Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Because it only took Viking-Sensei three years (and the approaching end of Errant Story) to come up with a better name for "General Discussions"
User avatar
Imp-Chan
Not Yet Dead
Posts: 1407
Joined: August 10th, 2007, 11:03 am
Twitter @: ImpChan
Location: Seoul, South Korea
Contact:

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Imp-Chan »

I'm pretty sure his wife stole him about as much as he stole her. It was, from my position as outside witness, a fairly mutual battle for clan supremacy courtship.

^-^'
Because scary little devil girls have to stick together.
Image
User avatar
Boss Out of Town
Team Captain
Posts: 1051
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 8:49 pm
Location: Near where the Children of the Corn go to school

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Boss Out of Town »

Well spoken discussion going on here . . .

"Bigotry" does seem to be something fundamental in humans. Whenever you put a number of Homo Sapiens together outside traditional cultural rules and oblige them to socially interact, they will divide ourselves into groups (often without conscious effort), assume simplified descriptions of these groups, and make value judgments on each of them, assigning them generalized behavioral and physical descriptions and ranking them in value based on these descriptions. This is true whether the created group is a high school student body, a city neighborhood filling up with recent immigrants, or a newly created empire encompassing half a continent.

I assume this thought process was useful to our primate ancestors. You find a simplistic version of it among monkeys and apes. If you think about it, assigning an object to a class, then evaluating that object as a threat, food source, etc., per a remembered description of that class, is probably hardwired into the mammalian brain. It is a good survival trait. Animals with less complex brains get by mostly on reflex reactions to stimuli. The mammalian brain, while capable of absorbing and action on far more information then the brain of a fish, would loose split seconds of precious reaction time if it had no way of simplifying its data processing in a crisis.

The ability of humans to process abstractions in our forebrains gave us a lot more computational options when creating our culture and resolving problems. One book on my shelf is entitled The 500 Nations of North America. Which is to say, a few hundred hunter-gatherers crossed Beringia some ten millennia ago and created five hundred distinct cultures well spreading across the continent. Like the original immigrants to the Americas, we can use our cognitive abilities to create a near infinite number of groups and classes. Of course, we then assign these groups social ranks, generalized characteristics, and moral worth. So, you can justify robbing the peasants over the hill because they are your social/class inferiors, because they are all dirty and stupid, and because they are all savages. While you are at it, you can enslave and kill them, as well, just because they are outsiders, "not us," and therefore not eligible to be treated by your usual moral standards.

Now, we also have the ability to judge other humans as individuals rather then assigning them group characteristics. Making individual judgments has many advantages when working on narrow issues, but it is not time or energy efficient. Imagine, for instance, walking through a crowd on a city street and judging individual as a mugging or pickpocket threat. Instead, we sweep our eyes across the crowd and classify most or all of the people we see as belonging to a non-threat group without a moment's hesitation. This is why good street thieves (and successful beggars) try to look "White-adult-middle-class professional" if possible. This is the least threatening group in the minds of most Americans, at least as far as street crime is concerned, so you can get close to a target without attracting their full attention--and their full capacity to analyze you as a threat.

When our cultural ancestors in the United States approved our constitution, they set up a legal system in which every individual had (in theory) equal rights and opportunities to life, freedom, and property. In order for this legal framework to function, citizens and officials have to be able judge each other as individuals, and for that to be the standard across the population they need to avoid forming groups of their own that spread the cultural meme of group judgments.

This individualized legal framework has a basic conflict with fifty thousand years of cultural evolution. Most of us, in most situations, never consciously note whether we are judging the people with which we are interacting as individuals or by group characteristics. In fact, we are probably using both processes in the course of the interaction. If I were negotiating a business deal with, for instance, Imp Chan, I would simultaneously be considering all I know about her as an individual, from her writing and from various comments I've read in the forum about her personal history, while also incorporating general information I (think) I know about literate people, about women, about 20-somethings, about anime fans, etc.

What we have been trying to do in this country for two centuries is work out the details of how much weight judgment by groups can be allowed in a given situation (legally, ethically, and practically.) We also have had to decide how much legal pressure we can effectively bring on people to make them interact with others as individuals rather then members of groups, and how we can indoctrinate ourselves and our fellow citizens to act according to the standards our overall community sets for its citizens.

