Dear Professor Thorp, if I may, as you may be aware of, we in India also have an equivalent of affirmative action, which is referred to as reservations. Please allow me a naïve take on reservations, albeit from your (American ;) pragmatic perspective. Admitting a student into a college is not unlike investing in stock market, based on its past performance. This seemingly simplistic assertion needs little unpacking. A student with all A grades is more likely to do well in school and do good for the society compared to one with, say, mostly B grades, a couple of A grades, and even a C grade. This is true if and only if all else is the same for both students; but it ain't! Any capitalist would find it prudent to invest in a venture that went from a garage to a million-dollar market share instead of gambling on one that went from a million to a couple of million (à la Trump ;) More importantly, students who barely passed, while withstanding the tempestuous upheavals that is their everyday, are more likely to not only successfully navigate through the disorienting blooming buzzing confusion that is the onslaught of time, but also make way for those who scored high merely by memorizing multiplication tables, so to speak, in their luxurious enclosures insulated from the reality out there, which is barely sensible and mostly beyond the reach of reason. While I was in college, I visited my friend, who happens to be born into the caste of Relli. Rellis are, not unlike parents changing diapers and cleaning their babies, engaged in cleaning all the dirt and making sure the rest of us get to live in a healthy environment. Unfortunately, my friend's home was, mildly put, not pleasant to be in, leave alone focus on studying. I, on the other hand, didn't know people had to work to live until I left home for college; speak of protected environment: all I did was eat sweets and study and complain to my uncle that the teachers are dumb ;) Summing it all, somebody should school your supreme court braindead justices that affirmative action is no favor to low-scoring students, nor is it undoing past injustices, but a judicious investment by the society for the greater good of all: our future, including that of those smarty pants, who tend to be paralyzed without a protocol to follow. Thank you very much for your patient reading /\ /\ /\
Pardon me for this may read harsh, but the root cause of all American problems that invariably infect the rest of the world appears to be the basic tenet of American epistemology:
Truth is what I can get away with!
One such familiar and comforting (at least for those living in America) truth: America is special/exceptional/unique. It doesn't take any effortful mental acrobatics to see the vacuousness of aforementioned truth; just recollect that every particular is unique ;)
And yet, many writers, who are presumably well-read, unwittingly fall prey to this collective (american) unconsciousness, when they preface everything and anything by bringing into figural salience something about that thing that is unique, which is, simply put, saddening in its wanton display of desperation to be perceived as unique. To see the hollowness of this American wont:
I'm the one and only person in this entire universe to type this, here, and now ;)
Your basic tenet of epistemology has already infected us, thanks to an erstwhile Trump advisor hired by no less evil and cruel Chief Minister of our state of Andhra Pradesh; we are heading straight to hell in a wastebasket: violence, unspeakable heart-wrenching violence, and wholesale decimation of state institutions including schools and judiciary.
Please accept my sincere apologies if this is beyond the pale /\ /\ /\
While I appreciate the transparency, this was a pretty disturbing insight into the minds that run our academic institutions and top scientific journals. There are plenty of ways to consider a persons starting position in life without resorting to overtly racist policies. It's no one that academia has such a poor reputation.
Dear Professor Thorp, if I may, as you may be aware of, we in India also have an equivalent of affirmative action, which is referred to as reservations. Please allow me a naïve take on reservations, albeit from your (American ;) pragmatic perspective. Admitting a student into a college is not unlike investing in stock market, based on its past performance. This seemingly simplistic assertion needs little unpacking. A student with all A grades is more likely to do well in school and do good for the society compared to one with, say, mostly B grades, a couple of A grades, and even a C grade. This is true if and only if all else is the same for both students; but it ain't! Any capitalist would find it prudent to invest in a venture that went from a garage to a million-dollar market share instead of gambling on one that went from a million to a couple of million (à la Trump ;) More importantly, students who barely passed, while withstanding the tempestuous upheavals that is their everyday, are more likely to not only successfully navigate through the disorienting blooming buzzing confusion that is the onslaught of time, but also make way for those who scored high merely by memorizing multiplication tables, so to speak, in their luxurious enclosures insulated from the reality out there, which is barely sensible and mostly beyond the reach of reason. While I was in college, I visited my friend, who happens to be born into the caste of Relli. Rellis are, not unlike parents changing diapers and cleaning their babies, engaged in cleaning all the dirt and making sure the rest of us get to live in a healthy environment. Unfortunately, my friend's home was, mildly put, not pleasant to be in, leave alone focus on studying. I, on the other hand, didn't know people had to work to live until I left home for college; speak of protected environment: all I did was eat sweets and study and complain to my uncle that the teachers are dumb ;) Summing it all, somebody should school your supreme court braindead justices that affirmative action is no favor to low-scoring students, nor is it undoing past injustices, but a judicious investment by the society for the greater good of all: our future, including that of those smarty pants, who tend to be paralyzed without a protocol to follow. Thank you very much for your patient reading /\ /\ /\
Dear Professor Thorp,
Pardon me for this may read harsh, but the root cause of all American problems that invariably infect the rest of the world appears to be the basic tenet of American epistemology:
Truth is what I can get away with!
One such familiar and comforting (at least for those living in America) truth: America is special/exceptional/unique. It doesn't take any effortful mental acrobatics to see the vacuousness of aforementioned truth; just recollect that every particular is unique ;)
And yet, many writers, who are presumably well-read, unwittingly fall prey to this collective (american) unconsciousness, when they preface everything and anything by bringing into figural salience something about that thing that is unique, which is, simply put, saddening in its wanton display of desperation to be perceived as unique. To see the hollowness of this American wont:
I'm the one and only person in this entire universe to type this, here, and now ;)
Your basic tenet of epistemology has already infected us, thanks to an erstwhile Trump advisor hired by no less evil and cruel Chief Minister of our state of Andhra Pradesh; we are heading straight to hell in a wastebasket: violence, unspeakable heart-wrenching violence, and wholesale decimation of state institutions including schools and judiciary.
Please accept my sincere apologies if this is beyond the pale /\ /\ /\
Thanking you,
Yours truly,
posina
Race-based admissions policies have been especially damaging -- not only to applicants but to society -- when adopted in medical schools. See https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/race-based-admission-to-medical-schools-was-dangerous-good-riddance.
Sir, with all due respect, there are good doctors in Africa ... I'll leave da rest of the argumentation to your fertile imagination ;)
As an academic scientist for 40 years, I am incredibly disappointed to learn that the Editor in Chief of Science is a proponent of racism.
While I appreciate the transparency, this was a pretty disturbing insight into the minds that run our academic institutions and top scientific journals. There are plenty of ways to consider a persons starting position in life without resorting to overtly racist policies. It's no one that academia has such a poor reputation.
Why do you pronounce as if it is a settled fact that Justice Thomas’s reasoning is skewed? Shouldn’t you leave that up to the reader?