@derekg5563

1 month ago

Surely it's not about the fact that they are women but the fact that they act in a way that you are used to seeing in women. Imagine, say, four of your female friends right now, and now imagine that they became men but act in the same way, and still skateboard, and now compare that to four random women who skateboard but act totally differently from you. Surely, if you could choose, you would prefer to surround yourself with those four men, rather than those other four women, right? That's because it was neither the person's gender nor their genitals that made you enjoy surrounding yourself around them; yet, those are the parts that get the credit, and those are the parts on which we choose to divide people, instead of the things that actually made you want to surround yourself with them. Then women who are not like the women you have in mind will wrongly think that you are referring to them, and men who are like the women you have in mind will wrongly think that you are not referring to them. While surrounding yourself with women may have worked out for you because of the specific characteristics of those women, you shouldn't generalize that into a principle that you should surround yourself with women, because it would make people expect something magical to happen by just looking for women without knowing any of their traits, which will lead to a sloppy way of choosing friends and unintended consequences, when the traits you overlooked become relevant in scenarios that could arise. If they instead know the traits that are important, rather than the gender, then a person can look for those traits and develop a basis for knowing whether they will have a good friendship or not. Using this method instead of the "women" method would have still resulted in you having the same friends as you do now, but it has the advantage of giving you even more potential matches and fewer potential non-matches. In other words, by using traits as a filter, you can get all of the benefits of using women as a filter without any of the downsides of using women as a filter. In other words, using women as a filter looks better than it is when you only look at the cases in which it produces matches and not those in which it produces non-matches (for example, women who have a completely different personality from yours). As far as the idea of letting a kid do something because it's what they want, the problem is that the way we try to justify this idea is by the outcome, but of course outcomes vary. If she got really terrible injuries that she later regretted, would we still think that the parent made the right call, even if the kid wanted to do it? Or would we assume that the kid was brainwashed? That seems odd, though. Surely a parent can try to decide what's right for their child but is unable to predict the actual outcome, and sometimes that outcome is good, and sometimes it is bad, with all different degrees of good and bad possible. If the outcome is good we can pretend that our principles are great, but that won't work out for a parent who follows the same advice and gets a bad outcome and gets condemned for doing the same thing because they couldn't predict the future and the outcome incidentally turned out to be bad. Instead of rubbing it in when we make a decision that works out, we can be more cautious than that and openly discuss different methods without assuming that ours is better than those of others, and thus without pressuring people to make a decision without really proving that it is the best decision. That will allow for a greater proportion of better outcomes for everybody, when we stop trying to feel like better parents than others and instead just try to teach others while also being open to being taught by those with both very different perspectives and very different experiences that could contradict our assumptions that we made based on our own particular perspectives and experiences.

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