A few examples (in approximately increasing order of controversy):
If you proceed anyway...
- Identify knowledge that may be dangerous. Forewarned is forearmed.
- Try to cut dangerous knowledge out of your decision network. Don’t let it influence other beliefs or your actions without your conscious awareness. You can’t succeed completely at this, but it might help.
- Deliberately lower dangerous priors, by acknowledging the possibility that your brain is contaminating your reasoning and then overcompensating, because you know that you’re still too overconfident.
- Spend a disproportionate amount of time seeking contradictory evidence. If believing something could have a great cost to your values, make a commensurately great effort to be right.
- Just don’t do it. It’s not worth it. And if I found out, I’d have to figure out where you live, track you down, and kill you.
This is exactly the crux of the argument. When people say that everyone should be taught that people are the same regardless of gender or race, what they really mean isn't that there aren't differences on average between women and men, etc, but that being taught about those small differences will cause enough people to significantly overshoot via confirmation bias that it will overall lead to more misjudgments of individuals than if people weren't taught about those small differences at all, hence people shouldn't be taught about those small differences. I am hesitantly sympathetic to this view; it is borne out in many of the everyday interactions I observe, including those involving highly intelligent aspiring rationalists.
This doesn't mean we should stop researching gender or race differences, but that we should simultaneously research the effects of people learning about this research: how big are the differences in the perception vs the reality of those differences? Are they big enough that anyone being taught about gender and race differences should also be taught about of the risk of them systematically misjudging many individuals because of their knowledge, and warned to remain vigilant against confirmation bias? When individuals are told to remain vigilant, do they still overshoot to an extent that they become less accurate in judging people than they were before they obtained this knowledge? I would have a much better idea how to proceed both as a society and as an individual seeking to maximize my accuracy in judging people after finding out the answer to these questions.