(As an aside, it's actually kind of _hilarious_ how far Yudkowsky's "rationalist" movement has succeeded at winning status and mindshare in a Society whose [_de facto_ state religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) is [founded on eliminating "discrimination."](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights) Did—did anyone besides me "get the joke"? I would have expected _Yudkowsky_ to get the joke, but I guess not??)
-Of course, as Keltham correctly points out, if you have more specific information about an individual that [screens off](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority) information from their demographic category, then you should use the more specific information: once you measure someone's height, the fact that men are taller than women on average with an effect size of 1.7 standard deviations is no longer relevant to the question of that person's height. In very many situations, if there's a cost associated with acquiring more specific individuating information that renders information from demographic group-membership irrelevant, you should pay that cost in order to get the more specific information and therefore make better decisions.
+Of course, as Keltham correctly points out, if you have more specific information about an individual that [screens off](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority) information from their demographic category, then you should use the more specific information: once you measure someone's height, the fact that men are taller than women on average with an effect size of about 1.5 standard deviations is no longer relevant to the question of that person's height. (As the saying goes out of dath ilan, [hug the query](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2jp98zdLo898qExrr/hug-the-query)!) In very many situations, if there's a cost associated with acquiring more specific individuating information that renders information from demographic group-membership irrelevant, you should pay that cost in order to get the more specific information and therefore make better decisions.
But crucially, getting individuating information is an [instrumental rather than a terminal value](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values); you should do it _when and because_ it improves your decisions, not because of some alleged principle that you're _not allowed to notice_ someone's race or sex. If there's a _cost_ associated with taking individual measurements, and the cost exceeds the amount you would save by making better decisions, then you shouldn't take the measurements. If your measurements have _error_, then your estimate of the true value of the trait being measured [regresses to the group mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) to some quantitative exent. Again, this just falls out of _ordinary_ Bayesian reasoning, which continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about groups of people.
But the relationship between "measured traits" and any actual decision you might care about _is also merely statistical_. The reason we have a concept of "Intelligence" is because it turns out that people's performances on various mental tasks happen to positively correlate with each other, but that's just _on average_: it could easily be the case that this particular Intelligence 18 person is less suited to a particular task than some Intelligence 14 person. _Mathematically_, it's the same issue.
-We don't typically _think_ of it as the same issue here in America on Earth. People do sometimes complain about inappropriate reliance on "individual trait" proxies: that holding a college degree isn't the same thing as being educated, that IQ is not intelligence, that job interviews aren't the same thing as job performance, but the objection doesn't pack the same moral force in our culture:
+We don't typically _think_ of it as the same issue here in America on Earth. People do sometimes complain about inappropriate reliance on faulty "individual trait" proxies: that [holding a college degree isn't the same thing as being educated](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/), that job interviews aren't the same thing as job performance, that IQ is not intelligence. But the objection doesn't pack the same moral force, as can be seen by how often complaints about "individual" proxies are _justified in terms of_ their effects on demographic groups, as when it is argued that ["whiteboard" coding tests are bad for diversity](https://shecancode.io/blog/its-time-to-end-whiteboard-interviews-for-software-engineers), or that [IQ is racist](https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing).
-oftentimes, the objection to
+The explanation for the difference in intuitions is as much political as it is moral. On account of being visible clusters in a ["thick" subspace of configuration space]((https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)) (having many different correlates, [even if the effect size along any one dimension may not be very large](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy)), race and sex are _salient_ as [markers for coordination](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/). Groupings made on the basis of less visible and lower-dimensional traits, like "People with Intelligence 14", don't form a natural "interest group" in the same way, even if the lower-dimensional trait is more decision-relevant in many contexts. Conflict between interest groups in a democratic Society like America creates memetic selection pressure for "equality" memes that deny the existence of non-superficial group differences, as [the natural Schelling point for preventing group conflicts](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts). It's an idea born of distrust in reasoning in an adversarial environment: if you let people _make probabilistic inferences_ using race or sex as inputs, they might motivatedly try to add _bad_ inferences to Society's shared maps that would give their own demographic an advantage in conflicts. It's safer to nip such Shenanigans in the bud by disallowing the whole line of thought: can't oppress people on the basis of race if race _doesn't exist!_
-[
+But Keltham isn't _from_ America; you'd expect his thoughts to optimized for _solving problems_, not disallowing Shenanigans. Everything we've been told about dath ilan emphasizes that they should be collectively smart enough not to fall into this _crazy_ trap of political incentives making a certain class of correct Bayesian updates socially taboo; the Keepers should have pre-emptively done the analysis in the preceding paragraph _without_ having to empirically see it eat their Society's sanity, and incorporated the appropriate counter-memes in their rationality training for children. To the dath ilani intuition, then, the quantitative extent to which the statement "It's wrong to make _X_ decision about someone just because they're _Y_" makes sense, depends quantitatively on how strongly _Y_ predicts the outcomes of _X_. Whether _Y_ is an "individual trait" like having Intelligence 18 or a demographic category like being female _does not matter_.
