MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
Not sure if this belongs here or in SQS, but it could either be a small question I don't understand or a discussion depending on whether or not people disagree about the answer.
Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did (at least in the U.S.), when typically one would expect it to go the other way. That is, the right is usually more pro-military, pro-military intervention, and patriotic defending of one's homeland. Even though the right tends to be more focused on domestic issues and oppose foreign aid, military support tends to be the exeption. Although there was bipartisan support of the Iraq war (at least in the aftermath of 9/11) the Republicans were more strongly in favor of it and stayed in favor of it for longer. If Russia had threatened to invade the U.S. the Republicans would have been not only gung-ho about repelling them but also about retaliating and obliterating them in revenge so that none would dare try ever again. So you would think they would sympathize with Ukrainians as similarly patriotic defenders of their home turf, while the left would be all peace and let's try to get along and diplomatically convince the invaders to stop without violence, or something like that.
But that's not what happened. Why?
Is it just because the left has been harping on about Putin for years so hopped on the anti-Russia train too quickly and the right felt compelled to instinctively oppose them? If China had invaded Ukraine (for some mysterious reason) would the right be pro-Ukraine and the left opposing intervention because they don't want to piss off China (and accusing Ukraine of being nazis as an excuse)? That is, is there something specific to Ukraine/Russia that caused this divide here specifically, or am I misunderstanding the position of each side regarding military intervention in general (or has it changed in the past few decades and my beliefs used to be accurate but no longer are)?
MathWizard
formerly hh26
11mo ago
Progressives have this insane tendency to assume that if it really is true that blacks aren’t as smart as whites on average, then the only logical thing to do would be to murder all of our fellow black citizens in Treblinka-style death camps. Why? Because, they apparently reason, only Nazis, as they’ve so often said, think blacks have lower mean IQs, so if it turns out that the IQ Nazis are right, well, that means Hitler should be our role model.
Or something. You can never quite get liberals to articulate why they are convinced it would be the end of the world if there are racial differences in intelligence, other than that’s the ditch they’ve decided to die in and it would be embarrassing for them to turn out to be wrong.
An awful lot of people believe that low intelligence logically implies moral inferiority. That if you are unintelligent, you are a bad person. It is a moral failing to not be smarter.
Progressives seem to believe this more strongly than conservatives, and use it as one of their primary attacks against the right. If you take "stupid = bad" as an axiom, then HBD forces you to conclude that less intelligent races are bad, and progressives who don't even question the "stupid = bad" axiom automatically equate HBD with "some races are inferior". But because the "stupid = bad" axiom is unstated, and probably not consciously endorsed, they can't quite articulate this chain of reasoning. The embarrassment that would come if it were incontrovertibly proven that some races were inferior on a genetic level is that it would be revealed that they are bigots. They have always been bigots against unintelligent people, but by restricting their bigotry to unintelligent white people, manage to convince themselves that that doesn't count. But if colored people are even less intelligent, and it wasn't society's fault it was inherent to the individuals themselves and their genes, then the progressives would either have to admit to being racist, or change their worldview to account for good but unintelligent people. Who, in my opinion, exist in multitudes. I've met quite a few. But a lot of people aren't ready to admit that.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
The pro-life maneuver with the highest expected value, as measured by abortion reduction multiplied by probability of actually getting passed in the legislature, is to promote free birth control. Most people on the left already want this, so it shouldn't be hard to get bipartisan support. Then way more people will use it, way fewer accidental pregnancies occur, and actual abortion rates plummet regardless of whether it's legal or illegal.
This might have the bonus affect of making it much easier to pass restrictions on abortion afterwards. If fewer people have needed one or known someone who has needed one, and the only people who ever get abortions are morons who forgot to take their free birth control, people in general will be less sympathetic. Lazy people just using abortion as birth control will have cheaper alternatives and so care less. People worried about being forced to give birth to an unwanted child in some hypothetical future will be less worried because they can just use their free state-provided birth control. And the messaging that pro-life people just want to enslave women as breeders forced to give birth against their will just dissolves away because we're actively trying to prevent them from getting pregnant.
