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Eugine_Nier comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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For a moment there, I feared you'd speak of genetics and eugenics, but then
if you mean something as prosai as dietetics, I can totally get behind that; I find it easy to believe that crappy food induces cranky mood (and that, in the US, crappy cheap food is remarkably deleterious).
Is this not acknowledged? Nay, is this not common knowledge?
Putting the full blame on them is as absurd as fully absolving them. What insane political climate do you live in, that you'd have to settle for either fallacy?
I remain unconvinced that this is exactly the case, and, even though I can accept its provisional validity, with many caveats and reservations, I'm pretty sure the actual reality is more interesting than "blacks and latinos are born dumber, White-Jews and White-Asian nerds are born smarter, and White-Christians are born a little bit smarter than average".
Assuming this particular piece of knowledge matters, what are we supposed to do about it? Be more forgiving of teachers' inability to enable black students to reach some average standard? Allocate Jewish and Asian kids less resources and demand that they meet higher standards? Should we treat kids differently, segregating them by race or by IQ? What practical use do we even have for scientific racism?
For starters we can stop concluding that an outcome that correlates with race means that the process was racially biased. In particular, eliminate affirmative action and disparate impact.
What's desperate impact? And not all affirmative action is racial. The kind I'm familiar with consists basically of scholarships for smart kids from poor families to go to prestigious schools and reach their full potential, regardless of racial background. And women's parity quotas, which are a clumsy-as-heck-policy that annoys everyone, women included. What kind are you familiar with?
In US political debates about affirmative action, the term usually is meant to imply an overt lower admissions or hiring standard for the group that the affirmative action is supposedly helping.
Scholarships for smart kids from poor families are uncontroversial, and therefore don't come up much in political discourse.
Sorry, typo. I meant disparate.
Good, I'm glad you see that this is a bad idea.
The kind where universities admit unqualified minority kids in order to have a "diverse student body".
Do they get qualified along the way, or do they actually prove themselves to be persistently and irredeemably incompetent?
They tend to wind up dropping out.
Regardless of why this is so, wouldn't this outcome make the policy ineffectual and not worth continuing?
Also why in the world did that comment get a down-vote? Is there someone here lurking, down-voting my posts on principle?
Yes, but if they were to admit the policy was ineffectual, they'd have to admit that there aren't as many qualified black students as white students and that would be racist and evil.
Doesn't that mean that the ones who don't drop out aren't that less ... than ... ?