This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
On a related note, has anyone else noticed how weird the scoring systems on graduate level admissions tests are? The GRE, for example, has 2 sections verbal and quantitative each section scores out of 170, except the minimum possible score is 130. So the score range is only 40 wide. Why didn't they just make it 0-40? Why 130-170? The MCAT is even weirder, each section scores from 118-132. Why not 0-14 or 1-15?
My hypothesis is that adding a constant to everyone's scores makes the scores appear artificially closer together which reduces the perceived unfairness of affirmative action admissions. I wonder if we'll see a reversal of this trend now that the Supreme Court has come down on AA.
Pretty sure the tests were scored like this decades before people cared about affirmative action.
If they're trying to artificially boost anyone it's the people who pay them for practice tests and tutoring.
But more likely it's just some obscure thing about how the scoring works. It's definitely not just a number of points for each question, some computerized versions have adaptive questions based on how well you're doing, etc.
The MCAT sections are balanced to add up to 500, which is just a nice round number I guess.
This doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter what the score curve is like. You can always transform a scoring system with a 130 min score and 170 max score to one with a 0 min score and 40 max score and the same curve by just subtracting 130 from each score.
You can literally make the numbers do that, yes, but they won't necessarily mean the same thing.
40 is twice as much 20. 170 is not twice as much as 150.
A scale may cut off the tails in either direction after enough standard deviations because it is not able to accurately measure those extremes, or because the testmaker doesn't have any use for measures beyond those limits. In that case, cutting off your scale at 130 properly implies that there's lots of lower numbers you could get but are not measuring; anchoring the bottom of your scale to 0 improperly implies that this is the lower bound of possible performance.
Etc.
Again, I don't know how these scales are designed or what they're supposed to mean. But it's very possible that relationships like these (probably not these specific ones, but other things that do not survive translation) may be intended in their scale.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link