[ExI] Dismissing Shockley was Status as human motivator

[Jones Murphy]

Shockley was paranoid about dysgenia, but there appears to be
overwhelming eugenia going on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

My favorite Shockley story comes from our mutual former workplace, Bell Labs:

Shockley was in his office when he saw a tall young black guy walk
past. Shockley ordered the guy to replace a light bulb, which the
youngster cheerfully did. A few days later Shockley attended a talk on
nuclear magnetic resonance, and to his dismay, the newly minted
Berkeley physics PhD(Earl Shaw) giving the talk was the guy he had
just ordered to replace his bulb. Shockley was apologetic, to put it
mildly. But he is an excellent example of how even very bright people
are heavily influenced by their local culture, particularly on
emotional issues like caste and hierarchy.

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 7:14 AM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 9:24 PM, Olga Bourlin <olga.bourlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> snip
>
>> I found Keith's previous reply to mine so unrelentingly mean spirited
>> with unexamined racism that I frankly didn't know where to begin.
>>
>> But, hey, here everybody gets a free pass.  Ayn Rand gets a free pass.
>>  William Buckley gets a free pass.  The Nobel Sperm Bank probably even
>> gets a free pass.  And nobody needs to concern themselves with the
>> conservatives spewing their coded racism around the airwaves these
>> days. Why?  Well, because, as Keith went on to explain in his defense
>> of the racist eugenecist Shockley ... WHO CARES?:
>>
>> "He thought this work was important to the genetic future of the human
>> species,"  For me and Extropians who think about it, this is a big WHO
>> CARES!  The human species doesn't _have_ a "genetic future."   People
>> are who they are in the present and genetics will be under full
>> control just before genes no longer matter at all.
>
> Defense????  Can you think of a better way to put down someone like
> Shockley than to say that (given what we now understand) his concerns
> are outdated and ridiculous?
>
> If so lay it out.
>
> Keith
>
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