So, now I’m being needled because I wrote as a man about male behavior and didn’t spend enough time in my post discussing women or asking how they feel about men in a forum full of women giving their opinion about men. I further made a mistake because I did not focus on gender issues despite there being no lack of gender issue discussions elsewhere in this forum and in this thread.
I get it now. One note. That’s all we need or care for. That one note. Some people have spent a good deal of effort perfecting their one note song and damn anyone who sings another one. There is no room for other notes in this song… because all songs should be that one note because all other notes do not include that note which is most precious and are therefore unworthy notes and should never be sung.
Oh yes, that must be it. It’s because you’re “a man” and not because of your single note’s dissonance and lack of harmony with other men and women.
For someone that doesnt want to argue there sure do seem to be a lot of replies eh?
wow, that’s not what I said at all. I am a man and I wrote about male behavior but you conveniently left off the rest of that sentence where I said I was being needled for not spending enough time writing about women… But again, one note. that’s all you got. one note
I’m sorry I didn’t grasp the fullness of your invented martyrdom scenario.
I’ll get my meditation cushion out 
In all seriousness, I wonder whether there might be more scope to push things like resumes with names removed etc. I don’t know whether this is already a feature of peer review, but it might be an idea for academic journals to practice a similar sort of anonymisation when selecting articles.
A couple of things:
First, I think you may be confused when I refer to putting forth a plan. I’m not talking about a philosophy or a mental exercise we can use to deconstruct the primacy of our sense of self. I’m talking about an actual plan of action to enact positive change in the world. If you want us to reject the idea that we should be trying to address inequality in society on the premise that it is based on a flawed understanding of the world, and the “underlying mechanisms of sense, symbology, and self,” you need to suggest an alternate path forward.
If you think you have a vision for a better world, how do you propose, in real terms, that we get there collectively? Without that, you come across to me as being more interested in demonstrating that you have a deeper understanding of the world than the rest of us, rather than actually adding anything constructive to the conversation.
This is a terrible argument for willful ignorance, I’m sorry. Even if we accept your premise that population trends are inherently bad (although I thought that we were not supposed to perform games of making our values appear as universal, when they demonstrably aren’t - or is that just the rest of us?), that in no way justifies ignoring them. You are correct that a trend is never going to tell us everything about the specifics of each data point, and the innumerable variables that effect them. This is not the same thing as it not telling us anything about the data point in question. Again, I would refer you to my previous comment about the convenience of positions that lead to inaction.
Well on this, at least, I think we do agree.
Please do not put words in my mouth. Actually read what I wrote to you, from the first response, and go from there. I disagreed with you and you’ve done nothing but respond with hostility to the start.
Honestly, if you don’t want to be challenged on these ideas, why come to these threads? Someone disagreeing with you and challenging you to think and respond is not “needling”…
It is a particularly male pattern (myself included) to invest themselves in their opinions and overvalue said opinions. Honestly these discussions bore me to tears because they’re so rhetoric-based, if he came from a fact based position and gave some meat other than his feelings at least I could learn something.
I wonder if that would have counter effects in industries like tech, where the applicants can be primarily white males, and my company and others do have abstract policies on diversity hiring (more end goals than quotas. And having good, active managers helps alongside hiring graduates of the Ada Academy, I’ve never worked at a job with so many female devs!)
It’s a long way to Mars. 
@Jilly: The gif above is for you, too!
Men and women are different.
Yes, the categories are fuzzy because here in the real world, all categories are fuzzy. But if we use a “cluster in thing-space” approach to describe gender, we will find a big mostly bimodal distribution where we can usefully describe one mode as “male” and the other as “female”. That is, even though we can quibble about where to draw the exact boundaries, the boundaries are not completely arbitrary. The categories provide useful information about the structure of the world even if they’re in a sense imprecise.
And if we use some measurement methodology and determine that the “male” mode includes a positive value for “sexist evaluation of colleagues” and the female mode has a near-zero value for “sexist evaluation of colleagues”, then saying “men are more sexist than women” is not just word games – it is a useful description of the state of the world.
Useful descriptions of the state of the world are great because they help you to understand problems – problems like sexism. If the female-cluster-in-thingspace is less associated with sexism than the male-cluster-in-thingspace, that might be telling us something important about the nature of sexism that we should try to understand instead of sweeping under the rug.
The act of ignoring distinctions that have an effect on the real world doesn’t make those effects disappear. It just makes it more difficult to recognize and deal with those effects.
Incidentally, you are arguing for (a particular kind of) political correctness. I’m not opposed to arguing for political correctness, but you should understand that’s what you are doing.
And also arguing for an arbitrary, subjective take on reality. But it’s the one that makes him happy, therefore be believes it to he “rational” and less arbitrary. Nope, it’s just as constructed and unoriginal as the existing systems in place.
But much less useful because he refuses to accept the existing models, and by not examining the system he ignores how society works, how persons are actually treated. Blindness is not illumination, you have to understand the categories that exist to move beyond them.
It’s almost as if understanding isn’t the end goal but getting everyone else to conform to categories you’ve created from nothing and thus understand better. It doesn’t have to be a true understanding, just somehing that “makes sense” with your current worldview.
