[lordnacho]

Well it would make sense if that were the case.

You have some system that tried to balance bias, variance, and utility. Sometimes that best way to do that is to have some bias. The classic example of this is you may jump when you see something that looks like a predator, but then turns out not to be. The cost of being wrong (see nothing when predator, see predator when nothing) means it's optimal to sometimes see danger that isn't there.

[PakG1]

That's the argument for racial profiling. Not making any argument for or against, just pointing out something interesting. I didn't think about the topic in this context before, as to whether or not it's rational. It's always only been a question of ethics to me. So the natural follow-up question: are various ethics irrational? Again, only a theoretical exercise, not putting my personal views into this.

[BurningFrog]

Well, it's an argument for racial profiling if certain races actually are more dangerous.

It's hard to answer your question, since both ethics and rationality are fuzzy, slippery concepts that need to be nailed down firmly to reason meaningfully about.

Or, put less pretentiously, I don't know.

[rudolf0]

>Well, it's an argument for racial profiling if certain races actually are more dangerous.

When you say "more dangerous" do you mean "inherently more dangerous" or "more likely to commit crimes per capita"? Because if it's the latter, then depending on how you define "race" some of these statistics are already known.

[BurningFrog]

The latter is the only one that's of practical interest.

"Known"is a bit strong, since the source for the statistics can be debated.

[rarec]

Are various ethics irrational? Quite probably. Being more specific on which ethics you mean might give more to chew on.

Humans are notoriously great at pattern matching, and seeing things that aren't there simply based on a prior mental model. Stereotypes of all kinds are a result of this.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Ethics are a competing patchwork of conflicting drives.

Evolution tends to select for short-term survival over long-term viability. It's absolutely a mistake to believe the two are aligned.

The reality is that humans are (probably) the first Earth species to be capable of abstract non-physical modelling of the future. But we have a huge amount of behavioural baggage which guarantees that we tend to ignore long-term warning signals in pursuit of short-term gains motivated by evolutionary heuristics.

The heuristics work fine until they don't. Species discover this the hard way all the time.

It would be nice to think we're not one of those species, but the jury is still out on that.

[rhodri]

we're certainly capable of creating the most complex models – what's interesting about this very human tendency is that the models begin to take on a reality of their own, replacing our actual observations.

we can see this most clearly in our politicians' insistence on their particular model of the economy as their priority, rather than the actual concerns of the citizens they are responsible to.

[aswanson]

Do you think our political biases themselves come from evolutionary survival schemas? e.g. right vs left, etc.

[__jal]

If that were so, "left" and "right" would reflect similar inclinations across polities and evolutionarily-short time periods.

They don't.

Or at least, I'd be highly amused to see someone attempt to square the Trump platform with Burkean thought, and that's a relatively smallish difference, both evolutionarily and intellectually speaking, compared to others.

[woliveirajr]

If we compete for resources, sometimes my tribe and yours aren't exactly friendly. Perhaps seeing you (alone or in groups) wasn't exactly a pleasant experience, so I might not like your hair, skin color, eyes format, and so on... Not liking you and not being liked by you might have happened in the past.

And if my group was more aggressive, there are some probability that yours didn't even survived and mine did. Or if I was more "racist", perhaps my genes would spread better. So, some genetic that makes me don't like "different" people might have a role.

If our genes didn't evolve (in that aspect) in some few thousand years, simply because there wasn't enough ambiental/social/whatever pressure in that direction... here we are.

[whybroke]

Actually it explains why everyone has innate racial profiling, even members of the target group. It's also why, even if a policy against it is adopted, it is immensely hard to actually change.

[maxerickson]

Statistically, more violence occurs between people that know each other than occurs randomly.

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/vvcs9310.txt

It's also the case that violence is so unlikely at any given encounter that it isn't rational to worry about it (in the US, there are billions of stranger-stranger encounters in a given year, millions of incidents of violence).

I guess someone might argue that arranging for encounters that are 99.9% likely to be violence free compared to encounters that are 99.8% likely to be violence free is worthwhile, but their glances probably aren't powerful enough to actually create that difference.

[cerebrum]

Having bias is not the same as being irrational. Having a right bias is actually good as in the example of the parent poster.