+In the conversation that follows, the woman suggests military conscription as a legitimate reason for why the law might need to descriminate on sex. Keltham suggests, "Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it."
+
+... and that's the part that broke my suspension of disbelief in Keltham being a realistic portrayal of someone who grew up in dath ilan as it has been described to us, rather than being written by people who live in Berkeley in the current year who don't know how to think outside of their own culture's assumptions.
+
+To be clear, it makes sense that Keltham feels bad for the women of Orision, who seem so much less self-actualized than the women of his world. It makes sense that he wants to smash the patriarchy, and reform their sexist customs about education and property.
+
+But the _specific_ way in which he's formulating the problem—that the law should be "_the same for men and women_, and halflings and tieflings and elves too"—seems distinctively American. The idea the government can't discriminate by race or sex as a _principle_ (as contrasted to most laws happening to not refer to race or sex because those categories happen to not be relevant to that specific law) is a specific form of Earth-craziness that only makes sense as a reaction to other Earth-craziness; it's not something you would ever spontaneously invent or think was a good idea if you _actually_ came from a 140 IQ Society that thoroughly educated everyone in probability theory as normative reasoning. Let me explain.
+
+Keltham is, of course, correct that if you have specific information about an individual's traits, that [screens off](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority) any probabilistic guesses you might have made about those traits knowing only the person's demographic category. Once you measure someone's height, the fact that men are taller than women on average with an effect size of about 1.5 standard deviations is no longer relevant to the question of that person's height. (As the saying goes out of dath ilan, [hug the query](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2jp98zdLo898qExrr/hug-the-query)!) In very many situations, if there's a cost associated with acquiring more specific individuating information that renders information from demographic base rates irrelevant, you should pay that cost in order to get the more specific information and therefore make better decisions.
+
+But crucially, getting individuating information is an [instrumental rather than a terminal value](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values); you should do it _when and because_ it improves your decisions, not because of some alleged principle that you're not allowed to make probabilistic inferences off someone's race or sex. Probability theory doesn't have any built-in concept of "protected classes." On pain of paradox, Bayesians _must_ condition on all available information. If groups differ in decision-relevant traits, _of course_ you should treat members of those groups differently! What we call "discrimination" in America on Earth is actually just Bayesian reasoning; P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E) doesn't _stop being true_ when H happens to be "I should hire this candidate" and E happens to be "The candidate is a halfling". Furthermore, there's no reason for the law to behave differently in this respect than a private individual: is Governance supposed to be _less_ Bayesian _because it's Governance_?!
+
+Thus, if there's a _cost_ associated with taking individual measurements, and the cost exceeds the amount you would save by making better decisions, then you shouldn't take the measurements. If your measurements have _error_, then your estimate of the true value of the trait being measured [regresses to the group mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) to some quantitative exent. Again, all this just falls out of _ordinary_ Bayesian decision theory, which continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about groups of people.
+
+If this still seems counterintuitive, it may help to consider that from the standpoint of Just Doing Bayesian Decision Theory, the distinction between "information from demographic group membership" and "information from individual measurements" isn't fundamental. The reason it seems unjust to notice race when you can just look at an individual's Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores, is because the relationship between race and any actual decision you might care about is merely statistical: it's not fair to always look to the orc if you need someone in your party to lift a fallen tree, just because orcs are stronger than other races _on average_, because it could easily be the case that this _particular_ orc is less suited to the task than other party members.
+
+But the relationship between "measured traits" and any actual decision you might care about _is also merely statistical_. The reason we have a concept of "Intelligence" is because it turns out that people's performances on various mental tasks happen to positively correlate with each other, but that's just _on average_: it could easily be the case that this particular Intelligence 18 person is less suited to a particular task than some Intelligence 14 person. _Mathematically_, it's the same issue.
+
+We don't typically _think_ of it as the same issue here in America on Earth. People do sometimes complain about inappropriate reliance on faulty "individual trait" proxies: that [holding a college degree isn't the same thing as being educated](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/), that job interviews aren't the same thing as job performance, that IQ is not intelligence. But the objection doesn't pack the same moral force in our culture, as can be seen by how often complaints about "individual" proxies are _justified in terms of_ their effects on demographic groups, as when it is argued that ["whiteboard" coding tests are bad for diversity](https://shecancode.io/blog/its-time-to-end-whiteboard-interviews-for-software-engineers), or that [IQ is racist](https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing).
+
+The explanation for the difference in intuitions is as much political as it is moral. On account of being visible clusters in a ["thick" subspace of configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (having many different correlates, [even if the effect size along any one dimension may not be very large](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy)), race and sex are _salient_ as [markers for coordination](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/). Groupings made on the basis of less visible and lower-dimensional traits, like "People with Intelligence 14", don't form a natural "interest group" in the same way, even if the lower-dimensional trait is more decision-relevant in many contexts. Conflict between interest groups in a democratic Society like America creates memetic selection pressure for "equality" memes that deny the existence of non-superficial group differences, as [the natural Schelling point for preventing group conflicts](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts). It's an idea born of distrust in reasoning in an adversarial environment: if you let people _make probabilistic inferences_ using race or sex as inputs, they might motivatedly try to add _bad_ inferences to Society's shared maps that would give their own demographic an advantage in conflicts. It's safer to nip such Shenanigans in the bud by disallowing the whole class of thought to begin with: can't oppress people on the basis of race if race _doesn't exist!_
+
+But Keltham isn't _from_ America; you'd expect his thoughts to optimized for _solving problems_, not disallowing Shenanigans. Everything we've been told about dath ilan emphasizes that they should be collectively smart enough not to fall into this _crazy_ trap of political incentives making a certain class of correct Bayesian updates socially taboo in order to avert other social ills; the Keepers should have pre-emptively done the analysis in the preceding paragraph _without_ having to empirically see it eat their Society's sanity, and incorporated the appropriate counter-memes in their rationality training for children. To the dath ilani intuition, then, the quantitative extent to which the statement "It's wrong to make _X_ decision about someone just because they're _Y_" makes sense, depends quantitatively on how strongly _Y_ predicts the outcomes of _X_. Whether _Y_ is an "individual trait" like having Intelligence 18 or a demographic category like being female _does not matter_.
+
+This is also how American people's intuitions work, too, in contexts where their [paranoid egalitarian meliorist](TODO: linky) memetic antibodies haven't been activated. Consider how the text of _Planecrash_ itself repeatedly contrasts Keltham to everyone else in the world of Golarion. No one (neither Watsonianly in the text, nor Doylistically in various discussions of the text on Discord) is shy about saying that Keltham is special in this setting _because he's dath ilani_. We don't insist on talking about how Keltham is smart _and_ knows about probability theory _and_ knows about chemistry _and_ doesn't know about Golarionian theology _and_ is accustomed to a high material standard of living _and_ is squeamish about seeing slave markets, as if these were separate, isolated facts about Keltham as an idiosyncratic individual. We connect these facts to Keltham's nationality even though, if you look, there are surely _also_ natives of Golarion who are smart (to some quantitative extent) and know about chemistry (to some quantitative extent) and disapprove of slavery (to some quantitative extent), because our whole high-dimensional picture of what Keltham _is_—comprising many, many traits to their respective quantitative extents—is, in fact, [_causally downstream_ of the "essential" fact](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) of his having grown up in another world. It's either not bigoted to _notice_, or a cognitive system requires some amount of "bigotry" in order to function.