Of course that would be suboptimal, hundreds of hours calculating base rates would certainly not be worthwhile. I’m not offering to do it and I’m not demanding that anyone do it. Hundreds of hours directly studying EA would surely be more worthwhile, I agree on that. All I’m saying is that this information we have now is better than that information which we had an hour ago.
Actually, to avoid bias when adjusting a prior, we really need to include as many adjustments as possible all at once.
Otherwise, unscrupulous people can just come along and say “Let’s adjust these three things!”, which all make the risk look smaller, thereby misleading people into thinking that the risk is negligible.
Or an ordinary biased human being could come along and accidentally ask for ten things to be adjusted which all just so happen to make the risk look super exaggerated.
We’ll have a lot of vulnerability to various biases if we adjust stuff without careful consideration.
Also, if we think it is always better to chuck in arbitrary adjustments, then this creates an incentive for people to come along with a pet political belief and try to have everyone include it everywhere all the time, just for the sake of promoting their pet belief constantly.
One arbitrarily selected adjustment is not better.
Well that’s true. Depending on how many unscrupulous people you think there are on the EA forum :) Though you don’t necessarily need to include all possible adjustments at once to avoid biased updates, you just need to select adjustments via an unbiased process.
Demographics is one of the more obvious and robust things to adjust for, though. It’s a very common topic in criminology and social science, with accurate statistics available both for EA and for outside groups. It’s a reasonable thing to think about as an easy initial thing to adjust for. You already included adjustment for gender statistics, so racial statistics should go along with that.
The way in which gender is relevant while race is not is that sexual attractions are limited by gender preferences in most humans.
Given that most sexually violent people attack one gender but not the other, and given that our gender ratio is very seriously skewed, gender is a critical component of this sexual violence risk estimate.
Given that you believe a race adjustment should go with gender adjustment, I don’t see why you are not also advocating for all of the following:
The way in which gender is relevant while race is not is that sexual attractions are limited by gender preferences in most humans.
Sexual violence tendencies are correlated with racial status in most humans. Why treat it differently?
Given that most sexually violent people attack one gender but not the other, and given that our gender ratio is very seriously skewed, gender is a critical component of this sexual violence risk estimate.
And given that sexually violent people are disproportionately represented across racial categories, and given that our race ratio is very seriously skewed, race is a critical component of this sexual violence risk estimate.
Given that you believe a race adjustment should go with gender adjustment, I don’t see why you are not also advocating for all of the following:
Try and find some statistics for both EAs and sex offenders with comparable data categories on those topics and you’ll see.
I hope you’re just using this as a demonstration and not seriously suggesting that we start racially profiling people in EA.
This unpleasant tangent is a great example of why applying aggregate statistics to actual people isn’t a good strategy. It should be clear why people find the following statements upsetting:
Statistically, there are X rapists in the EA community.
Statistically, as a man/black person/Mexican/non-college grad/Muslim, there is X probability you’re a rapist.
I think it’s pretty odd of you to try to tell me about what upsets EAs or how we feel, given that you have already left the movement. To speak as if you have some kind of personal stake or connection to this matter is rather dishonest.
I hope you’re just using this as a demonstration and not seriously suggesting that we start racially profiling people in EA.
Racial profiling is something that is conducted by law enforcement and criminal investigation, and EA does neither of those things. I would be much more bothered if EA started trying to hunt for criminals within its ranks than I would be from the mere fact that the manner in which we did this involved racial profiling.
It should be clear why people find the following statements upsetting:
It’s often useful to be able to imagine what will be upsetting to other people and why, even if it’s not upsetting to you. Maybe you’ll decide that it’s worth hurting people, but at least make your decisions with an accurate model of the world. (By the way, “because they’re oversensitive” doesn’t count as an explanation.)
So let’s try to think about why someone might be upset if you told them that they’re more likely to be a rapist because of their race. I can think of a few reasons: They feel afraid for their personal safety. They feel it’s unfair to be judged for something they have no control over. They feel self-conscious and humiliated.
