As I said in my reply to Allosaur above, it is not "profiling" per se but the profile that is held as a the standard. You probably know The Right Stuff. The NASA liaisons come to Edwards AFB to find candidates for the astronaut program.
"What about Yeager over there?"
"He doesn't fit the profile."
"Yeager doesn't fit the profile?!"
"He never went to college..."

Williams' article just excuses all of the old prejudices. Black men have high blood pressure? You don't want to hire one. Women have babies? Pay them less.

Williams wrote:
"In the real world, there are many attributes correlated with race and sex. Jews are 3 percent of the U.S. population but 35 percent of our Nobel Prize winners. Blacks are 13 percent of our population but about 74 percent of professional basketball players and about 69 percent of professional football players. Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Women have wider peripheral vision than men. Men have better distance vision than women."

In every case, there are more-or-less objective tests to determine who is the best candidate, irrespective of race or gender.

This would be obviously ridiculous: "Every fighter aircraft will be a side-by-side cockpit with a female on the left and a make on the right."

How about this: "I do not understand why my moving company went out of business. I hired a lot of really big strong guys."

The salient point is not that we "profile" i.e., measure against a standard, but what the standards are. Williams excuses all of the wrong ones. Myself, I want to know who has read Atlas Shrugged.

It is not "profiling" per se, but the standard against which one profiles. As I noted below: "At the David Ben-Gurion Airport, the security officers do not care if you are an Arab or a Jew or a Buddhist; Black or White or Green; male, female, or gayly transgendered. They want to know if you are evasive."

In this case, if African-Americans males are 30% more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, then, as an employer, should I not profile and discriminate in order to keep my costs down? If women are more likely to leave work and draw childcare time...

"blog article is loaded with errors"
Some of it strikes me as an effort to shoehorn grouping people into bunch of situations where it makes no sense. I don't understand the reason for this because seeing individuals as group members is a reals problem, and there is not a problem of ignoring obvious group trait correlations that would be helpful.

On your points:
#1 - This is counter-intuitive and does not ring true to me. With moving (and hand-to-hand fighting for that matter), technique matters a lot, but physical size/condition matters a lot too.
#2 - Yes! There are also things like heart attacks that we think of as affecting men, so when women present with nausea and shortness of breath, on the average doctors are slower to check for heart attack.
#3 - Yes. It's a disgrace. I don't have the answer. My UU minister thinks BLM is helpful. I take their point and support BLM. But I think we should try to systematize criminal justice rather than accept we're all biased and then try to address the biases (e.g. racism) one at a time. At the same time, policing depends on split-second decisions, and in those decision implicit bias is a huge factor.
#4 - Yes, not only because it's true, but there's also a cost in citizens seeing the police as protecting on group (e.g. the senior home) and treating another group as the likely suspects. It's hard to get the "likely suspects" group to work with the police to stop crime.
#5 - If he's the "libertarian" racists whose videos I've seen, he's not worth talking about.
Regarding corporations - It sounds like it's easier for the law than it is for public opinion to pierce the veil.

You took a hit in that long reply you wrote.
You mentioned prisons. When I was a corrections officer for 21 years, I've group-wise profiled black inmates among black inmates. white inmates among white inmates and integrated inmates among integrated inmates.
See something fishy? Into in it I went.
Now retired in the "free world?" No one's paying me to look for trouble. I'm turning around and going the other way.
I'm concealed carry should I get stuck into a situation but so far I've been able to keep the gun hid. May that good luck hold.

I profile people by the way they look and behave all the time. It's a survival technique.
In the wild I'm looking out for the lions, tigers and bears--oh my!
Chipmunks, squirrels and cuddly little bunny rabbits fail to trigger a threat response for some funny reason.

Isn't considering the downvote as evidence of "an undercurrent of collectivism" a form of profiling? Unless you know the motivation for the downvote, you can't be certain that it is an example of "an undercurrent of collectivism". (The downvoter was not me, by the way.)

I don't think Walter Williams' views contain an "undercurrent of collectivism", and he didn't use collectivist arguments to make his point. His views and arguments have nothing to do with "social metaphysics."

Ayn Rand defined a "social metaphysician" as "one who regards the consciousness of other men as superior to his own and to the facts of reality." Profiling - an evaluation of the likelihood of non-obvious attributes based on observation of more obvious ones - is not in itself an expression of social metaphysics. It is a proper tool that helps to evaluate the facts of reality in the presence of incomplete information, and a guide to further examination of the entity being profiled.

