The Top 10%

I saw a cool story on 60 Minutes tonight. I think it was a repeat, but then the only TV I watch is an occasional episode of 60 Minutes after dinner at my parents' house, so it was new to me. Anyway, the story was this:

Since affirmative action has gone out of constitutional style, Texas tried another angle. The top 10% of each year's high school graduating class may attend state universities. Period. This cuts across all kinds of social lines because schools tend to be geographical and geography tends to be class-based. This is a cool legal hack even before you hear the rest of the story.

Better, it's working really really well. In terms of getting poor non-whites on campus, it's more effective than affirmative action was. Not only that, but UT is posting record academic performance. This basically means that accepting only the top performers on a statewide basis is not a predictor of academic results; something else is going on, and accepting the top 10% on a district-wide basis is "good enough" to produce record-setting academic results at UT.

There are some problem details, such as maybe 10% is too much for the state university system to handle (not all 10% take the state up on its offer, but more do each year), but that seems easy enough to fix. For example, they could put a formula in the law which annually derives the cut-off percentage based on the number of graduates and the capacity of the system.

Among the complainers are kids from the predictably rich/white districts who have more challenging curriculum than the kids in the poor/non-white districts. Kids in the top 11% at the rich/white schools might have been in the top 1% at a poor/non-white school. And there's a white state legislator who wants to end the system because it is "not fair." (Is he seven years old?) What the complainers fail to understand is that the purpose of a state university system is not to reward hard work in a difficult high school. The purpose is to educate the state's population. And it's working!

I am so jazzed about this idea and system that it gives me a whole new perspective on Texas. Every state should do this or something like it.

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The United States isn't a Christian state.

Recently, I received this in email:

The founding documents make a point of noting that the moral legitimacy of the government is expressly derived from religious principles. The entire justification of the government is to represent rights that were "endowed to men by their creator."

This is a common but ahistorical interpretation which seems to have relevance only because it has become a sound-bite of the religious right. In fact, what this phrase really does in the Deist sense in which Jefferson and his home-boys undoubtedly intended is to assert that the rights in question are self-evident. And, whaddya know, when you look at the whole sentence, it actually does say exactly that. Seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Did some folks who signed the document misunderstand it? Maybe. But Deism was politically correct in those circles at the time, and it's likely most other signatories correctly understood what Jefferson wrote.

Now, if you want to insist that Deism is a religion, then in some technical or academic sense you would be right. But I think Deism is more a bundle of philosophy than a religion; it essentially seeks to observe the world and believes the existence of a creator (little C) is implied rather than revealed. It doesn't even care much about the nature of this creator; the creator is more of a stand-in for the fact that the problem of first cause had not been solved. If that's a religion, then call me a fanatic, because I am likewise unfamiliar with a solution to that problem. (Perhaps I need to get around to reading more physics.)

And what's incontrovertible is that Deism is not similar to or even compatible with Christianity of any stripe, much less the tribal consumerist flavors popular today.

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Technical Enabler

This Gizmodo interview with Bill Gates about Digital Rights Management reminds me of a joke about him. A woman lost in a runaway hot air balloon is floating past Bill's open office window. She looks in and, not recognizing him, calls out: "Where am I?" Bill responds: "You're in a hot air balloon." The woman then guesses she must be in Redmond because she has just received a technically correct but useless response. And that's what I thought of Bill's response to Gizmodo's prodding on DRM. Viewed from a technical perspective, Bill is only providing the tools, and people are free to use them wisely or unwisely, he says. But Bill is so focused on the tech that he can't see the difference between a pop song and a medical record: "It's the same bits!" Meanwhile, back on Earth, absolutely no one considers her HIV status to be a product of intellectual effort intended for publication. All bits are created equal only in the eyes of a computer program designed specifically to treat them that way; in all other contexts, and especially in human ones, bits are not equal. Enabling people to do stupid things with bits is not the same as requiring them to do those stupid things, but there are still reasons to avoid being an "enabler," and Bill doesn't seem to be considering them.