If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Dak]

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/elite-colleges-veterans/545615/

By the time I’d enrolled at Columbia—before that, and after the Marine Corps, I’d worked at the financial consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers—I’d attained a measure of that freedom. But being on an elite campus after living the life I’ve lived is often jarring.

I remember how it felt when, earlier this year, in a class on development economics, a slide came up that read, “Education investment by the poor—why don’t they go to school?” My classmates proceeded to discuss this “they” and their motivations. It was surreal to have my own experience encapsulated in a PowerPoint slide, and I realized just how little of a grasp some of my peers had on the lives of people much poorer than them. How can poverty be solved when the future policy makers and development economists of the world have little to no personal experience with the problems they aim to address?

This is something I've been saying for years now.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized how unusual my Ivy League story was. Last year, there was only one veteran attending Princeton as an undergrad, and just three at Harvard. In fact, in 2016, out of the 160,000 people enrolled in a group of 36 top-flight undergraduate programs, just 645—or about 0.4 percent—of them were veterans. There are estimated to be 22 million veterans in the U.S., which works out to about 8 or 9 percent of American adults—meaning veterans are grossly underrepresented at these 36 schools.

Why? Because the GI Bill doesn't cover the full cost of tuition as far as I know (capped at instate public tuition), and the COL outstrips the stipend in many if not all cases. It's not rocket science. Those GI Bill limitations were half of the reason I went back to NC for college. A program like I wanted in a low COL area, and I knew I could get instate designation quite easily.

The author brings up issues with old SAT scores (or absent SAT scores), as well as subpar educational background, which are undeniably issues as well, but I think the economics of the situation is a major part of the issue.

 

[rms]

yeah, NYS is a cool state where they cover private state costs but it's not everywhere. Also I imagine most vets like myself never took SAT/ACT and that's a pain in the ass to get into colleges anyways

 

[Dak]

yeah, NYS is a cool state where they cover private state costs but it's not everywhere. Also I imagine most vets like myself never took SAT/ACT and that's a pain in the ass to get into colleges anyways

Yeah being homeschooled and having a lazy mother as an educator I never took the SAT/ACT. I transferred into a public 4 year institution with an AA. I also had an additional barrier to attending more expensive institutions in more expensive places by way of having dependents.

 

[rms]

had an infantry bud leave Boulder and transfer to Northeastern, think he got yellow ribbon though.

that % of vets out of total americans is a really bad stat though

 

[Dak]

had an infantry bud leave Boulder and transfer to Northeastern, think he got yellow ribbon though.

that % of vets out of total americans is a really bad stat though

Yeah, when I was looking at going back to school the Yellow Ribbon was less prevalent iirc, plus COL tended to outstrip the stipend in those places too. I needed housing allowance to cover all expenses, not just housing.

 

[CiG]

This goes out to the "victims" of Louis C.K.'s attempts to have weird, consensual sex.

 

[CiG]

 

[no country for old wainds]

View attachment 12614

This goes out to the "victims" of Louis C.K.'s attempts to have weird, consensual sex.

trying to work out if this was supposed to indicate money or jizz

 

[CiG]

It's a tiny violin stop projecting you degenerate.

 

[Cythraul]

Something like that could be interesting if society were open enough to also admit that racism is funny as long as it isn't violent or perpetrated by government and all racial stereotypes also contain a grain of truth.

If it's just a one-sided snowflake fest, meh it's just pointless victimhood masturbation imo.

Yeah. As reprehensible as genuine racism is, a lot of what passes for "anti-racism" nowadays is just a war on noticing.

 

[CiG]

Noticing racial differences?

 

[Cythraul]

Of course.

 

[CiG]

Ah, just making sure I understand.

 

[Einherjar86]

Yeah. As reprehensible as genuine racism is, a lot of what passes for "anti-racism" nowadays is just a war on noticing.

Can noticing be a neutral/indifferent behavior?

I feel that a large part of the argument between FD and HBB had to do with HBB's assumption that "noticing" a larger percentage of blacks than whites commit crimes. "Noticing" this fact led HBB to describe blackness as a predictor for crime, which isn't actually a factual statement--it's an interpretive statement, and interpretations are never neutral.

I'd suggest that noticing certain details of everyday life are almost always inextricable from the interpretations we derive from them, meaning that noticing itself is always a prejudiced behavior that deserves some discussion (maybe not the media excess that we find on the internet nowadays, but in some measured capacity).

And yes, I realize that what I just said is an interpretive statement.