You said "tall" "good looking" "guy" and "nice suit"

that's profiling (sarcasm)

See "Science versus Common Sense" on my blog here http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...

And the extreme example is, indeed, a reductio ad extremis. Mammal... chordate...

By the way, the last time that I was robbed of $39, it was by a tall, good-looking guy in a nice suit:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...

Collective profiling is a failure to think. The essay by Walter Williams' Town Hall blog article is loaded with errors.

(1) First of all, I have worked in trucking and in household moving. Size and strength are irrelevant. Care for your work is primary. And no one works alone. You always team up for anything not obviously (trivially) a one-person load.

(2) Just because I am "White" by appearance does not mean that I am not at risk for any number of other health problems. It would be a failure for a doctor to ignore potential problems based on her assessment of my apparent "race" -- because no genetic markers exist for "race."
What would your medical prognosis be for this girl?
https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/def...
The article does not mention that by any "genetic" test for "race" she is Asian, even though she looks African. So, if she walked into a clinic here in Austin, Texas, should she be "profiled" before she is examined and treated?
As for my "whiteness" I have B-positive blood, more "typical" of west Asians (see here http://anthro.palomar.edu/vary/vary_3... ). So, what profiling would be appropriate for me in the doctor's office?

(3) The fact that the incidence of Black men in US prisons is twice the incidence of African-Americans in the general population (https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/... ) is a consequence of racial profiling in the US criminal justice system.

(4) That brings up the problem from Dr. Williams' Town Hall essay of criminal profiling. With the exception of female burglars, most "street criminals" prey on their own neighborhoods. If the thefts occurred near a senior home, I would look there first before I went into the inner city to roust out young Black men on the theory of profiling.

(5) On that note, there was a "libertarian realist" i.e., racist, using the name Brad Thun who visited some "Objectivish" boards. He asked this, rhetorically: If you were in an inner city alley at night and you saw someone coming, would you be more afraid of a young Black male or an old white woman. One of the "profilers" took the bait. However, I pointed out that a young Black male belongs in the alley - heck, the kid's probably coming home from the library - but the old white woman is the odd event, and more likely to be a danger. ... and no asked, "Why am I in an inner city alley at night?"

At the David Ben-Gurion Airport, the security officers do not care if you are an Arab or a Jew or a Buddhist; Black or White or Green; male, female, or gayly transgendered. They want to know if you are evasive.

I mentioned this before: my degrees are in criminology. Most people only know a "mass mediated hyper-reality" of crime in which the Internet and television play back for us what they believe our expectations to be. More people are afraid of Hannibal Lecter than they are of Dean Daniels, William Bradley, or Billy Johnston. (See here: https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/2015-... )

("Mass mediated hyper reality of crime" on my blog here: http://csiflint2011.blogspot.com/2011... )

Moreover, we often know the names of corporations but not the names of the actual individuals who commit mass crimes. (See for example here; https://cfpub.epa.gov/compliance/crim... ) That said, it would be wrong to profile corporations as statistically likely to be criminals.

You took a hit, and I was going to give you a thumbs up, but I left the 0 because I want it shown that there exists in the Gulch, an undercurrent of collectivism. The discussion elsewhere here on The Bell Curve also reveals the same prejudices for what Ayn Rand called "social metaphysics."

See my comments below.

It truly ridiculous that a common sense observation can be vilified. Taken to the extreme:

Officer: Can you describe the person that did this?
Victim: I was robbed by someone.
Officer: Can you describe the person?
Victim: err, human.

Sheer stupidity.

I don't think it should be a "dirty" word, but it's usually not smart. In most of the cases, they're actually examples of areas where grouping people confuses the issue. It says men have better distance vision, but an eye chart would be a much more reliable way to identify people with good eyesight. For unloading furniture, it presents the false choice of a complicated strength test vs grouping by sex, skipping the obvious choice of looking at their size, age, and physique. In the law enforcement example, if criminals find out the profile they'll recruit members of groups where criminals are under-represented.

Focusing on groups comes at the expense of not focusing as much on individuals. We are adapted to group people and fear people outside our group, a trait beneficial to hunter/gatherer bands with no legal system, but in the modern world it's a horrible trait because a lot of human progress comes from people doing things different, not following the group.

In most cases, including most of the examples in the article, I say focusing on group identities is not smart.