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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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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.

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