 

[CiG]

I believe he eventually qualified it as non-immigrant blacks in America is a predictor for criminality, which of course would still be problematic to many people anyway.

 

[Dak]

Non-immigrant blacks are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime, violent and otherwise. Calling these descriptive statistics "interpretative" requires some degree of mental gymnastics. Now, the word "predictive", to be used more empirically, requires other statistical analyses. You could call these analyses "interpretive", but so what? How dare we attempt to make sense of the data?

Larry David was taken to task for noticing the level of representation of Jews among the accused Hollywood harassers. Ironically, their representation is probably proportional or even below the proportional to the number of Jews in the entertainment industry, but we can't be sure because those sorts of statistics aren't readily available. The ADL and similar organizations would rather no one even have descriptive statistics of anything, since those are needed to begin informed interpretations.

Edit: Of course, somehow no one bats an eye when the opioid crisis is considered a "white problem".

 

[Einherjar86]

Non-immigrant blacks are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime, violent and otherwise. Calling these descriptive statistics "interpretative" requires some degree of mental gymnastics. Now, the word "predictive", to be used more empirically, requires other statistical analyses. You could call these analyses "interpretive", but so what? How dare we attempt to make sense of the data?

I didn't call the statistics themselves interpretive, although someone with more acumen than I probably could decipher how they are, to some degree. I called the predictor comment interpretive, and suggested (interpretively) that interpretations of data are probably inextricable from our noticing them, making it difficult to see how noticing is a purely passive/neutral/indifferent act. Even statistical analysis has to be perspectivally oriented (i.e. we have to choose what phenomena we wish to observe).

Also, what makes you think I'm saying we shouldn't interpret data? My entire career is founded on the notion of interpretation. All I'm saying is that interpretation can't be foreclosed to criticism, even if some of the criticism is ideologically motivated and/or rhetorically vacuous. I think the resistance you find to certain comments has to do with the idea that interpretations based on statistical evidence are somehow immune to criticism.

 

[CiG]

Shit really hits the fan when opportunism meets interpretive data.
Agenda A makes it about race, agenda B makes it about poverty, agenda C makes it about values, agenda D makes it about culture, agenda E makes it about police practices and they're all looking at the same data.

 

[Dak]

I didn't call the statistics themselves interpretive, although someone with more acumen than I probably could decipher how they are, to some degree. I called the predictor comment interpretive, and suggested (interpretively) that interpretations of data are probably inextricable from our noticing them, making it difficult to see how noticing is a purely passive/neutral/indifferent act. Even statistical analysis has to be perspectivally oriented (i.e. we have to choose what phenomena we wish to observe).

There's a degree to which we don't choose what to observe, at least not directly. If you live in a high crime environment, you will have different observations than someone who lives in a gated community. If you happen to buy the NYT, you will have different observations than someone who reads TMZ. Now those are more superficial examples compared to statistics collecting, but if we want to talk about crime, to what degree can one claim bias in routine governmental crime stats collecting? The US collects more thorough statistics than all countries afaik, as it relates to crime. While you can massage data, there's little evidence that is occurring in crime statistic collection and reporting.

Also, what makes you think I'm saying we shouldn't interpret data? My entire career is founded on the notion of interpretation. All I'm saying is that interpretation can't be foreclosed to criticism, even if some of the criticism is ideologically motivated and/or rhetorically vacuous. I think the resistance you find to certain comments has to do with the idea that interpretations based on statistical evidence are somehow immune to criticism.

I'm resistant to moralizing over the data.

 

[Einherjar86]

There's a degree to which we don't choose what to observe, at least not directly. If you live in a high crime environment, you will have different observations than someone who lives in a gated community. If you happen to buy the NYT, you will have different observations than someone who reads TMZ. Now those are more superficial examples compared to statistics collecting, but if we want to talk about crime, to what degree can one claim bias in routine governmental crime stats collecting? The US collects more thorough statistics than all countries afaik, as it relates to crime. While you can massage data, there's little evidence that is occurring in crime statistic collection and reporting.

I'm resistant to moralizing over the data.

I don't think it's moralizing to suggest that blackness as a predictor for crime disregards alternative contributing factors, whether they be class, education, socioeconomic opportunities, lifestyle representation, etc. Or additionally, to suggest that statistics are filtered through definitions and degrees of criminality that can be easily manipulated.

It's not that the numbers themselves are inaccurate, but that they don't reflect a stable motivation, cause, or category for the crimes they document.