guesswho
2yr ago
If "sex is just like tennis"
That's an uncharitable summary that OP made of one section of one article taken out of context, not a universally agreed-upon progressive maxim.
Aella had recently an interview on trigonometry where she said she vastly prefers escorting and prostitution compared to factory work she used to do when very young, which made her drink too much. Where does the shielding end?
If 'shielding our children from future harm' is the excuse we need to bring back a strong labor movement and make factory work less stressful and soul-crushing, then it's a weird attack vector but I'm all for it.
Also: When you seriously write the words 'My opponents want to maximize suffering' is approximately the point where you should take step back from teh keyboard, look at yourself in the mirror, and ask whether you might possibly be stuck in a filter bubble that's giving you wildly uncharitable beliefs about other human beings.
I do think that my opponent's policies and behaviors cause more suffering than my side's policies and behaviors on average, but I would never say they want to maximize suffering! That's not even cartoon supervillain, it's literally cartoon Satan (because even the 'real' Satan is more nuanced than that!).
guesswho
2yr ago
If you succeed in prostitution-is-work before you succeed in prison abolition (etc.) then the scenario I outlined becomes possible.
Perhaps, but that's just tactics.
My understanding of your original comment was that it was arguing that sex work is not work through the argument of 'We're ok with making prisoners do work, we are not ok with making prisoners have sex, QED sex is not work.'
If that was the point of the comment, my response of 'we not ok making prisoners do work' does dissolve the argument.
I agree there's tactics involved in avoiding the bad outcome you hint at as a practical matter, although realistically I don't expect it to ever some up no matter how we go about things because politics is ultimately governed by vibes more than logical formulations, and you whole point is about how those vibes are atrocious and unacceptable.
That's a whole different issue, though.
What would be wild is defining a Scope of Practice that excludes non-licensed people from undertaking the listed actions, regardless of whether they are paid or not.
Yup, it sure would be wild if we did that for chefs! Or writers! Or drivers! Or dishwashers! Or babysitters!
It would definitely be crazy if Scope of Practice laws were used to do crazy things for no reason. But that has nothing to do with sex work. Scope of Practice laws aren't used that way because, again, voters wouldn't like it.
guesswho
2yr ago
You seem to be arguing against the position 'sew work isn't sex', which isn't an argument anyone is making.
Yes, sex work is still sex, with all the attendant facts and context about sex. All your attempts to point out how sex work is like sex are kind of pointless; yes, it sex work is sex, hence the name.
The claim being made here is that it's work. Not that it isn't sex.
guesswho
2yr ago
My mom is a psychologist and I would not want her to take any of my friends as patients (and I believe professional ethics would preclude it).
Lots of jobs are like this.
guesswho
2yr ago
Sorry, wait, sorry, is your impression that 'comfort women' were salaried government employees with due process rights and retirement packages and etc.?
Military conscription is bad but it's still qualitatively different from slavery in important ways.
The closest military analogy to comfort women would be something like child soldiers in Africa, which yes we do also strenuously object to.
guesswho
2yr ago
Prisoners can be compelled to do work;
Yes, we call that slavery and are also very actively against it.
The Venn diagram of sex-worker rights advocates and prison abolitionists is not quite a circle, but it's pretty close.
If you want to go wild, they could even restrict who gets to do Real Work™ (even as an unpaid hobby) much like they restrict the practice of medicine, engineering, or law.
Ok, sure? Prostitution licensing seems unnecessary, but maybe it would help get everyone in the system enough to fight pimping/disease/violence/etc. And maybe people could audit the classes at the trade school and pick up some useful skills.
guesswho
2yr ago
Nah, lying in politics rarely creates backlash, it's too common and the public's attention span is too short.
Remember when we had those websites with rolling tickers of every lie Trump was telling with citations, and everyone just rolled their eyes and ignored them until constantly lying became part of his 'charm'? You could have made a ticker like that for most people and groups in politics, people care about results a lot more than they care about strict honesty.
If anything, it's telling the truth that most commonly leads to backlash, because it leaves you vulnerable and under-optimized.
guesswho
2yr ago
Why the sudden spike of people identifying as trans?
Why the sudden spike in people identifying as something that wasn't an identity in the past? Because it's an identity now.
There were very few authors before the invention of written language. There were very few basketball players before we started playing basketball.
It's not 'more' people identifying as trans, it's 'any', as it was not a thing you could identify as until very recently.
There have been various analogues in different cultures at different times, and we have zero accurate records on how common any of those were in their own times and places.
guesswho
2yr ago
Why do you think pedophilia is bad?
Their honest answer is probably pretty close to your honest answer, if neither of you are trying to play rhetorical games at the time you give it.
guesswho
2yr ago
The Motte is overwhelmingly Millennial. If you're interested in diverse perspectives, you might try particularly for more oldsters.
