I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted. The United States has a system of de jure discrimination against white and asian men. Moreover, there is a great deal of de facto discretization against them as well. Many people seem to think that it is "fair" and appropriate for this to be the case, but I don't think its debatable that this is the fact of the matter. I think those who support this policy should defend it honestly instead of lying about it and claiming its not the policy, when it plainly is.
An example is the federal contracting rules that specifically require that some contracts be awarded to companies that are not run by white males.
This of course is gamed. The common case for a small contractor is that a woman is officially running the business but her husband is really doing it. Large contractors subcontract out to these small contractors for no reason other than to fill quotas. It is often make-work nonsense, paying them even though there is no reason other than the quota to have them working on the project. In other words, it is government waste.
There are people who make a career out of filling these quotas.
Consider how things work if nobody games the system. Each contractor is really being operated by the claimed owner/CEO/president. If the best contractors for a government agency's needs all happen to be run by white males but other less-good contractors exist, some of those better choices need to be rejected. The people running them are hurt by not getting the contracts. The government agency is also hurt by not getting to use the best contractors, and of course this hurts the general public due to government waste.
Ah yes, the system of discrimination that nevertheless has white and asian men disproportionately over-represented in silicon valley, tech companies, and government.
It's worth noting that all of hiring is some form of discrimination. An employer is activilly discriminating against anyone one they do not hire by any number of criteria.
This is fine. Generally accepted criteria such as fitness of duty, education, relevant experience, references and criminal background are all forms of discrimination that are generally accepted forms of discrimination.
But, unacceptable forms of discrimination include race, sex, religion and sexual orientation. If you, as an employer, engage in discrimination against better qualified employees to make a quota of an arbitrary percent of these protected classes against another based upon their class status, you are, in my opinion engaged in unlawful discrimination. It is still targetted discrimination even if it's against a majority class member such as race or gender, if that's the reason for the decision.
Promoting or accepting an underqualified minority over a more qualified minority under "affirmative action" or "diversity" is systematic, institutionalized racism/sexism.
Instead, how about we stop asking or considering "what" we are and consider what we can offer beyond our race/sex/sexual orientation?
> Ah yes, the system of discrimination that nevertheless has white and asian men disproportionately over-represented in silicon valley, tech companies, and government.
Asian immigrants, many of us who grew up in poverty and other difficult circumstances, are "privileged" now?
One of these days, progressives on HN are going to wake up to find the many, many Asians in technology on the opposite side of them. We ain't "woke" and we ain't your "allies", largely because of treatment like this.
It occurs in most non-merit based social settings. 95% of all churches are 95% homogeneous. Racial groups self segregate at lunch tables. 85% of millennials don't have a single friend outside their own racial group.
In merit based settings like employement, the employer is going to be selecting for IQ so the racial demographic of the employees is irrelevant, only their productivity.
I hate to be that person, but could you maybe cite those statistics? I was willing to give a pass on 95% of churches being 95% racially homogeneous, but I'm deeply skeptical the 85% figure is true for all millennials.
So, controversial question here. Is there a racial divide by IQ then?
I'm not talking about the cause of this, whether genetic, cultural or others. But right now in the United States, is there a sizable IQ distribution difference across the various racial groups?
Personally, I think complex analysis is important. I really like Serge Lang's book "Complex Analysis." It is supposedly a graduate level text, but the first half of it covers the basics at a level suitable for upper division undergrad class. Ahlfor's book is also really really good, but a little harder to read in my opinion.
I didn't like either Royden or Rudin. I really like Folland's book "Real analysis: modern techniques and their applications." His Fourier analysis book is also pretty good IMO.
Yes, I've got a copy of Alfors. And at one time I started a course from a student of Alfors. And I have a book by Hille.
I just never could see much utility in complex variables: Complex valued functions of real variables. Sure. Complex valued measures? Sure. Fourier theory making a lot of use of complex numbers? Of course. A vector space where the field is the complex numbers? Certainly. Hermitian and unitary matrices with complex numbers? About have to like those due to the fundamental theorem of algebra, that is, roots of polynomials and, thus, complex eigenvalues. Functions of a complex variable? Never could see the utility.
I think it is about status signalling for the parents
and the social status prospects for the children more than its about career prospects for the children.
What college your children attend seems to have a big affect on your social status in the US, and the children's social status is definitely hugely affected by what college they attend. Apparently it is much cooler to say you went to USC then the University of Arizona.
Maybe it shouldn't be this way, but I think the parents aren't stupid to be worried about their children's social status in this way.
Opioids relieve pain. They also suppress your breathing.
The pain system in your body gets used to the opioids faster than the breathing system. Over time, the difference between the amount of opioids you need to help the pain and the amount of opioids that make you stop breathing gets smaller and smaller. This has a very predictable bad end result.
I inherited a house and condo from my parents. They are in California and purchased long ago, so the property taxes on them are ridiculously low (the condo, worth about 700K has a property tax valuation under 150K ... thank you California taxpayers).
I rent them both out I pay a management company to handle maintenance. I screen tenants myself, and so far I've been lucky getting tenants who stay for fairly long periods. I clear about 5K/month after maintenance fees, taxes and insurance. Its very little work.
