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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/math-decline-ucsd/684973/

At the same time, the UC system eliminated its best tool for assessing students’ academic preparedness. In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students.

Anyone remember the greatest hits of racialized education from the mid 2010s? Math is racist. Decolonize science. Genetically transmitted racial trauma. Social promotion for underperforming (especially "minorities") so that they won't feel bad.

Much of the above arguments were created by progressives and embraced by administrators seeking to avoid hard metric accountability to keep their funding alive. Real high impact success required tracibility and accountability, like Roland Fryers Promise program in Harlem that closed achievement gaps significantly. Naturally that all gets abandoned because it required work, which is apparently racist.

Well, its all coming home to roost. The first crop of pandemic + zero accountability + AI kids are coming into college, and the results aren't pretty. Fully 50% of entrants cannot write an essay or do high school math. Institutions that have self respect have pivoted back to some form of standardized testing, but it may be too late. The value signal of a bachelors was already diminished pre pandemic because too many incompetents were getting degree mill slop, saturating the job market with useless cultural studies slop churned out by universities soaking in those sweet Pell Grants. The 30% of the cohort getting bachelors is still unimportant compared to the top 5% in Ivies. The lack of critical mass of competence seems real this time.

So does education matter? Can you simply git gud with an Agile cert and a self built site with 1099 proof of taxable income from a successful venture, as opposed to educationmaxxing? If the value signal is degraded, can it be restored? Has the era of mandatory rectification of disparate outcome with forced racial redistribution ended? Is all this unimportant in an AI age where Scarjo can whisper ASMR opium?

Taking aside the insipid culture war aspect (which we all agree on and hence is just kind of boring to discuss), it's actually kind of interesting as an extremely effective example about the Generalized Lucas Critique.

  • Conditioned on some threshold SAT score, having a good GPA was fairly predictive of college success.
    • This makes sense -- the SAT was a good filter for aptitude. Beyond aptitude, GPA measured other components (diligence, focus) that contribute
  • Once you remove the SAT, having a good GPA is no longer predicative
  • You can not use correlations in the historical data to predict the effect of a change that modifies the structural rules by which the data are generated.

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