Richard Hanania reflects on 2021; Freddie deBoer on college admissions; Infovores on elite lies; Rav Arora on elite denial of crime; Zvi on the absence of evidence
I’ll offer another hypothesis on the motives for college admissions which has been put forth by other well before me. Tuition at elite college covers less than 1/3 of the operating costs. The interest /gains from the endowment covers about half the costs. The balance is covered by “annual fund” donations most of which are large $100k+ gifts that come from about 400 individuals in any one year.
Now to make a $100k+ annual gift one needs a least $1M of annual income. There a very few people that earn at that level. My guess is a typical elite college produces around 10 such individuals per year. Most elite colleges admit approximately 10,000 students per year and like a VC firm they in effect are making bets at 1:1000 in the hopes of creating a handful of loyal $1M+ earners in order to stay alive from their future generosity.
They are well aware of this reality but it verboten to discuss. The administration knows it has some leeway on the 10,000 new matriculants, but there are limits to how many subpar candidates they can accept to meet their woke commitments for diversity and inclusion. Serving the alumni donors that give large sums also obligates the universities to admit their children when possible. Additionally, the hope is that the offspring of the wealthy will themselves be wealthy and make large future gifts.
So, the motivation of elite universities for a admissions is to make 1000:1 VC like bets In order to survive. It’s purely economical.
Steve Sailer often makes the related point that elite colleges need to keep admitting hateful white minor sports frat boys because they are by far the most likely to contribute to these funding drives.
> Tuition at elite college covers less than 1/3 of the operating costs.
This just pushes the question one step back. What is the breakdown of their operating costs? How much is spent on the actual tuition as opposed to, say, managing endowments, running the funding drives etc.? I.e. to what extent are elite colleges self-licking ice cream cones?
But the point is about the bad-faith abuse of the term to mispresent the real state of knowledge and the intentional objective to encourage erroneous inferences and create false impressions among one's audience. One can mislead without making any technically false statements but by essentially lying about how confident a reader is entitled to be in the wrong views that the writer is specifically trying to elicit.
So, in terms of pure logic, and if you are pretty confident that good investigators have looked dilligently for evidence something they have not been able to find but which should be easy to find if true, then sure, absence of evidence is some evidence for absence.
Bus when used in contemporary media, use of the phrase is strong evidence for the absence of nothing but a giant pile of BS.
You are restating Alexander's and Mowshowitz's point, with which I do not disagree whatsoever. But they did not (and would not) say "evidence of absence is not absence of evidence" because they are righteous Bayesians. The main problem they are criticizing is a narrowminded (at best) evaluation of available evidence.
What I am disagreeing with is that when Kling says:
"As the saying goes, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that we don’t know any alien life does not guarantee that that there is no alien life."
he is operating from a frequentist (read: incorrect) framework. The fact we have not observed any alien life is great evidence that it doesn't exist where we haven't observed it and some evidence it might not exist at all even where we haven't been able to look. Leaping from "we don't know any alien life" to "does not guarantee" is not how basic logic works, yes, but that's a straw man of Bayesian reasoning anyway because he's leaping from probabilistic reasoning to definitive conclusions. The fact that we have not confirmed any alien life is pretty good evidence we should use high skepticism when evaluating claims of say UFOs. See also: Bigfoot, ghosts, angels.
All of this could be avoided if the classics sayings were:
The absence of evidence is not NECESSARILY evidence of absence.
Correlation does not NECESSARILY imply causation.
Precision matters because too many people hear these common phrases and end up having different but still incorrect impressions about how to reason from statistics.
Shouldn't logical principle read 'the absence of evidence is not [necessarily] evidence of absence"? The positive claimant *still* bears the burden of proof. Or did someone disprove 'Russell's Teapot' and I didn't get the memo?
Something doesn't add up on the college outrage. Presumably we care about these institutions because of the job prospects they enable. Shouldn't we then be upset with corporate america for their hiring practices? And if corporate america is being systematically hoodwinked into hiring poorly-selected people shouldn't their performance suffer?
I think the Hannia diagnosis of universities proves too much. And doesn't so much emphasis on WHY people are wrong get in the way of persuading them that they ARE wrong?
"I’d say that it never ‘made sense’ to use ‘no evidence’ as a synonym for ‘false’ and that this is not a word choice that is made in good faith."
"False" itself is almost always a bad faith word in journalism too. It usually appears lately in the phrase "Falsely claimed" which is the same kind of journalistic tic as "no evidence". But worse, because it's grammatically at odds with itself. If someone makes a claim, it's by definition a disputed fact.
Hanania's piece also has a nice description of libertarianism:
"This is a good case for being a libertarian; while you might want government interventions that are likely to have a positive impact, in reality government will either be activist or passive, and passive is generally better because, like in any complex system, there are always more ways to interfere destructively in an economy than to interfere in a positive way."
Hanania's take on colleges seems rather harsh, but this might be important food for thought: "If it wasn’t for wokeness, the people who determine policy in public schools and universities would still need somewhere to direct their energies. One can imagine them turning in a more committed direction towards socialism or extreme forms of environmentalism hostile to economic growth, which would probably be worse for humanity."
Private universities are one thing; state universities are another. Abolishing college admissions departments and replacing them with simple metrics (i.e., get above this score on the SAT) can be done. The fact that is hasn't already is a policy failure. Republicans completely control state governments in ~20 states. Affirmative action consistently polls poorly. Eliminating it (and making the college application take a few minutes to fill out) would be popular. No one cares... yet.
I agree. I also think it should be a minimum SAT/ACT score, something reasonable, no grades. At the federal level restrict Pell grants to a similar cut off.
