D and D

I have a couple of things that I noticed while reading “Discrimination and Disparities” by T. Sowell.

Obviously the authour is a very logical and factual no BS guy.

The book is full of tricks politicans use and facts they tend to hide.

I noticed this disambiguation of the term “discrimination” by the author:

• evidence based discrimination (1A): based on knowledge of traits and behavior of a given individual
• evidence based discrimination (1B): based on statistics on group behavior, traits
• arbitrary discrimination (2): arbitrary/irrational

This is how I understood this.

Assuming that factual/true information allows for better cooperation:

• The 1A is advantageous for both parties;
• The 1B has smaller cost and smaller value for cooperation;
• The 2 is most likely to be harmful for cooperation;

The 2 is not really explored probably because there are too many lies around it. For example it seems to be the go-to thing that certain kind of politicans attribute indiscriminally at any expedient case.

Also I think that about 2 there is alot of stuff written by different sociologists.

The author is a very down-to earth empirical guy. So he writes about 2 only factual cases where it was harmful. The only possible problem with this is that he does not address situations when it was advantageous or at least lack of such situations. Or maybe I missed this part.

Also the author does not theorise about 2. Maybe it is a good thing because what is the point in theorising about irrational.

The author writes in the spirit of making people better decision makers by giving them factual information. I can’t complain about that.