Comments

1. #1 Jeff Knapp

   November 16, 2009

   Woa! You guys actually have Mexican food in the Land of the Norske? Seems as strange as me finding a restaurant called Mor Mor that serves lutefisk and lefse here in L.A. I just don’t see it happening. But, stranger things have been known…

2. #2 Greg Laden

   November 16, 2009

   You’ve obviously never had a lutefisk taco!

3. #3 daedalus2u

   November 16, 2009

   I had meant to post this here only, but (by mistake I posted it over at Collective Imagination (where it is held for moderation). Sorry for the duplication, I think the two posts are identical, if not you may find them uncanny

   My interpretation of the uncanny valley effect is that it is something that all humans do when they encounter another human; in effect they do a Turing test to see if the entity they are encountering is “human enough”. If the other human fails the Turing test, then xenophobia is triggered.

   Essentially it is a test of the communication protocols that the two humans are using to communicate, their respective “theories of mind”. In a very fundamental sense, all that can be communicated are mental concepts, as instantiated in mental hardware as brain states. To communicate a mental state, one translates the mental concepts into language via a theory of mind, transmits the data stream of the language, the receiving party collects the data stream and then translates it back into mental concepts via their resident theory of mind. If the two individuals don’t have the same translation protocols for translating the language data stream into mental concepts (i.e. the same “theory of mind”), they cannot communicate. The only possible things that they can communicate are mental states that both brains are able to instantiate. If the neurological hardware doesn’t have the capacity to support thinking a mental concept, that concept cannot be thought.

   If the error rate becomes too high, then the other party “fails” the Turing test and xenophobia is triggered.

   I think this is the source of essentially all bigotry and racism. Such things are the “default” interaction mode when someone fails the Turing test. Xenophobia can also be learned and a person can train themselves to not invoke xenophobia when they meet someone who fails their Turing test, or they can make their Turing test so narrow and specific that everyone invokes xenophobia.

   This is why the Teabaggers hate liberals so much. They are unable to understand liberals as human beings, so xenophobia is invoked, feelings of hate are produced, and reasons are made up post-hoc to justify why there is such hatred. I think this is the same with all forms of bigotry. This is why arguing with Teabaggers is useless. They didn’t arrive at their feelings of hatred by facts and logic, facts and logic won’t change how they feel.

   It is the feelings that come first, the rationalizations are latched onto later and don’t need to make any sense. This is why the Obama “death panel” meme was so effective. The Conservatives have such hatred of Obama, that they do feel he is like Hitler. The feelings of hatred are about the Teabaggers not having the capacity to understand what Obama stands for, what he is doing, how he is thinking and what he intends to do. They have latched onto their feelings of hatred and are justifying the intensity of those feelings with truly wacky ideas, that Obama is a terrorist and that Obama wants to kill millions of people, just like Hitler did. It is pure delusion.

   I actually come at this through my autism research. Usually xenophobia is triggered via the uncanny valley because there are cultural differences in body language, customs, accents, word use, myriad little things that are difficult to articulate. Many of these are completely unconscious communication modalities and are very difficult to teach or mimic. People from different cultures have them, the details are simply different and it shows up as an increased error rate. In contrast, people with autism lack (to a degree) the brain structures that perform these subtle communication protocols. People with autism can’t produced a nuanced communication with all the detailed cultural protocols because they don’t have the neurological hardware to do so. This lack of the protocols due to the lack of the hardware triggers the uncanny valley in a gigantic way. This is why people with autism are so abused. This is why curebie parents “hate” autism so much. What has happened is that because their child cannot communicate with them the way they are hard-wired to expect, xenophobia against their own child has been triggered. I think this is the reason for the stories of changelings, the triggering of the uncanny valley in a parent by their child. The curebie parents have then displaced the feelings of hatred they have for their child with autism onto what they perceive as having “caused” the autism, big pharma, vaccines, mercury, or anyone who is not “fighting” with them against the monstrous evil that has occurred (i.e. the neurodiverse who don’t perceive there to have been a monstrous evil).

4. #4 Stephanie Z

   November 16, 2009

   Jeff, we do indeed have Mexican food in Minnesota. La Casita isn’t it, although it is fairly tasty.