If a race is associated with unfavorable traits, it is more likely that someone of that race has those unfavorable traits than someone who is not. Just because another factor provides a more accurate comparison doesn’t change this—you should then use the other factor in combination with race, not instead of race. Only if the correlation between race and bad things is eliminated once you take the other factor into account should you then stop using race and switch to the other factor only.
The problems are that people speak in terms that assign causation to the race factor. Such as “White Men Can’t Jump,” and that even if you say “A White Man is less likely to be able to jump than a Black Man,” you are still assigning cause based on race instead of environment. Environment is what dictates these likelihoods.
For example, people whose ancestry is in Kenya happen to be more likely to be great distance runners essentially because they live in a higher elevation with less oxygen. But to say “Kenyans are more likely to be great distance runners” is less accurate than saying “People whose ancestors spent uncommonly large amounts of time at great elevation with less oxygen.”
Thus, when you really look at it, speaking in terms of race is a mistake in categorization and thinking.
But to say “Kenyans are more likely to be great distance runners” is less accurate than saying “People whose ancestors spent uncommonly large amounts of time at great elevation with less oxygen.”
Actually no. Peruvians spent a long time at high altitude but don’t fill the ranks of prodigious distance runners. This is because they evolved a different adaption—barrel-chestedness—instead of more/better haemoglobin.
Not necessarily. We don’t know when the tribes currently living in the mountainous areas of Kenya moved there. A great deal of East Africa is low-altitude flat land, there’s nothing resembling Tibet there...
True. My main point is that there can be many possible adaptions for a similar set of high-altitude environments and not all of them will make you a good distance runner.
For example, people whose ancestry is in Kenya happen to be more likely to be great distance runners essentially because they live in a higher elevation with less oxygen.
This is what is commonly meant by saying that the outcomes is dictated by genetics. You seem to be intentionally using terminology in non-standard ways in an attempt to confuse the issue.
No, that’s not what’s commonly meant, and the lack of acknowledging that environment is the ultimate cause is one of the major sources of confusion that creates racist thinking.
Not realizing this may confuse the issue for you. But I know precisely what I’m saying.
No, that’s not what’s commonly meant, and the lack of acknowledging that environment is the ultimate cause
I don’t think anyone is disputing this. Of course, saying the “environment is the ultimate cause” is like saying “the big bang is the ultimate cause”, true but not helpful.
is one of the major sources of confusion that creates racist thinking.
Care to define what you mean by “racist thinking”, also preferably with an explanation of why your particular definition is a bad thing?
It’s true and helpful to recognise that the behaviour patterns US racists complain about are envirnonmently linked, inasmuchas outside the US , different races display the same behaviour, and same races display different behaviour.
It’s not a matter of disputing, it’s a matter of not recognizing and taking it into account.
Of course, saying the “environment is the ultimate cause” is like saying “the big bang is the ultimate cause”, true but not helpful.
You don’t see how a logical thought process that would advocate genocide (removing “bad genes” you believe are responsible for undesirable social characteristics or behavior) over changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups pf people is a bad idea?
Care to define what you mean by “racist thinking”, also preferably with an explanation of why your particular definition is a bad thing?
To quote myself from years ago...
Racism: A specific form of the causation-correlation logical fallacy, where a person looks at different tendencies that happen to align among people of different ethnicities and assumes incorrectly that the ethnicity or genetic aspects of the ethnicity are the CAUSE of those differences. The person then usually acts, speaks, or governs in a damaging and incorrect way based on that mistaken assumption.
Examples: 1. I waved hello to a sleeping Asian person once, and he did not respond. This taught me that Asian people are rude, and I have never said hello to one since!
You don’t see how a logical thought process that would advocate genocide (removing “bad genes” you believe are responsible for undesirable social characteristics or behavior) over changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups pf people is a bad idea?
Assuming I’m parsing this sentence correctly, you favor “changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups of people”. Good, so do I. However, the way racial differences are currently not acknowledged is making this difficult. A lot of institutions have policies requiring that admittance to educational institutions or employment be proportional by race. And there are people seriously arguing that arrests should be proportional by race of population.
Also, false egalitarian beliefs have killed farmorepeople than false “racist” beliefs. The way is happens is the following logic:
“As we all know no group is better than any other, yet group X is doing better than other groups. Why is this the case? It can’t be that group X is in any way better, it must be that group X is getting ahead by cheating and other nefarious means, thus group X must be punished.”
Come to think of it, the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign also followed the above logic. Just replace the first clause with “as we know no group is better than Aryan Germans”.
Racism: A specific form of the causation-correlation logical fallacy, where a person looks at different tendencies that happen to align among people of different ethnicities and assumes incorrectly that the ethnicity or genetic aspects of the ethnicity are the CAUSE of those differences. The person then usually acts, speaks, or governs in a damaging and incorrect way based on that mistaken assumption.
Um, the genetic aspects of ethnicity quite likely are the cause of a lot of those differences. Yes, they were ultimately caused by differences in the ancestral environment but genetics are in fact the proximate cause.
Examples: 1. I waved hello to a sleeping Asian person once, and he did not respond. This taught me that Asian people are rude, and I have never said hello to one since!
Um, this example doesn’t appear to be about confusing correlation with causation so much as inferring correlation based on insufficient evidence.
Assuming I’m parsing this sentence correctly, you favor “changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups of people”. Good, so do I. However, the way racial differences are currently not acknowledged is making this difficult.
First, I hope it’s clear that if we chalk up personality traits and other such individual characteristics to race instead of environment, then the solution to removing certain undesirable traits (like criminality) would be banishment/disenfranchisement etc of an entire race of people, or outright genocide. This is why this is a problem.
Secondly, you say that you recognize that environment is the cause, but you immediately go back to referring to them as “racial differences.” This is the phrasing that leads to race-based thinking, and thus prejudice and discrimination. I can’t stress enough that these aren’t racial differences and there’s a reason society generally rebukes this classification.
