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SoullessAutomaton comments on A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies - Less Wrong
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"Don't matter" sounds to me like a cop-out akin to religion's "retreat to faith". A lot of evidence for absence of systematic variation in ability gets noticed and promoted by SWPL followers, indicating the question's importance to the belief system.
It's more that it really doesn't matter. Noise from individual variation swamps group variation in almost every practical case, and other outward cues of ability (i.e., hard-to-fake signals) are more informative.
The main reasons to make a big deal out of group variation are, in order of how common they are:
We have a lot of epistemic rationalists here in the third category, but in most cases if you talk about the reality of group variation people will assume you are one of the first two types, which probably isn't helpful for anyone.
To first paragraph: the variables "variation within group" and "difference of means between groups" should be regarded as belonging to different statistical data types, not yielding any significant insight when compared. For example, variation of physical strength among men is greater than the difference between mean strengths of men and women, but that doesn't imply the latter is insignificant. Same holds for many traits of many real-world ensembles, e.g. most behavioral differences within/between dog breeds.
To the rest: ad hominem and Bulverism fallacy. But if you really insist on knowing my reasons, I'm irritated by hearing popular falsehoods.
Well, yes, we all know this. But you miss the point--difference of means are almost never relevant. If I need someone to help me carry something, I need a strong person, and I'd do better looking at more useful cues ("does this person look fit and healthy?") rather than thinking about group means ("oh, I'll ignore this female athlete and get the scrawny nerd to help me").
This is why it "doesn't matter".
In other words, you assign intrinsic value to truth independent of instrumental value, which is exactly what I said. This is fine! We like truth here. But, outside of LW, this can lead to people making uncharitable assumptions about your motivations, which is all I was saying.
When you have more relevant information you're better off using that. When you don't, e.g. when using a dating site, you're better off following justified stereotypes than ignoring them.
One particularly controversial such case is police stop-and-frisks. I read somewhere that NYC blacks get stop-and-frisked disproportionately more often than whites, but black criminals have a lower chance of getting stop-and-frisked than white criminals due to PC backlash. The different concepts of fairness seem hard to reconcile in low-information situations like that. Or take racial profiling in airports: if you call for using using more relevant information in that case, rather than less as the SWPL crowd desires, you'll need an Orwellian level of knowledge about the passengers which causes new morality problems.
Another example would be having to make decisions concerning large groups of people. Would you or wouldn't you allow unsupervised immigration from a certain country based on the average IQ there? What if it's 50? As you make your decision, keep in mind that people from this country will try harder to get into yours because they're worse off than other potential donor countries, so you might get a self-selection effect on your hands.
Yes, but such low-information situations are fairly rare.
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.
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:
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.
Typically, this works to your advantage. If you scrutinize middle eastern travelers more, terrorist groups might decide to recruit white hijackers. But where are they going to find them? Wherever you think they might look, you can have CIA undercover agents trying to be hired.
The primary strength conspiracies have is small, close-knit groups. Anything you can do to force them to become larger or more diverse can help.
This probably works for terrorist groups. And actually explains why they recruit so many children of diplomats. (This suggests the CIA should try to recruit agents among them more, but that's a problem if they're already terrorists.)
But for groups that can be a lot more diverse, here's a note to cops: If you see a group of high school students, most of whom are dark-skinned boys with long hairs and marijuana-related T-shirts, and one of whom is a prim-and-proper white girl with her nose constantly buried in a textbook, stop carding and searching the boys all the time. The girl has the weed, and thinks you're insulting their intelligence.
Yes, your arguments sound pretty convincing. I'll have to reconsider my position on the frequent applicability of stereotypes.
The problem is you can't use IQ tests. You see IQ tests are clearly racist and insidiously so since culturally loaded sub-tests like vocabulary seem to actually show smaller ethnic differences.
No matter. We'll find out how the tests are racist some day!
Your mockery, at least as concerns standardized testing in general, is misplaced
That is in reference to a firm that produces standardized tests deciding to abandon a particular question because inner city kids did better on it than suburban kids did.
I'm talking about IQ tests constructed by academics not firms.
I haven't heard about the sub-test discrepancies, that sounds interesting. Do you have a link?
The examples I saw were analogies; you would get things like cup :: saucer or yacht :: regatta which upper-class kids were far more likely to be familiar with than lower-class kids (and since class and race are correlated, that meant there would be racial discrepancies).
IQ test may or may not measure intelligence, they measure doing well at what's usually called abstract thinking pretty well. They don't really measure cultural knowledge, at least real IQ tests don't.
Cultural bias being behind the observed gaps isn't really something that seems very likley to most psychometricians. From a paper titled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" published to clear up public misconceptions about expert opinion during the debates surrounding the publishing of Murray's book the Bell Curve.
Some experts of course disagree with this. And common sense. I can sort of see why Askenazi Jews do better on IQ tests than other European Americans because they are culturally literate, wealthy and more educated, rather than high IQs leading to cultural literacy and education. But why do East Asians? In Asia even? I suppose it could just happen to be that stuff that goes with high status in Western society has the same function in East Asian societies. In basically every developed country ever.
That then brings us dangerously close to considering that some cultures may be objectively better at making a working, prosperous and safe technological society, maybe, we should work to change those aspects among immigrants, perhaps even their native countries to improve their quality of life? Oh but that's a no no you nasty nasty cultural imperialist utilitarian!
But leaving this last tangent aside, the "IQ tests are biased and thus don't suggest actual differences in intelligence" is far from the ultimate argument against such policies, that we all know it would be used as such against any proposal to limit immigration to any Western country with IQ testing. Funny how formal education as a criteria for immigration isn't ever put down with the same argument.
At this point lets once again for the sake of argument say that the dissenting experts are right. Even so, the test still accurately measure how well large groups of people do in Western type societies, since they are positively correlated with everything from health to education attainment to low criminality to high income. Any country trying to craft the best policy for its citizens would find such a measure useful, since it measures something as trivial as ... you know... how well the people are actually probably going to do, as it is, not how well society wants to pretend they are likley to do.
Hence my sarcastic comment, aimed at the kind of objections that would be used to oppose such a no-brainer (pardon the pun) policy.
This can get kind of interesting if what is assumed to be true affects what is actually true.
Why was this voted down? It's a good point.
Because many people are sceptical of stereotype threat.