The next time someone says they don't like working with women because of all the catty, emotional, humorless bullshit, just show them this thread and let them know men can be just as bad.
The threads have been getting kind of uber-serious/cunty* recently, haven't they? *New adjective! "Uber-serious/cunty" is now in my personal lexicon!
This situation is getting pretty far removed from reality now but I'll humor you I guess. Yeah, in that absurd situation where I am literally given no choice but to judge two people based on their race alone, I suppose I'd pick the invisible black guy over the inivisible Jewish guy because the black guy is probably at least slightly more likely to be into basketball. What does that prove exactly? That when forced to judge somebody based on race and nothing else, that I will in fact judge that person based on race? My point is that in real life, where you actually get to look at people, talk to them, and interact with them, it's stupid to make assumptions like this about people based just on their skin color because statistics about a heterogeneous group of millions of people generally means next to fuck all when you are picking out one individual person from that group. And if I may? Holy fuck. I can't believe we're seriously having an argument right now about whether or not black people are better at basketball than Jewish people. Do you really not agree that people are individuals and they have widely varying interests and abilities and that you can't really just assume stuff about them based off their skin color? Do you know what confirmation bias is? selection bias? They are two of the many reasons why you shouldn't rely just on your own life experiences when judging an entire fucking race of people. There's a reason why nobody publishes articles for peer review based off of "life experiences," because humans are notoriously terrible at extrapolating intelligent conclusions about the world at large from their own limited experiences. There's a good reason I stayed away from ever saying "I know a lot of [black people/Jewish people/funny women/whatever]" - personal anecdotes are pretty much useless when you are talking about trends of an entire race of people. Really man? All black people are not exactly like your girlfriend and her extended family. If you had just made a new black friend and you wanted to invite him to a pool party, would you feel the need to reassure him by saying that it's okay that he doesn't know how to swim? Would you even ask "Do you know how to swim?" It's completely moronic (and kind of insulting) to try to extrapolate these characteristics to every black person, even if you have evidence that not as many black people can swim as can other races, because there are still a lot of black people who can swim and black people are not all the same fucking person. Am I really in the minority on this? Does everybody else really believe people of a certain race or gender or whatever are all just interchangeable with one another?
Is that (Uber-serious)/(cunty) or Uber-(serious/cunty)? Speaking of cunty and getting back on topic, I hate what's happened with the word "bitch." If you say that a woman is a bitch, it must mean that she's actually a really strong, intelligent, ambitious woman, and you're just intimidated by her awesome vagina power, you chauvinist pig. Sometimes women are just bitches, and it's not a virtue. Not that men are any better, but I can't imagine a man being called an asshole and responding "You just can't handle intelligent, handsome, strong men!"
If I were putting a hockey team together, I wouldn't spend much time scouting and recruiting up in Harlem.
You're right about that. I'd go recruiting in Canada instead. Though, neat fact, the one black kid who played in house league with us when I was a kid is now in the NHL.
This. I dislike confrontational people. They make life a lot more stressful. Disagree with something I have to say or am doing? Go for it. Just be tactful about it so it doesn't feel like you want me, my family, and my favorite vegetable to die. For some reason, a lot of women confuse "confident" with "confrontational." Yes, I understand that you're a confident woman and, more importantly, you're used to men just disregarding what you have to say because you're a woman. But that doesn't make it okay to shove your views down my throat and scream and bitch when I have something that conflicts with them. There are definitely men who do this as well, but we get to just call them assholes. A woman who does this brings up all sorts of debates that I just don't want to deal with.
It proves that Carolla's statement is completely factually accurate (the one you initially called "racist") and that you agree with him. Idiot. Luckily, absolutely no one is arguing this, neither myself nor Carolla in that one example you agreed with. It's easy to make strawmen, but as usual, you're completely ignoring what is said. "In general, blacks are better at basketball than Jews" is a different statement than "every single black is good at basketball" unless you're being a dishonest moron. Once again, according to Muses, we should ignore BOTH life experience AND statistical evidence when it comes to anything that might be deemed politically incorrect. However, this same asshole just admitted above that he would choose the black guy over the Jewish guy for basketball if he knew nothing else about them. It sure must be fun playing with these strawmen, right? Once again, if your interpretation of this "No, but we can say that there is a y% chance that a black guy is good at basketball and a x% chance that a Jewish guy is, and that y > x. It might only be 10% versus 6%, but a difference undeniably exists. According to you, we need to ignore this statistical evidence because it's not PC." was "all people of a race are interchangeable" you are either dishonest or a moron, or likely both.
