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by meheleventyone
2608 days ago
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What I was getting at is that our important choices are about outcomes and those have nothing really to do with assumptions about reality. For example all should be equal before the law. A statement that is supposed to be true but very obviously isn’t. Your post is great for the assumptions it encodes. Like what does it mean to be good at weight lifting? And that for some reason being good at weight lifting is a good proxy for being a good bouncer or construction worker? For an off the cuff example it’s a great way to demonstrate the sort of bias we can naively introduce then defend because it’s just ‘reality’. When really it’s much more complex than identifying a relevant trait and assuming everything else falls out of it. |
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being a good weight lifter, means you can lift heavier weights then a less-good weight lifter. Whether this is a proxy for anything isn't relevant, because it's a purely contrived example. There are clearly jobs where physical strength (among other things) is important, and given the context of this example, there is no guarantee that a more complicated model evens out the differences.
The point of the example is, basically "there are some things which might discriminate strongly on the basis on physical traits, which might end up correlating with race/sex etc" - ask for a better model by all means, but there is no guarantee the perfect model will never correlate strongly with some political demographic, and hence be controversial.