SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
4d ago
People often talk about the degree barrier
Fun, counterintuitive fact: Degree requirements actually favor black applicants, because in the US, black people are educational overachievers.
That is, for any given test score level, black Americans have, on average, higher educational attainment than non-Hispanic white Americans. If you look here, in 2021, 26% of black and 45% of NHW Americans age 25-29 had at least a bachelor's degree.
If we look here, we see that the 74th percentile for black SAT takers is between 1000 and 1100, let's say 1050. This is an upper bound for the average SAT score of black four-year graduates; it's likely a bit lower due to the imperfect correlation between test scores and educational attainment. The 55th percentile for whites is around 1150, half a standard deviation higher. If we do a similar exercise for masters or higher, again we find roughly a half-sigma difference.
I don't think this is primarily attributable to affirmative action, since most four-year universities do not have competitive admissions. Probably the fact that black students tend to have wealthier and more educated parents than white students with the same test scores plays a role. Athletics may be a factor as well.
Anyway, since black people tend to be more credentialed than white people (and Hispanics) with the same cognitive and academic skills, degree requirements actually give them an edge. I expect that the DEI industry will quickly lose interest in skills-first hiring when they realize that the main beneficiaries are white and Hispanic men.
SerialStateLineXer
7d ago
Oh, sorry, I didn't see this until now. It was about a year and a half, half because I wanted a break, and half because I really hate updating my resume and kept putting it off.
Someone who spends their money by buying stuff gets hit by sales taxes, while someone who "spends" their money to make more money gets hit with capgains taxes.
And then gets hits by sales taxes anyway when he spends his money in the future.
Taxes on investment income distort the trade-off between present and future consumption in a way that neither taxes on consumption nor taxes on wage income do.
There's a superficial appearance of symmetry here, where it seems like taxes on investment income discourage investment and taxes on consumption discourage consumption, but the illusion goes away if you work through the math. The tax system really is set up in a way that penalizes saving and investing.
SerialStateLineXer
12d ago
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues.
There's a lack of quantitative reasoning in general. People just throw out qualitative claims and assume that the quantitative stuff works out to whatever is most convenient for their argument.
I wonder if there's a connection between this and schoolchildren's notorious aversion to word problems.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I've done it. I had a lot of money saved up and needed a break. The hardest part was not getting through interviews for another job, but psyching myself up to update my resume, which I hate doing.
Ultimately it depends on how much money you have saved and how much of it you're willing to burn through and how tight the labor market in your industry is. If the labor market is tight, you can probably find another job without too much trouble even if you're not currently employed.
But I was applying for software engineering jobs in 2012, so my experience may be nonrepresentative. I wouldn't quit my current job without a replacement lined up.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I keep hearing about how great everyone feels after quitting drinking, and I kind of feel bad that I don't have a way to get that kind of improvement. For me, not being in a constant state of low-grade chronic alcohol poisoning is just normal, so I don't really appreciate it.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/measuring-shrinkflation-and-its-impact-on-inflation.htm
For example, if a half-gallon (64 oz) of Brand A vanilla ice cream is priced in January 2021 at $5.99, then the effective price per ounce is $5.99 divided by 64 oz or $0.093 per ounce. If, in February 2021, the same Brand A vanilla ice cream is reduced in size to 60 oz, but the price is still $5.99, the effective price per ounce would be $0.0998 per ounce. This results in a 6.7-percent increase in the price per ounce of the ice cream, and the CPI would include this price increase.
Our economists even adjust for items that do not have a weight, like toilet paper. For example, when the number of sheets per toilet paper roll changes from 220 per roll to 200, the economist will adjust the data to show a 10-percent price-per-sheet increase.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
God: Hey, I need you to turn my son over to the Romans so that can crucify him.
Jews: :-/
God: Trust me, it'll be awesome! You're my chosen people! Would I lead you astray?
Jews: Well, there were those forty years in the...
God: Oh, for my sakes! Will you let that go already? I gave you manna, didn't I?
Jews: Okay, fine, you're the god.
Jesus: X-(
A thousand years later...
Jews: :-(
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
On the other end of the spectrum, have you ever had any clients who you were fairly sure were innocent and being railroaded, but whom you were unable to get acquitted?
If so, is this a regular occurrence (say more than 2%), or extremely rare?
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I haven't really dug into the issue, but my recollection is that her recall election was close enough that any loss of supporters due to redistricting would have made reelection unlikely.
But maybe it was more than pendulum swinging back towards the center than the redistricting.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
The radical DSA councilwoman retired, and was replaced with the "more conservative" of the two choices
This was due to a redistricting that pretty much guaranteed she would lose, right?
We have these:
- Non-technical Universities
- Black underclass, where a large percentage of the men are dead or in prison.
Edit: This was supposed to be a response to that comment speculating about the effects of reducing the male : female ratio. I'm not sure what happened.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
And large-scale genome sequencing has demonstrated that intelligence and other cognitive and personality traits - things that contribute to income, life success - are quite ([roughly] 50%) heritable.
This is not quite right. For one, adult intelligence is more like 70-80% heritable. But also, we know this from twin studies, not from genome sequencing. Due to insufficient data (partially due to the inherent difficulty of collecting reliable IQ and genetic data for millions of people, and partly due to ideologically motivated obstruction of such efforts), current GWAS models show only a fraction of the true heritability of IQ. IIRC the best models predict only about 15% of variance in IQ.
