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non_radical_centrist  2mo ago (astralcodexten.com)   2536 thread views

How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?

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I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.

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I also contend that at some point we'll figure out the alleles for all sorts of various aesthetic preferences, and even preferences for narrative tropes.

I might be wrong, but I expect that a lot of that has a very large influence by the environment. If you had a perfect understanding of the influences of human genes, you could probably make a slightly better than chance guess at whether someone would be a Star Wars fan if you knew their genes, but it really wouldn't be useful to create a genetic "Star Wars fan" category because it would be very divorced by the actual reality of which people enjoyed Star Wars.

If you had a perfect understanding of the influences of human genes, you could probably make a slightly better than chance guess at whether someone would be a Star Wars fan if you knew their genes

Maybe consider that we can do much better than that just based on whether the person has a Y chromosome!

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