It’s a good reminder that intelligence is used to achieve goals, it’s not used for setting goals. When someone’s values are so different it’s hard to have any sort of meaningful conversation.
This is something I spend a lot of time thinking/worrying about.
I deeply believe that to make meaningful progress, we all need to start listening to each other. Not just what others are saying outwardly, but looking for the underlying reasons they’re saying it - their values.
When someone’s position on policy is drastically different than my own, a conversation about values often reveals that we’re not so far off in terms of what we believe. They just got stuck on their particular implementation detail.
But when values are worlds apart, what then?
On the plus side, I’ve encountered far more people who fall into the former category - disagreement on policy - then I’ve encountered in the latter - a true chasm between our value systems.
The frustrating part is that the same group of people in the policy disagreement category are quick to lump me in with the value extremists without stopping to make sure that’s what I really believe.
And such is the state of modern political discourse, where championing equality is derided as a fanciful dream about equity, when nothing could be further from the truth.
I recommend having 'deep' conversations. Dig down into definitions, in to differences perceived, find where your perceptions differ. Then you can propose experiments that would change one perception or another.
Most people do not have the time for that for one reason or another(including myself sometimes), but it has worked for me and might for you.
I thought grit was more important than intelligence?
Why didn't the US make that a goal in 1793?
This is usually the point in the conversation where they share the cartoon of a group of people staring over a fence watching a baseball game, with each person standing on a different sized stepladder such that their overall height is equal. So yes, I would argue that is exactly what they are trying to do.
If you really want to tackle this issue, you need to look at why men live shorter than women. Do they die violent deaths more often? Trying to make society less violent could benefit everybody. Do they harm their health by working more often in unhealthy situations? Maybe improve those work situations. Are they more likely to commit suicide? Maybe invest in better mental healthcare. Does testosterone make them more likely to engage in risky behaviour that gets them killed? Well, at some point you've got to decide whether the higher risk and resulting shorter life expectancy is a matter of personal choice or not. I suppose education can play a role here.
Data suggests that more gender equality in society also leads to more gender equality in life expectancy[0]. But we should also remember that the goal of equality has to be to lift people up. Of course we could close the gender life expectancy gap by reducing life expectancy for women (maybe reducing maternity health care?) but I hope everybody agrees that would be a terrible idea. We should tackle the issues that cause men to die earlier.
Well one obvious factor is that society has a bias towards over investing in women's health. Look at cancer research. Pancreatic cancer kills a similar number of people to breast cancer but receives something like 1/100th of the research funding. If we reallocated breast cancer funding to pancreatic cancer, that could reduce the gender lifespan gap while still saving a similar number of lives (or even more) overall.
That's pretty clearly sexism against men, e.g. viewing men as disposable. Remember we test drugs on mice before humans, and that's not because we like mice; it's because they're cheap and disposable.
Imagine we only tested drugs on women. People would definitely see that as sexism against women, if not outright abuse of women! There would be endless news articles about women who suffered permanently debilitating effects of the drugs that were tested on them. There would be feminist protests to stop testing drugs on women.
The drugs aren't being tested on men instead of mice, they're being tested on men instead of women. The reason for that is that men have more stable hormone levels that don't fluctuate over the month and therefore give more reliable test results, but that also means that these treatments don't account for the fluctuating hormone levels of women.
I don't know where you live, but in most countries people aren't being forced into these sort of tests against their will. You make it sound like you're living in a totalitarian dictatorship where people are dragged off the street for dangerous experiments that haven't gone through a rigid testing process yet.
Spot on. Even the most hardcore progressive fanatics I’ve spoken to aren’t pushing for a totally equal experience across humanity. It’s about giving everyone a fair shot at a quality life. Some may have terrible ideas for how to achieve that, but they’re not trying to cut all flowers to the same height.