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> The handicap principle is a hypothesis proposed by the biologist Amotz Zahavi to explain how evolution may lead to "honest" or reliable signalling between animals which have an obvious motivation to bluff or deceive each other. It suggests that costly signals must be reliable signals, costing the signaller something that could not be afforded by an individual with less of a particular trait

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle


Tax fuel instead if we care about the environment. Let the market decide how to prioritize.


Distribution of 1500+ SAT Scores

White 0.381106

Black/African American 0.0544724

Hispanic/Latino 0.111558

Asian/Asian American 0.414271

Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.00100503

American Indian/Alaska Native 0.00261307

Two or More Races 0.0349749

Sources:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_226.10.a...

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-r...


Is this normalized by number of each demographic that sits for the test? (Sorry if that's answered in the PDF but maybe someone with more time or statistical understanding than me can check it.)


Out of all the people that scored 1500+ on the SATS, this is the percentage breakdown by race.


If the mainstream discourse was "yes, whites are underrepresented, but they deserve it because they're dumb", that would be progress compared to the current "there are too many whites in the Ivies due to white supremacy (and the SAT is racist)" narrative. Sources:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36992516

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36992739


>If the mainstream discourse was "yes, whites are underrepresented, but they deserve it because they're dumb",

This is the mainstream discourse imo. The SFFA case didn't argue against affirmative action for non-white people, they argued against it for white people. They tried to make the case that whites were disproportionately legacy and athlete admits so therefore were dumb. (In my other comments I show that legacy students at Harvard actually had higher SAT scores). The SC of course had an ax to grind against Affirmative Action but the actual evidence, especially in light of the SAT distribution from GP, that there was AA for whites specifically I think is extremely lacking.

It's quite the opposite. Actually, using the same arguments SFFA made, it looks like Ivies discriminated against whites more than Asians. Remember that almost 1 million white students took the SAT in 2021. That leaves a huge number of high scoring students but somehow between only about 25-40% representation at Ivy League and Ivy League adjacent universities.

I think the myth of the privileged, entitled dumb white student with rich parents is pretty commonly used now. The excuse that high scores are a result of having rich parents who bought tutoring only seems to matter when the race of the student is white. It's ironically also the case that whites are the least likely group to take test prep and that test prep only seems effective in the style that East Asians tend to use which is the cram school variety or hagwon.


> using the same arguments SFFA made, it looks like Ivies discriminated against whites more than Asians.

Could you elaborate on this?

> whites are the least likely group to take test prep

I'd love a source for this, if you still have it.


>Could you elaborate on this?

The SFFA case used some research from Princeton(I was told this so I never verified it was from Princeton) which showed that among Asians with a 1550+ on the SAT, the top one percentile of Asian students taking the test exceeded the number of seats at Harvard, etc. for freshman. The SAT has some stats here https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-r...

So the SFFA case argued that the Ivies must be suppressing high scoring Asians. Although ultimately the court case came down to whether or not it was legal for schools to use race for admissions. But, for example, nearly 1 million white students took the SAT in 2020. The top 1 percentile of 1 million is ~10000. Yet the white enrollment at Harvard was only about ~37% that year but discrimination against whites didn't seem to be a factor because SFFA argued that legacy and athletic admissions were secret backdoors allowing AA for white students, without any evidence for this claim.

>source

https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/89/2/435/223527... <- if you can access this article. But here is a quote from a different researcher citing this article (https://www.jstor.org/stable/40984541):

Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites from comparable backgrounds to utilize test preparation

This paper also shows a similar outcome and includes Asians. Asians are the most likely to take test prep. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283121142560...

There is a fair bit of research done about the East-Asian style "shadow education" as they call it. It's worth looking into. As well, the College Board has historically not done a good job of securing the test especially on the international level where a lot of cheating scandals have arisen. The same test prep companies that operate in China and Korea also have operations in the US. This is worth looking at https://theconversation.com/test-prep-is-a-rite-of-passage-f... because it presents evidence that test prep is only really effective in the way East Asians use it which is for long periods of time.


Furthermore, why use 1500 SAT score? Because it gives the distribution you like? Harvard's cutoffs are 1100 for Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics, 1350 for Asian women and 1380 for Asian men, and 1310 for "white wannabe students in states that don’t see a lot of Harvard attendees":

https://nypost.com/2018/10/17/harvards-gatekeeper-reveals-sa...



Freakonomics recently did an episode about popular financial literature vs what academics say:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-personal-finance-gurus-...


Still valid. Put it in the SP500.

If you have kids, you can put it in Utah's 529, and save on taxes when you need it for college.

> The Fund employs an indexing investment approach designed to track the performance of the S&P 500 Index, a widely recognized benchmark of U.S. stock market performance that is dominated by the stocks of large U.S. companies.

http://www.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/i854.pdf


Into the Breach


I played around with many of these before:

- https://github.com/quantopian/qgrid

- https://github.com/man-group/dtale

I find that I'm actually a lot faster using basic Pandas methods to get the data I want in exactly the form I want it.

If I really want to show everything, I just use:

```

with pd.option_context('display.max_rows', None):

   print(df)
```


I use a similar function when I want to see everything:

```

def showAllRows(dataframeToShow):

  with pd.option_context('display.max_rows', None, 'display.max_columns', None):

    display(dataframeToShow)
# calling it while limiting the number of returned rows.

showAllRows(df.head(1000))

```

Be warned though! if you call this function without limiting the number of rows to be fetched, it is guaranteed you will crash your machine. Always use head, sample or slices.

If do get a crush, then your only option is to open the ipynb file with vi and manually delete the millions of lines this function created.

Another function that I like is:

```

def showColumns(df, substring):

    print([x for x in df.columns if substring in x])

    return
# calling it

showColumns(df, "year")

```

This is useful in data frames with many columns, when you want to find all the columns that have a specific string in their name. It returns a string, which then you can pass it in the dataframe to print only these columns.


what irks me about dtale is if you scroll with the vertical slider, it can't update the view fast enough until you stop scrolling.


I had my 4 year old do this and it allowed her to skip a grade:

https://beastacademy.com/books/1A


For Sublime Text users, SFTP is super useful:

https://codexns.io/products/sftp_for_sublime


Something super-similar is available for VSCode too: SFTP https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=liximomo...


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