-[](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts)
+This is also how American people's intuitions work, too, in contexts where their social-justice antibodies haven't been activated. Consider how the text of _Planecrash_ itself repeatedly contrasts Keltham to everyone else in the world of Golarion. No one (neither Watsonianly in the text, nor Doylistically in various discussions of the text on Discord) is shy about saying that Keltham is special in this setting _because he's dath ilani_. We don't insist on talking about how Keltham is smart _and_ knows about probability theory _and_ knows about chemistry _and_ doesn't know Golarionian theology _and_ is accustomed to a high material standard of living _and_ is squeamish about seeing slave markets, as if these were separate, isolated facts about Keltham as an idiosyncratic individual. We do this _even though_ there are surely also natives of Golarion who are smart (to some quantitative extent) and know about chemistry (to some quantitative extent) and disapprove of slavery (to some quantitative extent), because our whole high-dimensional picture of what Keltham _is_—comprising many, many traits to their respective quantitative extents—is, in fact, [_causally downstream_ of the "essential" fact](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) of his having grown up in another world. It can't be bigoted to _notice_.
-
-]
-
-But if you take probability and expected utility seriously—and everything we've been told about dath ilan says that that's what their Civilization is _all about_—then the quantitative extent to which the statement "It's wrong to make _X_ decision about me just because I'm _Y_" makes sense, depends quantitatively on how strongly _Y_ predicts the outcomes of _X_. Whether _Y_ is an "individual trait" like having Intelligence 18 or a demographic category like being female _does not matter_.
-
-[TODO: we talk about Keltham being different "because" he's a dath ilani]
-
-As far as principles are concerned, anyway. But pragmatically, might it not be the case in practice, that statistical group differences are small enough, and that individual trait measurements are cheap and reliable enough, such that "don't discriminate by race or sex" is a useful _heuristic_?
+However, just because noticing group differences is theoretically sound, doesn't mean it's always the right thing to focus on. Pragmatically, might it not be the case in practice, that statistical group differences are small enough, and that individual trait measurements are cheap and reliable enough, such that "don't discriminate by race or sex" is a useful _heuristic_?
It's an empirical issue—but sure, very often, yes. For most jobs—especially most jobs in an industrialized Society like dath ilan—"always test the individual's aptitude, never use sex as a proxy" is a fine rule, because most jobs primarily rely on human general intelligence: there was no _dentistry_ in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and thus there's no reason why women or men should make better dentists. In domains where sex differences are small, using sex as a proxy would just be _dumb_, not _unjust_.
-But then it's _bizarre_ that Keltham persists in his no-legal-sex-discrimination stance when his interlocutor brings up _military conscription_ as a potential counterexample. Because, well, as unpleasant as it is for modern folk to think about ... there _was_ war in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Men's bodies are built for war. Men's _emotions_ are built for war. [(Males have more reproductive fitness to gain and less to lose by the prospect of risking death in a war where the victors gain mating opportunities.)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/EvolutionofWar.pdf) The sex difference in muscle mass is [_2.6 standard deviations_](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf). That means a woman as strong as the average man is at _the 99.5th percentile_ for women. That means if you just select everyone whose strength is greater than one standard deviation _below_ the male mean, you end up excluding 94.5% of women.
