A few weekends ago, Adam, Raj and I had a conversation about affirmative action. We took the case of MIT's affirmative action programs, some of us arguing in favor, others against. We ended up quibbling less about the way in which the policy was implemented, and more about the existence of the policy at all. I have had this discussion with others in the past and so I am hoping to provoke some discussion about it here.
The main argument against seems to be that minorities at institutions with affirmative action policies suffer discrimination once they get in on the basis that they are less likely to be as qualified as non-minorities. Therefore, as strange as this seems, in order to avoid discrimination, we should just consider everyone equally irrespective of race, meaning that fewer minority students will have a chance to go to MIT.
I had a few responses to this line of argumentation. The first was to ask the question if it is appropriate or not for institutions to weigh people's applications differently on the basis of which state they come from. As we know, some states have better educational opportunities than others, and it is a frequent practice of universities to consider an applicant's record based on a baseline for that state, rather than by a single baseline. It seems to me that once we allow for this practice, we have already started down the road of not having a single standard, and opening the door for the same kind of discrimination argued against above. If you don't come from New York or California, you are less likely to be the best student, and thus might be subject to discrimination on that basis. Of course, this begins to sound pretty silly fast. But, fundamentally, if you believe that unequal treatment of applications results in discrimination while at university, then you have to believe it is true in this case as well. Why do people seem to be more concerned about the unequal standards concerning race than they are about unequal standards concerning state? It seems pretty arbitrary to me, and thus I feel like this particular issue is a wash. If you go around assuming that people are of one skill level or another on the basis of who they are or where they are from, maybe you'll be right or maybe you'll be wrong. But I don't think we should get rid of affirmative action policies in an attempt to prevent people from making assumptions about people's high-school academic record. The fact is that people who are looking to make assumptions are going to make them regardless.
The second response I had was to question the underlying assumption that MIT should always be looking to select from its applicant pool the most qualified students by some absolute standard. As we've already seen, if you want to select students from more than just the most populous states, you are already going to have to admit that there are different standards of excellence. More importantly, many admissions offices with affirmative action policies emphasize that they are trying to find the best CLASS. This difference between picking a good class and picking the best individuals is a point that anti-affirmative action folks seem to miss. The difference between the two is the value of diversity. I think that at the heart of this issue, folks that don't believe in affirmative action feel that diversity should never trump absolute educational excellence.
Well, I disagree. I feel that diversity should be allowed to trump absolute educational excellence in limited circumstances. I think that there is more to college life than getting straight A's in every class. A large component of college life is having the opportunity to be exposed to ideas and viewpoints that you are not necessarily familiar or comfortable with. Have we bought into the standardized measurements of academic success and intelligence so firmly that we are no longer able to admit that people who fall outside those measurements have something valuable to contribute? I think that you can learn more from someone who comes from a different background but who might get worse grades than you can from someone with a similar background who gets better grades than you. Maybe (shock) it won't be about physics but (double shock) about life and the way society works. And that's the idea behind picking the best CLASS, one where people have the most opportunity to learn from each other as they do from the university they attend.
The last response was to argue that an institution of higher learning does have some obligation to spread knowledge throughout society, not just to those places where it already exists. This actually turns out to have a good self-interest argument hiding inside of it. If you believe that there is a knowledge disparity between groups, then you can either take the perspective that the responsibility for solving that problem should fall to someone else, or that you should step up and try to solve it yourself. My question is, if universities don't make an effort to spread knowledge across minority groups, who will? Where is the parentally-influenced emphasis on education going to come from, if not from well-educated unversity-graduated parents? To say that affirmative action policies should not exist is either to bury one's head in the sand and say that there is no real knowledge disparity, or to say that universities, those agencies most able to mitigate the problem, shouldn't try to play a role in fixing it. The fact is, even minorities who get straight C's at a place like MIT raise the bar for future generations just because they went, had the experiences, formed the connections, and figured things out. They will inevitably go on to pass that information along to other people within their social and cultural groups, more so than non-minorities will or can.
But wait, in the long-run this is going to lead to a larger talent pool spread across racial groups, which is both good for society, and good for the university which enabled it. Where are the children of MIT-educated minorities going to be more likely to want to attend? To me, affirmative action policies can be thought of as both an obligation of a university concerned with educating society, as well as a smart long-term investment in the applicant pool of tomorrow.
