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Comment by cetahfh14615 | Hacker News Reader

> ignorance is never better than knowledge

this is a moral judgement and a strong claim. I can think of a few types of knowledge off the top of my head that aren't making the world a better place

Something like learning how to tie a noose: this is (in most cases) bad knowledge. This isn't something anyone should learn unless they need it for something that isn't its best known purpose

when it comes to something like race/gender/etc, I can't think of one positive usage of that kind of knowledge, if we can even call it that. I'd argue that even the idea of race/gender/etc is against the goal of equality and if we want true equality these ideas need to be discarded

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Well, I for one think “the goal of equality” should be discarded. People are to be treated equally and we already have the declaration of universal human rights as a foundational and international document for that.

If you want people to end up all “being equal” to one another you will just end up on the farm, where all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

Also, I think it quite amusing that you call what Fermi said “a strong claim” and a “moral judgement” and a few lines down you have the audacity to say that certain “ideas need to be discarded”. First of all, some of the “ideas” you talk about are indeed facts. And then who on earth do you think you are to tell other people what they may think of?

you're sort of assuming what I mean by "equality"

I'm not talking about leveling, I'm talking about something more like job applications that are completely race-sex-etc blind, where that signal isn't even allowed into the mix. I think that in a truly meritocratic system you'll see a diverse representation. No, it might not be perfectly diverse, but it would lead to more (and fairer) diversity and not less

In the international FIDE list of chess grandmasters, 39 out of 1953 are female. That’s 2%. And while I’m certain that there’s some icky misogynistic men who have made some decisions in that regard, I’m equally certain that we will never see the ratio being fifty-fifty. Not even close.

That being said, I really don’t care what we will see or what the outcome will be in a truly meritocratic system. I’m just interested in the merit.

Could that fact still be published in Nature?

Nah man, it would be hArMfUL.

The knowledge of how to tie a noose hurts no one. Knowledge in and of itself is harmless at rest. As with all knowledge it’s what you do with it. Keeping people in the dark is an immoral solution to evil.

What knowledge is "in and of itself" means nothing because it exists in a context, the only thing that matters in the case of knowledge (or anything) is what's done with it and how it is useful

And AR-15s hurt no one. Yet they are purposed to have massive killing power against humans, and massively amplify the damage a single ill person can do. Hypothetically there could be some type of weapon that once discovered could end all life on this planet. If that weapon was trivial to build, it would take 1 person with that knowledge to end eveything. Human knowledge is a human construct, and shouldn’t be thought about in absolutes.

The noose knot is very similar, if not exactly the same, as several fishing knots[1].

Also, in a rational society, the goal isn't blanket "equality". People are not equal. I'll never have a career as a basketball player.

Equality of opportunity is the goal, not equality of outcome.

Equality of outcome arguments generally boil down to some derivative of "we should take from group a and give to group b, and I should be the one to oversee this".

[1] https://www.knotsforfishing.com/hangmans-knot/

You are conflating knowledge and arbitrarily constructed definitions. My understanding of knowledge is that it is based in some objective ground rather than a changeable definition.

Race and gender are social constructs, not objective facts of reality. I agree though, discard social constructs.

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