But can I take this _literally_ as the _exact_ statement of a moral principle? _Technically?_—no! That's actually not how epistemology works! The proposed principle derives its moral force from the case of complete information: if you _know for a fact_ that I have moral property P, then it would be monstrously unjust to treat me differently just because other people who look like me mostly don't have moral property P. But in the real world, we often—usually—don't _have_ complete information about people, [or even about ourselves](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
-Bayes's theorem (just [a few inferential steps away from the definition of conditional probability itself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Derivation), barely worthy of being called a "theorem") states that for hypothesis H and evidence E, P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E). This is [the fundamental equation](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes) [that governs](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) [all thought](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QrhAeKBkm2WsdRYao/searching-for-bayes-structure). When you think you see a tree, that's really just your brain computing a high value for the probability of your sensory experiences given the hypothesis that there is a tree multiplied by the prior probability that there is a tree, as a fraction of all the possible worlds that could be generating your sensory experiences.
+Bayes's theorem (just [a few inferential steps away from the definition of conditional probability itself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Derivation), barely worthy of being called a "theorem") states that for hypothesis H and evidence E, P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E). This is [the fundamental equation](https://www.readthesequences.com/An-Intuitive-Explanation-Of-Bayess-Theorem) [that governs](https://www.readthesequences.com/A-Technical-Explanation-Of-Technical-Explanation) [all thought](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QrhAeKBkm2WsdRYao/searching-for-bayes-structure). When you think you see a tree, that's really just your brain computing a high value for the probability of your sensory experiences given the hypothesis that there is a tree multiplied by the prior probability that there is a tree, as a fraction of all the possible worlds that could be generating your sensory experiences.
What goes for seeing trees, goes the same for "treating individuals as individuals": the _process_ of getting to know someone as an individual, involves exploiting the statistical relationships between what you observe, and what you're trying to learn about. If you see someone wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, you're going to assume that they _probably_ use Emacs, and asking them about their [dot-emacs file](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Init-File.html) is going to seem like a better casual conversation-starter compared to the base rate of people wearing non-Emacs shirts. Not _with certainty_—maybe they just found the shirt in a thrift store and thought it looked cool—but the shirt _shifts the probabilities_ implied by your decisionmaking.
Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps _get the right answer_. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be unhappy about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I _can't prove it to you_, so you instead guess _incorrectly_ that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on. Nelson _et al._ also found that when the people in the photographs were pictured sitting down, then judgements of height depended much more on sex than when the photo-subjects were standing. This also makes Bayesian sense:
+["more likelihood ratios is a _different_ moral than "don't descriminate"]
+
[the other thing the ball-hiders can't get right: actually, IQ is morally valuable]
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