Hacker News Reader

Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

>>If not, why not? I.e., what makes race special?

What makes cancer special? Ebola? AIDS/HIV? Why/how does anybody focus on anything? btw, these are the kinds of specious debates on HN that derail the main topic into oblivion. Having to redefine & rehash all kinds of things you, as an adult, should already know about society. I'm not going down this path again. You should already know racism & sexism is a serious enough problem that merits focus. Not knowing that is a symptom of arrogance/ignorance/stubborness that can't be resolved in an HN thread. It's just a waste of time and detracts from the main issue at hand that wiser(employees of hackerschool.com) people already have a grasp on and wish to address.

EDIT: And off the front page this article goes. I want that comment-endorsing system to come back.

View on HN

The concrete reasoning for Ebola is:

1) Positive claim: Ebola causes death.

1a) Death due to Ebola are probably easier to prevent than a random sample of death. This is because we can probably find a single procedure to prevent { ebola death 1, ebola death 2, ... }, while we cannot find a single procedure to prevent {shooting death 1, drowning death 2, ebola death 3, cancer death 4}.

1b) Thus, preventing death due to Ebola will likely be cheaper than preventing a random selection of deaths.

2) Normative claim: Death is bad.

2a) Preventing death cheaply is better than preventing death expensively.

3) Preventing ebola will reduce incidents of death by (1), and that will be good (by claim (2)). It will likely be cheaper to prevent deaths due to ebola than due to a random sampling of causes (1b). Preventing deaths cheaply is better than preventing deaths expensively, by (2a).

It's not remotely difficult to justify the normative claim that stopping Ebola is good. And you can now see my normative principles - if you believe death is good, we know why we disagree.

If we want to come to agreement, we now know we need to debate moral philosophy rather than empirical claims like "is ebola really a single disease".

Most of this conversation is me asking "what goes into slot (2)" and a bunch of people repeating to me what they put in slot (1).

You seem to be suggesting that the question is absurd but it's not. It's not only meaningful, it's completely obvious and natural. People who focus their research on a particular topic are routinely asked why. Same with company founders or even hobbyist. "Why this" has to be the most human of questions right after "how are you".

I, too, find the fixation on race/sex/class weird when there are many factors that seem much more important. I wrote about it before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8160608

Are you white male?

Your previous writing is simplistic rationalisation of racist attitudes. "People aren't racist, the problem is black people for not inheriting hard work nor intelligence".

How can you call my writing simplistic when next to a crude classification of people into a handful of racial categories? Anyway, the original post was about a white guy. There's even a picture[1] in the article. Which is the point: that he was a white guy didn't matter very much.

Those categories (like race or sex) seem not only arbitrary but not even very good. Yet, commenters here insist that they are obvious and the question why those and not some other doesn't even require (deserve?) an answer.

How so? For those who, like me and yummyfajitas, missed that social insight.

[1] http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/08/10/sunday-review/0810...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com