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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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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.

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