[SEQ RERUN] Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?

I'm not sure the conventional kind of basilisk qualifies as knowledge, as such: Langford's original story was about an image that crashes onlookers' brains through a defect in image processing, not through anything to do with verbal or logical parsing. Most other treatments of the concept have done the same, more or less, although there are some ambiguous ones (like the "Funniest Joke in the World" Python sketch).

There are various presentations of knowledge which clearly aren't mind-safe (and presentation and context usually matter more than the content), but their danger generally comes in the form of bias and related issues like priming effects, which of course is rather well-traveled ground on this site. I think we can explain the effects of bringing up racial IQ differences and other politically sensitive ideas perfectly well within that framework, without having to invoke any more fundamental problems; in fact, we do.

The "basilisk" is of a very different character btw. It's more of a game theoretic issue, sort of like how if you can't understand the language the blackmailer is using to try to communicate you can't be blackmailed.

I've noticed that even on Lesswrong, there is such a thing as knowledge that it is deemed better not to know. Apparently this is referred to as the basilisk's gaze (I've yet to manage to read anything deemed dangerous here before it was deleted, so I could be wrong in the details of that).

Yes, I've yet to encounter a legitimate example but that's the name for the hypothetical concept. ;)

What the opponents of acknowledging racial differences are worried about is that the employer will also take the step of saying "This particular black applicant scored exceptionally well on the examination, but since I know that blacks in the aggregate have lower IQs, I'm going to treat my prior and the examination as separate bits of knowledge and scale my assessment of the candidate's intelligence downward from what the exam alone would suggest." As opposed to having the prior be swamped by the examination.

Observe that in the recent crisis, blacks and hispanics had two or three times higher default rate, even when controlled for income and credit rating. So had bankers applied that policy, they would have been right. A protected minority candidate with the same apparent credit worthiness as a white candidate is far more likely to default.

La Griffe du Lion has claimed that the same is true in academic achievement - that blacks with the same IQ and GPA as whites have lower levels of achievement, though I do not recall what evidence he presented for this claim.

Herrnstein and Murray on the other hand claimed that controlling for IQ, blacks had similar levels of accomplishment, though I seem to recall they were controlling for IQ and intact family

All three claims could be simultaneously true if we suppose that accomplishment reflects IQ and character, and that assessing an IQ indicator alone is not sufficient to swamp one's priors.

I think it's very hard for people to overcome their priors here even after getting contradictory evidence. Does being a Bayesian and thinking of them only as priors really work on all levels of your mind?

I would agree with your explanation.

Also, in the job example once you get to interview/test stage the observations should indeed clearly swamp out all priors based on what group the candidate belongs to. However earlier in the process (when sifting through thousands of similar resumes) could these priors still retain some importance?

Basically I would separate 2 types of discrimination:

• (1) I will not hire a person from group B because I don't like people from group B. Or I believe people from group B will almost certainly perform less well than people from group A.

• (2) I know the prior distribution of job performance for groups A and B (A is higher on average). After taking into account my obervations (looking at a resume) about 1 candidate from each group, the posterior distribution indicates that the candidate from group A is expected to perform better. So I hire A. Had I ignored the prior I would have hired B.

(1) is sub-optimal clearly unacceptable. (2) seems theoretically optimal and appears to be used for many groupings, like [went to a top university] vs. [medium university - same gpa/experience]

However (2) is completely unacceptable for other groupings (like race). Possible explanations:

• It has no impact anyway. For these groupings any differences in priors would be so tiny that they would immediately get overwhelmed by the slightest job application relevant info
• These are groupings for which people have absolutely no control. It is unfair that top group B people need to systematically overcome this prior.
• In practice no one will be able to apply this properly and everyone will end up amplifying priors and giving them way too much importance, so it is best to not go near it.

Same way that some people can talk about the statistical correlations between e.g. IQ and race, most other people nowadays have learned to correlate instead those people who so correlate these things with evil people who want to oppress other races.