But even if nothing else changes legislatively, even if the silly pollitical warmakers would consider this a loss because the pro-choice get everything they want, this would be a massive win for pro-life and effective altruism. I don't think people trying to have tons of promiscuous sex "deserve" to have their degenerate lifestyles subsidized by my tax dollars, but I'm going to offer it anyway because "deserves" matter less than saving lives.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6mo ago
Points 2 and 3 basically contradict each other. That is, there's the object level struggles of material providing, which therapy would not have helped with, and the irrational misperception that these issues were irreparably unsolvable to the point that suicide was the only way out. In-so-far as therapy and suicide prevention could have helped him figure this out, they would have been useful (in-so-far as some therapy and suicide prevention are lefty mental health stuff made of empty-sounding words that don't improve rational consideration of object level issues, they would not have been useful)
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
I think this requires noblesse oblige from the people higher up, which mostly only happens if there is accountability for people at the top via skin in the game. If you are a feudal lord with lands that your famils has held for generations and peasants under you whose families have worked for your for generations, you are incentivized to take care of them because their thriving is your thriving. If you mistreat them too terribly they will rebel and chop your head off. If you mismanage the lands you will go bankrupt and be reduced to poverty. If you do a good job you will be wealthy and loved.
If you are the patriarch of a family and you mistreat your wife and/or children they will hate you and leave.
If you are a modern high level bureaucrat or government official in charge of millions/billions of dollars of someone else's money and mismanagement is rewarded with a transfer or a golden parachute, there's none of this. There's no incentive to behave responsibly to those below you, and there's no incentive for people trying to climb their way up to do so gracefully when a momentary clawhold can be cemented with the powers obtained along the way.
If SBF, or the bankers who caused the housing crisis, or the politicians who ruined the economy during Covid faced the ruin of their families into longterm poverty, or beheading by angry mobs, those issues probably wouldn't have happened in the first place because they would have been more careful. If every politician who voted for war was required to lead on the front lines, we'd have a lot fewer wars. But because many (most?) hierarchies allow people high to foist the consequences of their decisions onto people lower down, we typically don't get the nice scale of risk/reward that you envision here, though it sometimes does work like that.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
12d ago
Partly a response, partly hijacking this to ask a question of my own to everyone else: what are you using as a editor/compiler?
I programmed exclusively in Java for years, but my new boss wanted programs in Python so I've been doing that this past year. Using Eclipse, which is wonderful as an editor, since it lets me organize everything and highlights typos that I make and stuff.
Aside a whole lot of friction involving different conventions and abilities, I was annoyed that all of the Python editors people recommended seemed way less functional until I discovered that I can program Python in Eclipse if I do the right stuff. So I've been doing that.
I'm not sure what the general consensus is, because I'm mostly self-taught and program on my own, making mathematical models for research purposes that nobody else has to use or collaborate with, so I've probably got all sorts of weird habits that would make more sophisticated programmers cringe. So I can't tell how much of this is objective and how much is just me being used to Eclipse for so many years and having little experience with anything else. But I tentatively recommend looking into PyDev for Eclipse, because in my opinion it's nice.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money. Nonzero, but very few. Most people complaining about rich people are actually upset at some combination of
1: Rentseeking. Big company gets a stranglehold on some sort of niche or patent, ousts/regulates/threatens out their competition, and earns tons of money disproportionate to their actual economic contribution. CEO/executives/shareholders get rich on economic surplus that they didn't rightfully earn.
2: Inherited wealth. If John is talented and earns a ton of money, as his private property he can do whatever he wants with it. One of the things people like to do with their money is give it to their children, especially when they die and can't use it any more. So John gives his earned wealth to his son Jim, who is a spoiled talentless loser, and gets all of the benefits of massive wealth with none of the personal contribution to society or perceived merit. Everyone hates Jim.
