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Lots of interesting insights, but their affirmative action take is a miss. > Critics of affirmative action often commit the fallacy of letting a failure in one

Lots of interesting insights, but their affirmative action take is a miss. > Critics of affirmative action often commit the fallacy of letting a failure in one area doom the entire enterprise. This ignores the interdependent nature of affirmative action. [1] Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics. The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity. [1]: https://nonzerosum.games/unlockingsolutions.html https://nonzerosum.games/unlockingsolutions.html

aprilthird2021 9mo ago
But those resources are already redistributed (from a distribution that somewhat aligns with demographics) with things like personal relationships (think legacy admissions or a father's buddy handshake internship). AA is meant to correct historical instances of this which snowball into familial / generational wealth and (most difficult to diffuse) social capital that was distributed unfairly. That's the argument for it, not my belief. The argument for AA is that the so-called meritocracy had/has its own unequal distributions.
- RobotToaster 9mo ago
  >AA is meant to correct historical instances of this which snowball into familial / generational wealth and (most difficult to diffuse) social capital that was distributed unfairly. If that was the case it would be based on family wealth/income.
  - aprilthird2021 9mo ago
    Social capital is not measured in family wealth / income, but it can very easily translate into jobs and other valuable things (like when your father knows someone who can get you an interview)
    - RobotToaster 9mo ago
      I'd argue that they're very highly correlated. It would be an unusual outlier for someone to have high social capital but low wealth/income.
anon84873628 9mo ago
Do you disagree that some critics of AA are committing that fallacy? AA is being used as an example of the failure mode where: "The failure of a single component does not mean the program is fatally flawed; rather, it highlights the need for a comprehensive, coordinated approach" Indeed, I'm sure the author would agree that part of the comprehensive solution is to increase the amount of university admission slots.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  That feels more like a cop-out than a legitimate criticism of a fallacy. If the author could propose an affirmative action program that didn’t have that “single component” at the core of how it operates then I’d be more interested in the argument, but as-is it just feels like an attempt to forcefully ignore valid criticisms.
  - anon84873628 9mo ago
    The "single component" in this example is scholarships. The goal is successful education outcomes for minorities. The other measures required for success are to fix the things the article mentions about why the students are still dropping out, besides tuition. I.e. the program would be comprehensive beyond just admissions slots.
- skibidithink 9mo ago
  Even if some critics of AA are committing that fallacy, debunking a weaker argument when a stronger argument exists is ineffective. The implicit argument is that AA's largest challenge is a coordination problem. It's not. It's a clash in values and a fight over zero-sum rewards.
  - anon84873628 9mo ago
    The argument is that critics of AA are committing the Fallacy of Composition. Specifically when saying that since giving out scholarships doesn't result in equal educational outcomes, then we should stop giving out scholarships. I am with the author on this one. Creating better educational outcomes (for all students) is a coordination problem.
asimpletune 9mo ago
I think something that often isn't considered with affirmative action is the benefits that are conferred to the people who are not in a minority. In other words it is a genuinely useful thing to go to a university with a broad spectrum of people and ideas. In a purely meritocratic sense, all other beings equal a university that provides a diverse faculty and student body will better educate its students than a university that doesn't, all other things remaining equal.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  The problem in practice is that these programs don’t actually select for diverse ideas, they select for demographic traits like gender or ethnic background. If the team uses relational databases but someone shows up to an interview with a strongly held belief that NoSQL is the way to go, they’re likely to be rejected because their ideas don’t match the team’s. Same if the team strongly believes in some version of agile but a person they interview doesn’t like agile. Diversity programs in practice never even attempt to push diversity of ideas, they ignore all of that and focus on things like gender and ethnic background. This feels like a dangerous opinion to voice, but the workplace affirmative action programs I’ve seen in practice have been very poor in their implementation. At my last workplace that instituted diversity targets, HR would just start rejecting hires if they thought it would skew the diversity numbers in the wrong way. So you’d hit a wall where the only candidates you were allowed to hire couldn’t be, for example, men or of Asian descent or some other demographic trait they thought was over-represented. None of this improved diversity of ideas, it became a game to find a person whose ideas matched the team who also happened to have the right gender or skin color to keep our diversity statistics going in the direction HR demanded.
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analog31 9mo ago
To counter that, though without a precise economic analysis, both university admissions and employment grew during the affirmative action era. Everything looks like zero-sum if viewed as a static, local model.
- skibidithink 9mo ago
  It's only positive sum if they grew because of affirmative action. And if affirmative action caused net friction, it'd be a Moloch.
  - VinLucero 9mo ago
    Are you assuming elite college admission counts are rigid in the count of people admitted because of real teaching constraints or reducing the supply of prestige?
    - skibidithink 9mo ago
      None of my arguments require any assumption on why. But I would say that it's because of prestige and signaling.
- eru 9mo ago
  University admission is arguably bad for society. (See Caplan's Case Against Education.)
MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
>The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity. A lot of proponents of affirmative action will agree with this. They'll explicitly acknowledge that people admitted under AA will be underqualified, due to factors mentioned in the article: [Minorities] may lack foundational skills (taken for granted in more affluent households and schools) and therefore might require breaks from study, which can lead to dropping out. They might have developed unhelpful habits or attitudes formed in teen years, or a sense of identity tied up with being part of a historically maligned group, affecting confidence and performance. [Affirmative action] does nothing to address these factors. Said proponents would agree that AA is a failure if assessed strictly by these criteria. However, they would then go on to say that the benefits conferred by an elite education to the current crop of AA beneficiaries lead to future generations of minorities being less likely to experience the aforementioned issues, so after accounting for all future externalities, AA is a net good. As Justice O'Connor famously wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) [0], It would be a sad day indeed, were America to become a quota-ridden society, with each identifiable minority assigned proportional representation in every desirable walk of life. But that is not the rationale for programs of preferential treatment; the acid test of their justification will be their efficacy in eliminating the need for any racial or ethnic preferences at all. […] It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education [California v. Bakke (1978)]. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today. That said, it's been almost 25 years since she wrote that (and 50 years since California v. Bakke), and it's debatable whether those future externalities have manifested. [0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/
