fubarobfusco comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: eggman 19 February 2014 12:57PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (454)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 23 February 2014 01:24:32AM *  3 points [-]

Your comment seems to make many good points. However, I identified a few evident falsehoods in areas I know something about, which leads me to suspect a similar laxity with the truth in areas I know less about.

For instance:

This means someone who wants to practice Law or Marketing needs to go $120,000 in debt and waste four years of their life getting a degree in Art History to present at their interview.

If you want to practice law, you're best served by studying lab sciences, math, or government in undergrad. (Those are the undergraduate majors with the highest admittance rate to law school.) Then you go to law school, which is where you incur the goatloads of debt.

The fact that you can't get admitted to the bar (in most of the U.S.) without going to law school is not a result of anyone's ideology about intelligence. This policy change was adopted explicitly by states in response to pressure by the American Bar Association beginning in the 1890s. IQ testing didn't even exist then. (And for what it's worth, scientific racism was at that time deemed progressive.)

Comment author: epursimuove 04 July 2014 04:31:33PM 0 points [-]

(Those are the undergraduate majors with the highest admittance rate to law school.)

Does this control for different average IQ (or SAT, if you prefer) among different majors?