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Cultures are made of people, and all people are racist everywhere and at all times throughout history. Nor could this possibly change.

vagrantJin 6y ago
True. May I also add that cultures are indeed fluid, and change over time on account of being made of people. Allow me to give an anecdotal example. Men used to marry and sleep with very, very young girls this and was seen as culturally acceptable, normal, correct and even healthy. Fast forward a couple of centuries and we've agreed as a whole, regardless of race and culture, that this is a practice we should do away with. Wholesale. As you can see, culture and people, do in fact change. With this potential for change in mind, we need to tackle the elephant in the room. The reasons for which a practice, regarded by most as a beneath the standards of our global, egalitarian morals, should persist and continue to exist. Something must drive racism, some benefit that outweighs the cost, from a psychological standpoint. What is it?
- downerending 6y ago
  It's the fact that racism is ultimately stereotyping, which you could think of as rapidly gathering information under uncertainty. It's not very different than training an ML model. There's no way to capture all of the complexity of the world, but capturing some of it has immense survival value, and would have been the norm throughout the evolutionary history of animals (at least). We can be sad about the necessity of this, just as we are sad that most animals (and most of us) will die horribly. But it's an immutable fact of reality. If it were somehow possible to raise or breed a person that lacked any capability for racism or other forms of bigotry, they would go into the world like a sheep among a society of wolves. They'd die quite quickly. Better for us to simply acknowledge the truth, and try to rationally limit the fallout. Pretending it's not so simply makes things worse.

vagrantJin 6y ago

True. May I also add that cultures are indeed fluid, and change over time on account of being made of people. Allow me to give an anecdotal example. Men used to marry and sleep with very, very young girls this and was seen as culturally acceptable, normal, correct and even healthy. Fast forward a couple of centuries and we've agreed as a whole, regardless of race and culture, that this is a practice we should do away with. Wholesale. As you can see, culture and people, do in fact change. With this potential for change in mind, we need to tackle the elephant in the room. The reasons for which a practice, regarded by most as a beneath the standards of our global, egalitarian morals, should persist and continue to exist. Something must drive racism, some benefit that outweighs the cost, from a psychological standpoint. What is it?

downerending 6y ago
It's the fact that racism is ultimately stereotyping, which you could think of as rapidly gathering information under uncertainty. It's not very different than training an ML model. There's no way to capture all of the complexity of the world, but capturing some of it has immense survival value, and would have been the norm throughout the evolutionary history of animals (at least). We can be sad about the necessity of this, just as we are sad that most animals (and most of us) will die horribly. But it's an immutable fact of reality. If it were somehow possible to raise or breed a person that lacked any capability for racism or other forms of bigotry, they would go into the world like a sheep among a society of wolves. They'd die quite quickly. Better for us to simply acknowledge the truth, and try to rationally limit the fallout. Pretending it's not so simply makes things worse.