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Peterdjones comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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Culture and environment are not race. Therefore, if you're studying race, those influences should be taken out of your scientific experiment. It's extremely difficult to remove things like culture and environment from a study on IQ. The fact that so much is correlated with it doesn't mean the results of studies intended to determine racial differences are significant so much as it means they're a tangled mess of cause and effect which we likely haven't sorted out adequately.
A. We don't want black people to suffer needlessly.
B. We don't want to encourage ourselves and others to be prejudiced against people when, regardless of what the average African's IQ is, it is still both logically incorrect (hasty generalization) and ethically wrong to prejudge individual Africans. However, knowing how humans behave, we figure that if people believe Africans have lower IQs, that will result in an increase in prejudice.
Actually, I bet some people are not happy saying that there are correlations there. This is one of those notions you might want to double check.
So what you're saying is that it's ethically wrong to use Bayesian reasoning.
It is almost always bad Bayes, or any other kind of reasoning, to make judgements about individuals based on group characeristics, since there is almost always information about them as individuals available which is almost always more reliable.
Group level information is still useful for shrinkage of estimates and correcting for the always-present unreliability in individual estimates; see for example the long conversation between me and Vaniver on LW somewhere where we work through how you would shrink males and females' SAT scores based on the College Board's published reliability numbers.
And E(X's deserved SAT score|X's measured SAT score; X is male) - E(X's deserved SAT score|X's measured SAT score; X is female) was, like, four points? I still think people's System 1 are likely to overestimate this difference if they know about the correlation more than underestimate it if they don't.
A 4 point adjustment (or more) across all candidates based solely on 1 binary variable (gender) and a trivial centuries-old bit of statistical reasoning seems like a fairly impressive output, and likely to make a difference on the margin for thousands of applications out of the millions sent each year.
And your evidence for this is...?
For applicants scoring 800 on a hypothetical normally distributed math SAT, yep. For normally distributed tests, shrinkage is linear based on the difference between the group mean and the measured mean, and so it's smaller for less extreme scores.
(For some reason, I'm having difficulty finding the link to the actual conversation; I think Google search is not going into deep comment threads, and the search function is based off the site, rather than just a database of my comments. Anyone remember helpful keywords further upthread to get a link to the actual conversation?)
Saying "we shouldn't explicitly calculate something because some people might implicitly calculate that thing incorrectly" sounds to me like going in the exact wrong direction.
Here is Wei Dai's tool for searching LW comments.