Case in point: if a student assaults another student, when is it just kids fighting, and when is it a felony and attempted murder?

• If no lethal weapons were involved, our cultural norm would expect a District Attorney to make individual judgments in each case and, if possible, err in the direction of "just fighting."
• If the DA decides to arrest six students in a fight and charge them all with attempted murder, we need clear evidence that this situation was extraordinary. What made this individual episode different from the group of school fights that did not result in murder charges?
• If he filed charges because he arbitrarily decided that the local students, as a group, are dangerous and these kids needed to be punished as an example, he is not entirely thinking outside his professional culture--DAs "make examples" of people all the time--but the students have a case for overreaction and prejudice against teenagers (which isn't usually illegal, just annoying to teens.)
• If he charged the six students because his "group judgment" of Blacks is that that they are all potential killers when they fight or that any Black kid who attacks a White kid needs to made an example of, then he is in clear violation of civil rights statutes and someone in authority needs to come down on him hard.

Given the history of race relations in America, people who assumed the last situation applies in the Jena case are being quite reasonable. Cops and DAs (of any ethnic group) who treat Blacks like werewolves, liable to explode into violence at any time, are still common.
User avatar
Viking-Sensei
Evil Admin Overlord
Posts: 1193
Joined: August 14th, 2007, 12:18 pm
Twitter @: Kallisti_x
Location: Vikingopolis, USA
Contact:

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Viking-Sensei »

See Pink Floyd's Us and Them for a beautifully simple (and musical) conceptual summary of the polarization reaction from humans.

Also, I cannot help remember the subplot in Red Dwarf where Cat was the last of his race alive after they'd gotten into a bloody civil war about the color of hats that people wore in their Cat Heaven, based on some idle daydreaming Lister had done eons ago before the Cats evolved from his housecat. It just goes to prove that people can allign themselves with one another over the dumbest things ever.
How could a plan this awesome possibly fail?
Image
User avatar
Graybeard
The Heretical Admin
Posts: 7180
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 8:26 am
Location: Nuevo Mexico y Colorado, Estados Unidos

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Graybeard »

Viking-Sensei wrote:See Pink Floyd's Us and Them for a beautifully simple (and musical) conceptual summary of the polarization reaction from humans. (...) It just goes to prove that people can allign themselves with one another over the dumbest things ever.
Check, on the Pink Floyd piece. Anyone not familiar with this and the Dark Side of the Moon album containing it is nyekulturny, IMO.

As for the dumb things people align themselves over, everybody/anybody know what a "granfalloon" is?
User avatar
Forrest
Finally, some love for the BJ!
Posts: 977
Joined: August 21st, 2007, 12:49 pm
Location: The Edge of the Earth
Contact:

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Forrest »

Boss Out of Town wrote:I assume this thought process was useful to our primate ancestors. You find a simplistic version of it among monkeys and apes. If you think about it, assigning an object to a class, then evaluating that object as a threat, food source, etc., per a remembered description of that class, is probably hardwired into the mammalian brain. It is a good survival trait. Animals with less complex brains get by mostly on reflex reactions to stimuli. The mammalian brain, while capable of absorbing and action on far more information then the brain of a fish, would loose split seconds of precious reaction time if it had no way of simplifying its data processing in a crisis.
Indeed, this was another of the major points made in the second half of that class I mentioned earlier, regarding whether prejudice (even in conjunction with an explicit rejection of the essentialist notion of racism) counts as a form of racism. The upshot was that discrimination and prejudice are not bad per se. Rather, they're the basis of almost all scientific reasoning: grouping perceived phenomena and making predictions about other attributes of those phenomena based on the attributes you've already observed. The harm comes from being unable or unwilling to update your categorization in the face of new evidence, requiring you to simply ignore the new, contradictory evidence. So if every black person you've ever heard of has been uneducated/lazy/violent, or a sports superstar, or whatever stereotype you want to pick, then it's reasonable to assume that they all are. However, you should always be open to the possibility of finding one who doesn't fit that stereotype, in which case you'd better be willing to acknowledge that and make room in your mental classification for people like that. (And even then, finding some outliers does not disprove a broad statistical assessment; e.g. "most girls don't like first person shooters" is not disproven by finding a single girl who does).