Emotional turing tests might be a good habit in general.
It’s nice to imagine things. But I’ll wait for actual EAs to tell me about what does or doesn’t upset them before drawing conclusions about what they think.
Considering that most people would be unhappy to be told that they’re more likely to be a rapist because of their race, we should have a strong prior that many Effective Altruists would feel the same way. What strong evidence do you have that, in fact, minorities in EA are just fine with being told their race makes them more likely to be rapists? Seems like a very strange assumption.
Apart from Lila’s argument, this “non-white people are more likely to be rapists” is a terrible line of thinking because (IMO) it’s likely to build racist modes of thought: assigning negative characteristics to minorities based on dubious evidence seems very likely to strengthen bad cognitive patterns and weaken good judgement around related issues.
If the evidence were incontrovertible, this might be acceptable, but it’s nowhere near the required standard of proof to overcome the strong prior that humans are equally likely to commit crimes regardless of race (among other reasons, because race is largely a social construct). Additionally, the long history of using false statistics and “science” to bolster white supremacy should make one more skeptical of numbers like this.
Considering that most people would be unhappy to be told that they’re more likely to be a rapist because of their race, we should have a strong prior that many Effective Altruists would feel the same way.
Well I saw statistics that suggest that I’m more likely to be a rapist since I’m a man, the post explicitly said that I have a 6% chance of being a rapist as a man in EA, and that didn’t make me unhappy. And I haven’t seen anyone who has actually expressed any personal discomfort at the OP nor any of my posts, leaving aside the secondhand outrage expressed by characters such as yourself. So my prior is that this is false.
Apart from Lila’s argument, this “non-white people are more likely to be rapists” is a terrible line of thinking because (IMO) it’s likely to build racist modes of thought: assigning negative characteristics to minorities based on dubious evidence
Well you can actually ask rape victims what race their attacker was and then see what the statistics are, as RAINN did in the link I provided. That’s not dubious evidence.
If the evidence were incontrovertible, this might be acceptable, but it’s nowhere near the required standard of proof to overcome the strong prior that humans are equally likely to commit crimes regardless of race
Huh? Why on earth would you have that prior, given the long long history of different ethnic groups behaving differently and being treated differently throughout Western history? And we have damningly strong evidence that people of difference races commit crimes at different rates, as a pure statistical fact backed up by mountains of data gathered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and many other institutions. What you want to attribute that to is up to you, but refusing to acknowledge it is the height of denialism which even race and progressive activists don’t do. The actually well-informed progressive/leftist activists and philosophers don’t grasp at concepts of rationality to try to throw together some skepticism about whether different races commit crimes at different rates, they just say that the cause of these differential rates is social and a result of structurally racist society, but if you gave a whiff of charity to my posts then you would know that nothing that I have said in any way assumes that the increased propensity of blacks to commit rapes relative to whites in the Western world is not a direct result of structurally racist society.
among other reasons, because race is largely a social construct).
This is a silly cop-out. Only uninformed right wing pundits who strawman poststructuralism think that for something to be a social construct implies that it doesn’t matter and isn’t real. We can define race as minimally as “the color that people check on surveys when they are asked about their race” and it is still true that people commit crimes at different rates in correspondence with how they identify. Dodging these issues by disputing how much biological reality there is or isn’t associated with social race constructs blindly sweeps over enormous realities about how race, ethnicity and skin color are perceived and operate in contemporary society.
Additionally, the long history of using false statistics and “science” to bolster white supremacy should make one more skeptical of numbers like this
Those dastardly white supremacists at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network! Or is it the rape victims—you think we shouldn’t believe the rape victims when they tell us what race their aggressor was, is that right? I’m almost offended by that. And yet you try to lecture me about things that will “strengthen bad cognitive patterns and weaken good judgement”...
I am already aware of a pretty large number of correlations between sexual violence and a lot of different things. I’m telling you that there are a bunch of other things on that list I provided which would significantly alter the result of the estimate.
