How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm • Hacker News Board

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#81

Post by spriggan3 » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:10 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #33

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 hu…

> I'm black, and when white people call me bro

White people shouldn't call you bro like black people shouldn't call you bro either. I'm black, no one calls me bro or the n word, black or white, it shouldn't be a matter of color but respect. I don't understand why you need to single out whites on that matter.

Likewise it would be stupid to say it's ok for girls to call each other bitch or cunt, but not ok for a man to do that because he is a man.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#82

Post by JabavuAdams » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:10 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #33

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 hu…

Sheesh. Stop being so white. /sarcasm

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#83

Post by weberc2 » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #18

I look at this as a sign of society evolving. Subtle emotional traumas exist, micro-aggressions exist. Way more things are harmful to children than we are really aware of. Mental health issues scale smoothly from 'nonexistent' to 'makes you completely nonfunctional' and can't be easily separated from 'ordinary' personality. Society was not-so-blissfully unaware of these aspects of life, this is the process of coming…

The more concerning thing is that these words have broadened in definition such that when someone is accused of being prejudiced, people think KKK and not "someone who committed a microaggression". Further, these sensitivities disproportionately affect certain groups; we're very concerned about microaggressions toward certain groups, but hate toward other groups seems to be on the increase.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#84

Post by sgift » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:24 PM UTC

estefan wrote: post #5

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 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.

I don't think we're really meant to believe that, it's just we haven't found a way to decide (on a big scale) who we should listen too and who not. Only intelligent people? Only moral people? Only people with money? Only .. I think you get it.

Next you have the problem with "trust those with education" - sounds great, but .. what about those who have education but are paid for a specific point of view? Maybe without us knowing it.

It's the classic "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"-thing. People get told to listen to - great! People get mislead by - shitty. People get to to listen to - no way. Last time you told me to listen to someone he lied to me!

That's the reason we ended with "one person, one vote" in the first place (and governing is nothing else but constant exchange of opinions). A system where automagically the "best, brightest, morally fittest, etc." would lead would be vastly superior. Unfornately, outside of fairy tales, we have no idea how to do that and instead try to limit the damage one bad apple can do.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#85

Post by twoodfin » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:25 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #33

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 hu…

I very much appreciate your comment. I also don't have a good understanding of the "fútbol" kerfuffle, if it indeed is offensive to some people. But at worst it'd seem to be on a par with folks mockingly pronouncing the name of a Minneapolis-based department store chain as "Tar-ZHAY". Why drop into French 'dialect'? Because you're communicating a point about its relative sophistication using (indeed) a stereotype, but not, I think, a particularly harmful one.

And English has been picking up foreign words (often where there was already a native equivalent) for their concepts and connotations forever. I think there's a distinction to be made between referring to a chic party as a "soirée", or soccer as "fútbol", and switching into a bad Italian accent to describe criminal debauchery.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#86

Post by nmrm2 » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:26 PM UTC

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 former is seen as "a problem" and the latter isn't

That's not true. There are organized efforts to increase the number of men in (especially elementary school) teaching roles as well as efforts to increase the number of male nurses.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#87

Post by richmarr » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:26 PM UTC

jules wrote: post #36

pj_mukh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disgui…

Generalising from that study seems unwise.

(a) Hiring faculty is a very different thing (and subject to different rules and policies) than getting students succesfully to graduation.

(b) Unless male economists are uniquely meritocratic there's more at play here than personal bias. It seems more likely that the other subjects have a culture of progressively trying to redress historic gender imbalance. Since those preferences seem to occur at a subject/departmental level it seems even more unwise to try to generalise off the back of them.

(c) If you do want to generalise, there are other more generalisable studies that contradict the results of this one.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#88

Post by 7Z7 » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:26 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #65

DougWebb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a vegetarian, and I gladly pay others to kill animals for me to eat. But I do not pay for the animals to be tortured in the process; I want them killed as quickly and painlessly as possible. Cats injure, torture, and play with their prey before killing it. Humans should not do that.

Not that they're always successful, but hunters also want animals killed as quickly as possible (not necessarily painlessly, but are our methods of slaughtering really that painless? Do we give them a nice general anesthetic before bashing in their brains or decapitating them?). Anything but a good clean shot is considered, depending on the hunter, cruel, wasteful, poor form, etc. Most of the people I know who hunt a…

There is a great difference between deer hunting and fox hunting, don't confuse the two. In fox hunting there is no "good clean shot".

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#89

Post by hderms » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:28 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #33

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 hu…

I'm white and grew up in a near-western suburb of Chicago and have also noticed that white people were quick to adopt a black dialect. I'm not sure it was necessarily only correlated with the things you mentioned (partying, anger, etc...) but it definitely existed. People adopted a lot of slang words from the black community too, which can sound really unnatural coming from a rich white kid's mouth.

However, I don't think it was necessarily a result of people viewing black people negatively, in fact, it often seemed to be admiration. I could be wrong because I can't read minds but these were young kids that had been raised in an anti-racist environment, so suggesting that they were mimicking black culture because they secretly felt negatively about it isn't a convincing explanation for the entirety of it.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#90

Post by nmrm2 » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #65

DougWebb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a vegetarian, and I gladly pay others to kill animals for me to eat. But I do not pay for the animals to be tortured in the process; I want them killed as quickly and painlessly as possible. Cats injure, torture, and play with their prey before killing it. Humans should not do that.

Not that they're always successful, but hunters also want animals killed as quickly as possible (not necessarily painlessly, but are our methods of slaughtering really that painless? Do we give them a nice general anesthetic before bashing in their brains or decapitating them?). Anything but a good clean shot is considered, depending on the hunter, cruel, wasteful, poor form, etc. Most of the people I know who hunt a…

FYI, the author's original comment was about fox hunting, which is decidedly different from most forms of hunting popular in the US.