Eugine_Nier comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 October 2007 09:50PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (526)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 August 2013 09:25:31PM 2 points [-]

No matter how good your process for arriving at beliefs, it is indeed unethical to go around spreading those beliefs to people that will predictably misunderstand and misuse them.

Funny how the only people to make that argument tend to be people who don't want to believe the beliefs in question, but have out of ways to ignore the evidence.

On a less meta level: what kind of "misunderstand and misuse" do you think is going to "predictably" happen.

Comment author: Wes_W 17 August 2013 10:10:40PM 1 point [-]

In the interest of clarity: I am not at all sure how to proceed in this particular case. History makes me wary of departing from the current Schelling point of assuming everybody is equal, but that's not my point.

I am saying that a course of action based on Bayesian reasoning has no special immunity to being ethically wrong, and it is those actual results that are worth worrying about, not merely the epistemology.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 August 2013 09:52:36AM 0 points [-]

Funny how the only people to make that argument tend to be people who don't want to believe the beliefs in question, but have out of ways to ignore the evidence.

I, for one, do believe that the average African has lower IQ than the average European but don't go around telling that to the wrong people.

On a less meta level: what kind of "misunderstand and misuse" do you think is going to "predictably" happen.

Underestimating how much the evidence race provides about an individual's IQ can be screened off by other evidence about the individual, due to the confirmation bias and similar.