Sixteen Volts

A few years ago, I read an opinion piece in which some white man wrote that if blacks don't like to be targets of ethnic profiling, they should commit fewer crimes. Now, one doesn't have to be raving lefty to see that this advice is actually rather silly in practice, if you think about it. A law-abiding black man who is unfairly targeted by racial profiling is already committing as few crimes as he possibly can, zero, and he can't commit any fewer. So for these men, this advice is useless. Expecting him go around like Luke Cage to prevent crimes that other black men commit is not very realistic, in most cases. On the other hand, a black man who really does commit crimes could choose more legal ways of making money, but the effect of one man doing so on the overall efficiency of profiling is too small for it to have any effect on his life, so why would he give up his ill-gotten gains of crime?

So even though I can understand the sentiment behind this advice, in practice we need more useful solutions to address the injustices that result from stereotypes and profiling. Ethnic profiling has recently become a hot button again, for certain reasons. Of course, categorically opposing all stereotypes and profiling is an easy way for leftists to signal their moral and ideological superiority over their less enlightened countrymen, at least as long as words are cheap and their own lives and well-being are not at stake. I can't think of another way to look practically as wise as Gandhi as cheaply and easily as saying "We are all individuals and should be treated as such, it's just plain wrong to stereotype others". Of course, what the leftists absolutely hate the most about stereotypes is precisely the fact that the real-world stereotypes so often turn out to be true in the real world, as once pointed out by SeanBaby. And where this whole thing gets side-splitting humorous is when the "victims" of stereotyping and discrimination just can't seem to help but themselves employ crude stereotypes about the members of their ideological opposition, and use these stereotypes to make inferences about their real lives, motives and intentions.

I can recall seeing the questions of stereotypes and profiling being addressed in a few places, at least in EconLog ("Crashing Into Stereotypes"), by Fred Reed (e.g. "Racial Profiling" and "Cops Can't Win") and Walter Williams ("Non-politically correct thinking"). Steve Dutch wrote in his "Dutch’s Laws of Just About Everything" that all stereotypes have at least some basis in fact, an explanation far more plausible than the idea that stereotypes are merely made up and randomly pulled out of thin air. (Of course, malice and envy may have a hand in creating some stereotypes, such as the stereotype of attractive women being dumb.) The book "Profiles, Probabilities and Stereotypes" by Frederick Schauer that I discussed in my post "Blink and you might just miss it" strongly defends the use of stereotypes. The Danimal once noted that

A person who hates being stereotyped could not coexist with humans. I find it convenient that I don't have to explain every last detail about myself to every last person I meet because most people are able to generalize correctly about some things from a few obvious clues.

So why is "stereotype" such a bad word, let alone "profiling"? Put in general terms, the inherent injustice in stereotyping and profiling is the following: some members of group X have a property P that others consider undesirable, but others cannot reliably detect whether a given member of group X has property P before it comes time to make an important decision whose result depends on whether that particular member of group X really has the property P. As a result, people will treat all members of group X with suspicion, even when unwarranted. Everybody should be familiar with the canonical example of X = black men and P = is a carjacker, a problem made extra serious because the taxi driver has so very little time to make a decision whether to pick up the person hailing the cab, and the life-threateningly serious consequences of him picking up a passenger who really is a carjacker. We can demand the legal system to rather let ten guilty men go free than convict one innocent man, but we can't really demand a taxi driver to pick up one violent carjacker so that he wouldn't wrongly drive past a hundred honest men. And those who do expect this... well, feel free to start your own taxi company that picks up anybody who hails a cab at any time, without any discrimination and no questions asked.

When he is being unfairly discriminated against, what is a member of the group X who is not-P supposed to do? First of all, complaining may be emotionally satisfying and (assuming you are otherwise sympathetic enough, or get to piggyback on some historical grievances) give you victim points that you can later cash in for other goodies, but it does little to solve the actual problem. A not-P member of group X complaining about the stereotyping and profiling that others do is essentially complaining that the other people are not omniscient or mindreaders. In fact, such complaints are a form of extreme autism, in which the autistic person is unable to distinguish between his personal knowledge and the general knowledge, but instead believes that if he knows something (that he is not-P), everyone else should automatically know this too and behave accordingly, and if they don't do so, it means that they are evil.

