Comments by "L.W. Paradis" (@l.w.paradis2108) on "Robby Soave: Asians Told To Be LESS ASIAN To Get Into Harvard?" video.

The idea that there is a college admissions counselor anywhere who tells students not to say they play piano or violin in order to get into an "elite" school tells you EVERYTHING. This show is over.
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Oh please. She obviously has to be much smarter than a lot of people to be here. Smarter than Robbie for sure.
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@cacornhusker2940 You really haven't noticed how smart she is? Most of the negative comments here are from people who cannot keep up with her pace, or the complexity of her arguments. Granted, as a journalist and newscaster, she should slow down to help them out. :/
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@kel-in5gi Ah . . . Non sequitur? Read it again. Telling an Asian student not to mention playing classical music as an extracurricular pursuit is bigoted.
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@bryanhall2860 You would know this, how? The fact that we place no value on humanities is why we are here in the first place. What do you imagine the humanities are, and who do you think studies them? The most common degree in the US by far is Business. Next come all the medical fields, with Nursing on top. Too bad there are not more competent lawyers around to challenge things like vaccine mandates, hm?
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Ask Kim Iversen what she was told about being half-Asian. You could have asked her while she was here.
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@Vhc706 Tryin' to make it real compared to what?
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@gordonstewart8897 There's a lot of truth to this. MIT, CalTech, and U of Chicago are among the true academic stand-outs, and Princeton for some things as well. Anyone really serious about a career in the humanities should consider Oxford or Cambridge, or at least find a way to do a year abroad in one of those, and a year in Paris -- and take it very seriously. That's what the Japanese students studying in Europe did, back in the 1980s when their economy was flourishing.
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@anneb889 Staying married while giving your kids video games for Christmas instead of a piano or a book will not make a person academically successful -- though the video game playing kid might fit in better, have more friends, and make more money than the kid who did read. My point was that teen pregnancy and dropping out, and being from a single parent family may all stem from a third cause. Correlation is not evidence of causation. Affluent people have been divorcing and remarrying for years now, or simply living together -- not just for years, but for generations. How are their kids doing?
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@morganghetti People go ape-sh*t whenever they notice that a woman whose husband or father are not WASPs is truly brilliant. She didn't get the permission slip that would protect her. WASPs they simply leave alone, because they know that no amount of trash talking can undermine a WASP's self-confidence. Bri? She might still be vulnerable. You can get to the top by striving to be the best, or by taking out your competition. Guess which is easier in 2022?
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@anneb889 Assuming that two-parent families bring about greater academic achievement may sound intuitively plausible, but maybe some other factor helps produce both family stability and a drive to excel academically. Statistics can tell you what cannot be a causal factor, but they never tell you what is.
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@coachduke9323 If the proportion of Asians at Harvard, relative to their population in Massachusetts or in the US as a whole, demonstrated that they are not being discriminated against as a matter of law, then this case would never have been granted certiorari by the Supreme Court. I was responding to the first post, which claims that the proportion of Asians at Harvard by itself shows they aren't being discriminated against.
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Exactly. Finally, someone who gets it.
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The Jewish kids do better as well. What is the real difference? Not necessarily stable homes. The difference is that extra two hours of studying every single day, for fifteen years. Add that up and see what you get.
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@redkatana7450 I don't think stepping away from the video game and the obsession with celebrities and picking up a book by J. M. Coetzee or Balzac is all that tough. It can be made to be tough, I guess.
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@anneb889 What is Andrew Yang's source?
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That is why a series of Supreme Court cases allowed for affirmative action and taking into account diversity based on race. Read the cases and find out.
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@gordonstewart8897 Quora is no authority for anything. It's a very good discussion platform, but that is all.
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@gordonstewart8897 Have you yourself ever reviewed a syllabus from Harvard? Have you tried reading what's on it? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying you have no basis for that statement. At any rate, the hardest part of any desirable school or job may indeed be getting in the door, but that does not mean the demands are not high once you are admitted. Sometimes they are high to the point of being unfair. Yale had a lawsuit against it for discrimination against those with significant health issues, especially mental health. No state school pushes anyone out for such a reason, or creates barriers to readmission. Not everyone can meet Rhodes Scholar standards, or should have to. Certain issues are ubiquitous among the most talented.
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Maybe you should read all the Supreme Court cases that permitted affirmative action and see how they justified it. Did you think this was the first case anyone brought?
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@detroitcityman6622 Not so. You don't know the history of the Court. Reagan and Bush appointees were Justices for a generation. Most of the Justices have been conservative Republicans for a long time.
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@detroitcityman6622 Wait, am I being silly? Any excuse not to read is more like it . . .
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Um, so . . . you don't know you're mentally ill, do you?
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If that were the criteria, the case would never have been granted cert.