3: Interest. Capital is incredibly valuable to the economy. Therefore people who invest their money in capital can earn lots of money from their money. Therefore their wealth grows exponentially even without them having talent or contributing labor. Talentless losers like Jim can invest the wealth they inherited and continue to become increasingly wealthy without actually having any talent whatsoever. They're still contributing to the economy in the sense that the wealth they invest is useful, but they themselves have done nothing to earn it other than inheriting the legacy of their parents who did earn it (or stole it via rentseeking, or literal theft in the distant past)
These are all really hard problems to solve. I'm not entirely convinced that 2 and 3 are actually problems in their own right rather than just discomforting rights people have. Like, someone has the right to masturbate while smearing poop on their chest, but I find it disgusting and would rather wish they didn't even though technically I would agree they are free to do that in the privacy of their own home and I won't argue that the government should make it illegal. It's still disgusting to my sensibilities.
In my opinion, 1 is a genuine problem that definitely needs to be solved. 2 is probably fine if we can address 3, and 3 is only solvable by economic stagnation or post-scarcity. Basically, as long as the economy is growing, and capital investment is an important component of that growth, then the people driving the growth via investment will capture the growth. If the economy stops growing, or labor becomes a more important part of growth rather than capital, then capital is no longer so ridiculously valuable and interest rates will plummet. Until then, I think we're stuck with Jims getting richer.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
29d ago
Nope. Controversial opinion here, I think coffee is a flavor not a real beverage. I absolutely love coffee-flavored desserts, ice cream, mocha, stuff like that. The only time I'll drink actual coffee is if it's in a super-sweet latte or something, with more milk and sugar than actual coffee. Essentially a warm coffee-flavored milkshake.
Or, if I'm trying to be responsible and not drink a meal's worth of calories in a cup, I'll just drink water.
I just don't get proper coffee just brewed in water with nothing or very little else. I don't think it tastes good, it's like stirring spoonfuls of cinnamon or nutmeg into your water. They taste good when combined with the right stuff, but not by themselves.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
7mo ago
The best argument I've heard in favor of unions is that the equivalent bargaining power of "a company" isn't "an employee" it's "all the employees".
Suppose we remove the distinction of capital versus labor, and suppose that we have two groups of people with disproportionate level of bottleneck in a production process. That is, if we have X people from the first group, and Y people from the second group, then the level of production is something like
f(X,Y) = A sqrt(X)P(Y)
where A is some constant, and P is 0 if Y is 0 and 1 if Y >= 1
That is, you only need one Y (the employer), but can have as many X as you want, but the more X you have in the same job the more diminishing returns you get. For each production process people can gather together and organize and form mutually consensual agreements to find some equilibrium level of X that makes this efficient. BUT, Y has disproportionate bargaining power here. If any individual X threatens to quit, their quitting drops the profits of the process by some small amount. But less than their average. The other X essentially pick up the slack, and the production keeps on going. But X is now unemployed and has 0 income, which is catastrophically awful and wasteful, as all of their potential labor is essentially being wasted unused. X quitting hurts themselves more than it hurts Y. But if Y threatens to quit then everything stops and everyone is at 0, so it's a credible threat.
But if all of the X form a union and threaten to quit/strike together, then again production stops entirely, just as if Y threatened to quit. So now they have equal bargaining power.
I'm pretty sure whoever I read this sort of argument from explained it way better than I just did, but I don't remember who or where (it might have been on the motte, so if whoever it was recognizes this argument as their own and can find the post, feel free to repost it and claim credit).
MathWizard
formerly hh26
10mo ago
I agree, but I think the rape affect is appropriate, at least with regard to trans issues. Medical transitions are a form of genital mutilation which cause massive harm similar in kind but greater in magnitude to rape. I would rather a child be groomed into sex with a pedo than groomed into undergoing medical transition, because the former would leave fewer long term irreversible trauma and could hopefully eventually be healed and recovered from.
