

Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help (2003) - gwern
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.138.3468&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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TTPrograms
The contradiction between the ultimate value of pure scientific inquiry and
the detriment of results that could be construed to be racist is an issue I've
puzzled with some in the past. The conclusion I've come to is that it's part
of our social contract to never act on any such correlation - any result that
says that X person may behave like Y must be totally disregarded when
interacting with any individual (except for, say, medical use). This extends
beyond racism and sexism from disregarding institutionalized prejudices into
actively ignoring discovered information. It's a fine line, for sure.

~~~
Camillo
I think we should distinguish between the individual and the group.

When dealing with a specific individual, it is important to avoid short-
circuiting inferences based on some group membership. This does not require
any suppression of the truth: it is a fact that intra-group variance is higher
than inter-group variance, and a member of the group with the lower average
may surpass a member of the group with the higher average.

For example, let's say you have two candidates for a tech job, one black and
one Asian. If you were forced to pick one based on that fact alone, it may be
true that picking the Asian would be the better strategy, but it is clear that
choosing an employee based on race alone is completely asinine. Both fairness
and good business practices require that you evaluate both candidates on their
individual merits; at which point any prior probabilities based on race become
moot, since you now have specific individual information to decide on. And it
is entirely possible that the black candidate will turn out to be the better
pick.

However, it is wrong to try and transfer this to the collective level and
claim that the racial composition of your workforce should match that of the
general population. That would be the expected outcome if and only if it were
the case that aptitude for tech jobs is equally frequent amongst different
races. However, scientific evidence does not seem to support that assumption;
in fact, it seems to strongly support the opposite.

In that situation, it is not just that fairness at the individual level does
not lead to "fairness" at the collective level: the two objectives are
actually at odds. If aptitude is not equally distributed and you still want to
force the racial composition of your employees to match that of the general
population, the only way to do that is to pick some worse candidates over
better ones just because of their race. In order to be "fair" to groups, you
have to be unfair to actual people.

Which, by the way, is a very good reason why this research should _not_ be
suppressed. Making policy decisions based on falsehoods is bad enough, but
treating people unfairly because of falsehoods is even worse.

------
calibraxis
Wow: "Although intelligence tests are often cited as psychology’s biggest
success..."

~~~
gwern
They are from some perspectives. For example, the US Army has long been a
major funder of psychometric research because IQ scores are _so_ useful for
dealing with conscripts drawn from the entire population (not just a few elite
universities) that it saves them a fortune in training and accidents (lower-IQ
people are dangerous around weapons or equipment); hard to think of any
psychology research which might've been more useful to them than that.

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nhoven
I've seen several articles on intelligence/IQ/g hit the front page recently
(often followed by being flagged and removed). There have been two this
morning, plus others in past weeks. At the time of this comment, this post
only has 6 points, how are they consistently climbing the charts so quickly?

~~~
gwern
Are you sure they're being flagged? I think HN has been experimenting with
showing recent submissions more on the main page in order to remedy the
problem of /newest being a ghetto no one votes in.

~~~
nhoven
Good point, the one I saw a week or so ago was definitely flagged. These may
just be related to the algorithm change you mentioned, and I just noticed them
because the previous one made an impression.

