This isn’t “I want to believe”, this is “it would be irresponsible to not consider”.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 3rd, 2023

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  • Cherry Picking is the practice of choosing evidence that supports your argument while ignoring evidence against it.

    I agree with this definition.

    It is also almost always intentional, or a result of ignorance, and the term carries negative connotations. Cherry picking is an accusation of bad faith arguing,

    I disagree with this part.

    you dismiss the claim that harrassment exists with only your ancedotal evidence of not having seen it yourself.

    Not what I’m trying to do, and I’ve tried to be very explicit about that. I’m not dismissing that it exists, just that it’s severe or pervasive enough to be worth warning people away from this place. Minor incidents happen everywhere and should be dealt with accordingly. Title IX uses the metric of whether actions are “severe or pervasive”, and I think that that’s appropriate here as well. The problems pointed out by spujb are a problem that we should try to address, but are not a problem worth reacting to with slash and burn techniques advised.

    If you really want to dismiss the notion that their evidence is significant,

    I don’t. I really, really don’t. I’m trying to be as clear as possible that their evidence is valid and significant and ought to be taken seriously. I keep saying this. Please read my words.

    Just my two cents, dismiss as you please

    Thank you for sharing. Your thoughts are welcome.


  • Thank you for coming towards me and expressing boundaries. I’m going to come towards you now. To do so I will focus on the boundaries of our experience that you have outlined. I’ll go in reverse order.

    1. I’m sorry for criticizing your lack of empathy earlier in this interaction. It was inappropriate. I understand that everyone has busy lives and only so much energy to devote to any given interaction. I understand that your lack of empathy was situational, and not intrinsic to you. It would have been more precise for me to say that from my perspective it appears that you lacked the bandwidth for empathy earlier in this interaction. Even so, it is probably inappropriate for me to have a default expectation of empathy from others. I understand how my wording could make you think that I was accusing you of being incapable of empathy altogether. I did not mean to “label” you as intrinsically lacking in empathy, just to point out the lack of it in this interaction. Your interpretation was not my intention and I apologize for my imprecision. I also want to take this moment to thank you for investing some empathy in your latest reply to me.

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    1. I can avoid DMing you if that’s something you are uncomfortable with. Thanks for letting me know. I was only trying to inform you that I had added an edit to try to better express my empathy to you. Although I don’t understand why and would appreciate elaboration, I’ll avoid reaching out to you directly in the future if it makes you uncomfortable. I now better understand some of your earlier comments: I thought you were talking about inappropriate DMs specifically (e.g. dick pics or harassment or insults or whatever), not that you apparently have a problem with DMs generally. Now I know; thank you for communicating.

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    1. I need to push back here a little bit because this is a key point of our disagreement and I believe it’s something that we need to discuss if we want to reach a common understanding. My use of the term “cherry picking”, as I have repeatedly tried to explain in this conversation, does not in any way minimize your experiences. I am only trying to call a spade a spade and have an honest discussion about the data being presented. I am using a common term to describe a type of data collection and presentation that almost universally applies to anecdotal evidence, simply by the nature of human psychology (e.g. confirmation bias) relevant to the generation of anecdotes. If we cannot call cherry picked data by its name, we cannot have a serious discussion about how to respond to it. I repeat what I have said previously in this thread: your cherry-picked personal experiences are valid and ought to be taken seriously if we want to solve the problem of sexual and gender-based harassment. Please take mine seriously as well. You have refused to engage with or even acknowledge them, which is the crux of my stated perception of a lack of empathy.

    At this point I would normally offer to move this conversation into DMs, but I understand that that would make you uncomfortable.

    I see that you are trying, and I hope that you see that I am as well. Since DMs are out, how would you like to proceed?

    EDITED to fix numbering





  • Ok, since you brought up my two short DMs, I’ll post them here for public consumption.

    I am very much trying to continue the conversation that you started about experiences of gender-based abuse by adding variety of experience from a very different perspective that contrast with the cherry-picked list that you provided of things you read online that resonated with your preconceptions. My examples are cherry-picked from my life; yours are cherry-picked from lemmy.

    I am repeatedly echoing the sentiment of your original post: that we need to talk about and understand these things if we want to learn and grow. It’s how humans share data.

    You claim that I am being dismissive only because the cherry picked examples from my life experience come from an opposite tail of the distribution of gender-based abuse as your list. I can’t help where my life experiences lie on this distribution, but I can share them (as you did) to provide some additional data that helps to fill out the range of the population.

    You are dismissing me by saying that my experiences must be shared in bad faith to be dismissive/encourage doubt/end conversations. Please re-read my words. They are trying to communicate that I DESPERATELY want a conversation on this topic so that we can all learn and grow from each others’ experiences. Just because my experiences are different from yours does not make them bad-faith.

