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Old_Gold comments on Should we admit it when a person/group is "better" than another person/group? - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: adamzerner 16 February 2016 09:43AM

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Comment author: OrphanWilde 18 February 2016 02:42:16PM -2 points [-]

Well, steelmanning your Chomsky sentence, I assume you mean treating someone's race as the only meaningful information about them. In that case you might want to actually read what I wrote.

No. I mean treating race as a meaningful property of a person in the first place.

In that case what did you mean and how was it relevant to my point?

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.

Do you agree that there is a fact of the matter on the questions relating to race?

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.

Comment author: Old_Gold 19 February 2016 02:55:15AM 4 points [-]

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

Genetics science says otherwise. Or do you believe that genes have no impact on who someone is?

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?

I don't know, are you? You can trace your ancestry or get genetic tested if your curious.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 19 February 2016 01:19:43PM -2 points [-]

Genetics science says otherwise. Or do you believe that genes have no impact on who someone is?

This fails to even remotely respond to what I wrote.

I don't know, are you? You can trace your ancestry or get genetic tested if your curious.

Yes, in all cases, and since you apparently don't understand the concept being conveyed here: There are no pure-blooded aryans here. There are no pure-bloods at all.

Comment author: Old_Gold 20 February 2016 04:22:30AM *  4 points [-]

There are no pure-blooded aryans here. There are no pure-bloods at all.

There's also no such thing as 100% pure water, that doesn't mean "water" or even "fresh water" is a meaningless or "socially constructed" concept, and it definitely doesn't mean it's a good idea to drink a glass of sea water.