Also, false egalitarian beliefs have killed far more people than false “racist” beliefs. The way is happens is the following logic:
What?? The Communist famines and purges were results of sociopaths killing their political enemies and delusional economic policy. Not egalitarianism, but believing that the country would survive fine if everyone stopped producing food and instead was forced to make metals. Those aren’t “egalitarian” failures (not that I believe in egalitarianism), but racial purges are absolutely and explicitly done in the name of “ethnic cleansing.”
...and even if this were true, this is a bizarre attempt at a red herring argument. If I killed your dog, would you consider it okay as long as I pointed out that other people have killed more dogs than me?
Um, the genetic aspects of ethnicity quite likely are the cause of a lot of those differences.
This implies that you’re ignoring the most fundamental parts of this conversation, so I’m not sure what the point is of this exchange.
First, I hope it’s clear that if we chalk up personality traits and other such individual characteristics to race instead of environment, then the solution to removing certain undesirable traits (like criminality) would be banishment/disenfranchisement etc of an entire race of people, or outright genocide. This is why this is a problem.
As opposed to the banishment/disenfranchisement etc of actual convicted criminals?
You seem to be conflating several claims and committing the is-ought fallacy:
Whether races exist as useful categories that allow to make predictions about observations is an epistemic question. We have very strong evidence for this claim.
Whether some races, in modern Western countries, are more prone to have certain “bad” traits (e.g. low IQ, high crime rates, etc.) is also an epistemic question. We also have strong evidence for these claims.
Whether this correlation between race and “bad” traits is essentially due to genetic factors, is yet another epistemic question. We don’t have strong evidence either for or against these claims, and in general they are very difficult to test. Political incorrect as they are, some of these claims, specifically the one about IQ, have some degree of plausibility, due to the high heritability of some of these traits. But the jury is still out.
Whether we should discriminate against these races with “bad” traits is an entirely different kind of question, a moral question. It doesn’t follow from any of the previous claims.
Whether we should discriminate against these races with “bad” traits is an entirely different kind of question, a moral question. It doesn’t follow from any of the previous claims.
On the other hand, whether discriminating against races with “bad” traits will lead to an increase in utility (for whichever your favorite utility function is), is at least in principal, an epistemic question.
As opposed to the banishment/disenfranchisement etc of actual convicted criminals?
If you remove the trait, you won’t have criminals. A genetics-caused relationship, logically, would allow you to do this. You’ll know beforehand who will be a criminal. Not only that, since it would assist in establishing likelihood, you should be able factor race into the evidence in criminal trials. This would be a terrible idea.
Whether races exist as useful categories that allow to make predictions about observations is an epistemic question. We have very strong evidence for this claim.
Whether some races, in modern Western countries, are more prone to have certain “bad” traits (e.g. low IQ, high crime rates, etc.) is also an epistemic question. We also have strong evidence for these claims.
You have nothing but correlation, and correlation based on fuzzy and corrupted data. Correlation is not causation, and you seem to struggle mightily with the difference.
Political incorrect as they are, some of these claims, specifically the one about IQ, have some degree of plausibility, due to the high heritability of some of these traits. But the jury is still out.
Whether we should discriminate against these races with “bad” traits is an entirely different kind of question, a moral question. It doesn’t follow from any of the previous claims.
These claims are also the result of you not seeing the distinction between logic based on causation and logic based on correlation.
If you remove the trait, you won’t have criminals. A genetics-caused relationship, logically, would allow you to do this. You’ll know beforehand who will be a criminal.
Only if the correlation was perfect. In any case, even if you were able to identify criminals before the fact, it doesn’t mean that it would be moral to “punish” them beforehand.
Not only that, since it would assist in establishing likelihood, you should be able factor race into the evidence in criminal trials. This would be a terrible idea.
There are good reason not to use profiling in criminal investigations and trials.
Anyway, what evidence would make you accept the claim that one group of easily identifiable people people was more prone to commit crime than the general population? If you were given this evidence, would you consider appropriate to use profiling against this group in criminal trials, or otherwise bannish/disenfranchise or even genocide them?
You have nothing but correlation, and correlation based on fuzzy and corrupted data.
Evidence would be appreciated.
Correlation is not causation, and you seem to struggle mightily with the difference.
I don’t want to come out as rude but I don’t think you know what you are talking about when you say ′ Correlation is not causation’:
Distinguishing causation from correlation is important only when one of the variable is under your control. There is some controversy about whether Evidential Decision Theory or Causal Decision Theory or something else is the ultimately ideal way of making decisions, but in practice the best that you can do in most non-pathological scenarios is to use some approximation of Causal Decision Theory. You can decide to smoke or not smoke, so establishing whether smoking causes cancer or is merely correlated to it via a common cause, is of paramount importance. (*) People’s race, on the other hand, is not a decision variable. You can’t change your neither your own race nor somebody’s else race. Therefore, the ‘correlation vs causation’ issue is irrelevant.
But more generally, nobody in this thread is suggesting that public policy should be predicate public policy on race.
( When using EDT, the relevant question becomes whether, after conditioning on everything you know, including your own preferences, smoking is still positively correlated to cancer. If it is (*), and you value not getting cancer higher than smoking, then you should decide not to smoke. If it not, then you can smoke if you like it.)
(** In case anybody is wondering, we are pretty certain that it is, due to randomized controlled trials on animals and humans.)
You can’t change your neither your own race nor somebody’s else race.
You can change your future children’s race by deciding whom to have children with. More generally, in principle it is possible to change the racial makeup of the next generation by incentivizing certain races to have more children and other races to have fewer children.
More generally, in principle it is possible to change the racial makeup of the next generation by incentivizing certain races to have more children and other races to have fewer children.
Even more generally, just killing off people of certain races works better for changing “the racial makeup of the next generation”.
It risks creating a self-fulfilling propecy: Statistics show that “Martians” are more likely to be convicted, thus you lower the bar to convict them, which makes them even more likely to be convicted, and so on. In principle you could avoid this by properly conditioning not on Martian conviction rate, but on the rate Martians have been observed doing things which are considered prima facie evidence in a trial. In practice, you would likely end up introducing a bias.
it can be exploited: If, by symmetric Bayesian reasoning, you rise the bar to convict “Earthlings”, you create an incentive for Earthlings to commit crime. Even if most Earthlings are very much law-abiding, few bad Earthlings can benefit a lot from the system and cause lots of damage.