Interestingly, this same sort of unwillingness to update your mental model of the world in light of new evidence seems to be the basis of religion's hostility toward science.
User avatar
Viking-Sensei
Evil Admin Overlord
Posts: 1193
Joined: August 14th, 2007, 12:18 pm
Twitter @: Kallisti_x
Location: Vikingopolis, USA
Contact:

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Viking-Sensei »

Forrest wrote:Interestingly, this same sort of unwillingness to update your mental model of the world in light of new evidence seems to be the basis of religion's hostility toward science.
Oh, the things I could say angrily towards most religions at this point in my life.

After years of not knowing what I was and reading way too much religious theory, I finally worked out who I am/what I am as a religious identity. I'm an 'Omnitheist', a term I coined to best represent what I and the handfull of people like me believe to be true. As an Omnitheist, I try (with the basic understanding from the getgo that I will certainly fail) to understand and accept all religions as being essentially and fundamentally true, if not occasionally factually inacurate.

Much like an Atheist might say "None of the religions agree, so they must all be wrong and I denounce the entire system as essentially flawed" or an Agnostic say might say "None of the religions agree, so I'm not choosing to decide which is right until I witness or expeirence something to make these spirital quandries revelant to myself.", the Omnitheist says "None of the religions agree on everything, but a lot of them agree on most things... so maybe the disagreements are simply misunderstandings based on perception-based bias and misinformation and there exists a greater order of truth beyond that which any one human being or religion is capable of grasping."

The best example for the founding principle of Omnitheism is that of the "Elephant Under A Sheet" story. If you don't know it... here it is in brief.
Several people are asked to approach an unknown object (It's an elephant) placed under a sheet. Each person places their hand under the sheet, feels the part of the elephant they've touched, and attempts to describe it. The first hits a tusk and says "This is bone! It must be a dinosaur fossil." The second hits the tail and says "This is ropey and hairy... I know, it's a donkey's tail." The third grabs a leg and says "You're both wrong, this is a stout tree trunk."... and on and on, until the elephant's run out of body parts.
The point of the Elephant story is that each person was essentially correct in their basic description... It was only when they started to assume that each of them had a monopoly on the truth and tried to base their assumptions only on what they themselves assumed to be correct that they failed to identify the elephant. Omnitheism hopes to, by watching others celebrate and worship their god/gods, get past the "It's an elephant" stage one day and move on to bigger questions like "Why is there an elephant under a sheet?" and "How did someone manage to get an elephant in here? Those doors don't look nearly big enough." and "What sort of sick bastard organizes an elephant-based guessing game in the first place?"

Now, to tie this all back in to the original topic at hand... as an Omnitheist, I try and believe all other religions are correct. Therefore, the only really *wrong* wrong thing someone could do is declare that they are the only correct one and that everyone else is going to (Insert_Scary_Afterlife_Scenario_Here) for not agreeing with them. That's like... Omnitheist Sin Numero Uno.

That's why I sort have a sidelong grudge towards fanatical devout Christianity, especially Catholics and old-skool believers who would still push the flat-Earth theory if it wasn't so painfully obvious to them that it wasn't true. It's not that I don't believe that the universe could only be 6000 years old and was made "old" when it's new because God sometimes can be a jerk... so far, this theory seems to hold a fair bit of water... it's just that groups that wield TRUTH like a sword don't get to complain in my book if they get cut by it.

You don't hear the Apolloans (I think that's what they're called - there's still a few of them out there) calling foul because we teach children in school that the Sun is a 'star' and not a guy-in-flaming-chariot. Sure, we can't prove that it's actually a star, or that all the stars in the night's sky aren't actually gods with pimped-out rides, but at least they've got the class not to make a big issue out of it.

It's possible to have two incompatible views of things in the experiencible world... hell, that's what the game Plink on The Price is Right is all about. Drop it here and it's a million dollars, drop it the same place next time and it's $0. Three people who reinforce a stereotype in a row doesn't mean the fourth will, or has to, or is even an anomaly because they don't. They're just from a different part of that cloud of perception-based bias and misinformation, and by learning of them and knowing them you come closer to understaning the greater order of truth beyond that which any one human being is capable of grasping.
How could a plan this awesome possibly fail?
Image
User avatar
Boss Out of Town
Team Captain
Posts: 1051
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 8:49 pm
Location: Near where the Children of the Corn go to school

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Boss Out of Town »

Viking-Sensei wrote:That's why I sort have a sidelong grudge towards fanatical devout Christianity, especially Catholics and old-skool believers who would still push the flat-Earth theory if it wasn't so painfully obvious to them that it wasn't true. It's not that I don't believe that the universe could only be 6000 years old and was made "old" when it's new because God sometimes can be a jerk... so far, this theory seems to hold a fair bit of water... it's just that groups that wield TRUTH like a sword don't get to complain in my book if they get cut by it.

