I'm not sure what you think the difference between "people choose, consciously or subconsciously, to get offended" and "people get offended" is.
Regardless: some people get upset when they think I believe, based on their group membership G, that they have an attribute A. Sometimes this happens even when A is more common in G than in the general population.
Perhaps this is unreasonable when A is "is American" and G is "LessWrong".
Perhaps it's also unreasonable when A is "has a criminal record" and G is "American black man."
But the fact remains that people do get upset by this sort of thing..
If we want to establish the explicit social norm on LessWrong that these sorts of assumptions are acceptable, that's our choice, but let's at least try not to be surprised when outsiders are upset by it.
Edit: Actually, on thinking about it, I realize I'm being a doofus. You almost undoubtedly meant, not inferring A from G when A is more common in G than in the general population, but inferring A from G when A is more common than -A in G, which is a far more unreasonable thing to be upset about. My apologies.
Edit: Actually, on thinking about it, I realize I'm being a doofus. You almost undoubtedly meant, not inferring A from G when A is more common in G than in the general population, but inferring A from G when A is more common than -A in G, which is a far more unreasonable thing to be upset about. My apologies.
Strictly speaking you should adjust your probability estimate of the person having attribute A either way. How you then act depends on the consequences of making either error., e.g., the consequences of falsely assuming someone isn't a violent criminal can be more serious then the reverse.
During discussion in my previous post, when we touched the subject of human statistical majorities, I had a side-thought. If taking the Less Wrong audience as an example, the statistics say that any given participant is strongly likely to be white, male, atheist, and well, just going by general human statistics, probably heterosexual.
But in my actual interaction, I've taken as a rule not to make any assumptions about the other person. Does it mean, I thought, that I reset my prior probabilities, and consciously choose to discard information? Not relying on implicit assumptions seems the socially right thing to do, I thought; but is it rational?
When I discussed it on IRC, this quote by sh struck me as insightful:
I came up with the following payoff matrix:
In this case, the second option is strictly preferable. In other words, I don't discard the information, but the repercussions to our social interaction in case of an incorrect guess outweigh the benefit from guessing correctly. And it also matters whether either Alice or Bob is an Asker or a Guesser.
One consequence I can think of is that with a sufficiently low p, or if Bob wouldn't be particularly offended by Alice's incorrect guess, taking the guess would be preferable. Now I wonder if we do that a lot in daily life with issues we don't consider controversial ("hmm, are you from my country/state too?"), and if all the "you're overreacting/too sensitive" complaints come from Alice incorrectly assessing a too low-by-absolute-value negative payoff in (0, 1).