It is intrisically poltically controversial: it runs contrary to the interests of the Martians, and Martians can realistically coordinate to lobby against it, and if their lobbying is unsuccesful, this becomes a point of constant friction between Martians and Earthlings. You don’t want to incite this kind of tension.
Only if the correlation was perfect. In any case, even if you were able to identify criminals before the fact, it doesn’t mean that it would be moral to “punish” them beforehand.
If you’re a Bayseian, you might refuse to hire them because of the increased probability that they are a criminal. That would not be punishment, since you are not morally obligated to hire them at all. Likewise, charging them more for insurance, or walking across the street when you see one, is not “punishment”.
While you may have Bayseian grounds to not hire racists, I doubt that you’d have Bayseian grounds to not hire Bayseian racists. There’s little reason to believe that racism based on accurate Bayseian calculation is associated with the same negative traits as racism in general. So if you’re hiring on a Bayseian basis, you should divide the potential racist hires into Bayseian and non-Bayseian racists and refuse to hire only the non-Bayseian ones.
(Of course, the same applies to hiring minorities, if you can divide the minorities into similar subgroups.)
So if you’re hiring on a Bayseian basis, you should divide the potential racist hires into Bayseian and non-Bayseian racists and refuse to hire only the non-Bayseian ones.
But being a Bayesian is a hidden variable, while having a race-based hiring policy is mostly observable. And having a race-based hiring policy also correlates with being a “stupid” racist. Oops.
There’s little reason to believe that racism based on accurate Bayseian calculation is associated with the same negative traits as racism in general
I’d need a bit of clarification of what a racist means when he self describes his racism as based on accurate Bayesian calculation. (Given Dunning-Kruger effect… I may actually expect such person to do worse on math [than people who know the Bayes formula])
So, suppose you are automating your hires by writing an app into which you enter the candidate’s responses to some interview questions and the like. Perhaps 20..50 items total. Does a “Bayesian racist” add a radio group for race, which when set to black lowers the score?
edit: note, I’m using ‘self describes as’ for evidence.
I doubt that you’d have Bayseian grounds to not hire Bayseian racists
Ohh, I do. I know that racists are a worse hires, and I don’t know anything in particular about racists born on Tuesdays or racists who self describe as Bayesian.
Given equal qualifications, I expect (known to me as self-described) Bayesian racists to be overall more stupid. Especially ones who think that adding ‘Bayesian’ to racist should entitle them to less discrimination than they would do with ‘Bayesian’ added to ‘black’.
edit: And if I care about understanding of statistics, I’ll add a math question or two to the interview quiz, which I suspect a lot of self described Bayesians, racist or otherwise, are going to fail. Within those that don’t fail, I can further use racism as evidence.
You seem to be confused between P(A|B) and P(B|A). Your link is to some PR about a paper (do you have a link to the paper itself, by the way?) which claimed that dumb kids in the UK grew up to be more racist than one would otherwise expect. And..?
If there are good Bayesian grounds.… Someone needs to demonstrate a hiring situation where group information masks individual information, AKA the resume.
Uh, the obvious? Treating people badly because one “believes” that physical or intellectual differences imply morlal inferiority. Generally speaking, everyday racists are mostly quite shitty to black people.
A non-Bayseian racist wants to decrease the utility of other people either as a terminal preference (or as something that has the same practical implications as a terminal preference, such as being disgusted by their presence) or because of bias. Bias is irrational and a bad trait, and correlated with bias in other areas as well. Decreasing the utility of other people as a terminal preference is not irrational in the sense of involving bad logic, but it’s something that I want to avoid if I hire someone for any job involving other people.
It’s always possible that they can compartmentalize their racism or that they will be sufficiently deterred by the threat of lawsuits or being fired that they don’t cause any damage, but Bayseianism is about the odds; the odds are that they are more likely to cause problems even if not every one does.
A non-Bayseian racist wants to decrease the utility of other people
Huh? Maybe I don’t understand what make a racist non-Bayesian, but most definitions of racism revolve around believing that there are innate and significant differences between races. That’s an epistemic issue. How do you derive from that the desire to “decrease the utility of other people”?
First, for the world outside of LW that’s a meaningless distinction.
Second, I’m not sure how do you know what the actual differences are. Doesn’t it boil down to the “Bayesian racists” being able to cite some science to support what they believe and the “non-Bayesian racists” not being able to?
Third, you still need to jump the gap between believing the races to be different and wanting to “decrease utility” of other people.
Third, you still need to jump the gap between believing the races to be different and wanting to “decrease utility” of other people.
There is no gap. If you have reason to believe the races to be different, and act differently towards them based solely on this difference, you’re a Bayseian racist, and I do not claim that Bayseian racists want to decrease utility of other people. Non-Bayseian racists do; a non-Bayseian racist is different from a Bayseian racist.
If you have reason to believe the races to be different, and act differently towards them based solely on this difference, you’re a Bayseian racist
So, let’s take some Southern redneck. He interacts with black people on a regular basis and based on his personal experience he came to the conclusion that they are pretty damn dumb, dumber than white rednecks, anyway. Does he have a “reason to believe”? Is he a Bayesian racist?
Or let’s take Alice. Alice knows the statistics about crime rates among black males and, say, Asian males. So on an empty street when she sees a black male she actively avoids him, but when she sees an Asian male she does not. Is she a Bayesian racist?
If there are no cognitive biases involved, sure. In practice, I think that would be unlikely.
On the other hand, someone who says “I find the presence of black people to be disgusting. I would not hire one because I don’t want to be near them” would be a non-Bayseian racist. There’s no Bayseian reason for, for instance, having segregated water fountains.
You’re using the word “Bayesian” here as a synonym for “rational”, right?
Well, Bayseian is a synonym for being rational (or for a subset of being rational), so it amounts to that.
Do you think there’s a “Bayesian reason” for having segregated schools?
I don’t know. If you can come up with a reason that depends on the higher probability that some races have some traits, I suppose there would be. I would of course like to see such a reason first.
