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Re:Police Are Getting DNA Data from People Who Think They Op... by DoughnutHole on Saturday August 19, 2023 @08:16AM (#37187974)
There are plenty of systemic factors that we have banned from being considered in things like insurance.

Black men have a lower life expectancy and higher chances of certain illnesses or of being the victim of a violent crime than white men. If you put a race question on your life insurance form and incorporate that into your pricing you’ll be looking at a a brutal lawsuit.

Actuarial math is not some moral law that we are beholden to as a society. There are discriminations that we decide are unjust and make society worse even if they spread the costs of insurance more accurately.

Re:Police Are Getting DNA Data from People Who Think They Op... by memefrog on Saturday August 19, 2023 @10:10AM (#37188964)
I certainly hope race is factored into insurance! Sex is. Why wouldn't race be? Geographical location is, and that is largely a proxy for race.

It is not "unjust" to make more accurate predictions using the data you have available. It is fundamentally incapable of being unjust. Injustice comes from making wrong decisions, not from making right decisions.

You seem like the type of person that would declare statistics racist because it reveals facts you don't want to hear.

Re:Police Are Getting DNA Data from People Who Think They Op... by DoughnutHole on Saturday August 19, 2023 @01:39PM (#37191161)
This is such a juvenile understanding of racism.

Justice is not derived from statistics. Espousing statistics does not justify racial discrimination.

We did not ban racial discrimination because we engaged with statistical arguments for racism and decided they were unfounded. A decision can be supported statistically (in some contrived way “right”) and be ethically wrong.

We undid legal racial discrimination because it’s morally repugnant.

Re:Police Are Getting DNA Data from People Who Think They Op... by memefrog on Saturday August 19, 2023 @08:03PM (#37194646)
>We did not ban racial discrimination because we engaged with statistical arguments for racism and decided they were unfounded.

That is exactly what we did. Legally entrenched racial discriminatiom was widely supported pretty much exactly up until science refuted scientific racism.

The whole argument against racism is that race doesn't matter, it is just a social construct, "race" is meaningless because there is more variability with races than between them, etc. That has always been a key argument against racism.

>We undid legal racial discrimination because it’s morally repugnant.

It is morally repugnant because it is incorrect. It would not be morally repugnant to discriminate racially if it wasn't baseless, just as it isn't morally repugnant to discriminate in any situation where it is justifiable.

For example nobody has a problem with not hiring a black man to play a white female character in a film. Nobody has a problem with having publicly funded breast cancer screening programs that are only available for women, even though in very rare cases males can get breast cancer.

Racism is morally repugnant when you make decisions based on race. It is obviously not morally repugnant if you are making decisions based on something else, and that happens to correlate with race. There is quite obviously nothing wrong with basing insurance premiums on all available information about someone, including genetic information.

Would you say it is morally repugnant to charge higher premiums to white people for skin cancer health insurance cover? Come on! Use your brain, man.

Re:Police Are Getting DNA Data from People Who Think They Op... by timschmidt on Saturday August 19, 2023 @09:22PM (#37195091)
> The whole argument against racism is that race doesn't matter, it is just a social construct

That's an interesting misunderstanding you have. Perhaps telling. From my perspective, the whole argument against racism is that it paints people as something other than individuals with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and positions in life.

Re:Police Are Getting DNA Data from People Who Think They Op... by memefrog on Sunday August 20, 2023 @05:58PM (#37203303)
That is just another way of saying what I just said
Re:Police Are Getting DNA Data from People Who Think They Op... by timschmidt on Monday August 21, 2023 @10:20AM (#37209910)
Disagree.