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@coachduke9323 GPA, SAT? LOL, being a legacy or "special development" (like a child star or Olympic gold medalist, or the child of someone who gives $1 million+ to Harvard) is by far the single most important criterion.
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@coachduke9323 Non-merit admissions have always been an issue. I don't think there is any way to change what private universities do, and it is pointless to discuss criteria when we have absolutely no influence over criteria and cannot have influence. What we could change is the fact that these are the feeder schools to all major positions of power, especially in politics. If I had kids, I'd want them educated in the UK and France, unless they have a scientific bent. Then I would want them to go to a great engineering school, which ranges from MIT to University of Illinois. In other words, those schools are not all private. For pure mathematics, Oxford or Cambridge, definitely. Only the empirical sciences and technology are worth running the gauntlet here.
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@coachduke9323 It is possible to discriminate even when grades are not the sole criterion for admission by demonstrating that only if you are Asian will your grades be given markedly less importance than they are for everyone else. That is a difficult statistical analysis to present, and usually a discrimination claim has to have other evidence to support it, such as "smoking gun" evidence. For example, Kim Iversen's mother was a refugee from Vietnam, and Kim was expressly told not to say she is Asian, since her name allows her to pass for Northern European. I guess having a mother who was a refugee from Vietnam just isn't the narrative that gets you ahead anymore. Once you put the statistical evidence together with specific examples, though, you do have a case.
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@jorgegonzales9815 Sorry, but you didn't understand what I meant, and you don't understand evidence. Sworn testimony, if offered, that you were expressly told to hide your ancestry to improve your chances for an opportunity most certainly is not a mere anecdote. If it were, then any time a worker testifies that they were propositioned by their boss in exchange for favorable treatment is merely an "anecdote." If students of any racial minority have to meet significantly more stringent criteria concerning region of origin, lower socio-economic status, sports success, and so forth, than do others not of that minority, that is evidence of discrimination. I never said that "just the fact that the Supreme Court accepted the case" means the plaintiffs have "proven" discrimination. That's not the point at all. If on this record, no reasonable jury could find discrimination because the facts taken as a whole do not amount to discrimination under the applicable legal standard, then the Supreme Court would not have granted cert. The only plausible exception would be if the Court wants to change the interpretation of that legal standard. That's simply a fact. Inform yourself about Supreme Court jurisdiction.
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@jorgegonzales9815 Thinking you can avoid charges of discrimination purely based on arguing statistics the way you do ended by the 1990s. One of the favorite moves of employers with a workforce that on its face appeared racially diverse, but in fact resulted from discrimination, was to hire only black women and actively discriminate against black men. This strategy was finally exposed by the end of the last century. The concept of intersectionality was devised in law (not, say, sociology) to address exactly this form of racial discrimination.
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@jorgegonzales9815 I never said Kim's experience was evidence in any lawsuit. I gave an example of the types of incidents that, if proven, can serve to show discriminatory animus. Kim isn't a party to this suit. LOL
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@jorgegonzales9815 You sound like a bot. In any case, you're not a lawyer.
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@jorgegonzales9815 Blocked as possible bot, certainly a time-waster.
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@jorgegonzales9815 Oh, here is a remark that doesn't sound bot-like. But of course it devolves into ridiculous ad hominem and nonsense. But thanks for letting me know what I better say around incompetent politically correct people. I forgot to stop thinking and start stringing phrases together. Guess what -- you would be incompetent to argue this case in a way to protect anyone from discrimination, least of all black applicants, who are the ones always subjected to systematic discrimination, to the greatest extent of any group.
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@jorgegonzales9815 No one said statistics aren't "valid benchmarks." I said your simplistic proportionality argument, which has NO place in elite college admissions, isn't. Go look up how Seth Waxman argued in the brief in favor of Harvard. You are so lame.
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If you read Cliff's Notes in high school, you might think so.
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@raedmundson11 You wouldn't recognize the references she makes, or where her arguments come from. You haven't read those cases -- or perhaps any cases. You haven't read the same books -- or perhaps any books?
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@dorian7215 Not at all. EVERY "selective" college includes non-academic criteria for admissions, and there have been scholarships based not only on merit but on all sorts of extraneous criteria ever since I can remember. This is because in a privatized system, the ones with control of the money/resources get to set whatever criteria they like. A boss can prefer Mets fans over Knicks fans, White Sox fans over Cub fans, blonds over brunettes (of the "same race"), and people who grew up in a big city or on a dairy farm over those who grew up in a posh suburb. College is only marginally different. FAR MORE qualified people apply to colleges than are accepted. People who deserve to be somewhere are turned down all the time. You don't get the game, do you? To make something seem really desirable, just turn down a lot of qualified applicants. It's part of market logic.
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I certainly do.
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