Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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What do you mean by this? Do you mean that all humans are equally smart? Or do you mean assuming some humans are in fact smarter than others but smartness isn't correlated with say skin color? If the latter, that "all humans are ultimately the same" doesn't seem like a good summary.
Edit: Or are you attempting some version of what Christians mean by this statement, namely "all humans have a soul and all souls are equal before God"?
I was also slightly offset by this, particularly the vague phrasing "ultimately the same", which by reflex I would've asked to taboo. However, by charitable interpretation, I think the intended meaning is that everyone is running on the same source code. Even if the source code contains modules that take set values according to runtime events and then become irreversible (or extremely difficult to alter), which leads to the same "program" doing vastly different things and having different capabilities.
An example intuition pump here might be to imagine a standard PC running a custom OS that enables or disables a bunch of its key features and messes a bunch of its parameters or will use different optimization subroutines and garbage collection procedures during it startup routine all according to some hidden, unknown algorithm that takes pictures of the user during said startup as input.
Obviously the sourcecode and hardware are the same, but the behavior and capabilities will be radically different depending on the user. You might even be able to hack parts of the OS during runtime to enable certain disabled features or tweak some parameters, but how much can be hacked and how to do it is unknown at first.
Well, this can be made trivially true through a suitable choice of the line between "source code" and "set values". For example, define the laws of physics and basic biology to be the "source code" and let our DNA and upbringing be the "set values". I fail to see how this is interesting.
I took his statement to mean, "the variation among individual humans across the entire human species is far greater than any variation between racial subgroups, to the point where the racial variations become negligible".
While there are of course minor differences between individuals, they tend not to correlate with anything much, and are generally far, far smaller than humans tend to assume. Those terrorists don't hate our freedom, those women aren't naturally more emotional, and those blacks aren't really savages.
I would not object to Bugmaster's summary, although it seems somewhat overly specific.
What do you mean by "really"?
If you mean that if I go out into the world and measure savageness and emotionalness and terroristness (the freedom-hating thing is straw), I will not find an effect? This is a rather radical claim, and I would like to see such a study. My impression is that studies like that find that there are effects.
If you mean "really" to mean "genetically", note that my "weak racism" would still be a valid interpretation. (For reference, "weak racism" is the claim that whether the effect is genetic or memetic or societal only matters for what kind of intervention to fix it with, and does not have bearing on whether the effect exists or is something worth talking about.)
Actually no. If one were to ask (Islamic) terrorists how they think society should be organized, one would find that their suggestions contain significantly less freedom than modern western societies.