Agene Roflmao

Authorized to speak on behalf of the hive mind.

[Robert Shibley @rshibley]

Once again I am begging colleges to have a training or something where you just repeatedly tell faculty and admins "It's illegal to just pick your favorite race and give them a leg up, and we need you to immediately stop doing so before we get sued into oblivion."

[Santi Ruiz @rSanti97]

The McKinsey study that claimed diverse workforces lead to bigger profits was always fake (they won't share data, it doesn't replicate for the S&P500 or other settings, and it doesn't make sense).

But fake social psych research is a demand problem, not just a supply problem.

[Justin Amash @justinamash]

A reminder that Trump declared a phony emergency to falsely justify imposing tariffs—in contravention of the Constitution and law—so he can use them as levers for his political and personal whims. It’s a violation of the separation of powers and an extraordinary abuse of office.

Trump has temporarily masked the harm to the economy by delaying implementation. U.S. companies boosted inventories in anticipation of the tariffs, igniting an unsustainable but mild boom to be followed by a bust. The worst can be avoided if the government soon changes course, though some of the damage can’t be undone.

If the judiciary expeditiously and conclusively rules against Trump—that it is unlawful for the president to unilaterally impose tariffs under the claimed authority of the IEEPA—then everyone can declare victory. Trump can blame the Supreme Court for curtailing his “beautiful” scheme. Congress can reclaim its authority. The people can benefit from more choices and lower prices on countless goods, including U.S. goods.

If the judiciary acts too slowly or rules incorrectly—and the tariffs go fully into effect—then the economy will suffer tremendously (to say nothing of the injury to the Rule of Law), and almost everyone loses.

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

BREAKING: DOJ releases new guidance explaining that DEI programs — and even proxies such as “overcoming obstacles” stories and DEI statements — violate the law if they discriminate based on protected characteristics.

The memo lists “best practices” for avoiding legal issues.

🧵

[Bryan Caplan @bryan_caplan]

"Since @Hillsdale is not legally entitled to government funding, neither is any other notable college in America. Why? Because unlike Hillsdale, virtually every US college has been flagrantly discriminating on the basis of race and sex for decades."
https://t.co/crJIApiu1g

[Eiko Fried @EikoFried]

In February 2024, I wrote Scientific Reports about a published meta-analysis claiming that mindfulness interventions affect neural plasticity, 'cementing the neuropsychological basis of mindfulness-based interventions'.
Paper was retracted yesterday—here a process summary.🧵

[Agene Roflmao @Agene_R]

@rpondiscio @nsachdeva2019 @JimHewittOISE Education as an institution requires fantasy for public support. It is incompatible with scientific inquiry.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

🚨This is scandalous. Members of Congress cannot legally be turned away from ICE facilities when conducting oversight. The El Paso SPC is one of the few ICE detention centers owned by ICE. Yet these emails say Kristi Noem herself is deciding when and how Members can do oversight.

[Zaid Jilani @ZaidJilani]

By pandering to sadists and militarizing our cities, Trump is losing his political edge on immigration. A new Gallup poll shows America once again lurching to the left, likely out of disgust with Trump overreach on deportations and due process. https://t.co/Ntv6ajRT39

[Jack @tracewoodgrains]

This is a fair question! Opposition to ability grouping is a fringe idea opposed by the great majority of parents. So which obscure, fringe organizations are pushing it?

Let's ask the National Council of Teachers of English what they think:

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Pump the brakes: the Digital SAT is not even slightly scandalous.

This is unambiguous if you read the College Board's reports on the matter. Let's start with the plan.

Switching to computer adaptive testing (dubbed the Digital SAT) was always expected. It's known to be capable of making testing less expensive and more rapid, without any loss of validity or fairness. We've known that it's possible for a long time. For example, here's Bugbee's review from all the way back in 1996.

The College Board, being one of the best testing authorities out there, takes the psychometrics of its examinations very seriously. Each year, they throw out questions that are biased by several background variables including race and sex, and they do not take bias lightly or lying down.

