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Lumifer 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.
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.