h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Cultural Prejudice - A87771261
Author: AE Hill - U14997160

help if you can... [smiles]

Your ideas are interesting. Do you want to know why the essay isn't?

Because, as a reader, I have a prejudice against having somebody else's careful reasoning dumped in my lap. You are expecting me (as a reader) to take an interest, and you haven't given me a reason in the world to stop what I'm doing and follow this, other than that this is what you choose to talk about right now.

My parents had a lady friend who was almost 90. She'd call their house, anytime, day or night. When you picked up the phone, she wouldn't say her name, she'd just start talking, sort of in mid-thought. One day she called and said, 'I wish I had some fresh zucchini.'

That's what this feels like.

Try this as an experiment:

1. Start with a 'hook'. Think of a problem, an example, an anecdote, that would introduce your topic and get the reader's attention. Remember to go back to it at the end of your discussion. Tell us why this is interesting - to US.

2. Take out the excursis on computers, or reduce it to one sentence. You went down a rabbit hole there, and you knew it. Don't go there.

3. In the part about Biloxi, be concrete. What would happen if you went down the wrong street? What didn't they like about strangers? Was it just strangers in uniform? Give an incident. If you generalise too much, the reader feels like you're cheating: you asked us to pay attention, then kept all the good information to yourself.

4. When you go back to your original thesis, be sure to say at least one true thing about what you've been talking about. What is your conclusion? That prejudice isn't always a bad thing, but that it must be used wisely? How can that be done?

You'll know when you've succeeded - because everybody who reads the essay will spontaneously come up with examples of their own. 'Yeah! That's just like the time when I...'

I hope some of that helps.

Thank you Dmitri

Looks like it will take some time to assimilate your ideas.
I will make changes to see what happens.

Give us a heads-up when.

I liked the results of your suggestions.

Thanks.

Care to comment further?

Hey, that flows much better. I found it easy to follow the argument.

And you personalised it in a non-confrontational way. Good for you.

Thanks so much for reading my perspectives on prejudice.

Everyone here has been so nice.

Speaking of confrontational, you were the first to be so blunt.
Sociological niceties aside, what you said was what I wanted to hear.
Your comment served more as a reminder than as a lesson in communication.
I sorely needed that reminder in this case.

When I need to learn something really new, I believe it to be mandatory to readjust whatever thinking I was using before the new perspective came to my attention. To do that properly, I have to somehow air out the important reasons that had previously precluded my awareness of the new idea. If we are to truly learn, the hard bit is to unlearn.

If it does not cause too much consternation, I debate against the new idea that I actually want to make my own. All to often that appears as confrontation. Shades of grey are all that separates a bold challenge from a clash of ideas. It is only a matter of degree if a difference of perspective is hostile or truly a focused comparison to achieve better understanding.

Well put. Sometimes people are cautious - with good reason. They do not wish to offend. But they do wish to be helpful.

Don't worry. We're a friendly bunch, and most of us don't bruise too easily.

I like that - unlearning before learning.

Just as an aside,
you speak of peoples feelings.
I think short typed messages can very easily be misjudged as to emotional content.

The "emoticons" or "smileys" serve to help keep things light.
Social graces may be different, but a smile is universal.

You are so right. And in the right place.

We believe this website may have more smileys than any other in cyberspace.

We do believe we are almost unique in possessing such smileys as , , and . Not to mention and .

And our rocket ships go both ways.

Something related to prejudice that we have discussed here before is the Implicit study by Harvard which reveals our internal ideas of what we think is right or wrong that is often hidden, try these tests out:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ , you might need to cut and paste the Url, these skins won't permit linking to https sites directly.

Many people find out that they have more predjudices than they thought they had. It is natural as you said to categorize.

Well…. What book shall we write?
For me, “Psyc 1A” was okay, but “Psyc 1B” was called Physiological Psychology and was profound. From that time forward, Psychology was not scientific unless it was securely linked to a physiological foundation.

I had the good fortune to develop a Neural Network application. It then became apparent to me that what a basic Neural Network does is not a conscious function. It is another book or two to ask about consciousness. What is obvious from even a cursory understanding of Neural Networks is that they can generalize and they can recognize patterns. From that understanding it can theorized that most human behavior can be explained as layers of these fundamental traits.

A neural Network comes up with a profoundly astute answer, but the answer to why that is the answer is a different pattern recognition problem. From early tests of subjects with the corpus callosum severed, it was clear that when subjects were asked why the right brain said one thing, the left brain confabulated the answer. The truth is that we really do not know why we think that answers we get subconsciously are true. In fact all of our efforts are only probabilistic efforts.

Add a column of five digit numbers and most people will get the wrong answer. A computer will usually get it right and far faster. Ask a computer to pick your grandmother out of crowd of fifty people and see how long that takes. A neural Network does not get answers the way a computer does [although a computer can be programmed to model the mathematical results of a Neural Network]. Still, most computers are just Von Neumann machines, i.e. serial processors. True Neural Networks are vast parallel processors.

Back to your point, prejudices are usually the result of subconscious processes that, by definition, we cannot be aware of. If we are asked to provide a basis for our preference or prejudice we can usually only confabulate a probabilistic answer.

I like that. Confabulate an answer. That's pretty much what I call the Star Trek Method. You figure out what you want, and then you invent a technobabble 'explanation'. It's what gets us all in trouble a lot of the time.