Interesting Questions

I was listening to an interesting conversation yesterday between the boys of The Bitcoin Podcast and Chris DeRose [here]. For those who may not know, whenever Chris is a part of any conversation it's never a dull one, and this time was no exception.

I'm about half-way through the podcast, but a comment echoed by the TBP boys has stuck with me. Essentially they said that a world where everybody is grey (i.e. when all of the races and peoples of the world marry and produce future generations of racially indistinguishable people) does not seem like a world that would be fundamentally interesting to them. They fear that all that is unique in our world today would disappear into a homogenous blob of sameness.

The underlying assumption in that line of thinking is of course that different colored people think differently. That is a common line of thinking, at least amongst a large segment of Americans. It also happens to be fundamentally racist. It's not the type of racism that results in murder, at least not directly, but it's racist nonetheless.

Anyways, what I thought about after listening to those comments was the type of question the TBP boys and people like them would then ask someone to make sure they help bring something unique to the table. Of course they'd have to ask something like: What color is your skin?

But is that the most interesting question you can ask someone? Wouldn't you rather ask about someone’s collective experiences, places lived, languages spoken, personal beliefs, and things like that? Of course, but people think that the color of a persons skin is a good metric to use to indicate diversity of those hyper-individual underlying characteristics.

Why? Perhaps because before modern modes of transportation and the internet was created, people (who happened to largely share the same skin color) shared broadly similar characteristics (e.g. beliefs, attitudes, languages etc...) across their respective populations

There is more to unpack here, and I may come back and expand this, but it's time to enjoy Buddha's Birthday and the day off from work I have because of it with my wife.