All our operational decisions in life are based on discrimination, on shortcuts, on heuristics. If it were not so, we simply could not barely move, we could not live.
Given that there is an enormous amount of information around us and processing it would require more time than we have in our own existence, we allow ourselves to be carried away by hunches, by prejudices, by emotional inertia.
It is not necessarily bad (it allows you to live), What is worrying is that we use wrong or too superficial shortcuts.
Discrimination due to excess information
Discrimination should not have any pejorative connotations. Strictly speaking, discriminating only means that, given too large an amount of information or options, we choose a limited set of them.
It is the reasons why we behave due to this discrimination that, eventually, can be evaluated at a moral, epistemological or even on a pragmatic level.
For example, racism is an absurd discrimination because it is based on skin color, but skin color tells us nothing, for example, about a person's genome (We are only informed of its phenotype, that is, of the external characteristics that are the result of the environment).
But each of the discriminations must be subjected to ongoing scrutiny and continually reevaluated based on new data.
Unequal like height (there are a correlation between salaries and height of workers, and also between attractiveness and salary), age (we are already beginning to talk about ageism), strabismus, stuttering, ugliness (in some courts, more handsome actors are already offered to represent clients with scars on their faces because these they receive percentage-wise higher sentences), the extra kilos (there is already talk of fatphobia), the character (the kind, hypocrites and balls receive more gifts than the rest)…
Perhaps we should be guided by an algorithm that continuously calculates the discrimination features of the person in front of us, as if we could wear an energy calculation device as in dragon ball. Or maybe that would sound too much like an episode of Black Mirror. It is something that we must debate, meditate on, reflect on, debate again.…and avoid broad-brush slogans such as “we must not discriminate” or “you are a racist.”
You can go further in this dissertation in this coffee talk that is Baker Cafe:
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The news
Discriminating is not bad, what is negative is doing it for the wrong reasons
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.