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If you watch 500 marathons and every time the winner is black, then when marathon #501 comes around and you’re getting ready to place your bets, you would be a complete moron to approach those bets with the attitude, “I have no opinion about which race the winner will be from. It could be the white guy this time, we have no way to know beforehand!” When surveying the slate of runners, you are completely justified in looking at the white guys and saying, “Bad bet, safe to ignore.”
Similarly, in societal terms, if I’m a recruiter trying to hire for a white-collar job, and I have to make a decision based on limited information, I would have to be a complete moron - or a liberal ideologue - not to utilize my understanding of probabilities gained from observation of previous outcomes. If the only information given to me about two competing candidates is that one guy’s name is Connor Przyewski, and the other guy’s name is Anquon Washington, I have to use outside information - like my observations of patterns - to supplement the explicit info I was provided. This means that I have to judge the candidates based on the information I have, which, if skin color has a demonstrated correlation with observable disparate outcomes, would include skin color as a useful proxy for important information.
In reality, you would have more information than just the applicants' names. This being a white-collar job, there would presumably be detailed resumes. You can judge the candidates based on that. Either the Black candidates' resumes would be weaker, or their resumes would be of a similar quality to Whites, but they would be underrepresented relative to the population.
Likewise with racial profiling in policing. A police officer usually has much more information than just race. In a true Bayesian inference calculation, race would end up mattering very little. Instructing police officers to racially profile would probably just cause them to give too much weight to race and ignore other relevant information. Note that even race-neutral policing results in Blacks being disproportionately arrested etc., because they commit crime at a higher rate than Whites.
My understanding of HBD, in general, is that the takeaway should be that a non-racially-discriminatory system will produce unequal outcomes, not that racial discrimination is justified. That is, the current system is non-discriminatory and disparate outcomes are because of HBD, not that the current system is discriminatory and that's fine because of HBD.
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I don't think there's a magic bullet solution, but this is why I think legally mandated moronicism - so that everyone is equally a complete moron in this respect - accompanied with increased legibility into individual competence is the right approach. There should never be a case where someone's name or race is the only information given to you as a recruiter/hirer, and it should be punishable if you make some meaningful consequential decision in the case that somehow that were the only information given to you.
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