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Fetterkey comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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"there's absolutely nothing wrong with men making generalizations about women, nothing wrong with whites making generalizations about blacks or vice versa. allowing overly sensitive members of minority groups to dictate behavior is a waste of time."
Are you serious? Assuming that you are, you are treading on ground that is far from stable, especially in a place such as this...
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I fear I play a poor inquisitor, and you a poor Galileo. The thought that it's all right to make broad generalizations about large groups of people isn't some great new theory that society is trying to suppress-- it's just wrong. Indeed, such an idea is regressive, not revolutionary.
you're attaching a bunch of words with negative connotation without actually telling what's wrong. we all make generalizations all the time. we can't interface with reality without making generalizations. if it is clearly wrong then you have the entire apparatus of social statistics to debunk.
I'm quite surprised that this requires explanation, since this seems like basic-level rationality to me, but here we go:
Generalizations about people of a particular ethnicity, based solely on their ethnicity, are racist. Overt racism is not acceptable in modern civilized society. In the past, overt racism was acceptable, but we have moved beyond that. It is extremely unwise both from a personal belief perspective and from a general signalling perspective to hold or argue for such views.
generalizations about individuals based on their ethnicity is clearly dumb. inquiring into broad trends that correlate well with ethnic divisions is interesting and demands further research.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/116483.html
we're at the dawn of understanding genetics. to preemptively decide that a branch of inquiry will not be allowed simply because our ancestors were ignorant douche bags is silly. as rationalists I'd say it's our job more than most to take a mature, level headed look at the data that emerges. things are really going to heat up once we get cheap complete genome sequencing. we'll be able to look at actual allele distributions in ethnic sub-groups on a large scale for the first time in history (!)
I understand this research, view it as important, and know several people who are working in this field at the present time. That said, the work of geneticists is quite different from casual social observations and generalizations. When I speak out against sweeping generalizations based on gender or ethnicity, I do not speak out against the geneticists.
I'm not going to shout down people who make observations about group behavior just because their observations haven't been tested in a double blind trial yet. the data precludes us from making certain generalizations. it doesn't stop the tentative creation of new ones.
if I made a generalization about people with fingers of certain length it wouldn't generate nearly this much ire. we shouldn't treat race any differently just because people made stupid generalizations in the past.
We don't have enough data to make the case for OR against any racism (biological differences -> behavioral differences)
If a topic tends to historically collect relatively more stupid generalizations than other topics, isn't it reasonable to keep a stronger default prior against such generalizations that aren't backed by data?
So, lacking data, what is the null hypothesis?
That's an important point (that others' generalizations on race are suspect by default). However, I'm perfectly happy to consider appearance (including race) as a conditioning variable in my own thinking. I guess it might be smart to not admit this, but I think it's relatively uncontroversial amongst the mind-not-yet-killed.
There are some reasons to distrust one's own baseline p(trait|appearance) estimates, other than the obvious (confounds, low sample size), say, particular personally experienced traumatic events, or exposure to explicit indoctrination on the matter. Most of us are not committing errors like: "in my experience, chinese people like chocolate ice cream more than strawberry, while everyone else prefers strawbeery; therefore chinese genetics code for chocolate-preference."
the null hypothesis for me is that i'll listen to a wide variety of other people's hypothesis.