The Ethics and Etiquette of Statistical Discrimination

Perhaps if the variation within the group is much higher than the group difference from the mean, the benefit (the amount of error reduced by statistical discrimination multiplied by the cost of error) is much, much less than the cost (the discriminated person’s inconvenience or displeasure at being discriminated against, plus the discriminator’s cost of determining the actual characteristics of the individual).

If the benefits are higher than the costs, discrimination is rude, even if you have a taste for it.

So it’s not rude to not invite your cop friend to your heroin party, it’s mildly rude to not invite your secular Muslim friend to your bacon party, but it’s very rude to not invite your friend of race X to your book club because statistics show that X’s read 10% fewer books than non-X’s.

Haven’t really thought this through, it’s off the top of my head.

What about when it harms someone else? That seems like a fair limitation.

If statistical discrimination leads me to give someone lower preference in an interview, for example, maybe I should give that person a deeper look to compensate for what could be my statistical error?

Or how about, if it runs parallel to racial stereotypes. For obvious historical reasons.

Not saying I necessarily agree with these reasons, just these are the most often cited objections.

Statistical discrimination always “harms” someone relative to the world with no discrimination. Guys with mohawks would be better off if people ignored their hair style. Sure, you could give them “deeper looks”, but why? That would defeat the purpose of statistically discriminating.

I happen to think that the reasons for different standards mostly lack any philosophical depth and are instead post-hoc reactions to past injustices. We frown upon racial discrimination not necessarily because racial discrimination is currently worse than any other kind, but because of what it used to be like.

“We should avoid discriminating based on truly immutable characteristics such as race, gender and sexual orientation.”

Bryan’s talking about statistical discrimination, where you’re making decisions under a fair amount of uncertainty. So if your house is engulfed in flames, who do you run to for help in getting it under control until the firemen arrive — men or women? Obviously men: taller, stronger, faster, more composed under pressure, and more likely to help strangers in need.

If you know that blacks tend to respond far better to some heart medicine than whites do, do you toss aside the patient’s race when making the decision whether or not to prescribe BiDil?

No, like Phil said it has to do with the chance of making an error and the size of the consequences of the error. How you came to make the association between group membership and some other trait is irrelevant, except to allow “protected minorities” to continue getting unfair advantages.

@agnostic

“Obviously men: taller, stronger, faster, more composed under pressure, and more likely to help strangers in need.”

Fire departments should select employees based on these qualities. I’m not sure there are these differences between employees who have gone through a selection process. If the fire department doesn’t have an adequate selection process (perhaps they accept too many women), perhaps statistical discrimination may be justified.

“No, like Phil said it has to do with the chance of making an error and the size of the consequences of the error.”

But it needs to be weighed against the psychological harm it causes, which in most cases outweighs these characteristics. A person who is discriminated against, particularly because of characteristics that may be products of residual racism/patriarchy/homophobia by the dominant group, will understandably suffer more than just the foregone job, and rebel.

I would also argue that from a political economy standpoint, libertarians should oppose statistical discrimination. The idea of equality of opportunity, that anyone from any background can become successful, is one of the best safeguards against redistributive socialism. Destroy it and watch how the politics becomes a discussion of class warfare.

I’d also wonder whether you hold this position because you’re privileged or if you’d choose it coming from a veil of ignorance.

Discriminating in medicine for the patient’s benefit is different than discriminating for your own benefit. There is no psychological cost in the former, there is a large psychological and social cost in the latter.

If I can quote the Onion: “Stereotypes are a real time saver”.

I think that discrimination is probably only unethical (if at all) when it is intentionally harmful.

We can easily form the dichotomy, that there must exist two sets of traits according to which it is possible for a given employer (E) to discriminate against a given person (P) for a given job (J):

• i) traits that (E) believes to statistically affect (P)’s ability to do (J); and:
• ii) traits that (E) believes to be irrelevant to (P)’s ability to do (J).

Is it not the case that under any rational employer’s favoured circumstances, the average employer (given that one must have at least some sense to get to a position of employing others) wouldn’t choose to discriminate according to the latter set, and having exercised the extent of their beliefs in informing the composition and content of each set, discern the optimal employee according to the content of these sets to the best of their means? I would have thought this obviously true. To impose the requirement that the employer disregard their beliefs regarding any set of arbitrary forbidden discriminants is surely a tortuous request of self-harm, especially given that the same effects will surely come from the free distribution of information on the market, given the fact that it is in the interests of any employer to optimise the best discriminations and exorcise the worst.