I ran across a pretty interesting article in Time magazine today.
The essay basically asks why America is so interested in films related to loss of memory. First of all, I would say, perhaps we aren't as interested as one might think. Despite several films that have come out on the topic, I think that America still has a ways to go before we truly confront the idea of brain as a system. Things like the pesky notion of the soul continue to obscure a deeper understanding of why we do what we do.
I found this a few months back and found it really interesting. I figured I'd post it and perhaps others would find it similarly enlightening. Its basically a bunch of different articles on the issue of class in America. I found the education article and the politics article particularly good. Enjoy!
I am starting to become curious about what the optimal end game in Iraq is. It strikes me that even in the best case of self-government, Iraq is going to need help propping up its security from someone other than itself. If we stick with Bush, its unlikely that the security is going to come from anywhere other than us. If we go with Kerry, at least we'll have a chance of shedding the bad blood that Bush created, and perhaps be able to have more international support. It seems like a vote for Bush is a vote for either a re-investment of U.S. troops in Iraq or failing to follow through on Iraq even worse than we already have.
I guess what I wonder is if the notion of a secure Iraq is realistic, regardless of who the enforcer is. Consider that Israel one of the best militaries in the world, and it doesn't seem to be much better at stopping suicide bombings than anywhere else. Even in the best case scenario of enforcement, it seems like somehow Iraq will need to become less of a desirable target. Will this ever happen so long as it is a democracy and representing Western values? Perhaps it's actually "safer" for Iraq to not be democratic, considering its surrounding environment.
But I think that would be a terrible loss for the West and for the World. Perhaps Iraq's fate is linked to the democratization of the Islamic states, which means it may be tortured for a good deal longer than we'd all like...
My evolution of thought in this matter went something like the following. At first, like with most, I didn't even stop to question that there were any alternatives to absolute truth. Then, probably due to experience in debate where I would twist the definitions of a resolution to my favor in rounds (i know, such lameness), I started to question the absolute definitions of things. Learning about the rationale behind the adversarial system of justice (defendant vs. plaintiff) made me question absolute truth further. Here was a system which determined truth by allowing it to emerge from conflicting viewpoints, it seemed to work well, yet it definitely relied upon relative truth to function.
That was not enough to make me think that absolute truth didn't exist at all, just that it was difficult to make our way to it. The more I tried to find a satisfactory definition of absolute truth, though, the more difficult it got. I had settled on the idea of absolute truth as a hypothetical construct: that which exists in the world, but which is outside the realm of direct perception by anyone; each person can only know about a perspective-independent version of it.
Somewhere in the middle of college though, I learned about the Halting problem in Computer Science, which introduces the idea that there are some problems that computers can't solve, was the beginning of this. It turns out that the Halting problem is just a manifestation of a deeper problem that Godel pointed out about formal mathematical systems: that there are always fated to be finite. Every formal mathematical system can express statements that are illogical or paradoxical given its rules.
This caused me to consider an analogy to language, and by extension, certain classes of human thought. While by no means equivalent, there is a frequent analogy to the system of human language to a formal mathematical system. In some ways, this analogy makes sense. You can represent chains of logic in language, and similarly, you can represent chains of logic in mathematical systems. When we are reasoning about things, particularly in a scientific context, we frequently like to think about our reasoning as objective and logical. The success of Artificial Intelligence to be able to build programs that can perform logical tasks on limited domains and generate human readable explanations is a further example of this analogy.
It is this analogy, combined with some of the thoughts about Zen Buddhism and Taoism expressed in books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Godel, Escher and Bach, which brought me to the conclusion that when we find questions about the world that seem to have no answer, perhaps are trying to solve a problem which has no solution given the logical system being worked in. Perhaps we are asking the equivalent of a Halting problem to a computer, or have tried to make sense of formal statement in a system which views it as paradoxical. This lead me to take the words of Marvin Minsky in the Society of Mind: "Words should be our servants, not our masters", to heart in a very particular way. Words, and by extension, our conceptions of their meanings and their boundaries, might be limiting our ability to answer questions like "Is there a God?" and "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" The Zen Koans are specifically targetted at trying to get students of Zen to recognize the concept of "thought free from language", a point exemplified by the term "mu", the response to a yes or no question that has no sensical answer.