With regards to LGB, grooming is only an appropriate accusation if the ideologues are trying to convince the children to be more sexually explicit, promiscuous, and/or think sex with adults is okay (things which would be a prelude to pedophilia). Almost nobody is accusing normal LGB people of being "groomers", and I disavow the ones who do. The efficacy of "groomer" comes from the rape affect, and in order to preserve that as a useful tool we need to use the word only in cases where that implication is accurate.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6mo ago
Even then, I think people underestimate the quality of life you can expect as a poor person with an intact family. If his entire industry went under and he couldn't adapt and was stuck flipping burgers for minimum wage he could still provide for his family. They might have to downgrade their home and lifestyle expectations, but they're not going to starve to death or end up homeless. And I suspect that the actual quality of life for his daughter would be higher poor with an alive father than rich with no father.
If you have serious mental health issues rendering you completely unemployable, then the object level might be unfixable, but for everyone else it's more a question of lowering standards and struggling to do as well as you can and fix as much as you can even if you can never return to the wealthy lifestyle you were expecting.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
3mo ago
Outlaw Non-competes: Non-compete agreements distort labor markets and should be banned at the federal level.
I'm surprised to see this one in here alongside all the others. On the one hand, I agree that on the first-order a non-compete will distort labor markets, but on the other hand an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing. A company doesn't want to hire someone, spend time and resources teach them all the best techniques for doing a job effectively, and then have that person immediately leave and take all that training somewhere else or strike out on their own. Similarly, a company doesn't want to give someone a bunch of infrastructure and marketing and accumulate a bunch of clients and then spin off into a private business, carrying those clients with them.
Now, I don't think we have an obligation to do things just because they make companies happy, not at all. But the incentive structure means that if companies can't curtail these behaviors via non-competes they will curtail them in other ways. Companies will guard their secrets more carefully, will shuffle customers around so they can't get too attached to any one employee, and do other inefficient things that create economic friction.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6mo ago
Pretty much all legitimate justifications for racism rely on inaccurate proxies for other things we actually care about. I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.
Since I am white and was raised by white parents among mostly other white people, I can reasonably expect that the average white person is more likely to be similar to me than the average black person. We'll be more likely to have similar cultural knowledge, values, habits, etc. But my black neighbor who I actually know and happens to be a christian pastor has way more in common with me than the average white Californian.
In the past race was a very strong proxy for nationality, culture, and loyalty. In modern times it is a weak signal unless you live in a predominantly monoethnic country.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
11mo ago
I'm planning to propose to my girlfriend soon, and am looking for advice on the engagement ring. I'm planning on going with a placeholder for the actual proposal and getting the real ring afterwards so that we can pick something out together that lines up with her preferences. But I'd like some ideas and general knowledge to bring to the table.
My understanding is that natural diamonds have their prices massively inflated by diamond cartels, propaganda, and literal slavery, so am planning to avoid them. I'm not opposed to going with a synthetic diamond, since they're better and cheaper, but maybe the prices are still artificially high due to the propaganda of diamonds overall? I'm not really sure.
Her favorite color is yellow, so I'm thinking a silver ring with a yellow gemstone (diamond or other gem), but there's a bunch of different types of gems even restricting to yellow, and I want one that's going to last long and look fancy without deteriorating over time. My natural inclination is to be a cheapskate about everything, so I want to make sure I'm not just doing mental gymnastics to justify cheaping out on something with significant emotional value. Neither of us are especially social people so aren't super concerned with how other people would perceive buying a non-diamond ring, but it probably matters a little bit. Ideally I would like to get something that is simultaneously cheaper and more meaningful and more impressive looking than a diamond. What are my best options and tradeoffs to consider? Also, are we better off shopping around at local jewelers so we can see stuff in person, or they all scams including the non-diamond gems such that there is a significantly better quality/price ratio online?
MathWizard
formerly hh26
11mo ago
Especially given the pascal's wager type argument going on here. You don't even need to prove that AI will definitely kill all of humanity. You don't even need to prove that it's more likely than not. A 10% chance that 9 billion people die is comparable in magnitude to 900 million people dying (on the first order. the extinction of humanity as a species is additionally bad on top of that). You need to
1: Create a plausible picture for how/why AI going wrong might literally destroy all humans, and not just be racist or something.
