Emile comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Emile 26 September 2011 03:26:40PM 2 points [-]

The problem is we have two meanings of "racist". One is "a person who believes the distribution of traits differs among races". The other is, roughly, "a person who hates members of other races". Most people believe these are equivalent.

I agree with what you mean, but I'm not sure the demarcation line between the two is very sharp, especially for non-nerds who don't overthink the issue.

Our brains store information as rough summaries, and don't always separate the value judgement from the characteristics. I'm not sure that there's a big difference between the mental representations for "X has such-and-such negative characteristic" and "I don't like X".