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John_Maxwell_IV comments on A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies - Less Wrong
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If it really, truly didn't matter to us, then it wouldn't be a sensitive subject in the first place. When someone makes a wildly inaccurate estimate of the price of tea in China, no one gets outraged or asserts in boldface that the price of tea in China really doesn't matter.
People care a lot about the private lives of celebrities, but that doesn't mean the private lives of celebrities matter. The reason people care about systematic racial differences (and systematic gender differences) is because they're concerned about whether they measure up, or they're wondering whether their group is doing better than some other group, or something frivolous like that. The solution to the problem is not to find the answer. Folks have already tried that, and there's no consensus. The solution is to get people to stop caring so much.
In a reductionist universe, nothing can be said to matter except with respect to someone who cares about it. Why are you reading a frivolous site like this, when you could be catching up on the latest news about Brooke Shields's mother? Why are the people reading about Brooke Shields's mother doing that, when they could be sorting pebbles into correct heaps?