I’m sorry to hear that you’ve experienced sexism both within and outside EA.
Just to clarify your view, you said that:
there is data to suggest the variability hypothesis may be true in some places and for certain kinds of intelligence.
But an implication of the hypothesis is that men will make up a greater proportion of the “intelligent” people in those places for those kinds of intelligence.
Do you think it would be fine to use this information as a prior in those contexts?
Even if there are cases in which it would theoretically be reasonable to employ different priors for men vs. women, I doubt people will be able to reliably identify these cases, choose appropriate priors, and correctly apply the priors they’ve chosen. When you couple these challenges with the fact that there are significant downsides associated with trying to discriminate in a principled way (e.g., harming people, alienating people, creating self-fulfilling prophesies, making it harder for members of an already disadvantaged group to succeed, etc), it seems like a bad idea to base priors on the variability hypothesis in basically any context.
I’m sorry to hear that you’ve experienced sexism both within and outside EA.
Just to clarify your view, you said that:
But an implication of the hypothesis is that men will make up a greater proportion of the “intelligent” people in those places for those kinds of intelligence.
Do you think it would be fine to use this information as a prior in those contexts?
Even if there are cases in which it would theoretically be reasonable to employ different priors for men vs. women, I doubt people will be able to reliably identify these cases, choose appropriate priors, and correctly apply the priors they’ve chosen. When you couple these challenges with the fact that there are significant downsides associated with trying to discriminate in a principled way (e.g., harming people, alienating people, creating self-fulfilling prophesies, making it harder for members of an already disadvantaged group to succeed, etc), it seems like a bad idea to base priors on the variability hypothesis in basically any context.