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How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

theatlantic.com

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Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#31

Post by vilda »

EliRivers wrote: post #13
petewailes wrote: post #3

I suspect a large part of this is down to 1. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions, and 2. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a blanket approach doesn't work. The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few people talk about the lack of men in teaching…

While I don't disagree with the general thrust of your argument, as an aside, the lack of men in nursing roles (and teaching, especially to younger children) is seen as a problem and when you spend time in the nursing or teaching community it comes up a lot. Campaigns to attract more men into these professions have been running for a long time. While I'm here, speaking as a townie, I don't see any complexity in the f…

While it is seen as a problem, the point is that it's not taken seriously enough than the opposite imbalance.

There are way worse examples:

Male students are getting a whole one level worse marks than female students with the same knowledge [1] (Czech).

Theoretically, each parent has an equal right to the custody of the child when they separate. In reality, with a whooping 85-90% the custody is resolved according to female preference [2]: "It is a very common scenario in divorce in England that the house is transferred into the wife's sole name, the children live with the wife and the husband pays maintenance for the children..."

Males are 400-600% more likely to be attacked than females, while it is females safety that is discussed way more.

The vector of home violence is woman against child and not man against woman as often believed: "The DHHS data shows that of children abused by one parent between 2001 and 2006, 70.6% were abused by their mothers, whereas only 29.4% were abused by their fathers."

Even worse, when child is killed: "And of children who died at the hands of one parent between 2001 and 2006, 70.8% were killed by their mothers, whereas only 29.2% were killed by their fathers."

[1] https://www.scio.cz/download/vektor/Vektor_prezentace.ppt

[2] http://www.terry.co.uk/men_div.html

[3] http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm06/cm06.pdf

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#32

Post by gaius »

afarrell wrote: post #2

> like saying the word “fútbol” instead of soccer Hispanic folks: Is this in fact a thing that feels alienating to you? If so, would you be willing to explain why? It is the first time I've heard about it so I'd just like to confirm that Conor Friedersdorf is referring to a real thing.

Football is the British English word for soccer, a game that is played with your foot on the ball obviously. I've never heard of anyone finding "futbol" to be cultural appropriation of that.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#33

Post by pessimizer »

afarrell wrote: post #2

> like saying the word “fútbol” instead of soccer Hispanic folks: Is this in fact a thing that feels alienating to you? If so, would you be willing to explain why? It is the first time I've heard about it so I'd just like to confirm that Conor Friedersdorf is referring to a real thing.

I'm not Hispanic, and don't care at all about soccer, but I imagine it would be aggravating as hell. I'm black, and when white people call me bro, or start speaking in dialect - I honestly start to hate them.

For cultural reasons, when a lot of white Americans are talking about getting fighting and getting angry, or partying and having fun, relaxing and being lazy, flirting or getting laid, or one-upping people or hustling for money, they drop into a black dialect (and an entire stereotypical affect) for a moment. Even upper-middle class black people do it sometimes - Oprah is famous for it.

I spoke like that growing up on the South Side of Chicago, my grandparents speak like that, and many of the people I love speak like that. People are dropping into dialect because, deep down, they think of black people as a bunch of violent, lazy, partying, horny grifters - and find it very amusing and black of themselves when they experience anger, laziness, joy, sexual arousal, or pride at their own craftiness. This is the reason why most pop music is delivered in black dialect. It reminds me of what they think of me, and my family, although they would never acknowledge it to me, and many wouldn't acknowledge it to themselves.

To be clear, I'm not a fan of oversensitivity and preciousness, or "microaggressions" or cultural studies departments, or theory-theory psychology in general, which I think is just secular religion. But someone dropping into dialect when they talk to you is not all that subtle.

I could see Hispanic people feeling stereotyped by soccer stuff. Soccer is English, it's called "football" in English, so what's this urge to drop into Spanish dialect all of a sudden? Do you drop into dialect when you talk to your white friends? If you do, why?

edit: And I don't mean to imply that white people don't get treated like this - I hear people drop into an Italian-American affect a lot when they're talking about being criminals, or being rapey.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#34

Post by spacecowboy_lon »

afarrell wrote: post #16
sho wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author appears to be referring to a previous piece: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise...

Huh. That email exchange is actually a pretty good example of concept creep as applied to the concept of cultural appropriation.

