> So you're not aware of race and IQ studies, where differences have persisted relatively consistently over a hundred years of research despite decades of effor

> So you're not aware of race and IQ studies, where differences have persisted relatively consistently over a hundred years of research despite decades of effort to reduce any possible influence of cultural components? I'm certainly aware of such studies, I'm also aware that pretty much every study that has found some difference in IQ between races has been found to contain social conditioning issues. Whether that was early on issues like nutrition that caused entire standard deviation jumps in IQ, or more recent discoveries like how the race of the test proctor can impact IQ and similar studies, or that if you pay someone more prior to an IQ test, they'll perform better. Because of all of these confounding factors, it's not really possible to draw any conclusions from what we know to be a bunch of variously flawed studies. To me, the most uncomfortable truth revealed by all this research is how willing some people are to jump at ultimately tenuous research that supports racist preconceptions. > You assert this, but I don't know it to be the case. That's okay. > This is silly, because it means you want to pretend we live in a vaccuum where society doesn't exist and where people don't have outward indications of internal traits (whether deliberate or not). No, I am well aware that society exists and people can have outward indications of traits. My point is that we should not build systems that discriminate based on those things. And there's no point in building a system that can recognize a person's gender or social class or whatnot if we won't use it, and any use of such a system will be discriminatory and harmful, you're welcome to try and provide a counterexample though. > Think about this: you may not like this research, but just like with gun control, trying to prevent people from doing it will just push it underground, and if there is predictive power with this, if it is only underground, it will only be used for bad purposes. This doesn't follow. If it's not underground it will also only be used for bad purposes, but be developed more quickly. And social pressure to not work on or be involved with such tools means that it will be used for significantly fewer bad purposes. Using facial recognition for policing is a bad purpose. We were going that direction, now we're not, not because the police don't want to, but because social pressure against researchers, by other researchers, caused them to stop developing the products in that realm. That's a clear win.