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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27766 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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In what contexts are accurate prejudice/biases acceptable justification for discrimination?

I want to consider a broad range of groups including both involuntary/innate characteristics such as race, gender, and IQ, as well as more voluntary categories such as religion, political ideology, or even something like being in the fandom for a certain TV show, expressing a preference for a certain type of food, or having bad personal grooming. This is a variable that your answer might depend upon.

Let's suppose that we know with certainty that people in group X have a statistically higher rate of bad feature Y compared to the average population, whether that be criminality, laziness, low intelligence, or are just unpleasant to be around. I'm taking the fact that this is accurate as an axiom. The actual proportion of people in group X with feature Y is objectively (and known to you) higher than average, but is not universal. That is, Y is a mostly discrete feature, and we have 0 < p < q < 1 where p is the probability of a randomly sampled member of the public has Y, and q is the probability that a randomly sampled member of q has Y. Let's leave the causation as another variable here: maybe membership in X increases the probability of Y occurring, maybe Y increases the probability of joining X (in the case of voluntary membership), maybe some cofactor causes both. This may be important, as it determines whether discouraging people from being in group X (if voluntary) will actually decrease the prevalence of Y or whether it will just move some Ys into the "not X" category.

Another variable I'll leave general is how easy it is to determine Y directly. Maybe it's simple: if you're interacting with someone in person you can probably quickly tell they're a jerk without needing to know their membership in Super Jerk Club. Or maybe it's hard, like you're considering job applications and you only know a couple reported facts, which include X but not Y and you have no way to learn Y directly without hiring them first.

When is it okay to discriminate against people in group X? The far right position is probably "always" while the far left would be "never", but I suspect most people would fall somewhere in the middle. Few people would say that it would be okay to refuse to hire brown-haired people if it were discovered that they were 0.1% more likely to develop cancer and thus leave on disability. And few people would say that it's not okay to discriminate against hiring convicted child rapists as elementary school teachers on the basis that they're a higher risk than the average person. (if you are such a person though, feel free to speak up and explain your position).

So for the most part our variables are:

-Group membership voluntariness

-Feature Y's severity and relevance to the situation

-The situation itself (befriending, hiring, electing to office)

-Ease of determining feature Y without using X as a proxy

-Causality of X to Y

Personally, I'm somewhere between the classically liberal "it's okay to discriminate against voluntary group membership but not involuntary group membership" and the utilitarian "it's okay to discriminate iff the total net benefit of the sorting mechanism is higher than the total cost of the discrimination against group members, taking into account that such discrimination may be widespread", despite the latter being computationally intractable in practice and requiring a bunch of heuristics that allow bias into the mix. I don't think I'm satisfied with the classically liberal position alone because if there were some sufficiently strong counterexample, such as someone with a genetic strain that made them 100x more likely to be a pedophile, I think I'd be okay with refusing child care positions to all such people even if they had never shown any other risk factors. But if there were a similar strain that made them 10% more likely I don't think it would be fair to do this, because it's such a low base rate that 10% doesn't do much to offset the cost of the discrimination. Also the utilitarian position allows for stricter scrutiny applied for more serious things like job applications (which have a huge cost if systematically discriminating against X) versus personal friendships (if people refuse to befriend X because they don't like Y, those people can more easily go make different friends or befriend each other, so the systemic cost is lower)

But I'd love to hear more thoughts and perspectives, especially with reasoning for why different cases are and are not justified under your philosophical/moral framework.

I just want to chime in as I do that as someone who believes HBD is very likely true that I have no real interest in the use of it in this way. The use of these characteristics to pre judge people is reprehensible. I am only interested in HBD as an alternative explanation for disparate outcomes.

It's only reprehensible because we have better alternatives, right? Say (tortured hypothetical) it's the year 1500, and you're picking crewmembers for your voyage in a week. You need a bunch, so all you have to evaluate them is a three minute chat, and they're not particularly educated so there's not much shared knowledge to go on. It's your experience from past voyages that jewish crewmembers are the best and africans are the worst, and this is still informative even after adjusting for your first impression. (Also, a bad crewmember might mean 'your ship sinks'). I think making the race-based judgement here is fine. The only other alternative is picking randomly to an extent. And if you have a moral issue with some people being deprived because they're paid less - how is 'not being chosen because you're black' morally worse than 'not being chosen because you're low iq'? Both are unchosen.

This, of course, isn't really true in the modern day. You can just give someone an IQ test or an interview problem or something.

Even in this scenario given a three minute chat and just observing behavior I think you could swamp race with other observations. But yes, if you're going to construct a scenario that amounts to "You need to select people knowing only the average stats of their group" (racial or otherwise - this same analysis applies to things like hair color of any other arbitrary grouping) then it would just follow that you should select the group with the highest expected competence.

I agree with the following implications and further think this implies some obligation of those who are more capable to help those who are less. Not on a group based level but just the mesh of all humanity.

Is it even possible to not pre-judge though? I think this is what leftists fear about HBD going mainstream and being accepted as true by the average person. If its true that a group is many times more likely to commit violent crime, or some trait marker means someone is many times more likely to be a poor employee, is it reasonable or even possible to not act on that belief?

And if you are acting on behalf of someone else, hiring for a job in someone elses company or choosing a school district for your kids, is it moral to not make the best informed choice possible?

I've never had any trouble with it myself. For the most part people you're interacting with have been sorted such that I think assumptions wouldn't be interpersonally useful. I work with excellent black engineers. It's a lot like how I can recognize for various reason women tend not to enter engineering fields and yet I easily recognize one of the most talented engineers on my team is a woman.

I think this is what leftists fear about HBD going mainstream and being accepted as true by the average person. If its true that a group is many times more likely to commit violent crime, or some trait marker means someone is many times more likely to be a poor employee, is it reasonable or even possible to not act on that belief?

You don't need HBD for that. You just need to know the facts; HBD gives a reason for them, but even if HBD is false and there is some other reason for them, the same inferences may be drawn.

Except I'm not just coyly avoiding references to HBD but secretly referring to that alone, I'm deliberately including a broader range of groups like using someone's membership in the KKK to know you don't want to be friends with them, or using someone's presence on a sex offender registry to avoid hiring for daycare positions. This is also a form of using someone's group membership to pre judge them. Of course there are differences, I'm not trying to argue "these are the same therefore in order to be consistent you have to support or oppose both". My point is more "there are tons of differences between these things, which ones are the actually relevant distinctions and why?"

I think I’d have a high threshold for most common contexts, though as the task at hand got more critical to the mission of the company, the health and safety of the clients or employees, or the safety of the product, my threshold goes down by quite a lot.

I don’t care if my front desk people in a hotel are maximally competent. The role isn’t complicated, and above a certain threshold of competence (speaks English, functionally literate and numerate, understands social contexts) I don’t get that much more for being choosy in who I hire. Any minimally competent person can do the task.

When it comes to something more mission critical, for example a programmer for my software company, the threshold goes down rather quickly. I lose money when I have to waste 1000 man-hours because someone bungled the code, and delays might well cost me millions in salary or lost sales. This hurts everyone working for the company.

The most obvious case would be in dangerous roles, or roles where a mistake can cause injury or death to other people or themselves. A doctor who is too stupid to understand what he’s doing, or has ADHD badly enough that he’s likely to miss critical details is a danger to his patients. An engineer who is unable or distractible enough to not do accurate calculations is a danger to anyone who uses his designs. Even in some forms of factory work, missing a detail or failing to check for people around before servicing or starting equipment can cause serious injury.

So it’s sort of a sliding scale for me. The more critical the role and the more a mess up will harm employees, clients, or the company itself the more I’m at least OK with using any means necessary to get the best possible person for the role.

Any minimally competent person can do the task.

Here is where I sigh heavily and type out a reply more in sorrow than in anger.

I've worked a lot in those kinds of "all you need is a warm body" jobs. And then bosses wonder why the fuck their customers are annoyed and leaving shitty reviews.

Because even for "what the hell do I care who I hire, all I want is a trained monkey to take names and rattle off the prepared script" roles, you do actually need a teeny bit more than "can stand upright unassisted and speak English".

The other day at work I had to engage with the customer service hotline of the bank where we do business, and it soon became apparent that they'd outsourced from the natives here to someplace else. Presumably because it would be cheaper and "what the hell do we care who we hire for these minimal roles".

And it was not a happy experience, lemme tell you. Not the fault of the people on the other end of the line, who were doing their best but had plainly just been dumped with "yeah this is the script" and no support, but the attitude of the higher-ups responsible for the decisions on outsourcing, customer service, shaving off expenses for wages, etc.