Or youngsters!
Millennials are 40 now, well into the age our parents were when we were complaining about how out of touch and old-fashioned they were.
guesswho
2yr ago
Gallup was hired by IFS to conduct the survey. This is how pretty much all survey firms work, they're not independent research organizations, they take contracts from clients who want the survey run, and those clients then own the data and decide if/how it is released and distributed.
The fact that Gallup is involved is definitely legitimizing, they have a reputation that won't let them intentionally collect biased data or allow clients who mention their name to lie about what the data say too much without speaking up. As compared to if IFS had done the calling internally or with a less famous vendor.
But at the end of the day, IFS still commissioned the poll and determined what it would ask about and how the questions would be formed, and is in control of how the findings are released.
guesswho
2yr ago
Cold take: kids with strict parents lie to interviewers on the phone about their parents.
It's worse than that, these calling houses typically aren't allowed to/won't talk to minors directly without a parent's involvement, the parent is ussually the one filling out the survey (and supposedly asking the child for their answers, but...).
Given that the this entire study is about disciplined and punitive parenting vs open and free-wheeling and the question is 'does your child say that you are great and they are doing great and everything is great when you ask them what to put down on this survey', there's probably a good measure of auto-correlation going on here.
Keep in mind that the 'data' here is a poll by a right-wing think tank. The data basically says that conservative parents said they have a good relationship with their children and that their children have good mental health on a single survey. /shrug.
Polling definitely isn't useless in general, but there are things it can tell you and things it can't. In particular, surveys of minors like this typically contact the parent, and have the parent ask their child questions and then fill in the survey for them; there's bound to be confounds between parenting style and what your child tells you when you ask them these types of questions, 'lying to my strict father that everything is fine so he doesn't get mad' is a trope for a reason.
I can't prove to you post hoc that I would have dismissed this survey if it had come out closer to my preferred beliefs, maybe I'm stupid enough that I wouldn't have, but I hope I would have and I do think I should have, in that hypothetical.
A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches".
Note that it's not actually inconsistent to say that 'The big decrease in mental health compared to past generations is caused primarily by social media' and 'The biggest factor explaining the differences in mental health between different kids today is parenting style'.
If all kids in your survey are similarly saturated in social media, then social media will explain very little of the variance in your data because everyone gets the same exposure. That doesn't mean that social media isn't having a huge effect on everyone, just that this effect is uniform in your data set.
It's sort of like how intelligence is very very highly heritable if you only measure among affluent college kids who signed up for your study, and a lot less heritable if you take a global sample that includes people with childhood malnutrition and lack of education access. These are all measures of the amount of explained variance in your data set, you have to think about what types of variance that data set does and doesn't capture in order to interpret it correctly.
But it's worth noting that this is probably the main explanatory factor behind why conservative teens have so much better mental health than liberal ones; after all, the competing "it's smartphones and instagram" hypothesis doesn't explain this.
Does it not?
I guess I don't have evidence on this, but I just assumed that it's still the case that rural children spend less time on screens and more time outside than urban children, even if the gap is shrinking.
Also, if the political difference (presuming one exists) were caused by conservative parents limiting screen time and/or banning social media, that's still congruent with those things being the proximal causal factor.
guesswho
2yr ago
the gun murder rate in the capital of Stockholm is now 30 times that of London.
Hurray for strict gun control laws and enforcement! It really works!
Of course, the number of knife murders in London is about 5x higher than the number of gun murders, so little wonder why the Guardian picked that very specific statistic to focus on.
Meanwhile, if my 5 minutes of Googling and napkin math are correct, gun murder rate in New York is about 90x higher than London. So Stockholm is still putting out rookie numbers, really.
guesswho
2yr ago
I don't really understand the central claim here I think?
Like, I get why the data is auto-correlated, sure.
But the Dunning-Kruger effect isn't an observation about confidence and test scores being correlated at all, it's an observation about the slope of the lines. That the slope of y-x is smaller than the slope of x=x, such that low scores are overconfident and high scores are underconfident.
And it seems like random data could have produced either slope.
guesswho
2yr ago
Easy theory is that autism makes you largely immune to social scripts and peer pressure, and those are the only things keeping some small percent of the population trapped in their assigned gender roles.
Or, more generally: autistic people who want to be socially competent have to intentionally and intellectually examine and dissect social scripts and norms that everyone else just picks up naturally without thinking about them. Examining those things intentionally and intellectually makes it easier to notice that they're arbitrary and often dumb, and make different choices for yourself.
guesswho
2yr ago
There seems to be a strong correlation with the type of mild autism that puts people in places like here or the tech sector rather than care homes and institutions. May be related to that.
