I’ve noticed that even on Lesswrong, there is such a thing as knowledge that it is deemed better not to know. Apparently this is referred to as the basilisk’s gaze (I’ve yet to manage to read anything deemed dangerous here before it was deleted, so I could be wrong in the details of that).
It seems to me that a lot of the “Don’t suggest that there are racial differences in IQ” position is actually based on a hidden belief that looking at the possibility of racial differences is gazing at a basilisk.
Suppose you are an employer hiring for a position, using an examination where performance is correlated with intelligence.
It is essentially harmless to take the position, “My prior is that whites have higher IQs on average than blacks, so I expect the average score of the white applicants to be higher than the average score of the black applicants.”
What the opponents of acknowledging racial differences are worried about is that the employer will also take the step of saying “This particular black applicant scored exceptionally well on the examination, but since I know that blacks in the aggregate have lower IQs, I’m going to treat my prior and the examination as separate bits of knowledge and scale my assessment of the candidate’s intelligence downward from what the exam alone would suggest.” As opposed to having the prior be swamped by the examination.
This is on top of (legitimately) expecting that the average person won’t understand the difference between the layman’s concept of “race” and the more scientifically rigorous concepts of “population” and “cohort.”
In the wider world, unlike on Lesswrong, openly coming out and saying “Considering this idea is like gazing at a basilisk” would end disasterously. So people go with “This idea is false” instead.
I’m not sure the conventional kind of basilisk qualifies as knowledge, as such: Langford’s original story was about an image that crashes onlookers’ brains through a defect in image processing, not through anything to do with verbal or logical parsing. Most other treatments of the concept have done the same, more or less, although there are some ambiguous ones (like the “Funniest Joke in the World” Python sketch).
There are various presentations of knowledge which clearly aren’t mind-safe (and presentation and context usually matter more than the content), but their danger generally comes in the form of bias and related issues like priming effects, which of course is rather well-traveled ground on this site. I think we can explain the effects of bringing up racial IQ differences and other politically sensitive ideas perfectly well within that framework, without having to invoke any more fundamental problems; in fact, we do.
Upvoted for bringing the Langford story to my attention; I was not aware of it.
I continue to believe my explanation accurately describes the approach of a significant proportion of highly educated individuals expressing anti-racial differences views, whether or not those individuals are even aware of the general concept of mindkilling.
There’s a similar plotline in one of the Star Trek episodes with the Borg, where (IIRC) they discuss the morality of crashing all the Borg’s minds with some bug they’ve found in their information processing, decide not to, and then discover they already sort of did that by accident....
The “basilisk” is of a very different character btw. It’s more of a game theoretic issue, sort of like how if you can’t understand the language the blackmailer is using to try to communicate you can’t be blackmailed.
I’ve noticed that even on Lesswrong, there is such a thing as knowledge that it is deemed better not to know. Apparently this is referred to as the basilisk’s gaze (I’ve yet to manage to read anything deemed dangerous here before it was deleted, so I could be wrong in the details of that).
Yes, I’ve yet to encounter a legitimate example but that’s the name for the hypothetical concept. ;)
They are not basilisks. Basilisks do real damage to you, they don’t make you nauseous. To get the general idea of the concept see RationalWiki. That illustrates what apparently constituted a basilisk for certain psychologically vulnerable individuals. Of course others would warn you that you shouldn’t discover what an alleged basilisk is on the off chance that it actually is one!
Are there any useful links to stuff on this concept? I expect that being exposed to ideas that mess with your mind might be a good way to develop the ‘mental immune system’.
That particular event is a rather strange bit of early LW lore. It seems to have largely passed out of the site’s public consciousness now, but for a while it cast a long shadow: doing a site search on “forbidden topic” ought to give you an outline of the opinion surrounding it.
I’d advise against deliberately seeking out allegedly harmful knowledge in order to expose yourself to it: I’m aware of no particular evidence that the mind responds to memetic threats (as opposed to non-memetic stresses) by hardening itself against them, and with confirmation bias and group identification behavior in mind there are a number of reasons why that might not be the case. I should probably temper that by admitting I haven’t always followed my own advice here, though.
