low IQ

How does low IQ directly cause crime?

properly police black neighborhoods

What does this entail?

Citation required. What is strange about this is that when you go looking, you don't see good studies that track people through generations and show that this is in fact the case.

The idea that slavery/segregation/discrimination has created a very significant deficit for blacks seems beyond dispute in my view. The words "very significant" could be disputed based on how we defined them, but that's a technicality. I'm honestly shocked to hear this idea challenged...

I've cited this study.

It's stated that "African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and they earn nearly 25 percent less when they are employed." The study itself shows significant discrimination based on race in the beginning stages of the hiring process.

Lumifer seemed to accept the basic premise, but was nonetheless skeptical and too uninterested to look into the study. I'd be interested to know what you think.

Regardless, it is evidence that employers discriminate against blacks. And employment is tied to income...and wealth...and opportunity. And that is passed on generation after generation.

This idea "slavery is the cause" seems not to be an actual active idea but only functions as a thought terminating cliche. It could have been slavery so it was.

Again, it seems indisputable to me that slavery has an effect. Segregation and discrimination, too. I honestly don't understand how it couldn't. The only question that is left is in regard to the significance of the effect. And if there are other factors. I'd love to hear some of your evidence for other factors.

And as for this...

It reminds me of religious apologists talking about the problem of evil...

I strongly disagree. People being enslaved based on race for hundreds of years, segregated for a hundred more, and then discriminated against until the present day, and that leading to some problems within that race has zero, and I mean zero, to do with the concocted, magical-causal "explanations" of religion.

How about this...

Man A is freed from slavery at 40 with no skills, no education, no family and no professional or network.

Also at 40, man B has a small fortune, an education, is skilled in a trade, has a large family, a good reputation, and a wide network of business and social contacts.

Assuming the offspring of each man—A1 and B1—has identical DNA, which offspring has the highest probability of graduating from an elite university?

Which—A1 or B1—will be more likely to have a successful career?

Which will pass on the largest inheritance to A2 and B2?

Why?

And what do you expect to change in subsequent generations?

(One thing that could change are laws eliminating discrimination...)

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.

It's debatable whether or not it's specifically anti-black. Or anti-some-other-group. At any rate, a bias against those-not-like-me would be sufficient in this case to cause blacks a significant deficit in opportunity for employment in a historically majority white nation.

Um, the IQ would be different?...

As usual, I phrased my comment poorly. Let me try a different tack...

You are saying black Americans have a genetic deficit in the form of lower average IQ. Because IQ is heritable and very important toward social "success", this is a (or even the?) major factor in why they lag behind in certain social metrics (avg. income/wealth, crime rates, etc.) in American society.

I'm saying slavery/segregation/discrimination has created a very significant deficit for blacks to overcome in America, to the extent that we would expect to see something like we see in terms of the disparity in avg. income/wealth, crime rates, etc. I'd hypothesize slavery/segregation/discrimination has been consequential to the extent that even if blacks had a higher average IQ than whites, they would still be in a similar situation. (i.e. the discrimination is that bad and that significant.)

Plainly, advanced IQ (or other genetic advantages) aren't enough to overcome significant discrimination in all cases. The disadvantages can be too steep in a given society.

I'd propose a good portion of the U.S. is a bit more racist than I think you are taking into consideration. And this may have caused a deeper deficit for blacks than you are appreciating.

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...

Things can change. Slowly.

Is this sort of discrimination not consequential in your view?

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.

can you imagine a scenario in a society where a high IQ group of people was discriminated against to the extent where they couldn't overcome the discrimination, despite their advanced higher IQ?

Sure.

How would the circumstances be different than what blacks have faced in the U.S.?

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...

In certain cases people can pattern-match sociopath by looking at someone's face.

Do you have any links, because this is interesting if true. Kinda like human lie detectors. But I am skeptical, because how would such a thing arise?

Why would sociopaths have distinguishing facial markers and what are they?

An extra data point. If we crash and burn, then earth will be too hot for multicellular life by the time the coal and oil are replenished. So the one and only industrial revolution has happened.

And given ~4,000m years of life so far and the heating only a few hundred million years away, we only just made it. Which suggests it is pretty hard to build intelligent life. Maybe because computation is very expensive so the gradient is steep. Robin Hanson has a paper on this point.

I think it's well within the realm of possibility it could happen a lot sooner than that. 20 years is a long time. 20 years ago the very first crude neural nets were just getting started. It was only the past 5 years that the research really took off. And the rate of progress is only going to increase with so much funding and interest.

I recall notable researchers like Hinton making predictions that "X will take 5 years" and it being accomplished within 5 months. Go is a good example. Even a year ago, I think many experts thought it would be beaten in 10 years, but not many thought it would be beaten by 2016. In 2010 machine vision was so primitive it was a joke at how far AI has to come:

In 2015 the best machine vision systems exceeded humans by a significant amount at object recognition.

Google recently announced a neural net chip that is 7 years ahead of Moore's law. Granted only in terms of power consumption, and it only runs already trained models. But nevertheless it is an example of the kind of sudden leap forward in ability. Before that Google started using farms of GPUs that are hundreds of times larger than what university researchers have access to.

That's just hardware though. I think the software is improving remarkably fast as well. We have tons of very smart people working on these algorithms. Tweaking them, improving them bit by bit, gaining intuition about how they work, and testing crazy ideas to make them better. If evolution can develop human brains by just some stupid random mutations, then surely this process can work much faster. It feels like every week there is some amazing new advancement made. Like recently, Google's synthetic gradient paper or hypernetworks.

I think one of the biggest things holding the field back is that it's all focused on squeezing small improvements out of well studied benchmarks like imagnet. Machine vision is very interesting of course. But at some point the improvements they are making don't generalize to other tasks. But that is starting to change, as I mentioned in my above comment. Deepmind is focusing on playing games like starcraft. This requires more focus on planning, recurrency, and reinforcement learning. There is more focus now on natural language processing, which also involves a lot of general intelligence features.

Are you saying that no complex phenomenon is going to be able to provide only benefits and nothing but benefits, or are you saying that corporations are, on the balance, bad things and we would have been better to never have invented them?

I accept genes are a big part of the picture.

I'm not sure I believe genetics are more important than other factors. And this is not necessarily a simple nature vs. nurture issue. In the case of African Americans' treatment in U.S. history, it's an extreme set of "nurture" circumstances that robbed a group of people of all opportunity for many generations, based on race. I'm not sure "good genes" simply overcomes extremely lopsided (often systemically unfair) circumstances.

Anyway, it won't be resolved here. Thanks for your thoughts.

Why doesn't the U.S. government hire more tax auditors? If every hired auditor can either uncover or deter (threat of chance of audit) tax evasion, it would pay for itself, create jobs, increase revenue, punish those who cheat. Estimated cost of tax evasion per year to the Federal gov is 450B.

Incompetent government tropes include agencies that hire too many people and becoming inappropriate profit centers. It would seem that the IRS should have at the very least been accidentally competent in this regard.