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If I understood your example correctly, you believe that humans are intellectually limited and cannot adjust their way of thinking correctly to changing situations. There are essentially only two choices for us - we must either be “colorists” (racists/sexists/…) or “non-colorists”. Since being a “non-colorist” is preferable to being a “colorist”, we must choose become “non-colorists” and try to suppress thoughts which may cause us stray from this choice.

Have I understood you correctly?

P.S. I think your there is a mistake in your formula. Its minimum is at X=0 :)






That is not what I mean althought I understand that is a fairish way of reading what I wrote.

Humans should be able to be flexible and use a system of thinking well suited for their task and not just suitable values within a fixed architechture. Person A is using an ontology that has been formed for a different purpose (and possibly under epistemologically suspicious circumnstances). It can be show that using this ontology one can't even entertain certain strategies and in this case the optimal strategy is one of those strategies. To a colorist both swatting bees and letting hoverflys live and swatting hoverflys and letting bees live are the same strategy of killing 50% of yellow-blacks.

There is a saying that "all models are wrong but some are useful". The hoverfly ontology is more defensible because it allows to formulate strategies that have a higher expected utility. The idea isn't that one ontology is better than the another but that there is a responcibility to use and maintain your ontology to be effective. Therefore statements about the poisonity of yellow-blacks can be deemed irrelevant no matter how accurate because they fail to divide the world into useful categories to base actions upon.

For example we don't talk about what is the mass of a lepton because there are three separate mass eigenstates (roughly electron, muon and tau (the thing is complicated because the flavour eigenstates do not have a neat one to one correspondence to mass eigenstates (say we got bees, their mimic hoverflys and another wasp poisonous species and a a non-poisonous mimic to that, the "poisonous eigenstate" can appear to be bee-like or other-wasp-like and bugs with definite bee-likeness have a undefined poisonousness))). The mass closest to the expectation value of the mass is in a sense more accurate than the other values but it would still be misleading to think that leptons weigth that much. Rather electrons weight what electrons weight, muons weight what muons weight and taus weight what taus weigth and a lepton can be either an electron, muon or tau.

The argument is supposed to run into the other direction too. If the village has no use to know the different characteristic different trees because they only use the tree for firewood and all trees burn equally well there is no need to separate oaks from briches and a tree can just simply be a tree (and the cognitive load be rather used to make distinctions that do matter like subdividing yellow-black bugs). In this case it would favour a stereotypist or even a monotypist over a polytypist.

The question is does the ontology form natural utility groupings for action. A racist thinks that race is more akin to the trees than the yellow-blacks. One often used valid reason to oppose racism is that potentially and probably relevant information is being discarded and better results would be achieved by keeping track of them. Often this is because downsides which race is used as a proxy for can be detected more directly or that different aspects or reasons for the downside can be addressed by different actions.

Unfortunately percieveing math as simple made me not pay due attention to it. The formula should be (100*(X))+(50*(1-X)). Deaths by bee sting from 100 to 0 by increasing swatting and deaths by starvation from 0 to 50 by increasing swatting. The increase in starvation deaths is never large enough to compensate for deaths prevented by swatting. Thus the result is swatting with extreme prejudice. Discriminatory swatting prevents all bee stings and incurs only half the starvation deaths (assuming 1:1 bee to mimic ratio).
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Fwiffo
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