2: Demonstrate that the probability of this happening is on the order of >1% rather than 0.000001% such that it's worth taking seriously.
3: Explain how these connect explicitly so people realize that the likelihood threshold for caring about it ought to be lower than most other problems.
Don't go trying to argue that AI will definitely kill all of humanity, even if you believe it, because that's a much harder position to argue and unnecessarily strong.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
It's one or the other, no in-between.
....no? It's definitely in between. He is a nice guy who genuinely believes in the value of his service, and has seen it genuinely help people, and has rationally concluded that valuable services are worth large amounts of money, and good advertising and optics help you sell more of them.
This is no different than a top class chef charging $100 for meals at a high class restaurant instead of working at a soup kitchen. You would not describe such a person as "the nicest kindest chef", it's not a charity, but neither is it merely a scam.
High value product for high cost = fair
High value product for low cost = kind
Low value product for high cost = scam
Low value product for low cost = fair
Whether it genuinely is a high value product, I have no idea. But I believe that he genuinely believes in it, and wouldn't offer it if he didn't believe it was valuable, in a way unlike Andrew Tate or other scammers.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
The actual mathematical definition of a tautology is a logical statement which is always true. As opposed to a conditional statement which has some free variables and might be true or false depending on the inputs of those variables. It need not be "obviously" or "trivially" true: any mathematical theorem, if packaged together with its axioms and assumptions, is technically a tautology because it's always true.
In the context of science then, a tautology is a theory which is always true, not requiring conditional variables from the real world. Natural selection of some sort is true in every conceivable universe or system with reproducing and mutating life-forms. I think this makes it more profound as a theory, rather than less.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
12d ago
Do you know if there's a way to.... I'm not even sure what the right language is here.... put different classes in different .py files, or at least different tabs, without running into recursive dependency issues.
Like, in Java, I can make a World class that contains a population from the Agent class, and models an epidemic going through them, and the Agents have a bunch of methods internally regarding how they function as they get infected and recover and stuff. And if I pass a copy of the main World to each Agent when it's created, then when they do stuff in their methods they can call back up to the World, usually for counting purposes, they say "hey I got infected, increment the total infection counter" or "hey someone was going to infect me but I'm already infected, increment the redundant infection counter".
As far as I can tell, in Python I can't do that nicely. If the World class imports Agent, then the Agent class can't import World. I can resolve this by defining both classes in the same .py file, but then all my code is arranged 1-dimensionally and I have to scroll through tons of stuff to find what I'm looking for (or use ctlr F). Whereas in Java each class has its own tab, I can open or close or switch to, so well-behaved ones that I'm not working on don't take up space or get in my way. I'm not sure if this is a Python issue or just a Eclipse issue. Is there a way to split a .py file into multiple tabs so I can organize better?
MathWizard
formerly hh26
8mo ago
Besides the pro-life movement opposes birth control.
That's precisely my point. It needs to change. A lot of people are lazy and stupid, or just poor, and those are the people most likely to also be too lazy to pull out or time when they have unprotected sex, or think about long term consequences like pregnancy. The pro-life movement needs to be on the forefront of not only providing and promoting free birth control, but pressuring people to use it. Don't shame people for having premarital sex, shame people for having unprotected premarital sex, because that's the kind that actually causes harm.
If you're a rational person who plans ahead, I don't think there's a large practical difference between $10-20 per month and just free, for something as impactful as birth control. But if you are lazy and impulsive there's a huge difference between not having condoms in your pocket and having sex anyway because you want to get laid, versus having a pile of condoms in your cabinets because the government and/or pro life movement keeps mailing them to you. Or maybe they just keep having sex all the time without condoms but all of the women have IUDs because those are free now and they got tired of people pressuring them to please get one. Or maybe it becomes a rite of passage for a girl to get one on her 18th birthday or something and it's just normal for everyone to have them until they actually want kids.
