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Notes -
Response to the conversation you've been having here in general since I couldn't decide on a single sub-reply to answer:
This seems to be your main criticism, so it's an important one. I'm going to #include all of the prior responses to your top-level as context, so I'm assuming you can relate to the concept of 'regression to the mean' as something like 'measurement error'. An IQ test can tell us that a person is smart but not that their children will be. This is true and you seem to understand it. But it's also the case that there's a substantial amount of noise in IQ testing and an IQ test can tell us someone is above a certain threshold when they actually aren't, a 'false positive', in which case their children almost certainly won't be.
So with this in mind, an analogy:
You're in charge of purchasing nails for a massive new construction project. Millions of nails are required and they need to meet certain standards or else the structure collapses. The engineers factor in some redundancy and allow that some duds are okay, but no one's sure how many, exactly, so it's important that you be very careful.
Available to you are two brands, A and B. Both nail companies, A and B, produce some good nails and some defective ones.
Brand A is a domestic producer. It's been in business for a long time and turned out a pretty consistent product. In fact, it's been such a mainstay that the assumptions the engineers are working with are based on using these nails. About 10% are defective, but this is understood and historically structures built along these lines and with these nails stand up just fine.
Brand B is a foreign producer with shoddier craftsmanship. Neither the materials nor the manufacturing process are as high-quality. 90% of their nails fail to meet your standards, but 10% do! And they're cheaper, too.
Now, on the face of it you'd be insane to even entertain the idea of buying any nails from brand B. However, due to internal politics, there's strong pressure from the executives to maintain the fiction that all brands are of identical quality. Maybe many of them 'happen' to be major shareholders in Brand B. And it turns out that there's a way to test the nails, individually, and it's so fast and cheap that there's no reason at all not to test every single one. So you turn to your co-worker and say, "Look, there's a lot of pressure to buy from Brand B, and we can test the nails, so why not just do that?"
This is actually kind of a weird thing for you to argue about on the face of it, because the execs have made it clear they won't approve any testing in the first place. (Again one can't help but wonder at their motivations). But your co-worker additionally expresses reluctance because of one more consideration: testing error. 10% of the time, for whatever reason, the nail test returns a positive (desirable) result regardless of whether the nail is good or not. 90% accuracy is still pretty good, you argue, but he's not so sure.
He points out that if you apply that test to Brand A's nails, 99% of the nails used will meet the standards. But if you apply the test to Brand B's nails, almost half of the nails used will be garbage. Can the structure withstand that? Who can say? Oh and by the way both of you and everyone you care about is going to live in it and if it collapses all is lost.
The correct thing to do here isn't to treat both brands as a priori equal and go based on test results. The correct thing to do here is to start with Brand A and then apply the test on top of that. What non-political justification could you possibly even have to screw around with Brand B in the first place?
As such I think you should drop this criticism.
If you find someone saying "We should buy from Brand A and not bother testing", the criticism would be a bit more valid, but at least they've got historical performance on their side, which is worth something.
EDIT: P.S. the end of the story is the executives insist that you buy mainly from Brand B without any testing, the structure begins to list badly, the executives fly off to their villas elsewhere, and everything you value is destroyed. Possibly you could move to another company before that happens but it seems that somehow they're all making the exact same mistake.
Thanks for putting numbers on your analogy. How much of a quality delta between the two brands of nails would your conclusion remain true for you? I understand that a 10/99 difference is too wide for you to bother testing the other brand, so at what point would you change your mind?
Respectfully, in this analogy, given the stakes and uncertainties involved, I don't think there's ever any justification for bothering with the inferior pool in the first place.
Of course, people aren't nails. So let's abandon the analogy.
At times it can make sense to import specific individuals - not classes of them - who have demonstrated utility, distinguished themselves, and so on. The bet being made here is that even if his kids are all rotten the good this specific person will do in this generation probably outweighs the future harm of his progeny. And instead you might get lucky and get a lot out of his kids, too!
The risk is greatly increased by a welfare state, of course. If his offspring are so economically unsuccessful that they can't afford to reproduce much or at all, the problem solves itself, which is how so many historical states managed nearly-unrestricted immigration. Come, contribute, succeed -- or read the writing on the wall and try elsewhere!
But the question I wonder about, and which I would very much like to be able to put a number on, is what percentage of a population can be non-conforming immigrants before institutions break down. I don't have an answer there and don't even feel really comfortable guessing. Different institutions have different capacities for this sort of thing, the collapse of one can snowball into others, and so on. The matter is playing with fire by its very nature.
By the way I'm the person you've been discussing this with on discord -- no intent to mislead you about that, in case you hadn't noticed. This seemed the better forum for this format of discussion.
So the instructive lesson of your analogy is that when you're buying nails, you should pick the brand with the higher quality reputation instead of testing each individual nail. Sure, that makes sense. Now what? What was the point of building up an elaborately granular analogy spanning several paragraphs only to abandon the gratuitous detail as irrelevant? I don't get it.
Truly in awe at how you got there from "The correct thing to do here is to start with Brand A and then apply the test on top of that."
No it doesn't.
Not only did I explicitly say something contrary to your apparent conclusion after laying out the reasoning for you, but your interpretation doesn't make any internal sense to begin with. At this point I have to think that you're not capable of understanding or you do not wish to understand[1]. Either way we're done.
[1] Inclusive or.
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