+But then it's _bizarre_ that Keltham persists in his no-legal-sex-discrimination stance when his interlocutor brings up _military conscription_ as a potential counterexample. Because, well, as unpleasant as it is for modern folk to think about ... there _was_ war in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Men's bodies are built for war. [Men's _emotions_ are built for war.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/) [(Males have more reproductive fitness to gain and less to lose by the prospect of risking death in a war where the victors gain mating opportunities.)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/EvolutionofWar.pdf) The sex difference in muscle mass is [_2.6 standard deviations_](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf). That means a woman as strong as the average man is at _the 99.5th percentile_ for women. That means if you just select everyone whose strength is greater than one standard deviation _below_ the male mean, you end up excluding _94.5%_ of women.
Notwithstanding that Keltham grew up in a peaceful Society that [screened off its history](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939) (such that he wouldn't have read histories of some analogue of Genghis Khan), it seems like Keltham should know this stuff? We're told that dath ilan [has very advanced evolutionary psychology](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140), and there's no apparent reason for them to have spent any of their eugenics bandwidth selecting for reduced sexual dimorphism (which is [slower to evolve than monomorphic traits, anyway](/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf)). We're told that [ordinary dath ilani are good at reasoning about effect sizes](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1783037#reply-1783037).
-But if Keltham _does_ know this stuff, why is he talking like a UC Berkeley graduate?
-
-
-
-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fg9fXrHpeaDD6pEPL/truly-part-of-you
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2jp98zdLo898qExrr/hug-the-query
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
-neglect of probability (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q7Me34xvSG3Wm97As/but-there-s-still-a-chance-right)
-
-----
-
-[TODO— make intro much shorter; minimal amount of words/info to set up the context for my complaint
-
-In _Planecrash_, a collaborative roleplaying fiction principally by Iarwain (a pen name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and Lintamande, our protagonist, Keltham, hails from [dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), a more smarter, more rational, and better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. Keltham has somehow survived his apparent death and woken up in the fantasy world of [Golarion](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Golarion), and sets about uplifting the natives using knowledge from his superior civilization.
-
-In [the "Crisis of Faith" thread](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5977), Keltham has just arrived in the country of Osirion. While much better than his last host nation (don't ask), Keltham is dismayed at its patriarchal culture in which women typically are not educated and cannot own property, and is considering his options for reforming the culture in conjunction with sharing his civilization's knowledge.
-
-But some of the _specific_ ways in which Keltham thinks about the problem seem distinctively American, rather than dath ilani (given everything else we've been told about dath ilan). Having been advised to survey what native women think of their plight _before_ seeking to upend their social order, [Keltham asks an old woman](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402):
-
-> Suppose some dreadful meddling foreigner came in and told Osirion that its laws had to be _the same for men and women_, and halflings and tieflings and elves too, but men and women are the main focus here. You can make a law that the person with higher Wisdom gets to be in charge of the household; you can make a law about asking people under truthspell if they've ever gotten drunk and hurt somebody; you can't make any law that talks about whether or not somebody has a penis. You can talk about whether somebody has a child, but not whether that person was mother or father, the child girl or boy.
-
-> She can also suppose things like that truthspells have become cheaper, a tenth of the current cost, say, if that helps her put Osirion back together. If it's absolutely vital that a way exist to determine whether a child belongs to a particular parent, what used to be called a father, she can suppose that a way exists.
-
-It makes sense that Keltham wants to smash the patriarchy in Osiron, but I'm surprised that he generalizes all the way to forbidding _any_ laws that reference sex or race. In contrast, you _could_ just say that women should be educated and hold property, as a specific change to the law that's empirically a good idea.
-
-Of course, here in America on Earth, there are historical reasons that _our_ culture has come to uphold equality under the law as a _principle_, rather than most laws just happening not to treat different groups differently. It's a sensible precaution if you don't trust your government or your culture: if a law that distinguishes demographic groups could be used to oppress one of those groups, don't allow _any_ such laws, even if they come with a purportedly benevolent rationale attached.
-
-But Keltham isn't _from_ America. Everything we've heard about his world says that they educate everyone thoroughly in probability theory as normative reasoning, and that citizens end up trusting the existing government on the basis that they would know about and could overthrow a corrupt government. In _that_ context, equality under the law is ... much less obvious of a desideratum?
-]
-
-
-
-A principle that the law can only refer to lower-dimensional concepts (like "Wisdom") but isn't allowed to [refer to clusters](/2021/Mar/link-see-color/) in [thick subspaces of configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (like "is a halfling") is a principle that _decreases the expressive power of the law_, restricting the ontology that the law is allowed to reason about: effectively, saying that the government has to be _less Bayesian_ because it's the government.