It took three phone calls to get a minor issue sorted out, that ordinarily would have taken just one.

And that is why the saying "pay peanuts and get monkeys" came into being. If your attitude to public-facing/customer-facing jobs is "this isn't important, it's just something any minimally competent person can do", then that is what you will get: minimal competence. Which is not enough. If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!

And how do you get people willing to go the extra step? For a start, don't display that you think this is a step above not being employable at all, that you don't give a shit about the job or the people who do it, and that you consider it so minimal, you have no respect for the people doing it.

Whenever I encounter shitty public service, I usually joke after the fact "interest rates are too low".

I dont mean this literally of course, but it is a real problem that improved sorting of people into roles plus some percentage of the distribution of IQ and conscientiousness being too low for meaningful contribution to society, means some experiences in life are just going to be terrible. I often wonder how much of my own childhood experience with generally decent schoolteachers versus my children's teachers who are basically morons is my own changing perception, vs. the fact that smart women have better options now.

I've had similar thoughts about my own elementary school teachers vs my childrens. Smart women do have more options now. Classrooms are different now, the expectations of the experience are different. I think this encourages the moronic.

Datapoint of one(or some small number, whatever), but I remember my teachers as mostly moronic, sometimes motivated to teach and sometimes more concerned with making the kid fit into a box optimized for being easy to work with, and generally being quite lazy. So possibly changing perceptions.

Yeah, I easily can count the number of teachers I didn't think were stupid on one hand.

The amount you would have to pay more for the good for marginally better service is not worth hiring marginally more competent warm bodies.

The best receptionist in the world would be a really flirty Victorias Secret model with massive tits and 150 IQ who also volunteers at the animal shelter and the retirement home and has a warm smile. But she's not going to bring in enough marginal dollars to Dunder Mifflin Paper company to justify the salary on net.

You are leaving Economics completely out of the picture.

If, on the other hand, you have people willing to go the extra step to solve a problem, help a customer, or fix something that is not working - well hey there, your customers have a better experience and don't go away planning to switch to your competitor!

The issue is often that their competitors are not any better in this regard. Or, even when they are, any advantage from customer service is absolutely swamped by other considerations.

I travel a lot and have had a range of experiences with hotel front desks, but I can't say any of them would ever trump even a small difference in price or location. I think the only exceptions I could imagine would be those bordering on the actually criminal.

Especially in the era of travel aggregators, a lot of folks are looking at just the price tag and maybe a map.

Yeah, that's the problem. Because that approach does lead to the "not my job, not my problem" attitude with staff, where a small amount of extra effort could avoid something becoming a major problem later on, but eh why should I care, the boss doesn't, I'm just gonna do my hours and not a finger's worth of extra effort.

And so customers go "they're all equally shitty, which one is cheapest?" and for cost-cutting, employers go the "it's a minimal job for minimal staff" and the outcomes are what we've all experienced: hanging on the phone trying to get the options from the automated menu instead of talking to a real person; if you do get a real person, they're working off a script in an overseas call centre and can't help you even if they wanted to; they don't want to, because everyone knows call-centre work is shitty and this is only something they're doing until they can get something better; help lines aren't helpful, and the degradation in quality continues so long as people will put up with it because it's not worth shifting from service provider A to service provider B since they all use the same kind of cost-cutting measures.

But automation and AI will make it all better, so even the minimal people will be out of jobs to be replaced by the Helpful Friendly ChatBot! Except I don't expect AI to be exempt from the "it's a minimal job, cut expenses as much as possible, this may be crappy but it's good enough" attitude, either.

I've seen the jokes about the American DMV and I don't know what they are like in reality, but that's all part of the "minimal job for minimal people" attitude and how it corrodes any sense of wanting to do something to help people. I've had low-level public-facing public service jobs where it would have been easy to go "not my job, not my problem" and leave people hanging, versus putting in a bit more effort to try and help them solve their problem and tell them what to do and how to navigate the bureaucracy, even though that wasn't formally part of the job.

But if that is not wanted, and indeed punished, by "I don't care who I hire so long as they can turn up sober and speak English" attitudes to 'it's a job any minimally competent person can do and doesn't need good workers because if they're any good they're going to leave for something higher up and better paid' positions, then bored, indifferent and even actively aggressive clerks who shut the window just as your position in the queue moves up to it are what you're going to get. "Oh, I could have stayed open five more minutes beyond my official closing time and taken that form, but now you're going to have to wait another two hours in line? Not my job, not my problem".

I think you're on to something here and it is reminding me of a post on Pakistani vs Japanese manufacturing that I remember reading a month or two back but now can't seem to find. One of the take-aways was that the sort of "not my job not my problem" attitude often behaved in similar ways to a pathogen as what's the point of putting in effort if the next guy down the assembly line is just going to fuck it up.

Here.

That's the one, thank you.

I thought it was only a week or two back - I remember reading it very recently. I haven't had any luck finding it either though. I want to say @screye was involved?

@AsTheDominoesFall, found it. It was 3.5 weeks ago, where i was thinking 4 - 6. I couldn't remember the title and it didn't show up when I did a search for "manufacturing" and various other related terms.

Ah, the post I was thinking of must have been inspired by that one, it was a tangent in the main thread iirc - although I still can't find it, so maybe I don't.

naah, can't recall that one :/

Probably one of the other resident south-asians ?

But they were doing so before this. Most of the jobs I’m thinking of have been in a race to the bottom for decades. People want low prices and labor has a fairly high cost so most service roles are bare bones, purposely dumbed down so anyone off the street can do it, and quite often understafffed from even their own plans. People don’t actually care in most instances. They want cheap, and probably don’t even notice the service end unless it particularly bad. So there’s never really been a reason to worry about quality in low level workers. And as I said above, at the wages most of these jobs can afford to pay, you really don’t get to keep qualified people that long. That young go getter who’s really bright and helpful will probably be doing something else pretty quickly because the pay sucks and he’s got options. If you paid enough to keep him, the room rates go up and you have more empty rooms. The same would go for low level retail. If you paid enough to attract talent you’d have to raise your prices, and people generally don’t really put up with that when there are other cheaper options.

And every once in a while, someone does better customer service, word gets around, and people start actually going over to the better firm. Which then finds they can't scale the better customer service, returns to the crappy norm, and we're back where we started.

Hmm I'm starting to think we've gone over this before...

I don’t care if my front desk people in a hotel are maximally competent. The role isn’t complicated, and above a certain threshold of competence (speaks English, functionally literate and numerate, understands social contexts) I don’t get that much more for being choosy in who I hire. Any minimally competent person can do the task.

Sure, I’d add not a thief, friendly, and capable of prioritization. But you do actually get a value add from a better employee- particularly ability to train as a mgr/assistant mgr, which places like that are always short of.

Agreed in the abstract although I think in a lot of those industries you’ll find more issues with turnover than competence, anyone with a reasonable work ethic, a normal IQ and basic skills will probably do well at low level management anyway. The issue with too much competence in that kind of job is that they’re usually temporarily working that field whilst perusing higher skills to get a better job. Brandon Sanderson talks about working the night desk at a hotel before becoming a writer. He was and still is fairly competent and you could train him to be a good manager. Except for the rather obvious problem that he has no intention of staying in the hotel after he gets published. Or you might get a smart kid to work the desk while going to college and find that they leave after graduation. And again sure for a time you get someone good, but once he graduates he’s going on to his professional field leaving you to get someone else to fill the gap.

In what contexts are accurate prejudice/biases acceptable justification for discrimination?

Everything. Next question please.

To elaborate, whenever the expected utility from discrimination exceeds the costs. If there's a genetic test that correlated with a 0.05% increase in risk for colon cancer, no sensible insurance company would order it, nor should a sane employer hinge their employment decisions upon it, because that would just be a pain in the ass. There's no magic threshold where Bayesian reasoning and statistics becomes applicable, just that there's a time and a place where it's worth the effort over the default course of action.

For many properties relevant to us, it's just blindingly obvious, such as if a person is male or female for the purposes of how concerned you should be when seeing them jogging towards you in a deserted alley.

Few people would say that it would be okay to refuse to hire brown-haired people if it were discovered that they were 0.1% more likely to develop cancer and thus leave on disability

I would be perfectly OK with this, because even slightly rational employers wouldn't fire someone on that basis, and a world where that happens is one that looks nothing like ours. Should they end up fired, then they'll likely end up hired by someone else for 99.99% of their previous wages.

For example, I'm against employers being unable to discriminate on the basis of disability, despite having my own mental health issues, such as ADHD. I'm still functional, if it was so bad that I, say, forgot what medicines I'd prescribed my patient or wandered off in the midst of work, then I would have no expectations of further employment. I wouldn't want that person as an employee, colleague or even my own physician, yet that counts as a protected characteristic.