When it came time to transition to the Digital SAT, they outlined their strategy, like so:

The College Board undertook several studies to fine-tune and evaluate the Digital SAT, and they didn't introduce it before the required studies were through. Those studies suggest that it works great, like so many other computer-adaptive testing regimes.

How great? The simplest way to show this is to look at the concordance study. That study featured a representative sample of 12,640 students who took both the pen-and-paper and the Digital SAT.

Scores are so highly correlated between formats, that it's like one person taking the same test from the pen-and-paper format twice. That should put to bed any and all thoughts that there's a "scandal," but let's go further.

The achieved means and standard deviations are identical. For Reading and Writing, Mathematics, and the Total Score, the means for both assessment types are 602, 600, and 1202. The standard deviations are 94 and 113 for the two subscores, and we know that they intercorrelated almost identically because the standard deviation for the total score was 195 for the pen-and-paper test and 192 for the Digital SAT—basically the same.

The mean difference between testings within the pen-and-paper SAT is positive: when people retest, they tend to do a little better. The mean difference between testings with the pen-and-paper and the Digital SAT is zero, because they're not totally identical, but they are equivalent assessments of the same things.

The mean absolute deviation (i.e., the amount each individual is expected to deviate between testings) is 38, 46, and 59 points for an individual retaking the pen-and-paper SAT, for the Reading and Writing, Mathematics, and Total scores, respectively. The same number for crossing over to or from the Digital SAT is 36, 36, and 54 points. Again, however, the mean difference between test formats is zero.

Across subgroups (e.g., ESOL, 11th or 12th graders, male or female, Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, etc.), the mean scores, standard deviations, and thus the gaps were also similar.

There is simply no controversy here. The Digital SAT is good. It is a way to save students and invigilators time, while giving them the same high-quality test sensible people have come to know and love. So if anyone asks if you've heard about the Digital SAT scandal, you can confidently tell them that any scandal about the Digital SAT is equally a scandal about the pen-and-paper SAT, and the scandals for that test are hooey.

Sources:

https://t.co/8IqUTdVD7A

https://t.co/tZNHDfuero

https://t.co/REaTir13x4

https://t.co/vGVZNarQHI

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

We did this. We turned people over to El Salvador to be beaten and abused, with no due process at all; in fact, openly illegally.

Everyone involved must be held accountable.

[Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @JoshEakle]

Garcia is back in the States and can speak.

And, because of his testimony, it's clear that CECOT is torturing inmates.

In 2025, the American President is disappearing immigrants to concentration camps in El Salvador to be tortured until they die.

This cannot be who we are.

[Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo]

I do not understand this compulsion people in universities apparently have to write down things that are illegal and/or likely to get them fired.

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

GREAT NEWS: The DOJ is investigating the University of California — the first place to use DEI statements in academic hiring — for alleged discrimination in hiring on the basis of race and sex.

@HarmeetKDhillon’s letter:

[Stephanie H. Murray @stephmurrayyyy]

Btw if you guys are impressed by the marriage trends for college educated women, the trend for high earning women will blow your mind.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

Note please that this is writing up a @USGAO report from 2021. It is not a new report. Rather, it highlights the problems that ICE has had in the past, to emphasize why the current quotas and rapid deportations are likely to sweep up people who should not be deported.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

Historians in a sane posterity will marvel at the fact that the dominant political party of the world's imperial hegemon at its zenith rallied to this cause with greater unanimity than they did any other.
https://t.co/ZpbqJDQ3te

[Agene Roflmao @Agene_R]

@NancyRomm What a weird argument. “It might not work” therefore we shouldn’t try? Bunker busting the remote weapons complex equals leveling Iranian cities? I’m not sold either way and this was not helpful.

[Aaron Sibarium @aaronsibarium]

NEW: The Harvard Law Review axes 85% of pieces using a rubric that asks about "author diversity." It even axed a piece by an Asian scholar after editors complained that there were "not enough Black" authors.

We analyzed 500 new documents from HLR. What we found was shocking.🧵