garrettw87

oktupol, 10 months ago

My colleagues and I joke around that SAP stands for Sadness and Pain.

EnglishMobster, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

My worry that many articles are going to have a biased take on the situation, or be coming from Mastodon etc. where things don't map up 1:1.

My perspective:

I moderate a medium-sized magazine here on Kbin (@Disneyland, about 264 subscribers here and a couple dozen elsewhere on the fediverse). You can't moderate a magazine from another instance, nor can you redirect a magazine somewhere else. This means I effectively must use Kbin.social, especially since I also mod the /r/Disneyland subreddit and have been redirecting people to our magazine for a month now.

I personally would like to see Threads here, if only because @disneyparks would be a nice fit to have automatically included in our microblog tab. I can't go to another instance that supports Threads because again - moderators on Kbin can't be from different instances. And besides - me being on another instance doesn't stop the fact that I couldn't have content from Threads automatically added here. So my options are basically "deal with it" or "abandon the community here".

It really sucks that there is a way that could make my magazine better by including actual official Disney sources in our Disney-themed magazine, but some people are afraid of EEE they are trying to keep that from everyone. I'd rather federate with Threads and allow users to individually block the domain if they desire.

• If EEE is the worry, fight them at the "extend" step, not the "embrace" one.

• If mountains of spam is the worry - people have to manually follow people from other instances for those posts to federate to Kbin, so not every single account will magically pop up here on Kbin. It'll be accounts that people on Kbin have followed; a small chunk.

• Vice-versa, Threads is full of casual users who don't know much about the fediverse. Any Threads users interacting on Kbin are those who understand the fediverse and go out of their way to subscribe to Kbin magazines from Threads. We know from past history that these are going to be a minority; even within the fediverse, Mastodon is huge (and tech-savvy) but we see very few Mastodon folks posting to Kbin threads.

• If "Facebook is sucking up all my data" is the worry, they could do that anyway. The fediverse is open and public; they can easily set up a "shadow instance" that federates everywhere and slurps everything. They don't need Threads for that.

If people just don't want to see Threads users at all, making the block button defederate on the account level would be wonderful. If people choose to block Threads, then Threads users couldn't see them and vice versa. People who see Threads as a potential useful resource (myself, for the magazine I mod) would still be able to have that content in the community here on Kbin. Everyone's happy.

FlowVoid, 11 months ago

This is exactly right. There have been various interviews with college admissions directors over the past year, and they pretty much all said the same thing. To paraphrase, "We expect that AA will be struck down. If we can't directly ask about race on the application, then we will achieve the same result by indirect means".

AA opponents mistakenly believe that colleges will now be forced to consider only grades and test scores. Nothing could be further from the truth.

HandsHurtLoL, 11 months ago

@garretw87 @smokinjoe

I understand where garretw87 is coming from here with the cautious optimism. Unlike the Voting Rights Act (section 4, iirc) that was struck down a few years ago and then multiple republican-led state legislatures immediately moved to find ways to disenfranchise any demographic they deemed to vote democrat, these race-conscious policies are a result from internal motivations and commitment to diversity.

Nothing is going to make Harvard enact a policy that it doesn't ultimately believe in (although we clearly see that court cases can dissolve existing policies). And even if the laws say that Harvard's goals of increasing diversity can't be through race-conscious admissions, then Harvard can and will find another signifier than race to achieve its goals. One way may be to add points during the review process to an applicant who reports that their family received social benefits, or maybe even go so far as to demarcate a map of zip codes and add points if an applicant grew up in specific communities that are well known for specific demographics.

I anticipate that something like this that is broadly defined but catches prevalence for certain ethnic groups while not being exclusive to any one ethnic group could be the way for Harvard to continue recruitment and achieve its diversity goals.

Also, before my comment here gets reduced down to " OP assumes all X race must be poor, hurr durr" I want to add that there is a small batch of elite high schools in America that recruit very talented students of all races from some of the poorest communities (the Bronx, Appalachia, South side Chicago, etc.) that extend generous scholarship packages for room, board, and tuition from which universities like Harvard are recruiting about half of its prospective diversity students. To put all the focus on universities for being race-conscious is to turn a blind eye that there exist private high schools that are doing the same thing.

DarkGamer, 11 months ago

I have mixed feelings about this ruling.

Affirmative action was trying to compensate for implicit anti-minority bias with explicit pro-minority bias. Today in many places, Republicans have outlawed even teaching people that this implicit bias exists with their war on critical race theory. There's a troubling recent resurgence of open racism on the right. We clearly haven't fixed the problem.

And yet, fighting institutionalized racism with institutionalized racism seems very hypocritical to me. It's much like how murder is illegal yet many states implement the death penalty. If we want our society to be a meritocracy we shouldn't grant opportunities based on the intersection of socioeconomics and genetics. This would presumably lead to a system where political and ethnic groups fight over which groups are disadvantaged and by how much, and whom the rules should favor, if it hasn't already, (the arguments made regarding Asian applicants presented in this case seem a lot like this.)

Clearly some groups were directly historically disadvantaged by the state, most notably African Americans and Native Americans. The government that did this to them should have responsibility for the consequences of these injustices, and not unrelated universities. If we are to target aid in a racial way it would make sense to do it as reparations targeted at the groups that were disadvantaged in a racial way, rather than forcing colleges to abandon meritocracy. If anything I want colleges to be more meritocratic, to the point of no longer letting people in for being legacies or donors.

Although racial disparities aren't fixed, addressing it this way is illegal and problematic. It seems the only viable alternative left to address remaining social inequities is to elevate all socioeconomically disadvantaged people in a colorblind way.

As for colleges, if they want to avoid racial bias they could omit racial identifiers and correlates like the name and location of the applicant and choose their students in a truly colorblind and meritocratic way, because without such identifiers implicit biases can't be expressed.