经济与社会科学2020public.econ.duke.edu
哈佛招生中的亚裔美国人歧视
Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions
进阶 · 约 75 分钟读完前置知识：计量经济学基础、统计推断、美国大学招生制度
导读
这篇论文研究哈佛本科招生中是否存在针对亚裔美国人的歧视，围绕招生数据考察族裔因素对录取决定的影响，并特别关注性格、领导力等主观评价环节。评论者把它与哈佛历史上用“性格”标准限制犹太学生比例的做法相类比。
HN 关注点：名校招生中的亚裔公平问题，以及“性格/领导力”等软指标是否成为变相族裔筛选工具。
后来怎么样
该文作为 SFFA 诉哈佛案中的重要实证分析材料，为审查主观评分中的族裔差异提供了依据；2023 年美国最高法院裁决终结种族意识招生，推动全美招生政策转向。
HN 评论精选
这几条评论里：补充 2 亲历 2
亲历亲历表明亚裔常被主观评价为缺乏领导力/个性，即便实际业绩突出。
不是哈佛，但作为亚裔美国人，这种把亚裔说成“个性指标有缺陷”的软性标签在我这里很真实。我父亲在全职政府工作中反复得到“没有领导潜力”的评价；可他在美国海军的兼职工作中一路升到上校，最后还领导团队完成了海军首个全数字化库存系统，为海军节省数十亿美元，并按时、按预算交付。顺带说，他不是技术出身，用他自己的话只是“擅长让书呆子们把事情办成”。我个人也遇到过几次明示或暗示我不配当领导者，尽管我在职业生涯中成功管理过小团队。
dnautics查看英文原文
Not Harvard, but (being Asian American) this sort of soft characterization as being deficient in personality metrics rings true in my head. For starters, my father in his full time government job repeatedly got "no leadership potential" reviews. Meanwhile in his part time job with the US Navy, he advanced to the level of captain and in his final act for the Navy led a team that completed its first fully digitized inventory system, saving the Navy billions of dollars, and delivered it under budget and ahead of time. (Fwiw he was non-technical, just "good at making things happen for nerds", his words not mine) In my personal life, I've encountered several situations where people have expressed to me explicitly or implicitly they didn't consider me to be leader-worthy despite my having successfully managed small teams several times in my career.
补充历史上哈佛曾用“性格/全面性”等软指标限制犹太人，如今类似机制可能转向课外活动等软指标。
这很典型，哈佛在犹太人受歧视时就这么做过。为了“有品位地”歧视（常春藤都讲究“好看”），哈佛做了一次人口研究，发现大多数犹太人来自纽约州北部，于是开始把精英教育通道扩大到中西部和太平洋西部，而那些地方几乎没有犹太人。我大学时还听过一个故事：宾大一位犹太语言学家在70年代于哈佛怀疑存在歧视，闯入招生办并找到证明文件，哈佛随后把他送到越南（据推测是让他去送死），但他活了下来，战后去MIT拿了博士。所有常春藤和斯坦福都会歧视，它们完全可以用优秀毕业生和象棋冠军把学校填满十倍，但也得顾及企业客户想要多样化人才。现在研究显示，有品位的歧视工具是课外活动——你很难找到太多亚裔美国人玩长曲棍球或赛艇。别忘了这些是私立机构，严格来说它们想做什么都可以。
xiaolingxiao查看英文原文
This is typical, Harvard did it for Jews back when they were discriminated against. In order to discriminate "tastefully" (Ivies are all about "is it a good look"), Harvard did a population study and learned that most Jews came from upstate NY. Thus began Harvard's mission of broadening access to elite education to the Midwest and Pacific West, where there are almost no Jews. While in college, I heard a very fascinating story of how Harvard retaliated when confronted with evidence. There is a linguistic professor at Penn who went to Harvard and is Jewish. While at Harvard in the 70s, he suspected discrimination and broke into the admissions office, unearthing documents proving his case. Harvard responded by sending him to Vietnam, presumably to die. Long story short, he lived to tell the tale. After the war, he went to MIT and received a doctorate. He has all kinds of interesting stories about 'Nam too, but this Harvard story is really something else. All Ivies/Stanford discriminate, they can fill the school 10x over with Valedictorian/Chess champions if they want to. But they have to mindful of their corporate customers as well, companies want a diverse menu of people. Some studies have been done around how they discriminate now: presently the tasteful instrument of discrimination is extra-curricular activities. You'd be hard pressed to find too many Asian Americans doing Lax or Crew. Remember, these are private institutions so strictly speaking, they could do what ever they want (Disclosure: I am Asian). The bigger issue is that many people do have to go to one of these colleges for upward mobility. These schools are like oligopolies that have taken captive the American dream.
