From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2021 06:07:24 +0000 (-0800) Subject: publish "See Color" linkpost X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=24b0223ea07fa0dcaa2f9a5bb6a6ed99ac32f44e;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git publish "See Color" linkpost (This isn't important, but while I'm struggling with "Sexual Dimorphism", it's better to stay active by pushing content out the door; publishing stray thoughts is free (it's what my secret blog is for) and I have no obligation to reply to comments.) --- diff --git a/content/drafts/link-see-color.md b/content/2021/link-see-color.md similarity index 83% rename from content/drafts/link-see-color.md rename to content/2021/link-see-color.md index 99e0307..a2b25d6 100644 --- a/content/drafts/link-see-color.md +++ b/content/2021/link-see-color.md @@ -1,8 +1,7 @@ Title: Link: "See Color" -Date: 2021-03-08 +Date: 2021-03-07 22:05 Category: commentary Tags: linkpost, video, ideology, Steven Universe, race, categorization -Status: draft > _Here we are in the future > Here we are in the future and it's wrong_ @@ -35,8 +34,8 @@ In contrast, "See Color"'s attacks on old-school liberalism _land_. We open to a > > AMETHYST: Dude, so this entire public service announcement could be a ploy to avoid talking about racism altogether! Hey, ah, could we get a rewrite where we appreciate each other without erasing what makes each of us different? -How is the old-school liberal to reply to this? The function of saying "or purple" is to appeal to a _principle_ of equal treatment. Adding a fantasy race in there highlights the universality of our commitment to equality: purple magical alien gem superheroines might not exist, but if they _did_, they would be entitled to the same rights and dignity as everyone. +How is the old-school liberal to reply to this? I say: the function of saying "or purple" is to appeal to a _principle_ of equal treatment. Adding a fantasy race in there highlights the universality of our commitment to equality: purple magical alien gem superheroines might not exist, but if they _did_, they would be entitled to the same rights and dignity as everyone. -But how should our principle of majestic equality be applied? [Categories summarize information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)—[cluster-structure in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace). As a matter of AI design, there would be no _functional_ reason to assign entities to different categories, if they didn't differ in _some_ decision-relevant ways. The reason it's pretty weird to reference Amethyst's skin color in a lesson about human racism, is because the challenges Amethyst might face as a gem in a world of humans—perhaps the perceptual skew of living thousands of years when most humans don't see a hundred—is going to depend on the ways in which gems and humans are actually different, which don't apply to humans of different races who are relevantly the same. +But how should our principle of majestic equality be applied? [Categories summarize information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)—[cluster-structure in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace). As a matter of AI design, there would be no _functional_ reason to assign entities to different categories, if they didn't differ in _some_ decision-relevant ways. The reason it's pretty weird to reference Amethyst's skin color in a lesson about human racism, is because the challenges Amethyst might face as a gem in a world of humans—perhaps the perceptual skew of living thousands of years when most humans don't see a hundred—are going to depend on the ways in which gems and humans are actually different, which don't apply to humans of different races who are relevantly the same. -In this way, we see that old-school liberalism is effectively the position that race _shouldn't exist_ as a cognitively meaningful category. But is it that easy? If there's some sense in which race _does_ exist—even just as a social "type tag" based on superficial anatomy markers in humans who are [otherwise totally biologically the same](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—then verbally claiming to pretend that it doesn't, isn't a realistic or _honest_ strategy for remediating the harm done by [unfair conventions that culturally evolved around the presence of the category](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/). +In this way, we see that old-school liberalism is effectively the position that race _shouldn't exist_ as a cognitively meaningful category. But is it that easy? If there's some sense in which race _does_ exist—even just as a social "type tag" based on superficial anatomic markers in humans who are [otherwise totally biologically the same](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—then verbally claiming to pretend that it doesn't, isn't a realistic or _honest_ strategy for remediating the harm done by [unfair conventions that culturally evolved around the presence of the category](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).