There's another benefit: you remove a motivation to lie to yourself. If you think that a contingent fact will get you out of a hard choice, you might believe it. But you probably won't if it doesn't get you out of the hard choice anyway.

When you're deciding what to replace X with in the following statement, it most certainly does matter:

"X have a lower IQ on average."

You can choose "People of African descent" or you can choose "People from poor backgrounds" or "People with serious health conditions" or "People with drug addictions" or any number of other things.

When attempting to determine how best to help a school in a black ghetto that is failing, and you're choosing between spending money on remedial courses or on a school nutrition program, you will most certainly benefit from having this knowledge.

Conversely, I can't think of any applications for which tying IQ to race is useful. Would you name three examples?

Also, I'm still interested in seeing the source that you believe is an accurate prior regarding race and IQ. Do you happen to have that information available?

What's gone wrong? "Consequentialism" is used in philosophy as a term for the view that the morality of an action depends only on the consequences of that action.

Worse, the idea of consequentialism (or "utilitarianism") is often taken by people with a little philosophy awareness to mean the view that "the ends justify the means" without regard for actual outcomes — that if you mean well and can convince yourself that the consequences of an action will be good, then that action is right for you and nobody has any business criticizing you for taking it.

What this really amounts to is not "the ends justify the means", of course, but the horrible view that "good intentions justify actions that turn out to be harmful."

Ambiguity on "ends" probably does some damage here: it originally referred to results but also came to have the sense of purposes, goals, or aims, in other words, intentions.

I think an obvious difference between the last one and the first two is that the last one includes a number. There is no uncertainty when comparing numbers, no wriggle room for subjectivity. A real number is either smaller, bigger, or equal to another real number. Period. This rigidity does not mesh well with the flexibility that comfortable social interaction requires. I don't think this is the only reason why the third is so inappropriate, but it definitely contributes.

I think the behavior we are seeing here may be more a case of loss aversion rather than anything else.

Assuming that red cards must come at some point (true if we are flipping over a limited set of cards with a blue-red ratio of 7 to 3; not sure if that is the setup), the subjects adopt a strategy that gives them the highest likelihood of avoiding failure completely. Predicting blue cards every time requires accepting a certain degree failure right from the outset and is thus unpalatable to the human mind which is loss-averse.

Even if the experiment is designed so that red cards are not guaranteed to come at some point (if, for example, you shuffle after every flip), the subjects may fall prey to gambler's fallacy, which, when combined with their loss-aversion, leads them to adopt the 70-30 strategy.

Would you play a lottery with no stated odds?

Imagine another thought experiment -- you're asked to play a lottery. You have to pay $2 to play, but you have a chance at winning $100. Do you play?

Of course, you don't know, because you're not given odds. Rationally, it makes sense to play any lottery where you expect to come out ahead more often than not. If the lottery is a coin flip, it makes sense to pay $2 to have a 50/50 shot to win $100, since you'd expect to win $50 on average, and come ahead $48 each time. With a sufficiently high reward, even a one in a million chance is worth it. Pay $2 for a 1/1M chance of winning $1B, and you'd expect to come out ahead by $998 each time.

But $2 for the chance to win $100, without knowing what the chance is? Even if you had some sort of bounds, like you knew the odds had to be at least 1/150 and at most 1/10, though you could be off by a little bit. Would you accept that bet?

Such a bet seems intuitively uninviting to me, yet this is the bet that speculative causes offer me.

The reason not to play a lottery is because it is a zero-sum game in which the rules are set by the other agent; since you know that the other player's goal is to make a profit, you should expect the rules to be set up to ensure that you lose money. Obviously, reality is not playing a zero-sum game with humanity; if one chooses a different expected payout structure- say, you have no idea what the specific odds are, but you know that your crazy uncle Bill Gates is giving away potentially all his money to family members in a lottery with 2$ tickets- then obviously it makes sense to play.

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The last time I looked this up, all results on the Piraha language are due to a single anthropologist, Daniel Everett. There's been some debate in the literature about whether or not he was actually correct about their innumeracy; see the "Further Reading" section on the wikipedia page for some examples.

Aren't numbers a human universal? Sure, it's hard to talk about curves without defining "curve" first, but if I can just draw in the sand and say "that's a curve," we're back to the option of communicating the gist of things without handing the person a textbook. Could I communicate any sort of higher math I know in this way? This is tricky because I can't think of anything, but that's hardly a general proof. Maybe quaternions would be hard to communicate to a hunter-gatherer, but again "hard" is a far cry from impossible.

Java and Python are many orders of magnitude more popular than Scheme and if only 10% of the people who get excited about participating actually know how to parse than we would still have much greater numbers.

Java and Python are much harder to parse than scheme, and the percentage of Java or Python programers who could write a parser for those languages is less than 10%. Furthermore, the ones who could write a parser likely also know Scheme or at least some other lisp dialect.