On the other hand, I do think there’s room for a more general theory of harmful knowledge. While some of the groundwork has been laid, and we have a few ad-hoc guidelines in place, we don’t yet have a good consensus on epistemic safety, as the comments on the World of Warcraft thread (to say nothing of this one!) demonstrate. About as close as I’ve seen anyone get is Nick Bostrom’s 2009 paper on information hazards, but it limits itself to typology. Contributing to such a theory might be a valuable thing to pursue, if you’re determined to risk your sanity.
As far as I can tell, people’s vulnerability to memetic hazards that drive some people but not others insane should be very predictable. Granted that there are problems with retrospectively changing one’s outlook to try and defend against some of them, it shouldn’t be too hard to test someone to see if they already have appropriate cached response defenses up without exposing them to the idea itself.
I don’t think I’d go as far as deliberately risking my sanity (such as it is).
On the other hand, I do think there’s room for a more general theory of harmful knowledge. While some of the groundwork has been laid, and we have a few ad-hoc guidelines in place, we don’t yet have a good consensus on epistemic safety, …
So has knowledge that is harmful in more than specific situations been demonstrated to exist, or are you referring to theorising?
Depends what bounds you want to put on it. Basilisk-like knowledge (what the Bostrom paper calls a neuropsychological hazard) affecting the human cognitive architecture has not as far as I know been demonstrated to exist. Several other context-dependent but still fairly general informational hazards (ideological, for example) do clearly exist, though, and many of them seem poorly understood.
The forbidden topic in particular seems to belong to an interesting family of reflective hazards that hasn’t gotten much attention at all, although for the sake of local norms I’d rather not devote too much attention to it here.
Doh. Maybe I’m too tired so my brain is working less well than I’d hope, but I hadn’t noticed the link to the Bostrom paper there. I need to try to more carefully read through the stuff people say to me.
I’ll give the paper a read-through tomorrow.
[edit] I scanned the paper, but the tiny section on neuropsychological hazard seemed to tend toward the low-level (photosensitive epilepsy as one example), rather than the Lovecraftian (as I might have expected it to, if I had thought carefully about it, since I don’t place much credence in high-level ideas that could blow your mind that way)
What the opponents of acknowledging racial differences are worried about is that the employer will also take the step of saying “This particular black applicant scored exceptionally well on the examination, but since I know that blacks in the aggregate have lower IQs, I’m going to treat my prior and the examination as separate bits of knowledge and scale my assessment of the candidate’s intelligence downward from what the exam alone would suggest.” As opposed to having the prior be swamped by the examination.
Observe that in the recent crisis, blacks and hispanics had two or three times higher default rate, even when controlled for income and credit rating. So had bankers applied that policy, they would have been right. A protected minority candidate with the same apparent credit worthiness as a white candidate is far more likely to default.
La Griffe du Lion has claimed that the same is true in academic achievement—that blacks with the same IQ and GPA as whites have lower levels of achievement, though I do not recall what evidence he presented for this claim.
Herrnstein and Murray on the other hand claimed that controlling for IQ, blacks had similar levels of accomplishment, though I seem to recall they were controlling for IQ andintact family
All three claims could be simultaneously true if we suppose that accomplishment reflects IQ and character, and that assessing an IQ indicator alone is not sufficient to swamp one’s priors.
Observe that in the recent crisis, blacks and hispanics had two or three times higher default rate, even when controlled for income and credit rating. So had bankers applied that policy, they would have been right. A protected minority candidate with the same apparent credit worthiness as a white candidate is far more likely to default.
I am not convinced this situation is at all analogous. Consider the following three facts: 1) The geographical distribution of blacks, hispanics, and whites is not random—there is considerable segregation by race; 2)In the aggregate, blacks and hispanics have lower average credit rating than whites; 3)If your neighbor defaults/is foreclosed, your own property value falls.
This would suggest that more higher-credit minorities would get dragged down by their neighbors than would white homeowners with equal credit scores. But an individual’s intelligence is not dependent on the intelligence of his neighbor, at least not at remotely the strength of causation that his property value is related to the property value of his neighbor.
La Griffe du Lion has claimed that the same is true in academic achievement—that blacks with the same IQ and GPA as whites have lower levels of achievement, though I do not recall what evidence he presented for this claim.
GPA is a good basis for comparison within a school, but it is not a good basis for comparison between schools, so this is not surprising, considering that the average majority-minority school is less well-resourced than the average majority-white school. (I would suggest that standardized measures like the SAT are better than GPA, but unfortunately that is a highly imperfect solution as well.
