Back to episode — Episode 2291 Scott Adams - CWSA 11/13/23, Reframing The News So You Can Use It
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lse on Earth. We all know that. Now there's a special case where if I ask you is there milk in the refrigerator and you looked and there was one container and you look and it's empty and then you look really carefully in the rest of the refrigerator and there's no other milk, yes, in that very weird specific case you can know there's no milk in the refrigerator. But you know that's a very special…
← Previous segment →do with QAnon. And also I was debunking QAnon. Yeah yeah yeah, but you get all your news from Fox News. To which I say no I don't. I consciously and publicly look at all the news sources left and right and I criticize them all. Yeah but Trump said that a guy with a disability in his arm, he mocked him in public. No he didn't. You look at the compilation clips that the right never sees where he's been using the same gesture for ordinary everyday people with no disabilities forever, which they have never seen. Anyway, so that's your fun for Thanksgiving.
Washington DC is having trouble getting enough social workers. They've got some kind of a diversity problem here 'cause I guess there's some kind of test you can take to qualify as a social worker. And 76% of white test takers passed but only 33% of black test takers did. And weirdly Asian American test takers were in between, which you don't normally see in these objective tests. But the belief is that what's happening here is that it's letting too many white people get into the jobs and is what they say diversifying the field. In other words, it's a field they want, like everything else, to be diversified. But when you have a test that white people are passing at a three times or more the level of black people, you're going in the opposite direction. And now you might ask yourself, and then the claim is that the test itself is racially biased. So they're not saying that the black applicants have less qualifications. They're saying that it's a test that if you gave it to any white person and any black person, on average, not any person but on average, there would be a racial bias built into the questions so massive that has like a tripling effect of who passes and who fails. I mean, really big effect.
So what's your first question? Can you give me an example of one of those questions? Right. Well it turns out that they're private, and it makes sense 'cause it's a test. You can't give people the questions 'cause then they know the answers before they took the test. So they can't tell you the questions. They can only tell you that they've secretly seen the questions and they think that they might be biased. Do you buy that? Is that a strong argument? The things we can't show you are biased. Well, remember there used to be the same argument about the SATs. Do you remember that years ago? People said the SATs, the questions are biased. And I remember saying the same thing. Can you give me an example of a biased math question or a biased any other kind of question? And they actually had an example that persuaded me. Now I don't know how many of these there are, but I'm going to give you the same example. And I remember hearing it and thinking, I'll be damned, they do actually have an example that's completely racially biased. Here's the example I heard. Now I'm not going to claim that from this one example you can say much, but what if there are more examples? You know, I was surprised there was even one example. And I'm going to give it to you. But what if there are more? Here's the example. The question was something like match this word to the one that's, you know, that goes with it. And the word was cup. And the options were
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table, saucer, and then some third one like plate. The white applicants or the white test takers were more likely to say cup and saucer because they're literally a pair, cup and saucer. But if you were from a low-income house, what are the odds you'd ever seen a saucer? So it turns out that a lot of the low-income people didn't even know what a saucer was. Is that their fault? Is there something w…
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