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Notes -
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 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.
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
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.
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Funny you should mention that...
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