Crémieux Profile picture
Oct 4, 2024 19 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Lots of people attacking this decision, but do you think YOU could pass the POST?

Here's a thread of test questions.

Question 1: Image
If you're already struggling, don't worry, just keep plugging in your answers.

For questions 2 and 3 you'll have to do some addition and subtraction: Image
The test might seem too tough for you now, but just wait until you see question number 4: Image
Question 5 separates the men from the boys, or apparently, the men women from the women: Image
Now we're going to transition from the mathematics section to reading comprehension.

Before getting to the questions, read this paragraph. You'll need it for questions 6 through 10: Image
Now here are the stumpers in question: Image
Question 11 gets its own passage: Image
Giving up yet? Well hang in there.

Questions 12 and 13 rely on this material: Image
Now you have to answer the hard questions like 'Can you read a paragraph that contains the answer?' Image
The following questions ask you to identify spelling and grammatical errors and to insert the correct word where it fits: Image
Question 18 also asks you to identify a spelling error. This can be a hard one! Image
Now here's how you do the final section.

You have to fill out forms correctly, according to a style guide everyone is provided. Image
The questions are based on this.

You have to fill in which items were stolen, where the victim lived, the suspect's name and address, the suspect's clothing items, and the names of the officers assigned to the complaint. Image
Now, without sarcasm, if you fail this sort of test, something is wrong with you. This test is incredibly easy and you would have to be illiterate and innumerate to fail.

And yet, 9% of Whites and 29% of Blacks fail. Incidentally, with equal variances, that's a 0.79 d difference
That difference is what's expected based on the Black-White difference in the general population with a bit of selection into test-taking added. It matches up with what we know to be unbiased differences in other tests of police officers (e.g., on the WAIS).
Now what do the women fail? Well, 49% of them can't do 18 push-ups in a minute, 27 sit-ups in a minute, run 1.5 miles in 15m20s, and reach 1.5 inches past their toes while seated.

They're pathetically physically incapable, so that's the department's fault.
The Maryland Department of State Police would need to show that the thresholds used in the test have equal predictive power by sex, that they're relevant to the job, etc.

Everyone knows a physical test is fine, but justifying it is obviously hard.
You could argue that maybe the female officers won't be stepping into the line of duty, or that the test just doesn't work at all, but argue that.

Otherwise, we get yet another senseless attack on having even bottom of the barrel standards.

It's pathetic.
Now if you really couldn't figure out the POST question answers, here's a link to the answer sheet: mdsp.maryland.gov/Careers/Troope…

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More from @cremieuxrecueil

Oct 17
This is not true and there has never been a reason to believe it.

When we do have raw data for anywhere, we see that there's consistent scoring over time, not massive intelligence gains.

If we do not take measurement invariance seriously, we will be seriously misled. Image
I actually think it is exactly Noah's sort of post that helps to keep the culture of scientific fraud in academia and elsewhere alive.

Noah is smart enough and has been told enough to know better, and he still wrote something that he can't support.

But it's a popular message.
The message is just empirically wrong.

Will we ever move beyond the Cargo Cult version of the Flynn Effect that people like Noah, knowingly or otherwise, are wont to promote?

I don't think we will!

To learn more, see:
Read 4 tweets
Oct 14
Where did that human capital go?

After the Counter-Reformation began, Protestant Germany started producing more elites than Catholic Germany.

Protestant cities also attracted more of these elite individuals, but primarily to the places with the most progressive governments🧵Image
Q: What am I talking about?

A: Kirchenordnung, or Church Orders, otherwise known as Protestant Church Ordinances, a sort of governmental compact that started cropping up after the Reformation, in Protestant cities. Image
Q: Why these things?

A: Protestants wanted to establish political institutions in their domains that replaced those previously provided by the Catholics, or which otherwise departed from how things were done. Image
Read 12 tweets
Oct 7
What predicts a successful educational intervention?

Unfortunately, the answer is not 'methodological propriety'; in fact, it's the opposite🧵

First up: home-made measures, a lack of randomization, and a study being published instead of unpublished predict larger effects. Image
It is *far* easier to cook the books with an in-house measure, and it's far harder for other researchers to evaluate what's going on because they definitionally cannot be familiar with it.

Additionally, smaller studies tend to have larger effects—a hallmark of publication bias! Image
Education, like many fields, clearly has a bias towards significant results.

Notice the extreme excess of results with p-values that are 'just significant'.

The pattern we see above should make you suspect if you realize this is happening. Image
Read 10 tweets
Oct 6
Across five different large samples, the same pattern emerged:

Trans people tended to have multiple times higher rates of autism. Image
In addition to higher autism rates, when looking at non-autistic trans versus non-trans people, the trans people were consistently shifted towards showing more autistic traits. Image
In two of the available datasets, the autism result replicated across other psychiatric traits.

That is, trans people were also at an elevated risk of ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, OCD, and schizophrenia, before and after making various adjustments. Image
Read 6 tweets
Oct 6
Across 68,000 meta-analyses including over 700,000 effect size estimates, correcting for publication bias tended to:

- Markedly reduce effect sizes
- Markedly reduce the probability that there is an effect at all

Economics hardest hit: Image
Even this is perhaps too generous.

Recall that correcting for publication bias often produces effects that are still larger than the effects attained in subsequent large-scale replication studies.Image
A great example of this comes from priming studies.

Remember money priming, where simply seeing or handling money made people more selfish and better at business?

Those studies were stricken by publication bias, but preregistered studies totally failed to find a thing. Image
Read 6 tweets
Oct 5
Neat new article from @Scientific_Bird.

It argues that one of the reasons there was an East Asian growth miracle but not a South Asian one is human capital.

For centuries, South Asia has lagged on average human capital, whereas East Asia has done very well in all our records. Image
It's unsurprising when these things continue today.

We already know based on three separate instrumental variables strategies using quite old datapoints that human capital is causal for growth. That includes these numeracy measures from the distant past.

Image
This makes a lot of sense, too.

Where foreign visitors centuries ago thought China was remarkably equal and literate (both true!), they noticed that India had an elite upper crust accompanied by intense squalor.

Image
Read 4 tweets

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