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Morendil comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
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On the Freakonomics blog, Steven Pinker had this to say:
I've seen a common theme on LW that is more or less "if the consequences are awful, the reasoning probably wasn't rational". Where do you think Pinker's analysis went wrong, if it did go wrong?
One possibility is that the utility function to be optimized in Pinker's example amounts to "convict the guilty and acquit the innocent", whereas we probably want to give weight to another consideration as well, such as "promote the kind of society I'd wish to live in".
One (more) reason to be uncomfortable with such an argument: "black" doesn't carve nature at its joints.
(Whereas, relevantly for such arguments, "poor" does - though I believe that arguing that way leads down the path that has been called "reference class tennis".)
For questions of, say, population genetics, I think that is quite right. But for questions of sociology or social policy I don't see why one wouldn't include 'black' as part of the ontology.
Doesn't it?
When it comes to US demographics, "black" covers a "natural" cluster of the population / identifiable blob in thingspace. Sure, there are border cases like mixed-race people and recent African immigrants, just like there are edge-cases between bleggs and rubes. "Is person X black or not?" is probably one of the top yes/no questions that would tell you the most about an American (Along with "Did he vote for Obama?", "Is he richer or poorer than the median?", or "Does he live north or south of the Mason-Dixon line?")
Sure, when it comes to world demographics, or Brazilian demographics, it doesn't cut reality at it joints as well.
It's Mason-Dixon, after the two surveyors.
Whoops, thanks!
That's not too important. If I go to my closet and pull out twenty items of clothing at random, and designate those group A, and designate the rest group B, if I know what is in each group I can still make predictions about traits of random members of either group.