= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kawoomba comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1750)
One of life's crazy coincidences: I just at this very moment looked at that same page and took a quote from it for another comment I just now submitted, before reading yours.
That aside, my "strictly speaking wrong" was, unfortunately, also strictly speaking wrong. For example, the jargon "x gene variant confers a certain immunity versus y disease" is also in good use - otherwise the word "immunity" could never be used period. Vaccinations wouldn't be described by conferring immunity, when sometimes they just limit the extent of the infection to a subclinical level. So in some sense, "immunity to sunburn" isn't even wrong, strictly speaking, just an unfortunately chosen phrase in a forum such as this (which always checks for boundary cases and not for "true in a more general sense", a habit I myself indulge in too much).
I'd normally agree, but in this case CCC explicitly said “black people can't get sunburnt”.
OTOH, I only get sunburnt if I do something deliberate such as sunbathing for an hour around noon in July in Italy, and even then it's relatively mild, and I'm not quite black; I'd expect darker-skinned people to be even more resistant than that. So I'd say that whereas black people can get sunburnt in principle, for all practical purposes they can't. This is still a hell of an advantage compared to the pale northern Europeans I knew who got sunburned by walking around in November in Ireland.