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"Strange" is not the same as monstrous though. People will spend enormous resources (off my head its like 10% of global GDP) seeking to experience "strangeness"

"Strange" is not the same as monstrous though. People will spend enormous resources (off my head its like 10% of global GDP) seeking to experience "strangeness". We call this phenomenon tourism :-) The benefit of temporal distance is that it (hopefully) helps further separate what is objective (and e.g., scientifically verifiable, understood etc) versus what is effectively an assumption that is culturally tinged. For example the medieval era definition of humanity given in this article is as "rational and mortal". I suspect that as people dive deeper into forms of artificial rationality we will revisit this multiple times.

krapp 3y ago
We consider people not like ourselves to be monstrous all the time. Certain religious and ethnic groups are described as "animals" with values "incompatible with humanity." Westerners often describe Asian cultures as if those people came from another planet, with the implication that there is something fundamentally alien about them we simply can never comprehend. I mean "race" and "gender" have always been cultural and political constructs far more so than rational and scientifically verifiable, but we still cling to notions of them created centuries or millennia ago as if they were as immutable as the laws of physics. Boys are like this, girls are like that, white people this, black people that. All it takes to get from mere stereotype to "monstrous" is hatred and fear. I'm reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates' passage about 9/11 in one of his books, and how he saw the first responders: “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” Or the links between anti-semitic conspiracy theory and shapeshifting reptilians created by David Icke and the like. Or what's going on now with Israel and Palestine. We may no longer think other people go around with faces on their chest and backwards feet but seeing others as fundamentally less human than ourselves, or irreconcilably "other", with whom we can find no commonality, is still very much a thing.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  An easy controversial topic is eating dogs. In some cultures it's normal, in others is a monstrosity.

krapp 3y ago

We consider people not like ourselves to be monstrous all the time. Certain religious and ethnic groups are described as "animals" with values "incompatible with humanity." Westerners often describe Asian cultures as if those people came from another planet, with the implication that there is something fundamentally alien about them we simply can never comprehend. I mean "race" and "gender" have always been cultural and political constructs far more so than rational and scientifically verifiable, but we still cling to notions of them created centuries or millennia ago as if they were as immutable as the laws of physics. Boys are like this, girls are like that, white people this, black people that. All it takes to get from mere stereotype to "monstrous" is hatred and fear. I'm reminded of Ta-Nehisi Coates' passage about 9/11 in one of his books, and how he saw the first responders: “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” Or the links between anti-semitic conspiracy theory and shapeshifting reptilians created by David Icke and the like. Or what's going on now with Israel and Palestine. We may no longer think other people go around with faces on their chest and backwards feet but seeing others as fundamentally less human than ourselves, or irreconcilably "other", with whom we can find no commonality, is still very much a thing.

gus_massa 3y ago
An easy controversial topic is eating dogs. In some cultures it's normal, in others is a monstrosity.