-
-
-
-In America, we're used to objecting, "But it's unfair to treat someone as representative of their race or sex, because some people are atypical for their group; you need to look at their individual traits, like Intelligence or Charisma". But really, individual "traits" are _also_ an abstraction that sums over individual differences: someone might be more charming to certain people or in certain contexts in complicated ways that a single Charisma score can't express. In that light, it's not obvious why the objection against using demographic categories as predictors is more compelling than, "But it's unfair to treat someone as representative of their Intelligence or Charisma, because some people are atypical for their trait score, you need to look at individual sub-traits" ... and so on recursively? Are all forms of abstraction-for-statistical-prediction inherently oppressive?
-
-[
-use whatever abstractions are best for making relevant predictions for your use-case; use more detailed information when available and cheap, but don't moralize about using higher-level abstractions when convenient
-
-But from a perspective of first-principles statistical reasoning, this concern applies recursively at all levels.
- That's a totally natural thing to want if you're a 21st century American, but it ... doesn't seem like the first solution you'd expect a dath ilani's mind to go to?
-]
-
-And yet Keltham seems to be committed to this principle to an extent that would not only seem odd in virtually all traditional human cultures, but also seems odd when you just think practically about the numbers. When the woman he's interviewing suggests military conscription as a use-case for why the law needs to discriminate by sex, [Keltham suggests](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422):
-
-> Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it. [...]
->
-> Strength is an _externally visible and measurable_ quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises. That's an example of the sort of idea Keltham was talking about when he asked how to put a country back together, after you stopped being able to measure people's sex and treat them differently based on that.
-
-And Keltham just bites the bullet!
+But if Keltham _does_ know this stuff, why is he talking like a UC Berkeley graduate? ["Strength is an _externally visible and measurable_ quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises,"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422) he says. When his interlocutor objects that strong women would get drafted, which would be terrible, Keltham asks how it would be _more_ terrible than men getting drafted. When the interlocutor replies that the woman's marriage prospects would be damaged by a history living among men in the army, Keltham muses, ["the army would need strong enough internal governance to prevent women in it from being raped, but you could do that with cheaper truthspells?"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817432#reply-1817432)
-> They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation)
+There's just _so much_ wrong with this entire exchange from the perspective of anyone who knows anything about humans and isn't playing dumb for a religious American audience.
+* if you decided that strength determines who you want in your army
--- /dev/null
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fg9fXrHpeaDD6pEPL/truly-part-of-you
+neglect of probability (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q7Me34xvSG3Wm97As/but-there-s-still-a-chance-right)
+
+----
+
+[TODO— make intro much shorter; minimal amount of words/info to set up the context for my complaint
+
+In _Planecrash_, a collaborative roleplaying fiction principally by Iarwain (a pen name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and Lintamande, our protagonist, Keltham, hails from [dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), a more smarter, more rational, and better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. Keltham has somehow survived his apparent death and woken up in the fantasy world of [Golarion](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Golarion), and sets about uplifting the natives using knowledge from his superior civilization.
+
+In [the "Crisis of Faith" thread](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5977), Keltham has just arrived in the country of Osirion. While much better than his last host nation (don't ask), Keltham is dismayed at its patriarchal culture in which women typically are not educated and cannot own property, and is considering his options for reforming the culture in conjunction with sharing his civilization's knowledge.
+
+But some of the _specific_ ways in which Keltham thinks about the problem seem distinctively American, rather than dath ilani (given everything else we've been told about dath ilan). Having been advised to survey what native women think of their plight _before_ seeking to upend their social order, [Keltham asks an old woman](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402):
+
+> Suppose some dreadful meddling foreigner came in and told Osirion that its laws had to be _the same for men and women_, and halflings and tieflings and elves too, but men and women are the main focus here. You can make a law that the person with higher Wisdom gets to be in charge of the household; you can make a law about asking people under truthspell if they've ever gotten drunk and hurt somebody; you can't make any law that talks about whether or not somebody has a penis. You can talk about whether somebody has a child, but not whether that person was mother or father, the child girl or boy.
