From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Sep 21 2002 - 22:13:53 MDT
Eliezer writes
> 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?
In my hypothetical scenario the differences were so large
that you'd be *sure* to know a lot about someone by which
group they were in. It's the reason (to be extreme) that
we don't try hitching dogs to plows---we know that any
individual dog is too unlikely to be as good as a horse
when it comes to field work. (I hope that I'm understanding
you right, here.) And as for police work, if someone got into
the henhouse and killed a bunch of chickens, then we don't
suspect any of the cows.
So, as I say, we're lucky that it's not that way with humans
hardly at all. I say "hardly", because under some circumstances,
like the current terrorist situation, it just happens that there
is much higher probability that a terrorist will be a young man
from the middle east, and a much lower probability that she'll
turn out to be a grandmother from Texas, and I think that the
El Al security guy's judgment will (correctly) be influenced to
some small degree, (though I know that this is very contrversial
on this list).
To torture myself with the nastiest case I can think of:
(luckily this hasn't come up) what if when I'm teaching
a bunch of kids I've never seen before it becomes real
necessary in my lecture that the next kid I call on get
the right answer, and a mexican kid and an chinese kid
raise their hands---god help me, I guess I'm turning
into one of "them", because I don't even want to think
about it.
> I don't need to chunk people into racial groups to think about
> the [poverty] problem because even if statistical racial
> differences *did* exist, they simply wouldn't matter. From an
> ethical standpoint, poverty is poverty is poverty...
Yes, same here. I don't even think that poverty is anyone's
business, including the government's. I'm struggling to come
up with something where an agency *would* have an interest.
Now an insurance company might discover that one racial group
had a peculiar tendency towards accidents in the home, and
recommend to its board of directors that no more policies
for this group be written for such accidents. I endorse
freedom to such an extent that I'd see this as their own
business. In fact, such a reaction on their part could
even be salutary: members of that group might get wind of
it, and become aware of it and take more precautions or
discover why the accidents.
> 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.
Recognizing that "tribal polarization brainware" exists
is quite valuable, but space precludes me from describing
how I think it evolved and why, and whether there is *any*
use for it still on Earth. We doubtless agree that it
would be one of the first things a transhuman would be
likely to edit out of his motives and unconscious reflexes
after the big S.
Lee
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