I hope when you guys get done beating up on theism, you’ll take on a real challenge and go up against the SWPL bloc. That religion is far more dangerous and far more powerful than poor old Judeo-Christianity, which isn’t even able to order scientists around anymore. Maybe Eliezer can debate Nancy Hopkins?
Please tabooreligion. If you want to argue that a certain cluster of beliefs commonly held by upper-middle-class white American liberals is systematically mistaken in ways analogous to religious beliefs, and that this has harmful consequences, do come out and say this explicitly, and maybe we could have a productive discussion about the actual issues at hand. But gratuitous misuse of the world religion to describe positions you dislike just functions as a semantic stopsign. Actual religions have things like deities, and prayers, and rituals.
Actual religions have things like deities, and prayers, and rituals.
No, not necessarily. The usage you’ve criticized is perfectly compatible with the correct definition of the word. Please familiarize yourself with that definition before offering further criticism.
Taking a word and re-defining it into a ‘semantic stopsign’ doesn’t help anything or anyone, except confusion and causes that can be aided by confusion.
It’s a term often used by razib and people at the Gene Expression blog, derived from the satirical website of the same name, used to refer to the cultural and political choices favored by upper-middle-class-to-rich Caucasians, including political correctness and the modern connotations of ‘liberalism’.
I sympathize with your sentiment, but guess you’ll have a hard time persuading LW/OB rationalists to act up against SWPL—great name for the phenomenon btw, I will use it from now on. First, such actions would greatly harm the stated goal of outreach to intelligent/educated demographics. Second, on sober thought SWPL per se hasn’t yet caused as much hurt in the world as competing ideologies have (I’m not counting spiritual ancestors, this would be unfair). Third, a lot of us here are SWPL followers.
Perhaps we could make some progress if we employed a divide and conquer strategy. The agendas of the SW and PL blocs are not entirely consonant. Generally speaking, the SW position is somewhat more amenable to the techniques of rationality discussed on this site. The PL worldview, however, is more deeply committed to dark side epistemology (though I imagine that that could be a controversial position even here).
Second, on sober thought SWPL per se hasn’t yet caused as much hurt in the world as competing ideologies have.
Agreed, the subculture in question seems fairly innocuous in itself. It needs infiltration and purging of dangerous aspects, not external opposition (fortunately, we seem to already have many inside agents).
The top Google result for “SWPL” is the blog “Stuff White People Like”. I’m pretty sure that they have nothing to do with Nancy Hopkins—what SWPL are you talking about?
It does refer to “Stuff White People Like”, which is a perceived cluster of beliefs and behaviors that includes political correctness, hence Nancy Hopkins.
There’s no point in spending time addressing controversial questions that don’t matter. I contend that the question of systematic variation in ability is one of these.
“Don’t matter” sounds to me like a cop-out akin to religion’s “retreat to faith”. A lot of evidence for absence of systematic variation in ability gets noticed and promoted by SWPL followers, indicating the question’s importance to the belief system.
It’s more that it really doesn’t matter. Noise from individual variation swamps group variation in almost every practical case, and other outward cues of ability (i.e., hard-to-fake signals) are more informative.
The main reasons to make a big deal out of group variation are, in order of how common they are:
You’re a member of some group that dislikes the SWPL bloc and need more “soldiers” for your side of the argument
You have “prejudice against group X” on your bottom line and are filling in the blanks above
You’re the kind of person who operates under some sort of weird categorical imperative to announce the truth of all propositions, regardless of instrumental value
We have a lot of epistemic rationalists here in the third category, but in most cases if you talk about the reality of group variation people will assume you are one of the first two types, which probably isn’t helpful for anyone.
To first paragraph: the variables “variation within group” and “difference of means between groups” should be regarded as belonging to different statistical data types, not yielding any significant insight when compared. For example, variation of physical strength among men is greater than the difference between mean strengths of men and women, but that doesn’t imply the latter is insignificant. Same holds for many traits of many real-world ensembles, e.g. most behavioral differences within/between dog breeds.
To the rest: ad hominem and Bulverism fallacy. But if you really insist on knowing my reasons, I’m irritated by hearing popular falsehoods.
To first paragraph: the variables “variation within group” and “difference of means between groups” should be regarded as belonging to different statistical data types, not yielding any significant insight when compared. For example, variation of physical strength among men is greater than the difference between mean strengths of men and women, but this doesn’t imply the latter is insignificant. Same holds for many traits of many real-world ensembles, e.g. most behavioral differences within/between dog breeds.
Well, yes, we all know this. But you miss the point—difference of means are almost never relevant. If I need someone to help me carry something, I need a strong person, and I’d do better looking at more useful cues (“does this person look fit and healthy?”) rather than thinking about group means (“oh, I’ll ignore this female athlete and get the scrawny nerd to help me”).
This is why it “doesn’t matter”.
To the rest: ad hominem and Bulverism fallacy. But if you really insist on knowing my reasons, I’m irritated by hearing popular falsehoods.
In other words, you assign intrinsic value to truth independent of instrumental value, which is exactly what I said. This is fine! We like truth here. But, outside of LW, this can lead to people making uncharitable assumptions about your motivations, which is all I was saying.
When you have more relevant information you’re better off using that. When you don’t, e.g. when using a dating site, you’re better off following justified stereotypes than ignoring them.
One particularly controversial such case is police stop-and-frisks. I read somewhere that NYC blacks get stop-and-frisked disproportionately more often than whites, but black criminals have a lower chance of getting stop-and-frisked than white criminals due to PC backlash. The different concepts of fairness seem hard to reconcile in low-information situations like that. Or take racial profiling in airports: if you call for using using more relevant information in that case, rather than less as the SWPL crowd desires, you’ll need an Orwellian level of knowledge about the passengers which causes new morality problems.
Another example would be having to make decisions concerning large groups of people. Would you or wouldn’t you allow unsupervised immigration from a certain country based on the average IQ there? What if it’s 50? As you make your decision, keep in mind that people from this country will try harder to get into yours because they’re worse off than other potential donor countries, so you might get a self-selection effect on your hands.
Yes, but such low-information situations are fairly rare.
One particularly controversial such case is police stop-and-frisks.
This is possibly a case where group means actually are relevant, yes, modulo a lot of assumptions about how people are selected for the stop-and-frisk.
Or take racial profiling in airports:
Again, not objectionable on the surface, However, given the stunningly ineffective nature of airport security (cf. Bruce Schneier and the “security theater” concept) I doubt this actually provides a benefit, for reasons wholly unrelated to race.
As an aside, in adversarial situations you need to be careful that weighted targetting based on superficial cues doesn’t merely give the enemy information on how to disproportionately avoid scrutiny.
EDIT: Either I missed this part or you added it while I was replying, but:
Would you or wouldn’t you allow unsupervised immigration from a certain country based on the average IQ there?
Assuming you want to filter applicants based on IQ, testing individuals seems vastly more helpful than assuming based on population mean, especially given that the demographics of applicants will not be the same as the total population. Also, if you admit all immigrants from any country you’re likely to get a self-selected group of people who are less successful at home.
As an aside, in adversarial situations you need to be careful that weighted targetting based on superficial cues doesn’t merely give the enemy information on how to disproportionately avoid scrutiny.
Typically, this works to your advantage. If you scrutinize middle eastern travelers more, terrorist groups might decide to recruit white hijackers. But where are they going to find them? Wherever you think they might look, you can have CIA undercover agents trying to be hired.
The primary strength conspiracies have is small, close-knit groups. Anything you can do to force them to become larger or more diverse can help.
This probably works for terrorist groups. And actually explains why they recruit so many children of diplomats. (This suggests the CIA should try to recruit agents among them more, but that’s a problem if they’re already terrorists.)
But for groups that can be a lot more diverse, here’s a note to cops: If you see a group of high school students, most of whom are dark-skinned boys with long hairs and marijuana-related T-shirts, and one of whom is a prim-and-proper white girl with her nose constantly buried in a textbook, stop carding and searching the boys all the time. The girl has the weed, and thinks you’re insulting their intelligence.
Assuming you want to filter applicants based on IQ, testing individuals seems vastly more helpful than assuming based on population mean, especially given that the demographics of applicants will not be the same as the total population.
The problem is you can’t use IQ tests. You see IQ tests are clearly racist and insidiously so since culturally loaded sub-tests like vocabulary seem to actually show smaller ethnic differences.
No matter. We’ll find out how the tests are racist some day!
Your mockery, at least as concerns standardized testing in general, is misplaced
A good item was not one that discriminated between ignorance and knowledge, but one that discriminated between good students and poor students. Therefore, if everybody selected the same distractor, good and poor students alike, the item was discarded, even if it was important stuff to know, even if it was right. And no matter how important, if the good students didn’t get the right answer, the item was thrown out.
That is in reference to a firm that produces standardized tests deciding to abandon a particular question because inner city kids did better on it than suburban kids did.
The examples I saw were analogies; you would get things like cup :: saucer or yacht :: regatta which upper-class kids were far more likely to be familiar with than lower-class kids (and since class and race are correlated, that meant there would be racial discrepancies).
IQ test may or may not measure intelligence, they measure doing well at what’s usually called abstract thinking pretty well. They don’t really measure cultural knowledge, at least real IQ tests don’t.
Cultural bias being behind the observed gaps isn’t really something that seems very likley to most psychometricians. From a paper titled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” published to clear up public misconceptions about expert opinion during the debates surrounding the publishing of Murray’s book the Bell Curve.
Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings — “catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.
Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate (in technical terms, reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments. They do not measure creativity, character personality, or other important differences among individuals, nor are they intended to.
While there are different types of intelligence tests, they all measure the same intelligence. Some use words or numbers and require specific cultural knowledge (like vocabulary). Others do not, and instead use shapes or designs and require knowledge of only simple, universal concepts (many/few, open/closed, up/down).
… Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language.
Some experts of course disagree with this. And common sense. I can sort of see why Askenazi Jews do better on IQ tests than other European Americans because they are culturally literate, wealthy and more educated, rather than high IQs leading to cultural literacy and education. But why do East Asians? In Asia even? I suppose it could just happen to be that stuff that goes with high status in Western society has the same function in East Asian societies. In basically every developed country ever.
That then brings us dangerously close to considering that some cultures may be objectively better at making a working, prosperous and safe technological society, maybe, we should work to change those aspects among immigrants, perhaps even their native countries to improve their quality of life? Oh but that’s a no no you nasty nasty cultural imperialist utilitarian!
But leaving this last tangent aside, the “IQ tests are biased and thus don’t suggest actual differences in intelligence” is far from the ultimate argument against such policies, that we all know it would be used as such against any proposal to limit immigration to any Western country with IQ testing. Funny how formal education as a criteria for immigration isn’t ever put down with the same argument.
At this point lets once again for the sake of argument say that the dissenting experts are right. Even so, the test still accurately measure how well large groups of people do in Western type societies, since they are positively correlated with everything from health to education attainment to low criminality to high income. Any country trying to craft the best policy for its citizens would find such a measure useful, since it measures something as trivial as … you know… how well the people are actually probably going to do, as it is, nothow well society wants to pretend they are likley to do.
Hence my sarcastic comment, aimed at the kind of objections that would be used to oppose such a no-brainer (pardon the pun) policy.
But leaving this last tangent aside, “{some claim that people actually make}” is far from the ultimate argument against such policies, that we all know it would be used as against any proposal to {do some thing}. Funny how {vaguely analogous thing frequently criticized with equally analogous arguments} isn’t ever put down with {equally analogous arguments}.
That then brings us dangerously close to considering that some cultures may be objectively better at making a working, prosperous and safe technological society, maybe, we should work to change those aspects among immigrants, perhaps even their native countries to improve their quality of life? Oh but that’s a no no you nasty nasty cultural imperialist utilitarian!
I actually have not seen anyone go down the argument branch you’re talking about here. I mean, are there people who are actually against foreign aid programs aimed at improving school attendance or literacy rates? On any grounds besides finding a more efficient charitrons-per-dollar scheme, I mean.
I actually have not seen anyone go down the argument branch you’re talking about here.
Do you mean that you haven’t seen anyone here (on LW) go down this branch? Or that you haven’t seen anyone (in general) go down the branch that CJ is, here (in this thread), talking about?
The latter. I’ve heard arguments along the lines of “We shouldn’t do X because it’s imperialist” before, but usually in regards to artistic or military interactions, not foreign aid work.
For my own part, it depends on which “aspects” CJ is talking about.
For example, I know some people who argue that Christian cultures are objectively better at making a working, prosperous, and safe society, and that therefore we should work to convert immigrants and their native cultures to Christianity. And I know people who object to such interventions on the grounds that this is nasty cultural imperialism.
Of course, CJ is not talking about Christianity, so that’s irrelevant; I mention it only as a concrete example the kind of pattern I’m thinking about.
