Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Crime stats, average IQ across groups, stereotype accuracy, etc. If you measured these stats for Irish Americans in 1865 you'd also see high crime and low IQ. If you measure these stats with recent black immigrants from Africa, you see low crime and high IQ. These statistical differences are not caused by race. An all-knowing oracle wouldn't need to hold "opinions that are racist" to understand them.
But for accuracy it doesn't matter if the relationship is causal, it matters whether the correlation is real. If in some country - for the sake of discussion, outside of Americas - a distinct ethnic group is heavily discriminated against, gets limited access to education and good jobs, and because of that has a high rate of crime, any accurate model should "know" that it's unlikely that someone from that group is a d…
The obvious problem comes with the questions why is that true and what do we do with that information. Information is, sadly, not value-neutral. We see "XYZ is a felon" and it implies specific causes (deviance in the individual and/or community) and solutions (policing, incarceration, continued surveillance), which are in fact embedded in the very definition of "felon". (Felony, and crime in general, are social and governmental constructs.)
Here's the same statement, phrased in a way that is not racist and taboo:
Someone named XYZ is much more likely to be watched closely by the police, much more likely to be charged with a crime, and much less likely to be able to defend himself against that charge. He is far more likely to be affected by the economic instability that comes with both imprisonment and a criminal record, and is therefore likely to resort to means of income that are deemed illegal, making him a risk for re-imprisonment.
That's a little long-winded, so we can reduce it to the following:
Someone named XYZ is much more likely to be a victim of overpolicing and the prison-industrial complex.
Of course, none of this is value-neutral either; it in many ways implies values opposite to the ones implied by the original statement.
All of this is to say: You can't strip context, and it's a problem to pretend that we can.