polymathwannabe comments on Should we admit it when a person/group is "better" than another person/group? - Less Wrong Discussion
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No. I mean treating race as a meaningful property of a person in the first place.
You start from where you responded to me - the conversation began before that, so my context for this conversation is apparently different from yours. Which is to say - the problem is not the relevance of what I say to your point, but the relevance of what you say to mine.
No.
Not as a statement of solipsism, but because "race" isn't a well-defined category system, but a product of people's absurd need to draw well-defined boundaries where no well-defined boundaries exist. There's far more difference between a black-skinned person whose ancestors have lived in America for five generations and a black-skinned person whose ancestry remains rooted in Africa, than there is between the black-skinned American and a white-skinned American - yet these two are grouped together in "black" as if that were a meaningful category.
And then the concept of mixed-race; the insistence on treating edge cases as between categories, rather than demonstrating that the joints can't actually be carved there. It's a bit like insisting that the two ends of ring species are, in fact, distinct species - and the middles are mixed-species. If races can mix - and, indeed, if they've spent the past few centuries doing so - there aren't races anymore, just a spectrum of individuals who can't be sorted in any meaningful way. At which point, well, you might as well just treat people as individuals.
Am I from a small tribe in Polynesia because I have an unusual crown formation? Maybe I'm American Indian because of the way my roots wrap around my jawbone? Well, what about my blonde hair and blue eyes? What about my red beard? Where the hell am I in that spectrum? Well, today, I'm "white", because US slavery made that distinction important in our culture, and nothing else. And the fact that I'm "white" instead of a convoluted mess of a dozen different races - mixed race, in point of fact - means that the categorization at play is the product of cultural historical accident, rather than anything resembling truth.
Is there something stronger than an upvote that one can give, like a super-upvote?
The appreciation is appreciated. :-)
I'm actually vaguely unsatisfied with this. There's a stronger statement about this I feel like I could make, but I can't translate the strong version of this into words; the discussion so far has been an abstract cloud in my brain that isn't condensing properly into a properly pithy form (which is part of why I was long-winded there). It's where all of this ties back into my opening post - about how, historically, people have been utter rubbish at judging the relative merits of groups, and how a spectrum of beliefs about race is a stronger "group" identifier than skin color. But it's not condensing properly.
Have you considered taking this as a hint that your beliefs about the subject are incoherent.
No. I don't think in words, and the translation from the thing-I-think-in into words is frequently very lossy.