Twin studies are the gold standard for estimating heritability; the advantage of GWAS is that it can give us actual models to predict IQ from genetic sequences.
I changed your "~50%" to "roughly 50%" because the site interpreted a quoted tilde as markup for strikethrough.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind, how long would you expect it to take from the day that there is zero race-based discrimination anywhere in the country, to the day when all racial wealth and achievement gaps have been completely eradicated?
My answer is 'probably around 300 to 500 years.'
No, this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and flatly contradicted by multiple streams of available evidence.
First, there's the historical example of East Asian and Jewish Americans. Yes, recent immigration from East Asia has been selective, but East Asians had already pretty much caught up with whites by the late 60s, before selective immigration really got going, and I don't think there was ever much selective immigration with Jews, who were already so overrepresented at top universities that Harvard imposed quotas in the 20s, when antisemitism was still a very real problem.
Second, poverty just isn't that sticky. The intergenerational rank-rank elasticity of permanent income (i.e. lifetime earnings) is about 0.4, meaning that on average, the children of parents at a given permanent income level will regress about 60% of the way to the 50th percentile.
Note that that 0.4 elasticity is not purely due to the stickiness of exogenous poverty, as much of it is due to the heredity of cognitive and personality traits. The true exogenous effect of parental income is considerably smaller than this. What this means is that we can expect regression to the mean in just a generation or two. This is commonly observed with truly exogenous poverty, e.g. with Vietnamese refugees.
Finally, rapid regression towards the mean was observed with black families during and for approximately one generation after the Civil Rights Era. And then it stopped, and has now been stalled out for two generations. We now see downward mobility of black men born into families with permanent incomes above the black mean, even when below the white mean. In other words, black men regress towards a lower mean than white men. It's tough to pin this on the the intergenerational stickiness of poverty (even ignoring the aforementioned fact that it's not actually that sticky), but is exactly what we would expect to see if there were a genetic basis for the achievement gap.
Raj Chetty says that this isn't consistent with a genetic basis for the gap because black women don't exhibit the same degree of downward mobility, but the case of women is more complicated because the shortage of reliable black men means that black women are more dependent on their own incomes than white men. Furthermore, black women from middle-class families are especially well positioned to benefit from affirmative action because they're less likely to have criminal records than black men. Finally, black women still do not exhibit the upward mobility that we would expect to see if their parents' poverty were truly exogenous.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Yeah, those guys, or whatever similar breed is in the video linked from the OP. The dogs in the 1910 video look a bit healthier to me. Their modern descendants seem to have been bred in a way that grotesquely exaggerates those features.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I do not get the appeal of dogs with small heads and long faces. Those things creep me out.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Do you normally celebrate your birthday on February 28th, or March 1st?
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
A video contains roughly 30 frames per second, each frame a picture.
A frame of video will, on average, differ only slightly from the previous frame, and be worth much less than the thousand words a single picture is worth. This is why videos can compressed at much higher ratios than still images with minimal perceivable loss of quality.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
HR reps have talents they can shop around, too. Lots of companies have HR departments, probably more than have in-house software departments. But the people who can do those jobs are more abundant, relative to supply, than software engineers.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
With programmers you can get some degree of bilateral monopoly power, where a long-time employee of a firm has a lot of firm-specific knowledge, which is very valuable to the firm but not to anyone else. This the programmer has something unique to offer the firm, and the firm is the only one willing to pay for it.
This is probably more likely to happen at non-tech firms, as tech firms are better at making sure that no crucial software is exclusively maintained by one person.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
I think that academic freedom does have some value, so I'm not sure I'm ready to throw my support behind government stepping in and regulating the research of academics, even at public universities.
However, there are totally reasonable ways governments can regulate public universities that do not infringe on academic freedom:
- Ban ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions.
- Regulate the activities of administrators and the number of staff which can be hired for certain roles.
- Ban the use of DEI statements and other ideological tests and discrimination in hiring.
These are broad principles, not blueprints for concrete laws. I'm well aware that "no ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions at public universities" sessions is unlikely to be an effective law; it needs to spell out the details, and multiple passes may be required to plug loopholes.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Another approach is to bar public schools from requiring or giving pay premiums for advanced education degrees.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
The BBZ wasn't quite as enthusiastic about my plan to devote the NHS's entire budget to improving the health outcomes of trans women of color as I expected them to be. They were concerned about the effect on other marginalised communities.
I flew too close to the sun.
I think the reason for higher rates of comorbidities among low-IQ individuals from higher-IQ populations is that you're very unlikely to get an IQ two standard deviations below the mean purely because of additive genetic effects, so a large proportion of people with IQs this low are going to have some major developmental disorder causing the cognitive deficit. On the other hand, if an IQ of 70 is only one standard deviation below the population mean, then a sixth of the population is going to get there with additive genetic effects and a relatively small proportion will get there through some major developmental disorder.
I don't think it works the other way. The only way you get an IQ two standard deviations above the mean is with additive genetic effects. There's no anti-Down syndrome, where you can get an extra chromosome that gives you 30 extra IQ points.
However, it's worth noting that black students don't actually perform better in college than white students with the same test scores. They're just more likely to enroll and stick it out to the end. This is why I suspect that non-academic factors like higher family SES and athletics play a role. Unlike raw IQ, educational attainment has a substantial shared environment component in twin studies, probably due to a combination of cultural attitudes toward education and parents' ability to help pay for college.
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