CJ is talking about some other aspect of certain cultures… call it X. As I understand it, CJ believes X encourages abstract thinking, which explains higher IQ scores among residents of X-rich cultures, and explains high status among X-possessors in just about every developed country ever.
I’m not sure if anyone actually proposes bringing X to cultures that lack it, nor if anyone actually criticizes such X-proselytizers as nasty cultural imperialists, though. That’s because I’m not sure what X actually is.
Since you mention Christianity, here is an example of the transformation power of introducing new memeplexes on the practice of killing cursed (“mingi”) children:
Missionaries first came to the Banna decades ago, and the Christian church here is larger than any other among the tribes of this region. Still, their numbers are small; Banna’s Christians make up just 1 or 2 percent of the tribe’s population.
But their collective efforts have been enough to almost eliminate mingi killings within their tribe. With little money or other means of support, Banna’s Christians have accepted responsibility for nearly all of the tribe’s mingi children. Many, like Kaiso, are already caring for one or more mingi boys and girls. One family has taken in 17 foster children.
Whether the slow end of the killing of children because of superstition constitutes objective working or prosperous society is a matter of debate (population growth and all that Jazz). I find it hard to deny that this kind of “cultural imperialism”, seems right to me.
Much like, and this goes partially against my principles, I wouldn’t mind, in a different branch of our universe, forcibly converting modern day Aztec’s still sacrificing thousands of people to the Sun each year to Christianity (or Islam for that matter).
In the context of CJ’s original post, I suspect this is tangential, though as above I’m not entirely sure… infanticide, superstition, or some combination thereof might be the mysterious X. (Or, rather, their negation might be.)
If X is anti-infanticide, I think the original claim is simply wrong, but I do agree that real people do propose bringing X to cultures that lack it (as you describe with the Banna). And there’s probably someone somewhere objecting to that as cultural imperialism, though probably not with much support.
If X is anti-superstition, the original claim might be right and is worth experimenting with, and I’d grant that people like Hitchens and Dennett and Dawkins could be construed as proposing bringing X to cultures that lack it, including my own. (And they are definitely objected to as an analog to cultural imperialists.)
For example, I know some people who argue that Christian cultures are objectively better at making a working, prosperous, and safe society, and that therefore we should work to convert immigrants and their native cultures to Christianity.
Strictly enforced monogamy by Christianity coupled with strong rules against inbreeding (extending beyond cousins!) perhaps are something that fits the bill . Obviously modern Western Christianity seems to be slowly abandoning both, with the exception of fundamentalists.
I’m pretty sure that if one could push a button that would convert the non-Islamic population of Africa to Christianity instantly one would see an improvement in the measurable standard of living. Doing the same for the Muslim population might or might not (one would have to weight its effect on the spread of AIDS vs. the gain women would enjoy).
Will probably produce different societies, not to mention values. In many respects Western “humanism” is deeply infected with “Christian” memes, it partially serves as a refuge for atheists to shepperd the ones they liked from Christianity into it.
For me, the most obvious candidate for X is literacy and mathematics education, so that’s what I was thinking about. However, you’re right that religion fits CJ’s pattern a lot better.
The important difference may be that religion is usually proposed as a method of increasing a society’s morality, rather than its level of comfort or wealth. Perhaps that’s what makes it more apt to be seen as imperialist: Compared to metrics for safety or prosperity, morality metrics are easier to see as a relativistic thing that societies ought to define internally. The resistance against IQ as a metric to focus on internationally may be similarly explained.
Okay, I was three when I got an IQ test, so I can’t give a detailed account, but I clearly remember thinking at the time that the test mostly measured my parents’ ability and willingness to teach me math and reading.
Okay, I was three when I got an IQ test, so I can’t give a detailed account, but I clearly remember thinking at the time that the test mostly measured my parents’ ability and willingness to teach me math and reading.
I’m not sure how much I would trust a 3 year old’s understanding of psychometrics and population dynamics.
A child’s IQ test at very early ages like 3 is a very poor indicator of later life performance on IQ tests and has even poorer predictive power (once controlled for parents) for other things IQ is generally good at predicting. The correlation is just around 0.4 or perhaps 0.5. Some kids develop faster than others, peaking early, some are prodigys and mediocre adults, others get hit on the head.
I’m not really sure why anyone would give their 3 year old an IQ test.
Let alone an adult’s recollections of when he was 3… I barely remember anything about when I was that young, and as for those few memories I have, I’m not 100% sure they are genuine (as opposed to me having reconstructed them from stories my parents told me/videos and photos they showed me/etc.).
Back then I thought prodigies were so rare that this was an acceptable heuristic, and if I needed to prove my competence to an adult I could just talk to them for five minutes. Then I read about signalling.
Trust their competence in a given domain, yeah. To take a non-IQ-related field, I would have said “It’s fair to assume a six-year-old, or even an adult, doesn’t understand much about economics and therefore their opinion of it is worthless. Most don’t. And that’s okay, because if I need to prove I can explain it, I’ll just do. And then they’ll trust my understanding of it and listen to the opinions I base on it.”.
And that’s true to an extent. But an adult can pick up so much cheap credit condescending to children that they just don’t start trusting them. If a kid demonstrates their understanding of economics to an adult, the adult will praise the child, but not even think that the child’s opinions on economic policy (as opposed to, say, a pundit’s) should carry any weight.
Do you expect to see those sorts of objections here?
No. But I’m disappointed people are so naive to actually suggest that testing for IQ directly may be more politically doable than just rigging the country and education quotas to get the same effect.
What do you seek to accomplish with your sarcasm?
Same as any person who uses sarcasm.
But to be a bit less confrontational, I’m just bloody tired of the whole debate. And I’m tired with the whole magical thinking that surrounds squishy social knock off effects that certain truths may or may not have. Having to constantly reiterate the basic arguments and taking people by the hand and leading them over the data and literature, only for people to eventually quiet down perhaps mumbling something about how its probably true but we can’t ever talk about it because it will make things so much worse… And this is the very best case scenario! Even on pretty reasonable sites with high standards lots of people instantly go into arguments as soldiers mode.
The debate literally has nothing new of interest to offer, since I’ve visited all the branches of that conversation and LW rarely searches more than two or three levels into that space. I keep having to explain the same elementary principles over and over and over again (LW is better in this regard but only by degree or two, I mean heck you still get people trying to claim intelligence dosen’t matter for socio-economic outcomes or confusing the remaining “nurture” as in non-heritable factors with something that is automatically fixable by some social policy, instead of a confusing sea of many different crazy random stuff like what you get in nearly every biological system in animals that we have even less idea how to influence without nasty side effects than splicing its genes).
Rereading the original reply I made, sure perhaps its a bit harsh and maybe I should have just been quiet, so perhaps my emotions got the best of me. Usually I try to invest some effort into the replies I give on this site. Today I just went with the accurate, fun and perhaps a somewhat bitter thing to write.
No. But I’m disappointed people are so naive to actually suggest that testing for IQ directly may be more politically doable than just rigging the country and education quotas to get the same effect.
I suspect they were discussing desirability, not feasibility. If we, say, limited Indian migration to the US to just Gujaratis, we wouldn’t get as good results as if we limited Indian migrants to the US to just those above IQ 120, even if Gujaratis are disproportionately represented among high IQ Indians.
I suspect they were discussing desirability, not feasibility. If we, say, limited Indian migration to the US to just Gujaratis, we wouldn’t get as good results as if we limited Indian migrants to the US to just those above IQ 120, even if Gujaratis are disproportionately represented among high IQ Indians.
It seems our differences of opinion, where they exist, are differences of emphasis distribution over facts and arguments rather than any substantial logical contradictions. Not sure if this conclusion sounds optimistic.
You’re the kind of person who operates under some sort of weird categorical imperative to announce the truth of all propositions, regardless of instrumental value
If all of science agreed that members of one race really were slighty smarter on average than members of another race, that could be extremely demoralizing for the people of the slightly-dumber race. See stereotype threat. This seems like a high price to pay to eliminate a popular falsehood—I imagine their are other falsehoods that would be easier to eliminate for a smaller price. And unlike religion, there’s no long-term benefit associated with its removal.
It’s mentioned below to some extent, but if you start with the assumption that there’s no systematic variation between groups, then if you see a statistical difference in how groups are treated, that’s evidence of a systematic bias. If it turns out that there is systematic variation between groups, the data can be explained without the bias. It’s the difference between “Harvard is racist” and “Harvard accepts bright people regardless of race”.
Harvard has two responses to these claims: they can continue getting called racist, or they can unfairly admit minorities who don’t deserve to get in. Both of these alternatives are preferable to telling a large group with normal human psychology that they are inferior.
Edit: I tend to think it’s OK for Harvard to admit too many minorities because I think having the upper class be made up of people from a variety of backgrounds is valuable. But I could see how this could be a problem in other domains, such as cousin_it’s mortgage example.
there’s no long-term benefit associated with its removal.
The first step in solving a problem is to recognise it. If I discovered I have cancer I would be demoralised immensely but I’d prefer that and take a shot at recovering rather than die unknowingly.
Strongly seconded. I speak from experience: when evidence starts mounting for some horrible, nightmarish proposition that you’re scared of, it is tempting to tell yourself that even if it were true, it wouldn’t really matter, that there would be no benefit to acknowledging it, that you can just go on acting as you’ve always done, as if nothing’s changed. But on your honor as an aspiring rationalist, you must face the pain directly. When you get a hint that this world is not what you thought it was, that you are not what you thought you were—look! And update!---no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much your heart may cry for the memory of the world you thought this was. Do it selfishly, in the name of the world you thought you knew: because once you have updated, once you see this hellish wasteland for what it really is, then you can start to try to patch what few things up that you can.
Suppose you really don’t like gender roles, and you’re quietly worried about something you read about evolutionary psychology. Brushing it all under the rug won’t help. Investigate, learn all you can, and then do something. Maybe something drastic, maybe something trivial, but something. Experiment with hormones! Donate a twenty to GenderPAC! Use your initials in your byline! But something, anything other than defaulting to ignorance and letting things take their natural course.
As soon as you start talking about your “honor as an aspiring rationalist”, you’re moving from the realm of rationality to ideology.
Like I said, I don’t think this question matters and I’m mostly indifferent to what the answer actually is. I’m just trying to protect the people who do care.
As soon as you start talking about your “honor as an aspiring rationalist”, you’re moving from the realm of rationality to ideology.
Well, sure, but the ideological stance is “You should care about rationality.” I should think that that’s one of the most general and least objectionable ideologies there is.
Like I said, I don’t think this question matters and I’m mostly indifferent to what the answer actually is. I’m just trying to protect the people who do care.
But I do care, and I no longer want to be protected from the actual answer. When I say that I speak from experience, it’s really true. There’s a reason that this issue has me banging out dramatic, gushy, italics-laden paragraphs on the terrible but necessary and righteous burden of relinquishing your cherished beliefs—unlike in the case of, say, theism, in which I’m more inclined to just say, “Yeah, so there’s no God; get over it”—although I should probably be more sympathetic.
So, why does it matter? Why can’t we just treat the issue with benign neglect, think of ourselves as strictly as individuals, and treat other people strictly as individuals? It is such a beautiful ideal—that my works and words should be taken to reflect only on myself alone, and that the words and works of other people born to a similar form should not be taken to reflect on me. It’s a beautiful ideal, and it seems like it should be possible to swear our loyalty to the general spirit of this ideal, while still recognizing that---
In this world, it’s not that simple. In a state of incomplete information (and it is not all clear to me what it would even mean to have complete information), you have to make probabilistic inferences based on what evidence you do have, and to the extent that there are systematic patterns of cognitive sex and race differences, people are going to update their opinions of others based on sex and race. You can profess that you’re not interested in these questions, that you don’t know—but just the same, when you see someone acting against type, you’re probably going to notice this as unusual, even if you don’t explicitly mention it to yourself.
There are those who argue—as I used to argue—that this business about incomplete information, while technically true, is irrelevant for practical purposes, that it’s easy to acquire specific about an individual, which screens off any prior information based on sex and race. And of course it’s true, and a good point, and an important point to bear in mind, especially for someone who comes to this issue with antiegalitarian biases, rather than the egalitarian biases that I did. But for someone with initial egalitarian biases, it’s important not to use it—as I think I used to use it—as some kind of point scored for the individualist/egalitarian side. Complex empirical questions do not have sides. And to the extent that this is not an empirical issue; to the extent that it’s about morality—then there are no points to score.
