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Religion, Violence, Tolerance and Progress: Nothing to Do with Theology

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Re: Religion, Violence, Tolerance and Progress: Nothing to Do with Theology

#11

Post by dx87 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #9
dx87 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be controversial, but it is. Assuming that everyone in a demographic is the same is why companies try to increase diversity by hiring based on skin color instead of their actual life experiences. It also means that you can't blindly hate on libs/conservatives, you need to actually talk to people and understand why they think a certain way.

> Assuming that everyone in a demographic is the same is why companies try to increase diversity by hiring based on skin color instead of their actual life experiences. That makes no sense as a takeaway here. The author's argument is that while religious theology doesn't drive the cultural norms, the religious boundaries define a grouping wherein people tend to converge on or copy cultural norms. Thus, you end up wit…

You're making the same assumption that people with the same skin color will have the same culture. A black person raised in Baltimore or Atlanta is going to be culturally distinct from a black person from Africa who's parents paid to send him to a college in the USA. Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism.

Re: Religion, Violence, Tolerance and Progress: Nothing to Do with Theology

#15

Post by Cantbekhan »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #6
lihaciudaniel wrote: post #2

Controversial author on a controversial topic

Is this really controversial? It's pretty well established that people match local norms far more than they match whatever the statistical norms are for the demographics they belong to.

It's extremely controversial ... in some places. In France right now the topic is extremely controversial due to recent events and will lead to laws proposed at National and EU level for regulating Social networks which are blamed openly by the public opinion for their amplifying effect.

This combined with new laws proposals from Germany could soon have a substantial impact on Tech by mandating various regulations on such platforms.

The effect of such regulations that could be endorsed by the two biggest and most influential members of the EU and could lead to a drastic change in the tech world in Europe.

Re: Religion, Violence, Tolerance and Progress: Nothing to Do with Theology

#16

Post by torben-friis »

popup21 wrote: post #12

What does this have to do with tech hacking?

every time this question comes up, the same answer is given. From the first paragraph of the guideline:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Re: Religion, Violence, Tolerance and Progress: Nothing to Do with Theology

#18

Post by adamch »

popup21 wrote: post #12

What does this have to do with tech hacking?

At a general level, you may work with users, and it's important to not have fallacious thinking about users, e.g. "if I can dispel belief X their behaviour will change to Y". Instead, Talib would bet their behaviour will still be like others in the X-believing community. When tech is currently doing a lot of soul-searching about the social effects of e.g. Facebook it's useful to have a theory to explain why predictions of user behaviour were wrong.

At a more specific level, I think this is very useful for thinking about programming language communities and how they affect behaviour.

Re: Religion, Violence, Tolerance and Progress: Nothing to Do with Theology

#19

Post by TulliusCicero »

dx87 wrote: post #11
TulliusCicero wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming that everyone in a demographic is the same is why companies try to increase diversity by hiring based on skin color instead of their actual life experiences. That makes no sense as a takeaway here. The author's argument is that while religious theology doesn't drive the cultural norms, the religious boundaries define a grouping wherein people tend to converge on or copy cultural norms. Thus, you end up wit…

You're making the same assumption that people with the same skin color will have the same culture. A black person raised in Baltimore or Atlanta is going to be culturally distinct from a black person from Africa who's parents paid to send him to a college in the USA. Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism.

I didn't say I believed this to be true myself. I'm saying that the logic is analogous to the argument in the article.

I do think there's something to 'shared experiences' across ethnic groups to an extent, though it probably won't have as strong an effect as sharing a religion, given that religion is at least nominally a choice, and has an explicit ideology backing it. Nevertheless, you see this effect when you see viral memes with captions like "only asian american kids get this" -- obviously these don't apply universally, but there's enough of something there to drive their virality. Hell, sometimes it may be as simple as shared experiences dealing with racism.

> Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism.

I don't really see how you got this from what I said.

Re: Religion, Violence, Tolerance and Progress: Nothing to Do with Theology

#20

Post by IkmoIkmo »

dx87 wrote: post #11
TulliusCicero wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming that everyone in a demographic is the same is why companies try to increase diversity by hiring based on skin color instead of their actual life experiences. That makes no sense as a takeaway here. The author's argument is that while religious theology doesn't drive the cultural norms, the religious boundaries define a grouping wherein people tend to converge on or copy cultural norms. Thus, you end up wit…

You're making the same assumption that people with the same skin color will have the same culture. A black person raised in Baltimore or Atlanta is going to be culturally distinct from a black person from Africa who's parents paid to send him to a college in the USA. Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism.

> You're making the same assumption that people with the same skin color will have the same culture.

He said ethnicity, not skin colour. Ethnicity is a quite broad and fluid concept which you could assign to any distinguishable cultural group which has some shared history, shared norms or values etc.

As such, it's entirely valid to say that if you belong to a certain ethnicity, statistically you're quite likely to converge personally on many of its norms and values. That doesn't mean all muslims are alike, but two muslims are more alike, ceteris paribus, than a muslim and a non-muslim.

That also doesn't exclude that there can be many different ethnicities at play at the same time, e.g. there are asian (e.g. Indonesian) muslims and african (e.g. Moroccan) muslims. And again, a muslim moroccan is more alike a Moroccan jew than perhaps an Indonesian muslim. Because Morocco has a culture, and Moroccans as an ethnicity converge to many of its norms and values, just like Indonesians in Indonesia.

And so indeed, Black Americans are a distinct ethnicity from African Americans (for lack of better terminology), agreed. And within those ethnicities its willing or unwilling members converge on the norms/values in those groups. I don't see how that's controversial. That doesn't mean they're all copies or mindless drones. Nor does it mean the members cannot have other ethnicities which they also converge on.

I'd say the fact members of group A statistically tend to be more likely to exhibit than outside members, the characteristics of group A (i.e., converging weakly or strongly to norms/values of group A), is so obvious that it is almost a truism that isn't worth stating, and hardly controversial or thinly veiled racism.

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