Alicorn comments on Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians - Less Wrong
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Comments (271)
Can you say a little more about what a "protected" feature is in this context?
That is, suppose I wish to form a community in which Xes are unwelcome, and I want to predict whether you will dislike it if I announce that wish.
I'm pretty clear that you will dislike it if X in {woman, Caucasian, queer, attracted-to-men, attracted-to-women} and not (necessarily) if X in {unwilling-to-pay, non-expert-in-$FOO}.
What about X in {adult, American, non-recovering alcoholic, hearing, sighted}?
More generally: is there a rule I could apply to predict the result for given X, supposing I knew the relevant demographic facts about Alicorn?
I waver on to what extent age is a protected category but normally err on the side of not caring about age-specific community arrangements to the extent that these overlap with pointlessness or have equivalents for multiple age groups. (E.g. a nursing home is not obliged to have children's classes if they have adult classes, because that would be silly, and a driving school does not need to admit twelve-year-olds, because for reasons that are not the school's responsibility twelve-year-olds may not drive).
Disability status (sensory, mental, physical, and to a lesser extent disease/addiction related) is protected but interacts strongly with pointlessness. Disease/addiction are less protected to the point where one might exclude alcoholics from a wine tasting on that characteristic alone, or send a kid home from school because ey has a contagious disease which is incidentally causing a temporary disability.
Nationality is weakly protected but interacts (through geographic location and language/culture) with pointlessness and with non-protected features, so tends not to look protected in terms of my reaction to various items.
If I had to describe a rule, I'd describe it in terms of the voluntariness of the feature, the background likelihood that people discriminate against those with this feature (not just the individual likelihood that the community-former is being exclusive for discriminatory reasons), and the difficulty/intrusiveness of hiding the feature should one want to do so. So, for example, race is maximally protected, because it's completely involuntary, racism is totally a thing humans do, and it's difficult to conceal.
(nods) I think I follow.
So if you moved to a community where people with your color hair were routinely discriminated against and hair dye illegal, you would dislike the idea of a not-your-hair-color-only club, but in a community without such constraints you would be all right with it?
Actually, I disapprove of hair dye for unrelated reasons, but yeah, you seem to have the gist of it.