It gets worse—you don’t even have anywhere near complete information about yourself. People form egregiously false beliefs about themselves all the time. If you’re not ridiculously careful, it’s easy to spend your entire life believing that you have an immortal soul, or free will, or that the fate of the light cone depends solely on you and your genius AI project. So information about human nature in general can be useful even on a personal level: it can give you information about yourself that you would never have gotten from mere introspection and naive observation. I know from my readings that if I’m male, I’m more likely to have a heart attack and less likely to get breast cancer than would be the case if I were female, whereas this would not at all be obvious if I didn’t read. Why should this be true of physiology, but not psychology? If it turns out that women and men have different brain designs, and I don’t have particularly strong evidence that I’m a extreme genetic or developmental anomaly, then I should update my beliefs about myself based on this information, even if it isn’t at all obvious from the inside, and even though the fact may offend me and make me want to cry. For someone with a lot of scientific literacy but not as much rationality skill, the inside view is seductive. It’s tempting to cry out, “Sure, maybe ordinary men are such-and-this, and normal women are such-and-that, but not me; I’m different, I’m special, I’m an exception; I’m a gloriously androgynous creature of pure information!” But if you actually want to achieve your ideal (like becoming a gloriously androgynous creature of pure information), rather than just having a human’s delusion of it, you need to form accurate beliefs about just how far this world is from the ideal, because only true knowledge can help you actively shape reality.
It could very well be that information about human differences could have all sorts of terrible effects if widely or selectively disseminated. Who knows what the masses will do? I must confess that I am often tempted to say that I have no interest in such political questions—that I don’t know, that it doesn’t matter to me. This attitude probably is not satisfactory for the same sorts of reasons I’ve listed above. (How does the line go? “You might not care about politics, but politics cares about you”?) But for now, on a collective or political or institutional level, I really don’t know: maybe ignorance is bliss. But for the individual aspiring rationalist, the correct course of action is unambiguous: it’s better to know, than to not know, it’s better to make decisions explicitly and with reason, then to let your subconscious decide for you and for things to take their natural course.
that it’s easy to acquire specific about an individual, which screens off any prior information based on sex and race
I think people may be overapplying the concept of “screening off”, though?
If for example RACE → INTELLIGENCE → TEST SCORE, then knowing someone’s test score does not screen off race for the purpose of predicting intelligence (unless I’m very confused). Knowing test score should still make knowing race less useful, but not because of screening off.
On the other hand, if for example GENDER → PERSONALITY TRAITS → RATIONALIST TENDENCIES, then knowing someone’s personality traits does screen off gender for the purpose of predicting rationalist tendencies.
I agree with the overall thrust of this, but I do have some specific reservations:
It’s tempting to cry out, “Sure, maybe ordinary men are such-and-this, and normal women are such-and-that, but not me; I’m different, I’m special, I’m an exception.
The temptation is real, and it’s a temptation we should be wary of. But it’s also important to realize that the more variation there is within the groups, the more reasonable it may be to suppose that we are special (of course, we should still have some evidence for this, but the point is that the more within-group variation there is, the weaker that evidence needs to be). It’s difficult to know what to do with information about average differences between groups unless one also knows something about within-group variation.
But for the individual aspiring rationalist, the correct course of action is unambiguous: it’s better to know, than to not know, it’s better to make decisions explicitly and with reason, then to let your subconscious decide for you and for things to take their natural course.
Again, I’m very sympathetic to this view, but I think you’re overselling the case. If (correctly) believing your group performs poorly causes you to perform worse then there’s a tradeoff between that and the benefits of accurate knowledge. Maybe accurate knowledge is still best, all things considered, but that’s not obvious to me.
Beyond the context of this specific debate, the theory of the second-best shows that incremental movements in the direction of perfect rationality will not always improve decision-making. And there’s a lot of evidence that “subconscious” decision-making outperforms more explicit reasoning in some situations. Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, and pretty much all of Gerd Gigerenzer’s books make this argument (in addition to the more anecdotal account in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink). I tend to think they oversell the case for intuition somewhat, but it’s still pretty clear that blanket claims about the superiority of more information and conscious deliberation are false. The really important question is how we can best make use of the strengths of different decision-strategies.
If it turns out that women and men have different brain designs, and I don’t have particularly strong evidence that I’m a extreme genetic or developmental anomaly, then I should update my beliefs about myself based on this information, even if it isn’t at all obvious from the inside, and even though the fact may offend me and make me want to cry.
Might be just mind projection on my part, but it seems to me that in those accursed cases, where various aspects of an “egalitarian” way of thought—that includes both values, moral intuitions, ethical rules, actual beliefs about the world and beliefs about one’s beliefs—all get conflated, and the entire (silly for an AI but identity-forming for lots of current humans) system perceives some statement of fact as a challenge to its entire existence… well, the LW crowd at least would pride themselves on not being personally offended.
If tomorrow it was revealed with high certainty that us Slavs are genetically predisposed against some habits that happen to be crucial for civilized living and running a state nicely, I’d most definitely try to take it in stride. But when something like this stuff is said, I tend to feel sick and uncertain; I don’t see a purely consequentialist way out which would leave me ethically unscathed.
Ah, if only it was so easy as identifying the objective state of the world, than trying to act in accordance with (what you’ve settled on as) your terminal values. But this would require both* more rationality and more compartmentalization than I’ve seen in humans so far.
“You come to amidst the wreckage of your own making. Do you stay there, eyes squeezed shut, afraid to move, hoping to bleed to death? Or do you crawl out, help your loved ones, make sure the fire doesn’t spread, try to fix it?”—Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
One day, I started looking at the people around me, and I began to realize how much they looked like apes. I quickly stopped doing this, because I feared it would cause me to treat them with contempt. And you know what? Doublethink worked. I didn’t start treating people with more contempt as a result of purposely avoiding certain knowledge that I knew would cause me to treat people with more contempt.
If you think that my efforts to suppress observations relating the appearance of humans with the appearance of apes were poorly founded, then you have a very instrumentally irrational tendency towards epistemic rationality.
[...] then you have a very instrumentally irrational tendency towards epistemic rationality.
Guilty as charged! I don’t want to win by means of doublethink—it sounds like the sort of thing an ape would do. A gloriously androgynous creature of pure information wins cleanly or not at all. (I think I’m joking somewhat, but my probability distribution on to what extent is very wide.)
At some point you will have limited resources, and you will need to decide how much that preference for winning cleanly is worth. How much risk you’re willing to take of not winning at all, in exchange for whatever victory you might still get being a clean one.
For example, say there are two people you love dangling off a cliff. You could grab one of them and pull them to safety immediately, but in doing so there’s some chance you could destabilize the loose rocks and cause the other to fall to certain death.
The gloriously androgynous creature of pure information (henceforth GACoPI) that you wish you were cannot prioritize one love over the other in a timely fashion, and will simply babble ineffectual encouragement to both until professional rescuers arrive, during which time there is some chance that somebody’s arms will get tired or the cliff will shift due to other factors, killing them both. An ape’s understanding of factional politics, on the other hand, has no particular difficulty judging one potential ally or mate as more valuable, and then rigging up a quick coin-flip or something to save face.
The gloriously androgynous creature of pure information (henceforth GACoPI) that you wish you were cannot prioritize one love over the other in a timely fashion, and will simply babble ineffectual encouragement to both until professional rescuers arrive, during which time there is some chance that somebody’s arms will get tired or the cliff will shift due to other factors, killing them both.
The grandparent uses “winning cleanly” to mean winning without resorting to doublethink. To go from that to assuming that a GACoPI is unable to enact your proposed ape solution or come up with some other courses of action than standing around like an idiot smacks of StrawVulcanism (WARNING: TVTropes).
Wouldn’t your efforts be better directed at clearing up whatever confusion leads you to react with contempt to the similarity to apes?
I can maybe see myself selling out epistemic rationality for an instrumental advantage in some extreme circumstance, but I find abhorrent the idea of selling it so cheaply. It seems to me a rationalist should value their ability to see reality higher, not give it up at the first sign of inconvenience.
Even on instrumental grounds. Just like theoretical mathematics tends to end up having initially unforeseen practical application, giving up on epistemic rationality carries potential of unforeseen instrumental disadvantage.
An approach using both instrumental and epistemic rationality would be to research chimps and bonobos and find all the good qualities of them that we share. The problem here is your association “apes = contempt,” and trying to suppress that we are apes isn’t going to fix that problem.
I agree with the overall thrust of this, but I do have some specific reservations:
It’s tempting to cry out, “Sure, maybe ordinary men are such-and-this, and normal women are such-and-that, but not me; I’m different, I’m special, I’m an exception.
The temptation is real, and it’s a temptation we should be wary of. But it’s also important to realize that the more variation there is within the groups, the more reasonable it may be to suppose that we are special (of course, we should still have some evidence for this, but the point is that the more within-group variation there is, the weaker that evidence needs to be). It’s difficult to know what to do with information about average differences between groups unless one also knows something about within-group variation.
But for the individual aspiring rationalist, the correct course of action is unambiguous: it’s better to know, than to not know, it’s better to make decisions explicitly and with reason, then to let your subconscious decide for you and for things to take their natural course.
Again, I’m very sympathetic to this view, but I think you’re overselling the case. If (correctly) believing your group performs poorly causes you to perform worse, then there’s a tradeoff between that and the benefits of accurate knowledge. Maybe accurate knowledge is still best, all things considered, but that’s not obvious to me.
Beyond the context of this specific debate, the theory of the second-best shows that incremental movements in the direction of perfect rationality will not always improve decision-making. And there’s a lot of evidence that “subconscious” decision-making outperforms more explicit reasoning in some situations. Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, and pretty much all of Gerd Gigerenzer’s books make this argument (in addition to the more anecdotal account in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink). I tend to think they oversell the case for intuition somewhat, but it’s still pretty clear that blanket claims about the superiority of more information and conscious deliberation are false. The really important question is how we can best make use of the strengths of different decision-strategies.
I agree with the overall thrust of this, but I do have some specific reservations:
It’s tempting to cry out, “Sure, maybe ordinary men are such-and-this, and normal women are such-and-that, but not me; I’m different, I’m special, I’m an exception.
The temptation is real, and it’s a temptation we should be wary of. But it’s also important to realize that the more variation there is within the groups, the more reasonable it may be to suppose that we are special. It’s difficult to know what to do with information about average differences between groups unless one also knows about within group variation. (The only case
But for the individual aspiring rationalist, the correct course of action is unambiguous: it’s better to know, than to not know, it’s better to make decisions explicitly and with reason, then to let your subconscious decide for you and for things to take their natural course.
Again, I’m very sympathetic to this view, but I think you’re overselling the case. If (correctly) believing your group performs poorly causes you to perform worse, then there’s a tradeoff between that and the benefits of accurate knowledge. Maybe accurate knowledge is still best, all things considered, but that’s not obvious to me.
Beyond the context of this specific debate, the theory of the second-best shows that incremental movements in the direction of perfect rationality will not always improve decision-making. And there’s a lot of evidence that “subconscious” decision-making outperforms more explicit reasoning in some situations. Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, and pretty much all of Gerd Gigerenzer’s books make this argument (in addition to the more anecdotal account in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink). I tend to think they oversell the case for intuition somewhat, but it’s still pretty clear that blanket claims about the superiority of more information and conscious deliberation are false. The really important question is how we can best make use of the strengths of different decision-strategies.
I agree that denial usually seems like a bad idea, but the problem with things like stereotype threat is that they suggest (and more importantly provide evidence) that sometimes it might actually be useful (a path to improvement, even if not necessarily the first-best path).
The trick, presumably, is to distinguish the situations when this will hold from those when it doesn’t.
Yes, but there is a long-term benefit associated with the removal of your cancer. On the other hand, if you had a blemish on your shoulder, you’d be better off not noticing it.
Science makes a lot of vastly more demoralizing conclusions like Darwinism or the possibility of nuclear weapons. If you really believe what you say you believe, you should focus on debunking those first.
But Darwinism and the possibility of nuclear weapons are important to know about.
Let’s say that there is systematic variation between races. What’s the benefit of knowledge about this being disseminated? So colleges will stop giving preferential treatment to minorities? If that’s the case, I think the costs outweigh the benefits.
What’s the benefit of knowledge about this being disseminated?
For one, a lot of people would find their accurate reasoning no longer denounced as racist by others. Example: before the crisis SWPL popular opinion blamed bankers for discriminatory mortgage lending to blacks. Government went in and fixed this by fiat. Today the same crowd turns around and blames bankers for disproportionate foreclosures among blacks, not realizing the implicit admission that outlawed lending practices must’ve been fair.
In short, you didn’t succeed in impressing upon me the costs of truth.
Short answer: couldn’t care less. Accepting the truth is everybody’s problem, not just mine to decide.
