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Personally I appreciate your merit. Starting the race 100 meters ahead of the other runners probably doesn't get you a very accurate measure of who is the fastest.

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AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent [-]

The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery.

If you then want to buy books for people who can't afford them, that's an entirely different proposal than giving the job to someone who isn't as qualified.

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wredcoll 20 hours ago | parent [-]

> The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery.

Well, an athletic competition would make more sense because that actually determines whose the best. We don't test heart surgeons to see who the best is, we test to see if they can do the job.

That's what people tend to... conveniently overlook... in these conversations. No one is hiring "the best" or only accepting "the best" into their college or whatever else. They pick a good one from the pool of candidates they have available.

Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.

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AnthonyMouse 20 hours ago | parent [-]

> Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.

When you have a competitive major university that gets thousands of applicants and you base admission strictly on test scores, you'll end up accepting only 1% black applicants because their test scores are lower for various reasons. If you wanted to accept 14% black applicants as reflects their proportion of the US population, you would have to be turning down other applicants with significantly higher test scores. It's not just about accepting someone who got a 1520 instead of a 1530, the difference is hundreds of points.

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wredcoll 19 hours ago | parent [-]

That seems rather unlikely, you have any data to back that up?

Someone else linked this article https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...

> For the 2015-2016 academic year, the average GPA of all students applying to medical schools was 3.55 and the average MCAT score was 28.3 according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

> The middle set of bars in the top chart above show that for applicants to US medical schools between 2013-2016 with average GPAs (3.40 to 3.59) and average MCAT scores (27 to 29), black applicants were almost 4 times more likely to be accepted to US medical schools than Asians in that applicant pool (81.2% vs. 20.6%), and 2.8 times more likely than white applicants (81.2% vs. 29.0%).

Seems like they're in the same applicant pool.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That link shows that (presumably in order to meet diversity targets) black applicants with a GPA of 3.2-3.39 had nearly the same acceptance rate as Asian applicants with a 3.6-3.79 GPA. 0.4 points is an entire standard deviation for GPA.