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The_Lion comments on Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December - Less Wrong
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Comments (186)
You may want to practice reciting the litany of Gendlin.
So have false beliefs about equality.
It's far from clear that it's "false beliefs about equality" that were responsible for the massacres committed by the communist states you refer to.
And given the context, it's maybe also worth pointing out that the communists' distinctive "beliefs about equality" were not beliefs about racial equality[1], or beliefs about equality of intelligence[2], so bringing them up here is something of a red herring.
[1] E.g., under the Khmer Rouge, you really didn't want to be ethnic Chinese.
[2] Opinions on that point in, e.g., the USSR seem to have been highly variable.
Did Khmer Rouge really care about ethnicity, or that was just a convenient marker for a particular social class?
Taboo 'care'. They did kill people just for looking Chinese.
That doesn't change much, I can taboo "care" easily enough. Did they kill all Chinese-looking people because looking Chinese was an imprecise but a good-enough marker for a particular socio-economic group?
It looks to me as if they really cared about ethnicity, but I'm far from being an expert and could be wrong. The case seems to be clearer for the Vietnamese than for the Chinese.
Evidence that that was why they did what they did?
[EDITED to add: Also: if this is meant to be an example of an atrocity arising from a "false belief about equality": evidence that in fact the Chinese were better off than the Khmer on account of racial inequality?]
That's ... rather broad. Can you point to some specific thing indicating that the Khmer Rouge did what they did for reasons that resemble the ones you described?
Thank you for alerting me to an interesting phenomenon of which I was not previously aware. On the face of it there are other explanations besides racial superiority; for instance, different social traditions can make one group succeed "against" another without anyone being better than anyone else (example: consider a toy model in which people have prisoner's-dilemma-type interactions; one group, the "natives", plays always cooperate and does very nicely until another group, the "immigrants", comes along and plays cooperate with other immigrants, defect against natives and thereby outcompetes the natives by being slightly meaner and slightly more prejudiced). Is there an obvious reason why the racial-superiority explanation should be preferred?
We do know the average IQs of the populations involved.
Mine was a little ill-thought out comment.