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0 pointsotakucode7y ago0 comments

I can see that, but I don't understand how simply 'attaching a label' could lead to any real earnest sentiment. If I train myself, day in and day out, to tag a photo of children 'racist', is the presumption that I will start to actually think that children generally believe in fundamental qualitative differences between people that break along racial lines? That isn't how my brain works. If someone asks me 'hey, are kids racists?' I don't think 'hmmm... do I FEEL LIKE kids are racists?'... I think 'Hmmm... do I have any evidence or have I come across any resources that suggest children might harbor racist tendencies?' And 'well I attached all those labels' doesn't qualify as evidence of anything except me wasting my time. Words have power, but they're not magical.

It certainly can be frightfully easy to lead people down a path into forming tons of negative associations about some group or topic, and that will result in a trained emotional response pretty reliably..... but it's just an emotional response. It doesn't mean anything, and can't be used to support or detract from anything in terms of what is true.

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mockingbirdy7y ago

> it's just an emotional response. It doesn't mean anything, and can't be used to support or detract from anything in terms of what is true.

Emotional responses are more important for your belief system and vice versa than you seem to realize. "what is true" is based on your belief system. It may not seem visible, but all those small interactions shape our emotions and belief system.

It's like training data for a neural network which has functional components and meta-learning capabilities (this is essentially what a brain is). Saying "this training data doesn't affect my neural network" or "this part (emotions) of my neural network doesn't affect another part (reasoning)" is not correct when training neural networks. Why would you assume that this is any different for your biological neural network? Every interaction shapes your brain, however small it seems.

watwut7y ago

You will be more likely to assume the children are racist in ambiguous situations. You will be more likely to react negatively to them.

Children will see your negative emotional response to them and will react to it. The negative or positive emotional response on someone determines a lot about your interaction with them and is hard to hide for most people.