Rationality Quotes April 2012

Because this is (to my mind) an example of a situation where the facts aren't friendly and the truth is harmful - thus (hopefully) justifying my objection to the original quote.

If you know of any illusions that give inevitably ceasing to exist negative utility to someone leading a positive-utility life, I would love to have them dispelled for me.

I'm not endorsing that, for exactly the reason you said: knowing stuff, on average, will let you achieve your goals. The original quote, though, stated that the truth is "never unsatisfying", which seemed to me to be a false statement.

You got me, since during the time I did believe that I was a lot less happy than I am now, because that falsehood was part of a whole set of falsehoods which led to annoying obligations. But I do distinctly remember being satisfied with knowing the ultimate goal of the universe and my place in it, and how realising the truth made me feel unsatisfied.

The statement "the truth is never an unsatisfying thing" seems to be affect-heuristic reasoning: going from "truth is useful" to "truth is good" to "truth always feels good to know".

Not a complete answer, but here's commentary from a ffdn review of Chapter 14:

Kevin S. Van Horn
7/24/10 . chapter 14
Harry is jumping to conclusions when he tells McGonagall that the Time-Turner isn't even Turing computable. Time travel simulation is simply a matter of solving fixed-point equation f(x) = x. Here x is the information sent back in time, and f is a function that maps the information received from the future to the information that gets sent back in time. If a solution exists at all, you can find it to any desired degree of accuracy by simply enumerating all possible rational values of x until you find one that satisfies the equation. And if f is known to be both continuous and have a convex compact range, then the Brouwer fixed-point theorem guarantees that there will be a solution.

So the only way I can see that simulating the Time-Turner wouldn't be Turing computable would be if the physical laws of our universe give rise to fixed-point equations that have no solutions. But the existence of the Time-Turner then proves that the conditions leading to no solution can never arise.

infinite memory space

Curious, does "memory space" mean something more than just "memory"?

Just a little more specific. Some people may hear "memory" and associate it with, say, the duration of their memory rather than how many can be physically held. For example when a human is said to have a 'really good memory' we don't tend to be trying to make a claim about the theoretical maximum amount of stuff they could remember.

No, although either or both might be a little misleading depending on what connotations you attach to it: an idealized Turing machine stores all its state on a rewritable tape (or several tapes, but that's equivalent to the one-tape version) of symbols that's infinite in both directions. You could think of that as analogous to both memory and disk, or to whatever the system you're actually working with uses for storage.

Have you ever tried to teach math to anyone who is not good at math? In my youth I once tutored a woman who was poor, but motivated enough to pay $40/session. A major obstacle was teaching her how to calculate (a^b)^c and getting her to reliably notice that minus times minus equals plus. Despite my attempts at creative physical demonstrations of the notion of a balanced scale, I couldn't get her to really understand the notion of doing the same things to both sides of a mathematical equation. I don't think she would ever understand what was going on in matrix calculus, period, barring "teaching methods" that involve neural reprogramming or gain of additional hardware.

I fear you're committing the typical mind fallacy. The dyscalculic could simulate a Turing machine, but all of mathematics, including basic arithmetic, is whaargarbl to them. They're often highly intelligent (though of course the diagnosis is "intelligent elsewhere, unintelligent at maths"), good at words and social things, but literally unable to calculate 17+17 more accurately than "somewhere in the twenties or thirties" or "I have no idea" without machine assistance. I didn't believe it either until I saw it.

I can't imagine how hard it is to learn to program if you don't instinctively know how. Yet I know it is that hard for many people. Some succeed in learning, some don't. Those who do still have big differences in ability, and ability at a young age seems to be a pretty good predictor of lifetime ability.

I realize I must have learned the basics at some point, although I don't remember it. And I remember learning many more advanced concepts during the many years since. But for both the basics and the advanced subjects, I never experienced anything I can compare to what I'd call "learning" in other subjects I studied.

When programming, if I see/read something new, I may need some time (seconds or hours) to understand it, then once I do, I can use it. It is cognitively very similar to seeing a new room for the first time. It's novel, but I understand it intuitively and in most cases quickly.