- skibidithink 9mo ago
  And many against affirmative action will agree that there have been massive historical injustices for certain demographics that have lingering effects. The difference between these two sides is which value they prioritize.
jrm4 9mo ago
University admission is a zero-sum already deeply unfair game (with slots going to the rich and privileged) AA just pushes against THAT, for better or worse.
- skibidithink 9mo ago
  AA doesn't prevent the rich from buying admissions. It redistributes slots from middle and lower class folks with the wrong ethnicity.
  - firejake308 9mo ago
    I went to a school in the suburbs with kids from middle class families and lower-middle class families. Many of us wanted to get into the Ivy League schools, but what I saw was that, presumable because of AA, the middle class kids from over-represented minorities (Asian, white) did not get into the Ivies, and the 1 or 2 who did get in were middle class kids from under-represented minorities (Black, Hispanic). But their families were still pretty well-off. Under no circumstances did a kid from a lower-middle class family make it into an Ivy, regardless of race. I really don't get why AA has to be about race, if we just did AA based on parental income alone, I would support it 100%. I think most concervatives would be happy because it wouls support poor whites, and most liberals would also be happy because it would in actuality URMs would still be the most benefited because they are the majority of low-income families. My only assumption is that it doesn't leave any openings for the rich and powerful to game the system, so people with the power to make changes will never make that change.
  - jrm4 9mo ago
    I never said it did that; It pushes back against the phenomenon. The most neutral way I can put it: Every school turns away a LOT of equally qualified applicants, at some point decisions must be made. Next issue, schools don't exist purely for the benefit of the students, but the world at large. This is why you want a -- dare I say it -- diverse population. To maximize the good your students can do. Now, one may not love race as a proxy for this, but it's at least arguably a workable solution.
didibus 9mo ago
It depends, there were a lot of studies that showed prejudice and bias in the meritocratic process. You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks, and anonymous interviews having higher rates of hire and such. Due to this, people considered affirmative actions to correct for this skew. That would actually make it a meritocratic motivated AA. And then you have the idea of missed potential. Those who weren't given the opportunity to develop, it limits the pool of exceptional candidates. It's similar to when black athletes weren't allowed in sports. We thought we had a meritocratic process, but we were artificially limiting those with potential. The challenge is bigger here, so you need a bootstrapping process, because you're faced with a chicken and egg situation. You wouldn't know if it works or not unless you give it at least one if not two generations to take effect. I admit that this is the more controversial one, as it means temporarily favoring disadvantaged groups to bootstrap things. I just wanted to point out that there's a meritocratic angle to it as well. Equity doesn't mean give those that suck a boost. It means give those that weren't given the environment to develop their full potential a chance at it, they may end up being even better than the alternative.
- robocat 9mo ago
  You are stawmanning. You are attempting to say what they think meritocracy is - and your basing your thoughts on your own stereotypes. > You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks That is not meritocracy.
  - aprilthird2021 9mo ago
    But that's what we live in. We can't force meritocracy on people when they have the ability to accept and reject candidates in a biased way
  - didibus 9mo ago
    Yes, that's what I'm saying. These systems claimed to be meritocratic but empirically weren’t. AA was introduced as a corrective, not a rejection of merit. Was it successful at correcting it, did it introduce other defects, I don't know, but you can see that implementation of AA can result from wanting to be more meritocratic, not less.
strongpigeon 9mo ago
I was more thrown off by their definition of "Coordination Problems" than anything. They say: > We sometimes run into problems where a number of factors have to be addressed simultaneously in order for them to be effective at all. One weak link can ruin it for the rest. These are called Coordination Problems. Coordination problems are about multiple actors choosing interdependent outcomes, rather than a problem that needs everything to be done right. This sounds more like a "Weakest Link" problem than a coordination problem. Not that it invalidates the rest of the post, but it did make me dig in more into the person's background and showed that they're more of a journalist than a game theory expert.
- anon84873628 9mo ago
  Yeah, they are assuming that different actors are responsible for those different links, probably with different incentives. And it is also a resource allocation problem.
BeetleB 9mo ago
> Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics. I wish I could find the source, but the vast majority of universities don't have a fixed admissions quota. They are criteria based (if you meet the criteria, you get in). In principle, AA admissions did not prevent others from getting a seat. Of course, it's possible the general admissions criteria is raised slightly to compensate, but again - for most universities, AA admissions wasn't a significant number, and however much the bar raised, it was likely minuscule. I'll be blunt. Everyone I've personally known who didn't get admissions in a particular university and blamed AA for it was trying to get into a top school, and likely didn't earn his spot.
- verteu 9mo ago
  CA Prop 209 is a good natural experiment: https://reappropriate.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Total-UC-admissions1.jpg https://reappropriate.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Total-UC...
  - BeetleB 9mo ago
    This tells me only about a few universities, and there are too many confounding variables.
    - skibidithink 9mo ago
      It's better data than the people in one person's life.
    - ls612 9mo ago
      But you can look at trends in other comparable states compared to California both before and after CA outlawed AA at public California universities by referendum.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]