You don't hear the Apolloans (I think that's what they're called - there's still a few of them out there) calling foul because we teach children in school that the Sun is a 'star' and not a guy-in-flaming-chariot. Sure, we can't prove that it's actually a star, or that all the stars in the night's sky aren't actually gods with pimped-out rides, but at least they've got the class not to make a big issue out of it.
Just for the record, I'm pretty sure the Catholic church never believed in a flat earth, save among some illiterate brethren back during the Dark Ages. Like, they came to a grudging acceptance that other faiths were not incorrect enough to argue with a couple of hundred years ago. This doesn't keep them from sending out missionaries, and it didn't keep specific bigoted Catholics from attacking local faiths, but erratic behavior of that sort is common in human organizations.

While conservative factions of the church hierarchy have had occasional grievances with specific points of scientific knowledge (per the well-known cases of Copernicus and Galileo), the church as a whole has a long tradition of rational intellectualism dating back to the Apostles. Eventually, when the evidence for it piles up, the Catholic hierarchy will accept new knowledge.

I wanted to clarify this primarily because most people with a grievance against Christianity tend to lump all Christians in one group, and that groups characteristics are those of conservative fundamentalist evangelical Protestants. This is the only important Christian faction to believe in biblical literalism and reject the Western intellectual tradition of rational discourse, which is why they set up their own universities and their activists use political trickery to force their religious views into science classrooms. The Catholic church accepted evolutionary science back in the 19th Century.

I'm not a Catholic myself, and not particularly religious, but it helps to deal with the troublemakers if you identify them correctly.
User avatar
Boss Out of Town
Team Captain
Posts: 1051
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 8:49 pm
Location: Near where the Children of the Corn go to school

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Boss Out of Town »

Forrest wrote:
Boss Out of Town wrote:I assume this thought process was useful to our primate ancestors. You find a simplistic version of it among monkeys and apes. If you think about it, assigning an object to a class, then evaluating that object as a threat, food source, etc., per a remembered description of that class, is probably hardwired into the mammalian brain. It is a good survival trait. Animals with less complex brains get by mostly on reflex reactions to stimuli. The mammalian brain, while capable of absorbing and action on far more information then the brain of a fish, would loose split seconds of precious reaction time if it had no way of simplifying its data processing in a crisis.
Indeed, this was another of the major points made in the second half of that class I mentioned earlier, regarding whether prejudice (even in conjunction with an explicit rejection of the essentialist notion of racism) counts as a form of racism.. ..
Hmmm . . . nice try, but that entire argument is based on using definitions of racism, prejudice, and discrimination other than the ones most people use when these topics come up in political/cultural debate. Here are the three definitions in from Webster's online most apt to the issue:

"Any of the traditional divisions of humankind, the commonest being the Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negro, characterized by supposedly distinctive and universal physical characteristics: no longer in technical use."

We have, universal in human societies, what might be called Ethnicism, the categorizing of ethnic groups as inferior based on an arbitrary set of descriptives that are either (1) Unprovable (Americans have no talent for philosophy, Germans have no sense of romance) (2) disprovable but evidence is ignored for cultural or personal reasons (Blacks are not as smart as Whites, Americans are as spiritually strong as Japanese and cannot fight a long war) and (3) only applicable to describing individuals, not populations, and therefore a non sequitur (Jews are shrewd, the French are cowards). In the case of modern Western culture, the "scientific" division above was long used, but was discredited because there was so much variation among human populations that no solid boundaries between races could be defined. Modern genetics has shown that the categories above were an optical illusion.

"A human population partially isolated reproductively from other populations, whose members share a greater degree of physical and genetic similarity with one another than with other humans."

This is the modern scientific definition of race, but, again, there are no true boundaries to set. Genetic dissimilarity is usually a matter of small increments, not an obvious measured boundary.

