Competition is generally not a competition in potential skill, but a competition in actual skill.
Here we get back to the point of my first comment.
Suppose that you have two groups, the Blues and the Greens, which have a huge gulf in economic status, but equal intrinsic abilities. Blues are almost all put through excellent, expensive schooling, whereas Greens are haphazardly educated. When they compete for access to higher education, Blues tend to overwhelmingly outperform Greens. Future Greens are left in a disadvantaged position similar to their parents.
In a sense, the Blues and Greens are competing on equal footing; if they receive the same results, they get the same access. But the affirmative action position is that, given the opportunity to correct the situation, it’s unfair to leave the Greens in a cycle where they’ll continually receive less opportunity relative to their aptitude.
I don’t contest that affirmative action as currently applied fails to be an honest accounting of our best estimates of potential-given-disadvantage. I wouldn’t even assert that our current affirmative action system is the best we can do with our current budget without crossing existing political taboos. But some of the factors you’re suggesting accounting for are difficult and expensive to track and/or subject to too much political stigma to feasibly implement.
If you want to track variable X, and you have two heuristics, A and B, where A has 85% accuracy and B has 99% accuracy, but is a huge political liability to anyone who employs it, then for practical purposes your choice is between using heuristic A, or not tracking variable X.
The level of abstraction obfuscates the issue. The problem is that some people want a racial spoils system.
People generally approve of means tested public assistance, particularly for children, while many disapprove of race based public assistance. White is not a synonym for advantaged, and black is not a synonym for disadvantaged. Help the disadvantaged. Easy peasy.
If a greater percentage of blacks are disadvantaged, a greater percent can qualify for assistance, this time without the stigma associated with race based preferences.
Of course, the cost a program based on actual advantage starts to be born by the advantaged regardless of race, and not born by disadvantaged whites. I don’t think it’s just a fluke that the disadvantaged bear the cost of the current programs.
If it’s that easy, can you explain precisely how you would do it?
As-is, affirmative action targets a significant number of candidates who’re not particularly disadvantaged in meaningful terms, and it is a problem. But on the other hand, racism, conscious and otherwise, is still a significant enough force throughout the country that applying strictly race-blind criteria in order to assessing how disadvantaged candidates are is liable to return bad estimates in many cases.
Doing better than the current system may not be a great feat, but creating a perfectly equitable system isn’t a trivial one.
If it’s that easy, can you explain precisely how you would do it?
If the problem is that children of poor parents have a financial problem getting education, create an organization that will search for talented poor children, and give them money and other support.
If the problem is that children of uneducated parents can’t get knowledge from their parents, create good educational DVDs and distribute them freely to poor people.
If the problem is that poor people have a culture where education is low-status, apply some propaganda (e.g. try to associate education with something they already consider high-status).
If the problem is poor children not having enough iodine in salt, put more iodine in salt, and give it freely to poor people.
Etc. Find the specific cause of the problem, apply solution to the specific cause of the problem. Measure the outcomes.
If the problem is that children of poor parents have a financial problem getting education, create an organization that will search for talented poor children, and give them money and other support.
Vague. How do you find the talent among poor people? This is made more difficult by the fact that the cultural influences of their environment may be steering them away from attempting to demonstrate such talents of their own initiative.
If the problem is that children of uneducated parents can’t get knowledge from their parents, create good educational DVDs and distribute them freely to poor people.
What if (as is probable,) educational DVDs are strictly inferior to receiving qualified hands-on assistance? A DVD can’t correct you if you misunderstand an explanation, or notice when your attention is lagging, or recognize your learning style and focus its efforts on addressing it. Also, the parents of disadvantaged children are a lot less likely to sit down and help them with their homework. A DVD cannot sit down with a student and help them do their homework.
There’s a point where people are liable to say “This is just too much effort for the government to go to to assist disadvantaged students, we can’t hold their hands the entire way,” but the effort that more advantaged families frequently put into their own childrens’ education is extensive and not easy to replicate on a mass scale.
If the problem is that poor people have a culture where education is low-status, apply some propaganda (e.g. try to associate education with something they already consider high-status).
Vague again. What sort of propaganda do you think would work well enough to meaningfully address the culture gap? “Apply some propaganda” is about as helpful advice as “use rationality.”
