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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Learning disorders are pretty close to being a special case of an IQ differential. Someone with a lower IQ will struggle to ever be as good a doctor as someone with a higher IQ, holding other attributes constant. (Lower IQ does not directly indicate a better bedside manner, or other benefits; that sort of "fairness/balancing/whatever" is for video games, not reality.)

Affirmative action has many problems, and "less capable graduates" barely makes the list. Even if you set aside the naked racial preferences and the reputation hit to successful minorities, you still have the mismatch between students and institutions, leading to much higher minority dropout rates from institutions above their level, when they could have been successful at institutions closer to their testing levels. Testing has a tight correlation with academic performance and graduation rates; when minorities end up thoroughly dominating the lowest quintile in class, it should come as no surprise that they also dominate the list of dropouts. (Of course, when you add in predatory student loans, and the worst case scenario is "loans + no degree," affirmative action starts to look like a perfect storm of how to screw over minorities most efficiently. I guess advocates of affirmative action can rest on their good intentions?)

"Adjusting" is never free; there is always a tradeoff. Even the mere knowledge that "adjusting" is happening generates second-order effects. Sometimes the specific policy is net-positive--the tradeoff was worth it. All too often, though, the effects are net-negative, as with affirmative action.