From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon May 21 2001 - 18:43:10 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> There is a biological urge, I think, for people to seek out others of
> their own tribe.
*Yes*. That's *right*. Which is why any attempt to track which race a
person is carries its own discrimination-propagating overhead. It is why
"distinguishing between races in order to stamp out racism has ceased to
be a good tradeoff". Let people think of their tribe as "Democratic" or
"Republican" or "Presbyterian" or "Extropian" or something else that's a
free choice of beliefs.
> Of course, when parents are designing their kids
> in a few years, one of the options will hopefully be whether to include
> this option or not.
You can't untangle genes so easily. Locating a hardware brain center
supporting racism and training selected volunteers via fMRI "cognitive
feedback" to identify and stop using that emotion would be a different
issue.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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