So remind me again who invented Football (Soccer) by the offended persons rules those of us form the UK should be offended by the appropriation of Football :-)

Sorry of course this is Association football we are talking about and not Rugby :-)

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#35

Post by yummyfajitas »

pj_mukh wrote: post #27
jules wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the difference between a collectivist and individualist point of view. You can view women as a group or tribe, competing against other groups or tribes, or you can view each person as an individual with one of the characteristics being gender. The last sentence of your comment is from a collectivist point of view. I don't think this view is helpful. One woman isn't really helped by another woman being…

Yes, what you described is a pure meritocracy and all things being equal, that would be GREAT, unfortunately, all things are not equal. If all people got equal encouragement, inspiration, and opportunity (from the moment of birth) then we could simply focus at the moment of judgement (which btw, is also currently biased [1]). So that is basically what STEM advocates are working on, making sure women and other disadva…

All you are saying is that due to bad luck during upbringing, some people have less merit than others. Furthermore this bad luck is not statistically independent of various other characteristics.

Why does this imply that meritocracy is not great?

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#36

Post by jules »

pj_mukh wrote: post #27
jules wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the difference between a collectivist and individualist point of view. You can view women as a group or tribe, competing against other groups or tribes, or you can view each person as an individual with one of the characteristics being gender. The last sentence of your comment is from a collectivist point of view. I don't think this view is helpful. One woman isn't really helped by another woman being…

Yes, what you described is a pure meritocracy and all things being equal, that would be GREAT, unfortunately, all things are not equal. If all people got equal encouragement, inspiration, and opportunity (from the moment of birth) then we could simply focus at the moment of judgement (which btw, is also currently biased [1]). So that is basically what STEM advocates are working on, making sure women and other disadva…

You're right that it's biased, but perhaps not in the way you think it is: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

> The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference.

Encouraging everyone equally is great, but the problem is that many of these advocates seem to operate under the unsubstantiated hypothesis that there are no correlations between gender and career choice except those caused by upbringing. This leads to the idea that an unequal representation is necessarily a sign of a problem that needs to be fixed. I don't think this is supported by the data. We know from biology and other fields that there are natural differences. We also know that in more emancipated societies where people have more opportunity to choose what they want, there is a greater gender imbalance in universities (example: highest % of women earning science degrees is Iran; no western european country nor the US nor Canada is even in the top 20). Perhaps a gender imbalance is a sign of a society where individuals can do what they really want.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#37

Post by reitanqild »

pvaldes wrote: post #24
petewailes wrote: post #3

I suspect a large part of this is down to 1. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions, and 2. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a blanket approach doesn't work. The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few people talk about the lack of men in teaching…

> The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute. You have your point, but is a common and too simplistic interpretation. We need to repeat this more: To have cattle or being able to shoot a rabbit is irrelevant and not a guarantee at all to und…

> all those knowledge is generated normally in universities, placed in big cities, after years of painfully slow research done by experts in zoology, chemistry, genetics...

IIRC, so are the ideas that wolves, an animal capable of eating sheep or even moose would not eat children if they happened to walk unprotected.

Not saying we should get rid of wolves only that some realism need to be applied.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#38

Post by viewer5 »

pron wrote: post #29
jules wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the difference between a collectivist and individualist point of view. You can view women as a group or tribe, competing against other groups or tribes, or you can view each person as an individual with one of the characteristics being gender. The last sentence of your comment is from a collectivist point of view. I don't think this view is helpful. One woman isn't really helped by another woman being…

> You can view women as a group or tribe, competing against other groups or tribes, or you can view each person as an individual with one of the characteristics being gender. This distinction results from a poor understanding of what you call the "collectivist view". This approach does not view a social group as a constructive set -- a tribe as you call it -- but as an empirical, emergent set. The idea is that certai…

> Either women statistically have common goals or they don't (they do)

Like what?

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#39

Post by estefan »

manyxcxi wrote: post #30
estefan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that we're meant to believe everyone's opinions are equally valid. Empirically, it seems to me, some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent.

> some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent Some are. Even more are just plain incorrect for all the many reasons human beings are incorrect. At least in the states, we've spent the last 30 years making people believe that simply because you feel it is so, it must be. That's got to be a huge factor in the degradation of discourse in the same time period- if instead of coming from the classical positio…

You put it so much more eloquently than I did. Yes, this is exactly what I mean.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#40

Post by pj_mukh »

pj_mukh wrote: post #27
jules wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the difference between a collectivist and individualist point of view. You can view women as a group or tribe, competing against other groups or tribes, or you can view each person as an individual with one of the characteristics being gender. The last sentence of your comment is from a collectivist point of view. I don't think this view is helpful. One woman isn't really helped by another woman being…

Yes, what you described is a pure meritocracy and all things being equal, that would be GREAT, unfortunately, all things are not equal. If all people got equal encouragement, inspiration, and opportunity (from the moment of birth) then we could simply focus at the moment of judgement (which btw, is also currently biased [1]). So that is basically what STEM advocates are working on, making sure women and other disadva…

"Furthermore this bad luck is not statistically independent of various other characteristics"

Right, so that's not bad luck. That's systemic bias.

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