And certainly that's actually the rational thing to do. If you hear someone seek to correlate races with IQ, you ought adjust upwards the probabilty of them wanting to oppress other races. Because there is a positive correlation between people who speak about lower intelligence of blacks and evil people who so want to oppress other races.

Is there any research on whether people can achieve evidence-based prejudice, or if (as I'm inclined to suspect) they overshoot and overestimate the effects of differences?

I can't even imagine what sort of hell would break loose in my Politics class if I were to profess a belief merely in the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence between races. Any logic would be ignored, immediately branded as justification for a bigoted agenda. Politics truly is the mindkiller.

That's a powerful one. Several of the Rationalist Bootcampers had similar reactions.

If I wanted to raise this possibility for discussion, I would likely leave "race" out of the discussion.

I'd probably start out by raising the possibility of measurable differences in intelligence among individuals; if that were successful I'd move on to the notion that there might be other shared differential characteristics among high-intelligence and low-intelligence communities; if that were successful I'd move on to the question of what those other characteristics might be... for example, age, or childhood nutritional regimens, or geographic region of birth, or various other things.

If, instead of doing that, somebody starts out by privileging a hypothesis that "race" correlates with intelligence for some particular definition of "race" and framing the conversation in those terms, I'd want to know what leads them to privilege that hypothesis before I was willing to invest much in that discussion, in much the same way that if someone starts out by privileging a hypothesis that the Old Testament God created the world in seven days I'd be inclined to reject their conversational framing.

Sure you can, just call them blondes or gingers, instead of that other explosive thing. You can reveal the truth at the end of the discussion.

It's bad to treat smart people like they're dumb.

This will happen anyway, in fact it will happen more often if relevant information is discarded. The difference is that the victims will no longer be correlated with race. Thus we are still left with the question of why adding race makes it worse.

Edit: Another way to express what I'm trying to say is that your argument, if it works, shows we should avoid using any data that's correlated but not perfectly correlated with intelligence, e.g., test scores, grades, job performance, pretty much anything really.

I get the same feeling with the "not everybody should attend college" crowd, since it too often seems to consist of high status inviduals from elite schools vastly overstating their case. That is, signaling their status. (In fact, unless you're super interested in becoming a professor, you probably shouldn't attend college in the same way non-priests shouldn't have taken up seminary.)

I'm not confident I understand what you are saying.

If you want to be an engineer, or have any other career that requires technical education, going to college is generally a pretty good idea.

Individual IQ differences are, in general "not okay"

Which would seem to make the entire metric either worthless or 'bad'. :P

College is a good idea if you'll have more job opportunities and get paid more for having gone. In other words, before you can convince me that I don't need a college degree you'll need to convince a few million hiring managers in my field of the same thing. The fact that their opinion may be poorly supported by evidence doesn't change anything for me.

I'm not sure if someone has to be disabled for the ineffable plan to work or what, but they don't seem to focus that much on that part.

I have asked this to a Mormon friend and a guy married to a Mormon, and they said that the reason it is considered a blessing to be born with stuff like Down's Syndrome is that you are incapable of sinning, because sin requires knowledge of good and evil. So you basically have a free pass to the top levels of Heaven. So yes, to a Mormon, being born retarded is a great thing, while being born with dark skin is a terrible punishment.

pre-mortal life

Strange name to call it. One would think all life is essentially pre-mortal.

it's commonly believed that your conditions here are chosen based on how you acted in the pre-mortal life.

In some religions that was a past life on Earth. Having it be a pre-mortal life seems like an extravagance.

Downvoted: You seem rather confused in your thinking -- and you seem to be projecting some confusion to the rest of us as well. I don't think anyone here has confused the meanings of the sentence "Group A has lower average intelligence than Group B" and the sentence "All members of group A have lower intelligence than any member of Group B" -- that's a confusion which you spend the three first paragraphs needlessly disentangling for the rest of us.

As for your last two paragraph, you seem to be thinking that for Eliezer to mention one example of the universe's unfairness, means that he necessarily considers it the prime example of said unfairness. Hardly. It just came up, because another person mentioned differences in intelligence as a sign of an unjust God -- but they limited said thinking to only racial differences, not individual differences.