From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Fri May 24 2002 - 11:48:55 MDT
On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 05:35:10PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> I'm not sure how you go from Self Direction and respecting other people's
> choices to the conclusion that group membership should be ignored unless
> it makes a signficant difference to other people's lives. You seem
> to be saying that you should ignore groups that make a significant
> difference to someone's life, but take into consider all the others
> (that don't matter much?). Could you clarify that part?
What I mean is that group memberships that essentially indicate lifestyle
choices that don't affect other people should be ignored.
> I agree that it makes sense to be cautious about using group membership
> information because of the danger of over-generalizaing.
I was also thinking of the tendency to undervalue groups considered
foreign or different.
> I think we need to distinguish between groups defined in terms of a
> salient characteristic, like someone who does not have enough education
> for a given job, and groups which are defined in other terms, like race.
> It's legitimate not to hire someone if he doesn't have the education
> needed. But refusing to consider someone because he is a member of a
> race which usually does not have sufficient education is another matter.
But the really salient characteristic here is how well someone will
perform in a job, and education level is also only an indicator/predictor
of that. So I'm not sure that distinction makes sense either.
> It is hard to know exactly where is the right place to draw the line in
> today's world. I prefer to take a long term perspective and to try to see
> how these issues are changing over time. IMO the key insight offered by
> the Extropian perspective is that the superficial and often misleading
> physical characteristics by which so many people are judged today will
> become malleable in the future. The debates and rants here on women vs
> men take on an entirely different flavor once sex becomes a matter of
> choice and not birth. Already we have this communications medium in
> which we have active and vital interactions without knowing much more
> about other people than what they choose to reveal. In time I believe
> the physical world will provide people with similar flexibility in how
> they present themselves.
That may not make as much difference as you think. It seems we can have
just as much irrational prejudice based on self chosen groups. So instead
of irrational prejudice based on biological sex, you could get irrational
prejudice based on the presented sex. (I'm assuming here that people will
tend to stick with a single presented sex instead of switching frequently.
If not, I'm sure there will be other groupings that people self-assort
into that could become the basis for irrational prejudice.)
So again, I think the crucial element in whether a group membership should
be considered is not whether it's voluntary or not, but whether
considering it is likely to cause an irrational error in judgement.
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