When I studied e.g. biology or math at university, I had to deliberately memorize, to solve exercises before understanding the "real thing", to accept that some things I could describe I couldn't duplicate by building them from scratch no matter how much time I had and what materials and tools. This never happened to me in programming. I may not fully understand the domain problem that the program is manipulating. But I always understand the program itself.

And yet I've seen people struggle to understand the most elementary concepts of programming, like, say, distinguishing between names and values. I've had to work with some pretty poor programmers, and had the official job of on-the-job mentoring newbies on two occasions. I know it can be very difficult to teach effectively, it can be very difficult to learn.

Given that I encountered a heavily preselected set of people, who were trying to make programming their main profession, it's easy for me to believe that - at the extreme - for many people elementary programming is impossible to learn, period. And the same should apply to math and any other "abstract" subject for which biologically normal people don't have dedicated thinking modules in their brains.

Obviously the man in the Chinese room lacks understanding, by most common definitions of understanding. It is the room as a system which understands Chinese. (Assuming lookup tables can understand. By functional definitions, they should be able to.)

This is weird. It is hard for me to hear the difference in the cadence, but crystal clear otherwise. In the cadence, the problem for me is that the notes are dragging on, like when you press pedal on piano a bit, that makes it hard to discern the difference.

Maybe they lost something in retelling here? Made up new stimuli for which it doesn't work because of harmonics or something?

Or maybe its just me and everyone on this thread? I have a lot of trouble hearing speech through noise (like that of flowing water), i always have to tell others, i am not hearing what you're saying i am washing the dishes. Though i've no idea how well other people can hear something when they are washing the dishes; maybe i care too much not to pretend to listen when i don't hear.

This needs proper study.

F   B♭   C   F
F   B♭   Cmi F

I've had between a dozen and two dozen music students over the years. (Guitar and bass guitar.) Some of them started out having trouble telling the difference between ascending and descending intervals. (In other words, some of them had bad ears.) All of them improved, and all of them, with practice, were able to hear me play something and play it back by ear. I'm sure there are some people who are neurologically unable to do this, but in general, it is a learnable skill.

The cognitive fun! website has a musical interval exercise.

Edit: One disadvantage to that exercise/game for people who aren't already familiar with the intervals is that it doesn't have you differentiate between major and minor intervals. (So if you select e.g. 2 and 8 as your intervals, you'll be hearing three different intervals, because some of the 2nds will be minor rather than major.) Sooner or later I'll write my own interval game!

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2074

It shocked the hell out of me, too.

Likewise.

I stated the evidence incorrectly, look at the uncle/aunt of your comment (if you haven't already) for the actual evidence.

If you limit yourself to humans, yes. But at least one mind has to be able to think a thought for that thought to exist.

I believe wnoise was making a joke-- one that I thought was moderately funny.

Well, I can elaborate, but I'm not sure how helpful it will be. "No one can be told what the matrix is" and that sort of thing. The basic idea is that it's the equivalent of the line rising out of the paper in two-dimensions, but in three dimensions instead. But that's not telling someone who has tried and failed anything they don't know, I'm sure.

If you really want to be able to visualize higher-order spaces, my advice would be to work with them, do math and computer programming in higher-order spaces, and use that to build up physical intuitions of how things work in higher-order spaces. Once you have the physical intuitions it's easier for your brain to map them to something meaningful. Of course if your reason for wanting to be able to visualize 4D-space is because you want to use the visualization to give you physical intuitions about it that will be useful in math or computer programming, this is an ass-backward way of approaching the problem.

Doing specific rotations by breaking it into steps is possible. Rotations by 90 degrees through the higher dimensions is doable with some effort -- it's just coordinate swapping after all. You can make checks that you got it right. Once you have this mastered, you can compose it with rotations that don't touch the higher dimensions. Then compose again with one of these 90 degree rotations, and you have an effective rotation through the higher dimensions.

(Understanding the commutation relations for rotation helps in this breakdown, of course. If you can then go on to understanding how the infinitesimal rotations work, you've got the whole thing down.)

Adding multiple temporal dimensions effectively how I do it, so one more shouldn't be a problem*. I visualize a 3 dimensional object in an space with a reference point that can move in n perpendicular directions. As the point of reference moves through the space, the object's shape and size change.

