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I started writing a post for the culture war thread, and it got longer than I thought it would so I ended up just posting it as its own thread. I know some people don't always see those threads, so I thought I'd post a link here. I'm open to discussing it in either location:
https://www.themotte.org/post/604/the-case-for-ignoring-race
Race is far too predictive for me to give this real credence. I'm only racist because I seek to understand reality, and unfortunately reality is racist as hell.
It's rare indeed that a rational agent is worse off with additional Bayesian evidence, and as mentioned, race is very strong evidence.
It's certainly not everything, as even most HBD-ers would accept, but goddamn do theories for why the world looks the way it does fail utterly without considering it.
As far as I'm concerned, the policy of acknowledging both race and additional information you have about a person is strictly superior to doing the same but ignoring race. I'd be more concerned if a black doctor was treating me since I know about how much AA they receive, I'd be less concerned if the doctor publicized his SAT score or had other objective markers for performance like a specialization in a field where his race counts for nothing (I doubt that's the case in the US, but I could be wrong). This is where AA in general taints by association, said doctor could absolutely be someone who managed to get in without not so subtle nudges, but since they usually lack a way to prove it, they're automatically discounted in the eyes of a rational agent with no additional information.
To use your example of running into a young male in a hoody at night, yes you should be significantly more concerned if he was black, the stats don't lie. Certainly you should avoid being in that situation in the first place, but feel no shame about crossing the street well in advance.
A study on obstetric patient outcomes found that the residency program the doctor attended had a significant effect on patient outcomes. The best residency programs had a 10% chance of complications, vs 13% for the worst.
Adjusting for medical exam scores didn't change the results.
Your reasoning is backwards here. If you believe a black doctor is receiving preferential treatment (such as better residency placement, despite having lower exam scores), you should choose the black doctor.
I have great idea then! Let's let everybody into the best residency program, without any tests, or regard how well they do there. We'll have a whole society full of great doctors!
I don’t think OP implies that at all.
The point is not that exam scores can be disregarded. It’s that they don’t matter conditional on the good residency. Whatever combination of test scores and AA and resume-padding gets you into that residency—that’s still important.
The question becomes how much AA is practiced in getting into residencies. If there is AA practiced at medical school but much less at residency, then it may be that residencies themselves aren’t that skill building but are separating the wheat from the chaff.
Right.
No idea what the demographics look like among these residencies, though.
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I'm not really sure what your "gotcha" is. You only get into a residency program after you've passed the USMLE and per the paper:
If we could feasibly let everybody who passed their exams into the best residency programs - we would. It would probably lead to better patient outcomes.
It's magical thinking, refuted by Goodhart's Law.
The first problem is that the idea that the residency programs themselves act as filters doesn't even occur them. It shows how much these people are stuck in a bubble.
The second problem is this:
If passing the exam is a pre-filter that residency programs rely on, and you'll give people of a particular race a boost that let them pass an exam they otherwise wouldn't, that's going to mess the pre-filter.
A hypothesis that is very easy to check - find some of the worst doctors that managed to hang on to a licence, send them to the best residency programs, and see what happens. I have no patience for people who fish for correlations (or lack therefor) anymore.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by filter here. They pretty explicitly call this out as a possibility - which is why they account for exam scores.
Why bother with testing the residency program at all in this scenario? You should see doctors from the best medical schools performing considerably better than those from lower ranked ones - but that isn’t really true either.
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The case of AA is actually one of the reasons why I would advise people to not go looking for racial spoils. It doesn't help in the long-term because people re-adjust their expectations (as you have done). The personal narratives involved in receiving that kind of help also seem very toxic to self-achievement. AA is a case where social enforcement of race based beliefs has lead to race based information being more salient, which is one of the caveats I talked about above. The more we make race matter, the more it will matter. The less we make it matter, the less it will matter. And as I said you are not in traffic, you are traffic. Same applies to society.
For understanding the overall world, and its history, it is quite possible that race and genetics are helpful pieces of additional information. I didn't want to commit to race never being useful information. I just don't think most people are engaged in sweeping attempts to understand history.
The stats in many ways do lie. Put someone in poverty. Add violence to their upbringing. Have them be young and male. You have a recipe for ciminality. Many of the people in this position in certain countries happen to be black. It is not them being black that is causing them to be criminal. Being able to identify a white person that was raised in these circumstances is purely advantageous.
The clothes and the context are still doing most of the work for you. Change the clothes to a business suit, and be in a nice area of town. Suddenly you being worried about being mugged by the black business man is an absurd level of paranoia and fear on your part.
You are wrong here three ways, I think. First, even if we assume that only poverty, violence (which came from where, I wonder?), and average age are the only factors that predict criminality, you can't know someone's upbringing, income level, and actual age just by looking at them for a moment. You can know their race. And if it just so happens that there's so much poverty, violence, and demographic distortion in the black community that they do 60% of the murdering, then no, the stats don't lie, you should avoid black people, because when you see black skin you see an indicator of possible violence.
Second, you are simply directly wrong. Go ahead, dig up the stats of people of various races by income level. Let's look at whether the generation of Jews immediately after the holocaust jumped up to black-like levels of violence and criminality. Compare the actual cohorts by age and sex, and show me what those stats look like. Being black doesn't make you a criminal, any more than being drunk makes you get into traffic accidents. Some people can drive drunk just fine, and some people who are perfectly sober kill themselves and others, and you can absolutely find someone who is a better driver drunk that most people are sober. But just like the population of drunk people are much worse drivers overall, the population of black people is much more criminal overall.
Black people are in poverty not because they are discriminated against, but because they're black (and everything that entails on the collective level), just like Jewish people are prospering not because of the protocols of their Zionish elders, but because they're Jewish. The violence in their upbringing is because they are raised by and around other black people, who do that violence, because they are black. They are disproportionately young because they have higher death rates, due both to violence and to poor health outcomes, frequently caused by poor diet and general health maintenance, because they are black.