亲历亚裔申请者亲述录取结果不确定是否因族裔，并感到针对亚裔的歧视不被重视。
我是亚裔美国高中毕业生，大学申请季快结束了。我既沮丧又愤怒：这种歧视存在，而且还有人替它辩护。我觉得人们没有像对待其他群体的种族主义那样认真对待针对亚裔美国人的种族主义。像HN上很多人一样，我是程序员，对函数式编程、编程语言理论和类型论感兴趣；这些兴趣又让我接触到纯数学（比如范畴论），虽然我数学懂得不如编程多，但我想继续学，因为这些想法优雅而美丽（例如 Curry-Howard 对应，用“程序即证明”连接编程和逻辑；还有 HoTT，用“相等类型是无穷群胚的同构”给类型更高维结构）。我申请了几所有 PL 理论学术存在的学校的 CS 专业，在补充文书中谈了我的兴趣以及想和教授做本科研究的愿望。我的成绩有竞争力。我们学校别的孩子进了我的“冲刺校”（比如 Cornell），我被拒了，但幸运的是进了一些有 PL 理论的“匹配校”。很难说平权行动是否有影响。也许如果我的申请完全一样、但我不是亚裔，我会被录取……
_wt8k查看英文原文
I am an Asian-American high school senior who is nearing the end of the college admissions process. I am so frustrated and angry that there is this discrimination, and people defend it. I feel that people don't take racism against Asian-Americans as seriously as racism against other groups. Here's more about me. Like many people on HN, I'm a programmer. I'm interested in functional programming, programming language theory, and type theory. These interests caused me to discover pure math (such as category theory), and although I do not know as much about math than about programming, I want to learn more because I find these ideas elegant and beautiful. (For example, the Curry-Howard correspondence, which links programming to logic through the idea that programs are proofs, or HoTT, which gives types higher-dimensional structure based on the idea that equality types are the isomorphisms of an infinity-groupoid.) I applied as a CS major to several colleges where PL theory had an academic presence, and in my supplemental essays, I discussed my interests and my desire to work with professors and do undergraduate research. I have competitive stats. Although other kids in my school got into my "reaches" (e.g. Cornell), I got rejected, but luckily I got into some "match" schools that did PL theory. It's hard to say if affirmative action made a difference. Maybe if my application were exactly the same, but I weren't Asian, I would have gotten in, and if my application were the same except that I got an A instead of a B+ in a class, I would also have gotten in. I got waitlisted from some highly competitive schools, so I could have been on the edge. A big part of me not knowing how much my race would have made a difference is how non-transparent college admissions are. It's left up to some nebulous idea of "fit" decided by a group of people sitting at a table, who only have a few minutes to spend on each applicant. But, what bothers me is the stereotypes. They've turned liking math and CS into a bad thing, at least when it's an Asian kid who's doing it. People defend affirmative action by saying that there are simply too many highly competitive Asian kids who want to study computer science. So, if I want to go to a good school, I shouldn't study computer science, even though that's what I want to do, just because of the way I was born? Among non-CS people, CS is probably seen as the stereotype track to get a high-paying job (and cynically, perhaps it's a popular major for this reason), but hopefully on a site such as HN, people will be more empathetic to the appeal of CS. I'm also frustrated because most people probably don't know how math really is like. People just see it as nerdy word problems, and they've never heard