I’ll offer another hypothesis on the motives for college admissions which has been put forth by other well before me. Tuition at elite college covers less than 1/3 of the operating costs. The interest /gains from the endowment covers about half the costs. The balance is covered by “annual fund” donations most of which are large $100k+ gifts that come from about 400 individuals in any one year.
Now to make a $100k+ annual gift one needs a least $1M of annual income. There a very few people that earn at that level. My guess is a typical elite college produces around 10 such individuals per year. Most elite colleges admit approximately 10,000 students per year and like a VC firm they in effect are making bets at 1:1000 in the hopes of creating a handful of loyal $1M+ earners in order to stay alive from their future generosity.
They are well aware of this reality but it verboten to discuss. The administration knows it has some leeway on the 10,000 new matriculants, but there are limits to how many subpar candidates they can accept to meet their woke commitments for diversity and inclusion. Serving the alumni donors that give large sums also obligates the universities to admit their children when possible. Additionally, the hope is that the offspring of the wealthy will themselves be wealthy and make large future gifts.
So, the motivation of elite universities for a admissions is to make 1000:1 VC like bets In order to survive. It’s purely economical.
Steve Sailer often makes the related point that elite colleges need to keep admitting hateful white minor sports frat boys because they are by far the most likely to contribute to these funding drives.
> Tuition at elite college covers less than 1/3 of the operating costs.
This just pushes the question one step back. What is the breakdown of their operating costs? How much is spent on the actual tuition as opposed to, say, managing endowments, running the funding drives etc.? I.e. to what extent are elite colleges self-licking ice cream cones?
Absence of evidence frequently is evidence of absence. Correlation is frequently causation too.
The trick is having reasonable conclusions from available evidence and the lack of expected evidence.
That's correct, so far as it goes.
But the point is about the bad-faith abuse of the term to mispresent the real state of knowledge and the intentional objective to encourage erroneous inferences and create false impressions among one's audience. One can mislead without making any technically false statements but by essentially lying about how confident a reader is entitled to be in the wrong views that the writer is specifically trying to elicit.
So, in terms of pure logic, and if you are pretty confident that good investigators have looked dilligently for evidence something they have not been able to find but which should be easy to find if true, then sure, absence of evidence is some evidence for absence.
Bus when used in contemporary media, use of the phrase is strong evidence for the absence of nothing but a giant pile of BS.
You are restating Alexander's and Mowshowitz's point, with which I do not disagree whatsoever. But they did not (and would not) say "evidence of absence is not absence of evidence" because they are righteous Bayesians. The main problem they are criticizing is a narrowminded (at best) evaluation of available evidence.
What I am disagreeing with is that when Kling says:
"As the saying goes, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that we don’t know any alien life does not guarantee that that there is no alien life."
he is operating from a frequentist (read: incorrect) framework. The fact we have not observed any alien life is great evidence that it doesn't exist where we haven't observed it and some evidence it might not exist at all even where we haven't been able to look. Leaping from "we don't know any alien life" to "does not guarantee" is not how basic logic works, yes, but that's a straw man of Bayesian reasoning anyway because he's leaping from probabilistic reasoning to definitive conclusions. The fact that we have not confirmed any alien life is pretty good evidence we should use high skepticism when evaluating claims of say UFOs. See also: Bigfoot, ghosts, angels.
All of this could be avoided if the classics sayings were:
The absence of evidence is not NECESSARILY evidence of absence.
Correlation does not NECESSARILY imply causation.
Precision matters because too many people hear these common phrases and end up having different but still incorrect impressions about how to reason from statistics.
Shouldn't logical principle read 'the absence of evidence is not [necessarily] evidence of absence"? The positive claimant *still* bears the burden of proof. Or did someone disprove 'Russell's Teapot' and I didn't get the memo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
Something doesn't add up on the college outrage. Presumably we care about these institutions because of the job prospects they enable. Shouldn't we then be upset with corporate america for their hiring practices? And if corporate america is being systematically hoodwinked into hiring poorly-selected people shouldn't their performance suffer?
I think the Hannia diagnosis of universities proves too much. And doesn't so much emphasis on WHY people are wrong get in the way of persuading them that they ARE wrong?
"I’d say that it never ‘made sense’ to use ‘no evidence’ as a synonym for ‘false’ and that this is not a word choice that is made in good faith."
"False" itself is almost always a bad faith word in journalism too. It usually appears lately in the phrase "Falsely claimed" which is the same kind of journalistic tic as "no evidence". But worse, because it's grammatically at odds with itself. If someone makes a claim, it's by definition a disputed fact.
Hanania's piece also has a nice description of libertarianism:
"This is a good case for being a libertarian; while you might want government interventions that are likely to have a positive impact, in reality government will either be activist or passive, and passive is generally better because, like in any complex system, there are always more ways to interfere destructively in an economy than to interfere in a positive way."
Hanania's take on colleges seems rather harsh, but this might be important food for thought: "If it wasn’t for wokeness, the people who determine policy in public schools and universities would still need somewhere to direct their energies. One can imagine them turning in a more committed direction towards socialism or extreme forms of environmentalism hostile to economic growth, which would probably be worse for humanity."
Private universities are one thing; state universities are another. Abolishing college admissions departments and replacing them with simple metrics (i.e., get above this score on the SAT) can be done. The fact that is hasn't already is a policy failure. Republicans completely control state governments in ~20 states. Affirmative action consistently polls poorly. Eliminating it (and making the college application take a few minutes to fill out) would be popular. No one cares... yet.
I agree. I also think it should be a minimum SAT/ACT score, something reasonable, no grades. At the federal level restrict Pell grants to a similar cut off.