That's for when we're actually post-scarcity, at least in terms of deserving subsistence if not a job, and we're not there yet.

To elaborate, whenever the expected utility from discrimination exceeds the costs. If there's a genetic test that correlated with a 0.05% increase in risk for colon cancer, no sensible insurance company would order it, nor should a sane employer hinge their employment decisions upon it, because that would just be a pain in the ass.

I'm not sure I agree with this: there are lots of tests like BRCA1 that reveal something like 40% of women with the gene will develop breast cancer. Large employers often self-insure for employee health insurance (often with a known insurer providing the infrastructure and managing benefits), so health care costs actually come directly out of their bottom line. I can imagine that the math works out pretty easily that if, say, Starbucks knew of a positive test for the gene or a family history of certain diseases, it would actually be an actuarial loss to hire certain candidates and provide health insurance.

The US prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of genetic information, and I'm not sure I disagree with the idea that we should do so.

I'm not sure I agree with this: there are lots of tests like BRCA1 that reveal something like 40% of women with the gene will develop breast cancer.

That's not a vanishingly small likelihood is it? It makes perfect sense for insurers to cover it.

As for me, I'm fine with it, I consider attempts to shield important information away with a sceptical eye, leaving aside issues of poor incentives like the police breaking the law to acquire evidence which ought to be inadmissible and such. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and rare is the time when more information is bad for you.

Large employers often self-insure for employee health insurance (often with a known insurer providing the infrastructure and managing benefits), so health care costs actually come directly out of their bottom line.

Is this how it works?

I thought the whole point of health insurance was that it cost the company the same amount no matter how much of it you use.

I guess if they told the health insurance company they were genetically screening employees they could ask for a lower rate, but I sort of wouldn't expect the health insurance companies to go along with it, when they can refer to it being bad optics in order to not give a discount.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Is this how it works?

I thought the whole point of health insurance was that it cost the company the same amount no matter how much of it you use.

If you doubt it, you could literally just hit your favorite search engine up for an explanation of self-insuring companies.

I thought the whole point of health insurance was that it cost the company the same amount no matter how much of it you use.

No, the whole point of health insurance is to pool risk. Companies offer it as a perk, now, but the typical American association between employment and insurance is exceedingly contingent. Insurance companies collect premiums to finance the pool, as well as to finance the administration of the pool and also to distribute profits to shareholders and do all the other things companies do. Large insurance companies have larger pools, distributing risk more widely and collecting more money to the pool. If you're a large enough corporation, however, collecting the premiums yourself (and perhaps paying a small administrative fee to an insurance company) may save you and/or your employees a lot of money, for example if your employees tend to be some combination of young, healthy, unmarried, and/or childless.

Strictly speaking, you can self-insure as an individual, too. If you forgo insurance and simply put your "premiums" into a high yield savings account every month, then over the course of your lifetime you should on average actually come out ahead of people who buy insurance, since the whole point of insurance companies employing armies of actuaries is to be sure that they don't go bankrupt--that is, to insure that more money is coming into the pool, than going out of it. So if you believe the mathematicians, you should self-insure! Of course in reality it doesn't work out this way, even if you're relatively lucky; since insurance companies also have enormous negotiating power, even when self-insuring accurately duplicates the risk pool it doesn't duplicate stuff like "in network" discounts, negotiated rates, "maximum out-of-pocket," and other such perks. To say nothing of most peoples' inability to truly weather a large financial shock on the theory that they should, by the time they are ready to die, still technically come out financially ahead.

You have an inverse of Pascal's Wager going on as an individual. If MegaCorp runs its health insurance in house it at least in theory turns a profit from 99 mostly healthy employees paying for the 1 unlucky guy that gets into a terrible car accident or gets cancer. If it's Joe Schmoe trying to do that then he comes out ahead 99 percent of the time and gets fucking cleaned out 1 percent of the time. This isn't the same.

If it's Joe Schmoe trying to do that then he comes out ahead 99 percent of the time and gets fucking cleaned out 1 percent of the time. This isn't the same.

Right, that's why I said:

Of course in reality it doesn't work out this way, even if you're relatively lucky . . . To say nothing of most peoples' inability to truly weather a large financial shock on the theory that they should, by the time they are ready to die, still technically come out financially ahead.

For that matter, self-insurance sometimes goes very badly even for whole corporations--though, as with insurance companies, the larger they get the less this is likely to be a problem. Small and mid-size firms do self-insure sometimes, and sometimes this goes badly for them. Two or three million-dollar medical events in a single year would be terribly bad luck for a company of, say, 500 employees, but it's well within the realm of the possible. This is why a company that self-insures should typically also have some kind of stop-loss policy backing up its self-insurance pool (and indeed many insurance companies themselves have stop-loss coverage). This is a fascinating area of the law that unfortunately falls outside my expertise, but I find it fascinating even so. Insurance and, essentially, meta-insurance form the basis of all sorts of interesting economic gambits. But some of the greatest profits of all have been won by persuading whole nations that participation in such gambits is wise, or even obligatory.

Which is to say: while I acknowledge that the equilibrium I live in requires that I bet, pragmatically, against the actuaries who think they'll take more of my money than they'll have to give back, I remain suspicious that insurance is in fact a deeply parasitic economic entity, of a kind that should probably be much more regulated than it is (even though I am, in almost all cases, reflexively anti-regulation).

relatively lucky

Maybe I'm just being autistic here, but I was thinking that most of these self-insuring fools actually make it out OK or even come out ahead, a few break even, and some get hauled to the cleaners and back.

This is such a general problem that a even book would be insufficient to wholly deal with it.

Some other examples: Instead of directly determining a person under eighteen's ability to consent by whom they wish to governed, all are deemed incapable of it because of an involuntary characteristic (age). That this discrimination takes places has is probably related to the fact that the alternative, individual assesment of voters understanding of elections, has been determined to be outside the overton window. While the other alternative, barring no-one on the grounds of age, is infissable as infants are incapable to even use a pen to mark the ballot, let alone understand the meaning of this action.

During ww2 all Japanese-Americans were deemed a threat and interned, while Koreans Americans weren't affected and also showed no sympathy for their co-Asians. Meanwhile Soviet Union in 1937 declared Korean-Soviets were more loyal to Japan than SU, and deported them to mostly Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In Japan, Koreans distinguished themselves as brutal, particularly as guards of PoWs. Was it moral for FDR to allow Koreans to roam free, while Stalin deemed them a threat, and Japan viewed them as an asset? Or perhaps all internment and ethnic cleansing schemes schemes unjustified by their very nature?

Instead of directly determining a person under eighteen's ability to consent by whom they wish to governed, all are deemed incapable of it because of an involuntary characteristic (age).

When the person under eighteen is paying all the bills for this house and keeping it up and running and solving their own problems, then the person under eighteen can get a say in who runs the place, otherwise I'm your mom and this is my house, my rules.

(Sorry, couldn't resist).

There are limits. I think a child does have a right to e.g. being fed, and if the current parent isn't satisfying this then society probably should step in.

Taking that argument seriously leads to some pretty dark places when it comes to voting restrictions.

Only if you think anything but the most novel moral fads is "dark".

Universal franchise has been panned as a stupid idea for as long as Republics have existed, and under the name of "democracy" specifically denounced by all but the most depraved and bloody products of the Enlightenment.

In fact the only reason most people ever got the franchise was to justify feeding them into the meat grinders of the bloodiest wars to ever happen and taxing them at rates that would be deemed confiscatory by most of history. So I think this ancient skepticism was on point.

What dark places? That the franchise should be restricted to net taxpayers? It’s actually pretty trivial to figure that out without having to resort to ethnic or other discrimination.

I will charitably assume that you understand discrimination here quite broadly, and mainly as things on the quantitative side, like multidimensional demographic profiling in mortgage approvals, rather than a recipe for an explicit caste society. Most arguments against this line of thought are invalid (rejecting the premise) or non-consequentialist and «principled» to the point of absurdity (statistically reliable proxies in uncertainty are bad! Uncertain gut feelings/laughably gameable metrics are good!).

