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Retracting my prior statements on "CTY", that CTY is gone

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EEVblog:

--- Quote from: tom66 on July 28, 2020, 07:14:07 am ---Discriminating on race alone would be a bad factor, Dave.
--- End quote ---

Yes, but that seems to be implied here.
What else does "traditionally underrepresented student group" mean? We all know what it means to today's world - white males need not apply. Asian's too most likely.


--- Quote ---An example scholarship should look at family income, whether members of the family previously had held a professional job or degree, and aptitude, though I would argue the bar for aptitude should be *fairly* reduced to account for the poorer position someone is in when applying to that scholarship (e.g., it'll take someone with A/B grades, instead of A+) 
--- End quote ---

I wouldn't disagree with that. Personally I'd put a lot of value on a interview to see how keen they are. Some people just don't care about what they are doing and are just there because they can get it for free.


--- Quote ---I think you would find that you would get more under-represented groups if you did this - so there'd be more minorities and yes, poor white families too.
--- End quote ---

I'm pretty sure that if you are a poor white male, you don't meet the requirements of this scholarship. You don't even have a chance.

SerieZ:

--- Quote from: tooki on July 27, 2020, 08:59:12 pm ---What you're saying makes sense in isolation, but your original post, with its references to Hong Kong and all, clearly indicated that you thought the scholarship's hardship requirements applied to all applicants to the CTY program in lieu of the actual CTY admission requirements, and conversely, that admission requirements to the CTY program included hardship. But that's not true.

The scholarship requirements apply only to a particular financial aid program, which not everyone needs.

It's the classic equality-vs-equity thing:
(Attachment Link)


Ideally, programs like CTY would not cost anything for anyone (neither in tuition nor ancillary costs like travel), and thus scholastic merit alone would decide which kids can attend. But it's not, and many smart kids from disadvantaged situations have impediments to being able to go, be it the cost of tuition, travel, or things like parents whose minimum-wage jobs don't give them the flexibility to take time off to take the kid to the program, not to mention more complex circumstances like parents with addiction, or even being an orphan or in foster care. I think it's unethical for us to not extend special help to those kids.

And to be clear, since I am unsure whether this point has gotten through: those kids still have to meet the CTY program requirements. It's not as though the disadvantaged background gives them priority over better-qualified-but-privileged kids!

--- End quote ---

I have seen that Picture quite a lot and I get why a lot of people post it, but when you think about it for longer than 1 minute you realize that equity in real life application always means you always will discriminate against certain people over another because it is impossible to factor in all the traits that could make a person considered disadvantaged (i.e who is more disadvantaged than another?), it is not just a fence and 3 people of different heigth, it is a gross oversimplification and it certainly makes it impossible to make things "fair" considering the amount of traits people have. In fact when you attempt to categorize People in that way often you end up more unfair than you started out.
That is why I believe equality is better as the only place where equity truly exists is in Death, and mass-attempts at categorizing people by privilege have always resulted in literally just that - mass graves.

Or in short: If your Organization is going to discriminate people by categories at least be honest about it and tell that to people in their face.

tooki:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 28, 2020, 03:23:29 am ---
--- Quote from: tooki on July 25, 2020, 08:18:49 pm ---Bruh...  :palm:
That’s not the eligibility requirements for the CTY program. It’s the eligibility requirements for the scholarship, i.e. for a particular kind of financial aid they grant.

--- End quote ---

Is any of that money from the government? That makes a big difference.

--- End quote ---
I don’t actually know. Johns Hopkins is a private university, but I have no idea if the scholarship has any public funding, if it comes from JHU’s general budget, or from a private endowment (which commonly come earmarked for specific demographics).


--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 28, 2020, 03:32:55 am ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on July 25, 2020, 09:18:32 pm ---As much as I disagree with the principle of picking people for a job based on non-achievement criteria (e.g. there aren't enough women in field X, let's hire more women instead of qualified candidates only), which can corrupt the performance of an organisation and lead to failure,  I fail to see why these policies would be an issue for an *educational* institution.
Surely we want as *many people* as reasonable practicable to be educated, and selecting people who have historically lower achievement in a given field, is better than selecting more of the same candidates who could get into any other university?
--- End quote ---

Surely a monetary scholarship should be based on two things only:
1) Aptitude
2) Economic need.
(and other requirements like being a citizen or whatnot)

What does "traditionally underrepresented student group" have to do with that?

