This post is deeply discomforting for me, but I am worried that it will be the future regardless.
I must say I disagree on your issue with the European approach. I do think that the current ignorance approach to preventing racial discrimination is the best one. Unless that sentence is completely unrelated to the previous one, and I completely missed your point. (this is highly probable, so if it is the case, please do explain what part of EU privacy law you are concerned about, and ignore the rest of this comment).
Doing option 1 relies on trusting people to make unbiased decisions – people that, even if honest, cannot guarantee they will not be influenced by subconscious biases. One solution to that which is common in some places is to enforce certain quotas, but that makes the competition itself less fair, among other issues.
Option 2 seems to be “just let people discriminate”, which I think we agree on is not optimal. Although feel free to tell me if I’m missing something here.
Option 3 makes it easier for people to actually focus on what does matter, without being distracted by things that only bring up prejudice. This isn’t being ignorant about important things, it’s using a screen to make it easier to not be distracted by things that aren’t relevant that would have caused one to make worse decisions.
Of course I’d prefer to live in a world where we don’t need to hide information that shouldn’t influence people, but that doesn’t seem realistic to me in the short and medium-term.
What we as society think is moral is something that changes all the time, and laws and norms follow it, that’s just the way society works. That doesn’t mean we should give up on enforcing morals because they change anyway. We make laws that try to stay up to date with what we as society think is fair.
This post is deeply discomforting for me, but I am worried that it will be the future regardless.
I must say I disagree on your issue with the European approach. I do think that the current ignorance approach to preventing racial discrimination is the best one. Unless that sentence is completely unrelated to the previous one, and I completely missed your point. (this is highly probable, so if it is the case, please do explain what part of EU privacy law you are concerned about, and ignore the rest of this comment).
Doing option 1 relies on trusting people to make unbiased decisions – people that, even if honest, cannot guarantee they will not be influenced by subconscious biases. One solution to that which is common in some places is to enforce certain quotas, but that makes the competition itself less fair, among other issues.
Option 2 seems to be “just let people discriminate”, which I think we agree on is not optimal. Although feel free to tell me if I’m missing something here.
Option 3 makes it easier for people to actually focus on what does matter, without being distracted by things that only bring up prejudice. This isn’t being ignorant about important things, it’s using a screen to make it easier to not be distracted by things that aren’t relevant that would have caused one to make worse decisions.
Of course I’d prefer to live in a world where we don’t need to hide information that shouldn’t influence people, but that doesn’t seem realistic to me in the short and medium-term.
Isn’t what information shouldn’t (and should) influence people constantly changing?
What we as society think is moral is something that changes all the time, and laws and norms follow it, that’s just the way society works. That doesn’t mean we should give up on enforcing morals because they change anyway. We make laws that try to stay up to date with what we as society think is fair.