While this might seem like a step backward, I have come to interpret the contribution of Eastern philosophies less as nifty-sounding mysticism, and more as an invitation to view reality from a multiplicity of perspectives rather than from just one. Perhaps it is an invitation to examine the logical system we are applying to the problem, discover its limitations, and move outside of them. What is the sound of one hand clapping? (another famous Zen Koan) Our brains try to combine the idea of clapping with the idea of only one hand doing it, and we fail to conceive of it. Maybe it doesn't have an answer... maybe we have to redefine clapping... we can't really say with certainty because the question does not lead to an absolute, objective answer the way it is asked. We might be tempted to answer "one hand can't clap", or "no sound", but those are really just weak ways of saying the question can't be asked. Stepping outside its presentation, however, we can realize the cause of that inability: the limitations of our ability to ask every question we can define in language.
I reached the conclusion about definitions in general that they are useful as models and a means to convey information. However, if we assume that words and their definitions exist as their own entities separate from human beings, they can be limiting, particularly if they lead us to expect answers where none can be found. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for absolute truth. Because if absolute truth is only useful as a way of conveying "that which exists objectively in the world", the other definition "that which exists objectively in the world but we can never know" is much less useful and relevant. If all we can know about absolute truth is relative truth, why bother with absolute truth? If there's no way to make a compelling argument that the existence of absolute truth can impact anything at all, worrying about it seems pointless. "Does absolute truth exist?" then takes its place alongside the other Zen Koans as unaskable from a single rigid perspective.
Ever since he announced it, I have a tough time understanding why President Bush has publicly endorsed a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage. My incredulity stems less from liberal hatred of the values that he is trying to impose on Americans, and more from a perspective of strategy.
Personally, I feel like its smarter to try and understand an opponent's strategy and counteract it, rather than to let one's anger at their actions blind you. As good as it might feel to write Bush off as an idiot, the fact is that it is unlikely that he is acting randomly or without an intended goal in mind. I may disagree with him and feel like he has a much different world-vew than I do, but I do consider him plus his cabinet to equal a rational actor.
Its with that in mind that I continue to try and seek an explanation for why Bush has made that endorsement. I have a tough time believing that his policy team actually thinks that such an Amendment will ever succeed passing Congress AND the requisite number of states. Just looking at the Constitutional history is enough to see that our Amendments have mostly been about guaranteeing freedoms rather than taking them away. Frankly the closest Amendment to a gay marriage ban is the Prohibition Amendment. Does George Bush's cabinet really think that this country is going to pass another one of those?
If they don't really think that such an Amendment is going to get passed, I don't see how its a smart move to endorse it. It can only get chalked up as a failure against him when it fizzles away and dies, now that he has endorsed it.
The only conclusion that I can reach is that the strategy is just to endorse it purely for show, with full knowledge it will never pass, and take the P.R. hit for it. He must be calculating that the benefit gained among his conservative constituency will outweigh the cost when it dies.
As divisive as that endorsement was, after some analysis, I'm really not too worried about it. I think that while its a rational thing to try, the miscalculation of cost and benefit is another mistake that will eventually cost him the election.
I have often wondered but seldom been able to put into words the following.
An important institution of social and political power in human civilizations has historically been organized religion. Most religions seem to have one very important characteristic that distinguishes them from other powerful institutions: they purport to explain the reason human beings exist on earth. They mostly all have creation stories of some kind.
If giving a rationale to human existence is step one towards having an influential religion, step two seems to be leveraging that rationale to create a sense of obligation among its followers to adhere to a certain set of behaviors. For Christians, this is something like: 1) God created man, Jesus is the son of God, Jesus died for your sins, THEREFORE, 2) you should do x, y, and z. Depending on how you define morality, one might say that step two is the establishing of a MORAL obligation.
Having established, then, a connection between creation stories and the obligations suggested by organized religions, I have often wondered: if we replace the religious creation story with the story of evolution, could we rationalize some different obligations, or differently rationalize some familiar obligations, and what would these rationales and obligations look like?