+
+> She can also suppose things like that truthspells have become cheaper, a tenth of the current cost, say, if that helps her put Osirion back together. If it's absolutely vital that a way exist to determine whether a child belongs to a particular parent, what used to be called a father, she can suppose that a way exists.
+
+It makes sense that Keltham wants to smash the patriarchy in Osiron, but I'm surprised that he generalizes all the way to forbidding _any_ laws that reference sex or race. In contrast, you _could_ just say that women should be educated and hold property, as a specific change to the law that's empirically a good idea.
+
+Of course, here in America on Earth, there are historical reasons that _our_ culture has come to uphold equality under the law as a _principle_, rather than most laws just happening not to treat different groups differently. It's a sensible precaution if you don't trust your government or your culture: if a law that distinguishes demographic groups could be used to oppress one of those groups, don't allow _any_ such laws, even if they come with a purportedly benevolent rationale attached.
+
+But Keltham isn't _from_ America. Everything we've heard about his world says that they educate everyone thoroughly in probability theory as normative reasoning, and that citizens end up trusting the existing government on the basis that they would know about and could overthrow a corrupt government. In _that_ context, equality under the law is ... much less obvious of a desideratum?
+]
+
+
+
+A principle that the law can only refer to lower-dimensional concepts (like "Wisdom") but isn't allowed to [refer to clusters](/2021/Mar/link-see-color/) in [thick subspaces of configuration space] (like "is a halfling") is a principle that _decreases the expressive power of the law_, restricting the ontology that the law is allowed to reason about: effectively, saying that the government has to be _less Bayesian_ because it's the government.
+
+
+
+In America, we're used to objecting, "But it's unfair to treat someone as representative of their race or sex, because some people are atypical for their group; you need to look at their individual traits, like Intelligence or Charisma". But really, individual "traits" are _also_ an abstraction that sums over individual differences: someone might be more charming to certain people or in certain contexts in complicated ways that a single Charisma score can't express. In that light, it's not obvious why the objection against using demographic categories as predictors is more compelling than, "But it's unfair to treat someone as representative of their Intelligence or Charisma, because some people are atypical for their trait score, you need to look at individual sub-traits" ... and so on recursively? Are all forms of abstraction-for-statistical-prediction inherently oppressive?
+
+[
+use whatever abstractions are best for making relevant predictions for your use-case; use more detailed information when available and cheap, but don't moralize about using higher-level abstractions when convenient
+
+But from a perspective of first-principles statistical reasoning, this concern applies recursively at all levels.
+ That's a totally natural thing to want if you're a 21st century American, but it ... doesn't seem like the first solution you'd expect a dath ilani's mind to go to?
+]
+
+And yet Keltham seems to be committed to this principle to an extent that would not only seem odd in virtually all traditional human cultures, but also seems odd when you just think practically about the numbers. When the woman he's interviewing suggests military conscription as a use-case for why the law needs to discriminate by sex, [Keltham suggests](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422):
+
+> Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it. [...]
+>
+> Strength is an _externally visible and measurable_ quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises. That's an example of the sort of idea Keltham was talking about when he asked how to put a country back together, after you stopped being able to measure people's sex and treat them differently based on that.
+
+And Keltham just bites the bullet!
+
+> They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation)
+
+
+
+https://warontherocks.com/2014/11/heres-why-women-in-combat-units-is-a-bad-idea/
+
+> the military treat individuals not as individuals, but as interchangeable pieces of a complex system. Not only does every combat soldier need to be capable of accomplishing the same essential tasks as every other combat soldier
+
+> To pretend that we don't know what will happen when men and women are thrown together for prolonged periods in emotionally intense situations defies common sense
+
+----
+
+I fixed this, eventually
+
+this, too
+
+Anyway, the occasion for messaging you today is that you might be a good test audience for this one: is this draft falling into the "allying with terrible positions out of contrarianism" failure mode?
+
+my _guess_ is (and I'm writing this post to argue that) that you being drafted into the army actually _would_ be worse (for you, and for the army) from our englighted Bayesian humanist perspective than it would be for a male who was otherwise personality-matched and strength-matched, for real, and not just as edgy right-wing anti-virtue signaling
+
+but you might know reasons my guess is wrong
+
+(I really appreciate the pushback earlier)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff