wrhn

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Comment · 5 years ago
More notable than how they use tangential evidence to debunk a claim (e.g. citing a drop in rape as evidence it's not the rape capital, and comparing the rate of rape in absolute terms, not per-capita), is which part of a claim they choose to debunk.

According to the Swedish state TV, 58% of all convicted rapists were foreign-born [1], despite being only 19% of the population [2]. They could cite that as supporting "accepting refugees from war-torn regions like Syria would make the United States less safe", and rate the whole statement as a mixture. Instead they meticulously dance around the core of the statement [3], using all sorts of indirect statistics.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45269764

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden

[3] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/crime-sweden-rape-capital-...

Comment · 5 years ago
You mean the time they bought the company that solved protein folding.
Comment · 5 years ago
I pointed out (exaggerating only modestly) the absurd amount of benefit of the doubt you're giving the NY Times. If you believe that's an insult, I really can't help you.
Comment · 5 years ago
This level of skepticism would find even the Daily Mail as free of bias and agenda.
Comment · 5 years ago
And if their ToS are themselves political?
Comment · 5 years ago
Even if the algorithm was correct, the remaining staff will now focus on gaming the perceived productivity metrics. We all know what that means for actual productivity.
Comment · 5 years ago
Looking at only the college age 20-24 year age group [1], the numbers change as follows:

           Ivy League  US     Ratio
  Jewish*  17.2%        2.1%  8.21
  Asian    19.6%        7.1%  2.75
  White    33.1%       51.6%  0.64
  Hispanic 11.4%       19.4%  0.59
  Black**   7.8%       16.5%  0.47
The relative placement of the bottom 3 groups changes, but their individual representation ratios remain approximately the same. Any conclusions about discrimination that you could draw from the first set of numbers, you can draw from this one - the differences are negligible.

As for there being many people in Asia, that is irrelevant - I excluded international students when calculating Ivy League demographics, so only the US population is relevant.

*I assumed the same age structure for non-Jewish and Jewish whites.

**The census data table gives the total Black population as 47 million for 2017, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... gives only 40 million, despite citing census.gov as its source. I don't know where the disparity comes from, and that's the only place I've seen such a high estimate of the US Black population.

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2010-... 2019 estimate

Comment · 5 years ago
Any advice on how I could present this data without it becoming a dogwhistle? The edit window is over, but I'll gladly make those changes next time.
Comment · 5 years ago
> They're the only small group being considered. Of course they're gonna be "by far" something. Many other small groups have above-average representation in academics.

Maybe small in the US as a whole, but in the Ivy League they are 17.2% - the 3rd largest ethnicity, almost as large as Hispanics and Blacks combined.

But lets suppose they are being discriminated against. That would require some other group, that makes up a significant % of the Ivy League, to be unfairly privileged (otherwise it would have a negligible effect on the % of Jewish students).

So which group do you think that is? You said Asians are discriminated against, so they're out. Maybe you think there's too many Hispanic or Black students, despite being 11x less likely to be accepted into the Ivy League? Or is it non-Jewish whites, the most under-represented group, that are also the most privileged?

Comment · 5 years ago
It's just a trivial excel table. The Hillel sources are a bit tricky to get to - their URLs are:

https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/brown-universit...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/columbia-univers...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/cornell-universi...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/dartmouth-colleg...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-universi...

http://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/university-o...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-univer...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/yale-university

https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges has a decent summary of other demographic data.

For the US, I used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

Unfortunately I could not find many numbers from eJP, except those in the https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat... article. Perhaps you will have better luck searching.

Comment · 5 years ago
The presidents of Yale, Pennsylvania, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Brown are Peter Salovey, Amy Gutmann, Lawrence Bacow, Lee C. Bollinger, Christopher Eisgruber, and Christina Paxson. They are all Jewish (don't take my word for it - check their wikipedia pages).

If you contend they are discriminated against despite holding at least 6 of the 8 presidencies, and despite being by far the most over-represented group, I assume you have some fantastically strong supporting evidence.

Comment · 5 years ago
Maybe they don't believe the data? And it's very tedious to check. If that's the case, I suggest to check the data for a few individual universities. Cornell and Princeton are slight outliers, but otherwise individual universities don't deviate much from the average. That should give some credence to the numbers.
Comment · 5 years ago
US universities also had a history of trying to exclude Jewish people [1]. I say history, because the practice has by all accounts stopped, and the current situation in the Ivy League [2] is as follows (looking only at non-international students):

                          Ivy League   US      Ratio
  Jewish                  17.2%         2.4%    7.16
  Asian                   19.6%         5.3%    3.71
  White (incl. Jewish)    50.3%        61.5%    0.82
  Hispanic                11.4%        17.6%    0.65
  Black                    7.8%        12.7%    0.61
  White (non-Jewish)      33.1%        59.1%    0.56
The numbers don't sum to 100% because I did not include multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.

No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota#United_States

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League

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