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Why is it "ludicrous" for society to discourage women from engaging in certain behaviors, if it turns out that it's bad for society if women engage in tho

Why is it "ludicrous" for society to discourage women from engaging in certain behaviors, if it turns out that it's bad for society if women engage in those behaviors? That sounds eminently reasonable to me. Define "behaviors" and "bad for society" because your bringing this up makes me think you actually believe specific such things. It's ludicrous because saying we should decide social policies based on generalizations of groups of people is a bad idea. Replace women with any group: LGBT, people of color, poor people, foreigners, etc. You'll see that it's kind of a crazy statement. It might benefit some people to oppress people of color, for example, and so you might say it "benefits society" depending on what society you're talking about. It might even lead to technological progress! But does that make it right, and is it good? Should they not look for chaste women as life partners, if it turns out that marriages to chaste women end up being the most successful? Should society not then encourage women to be chaste, if society cares about how many marriages end up being successful? Society should care about the rights of the individual to freedom and happiness to live their lives: equally, without regard to gender. You also fail to define successful marriage: you could mean if they successfully rear children, or you could mean they are happy long term, or you can mean any other number of things. To encourage systemic behavior on poorly defined things like this leads to people getting hurt. In this case, it means women not having the same rights as men. And not only that: men with what are considered more feminine characteristics sometimes suffer similar consequences. Feminism is a misnomer; gender equality benefits both men and women because gender is not a binary and all men are not the same and all women are not the same. You keep saying "if x turns out to y" but we don't have such data. Either say something or don't, that's why it's pointless. I think you'll find that there are actually no hard and fast rules like the ones you say we should consider may be the case, and that people actually occupy a very diverse spectrum. As such social policy should be as permissive as possible to avoid hurting classes of people not considered the "majority."

jimmyk 10y ago
>It's ludicrous because saying we should decide social policies based on generalizations of groups of people is a bad idea. Replace women with any group: LGBT, people of color, poor people, foreigners, etc. We don't let foreigners vote because, generally speaking, their interests are less closely aligned with the best interests of the country compared with citizens. Should we let foreigners vote now? Certain racial minorities tend to come from poorer backgrounds, so we mandate that they receive certain advantages in hiring and college admissions and so on. Should affirmative action be ended? Why is it necessarily a bad idea to base social policies on generalizations of groups of people? If the generalizations are correct, why is it automatically bad to take them into account when deciding policy? In what other circumstance is it a good idea to discard correct information when making decisions? >Society should care about the rights of the individual to freedom and happiness to live their lives: equally, without regard to gender. We all sacrifice some of our freedoms to make society a better place. Why should society not be allowed to take gender into account when making policies, if gender is actually relevant to the policy? >You also fail to define successful marriage: Generally speaking I mean they produce children that become productive members of society. >To encourage systemic behavior on poorly defined things like this leads to people getting hurt. Ignoring facts also leads to people getting hurt. >You keep saying "if x turns out to y" but we don't have such data. I'm not going to bother getting into specifics because it sounds to me like you wouldn't change your mind even if I provided such data. It sounds to me like you believe it's morally wrong in and of itself to hold men and women to different standards, even if there is good reason to do so. >I think you'll find that there are actually no hard and fast rules like the ones you say we should consider You're saying there is no statistical relationship between, say, the amount of casual sex people have and any other statistic that society has an interest in increasing or decreasing?
- kajecounterhack 10y ago
  We don't let foreigners vote because, generally speaking, their interests are less closely aligned with the best interests of the country compared with citizens. Should we let foreigners vote now? s/generally speaking/very specifically speaking/r. Foreigners don't live here and don't pay taxes. That is clear-cut, unlike gender. This is not an accurate analogy. Now, treating foreigners poorly because you think they're poorer or stupider than you or that their culture is inferior is why we have a lot of hate in the world -- that's an example of society choosing behavior / shaming based on generalization. And clearly that's not a good thing. Certain racial minorities tend to come from poorer backgrounds, so we mandate that they receive certain advantages in hiring and college admissions and so on. Should affirmative action be ended? No, but it has plenty of criticism right now in the sense that the actual purpose is to help economically disadvantaged and often what happens instead is privileged individuals in disadvantaged categories benefit the most (not actually representative of who we try to help). Clearly we should seek the most accurate classification and base policy on that. Law should be a scalpel, not a cudgel. And so the same is with society: we should err on the side of respect and open-mindedness rather than trying to shoehorn everyone into boxes / classifications of our own imagination. We all sacrifice some of our freedoms to make society a better place. Why should society not be allowed to take gender into account when making policies, if gender is actually relevant to the policy? Are you saying women should sacrifice being treated as people with agency to make the world a "better place" ? Better for who? Generally speaking I mean they produce children that become productive members of society. Cool so what do you want to say? That subjugation of women will make it more likely that we produce children who are productive members of society? I won't agree with that and you wouldn't have data to support it. Ignoring facts also leads to people getting hurt. Ignoring that status quo is not the same as fact leads to people getting hurt. Furthermore, assuming that you can know all the facts leads to people getting hurt. For example, many in society used to say homosexuals can't raise children as well as straight couples, but ignored the circumstances under which homosexuals were forced to live as influencing their classification (persecution). Now that (specifically liberal American) society has become more accepting of homosexuals, you might see that statistically well-adjusted homosexuals are on the rise, and those couples that raise kids do so just as well as their straight counterparts. In the world you propose, people can say "well statistics show they have higher divorce rates or children make less when they grow up" and use that as a reason to shame gay marriage. And in that world you'll fail to account for the myriad of reasons why that's a flawed notion. Even if statistics show something, it doesn't mean we should act on it. We don't always know why things are and the various causes, so as soon as you try to blame it on poorly-defined blurry groups such as race and gender, you begin to encroach upon irrational territory. Basing decisions off intractable data is terrible. I'm not going to bother getting into specifics because it sounds to me like you wouldn't change your mind even if I provided such data. It sounds to me like you believe it's morally wrong in and of itself to hold men and women to different standards, even if there is good reason to do so. If there's something we agree on here it's that I'm dubious of any data you'd provide, mainly because I don't believe such data exists. My assumptions and ideologies are formed upon the basis that we actually cannot accurately enough assess this information and thus must operate with a wide berth of respect for one another. I think of law and society norms as being a shitty x-dimensional linear classifier, and people y-dimensional points, where y >>> x. This is where my disdain for your "data" arises: where you assert you can say some facts for "all women vs all men" and I'm saying you just can't. As far as reason goes, burden of proof is on the hypothesis. Statistics also can be interpreted with a high degree of variability. So even if my premise was incorrect, and you did "have the data," we'd have to have a conversation about how you're interpreting it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization ^ Turns out with most things regarding people we cannot directly measure / find metrics. Instead we have to satisfy ourselves with operationalizations. So yeah, forgive my skepticism when you claim to have enough data to know the effects of gender norms on societal health when you haven't even done step 1, defining how these things are measured and accounting for confounders. You know what you can measure? Suffering. You can talk to women and people of color and realize that there are systemic flaws that really hurt people. And you can act on that data, because it's not abstract. You can be kinder. You're saying there is no statistical relationship between, say, the amount of casual sex people have and any other statistic that society has an interest in increasing or decreasing? I'm saying that if there is, you can't know it, and even if you do, it's so noisy it's useless to try to base policy on and inevitably hurts people. Equality for all people regardless of gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, is an ideal. If you don't believe in it, we're going to disagree, because it speaks to the core of what we feel is "good for society" or a "good society." If you think of life as an optimization problem, you can think of sum(ideals) as the objective function. A good society to me is one in which everyone has the same civil liberties to life and happiness. Physical life is not fair (you may be born with a disease and I may not, born rich vs born poor, etc) but that doesn't stop us from saying that fairness is a virtue worth pursuing where we can. Do we at least agree on that?

jimmyk 10y ago

>It's ludicrous because saying we should decide social policies based on generalizations of groups of people is a bad idea. Replace women with any group: LGBT, people of color, poor people, foreigners, etc. We don't let foreigners vote because, generally speaking, their interests are less closely aligned with the best interests of the country compared with citizens. Should we let foreigners vote now? Certain racial minorities tend to come from poorer backgrounds, so we mandate that they receive certain advantages in hiring and college admissions and so on. Should affirmative action be ended? Why is it necessarily a bad idea to base social policies on generalizations of groups of people? If the generalizations are correct, why is it automatically bad to take them into account when deciding policy? In what other circumstance is it a good idea to discard correct information when making decisions? >Society should care about the rights of the individual to freedom and happiness to live their lives: equally, without regard to gender. We all sacrifice some of our freedoms to make society a better place. Why should society not be allowed to take gender into account when making policies, if gender is actually relevant to the policy? >You also fail to define successful marriage: Generally speaking I mean they produce children that become productive members of society. >To encourage systemic behavior on poorly defined things like this leads to people getting hurt. Ignoring facts also leads to people getting hurt. >You keep saying "if x turns out to y" but we don't have such data. I'm not going to bother getting into specifics because it sounds to me like you wouldn't change your mind even if I provided such data. It sounds to me like you believe it's morally wrong in and of itself to hold men and women to different standards, even if there is good reason to do so. >I think you'll find that there are actually no hard and fast rules like the ones you say we should consider You're saying there is no statistical relationship between, say, the amount of casual sex people have and any other statistic that society has an interest in increasing or decreasing?

kajecounterhack 10y ago
We don't let foreigners vote because, generally speaking, their interests are less closely aligned with the best interests of the country compared with citizens. Should we let foreigners vote now? s/generally speaking/very specifically speaking/r. Foreigners don't live here and don't pay taxes. That is clear-cut, unlike gender. This is not an accurate analogy. Now, treating foreigners poorly because you think they're poorer or stupider than you or that their culture is inferior is why we have a lot of hate in the world -- that's an example of society choosing behavior / shaming based on generalization. And clearly that's not a good thing. Certain racial minorities tend to come from poorer backgrounds, so we mandate that they receive certain advantages in hiring and college admissions and so on. Should affirmative action be ended? No, but it has plenty of criticism right now in the sense that the actual purpose is to help economically disadvantaged and often what happens instead is privileged individuals in disadvantaged categories benefit the most (not actually representative of who we try to help). Clearly we should seek the most accurate classification and base policy on that. Law should be a scalpel, not a cudgel. And so the same is with society: we should err on the side of respect and open-mindedness rather than trying to shoehorn everyone into boxes / classifications of our own imagination. We all sacrifice some of our freedoms to make society a better place. Why should society not be allowed to take gender into account when making policies, if gender is actually relevant to the policy? Are you saying women should sacrifice being treated as people with agency to make the world a "better place" ? Better for who? Generally speaking I mean they produce children that become productive members of society. Cool so what do you want to say? That subjugation of women will make it more likely that we produce children who are productive members of society? I won't agree with that and you wouldn't have data to support it. Ignoring facts also leads to people getting hurt. Ignoring that status quo is not the same as fact leads to people getting hurt. Furthermore, assuming that you can know all the facts leads to people getting hurt. For example, many in society used to say homosexuals can't raise children as well as straight couples, but ignored the circumstances under which homosexuals were forced to live as influencing their classification (persecution). Now that (specifically liberal American) society has become more accepting of homosexuals, you might see that statistically well-adjusted homosexuals are on the rise, and those couples that raise kids do so just as well as their straight counterparts. In the world you propose, people can say "well statistics show they have higher divorce rates or children make less when they grow up" and use that as a reason to shame gay marriage. And in that world you'll fail to account for the myriad of reasons why that's a flawed notion. Even if statistics show something, it doesn't mean we should act on it. We don't always know why things are and the various causes, so as soon as you try to blame it on poorly-defined blurry groups such as race and gender, you begin to encroach upon irrational territory. Basing decisions off intractable data is terrible. I'm not going to bother getting into specifics because it sounds to me like you wouldn't change your mind even if I provided such data. It sounds to me like you believe it's morally wrong in and of itself to hold men and women to different standards, even if there is good reason to do so. If there's something we agree on here it's that I'm dubious of any data you'd provide, mainly because I don't believe such data exists. My assumptions and ideologies are formed upon the basis that we actually cannot accurately enough assess this information and thus must operate with a wide berth of respect for one another. I think of law and society norms as being a shitty x-dimensional linear classifier, and people y-dimensional points, where y >>> x. This is where my disdain for your "data" arises: where you assert you can say some facts for "all women vs all men" and I'm saying you just can't. As far as reason goes, burden of proof is on the hypothesis. Statistics also can be interpreted with a high degree of variability. So even if my premise was incorrect, and you did "have the data," we'd have to have a conversation about how you're interpreting it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization ^ Turns out with most things regarding people we cannot directly measure / find metrics. Instead we have to satisfy ourselves with operationalizations. So yeah, forgive my skepticism when you claim to have enough data to know the effects of gender norms on societal health when you haven't even done step 1, defining how these things are measured and accounting for confounders. You know what you can measure? Suffering. You can talk to women and people of color and realize that there are systemic flaws that really hurt people. And you can act on that data, because it's not abstract. You can be kinder. You're saying there is no statistical relationship between, say, the amount of casual sex people have and any other statistic that society has an interest in increasing or decreasing? I'm saying that if there is, you can't know it, and even if you do, it's so noisy it's useless to try to base policy on and inevitably hurts people. Equality for all people regardless of gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, is an ideal. If you don't believe in it, we're going to disagree, because it speaks to the core of what we feel is "good for society" or a "good society." If you think of life as an optimization problem, you can think of sum(ideals) as the objective function. A good society to me is one in which everyone has the same civil liberties to life and happiness. Physical life is not fair (you may be born with a disease and I may not, born rich vs born poor, etc) but that doesn't stop us from saying that fairness is a virtue worth pursuing where we can. Do we at least agree on that?