aprilthird2021 9mo ago

But those resources are already redistributed (from a distribution that somewhat aligns with demographics) with things like personal relationships (think legacy admissions or a father's buddy handshake internship). AA is meant to correct historical instances of this which snowball into familial / generational wealth and (most difficult to diffuse) social capital that was distributed unfairly. That's the argument for it, not my belief. The argument for AA is that the so-called meritocracy had/has its own unequal distributions.

RobotToaster 9mo ago
>AA is meant to correct historical instances of this which snowball into familial / generational wealth and (most difficult to diffuse) social capital that was distributed unfairly. If that was the case it would be based on family wealth/income.
- aprilthird2021 9mo ago
  Social capital is not measured in family wealth / income, but it can very easily translate into jobs and other valuable things (like when your father knows someone who can get you an interview)
  - RobotToaster 9mo ago
    I'd argue that they're very highly correlated. It would be an unusual outlier for someone to have high social capital but low wealth/income.

anon84873628 9mo ago

Do you disagree that some critics of AA are committing that fallacy? AA is being used as an example of the failure mode where: "The failure of a single component does not mean the program is fatally flawed; rather, it highlights the need for a comprehensive, coordinated approach" Indeed, I'm sure the author would agree that part of the comprehensive solution is to increase the amount of university admission slots.

Aurornis 9mo ago
That feels more like a cop-out than a legitimate criticism of a fallacy. If the author could propose an affirmative action program that didn’t have that “single component” at the core of how it operates then I’d be more interested in the argument, but as-is it just feels like an attempt to forcefully ignore valid criticisms.
- anon84873628 9mo ago
  The "single component" in this example is scholarships. The goal is successful education outcomes for minorities. The other measures required for success are to fix the things the article mentions about why the students are still dropping out, besides tuition. I.e. the program would be comprehensive beyond just admissions slots.
skibidithink 9mo ago
Even if some critics of AA are committing that fallacy, debunking a weaker argument when a stronger argument exists is ineffective. The implicit argument is that AA's largest challenge is a coordination problem. It's not. It's a clash in values and a fight over zero-sum rewards.
- anon84873628 9mo ago
  The argument is that critics of AA are committing the Fallacy of Composition. Specifically when saying that since giving out scholarships doesn't result in equal educational outcomes, then we should stop giving out scholarships. I am with the author on this one. Creating better educational outcomes (for all students) is a coordination problem.

asimpletune 9mo ago

I think something that often isn't considered with affirmative action is the benefits that are conferred to the people who are not in a minority. In other words it is a genuinely useful thing to go to a university with a broad spectrum of people and ideas. In a purely meritocratic sense, all other beings equal a university that provides a diverse faculty and student body will better educate its students than a university that doesn't, all other things remaining equal.