It’s easy to say “Find the specific causes and address them.” It’s much harder to say exactly how to find out in the first place exactly what the significant causes are, let alone how to resolve them.
Note: There are people who spent a lot of their time thinking and experimenting in this area. Refutation of my solutions does not mean that they could not come up with a better solution.
I don’t doubt that better solutions than what we have in place are possible, I’m sure that they are. Unfortunately, in politics, coming up with a viable plan tends to be a lot easier than implementing it.
But on the other hand, racism, conscious and otherwise, is still a significant enough force throughout the country that applying strictly race-blind criteria in order to assessing how disadvantaged candidates are is liable to return bad estimates in many cases.
Even if racism is an issue, using indicators of disadvantage such as income/wealth in addition to race (as probably the best proxy of concious or unconcious racism) would almost certainly yield better results than using race alone.
Note that if you do care about the race balance alone, then affirmative action is the best approach, as that will lead to admitting marginally weaker students in less represented races (while only rejecting marginally qualifed applicants in overrepresented groups), as needed to reach the desired share.
This is true, but it seems to me that buybuydandavis would prefer a system that attempts to isolate causes of privilege independent of race, and my point is that this is likely to be a lot harder than one which isn’t race-blind.
To be precise, I’d have to have the data. And no, I won’t come up with something perfect, just something a lot better than what we have now.
I don’t think it’s a conceptually hard problem. Predict performance in college based on socio economic factors. Colleges should have plenty of relevant data. Adjust admissions policy to select those with highest predicted performance. That’s if we’re trying to take the people with most potential. Probably a combination of IQ, grades, and parental economic status, along with population statistics for your high school cohort.
If we just want to help the disadvantaged, come up with measures of disadvantage, and apply. Parents wealth/income is probably the place to start, and would avoid the absurdity of having the President’s daughters be classified as disadvantaged. One shouldn’t want to help the most disadvantaged, because they’re unlikely to benefit. Likely the same factors as before, though changing the goal to helping the disadvantaged will involve a trade off between likely achievement and disadvantage.
As I said in my response to Viliam_Bur, it’s easy to say “find out what the relevant factors are, address those,” much harder to detail exactly how one works out what the significant factors are, let alone how to best address them.
Keep in mind that sorting by IQ is still a strong political taboo, and more politically viable proxies, such as SAT scores, are liable to be corrupted by factors such as SAT prep. Plus, target minorities are subject to an IQ gap which may be due to some of the cultural and/or economic factors which the policy is intended to address in the first place, in which case sorting by IQ would compound the original problem.
Keep in mind that sorting by IQ is still a strong political taboo,
With who? Not most Americans, I’d bet. Most Americans accept as obvious that IQ correlates with potential for higher learning.
the cultural and/or economic factors which the policy is intended to address in the first place
So the policy is intended to remake society, not find the students with most potential, or give some extra help to disadvantaged students? This is just a tool to make society look like you want it to look?
Most Americans are strongly opposed to practices such as using IQ to filter applicants for any sort of job, even when IQ strongly correlates with success in that job.
The purpose of the policy is as I outlined in the Blue and Green scenario above; yes, the end goal is to restructure society, so in the long run, certain disadvantages become less systematic and self perpetuating.
Most Americans are strongly opposed to practices such as using IQ to filter applicants for any sort of job, even when IQ strongly correlates with success in that job.
Weren’t we talking about college admissions and potential at college—school? Americans don’t think intelligence is an indicator of potential for school? I really don’t think so.
yes, the end goal is to restructure society
I signed up for helping demonstrably disadvantaged people, particular those with greater potential, not restructure society, and am in general opposed to government efforts to do so.
Weren’t we talking about college admissions and potential at college—school? Americans don’t think intelligence is an indicator of potential for school? I really don’t think so.
Try creating a poll on whether people think colleges ought to be able to look at IQ scores and use them as a criterion to judge between candidates for admissions, and perform it, not at a community like Less Wrong, but somewhere like Times Square. If you think that most people would be in favor of this, I think you should prepare to be surprised.
The idea that IQ tests are actually a good way of measuring something meaningful about a person’s intellectual capacity is itself much maligned in public discourse. It might have a lot of currency on Less Wrong, but that’s not a useful indicator of public attitudes.
