Comment by zahlman
> This is such a bizarre sentence. The way its tossed in, not explained in any way,
It reads naturally in context and is explained by the foregoing text. For example, the phrase "these theoretical & empirical considerations" refers to theoretical and empirical considerations described above. The basic idea is that, because everything correlates with everything else, you can't just look at correlations and infer that they're more than incidental. The political implications are not at all "weird", and follow naturally. The author observes that social scientists build complex models and observe huge amounts of variables, which allows them to find correlations that support their hypothesis; but these correlations, exactly because they can be found everywhere, are not anywhere near as solid evidence as they are presented as being.
> Like I guess the implication being made is something like "because there is a hidden latent variable that determines criminality and we can never escape from correlations with it, its ok to use "is_black" in our black box model which decides if someone is going to get parole?
No, not at all. The implication is that we cannot conclude that the black box model actually has an "is_black" variable, even if it is observed to have disparate impact on black people.
Sorry, but I don't think that is a reasonable read. The phrase "not drawing on them may not be desirable, possible, or even meaningful" is a political statement except perhaps for "possible," which is just a flat statement that its hard to separate causal variables from non-causal ones.
Nothing in the statistical observation that variables tend to be correlated suggests we should somehow reject the moral perspective that that its desirable for a model to be based on causal rather than merely correlated variables, even if finding such variables is difficult or even, impossible to do perfectly. And its certainly also _meaningful_ to do so, even if there are statistical challenges. A model based on "socioeconomic status" has a totally different social meaning than one based on race, even if we cannot fully disentangle the two statistically. He is mixing up statistical and social, moral and even philosophical questions in a way which is, in my opinion, misleading.