--- End quote ---
It has a ton to do with it, insofar as systemic discrimination in USA created a lot of the disadvantages that caused those demographics to be underrepresented, or even outright discriminated against. It’s not just those demographics’ lower incomes that pose barriers to education. For example, we know that just having a “black” name means a kid’s schoolwork is scored more harshly.* We know that black students are disciplined far more severely for the same infractions, which has its own domino effect of follow-on academic consequences.

Ultimately, remember that nobody worth listening to is actually advocating for equality of outcomes for everyone, divorced from merit, effort, etc. But what many of us, myself included, consider highly important is equality of opportunity. JHU itself, despite being literally one of the world’s most renowned medical schools, is actually situated right next to some of the very worst neighborhoods in Baltimore. I think it’s got to be unusual for a university of that caliber to be literally on the front lines of the urban decay directly caused by systemic racism, and I would assume that this informed a lot of JHU’s focus when studying socioeconomic issues and public health, since it’s not just some far-away abstract problem. Meanwhile, one of the JHU hospital campuses is right in the middle of what could diplomatically be called “low income white” neighborhoods. So that, too, is very close to home. Upshot being that if there’s a university that I would trust to take a fair, respectful approach to race and whatnot in admissions, financial aid, etc., it’d be Hopkins.

(Well, JHU and the university I went to, whose president has become nationally recognized for producing a far above average graduation rate for black students. Lots of universities have no trouble getting black students to enroll, but actually making sure they graduate can be more challenging, often due to issues at home. So this is a big deal. And that’s a university known primarily for hard sciences and engineering, rigorous academics, and for letting students get hands-on lab and research experience far beyond what’s typical. So definitely not by looking the other way and letting them slide by.)

*here in Switzerland, the same effect was observed towards ex-Yugoslav names. They did some kind of experiment where the same schoolwork was graded, sometimes under a Western European student name, sometimes with a Yugoslav sounding name, and the latter was graded appreciably lower on average. Similarly, they found that for any given level of academic success, kids with “-ic” names were more likely to be steered towards less-academic trades than equivalent performers with more Western European names. I find this interesting because the ex-Yugoslavs are just as white as Western Europeans (and whiter than Southern Europeans!), so skin color isn’t even the issue. Heck, if many people can discriminate even within their race, then many are definitely going to do it to people outside their race... :(


--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 28, 2020, 08:00:14 am ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on July 28, 2020, 07:14:07 am ---Discriminating on race alone would be a bad factor, Dave.
--- End quote ---

Yes, but that seems to be implied here.
What else does "traditionally underrepresented student group" mean? We all know what it means to today's world - white males need not apply. Asian's too most likely.

--- End quote ---
From reading the website, it sounds as though there are multiple financial aid solutions available (they say they don’t want money to be a barrier to participation for any qualified child). So if this one specific one doesn’t work, another one should.


--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 28, 2020, 08:00:14 am ---

--- Quote ---An example scholarship should look at family income, whether members of the family previously had held a professional job or degree, and aptitude, though I would argue the bar for aptitude should be *fairly* reduced to account for the poorer position someone is in when applying to that scholarship (e.g., it'll take someone with A/B grades, instead of A+) 
--- End quote ---

I wouldn't disagree with that. Personally I'd put a lot of value on a interview to see how keen they are. Some people just don't care about what they are doing and are just there because they can get it for free.


--- End quote ---
Absolutely. Given how prestigious JHU is, i suspect that they have tons of qualified applicants far in excess of available slots, so they can be selective, and would incorporate an interview.


--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 28, 2020, 08:00:14 am ---

--- Quote ---I think you would find that you would get more under-represented groups if you did this - so there'd be more minorities and yes, poor white families too.
--- End quote ---

I'm pretty sure that if you are a poor white male, you don't meet the requirements of this scholarship. You don't even have a chance.

--- End quote ---
It could be. But since it seems there’s other financial aid types too (and that poor whites nonetheless do not share all the disadvantages that blacks and Native Americans have), I don’t think this is necessarily bad.

tooki:

--- Quote from: SerieZ on July 28, 2020, 08:43:24 am ---
I have seen that Picture quite a lot and I get why a lot of people post it, but when you think about it for longer than 1 minute you realize that equity in real life application always means you always will discriminate against certain people over another because it is impossible to factor in all the traits that could make a person considered disadvantaged (i.e who is more disadvantaged than another?), it is not just a fence and 3 people of different heigth, it is a gross oversimplification and it certainly makes it impossible to make things "fair" considering the amount of traits people have. In fact when you attempt to categorize People in that way often you end up more unfair than you started out.
That is why I believe equality is better as the only place where equity truly exists is in Death, and mass-attempts at categorizing people by privilege have always resulted in literally just that - mass graves.

