The human race is full of jerks

I disagree, actually. Since race is a construct, racism is a construct as well. Maybe you could say that people tend to fear outsiders, but that is also something that is political tool. I’m skeptical when “X is a thing we’re born with” comes out, because that really is very much flattens human experience.

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Especially since research shows that being born with a tendency doesn’t mean that environment won’t tweak things differently.

The long and short copies of a particular gene (I’ve forgotten the specific name), for example, that seems to affect coping mechanisms. Born with two short ones, but blessed with a supportive loving environment in childhood, and the kid turns out OK. Born with two long ones, but severely abused from a young age, and the gene isn’t sufficient to protect. Born with one long and one short, you can actually figure out what sort of childhood occurred based on how the kid turns out.

(edited for typo, which I seem to be doing a lot of these days)

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Yeah, a friend of mine whose mother is a biologist was talking to me about this stuff recently - epigenetics, isn’t it called? Interesting stuff.

But yeah, the whole “racism is natural” stuff, I’m not buying.

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Tribalism I can get but I am not sure how much that is actually wired into us. Sadly skin color is an easy visible us/them marker. I hope we can get past all that at least to where the worst we can argue over is silly things like emacs and vi…

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Yet the sorts of concepts and ideas about evolution and inferiority is a rather new concept, historically speaking. it wasn’t until the new world slave trade that black skin was considered a bad thing in and of itself. After all, some Europeans valorized the Ethiopians, because they were also Christians (pre-new world slave trade). People were more likely to identify with religious belief than skin color.

Or we can argue over which rock bands are the best and which blow!

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Oh well now that I can get behind… though anymore I don’t disparage anyone’s taste in music other than in good fun.

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I feel like I should write a dystopian (possibly comedic) short story about the future rock music wars!

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I think tribalism is one of the primary behaviors hardwired into us, if not the primary one.

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All I said is “This rock is good enough for Jehovah!”

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Why are citations necessary? Do you imagine rape isn’t more common in the animal kingdom than in civilisation?

Do you reckon that all the men who act on the impulse to rape someone have learned that impulse somewhere, or are they merely responding to testosterone’s effects without giving a shit for the rights of others?

Pretty much all men feel an urge, often quite strongly, to initiate sex with anyone they find attractive. How is this controversial?

Race might not be a real thing, but something resembling the concept is, given the differences in facial morphology our facial recognition hardware has a hard time with.

There’s the monkeysphere, and then there’s the difficulty of discerning particular individuals amongst that bunch of folks who all have a different skin colour and appear more generic due to one’s own hardware limitations.

I don’t think pretending this isn’t real helps the cause; it’s a difficulty to overcome.

Sex is not rape. That you seem to be using the words interchangeably is concerning.

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let’s try this again

I see that this is a troll topic, started by a troll to troll us.

Perhaps we should decline to follow his lead and talk about something else instead.

Is that sort of insult necessary?

Isn’t it kind of obtuse of you to miss that it’s the rapists who are the ones conflating sex and rape?

As in, gee, I really want to sex her - hang on, she doesn’t want me to, oh well, bad luck - I’m gonna anyway.

Pretty rank move IMO, to lob me in with rapists as a tactic of argument.

Perhaps racism is the wrong term, but behavioral studies have repeatedly demonstrated a tendency towards human behavior that is very similar. I specifically avoided the concept of tribalism because it does not fit the observed behavior. Racism explicitly posits superiority. I am arguing that humans have an innate trait to identify themselves as superior to other people.

People believe, normally, that they are superior to the average person and that any group that they are arbitrarily affiliated with is superior to other similar types of groups. People with green eyes will generally believe that having green eyes is better. They will think that people with green eyes are more honest, smarter, etc. There are obviously exceptions to this experience(self-loathing), but if sampled most children will quickly argue for the superiority of individuals who share traits with them.

Race may be a construct, but not racism(or whatever we want to call this behavior). In fact, the way in which that racism has historically been overcome is to convince the ‘superior’(superior/inferior referring to the targets of the racism and not any actual trait) group that the ‘inferior’ group is more closely affiliated with them than they previously assumed. It is particularly effective when both groups can join together and be racist towards a third group.

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xenophobia

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So if each person is deciding that they are “superior” (whatever that means), isn’t it clearly delusional?

It sounds like just another version of classic self-serving bias. People could treat cognitive biases as just another health problem to be understood and optimised. But it is different than simply striving to cure influenza or diabetes because the social structures of human society itself have been organized to exploit people’s cognitive biases. So there is literally no place for a cure.

It is a huge undertaking to clue people in to this, such as teaching kids about cognitive biases and logic in elementary school, or earlier. And to push for undoing the traditional power games of politics and economics. It is practically impossible to have much success with this when the structures of society actually require people to favor indirect reputation and symbol manipulation over evidence and communication.

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Yes. It is absolutely delusional

xenophobia is “fear of strangers”. Not a feeling of superiority over those strangers. Racism is a “prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races”. The definition of “race” might be debatable, but I am not talking about xenophobia.

I agree. I was asking the question because when it comes to social problems, I encounter many people using the excuse of a factor being “innate” to be sound reasoning to not do anything about it. Such as asserting that sexism is natural (when men do it), racism is natural (when whites do it), political power is natural (when I have it), capitalism benefits all (when I succeed), and so on. People have some sharp double standards here about addressing pathology/health when the domain is mental/emotional/behavioral as opposed to physical. Even staunch bigots never insist that they should succumb to a physical ailment because it is “the natural order of things”!

I am confident that cognitive biases can be overcome. But alarmed at how much people fight to keep them. With the delusion that it is making them a better, more effective person somehow.

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