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Vaniver comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
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I do not consider it laudable that, when someone makes a rational suggestion, it is seen as a moral abomination. If it's a bad idea, there are rational ways to declare it a bad idea, and "moral abomination" is lazy. If it is a good idea, then "moral abomination" goes from laziness to villainy.
If his argument is "this causes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because we will convict blacks and not convict Asians because blacks are convicted more and Asians convicted less, suggesting that we will over-bias ourselves," then he's right that this policy is problematic. If his argument is "we can't admit that blacks are more likely to commit crimes because that would make us terrible people," then I don't want any part of it. Since he labeled it a moral abomination, that suggests the latter rather than the former.
I think he's just saying that not all rational evidence should be legal evidence. I don't think that he should be read according to LW conventions when he calls lower evidence standards for blacks a "rational policy". He doesn't mean to say that it would be rational to institute this policy (and yet somehow also morally abominable). He means that institutionalizing Bayesian epistemology in this way would be morally abominable (and hence not rational, as folks around here use the term).
Sure; in which case calling it a moral abomination is laziness. (The justification for holding legal evidence to a higher standard is very close to the self-fulfilling prophecy argument.)
It's already been pointed out that being a member of a group is evidence, so the evidence standards are identical. This is important because some evidence screens off other evidence.
The problem with our conversation is that Pinker's argument is so wrong, with so many errors sufficient to invalidate it, that we are having trouble inferring which sub-components of it he was right about. I encourage moving on from what he meant to what the right way to think is.
The latter is probably not his intended meaning given that he states "these days the base rates for violence among blacks is higher."
I think calling something a "moral abomination" means it directly conflicts with your values, rather than only being a "bad idea." For example, lying may be a bad idea but probably not a moral abomination to a consequentialist whereas killing the healthiest humans to reduce overpopulation would not only be a bad idea because it would be killing off the workforce, it directly conflicts with our value against killing people.
The laziness in calling something a "moral abomination" is failing to specify what value it is conflicting with. Of course, having such a complex, context-dependent, and poorly objectively defined value as "non-discrimination" might be unfashionable to some.
Those are the words he puts in the mouth of "a rational decision-maker using Bayes Theorem," whose conclusion he identifies as a moral abomination. It is ambiguous whether or not he thinks that belief should pay rent.
The purpose of indignation is not to make calculations easier, but to avoid calculations.