Long answer: you seem to assume my utility function includes a term for actions and worldviews of distant others. In fact I deny all responsibility for any actions and thoughts of people other than myself, except what’s implicit in the following pledge: I will never manipulate anyone with falsehoods or emotional extortion. Other than that, I go about my own business (including making true pronouncements in my personal vicinity, not in the least intended to “spread the word”) and the world can screw itself—I’m not its caretaker.
But the outlawed lending practices weren’t fair. My next door neighbor took forever to get a business loan even though he was an excellent risk. The new system was also broken, but the old one wasn’t good.
Edited to Add: To be more specific, his white wife handled the application and it was all smooth sailing until he walked in to sign the bottom line, and then the offer was unceremoniously retracted with no explanation.
Incidentally, when these lending rules came into effect and he did get a loan, his business boomed and he paid it off without incident. So...
I disagree. The claim is that they were discriminated against unfairly and this can be proven by your anecdote that someone didn’t fail to repay a loan. Yet in aggregate, there was a lot of non-repayment going on.
The question is much less about whether he actually did repay the loan. It’s about the decision process.
Everything looked great until they realized they were about to lend to a black man.
That is fucked up. And it doesn’t happen in isolation.
Whether he actually managed to pay the loan off or not is almost aside from the point, though his success is indeed frosting (from the argument’s PoV—obviously rather more important to us personally).
Everything looked great until they realized they were about to lend to a black man. That is fucked up. And it doesn’t happen in isolation.
No, it’s not. It’s useful information. What you’re emoting about is like saying
Everything looked great until they realized they were about to lend to a bankrupt man. That is fucked up. And it doesn’t happen in isolation.
Whatever rates they estimated as just barely covering the risk of nonpayment and allowing them to eke out a profit based on their estimate from his personal wealth and existing track record is not the rate they would have estimated after learning additional stuff. Being black is some of that additional stuff.
I think we should both slow down. I’ve slipped up, and you’re slipping up. You’re saying I’m emoting and then tripping up in two dramatic ways that you really should have caught.
A) Going bankrupt would be part of that existing track record.
B) He could have dealt with a slightly higher rate. He wasn’t offered a slightly higher rate. He wasn’t offered any rate at all.
Okay. Taking some more time to think.
Being black may provide some information, but it is almost entirely screened by the information from the admissible parts of the track record. The banks were screwing up this calculation, and in doing so were not only hurting themselves but causing extreme damage to the world around them.
Adding a bunch of unbiased actors with relevant expertise, guts, and enormous amounts of capital would have solved the problem, but so would unicorns, and we had just as many of those. Regulation brought problems, but they were different problems.
A) Going bankrupt would be part of that existing track record.
And why can’t being part of a minority group be part of a track record? In both cases, the party thinking of giving the loan has learned new and material information.
B) He could have dealt with a slightly higher rate. He wasn’t offered a slightly higher rate. He wasn’t offered any rate at all.
So? If they had offered a loan at 100% interest, people would be bitching anyway about discrimination. Maybe it is a calculated PR move that people will complain less about not getting a loan than about getting a loan at +2% interest; maybe it has to do with the fixed overhead of servicing loans; maybe they only had so much appetite for risk even if the interest rate were raised to make the loan +EV again; maybe this is an unexpected consequence of the millions of words of regulation governing banks.
Being black may provide some information, but it is almost entirely screened by the information from the admissible parts of the track record.
I doubt that and I suspect you have no good reason to believe that.
I doubt that and I suspect you have no good reason to believe that.
Maybe for people with a really thin track record. Not for people who’ve run a profitable business for a decade, have a solid business case, etc.. Just what independent information does being black provide, here? (No need to respond to this point here—you can put it in response to TheOtherDave’s parallel comment)
Now, I freely grant that if you only look at the bankers’ side of things, regulation doesn’t make sense. They should be perfectly informed and make the ideal decisions as to who will succeed or not! And if they can’t make perfect use of that information, that’s their problem!
But of course, it’s not only their problem, and the purpose of the law is not solely to help the bankers get money.
A ‘being black’ penalty even of only 2% on loans would be colossal. Think how much debt a growing business has to incur, and compound that over the years. Apply it to choices of housing, of auto financing. Everyone in the community has less money, so they can’t buy as much, so businesses have a harder time growing, so people earn less. It’s self-perpetuating.
But it wasn’t that mild. Instead, the loans were simply turned down. The near-total absence of capital was crippling.
Do you think this is a problem? What might you do about it?
In the scales of values, where does
“equal opportunity”
rank up against
“allowing each individual to make the best choices available to them personally without regard to the impact that choice has on what choices other individuals get”?
(No need to respond to this point here—you can put it in response to TheOtherDave’s parallel comment)
(Responded.)
But it wasn’t that mild. Instead, the loans were simply turned down. The near-total absence of capital was crippling.
To repeat myself:
So? If they had offered a loan at 100% interest, people would be bitching anyway about discrimination. Maybe it is a calculated PR move that people will complain less about not getting a loan than about getting a loan at +2% interest; maybe it has to do with the fixed overhead of servicing loans; maybe they only had so much appetite for risk even if the interest rate were raised to make the loan +EV again; maybe this is an unexpected consequence of the millions of words of regulation governing banks.
Moving on:
A ‘being black’ penalty even of only 2% on loans would be colossal. Think how much debt a growing business has to incur, and compound that over the years. Apply it to choices of housing, of auto financing. Everyone in the community has less money, so they can’t buy as much, so businesses have a harder time growing, so people earn less. It’s self-perpetuating.
So, are you arguing that the ‘being black’ penalty is not accurate here? That the 2% penalty is compensating for risk that does not exist? If so then that’s quite an opportunity: a free 2% price cut. Especially in the current low-interest rate environment, that’s a lot of money being left on the table.
Or are you arguing that the penalty is accurate and anyone who tried to offer at non-penalty rates would lose their shirts as tons of loans defaulted?
I thought you were arguing against the latter, before… If you’ve changed your mind, it’d be good to say so clearly and explicitly before going on.
You persist in only looking at the effect on the banker. As I said, the regulation won’t make much if any sense from that point of view alone. Your pointing this out once more doesn’t really change anything.
That said, considering that the regulated banks had a low default rate until everything went screwy because of the (non-regulated) predatory lenders, I think I’ll stick with the theory that there was a market inefficiency.
Now, it wasn’t a simple barrier-free market inefficiency. If only one bank had moved, it could well have lost its shirt. Being the sole investor in a dead area is rough. It’s a bit like a many-player game with ‘staying out’ having a positive payoff from being able to invest elsewhere, and ‘going in’ having a payoff that starts out negative with no other cooperators, increases with cooperators for a while, peaks above ‘staying out’, then declines down to the ‘staying out’ level once the market is fully competitive (then below if it becomes saturated). When no one is there, you’d be crazy to move first.
Changing the rules so the banks had to serve their localities guaranteed a minimum level of going in, which made it no longer a bad move to go in.
Just so I understand that last part… are you claiming: 1) …there is no factor or set of factors X such that X screens off skin color for purposes of calculating loan EV, 2) …there may be such an X, but we don’t know what it is and/or have no way of measuring it, 3) …we know what X is, but the admissible parts of the track record don’t include it, ...or something else?
#1 seems really unlikely to me, so if you think it likely I’m interested in your reasons. #2 seems plausible. #3 also seems plausible, but if true, suggests that talking about the admissability of skin color is a herring of unspecified hue; as a bank, I should be trying to get X admitted instead.
I am claiming that you have jumped to the conclusion that claims 1-n must all be false and hence the cancellation is a Bad thing. For my purpose, any of 1-3 can be correct, and I don’t need to argue for any specific one especially if you already find plausible any of them.
If you want to overrule the bank’s reaction, you need a lot of local domain-specific knowledge, and that’s something neither you nor I have.
Here’s an example of the sort of obscure knowledge you might need: are you familiar with the term “minority fronts”? This is when a government or other entity attempts a form of affirmative action in which minority-owned businesses or organizations get financially favored for grants or bidding on contracts; yet of course there aren’t very many competent minority-owned businesses (that’s why they’re doing it in the first place), so this immediately leads to fraud in which a person meeting the minority criteria is put in place as the straw owner of a company actually run by other people of other groups and then the business bids on business as a minority-owned business, frequently simply passing on the work and money to a normal business minus the straw owner’s share. Naturally, this is largely meaningless for a white-owned business as whites are not considered a minority. Now, remembering that the ‘owner’ in such cases has stooped to conspiracy and felony fraud to steal possibly millions, do you think that their shell business is a better or worse credit risk than an equivalent white owner matched on other observables like income?
Personally, I’d say worse. This is just a cute example of why race can be a salient factor in loans and why a white owner might be different from a black owner; I bring it up to stand for the larger class of relevant details and possibilities, not being a banker or economist or risk specialist. So before you can say that the ‘discrimination’ is purely irrational and unjustifiable, you need to know about all these details. Do you? I don’t think you do.
EDIT: Ran into an international example of the abuse of affirmative action in The Economist:
The same goes for civil-service quotas. When jobs are dished out for reasons other than competence, the state grows less competent, as anyone who has wrestled with Indian or Nigerian officialdom can attest. Moreover, rules favouring businesses owned by members of particular groups are easy to game. Malaysians talk of “Ali-Baba” firms, where Ali (an ethnic Malay) lends his name, for a fee, to Baba (a Chinese businessman) to win a government contract.
Although these policies tend to start with the intention of favouring narrow groups, they spread as others clamour to be included. That American federal programme began by awarding no-bid contracts to firms owned by blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans; now it covers people with ancestry from at least 33 countries. In India 60% of the population are eligible for privileges as members of scheduled castes, tribes or “other backward classes”. Such policies poison democracy by encouraging divisions along lines drawn by discriminatory rules. The anger thus stoked has helped stir bloody conflicts in India, Rwanda and Sri Lanka. And such rules, once in place, are almost impossible to get rid of. In 1949 India’s constitution said quotas should be phased out in ten years, but they are now more widespread than ever. America’s policies have survived decades of legal pushback, though not unscathed.
For my purpose, any of 1-3 can be correct, and I don’t need to argue for any specific one especially if you already find plausible any of them.
OK.
you have jumped to the conclusion that claims 1-n must all be false
If that’s true, I haven’t noticed. If you feel like summarizing the evidence for believing I’ve reached that conclusion, though, I’ll certainly listen.
If you want to overrule the bank’s reaction, you need a lot of local domain-specific knowledge
I certainly agree that overruling the bank’s decision about loans without knowing about as much about loans as the bank does is going to have unexpected consequences, so unless the bank is currently pessimizing for my values I’m probably going to be less happy with the result than I am now.
And I certainly agree that I don’t know about all the details that go into making decisions about loans.
If the solution didn’t work, maybe one should consider the possibility that whatever problem there was, it wasn’t what one thought it was.
The solution actually wasn’t THAT bad- the community banks actually regulated by the community reinvestment act had/have lower rates of foreclosure then the national average, and lower rates of foreclosure on their loans to minorities.
Edit: this is because they are generally required to keep more skin-in-the-game, not BECAUSE they were regulated by the CRA (most fall under various patches of the regulations put in place after the S&L crisis). My point being, community banks were able to responsibly lend to a diverse population, and certainly the CRA wasn’t causal in the foreclosure crisis.
The solution actually wasn’t THAT bad- the community banks actually regulated by the community reinvestment act had/have lower rates of foreclosure then the national average, and lower rates of foreclosure on their loans to minorities.
That doesn’t necessarily address my point: if there were unjust discrimination, discrimination which was not a rational reaction to the credit risk, then saying “well, they didn’t cause as many losses as some aggregate measure of loss during the greatest period of property-related losses in the history of America” isn’t proving that. To prove that, you need to show something like that the loans turned out to have been made profitably on net in the long-term after adjusting for risk and opportunity cost etc.
To prove that, you need to show something like that the loans turned out to have been made profitably on net in the long-term after adjusting for risk and opportunity cost etc.
I’m not sure thats true, I think what you would want to show is that the loans ‘forced’ on the community banks are at-least-as-profitable as the loans the banks voluntarily took on. Given the bizarre financial period we just lived through, the losses on loans is going to be markedly higher across all institutions.
Maybe the next decade of CRA type lending won’t be contaminated by massive changes in the financial sector and a large crash- in which case maybe the questions of discrimination will become easier to untangle. For the last decade, the housing market underwent major changes, and the community banks were such a negligible sliver of the overall market that the CRAs effects are on community banks are higher order corrections to higher order corrections.
I’m not sure thats true, I think what you would want to show is that the loans ‘forced’ on the community banks are at-least-as-profitable as the loans the banks voluntarily took on.
No, because you’re comparing apples and oranges. If the banks were forced to take on loans to the groups in question due to political pressure despite having been previously correct in demanding higher interest to compensate them for the loans, and also simultaneously engaged in an epic miscalculation about the safety of loans to other groups based on naive models, then you could produce this inversion. They made a mistake, and then made an even larger mistake; this doesn’t make the original mistake not a mistake.