I think the main problem with the utilitarian approach is simply that the society we have cannot be trusted with the full power of Reverend Bayes. That's okay, in my view: it'll recalibrate under the pressure of truth and retain its good sides while reducing bad ones. But, as it stands, Nick Land said it best:

Consider John Derbyshire’s essay in infamy The Talk: Nonblack Version, focusing initially on its relentless obnoxiousness, and attentive to the negative correlation between sociability and objective reason. As Derbyshire notes elsewhere, people are generally incapable of differentiating themselves from group identities, or properly applying statistical generalizations about groups to individual cases, including their own. A rationally indefensible, but socially inevitable, reification of group profiles is psychologically normal – even ‘human’ – with the result that noisy, non-specific, statistical information is erroneously accepted as a contribution to self-understanding, even when specific information is available.

From the perspective of socially autistic, low-EQ, rational analysis, this is simply mistaken. If an individual has certain characteristics, the fact of belonging to a group that has similar or dissimilar average characteristics is of no relevance whatsoever. Direct and determinate information about the individual is not to any degree enriched by indirect and indeterminate (probabilistic) information about the groups to which the individual belongs. If an individual’s test results are known, for instance, no additional insight is provided by statistical inferences about the test results that might have been expected based on group profiling. An Ashkenazi Jewish moron is no less moronic because he is an Ashkenazi Jew. Elderly Chinese nuns are unlikely to be murderers, but a murderer who happens to be an elderly Chinese nun is neither more nor less murderous than one who is not. This is all extremely obvious, to obnoxious people.

To normal people, however, it is not obvious at all. In part this is because rational intelligence is scarce and abnormal among humans, and in part because social ‘intelligence’ works with what everyone else is thinking, which is to say, with irrational groupish sentiment, meager information, prejudices, stereotypes, and heuristics. Since (almost) everybody else is taking short-cuts, or ‘economizing’ on reason, it is only rational to react defensively to generalizations that are likely to be reified or inappropriately applied — over-riding or substituting for specific perceptions. Anybody who anticipates being pre-defined through a group identity has an expanded ego-investment in that group and the way it is perceived. A generic assessment, however objectively arrived at, will immediately become personal, under (even quite remotely) normal conditions.

Obnoxious reason can stubbornly insist that anything average cannot be about you, but the message will not be generally received. Human social ‘intelligence’ is not built that way. Even supposedly sophisticated commentators blunder repeatedly into the most jarring exhibitions of basic statistical incomprehension without the slightest embarrassment, because embarrassment was designed for something else (and for almost exactly the opposite). The failure to understand stereotypes in their scientific, or probabilistic application, is a functional prerequisite of sociability, since the sole alternative to idiocy in this respect is obnoxiousness.

As it stands, so it goes.

  1. Does this suggest that if such an obnoxious rational person does have the statistical sophistication to draw such distinctions and make decisions in secret, then it's okay? That is, stereotypes are bad in general if widespread because normies will abuse them, but the actual rational analysis is fine if used in an isolated and secret way that normies don't find out about?

  2. What defines "obnoxious" here? Is rationalism itself defined as obnoxious because it cares about pedantic details that normies don't? Or is it merely the social obliviousness of nerdy rationalists who oversimplify everything and miss the forest for the trees, such that a more sophisticated rational intelligence that understands and compensates for normies would not be obnoxious?

obnoxious race realist, colorized, 2019

I think this racist is better than the last, but the next racist will be the really good one. That will be our lucky racist. He will grant us three wishes.

There's another problem as well. Finding out specific information about someone is not free.

It may be that if a group has a 20% greater chance of committing a robbery in the future, it's cheaper to just exclude all of the group than to specifically examine each one. This is especially so when the undesirable trait is something like "will do X in the future"--it's pretty hard to measure that before it happens.

Thanks for pointing this out. Land here articulates very well something I've been trying to understand for quite a while.

A more simplified way to put it in my view, would be to say that statistical analysis and the scientific method more generally are best used as limited tools. Unfortunately these tools were so mind-bogglingly, world-shatteringly powerful our ancestors couldn't help but violently wrench the entirety of human society to serve the tools, and make them more effective. Now we can't even use the tools properly, because the masses of society don't understand that these methods aren't the exact same thing as divine messengers serving up Truth from the heavens.

And so the wheel turns. At least soon we'll have artificial intelligence to turn the wheel for us.

Personal life - always, Personal life as consumer - always as long as it is not in your face too much - aka it is ok to avoid purple owned businesses, it's not ok to explicitly demand to be serviced by the only green employee there. Professional - you can go like Cristal brand to tell that you are amused that this rap guys are buying so much Champaigne, they get offended, and you know that your real customers - can freely drink without being associated with the likes of Jay Z or 50 Cent

I am not a big fan of proxies when it comes to important matters. We should aim to get as close to the underlying variable as possible.

Got a black and white potential candidate for a job as a physics researcher? In my world whoever scores higher in the IQ test gets it.

Not hiring child molesters at a pre school is less about competence or safety and more about optics. Lets say you had a device that could read minds and is attached to ones wrist to deliver a deadly electrical shock before one is to sexually abuse a child. I would bet most parents would still rather this guy not be near his children with the device on even if it means his life depends on doing an excellent job.

Will we ever reach the perfect set of proxies? No. But if they are used the way Bayes intended, I am fine with them. In practice they are used as hard and dumb cutoffs.

Oh you have 5 years of experience Instead of the 5.1 we are asking for? Too bad.

The problem with this view, which is at the heart of the modern rational world, is that the energy expended to figure things out in totality isn't always worth expending.

Your brain doesn't need to understand the shape of the environment on the atomic level to manipulate it, you've developped the concept of objects, which are a useful, wrong, simplification of it.

Newtonian physics are falsified, yet we use them daily in engineering.

The truth is that ALL criterions are proxies. The true nature of the world is unknowable and all decisions are made using models based on experience.

And quality models are energy efficient for their uses.

This actually gets at how I personally define “IQ”, which is the physical level at of detail at which a being understands reality. In this sense, there is a theoretical — and arguably practical — upper bound on intelligence, where a being understands all of reality across all time — that is, the position of every atom in the universe across every temporal dimension.

I have no doubt in the near future we will have AIs which achieve a significant portion of this — the ability to perceive and manipulate reality at the atomic level across a substantial — say, galaxy sized — slice of the universe. In practice these would be indistinguishable from magic to someone alive today. You could just say “get me a beer” to the AI, it would instantly assemble atoms into a glass (ice cold with frost on it) filled with atoms assembled as freshly brewed beer.

Looks like you're mixing in so much perception, memory, reach and ability to manipulate into "intelligence" that your personal definition of "IQ" is going to massively differ from the colloquial.

This is like the gripe I have with the Yud-esque AI doomers who claim intelligence is when if more, then can do magic.

The issue with not using proxies is that really a lot of measures are nearly impossible to get any other way. I can’t give an intelligence test to potential hires — it’s illegal. So I have to use college graduation as a proxy. I can’t really ask whether you’re going to commit a crime, — the criminal isn’t going to admit it — but someone rocking up with face tattoos wearing a hoodie is a decent proxy for criminality.

I can’t give an intelligence test to potential hires — it’s illegal.

Where are you, and when was the last time you were in the position to hire someone? I only ask because while I've seen this argument made on numerous occasions throughout rationalist circles, I have never seen it born out in meat-space. In my experience, aptitude and skill tests are a bog-standard component of the hiring process, and have been throughout my professional life.

Having sat on both sides of that proverbial table I feel like something must be getting left out here.

Yeah, I’ve had to take aptitude and IQ-proxy(wonderlic etc) tests at most jobs I’ve applied for. If testing potential hires is illegal then it’s certainly not very well enforced.

I’ve had to take aptitude and IQ-proxy(wonderlic etc) tests at most jobs I’ve applied for.

Same here, furthermore just last week I was on the other side of the desk administering our internal test to a bunch of potential new hires. Given I work for a large US government contractor, and how up my ass Legal typically is about everything else involving budgets/hiring I find it hard to believe they would somehow miss that.

This thread is reminding me of doing high school debate and arguing about racial profiling.

"The good news is you won the debate. The bad news is you will never gain entry to a selective college nor a prestiguous employer. I hope this was worth it to you, young Mr. Sailer".

I feel like the unexamined assumption in both this post and many of the replies is "WTF does it even mean to be <quote>accurate<\quote> in this context?"

And even if some autist were to attempt to codify it, the Engineer's Hymn strikes me as the only appropriate response.

The careful text-books measure
Let all who build beware
of the shock, the load, the pressure
a material can bear
So, when the buckled girder
lets down the grinding span
The blame of loss, or murder
is laid upon the man
Not on the Steel - the Man!
But, in our daily dealings
with stone and steel, we find
The Gods have no such feelings
of justice toward mankind
To no set gauge they make us
for no laid course prepare
In time they overtake us
with loads we cannot bear
The prudent text-books give it
in tables at the end
The stress that shears a rivet
or makes a tie-bar bend
What traffic wrecks macadam
what concrete should endure
But we poor Sons of Adam
Have no such literature

In short, If your goal is to come up with some sort of systematic means of judging group membership so you don't have to put the effort into judging individual merit, you're inevitably going to get a garbage result because garbage in is garbage out.