I also wonder if intelligence is in some sense a prerequisite for having the introspection and general awareness to notice that society has a lot of social scripts and roles it tries to corral you into, and some of them are stupid or don't fit you well. My experience is that smart people in general are more likely to do 'weird' stuff, from polyamory to Larping to ignoring fashion to etc.
guesswho
2yr ago
Being a dink is enough to explain relative affluence, really, it's pretty powerful.
Another explanation for overrepresentation in creative fields is simply that being an outsider makes you conscious of your culture and makes you introspective about how you don't fit it and gives you relatively uncommon stories and a desire to express them which all help push someone into being a creative or give them more material to work with in their art.
Similarly, being excluded from/having difficulty with normal teen social stuff may probabilistically push you towards more studying/focus on career/etc (same as with the many of us mild autistics here), explaining more representation at high career levels generally.
guesswho
2yr ago
product pictures on Amazon, etc.
Is this true?
When I search Amazon for the word 'shirt,' in the first 3 rows on images, 8 models are white, 4 are non-white.
Do you see something different when you search the word 'shirt'? Did you have some other set of categories you were talking about?
guesswho
2yr ago
we force kids to leave their families for like 8 hours a day to go to school.
Elementary schools in my area are 6 hours (8:30-2:30), so definitely less than 'most'. Leaves about 10 waking hours a day between parents and kids. Plus 24/2 on weekends.
I don't think the average parent is actively imparting wisdom to their child fro more than 10 hours a day every day - even if they don't have a job and have a maid to do all the houswework, most people can't talk for 10 hours a day without their voice giving out.
So I don't think this is an actual restriction on parents raising their kids in the way you imply.
What I think is a restriction in the way you apply is the fact that in most families with kids, both parents have to work in order to keep the household comfortable, that work typically lasts longer than the schoolday, and typically leaves parents tired and harried when they get home. I think that's the actual largest limiting factor on how much parents get to actively mentor their kids.
I never watch ads, but just as a spot check I logged out of my Youtube account and turned of adblock and started clicking around. The first time I saw human faces onscreen in an ad it was 1 white man, 1 white woman, and 1 black man walking together and appearing at the same time. The next ad started in a locker room with a bunch of players huddled up, 3 in the middle of the screen were white men and then maybe 4-5 other men of other races around the periphery.
Maybe cable television is different, I think I literally don't know a single person in my immediate social circle who still watches that?
As another spot check, the first 5 ads in the list of 2023 Superbowl ads all have pretty prominent white guys. I stopped checking after 5, but you can click through the rest if that's instructive.
Edit: Also there's this. Which, I don't even know where they're getting the data, I'm having a hard time googling summaries that show their sources. But this like all the summaries I'm finding seems to flatly disagree with your observation, so I dunno.
I dunno, my random sampling is very small but disagreed with your impression as strongly as it could have. Maybe it's something about which channels you're watching?
If you think described experience is sufficient to differentiate between the experience of incorrectly and correctly believing you have the same experience as someone
Just to make sure my position is clear before we give up, for posterity if nothing else:
It's very unlikely that any two people ever have identical experiences of any complex thing, down to infinite resolution. This is partially why I was being so aggro about the use of the term 'qualia'.
Complex categories like 'man' and 'woman' include a huge variety of similar-but-different experiences (like most complex category boundaries, such as 'bird', contain many similar-but different-things) across the billions of different people in those categories.
I think cultural information (everything from spoken descriptions to artistic depictions to reasoning backwards from observations) is sufficient to be pretty confident about your own experiences being more central to one of those two vast fuzzy blobs than the other one (especially if you have good introspection and spend a lot of time thinking about it).
In normal conversation, we do not typically apply a very high standard of scrutiny to people guessing that they are having similar experiences to other people. Demanding a much much higher level of scrutiny in this case is an isolated demand for rigor.
I agree that we're probably at an impasse, except that I would again ask you to think about reconsidering the level of scrutiny you're placing on this one. How do you 'prove' that you're a 'fan' of a particular artist, or that you're an 'extrovert' or 'mildy autistic' or 'smart' or 'emotionally mature' or any of a million other very normal things to say about someone that are mostly premised on mental features?
99% of the time we just take someone's word for it when they say their mental features match a relevant category or have a particular feature. In a few cases where we're really strict, we have a written questionnaire they fill out or have a psychiatrist take some observations or something. Gender clinics already do stuff like that in these cases, I don't know the full details but I'm pretty confident you could make a written test similar to an IQ test or DSM diagnostic criteria that most trans people would pass.
I agree that everyone would rather not have gender dysphoria.
That's why we treat gender dysphoria with medical and social transition, so that it goes away.
There's pretty much no other treatment for any other major psychological condition that's anywhere near as effective.
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