Further: let’s suppose, at least for the sake of argument, that you’re very nearly right, that in our hypothetical HBD-is-right world you get scarcely any extra useful information from a person’s race once you’ve looked at a few other equally trivial characteristics.
The issue isn’t that there isn’t extra useful information, the issue is that we’re pretty terrible at quickly processing variable dependence to arrive at correct answers, where rapid processing is part of the situation in consideration.
In that kind of situation, clothing alone will tell you more than clothing plus race—not because you couldn’t arrive at a better answer given more information, but because the additional information is almost certainly going to be overweighted by virtue of the brain not having a good intuitive handle on either dependent variables or small numbers.
I don’t know...would clothing alone tell you more than clothing plus race? I think we would need to test this.
Is a poorly-dressed Irish-American (or at least, someone who looks Irish-American with bright red hair and pale white skin) as statistically likely to mug someone, given a certain situation (deserted street at night, etc.) as a poorly-dressed African-American? For reasons of political correctness, I would not like to share my pre-suppositions.
I will say, however, that, in certain historical contexts (1840s, for example), my money would have been on the Irish-American being more likely to mug me, and I would have taken more precautionary measures to avoid those Irish parts of town, whereas I would have expected the neighborhoods inhabited by free blacks to have been relatively safe.
Nowadays, I don’t know what the statistics would be if you measured crimes perpetrated by certain races, when adjusted for socio-economic category (in other words, comparing poor to poor, or wealth to wealthy in each group). But many people would probably have their suspicions. So, can we test these intuitions to see if they are just bigoted racism, or if they unfortunately happen to be accurate generalizations?
The issue isn’t that there isn’t extra useful information, the issue is that we’re pretty terrible at quickly processing variable dependence to arrive at correct answers, where rapid processing is part of the situation in consideration.
In that kind of situation, clothing alone will tell you more than clothing plus race—not because you couldn’t arrive at a better answer given more information, but because the additional information is almost certainly going to be overweighted by virtue of the brain not having a good intuitive handle on either dependent variables or small numbers.
I don’t know...would clothing alone tell you more than clothing plus race? I think we would need to test this.
Is a poorly-dressed Irish-American (or at least, someone who looks Irish-American with bright red hair and pale white skin) as statistically likely to mug someone, given a certain situation (deserted street at night, etc.) as a poorly-dressed African-American? For reasons of political correctness, I would not like to share my pre-suppositions.
I will say, however, that, in certain historical contexts (1840s, for example), my money would have been on the Irish-American being more likely to mug me, and I would have taken more precautionary measures to avoid those Irish parts of town, whereas I would have expected the neighborhoods inhabited by free blacks to have been relatively safe.
Nowadays, I don’t know what the statistics would be if you measured crimes perpetrated by certain races, when adjusted for socio-economic category (in other words, comparing poor to poor, or wealth to wealthy in each group). But many people would probably have their suspicions. So, can we test these intuitions to see if they are just bigoted racism, or if they unfortunately happen to be accurate generalizations?