Crémieux Profile picture
May 21, 2023 10 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Changes to the Bar exam so far don't seem to have made a dent in the race differences in performance on it.

How large are these differences? In the latest year, 2022, the Black-White gap in California Bar pass rates was 0.97 SDs.

And this matters because we expect a threshold Image
to practice (the Bar exam) to reduce subsequent performance gaps.

But how much should those gaps be reduced?

Let's simulate to find out!

@_twolfram recently provided an estimate for British lawyers' IQs of 110.31: sciencedirect.com/science/articl….

Let's go ahead and assume
there's a threshold that's 0.67 SDs (10 points) above the higher-performing of two groups with equal variances who are separated by 0.97 d.

With simulated group sizes of one million persons each, the mean differences decline, and the SDs do too. The new gap is 0.412 d. Image
But we know that the 0.97 d gap is an underestimate due to range restriction.

Using MBE scores, it looks like the unrestricted gap should be more like 1.22 d. That leaves us with a 0.537 d gap above the threshold.

Do we have subsequent performance measures?

Yes! We have three:
- Complaints made against attorneys
- Probations
- Disbarments

For men, the gaps, in order, are 0.576, 0.513, and 0.564 d. For women, the gaps are 0.576, 0.286, and 0.286 d.

Men fit expectations and women apparently needed less discipline. Source: https://board.calba...
These gaps probably replicate nationally.

For example, here are Texas pass rates from 2004 - a 0.961 d Black-White first-pass gap. The 2006 update to these figures raised the gap to 0.969 d. Source: https://ble.texas.g...Image
Those figures are basically in line with LSAC's national study of Bar exam pass rates. Image
And those are basically in line with New York's gaps. Image
And this should probably be expected, since tests measure the same things. Image
Since all of the people included in these statistics went to ABA-accredited schools, they all had the opportunity to learn what was required to perform well on these tests.

But just like the Step examinations for medical doctors, the gaps on the tests and in real life remain.

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More from @cremieuxrecueil

Apr 3
Timeline's feeling down. Thread of good news.

At every age, the incidence of dementia is down. As a society, people are no longer suffering dementia nearly as often! Image
The world over, child mortality is way down. It's unusual for parents to experience the death of a child these days, where even a century ago, it was the global norm. Image
Each year, novel gene therapies are approved.

The number of gene therapies in the pipeline is also rapidly increasing. There is tons of progress to be made here, and the main issue is regulatory.

We have lots of low-hanging fruit in curing disease! Image
Read 13 tweets
Apr 3
Which is more impressive for China, its

GDP Per Capita, or its

Actual Individual Consumption Per Capita (AIC is a superior measure of how rich its people actually are. It's based on how much they really consume)

Answer is below.
Here's the GDP Per Capita data. Image
And here's the AIC data. Image
Read 5 tweets
Apr 3
There's a common type of misunderstanding that sounds like this:

"If taller people tend to be more educated, and women tend to be shorter than men, how do you explain women tending to be more educated?"

The issue has to do with intercepts. Consider this plot: Image
You can see that, among Whites, women tend to be shorter than men, and they tend to have lower earnings.

But at the same time, to similar degrees in both sexes, taller people tend to have higher earnings.

Perplexed? You shouldn't be.
The fact is that there's more to this that differentiates men and women than height, so the intercept for women is shifted down, even though the slopes of the height * income relationship are fairly comparable.

You could also ask the same thing about race.
Read 8 tweets
Apr 2
Debate about the value of essays in college admissions missed a key point:

Essays are biased, so should not be used.

Here's an example: High-income people know 'what to write' to look good to raters, so they outperform on essays relative to their other qualifications. Image
This shows up by race, too, and that's why admissions departments use essays to infer race for the express purpose of discriminating.

Write that you're Black; that you grew up as a poor immigrant; that you're gay or a cripple.

They love that!

The reason essays do not have a role to play in the admissions process is because they're biased. It's plain, it's simple, it doesn't need to be discussed any further.

And here's some good policy: Use tools that are not biased or lose public funding.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 2
A new meta-analysis and systematic review on the effects of social media abstinence interventions on mental health has been published.

First result: No effect on positive affect: Image
Second result: No effect on negative affect. Image
Third result: No effect on life satisfaction in general. Image
Read 6 tweets
Apr 2
Happy Autism Awareness Day! I think too many people are 'aware' of autism.

Have you ever met someone who claims to be autistic, but they've never been diagnosed?

Self-reported autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is practically uncorrelated with real, clinician-diagnosed autism🧵 Image
Sort self-reporters into those with high and low ASD scores, and you get the bars on the left. The "high-trait" self-reporters look like people with diagnosed autism (ASD column).

But they're more socially anxious (middle) and avoidant (right). Image
So far, the means of distinguishing diagnosed from self-reported autistics have been crude.

To get a more nuanced understanding of their differences, we have to look at behavior.

For that, we'll start with the social control task.
Read 14 tweets

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