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Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
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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.