hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

Are you serious.

(also gotta love some of those fb comments)

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

it's a thought experiment

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

a horrible defense, fojar

1. it's actually not a thought experiment. thought experiments are meant to test where your actions or philosophical positions would fall given a set of extremely unlikely but possible circumstances. this is meant to estimate what would happen -- it's just a hypothetical, in the traditional sense.

2. it's a bad hypothetical, because to even think this would be legitimate for more than a second would require you to delude yourself about core aspects of human psychology, which is disgraceful on part of the authors for not knowing or taking into account given that they are psychology professors. (though, the nature of the field means that people can be a professor of psychology and completely ignorant about the contents of a relevant subfield.)

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

I suppose the their reasoning behind this experiment is they feel that raising those kids will allow parents to better empathize with people of another culture. But think about America, we have taken people from all over the globe and created a culture of our own, even though we all share the same american culture we are no closer to ending racism.

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

Based on the title, I thought this thread was going to be about Trump.

Anyways, I like how one person commented, "Gender being randomly assigned hasn't ended gender descrimintion" haha

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

So people would just not love their randomly assigned children very much if at all. Sounds like a fun experiment for the kids.

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

What core aspects of human psychology does the consideration of this hypothetical violate?

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

Nah man, it's unlikely or impossible, not unlikely but possible. Famous thought experiment: Maxwell's demon.

Again, it's a thought experiment, not a hypothetical. Try thought experiment on Wikipedia.

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

oy vey

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

like, I get where they're coming from, and it's not THAT farfetched

I know plenty of people who, for example, REALLY hate gay people until their child comes out, and then are forced to reevaluate their deeply-rooted prejudices. (But on the other hand, I also see the opposite --- the child becomes exiled from the family after coming out.)

the problem here is the conflation of institutional racism with personal racism, for lack of a better term. Each individual person can learn to accept people of different races, but that doesn't change the system. You can't change the socioeconomic landscape by making everybody more open-minded.

EDIT: The study adopts a more biological/evolutionary perspective on the matter as opposed to psychological. The thought experiment is not something that would ever happen, the authors aren't saying it's even BENEFICIAL to do so, just that it gives us insight into racism and genetic chauvanism. Anyway, the phrasing of the experiment is really off-putting -- I'd ask "what if race wasn't a genetic result, but if all babies could be any race by chance?"

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

I'm surprised nobody pointed out this cute little comment:

"Ellie Ellias Well genders being randomly allocated to people's babies hasn't ended sexism"

Honestly I think this is the most convincing counter in this entire thread.

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

I don't know why you even bother posting here.

EDIT: This is not a flaming post, it's a criticism.

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

I think the root of the problem is more so that this presents random assignment as a social construct. Indeed, in this case it would probably end horribly wrong, in many ways.

Consider instead a world where race was not genetically related whatsoever, and the race of your child was entirely random.

Without contrast to a world in which race does exist as a social and/or biological construct (take your pick), it's likely that race simply wouldn't be a thing in this case.

Re: hands down one of the most ignorant ideas I've ever seen proposed

the addition of "...would racism end?" is unnecessary for a thought experiment.

they used it to purposely provoke inadvertent opinions,
"If babies were randomly allocated" should be the title, with the diminishing of racism as a possible outcome explained within the article.

another joke of a thought experiment regarding socialism.
regardless, the amount of non-diverse families who mistreat their children should be enough to discourage this idea. (there are statistic of this stuff everywhere i'll prolly link later)
another repelling factor should be - to the families that are racist, and are given a reallocated child, what do you think is gonna happen?
yes, they are going to be racist to the foreign child. the matter of responsibility will not affect their inherited hatred for a specific race.

this goes way beyond a 'thought experiment', and it feels like a slap in the face to even be suggested. there are real problems that can be fixed to help prevent and eventually cease the existence of racism(people being prejudice may still exist though), and ignoring them by presenting something like this is almost insulting to those who do experience racial prejudice daily.