Dear sociologists, behavioral psychologists, and criminal profilers; Your entire field is racist, and provides no usable data on social trends or mores. You should all be shot by a ethnically and sexually diverse firing squad. Also the fact that the majority of the NBA is dominated by black people, The NHL is dominated by people from cold countries, and MLB is dominated by people from countries that are generally to poor to afford all those fancy pads, and equipment, is called a fluke. These are not trends, or any other fancy xenophobic word you want to toss around. You fuckers need to stop throwing all your so called "facts" and "statistical data" around like it means something. I pity you and your narrow minded useless "profession." Yours in enlightenment, Muses P.S. I am Muses and you fuckers are...BOOM ROASTED!!!
So when you limit the rules of this pointless hypothetical to "you must judge these people based solely on race or die" and I go ahead and judge them based on race, that means I agree with the guy who advocates for "playing the odds" in judging people's abilities in real life instead of, you know, getting to know them and judging them with real information about the person as an individual? Carolla is arguing exactly this. He talks about "playing the odds" in terms of guessing if a black guy is good at basketball or if a woman is dude-level funny or not. In this case, by "playing the odds" he means "assuming things about individual people based on what we think we know about their race as a whole." No, you should just not use life experience and statistical evidence as a basis for assuming things about individual people based on their race, because people are different and you will frequently end up assuming incorrect things about them. You're saying "Look, I made him choose between making an assumption based on race and dying, and HE CHOSE TO MAKE AN ASSUMPTION BASED ON RACE!! I GOT HIM!!" You haven't really proven anything by doing that. In real life it's okay to just say "I have no idea whether that guy is good at basketball or not because I don't know him and I've never seen him play basketball." In your "JUDGE BASED ON RACE OR DIE" hypothetical there is no "I don't have enough information to make that judgment" option, and that's why it's a bad hypothetical - because the choice that actually makes sense, and the one that a reasonable person would choose, does not exist. All I said was "this statistical evidence is pretty much irrelevant at an individual level." If you try to "play the odds" and make guesses about a person's life based on their race then you're going to be wrong an awful lot. You seem to be in favor of "playing the odds" because you're defending Carolla's advocacy of using "the odds" to judge people at an individual level. And by assuming that race tells you enough about a person to know anything else about their life, you are implying that they are to some degree interchangeable with the rest of their race. Way to twist my words around. There's nothing wrong with studying trends like these at a macro level. It's not inherently racist to say "Statistically crime is more strongly correlated with black people than with white people," and of course it can lead to valuable insight into our society to find the causes of these correlations. My whole point is that you would be making a mistake if you applied that statistic at a micro level and assumed that any one individual black person is a criminal without knowing anything else about them. Anyway, if this thread gets derailed into "make fun of Muses for having a dissenting opinion" then I think I will just quietly dip out. I've done my best to avoid any personal attacks on anybody, and I'm not interested in an internet slap-fight. Not right now anyway.
Confident people are generally less confrontational. They don't have anything to prove and they're less likely to feel threatened. I think in a lot of professional fields women are less likely to feel confident. Not because of a lack of skill, but because they believe they're being judged against a higher standard. Their insecurity may be completely justified and the forces that created it completely wrong, but it would have the effect of making them less pleasant to work with.
As an aside, when did "strawman" become a catch word? I swear to god, I've never heard it used in the context of, "You're using [whatever] as a strawman argument," before, say, a month ago. The only strawmen spoken about were around Halloween or scaring crows. Now everyone is using it all the time. Is it new, or has my head been in the clouds?
Both. It has been used forever, but just recently I've seen it used as a catch all for any number of logical fallacies, most commonly red herrings.
It's quite commonly used during pseudointellectual, meaningless, overinflated internet debates, along with the phrases and words: "ad hominem", "said xxx", "akin", "skew towards", irregardless", etc etc. That and "xxxx bias", because once someone discovers the wonderful world of behavioral heuristics, they're all over that shit.
