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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.
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
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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