If he got his opinion by updating it constantly and is willing to update it in the other direction given further evidence, yes. What he actually ends up doing with it is another matter entirely. I wouldn’t expect a Bayesian redneck to join the KKK, for example.
Is she a Bayesian racist?
I’d think she’s either committing the fallacy of trusting statistics to exactly predict the individual case, or simply not doing proper cost analysis. Even if the statistics say there are no unsolved crimes and none of the crimes are committed by Asians, the expected negative utility of running into the first Asian criminal in history should outweigh the inconvenience of avoiding one person on an otherwise empty street.
Even if the statistics say there are no unsolved crimes and none of the crimes are committed by Asians
In that hypothetical world, which is very different from ours, actively avoiding Asian males would be as weird as actively avoiding harmless old grannies, and doing weird things carries a nonzero social cost.
then the solution to removing certain undesirable traits (like criminality) would be banishment/disenfranchisement etc of an entire race of people, or outright genocide.
Notice how your attempting to equivocate between mass murder and disenfranchisement. Those are two very different things. One is obviously (terminally) bad. The other is at best an instrumental problem and we need to estimate its consequences to see whether its actually bad.
Secondly, you say that you recognize that environment is the cause, but you immediately go back to referring to them as “racial differences.”
The causality is environment → genetic differences → different behaviors. If a causality chain with more than one term is too complicated for you, I recommend you start by reviewing causality 101.
This is the phrasing that leads to race-based thinking, and thus prejudice and discrimination.
Well, I’ve just argued your definition of “race-based thinking” is rather confused and isn’t clear a bad thing, so would you please provide a better definition and an explanation before you continue using the term. Also while you’re at it could you define “prejudice and discrimination” and how it differs from using Bayesian prior to help make decisions.
What?? The Communist famines and purges were results of sociopaths killing their political enemies and delusional economic policy. Not egalitarianism, but believing that the country would survive fine if everyone stopped producing food and instead was forced to make metals.
The purges were targeted at kulaks, i.e., the people who were doing better, because that kind of thing can’t be permitted in the new egalitarian communist utopia. So yes, these are in fact “egalitarian” failures.
If I killed your dog, would you consider it okay as long as I pointed out that other people have killed more dogs than me?
A better analogy is that you’re arguing that we should avoid thinking X because some people who think X have shot dogs, I’m pointing out that people who (falsely) think not-X have shot far dogs than people who think X.
First, I hope it’s clear that if we chalk up personality traits and other such individual characteristics to race instead of environment, then the solution to removing certain undesirable traits (like criminality) would be banishment/disenfranchisement etc of an entire race of people, or outright genocide. This is why this is a problem.
I think that might say more about your own attitude to low IQ people than it does about everyone else’s …
Yes in the example the person is viewing a single tendency in an example and acting in a damaging way because of that. It may be more accurate for the speaker to say that he saw a group of Asian people sleeping on a plane and none waved back, while the Hispanic person who was awake, did.
A specific form of the causation-correlation logical fallacy, where a person looks at different tendencies that happen to align among people of different ethnicities
That implies there is a genuine difference in the aggregate group-level behavior. A proper example would be
Black people commit crimes at a disproportionate rate compared to Whites. This is because Black people are inherently more violent and criminal than Whites.
The second sentence doesn’t necessarily follow from the first, because there could be other factors that cause Blacks to be more violent.
Your examples are fallacies of generalizing from small and/or unrepresentative samples, not fallacies of inferring causation from correlation.
It may be helpful for you to know that the organization running this site is approximately half funded by Peter Thiel, who in his younger years when most decent folks are busy getting an education was busy challenging laws against hate speech. The site is ostensibly ‘less wrong’ than science.
This site bears the logos of three organizations (CFAR, MIRI and FHI); MIRI is indeed approximately half funded by Thiel, but I don’t know about the other two and I’m too lazy to find out.
people whose ancestry is in Kenya happen to be more likely to be great distance runners essentially because they live in a higher elevation with less oxygen.
I’m not sure this holds water. Kenya contains some reasonably high country, but it’s not unusually high by global standards; Nairobi lies in the western highlands at around 1800 meters, comparable for example to northern Spain or Colorado, while Mombasa is essentially at sea level. On top of that, most Kenyans are Bantu, members of an ethnic group that expanded out of West Africa in early historical times, so that population wouldn’t have had much time for adaptation.
I’ve heard of high-altitude adaptation in the context of Ethiopia, though, which is higher and inhabited by groups who’ve been there longer.
There are many other factors like bone structure (which is also dictated ultimately by environment) and the year-round warm weather that seem quite clearly to contribute, but it would be a digression and wouldn’t really be necessary to illustrate the point.
Disagree, it illustrates that point that saying “Kenyans are more likely to be great distance runners” is in fact more accurate than saying “People whose ancestors spent uncommonly large amounts of time at great elevation with less oxygen [are more likely to be great distance runners]” since the former doesn’t have the burdensome detail of assuming a particular causal mechanism.
I’ll correct that. Was probably in the course of typing several replies on different parts of the subject. Bone structure gets detected by environment, but it in itself isn’t.
But to say “Kenyans are more likely to be great distance runners” is less accurate than saying “People whose ancestors spent uncommonly large amounts of time at great elevation with less oxygen.”
If having such ancestors completely explains why Kenyans have that trait, then that would count as “the correlation between race and bad things is eliminated once you take the other factor into account”. So you’re not actually disagreeing with me.
If having such ancestors completely explains why Kenyans have that trait, then that would count as “the correlation between race and bad things is eliminated once you take the other factor into account”.
What other factor? If you mean “having such ancestors” then you’ve just tabooed the word “race” but I don’t see how this counts as “eliminating the correlation”.
If people of some race are more likely to have a bad trait, but that increased likelihood can be completely explained by the fact that people of that race are more likely to have some other factor, then there is no correlation between race and that trait once you condition on the other factor. That’s what “completely explained” means.
If that increased likelihood cannot be completely explained by the fact that people of that race are more likely to have that other factor, then there remains some correlation between race and that trait even after conditioning on that other factor.
