No, but a lot of you have well-established heuristics for differentiating white humans from non-white humans. Or humans from sentient non-human beings.
This is true, but not obviously relevant here.
If you’re trying to convince us that anti-Clippy or pro-human discrimination is harmful or morally wrong, I suspect that it would work better to actually create a well-reasoned argument for the position, rather than treating it as self-evident. It may be a good idea to make a top post on the subject. My impression is that continuing to bring the issue up when people disagree with you is hurting your case; it makes it seem like you’re trying to distract us from the issue at hand rather than defending your original point, and if you only bring up the discrimination issue in such contexts, it appears that you only care about it as a convenient distraction, not as an actual issue to be resolved.
Also note that such distracting behavior has already been established as being against group norms—this is not an instance of a rule being applied to you because you’re nonhuman. See logical rudeness.
I like Website:wikipedia.org, but it favors classifying my lie as “white”. User:twentythree did get a benefit from my lie in terms of feeling more welcome and less alone.
Your lie fails on the ‘would cause relatively minor discord if discovered’ test, though, and note that that’s joined to the ‘the hearer benefits from it’ test with an ‘and’, not an ‘or’. It’s also debatable whether the lie, if left un-challenged, would have been to Twentythree’s net benefit or not; even if it would have, similar benefits could have been achieved without lying, which may cause some people to classify the lie as non-white even if it passes the two stated tests.
(I’ve also spent some time thinking about my own observations of white lies, and can describe how I recognize them, if you’re interested. My definition doesn’t match Wikipedia’s, but seems to be a better match for the data.)
It is also similar to other white lies often told, such as the feigned belief many of you have here that you believe I am a Clippy (while really thinking I’m a human in that human’s maternal genetic progenitor’s subterranean indoor facility).
This is another instance of you encountering a special-case situation; I can go into more detail about it if you’re interested, but it should not be taken as normal.
Well, at least it was a while lie until several Users decided to alert User:twentythree to the actual truth, making common the knowledge of my longer posting history, and causing User:twentythree to “lose face”, as it is called.
According to my model, Twentythree has not lost any social standing in this instance. (I’d be interested to hear about it if anyone disagrees.)
I propose this: Some neutral party should ask User:twentythree if User:twentythree felt more welcomed by my initial reply message, though this is only a valid test if User:twentythree read my reply before others said that it was a lie.
Edit: I further note that in this recent exchange about this matter, I have received comparable net upvotes to those disagreeing with my assessment about the relative merit of the particular lie in dispute, suggesting I am not “digging” myself deeper, nor am I obviously wrong.
I have no objection to that, but it doesn’t address the entire issue. I suggest also asking Twentythree to predict what eir reaction would have been to finding out that your message had been a lie, if e had found out on their own rather than being told—both eir personal emotional reaction and eir resulting opinion of LessWrong as a community. It may also be useful to ask em if e considers the lie to have been a white lie.
If you consider me neutral enough, I’m willing to PM Twentythree and ask em to comment on this thread; otherwise, if you don’t have a particular neutral party in mind, I can ask the next LessWrong user who I see log in on my instant messaging friend list to do so.
There’s a nontrivial chance I’ll be asleep by then (I’m pushing 27 hours since last time I went to sleep), but if you’re willing to do the PMing, that’s fine with me.
Okay, this is becoming complicated, and would probably bother User:twentythree too much.
How about this: I’ll promise to stay away from the stranger aspects of human interaction where rules sometimes invert, and you’ll promise to make an effort to be less bigoted toward non-human intelligences?
This is true, but not obviously relevant here.
If you’re trying to convince us that anti-Clippy or pro-human discrimination is harmful or morally wrong, I suspect that it would work better to actually create a well-reasoned argument for the position, rather than treating it as self-evident. It may be a good idea to make a top post on the subject. My impression is that continuing to bring the issue up when people disagree with you is hurting your case; it makes it seem like you’re trying to distract us from the issue at hand rather than defending your original point, and if you only bring up the discrimination issue in such contexts, it appears that you only care about it as a convenient distraction, not as an actual issue to be resolved.
Also note that such distracting behavior has already been established as being against group norms—this is not an instance of a rule being applied to you because you’re nonhuman. See logical rudeness.
Your lie fails on the ‘would cause relatively minor discord if discovered’ test, though, and note that that’s joined to the ‘the hearer benefits from it’ test with an ‘and’, not an ‘or’. It’s also debatable whether the lie, if left un-challenged, would have been to Twentythree’s net benefit or not; even if it would have, similar benefits could have been achieved without lying, which may cause some people to classify the lie as non-white even if it passes the two stated tests.
(I’ve also spent some time thinking about my own observations of white lies, and can describe how I recognize them, if you’re interested. My definition doesn’t match Wikipedia’s, but seems to be a better match for the data.)
This is another instance of you encountering a special-case situation; I can go into more detail about it if you’re interested, but it should not be taken as normal.
According to my model, Twentythree has not lost any social standing in this instance. (I’d be interested to hear about it if anyone disagrees.)
I propose this: Some neutral party should ask User:twentythree if User:twentythree felt more welcomed by my initial reply message, though this is only a valid test if User:twentythree read my reply before others said that it was a lie.
Edit: I further note that in this recent exchange about this matter, I have received comparable net upvotes to those disagreeing with my assessment about the relative merit of the particular lie in dispute, suggesting I am not “digging” myself deeper, nor am I obviously wrong.
I have no objection to that, but it doesn’t address the entire issue. I suggest also asking Twentythree to predict what eir reaction would have been to finding out that your message had been a lie, if e had found out on their own rather than being told—both eir personal emotional reaction and eir resulting opinion of LessWrong as a community. It may also be useful to ask em if e considers the lie to have been a white lie.
If you consider me neutral enough, I’m willing to PM Twentythree and ask em to comment on this thread; otherwise, if you don’t have a particular neutral party in mind, I can ask the next LessWrong user who I see log in on my instant messaging friend list to do so.
You and those on your friends list (including me) do not count as neutral for purposes of this exercise.
How about if I PM the next person who comments on the site after your reply to this comment, and ask them to do it?
How about the next person who posts after one hour from this comment’s timestamp?
There’s a nontrivial chance I’ll be asleep by then (I’m pushing 27 hours since last time I went to sleep), but if you’re willing to do the PMing, that’s fine with me.
Okay, this is becoming complicated, and would probably bother User:twentythree too much.
How about this: I’ll promise to stay away from the stranger aspects of human interaction where rules sometimes invert, and you’ll promise to make an effort to be less bigoted toward non-human intelligences?
I’m not sure what you expect this to mean from a functional standpoint, so I’m not sure if I should agree to it.