From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Sep 21 2002 - 02:02:07 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> What motivates anyone to ask if `some groups of people have genetic
> limitations' that require appropriate treatment (intensive costly
> education, gene therapy, segregation, enslavement, whatever)?
>
> In general, I think, it's a pre-scientific `chunking' of our experienced
> world that coarsely aggregates people into sets on the basis of some
> bindingly apparent discriminator--sex, say, or age, height, skin tone, eye
> shape, hair type, verbal accent. We seem to have a propensity to carve the
> world into groups of this sort, treating some people as inside the `us'
> boundary and others inside the `them' boundary, and for these sets to get
> confused with `friend' versus `foe' AND `sexually unappealing' versus
> `wickedly attractive' and many other possible readings.
Post of the Month.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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