Jandila comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 26 September 2011 04:20:32AM -2 points [-]

First, your comment about defining racism misses the point: The issue there was specifically whether individuals are being racist and what that means.

I think it's sort of important to understand what Property X is before we can meaningfully argue about whether a given case specimen has Property X, let alone whether it's meaningful to group them in Reference Class X. Isn't it putting the cart before the horse to do it the other way?

Another issue is that there a large set of minorities which have succeeded quite well in the US despite having had serious issues in the past. The Chinese and the Jews are excellent examples (the second curiously enough seems to be overrepresented here.)

The Chinese and the Jews have hard remarkably different outcome distributions, and Jews in the US generally fit into the "white" category these days (and have for a long time). I'd avoid over-presuming on the amount of success Chinese-Americans have had, too -- see the Model Minority Stereotype, and consider that for most Asian Americans they've only enjoyed comparable gains to many whites at the cost of having to work two to four times harder to achieve it.

Even then, I'd still hardly call Chinese Americans included in mainstream-society; they're still predominantly seen as "other" by whites except insofar as they assimilate.