For me, the one-way functions weren't the impressive part of public-key crypto; it was the idea that you can stand in a crowded room full of people who desperately want to eavesdrop on you, hold a shouted conversation with someone you've never met before or spoken with privately, and keep everything secret. I mean, wow, y'know?

Okay, but if not everyone graduates from college, and the point of admissions is to weed out people who'll succeed in school rather than wasting everyone's time, then how does a college degree mean anything different for a standard graduate, a legacy graduate, and an affirmative-action graduate? (Note that the bar is lowered for legacy graduates to the same degree as affirmative-action graduates, so if you don't hear "my father also went here" the same way as "I got in partly because of my race", then there's a different factor at work here.)

Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they've been accused of. It's not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim--I hope you're familiar with Lee Atwater's very famous description of the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.

I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one's performance. (Though I've heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)

Additionally, it seems that there's a lot of 'different justification, same conclusion' with regards to claims about black people. For instance, "black people are inherently stupid and lazy" becomes "black people don't have to meet the same standards for education". The actual example I saw was that people subconsciously don't like to hire black people (the Chicago resume study) because they present a risk of an EEOC lawsuit. (The annual risk of being involved in an EEOC lawsuit is on the order of one in a million.)

I noticed--I was very surprised indeed. (I also appreciated the "I can't think my way out of a knife!" bit--the power of intelligence, indeed.) It's more unambiguously positive than the original ending, even--definitely not what I was expecting. This kind of story is inevitably going to end up being about someone who changes the whole world, and hey, that's what the movie fades out on. I'm impressed.

The "black names" were not high status

From the paper: "We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names." Section 5 deals with this; "Carrie" and "Neil" (low-status white) do just as well as "Emily" and "Geoffrey", while "Kenya" and "Jamal" (high-status black) do just as poorly as "Latonya" and "Leroy".

A minor nitpick - this isn't just about perfectly competent people

Absolutely--I should have said "equally competent" or "reasonably competent".

I don't have a particularly strong opinion on your example, though; I've rolled it around in my head a bit and can't quite see how to fit it into the same framework. There are, I believe, organizations and affinity groups advocating for better treatment of fat people, at least. I don't perceive 'ugly' or 'fat' as being the same sort of grouping as race, though, and I'm not sure where the difference comes from, exactly.

You should have taken your own advice and remembered the bit about Politics being The Mind-Killer. Yes, this is a reasonably good illustration of your point about the size of mind-design-space, but it generated a lot more heat than light, and I think it's more illustrative of the ways in which even careful work in this area can fly off the rails with ease.

if you think that women don't take the initiative enough in sex
the men with harems of synthetic sex slaves, and the women with romantic sensitive robots

(I'm aware the second is you quoting someone else's opinion, not your own.) It's received wisdom that women are much more discerning than men, and that this is inherent and unchangeable and totally biological. It's reported this way in the popular press; the Clark and Hatfield study (an stranger of the opposite sex propositions you out of the blue; do you accept?) showing marked disparity between men and women is interpreted as reflecting a deep and abiding inherent truth.

Except, no. Women's reluctance to accept that kind of proposition is less about being inherently wired for romance and more about perceiving unknown men as dangerous. Remove the perception of danger, and the difference in receptiveness to casual sex shrinks to the point of becoming noise.

The difference is, historically, moot; women never really had the level of freedom from violence it would take to distinguish between results implying "women are inherently keen on romance" and those implying "women fear unknown men". But it should serve as a giant flaming caution signal for anyone who wants to write about inherent differences between the sexes: even if you think you are, you're probably not treading lightly enough.

I know I grew up much too late to appreciate the efforts of feminists: nobody has ever tried to sell my sister, my mother has always been able to vote, and Hillary Clinton running for President didn't strike me as the slightest departure from what I think of as a normal universe.

If you'd grown up in the 1950s, you'd have said the same thing about women being able to vote, you know. Great moral changes don't look obvious before they happen. Shouldn't this be obvious from the whole 'Making History Available' idea?

And I know this post is almost four years old at this point, but wow was this ever a failed opportunity to do outreach.

I'll try to unpack that, especially since the original post was so sloppy.

The original post said "But why is it that the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay, whereas racial genetic differences in intelligence are not?". This is incorrect. "The rest of the world" seems to think that individual genetic differences in intelligence exist and are meaningful, whereas racial genetic differences do not. (Does Yudkowsky really think that anti-racist activists believe that black people are inherently less intelligent and that that fact should be ignored? I'm not sure how else to read that.)

The unfairness of individual differences in intelligence is that, well, it happens and it's unfair. The unfairness of racial differences in intelligence is that they don't exist, but people act as though they do, and it's that second part that's unfair. These are two different kinds of unfairness. For the first, changing people's minds won't do a darned thing; it's like trying to persuade water to run uphill. For the second, changing people's minds will, following the above logic, reduce the amount of unfairness in the world, because the source of the unfairness is in those people's minds.

So, treating able-bodied people differently from disabled people is... well, it depends. If you treat someone in a wheelchair like they can't walk, that's the first kind. (They actually can't walk; it's not anyone's fault.) If you treat someone in a wheelchair with no obvious signs of mental impairment like they have impaired intelligence, that's the second kind. (They're just as clever as anyone else; the unfairness is entirely in the way you're treating them.)

Does that clear things up a bit?

I'm not sure what I was going for there; the whole point of the Chicago resume study was that racist outcomes happened even when nobody involved set out to do racist things. I think I meant "unfair things that people do", as opposed to unfair things that simply happen.

In retrospect, that was really what did it for me. I held on to various forms of wishful thinking for a long time, because it seemed to me that minds and matter were fundamentally separate things, I couldn't see how it could be any other way--though I knew at that point that religious claims tended to be laughable, so I had some kind of vaguely half-assed do-it-yourself wishing-makes-it-so I believed in--and that implied the whole universe of dualism. Somehow I came away from it having relinquished that idea, and it, more than any other one book I'd read by that age, set the course for my intellectual journey.

And indeed, I was reading the twentieth anniversary edition, which even warned me up front: "In a word, GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"

(Also, come to think of it, I'd have skipped ahead a long way on the philosophy of uploading if I'd read A Conversation with Einstein's Brain a few years earlier.)