    From your behavior, I’m starting to suspect that this is projection and that you are a bad-faith troll who refuses to engage with others if they have different life experiences. However, I don’t believe that yet because you and I have had several other conversations in various other comments sections over the past year which have been good and productive and I have grown to like you.

    I want a productive conversation on this topic, yet you only seem to want to dismiss my perspective. This runs contrary to our past interactions. Please, I’m trying to have a productive conversation.

    That said, the examples you give aren’t your personal lived experience as much as extreme examples of sexism that you’ve stumbled across on this site and curated. The examples that I’m giving are genuine and personal lived experience as a gender minority (neither male or female) rather than things I read online. I don’t think that that makes one set of examples more valid than the other, just that these fact make your most recent comment seem highly hypocritical. You are replying to a minority trying to share their experiences and feelings by dismissing me, encouraging others to doubt me, and ending the conversation without engaging with our differences of life experience. Then you accuse me of doing that instead of actually engaging with my perspective. Please reconsider. I’ll end this here, but if you want to have an honest and genuine discussion about how to solve the issue of gender-based abuse that you brought up, my DMs are always open.



  • I do want to respect your experience and help to address the root problems leading to it.

    That’s why I am asking and engaging in this conversation: to be better informed and to help others subvert hate in this hate-filled time.

    I’m also an odd case, as an intersex person who was socially raised (predominantly) male but in recent years transitioned to female mostly to avoid harassment. I get so much less hate when I’m perceived as a woman that your experience is somewhat foreign to me. Whether presenting as a man or as a woman, I get hate overwhelmingly from women. Women in our society are hate-filled and angry and don’t know how to process emotions like discomfort caused by their intersexphobia nearly as well as men do.

    A curated collection of the worst examples meets the definition of cherry picking. Cherry picking doesn’t mean that your argument is invalid, just that there is missing context from the rest of the distribution of interactions. Any sufficiently large community will have enough assholes that bad behavior can be cherry picked from the extreme end of the distribution to be used as examples if someone wants to paint the whole community in a bad light.

    That said, the extreme and cherry-picked examples are still a problem that need to be taken seriously. My life is an extreme and cherry-picked example that runs counter to the common narrative from “feminists” who think that blocking and ostracizing dissenting voices is a solution, instead of recognizing that reaction as exclusive and anti-diversity. I understand that extreme/unusual or cherry-picked examples need to be taken seriously and considered as edge cases. I am not trying to dismiss you, although my word choice last night maybe could have been more explicit on this point. I’m sorry. What I’m trying to communicate is that I need to better understand the problem (in context) to be able to help be part of the solution.

    We need a better solution, and I want to help work towards that. I believe that starts with discussions like this one.



  • I’m not quiet about being a woman, but have yet to receive dms or inappropriate responses or dismissals due to that fact (via lemmy).

    EDIT: although elsewhere in this post’s comment section I just received such a dismissal by someone who thought I was a man. Indeed, this is the direction in gender space along which I am used to experiencing such behavior, and it is why I have chosen to emphasize the fact that I am a female with a vagina so much in recent years: to get women to stop harassing me.

    So I’ll shout it out here: I’m a woman, if anyone has a problem with that or just wants to talk about it, please reach out.

    I want to help solve the problem but I need to see it better first. I only ever see cherry-picked examples like you have collected here instead of seeing it in the wild. Don’t get me wrong, the cherry-picked examples are bad, but I need more than a handful of outliers to really understand the problem and where it comes from before I can understand what I can do to help.



  • Fun fact, when the jet stream gets perturbed like that and develops the sinusoidal deviations that we are experiencing, it’s called a Rossby wave.

    These waves are actually super normal as the jetstream shifts with the seasons and moves north/south, especially when in a La Niña phase of the ENSO, which we are in right now.

    The Hadley circulation cells whose boundaries define the jet stream are driven by convection. The US lies right along a jetstream boundary between two cells, and just downwind from the pacific ocean, so our weather is particularly sensitive to the temperature differences across the pacific ocean.

    El Niño patterns have a hot equatorial pacific ocean which drives significant convection on the southern cell of the jet stream crossing the US, stabilizing it. La Niña patterns have a smaller gradient between the temperatures in the cells to the north and south of the relevant jet stream, especially as climate change relatively warms the arctic faster, leading to higher amplitude destabilizations during La Niña patterns like we are experiencing now.

    More fun facts about these Rossby waves: they have been proposed as the mechanism to drive the eddies that end up forming planets in protoplanetary disks around baby stars (see the wikipedia page for Rossby waves above), and as the mechanism behind the hexagonal shape of Saturn’s polar cell. Worth noting that the exact mechanism for that hexagon is still highly debated, but Peter Gierasch used to have a fun model using a modified record turn table to create a rossby wave that formed a hexagon as a proof-of-concept that has stuck with me.