Example: to visualize a 5-dimensional sphere, I first visualize a 3 dimensional sphere that can move along a 1 dimensional line. As the point of reference reaches the three-dimensional sphere, a point appears, and this point grows into a full sized sphere at the middle, then shrinks back down to a point. I then add another degree of freedom perpendicular to the first line, and repeat the procedure.

Rotations are still very hard for me to do, and become increasingly difficult with 5 or more dimensions. I think this is due to a very limited amount of short-term memory. As for my technique, I think it piggybacks on the ability to imagine multiple timelines simultaneously. So, alas, it's a matter of repurposing existing abilities, not constructing entirely new ones.

*up to 7: 3 of space, 3 of observer-space, and 1 of time

There's a pretty serious gap between the idea of a person evolved to visualize four dimensions and it being capable of thoughts I cannot think. This might be defensible, but if so only in the context of certain thoughts, something like qualitative ones. But the original quote was inferring from the fact that not everyone can see all the colors to the idea that there are thoughts we cannot think. If 'colors I can't see' are the only kinds of things we can defend as thoughts that I cannot think, then the original quote is trivial.

So even if you can defend 4d visualizations as thoughts I cannot think, you'd have to extend your argument to something else.

But I have a question in return: how would the belief that there are thoughts you cannot think modify your anticipations? What would that look like?

Well, for example I don't think very much about soccer. There are thoughts about who the best soccer team is that I simply don't ever think. But I can think them.

Another case: In two different senses of 'can', I can and can't understand Spanish. I can't understand it at the moment, but nevertheless Spanish sentences are in principle translatable into sentences I can understand. I also can't read Aztec hieroglyphs, and here the problem is more serious: no one knows how to read them. But nevertheless, insofar as we assume they are a form of language, we assume that we could translate them given the proper resources. To see something as translatable just is to see it as a language, and to see something as a language is to see it as translatable. Anything which was is in principle untranslatable just isn't recognizable as a language.

I think the point is analogous (and that's no accident) with thoughts. Any thought that I couldn't think by any means is something I cannot by any means recognize as a thought in the first place. All this is just a way of saying that the belief that there are thoughts you cannot think is one of those beliefs that could never modify your anticipations. That should be enough to discount it as a serious consideration.

Can you rotate four dimensional solids in your head?

Well, suppose I'm colorblind from birth. I can't visualize green. Is this significantly different from the example of 4d rotations?

If so, how? (ETA: after all, we can do all the math associated with 4d rotations, so we're not deficient in conceptualizing them, just in imagining them. Arguably, computers can't visualize them either. They just do the math and move on).

If not, then is this the only kind of thought (i.e. visualizations, etc.) that we can defend as potentially unthinkable by us? If this is the only kind of thought thus defensible, then we've rendered the original quote trivial: it infers from the fact that it's possible to be unable to see a color that it's possible to be unable to think a thought. But if these kinds of visualizations are the only kinds of thoughts we might not be able to think, then the quote isn't saying anything.

if imposing reasonable egalitarianism (whatever "reasonable" is) was too costly to be sustainable, it seems unlikely that we'd have developed intuitions calling for it.

Some of the local Right are likely to claim that we developed them just for the purpose of signaling, and that they're the worst thing EVAH when applied to reality. ;)

(Please don't take this as a political attack, guys, my debate with you is philosophical. I just need a signifier for you.)

Unfair is the opposite of fair, not the logical complement. The moon is neither happy nor sad.

That is indeed possible if F is incoherent or has no referent. The assertion seems equivalent to "There's no such thing as fairness".

“The world is fair” = world.fairness > 0
“The world is unfair” = world.fairness < 0
“The world is neither fair nor unfair” = world.fairness == 0, or something like this.

In my experience the people who say "life isn't fair" are the main reason that it still isn't.

How did you develop a sufficiently powerful causal model of "life" to establish this claim with such confidence?

Current example: A friend of mine telling her very intelligent son that he has to do boring schoolwork because life isn't fair.

It occurs to me to ask her whether a good gifted and talented program is available.

I don't remember exactly what I imagined, but it was something like this:

Alice: I can't believe it! They chose that other guy for the job even though I have 6 more years of experience than him. It is so unfair... The only reason they picked him was because he went to the same school as the boss.

Bob: Well, life isn't fair sometimes. Just suck it up, work on your resume, and give the next interview your best shot.

