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Desrtopa comments on Minor, perspective changing facts - Less Wrong
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In some cases this is true, but the associate between income and crime rate is not hard and fast, and people often overestimate it. Plus, people will often mistake "concentration of racial minorities" for "unsafe."
The book I just finished discusses a particular community where the geographical divide of a particular street also has functioned for decades as a racial divide, and people on the white side continue to believe that the black side is "the bad part of town," and avoid it as dangerous, with businesses even refusing to deliver there, when crime statistics fail to bear out that it's any more dangerous. In fact, there is a dangerous part of town, where crime rates are particularly elevated, but it's only a small part of the alleged dangerous part of town.
Is there a term for the way biases persist because the cost of updating them seems high compared to the cost of maintaining the bias?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance
Red Holsteins are the result of a recessive gene in the more usual black and white Holsteins(1). Considerable and expensive efforts were made to eliminate the trait until is was discovered that they're at least as productive as Holsteins with black spots.
This should be remembered when you think tradition means people are doing something reasonable. Tradition, like evolution, probably means that disastrously bad traits are eliminated, not that exists is anywhere near excellence.
(1)]In the US, a white cow with black spots is the default image for a milk cow, and for those of us less educated about cattle, for cows in general.
Sounds like a sort of double-counting. "If I stopped believing the bad side of town is the bad side, then I might go over there and get mugged!"
I don't think that's necessarily it, I think it's more like "avoiding that section of town costs me so little that I don't want to bother to think about whether avoiding it makes sense".