of ideas like constructive math, programs-as-proofs, Cartesian closed categories, etc that I've become so intimate with. Why is it bad that I love math? Shouldn't you encourage me to learn this? I guess it's similar to the old stereotype of the "nerd" with no social skills, except with a racial element now. It's a Catch-22 because people hold Asians to a higher standard, so we need to get higher grades and test scores to be competitive, then that feeds back into the stereotype that we are overly studious and have no personality. There is no winning for us in this game. Isn't it an objectively good thing to do well in school? If it were someone who weren't Asian, people would see high scores and grades as a positive thing or even cheer it on as a sign of increasing equality. Like all competitive high schoolers (of all races), we must play the game of having loads of AP classes, etc, but people specifically see Asians doing this as a negative stereotype. But, on the front of us studying too much and not having personality, if you play an instrument, people will assume that you're doing it because your parents made you, or because of college admissions. Music is truly a beautiful thing and I experienced just how hea…
补充哈佛1925年以“性格/全面发展”为由限制犹太学生，和今天对亚裔的软性评价相似。
1925年，犹太学生占哈佛所有学生的28%。校长 Lawrence Lowell 在未能把犹太学生人数限制到他的学校后，推出了以“性格”评判个人的政策。这些政策实施后，犹太学生入学率下降，最终低于他最初想设的15%上限。并不是犹太人在被歧视；他们只是不够全面发展，缺乏性格和那种任何非犹太人都轻易拥有的 savoir faire。也许是基因或文化，我想我们永远不会知道。很难说他们为什么就是做不到。
renewiltord查看英文原文
In 1925, Jewish students at Harvard made up 28% of all attendees. President Lawrence Lowell brought into existence policies to judge individuals on character after failing to limit the number of Jewish attendees to his school. Once these policies were put into action, Jewish attendance at his school declined, eventually dropping below the 15% limit he was originally seeking to put it into existence. It wasn't that the Jewish people were being discriminated against. They were just not as well-rounded, lacking in character and that savoir faire that came so easily to anyone who was not Jewish. It may have been genetic or cultural. I guess we'll never know. Hard to tell why they just couldn't pull it off.
相关资源
从这篇论文所有 HN 讨论帖的全部评论里整理出来的链接。
历次讨论
- 2020Hacker News 讨论帖376 分 · 493 评
同领域还值得读
一切的回报率，1870–2015
The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015
利用1870–2015年多国的长期数据，估算股票、住房等各类资本的回报率，并将其与经济增长率进行比较。
经济与社会科学2019 · 487 分 · 260 评进阶 · 约 100 分钟编辑精选一切资产的回报率，1870–2015
The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015
构建了 1870–2015 年 16 个国家的长周期资产回报数据集，覆盖股票、住房、政府债券和短期票据，系统比较各类资产的真实回报与波动性。
经济与社会科学2018 · 215 分 · 151 评进阶 · 约 120 分钟编辑精选一切资产的回报率，1870–2015（2019）
The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 (2019)
这篇发表于《经济学季刊》的论文构建了 1870–2015 年间 16 个主要发达国家的股票、债券、房地产等资产收益率的长周期数据库。
经济与社会科学2024 · 190 分 · 148 评进阶 · 约 80 分钟编辑精选想法是否越来越难找？
Are ideas getting harder to find?
探讨“想法是否越来越难找到”：通过衡量多个领域的“研究生产率”，发现维持相同的增长需要投入指数级增长的研究资源，即研究效率在持续下降。
经济与社会科学2016 · 182 分 · 106 评入门 · 约 60 分钟编辑精选比特币与区块链的经济极限
The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain
芝加哥大学 Eric Budish 的论文从经济学角度分析比特币与区块链的根本限制：核心论点是只要攻击网络（双花或砸盘做空）的收益超过挖矿成本，51% 算力攻击就有利可图，而挖矿…
经济与社会科学2018 · 176 分 · 37 评进阶 · 约 90 分钟编辑精选