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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'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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