I’m definitely not going to alter the estimate to incorporate just race. I am definitely not going to alter the estimate to incorporate the entire list.
I think the most worthwhile way of getting a better estimate is to do a study, so I will not put further time into this discussion.
I think you’d get better results if you spent your time simply including things that can easily be included, rather than sparking meta-level arguments about which things are or aren’t worth including. You could have accepted the race correlations and then found one or two countervailing considerations to counter the alleged bias for a more comprehensive overall view. That still would have been more productive than this.
Of course that would be suboptimal, hundreds of hours calculating base rates would certainly not be worthwhile. I’m not offering to do it and I’m not demanding that anyone do it. Hundreds of hours directly studying EA would surely be more worthwhile, I agree on that. All I’m saying is that this information we have now is better than that information which we had an hour ago.
Actually, to avoid bias when adjusting a prior, we really need to include as many adjustments as possible all at once.
Otherwise, unscrupulous people can just come along and say “Let’s adjust these three things!”, which all make the risk look smaller, thereby misleading people into thinking that the risk is negligible.
Or an ordinary biased human being could come along and accidentally ask for ten things to be adjusted which all just so happen to make the risk look super exaggerated.
We’ll have a lot of vulnerability to various biases if we adjust stuff without careful consideration.
Also, if we think it is always better to chuck in arbitrary adjustments, then this creates an incentive for people to come along with a pet political belief and try to have everyone include it everywhere all the time, just for the sake of promoting their pet belief constantly.
One arbitrarily selected adjustment is not better.
Well that’s true. Depending on how many unscrupulous people you think there are on the EA forum :) Though you don’t necessarily need to include all possible adjustments at once to avoid biased updates, you just need to select adjustments via an unbiased process.
Demographics is one of the more obvious and robust things to adjust for, though. It’s a very common topic in criminology and social science, with accurate statistics available both for EA and for outside groups. It’s a reasonable thing to think about as an easy initial thing to adjust for. You already included adjustment for gender statistics, so racial statistics should go along with that.
The way in which gender is relevant while race is not is that sexual attractions are limited by gender preferences in most humans.
Given that most sexually violent people attack one gender but not the other, and given that our gender ratio is very seriously skewed, gender is a critical component of this sexual violence risk estimate.
Given that you believe a race adjustment should go with gender adjustment, I don’t see why you are not also advocating for all of the following:
age
marital status
literacy
education
employment status
occupation
geographical location
place of birth
previous residence
language
religion
nationality
ethnicity
citizenship
Sexual violence tendencies are correlated with racial status in most humans. Why treat it differently?
And given that sexually violent people are disproportionately represented across racial categories, and given that our race ratio is very seriously skewed, race is a critical component of this sexual violence risk estimate.
Try and find some statistics for both EAs and sex offenders with comparable data categories on those topics and you’ll see.
I hope you’re just using this as a demonstration and not seriously suggesting that we start racially profiling people in EA.
This unpleasant tangent is a great example of why applying aggregate statistics to actual people isn’t a good strategy. It should be clear why people find the following statements upsetting:
Statistically, there are X rapists in the EA community.
Statistically, as a man/black person/Mexican/non-college grad/Muslim, there is X probability you’re a rapist.
Let’s please not go down this path.
I think it’s pretty odd of you to try to tell me about what upsets EAs or how we feel, given that you have already left the movement. To speak as if you have some kind of personal stake or connection to this matter is rather dishonest.
Racial profiling is something that is conducted by law enforcement and criminal investigation, and EA does neither of those things. I would be much more bothered if EA started trying to hunt for criminals within its ranks than I would be from the mere fact that the manner in which we did this involved racial profiling.
Neither of those statements are upsetting to me.
It’s often useful to be able to imagine what will be upsetting to other people and why, even if it’s not upsetting to you. Maybe you’ll decide that it’s worth hurting people, but at least make your decisions with an accurate model of the world. (By the way, “because they’re oversensitive” doesn’t count as an explanation.)
