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gjm comments on Suppose HBD is True - Less Wrong
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You argue that (conditional on HBD, presumably in a version in which some gross trait like skin colour is informative about interesting things like intelligence) there's no point in anyone using race information, because (even with that hypothesis) there are other more informative ways of judging their intelligence.
But "there are other signals more informative than X" doesn't imply "there's no point looking at X". You may well get more information from someone's dress and accent and two minutes of talking to them than you get from their skin colour; but (at least in our hypothetical HBD-is-right world) you may get more information still by using all of those things.
Whether you should is a separate matter. There are many situations where locally-optimal decisions end up bad globally, and this could well be one, because (even conditional on HBD) a world where everyone is using race to make snap judgements about intelligence is a world where people in whatever racial groups do badly get systematically screwed over, including people who are very intelligent. The same goes with other qualities in the place of "intelligence". This is one reason why I am in favour of anti-discrimination laws even conditional on HBD. (Though some versions of HBD would have implications for what reasonable anti-discrimination laws could look like.)
Further: let's suppose, at least for the sake of argument, that you're very nearly right, that in our hypothetical HBD-is-right world you get scarcely any extra useful information from a person's race once you've looked at a few other equally trivial characteristics. That would mean that racial discrimination is more or less completely pointless, if viewed e.g. as a way of getting the best possible employees. Unfortunately, that's not the only socially relevant question. A world in which HBD is generally agreed to be right would be a world in which racial discrimination (even if actually pointless) would be much more socially acceptable, and many people are inclined towards racial discrimination for reasons other than getting objectively optimal outcomes. Widely-agreed-on HBD would provide a lot of cover for horrible racists, by which I mean people who (whatever fine-sounding reasons they might give) want to discriminate against various outgroups just because they don't like them. I take it this sort of consideration is one reason why there is not much appetite (in most circles) for discussing the possibility that HBD might be right.
Therefore manipulate those loathsome peasants with lies and suppress the truth to keep the peasants in line. The Noble Lie.
Unfortunately:
That is neither what I said nor what I meant.
Yes, I agree, it could do that and that would be bad.
So what did you mean? I thought the clear implication was that you favored suppressing the truth about HBD because you felt it would give bad people breathing room to do bad things. Or you just think that other people favored suppressing the truth about HBD on those grounds?
First: Not "suppressing the truth" but "not expending effort looking into something whose widespread belief would have bad consequences". Second: I said nothing about my own preferences, but about "why there is not much appetite (in most circles) for discussing (etc.)". Third: I do not advocate, neither do I think those opposed to "HBD" generally advocate, telling lies. Fourth: so far as I know, I don't regard anyone as "loathsome peasants"; in my idiolect "peasant" is not an insult, and the racists I know are mostly not peasants either literally or metaphorically.
What you're doing here is taking what I wrote, finding the worst kinda-sorta-semi-defensible interpretation of it you can, and expressing it in ways clearly intended to make me look as bad as possible. Apparently you think that's a reasonable way to treat someone else; to my mind it's an act of hostility as overt as breaking my windows or my nose, though of course much less actually harmful.
I notice you're unusually curt and tetchy.
"Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l'attaque, il se défend."
The key word was "unusually".
And my point is that in this discussion I am being misrepresented and attacked unusually much.
(I also happen to have an unusually strong dislike of the style of debate that proceeds mostly by insinuations, unstated implications and sideswipes, and have had for many years.)
When I see what I consider to be intellectually dishonest passive aggressive innuendo, I will often respond with a little hostility (closer to annoyance than the hostility I'd associate with breaking someone's nose) and convert the passive aggressive stance to an overtly aggressive interpretation to hopefully get past the bullshit and see if we can openly discuss the innuendo. It seems not.
That's very curious, because "intellectually dishonest passive aggressive innuendo" is pretty much exactly how I would describe your response to me, and I honestly can't see that I've engaged in anything of the kind. So clearly we have a failure of communication.
I'm not sure what open discussion you want to have that you think I'm avoiding, but let me try making a few things more explicit.
Does any of that help?
[1] I have used this phrase a few times and it occurs to me that it could readily be misconstrued. I refer specifically to "horrible racists" rather than just to "racists" because there are some definitions according to which anyone who accepts any sort of HBD thesis is ipso facto racist, no matter what their motives or attitudes or policies. By "horrible racists" I mean something like: people who denigrate[2] and/or work against the interests of some racial group(s) because they hate or fear them, or because they see the success of that group and the success of their own racial group as opposed to one another, and choose to harm the other guys for their own benefit.
[2] I swear I chose that word before it occurred to me what its etymology is.
I don't know anything to speak of about Al Sharpton. Horrible racism in the sense I describe is certainly not limited to white people. FWIW my guess at its relative prevalence differs from yours, but in any case I would expect HBD theses to be much more popular with white racists than with black racists. (Hi, Eugine.)
You mean like all the Al Sharpton-style black demagogues? There are certainly a lot more of those people than there are white people satisfying your definition of "horrible racist".
If the baseline level of noble lies is zero, then it would make sense to keep it there, as a Schelling fence. However, I doubt that any society has a baseline of zero.
Do you have Noble Lies that you approve of?
Or is the whole trick of Noble Lies that you'd never admit that they are lies?
When people say crazy, obviously false things, I more and more wonder how much of what they are saying are things they don't believe themselves, but are just saying to go along with what others say, or manipulate others in Noble Lie fashion.
Noble lies we approve of seem to us to be truths. Noble lies we dont approve approve seem to plain old lies..."crazy, obviously false things". So almost everybody thinks they are living ina Noble Lie free world.
Noble lies of the right include "my tribe is objectively better than everyone else's" and "his majesty was placed on the theone, by God". Obsessing about four point differences in IQ is a version of the former.
Doesn't seem that way to me. If I tell a Noble Lie, I don't believe it (in the epistemic sense), but intend others to do so. If I spread a claim I think is true and it is in fact false, I'm just spreading a falsehood that I'm unaware of.
If what I say is correct, you would not be able to tell, solipsistically, if you believed in any lies that seemed true to you. You need to start with other people's lies, in particular by thinking about how persistent crazy ideas could fulfil an instrumentaal purpose.
That's a very horrible reason for deciding to delude oneself about reality.
There's no such thing as a good reason for deciding to delude oneself.
But if investigating something has little apparent upside (e.g., if OrphanWilde is right or nearly right that, conditional on HBD being right, knowing it to be right wouldn't actually be very useful) and a likely outcome is making it easier for unpleasant people to do unpleasant things, that might be quite a good reason for not investigating it.
and
Methinks these two things are very very similar. In almost all cases when one says "I will carefully avert my eyes and not look over there", one is deluding oneself.
But your comment was an... interesting one. I did not expect such a clear case of "Screw the truth if it will offer succor to the enemy".
That is neither what I said nor what I meant.
(LW is interestingly opposite to the rest of the world on this stuff. In both cases, not taking an uncompromising position gets you jumped on. It just happens that the uncompromising positions you're expected to take are opposite to one another.)
Of course, that was a patented snarky one-liner interpretation :-) Dialing it down a couple of notches, what you said was that you'd much prefer not to look into a particular corner because what you could find there might be helpful to people you dislike. And hey, there is that guy on teh internets who thinks the corner is empty, anyways!
The issue here, by the way, is not whether your position is uncompromising enough, the issue is whether it's coherent and consistent with other views you've expressed.
Nope, still neither what I said nor what I meant.
Sorry, don't believe you.
The issue isn't that there isn't extra useful information, the issue is that we're pretty terrible at quickly processing variable dependence to arrive at correct answers, where rapid processing is part of the situation in consideration.
In that kind of situation, clothing alone will tell you more than clothing plus race - not because you couldn't arrive at a better answer given more information, but because the additional information is almost certainly going to be overweighted by virtue of the brain not having a good intuitive handle on either dependent variables or small numbers.
I don't know...would clothing alone tell you more than clothing plus race? I think we would need to test this.
Is a poorly-dressed Irish-American (or at least, someone who looks Irish-American with bright red hair and pale white skin) as statistically likely to mug someone, given a certain situation (deserted street at night, etc.) as a poorly-dressed African-American? For reasons of political correctness, I would not like to share my pre-suppositions.
I will say, however, that, in certain historical contexts (1840s, for example), my money would have been on the Irish-American being more likely to mug me, and I would have taken more precautionary measures to avoid those Irish parts of town, whereas I would have expected the neighborhoods inhabited by free blacks to have been relatively safe.
Nowadays, I don't know what the statistics would be if you measured crimes perpetrated by certain races, when adjusted for socio-economic category (in other words, comparing poor to poor, or wealth to wealthy in each group). But many people would probably have their suspicions. So, can we test these intuitions to see if they are just bigoted racism, or if they unfortunately happen to be accurate generalizations?