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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1696234841249857658?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

He’s now posting for physical fitness test for colleges in order to help black people get into college.

There probably is an edge for blacks at the extreme of the spectrum but I’m also a believer intelligence and athleticism aren’t anti-correlated. You would end up getting the superstar athletes who are 1100 SAT scores. But those guys don’t want to go to Harvard they rightfully view football as their payday and want to play in the SEC. The 1300 SAT score tennis player is likely already getting into Harvard.

Ramsy does have this popular mid-twit sounds good at first thought messenging.

I would be down with getting every kid to do a 6-ish minute mile. Upper class and wealthy people already are skinny. Obesity is one of those things I see in statistics but I know fairly close to zero people with the issue.

I think adding physical fitness measures as metrics for college admissions would actually decrease Black admissions on the timescale of two or three years. The second they're added, every current academic try-hard would shift priorities to working on those things, and it's actually an objective metric that can't be gamed (by applicants and admissions officers) as much as e.g. GPA or extra curricular padding. 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.

Even now, the savvier people deadset on prestige education brands know that excelling in some obscure sport is one of the best ways to get a meaningful edge in the admissions game.

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

You think a system based on mile time would select more strongly for IQ than a system based on test scores and GPA?

Could you make that argument, because that seems prima facie crazy to me.

There are obviously systems that would select more strongly for IQ than mile time, like test scores and GPA. But that's not our current system: people are first binned into categories based on their race, and only then do test scores and GPA come into play. 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. An auxiliary hypothesis needed for this to work is the mile time would still be correlated with IQ, with the delta between it and better measures being smaller than what's introduced by the binning.

There are diligence, ability to cheat, and family income effects that would be captured by mile times, which are themselves positively correlated with IQ.

The correlation between grip strength and reasoning is 0.23.

If you pick two random people their grip strength will correctly order them by IQ 58% of the time. If you only look at people with z>1 grip strength then this drops to 53%

So for any moderately selective college you’re basically operating 3% above random.

If you order by SAT you get 70% and 60% respectively.

You’ve got a long way to argue that affirmative action is so unmeritocratic that it makes such a crappy signal like mile time comparable to a decent signal like test scores.

Then we can talk about why you think “mile time with no AA” is either better or more politically feasible than “test scores with no AA”

If you start testing for something, people will start training it.

Yes and apparently adding a ton of non-IQ signal will magically make this test a better proxy for IQ.

The existing admissions process already has a ton of non-IQ signal. I'm not sure if this would be better or worse.

If you pick the top 1% of grippers their average IQ will be 102. I think Harvard manages to do better than that.

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