Or in short: If your Organization is going to discriminate people by categories at least be honest about it and tell that to people in their face.

--- End quote ---
Of course it’s a simplification. But it’s a good visualization of why we need to strive for equity. If you look at the picture I posted, which is an expanded version with an extra panel compared to the original, you’ll notice the right panel is one of actually removing the barriers, instead of the much more problematic compensation by providing individual assistance.

For example, rather than arguing over who is disadvantaged enough to merit financial aid, you should design the system such that there’s no tuition. Rather than attempting to compensate for the disadvantages caused by systemic racism, you should actively eliminate the systemic racism itself. (For example, rather than attempting to compensate for racist discrimination in hiring by employing affirmative action, you’d try to design away the opportunities for discrimination in the hiring process. You might start by anonymizing applications so that you don’t allow the applicant’s name to bias you either way.) Kinda like how in electronics, you strive to design a circuit that doesn’t rely on tight component tolerance, rather than designing a circuit with trimpots everywhere and lots of expensive 0.1% parts.

SerieZ:

--- Quote from: tooki on July 28, 2020, 09:26:34 am ---Of course it’s a simplification. But it’s a good visualization of why we need to strive for equity. If you look at the picture I posted, which is an expanded version with an extra panel compared to the original, you’ll notice the right panel is one of actually removing the barriers, instead of the much more problematic compensation by providing individual assistance.

For example, rather than arguing over who is disadvantaged enough to merit financial aid, you should design the system such that there’s no tuition. Rather than attempting to compensate for the disadvantages caused by systemic racism, you should actively eliminate the systemic racism itself. (For example, rather than attempting to compensate for racist discrimination in hiring by employing affirmative action, you’d try to design away the opportunities for discrimination in the hiring process. You might start by anonymizing applications so that you don’t allow the applicant’s name to bias you either way.) Kinda like how in electronics, you strive to design a circuit that doesn’t rely on tight component tolerance, rather than designing a circuit with trimpots everywhere and lots of expensive 0.1% parts.

--- End quote ---

No, it is a bad Visualization because it implies that you could resolve the infinite amount of traits people have that could result in disadvantage is as easily resolved as changing "a fence". That is not true, in fact is a terrible mistake to believe that and trying to fix it on that basis will result in more divide as is currently observable in the country you come from (or countries like Germany, Sweden etc.) where Intersectionalist have been pushing this BS over equality and diversity for decades now. Instead of a fence I think a more appropriate thing to picture is a whack-a-mole.

And this has been observable historically in Communist, Ethno-nationalist and Religious Fundamentalist countries in the past and currently as well.
They all strive for some bastardized form of equity based on categorization of people by trait. They all have ended in Catastrophe striving for Utopia.
(Class, Race, Faith - currently it is Privilege which weirdly attempts to mix all of them)

I also do not think you understand what systemic racism means - Apartheid would be such thing, openly discriminatory laws written based on certain traits. We do not have that in (most as far as I know) Western countries, no matter how you spin it. (Or give me some actual written laws to disprove that and we can talk in changing THOSE).
What people currently call systemic racism is all based on anecdotes and personal feeling, there is absolutely no evidence to support it.
Racism in itself, no doubt about that - that is a rather Human trait.

Regarding your Swiss example of Yugos, I have no doubt that such discrimination exists - I also have no doubt that if we look at raw numbers in crime, Behaviour etc. averages the Integration of many Yugos into Swiss culture "failed" thus being part of cause of the latter and viceversa.
Both statements say nothing about the Individual, should not be used to judge a person and are, for me, yet another reason why society overall (and you) needs to stop with the equity over equality thing and maybe stop fighting against windmills and tackle real solvable issues.

There is no way our lives can improve by going from that angle.

Edit: Id like to add to you other example of anonymized Curriculums: Some Jobs are Image based - like acting - and aren't credentials some form of discrimination anyways as some can get better access to it than others? Do we just put down Candidate XYZ on the paper.

Absurd. Sorry - also nothing new.

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