From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@factory.net)
Date: Sat Aug 31 1996 - 03:18:17 MDT
At 10:03 AM 8/30/96, N.Bostrom@lse.ac.uk wrote:
> example, consider the group consisting of you and I and all
> humans with IQ<85. We admit that this group is stupid but
> feel non the worse for that. (Perhaps you have taken "Blacks
> are..." to mean "All blacks are..."?)
Your parenthesis contains precisely the point at issue, as far as I'm concerned.
Communication is difficult, and if you want to insist on speaking in ways
which you know are easily misunderstood and easily misinterpreted, then you
will get trouble.
If you want to free these assertions (regarding the statistics of human
psychology) from emotional baggage, I don't have a problem with that. But
if you're sincere about this (and I think it's a very difficult project,
myself), then you'll have to constrain yourself to speak very, very
carefully at all times, or your efforts will be drowned in a rising tide of
hostile (but hardly deliberate) misunderstanding. I know you know what I'm
talking about, because this is what we've seen over and over again in the
past.
I doubt that the project's benefits are worth the costs.
Eric Watt Forste <arkuat@pobox.com> http://www.c2.org/~arkuat/
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