From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Thu May 23 2002 - 03:16:41 MDT
Consider a situation where you absolutely don't have time to judge someone
on his own merits before having to make some decision. The only
information you have is that he belongs to a certain group. Should you
ignore that information and just treat him as a random human being? Or
should you even ignore the fact that he is human and just treat him as a
random sentient being? What is sentient? And what does "random" mean?
(I.e., is he a random selection from all existing sentient beings, or from
all sentient beings that ever existed, or from all sentient beings that
ever existed and ever will exist, or from all sentient beings that can
possibly exist?)
What if he chose to join that group voluntarily? Does that change
anything? What if he was born into that group but had the choice of
leaving it, perhaps at some cost? Does it depend on the type of group? If
so, which types should be considered, and which types should be ignored?
I would welcome any suggestions on how to derive the answers to these
questions from Extropian principles.
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