He’d do better updating his worldview than modifying his reality to reconcile the blind spots in his worldview, but I doubt that’s going to occur.
@popobawa4u seems to see the world in a very different way from most people. While this can cause confusion and frustration, @popobawa4u is ultimately another happy mutant and I think it is mind-opening to try to understand where they* are coming from.
*I don’t want to confine @popobawa4u to arbitrary liguistic labels, and I hope the pronoun “they” will suffice in this instance.
Absolutely, I have some friends on the spectrum and it’s a lot easier to have these conversations in person versus online. Devoid of context, it’s hard to separate the detachedness from insincerity, the seeming lack of empathy or love of argument over the content of the subject-matter.
I think the frustration with me is the detachedness of semiotics without the fetters of human behavior and right-action. The target is feminism, not “what is misogyny”? And while questions are asked, there appears to be little interest in answers provided versus retreating further into abstraction.
So glad you wrote this—agreed! Cognitive diversity isn’t a euphemism; it’s a legitimate concept and its reality should elicit not just respect but a certain type of joy that we can’t—really can’t—all be the same and thank heavens for that.
There’s definitely a common language that I’m struggling to find, because otherwise this is getting a bit wanky, if definitions would help we would all be happy to do so, but they are not desired, the subject doesn’t sit static for long before moving onto an entirely different concept that may well be relevant but received little interest itself before zapping over to something else…
I suppose that is natural when there is little common base belief or structure of thought.
I have little issues discussing technical matters with friends and coworkers because I do break down complex systems plainly.
People though, those systems have underlying motivations to unpack…
wow, you respond to my post by misunderstanding or misrepresenting my point of view, attacking that point of view which I do not have, and then when I further explain myself you then decide to attack me for not talking about the talking points you think should be discussed. But I put words in your mouth and I am the hostile one. That’s all I need to know. Thanks for your time.
What you are suggesting here is anything but egalitarian. There are billions of paths forward. And they are not “alternate”, unless, again, somebody is having us implicitly defaulting to some presumptive values. I have explicitly explained that I do not “want us to reject the idea that we should be trying to address inequality in society”. What I said is that persuasion/coercion itself causes the very inequality people are complaining about, which is in no way the same thing. There is no unifying strategy, because there are no universal goals or values. Insistence that we must create or recognize commonality functions only as the flip-side of xenophobia. The notion of coexistence with those who don’t (at least appear to) belong to the same coercive social monolith is apparently “unthinkable”.
There is no functional “self” here, nor is there a “rest of us”. Collective action is not some nebulous action of “everybody”, it is the result of ANY of us interacting with any other. It is a multitude of adapting interdependent networks, rather than some idealistic unaccountable totality.One decide your way forward with those who one actually interacts with. One’s presumed interactions with other people and groups are more symbolic.
Your (and a few others’) insistence on making this into a personal issue, and framing it as “me” versus “everybody else” is precisely the same mechanism of tribal ingroup/outgroup reasoning which creates racism and sexism in the world in general. So I think it’s ironic that you insist that my observations are not relevant to the topic. Perhaps you are literally trying to force a social narrative and squeeze me out of it for ideological purposes. The only refutation I have encountered so far is deliberately misrepresenting my opinions as calls for inaction despite my explaining otherwise.
What exactly have I suggested ignoring? I have suggested refuting a few notions, which is again not the same thing at all.
Bad is a matter of opinion. That’s not what I was getting at.
Again with this “the rest of us”… Who are you speaking for, here? And what is your basis for assuming that I should naturally be some sort of exception, presumably because I have an identity which frames my sense of self as an exception. Is this not precisely what I was arguing against? Supposed by whom? What I was getting at is that the solution lies not in the specific values of specific selves, but rather in methodologies.
Well, I am not correct, because I am not an identity. If you interpret what you read from me as being accurate, it would still presumably be just as accurate if you read it elsewhere. What appears to be me is only a node where various emergent phenomena appear to intersect for a while.
I am not arguing against statistics, merely reminding that deciding what to measure, how to measure, and what these measurements mean (to whom?) are all loaded with implicit values. Such as the earlier question about “wage gap”. It has a different significance for those who decide that employment for its own sake has value, than for those who decide that it does not. That is not to say - as others seem to be suggesting is my position - that such data has no meaning. Despite there being a degree of objectivity buried in it, there is no reason to assume that it has the same significance to all who interpret it.
Consider my earlier comparison with the influence of organized religion prior to The Enlightenment. I can acknowledge that “The Catholic Church” had objectively measurable activity as a self-defined social movement - despite it representing (to my faculties) so much self-referential doctrine which is not about anything. This means that it is in some ways ultimately not real to me, whilst still having very real effects. How? Because it is a symbolic perceptual framework devised by people, which is itself in reality not the thing symbolized. This is how I perceive in modern-day other notions such as race, sex, humanity, and identity. Understanding that human social reality is based upon shared sets of symbols and trying to work with this process directly is hardly “denial”, “ignorance”, or “inaction”. It is just apparently not the way most here prefer to frame the problem. But suggesting that what appears to be the cause is irrelevant because people prefer to study only the effects seems oddly disconnected.
