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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28354 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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You're conjecturing that grip strength and conscientiousness are positively correlated (citation?)

I'm conjecturing that outcomes on any arbitrary measure that will result in better social outcomes and can be influenced by planning and hard work is positively correlated with conscientiousness and intelligence. Give a random student in China a test on US History and tell them it doesn't matter, and there'll only be a small correlation between intelligence and score. Let them know four years beforehand that if they get a perfect score on the test they'll get a million USD and a visa to the USA, and there'll be a strong correlation.

just see these traits as interchangeable proxies for each other is crazy... This is because the SAT is already a good proxy!

To quote myself in the comment you're responding to: "that would never become as strong a signal as SAT scores, which are fairly g-loaded."

But, you get at something real: I do think to some extent every objective metric is interchangeable. Choose an arbitrary objective metric to excel at and tell students that their future well-being depends on it, and conscientious students will outperform on it as much as possible, which will often be a lot for intelligent students. The questions are how much grip strength is trainable and how much intelligence helps training. If the trait is more like height, then measurements of it will fail as a proxy; if it's more like ability to play the piano, it will work well.

that conscientiousness and IQ are positively correlated (seems contentious at best after some Googling)

I acknowledge the studies on this do contradict my point, and I remain skeptical. My suspicion is that what they're measuring as conscientiousness doesn't capture what we think of as conscientiousness, but I've not had the chance to look into the studies in detail.

Suppose you published the entire SAT answer key a week before the test. Conscientious students would memorize it and completely destroy the other students, but nobody would dare to claim that this improves the correlation of the test with IQ! This is because the SAT is already a good proxy!

I'm going to bite the bullet here and say that, given a choice between our current system (which is not purely test or test-and-GPA based) and a purely memorize-the-publicized-answers test, I think the memorize-the-answers test would select more for IQ.

I'm conjecturing that outcomes on any arbitrary measure that will result in better social outcomes and can be influenced by planning and hard work is positively correlated with conscientiousness and intelligence

Your original claim was

I wouldn't be surprised if switching to 1-mile time as the sole criterion of admission would select more strongly for IQ than the current system.

Nowhere did you mention conscientiousness.

You doubled down in your next comment

What I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised if the mile time metric would manage to better select for IQ, even without the more direct signals from GPA and test scores, because it would drop the binning step

You believe Harvard's non-SAT-related admissions criteria make this plausible, despite the fact that the average Black admit to Harvard has a 96th percentile SATs.

If you filter for the top 1% of grip strength the average IQ will be 56th percentile (I don't recall the math offhand, but a simple programmatic proof:

import numpy as np
X = np.random.normal(0, 1, (1000000, 2))
cov = np.array([1.0, .23*.23, .23*.23, 1.0]).reshape(2,2)
Z = X @ np.linalg.cholesky(cov)  # Create two variables with correlation 0.23
grip = Z[:,0]
iq = Z[:,1]
print(grip.std()) # 1.00
print(iq.std())  # 1.00
print((grip * iq).mean())  # 0.053 (i.e. 0.23^2)
I = np.argsort(grip)
print(iq[I[-10000:]].mean())  # 0.144 or the 55.7th percentile

).

Let me reiterate that it seems clear that Harvard filters strongly on SAT. Certainly there are plenty of factors that dilute this, but given that the average Black admit to Harvard has a SAT-z-score of 1.8 while a grip-based admissions program would struggle to get an average admit with an IQ-z-score of 0.1 makes this seem like a pretty open-and-shut case to me.

just see these traits as interchangeable proxies for each other is crazy... This is because the SAT is already a good proxy!

To quote myself in the comment you're responding to: "that would never become as strong a signal as SAT scores, which are fairly g-loaded."

You accept the SAT as good. You just don't acknowledge how vast of a gap there is between an r^2 value of 0.7 and 0.05. The "interchangeable" part is that you're chaining these correlations (grip strength -> conscientiousness -> iq) and claiming that what comes out the other side is somehow relevant to the conversation. This is only sensible if you think these correlations are high.

I'm going to bite the bullet here and say that, given a choice between our current system (which is not purely test or test-and-GPA based) and a purely memorize-the-publicized-answers test, I think the memorize-the-answers test would select more for IQ.

I don't like affirmative action, but correlations of 0.8 (SAT and IQ) don't emerge by chance, and trying to cobble together terrible proxies into a decent one won't get you remotely close.

If you want to argue that affirmative action destroys the selection then argue it. Here is the obvious report to cite from. In my opinion this will be rather difficult since a school filtering for the top 1% of grippers would have an average IQ of 102, while Harvard very clearly is well beyond that.

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