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army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
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How about:
Someone who, following an honest best effort to evaluate the available evidence, concludes that some of the beliefs that nowadays fall under the standard definition of "racist" nevertheless may be true with probabilities significantly above zero.
Someone who performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person or a group of people, and whose conclusion happens to reflect negatively on this person or group in some way. (Or, alternatively, someone who doesn't believe that making such inferences is grossly immoral as a matter of principle.)
Both (1) and (2) fall squarely under the common usage of the term "racist," and yet I don't see how they would fit into the above cited classification.
Of course, some people would presumably argue that all beliefs in category (1) are in fact conclusively proven to be false with p~1, so it can be only a matter of incorrect conclusions motivated by the above listed categories of racism. Presumably they would also claim that, as a well-established general principle, no correct inferences in category (2) are ever possible. But do you really believe this?
The evidence someone's race constitutes about that person's qualities is usually very easily screened off, as I mentioned here. And given that we're running on corrupted hardware, I suspect that someone who does try to “performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person” ends up subconsciously double-counting evidence and therefore end up with less accurate results than somebody who doesn't. (As for cases when the evidence from race is not so easy to screen off... well, I've never heard anybody being accused of racism for pointing out that Africans have longer penises than Asians.)
I have seen accusations for racism as responses to people pointing that out.
Also, according to the U.S. Supreme Court even if race is screened off, you're actions can still be racist or something.
In real life, you don't have the luxury of gathering forensic evidence on everyone you meet.
I'm not talking about forensic evidence. Even if white people are smarter in average than black people, I think just talking with somebody for ten minutes would give me evidence about their intelligence which would nearly completely screen off that from skin colour. Heck, even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it.
Also, as Eric Raymond discusses here, especially in the comments, you sometimes need to make judgements without spending ten minutes talking to everyone you see.
There's this thing called Affirmative Action, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
...
I facepalmed. Really, Eric? Sorry, I don't think that a moral realist is perceptive enough to the nuances and ethical knots involved to be a judge on this issue. I don't know, he might be an excellent scientist, but it's extremely stupid to be so rash when you're attempting serious contrarianism.
Yep, let's all try to overcome bias really really hard; there's only one solution, one desirable state, there's a straight road ahead of us; Kingdom of Rationality, here we come!
(Yvain, thank you a million times for that sobering post!)
You know, there are countries where the intentional homicide rate is smaller than in John Derbyshire's country by nearly an order of magnitude.
That thing doesn't exist in all countries. Plus, I think the reason why you don't see that many two-digit-IQ people among (say) physics professors is not that they don't make it, it's that they don't even consider doing that, so even if some governmental policy somehow made it easier for black people with an IQ of 90 to succeed than for Jewish people with the same IQ, I would still expect a black physics professor to be smarter than (say) a Jewish truck driver.
That's not the point. The point is that the black physics professor is less smart than the Jewish physics professor.
But the difference is smaller than for the median black person and the median Jewish person. (I said "even just knowing what their job is would screen off much of it", not "all of it".)
The bell curve has both the mean and the deviation, you can have a 'race' with lower mean and larger standard deviation, and then you can e.g. filter by reliable accomplishment of some kind, such as solving some problem that smartest people in the world attempted and failed, you may end up with situation that the population with lower mean and larger standard deviation will have fewer people whom attain this, but those whom do, are on average smarter. Set bar even higher, and the population with lower mean and larger standard deviation has more people attaining it. Also, the Gaussian distribution can stop being good approximation very far away from the mean.
edit: and to reply to grand grand parents: I bet i can divide the world into category that includes you, and a category that does not include you, in such a way that the category including you has substantially higher crime rate, or is otherwise bad. Actually if you are from US, I have a pretty natural 'cultural' category where your murder rate is about 5..10x of normal for such average income. Other category is the 'racists', i.e. the people whom use skin colour as evidence. Those people also have substantially bad behaviour. You of course want to use skin colour as evidence, and don't want me to use your qualities as evidence. See if I care. If you want to use the skin colour as evidence, lumping together everyone that's black, I want to use 'use of skin colour as evidence', lumping you together with all the nasty racists.
IIRC, no substantial difference was found in the standard deviations among races. (Whereas for genders, they have the same mean but males have larger sigma, so there are both more male idiots than female idiots and more male geniuses than female geniuses.)
Isn't IQ defined to be a Gaussian (e.g. IQ 160 just means ‘99.99683rd percentile among people your age’), rather than ‘whatever IQ tests measure’? If so, a better statement of that phenomenon would be “IQ tests are inaccurate for extreme values.”
I want to use ‘use of “use of skin colour as evidence” as evidence’ as evidence, but I'm not sure what that's evidence for. :-)
What if verbal ability and quantitative ability are often decoupled?
I wasn't talking about "verbal ability" (which, to the extent that can be found out in ten minutes, correlates more with where someone grew up than with IQ), but about what they say, e.g. their reaction to finding out that I'm a physics student (though for this particular example there are lots of confounding factors), or what kinds of activities they enjoy.
If you're able to drive the conversation like that, you can get information about IQ, and that information may have a larger impact than race. But to "screen off" evidence means making that evidence conditionally independent- once you knew their level of interest in physics, race would give you no information about their IQ. That isn't the case.
Imagine that all races have Gaussian IQ distributions with the same standard deviation, but different means, and consider just the population of people whose IQs are above 132 ('geniuses' for this comment). In such a model, the mean IQ of black geniuses will be smaller than the mean IQ of white geniuses which will be smaller than the mean IQ of Jewish geniuses- so even knowing a lower bound for IQ won't screen off the evidence provided by race!
Huh, sure, if the likelihood is a reversed Heaviside step. If the likelihood is itself a Gaussian, then the posterior is a Gaussian whose mean is the weighed average of that of the prior and that of the likelihood, weighed by the inverse squared standard deviations. So even if the st.dev. of the likelihood was half that of the prior for each race, the difference in posterior means would shrink by five times.
Right- there's lots of information out there that will narrow your IQ estimate of someone else more than their race will, like that they're a professional physicist or member of MENSA, but evidence only becomes worthless when it's independent of the quantity you're interested in given the other things you know.
Can you give an example of evidence becoming worthless? (I can't think of any.)
Minor note, this appears to actually not be the case. Most studies have no correlation between race and penis size. See for example here. The only group that there may be some substantial difference is that Chinese babies may have smaller genitalia after birth but this doesn't appear to hold over to a significant difference by the time the children have reached puberty. Relevant study.
Huh, according to this map the average Congolese penis is nearly twice as long as the average South Korean penis. (ISTR that stretched flaccid length doesn't perfectly correlate with erect length.)
Oddly salient for such a trivial result. Should a study qualify for an Ig Nobel if you can use it to settle bar bets?