It's bad to treat smart people like they're dumb.
This will happen anyway, in fact it will happen more often if relevant information is discarded. The difference is that the victims will no longer be correlated with race. Thus we are still left with the question of why adding race makes it worse.
Edit: Another way to express what I'm trying to say is that your argument, if it works, shows we should avoid using any data that's correlated but not perfectly correlated with intelligence, e.g., test scores, grades, job performance, pretty much anything really.
If humans were perfect reasoners, your objection would be valid. But people are irrational, and will tend to over-discriminate based on race if minor discrimination (based on the amount of info race does provide) is socially allowed.
Here's a thought experiment: have a bunch of typical humans guess the intelligence of a group of subjects, knowing their test scores, grades, and job performance, but not race. Then have the same judges guess the intelligence of a second group of subjects, using all the above info plus race, and the fact that "on average,...
Today's post, Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? was originally published on 26 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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