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Nornagest comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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Even if this were true, it would not follow that there is no countervailing incentive to remove barriers to employment for disadvantaged classes of people. Is it not possible that society has an interest in broad employment, especially among people disadvantaged by such tests? Two thoughts:
1) IQ tests have a history of being used deliberately to weed out applicants of certain races. This was not an incidental effect: it was the entire purpose of the test, much like literacy tests for voting. The odds of them being used this way again, were changes made in the law, seem extremely high.
2) It is interesting that LW sees so many rational arguments for policies that would give more resources to whites or Asians, especially white or Asian males with high test scores who may not have gone to college. While these arguments are phrased as both logical and obvious, LW rarely (ever?) entertains the easily constructed, similarly phrased arguments that would push resources away from LW's typical membership. For example: "It's been known for generations that physical strength has a positive impact statistically on outcomes in basically every sort of violent encounter, so as a default, in a world where couples and families could be attacked, people should assume a necessity for bigger, more muscular men as romantic partners." Or how's this: "It's been known for generations that religious identification with the in-group eases working relationships and obviates friction over expressions of belief, so employers should as a default prefer employees share their religions."
That's actually an interesting argument. I wouldn't mind seeing it expanded, if you happen to have real numbers lying around.
Though some obvious confounders do come to mind: in a really diverse religious environment (like, for example, the Silicon Valley tech scene), you're giving up quite a bit in talent if you recruit only from your co-religionists. And if you weight it less heavily, I'd be very surprised if the response looked linear: I wouldn't expect a workplace that's (say) 50% Christian with the rest split between atheists, Hindus, and Buddhists to be that much more harmonious than one with equal numbers of all of the above plus the odd Wiccan or Discordian. It might actually be worse under some circumstances, although this is rank speculation.
A lot of the current research focuses on "trust" inside groups. This is not exactly double-blinded climate controlled stuff, as you might expect, just brave and smart social psychologists doing their best. I find it highly plausible and confirmatory of many centuries of non-scientific observations about insularity. Disclaimer: I AM NOT SAYING DISTRUST OF PEOPLE OF OTHER BELIEF SYSTEMS IS GOOD, JUST THAT IT HAPPENS.
Atheism associated with lack of "trustworthiness signals" by believers.
Religious in-group trust and cooperation is higher.
I know of no studies on friction over expression of religious beliefs. I do kind of take as a given that there are fewer HR complaints when everybody's got the same Sacred Heart/Darwin amphibian/Santa Muerte/COEXIST bumper sticker.
Granted that there are huge trade-offs for religious homogeneity, and I think that it's almost always a bad business decision (exceptions: semi-utopian communes? survival in Hobbesian chaos? new colonies without hope of reinforcement?) It was just an exemplary argument of a sort made less often than, you know, arguments about race and IQ.