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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Using name is a reasonable way to optimize figuring out someone's race. The question is: why are we trying to figure out someone's race? If you're talking about reducing effort, isn't the easiest thing to just not ponder the question of someone's race? People wouldn't bother to try and answer that question if they didn't care about what the answer was.

Now, the fact that people care is not in and of itself evidence of racism. To some extent, people just want to put a face and a narrative to a name. The question is, what's in that narrative?

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That's roughly right in a moral sense, but in a Bayesian sense I don't think it's unreasonable. If race (or background or country of origin, etc.) and some attribute (education, wealth, etc.) are correlated, and names and race are correlated, it's intuitive that names and that attribute are likely correlated.

It's a huge problem when you reverse the process and say, "Despite evidence of having X attribute, I'm going to treat you as though you don't because you belong to a set where X attribute is less common." So overlooking someone's resume because of their race/class/background/etc. is absolutely racist and unreasonable. Having a biased expectation a priori, however, is not necessarily unreasonable. However it may be morally wrong because having and acting on those expectations reduces the opportunities given to members of those groups who are outside the norm, which in turn reduces the group's ability to change those correlations and expectations.

Nobody meets you and says: "While it's reasonable, in a Bayesian sense, to conclude that someone with a 'black' name like mine grew up in a low-income, low-education household, in fact both my parents have graduate degrees and are high-income professionals."

A lot of those assumptions that people make, while statistically justified, will never be rebutted in individual instances because it's socially impractical to do so.

Yes. That's what I was trying to say with the "morally wrong because having and acting on those expectations reduces the opportunities given to members of those groups" bit. Creating uphill battles doesn't allow the situation to improve.

Well, in the one example given, a waiter used the name to discern that the debit card would probably belong to a black person. That seems like a perfectly innocent use.

If a waiter isn't certain who owns a particular credit card, I do not think handing it out to someone they think matches the name, is all that sensible a course of action.

Especially when they are literally holding a card with the name of the person they are looking for on it.

There are fairly well established social methods for dealing with that conundrum and none of the good ones involve the waiter handing the card to the person they think is most likely.

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