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Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by komali2 on Monday December 26, 2022 @01:58AM (#34135410)
> 75% of teachers are women, 97% of coal miners are men - certain professional aspirations attract certain people

Curious why you're implying your statistic implicitly and naturally leads to the truth of the statement "certain professional aspirations attract certain people (of specific gender)"

Correct my addition of "specific gender" if that wasn't your intention, but it seems what you're implying - that the reason 97% of coal miners are men because men prefer to be coal miners and women don't.

I disagree completely. I think there's probably far, far more reasons behind the statistic "97% of coal miners are men." Luckily for you, I think our society has trained us to nod our heads and think that your statistic makes "common sense," that's a distinct advantage, despite the fact that your proposition is really lacking in logical, deductive, contextual, or evidential rigor. Watch what happens when I make a similarly non-rigorous statement: Actually, 97% of coal miners are men because the people that hire for the job hold the mistaken, antiquated especially with modern technology, belief that men are more capable of the job because "men are stronger than women."

If I had made my argument as such like you have, I bet I'd get a whole stream of comments demanding I demonstrate the hiring bias with evidence, sources, that would challenge my idea, even try to show that men on average are stronger than women (without of course then completing the other half of the argument, demonstrating that greater raw strength leads to greater outcomes in coal mining).

You were replying to:

> Similarly how do they stop majority dominance

So, given that your answer is "common sense," and my argument is "yup, that's majority dominance, men hiring men," I repeat our OP's question: "How do you stop majority dominance when the conservative argument (yours) is so integrated into our social fabric that it goes unchallenged?"

My follow-up is why is the reaction to people protesting the people that make these types of speeches (such as arguing that men are better at a given job than women) so much stronger than the reaction by the mainstream media and the university heads to the person actually making the speech? Especially when those protesting have the much stronger argument that the defense of the bigot is actively contributing to the continuance of unequal opportunity for people (solidifying the "common sense" idea that women don't make good coal miners).

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by P5fRxh5kUvp2th on Monday December 26, 2022 @03:13AM (#34135745)
> Curious why you're implying your statistic implicitly and naturally leads to the truth of the statement "certain professional aspirations attract certain people (of specific gender)"

just stop.

everyone understands why care givers _tend_ to be women and race car drivers _tend_ to be men.

If you want to argue with a specific example, fine, but don't act as if there isn't well known precedent for this. The onus is on YOU to explain the difference away to something other than personal choice.

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by dagmx on Monday December 26, 2022 @03:26AM (#34135792)
> everyone understands why care givers _tend_ to be women and race car drivers _tend_ to be men.

I’d actually like you to explain this beyond a loose and implicit “everyone understands why”.

The old saying goes, assumptions make an ass out of U and I, and I don’t think the “why” of the matter is shared between everyone.

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by defrost on Monday December 26, 2022 @03:28AM (#34135802)
> everyone understands why care givers

I don't.

Would that be

* the natural order of things,

* God's plan,

* the end result of iterative bias such as that which gave us the L-chirality Vs D-chirality of amino acids | sugars,

* something else?

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by P5fRxh5kUvp2th on Monday December 26, 2022 @05:26AM (#34136413)
Sorry, I can't help you there, perhaps you're not human? Am I possibly speaking to a bot?

A bot will never understand in the same way that they'll never understand when I say "everyone understands why water tastes so good". It's just a part of the human condition that everyone picks up on by the very act of existing.

The vast majority of humans grew up around other humans, and these things get learned as a part of that. "Everyone understands how a hug feels".

I'm sorry that you're a bot, but I'm also not going to bother trying to explain something that will never be understood no matter how much I try.

Perhaps at some point ChatGPT will become good enough to better understand the human condition, but we're definitely not there yet.

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by defrost on Monday December 26, 2022 @05:33AM (#34136457)
Not a bot .. go on, take a stab at it.

At least outline your reasoning for what you think everybody understands.

Bear in mind I'm an intelligent human outside of your parochial bubble.

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by bitcharmer on Monday December 26, 2022 @07:58AM (#34137291)
You're either trolling or employing detraction techniques straight out of Shopenhauer's art of being right.

You don't want to learn or engage in meaningful discourse. You just want to be right.

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by komali2 on Monday December 26, 2022 @05:34AM (#34136463)
Normally such a blatantly bad faith reply deserves nothing more than a downvote, but I'll add that all these comments are doing, earnestly, exactly what your opposition is arguing: you're applying naturalist and traditionalist fallacy to maintain a conservative status quo interpretation of gender.

What's funny is it's not even historically accurate: your "universal human" interpretation of masculine / feminine binary is simply not universal by any stretch of the imagination.

Look how easy this was, I googled "examples of non gender binary societies" and got a listicle with ten examples you can go learn more about: https://screenshot-media.com/politics/lgbtqi-rights/non-bina...

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by P5fRxh5kUvp2th on Monday December 26, 2022 @06:29AM (#34136784)
You're arguing about gender identity, I am not.

Let me know when you decide to join the conversation that's actually going on.

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by mpweiher on Monday December 26, 2022 @04:19AM (#34136060)
The problem is that your hypothesis "this is caused by (bigoted) society" is unambiguously contradicted by the facts, aka "wrong".

In more gender equal societies, men and women self-segregate into different jobs more, not less.

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by komali2 on Monday December 26, 2022 @09:53AM (#34138029)
> is unambiguously contradicted by the facts, aka "wrong".

Can you demonstrate this deductively, logically, or with evidence?

I googled your proposition and came up with no obvious study you must be thinking about. Can you link it, please?

My point is also to reject the restrictive assignment of people based on primary sexed attributes. Sorry, you've got a vagina, you can't drive a racecar good. Seems insane to me. Typically when people talk about "certain professional aspirations attract certain people," it's not out of a desire to help people find roles in society that align with their gender identities, it's to enforce cultural stereotypes and maintain, in the case of our society, usually patriarchal hierarchies. Not always, sometimes it's matriarchal ones (such as regarding custody of children). This is to me distasteful and I strongly push for people to justify their positions when they could lead to this enforcement, even if it isn't their intention.

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by mpweiher on Monday December 26, 2022 @01:26PM (#34140292)
Google "gender equality paradox". It's not hard to find.

> reject the restrictive assignment of people based on primary sexed attributes.

That's not what happens or how it works. People largely self-segregate by choice.

> it's to enforce cultural stereotypes and maintain, in the case of our society, usually patriarchal hierarchies.

Actual evidence for this?

Re:Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from MIT by primitivesuave on Tuesday December 27, 2022 @12:07AM (#34145294)
Likely referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox

There is a much higher degree of correlation between personality types and occupation/pay - so for example, one actionable change might be to challenge young girls to develop assertiveness and other useful personality traits. It seems like teaching kids that "if you don't achieve your dreams it's because the cultural majority and/or patriarchy held you down" is not going to translate to any useful skill in approaching the world, and only serves as an easy excuse for them to throw out rather than actually address personal shortcomings.