Aurornis 9mo ago
The problem in practice is that these programs don’t actually select for diverse ideas, they select for demographic traits like gender or ethnic background. If the team uses relational databases but someone shows up to an interview with a strongly held belief that NoSQL is the way to go, they’re likely to be rejected because their ideas don’t match the team’s. Same if the team strongly believes in some version of agile but a person they interview doesn’t like agile. Diversity programs in practice never even attempt to push diversity of ideas, they ignore all of that and focus on things like gender and ethnic background. This feels like a dangerous opinion to voice, but the workplace affirmative action programs I’ve seen in practice have been very poor in their implementation. At my last workplace that instituted diversity targets, HR would just start rejecting hires if they thought it would skew the diversity numbers in the wrong way. So you’d hit a wall where the only candidates you were allowed to hire couldn’t be, for example, men or of Asian descent or some other demographic trait they thought was over-represented. None of this improved diversity of ideas, it became a game to find a person whose ideas matched the team who also happened to have the right gender or skin color to keep our diversity statistics going in the direction HR demanded.

deleted 9mo ago

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deleted 9mo ago

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analog31 9mo ago

To counter that, though without a precise economic analysis, both university admissions and employment grew during the affirmative action era. Everything looks like zero-sum if viewed as a static, local model.

skibidithink 9mo ago
It's only positive sum if they grew because of affirmative action. And if affirmative action caused net friction, it'd be a Moloch.
- VinLucero 9mo ago
  Are you assuming elite college admission counts are rigid in the count of people admitted because of real teaching constraints or reducing the supply of prestige?
  - skibidithink 9mo ago
    None of my arguments require any assumption on why. But I would say that it's because of prestige and signaling.
eru 9mo ago
University admission is arguably bad for society. (See Caplan's Case Against Education.)

MontyCarloHall 9mo ago

>The conflict is not a disagreement over effectiveness. It's a misalignment between meritocracy and equity. A lot of proponents of affirmative action will agree with this. They'll explicitly acknowledge that people admitted under AA will be underqualified, due to factors mentioned in the article: [Minorities] may lack foundational skills (taken for granted in more affluent households and schools) and therefore might require breaks from study, which can lead to dropping out. They might have developed unhelpful habits or attitudes formed in teen years, or a sense of identity tied up with being part of a historically maligned group, affecting confidence and performance. [Affirmative action] does nothing to address these factors. Said proponents would agree that AA is a failure if assessed strictly by these criteria. However, they would then go on to say that the benefits conferred by an elite education to the current crop of AA beneficiaries lead to future generations of minorities being less likely to experience the aforementioned issues, so after accounting for all future externalities, AA is a net good. As Justice O'Connor famously wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) [0], It would be a sad day indeed, were America to become a quota-ridden society, with each identifiable minority assigned proportional representation in every desirable walk of life. But that is not the rationale for programs of preferential treatment; the acid test of their justification will be their efficacy in eliminating the need for any racial or ethnic preferences at all. […] It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education [California v. Bakke (1978)]. Since that time, the number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today. That said, it's been almost 25 years since she wrote that (and 50 years since California v. Bakke), and it's debatable whether those future externalities have manifested. [0] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/

skibidithink 9mo ago
And many against affirmative action will agree that there have been massive historical injustices for certain demographics that have lingering effects. The difference between these two sides is which value they prioritize.

jrm4 9mo ago

University admission is a zero-sum already deeply unfair game (with slots going to the rich and privileged) AA just pushes against THAT, for better or worse.