No, because you’re comparing apples and oranges. If the banks were forced to take on loans to the groups in question due to political pressure despite having been previously correct in demanding higher interest to compensate them for the loans, and also simultaneously engaged in an epic miscalculation about the safety of loans to other groups based on naive models, then you could produce this inversion.
Only if the loans were in different asset classes. Because these are all housing loans, the underlying model of the housing market is an input to both group’s loans, with minority status as an additional adjustment.
Anyway, I don’t think looking at CRA and pre-CRA loans to minorities you can answer discrimination questions with any kind of precision. The data seems to lean in the direction of former discrimination, but massive structural changes to finance dwarf the tiny changes created by the CRA.
If it really, truly didn’t matter to us, then it wouldn’t be a sensitive subject in the first place. When someone makes a wildly inaccurate estimate of the price of tea in China, no one gets outraged or asserts in boldface that the price of tea in China really doesn’t matter.
People care a lot about the private lives of celebrities, but that doesn’t mean the private lives of celebrities matter. The reason people care about systematic racial differences (and systematic gender differences) is because they’re concerned about whether they measure up, or they’re wondering whether their group is doing better than some other group, or something frivolous like that. The solution to the problem is not to find the answer. Folks have already tried that, and there’s no consensus. The solution is to get people to stop caring so much.
In a reductionist universe, nothing can be said to matter except with respect to someone who cares about it. Why are you reading a frivolous site like this, when you could be catching up on the latest news about Brooke Shields’s mother? Why are the people reading about Brooke Shields’s mother doing that, when they could be sorting pebbles into correct heaps?
You really can’t think of any application, for good or ill, for information about systematic variation in human psychological traits? When you’re looking for a husband, it seems like it would be awfully useful to know what men are like. When you see racial gaps on the MCAT, if seems like it would be awfully useful to know if your test is simply biased (in which case you would want to immediately try to fix it) or if there’s actually a true difference in ability (for whatever reason).
Good points. But I still maintain that those aren’t the main reasons why people care about these issues. If we could remove the main reasons, that would be good.
Me, neither. I’m just guessing based on, say, this post.
What I meant is that is that religion is a controversial question that doesn’t matter, either. As Daniel Burfoot said, religion has been banished to a separate magisterium in which it barely gets to talk about the world, while political correctness is largely focused on talking about the world. This says nothing about the absolute importance of dealing with either.
Elsewhere on the thread, you say that the costs outweigh the benefits, which is a very different claim than saying it doesn’t matter. If the costs and benefits are small, then everyone should agree it doesn’t matter, but if the costs and benefits are large, you should expect disagreement over whether it’s worth it.
I personally don’t believe it matters, but my cost-benefits analysis panders to those who do. And I disagree that religion doesn’t matter. Sam Harris’ argument:
I am terrified of what seems to me to be a bottleneck that civilization is passing through. On the one hand we have 21st-century disruptive technology proliferating, and on the other we have first-century superstition. A civilization is going to either pass through this bottleneck more or less intact or it won’t. And perhaps that fear sounds grandiose, but civilizations end. On any number of occasions, some generation has witnessed the ruination of everything they and their ancestors had built. What especially terrifies me about religious thinking is the expectation on the part of many that civilization is bound to end based on prophecy and its ending is going to be glorious.
I hope when you guys get done beating up on theism, you’ll take on a real challenge and go up against the SWPL bloc. That religion is far more dangerous and far more powerful than poor old Judeo-Christianity, which isn’t even able to order scientists around anymore. Maybe Eliezer can debate Nancy Hopkins?
Please taboo religion. If you want to argue that a certain cluster of beliefs commonly held by upper-middle-class white American liberals is systematically mistaken in ways analogous to religious beliefs, and that this has harmful consequences, do come out and say this explicitly, and maybe we could have a productive discussion about the actual issues at hand. But gratuitous misuse of the world religion to describe positions you dislike just functions as a semantic stopsign. Actual religions have things like deities, and prayers, and rituals.
Wiki articles for Rationalist taboo and Semantic stopsign.
Assuming a charitable interpretation, I think he was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek with the use of “religion” there.
No, not necessarily. The usage you’ve criticized is perfectly compatible with the correct definition of the word. Please familiarize yourself with that definition before offering further criticism.
Taking a word and re-defining it into a ‘semantic stopsign’ doesn’t help anything or anyone, except confusion and causes that can be aided by confusion.
Why has this been voted up 4 times without anybody explaining what he’s talking about?
(Downvoted, for being hiply, intentionally obscure.)
The Wikipedia entry on Nancy Hopkins is a clue, but I still have no idea what SWPL stands for.
Stuff White People Like.
It’s a term often used by razib and people at the Gene Expression blog, derived from the satirical website of the same name, used to refer to the cultural and political choices favored by upper-middle-class-to-rich Caucasians, including political correctness and the modern connotations of ‘liberalism’.
It’s been deciphered, although not confirmed by the original commenter.
I sympathize with your sentiment, but guess you’ll have a hard time persuading LW/OB rationalists to act up against SWPL—great name for the phenomenon btw, I will use it from now on. First, such actions would greatly harm the stated goal of outreach to intelligent/educated demographics. Second, on sober thought SWPL per se hasn’t yet caused as much hurt in the world as competing ideologies have (I’m not counting spiritual ancestors, this would be unfair). Third, a lot of us here are SWPL followers.
Perhaps we could make some progress if we employed a divide and conquer strategy. The agendas of the SW and PL blocs are not entirely consonant. Generally speaking, the SW position is somewhat more amenable to the techniques of rationality discussed on this site. The PL worldview, however, is more deeply committed to dark side epistemology (though I imagine that that could be a controversial position even here).
Seriously, though, what is SWPL?
:D
This is some of the best short political satire I’ve ever read!
Stuff White People Like.
Agreed, the subculture in question seems fairly innocuous in itself. It needs infiltration and purging of dangerous aspects, not external opposition (fortunately, we seem to already have many inside agents).
You seem to have deciphered the initialism, what does it refer to?
Stuff White People Like—steven0461 got it right.
Stuff White People Like.
The top Google result for “SWPL” is the blog “Stuff White People Like”. I’m pretty sure that they have nothing to do with Nancy Hopkins—what SWPL are you talking about?
This comment is the only hit on SWPL “Nancy Hopkins”—please expand the acronym. I’m guessing it doesn’t refer to “Stuff White People Like”.
It does refer to “Stuff White People Like”, which is a perceived cluster of beliefs and behaviors that includes political correctness, hence Nancy Hopkins.
There’s no point in spending time addressing controversial questions that don’t matter. I contend that the question of systematic variation in ability is one of these.
“Don’t matter” sounds to me like a cop-out akin to religion’s “retreat to faith”. A lot of evidence for absence of systematic variation in ability gets noticed and promoted by SWPL followers, indicating the question’s importance to the belief system.
It’s more that it really doesn’t matter. Noise from individual variation swamps group variation in almost every practical case, and other outward cues of ability (i.e., hard-to-fake signals) are more informative.
The main reasons to make a big deal out of group variation are, in order of how common they are:
You’re a member of some group that dislikes the SWPL bloc and need more “soldiers” for your side of the argument
You have “prejudice against group X” on your bottom line and are filling in the blanks above
You’re the kind of person who operates under some sort of weird categorical imperative to announce the truth of all propositions, regardless of instrumental value
We have a lot of epistemic rationalists here in the third category, but in most cases if you talk about the reality of group variation people will assume you are one of the first two types, which probably isn’t helpful for anyone.
To first paragraph: the variables “variation within group” and “difference of means between groups” should be regarded as belonging to different statistical data types, not yielding any significant insight when compared. For example, variation of physical strength among men is greater than the difference between mean strengths of men and women, but that doesn’t imply the latter is insignificant. Same holds for many traits of many real-world ensembles, e.g. most behavioral differences within/between dog breeds.
To the rest: ad hominem and Bulverism fallacy. But if you really insist on knowing my reasons, I’m irritated by hearing popular falsehoods.
Well, yes, we all know this. But you miss the point—difference of means are almost never relevant. If I need someone to help me carry something, I need a strong person, and I’d do better looking at more useful cues (“does this person look fit and healthy?”) rather than thinking about group means (“oh, I’ll ignore this female athlete and get the scrawny nerd to help me”).
This is why it “doesn’t matter”.
In other words, you assign intrinsic value to truth independent of instrumental value, which is exactly what I said. This is fine! We like truth here. But, outside of LW, this can lead to people making uncharitable assumptions about your motivations, which is all I was saying.
When you have more relevant information you’re better off using that. When you don’t, e.g. when using a dating site, you’re better off following justified stereotypes than ignoring them.
One particularly controversial such case is police stop-and-frisks. I read somewhere that NYC blacks get stop-and-frisked disproportionately more often than whites, but black criminals have a lower chance of getting stop-and-frisked than white criminals due to PC backlash. The different concepts of fairness seem hard to reconcile in low-information situations like that. Or take racial profiling in airports: if you call for using using more relevant information in that case, rather than less as the SWPL crowd desires, you’ll need an Orwellian level of knowledge about the passengers which causes new morality problems.
Another example would be having to make decisions concerning large groups of people. Would you or wouldn’t you allow unsupervised immigration from a certain country based on the average IQ there? What if it’s 50? As you make your decision, keep in mind that people from this country will try harder to get into yours because they’re worse off than other potential donor countries, so you might get a self-selection effect on your hands.
Yes, but such low-information situations are fairly rare.
This is possibly a case where group means actually are relevant, yes, modulo a lot of assumptions about how people are selected for the stop-and-frisk.
Again, not objectionable on the surface, However, given the stunningly ineffective nature of airport security (cf. Bruce Schneier and the “security theater” concept) I doubt this actually provides a benefit, for reasons wholly unrelated to race.
As an aside, in adversarial situations you need to be careful that weighted targetting based on superficial cues doesn’t merely give the enemy information on how to disproportionately avoid scrutiny.
EDIT: Either I missed this part or you added it while I was replying, but:
Assuming you want to filter applicants based on IQ, testing individuals seems vastly more helpful than assuming based on population mean, especially given that the demographics of applicants will not be the same as the total population. Also, if you admit all immigrants from any country you’re likely to get a self-selected group of people who are less successful at home.
Typically, this works to your advantage. If you scrutinize middle eastern travelers more, terrorist groups might decide to recruit white hijackers. But where are they going to find them? Wherever you think they might look, you can have CIA undercover agents trying to be hired.
The primary strength conspiracies have is small, close-knit groups. Anything you can do to force them to become larger or more diverse can help.
This probably works for terrorist groups. And actually explains why they recruit so many children of diplomats. (This suggests the CIA should try to recruit agents among them more, but that’s a problem if they’re already terrorists.)
But for groups that can be a lot more diverse, here’s a note to cops: If you see a group of high school students, most of whom are dark-skinned boys with long hairs and marijuana-related T-shirts, and one of whom is a prim-and-proper white girl with her nose constantly buried in a textbook, stop carding and searching the boys all the time. The girl has the weed, and thinks you’re insulting their intelligence.
Yes, your arguments sound pretty convincing. I’ll have to reconsider my position on the frequent applicability of stereotypes.
The problem is you can’t use IQ tests. You see IQ tests are clearly racist and insidiously so since culturally loaded sub-tests like vocabulary seem to actually show smaller ethnic differences.
No matter. We’ll find out how the tests are racist some day!
Your mockery, at least as concerns standardized testing in general, is misplaced
That is in reference to a firm that produces standardized tests deciding to abandon a particular question because inner city kids did better on it than suburban kids did.
I’m talking about IQ tests constructed by academics not firms.
I haven’t heard about the sub-test discrepancies, that sounds interesting. Do you have a link?
The examples I saw were analogies; you would get things like cup :: saucer or yacht :: regatta which upper-class kids were far more likely to be familiar with than lower-class kids (and since class and race are correlated, that meant there would be racial discrepancies).
IQ test may or may not measure intelligence, they measure doing well at what’s usually called abstract thinking pretty well. They don’t really measure cultural knowledge, at least real IQ tests don’t.
Cultural bias being behind the observed gaps isn’t really something that seems very likley to most psychometricians. From a paper titled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” published to clear up public misconceptions about expert opinion during the debates surrounding the publishing of Murray’s book the Bell Curve.
Some experts of course disagree with this. And common sense. I can sort of see why Askenazi Jews do better on IQ tests than other European Americans because they are culturally literate, wealthy and more educated, rather than high IQs leading to cultural literacy and education. But why do East Asians? In Asia even? I suppose it could just happen to be that stuff that goes with high status in Western society has the same function in East Asian societies. In basically every developed country ever.