I'm just sayin... Look, the 'no swimmer' nomenclature isn't a slur, at least not in my experience with it's usage. It's just an observation of the reality of cultural dictates within certain demographics. IE African American's tend not to do a lot of swimming. I don't know of any physiological preclusion that relates to ability to swim. But as a broadly taken demographic - swimming isn't a common hobby. There's no qualitative assessment of character or capability or worth as individuals, it's just that brothers tend not to do a lot of swimming. There are certainly very good African American swimmers - but by and large - swimming is a honky recreation. I don't honestly have a well thought out theory on why that is, unless maybe it's tied to parent to child skill transition since it's only relatively recently in terms of family groups and skills transitioning between generations, that African people could learn to swim with as much ease and safety as crackers. But I've never even heard rumors of anyone having a contradictory observation. I know lots of people who'll object to anyone who voices any observation about any demographic as being prejudiced - but I don't know anyone, anywhere, who can honestly say 'Bullshit, where I live, swimming is a a common past time for both black people and white people'. Some things don't need 50 pages of well supported source data because they're obvious to anyone who cares to observe. The reality is that some behaviors are more or less common amongst certain demographics. It would be bigoted to say 'No darkies allowed in our pool!' - but nobody is saying that. They're saying 'Brothers tend not to do a lot of swimming and thus are less likely to be excellent swimmers and will be underrepresented amongst groups of elite swimmers'. Carolla basically said the same thing about female comics. He didn't say that it's not possible for women to be funny - he said that women tend to not to put time or effort into being funny and as such they're under represented amongst groups of very funny people, and by extension of that concept, that gender diverse hiring policies mean that less talented comedy writers are often given both employment and employment security because of their gender, despite the fact that they often under perform. I can't say if he's correct about the hiring policies within the specific industry that he's discussing. But the premise of his comments about female comics is logically valid and consistent with my experience with female comics. His description of gender diversification hiring policies is also logically consistent, and valid within my experience of diversification hiring policies in industries where I do have first hand knowledge. Observing how things are isn't the same as saying that it's how things SHOULD be. But the notion that we're all equal is fundamentally flawed since different people will have different genetic advantages from the word go. And even if we ignore those genetic advantages, demographic groups will be more or less likely to engage in certain activities based on any number of conditions, and the disproportionate engagement in activities will result in disproportionate skill levels among members of those demographics. That's not any kind of judgement factor for members of whatever demographic - it's just an unavoidable reality.
It's been around forever, but it's seen an uptick in the age of the internet, because everyone on the internet seems to think that hyperbole + sarcasm = valid argument.
I think the increased number of people referencing logical fallacies and the other nerd argument language is just a result of the same cultural shift. Nerds have been referencing logical fallacies in internet arguments for years (and usually misusing them). That shit is just getting more main stream now.
People use strawman arguments a lot when they're arguing. It's a common fallacy; they either misunderstand what the other person is saying, or they deliberately try to twist his words to make it sound like he's saying something completely different (and usually ludicrous). This is particularly pronounced on the Internet. The reason we see it called so often here and elsewhere is that most "debate" on the Internet is an argument. Arguments aren't trying to understand the other person's point of view. They're just everyone yelling "I WANT TO WIN AND BE RIGHT." It ends up leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth and sets the tone to be combative. When I get into a discussion with someone who has different views, even someone whose views I vehemently disagree with, I'm trying to figure out where he's coming from. For example, my boss is a fundamentalist Christian who hates Them Queer-o-sexuals and thinks America should be a Christian nation, that we're experiencing "moral decay," etc. His views are completely deserving of contempt, but the only way to change them is to listen and bring up how I disagree with this premise or that idea. As a result, I've gotten him to be less bigoted, or at least less outspoken about it... and he's also gone from claiming that Them Liberals are all in a conspiracy to destroy 'Murica to realizing that there are other valid viewpoints that disagree with his own. I doubt he'll ever be marching in gay pride parades, but at least he isn't ranting and raving about Those Faggots Destroying My Marine Corps anymore. To take an example from this board - I agree with a lot of stuff that KIMaster says, and the stuff that I disagree with, I acknowledge most of his points. He's a smart guy and is pretty rational about things. But the way he argues automatically makes me bristle. If I were on the receiving end of it, I'd just walk away; I wouldn't even try to engage him on any level, because it's just so hostile. Would you try to have a rational discussion face to face with someone who calls you an idiot and belittles you? The only reason why I'm able to have a rational conversation with my boss is that he calms down when someone is actually (respectfully) bringing up objections to his beliefs. If he started accusing me of being a morally depraved scumbag for disagreeing with him, I wouldn't even bother.