Not every reply is automatically disagreement, some are expanding on or clarifying ideas. I want to clarify and focus on the idea that the actual issue is in the way people phrase things, and show specifically how the phrasing should be changed.
If there is an aspect where I might be disagreeing though, it’s in the claim that race should be included at all in these statements. Given how people get confused on this and how dangerous it’s proven to be in the past, it’s probably better not to use race at all when making these statements about tendencies caused by environment...especially since race itself has no causal relationship.
Why? If a certain race is shorter than others, and you have measured the Indivudual of that race standing before you to be 6′8″, are you supposed to downgrade your measurement?
I don’t understand this because you either made a typo or are leaving out information (that, for instance, in the hypothetical intelligence is negatively correlated with height).
Only if the correlation between race and bad things is eliminated once you take the other factor into account should you then stop using race
If the “bad things” and the “other factor” are identical, the correlation between race and bad things conditional on the other factor is zero, so you actually don’t have a reason to use race. The correlation between race and being shorter than 6′8“ is eliminated once you condition on being 6′8”.
But this doesn’t work for “bad things” such as “will X happen in the future”, since you can’t directly observe them until it’s too late to make any decision about them, racial or non-racial.
I was referring to standard racist ideas such as “people of that race are more likely to rob you”. If you can observe whether someone has already robbed you, race is irrelevant for determining if they have robbed you, but that only applies to the past. You can’t observe whether someone is going to rob you in the future the same way you can observe whether someone is 6′8″.
(Of course you can have other objections. My recent comments about not hiring people based on IQ apply here too:if you refuse to hire people of some race because they have a higher chance of robbing you, the same people will find themselves constantly not hired, and this is bad. I’m not arguing for racism; I’m just pointing out that this objection doesn’t hold up.)
If a race is associated with unfavorable traits, it is more likely that someone of that race has those unfavorable traits than someone who is not. Just because another factor provides a more accurate comparison doesn’t change this—you should then use the other factor in combination with race, not instead of race. Only if the correlation between race and bad things is eliminated once you take the other factor into account should you then stop using race and switch to the other factor only.
Jiro,
The problems are that people speak in terms that assign causation to the race factor. Such as “White Men Can’t Jump,” and that even if you say “A White Man is less likely to be able to jump than a Black Man,” you are still assigning cause based on race instead of environment. Environment is what dictates these likelihoods.
For example, people whose ancestry is in Kenya happen to be more likely to be great distance runners essentially because they live in a higher elevation with less oxygen. But to say “Kenyans are more likely to be great distance runners” is less accurate than saying “People whose ancestors spent uncommonly large amounts of time at great elevation with less oxygen.”
Thus, when you really look at it, speaking in terms of race is a mistake in categorization and thinking.
Actually no. Peruvians spent a long time at high altitude but don’t fill the ranks of prodigious distance runners. This is because they evolved a different adaption—barrel-chestedness—instead of more/better haemoglobin.
Not nearly as much time as Kenyans, heck they haven’t been in South America for as long as human have been in Kenya.
Not necessarily. We don’t know when the tribes currently living in the mountainous areas of Kenya moved there. A great deal of East Africa is low-altitude flat land, there’s nothing resembling Tibet there...
True. My main point is that there can be many possible adaptions for a similar set of high-altitude environments and not all of them will make you a good distance runner.
Yep. See e.g. this.
Yeah, that’s where I learned about the differences between Peruvian, Tibetan and Ethiopian adaptions :)
This is what is commonly meant by saying that the outcomes is dictated by genetics. You seem to be intentionally using terminology in non-standard ways in an attempt to confuse the issue.
No, that’s not what’s commonly meant, and the lack of acknowledging that environment is the ultimate cause is one of the major sources of confusion that creates racist thinking.
Not realizing this may confuse the issue for you. But I know precisely what I’m saying.
I don’t think anyone is disputing this. Of course, saying the “environment is the ultimate cause” is like saying “the big bang is the ultimate cause”, true but not helpful.
Care to define what you mean by “racist thinking”, also preferably with an explanation of why your particular definition is a bad thing?
It’s true and helpful to recognise that the behaviour patterns US racists complain about are envirnonmently linked, inasmuchas outside the US , different races display the same behaviour, and same races display different behaviour.
It’s not a matter of disputing, it’s a matter of not recognizing and taking it into account.
You don’t see how a logical thought process that would advocate genocide (removing “bad genes” you believe are responsible for undesirable social characteristics or behavior) over changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups pf people is a bad idea?
To quote myself from years ago...
Racism: A specific form of the causation-correlation logical fallacy, where a person looks at different tendencies that happen to align among people of different ethnicities and assumes incorrectly that the ethnicity or genetic aspects of the ethnicity are the CAUSE of those differences. The person then usually acts, speaks, or governs in a damaging and incorrect way based on that mistaken assumption.
Examples: 1. I waved hello to a sleeping Asian person once, and he did not respond. This taught me that Asian people are rude, and I have never said hello to one since!
Assuming I’m parsing this sentence correctly, you favor “changing short and long term environmental pressures on groups of people”. Good, so do I. However, the way racial differences are currently not acknowledged is making this difficult. A lot of institutions have policies requiring that admittance to educational institutions or employment be proportional by race. And there are people seriously arguing that arrests should be proportional by race of population.
Also, false egalitarian beliefs have killed far more people than false “racist” beliefs. The way is happens is the following logic:
“As we all know no group is better than any other, yet group X is doing better than other groups. Why is this the case? It can’t be that group X is in any way better, it must be that group X is getting ahead by cheating and other nefarious means, thus group X must be punished.”
Come to think of it, the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign also followed the above logic. Just replace the first clause with “as we know no group is better than Aryan Germans”.
Um, the genetic aspects of ethnicity quite likely are the cause of a lot of those differences. Yes, they were ultimately caused by differences in the ancestral environment but genetics are in fact the proximate cause.
Um, this example doesn’t appear to be about confusing correlation with causation so much as inferring correlation based on insufficient evidence.