Even shorter, you're asking the wrong questions.

Edit:formatting

I don’t believe anyone operates this way in real life.

We all use models that are GIGO if said model provides a slightly better view of the world and it is very costly to acquire a better model. It’s called a heuristic.

So yes, I’m going to mind my P&Qs more when I see generic male black youths walking in my direction compared to generic Asian girl youths.

If I am approving someone for say a loan, then I have harder data and therefore the cost to acquire a better model is rather limited.

If the girls were all tatted-up and the guys were dressed like this would that change your calculus any?

A pet theory I've been playing around with is that the reason that the intellectually inclined introverts seem to gravitate towards intersectionality/HBD is that for whatever reason they never developed the ability to read any social signal more discrete than "looks like me = friend, looks like other = threat".

And all these pet theories you have are Bulverism, derived by working backwards from "The HBD believers are wrong, bad, and stupid, let's try to come up with a reason 'why' in a way that insults them". Which is fine if you're into insults but not a good way of determining anything about the world.

Are you also going to argue that Kepler's equations are wrong or not worth studying because he arrived at them by working backwards from a belief that the academic consensus of his day was incorrect?

Edit to add: Contra the popular consensus here, the measure of a theory's quality is not in it's intellectual or social merit, but a combination of how well it explains observed reality and how well it predicts future behavior.

I think I defined it fairly unambiguously:

Let's suppose that we know with certainty that people in group X have a statistically higher rate of bad feature Y compared to the average population, whether that be criminality, laziness, low intelligence, or are just unpleasant to be around. I'm taking the fact that this is accurate as an axiom. The actual proportion of people in group X with feature Y is objectively (and known to you) higher than average, but is not universal. That is, Y is a mostly discrete feature, and we have 0 < p < q < 1 where p is the probability of a randomly sampled member of the public has Y, and q is the probability that a randomly sampled member of q has Y.

It's "accurate" in that the literal proportion of people with trait Y in the general population and the group, in real life are p and q respectively, with p < q, and we also believe this to be true. As opposed to an inaccurate stereotype representing a false belief. In-so-far as Y actively impacts merit, then membership in X does provide a real signal correlated with merit.

Obviously actually measuring merit directly is superior to imperfect correlations, but if you are, for instance, hiring someone for a job, imperfect correlations are the only thing you have up until you actually hire someone and watch them perform the job. Literally everything you judge on is going to be an imperfect correlation of some form, so it's just a question of which ones you use and how much weight you put on each.

It's "accurate" in that the literal proportion of people with trait Y in the general population and the group, in real life are p and q respectively..."

The thing is that you haven't explained why that should matter.

Why are you trying to avoid measuring merit? Is it Laziness? or is it lack of ability/bandwidth?

In many cases it's where merit is difficult to measure up front. If you are looking at job applications, you can't literally perceive merit until you've already hired someone, and thus excluded the other candidates. If you're trying to avoid rapists, you can't perceive merit until they've literally attempted or succeeded at raping someone. If you're looking for romantic partners, a 1 minute analysis based on group membership is 120 times cheaper than going on a 2 hour date, and thus potentially worthwhile if the amount of information you can extract from it is 1% as much.

The optimal Bayesian thing to from a purely selfishly rational perspective seems to be using immediately identifiable group membership as a first screening pass (establishing the prior) and then update with more direct merit measures as/if they become available.

In many cases it's where merit is difficult to measure up front.

...And yet I don't think it's as hard as people make it out to be. To use the hiring example just last week I was in the position of vetting a bunch of potential new hires. Our organization uses the abbreviated (30 question) Wonderlic in conjunction with an internally generated field-specific aptitude/skill test. I feel like between the test scores and simply talking to each candidate individually for 15 - 20 minutes we were able to get a pretty good sense of each one's "vibe" and sort the ones we wanted to call back, from the ones we don't.

While I will grant that this method may not be practical for the sort of "all we need is a warm body" job that @FarNearEverywhere refers to I can't help but wonder how much of that is a product of the attitude that "all we need is a warm body". I recognize that I am fortunate to have a dozen applicants for 3 open slots. I can afford to be picky. At the same time there is price to be paid for not being picky. I'd rather be in the field myself with my guys collecting overtime because we're shorthanded than hire some shit-wit who's going to make a mess of things and potentially get someone killed.

Okay but you don't seem to be arguing against categorizing people, you're mostly just suggesting that accurate categories are superior to inaccurate categories. I'm not especially familiar with Wonderlic, but some quick Googling suggests it's an employment-specific intelligence test. Which means it's is not literally measuring merit at a job, it's categorizing people based on questions that it thinks are a proxy for job skill (unless the job literally consists of answering Wonderlic questions). People don't go around politically identifying with in discrete groups based on their intelligence, but screening out unintelligent people is still a form of grouping people up and discriminating based on something that isn't directly merit, but is strongly correlated with it.

Because measuring merit means hiring them for the job and seeing how well they do. By the time you've done this, if it turns out they have no merit, you've paid a big cost. The worst case is if "merit" doesn't just mean "will do the job well" but also includes things like "won't embezzle funds". It's hard to measure whether someone's going to embezzle funds other than by either using proxies, or waiting until they actually embezzle the funds and taking the hit.

All models are wrong, but some models are useful.

Less than you might think.

If so regarding modern cognitive models that undergird the HBD debate firms should be able to make a killing hiring math students from CSU-Monterrey and foregoing kids from Stanford, Cal Tech, and Berkeley and foregoing those poorly modeled higher salary demands.

I'm not sure what that has to do with HBD, but you can in fact do that. Except the "making a killing" part. Any major salary difference between similar employees with different educations will only last a year or two. And balanced against that are the increase search costs -- it may be you can hire randomly from Cal Tech and have a 95% chance of getting a good employee, but from CSU-Monterrey it's more like 5%. So you need to filter more, which costs you money up front. It also increases the chance of getting a dud, since your filters aren't perfect, and duds are expensive.

The 5% vs. 95% claim is self-rebutting. If the SAT is, indeed, crap, then CSU-Monterrey students are as good as Cal-Tech students AS A RULE. I didn't say you could make a killing by hiring CSU-Moneterrey grads that graduated at the top of their class and had full academic scholarships vs. random hiring at Cal Tech. I made an absolute statement that you could hire randomly from CSU-Mont and do just as well, while paying pennies on the dollar.

Funny you should mention that...

Some

I take the utilitarian position, however I feel like lots of people who think they are taking the utilitarian position nevertheless produce wildly different real-world conclusions about what types of discrimination are or aren't justified.

It's a hugely complex issue once you start considering things like the just world fallacy and how people will take any 'approved' discrimination as justification to dehumanize entire populations, or the way discrimination creates self-fulfilling prophecies, or etc.

I almost feel like this is one of those cases where people can't actually think usefully about the truth of the matter, and the utilitarian optimal thing is to pretend that you 100% believe and insist on the liberal version, while secretly using the utilitarian version on practice, because a society that believes in the liberal version will come closer to the utilitarian-optimal outcome than one that tries to explicitly do utilitarian math.

I'm not sure that's stable though, because it may inevitably slippery slope its way into progressivism. That is, this optimal state depends on universal but not-common knowledge: the utilitarian version has to actually be a secret. Because if you are publicly insisting on ignoring group memberships and everyone knows that person A is discriminating against group X in a not-secret way, then the public persona is forced to denounce them as a X-ist in order to maintain consistency. But if everyone using the utilitarian version in practice, then it's hard to keep that a secret from everyone else (who is doing the same thing). And if only the smart well-behaved rationalists who can be trusted to discriminate responsibly use the utilitarian version while everyone else uses the liberal version, then a higher fraction of smart well-behaved rationalists would be discovered and denounced as X-ist creating a stereotype against them.

Maybe it works if you restrict the secret utilitarian version to only cases where there's absolutely no conceivable way of being discovered.

And if only the smart well-behaved rationalists who can be trusted to discriminate responsibly use the utilitarian version while everyone else uses the liberal version, then a higher fraction of smart well-behaved rationalists would be discovered and denounced as X-ist creating a stereotype against them.

Right, I think that's the world we're actually in, and that it's probably worth the trade-off.

Rationalists should get better about hiding it, no one's ever caught me so far.

