> The overall effect is that a minority can extract the obedience of a majority.

Seems like a distraction: a minority of Americans want to ban abortion, yet, abortion remains illegal for a huge portions of Americans. A majority of Americans want weed legalized, yet, many thousands are in prison for using weed.

Maybe some people changed their twitter bios, to me that doesn't mean "a minority has extracted obedience from a majority" at all.

I'm deeply suspicious of your tone here. I try to take HN claims at good faith, but frankly your 5 points of evidence come across to me as ludicrous. The best good faith I can muster here is that this isn't completely made up fear-mongering but rather some ungenerous interpretation of events you've witnessed in academia. The writing style red flagged me:

> Penalize (during peer review) research that doesn't cite black authors.

This makes it sound like there's some kind of policy requirement for citing black authors that people are being penalized for not meeting, a sort of citation affirmative action. What we're missing is, is that true? Is there a policy? What does it say? What does "penalize" mean? What was the research? Was it geophysical research into fracking outcomes? Was the reviewer wondering why a specific piece of research by a black author that indicated that negative effects from fracking were being experienced by poorer neighborhoods wasn't included? What kind of context are we not getting here?

> Implement diversity boards that have final say in hiring and tenure decisions. (They need not have field expertise.)

Is this true? final say? If a diversity board rejected a candidate for being "white," there'd be no consequences? Really? Your parenthetical inclusion is pointing to the blatant fear. So, your geophysics department hires a prominent Vietnamese architect that knows nothing about geophysical sciences, and that's a realistic thing that could happen, is what you're implying. Huh.

> Ban white researchers from conducting genetic research in populations in non-white countries.

I have an extremely hard time believing that MIT has a rule somewhere that defines what a white researcher is, empowers some kind of authority to determine that when reviewing research grants, and then also goes to define what a "white" or "non-white" country is.

I'm so suspicious of your affected-detachment writing style that I had to delve into the comment history.

Something that jumped out at me is this "disaffected" comment on affirmative action: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30526006

> This is an oversimplification. It started out as: all things being equal, pick the black one. It applied to cases where one was torn between two equal candidates, and the idea was that a nudge toward hiring more blacks would help fix the disparities that arose from years of segregation and racial prejudice. The issue was that the standard for success of this program was racial proportions being equal to that of the general (or local) population.

> As years passed and the standard for success was not reached, affirmative action policies became more and more aggressive. This coincided with civil rights legislation that put pressure on companies and institutions to hire more blacks (expanded to include other racial minorities and women). The consequence is the system we have now, where people, if not explicitly using racial quotas, are creating racially oriented jobs (e.g. diversity staff in large companies / universities) or searching for racially loaded standards (e.g. personality scores for Asians in Harvard admissions) in order to engineer an overall impression of meeting racial proportioning criteria.

Can I ask about your casual way of talking about the race of people? Very rarely do I find someone that says "black ones," "more blacks," etc, that doesn't have distasteful beliefs about race. You're careful to capitalize "Asian," and you have a lot of comments dancing around genetic basis for race. I only delve so deep and analyze so carefully because it seems to me you are wicked smart, and somewhat careful, and my conclusion is that you have deeply unpopular ideas about races and that you are smart enough to know not to share explicitly but also want to warn about so as to avoid negative racial consequences, whatever those are (I'm guessing something smarter than vague "great replacement.") Basically, I think you have racist beliefs, and are carefully trying to discuss them here, or fear monger about them. Do you? Or perhaps, beliefs you think society "unfairly characterizes as racist?"

pre-post edit: (i forgot to hit reply and found this on my computer later)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30411553

> Some kids are more capable and more driven than others for reasons part cultural and part genetic, and the perceived quality of a school will reflect that of its students. ... Though this notion is distasteful to some, it must be addressed because otherwise, schools and teachers are going to be put on the hook for conditions that are simply outside their control.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523203&p=2#30524494

> When I was in high school, one student's parents (one doctor and one lawyer --- very financially well-off) took off work for one year just so they could claim having no income on the FAFSA documentation. She got accepted everywhere, winning across the places she applied over $300,000 in scholarships. The upper-middle class and wealthy can easily game this.

> Edit: I should also add that the student and both parents were black. This probably played a large role in the offers.