First, I hope it’s clear that if we chalk up personality traits and other such individual characteristics to race instead of environment, then the solution to removing certain undesirable traits (like criminality) would be banishment/disenfranchisement etc of an entire race of people, or outright genocide. This is why this is a problem.
Secondly, you say that you recognize that environment is the cause, but you immediately go back to referring to them as “racial differences.” This is the phrasing that leads to race-based thinking, and thus prejudice and discrimination. I can’t stress enough that these aren’t racial differences and there’s a reason society generally rebukes this classification.
What?? The Communist famines and purges were results of sociopaths killing their political enemies and delusional economic policy. Not egalitarianism, but believing that the country would survive fine if everyone stopped producing food and instead was forced to make metals. Those aren’t “egalitarian” failures (not that I believe in egalitarianism), but racial purges are absolutely and explicitly done in the name of “ethnic cleansing.”
...and even if this were true, this is a bizarre attempt at a red herring argument. If I killed your dog, would you consider it okay as long as I pointed out that other people have killed more dogs than me?
This implies that you’re ignoring the most fundamental parts of this conversation, so I’m not sure what the point is of this exchange.
As opposed to the banishment/disenfranchisement etc of actual convicted criminals?
You seem to be conflating several claims and committing the is-ought fallacy:
Whether races exist as useful categories that allow to make predictions about observations is an epistemic question. We have very strong evidence for this claim.
Whether some races, in modern Western countries, are more prone to have certain “bad” traits (e.g. low IQ, high crime rates, etc.) is also an epistemic question. We also have strong evidence for these claims.
Whether this correlation between race and “bad” traits is essentially due to genetic factors, is yet another epistemic question. We don’t have strong evidence either for or against these claims, and in general they are very difficult to test. Political incorrect as they are, some of these claims, specifically the one about IQ, have some degree of plausibility, due to the high heritability of some of these traits. But the jury is still out.
Whether we should discriminate against these races with “bad” traits is an entirely different kind of question, a moral question. It doesn’t follow from any of the previous claims.
On the other hand, whether discriminating against races with “bad” traits will lead to an increase in utility (for whichever your favorite utility function is), is at least in principal, an epistemic question.
Yes, but the point is that choosing this utility function is a moral question.
If you remove the trait, you won’t have criminals. A genetics-caused relationship, logically, would allow you to do this. You’ll know beforehand who will be a criminal. Not only that, since it would assist in establishing likelihood, you should be able factor race into the evidence in criminal trials. This would be a terrible idea.
You have nothing but correlation, and correlation based on fuzzy and corrupted data. Correlation is not causation, and you seem to struggle mightily with the difference.
These claims are also the result of you not seeing the distinction between logic based on causation and logic based on correlation.
Only if the correlation was perfect. In any case, even if you were able to identify criminals before the fact, it doesn’t mean that it would be moral to “punish” them beforehand.
There are good reason not to use profiling in criminal investigations and trials.
Anyway, what evidence would make you accept the claim that one group of easily identifiable people people was more prone to commit crime than the general population? If you were given this evidence, would you consider appropriate to use profiling against this group in criminal trials, or otherwise bannish/disenfranchise or even genocide them?
Evidence would be appreciated.
I don’t want to come out as rude but I don’t think you know what you are talking about when you say ′ Correlation is not causation’:
Distinguishing causation from correlation is important only when one of the variable is under your control.
There is some controversy about whether Evidential Decision Theory or Causal Decision Theory or something else is the ultimately ideal way of making decisions, but in practice the best that you can do in most non-pathological scenarios is to use some approximation of Causal Decision Theory.
You can decide to smoke or not smoke, so establishing whether smoking causes cancer or is merely correlated to it via a common cause, is of paramount importance. (*)
People’s race, on the other hand, is not a decision variable. You can’t change your neither your own race nor somebody’s else race. Therefore, the ‘correlation vs causation’ issue is irrelevant.
But more generally, nobody in this thread is suggesting that public policy should be predicate public policy on race.
( When using EDT, the relevant question becomes whether, after conditioning on everything you know, including your own preferences, smoking is still positively correlated to cancer. If it is (*), and you value not getting cancer higher than smoking, then you should decide not to smoke. If it not, then you can smoke if you like it.)
(** In case anybody is wondering, we are pretty certain that it is, due to randomized controlled trials on animals and humans.)
You can change your future children’s race by deciding whom to have children with. More generally, in principle it is possible to change the racial makeup of the next generation by incentivizing certain races to have more children and other races to have fewer children.
Even more generally, just killing off people of certain races works better for changing “the racial makeup of the next generation”.
Such as?
It risks creating a self-fulfilling propecy: Statistics show that “Martians” are more likely to be convicted, thus you lower the bar to convict them, which makes them even more likely to be convicted, and so on. In principle you could avoid this by properly conditioning not on Martian conviction rate, but on the rate Martians have been observed doing things which are considered prima facie evidence in a trial. In practice, you would likely end up introducing a bias.
it can be exploited: If, by symmetric Bayesian reasoning, you rise the bar to convict “Earthlings”, you create an incentive for Earthlings to commit crime. Even if most Earthlings are very much law-abiding, few bad Earthlings can benefit a lot from the system and cause lots of damage.
It is intrisically poltically controversial: it runs contrary to the interests of the Martians, and Martians can realistically coordinate to lobby against it, and if their lobbying is unsuccesful, this becomes a point of constant friction between Martians and Earthlings. You don’t want to incite this kind of tension.
If you’re a Bayseian, you might refuse to hire them because of the increased probability that they are a criminal. That would not be punishment, since you are not morally obligated to hire them at all. Likewise, charging them more for insurance, or walking across the street when you see one, is not “punishment”.
Well, I may refuse to hire someone I deem racist, on good Bayesian grounds too.
While you may have Bayseian grounds to not hire racists, I doubt that you’d have Bayseian grounds to not hire Bayseian racists. There’s little reason to believe that racism based on accurate Bayseian calculation is associated with the same negative traits as racism in general. So if you’re hiring on a Bayseian basis, you should divide the potential racist hires into Bayseian and non-Bayseian racists and refuse to hire only the non-Bayseian ones.