In general, I would have the state seek policies of colorblindness (even outside of the context of literal skin color). I can acknowledge that this may not always be the most efficient choice economically, but it seems desirable because it's a system I could accept being on the other end of. At the same time, I think we can and should guarantee a certain minimum of quality of outcome: even if you're at the bottom end of the system we should be able to make systems that give dignity, the basics (shelter, food, and such), and ideally purpose.

But I can also accept that there are times when deviating from this policy is expedient or even required: if there's a dangerous fugitive at large known to be tall, I wouldn't necessarily demand stopping and checking short people equally.

I do think we've discussed this topic to death, as has 'the discourse' generally. And ethics depends on context. Consequentialist or not, so long as your values look more like "economic productivity" or "more happy people" or "national greatness" than "racism bad", it makes sense to think about the ethics of discrimination based on how they impact those. And while in the far past, 'statistical discrimination' probably could cause significant harm, I think today it causes essentially no harm.

In most cases of potential discrimination with political relevance, modern science, technology, and political organization would allow a competent corporation or state to directly measure each individual's traits or capacities, bypassing the ethical dilemma. Intelligence / job skills? IQ tests. Criminality? Properly enforce even minor laws, and have a public database of offenses employers can consult. Various right-wingers lament the low IQ of immigrants, but no need to statistically discriminate here, just give potential applicants IQ tests. Not politically viable, but so are immigration restrictions on all colored people. This alone makes 'statistical discrimination' a mostly moot issue in practice, IMO, and any marginal statistical discrimination has no systemic impact as a result. This is the point at which critics of pervasive racism or sexism fall back to 'structural racism that disadvantages poor/nonwhite/nonmale people even by objective standards', although they never draw the conclusion that they should pay less attention to explicit discrimination.

The terms I'll use are statistical discrimination - most centrally, making a decision with goals unrelated to race/sex/the group in question, but using the group as a proxy for the goal - versus taste-based discrimination, making a decision that's not really rationally justified on any goal other than 'exclude group'. Which category you place something into depends on your values - a white nationalist probably thinks a white-only company is a rational choice to maximize productivity, and a committed anti-racist would in their heart consider any discrimination taste-based because black people aren't any less capable than white people. But there's a big difference between giving black people .3 percentage points higher interest rates than white people or not hiring a hispanic house-cleaner because the last one stole from you, and not hiring any female doctors in the entire medical system because you incorrectly think they're much less capable than men. Even if it was applied universally, statistical discrimination in modern life is just not that impactful. Even if the cars of black people are stopped 3x as much as those of white people, the cumulative harm this does to black non-criminals is just low, the rate of police physically harming innocent and cooperative people is low. If there was a latent supply of skilled black programmers somewhere, Big Tech would love to tap it no matter the average black IQ (alas, immigration laws). And to whatever extent statistical discrimination, by assumption justified excluding second-order effects, harms black people who are on the good end of the distribution in question (IQ, criminality), that harm is (by assumption) compensated for in aggregate by the higher skill, lower criminality, or whatever of the worker that replaced them. If it was absolutely morally necessary to alleviate this, itd still be better to do so so via e.g. taxes and transfers, a pareto improvement, than by banning statistical discrimination. And again, this should be moot because one can just measure individuals.

I don't think your voluntary vs involuntary group membership distinction is important. Being born with a low IQ is exactly as involuntary as being born with median IQ into a group with a high rate of having low IQ, but it's perfectly reasonable to give lower-paying jobs to people with lower IQ, so in low information environments (that aren't modern environments), I don't think giving lower-paying jobs to group members is different.

Then there's taste-based discrimination. Those committing it incorrectly (by assumption) believe it's statistical discrimination, and given how pervasive that mistake is it's worth considering. I think nobody can deny that this can be terrible in economic and moral senses. Take untouchables, a recurrent cultural phenomena, whether in india, europe, or elsewhere. These groups are prohibited, for absurd reasons, from engaging in most productive occupations and many social relations. (Although I'm curious if anyone has a defense of untouchable classes, the only study I found put dalit IQ at 5 points less than brahmin, which is low, but I don't think that estimate means much) It's a waste of surplus, and terrible for those affected. The categorical exclusion from many occupations of women and individuals of various races in the recent past seem similarly misguided, as confirmed by the low remaining wage gaps. But when people condemn taste-based discrimination today, the moral weight they put fits untouchables more than it does us. Most people in America are apolitical, centrist or progressive, and believe either in race-blind merit or explicit affirmative action, and hiring practices reflect this. And while nobody hiring women obviously depresses female wages, if even half of firms openly treat women equally, they'll suck up all the women and reduce the wage gap, adjusted for hours worked and skill, to a minimum. While taste-based discrimination is still dumb, and thus bad in the same way that firing someone for having brown hair is bad, in areas like hiring, interpersonal relationships, and criminal justice, it's not a significant moral issue in the US, in the same way that religious persecution was a massive issue 300 years ago but isn't anymore.

So to go into your example:

But if there were a similar strain that made them 10% more likely [to be a pedophile] I don't think it would be fair to [refuse them a childcare position], because it's such a low base rate that 10% doesn't do much to offset the cost of the discrimination

I think this is a misleading example - there are many people currently teaching who have demographic attributes that make them, statistically, more than 10% likely to be pedophiles than other groups of teachers. E.g. men vs women. But even taking it literally, I don't think it's an issue, because it's limited to the small percentage of occupations that involve childcare, so people with that strain can just get other jobs. It's equal in impact to the many other idiosyncratic and irrational preferences employers have.

One counterargument to meritocracy is that majority or minority populations don't like it when they're outperformed and seek redistribution or expropriation. From a naively utilitarian point of view, it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of meritocracy to achieve a bit more stability, or to find an equilibria somewhere you can get a good amount of both.

See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.

Personally, I think this is a bad idea that leads to long-run instability. Opening up and strengthening divisions in the population of the country is a bad idea. If you have meritocracy, then you will have groups of winners and angry losers. If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers, a recipe for toxic politics. Better a nation-state without such dividing points. Or, if you can't have a nation-state then at least try to avoid huge divisions in ability between populations, if you have to import people then aim for similar levels of skill to the general population.

If you have affirmative action, then you have new, state-defined groups of winners and angry losers

When the state determines winners and losers among groups, the incentive to compete for state control matches the state's ability to differentiate group outcomes.

I feel like this accounting of winners vs losers in meritocracy is obscuring the fact that there is no 'natural' distributional outcome of meritocracy.

Meritocracy 'naturally' produces an ordinal relationship between people on whatever axis it measures, which does naturally create 'winners' and 'losers' (and those in between).

But one meritocratic system might end with the winners have 10% more resources than the losers, and another meritocratic system might end with the winners having 1,000,000X more resources than the losers. This having nothing to do with how much better the winners are than the losers, just with contingent factors about how the system itself functions.

The meritocratic ordering itself says nothing about which of those two distributional outcomes is 'correct' or 'natural' or 'right,' meritocracy measures something different from that and has nothing to say on the matter.

Which of those systems we should choose to live in, and which distributional outcomes we should want our meritocracy produces, is purely an arbitrary and political question.

If the losers demand that they get more than the winners, then that is trying to overturn meritocracy and take what is not theirs.

If the losers think that winners should get 10x as much as losers, and the winners think that winners should get 1000x as much as losers, then that's just a standard conflict of material interests between two different groups of citizens.

That's just politics.

(also, insert the standard affirmative action rant about 'recruit the kid who runs fast but has terrible form')

See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.

Malays get this so that they don’t riot against the Chinese minority who dominate the country’s economy, as they already have before. For the Chinese, bumiputra is a price they are willing to pay for the preservation of their economic power (and its associated privilege, as it’s not as if they’re less clannish than the Malays are), a fig leaf that minimizes racial hostility. The alternative might well be being kicked out of Malaysia entirely, and while that would be bad for the Malays, it would also be bad for the Chinese affected.

The alternative might well be being kicked out of Malaysia entirely

As I've heard it told, the founding story of independent Singapore involved the parliament of Malaysia voting unanimously (absent members from Singapore) in 1965 to expel Singapore from its state involuntarily. This seems related to the fact that the island was, unlike the mainland, a majority ethnic Chinese. The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.

Malaysia isn’t that badly off- it’s certainly better off than Indonesia. Difference in government(and Lee Kwan Yew really was a once in a generation genius at government) and geography can explain the difference, probably better than HBD.

The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.

Ditto the inverse. The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter, and that by extension Lee Kuan Yew's efforts at economic and cultural integration were a waste of time/resources, and yet (as you yourself observe) the differences in outcome are notable.