The problem is, hardly anyone else would describe a person who's actually in a position of power to do the rearranging - like e.g. Lenin - as "Gnostic"; he has certainly been known as a dreamer blind to reality, but as I pointed out that's a very general indictment. The way it's actually used throughout history, "Gnosticism" has the connotations of a monastic life and mystical pursuits, detached from daily life or outright fleeing from society; after all, no leader who actually left a noticeable mark on society has ever been called that. Many parallels have been drawn between Marxism/Facscism/transhumanism/etc and religious fundamentalism, but those parallels did not include a persecuted, non-populist and underground branch of a religion.

The word has always been associated with "heresy", and a tendency that's imposing its own dogma & suppressing opposition is not called a "heresy". Voegelin should've introduced a new term for the category of people he wanted to indict instead of appropriating an unsuitable word.

In the form you posed the question ("which is more likely to happen first") it is much more difficult to answer because I'd have to evaluate how likely are institutions such as the lottery and the Catholic Church to persist in their current form for centuries or millennia.

Good point.

choosing a Schelling point

Aren't you choosing an anti-Schelling point? It seems to me that people avoid playing low Kolmogorov-complexity lottery numbers because of a sense that they're not random enough -- exactly the fallacious intuition that prompts the shocked faces you enjoy.

(Now that I think about it, choosing a Schelling point does have the disadvantage that should I win, I'd have to split the jackpot with more people, but I don't think that's ever gonna happen anyway.))

With this in mind I think I would choose combinations that match the pattern /[3-9][0-9][3-9][0-9][1-6][0-9]/. Six digit numbers look too much like dates!

After seeing quite a few examples, I've recently become very sensitive to comparisons of an abstract idea of something with an objective something, as if they were on equal footing. Your question explicitly says the Pope conversion is a legitimate non-shenanigans event, while not making the same claim of the lottery result. Was that intentional?

No, I just didn't think of it. (Assume that I meant that, if someone happens to have bought a 1-2-3-4-5-6 ticket, they would indeed be able to claim the top prize.)

1-2-3-4-5-6 is a Schelling point for overt tampering with a lottery.

I don't think that's true. If you were going to tamper with the lottery, isn't your most likely motive that you want to win it? Why, then, set it up in such a way that you have to share the prize with the thousands of other people who play those numbers?

But according to your current beliefs, in the actual world the theorem is necessarily true and its negation impossible

Whuh? I have logical uncertainty about the theorem.

Source?

Thank you! Fixed the link to match yours.

His instant demonization and near lynching (people putting out a dead or alive bounty) seems a very troubling development for American society.

More justice for Trayvon I guess.

I agree, so if you intended this as a counterpoint, it seems to follow that I have inconsistent beliefs. If so, can you expand?

We may be moving too fast when we expunge metaphysics from our web-of-belief. Say you believe that all beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experiences. What experiences do you anticipate only because you hold this belief? If there aren't any, then this seems awfully like a metaphysical belief. In other words, it might not be feasible to avoid metaphysics completely. Even if my specific example fails, the metaphysicians claim to have some that succeed. Studying metaphysics has been on my to-do list for a long time (if only to be secure in my belief that we don't need to bother with it), but for some reason I never actually do it.

Metaphysics, as a category, has its constituents determined by the contingent events of history. The same could be said for the categories of philosophy and art. As such, 'metaphysics' is a convenient bucket whose constituents do not necessarily have similarities in structure. At best, I think one could say that they have a Wittgensteinian family-resemblance. However, I am only defending the academic usage of the term. (More information here.) The folk usage seems to hold that metaphysics is "somewhere between "crystal healing" and "tree hugging" in the Dewey decimal system."

Conventional usage seems to be: speaking about deep intangible topics.

Which is a bad categegory, because it contains: abstract thinking + supernatural claims + complicated nonsense; especially the parts good for signalling wisdom.

Well, but what it that is meant by metaphysics? I've heard the word many times, seen its use, and I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with it.

It's a bit confusing in part because of its strange etymology. Originally, "meta" was used in the sense of "after", since "metaphysics" was the unnamed book that came after "physics" in the standard ordering of Aristotle's works. Later scholars accidentally connected that to something like our current usage of "meta", and a somewhat arbitrary field was born.

Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour.

Also, as Eric Raymond discusses here, especially in the comments, you sometimes need to make judgements without spending ten minutes talking to everyone you see.

Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.

There's this thing called Affirmative Action, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour.

What if verbal ability and quantitative ability are often decoupled?

Historically, proposing policies that are set to help the specific strengths of a minority group are not generally indicative of actually positive feelings about those groups.

Leaving as untouched as I possibly can while still participating in this discussion at all the political labeling question here, I am interested in your thoughts as to the structural similarities and differences between the hypothetical conversation you cite about sexism, and a conversation like:

"Let's make God happy by putting kittens in a blender!"
"Putting kittens in a blender sounds like a bad idea."
"You evil atheist!"

or

"Let's improve our capitalist economy by putting kittens in a blender!"
"Putting kittens in a blender sounds like a bad idea."
"You evil communist!"

I've spent a lot of time on the conservative side (between the guns, being in the Military and working in/around the Defense Industry, and in general being a tradition oriented more-or-less libertarian) and many of them aren't any different.

"Gay Marriage will ruin the institution" "Uh. How many times have you been divorced?" "COMMUNIST!" (no, not literally, but YKWIM)

Heck, even the Implicit Association Test assumes that if you're "liberal" on Gun Control (whatever that means) you're also Liberal on Gay Marriage and Abortion. Anyone wanna make some assumptions on the Implicit Associations of the writers of that test?

It is probably a very bad idea for me to make my first post in reply to something that is blatantly political, on a site which quite actively discourages it, but I'm not very rational. You see, I would probably consider myself more of a liberal than a conservative. I have even attended meetings of feminist organizations, which means that I am a very irrational type of bumbling fool. Nevertheless, I assure you that I would indeed question the ethics of putting kittens in blenders. I would also question the effectiveness of putting kittens in blenders as a means to solve sexism. However, I have never seen such a position proposed before and would be rather shocked to be called an "evil sexist", even by radical feminists who I do not tend to agree with, for opposing the practice.

Perhaps everything you say is true. Perhaps there is something in liberals that makes us more tribal than the average human being. I would freely admit to being more irrational than rational most of the time. When someone not of my tribe says something I find horrific, my emotions tend to make me go "damn their entire tribe for only they would think such things", rather than "I disagree with the point this individual is making, though I am sure it is not held by everyone else in his tribe and I am sure there are converse examples of people who have reached the same conclusion in my tribe".

I see that the inferences you have drawn from your experience at a large number of liberal events and a large number of conservative events have led you to the conclusion that "ONLY liberals and those that think like them seem prone to thinking "everyone is full of evil prejudice except my tribe". I would have thought that a statement of such strength, particularly since it uses the word ONLY, would require much more than the anecdotal experiences of one individual in order to justifiably reject the null hypothesis. Perhaps you have done many statistical studies on this that I am unaware of. Perhaps you have assumed knowledge of your studies is common among Less Wrong contributors (and I would admit that the average LW contributor is smarter than me, so it's not too much of a stretch). Indeed, you may have constructed your priors in a completely impartial manner and may indeed be completely justified in assuming the truth of your alternative hypothesis. Nevertheless, I am a little skeptical of the reliability of the methods you used for arriving at the conclusion of attributing this quality to "ONLY liberals and those who think like them",as opposed to "MOSTLY liberals and those who think like them"

Unsurprisingly, I have a number of issues with that sentence which are not just political. The set which includes "liberals and those who think like them" is not very well defined. I imagine a liberal thinks more like a conservative than a dog thinks like a liberal or a conservative. Consequently, your set could be defined to include everything within the set "conscious human beings", as conscious human beings are certainly things which tend to think like other human beings. However, it is very clear from context that this is not what you mean. Do libertarians think like liberals? I imagine many libertarians would say "yes, on a lot of things, but not on many other things. On other things, I tend to think like a conservative". but, clearly, your additional qualifier of "those who think like them" was included specify that you were not talking about only liberals. Do socialists think like liberals? I imagine a conservative would often say "yes, they do. They both tend to want more government intervention". Conversely, I think a socialist might say "no, liberals believe in private ownership of the means of production. I believe that system is inherently unjust". The vast majority of anarchists, as the forms of anarchism which have their origins in the labour movement, i.e. those advocating social anarchism are still the most common form of anarchism from a worldwide perspective. These anarchists would in fact see themselves as thinking more like orthodox Marxists than US conservatives. They would differ very strongly over the "statist" notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but would have similar long term ends. This puts the conservative who defines his conservatism as an ideology of "less government" in contrast to liberals and socialists in an odd position. You see, if he is not of a very extreme persuasion and is a believer in western democracy in its current form, it would probably be safe to say that he thinks more like liberals and democratic socialists than he thinks like a revolutionary social anarchist. So, defining who exactly thinks like a liberal, but is not actually a liberal is not an easy task. I believe there is a great deal of literature in linguistics and the philosophy of language dealing with the concept of "like" how difficult it actually is to categorize one thing as beinglike another thing. Trying to define an agent whichthinks like another agent seems, if anything, even more difficult.

