It’s unclear to me why you would make such an accusation without bringing any examples of what uninformed things about non-white non-Western ciswomen are supposedly said on LessWrong.
The phrase “I don’t see people in terms of race” is such an example. I have not detected racial insensitivity to that degree on Less Wrong. (Whether or not less intensive racial insensitivity exists on Less Wrong is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Google currently gives me: No results found for site:lesswrong.com “I don’t see people in terms of race”.
I haven’t heard any rationalist say it
This is true. I hope the original letter was written by someone from an exceptionally awful sub-community which is not representative of most of us.
I hope the original letter was written by someone from an exceptionally awful sub-community which is not representative of most of us.
This sounds to me like you are trying to avoid taking responsibility for a letter that you actually sign with your name. It might very well that someone writes you about a community who has nothing to do with the rationalist community and mistakenly labels them as such.
To the extend that there’s actually a problem that should be addressed it would be useful to be specific about which supposed sub-community the problem is about (as that would allow us to fix the problem in the sub-community) and I see no good reason to level the charge at the general rationality community.
It’s unclear to me why you would make such an accusation without bringing any examples of what uninformed things about non-white non-Western ciswomen are supposedly said on LessWrong.
The phrase “I don’t see people in terms of race” is such an example.
I don’t have any stats on this, but while I wouldn’t be surprised that groups considered the default say this (e.g. white, western males in the west), this seems less asymmetrical in principle in some other situations (e.g. I could see in principle a non-western non-white person being the majority in their majority non-western non-white country saying something similar if they’ve only lived with people of one so-called “race”, under popular definitions, in their life).
When you mentioned “uninformed things about non-white non-Western ciswomen”, my imagination ran towards a group of homogenous (white, western male) people who sit around and bring up “hey, I heard group X (of non-white, non-western, ciswomen) have these (insert imagined bizarre rituals and habits), I heard from (source)” “Yeah, I heard that too (from other source)”, “My mom told me (insert same stereotype) is true when I was 5” or something.
Then, a newcomer (or two, or three or a bunch) from group X joins in the conversation and say “no, I (or we all) have firsthand knowledge of growing up in X society, and that is totally unlike what you described. There is no bizarre ritual like that, or perhaps it’s a garbled description of something real that’s exaggerated.” Had the newcomers not joined, the old-timers would not have been able to shed their misconception and update their knowledge (in the charitable case that it was a genuine example of misinformation and not malicious hatred of outgroup, though with conflict theory that’s always possible still).
The phrase “I don’t see people in terms of race” is such an example. I have not detected racial insensitivity to that degree on Less Wrong. (Whether or not less intensive racial insensitivity exists on Less Wrong is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
This is true. I hope the original letter was written by someone from an exceptionally awful sub-community which is not representative of most of us.
This sounds to me like you are trying to avoid taking responsibility for a letter that you actually sign with your name. It might very well that someone writes you about a community who has nothing to do with the rationalist community and mistakenly labels them as such.
To the extend that there’s actually a problem that should be addressed it would be useful to be specific about which supposed sub-community the problem is about (as that would allow us to fix the problem in the sub-community) and I see no good reason to level the charge at the general rationality community.
I don’t have any stats on this, but while I wouldn’t be surprised that groups considered the default say this (e.g. white, western males in the west), this seems less asymmetrical in principle in some other situations (e.g. I could see in principle a non-western non-white person being the majority in their majority non-western non-white country saying something similar if they’ve only lived with people of one so-called “race”, under popular definitions, in their life).
When you mentioned “uninformed things about non-white non-Western ciswomen”, my imagination ran towards a group of homogenous (white, western male) people who sit around and bring up “hey, I heard group X (of non-white, non-western, ciswomen) have these (insert imagined bizarre rituals and habits), I heard from (source)” “Yeah, I heard that too (from other source)”, “My mom told me (insert same stereotype) is true when I was 5” or something.
Then, a newcomer (or two, or three or a bunch) from group X joins in the conversation and say “no, I (or we all) have firsthand knowledge of growing up in X society, and that is totally unlike what you described. There is no bizarre ritual like that, or perhaps it’s a garbled description of something real that’s exaggerated.” Had the newcomers not joined, the old-timers would not have been able to shed their misconception and update their knowledge (in the charitable case that it was a genuine example of misinformation and not malicious hatred of outgroup, though with conflict theory that’s always possible still).