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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28224 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Pretty much all legitimate justifications for racism rely on inaccurate proxies for other things we actually care about. I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.

Since I am white and was raised by white parents among mostly other white people, I can reasonably expect that the average white person is more likely to be similar to me than the average black person. We'll be more likely to have similar cultural knowledge, values, habits, etc. But my black neighbor who I actually know and happens to be a christian pastor has way more in common with me than the average white Californian.

In the past race was a very strong proxy for nationality, culture, and loyalty. In modern times it is a weak signal unless you live in a predominantly monoethnic country.

I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.

This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.

The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.

All priors collapse towards each other in the face of increasing amounts of evidence. Maybe you start 7% vs 33% that a random white vs black man is a violent criminal, and then if you learn they dress well and speak proper English it drops to 4% vs 5%. Or if you learn they have anger problems and are covered in tattoos it might go to 55% vs 60%. Given that genes have no almost direct causal impact on behavior except indirectly through other means such as IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing, it seems pointless to consider them when those things can be observed directly.

I agree with you that for random people on the street signals are more costly than they're worth and race can be useful as a quick hack to ballpark guess, I said as much in my previous post. But none of this implies that it

carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.

It only serves value in that it lets you guess at the direct predictors more quickly and easily than costly signals would. No priors carry immense amounts of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors. That's what makes them priors. The direct predictors are what we actually care about, and race is only useful in-so-far as it might be a faster way to guess at them if you don't already have them and don't want to spend the time and effort to acquire them properly. Which sounds reasonable for strangers, but less so for people you actually know.

All priors collapse towards each other in the face of increasing amounts of evidence.

Yes, but this does not address my argument that in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.

Given that genes have no almost direct causal impact on behavior except indirectly through other means such as IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing, it seems pointless to consider them when those things can be observed directly.

It’s the other way around. When you use race as evidence, you don’t do it by sequencing the DNA of the subject. No, what you do in practice is precisely using a socially constructed race as a proxy to make predictions IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing. You can’t cheaply get a lot of specific evidence about the latter, but you can use race stereotypes (which are pretty accurate) to infer these quite cheaply.

The direct predictors are what we actually care about, and race is only useful in-so-far as it might be a faster way to guess at them if you don't already have them and don't want to spend the time and effort to acquire them properly.

Which is exactly the case in majority of the situations. Indeed, you apparently agree:

Which sounds reasonable for strangers, but less so for people you actually know.

So where is the disagreement, exactly?

So where is the disagreement, exactly?

The way you phrased things, and still to some extent now, seems to be implying that race is always useful because information is too costly. My premise is that information is costly up front for strangers but accumulates automatically over time such that race becomes less and less useful the more you interact with the same individuals. If you agree with that entirely then I guess we don't have a disagreement other than with phrasing of things, but the fact that you phrased it the way you did makes me suspect that there is some underlying disagreement even if I'm not sure what it is. Because I wouldn't say that the existence and importance of friends and coworkers whom you can accumulate significant amounts of information on over years are compatible with

in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.

The usefulness of the prior asymptotically approaches zero over time such that, although it might never literally reach zero, after a couple years of knowing someone it's probably close enough to ignore (though this will vary by how much you actually interact with the person, since knowledge is not gained via the literal passing of time.)

Or maybe we both entirely agree on its usefulness in both the stranger case and the friend case but you are considering the stranger case to be "typical" and I am considering the friend case to be "typical" and we are each dismissing the other as an exception to the rule.

This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race

Can you give an example where the race prior isn't mostly insignificant? "Avoiding black guys more than you would white women when walking down the street" - justified or not, doesn't matter that much either way - violent crime against random people is pretty rare, and avoiding black people a little more does basically no harm to them. Hiring someone for a job, in an ideal colorblind world you can just give them an IQ test or judge how intelligently they talk.

The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.

Of what? If I meet a black pathologist, knowing that they're a pathologist tells me much more about them than knowing that they're black.

Likewise, if I see a white junkie, knowing that they're a junkie tells me much more about them than knowing that they're white.

By “residual value after controlling for other predictors”, I meant something like, if you have two pathologists, one of them being black tells you something additional on top of the fact of him being a pathologist, eg. that they are likely to be less competent at their job than their white counterpart.

Sure, it tells you something "extra", but it's something both immoral and, while perhaps it might in a very localized way be a net benefit in terms of information gain, it's long-term super unhealthy and harmful. I mean, if we're leaving the immoral part to the side and talking about pure utility, making a habit of utilizing those residual values (even assuming they are reliable) is problematic both for you and for society both in the medium to long term. Why? I don't think I need to explain the societal part, as societally accepted racism even when used as a background process rather than a primary process is a significant evil and limits overall prosperity and tends to hinder interpersonal and economic interactions in disproportionate ways - but personally there's harm too. Racism has such a virulent and problematic history that I don't think we can rely on ourselves to "limit" racism to merely residual value only. It's a pipe dream. Our brains simply don't work that way.

There is little substance in your comment other than repeatedly claiming that racism is bad because it’s immoral, and it’s immoral because it’s evil, and it’s evil, because it’s problematic. If taking race into account when making consequential decisions about reality is considered racist, even if we only do it to the statistically justified extent, then I simply don’t agree about it being gravely immoral, because we do the exact same thing with hundreds of other characteristics all the time without an ounce of queasiness, eg. cultural origin, or education history, or density of facial tattoos, or clothing worn.

Your best argument here is where you claim that it’s too easy to assign more weight to this piece of evidence than it is actually warranted. This is true, but this is also true about other characteristics, discriminating based on such does not get such a privileged treatment, so why should I care much?

This sort of stuff makes me feel bad for all the competent black pathologists, they have to pay the price for their affirmative action'd racial bretheren (who if they are a different type of African than the pathologist may well be just as genetically different from the pathologist than your average white pathologist).

Essentially: it's the asterisk on the Harvard degree.

"White and Asian medical school applicants discriminated against; black doctors most affected."

I don't feel bad, especially since most competent black pathologists were likely able to attend a more desirable medical school than they would have in the absence of affirmative action. I feel bad for the Asian and white applicants who had to attend a less desirable school as a result of affirmative action, or didn't get into one altogether. I feel bad for patients roped into getting treated by affirmative action doctors, except those patients with in- or out-group preferences for groups that are affirmative action-beneficiaries.

I think you're not reading the parent's comment correctly.

Race carries an immense amount of residual predicting power. Example: Compared to a white pathologist, a black pathologist is less likely to enjoy country music.

The parent never said anything about whether race or profession has more predictive power, only that race continues to have predictive power even after we've corrected for everything else.

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