Did you perhaps come up with a technical definition of for the set of people defined as "liberal or thinks like a liberal". Did you create questionnaires with a number of propositions associated with the ideology "liberalism" and give them to people in the circles you mentioned, so that you could, to some extent, identify those who were of the set "think like liberals" in non-liberal groups. Perhaps you used a ratio of 13 positive answers to 20 negative answers as a minimum benchmark for those who "think like[ liberals]". Were there questions on these sheets which were similar in form to "if you could stop sexism by putting kittens in a blender, would you put kittens in a blender?" and "in such circumstances, would you treat anyone stopping you from putting kittens in a blender as the enemy?". If people in the "liberals and those who think like them group" did answer positively to both of those questions, I would be fairly surprised.

But maybe you have just let political hyperbole get in the way of presenting a potentially more persuasive argument. There is probably a good case to be made for comparatively stronger tribal sentiments in liberals. After all, individualism is a fundamental part of modern day conservatism, but is no longer considered a key component of liberalism. Now liberals are associated with more collectivist values. Consequently, it would not be surprising if studies showed that liberals had emotionally stronger collectivist tendencies than conservatives. Indeed, I think one could be justified in assuming a prior probability of greater than .5 that more collectivist tendencies would be found in liberals than in conservatives if we use the US definition of those terms.

In conclusion, if you had just said something along the lines of "In my own experience, individuals of a liberal political persuasion tend to have stronger views concerning moral judgment of their opponents. Has anyone else noticed this or am I the only one? If not, are there probable cognitive causes behind this"? At least that would have seemed more rational. It would have seemed more like something that belongs on Less Wrong. Presenting your argument in that form might have spared you some of that negative karma. If emotions were not getting in your way, maybe you would have noticed that your argument would seem out of place on this website, particularly when you decided to capitalize EVIL PREJUDICE. You might also have realized that when your accusation levied at a political group was questioned, you merely resorted to stronger hyperbole involving kittens in blenders. Your argument had become a soldier and you decided that you should try to save it by resorting to an argument that was even more absurd and hyperbolic.

I've looked at some of your previous contributions and you are clearly intelligent, so I don't doubt that you probably had a valid point to make. You just could have made it better. You must have noticed that some of your statements just don't fit the accepted rules of discourse on this site.

If one has conscious racist opinions, or is conscious that one has unconscious racist opinions (has taken the IAT but doesn't explicitly believe negative things about blacks) but doesn't act on them, it's probably because one doesn't endorse them. I'd class such a person as a Racist1.

Can you expand on the difference you see between acting on your (non-endorsed) preferences in romantic partners, and acting on those preferences in, for example, friends?

Fair enough.

"public welfare codes for both "lazy" and "black" in the United States"

Taking your word on that, what "other critique of Obama's economic policies" are you imagining that would not have the same implications, unless you mean one that ignores public welfare entirely in favor of focusing on some other economic issue instead?

Well, yes by finding enough "code words" you can make any criticism of Obama racist.

I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one's performance. (Though I've heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)

A quick google search isn't giving me an actual percentage, but I believe that students who're admitted to and attend college, but do not graduate, are still significantly in the minority. Even those who barely made it in mostly graduate, if not necessarily with good GPAs.

Additionally, it seems that there's a lot of 'different justification, same conclusion' with regards to claims about black people.

I think it's more a case same observations, different proposed mechanisms.