(I believe this mechanism and these principles function outside of employment discrimination. I believe the fact that the argument doesn’t name arbitrary traits lends it favour. The whole argument disregards any utilitarian calculations of hurt feelings, which might significantly skew the ethics, although I intuit that there are equal and opposite reasons why hurt feelings are nothing less than virtuous when (if only when) they are the product of free actions.)

It is surely only when the employer disregards the data available (the product of their beliefs), for the sake of some such unreasonable emotion as spite, that we can consider an unethical action to have occurred, because it is then that discrimination has occurred in the absence of reason and in the favour of unthinking, mutual destruction.

Why involve the law? That is, just let people discriminate as they wish, and understand that the result will be what it should be. The problem isn’t when individuals discriminate, but when the law discriminates.

Most statistical discrimination involves the withholding of a benefit, not imposing a harm. A free society should permit such discrimination because it improves rational decision making.

Ben O’Neill has done some useful work on statistical discrimination and anti-discrimination laws from a libertarian perspective.

You wrote: “Judging everyone as an individual is expensive, and relying on statistical generalizations is a cheap and effective alternative.” But what do you mean by “judging someone as an individual”?

The examples of “judging” you gave were examples of *predicting behavior*. True, you can wait to see what someone does; but that isn’t *predicting*. If you want to estimate beforehand what someone will do, you must rely on correlations between qualities present at an earlier time (now) and actions at a later time (the future). Predictive inference *must be* statistical.

Predictive inference does vary in *breadth*. If all I know about someone is that he has property P, and I want to know whether he will in the future display behavior B, I must rely on the correlation between P and B. If I also knew that he had properties Q, R, and S, I could rely on the correlation between P&Q&R&S and B; this would generally give me a firmer basis for my expectation about B. But getting that extra information about his properties might be costly. (Is narrowing the class to which someone is assigned what you meant by “judging him as an individual”?)

Relying on statistical inference is not unethical; it is simply rational. But etiquette will sometimes require that we conceal some statistical inference we have made about someone from that person; we ought not needlessly to hurt other people’s feelings.

We should avoid discriminating based on truly immutable characteristics such as race, gender and sexual orientation.

Actually, all of those things can be changed. Blacks can wear makeup or bleach their skin. Men can have surgery to become women. Gays can take hormone supplements to change their orientation although the effects of such supplements are debateable.

The thing that doesn’t make any sense to me except from a respect for tradition stand point is that people with tatoos are so widely discriminated against in the workplace.

Philo has it exactly right. The question in the post is about prediction, which one can only do by using information about past behavior either of that person or of the qualities that the person has (and their correlation with past behavior of others).

If you do not know the person then you do not have past experience of his or her behavior (and hence cannot “judge the individual” in that way), so you really only have statistical inference based on known characteristics. These may be something we might think of as “judging the individual” if the characteristic is “he seems nice because he said hello and smiled when he walked in” but this is still a statistical discrimination (e.g., “people that say hello and smile are usually nice in other ways, hence probably nice to work with, hence a better hire…”)

If the characteristic is less “personal” in some way, it may *seem* more like statistical (or plain-old) discrimination – e.g., if its a broader category like gender, hairstyle, age, height, weight, race, etc.

I think the ethical question probably comes in, as Phil said at the top of the thread, when variation is high and the cost/benefit is skewed. It’s not about innate vs. not as sometimes this makes sense, as some have pointed out. The little old lady really probably isn’t going to mug you, and the cost/benefit and variation indicate that the discrimination is probably OK.

Ajb: Not only do I believe in statistical discrimination, I support racial profiling at airports to ease security hassles.

I’m always puzzled by the support for racial profiling at airport security. Let’s say that security at airports stops paying attention to elderly Asian ladies. The moment the terrorists find about is, their obvious response is to plant the bombs/guns/knives on elderly Asian ladies. One horrible idea – find an elderly Asian grandmother, kidnap her gorgeous two-year-old daughter, and threaten her life unless grandma carries a bomb/gun/knife onto the plane. Send elderly Asian grandmother one of the her granddaughters’ fingers as a sign you’re serious. Perhaps to reduce the odds of grandma going to the police, disguise it somehow and make up some cover story so grandma can hope that she’s not actually sacrificing lots of people’s lives for her granddaughter’s, and rely on self-deception to carry her through. And I think I got this idea originally from a movie trailer, so it’s very likely to be something the terrorists will think of.