The non ideological people I know think being smart helps you perform in school.
99th+ percentile math student here. Working hard helps more. Having the right mental outlook and drive to succeed helps more. Hell, having money arguably helps more.
Being smart doesn’t magically give higher performance in school. You can best model being smart as “certain kinds of problems are easier for smart people”.
Most people accept that being smart helps you perform in school, but that does not mean that they accept that IQ is an appropriate representation of intelligence, or that they support using it to sort people for tasks where intelligence is a significant qualification. Asking people whether they think schools should be able to pick the most intelligent candidates, or sort by IQ, will not get you the same answers.
As mentioned upthread, most people don’t mind sorting on SAT but oppose sorting on IQ. Hypothesis: Any measure that is perceived (correctly or not) to measure native talent accurately will be opposed, because people are afraid that their kids may not be talented “enough”, and if the measure is accurate, they won’t be able to gimmick it. People want a measure they can manipulate to their child’s advantage.
I don’t have any evidence for or against, but it seems plausible to me. I would expect people to want a system that benefits their own kids over others; I would expect that to be something you Can’t Say (because it amounts to defection); and a system that purports to be neutral but is actually gimmickable by the parent (through educational choices) would seem to suit.
[ETA: “Intelligence” as a quality is so nebulous that people won’t mind that, either; if they claim their kid is intelligent, but all measures of it are rejected as invalid for one reason or another, then nothing can prove that their kid is in fact stupid. The state of being intelligent becomes a matter of opinion, not a fact. Opinions are “safe”, in that they can’t be proven wrong; but accepting a measure as valid means accepting that it may measure you and yours as wanting, with no “just your opinion!” or “just socially disadvantaged!” to save you]
Hypothesis: Any measure that is perceived (correctly or not) to measure native talent accurately will be opposed, because people are afraid that their kids may not be talented “enough”, and if the measure is accurate, they won’t be able to gimmick it.
Hypothesis: People prefer an obvious measure, not a speculative one. If you want to measure how good people are at doing something, just let them do it and measure the results. Instead of using a predictor which may or may not work.
SAT is something the child did. IQ is what other people measured about them. SAT is about the potential and one’s ability to use it. IQ is only about the potential. Many factors lead to success in SAT. IQ is only one of them.
I don’t have any evidence for or against, but it seems plausible to me. I would expect people to want a system that benefits their own kids over others; I would expect that to be something you Can’t Say (because it amounts to defection); and a system that purports to be neutral but is actually gimmickable by the parent (through educational choices) would seem to suit.
It’s not something people discuss publicly all that often, but it’s not so taboo that it’s hard to find people who cop to doing it. A lot of parents see fighting for every possible advantage they can get their kids as being part of the fundamentals of being a good parent.
Here we get back to the point of my first comment.
Suppose that you have two groups, the Blues and the Greens, which have a huge gulf in economic status, but equal intrinsic abilities. Blues are almost all put through excellent, expensive schooling, whereas Greens are haphazardly educated. When they compete for access to higher education, Blues tend to overwhelmingly outperform Greens. Future Greens are left in a disadvantaged position similar to their parents.
In a sense, the Blues and Greens are competing on equal footing; if they receive the same results, they get the same access. But the affirmative action position is that, given the opportunity to correct the situation, it’s unfair to leave the Greens in a cycle where they’ll continually receive less opportunity relative to their aptitude.
I don’t contest that affirmative action as currently applied fails to be an honest accounting of our best estimates of potential-given-disadvantage. I wouldn’t even assert that our current affirmative action system is the best we can do with our current budget without crossing existing political taboos. But some of the factors you’re suggesting accounting for are difficult and expensive to track and/or subject to too much political stigma to feasibly implement.
If you want to track variable X, and you have two heuristics, A and B, where A has 85% accuracy and B has 99% accuracy, but is a huge political liability to anyone who employs it, then for practical purposes your choice is between using heuristic A, or not tracking variable X.
The level of abstraction obfuscates the issue. The problem is that some people want a racial spoils system.
People generally approve of means tested public assistance, particularly for children, while many disapprove of race based public assistance. White is not a synonym for advantaged, and black is not a synonym for disadvantaged. Help the disadvantaged. Easy peasy.
