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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.
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.
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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