VoiceOfRa comments on Is my theory on why censorship is wrong correct? - Less Wrong

-24 Post author: hoofwall 12 April 2015 04:03AM

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Tags: warning trigger discussion argument debate swear censor censorship rationality humans human misanthropy

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Comment author: VoiceOfRa 12 April 2015 05:42:55AM *  4 points [-]

Mind you, I do not discriminate against literal retards, or blacks, or gays, or anything. I do, however, incorporate the words "retard", "nigger", and "faggot" into my vocabulary literally exclusively because it triggers humans and demonstrates the fact that the validity of one's argument and one's ability to defend themselves in argument does not matter to the human.

You have this almost exactly backwards. Discriminating against people, a.k.a., applying Baysian priors, is in fact rational, despite modern hangups against saying this publicly. In fact you probably do actually discriminate, i.e., use evidence about people in making decisions. For example, let's say you need someone to help you fix your computer, you probably want someone who's intelligent and knows about computers, thus you will not be happy if a literal retard shows up.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 13 April 2015 01:35:17AM 2 points [-]

Up to a point. While you focus on the example the "literal retard" that's not where the problem comes in. The problem here is that people use the evidence more strongly than they should. Essentially this is the Screening off evidence problem. If I know say someone's standardized test scores and GPA that will be overwhelmingly more useful for predicting how intelligent they are than any weak prior based on race, gender or socioeconomic class. But humans often don't act that way.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 01:05:35PM -1 points [-]

Discriminating against people, a.k.a., applying Baysian priors, is in fact rational, 

Discrimination of the kind that gets legislated against in fact isnt.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 12 April 2015 05:24:47PM 2 points [-]

Um, no.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 06:00:38PM *  0 points [-]

The U.S. Supreme Court has established certain tests for determining whether disparate (different) treatment of a group is discriminatory and illegal. If the treatment is based on what the law refers to as a “suspect classification,” the disparate treatment will be subject to “strict scrutiny.”A suspect classification is some characteristic of the victim, typically immutable (one that cannot be changed, such as age, gender or race), that has no bearing on the person’s ability to perform his or her job. Under current Supreme Court rulings, there are four traits that are considered suspect classifications: race, national origin, religion and alienage (the status of being an alien).

Forcing employers to judge employees by their ability to do their job is forcing them to be rational.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 12 April 2015 06:10:03PM 2 points [-]

Except the burden is on the employer to "prove" (using only legal evidence) that the test is relevant.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 April 2015 06:49:29PM *  -2 points [-]

How does that impact my stated point?

Comment author: Jiro 13 April 2015 03:41:15AM *  1 point [-]

"You can use evidence relevant to the person's ability to do their job" and "you can use evidence that you can 'prove' is relevant to the person's ability to do their job" (where 'prove' in quotes is not the same as actual proof) are very different.

Comment author: hoofwall 12 April 2015 05:52:15AM -1 points [-]

I suppose I wouldn't want someone incompetent for a certain task to accomplish that certain task but what I meant was, I do not actively hate any of those things I mentioned as distinguished from just the idea of the human.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 12 April 2015 06:04:10AM 5 points [-]

Then why did you use the word "discriminate" when you meant "hate"?

Words may ultimately be arbitrary in some sense, but a language constitutes a consensus mapping of arbitrary symbols to things in the real world, and if you want to have a conversation with someone, it's helpful to follow the mapping. Or worse use the same word for two different things and slip between the two meanings when making an argument, it is even possible to confuse oneself this way.

This problem is not restricted to you, in our culture there is a tendency to do this with the word "hate".

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