If a greater percentage of blacks are disadvantaged, a greater percent can qualify for assistance, this time without the stigma associated with race based preferences.
Of course, the cost a program based on actual advantage starts to be born by the advantaged regardless of race, and not born by disadvantaged whites. I don’t think it’s just a fluke that the disadvantaged bear the cost of the current programs.
If it’s that easy, can you explain precisely how you would do it?
As-is, affirmative action targets a significant number of candidates who’re not particularly disadvantaged in meaningful terms, and it is a problem. But on the other hand, racism, conscious and otherwise, is still a significant enough force throughout the country that applying strictly race-blind criteria in order to assessing how disadvantaged candidates are is liable to return bad estimates in many cases.
Doing better than the current system may not be a great feat, but creating a perfectly equitable system isn’t a trivial one.
If the problem is that children of poor parents have a financial problem getting education, create an organization that will search for talented poor children, and give them money and other support.
If the problem is that children of uneducated parents can’t get knowledge from their parents, create good educational DVDs and distribute them freely to poor people.
If the problem is that poor people have a culture where education is low-status, apply some propaganda (e.g. try to associate education with something they already consider high-status).
If the problem is poor children not having enough iodine in salt, put more iodine in salt, and give it freely to poor people.
Etc. Find the specific cause of the problem, apply solution to the specific cause of the problem. Measure the outcomes.
Vague. How do you find the talent among poor people? This is made more difficult by the fact that the cultural influences of their environment may be steering them away from attempting to demonstrate such talents of their own initiative.
What if (as is probable,) educational DVDs are strictly inferior to receiving qualified hands-on assistance? A DVD can’t correct you if you misunderstand an explanation, or notice when your attention is lagging, or recognize your learning style and focus its efforts on addressing it. Also, the parents of disadvantaged children are a lot less likely to sit down and help them with their homework. A DVD cannot sit down with a student and help them do their homework.
There’s a point where people are liable to say “This is just too much effort for the government to go to to assist disadvantaged students, we can’t hold their hands the entire way,” but the effort that more advantaged families frequently put into their own childrens’ education is extensive and not easy to replicate on a mass scale.
Vague again. What sort of propaganda do you think would work well enough to meaningfully address the culture gap? “Apply some propaganda” is about as helpful advice as “use rationality.”
It’s easy to say “Find the specific causes and address them.” It’s much harder to say exactly how to find out in the first place exactly what the significant causes are, let alone how to resolve them.
I accept the criticism for my quick solutions.
Note: There are people who spent a lot of their time thinking and experimenting in this area. Refutation of my solutions does not mean that they could not come up with a better solution.
I don’t doubt that better solutions than what we have in place are possible, I’m sure that they are. Unfortunately, in politics, coming up with a viable plan tends to be a lot easier than implementing it.
Even if racism is an issue, using indicators of disadvantage such as income/wealth in addition to race (as probably the best proxy of concious or unconcious racism) would almost certainly yield better results than using race alone.
Note that if you do care about the race balance alone, then affirmative action is the best approach, as that will lead to admitting marginally weaker students in less represented races (while only rejecting marginally qualifed applicants in overrepresented groups), as needed to reach the desired share.
I don’t see why this is a reasonable thing to care about.
This is true, but it seems to me that buybuydandavis would prefer a system that attempts to isolate causes of privilege independent of race, and my point is that this is likely to be a lot harder than one which isn’t race-blind.
To be precise, I’d have to have the data. And no, I won’t come up with something perfect, just something a lot better than what we have now.
I don’t think it’s a conceptually hard problem. Predict performance in college based on socio economic factors. Colleges should have plenty of relevant data. Adjust admissions policy to select those with highest predicted performance. That’s if we’re trying to take the people with most potential. Probably a combination of IQ, grades, and parental economic status, along with population statistics for your high school cohort.
If we just want to help the disadvantaged, come up with measures of disadvantage, and apply. Parents wealth/income is probably the place to start, and would avoid the absurdity of having the President’s daughters be classified as disadvantaged. One shouldn’t want to help the most disadvantaged, because they’re unlikely to benefit. Likely the same factors as before, though changing the goal to helping the disadvantaged will involve a trade off between likely achievement and disadvantage.