Mohawks aren’t exogenous.

Tracy W writes:

I’m always puzzled by the support for racial profiling at airport security. Let’s say that security at airports stops paying attention to elderly Asian ladies. The moment the terrorists find about is, their obvious response is to plant the bombs/guns/knives on elderly Asian ladies.

I’ve always been puzzled that this counter-argument is repeated and considered strikingly brilliant by otherwise sensible people. Let me explain why it is not.

To start with what we know: The vast majority of operatives of terrorist organizations seeking to murder Americans (and others) identified from past attempts are young Arab Muslim men. And most of the rest are at least three of the four.

From this it follows that persons of this description must be among the most plentiful, available, and easy to use resources available for such organizations. In other words, this demographic has the ratio of reward (in terms of dead or terrorized infidels) to organizational effort (in terms of money, time, and other resources). If another demographic had a better ratio, the terrorist organization would already have switched to them and costlessly increased their effectiveness.

That does not mean that there aren’t blond-haired blue-eyed Norwegian grannies who converted to Islam and are now all hot to kill for Allah—surely there must be. Or Asian grannies from your movie trailer. What it does mean is that they must be much rarer, harder to use, and generally more expensive means of murdering infidels. If Osama Bin Laden had a granny brigade at his disposal he would already have unleashed it, rather than relying on such a non-diverse and identifiable set of operatives.

So what happens if we institute profiling? Young Arab Muslim men become much more likely to get caught and hence less useful tools. At the same time grannies, given the same amount of total enforcement effort and hassle, become at least a little less likely to get caught and hence more useful tools.

These two effects, while in opposite directions, are not of equal size: The terrorist organization is much more hurt by the declining effectiveness of its chief type of asset than it is helped by the increased effectiveness of a type of recruit it already hardly used because of other reasons. So while there is presumably a shift in the terrorist organization’s allocation of efforts, it will on net be worse off (and we better off) after the shift.

How much this hurts them (and helps us) depends on how much more expensive (in the above sense) grannies were for the terrorist organization than young Arab Muslim men before priofiling. If currently there was only a slight advantage to using the latter, then the net harm on terrorist organizations of profiling would also be small and so would the net help for us.

While that is possible, this seems unlikely. Terrorist organizations are likely to very much prefer using their current demographic (and hence be hurt a great deal by profiling) for several reasons.

First, there is a substantial individual dispersion within each demographic. If the difference in average between recruits from the two demographics were small, the distributions would likely overlap and grannies would be underrepresented in the sample of terrorist, but still a substantial presence. Instead, we see them hardly at all. That means that the difference in average between the two demographics is likely large and shifting from one to the other would impose a large cost on the terrorist organization.

Second, the difference in inherent characteristics between the demographics as to suitability as terrorist agents are likely to be substantial. While there likely are some socially contingent factors, others are so fundamental and significant that I’d estimate them to have a large effect. Lutherans are inherently less likely to consider the majority population of Europe and the U.S. to be infidels worthy of death than Muslims are. Arabs and Muslims today have a far greater cultural acceptance and valorisation of suicide attacks and even terrorism in general. Norwegians are far less likely to feel—rightly or wrongly—profoundly racially alienated from Americans than Arabs are. And throughout history and almost all known cultures, the young and men have always shown far greater propensity—again for good or ill—for the sort of physically dangerous but potentially glorious pursuits like suicide terrorism.

Finally, and most importantly, it does not matter if my predictions—admittedly based in part on broad cultural stereotypes—for the effectiveness of racial/cultural/gender/religious profiling are correct because the practice itself will demonstrate the correct point for stopping:

At the point of maximum harm to terrorist organization efforts to kill us—and for us the optimum amount of profiling—grannies and young Arab Muslim men and everybody else will have become equally (in)effective. At that point, we would expect to observe terrorist organizations to use all demographics equally. By no means should one pursue profiling beyond that point as it would only help the terrorists.

In other words, keep profiling until the demographics of apprehended terrorists look like America. If it is good enough for the U.S. cabinet, it is good enough for Al Qaeda. And just think how pleased their diversity management consultants will be!

And I think I got this idea originally from a movie trailer, so it’s very likely to be something the terrorists will think of.

Sure sounds like it. Yet, dare I suggest that movie trailers are not necessarily the most accurate tool for assessing the opportunity set of terrorist organizations?