(Of course, the same applies to hiring minorities, if you can divide the minorities into similar subgroups.)
But being a Bayesian is a hidden variable, while having a race-based hiring policy is mostly observable. And having a race-based hiring policy also correlates with being a “stupid” racist. Oops.
Live by Bayes, die by Bayes :D
To engage the comment some more.
I’d need a bit of clarification of what a racist means when he self describes his racism as based on accurate Bayesian calculation. (Given Dunning-Kruger effect… I may actually expect such person to do worse on math [than people who know the Bayes formula])
So, suppose you are automating your hires by writing an app into which you enter the candidate’s responses to some interview questions and the like. Perhaps 20..50 items total. Does a “Bayesian racist” add a radio group for race, which when set to black lowers the score?
edit: note, I’m using ‘self describes as’ for evidence.
Ohh, I do. I know that racists are a worse hires, and I don’t know anything in particular about racists born on Tuesdays or racists who self describe as Bayesian.
Given equal qualifications, I expect (known to me as self-described) Bayesian racists to be overall more stupid. Especially ones who think that adding ‘Bayesian’ to racist should entitle them to less discrimination than they would do with ‘Bayesian’ added to ‘black’.
edit: And if I care about understanding of statistics, I’ll add a math question or two to the interview quiz, which I suspect a lot of self described Bayesians, racist or otherwise, are going to fail. Within those that don’t fail, I can further use racism as evidence.
Is that the same “I know” as in e.g. “I know that atheists have no morals”..?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/intelligence-study-links-prejudice_n_1237796.html
You seem to be confused between P(A|B) and P(B|A). Your link is to some PR about a paper (do you have a link to the paper itself, by the way?) which claimed that dumb kids in the UK grew up to be more racist than one would otherwise expect. And..?
If there are good Bayesian grounds.… Someone needs to demonstrate a hiring situation where group information masks individual information, AKA the resume.
The information in the resume may need to be evaluated taking race into account because of affirmative action.
Adjusted for confidence in the factual accuracy of resumes, it’s a tough call.
You’re allowed to check
I’m not sure HR would approve racial stereotype studies as part of the hiring process.
And those traits are. The only one I negative trait I can think of is “not signaling membership in the high status ideology”.
Uh, the obvious? Treating people badly because one “believes” that physical or intellectual differences imply morlal inferiority. Generally speaking, everyday racists are mostly quite shitty to black people.
A non-Bayseian racist wants to decrease the utility of other people either as a terminal preference (or as something that has the same practical implications as a terminal preference, such as being disgusted by their presence) or because of bias. Bias is irrational and a bad trait, and correlated with bias in other areas as well. Decreasing the utility of other people as a terminal preference is not irrational in the sense of involving bad logic, but it’s something that I want to avoid if I hire someone for any job involving other people.
It’s always possible that they can compartmentalize their racism or that they will be sufficiently deterred by the threat of lawsuits or being fired that they don’t cause any damage, but Bayseianism is about the odds; the odds are that they are more likely to cause problems even if not every one does.
Huh? Maybe I don’t understand what make a racist non-Bayesian, but most definitions of racism revolve around believing that there are innate and significant differences between races. That’s an epistemic issue. How do you derive from that the desire to “decrease the utility of other people”?
Someone who treats races differently only based on actual (probabilistic) differences between races is a Bayseian racist.
First, for the world outside of LW that’s a meaningless distinction.
Second, I’m not sure how do you know what the actual differences are. Doesn’t it boil down to the “Bayesian racists” being able to cite some science to support what they believe and the “non-Bayesian racists” not being able to?
Third, you still need to jump the gap between believing the races to be different and wanting to “decrease utility” of other people.
There is no gap. If you have reason to believe the races to be different, and act differently towards them based solely on this difference, you’re a Bayseian racist, and I do not claim that Bayseian racists want to decrease utility of other people. Non-Bayseian racists do; a non-Bayseian racist is different from a Bayseian racist.
So, let’s take some Southern redneck. He interacts with black people on a regular basis and based on his personal experience he came to the conclusion that they are pretty damn dumb, dumber than white rednecks, anyway. Does he have a “reason to believe”? Is he a Bayesian racist?
Or let’s take Alice. Alice knows the statistics about crime rates among black males and, say, Asian males. So on an empty street when she sees a black male she actively avoids him, but when she sees an Asian male she does not. Is she a Bayesian racist?
If there are no cognitive biases involved, sure. In practice, I think that would be unlikely.
On the other hand, someone who says “I find the presence of black people to be disgusting. I would not hire one because I don’t want to be near them” would be a non-Bayseian racist. There’s no Bayseian reason for, for instance, having segregated water fountains.
Given how much this was moderated down, I wonder how many people think there is a Bayseian reason for having segregated water fountains.
It’s Bayesian not Bayseian.
You’re using the word “Bayesian” here as a synonym for “rational”, right?
Do you think there’s a “Bayesian reason” for having segregated schools?
Well, Bayseian is a synonym for being rational (or for a subset of being rational), so it amounts to that.
I don’t know. If you can come up with a reason that depends on the higher probability that some races have some traits, I suppose there would be. I would of course like to see such a reason first.
8-0 No, it isn’t.
A Bayesian, in this context, is one who practices the Bayesian approach to uncertainty. Rationality is much wider than that.
If he got his opinion by updating it constantly and is willing to update it in the other direction given further evidence, yes. What he actually ends up doing with it is another matter entirely. I wouldn’t expect a Bayesian redneck to join the KKK, for example.
I’d think she’s either committing the fallacy of trusting statistics to exactly predict the individual case, or simply not doing proper cost analysis. Even if the statistics say there are no unsolved crimes and none of the crimes are committed by Asians, the expected negative utility of running into the first Asian criminal in history should outweigh the inconvenience of avoiding one person on an otherwise empty street.
In that hypothetical world, which is very different from ours, actively avoiding Asian males would be as weird as actively avoiding harmless old grannies, and doing weird things carries a nonzero social cost.
Notice how your attempting to equivocate between mass murder and disenfranchisement. Those are two very different things. One is obviously (terminally) bad. The other is at best an instrumental problem and we need to estimate its consequences to see whether its actually bad.
