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From: emma@uw-june (Joe Pfeiffer)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Prejudice and Frames, Turing Test
Message-ID: <549@uw-june>
Date: Thu, 25-Aug-83 13:47:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-june.549
Posted: Thu Aug 25 13:47:38 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Aug-83 15:35:19 EDT
References: <4474@sri-arpa.UUCP> <403@pyuxll.UUCP>
Organization: U. Washington, Computer Sci
Lines: 25

I don't think I can accept some of the comments being bandied about
regarding prejudice.  Prejudice, as I understand the term, refers to
prejudging a person on the basis of class, rather than judging that
person as an individual.  Class here is used in a wider sense than
economic.  Examples would be "colored folk got rythm" or "all them white
saxophonists sound the same to me"-- this latter being a quote from
Miles Davis, by the way.  It is immediately apparent that prejudice is a
natural result of making generalizations and extrapolating from
experience.  This is a natural, and I would suspect inevitable, result of a
knowledge acquisition process which generalizes.

Bigotry, meanwhile, refers to inflexible prejudice.  Miles has used a
lot of white saxophonists, as he recognizes that some don't all sound
the same.  Were he bigoted, rather than prejudiced, he would refuse to
acknowledge that.  The problem lies in determining at what point an
apparent counterexample should modify a conception.  Do we decide that
gravity doesn't work for airplanes, or that gravity always works but
something else is going on?  Do we decide that a particular white sax
man is good, or that he's got a John Coltrane tape in his pocket?

In general, I would say that some people out there are getting awfully
self-righteous regarding a phenomenon that ought to be studied as a
result of our knowledge acquisition process rather than used to
classify people as sub-human.

-Joe P.