effect,that would match the data.

Let's say AA is an effect of progessivism,in those countries that have it. What follows from that about any rising tide of irrationalaity?

In mindkilled enviroments people make arguments that they would never make if they would look at the issue with a statistical perspective. This is one of those arguments.

I agree, and this is why I think it's sketchy (to put it politely) to argue that people are more (or less ) rational now than some point in the past because of greater (or lesser) acceptance of some political viewpoint.

Besides which, even if there were overwhelming proof that support of affirmative action is rational or irrational, I'm pretty confident that most people would choose their belief based on (1) what they are supposed to believe; and (2) what favors their interests.

In short, the vast majority of people are irrational when in "far mode" and always have been.

Perhaps by "minority," he is lumping all non-Whites together.

I wouldn't be surprised if you disagreed with his point, but I'm a little surprised that you just don't understand it. The cutoff you speak of is in the admissions criteria, not in talent (there being no way to measure talent directly). VAuroch is pretty obviously of the opinion that admissions criteria are poor measures of talent, and that in particular minorities are more likely to score poorly on the admissions criteria for reasons other than talent. Again, not surprised if you disagree, but I'm very surprised you couldn't figure out that that was what he meant.