As I said in my response to Viliam_Bur, it’s easy to say “find out what the relevant factors are, address those,” much harder to detail exactly how one works out what the significant factors are, let alone how to best address them.
Keep in mind that sorting by IQ is still a strong political taboo, and more politically viable proxies, such as SAT scores, are liable to be corrupted by factors such as SAT prep. Plus, target minorities are subject to an IQ gap which may be due to some of the cultural and/or economic factors which the policy is intended to address in the first place, in which case sorting by IQ would compound the original problem.
With who? Not most Americans, I’d bet. Most Americans accept as obvious that IQ correlates with potential for higher learning.
So the policy is intended to remake society, not find the students with most potential, or give some extra help to disadvantaged students? This is just a tool to make society look like you want it to look?
Be clear what the goal is.
Most Americans are strongly opposed to practices such as using IQ to filter applicants for any sort of job, even when IQ strongly correlates with success in that job.
The purpose of the policy is as I outlined in the Blue and Green scenario above; yes, the end goal is to restructure society, so in the long run, certain disadvantages become less systematic and self perpetuating.
Weren’t we talking about college admissions and potential at college—school? Americans don’t think intelligence is an indicator of potential for school? I really don’t think so.
I signed up for helping demonstrably disadvantaged people, particular those with greater potential, not restructure society, and am in general opposed to government efforts to do so.
Try creating a poll on whether people think colleges ought to be able to look at IQ scores and use them as a criterion to judge between candidates for admissions, and perform it, not at a community like Less Wrong, but somewhere like Times Square. If you think that most people would be in favor of this, I think you should prepare to be surprised.
The idea that IQ tests are actually a good way of measuring something meaningful about a person’s intellectual capacity is itself much maligned in public discourse. It might have a lot of currency on Less Wrong, but that’s not a useful indicator of public attitudes.
What’s popular at Times Square or in “public discourse” isn’t an accurate indicator of public attitudes across the United States either.
The non ideological people I know think being smart helps you perform in school.
99th+ percentile math student here. Working hard helps more. Having the right mental outlook and drive to succeed helps more. Hell, having money arguably helps more.
Being smart doesn’t magically give higher performance in school. You can best model being smart as “certain kinds of problems are easier for smart people”.
Are said “non ideological people” a majority?
Most people accept that being smart helps you perform in school, but that does not mean that they accept that IQ is an appropriate representation of intelligence, or that they support using it to sort people for tasks where intelligence is a significant qualification. Asking people whether they think schools should be able to pick the most intelligent candidates, or sort by IQ, will not get you the same answers.
As mentioned upthread, most people don’t mind sorting on SAT but oppose sorting on IQ. Hypothesis: Any measure that is perceived (correctly or not) to measure native talent accurately will be opposed, because people are afraid that their kids may not be talented “enough”, and if the measure is accurate, they won’t be able to gimmick it. People want a measure they can manipulate to their child’s advantage.
I don’t have any evidence for or against, but it seems plausible to me. I would expect people to want a system that benefits their own kids over others; I would expect that to be something you Can’t Say (because it amounts to defection); and a system that purports to be neutral but is actually gimmickable by the parent (through educational choices) would seem to suit.
[ETA: “Intelligence” as a quality is so nebulous that people won’t mind that, either; if they claim their kid is intelligent, but all measures of it are rejected as invalid for one reason or another, then nothing can prove that their kid is in fact stupid. The state of being intelligent becomes a matter of opinion, not a fact. Opinions are “safe”, in that they can’t be proven wrong; but accepting a measure as valid means accepting that it may measure you and yours as wanting, with no “just your opinion!” or “just socially disadvantaged!” to save you]
Hypothesis: People prefer an obvious measure, not a speculative one. If you want to measure how good people are at doing something, just let them do it and measure the results. Instead of using a predictor which may or may not work.
SAT is something the child did. IQ is what other people measured about them. SAT is about the potential and one’s ability to use it. IQ is only about the potential. Many factors lead to success in SAT. IQ is only one of them.
It’s not something people discuss publicly all that often, but it’s not so taboo that it’s hard to find people who cop to doing it. A lot of parents see fighting for every possible advantage they can get their kids as being part of the fundamentals of being a good parent.