From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Sep 21 2002 - 18:57:11 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> While I admit that the lack of knowledge that I referred to
> above is "pre-scientific" [rant about that suppressed here],
> this "chunking" is IMO an ineradicable part of any human's
> ceaseless hypothesizing---both conscious and unconscious---
> of what's going on around him. Hence the ceaseless
> disagreements about "profiling".
I don't think it's ineradicable. You present a hypothetical scenario
where there would exist real differences between groups, but why would
group-based profiling be necessary even in this case? It's the same reply
I give to people who point out that some groups which were previously
legally oppressed minorities are, today, statistically less wealthy
groups, and who say that this calls for preferential treatment to erase
the continuing injustice. But I don't care about black poverty, I care
about *poverty*, whether it's black, white, or green. If poverty exists
that's a problem. If poverty continues in the descendants of poor people
that's a problem. If some people are not as intelligent as they want to
be, that's a very severe problem which requires advanced technology (or,
what the heck, a Singularity) to address. I don't need to chunk people
into racial groups to think about the problem because even if statistical
racial differences *did* exist, they simply wouldn't matter. From an
ethical standpoint, poverty is poverty is poverty and I don't see what
"black poverty" has to do with it, or why it's any more important than
"white poverty" or "green poverty". The problem is "poverty", or (for the
Randians) "poverty in the talented descendants of people who were poor
(for whatever reason)", and I see no reason to try and solve less than the
whole problem; the main result of doing so would be activating tribal
polarization brainware, which benefits no one.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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