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OrphanWilde 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.
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?