So let’s try to think about why someone might be upset if you told them that they’re more likely to be a rapist because of their race. I can think of a few reasons: They feel afraid for their personal safety. They feel it’s unfair to be judged for something they have no control over. They feel self-conscious and humiliated.
Emotional turing tests might be a good habit in general.
It’s nice to imagine things. But I’ll wait for actual EAs to tell me about what does or doesn’t upset them before drawing conclusions about what they think.
Considering that most people would be unhappy to be told that they’re more likely to be a rapist because of their race, we should have a strong prior that many Effective Altruists would feel the same way. What strong evidence do you have that, in fact, minorities in EA are just fine with being told their race makes them more likely to be rapists? Seems like a very strange assumption.
Apart from Lila’s argument, this “non-white people are more likely to be rapists” is a terrible line of thinking because (IMO) it’s likely to build racist modes of thought: assigning negative characteristics to minorities based on dubious evidence seems very likely to strengthen bad cognitive patterns and weaken good judgement around related issues.
If the evidence were incontrovertible, this might be acceptable, but it’s nowhere near the required standard of proof to overcome the strong prior that humans are equally likely to commit crimes regardless of race (among other reasons, because race is largely a social construct). Additionally, the long history of using false statistics and “science” to bolster white supremacy should make one more skeptical of numbers like this.
Well I saw statistics that suggest that I’m more likely to be a rapist since I’m a man, the post explicitly said that I have a 6% chance of being a rapist as a man in EA, and that didn’t make me unhappy. And I haven’t seen anyone who has actually expressed any personal discomfort at the OP nor any of my posts, leaving aside the secondhand outrage expressed by characters such as yourself. So my prior is that this is false.
Well you can actually ask rape victims what race their attacker was and then see what the statistics are, as RAINN did in the link I provided. That’s not dubious evidence.
Huh? Why on earth would you have that prior, given the long long history of different ethnic groups behaving differently and being treated differently throughout Western history? And we have damningly strong evidence that people of difference races commit crimes at different rates, as a pure statistical fact backed up by mountains of data gathered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and many other institutions. What you want to attribute that to is up to you, but refusing to acknowledge it is the height of denialism which even race and progressive activists don’t do. The actually well-informed progressive/leftist activists and philosophers don’t grasp at concepts of rationality to try to throw together some skepticism about whether different races commit crimes at different rates, they just say that the cause of these differential rates is social and a result of structurally racist society, but if you gave a whiff of charity to my posts then you would know that nothing that I have said in any way assumes that the increased propensity of blacks to commit rapes relative to whites in the Western world is not a direct result of structurally racist society.
This is a silly cop-out. Only uninformed right wing pundits who strawman poststructuralism think that for something to be a social construct implies that it doesn’t matter and isn’t real. We can define race as minimally as “the color that people check on surveys when they are asked about their race” and it is still true that people commit crimes at different rates in correspondence with how they identify. Dodging these issues by disputing how much biological reality there is or isn’t associated with social race constructs blindly sweeps over enormous realities about how race, ethnicity and skin color are perceived and operate in contemporary society.
Those dastardly white supremacists at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network! Or is it the rape victims—you think we shouldn’t believe the rape victims when they tell us what race their aggressor was, is that right? I’m almost offended by that. And yet you try to lecture me about things that will “strengthen bad cognitive patterns and weaken good judgement”...
I am already aware of a pretty large number of correlations between sexual violence and a lot of different things. I’m telling you that there are a bunch of other things on that list I provided which would significantly alter the result of the estimate.
I’m definitely not going to alter the estimate to incorporate just race. I am definitely not going to alter the estimate to incorporate the entire list.
I think the most worthwhile way of getting a better estimate is to do a study, so I will not put further time into this discussion.
I think you’d get better results if you spent your time simply including things that can easily be included, rather than sparking meta-level arguments about which things are or aren’t worth including. You could have accepted the race correlations and then found one or two countervailing considerations to counter the alleged bias for a more comprehensive overall view. That still would have been more productive than this.