"An arbitrary classification of modern humans, sometimes, esp. formerly, based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape, and now frequently based on such genetic markers as blood groups."

The dictionary is being too polite. Invariably, behavioral characteristics are attached to the arbitrary classification (Blacks are lazy, Hispanics are dirty, WASPs are emotionally cold), along with non-scientific attributes ("White men can't jump!" and Black males are driven to sexually crave White females).

Your discussion involves the first and second definitions, the debunked old scientific term and the questionable modern one. When people argue about race in America, they are invariably discussing the third, cultural definition, even if they try to bring the scientific definitions in as support.

That same changing of definitions shows in the elaboration of the other two words . . .
Forrest wrote: The upshot was that discrimination and prejudice are not bad per se. Rather, they are the basis of almost all scientific reasoning: grouping perceived phenomena and making predictions about other attributes of those phenomena based on the attributes you have already observed.
Here, the definition your class came up with is so general I could use it to describe how I choose my favorite brand of root beer. When "prejudice" and "discrimination" are issues in our political discussions, it involves very specific actions: the prejudice that leads someone to assume a Jew will lie and try to cheat him in a business interaction, the discrimination of White real estate agents collaborating to discourage Blacks from moving into their neighborhood.
Forrest wrote:The harm comes from being unable or unwilling to update your categorization in the face of new evidence, requiring you to simply ignore the new, contradictory evidence. So if every black person you've ever heard of has been uneducated/lazy/violent, or a sports superstar, or whatever stereotype you want to pick, then it's reasonable to assume that they all are. However, you should always be open to the possibility of finding one who doesn't fit that stereotype, in which case you'd better be willing to acknowledge that and make room in your mental classification for people like that. (And even then, finding some outliers does not disprove a broad statistical assessment; e.g. "most girls don't like first person shooters" is not disproven by finding a single girl who does).
This is apt, but does not deal with the real source of prejudice, which is cultural training, passed down from generation to generation by family, peers, social training, and direct education. In the remote, very White rural county I was brought up in, interactions with Black people were extremely rare. Indeed, I distinctly remember the first time I saw an African-American, in Minneapolis, Minnesota when I was ten years old. In spite of this lack of personal interaction, I can assure you that every child in that county "knew" what Blacks were like, and why they should be scared of them or avoid them. The cultural indoctrination differed from integrated counties down in Mississippi only in intensity.

It is certainly true that being unwilling to change your beliefs in the face of example is a harmful thing. However, that individual failing is only one small part of the problem. The best way to avoid people being close-minded when they encounter a member of a negatively stereotyped group is to avoid indoctrinating them in the stereotype in the first place. There is also the problem of action at a distance. The most harmful actions due to stereotyping are those occurring outside of individual encounter. If housing discrimination is harming a group, the people directly involved are real estate agents, bankers, and a few of their associates and friends. The laws that protect against housing discrimination, like those that might prevent sexual harassment, gay-bashing, and racist assaults (on Blacks, Whites, or anyone), have to be written, passed, and supported by people who were not present at the scene of the harmful action. Practically, therefore, you cannot narrow the possible sources of change to personal encounters. Some effort to combat harmful stereotypes, to prevent bigotry and prejudice, has to be made at a higher level of organization. If you cannot strike at the source, nothing will change.
Ghost in the Shell
Jordan's Lab Assistant
Posts: 38
Joined: August 20th, 2007, 6:02 am

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Ghost in the Shell »

Boss Out of Town wrote: ... Some effort to combat harmful stereotypes, to prevent bigotry and prejudice, has to be made at a higher level of organization. If you cannot strike at the source, nothing will change.
That was why I said something about starting a campain to counter racism at a school rather than only punishing people in a certain situation (that probably has to be done as well to "protect the greater good of a state based on laws" (sorry, but I can't translate the german term that describes this)). If people hang up nooses in a tree that's serious, sure, but it's also a symptom that something with the society is wrong in general. That the mentioned indoctrination has already happened and you should start to do some counter-indoctrination against it.
Of course that's hard, because you will only succeed in convincing very few of the extremists or fundamentalists. The real goal should be to overcome the problem in several generations. That's dismotivating of course, because we live now, but it's the best we can do.
I have personal experience in talking to people following some kind of fundamentalism (racism and anti-immigrant minded opinions). It was one of the worst experiences I have ever made, but it clearly showed me that it's nearly impossible to change their minds with things as punishment. You only give them the feeling to be some weird kind of martyrer and in their groups, they probably are.
User avatar
Forrest
Finally, some love for the BJ!
Posts: 977
Joined: August 21st, 2007, 12:49 pm
Location: The Edge of the Earth
Contact:

Re: Well... here's an interesting starting place for this board.

