Good points. But I still maintain that those aren't the main reasons why people care about these issues. If we could remove the main reasons, that would be good.

Yes, but such low-information situations are fairly rare.

One particularly controversial such case is police stop-and-frisks.

This is possibly a case where group means actually are relevant, yes, modulo a lot of assumptions about how people are selected for the stop-and-frisk.

Or take racial profiling in airports:

Again, not objectionable on the surface, However, given the stunningly ineffective nature of airport security (cf. Bruce Schneier and the "security theater" concept) I doubt this actually provides a benefit, for reasons wholly unrelated to race.

As an aside, in adversarial situations you need to be careful that weighted targetting based on superficial cues doesn't merely give the enemy information on how to disproportionately avoid scrutiny.

EDIT: Either I missed this part or you added it while I was replying, but:

Would you or wouldn't you allow unsupervised immigration from a certain country based on the average IQ there?

Assuming you want to filter applicants based on IQ, testing individuals seems vastly more helpful than assuming based on population mean, especially given that the demographics of applicants will not be the same as the total population. Also, if you admit all immigrants from any country you're likely to get a self-selected group of people who are less successful at home.

Yes, alright, I see how incorrect egalitarian views could be a problem in scenarios unrelated to college admissions.

But the outlawed lending practices weren't fair. My next door neighbor took forever to get a business loan even though he was an excellent risk. The new system was also broken, but the old one wasn't good.

Edited to Add: To be more specific, his white wife handled the application and it was all smooth sailing until he walked in to sign the bottom line, and then the offer was unceremoniously retracted with no explanation.

Incidentally, when these lending rules came into effect and he did get a loan, his business boomed and he paid it off without incident. So...

As soon as you start talking about your "honor as an aspiring rationalist", you're moving from the realm of rationality to ideology.

Well, sure, but the ideological stance is "You should care about rationality." I should think that that's one of the most general and least objectionable ideologies there is.

Like I said, I don't think this question matters and I'm mostly indifferent to what the answer actually is. I'm just trying to protect the people who do care.

But I do care, and I no longer want to be protected from the actual answer. When I say that I speak from experience, it's really true. There's a reason that this issue has me banging out dramatic, gushy, italics-laden paragraphs on the terrible but necessary and righteous burden of relinquishing your cherished beliefs---unlike in the case of, say, theism, in which I'm more inclined to just say, "Yeah, so there's no God; get over it"--although I should probably be more sympathetic.

So, why does it matter? Why can't we just treat the issue with benign neglect, think of ourselves as strictly as individuals, and treat other people strictly as individuals? It is such a beautiful ideal--that my works and words should be taken to reflect only on myself alone, and that the words and works of other people born to a similar form should not be taken to reflect on me. It's a beautiful ideal, and it seems like it should be possible to swear our loyalty to the general spirit of this ideal, while still recognizing that---

In this world, it's not that simple. In a state of incomplete information (and it is not all clear to me what it would even mean to have complete information), you have to make probabilistic inferences based on what evidence you do have, and to the extent that there are systematic patterns of cognitive sex and race differences, people are going to update their opinions of others based on sex and race. You can profess that you're not interested in these questions, that you don't know---but just the same, when you see someone acting against type, you're probably going to notice this as unusual, even if you don't explicitly mention it to yourself.

There are those who argue--as I used to argue--that this business about incomplete information, while technically true, is irrelevant for practical purposes, that it's easy to acquire specific about an individual, which screens off any prior information based on sex and race. And of course it's true, and a good point, and an important point to bear in mind, especially for someone who comes to this issue with antiegalitarian biases, rather than the egalitarian biases that I did. But for someone with initial egalitarian biases, it's important not to use it---as I think I used to use it---as some kind of point scored for the individualist/egalitarian side. Complex empirical questions do not have sides. And to the extent that this is not an empirical issue; to the extent that it's about morality---then there are no points to score.

It gets worse---you don't even have anywhere near complete information about yourself. People form egregiously false beliefs about themselves all the time. If you're not ridiculously careful, it's easy to spend your entire life believing that you have an immortal soul, or free will, or that the fate of the light cone depends solely on you and your genius AI project. So information about human nature in general can be useful even on a personal level: it can give you information about yourself that you would never have gotten from mere introspection and naive observation. I know from my readings that if I'm male, I'm more likely to have a heart attack and less likely to get breast cancer than would be the case if I were female, whereas this would not at all be obvious if I didn't read. Why should this be true of physiology, but not psychology? If it turns out that women and men have different brain designs, and I don't have particularly strong evidence that I'm a extreme genetic or developmental anomaly, then I should update my beliefs about myself based on this information, even if it isn't at all obvious from the inside, and even though the fact may offend me and make me want to cry. For someone with a lot of scientific literacy but not as much rationality skill, the inside view is seductive. It's tempting to cry out, "Sure, maybe ordinary men are such-and-this, and normal women are such-and-that, but not me; I'm different, I'm special, I'm an exception; I'm a gloriously androgynous creature of pure information!" But if you actually want to achieve your ideal (like becoming a gloriously androgynous creature of pure information), rather than just having a human's delusion of it, you need to form accurate beliefs about just how far this world is from the ideal, because only true knowledge can help you actively shape reality.

It could very well be that information about human differences could have all sorts of terrible effects if widely or selectively disseminated. Who knows what the masses will do? I must confess that I am often tempted to say that I have no interest in such political questions--that I don't know, that it doesn't matter to me. This attitude probably is not satisfactory for the same sorts of reasons I've listed above. (How does the line go? "You might not care about politics, but politics cares about you"?) But for now, on a collective or political or institutional level, I really don't know: maybe ignorance is bliss. But for the individual aspiring rationalist, the correct course of action is unambiguous: it's better to know, than to not know, it's better to make decisions explicitly and with reason, then to let your subconscious decide for you and for things to take their natural course.