-And yet Keltham seems to be committed to this principle to an extent that would not only seem odd in virtually all traditional human cultures, but also seems odd when you just think practically about the numbers. When the woman he's interviewing suggests conscription as a use-case for why the law needs to discriminate by sex, [Keltham suggests](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422):
+The issue is that probability theory doesn't have any built-in concept of "protected classes." A principle that the law can only refer to lower-dimensional concepts (like "Wisdom") but isn't allowed to [refer to clusters](/2021/Mar/link-see-color/) in [thick subspaces of configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (like "is a halfling") is a principle that _decreases the expressive power of the law_, restricting the ontology that the law is allowed to reason about: effectively, saying that the government has to be _less Bayesian_ because it's the government.
+
+In America, we're used to objecting, "But it's unfair to treat someone as representative of their race or sex, because some people are atypical for their group; you need to look at their individual traits, like Intelligence or Charisma". But really, individual "traits" are _also_ an abstraction that sums over individual differences: someone might be more charming to certain people or in certain contexts in complicated ways that a single Charisma score can't express. In that light, it's not obvious why the objection against using demographic categories as predictors is more compelling than, "But it's unfair to treat someone as representative of their Intelligence or Charisma, because some people are atypical for their trait score, you need to look at individual sub-traits" ... and so on recursively? Are all forms of abstraction-for-statistical-prediction inherently oppressive?
+
+[
+use whatever abstractions are best for making relevant predictions for your use-case; use more detailed information when available and cheap, but don't moralize about using higher-level abstractions when convenient
+
+But from a perspective of first-principles statistical reasoning, this concern applies recursively at all levels.
+ That's a totally natural thing to want if you're a 21st century American, but it ... doesn't seem like the first solution you'd expect a dath ilani's mind to go to?
+]
+
+And yet Keltham seems to be committed to this principle to an extent that would not only seem odd in virtually all traditional human cultures, but also seems odd when you just think practically about the numbers. When the woman he's interviewing suggests military conscription as a use-case for why the law needs to discriminate by sex, [Keltham suggests](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422):