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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Oct. 03 - Oct. 09, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't know about the study, I have a generic suspicion of social sciences studies, especially ones which come to highly convenient conclusions, and hey! they happen to have a what's politely called "replication crisis". I am not interested enough to go read the study and figure out if it's valid, but on my general priors, I believe that people with black names will get less callbacks. However it seems to me that people with names like Pham Ng or Li Xiu Ying will also get less callbacks. People certainly have a bias towards those-like-me, but it's not specifically anti-black, it's against anyone who looks/feels/smells different.
Sure.
Um, the IQ would be different? It's not a mystical inner quality that no one can fathom. It's measurable and on the scale of large groups of people the estimates gets pretty accurate.
On the clearly visible level there would be very obvious discrimination -- quotas on admissions to universities, for examples. These discriminated-against people would be barred from reaching high positions, but at the level they would be allowed to reach they would be considered very valuable. Even if, for example, such people could not make it into management, managers would try to hire as many of them as possible because they are productive and solve problems.
As to similarities, I was about to write that the discriminated-against will never rise to the highest positions in the society, but oh look! there is that Barack Hussain fellow...
As an example of how such discrimination can be rational and indeed reasonable...
You have a resume. It provides some noisy data about someone. Including that person's race. Let's trim it down. You have an IQ test result and the person's race. Let's say that two candidates has the same IQ in the test, but one came from a group known to have a significantly lower IQ on average.
If we assume that an IQ test result has any measurement noise - and they do - then the Bayesian conclusion is the candidate from the group with higher average IQ is likely to actually have a higher IQ.
Now resumes constitute very noisy data. People often even lie in their resumes. There are large differences between groups in the US. The dispute is about the reasons for the differences not whether they exist.
A study would need to overcome these effects to demonstrate irrational discrimination. They would need to show that e.g. there was consistent out-performance for the group discriminated against post recruitment.
The two kinds of discrimination -- (1) because I prefer people-like-me, and (2) because I have informative priors about groups -- can perfectly well co-exist.