The first signs of an explicit argument for obligation based on evolution may have been the unfortunate Eugenics movement, which argued for Social Darwinism, or an extension of the survival of the fittest philosophy into social policy. I'm not in anyway about to argue in favor of Eugenics; and perhaps a comparison to the misuse of Christianity during the Crusades would be a suitable analogy to the misuse of evolution theory in this case.
So what are some better rationalizations of obligation that we can derive from our evolutionary history? One might begin by trying to imagine the landscape of people that had to make it through life in order to lead up to our grandparents, parents, and finally us. Those of us fortunate enough to be able to track their ancestry back many generations have better abilities to follow this sort of thing than I do. Either way, once you really think about all those people, I think that a) it starts to make more sense why ancestor worship is so popular in some religions and b) you start to be pretty grateful that things worked out the way they did. Contemplation of one's small likelihood of existence, while unnerving to some, can be thought of as creating an obligation for us to act in a way that acknowledges that rarity. In other words, a rationale for self-esteem. This can be thought of all the way from "Damn, I'm sure glad I was the sperm that won", to "My DNA is time tested! Millions of generations agree!" to "My collective ancestry had to jump through a lot of hurdles to get me where I am today, maybe I shouldn't beat myself up so much about minor-thing-X, and be sure to take a step back and be pleased that I exist at all".
I think that this conception of the world leads itself to many other conclusions, which I may try to elaborate on in future posts.
So I got a minor in Political Science. I also majored in Computer Science, so I hope that I can be forgiven for the analogy I am about to make.
Political Scientists try to explain and model what happens in the political landscape. They do this in a variety of ways such as making theories or calculating statistical models. One of the reasons I find the field interesting is because the problem of understanding politics is very similar to the problem of understanding the brain, or complex systems in general. Let me explain why I feel that way.
If you think about it, what happens in politics is the result of a lot of little local actions all added up into global actions. Lots of people vote, a representative is empowered to make big changes on their behalf. Our political institutions provide some of the structure that determines how those local actions affect the system as a whole. Each political institution is subject to pressures by other institutions or other forms of political influence.
What I find interesting is how we go about explaining the actions of that system, and how we go about predicting its future actions based on its past actions. In truth, even though we can read and understand the high-school government text, a lot goes on in our political landscape that we have trouble predicting. For example: Why was Howard Dean considered to be the Democratic Frontrunner by most people in Washington before the Iowa caucases? If there were anyone in a position to predict Dean's popularity with the nation, shouldn't it have been some of the smart people in Washington?
One way to think about why even the most qualified people make poor guesses about political activity is that their models aren't yet good enough. They do not yet capture enough information about what really happens in the world.
And this leads me to think of politics as a complex system. By a complex system, I mean to invoke the idea of those kinds of systems, mostly natural, that scientists are just beginning to understand, such as DNA, Protein-folding, and the Brain. What these systems have in common with each other and with politics is that a) no person designed them and therefore b) they tend not to work the way we would assume they would if a person had designed them.
Here's one reason to care about these kinds of systems. They tend to shoot all kinds of holes in our comfortable notions of determinism. We are pretty accustomed to thinking in a cause and effect way, more specifically, that the cause is that action directly preceding the effect. So, why did Howard Dean do so poorly in Iowa? One easy cause would be to say "he was too liberal for Iowans". We like this kind of explanation because its pretty easy to conceptualize. But what about the amount of money he spent in Iowa? What about the details of his speeches? What about the quality of his advertisements? What about the strength of the competition? What about the Iowa institutions that endorsed or did not endorse him? What role did these other variables play? Did they matter more or less than his liberal views, and in what ways did they interact?
Political scientists generally accept that in order to understand the causes of something, a full-out investigation considering all variables that might be relevant is necessary. But I'd go a step further to ask, why are the directly preceding actions so special? What about all the actions that preceded the preceding actions, and caused them to be put into play? How about the state of the economy that influenced the beliefs of the Iowans? How about the Iraq war? And it is because most of us are so inclined to give special consideration the most reasonable, immediately preceding action that it seems silly to say "Dean lost because of the Iraq war." Yet it is difficult to deny that the Iraq war had some role to play in Kerry's election over Dean.
At the bottom of all this, I see little signs that our intuitive notions of cause and effect only give us part of the story when dealing with these kinds of systems. For the full story, we are forced to expand our focus outwards and consider multiple causes, and multiple causes of causes, etc.