As long as we are not omniscient, you simply can't fault the other people from drawing probabilistically correct inferences from the things that they can cheaply and instantly observe, and then acting on these inferences. Otherwise you are effectively demanding that other people must sacrifice their well-being for you by either making choices and decisions that in aggregate turn out to be suboptimal, even if those choices and decisions turn out to be the correct ones whenever they happen to be dealing with you, or that these other people must spend time, money and other resources to acquire extra information that in most situations turns out to be irrelevant, just to avoid the sin of ever misjudging you. If you categorically oppose stereotypes and profiling, you are in effect saying that other people's time and energy are irrelevant next to your well-being. Irrelevant to you, that is. In this sense, a person who complains about being stereotyped is no different from somebody who plays loud music at night or some other social nuisance.

If the other people really hold stereotypes that are detrimental for them in the long run, the right thing to do is not to completely ban and eliminate all stereotypes, the way leftists demand, but to come up with more accurate and efficient stereotypes that work in practice. Since stereotypes and profiling are necessary evils under the conditions of information poverty and incomplete information, better solutions would naturally stem from eliminating the information poverty. The members of group X who are not-P need to somehow make it easier for the others to see whether a given person is P or not-P. For example, a black man could visibly carry a Bible with him, as a signal of him being law-abiding because he is so God-fearing. The main problem with this general approach is somehow coming up with immediate signaling mechanisms that others can rely on and that those people who are P cannot easily spoof. In the optimal case, this would effectively result in the whole group X splitting in two new groups, and the side in which the not-P people end up in would no longer have to suffer from stereotyping in that particular matter than the members of any other groups Y, Z, etc. Problem solved!

This observation, by the way, also explains why some people so vehemently try to make it hard or impossible for insurance companies and employers to ask and acquire statistically relevant information about people who are trying to purchase insurance from them or apply for a job. Despite their lofty rhetoric of how they are concerned about "privacy" and "human rights", when you look at it closer you can see that these people are simply the P who are intentionally trying to create information poverty so that the insurance company or the employer could not reliably distinguish between them and those applicants who are not-P, and that way charge more for the insurance for the members of the group P who then on average cause more losses for the insurance company, or choose not to hire them for a job in which they would probably fare worse. In effect, the members of group P are flat-out stealing, not from the insurance company or the employer, but from their very own brothers who are not-P, by not allowing the insurance company to charge more from the former group and less for the latter to better reflect the risk profile of each customer, and making the employers more wary to hire those members of group X who are not-P. As Bryan Caplan correctly pointed out in his post, the real social conflict is not between groups, but within groups: people who are below-average for their group make life worse for people who are above-average for their group.

As an aside, a more amusing group that is a "victim" of stereotyping and profiling from the opposite end of the social spectrum: single men who are wealthy and successful but who don't give out that impression to the people around them. Their typical complaint that I can remember reading many times goes something like this: the man goes to a party, a pretty woman there first gives him no time of day, later she finds out that he is actually wealthy and successful, she comes to him trying to act friendly and interested, so the man rejects her because he wants a woman who doesn't care about money and is interested in "real him". Every time I have read some variation of this story I have considered it to be so stupid in so many levels that I don't know where and how to even begin to unravel it, even if we leave aside the inherent absurdity of a wealthy and successful man complaining that other people would also be interested in and prefer wealth and success. Suffice to say that if some woman statistically associates certain traits with losers and hence avoids men who display these traits, she should be applauded for this wisdom instead of derided, and if a man doesn't want her to think that he is a loser, then perhaps he shouldn't look and act like one.

Those who wish for pure meritocracy in which everybody is treated as an individual should be careful what they wish for, since that system would be mercilessly cruel to those who are without merit. In the early nineties, The Danimal often discussed the topic of information poverty and how its elimination as the Moore's law and the increases in bandwidth chug along will eventually completely transform society. David Brin has presented similar ideas about "Transparent Society". I don't know if the following idea is originally his of if The Danimal was just quoting someone else, but let us imagine a device called "Eye of God", which are essentially glasses that you wear and that instantly identify every object that you look at and within a split second, download all information about that object that is available in public. Most of the time, the glasses would keep this information to themselves so that they wouldn't overwhelm you with a torrent of data, but in situations that satisfy certain criteria that you have previously set up, these glasses would surreptitiously issue you a warning. For example, when these glasses identify a person with a long criminal record.

It is certainly an interesting thought experiment to ask which people would be most enthusiastic to buy this device, and which people would angrily oppose its very existence. Criminals and other undesirable deviants are always the most enthusiastic supporters of privacy and anonymity, since their very existence depends on avoiding detection and both legal and social sanctions. For this reason, actual criminals tend to rarely participate in public discussion and debate, but they don't have to, since there are plenty of useful idiots who (hopefully unknowingly, but I am always not so sure) champion their causes.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, August 21, 2006 at 12:49 PM