yeah, while i personally suspect that a high enough fidelity simulation would be comparably conscious, and i think we should certainly err on the side assuming that's the case from an ethical perspective, i do fully agree it's still an open question.
> It's kind of a stupid idea for anti-racists to even keep using the term, given that the group has no identity outside of defunct 20th century pseudoscience notions of race and preserving and promoting the idea of it as any kind of coherent group is only fortifying tribalist lines we should instead be trying to dissolve.
yeah, this is kind of a tough one, though... because people need to be able to talk about the hegemony of the group that identifies itself as white at the expense of the groups that are excluded from that identification. and always saying something like "the cartel that calls itself white, where some members aren't even consciously colluding" is kind of a clunker. esp for people who don't think/read about this stuff on their own, and who just think of "white" as a simple and natural ethnic delineation, to the degree that any ethnic delineation can be thought of as simple or natural =)
race, including "whiteness" is a scientific and biological fiction invented and accepted to maintain (and hide) a caste system. but through the assiduous maintenance of that lie, it has become a different sort of social reality. not using the term "white" makes it incredibly hard to talk with most people about the issue. but using the term "white" as most people (superficially) think of it also helps cement its pernicious effects.
pretty difficult jam our society has gotten into there.
"the people who call themselves white" is the best terminology approach i've seen to dealing with this, but even that is still quite clunky, and may still make the speaker sound like a hand-wringing liberal to anyone who's not already on board with the viewpoint that race is a pernicious and unscientific lie.
> because people need to be able to talk about the hegemony of the group that identifies itself as white at the expense of the groups that are excluded from that identification.
The answer to this is to use it only when dealing with people who go around "identifying" themselves as white. You find a "white dating" site, you know they're the jerks, and then we have to have this discussion about why that's stupid and those people suck.
But there is also a modern tendency to use it in entirely other contexts. For example, it's more the rule than the exception that the good school district in an area is gated by high real estate costs. If you can't afford the more expensive house, your kid can't go to the better school.
It's easy to cast this and similar situations in racial rather than economic terms because the people who can't afford the more expensive real estate are disproportionately black. Then you get fake anti-racists talking about "white people" (implying the upper middle class) and "black people" (implying the poor), and for a specific reason.
Because that city will have 30,000 upper middle class "white people" and 25,000 poor "white people" and 25,000 poor "black people" and if the affluent can make it about race rather than economics then they get 55,000 votes to 25,000 in their favor instead of 50,000 to 30,000 against. It's an attempt -- often successful -- to preserve racism to serve as a wedge between poor black people and poor white people who would otherwise see that they have common interests.
Notice how many of the people who do this are college educated "white people" who for inexplicable reasons speak against the self-interest of their supposed ingroup, until you notice that the reason is actually quite explicable.
it's a hard thing to keep in mind and execute on, even if you know it consciously.
i think people in general can often have too much of a move fast and break things attitude, and i tend to be the opposite, but my default tendency toward risk aversion can definitely go to far. balance is important.
i think explicitly reminding myself to think about the realistic cost of failure can be helpful. e.g. 15 minutes or an hour starting in an uncertain approach to implementing a software feature, or writing something, or trying to sketch out a proof probably isn't a huge deal. 15 minutes or an hour trying some novel approach to fixing a production bug that's writing bad data when there's some known tedious thing that'd staunch the bleeding in a few minutes, or sinking many hours and/or much money into an uncertain hobby or activity, those might be less worth the risk =) (but i didn't get the impression you were including that sort of thing, just rambling)
> if most people are searching for the truth wouldn't it be better to give them both sides of the issue and have them decide for themselves?
i think the wording of this is insufficiently nuanced. consider that many issues involve more than two clear dominant points of view, and that for many issues most people would not consider all points of view to be equally credible.
> Why is Google deciding why that specific Hillary query is taboo?
because, as another poster pointed out in another subthread, any search engine that is usable (at the level of time and technical skill that most people have) will necessarily have to make essentially editorial judgements. after almost a lifetime of being the sort of nerd that likes to make lists, categorize things, geek out over philosophical classifications, etc, and after a few years of working in the library world, i'm convinced that coming up with any system of abstraction or classification necessarily implies making editorial judgements and value judgements. i think objectivity is a great and important thing to strive for (in reporting and in information classification), but i think achieving it perfectly is definitely not possible, especially on divisive issues, and especially where lots of people disagree (or claim to disagree) on the basic facts.
> And who gave them that right?
i don't know about right, but effectively they have the ability because: 1) they built a really good search engine, 2) they built a really successful ad business on top of that to monetize it, 3) through ignorance and laziness we let them hoover up our data and use it to greatly improve their ad business, which let them provide us even more free services that everyone got hooked on, 4) everyone seems too apathetic to make the effort to move away and no one seems interested in competing with them as a search or email provider for most people. and here we are.
> Frankly, if you're waiting my table and I need more water, you should bring me more water.
is the logic here that as a software developer, your quality of life should certainly be better than that of the people waiting on you? that seems wrong to me. i mean, i know this is a common sort of latent assumption in our society, but it is one that's worth examining.
regardless, you need to find a more sane and human dev job.
like... i get that this is technically true, but you see how the addition of an infrared camera to the mix makes things much more cumbersome? or rather, do you see how obviating the need for an infrared camera makes discovering the password much easier (because you don't have to acquire and place an infrared camera, you're just handed the info via the visible spectrum)?
clever trick with the infra cam, but i don't think you've showed the equivalence of the situations in any practical sense. maybe that wasn't your point, and you were just offering a sorta-similar-but-not-really detection technique?
The infrared camera is not something exotic. Anyone who is interested in discovering passwords will have one. Most people do not care - if I would post my bank account password here most people wouldn't attempt to login to see if it was real, and of those that do most wouldn't do anything bad. I still don't post my bank info because of the tiny number of people who would abuse it: they are mostly the same people as who would buy the infrared camera.
> but look around next time you go out there are cameras _everywhere_
> You may not think those cameras matter, but let's be honest, many people have access to the data feed through those cameras. From the near-minimum-wage "security" guard (or loss prevention) employee to the corporate security teams storing the backed up footage.
yeah, this is a thought that has crossed my mind a lot the last couple years, and i find it really unnerving. i now consciously try to keep my typing out of the sight line of cameras, though i don't always remember to do that, and i'm sure there are tons of cameras i don't notice.