All three claims could be simultaneously true if we suppose that accomplishment reflects IQ and character, and that assessing an IQ indicator alone is not sufficient to swamp one’s priors.
I would say that the claim “Blacks on average have worse character than whites” is far more dubious on a simple empirical level than “Blacks on average have lower IQ than whites” (and the precise determination of “character” is doing a lot of work in this formulation). This makes the situation worse, not better.
This would suggest that more higher-credit minorities would get dragged down by their neighbors than would white homeowners with equal credit scores. But an individual’s intelligence is not dependent on the intelligence of his neighbor, at least not at remotely the strength of causation that his property value is related to the property value of his neighbor.
So instead of evidence that the bankers should have redlined members of certain groups, this then would be evidence that they should have redlined certain neighborhoods.
Which of these questions do you think would have served the banks better:
A)Will this applicant remain financially solvent if the average home in their neighborhood drops in value by 30%?
B)Will this applicant remain financially solvent if the average home owned by a black family drops in value by 30%?
I do not think it correct to term it redlining unless the answer is actually going to be “no” for any individual in a given neighborhood regardless of their financial position.
A person in a white neighborhood was substantially less likely to experience a thirty percent drop in value. (Compare East Palo Alto with Palo Alto west of the freeway.)
Homes in areas with large numbers of Hispanics and/or blacks, primarily those with large numbers of Hispanics had the largest proportion of foreclosures, and such neighborhoods had the most severe drops in price, for example Gilroy in California, so discriminating by neighborhood or race or both, regardless of the individual merits of the applicant, would have served the banks better than a race blind or neighborhood blind policy
I would say that the claim “Blacks on average have worse character than whites” is far more dubious on a simple empirical level than “Blacks on average have lower IQ than whites”
Would you now?
Would you also arrange for your daughter to wait for you on Martin Luther King Boulevard?
Assume that Prismatic was making a claim about “worse” being different for each English speaker, and each of our models of others differ, and argue against that point instead.
the precise determination of “character” is doing a lot of work in this formulation
So what your saying is that if it’s not safe for your daughter to wait in a certain neighborhood that doesn’t qualify as the neighborhoods residents having worse “character” for your and/or Prismatic’s definition of “character”?
Would you also arrange for your daughter to wait for you on Martin Luther King Boulevard?
Sam0345 is making the assumption that I am white. This happens to be correct (at least, as far as most people are concerned since sometime in the mid-20th century), but I don’t think there was anything in my analysis to justify that assumption.
Thus we can assume that Sam0345 thinks my putative daughter is white. The problem is, while it may be unsafe for my putative white daughter to wait on the corner of MLK Blvd, there are also majority-white neighborhoods where it would be unsafe for a black individual to linger (and I mean because they risk being assaulted, not because the police would harrass them). This makes “neighborhoods you wouldn’t want to linger in” a muddled proxy for “average character of the residents.”
Would you also arrange for your daughter to wait for you on Martin Luther King Boulevard?
Sam0345 is making the assumption that I am white.
I am not making that assumption: Blacks are race realists—they know what neighborhoods are dangerous better than anyone. If you search twitter for racist references to recent violent incidents, most of the people complaining about the violence in explicitly racial terms are black.
There are also majority-white neighborhoods where it would be unsafe for a black individual to linger
Don’t be silly. If blacks were in danger of racist attack, you would have a better poster boy than Emmet Till. Till was not attacked by a white mob for being black, but by a husband for groping that husband’s wife, something that is apt to happen regardless of the race of groper and gropee.
Every day there are incidents where a black mob attacks a random white screaming racist epithets, indicating that the attack is motivated simply by whiteness. If the equivalent thing had ever happened to a black, that black would be the poster boy, not Till. Till was killed by a husband for making a pass at that husband’s wife, not by a white for being black, while every day whites are beaten and often killed purely for being white.
ETA: what this means is that assuming I wouldn’t arrange for my daughter to wait for me on MLK blvd., that doesn’t mean MLK blvd. is worse than other places unless I would arrange for my daughter to wait for me at those places. So I am criticizing the form of the argument.
Above, Konkvistador at least phrases it properly. My problem with sam0345′s post is that he seems to sacrifice clarity for offensiveness.
This is unlike normal arguments over political correctness, in which all sides agree some tradeoff between positive values of communicating clearly, being correct, not making people feel offended, etc. is appropriate.
