Statistical comment for iSteve

I’m surprised that Harvard has let the black share get so high because my impression is that Harvard has largely been hard-headed about not doing self-defeating things with its admissions policy. Harvard, which is now 382 years old, has been pretty competent over the centuries in admitting students who will be good for the Harvard brand. But making one-sixth of their admittees black means they are getting deep in declining marginal returns.

Perhaps Arcidiacono is playing some kind of game with the data?

Steve Sailer
If Harvard Had Colorblind Admissions, Its Black Share Would Fall from 15.8% to 0.9%

Since it’s Harvard, they *could* get the number of talented blacks they need to keep up both standards and appearances by skimming a non-representative sample off the top of the talented tenth. There are approximately 40 million black people in the US, and therefore approximately 55,447 of these with IQs of 130 or better who would be happy to go to Harvard. Divide that by an average lifespan and you’ve got enough per year to maintain a smart freshman class each year. And this is not even counting Nigerians with student visas (there are really orders of magnitude more people in this country, and the world, than we remember sometimes). This is an advantage Harvard holds over less prestigious universities, because the strategy doesn’t scale (and actually begins to fail catastrophically at about the tenth-place college).

The question is whether they are *actually* using a smart process, because that would require a more explicit conspiracy among more admissions people. Usually these sorts of conspiracies are communicated in hushed whispers and covert signals, so it’s hard to imagine there’s finely tuned statistical reasoning behind their decisions.

For you thards out there who are wondering why anyone would care about all this…the implicit argument is over who will rule the country as a caste of unelected bureaucratic elites in years to come. In America we select our elites through a semi-technocratic, Mandarin-style process that has become more and more rigid over time (this is the implicit thesis of Charles Murray’s work). The ivies, and Harvard in particular, are the first filter in the selection process for state department employees. So if more blacks are getting into Harvard you can reasonably expect more of them in the future deep state as well, not to mention the religious leadership of academia.

There’s actually a strong Alt-Right argument to be made in favor of current Harvard admissions policies, because a merit-based system would be a deal with the Yellow Devil and seal our country’s fate. But you can’t have that kind of debate openly because that would be giving the game away. Remember the number one rule of competitive melon magic: The Show Must Go On.