Indeed. And there is also a continuous shortage of farm workers, or at least workers willing to do backbreaking seasonal labor harvesting crops for substandard wages. Astonishing.
I think overhead rates at most big state schools are around 50%, and I believe they are higher at a lot of elite private universities. This is the link I got when I googled "Yale overhead rate":
If I am reading it right, it says that on-campus research has an overhead rate of 67.50 or 69.0 percent depending on the funding source. Ouch! I imagine that the federal government knows that it is subsidizing universities as a whole through this system and intends to do so.
Its very hard to turn down a request to review a paper you are qualified to comment on from an editor you know, or who regularly handles your papers. Editor X from Journal Y sends you a paper which you are well-qualified to review. You've submitted 5 papers to Journal Y in the last few years, some of them handled by Editor X. Are you really going to turn down Editor X's request?
What if the paper is written by Author Z, whose work you are familiar with and whose papers you read anyway. Why not review it?
Quite aside from the question of whether or not its okay to discriminate as long as it is principally whites who are harmed, I find this statement from the ACLU to be bizarre. I think it is fairly obviously wrong.
Moreover, the plaintiffs commissioned a study on the effect color blind admissions would have on the racial distribution of Harvard's undergraduate population. It should be taken with a grain of salt, as should the materials offered by the defense, and I suspect it overestimates the effect a bit, but it conforms fairly closely with anecdotal evidence I've seen and so sounds much more plausible to me than the ACLU's take.
It claims the share of black students would shrink from ~15% to ~0.9% and the share of hispanic students from ~15% to ~3%. Meanwhile, the share of white students would shrink slightly from ~37% to ~35%. The proportion of Asian students would roughly double, from ~25% to ~50%.
Again, the specific numbers might be a bit off, but it generally agrees with a lot of anecdotal evidence I've seen --- being black or Hispanic gives one a large advantage, being white is close to neutral, and being Asian is a large disadvantage.
If the primary goal is to be selected into Harvard, your finding is correct. Is it wrong to optimize for several metrics? What if the goal was to create opportunities that would exist for decades, for generations?
Assuming the basic facts claimed by the author are correct, this is really bad. I'm not referring to the behavior attributed to the U Chicago professor and her husband, either. That might be exaggerated by the author (the account is only one side of the story) and, even if it isn't, strong feelings are not uncommon when it comes to controversial topics. Systems should work even when individuals or small groups of people behave badly.
The scandal here is the journal editors deviating from their standard procedures. There are procedures in place for re-evaluating articles which have been published or accepted for publication, and for retracting them if they don't meet proper standards. If the members of editorial boards don't think those procedures are proper, they should work to change them, or, barring that, resign. What they did instead undermines the credibility of the journals. How do we know that usual procedures are followed in other cases when they clearly weren't in this one (assuming the facts are as stated in the post)? Are there articles that are accepted for publication because of external pressure, over the objection of reviewers and editors? Are there other papers which have been disappeared without the expected retraction notices? What a disgrace.
The process, as told by the author, was that one of the editors invited to submit, and three weeks later it was published upon which the rest of the editorial board took notice and threatened resignation.
By that telling it was published practically on the spot, especially for mathematics where things are famously glacially slow. Browsing through the journal one mostly sees submission and publication dates separated by many months. Last published paper in the current volume was received over a year before. But this paper made it in three weeks.
So it was fast tracked by an editor. Editorial board could take issue with that, arguing it haven't gone by the review properly or whatever the usual procedures before publication are. It might have been put up on the web by the managing editor (since on leave and replaced in the interim) or whomever had the admin password, but editorial board to whom the journal's reputation really belongs hasn't deemed it to be their publication.
Of the timeline, author says he's uploaded to ArXiv in September, while by that time he was on revision 3 of https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 uploaded in March. What was added in September however was a piece of journalism in an appendix, that then disappeared in most recent revisions. Last revision was posted just 2 weeks ago, apparently there still were arguments to strengthen (or journalism to remove) before Quillette ran the story.
There he paints his work as "science" and some people including the editorial board as "activists". By Google however appears the same Ted Hill founded a site "to promote campus activism in general" and "to serve as a focal point for organizing activists" where he chronicles his long history of activism http://www.motherfunctor.org/CompleteHistory2013.php
I find these threats doubtful, I don't see the editorial board wasting their life on sustained activism over the years chasing remnants of something they helped to create and what would be served a deathly blow by their resignation already. The author however has a history of activism I haven't looked into, but that usually involves a spin. There's also the possibility of his correspondents' misguided politeness by throwing him something to chew on to diffuse the blame. Mathematical Intelligencer editor could be seen as doing that in a somewhat more intelligent way blaming the possibility of "international hype".
As for the description of alleged emotional states involved, I'm oblivious and not seeing the relevance. Recounting the events and actions taken sufficed for a horrific story. The author deemed it important however to make it into something even more colourful with threats of some unspecified future actions (how does one harass a journal?).
The managing editor you speak of went on leave and has an interim replacement. I can see that entirely appropriate if only because of how retraction was handled by deletion and overwriting, instead of a proper notice in place. This was extremely unprofessional administration, which is usually a duty of the managing editor solely. The other possibility I described is that it wasn't really published the usual way, which is even more damning.