skibidithink 9mo ago
AA doesn't prevent the rich from buying admissions. It redistributes slots from middle and lower class folks with the wrong ethnicity.
- firejake308 9mo ago
  I went to a school in the suburbs with kids from middle class families and lower-middle class families. Many of us wanted to get into the Ivy League schools, but what I saw was that, presumable because of AA, the middle class kids from over-represented minorities (Asian, white) did not get into the Ivies, and the 1 or 2 who did get in were middle class kids from under-represented minorities (Black, Hispanic). But their families were still pretty well-off. Under no circumstances did a kid from a lower-middle class family make it into an Ivy, regardless of race. I really don't get why AA has to be about race, if we just did AA based on parental income alone, I would support it 100%. I think most concervatives would be happy because it wouls support poor whites, and most liberals would also be happy because it would in actuality URMs would still be the most benefited because they are the majority of low-income families. My only assumption is that it doesn't leave any openings for the rich and powerful to game the system, so people with the power to make changes will never make that change.
- jrm4 9mo ago
  I never said it did that; It pushes back against the phenomenon. The most neutral way I can put it: Every school turns away a LOT of equally qualified applicants, at some point decisions must be made. Next issue, schools don't exist purely for the benefit of the students, but the world at large. This is why you want a -- dare I say it -- diverse population. To maximize the good your students can do. Now, one may not love race as a proxy for this, but it's at least arguably a workable solution.

didibus 9mo ago

It depends, there were a lot of studies that showed prejudice and bias in the meritocratic process. You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks, and anonymous interviews having higher rates of hire and such. Due to this, people considered affirmative actions to correct for this skew. That would actually make it a meritocratic motivated AA. And then you have the idea of missed potential. Those who weren't given the opportunity to develop, it limits the pool of exceptional candidates. It's similar to when black athletes weren't allowed in sports. We thought we had a meritocratic process, but we were artificially limiting those with potential. The challenge is bigger here, so you need a bootstrapping process, because you're faced with a chicken and egg situation. You wouldn't know if it works or not unless you give it at least one if not two generations to take effect. I admit that this is the more controversial one, as it means temporarily favoring disadvantaged groups to bootstrap things. I just wanted to point out that there's a meritocratic angle to it as well. Equity doesn't mean give those that suck a boost. It means give those that weren't given the environment to develop their full potential a chance at it, they may end up being even better than the alternative.

robocat 9mo ago
You are stawmanning. You are attempting to say what they think meritocracy is - and your basing your thoughts on your own stereotypes. > You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks That is not meritocracy.
- aprilthird2021 9mo ago
  But that's what we live in. We can't force meritocracy on people when they have the ability to accept and reject candidates in a biased way
- didibus 9mo ago
  Yes, that's what I'm saying. These systems claimed to be meritocratic but empirically weren’t. AA was introduced as a corrective, not a rejection of merit. Was it successful at correcting it, did it introduce other defects, I don't know, but you can see that implementation of AA can result from wanting to be more meritocratic, not less.

strongpigeon 9mo ago

I was more thrown off by their definition of "Coordination Problems" than anything. They say: > We sometimes run into problems where a number of factors have to be addressed simultaneously in order for them to be effective at all. One weak link can ruin it for the rest. These are called Coordination Problems. Coordination problems are about multiple actors choosing interdependent outcomes, rather than a problem that needs everything to be done right. This sounds more like a "Weakest Link" problem than a coordination problem. Not that it invalidates the rest of the post, but it did make me dig in more into the person's background and showed that they're more of a journalist than a game theory expert.

anon84873628 9mo ago
Yeah, they are assuming that different actors are responsible for those different links, probably with different incentives. And it is also a resource allocation problem.

BeetleB 9mo ago

> Affirmative action sets up a zero-sum game where fixed resources like university admissions and employment offers are redistributed to people with the "correct" demographics. I wish I could find the source, but the vast majority of universities don't have a fixed admissions quota. They are criteria based (if you meet the criteria, you get in). In principle, AA admissions did not prevent others from getting a seat. Of course, it's possible the general admissions criteria is raised slightly to compensate, but again - for most universities, AA admissions wasn't a significant number, and however much the bar raised, it was likely minuscule. I'll be blunt. Everyone I've personally known who didn't get admissions in a particular university and blamed AA for it was trying to get into a top school, and likely didn't earn his spot.

verteu 9mo ago
CA Prop 209 is a good natural experiment: https://reappropriate.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Total-UC-admissions1.jpg https://reappropriate.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Total-UC...
- BeetleB 9mo ago
  This tells me only about a few universities, and there are too many confounding variables.
  - skibidithink 9mo ago
    It's better data than the people in one person's life.
  - ls612 9mo ago
    But you can look at trends in other comparable states compared to California both before and after CA outlawed AA at public California universities by referendum.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]