My problem with the above post is that it sacrifices accuracy for offensiveness, as if that were a positive value, rather than, say, a worthless thing, which might be the typical extreme anti-PC position.
I think it’s very hard for people to overcome their priors here even after getting contradictory evidence. Does being a Bayesian and thinking of them only as priors really work on all levels of your mind?
No, of course not! And that’s part of the problem—people don’t want to admit that they have certain implicit associations, so they try to signal the opposite, often at the expense of correctness. (E.g. for some employers, not appearing racist may be more important than selecting the best applicants.)
Also, in the job example once you get to interview/test stage the observations should indeed clearly swamp out all priors based on what group the candidate belongs to. However earlier in the process (when sifting through thousands of similar resumes) could these priors still retain some importance?
Basically I would separate 2 types of discrimination:
(1) I will not hire a person from group B because I don’t like people from group B. Or I believe people from group B will almost certainly perform less well than people from group A.
(2) I know the prior distribution of job performance for groups A and B (A is higher on average). After taking into account my obervations (looking at a resume) about 1 candidate from each group, the posterior distribution indicates that the candidate from group A is expected to perform better. So I hire A. Had I ignored the prior I would have hired B.
(1) is sub-optimal clearly unacceptable. (2) seems theoretically optimal and appears to be used for many groupings, like [went to a top university] vs. [medium university—same gpa/experience]
However (2) is completely unacceptable for other groupings (like race). Possible explanations:
It has no impact anyway. For these groupings any differences in priors would be so tiny that they would immediately get overwhelmed by the slightest job application relevant info
These are groupings for which people have absolutely no control. It is unfair that top group B people need to systematically overcome this prior.
In practice no one will be able to apply this properly and everyone will end up amplifying priors and giving them way too much importance, so it is best to not go near it.
Yes they do. What the cannot do is increase their IQ by a significant amount. But there is a whole range of IQ over which they are free to choose. Approximately the range [default IQ + 5, minimum measurable IQ]. Beating your head against something should do the trick but excessive drug use is probably more fun.
Good point (acknowledging wedrifid’s caveat) but one could argue IQ is often directly relevant to job performance, whereas race is not (“discriminating” based on ability-to-do-the-job is probably ok, even if mostly genetic).
It seems that using factors that cause good/bad job performance is normal hiring procedure whereas using factors that only correlate with good/bad job performance is statistical discrimination (thx for the link Emile)
It seems that using factors that cause good/bad job performance is normal hiring procedure whereas using factors that only correlate with good/bad job performance is statistical discrimination (thx for the link Emile)
So using things like test scores, impressions from interviews, etc., is statistical discrimination?
It seems that using factors that cause good/bad job performance is normal hiring procedure whereas using factors that only correlate with good/bad job performance is statistical discrimination
So using things like test scores, impressions from interviews, etc., is statistical discrimination?
hmmm. Yes that statement is probably not correct. I guess your examples are observations that correlate with factors that cause good/bad job performance. Why is it more acceptable? Maybe because the link is much clearer/ correlation is much stronger?
I’ve noticed that even on Lesswrong, there is such a thing as knowledge that it is deemed better not to know. Apparently this is referred to as the basilisk’s gaze (I’ve yet to manage to read anything deemed dangerous here before it was deleted, so I could be wrong in the details of that).
It seems to me that a lot of the “Don’t suggest that there are racial differences in IQ” position is actually based on a hidden belief that looking at the possibility of racial differences is gazing at a basilisk.
Suppose you are an employer hiring for a position, using an examination where performance is correlated with intelligence. It is essentially harmless to take the position, “My prior is that whites have higher IQs on average than blacks, so I expect the average score of the white applicants to be higher than the average score of the black applicants.”
What the opponents of acknowledging racial differences are worried about is that the employer will also take the step of saying “This particular black applicant scored exceptionally well on the examination, but since I know that blacks in the aggregate have lower IQs, I’m going to treat my prior and the examination as separate bits of knowledge and scale my assessment of the candidate’s intelligence downward from what the exam alone would suggest.” As opposed to having the prior be swamped by the examination.
This is on top of (legitimately) expecting that the average person won’t understand the difference between the layman’s concept of “race” and the more scientifically rigorous concepts of “population” and “cohort.”
In the wider world, unlike on Lesswrong, openly coming out and saying “Considering this idea is like gazing at a basilisk” would end disasterously. So people go with “This idea is false” instead.
I’m not sure the conventional kind of basilisk qualifies as knowledge, as such: Langford’s original story was about an image that crashes onlookers’ brains through a defect in image processing, not through anything to do with verbal or logical parsing. Most other treatments of the concept have done the same, more or less, although there are some ambiguous ones (like the “Funniest Joke in the World” Python sketch).
There are various presentations of knowledge which clearly aren’t mind-safe (and presentation and context usually matter more than the content), but their danger generally comes in the form of bias and related issues like priming effects, which of course is rather well-traveled ground on this site. I think we can explain the effects of bringing up racial IQ differences and other politically sensitive ideas perfectly well within that framework, without having to invoke any more fundamental problems; in fact, we do.
Upvoted for bringing the Langford story to my attention; I was not aware of it.
I continue to believe my explanation accurately describes the approach of a significant proportion of highly educated individuals expressing anti-racial differences views, whether or not those individuals are even aware of the general concept of mindkilling.
This story: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm ?
There’s a similar plotline in one of the Star Trek episodes with the Borg, where (IIRC) they discuss the morality of crashing all the Borg’s minds with some bug they’ve found in their information processing, decide not to, and then discover they already sort of did that by accident....
That’s the one I had in mind, yes.
The “basilisk” is of a very different character btw. It’s more of a game theoretic issue, sort of like how if you can’t understand the language the blackmailer is using to try to communicate you can’t be blackmailed.
Yes, I’ve yet to encounter a legitimate example but that’s the name for the hypothetical concept. ;)
What about those nasty shock sites you sometimes see on the ’net, or really sickening jokes/short stories where you wish you’d not seen/heard them?
They are not basilisks. Basilisks do real damage to you, they don’t make you nauseous. To get the general idea of the concept see RationalWiki. That illustrates what apparently constituted a basilisk for certain psychologically vulnerable individuals. Of course others would warn you that you shouldn’t discover what an alleged basilisk is on the off chance that it actually is one!
Guess I was going for stuff I wish I hadn’t seen rather than stuff that it would have actually been better not to know.
OK, I did a search on RationalWiki, and found this:http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong#The_ugly which strikes me as odd.
Are there any useful links to stuff on this concept? I expect that being exposed to ideas that mess with your mind might be a good way to develop the ‘mental immune system’.
That particular event is a rather strange bit of early LW lore. It seems to have largely passed out of the site’s public consciousness now, but for a while it cast a long shadow: doing a site search on “forbidden topic” ought to give you an outline of the opinion surrounding it.
I’d advise against deliberately seeking out allegedly harmful knowledge in order to expose yourself to it: I’m aware of no particular evidence that the mind responds to memetic threats (as opposed to non-memetic stresses) by hardening itself against them, and with confirmation bias and group identification behavior in mind there are a number of reasons why that might not be the case. I should probably temper that by admitting I haven’t always followed my own advice here, though.
On the other hand, I do think there’s room for a more general theory of harmful knowledge. While some of the groundwork has been laid, and we have a few ad-hoc guidelines in place, we don’t yet have a good consensus on epistemic safety, as the comments on the World of Warcraft thread (to say nothing of this one!) demonstrate. About as close as I’ve seen anyone get is Nick Bostrom’s 2009 paper on information hazards, but it limits itself to typology. Contributing to such a theory might be a valuable thing to pursue, if you’re determined to risk your sanity.
As far as I can tell, people’s vulnerability to memetic hazards that drive some people but not others insane should be very predictable. Granted that there are problems with retrospectively changing one’s outlook to try and defend against some of them, it shouldn’t be too hard to test someone to see if they already have appropriate cached response defenses up without exposing them to the idea itself.
I don’t think I’d go as far as deliberately risking my sanity (such as it is).
So has knowledge that is harmful in more than specific situations been demonstrated to exist, or are you referring to theorising?
Depends what bounds you want to put on it. Basilisk-like knowledge (what the Bostrom paper calls a neuropsychological hazard) affecting the human cognitive architecture has not as far as I know been demonstrated to exist. Several other context-dependent but still fairly general informational hazards (ideological, for example) do clearly exist, though, and many of them seem poorly understood.
The forbidden topic in particular seems to belong to an interesting family of reflective hazards that hasn’t gotten much attention at all, although for the sake of local norms I’d rather not devote too much attention to it here.
Doh. Maybe I’m too tired so my brain is working less well than I’d hope, but I hadn’t noticed the link to the Bostrom paper there. I need to try to more carefully read through the stuff people say to me.
I’ll give the paper a read-through tomorrow.
[edit] I scanned the paper, but the tiny section on neuropsychological hazard seemed to tend toward the low-level (photosensitive epilepsy as one example), rather than the Lovecraftian (as I might have expected it to, if I had thought carefully about it, since I don’t place much credence in high-level ideas that could blow your mind that way)
Observe that in the recent crisis, blacks and hispanics had two or three times higher default rate, even when controlled for income and credit rating. So had bankers applied that policy, they would have been right. A protected minority candidate with the same apparent credit worthiness as a white candidate is far more likely to default.
La Griffe du Lion has claimed that the same is true in academic achievement—that blacks with the same IQ and GPA as whites have lower levels of achievement, though I do not recall what evidence he presented for this claim.
Herrnstein and Murray on the other hand claimed that controlling for IQ, blacks had similar levels of accomplishment, though I seem to recall they were controlling for IQ and intact family
All three claims could be simultaneously true if we suppose that accomplishment reflects IQ and character, and that assessing an IQ indicator alone is not sufficient to swamp one’s priors.
I am not convinced this situation is at all analogous. Consider the following three facts: 1) The geographical distribution of blacks, hispanics, and whites is not random—there is considerable segregation by race; 2)In the aggregate, blacks and hispanics have lower average credit rating than whites; 3)If your neighbor defaults/is foreclosed, your own property value falls.
This would suggest that more higher-credit minorities would get dragged down by their neighbors than would white homeowners with equal credit scores. But an individual’s intelligence is not dependent on the intelligence of his neighbor, at least not at remotely the strength of causation that his property value is related to the property value of his neighbor.
GPA is a good basis for comparison within a school, but it is not a good basis for comparison between schools, so this is not surprising, considering that the average majority-minority school is less well-resourced than the average majority-white school. (I would suggest that standardized measures like the SAT are better than GPA, but unfortunately that is a highly imperfect solution as well.
I would say that the claim “Blacks on average have worse character than whites” is far more dubious on a simple empirical level than “Blacks on average have lower IQ than whites” (and the precise determination of “character” is doing a lot of work in this formulation). This makes the situation worse, not better.
So instead of evidence that the bankers should have redlined members of certain groups, this then would be evidence that they should have redlined certain neighborhoods.
Which of these questions do you think would have served the banks better:
A)Will this applicant remain financially solvent if the average home in their neighborhood drops in value by 30%?
B)Will this applicant remain financially solvent if the average home owned by a black family drops in value by 30%?
I do not think it correct to term it redlining unless the answer is actually going to be “no” for any individual in a given neighborhood regardless of their financial position.
A person in a white neighborhood was substantially less likely to experience a thirty percent drop in value. (Compare East Palo Alto with Palo Alto west of the freeway.)
Homes in areas with large numbers of Hispanics and/or blacks, primarily those with large numbers of Hispanics had the largest proportion of foreclosures, and such neighborhoods had the most severe drops in price, for example Gilroy in California, so discriminating by neighborhood or race or both, regardless of the individual merits of the applicant, would have served the banks better than a race blind or neighborhood blind policy
Would you now?
Would you also arrange for your daughter to wait for you on Martin Luther King Boulevard?
Assume that Prismatic was making a claim about “worse” being different for each English speaker, and each of our models of others differ, and argue against that point instead.
So what your saying is that if it’s not safe for your daughter to wait in a certain neighborhood that doesn’t qualify as the neighborhoods residents having worse “character” for your and/or Prismatic’s definition of “character”?
Sam0345 asks:
Sam0345 is making the assumption that I am white. This happens to be correct (at least, as far as most people are concerned since sometime in the mid-20th century), but I don’t think there was anything in my analysis to justify that assumption.
Thus we can assume that Sam0345 thinks my putative daughter is white. The problem is, while it may be unsafe for my putative white daughter to wait on the corner of MLK Blvd, there are also majority-white neighborhoods where it would be unsafe for a black individual to linger (and I mean because they risk being assaulted, not because the police would harrass them). This makes “neighborhoods you wouldn’t want to linger in” a muddled proxy for “average character of the residents.”
Would statistically speaking your Black daughter be safer on Robert E. Lee Boulevard or on MLK Boulevard?
I am not making that assumption: Blacks are race realists—they know what neighborhoods are dangerous better than anyone. If you search twitter for racist references to recent violent incidents, most of the people complaining about the violence in explicitly racial terms are black.
Don’t be silly. If blacks were in danger of racist attack, you would have a better poster boy than Emmet Till. Till was not attacked by a white mob for being black, but by a husband for groping that husband’s wife, something that is apt to happen regardless of the race of groper and gropee.
Every day there are incidents where a black mob attacks a random white screaming racist epithets, indicating that the attack is motivated simply by whiteness. If the equivalent thing had ever happened to a black, that black would be the poster boy, not Till. Till was killed by a husband for making a pass at that husband’s wife, not by a white for being black, while every day whites are beaten and often killed purely for being white.
P(H|e)=P(H)P(e|H)/P(e), P(e|H)/P(e) ~ 1
ETA: what this means is that assuming I wouldn’t arrange for my daughter to wait for me on MLK blvd., that doesn’t mean MLK blvd. is worse than other places unless I would arrange for my daughter to wait for me at those places. So I am criticizing the form of the argument.
Above, Konkvistador at least phrases it properly. My problem with sam0345′s post is that he seems to sacrifice clarity for offensiveness.
This is unlike normal arguments over political correctness, in which all sides agree some tradeoff between positive values of communicating clearly, being correct, not making people feel offended, etc. is appropriate.
My problem with the above post is that it sacrifices accuracy for offensiveness, as if that were a positive value, rather than, say, a worthless thing, which might be the typical extreme anti-PC position.
I think it’s very hard for people to overcome their priors here even after getting contradictory evidence. Does being a Bayesian and thinking of them only as priors really work on all levels of your mind?
No, of course not! And that’s part of the problem—people don’t want to admit that they have certain implicit associations, so they try to signal the opposite, often at the expense of correctness. (E.g. for some employers, not appearing racist may be more important than selecting the best applicants.)
I would agree with your explanation.
Also, in the job example once you get to interview/test stage the observations should indeed clearly swamp out all priors based on what group the candidate belongs to. However earlier in the process (when sifting through thousands of similar resumes) could these priors still retain some importance?
Basically I would separate 2 types of discrimination:
(1) I will not hire a person from group B because I don’t like people from group B. Or I believe people from group B will almost certainly perform less well than people from group A.
(2) I know the prior distribution of job performance for groups A and B (A is higher on average). After taking into account my obervations (looking at a resume) about 1 candidate from each group, the posterior distribution indicates that the candidate from group A is expected to perform better. So I hire A. Had I ignored the prior I would have hired B.
(1) is sub-optimal clearly unacceptable. (2) seems theoretically optimal and appears to be used for many groupings, like [went to a top university] vs. [medium university—same gpa/experience]
However (2) is completely unacceptable for other groupings (like race). Possible explanations:
It has no impact anyway. For these groupings any differences in priors would be so tiny that they would immediately get overwhelmed by the slightest job application relevant info
These are groupings for which people have absolutely no control. It is unfair that top group B people need to systematically overcome this prior.
In practice no one will be able to apply this properly and everyone will end up amplifying priors and giving them way too much importance, so it is best to not go near it.
People don’t have control over their IQ either.
Yes they do. What the cannot do is increase their IQ by a significant amount. But there is a whole range of IQ over which they are free to choose. Approximately the range [default IQ + 5, minimum measurable IQ]. Beating your head against something should do the trick but excessive drug use is probably more fun.
Good point (acknowledging wedrifid’s caveat) but one could argue IQ is often directly relevant to job performance, whereas race is not (“discriminating” based on ability-to-do-the-job is probably ok, even if mostly genetic).
It seems that using factors that cause good/bad job performance is normal hiring procedure whereas using factors that only correlate with good/bad job performance is statistical discrimination (thx for the link Emile)
So using things like test scores, impressions from interviews, etc., is statistical discrimination?
hmmm. Yes that statement is probably not correct. I guess your examples are observations that correlate with factors that cause good/bad job performance. Why is it more acceptable? Maybe because the link is much clearer/ correlation is much stronger?
Because you’ve drilled as far as you can before making a determination.
(2) is statistical discrimination.