That then brings us dangerously close to considering that some cultures may be objectively better at making a working, prosperous and safe technological society, maybe, we should work to change those aspects among immigrants, perhaps even their native countries to improve their quality of life? Oh but that’s a no no you nasty nasty cultural imperialist utilitarian!
But leaving this last tangent aside, the “IQ tests are biased and thus don’t suggest actual differences in intelligence” is far from the ultimate argument against such policies, that we all know it would be used as such against any proposal to limit immigration to any Western country with IQ testing. Funny how formal education as a criteria for immigration isn’t ever put down with the same argument.
At this point lets once again for the sake of argument say that the dissenting experts are right. Even so, the test still accurately measure how well large groups of people do in Western type societies, since they are positively correlated with everything from health to education attainment to low criminality to high income. Any country trying to craft the best policy for its citizens would find such a measure useful, since it measures something as trivial as … you know… how well the people are actually probably going to do, as it is, not how well society wants to pretend they are likley to do.
Hence my sarcastic comment, aimed at the kind of objections that would be used to oppose such a no-brainer (pardon the pun) policy.
Hey, look, it’s every Robin Hanson post.
No no that is just a special case of Robin Hanson posts, this is the general rule.
I actually have not seen anyone go down the argument branch you’re talking about here. I mean, are there people who are actually against foreign aid programs aimed at improving school attendance or literacy rates? On any grounds besides finding a more efficient charitrons-per-dollar scheme, I mean.
Do you mean that you haven’t seen anyone here (on LW) go down this branch?
Or that you haven’t seen anyone (in general) go down the branch that CJ is, here (in this thread), talking about?
The latter. I’ve heard arguments along the lines of “We shouldn’t do X because it’s imperialist” before, but usually in regards to artistic or military interactions, not foreign aid work.
Gotcha.
For my own part, it depends on which “aspects” CJ is talking about.
For example, I know some people who argue that Christian cultures are objectively better at making a working, prosperous, and safe society, and that therefore we should work to convert immigrants and their native cultures to Christianity. And I know people who object to such interventions on the grounds that this is nasty cultural imperialism.
Of course, CJ is not talking about Christianity, so that’s irrelevant; I mention it only as a concrete example the kind of pattern I’m thinking about.
CJ is talking about some other aspect of certain cultures… call it X. As I understand it, CJ believes X encourages abstract thinking, which explains higher IQ scores among residents of X-rich cultures, and explains high status among X-possessors in just about every developed country ever.
I’m not sure if anyone actually proposes bringing X to cultures that lack it, nor if anyone actually criticizes such X-proselytizers as nasty cultural imperialists, though. That’s because I’m not sure what X actually is.
Since you mention Christianity, here is an example of the transformation power of introducing new memeplexes on the practice of killing cursed (“mingi”) children:
Whether the slow end of the killing of children because of superstition constitutes objective working or prosperous society is a matter of debate (population growth and all that Jazz). I find it hard to deny that this kind of “cultural imperialism”, seems right to me.
Much like, and this goes partially against my principles, I wouldn’t mind, in a different branch of our universe, forcibly converting modern day Aztec’s still sacrificing thousands of people to the Sun each year to Christianity (or Islam for that matter).
In the context of CJ’s original post, I suspect this is tangential, though as above I’m not entirely sure… infanticide, superstition, or some combination thereof might be the mysterious X. (Or, rather, their negation might be.)
If X is anti-infanticide, I think the original claim is simply wrong, but I do agree that real people do propose bringing X to cultures that lack it (as you describe with the Banna). And there’s probably someone somewhere objecting to that as cultural imperialism, though probably not with much support.
If X is anti-superstition, the original claim might be right and is worth experimenting with, and I’d grant that people like Hitchens and Dennett and Dawkins could be construed as proposing bringing X to cultures that lack it, including my own. (And they are definitely objected to as an analog to cultural imperialists.)
Strictly enforced monogamy by Christianity coupled with strong rules against inbreeding (extending beyond cousins!) perhaps are something that fits the bill . Obviously modern Western Christianity seems to be slowly abandoning both, with the exception of fundamentalists.
I’m pretty sure that if one could push a button that would convert the non-Islamic population of Africa to Christianity instantly one would see an improvement in the measurable standard of living. Doing the same for the Muslim population might or might not (one would have to weight its effect on the spread of AIDS vs. the gain women would enjoy).
Also I think I need to point out that:
African tribal religion > Christianity > Atheism
African tribal religion > African tribal religion > Atheism
Will probably produce different societies, not to mention values. In many respects Western “humanism” is deeply infected with “Christian” memes, it partially serves as a refuge for atheists to shepperd the ones they liked from Christianity into it.
For me, the most obvious candidate for X is literacy and mathematics education, so that’s what I was thinking about. However, you’re right that religion fits CJ’s pattern a lot better.
The important difference may be that religion is usually proposed as a method of increasing a society’s morality, rather than its level of comfort or wealth. Perhaps that’s what makes it more apt to be seen as imperialist: Compared to metrics for safety or prosperity, morality metrics are easier to see as a relativistic thing that societies ought to define internally. The resistance against IQ as a metric to focus on internationally may be similarly explained.
Okay, I was three when I got an IQ test, so I can’t give a detailed account, but I clearly remember thinking at the time that the test mostly measured my parents’ ability and willingness to teach me math and reading.
I’m not sure how much I would trust a 3 year old’s understanding of psychometrics and population dynamics.
A child’s IQ test at very early ages like 3 is a very poor indicator of later life performance on IQ tests and has even poorer predictive power (once controlled for parents) for other things IQ is generally good at predicting. The correlation is just around 0.4 or perhaps 0.5. Some kids develop faster than others, peaking early, some are prodigys and mediocre adults, others get hit on the head.
I’m not really sure why anyone would give their 3 year old an IQ test.
Bragging rights?
Let alone an adult’s recollections of when he was 3… I barely remember anything about when I was that young, and as for those few memories I have, I’m not 100% sure they are genuine (as opposed to me having reconstructed them from stories my parents told me/videos and photos they showed me/etc.).
A persistent problem with investigating childhood amnesia.
Back then I thought prodigies were so rare that this was an acceptable heuristic, and if I needed to prove my competence to an adult I could just talk to them for five minutes. Then I read about signalling.
I find this interesting-seeming but confusing. Could you elaborate?
You thought it was acceptable to not trust the young, but that if you talked to the old you could get them to trust you?
How does signaling enter in?
Trust their competence in a given domain, yeah. To take a non-IQ-related field, I would have said “It’s fair to assume a six-year-old, or even an adult, doesn’t understand much about economics and therefore their opinion of it is worthless. Most don’t. And that’s okay, because if I need to prove I can explain it, I’ll just do. And then they’ll trust my understanding of it and listen to the opinions I base on it.”.
And that’s true to an extent. But an adult can pick up so much cheap credit condescending to children that they just don’t start trusting them. If a kid demonstrates their understanding of economics to an adult, the adult will praise the child, but not even think that the child’s opinions on economic policy (as opposed to, say, a pundit’s) should carry any weight.
Among other things it can make the old not trust the young even after they have been given sufficient evidence of their expertise.
Do you expect to see those sorts of objections here? What do you seek to accomplish with your sarcasm?
No. But I’m disappointed people are so naive to actually suggest that testing for IQ directly may be more politically doable than just rigging the country and education quotas to get the same effect.
Same as any person who uses sarcasm.
But to be a bit less confrontational, I’m just bloody tired of the whole debate. And I’m tired with the whole magical thinking that surrounds squishy social knock off effects that certain truths may or may not have. Having to constantly reiterate the basic arguments and taking people by the hand and leading them over the data and literature, only for people to eventually quiet down perhaps mumbling something about how its probably true but we can’t ever talk about it because it will make things so much worse… And this is the very best case scenario! Even on pretty reasonable sites with high standards lots of people instantly go into arguments as soldiers mode.
The debate literally has nothing new of interest to offer, since I’ve visited all the branches of that conversation and LW rarely searches more than two or three levels into that space. I keep having to explain the same elementary principles over and over and over again (LW is better in this regard but only by degree or two, I mean heck you still get people trying to claim intelligence dosen’t matter for socio-economic outcomes or confusing the remaining “nurture” as in non-heritable factors with something that is automatically fixable by some social policy, instead of a confusing sea of many different crazy random stuff like what you get in nearly every biological system in animals that we have even less idea how to influence without nasty side effects than splicing its genes).
Rereading the original reply I made, sure perhaps its a bit harsh and maybe I should have just been quiet, so perhaps my emotions got the best of me. Usually I try to invest some effort into the replies I give on this site. Today I just went with the accurate, fun and perhaps a somewhat bitter thing to write.
I suspect they were discussing desirability, not feasibility. If we, say, limited Indian migration to the US to just Gujaratis, we wouldn’t get as good results as if we limited Indian migrants to the US to just those above IQ 120, even if Gujaratis are disproportionately represented among high IQ Indians.
I understand and sympathize.
On the matter of desirability I tend to agree.
It seems our differences of opinion, where they exist, are differences of emphasis distribution over facts and arguments rather than any substantial logical contradictions. Not sure if this conclusion sounds optimistic.
This can get kind of interesting if what is assumed to be true affects what is actually true.
Why was this voted down? It’s a good point.
Because many people are sceptical of stereotype threat.
If all of science agreed that members of one race really were slighty smarter on average than members of another race, that could be extremely demoralizing for the people of the slightly-dumber race. See stereotype threat. This seems like a high price to pay to eliminate a popular falsehood—I imagine their are other falsehoods that would be easier to eliminate for a smaller price. And unlike religion, there’s no long-term benefit associated with its removal.
It’s mentioned below to some extent, but if you start with the assumption that there’s no systematic variation between groups, then if you see a statistical difference in how groups are treated, that’s evidence of a systematic bias. If it turns out that there is systematic variation between groups, the data can be explained without the bias. It’s the difference between “Harvard is racist” and “Harvard accepts bright people regardless of race”.
Harvard has two responses to these claims: they can continue getting called racist, or they can unfairly admit minorities who don’t deserve to get in. Both of these alternatives are preferable to telling a large group with normal human psychology that they are inferior.
Edit: I tend to think it’s OK for Harvard to admit too many minorities because I think having the upper class be made up of people from a variety of backgrounds is valuable. But I could see how this could be a problem in other domains, such as cousin_it’s mortgage example.
You do realize the top universities (and especially the Ivy Leagues) systematically discriminate against Asian students right?
Its really hard to fight or talk about something like that if one can’t just point out that East Asians have higher average IQs than say Europeans.
Maybe. Maybe not.
The first step in solving a problem is to recognise it. If I discovered I have cancer I would be demoralised immensely but I’d prefer that and take a shot at recovering rather than die unknowingly.
Denial is not a path to improvement.
Strongly seconded. I speak from experience: when evidence starts mounting for some horrible, nightmarish proposition that you’re scared of, it is tempting to tell yourself that even if it were true, it wouldn’t really matter, that there would be no benefit to acknowledging it, that you can just go on acting as you’ve always done, as if nothing’s changed. But on your honor as an aspiring rationalist, you must face the pain directly. When you get a hint that this world is not what you thought it was, that you are not what you thought you were—look! And update!---no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much your heart may cry for the memory of the world you thought this was. Do it selfishly, in the name of the world you thought you knew: because once you have updated, once you see this hellish wasteland for what it really is, then you can start to try to patch what few things up that you can.
Suppose you really don’t like gender roles, and you’re quietly worried about something you read about evolutionary psychology. Brushing it all under the rug won’t help. Investigate, learn all you can, and then do something. Maybe something drastic, maybe something trivial, but something. Experiment with hormones! Donate a twenty to GenderPAC! Use your initials in your byline! But something, anything other than defaulting to ignorance and letting things take their natural course.
As soon as you start talking about your “honor as an aspiring rationalist”, you’re moving from the realm of rationality to ideology.
Like I said, I don’t think this question matters and I’m mostly indifferent to what the answer actually is. I’m just trying to protect the people who do care.
Well, sure, but the ideological stance is “You should care about rationality.” I should think that that’s one of the most general and least objectionable ideologies there is.
But I do care, and I no longer want to be protected from the actual answer. When I say that I speak from experience, it’s really true. There’s a reason that this issue has me banging out dramatic, gushy, italics-laden paragraphs on the terrible but necessary and righteous burden of relinquishing your cherished beliefs—unlike in the case of, say, theism, in which I’m more inclined to just say, “Yeah, so there’s no God; get over it”—although I should probably be more sympathetic.
