Trump says his secret weapon in the fight to reform institutions of higher learning (38 USC § 3452(f)) is accreditation

He would actually gain a lot by deploying another weapon. This weapon is no secret to Democrats, but Republicans have only rarely used it

The weapon is data🧵 SFFA v. Harvard was a landmark case by the U.S. Supreme Court, wherein it was found that Harvard had been engaging in racially discriminatory admissions in violation of the law.

Per the court's decision, universities do not have the right to consider race during admissions.

ACT scores for 2024 have finally been released!

The picture looks much the same as the one last year🧵 When you rescale these curves by the numbers who took the test, you get this:

I just got done listening to Rogan's interview of Vance

It was substantive, and it is nice to hear that Vance would bring a lot of reasonability to the Trump White House if elected

Due to how long the interview was, it also showed off Vance's unusual-for-a-Republican priorities To be frank, Vance is a Christian Democrat from 2008.

His views are basically just rejecting recent, wacky things and wanting a state that stays out of the way of the healthy, while providing extensive services for the unhealthy.

I'm not going to rig an ongoing poll by linking directly to it, but I will say that >90% of respondents so far were wrong:

The answer is climate🧵 Anatomically modern humans first appeared around 200,000 years ago.

After a few false starts, the dawn of man took place with a series of dispersions out of Africa about 60,000 years ago.

By 40-50 thousand years ago, humans had made it most places, and by 10-20, to the Americas

What does labor-saving technology do to workers? Does it make them poor? Does it take away their jobs?

Let's review!

First: Most papers do support the idea that technology takes people's jobs. This needs qualified.

Most types of job-relevant technology do take jobs, but innovation is largely excepted, because, well, introducing a new innovation tends to, instead, give employers money they can use to hire people.

I just read one of the most interesting climatic reconstructions I've ever seen.

This one gives us temperature records for the last 485 MILLION years. The reconstruction is based on a lot of different methods, but the one that really stood out was the part where they leveraged the shell chemistry of single-celled organisms' fossils.

Wild that this is possible and someone thought of it!

Nighttime America in 1992 and 2013.

You can see the increase in prosperity in the extent of nighttime lights🧵 Compared to America, Africa didn't get much brighter between 1992 and 2013.

I suspect "The Sort" can greatly increase your exposure to time-wasting incompetence🧵 The obvious example of how The Sort exposes you to incompetence is that nowadays, competent people don't go into the public sector all that often.

This is a mixed bag: while the government is a poor use of human capital, it needs some to avoid holding back the rest of society.

"What happened in 1971?"

Nothing, that's just a common year people choose to mismeasure productivity and pay series from🧵 Using nonfinancial corporate sector productivity and wages, we see the same picture indicating no stark divergence in 1971.

Massachusetts residents who go to vote this November are going to see a curious ballot initiative:

Repeal Competence Assessment Requirement for High School Graduation.

The initiative is being championed by Progressives opposed to standardized tests.

Let's discuss🧵 Firstly, who's sponsoring this initiative?

The officials are @SenWarren @RepMcGovern @AyannaPressley @RepLoriTrahan and @JimHawkins4Rep.

The unions are the MA AFL-CIO and the Teachers Association.

The organizations are MassVote and Progressive Massachusetts.

These journalists may not know it, but the Floyd Effect is real.

You can see the causal impact of George Floyd's death on homicide rates extremely clearly using data provided by the CDC.

https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1846406372918702390

Q: How?

A: Probably a lot of things, including police 'backing off' from criminal enforcement.

Q: Isn't this just COVID?

A: No. The increase occurs in the month Floyd died, not the month COVID set in or lockdowns were called. Moreover, this does not appear outside of the U.S.

In the U.S. and even Europe, smarter people are more likely to found businesses and for their businesses to succeed.

But in China, smarter people are actually less likely to start businesses🧵 To be sure, in China, scores on the Gaokao are related to company performance.

The smarter the founder, the more likely the firm is to expand, to get out of its founding province, to become listed on a stock exchange, and so on.

This is an ice core from West Antarctica. The black ring on it is a layer of volcanic ash deposited some 21,000 years ago.

This and other ice cores can help us to learn about the past, including Phoenician and Roman history🧵 As it happens, lead emissions can be measured in ice cores (green), peat bog coring sites (cyan), and lake sediment, among other options.

This map shows the sensitivity of the ice-core record to historical northern hemisphere atmospheric lead emissions. This will be important.

OK, this is just absurd now. The Biden-Harris administration has attacked three emergency services agencies in a week because apparently these exams are too hard for Black people.

Want to see how hard this exam is? Let's look at some questions.

First up:

https://twitter.com/CivilRights/status/1844780797204513144

For the next two questions, you'll have to use the following information that you can reference at any time during the test:

The Nazca Lines are an amazing sight to see.

It took nearly a century to figure out just 430 of these Nazca geoglyphs, but now AI nearly doubled the number overnight, adding 303 new geoglyphs to our knowledge.

AI might've also revealed why the Nazca lines were constructed!🧵 For background, the Nazca lines are a set of exceptionally well-preserved geoglyphs and walking routes that exist in the agriculturally-unsuitable Nazca Pampa region.

The traditionally-known lines seem to depict things that make sense. For example, here's a spider:

Lots of people are saying this is frivolous because firefighters should have to pass some test, but let's go ahead and look at some test questions so you can see why this test is just way too hard.

This first one's a doozy: Sorry if you're already struggling, but please know: You're not allowed to use a calculator for this one.

Lots of people attacking this decision, but do you think YOU could pass the POST?

Here's a thread of test questions.

Question 1:

https://twitter.com/theblaze/status/1841950243103084851

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:

There are people who desperately want this to be untrue🧵

One example of this came up earlier this year, when a "Professor of Public Policy and Governance" accused other people of being ignorant about SAT scores because, he alleged, high schools predicted college grades better. The thread in question was, ironically, full of irrelevant points that seemed intended to mislead, accompanied by very obvious statistical errors.

For example, one post in it received a Community Note for conditioning on a collider.

"SAT scores just reflect zip codes" is probably dead.

A new study used a sample of 760,000 military children whose families were randomly assigned to different counties/zips and found living in a +1 SD county or zip code for twenty years upped scores by just 0.05 or 0.19 d: That 1 SD gap between Blacks and Whites? It's not explained by Blacks living in about 0.6 SD worse neighborhoods. Maybe about 10% is.

That's probably to much though, because the instrumental variable analysis suggested the sign of the effect on SAT scores was negative!

The College Board just released this year's SAT scores!

I thought I'd go ahead and put everything in familiar terms and make some plots.

This thread will have a lot of pictures. First up: How did everyone do? All of the typical race differences are there. Blacks did roughly 15 IQ points worse, Hispanics did about 10 points worse, Asians did similarly better, etc.

If we scale all that by the sizes of the populations who took the tests, we get this:

A few days ago, I wrote about evidence that the Counter-Reformation impeded scientific progress in the Catholic world relative to the Protestant one.

The evidence doesn't stop there. Lots of places diverge predictably🧵

First, Catholic and Protestant German cities:

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1837196622549373149

When does Spain fall behind the Netherlands and Britain?

After they got worked up about Protestant cells in the country, leading to a crackdown.