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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35437 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Acknowledging the reality of HBD is important because if we don't acknowledge it we will end up with policies which are premised upon it being false (disparate impact doctrine for discrimination and affirmative action are the big ones, general distrust in IQ as you mention is another) and these policies are highly inefficient and unfair.

I don't want a world where people go "I know about HBD so I'm going to throw all the applications from black people away". I want a world where people go "I know about HBD so if after considering all the applications in a race blind manner I end up with 2% blacks in a highly technical field I won't be surprised or consider that problematic". And I'm not alone in this. Basically everyone I see talking about HBD feels the same. The first position is a strawman.

If you know about HBD then it wouldn't it be self defeating to examine applications in a race blind way? And why would black people be ok with that when they have the voting power to force you to hire them anyway?

Because in real life situations, race is almost never the relevant inflection point. You almost always have more specific information that swamps out any signal from race.

If you know about HBD then it wouldn't it be self defeating to examine applications in a race blind way?

No because race is a very very rough predictor of aptitude and bosses screening applicants have access to much stronger predictors. If I want high mathematical ability in my candidates I could just select only Asian candidates as they tend to score better on measures of mathematical aptitude, or I could ignore race and screen based on something like SAT math scores or scores on a math test I make applicants complete. The second approach is vastly better at accurately screening for candidates with high mathematical ability.

The main issue for me is that when a society says, "we are going to blind ourselves to this aspect of reality for the greater good," it's inevitable that we blind ourselves to other aspects of reality as well. Until we develop an ideology that has, at its foundations, a denial of reality itself. That seems to be the nightmare scenario we are stumbling towards in the dark.

Yes, this is the point that was so eloquently made by Eliezer Yudkowsky in "Universal Fire" and by Scott Alexander in "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning". Everything is connected; you can't deny reality in just one little harmless area without starting a chain reaction which ends up with promising young scientists purged, freedom of speech destroyed, epistemology in tatters, and object-level policy disaster after disaster.

Thanks for the links. I'll look into them when I have time.

Edit: They are both short pieces but great reads.

Basically everyone I see talking about HBD feels the same. The first position is a strawman.

My experience dealing with actual HR people feels like they do, actually, throw away all the applications from groups they perceive to be unlikely to be capable.

HR people do indeed show bias, but not due to HBD.

Well sure, but that's probably at least in part due to not believing in HBD.

I don't see how it is relevant to their belief in HBD. I'm arguing that if they were HBDers, that would be just another axis to create an arbitrary hard cutoff point at.

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