Post by Forrest »

Boss Out of Town wrote:Hmmm . . . nice try, but that entire argument is based on using definitions of racism, prejudice, and discrimination other than the ones most people use when these topics come up in political/cultural debate. Here are the three definitions in from Webster's online most apt to the issue:
This paragraph confused me for a bit, until I realized that you're giving definitions of race, not racism. I never tried to give a definition of race; the closest thing I ever said was that "racialism" is the belief that different races (however you construe 'race', which I did not specify) have different, fixed cultural traits (as opposed to merely physical traits; "most Norse people are blonde" or "most Irish people are redheads" isn't racialism). This sounds like what you meant by "ethnicism": all the examples you gave of such are good examples of racialism, and in some cases (where there is a normative judgement involved), racism as well.
Your discussion involves the first and second definitions, the debunked old scientific term and the questionable modern one. When people argue about race in America, they are invariably discussing the third, cultural definition, even if they try to bring the scientific definitions in as support.
My discussion works just as well with the third definition of race, and I agree that that is the most common one used today.
Here, the definition your class came up with is so general I could use it to describe how I choose my favorite brand of root beer. When "prejudice" and "discrimination" are issues in our political discussions, it involves very specific actions: the prejudice that leads someone to assume a Jew will lie and try to cheat him in a business interaction, the discrimination of White real estate agents collaborating to discourage Blacks from moving into their neighborhood.
That's the point: that racial prejudice and discrimination are just specific forms of prejudice and discrimination in general, which are not in themselves bad things, as they're how we (to use your example) distinguish between brands of soda, and all sorts of other useful abilities. I discriminate between Coke and Pepsi and am prejudiced against Pepsi. I don't have to drink a Pepsi to know that I won't like it; I know, just by it being a Pepsi brand cola, that I don't like the taste of it.

The only harm comes from our racial stereotypes being *inaccurate*, and people being closed to new evidence that would disprove them. If all ethnically Jewish people really were liars and cheats, then the ability to discriminate between Jews and non-Jews would be good, as would being prejudiced against Jews in situations where trust is important. But Jews aren't all liars and cheats, or any more liars and cheats than anyone else; so such prejudice is unwarranted.
This is apt, but does not deal with the real source of prejudice, which is cultural training, passed down from generation to generation by family, peers, social training, and direct education. In the remote, very White rural county I was brought up in, interactions with Black people were extremely rare. Indeed, I distinctly remember the first time I saw an African-American, in Minneapolis, Minnesota when I was ten years old. In spite of this lack of personal interaction, I can assure you that every child in that county "knew" what Blacks were like, and why they should be scared of them or avoid them. The cultural indoctrination differed from integrated counties down in Mississippi only in intensity.
Ah, here you raise another interesting point that I hadn't yet thought of, though it's closely related to my whole "prejudice is epistemic racism" angle. Discrimination and prejudice aren't just bad when people fail to update their preconceived notions on the basis of new evidence. They're also bad when those preconceived notions are founded on crappy evidence to begin with; namely, believing something just because everyone else around you believes that. (Hey, similarities to religion abound in here...) If you believed all Jews were cheats because every Jew you had ever met had cheated you, that would be a well-founded prejudice; even if it's not actually true that all Jews are cheats, you'd have good reason to believe that they were.

Though, I suppose it does seem rational to trust the statements of your friends and family, even when not backed by evidence; but then, it's also intellectually virtuous to test your assumptions. So if you were raised in an all white community to believe that all black people were violent and dangerous, and had never seen a counterexample, then it would be rational (though incorrect) to assume that all black people are violent and dangerous. But it would be irrational to maintain that belief in the face of meeting non-violent, harmless black people, and it would be good of you, before you act on your culturally ingrained assumptions, to go out and meet some black people and see if the prevailing opinion really is correct.
Post Reply