I imagine that someone will be along in a bit to argue that if Singapore had massacred all the ethnic Malays on the Island rather than integrating them they would have been even more successful but I don't buy it. That's the kind of policy that causes "unrest"

The Malays would have won that riot because they dominated the military.

Which in turn suggests the existence of considerations with far greater effect sizes than simple genetics, supporting my point.

Well yeah, the state of modern Russia points to something beyond national average IQ scores being highly relevant for what happens in a country.

Agreed

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The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter

This is a laughable assertion. The standard HBD take acknowledges that culture and environment can cripple any person or set of persons, just that asserting those things apply to some situations is also laughable.

The problem is most HBDers that are willing to talk about it online are the type of folks who understand that HBD is somewhat real, and then they see absolutely everything through that lens. The people here on the Motte are actually quite reasonable about HBD in my view.

But in the wastes of the internet outside our walled garden... well, when you have a hammer as powerful and covered up as HBD, what isn't a nail?

I've rarely seen HBD ever deployed, even on the internet, in any context except for as a defense against unhinged allegations of racism.

Even here, my experience has been much closer to that of @TheDag's.

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This is a laughable assertion.

No it is not.

Near as I can tell, the sort of view expressed by @Folamh3, @self_made_human, and others here that...

it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

...is not an extreme or hyperbolic take, it's the median.

Charitably you are engaging in a very blatant Motte and Baily where you try to play the "group differences in outcome" card right up until someone asks how exactly you determine group membership for the purposes of determining group differences. IE Is a dark-skinned man who votes Republican "black" or is he, as Joe Biden and the Hosts of the View assert, "white". (Edit: See Slate and the LA Times' treatment of Clarence Thomas and Larry Elder)

Less charitably you are simply lying.

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note: I think it'd be more productive for everyone if you directly responded to the (different) arguments we're all making, instead of picking on one individual example of hypocrisy.

Take the rare very smart black kid in 1800. He's a slave. His masters notice he's clever, and give him more complex work. He remains a slave.

Take the kid post-reconstruction. He's the son of a farm laborer. He grows up, goes to the city, and gets a job at a factory. He's paid less than similar white workers for explicitly segregationist reasons. He's still given more responsibility than his black coworkers though, maybe even more pay.

The kid grows up in 1980. He's sent to a bad public school. Fights break out every day, teachers don't understand half of the material in most classes. But the teachers still read from the book, the textbooks are still available, so the smart kid picks up a lot. And he does well on the standardized tests. He goes to a good college, helped in part by affirmative action, and gets a job as an engineer. Or maybe he finds school stifling, does well on some classes but neglects others, and gets sucked into a culture of drugs and violence, becomes a sad statistic. Both happened.

The kid grows up in 2020. Bad public school, but with 2x the funding. The kid spends half his time on his phone, but still does well on tests. Test scores -> decent college -> decent job. Or, he finds school stifling. But now, he's naturally attracted to online communities with people of similar intelligence, and imitates their interests. With this, he makes connections, learns the tacit parts of upper-middle-class culture, and builds a desire for the kinds of occupations successful people pursue. Via one of those, he gets a good job.

This is why culture and environment 'don't matter'. They do matter, in the absolute. But, first in cities, then via technology, modern life exposes people to every other type of person, allowing people to effectively sort themselves by ability. And this heavily smooths out any differences in outcomes attributable to differences in culture or circumstances. Some still remains, of course, but much less than in the past. Innate ability, by contrast, is as strong a differentiator as ever.

A question: Jewish kids, Black kids, Hispanic kids, White kids, and Asian kids all have access to computers and the internet. They all post on all the major platforms. Why are so many of the best writers or smartest anonymous posters, even via the constrained medium of twitter, jews? Why are so few black?

You might explain this via lack of access, or systemic racism. But the second question is: Why, at least to my eyes, are the racial gaps in ability as large, and often larger, (both in terms of jew/white, asian/white, and white/black) in the realm of self-driven achievement on anonymous internet platforms than they are in educational institutions or real-world occupations?

Just to be clear, you're asking me to imagine a lineage of people who were smart and capable but held back by cultural and policy issues like slavery and segregation...

...and the conclusion that you expect me to draw from this example is that cultural and policy issues don't matter?

I think you're going to need to unpack your reasoning for me.

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Near as I can tell, the sort of view expressed by @Folamh3, @self_made_human, and others here that...

it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

It is probably true. Schools are like 2% of environment, probably less. In fact, some parents have taken to faking moving into "worse" schools to improve their kids chance of getting into top tier colleges. Its not extreme because its bland and true. If you took all the kids from Brooklyn Tech and put them in the worst school in NYC, and put all those kids into Tech, Tech would immediately become a "bottom 10" school and this rando bad school would become a "top 10" school. Environmental effects need to be much stronger than teachers to significantly affect outcomes.

Do you realize that he was paraphrasing DeBoer and you can look up what else the guy has written? Specifically, from the same link,

This perspective is both buttressed by a tremendous amount of evidence and yet considered impermissible in polite debate. And teachers and schools pay the price, as they are asked to control outcomes they have limited influence on. The abstract of this paper sums up the reality.

Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains.

[…]

Kids do learn at school. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So how can I deny that education works?

The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. People don’t know something, or don’t know how to do something, and then they take lessons, and then they know it or can do it. From algebra to gymnastics to motorcycle maintenance to guitar, you can grow in your cognitive and practical abilities. The rate that you grow will differ from that of others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals; a seasoned piano teacher will tell you that anyone can learn some tunes, but also that most people have natural limits on their learning that prevent them from being as good as the masters. So too with academics: the fact that growth in absolute learning is common does not undermine the observation that some learners will always outperform others in relative terms. Everybody can learn. The trouble is that people think that they care most about this absolute learning when what they actually care about, and what the system cares about, is relative learning - performance in a spectrum or hierarchy of ability that shows skills in comparison to those of other people.

I do not see how you can object to anything in there. Genetics drives the differential ranking of humans; environment drives the absolute magnitude of what's possible for every given percentile; it seems to be the society-wide environment and not some school or teacher's ultra clever nudging or a bit of extra resources. The evidence really suggests that, as long as you don't hit the kids over the head with a lead pipe, don't starve them or force into pit fights, and provide merely reasonable learning conditions by the standards of modern pedagogic science – which are in many cases cheaper to achieve than some extravagant progressive practices – they basically reach up to their genotypic potential in the contemporary society. Which is unequal in predictable ways.

Sure, ruining education remains easier than getting it right, just like producing inedible slurry is easier than running a decent food stall. But the latter is still not rocket science. It's reasonable, arguably necessary, to enforce some standards of hygiene and ingredient quality; it is inane to assert that, say, differences in height of New Yorkers of different races are driven by distribution of ethnic food stalls in their neighborhoods. Likewise with education.

…But of course you understand all that, you [expletive deleted]. You were trolling @Folamh3 back then as well:

I must confess a certain amount amusment/schadenfreude reading this.
If ability to read really is, as you just so confidently asserted, "all genetic" why shouldn't teachers pick their methods based on what's fun for them?

etc. etc.

You just refuse to engage charitably on this matter, and in fact seem to take some pride in that.

Look man, you and I have been doing this for years. 10 years this October by my count. What do you think my "engaging charitably" would look even like in this context?

The way I see it I have been eminently charitable, and in the decade I've been participating in this specific community I've seen an HBD post that rose above tired "arguments as soldiers" or "look at me I'm so edgey" maybe a handful of times at the most.

What this look likes from my end you have staked out a position in the Motte, and because your position in the Motte may have some merit (emphasis on the may) I am expected to cede the Bailey as typified by the linked post without a fight in the name of "charity".

If that's what is expected of me then, yes. I will admit that I do take a certain amount of pride in refusing to "engage charitably".

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In my follow-up comments to the comment you linked, I made it abundantly clear that when I said "it's all genetics" I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect, and I do not, in fact, believe that culture plays zero role in educational outcomes. My hyperbolic assertion that "it's all genetics" was intended to contrast with the attitudes of certain education researchers who do, apparently, believe that genetics plays no role in educational outcomes, and that educational outcomes are entirely determined by culture, upbringing and school quality.

I've made my actual position on this matter abundantly clear to you, and I think it's rather tiresome and dishonest of you to quote this off-the-cuff comment out of context. You seem convinced that this off-the-cuff comment I made in passing was some sort of "mask-off" moment for me, and all the follow-up comments I made expressing my actual position in more nuanced detail were simply lies. I don't know how you arrived at this position and I don't appreciate being misrepresented.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would knock it off and stop involving me every time you want to make a point about how evil and wretched HBDers are. And don't tell a story that you're only pinging me because I'm "one of the Motte's most prominent HBD proponents" or whatever: I barely discuss the issue at all, and the comment you linked is from seven months ago. In the interim, out of the dozens if not hundreds of comments I've posted here, I've discussed HBD in any capacity a grand total of three times, in one case because you were pinging me about it, in another case to explicitly refute the claim that HBD is the cause of disproportionate homicide rates between ethnic groups in the US. It's not a topic I know much about, claim any expertise in or discuss with any great frequency.