So, why does it matter? Why can’t we just treat the issue with benign neglect, think of ourselves as strictly as individuals, and treat other people strictly as individuals? It is such a beautiful ideal—that my works and words should be taken to reflect only on myself alone, and that the words and works of other people born to a similar form should not be taken to reflect on me. It’s a beautiful ideal, and it seems like it should be possible to swear our loyalty to the general spirit of this ideal, while still recognizing that---
In this world, it’s not that simple. In a state of incomplete information (and it is not all clear to me what it would even mean to have complete information), you have to make probabilistic inferences based on what evidence you do have, and to the extent that there are systematic patterns of cognitive sex and race differences, people are going to update their opinions of others based on sex and race. You can profess that you’re not interested in these questions, that you don’t know—but just the same, when you see someone acting against type, you’re probably going to notice this as unusual, even if you don’t explicitly mention it to yourself.
There are those who argue—as I used to argue—that this business about incomplete information, while technically true, is irrelevant for practical purposes, that it’s easy to acquire specific about an individual, which screens off any prior information based on sex and race. And of course it’s true, and a good point, and an important point to bear in mind, especially for someone who comes to this issue with antiegalitarian biases, rather than the egalitarian biases that I did. But for someone with initial egalitarian biases, it’s important not to use it—as I think I used to use it—as some kind of point scored for the individualist/egalitarian side. Complex empirical questions do not have sides. And to the extent that this is not an empirical issue; to the extent that it’s about morality—then there are no points to score.
It gets worse—you don’t even have anywhere near complete information about yourself. People form egregiously false beliefs about themselves all the time. If you’re not ridiculously careful, it’s easy to spend your entire life believing that you have an immortal soul, or free will, or that the fate of the light cone depends solely on you and your genius AI project. So information about human nature in general can be useful even on a personal level: it can give you information about yourself that you would never have gotten from mere introspection and naive observation. I know from my readings that if I’m male, I’m more likely to have a heart attack and less likely to get breast cancer than would be the case if I were female, whereas this would not at all be obvious if I didn’t read. Why should this be true of physiology, but not psychology? If it turns out that women and men have different brain designs, and I don’t have particularly strong evidence that I’m a extreme genetic or developmental anomaly, then I should update my beliefs about myself based on this information, even if it isn’t at all obvious from the inside, and even though the fact may offend me and make me want to cry. For someone with a lot of scientific literacy but not as much rationality skill, the inside view is seductive. It’s tempting to cry out, “Sure, maybe ordinary men are such-and-this, and normal women are such-and-that, but not me; I’m different, I’m special, I’m an exception; I’m a gloriously androgynous creature of pure information!” But if you actually want to achieve your ideal (like becoming a gloriously androgynous creature of pure information), rather than just having a human’s delusion of it, you need to form accurate beliefs about just how far this world is from the ideal, because only true knowledge can help you actively shape reality.
It could very well be that information about human differences could have all sorts of terrible effects if widely or selectively disseminated. Who knows what the masses will do? I must confess that I am often tempted to say that I have no interest in such political questions—that I don’t know, that it doesn’t matter to me. This attitude probably is not satisfactory for the same sorts of reasons I’ve listed above. (How does the line go? “You might not care about politics, but politics cares about you”?) But for now, on a collective or political or institutional level, I really don’t know: maybe ignorance is bliss. But for the individual aspiring rationalist, the correct course of action is unambiguous: it’s better to know, than to not know, it’s better to make decisions explicitly and with reason, then to let your subconscious decide for you and for things to take their natural course.
I think people may be overapplying the concept of “screening off”, though?
If for example RACE → INTELLIGENCE → TEST SCORE, then knowing someone’s test score does not screen off race for the purpose of predicting intelligence (unless I’m very confused). Knowing test score should still make knowing race less useful, but not because of screening off.
On the other hand, if for example GENDER → PERSONALITY TRAITS → RATIONALIST TENDENCIES, then knowing someone’s personality traits does screen off gender for the purpose of predicting rationalist tendencies.
I agree with the overall thrust of this, but I do have some specific reservations:
The temptation is real, and it’s a temptation we should be wary of. But it’s also important to realize that the more variation there is within the groups, the more reasonable it may be to suppose that we are special (of course, we should still have some evidence for this, but the point is that the more within-group variation there is, the weaker that evidence needs to be). It’s difficult to know what to do with information about average differences between groups unless one also knows something about within-group variation.
Again, I’m very sympathetic to this view, but I think you’re overselling the case. If (correctly) believing your group performs poorly causes you to perform worse then there’s a tradeoff between that and the benefits of accurate knowledge. Maybe accurate knowledge is still best, all things considered, but that’s not obvious to me.
Beyond the context of this specific debate, the theory of the second-best shows that incremental movements in the direction of perfect rationality will not always improve decision-making. And there’s a lot of evidence that “subconscious” decision-making outperforms more explicit reasoning in some situations. Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, and pretty much all of Gerd Gigerenzer’s books make this argument (in addition to the more anecdotal account in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink). I tend to think they oversell the case for intuition somewhat, but it’s still pretty clear that blanket claims about the superiority of more information and conscious deliberation are false. The really important question is how we can best make use of the strengths of different decision-strategies.
Might be just mind projection on my part, but it seems to me that in those accursed cases, where various aspects of an “egalitarian” way of thought—that includes both values, moral intuitions, ethical rules, actual beliefs about the world and beliefs about one’s beliefs—all get conflated, and the entire (silly for an AI but identity-forming for lots of current humans) system perceives some statement of fact as a challenge to its entire existence… well, the LW crowd at least would pride themselves on not being personally offended.
If tomorrow it was revealed with high certainty that us Slavs are genetically predisposed against some habits that happen to be crucial for civilized living and running a state nicely, I’d most definitely try to take it in stride. But when something like this stuff is said, I tend to feel sick and uncertain; I don’t see a purely consequentialist way out which would leave me ethically unscathed.
Ah, if only it was so easy as identifying the objective state of the world, than trying to act in accordance with (what you’ve settled on as) your terminal values. But this would require both* more rationality and more compartmentalization than I’ve seen in humans so far.
“You come to amidst the wreckage of your own making. Do you stay there, eyes squeezed shut, afraid to move, hoping to bleed to death? Or do you crawl out, help your loved ones, make sure the fire doesn’t spread, try to fix it?”—Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
One day, I started looking at the people around me, and I began to realize how much they looked like apes. I quickly stopped doing this, because I feared it would cause me to treat them with contempt. And you know what? Doublethink worked. I didn’t start treating people with more contempt as a result of purposely avoiding certain knowledge that I knew would cause me to treat people with more contempt.
If you think that my efforts to suppress observations relating the appearance of humans with the appearance of apes were poorly founded, then you have a very instrumentally irrational tendency towards epistemic rationality.
Maybe the lesson to draw is that you don’t respect apes enough?
Guilty as charged! I don’t want to win by means of doublethink—it sounds like the sort of thing an ape would do. A gloriously androgynous creature of pure information wins cleanly or not at all. (I think I’m joking somewhat, but my probability distribution on to what extent is very wide.)
At some point you will have limited resources, and you will need to decide how much that preference for winning cleanly is worth. How much risk you’re willing to take of not winning at all, in exchange for whatever victory you might still get being a clean one.
For example, say there are two people you love dangling off a cliff. You could grab one of them and pull them to safety immediately, but in doing so there’s some chance you could destabilize the loose rocks and cause the other to fall to certain death.
The gloriously androgynous creature of pure information (henceforth GACoPI) that you wish you were cannot prioritize one love over the other in a timely fashion, and will simply babble ineffectual encouragement to both until professional rescuers arrive, during which time there is some chance that somebody’s arms will get tired or the cliff will shift due to other factors, killing them both. An ape’s understanding of factional politics, on the other hand, has no particular difficulty judging one potential ally or mate as more valuable, and then rigging up a quick coin-flip or something to save face.
The grandparent uses “winning cleanly” to mean winning without resorting to doublethink. To go from that to assuming that a GACoPI is unable to enact your proposed ape solution or come up with some other courses of action than standing around like an idiot smacks of Straw Vulcanism (WARNING: TVTropes).
Wouldn’t your efforts be better directed at clearing up whatever confusion leads you to react with contempt to the similarity to apes?
I can maybe see myself selling out epistemic rationality for an instrumental advantage in some extreme circumstance, but I find abhorrent the idea of selling it so cheaply. It seems to me a rationalist should value their ability to see reality higher, not give it up at the first sign of inconvenience.
Even on instrumental grounds. Just like theoretical mathematics tends to end up having initially unforeseen practical application, giving up on epistemic rationality carries potential of unforeseen instrumental disadvantage.
Good point.
An approach using both instrumental and epistemic rationality would be to research chimps and bonobos and find all the good qualities of them that we share. The problem here is your association “apes = contempt,” and trying to suppress that we are apes isn’t going to fix that problem.
Do you have evidence that the direct good effects of your doublethink outweighed the indirect bad effects?
I agree with the overall thrust of this, but I do have some specific reservations:
The temptation is real, and it’s a temptation we should be wary of. But it’s also important to realize that the more variation there is within the groups, the more reasonable it may be to suppose that we are special (of course, we should still have some evidence for this, but the point is that the more within-group variation there is, the weaker that evidence needs to be). It’s difficult to know what to do with information about average differences between groups unless one also knows something about within-group variation.
Again, I’m very sympathetic to this view, but I think you’re overselling the case. If (correctly) believing your group performs poorly causes you to perform worse, then there’s a tradeoff between that and the benefits of accurate knowledge. Maybe accurate knowledge is still best, all things considered, but that’s not obvious to me.
Beyond the context of this specific debate, the theory of the second-best shows that incremental movements in the direction of perfect rationality will not always improve decision-making. And there’s a lot of evidence that “subconscious” decision-making outperforms more explicit reasoning in some situations. Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, and pretty much all of Gerd Gigerenzer’s books make this argument (in addition to the more anecdotal account in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink). I tend to think they oversell the case for intuition somewhat, but it’s still pretty clear that blanket claims about the superiority of more information and conscious deliberation are false. The really important question is how we can best make use of the strengths of different decision-strategies.
I agree with the overall thrust of this, but I do have some specific reservations:
The temptation is real, and it’s a temptation we should be wary of. But it’s also important to realize that the more variation there is within the groups, the more reasonable it may be to suppose that we are special. It’s difficult to know what to do with information about average differences between groups unless one also knows about within group variation. (The only case
Again, I’m very sympathetic to this view, but I think you’re overselling the case. If (correctly) believing your group performs poorly causes you to perform worse, then there’s a tradeoff between that and the benefits of accurate knowledge. Maybe accurate knowledge is still best, all things considered, but that’s not obvious to me.
Beyond the context of this specific debate, the theory of the second-best shows that incremental movements in the direction of perfect rationality will not always improve decision-making. And there’s a lot of evidence that “subconscious” decision-making outperforms more explicit reasoning in some situations. Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, and pretty much all of Gerd Gigerenzer’s books make this argument (in addition to the more anecdotal account in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink). I tend to think they oversell the case for intuition somewhat, but it’s still pretty clear that blanket claims about the superiority of more information and conscious deliberation are false. The really important question is how we can best make use of the strengths of different decision-strategies.
I agree that denial usually seems like a bad idea, but the problem with things like stereotype threat is that they suggest (and more importantly provide evidence) that sometimes it might actually be useful (a path to improvement, even if not necessarily the first-best path).
The trick, presumably, is to distinguish the situations when this will hold from those when it doesn’t.
Yes, but there is a long-term benefit associated with the removal of your cancer. On the other hand, if you had a blemish on your shoulder, you’d be better off not noticing it.
Science makes a lot of vastly more demoralizing conclusions like Darwinism or the possibility of nuclear weapons. If you really believe what you say you believe, you should focus on debunking those first.
But Darwinism and the possibility of nuclear weapons are important to know about.
Let’s say that there is systematic variation between races. What’s the benefit of knowledge about this being disseminated? So colleges will stop giving preferential treatment to minorities? If that’s the case, I think the costs outweigh the benefits.
For one, a lot of people would find their accurate reasoning no longer denounced as racist by others. Example: before the crisis SWPL popular opinion blamed bankers for discriminatory mortgage lending to blacks. Government went in and fixed this by fiat. Today the same crowd turns around and blames bankers for disproportionate foreclosures among blacks, not realizing the implicit admission that outlawed lending practices must’ve been fair.
In short, you didn’t succeed in impressing upon me the costs of truth.
Yes, alright, I see how incorrect egalitarian views could be a problem in scenarios unrelated to college admissions.
Short answer: couldn’t care less. Accepting the truth is everybody’s problem, not just mine to decide.
Long answer: you seem to assume my utility function includes a term for actions and worldviews of distant others. In fact I deny all responsibility for any actions and thoughts of people other than myself, except what’s implicit in the following pledge: I will never manipulate anyone with falsehoods or emotional extortion. Other than that, I go about my own business (including making true pronouncements in my personal vicinity, not in the least intended to “spread the word”) and the world can screw itself—I’m not its caretaker.