The causality is environment → genetic differences → different behaviors. If a causality chain with more than one term is too complicated for you, I recommend you start by reviewing causality 101.
Well, I’ve just argued your definition of “race-based thinking” is rather confused and isn’t clear a bad thing, so would you please provide a better definition and an explanation before you continue using the term. Also while you’re at it could you define “prejudice and discrimination” and how it differs from using Bayesian prior to help make decisions.
The purges were targeted at kulaks, i.e., the people who were doing better, because that kind of thing can’t be permitted in the new egalitarian communist utopia. So yes, these are in fact “egalitarian” failures.
A better analogy is that you’re arguing that we should avoid thinking X because some people who think X have shot dogs, I’m pointing out that people who (falsely) think not-X have shot far dogs than people who think X.
I think that might say more about your own attitude to low IQ people than it does about everyone else’s …
No. If you believe personality traits are caused by genetics, that’s the solution to minimizing or removing those traits.
Environment and nurture-based solutions, i.e., the accurate ones, are based on environment and nurture as the primary operative factors.
Have you actually sat down and thought about this for 5 minutes by the clock? Go do it now.
The example doesn’t match the definition.
Yes in the example the person is viewing a single tendency in an example and acting in a damaging way because of that. It may be more accurate for the speaker to say that he saw a group of Asian people sleeping on a plane and none waved back, while the Hispanic person who was awake, did.
No it’s still not right.
That implies there is a genuine difference in the aggregate group-level behavior. A proper example would be
Black people commit crimes at a disproportionate rate compared to Whites. This is because Black people are inherently more violent and criminal than Whites.
The second sentence doesn’t necessarily follow from the first, because there could be other factors that cause Blacks to be more violent.
Your examples are fallacies of generalizing from small and/or unrepresentative samples, not fallacies of inferring causation from correlation.
It may be helpful for you to know that the organization running this site is approximately half funded by Peter Thiel, who in his younger years when most decent folks are busy getting an education was busy challenging laws against hate speech. The site is ostensibly ‘less wrong’ than science.
You seem to be implying that that’s a bad thing.
On a totally unrelated note, the ultra-rich, who control the majority of our planet’s wealth, spend their time at cocktail parties and salons while millions of decent hard-working people starve.
I’m not sure this holds water. Kenya contains some reasonably high country, but it’s not unusually high by global standards; Nairobi lies in the western highlands at around 1800 meters, comparable for example to northern Spain or Colorado, while Mombasa is essentially at sea level. On top of that, most Kenyans are Bantu, members of an ethnic group that expanded out of West Africa in early historical times, so that population wouldn’t have had much time for adaptation.
I’ve heard of high-altitude adaptation in the context of Ethiopia, though, which is higher and inhabited by groups who’ve been there longer.
There are many other factors like bone structure (which is also dictated ultimately by environment) and the year-round warm weather that seem quite clearly to contribute, but it would be a digression and wouldn’t really be necessary to illustrate the point.
Disagree, it illustrates that point that saying “Kenyans are more likely to be great distance runners” is in fact more accurate than saying “People whose ancestors spent uncommonly large amounts of time at great elevation with less oxygen [are more likely to be great distance runners]” since the former doesn’t have the burdensome detail of assuming a particular causal mechanism.
Bone structure is an environmental factor? What?
I’ll correct that. Was probably in the course of typing several replies on different parts of the subject. Bone structure gets detected by environment, but it in itself isn’t.
If having such ancestors completely explains why Kenyans have that trait, then that would count as “the correlation between race and bad things is eliminated once you take the other factor into account”. So you’re not actually disagreeing with me.
What other factor? If you mean “having such ancestors” then you’ve just tabooed the word “race” but I don’t see how this counts as “eliminating the correlation”.
If people of some race are more likely to have a bad trait, but that increased likelihood can be completely explained by the fact that people of that race are more likely to have some other factor, then there is no correlation between race and that trait once you condition on the other factor. That’s what “completely explained” means.
If that increased likelihood cannot be completely explained by the fact that people of that race are more likely to have that other factor, then there remains some correlation between race and that trait even after conditioning on that other factor.
The problem is that in the grandparent the other factor is just a reformulation of “have the same race” in different words.
Not every reply is automatically disagreement, some are expanding on or clarifying ideas. I want to clarify and focus on the idea that the actual issue is in the way people phrase things, and show specifically how the phrasing should be changed.
If there is an aspect where I might be disagreeing though, it’s in the claim that race should be included at all in these statements. Given how people get confused on this and how dangerous it’s proven to be in the past, it’s probably better not to use race at all when making these statements about tendencies caused by environment...especially since race itself has no causal relationship.
Why? If a certain race is shorter than others, and you have measured the Indivudual of that race standing before you to be 6′8″, are you supposed to downgrade your measurement?
I don’t understand this because you either made a typo or are leaving out information (that, for instance, in the hypothetical intelligence is negatively correlated with height).
Corrected
Okay. I did say:
If the “bad things” and the “other factor” are identical, the correlation between race and bad things conditional on the other factor is zero, so you actually don’t have a reason to use race. The correlation between race and being shorter than 6′8“ is eliminated once you condition on being 6′8”.
But this doesn’t work for “bad things” such as “will X happen in the future”, since you can’t directly observe them until it’s too late to make any decision about them, racial or non-racial.
Do you have concrete examples? AFAICS we don’t have good ways of predicting future behaviour in general.
I was referring to standard racist ideas such as “people of that race are more likely to rob you”. If you can observe whether someone has already robbed you, race is irrelevant for determining if they have robbed you, but that only applies to the past. You can’t observe whether someone is going to rob you in the future the same way you can observe whether someone is 6′8″.
(Of course you can have other objections. My recent comments about not hiring people based on IQ apply here too:if you refuse to hire people of some race because they have a higher chance of robbing you, the same people will find themselves constantly not hired, and this is bad. I’m not arguing for racism; I’m just pointing out that this objection doesn’t hold up.)
An problem with racism is still confusion of correlation and causation....