If people were smart and responsible, none of this would be necessary. But also the abortion rate would be near 0 already. The fact that it's not is pretty clear evidence that people are not smart and responsible.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
10mo ago
Update to this post: https://www.themotte.org/post/498/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-21/101809?context=8#context
where I wanted advice on getting an engagement ring for my girlfriend. I have since proposed before getting the ring (as planned), it went wonderfully, and we are now engaged. After looking at a bunch of examples together and honing in on concepts and features she found appealing (turns out she doesn't simply like flowers, which I already knew, but she really really really likes flowers), we settled on this ring
from Taylor and Hart. It uses diamonds, but they use lab-grown diamonds, so I'm happy with that. We considered substituting some colored gems in the flower, but then there's also leaves which would look a bit weird if we made them green, but would also look weird if we colored the rest of the flower but left them white. Most importantly, my now-fiance thinks it's really pretty exactly how it is, so we don't want to change things in case it accidentally ends up looking worse.
Thank you for everyone who offered advice, regardless of whether I ended up using it or not.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
22d ago
I read a comment on Reddit by someone who talked about posting Flat Earth stuff as a creative writing exercise. You get to think up clever arguments and find loopholes when arguing against people who are objectively correct, and not worry about getting your ego hurt if you're proven wrong because you're not actually taking it seriously. I browsed the Flat Earth sub for a bit after that and tried to figure out who was serious and who wasn't, though with no way to test that I have no idea how successful I was.
I think the main issue I'd have with actually participating is the propensity to delude naive and mentally ill people into joining unironically. The more people who are involved and having fun and aren't lunatics, the more legitimate the movement seems. Although on the other hand it's a relatively harmless conspiracy for people to believe, so maybe it helps steal thunder away from more dangerous conspiracies that mentally ill people might fall into, so maybe it's useful, I dunno.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
How is that winning the issue? If blue and some swing states are able to exploit a lack of ID to cheat elections and remain perpetually blue, then they can win all the elections via fraud. And all the republicans can do is prevent fraud in already-red states so they don't also flip to blue.
On issues related to local governance, each State being able to do whatever it wants is a victory. But on federal issues, especially elections, that's not good enough.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I would consider a "scammer" to be someone who deliberately tricks people into overpaying for a service above what value they would actually acquire from it. In a normal rational capitalist transaction, both the seller and consumer gain utility by transfering a good which the consumer values more highly than the seller does, for some price in between the two subjective valuations of that good. A non-scam seller genuinely helps their consumers while enriching themselves because the consumers value the good more highly than the price paid. A scam is when the seller deceives the consumer into over-valuing the good to the point that they pay a price higher than the actual value they receive once the good is obtained. Importantly, this involves actual deception: someone who unknowingly sells something to customers is like someone who unknowingly tells you false facts that they believe: they're wrong, but they're not a "liar".
I'll be honest, while I've watched a reasonable amount of Dr K. I'm not very familiar with Andrew Tate directly. Everything I know about him is third-hand, so I wouldn't place bets on my belief that he's an actual scammer, it's mostly based on vibes. His advice is largely selfish and unconcerned with helping other people as long as you maximize your own well-being at the expense of others, which is entirely self-consistent with maximizing his own well-being at the expense of others. It would be not at all hypocritical for him to scam his audience. I think. Again, I've mostly heard about him third-hand, so I could be wrong here. I'm much more confident that Dr K is not knowingly scamming others, at least in the form of deliberately deceiving or overcharging them, based on his general personality and genuineness. I believe that he believes that his customers will benefit from his services at a value higher than the cost. I don't know if that's true or not, but even if false I wouldn't consider it a "scam", in the same way that I don't believe $100 restaurants are worth the price to non-millionaires, but still aren't scams as long as they're up front about the prices.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
Maybe it's just because lean right in my media consumption, but I've heard a lot of complaints about woke nonsense in videogames. Horizon Zero Dawn made the main character way less attractive, The Last of Us killed off the main guy from the first game in a disrespectful way. GTA 6 looks like a woke disaster. And of course I've seen quite a few games with the weird lefty art-style that indicate them as obviously woke that nobody ever plays or cares about because they aren't beloved franchises (though I don't think it's reasonable to complain about these. If woke people want to form their own IP and let people freely choose to play or not play, good for them, as long as they aren't co-opting non-woke franchises and destroying them)
I don't know that Sweet Baby Inc was involved in the games I mentioned. The Sweet Baby Inc Detected only has 16 reviews and those aren't any of them, so either they're not thorough, or something else is involved. But some sort of woke force has been going around corrupting games just like it has in comics and movies, and people have been complaining about it for the last decade. Not as much as they complain about in-game transactions, because it is less prevalent, but it's been there.