Sorry, I edited my comment a bunch of times, and I’m unsure which version you’re replying to.
In any case, if that’s really your view, I’m not sure I like you very much.
But the outlawed lending practices weren’t fair. My next door neighbor took forever to get a business loan even though he was an excellent risk. The new system was also broken, but the old one wasn’t good.
Edited to Add: To be more specific, his white wife handled the application and it was all smooth sailing until he walked in to sign the bottom line, and then the offer was unceremoniously retracted with no explanation.
Incidentally, when these lending rules came into effect and he did get a loan, his business boomed and he paid it off without incident. So...
“You say X on average, but a friend of mine did ~X, so you must be wrong!”
It was often enough that it got to be a nationally known problem that needed a solution, right? That the solution was terrible doesn’t change that.
If the solution didn’t work, maybe one should consider the possibility that whatever problem there was, it wasn’t what one thought it was.
The solution DID work. It just came with a bunch of other problems. Unforeseen consequences do not negate the original problem.
Actually, they sorta do. (“The operation was a complete success! Unfortunately, the patient died.”)
It is possible to construct examples where they are connected like that.
The topic at hand is not one of them.
I disagree. The claim is that they were discriminated against unfairly and this can be proven by your anecdote that someone didn’t fail to repay a loan. Yet in aggregate, there was a lot of non-repayment going on.
The question is much less about whether he actually did repay the loan. It’s about the decision process.
Everything looked great until they realized they were about to lend to a black man.
That is fucked up. And it doesn’t happen in isolation.
Whether he actually managed to pay the loan off or not is almost aside from the point, though his success is indeed frosting (from the argument’s PoV—obviously rather more important to us personally).
No, it’s not. It’s useful information. What you’re emoting about is like saying
Whatever rates they estimated as just barely covering the risk of nonpayment and allowing them to eke out a profit based on their estimate from his personal wealth and existing track record is not the rate they would have estimated after learning additional stuff. Being black is some of that additional stuff.
I think we should both slow down. I’ve slipped up, and you’re slipping up. You’re saying I’m emoting and then tripping up in two dramatic ways that you really should have caught.
A) Going bankrupt would be part of that existing track record.
B) He could have dealt with a slightly higher rate. He wasn’t offered a slightly higher rate. He wasn’t offered any rate at all.
Okay. Taking some more time to think.
Being black may provide some information, but it is almost entirely screened by the information from the admissible parts of the track record. The banks were screwing up this calculation, and in doing so were not only hurting themselves but causing extreme damage to the world around them.
Adding a bunch of unbiased actors with relevant expertise, guts, and enormous amounts of capital would have solved the problem, but so would unicorns, and we had just as many of those. Regulation brought problems, but they were different problems.
And why can’t being part of a minority group be part of a track record? In both cases, the party thinking of giving the loan has learned new and material information.
So? If they had offered a loan at 100% interest, people would be bitching anyway about discrimination. Maybe it is a calculated PR move that people will complain less about not getting a loan than about getting a loan at +2% interest; maybe it has to do with the fixed overhead of servicing loans; maybe they only had so much appetite for risk even if the interest rate were raised to make the loan +EV again; maybe this is an unexpected consequence of the millions of words of regulation governing banks.
I doubt that and I suspect you have no good reason to believe that.
Maybe for people with a really thin track record. Not for people who’ve run a profitable business for a decade, have a solid business case, etc.. Just what independent information does being black provide, here? (No need to respond to this point here—you can put it in response to TheOtherDave’s parallel comment)
Now, I freely grant that if you only look at the bankers’ side of things, regulation doesn’t make sense. They should be perfectly informed and make the ideal decisions as to who will succeed or not! And if they can’t make perfect use of that information, that’s their problem!
But of course, it’s not only their problem, and the purpose of the law is not solely to help the bankers get money.
A ‘being black’ penalty even of only 2% on loans would be colossal. Think how much debt a growing business has to incur, and compound that over the years. Apply it to choices of housing, of auto financing. Everyone in the community has less money, so they can’t buy as much, so businesses have a harder time growing, so people earn less. It’s self-perpetuating.
But it wasn’t that mild. Instead, the loans were simply turned down. The near-total absence of capital was crippling.
Do you think this is a problem? What might you do about it?
In the scales of values, where does “equal opportunity” rank up against “allowing each individual to make the best choices available to them personally without regard to the impact that choice has on what choices other individuals get”?
(Responded.)
To repeat myself:
Moving on:
So, are you arguing that the ‘being black’ penalty is not accurate here? That the 2% penalty is compensating for risk that does not exist? If so then that’s quite an opportunity: a free 2% price cut. Especially in the current low-interest rate environment, that’s a lot of money being left on the table.
Or are you arguing that the penalty is accurate and anyone who tried to offer at non-penalty rates would lose their shirts as tons of loans defaulted?
I thought you were arguing against the latter, before… If you’ve changed your mind, it’d be good to say so clearly and explicitly before going on.
You persist in only looking at the effect on the banker. As I said, the regulation won’t make much if any sense from that point of view alone. Your pointing this out once more doesn’t really change anything.
That said, considering that the regulated banks had a low default rate until everything went screwy because of the (non-regulated) predatory lenders, I think I’ll stick with the theory that there was a market inefficiency.
Now, it wasn’t a simple barrier-free market inefficiency. If only one bank had moved, it could well have lost its shirt. Being the sole investor in a dead area is rough. It’s a bit like a many-player game with ‘staying out’ having a positive payoff from being able to invest elsewhere, and ‘going in’ having a payoff that starts out negative with no other cooperators, increases with cooperators for a while, peaks above ‘staying out’, then declines down to the ‘staying out’ level once the market is fully competitive (then below if it becomes saturated). When no one is there, you’d be crazy to move first.
Changing the rules so the banks had to serve their localities guaranteed a minimum level of going in, which made it no longer a bad move to go in.
Just so I understand that last part… are you claiming:
1) …there is no factor or set of factors X such that X screens off skin color for purposes of calculating loan EV,
2) …there may be such an X, but we don’t know what it is and/or have no way of measuring it,
3) …we know what X is, but the admissible parts of the track record don’t include it,
...or something else?
#1 seems really unlikely to me, so if you think it likely I’m interested in your reasons.
#2 seems plausible.
#3 also seems plausible, but if true, suggests that talking about the admissability of skin color is a herring of unspecified hue; as a bank, I should be trying to get X admitted instead.
I am claiming that you have jumped to the conclusion that claims 1-n must all be false and hence the cancellation is a Bad thing. For my purpose, any of 1-3 can be correct, and I don’t need to argue for any specific one especially if you already find plausible any of them.
If you want to overrule the bank’s reaction, you need a lot of local domain-specific knowledge, and that’s something neither you nor I have.
Here’s an example of the sort of obscure knowledge you might need: are you familiar with the term “minority fronts”? This is when a government or other entity attempts a form of affirmative action in which minority-owned businesses or organizations get financially favored for grants or bidding on contracts; yet of course there aren’t very many competent minority-owned businesses (that’s why they’re doing it in the first place), so this immediately leads to fraud in which a person meeting the minority criteria is put in place as the straw owner of a company actually run by other people of other groups and then the business bids on business as a minority-owned business, frequently simply passing on the work and money to a normal business minus the straw owner’s share. Naturally, this is largely meaningless for a white-owned business as whites are not considered a minority. Now, remembering that the ‘owner’ in such cases has stooped to conspiracy and felony fraud to steal possibly millions, do you think that their shell business is a better or worse credit risk than an equivalent white owner matched on other observables like income?
Personally, I’d say worse. This is just a cute example of why race can be a salient factor in loans and why a white owner might be different from a black owner; I bring it up to stand for the larger class of relevant details and possibilities, not being a banker or economist or risk specialist. So before you can say that the ‘discrimination’ is purely irrational and unjustifiable, you need to know about all these details. Do you? I don’t think you do.
EDIT: Ran into an international example of the abuse of affirmative action in The Economist:
OK.
If that’s true, I haven’t noticed.
If you feel like summarizing the evidence for believing I’ve reached that conclusion, though, I’ll certainly listen.
I certainly agree that overruling the bank’s decision about loans without knowing about as much about loans as the bank does is going to have unexpected consequences, so unless the bank is currently pessimizing for my values I’m probably going to be less happy with the result than I am now.
And I certainly agree that I don’t know about all the details that go into making decisions about loans.
The solution actually wasn’t THAT bad- the community banks actually regulated by the community reinvestment act had/have lower rates of foreclosure then the national average, and lower rates of foreclosure on their loans to minorities.
Edit: this is because they are generally required to keep more skin-in-the-game, not BECAUSE they were regulated by the CRA (most fall under various patches of the regulations put in place after the S&L crisis). My point being, community banks were able to responsibly lend to a diverse population, and certainly the CRA wasn’t causal in the foreclosure crisis.
That doesn’t necessarily address my point: if there were unjust discrimination, discrimination which was not a rational reaction to the credit risk, then saying “well, they didn’t cause as many losses as some aggregate measure of loss during the greatest period of property-related losses in the history of America” isn’t proving that. To prove that, you need to show something like that the loans turned out to have been made profitably on net in the long-term after adjusting for risk and opportunity cost etc.
I’m not sure thats true, I think what you would want to show is that the loans ‘forced’ on the community banks are at-least-as-profitable as the loans the banks voluntarily took on. Given the bizarre financial period we just lived through, the losses on loans is going to be markedly higher across all institutions.
Maybe the next decade of CRA type lending won’t be contaminated by massive changes in the financial sector and a large crash- in which case maybe the questions of discrimination will become easier to untangle. For the last decade, the housing market underwent major changes, and the community banks were such a negligible sliver of the overall market that the CRAs effects are on community banks are higher order corrections to higher order corrections.
No, because you’re comparing apples and oranges. If the banks were forced to take on loans to the groups in question due to political pressure despite having been previously correct in demanding higher interest to compensate them for the loans, and also simultaneously engaged in an epic miscalculation about the safety of loans to other groups based on naive models, then you could produce this inversion. They made a mistake, and then made an even larger mistake; this doesn’t make the original mistake not a mistake.
Only if the loans were in different asset classes. Because these are all housing loans, the underlying model of the housing market is an input to both group’s loans, with minority status as an additional adjustment.
Anyway, I don’t think looking at CRA and pre-CRA loans to minorities you can answer discrimination questions with any kind of precision. The data seems to lean in the direction of former discrimination, but massive structural changes to finance dwarf the tiny changes created by the CRA.
If it really, truly didn’t matter to us, then it wouldn’t be a sensitive subject in the first place. When someone makes a wildly inaccurate estimate of the price of tea in China, no one gets outraged or asserts in boldface that the price of tea in China really doesn’t matter.
People care a lot about the private lives of celebrities, but that doesn’t mean the private lives of celebrities matter. The reason people care about systematic racial differences (and systematic gender differences) is because they’re concerned about whether they measure up, or they’re wondering whether their group is doing better than some other group, or something frivolous like that. The solution to the problem is not to find the answer. Folks have already tried that, and there’s no consensus. The solution is to get people to stop caring so much.
In a reductionist universe, nothing can be said to matter except with respect to someone who cares about it. Why are you reading a frivolous site like this, when you could be catching up on the latest news about Brooke Shields’s mother? Why are the people reading about Brooke Shields’s mother doing that, when they could be sorting pebbles into correct heaps?
Something can be said to “matter” if caring about it is useful for reasons other than it being intrinsically interesting.
You really can’t think of any application, for good or ill, for information about systematic variation in human psychological traits? When you’re looking for a husband, it seems like it would be awfully useful to know what men are like. When you see racial gaps on the MCAT, if seems like it would be awfully useful to know if your test is simply biased (in which case you would want to immediately try to fix it) or if there’s actually a true difference in ability (for whatever reason).
Good points. But I still maintain that those aren’t the main reasons why people care about these issues. If we could remove the main reasons, that would be good.
That’s Frank’s position, right?
Not sure; I have not watched the bloggingheads debate.
Me, neither. I’m just guessing based on, say, this post.
What I meant is that is that religion is a controversial question that doesn’t matter, either. As Daniel Burfoot said, religion has been banished to a separate magisterium in which it barely gets to talk about the world, while political correctness is largely focused on talking about the world. This says nothing about the absolute importance of dealing with either.
Elsewhere on the thread, you say that the costs outweigh the benefits, which is a very different claim than saying it doesn’t matter. If the costs and benefits are small, then everyone should agree it doesn’t matter, but if the costs and benefits are large, you should expect disagreement over whether it’s worth it.
I personally don’t believe it matters, but my cost-benefits analysis panders to those who do. And I disagree that religion doesn’t matter. Sam Harris’ argument: