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Notes -
I presume you are neither omniscient nor psychic, able to gather masses of true, fine-grained information about an individual from a glance? You are arguing for explicitly, dogmatically ignoring any information about a person that you can gather by inference. Yes, you can do Bayesian inference by always having a completely blank prior and admitting only facts in a specific category, but you will get worse information than if you had calibrated priors and allowed use of all information.
In short, your argument appears to be that people should cripple their judgment-making facilities for moral reasons. You can hold to this moral system, of course, but you haven’t made any argument for why anyone else should.
Im not claiming to be phsycic or omniscient. Im saying that behavior is the best predictor of behavior.
Again I ask, what did you think the parable of the Good Samaritan was about?
I think it’s saying that sometimes you can be wrong about people, and sometimes kindness comes from places you don’t expect.
Yes, don’t write someone off completely before you get to know them. But OTOH the existence of a ‘Good’ Samaritan pretty strongly implies they have a bad rep, and that rep likely comes from somewhere (other behaviour at other times). Going alone into an alley with five Samaritans probably isn’t a great idea unless you know them and you have personal experience of their specific behaviour to draw on.
Reputation matters precisely because it’s the distilled remnant of far more interactions than you can ever have personally. I’m in China at the moment and was nearly lured into a back alley to ‘see some calligraphy’ - a scam that is famous now I look it up. Waiting until I had personal experience with each scammer to know that they’re dangerous was and is a bad idea! I am now going to be much more wary of any given Chinese person who is unexpectedly friendly to me and that is very very sensible. Sucks if you’re a friendly Chinese guy who likes talking to foreigners but I’m not going to put myself at risk for that.
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