Joshua, I am beginning to think that you willfully decide to ignore what I say. I have never claimed that Imm is a racist. I have not called him a racist. I have not decided that he is a racist. I've only said that there appeared to me to be enough of a chance of him being one that I wouldn't risk spending time, effort, and emotional capital engaging him in debate over those topics.
Ironically, I find myself attempting to convince you that my thinking was sound, even though you believe I arrived at the wrong conclusion. In the meantime, I anticipate that every post I add to this discussion will earn me some amount of negative karma. Perhaps I would have been better off biting the bullet and engaging him on those things?
That Blue over there?
Where?
So first, it is noteworthy that Imm hasn't said anything like that at all.
I wasn't talking about Imm's post anymore. But I would argue that it is not worthy of note: we live in a society where racism is so discredited-but-not-extinct that even presenting empirical facts that might support it is taboo. Open normative statements such as the one I mentioned occurred often in back when one could comfortably be open and cruel in one's sexism, because back then that was the norm, and women engineers, challenging it, came under fire.
Nowadays, racists and such are under a lot of pressure not to leave any evidence at all of their affiliation. As a result, the probability that someone showing weark evidence of belonging to that group actually belongs to that group increases, because you don't expect to find strong evidence, and because you expect most people not to want to be associated with it that they'd go out of their way to show even weak evidence of it. Thus, what would otherwise be weak evidence becomes much stronger.
Joshua, I am beginning to think that you willfully decide to ignore what I say. I have never claimed that Imm is a racist. I have not called him a racist. I have not decided that he is a racist. I've only said that there appeared to me to be enough of a chance of him being one that I wouldn't risk spending time, effort, and emotional capital engaging him in debate over those topics.
So in addition to Kaj's point, I'm also curious what percentage that attitude triggers at. Is that a 5% chance, 10%? 55%, 99%? And more to the point, when you say racist, wha...
Now, it is said we all here pride ourselves on our intelligence, rationality, and moral sense. It is also said, however, that we are a fiercely independent bunch, and that we can let this pride of ours get the better of us. There have also been comments that the live communities that appear at meetups provide much more positive interactions than what goes on on this site's discussions; this might merit further investigation.
My point is; we've done a lot of research on how to do proper ethical and metaethical calculations, and on how to achieve self-empowerment and deal with our own akrasia, which is awesome. We've also done some work on matters of gender equality, which is very positive as well. But I haven't seen us do anything about the basic details of human interaction, what one would call "politeness" and "basic human decency". And I think it might be useful if we started tackling these, for our own sakes, that of those who surround us, and that of easing our mission along, which is, as I understand it so far, to save the world (from existential risk (at the hands of (unfriendly and self-modifying) artificial intelligence))).
What inspired me to propose this post was a video I just saw from Hank Green of the famed and fabled vlogbrothers. I hold these two individuals in very high esteem, and I would expect many here to share my feelings about them, on account of their values and sensibilities largely overlapping with ours; namely the sense that intelligence, knowledge and curiosity are awesome, and that intellectuals ought to use their power to help improve themselves and the world around them.
Here it is; I hope you enjoy it