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IlyaShpitser comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
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Conditioned on 'has graduated from an Ivy League college', it certainly is not. If anything, it is evidence in the opposite direction.
These days most Ivy League schools are easy to graduate if one doesn't pick a hard major, so that really means "conditioned on 'was admitted into an Ivy League college' ". Except Ivy League colleges practice affirmative action, so it's still evidence in the original direction.
We know which majors Obama and Bush picked.
Yes, and they weren't STEM fields, so no additional evidence there.
Even with affirmative action, it's still harder to get into Ivy League schools as a minority than as a white person. You need more talent to get in than the white guy you're competing with.
What on earth are you talking about? The way affirmative action works, is that the cutoff for blacks is lower than the cutoff for whites.
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.
Even if that were true, affirmative action is based on admitting a certain percentage of blacks. Thus unless he (or you) are claiming that the average black has more talent than the average white, the amount of talent a black needs will still be less than the amount of talent a white needs.
This would only be true if affirmative action were carried to the point where the percentage of black students in the elite schools exceeded the percentage of blacks in the general population. I don't have the numbers handy, but I did go to grad school at an Ivy, not terribly long ago, and that does not match my recollection of the racial make-up there. The undergraduate ranks seemed to be dominated by rich white kids.
Yes, affirmative action isn't used for grad school in STEM fields (at least for now).
Which I said nothing about. I referred to the undergraduate population (I wasn't an undergrad, but university campuses aren't particularly segregated between grad and undergrad populations). Actually, the grad student population generally was more racially diverse than the undergraduate population (mostly due to lots of international students among the grad students).
That's not the same as having more blacks, (by "black" I mean someone of sub-Saharan African decent, dark-skinned Indians have different IQ statistics).
This sort of quota approach isn't the only kind of affirmative action, although it's possible it's the only kind implemented in universities?
Unless I miss your point, this only holds true if the percentage of blacks required to be admitted is higher than the percentage of blacks in the population.
I would be interested to know what people consider to be better "measures of talent" than those usually considered by admissions office.
One reason for thinking that a measure of talent is poor might be that it is outperformed by other measures. There may not be genuinely good measures of talent. It does occur some sort of retrospective measure based on results is probably better than what the admissions office uses, but that is surely still not a perfect measure, and is also obviously not a practical option to replace what the admissions office uses (unless someone invents a time machine). Another reason to think a measure of talent is poor, though, and this is probably more applicable here, is that a measure may be considered suspect if there is reason to think it is really measuring something else entirely, perhaps because it correlates suspiciously strongly with factors regarded as independent of talent.
Except you're only evidence that those factors are independent of talent is that you declare any test that shows a correlation suspect.
Well, which ones? I am asking to name specific measures (and, of course, forward-looking -- hindsight is not relevant here).
Those usually considered by admissions offices are known to be horrible and in fact were originally selected so as to allow tacit discrimination while maintaining a veneer of fairness (specifically to discriminate against Jews, who by previous measures of achievement would have dominated the Ivies for a couple decades. Asians are currently in that same position.)
I am still waiting for someone to be specific about what they consider to be better measures.
Raw grades have been demonstrated to be better, but still not good.
Link, please. Also, raw grade have been demonstrated to be better at predicting what?
Raw grades are notorious for being subject to grade inflation and otherwise depending on the specific high school.