If you're so convinced that rabid, unqualified endorsement of HBD is the median position on this site, it shouldn't be remotely hard for you to find a better example to illustrate your point than me, a guy who has never claimed any expertise in the topic, doesn't find it particularly interesting and barely talks about it. Given that you know all of the foregoing, it's really obnoxious of you to repeatedly bring me up any time you're trying to score points in a HBD debate, especially now that you've been explicitly requested not to do so in future.

My read of that interaction is that you were trying to use arguments as soldiers and then got pissy when they got slaughtered to a man because you'd marched them into a killbox.

This is far from the first time that you and I have done this particular song and dance. You'll make some blanket claim about X-outcome is entirely explained by genetics and then someone usually myself or @FCfromSSC will point out that all the genetics in the world won't teach kids to read, or turn a flabby sack of dough into NFL athlete if they don't eat well and go to the gym, at which point you accuse your interlocutor of misunderstanding what you plainly said and/or quoting you out context. Rinse, wash, repeat, every 3 - 4 months.

Simply put, if you don't want to be used as an example of HBDer's poor behavior, stop providing such good examples.

Edit: See also my replies to @DaseindustriesLtd, and @hydroacetylene.

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it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

No Hlynka, as I've told you before, HBDers don't think genetics is the be all and end all.*

The reason that differences in outcome are minimal for a smart kid in a private versus public school is that they both surpass a minimum threshold of quality such that any further difference is down to genetics. Take the same kid and chuck them in the kind of rundown, underfunded schools you might find in the worst parts of India and you're going to see them suffer. If you wish to attribute all the disparities of the world to either genetics or "culture", then that's the latter because it has fuck all to do with genes.

You're so comfortable in your Western skin that you don't notice how almost everything around you is far better than it historically was, say a century ago, and is still better than the majority of this planet.

*Another example of your exasperating tendency to forget anything inconvenient to your narrative. Even my usual desire to adhere to the presumption of good faith and charity here on The Motte has long worn thin for you.

as I've told you before, HBDers don't think genetics is the be all and end all.

And yet HBDers keep arguing the contrary.

To be blunt, you either endorse the linked comment or you don't. Which is it?

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My position would be somewhere along the lines of: "If there is no way to evaluate the factor being considered directly, then discrimination based on proxies is acceptable. Voluntary proxies (like dress) are preferable to innate proxies (like race)."

Say redheads have an unusually high chance to spontaneously combust, and I don't want to hire them in my explosives factory. If I can measure an individual's combustibility, then discrimination against redheads is pointless and nefarious. If I can't, then yeah, sorry redheads.

Given that we can measure Big-5 personality traits and IQ in mere hours at most, effectively all proxies (race, education, class, wealth etc) are unacceptable nowadays, though they were fine before.

Given that we can measure Big-5 personality traits and IQ in mere hours at most

Of these, only IQ, and people are often reluctant to be measured. If someone gets a high score on IQ test, they almost certainly have high IQ. If someone gets a high score on personality test, this also could mean they are high IQ liar and decided their intelligence to get result wanted by test presenter.

If I can measure an individual's combustibility, then discrimination against redheads is pointless and nefarious.

This is an example of the base rate fallacy. The only way priors could cease to matter is if you had perfectly accurate information, which is obviously unrealistic. To borrow an example from Neven Sesardić:

In order to facilitate the calculation of relevant probabilities we need to introduce the only part of the equation that is still missing, namely the information about specific evidence. For that purpose imagine there is a piece of evidence (E) which is much more often present among those who are guilty of murder or non-negligible homicide (M) than among others (∼M).

To be specific, suppose that, among both whites and blacks, the probability of E, given M, i.e. p(E|M), is 0.3, whereas the probability of E, given not M, i.e. p(E|∼M), is 0.0003. Now since E is much more frequent among Ms. than among ~Ms., the presence of E in a person will markedly increase the probability that the person has M. <…>

The probability p(M|E) is obtained by dividing the frequency of E&M by the frequency of all E, i.e. E&M + E&∼M. So the probability that a randomly selected black person with characteristic E is also M is 0.6. Figure 5 gives the same graph for whites.

The difference is striking. The probability of a person with suspicious characteristic E being a murderer is 0.6 if he is black, but 0.09 if he is white. And this difference is exclusively the result of different prior probabilities of M among blacks and whites.

My point isn't disagreeing with that at all. In that example you cannot 100% measure homicide-guilt, so proxies, as listed in the quote, are fine. Additionally, considering multiple proxies simultaneously is fine as well. A white person dressed trashy is less likely to be a criminal than a black person dressed trashy, yes, and so you can definitely factor in both the race and dress proxies simultaneously. If we ever had a perfect legal system that always caught every criminal (or even say, 99.99%), then the use of those proxies would immediately become pointless, as you could instead just check whether they've been convicted.

But for the qualities that are most important in official contexts we have plenty of measurements we can take instead. Between IQ, Big-5, a simple psych questionnaire, and a skills test, a bureaucrat/hiring-manager can know nearly all you'd need to know to make a decision about any given individual. It doesn't matter what the base-rate IQ of blacks is if Jerome sitting in front of you tested at 130. It doesn't matter that whites from Germany are known to be hardworking if Matteo tested at 10th percentile conscientiousness. With the accuracy we're capable of attaining in our postmodern era, the generalities frequently worsen predictions rather than improving them.

The problem we have now isn't that we overuse measurements, but that we ignore them because we don't like the conclusions and so weigh the scales to get outcomes that are deemed more acceptable. This is effectively using generalities backwards, which is definitely worse than using them forwards, but still worse than just looking at individuals and getting some stats.

If we ever had a perfect legal system that always caught every criminal (or even say, 99.99%), then the use of those proxies would immediately become pointless, as you could instead just check whether they've been convicted.

Perfect legal system with catches people for past crimes, but not future ones? Then proxies still remain useful.

In that example you cannot 100% measure homicide-guilt, so proxies, as listed in the quote, are fine.

Except there is no such thing as 100% accurate measurement. People cheat, people bribe their way up, people luck out. Any measurement you use will have a certain margin of error. Within that margin prior probabilities reign supreme. Put simply, most Africans with an IQ of 130 are less intelligent than Europeans with the same score. Because the percentage of the latter with scores ≥ 130 is much higher (2.28% vs. 0.13% for African-Americans, one of the smartest African populations), you are simply more likely to encounter a genuine one vs. a cheat or a one-off compared to the former. You must adjust high African scores down to increase their accuracy, and you must adjust low European scores up. Ditto for men and women etc. This is the only way to do justice to truth and fairness. This applies even more so to immigration policy — because intelligence is not 100% heritable, the genotypic intelligence of high-IQ individuals from low-IQ populations (resp. their descendants) is always going to be lower than the already adjusted scores.

Yet if most people caught you correcting scores in this way they’d be fuming with righteous indignation. This is the result of ideological indoctrination that does not aim for truth or fairness and declares Bayesian reasoning (or more precisely, certain priors) taboo. The idea of ‘not judging people by the color of their skin’ is simply a fallacy, part of deceitful activist propaganda.

You must adjust high African scores down to increase their accuracy, and you must adjust low European scores up.

I've no education in statistics, but isn't this double counting? The average score for Africans is calculated including the high-achievers and low-achievers. If Africans score an average of say 85, and you then apply a penalty to the high achievers, by doing so you move the average down below 85, in which case a stronger penalty must be applied to future tests and so on, right?. You would improve the average accuracy of any individual test, but you'd skew the whole. I guess it's probably resolvable by keeping nominal and adjusted scores separate.

But really, how much of a concern is the precise accuracy here anyway? An IQ test takes what, an hour? Make people take one every year, or every time they apply for a job, or whatever. If the collective accuracy of 10+ IQ tests isn't good enough for society, then God knows how we've made it this long.

if you are such a person though, feel free to speak up and explain your position

I believe you are strawmanning my position. It would be absolutely fine to always prefer non-brown-haired candidates, other things being equal. They might still win by virtue of other characteristics.

This kind of strawmanning seems necessary to me in order to demonize basic Bayesian reasoning. Otherwise everyone would see this as eminently rational behavior.

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