In what contexts are accurate prejudice/biases acceptable justification for discrimination?
I want to consider a broad range of groups including both involuntary/innate characteristics such as race, gender, and IQ, as well as more voluntary categories such as religion, political ideology, or even something like being in the fandom for a certain TV show, expressing a preference for a certain type of food, or having bad personal grooming. This is a variable that your answer might depend upon.
Let's suppose that we know with certainty that people in group X have a statistically higher rate of bad feature Y compared to the average population, whether that be criminality, laziness, low intelligence, or are just unpleasant to be around. I'm taking the fact that this is accurate as an axiom. The actual proportion of people in group X with feature Y is objectively (and known to you) higher than average, but is not universal. That is, Y is a mostly discrete feature, and we have 0 < p < q < 1 where p is the probability of a randomly sampled member of the public has Y, and q is the probability that a randomly sampled member of q has Y. Let's leave the causation as another variable here: maybe membership in X increases the probability of Y occurring, maybe Y increases the probability of joining X (in the case of voluntary membership), maybe some cofactor causes both. This may be important, as it determines whether discouraging people from being in group X (if voluntary) will actually decrease the prevalence of Y or whether it will just move some Ys into the "not X" category.
Another variable I'll leave general is how easy it is to determine Y directly. Maybe it's simple: if you're interacting with someone in person you can probably quickly tell they're a jerk without needing to know their membership in Super Jerk Club. Or maybe it's hard, like you're considering job applications and you only know a couple reported facts, which include X but not Y and you have no way to learn Y directly without hiring them first.
When is it okay to discriminate against people in group X? The far right position is probably "always" while the far left would be "never", but I suspect most people would fall somewhere in the middle. Few people would say that it would be okay to refuse to hire brown-haired people if it were discovered that they were 0.1% more likely to develop cancer and thus leave on disability. And few people would say that it's not okay to discriminate against hiring convicted child rapists as elementary school teachers on the basis that they're a higher risk than the average person. (if you are such a person though, feel free to speak up and explain your position).
So for the most part our variables are:
-Group membership voluntariness
-Feature Y's severity and relevance to the situation
-The situation itself (befriending, hiring, electing to office)
-Ease of determining feature Y without using X as a proxy
-Causality of X to Y
Personally, I'm somewhere between the classically liberal "it's okay to discriminate against voluntary group membership but not involuntary group membership" and the utilitarian "it's okay to discriminate iff the total net benefit of the sorting mechanism is higher than the total cost of the discrimination against group members, taking into account that such discrimination may be widespread", despite the latter being computationally intractable in practice and requiring a bunch of heuristics that allow bias into the mix. I don't think I'm satisfied with the classically liberal position alone because if there were some sufficiently strong counterexample, such as someone with a genetic strain that made them 100x more likely to be a pedophile, I think I'd be okay with refusing child care positions to all such people even if they had never shown any other risk factors. But if there were a similar strain that made them 10% more likely I don't think it would be fair to do this, because it's such a low base rate that 10% doesn't do much to offset the cost of the discrimination. Also the utilitarian position allows for stricter scrutiny applied for more serious things like job applications (which have a huge cost if systematically discriminating against X) versus personal friendships (if people refuse to befriend X because they don't like Y, those people can more easily go make different friends or befriend each other, so the systemic cost is lower)
But I'd love to hear more thoughts and perspectives, especially with reasoning for why different cases are and are not justified under your philosophical/moral framework.
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