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Notes -
Hey, welcome to TheMotte.
Can you elaborate on why you think that removing honors classes will be super-effective? Can you point to a similar strategy in history that worked well?
Because I think of the original affirmative action policies put in place to limit the number of Jews from higher education at elite universities around the turn of the 20th century, and I note that Jewish advantage in higher education remained durable through those policies.
I think you might want to start by proving that the difference in racial make-up in higher-education in cognitively difficult classes, like math and physics and so on, is actually based in bias, and not in accurately reflecting racial differences in intelligence. You can do this by finding a measure of capacity in these topics that isn't biased, like double-blinded standardized tests or even just lifetime achievement of a racial group in a field across history, and seeing if that measure is reflected uniformly across racial groups.
Let's get some consensus on where north actually is before we call the compass pointing not where we expected it to biased.
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