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Jiro comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - Less Wrong
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Is there some reason why this was modded down aside from political incorrectness?
I didn't downvote, but your second paragraph has a problem in that in the basketball example height is only a proxy for the ability to play basketball.
The first paragraph is a bit iffy, too, because proxies have different effectiveness or usefulness. By the time you're estimating someone's ability to do the job on the basis of a resume, the male/female proxy becomes basically insignificant.
In any case, I think that the better language here is that of priors. It's perfectly fine to have different priors for male job applicants than for female job applicants, but once evidence starts coming in, the priors become less and less important.
IQ is a proxy for the ability to do well in a job, too. I was ignoring that, so in the analogy I would have to ignore that for height and ability to play basketball.
Arguing "the other proxy is so much better that we don't need the original one" is not the same as "the other proxy is better, and that's all we need to know", and is even farther from "we can measure it so we don't need a proxy at all".