Well sure. If you don't know everything else about the person you're looking at. But the goal- is to be able to know everything about each person you're looking at so that you don't have to make non-causal inferences. Not just for equity, but because they make you wrong more.
And the counterargument- to what I just said- is that it's hard to do that right? But ultimately I'm right. Right? We'd be right more if we had the resources to just see more layers of the life of the black dude in the alley?
So I'ma go make a social inference AI and get back to you.
I think "presume we still lack access to an AI with near-omniscience in the realm of [x]" is implicit in most discussions. Once your social inference AI exists and we have free access to it, the entire social landscape would transform so much that it's hard to even predict what problems might exist, much less how we'd fix them. How to treat race in that landscape is a very different question than how to treat race in the landscape in which we find ourselves. And without the ability to instantly or even quickly switch from one landscape to the other, we still have to figure out how to interact with each other in this current crude landscape where we lack access to this social inference AI.
Actually, coming back to this. I would like to get your thoughts. I believe in myself and my ability to make this AI. It will be very tough to get it to the point where it can see a face in a hoodie at night on a dark street and tell you about that guy- But I expect to be able to do a fairly comprehensive background/shared-values/personal-info/interaction-styles/preferences check on all internet figures with consistent usernames that frequently post in servers/sites/subs I visit by year's end.
What I want your thoughts on is- I know you litterally just said "it's hard to even predict what problems might exist, much less how we'd fix them." But this is important. If I succeed I need to be aware that of disruption I cause by distributing this to anyone who wants it and making it simple and easy to one click install on desktop and query via LLM....
I want to know what problems you think I'll be creating as I move forward. I want to be able to solve issues I help create by spreading this level of social awareness. Brainstormed hypotheses are fine here if you don't have strong predictions. It's all worth at least considering. Especially as I begin to automate the consideration and processing of such possibilities.
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Yes. Very understandable. I will not begrudge you that. I am going to keep sitting in my privileged small town and never walking down streets at night and making my social inference AI though. You keep doing you but heads up.
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Tragedy of the commons - those racial spoils come from the rest of society, which means that if you do not secure some of those racial spoils for yourself you are actually going to be paying for them in all likelihood. I agree that your message would be good if it was a society-wide rule, but it is bad advice if you're in a system where people are already looking for and finding those spoils.
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I'm not sure the "don't pursue AA because people will adjust their expectations" argument holds, since it fails a simple reversal test: would you also be neutral to discrimination? By your logic, discrimination wouldn't hurt a group once people's expectations adjust to be extra-impressed that they managed to overcome it.
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Assuming aptitude is normally distributed and doesn't contain any ceilings for some races, if you filter you applicants beforehand with a threshhold, race loses its predictive power. Of course this only works without concepts like affirmative action:
If the threshhold is 130 IQ, than the share of <140 IQ and >140 IQ will the same for blacks as for whites. The only difference willl be that whites will have a big positive multiplies for both sets.
Or phrased differently, P(130<IQ<135) / P(135<IQ) should be equal regardless of race
This would be true for an exponential distrubution but it is false for a normal distribution
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The notion that conditioning on a threshold can wash away differences in mean is wrong intuitively and its wrongness can be expressed formulaically and precisely, but I also did a quick simulation to confirm because why not.
Suppose we have a population with a mean of 100 (stand-in for white) and a second population with a mean of 85 (stand-in for black) for a given trait (e.g., IQ), both with standard deviations of 15. (1 - normcdf(140, 100, 15))/(1 - normcdf(130, 100, 15)) is about 16.8%. (1 - normcdf(140, 85, 15))/(1 - normcdf(130, 85, 15)) is about 9.1%. So whites have almost twice as much of those over 140 than blacks.
I generated 10 million hypothetical individuals for each population as a check, and got the same figures out to the digits shown in the percentages.
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This is incorrect. Even with a cutoff, whites would have a higher average IQ.
With a standard distribution, group differences will be amplified among outliers.
About 5.9% of people who are above +2 deviations will also be above +3.
Only about 2.3% of people who are above +3 deviations will also be above +4.
I encourage you to calculate these numbers yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule
Should've just done it in advance. Lesson learned, thanks for the correction
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Suppose that Pop A has mean 100, sigma 15 and Pop B has mean 85, sigma 15.
The ratio shown above is not the same for the two populations. If the cutoff is 85 and the high mark is 100 instead, this is obvious without computing Z-scores.
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Is that really true? Consider a threshold of 0 IQ (so 6 std dev below the mean). No-one (well, 1 in a billion) is excluded by this, but as the sets are the same, if there was predictive power before, there is after.
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All doctors still have to pass the requirements don't they, regardless of how they get into medical school? Also I don't think it's necessarily linear between SAT and being a good doctor. My guess is you would want a minimum (higher than average) threshold and people at the top would probably specialise in any case. In between hard working, curious, empathetic, life-long learning could circumvent a lot- I don't know how these characteristics distribute but I don't think the average white doctor is that high a bar in the 10 min pharmaceutical dispensing slot I experience them in. Mostly they're just passing on the received wisdom of the medical model.
There was the somewhat recent change in the exam that leads to placements in residencies specifically to address racial differences in test outcomes.
But does it affect the baseline competence test? As far as I can tell, med school does the gating for competence, and residencies were further gatekeeping intended to drive up doctor salaries that weren’t awarded strictly meritocratically to begin with.
Medicine is not so rigorous that there isn't a glaring difference in quality of treatment and outcomes between the a 10th percentile and 90th percentile doctor.
I do still think US doctors are among the best in the world, but you shouldn't settle if you can help it.
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