"b-but bears are actually dangerous!" Shut the hell up.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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A very large amount of people who think the result of the man/bear thought experiment means that all men are bad/rapists. I have been arguing with quite a few.
So, I am confused. I thought we disagreed on more. But I think we agree on most things. Am I missing something?
ok so it's more on a thread/societal level then, yeah that was pretty much what it thought as well. Just wanted to be sure before trying to pull shenanigans or anything.
We probably agree, my problem is that i think people are shooting themselves in the foot by not correctly representing the situation here and as a result, not doing a net positive (or as much as they could be), or potentially even a net negative.
Basically TL;DR "litmus test" for this, is that if someone comes in and says "are you calling all men rapists?" you've probably done a funny somewhere, and it should probably changed. Obviously theres always going to be the one dude, but that's an exception so i'm not counting that. It's just important to be careful about who you consider the exception to be, because in ww2, it was a little spicier than the topic at hand today.
I mean, it also could be intentional. Some people really do hate women. So the first thing they did after the man/bear thought experiment was to say "Oh look women all think all men are rapists/bad. There is some kind of gender war going on here". A lot of people I have talked to have chilled out after I ask "Who said that all men are rapists? No one is saying that." They realize they might not have understood the original issue or have been mislead.
That's what I like about this meme. The statement is fundamentally true. It is a sub-set of "Feelings are less important than safety". Anyone who upset about it is either someone who is uninformed or mislead. Orrr someone who wants their to be drama, someone who wants women to be afraid or be victims and/or wants men to be hopeless and upset. If you are just uninformed a quick question can resolve the issue. If it is intentional, a discussion should ensue that make their ideas look a foolish or wacky.
yeah, ideally you shouldn't be saying something that causes this in the first place, but that's an impossible problem to solve, so the second best solution is to just be clear and concise about what you're talking about. Which people on the internet hate doing because funny short quip get updoot instead.
Unfortunately, i saw a lot of real silly for lack of a better term here, responses to people either not understanding it, or not being able to comprehend what was going on. Wouldn't be the internet otherwise i suppose.
so technically, the statement you quoted here is a sub set of the original statement provided in the meme, which is a super set of of this. Though i suppose that depends on how you define it, because if you're going by how wide of a net it throws, it would go the other way.
Personally i also really like the way the meme is structured, because it leaves very little room for misinterpretation, i just don't really know that it provides the proper context to someone that hasn't seen it because, well, at least one of the threads is deleted, and the other is like a week old or something. But assuming you have the context its great. What i don't like is people bastardizing it and saying "feelings are less important than safety" for a few reasons, but notably because this sentence makes no sense semantically. Given that feelings are often what produce a sense/feeling of safety for most people. It just doesn't seem to track. Unless you're talking explicitly about physical safety, in which case it would make sense, but then we'd be ignoring the entire point of the bear v man statement all together. And it's lost all meaning suddenly.
Plus it's also incredibly vague, i cant remember if i went into details in this thread or another one, but it could mean literally fucking anything, unless you have the "inside knowledge" it's an obtuse statement to the point of it being hard to understand. Which is another problem i have with these sorts of statements, they only really make sense to an "in group" most of the time, which is great for the ingroup, but sucks if you aren't in the in group, because then you get the hexbear instance problem.
I agree with most of what you're saying.
You keep coming back to the vauge thing and I don't understand how it's vague.
If I didn't know any current events, I would still agree with the statement. I might be curious as to why the statement needed to be made but that is something I could figure out later.
it's important to remember that the consumer isn't you. Notably, i'm rather predisposed to autistic mannerisms when it comes to thinking about things, so if you hit me with something that is missing obvious context that i should have in order to understand it, i'll make a mockery of it by misinterpreting the ever living shit out of it because i think it's funny.
Another big thing in this case specifically, is that not everyone is a female, or has had those experiences, nor have they talked with people about them. Like i said previously (womens safety is more important than mens feelings) is pretty easy to glean information from (safety is more important than feelings) means almost nothing in comparison, even though you removed two words. You removed two words, and replaced those specific subjects, with what could be literally any other subject like i mentioned previously, feelings are rather intertwined with safety most of the time.
Which can lead to really funny misinterpretations of this statement specifically where you think it's talking about the fact that you need to separate your feelings from your sense of safety, because often times they can be irrelevant, which is true. But also not what we're talking about here. But given the recent bear thread that happened, is that what we're talking about? I'd probably say no. But hey look at that, i might be wrong and misunderstanding it entirely, when in reality i could've nailed it right on the metaphorical head here without even realizing it.
As far as i'm concerned, we could be talking about the very broad interpretation i lined out, as well as the more specific one laid out in the pretext, and to be completely honest, i'm not fucking sure which one it is. Both of those make perfect sense to me given the contents of it, and contexts surrounding the other.
Thank you for explaining that.
Hilarious, I do like a good trolling.
Like what context specifically?
Can you give me some specific examples? It would help me understand.
Which is fine. English is a very imperfect language (most languages are, but that is the best we have). Most of the people are wrong most of the time, including me.
What is your threshold for vagueness here? You would need to have a programming language to remove vagueness down to 0% and encoding this meme perfectly would be 20 pages of code if not more.
the context that lead to the statement being made in the first place. You can think about it a little bit like crypto. Unless you have what was used to construct it, you cannot deconstruct it, or at the very least, you have no guarantee of being able to deconstruct it effectively. (yes technically pub key is a little different here but for all intents and purposes it works the exact same so)
i provided one in the above statement which was a very literal interpretation of that statement, which quite literally interprets the fact that your feelings sometimes provide negative influence to your perceived safety. To use a specific example here, you may have a fear of heights, which leads to you feeling "unsafe" at heights, even though it's a psychological adaptation that you have causing it. Although in that case it's pretty well understood to be a psychological adaptation of something, so that's not a common thing.
yeah, and this is why i try to be pretty specific about things when i talk about them, or at least specific enough to provide base information, because if i were fully specific, i would be there for hours.
My baseline test for whether something is too vague, is if you couldn't inform someone of something with that statement. If you say a statement and someone goes "yeah no i don't get that" it's probably too vague. In this specific example, the way the meme in the image is worded is basically perfect. I don't think you could really do a better job there, it's missing the bear context, but frankly, i don't think that's needed given how specific that statement is. You don't always need context in statements, sometimes it's situational like in this case, and other times you just can't be bothered. But then you also need to be ready to explain it, because people aren't going to understand it.
but bringing it down to something like "safety is more important than feelings" is so inherently vague that unless it's directly referenced to this meme, it has basically no meaning. Considering that we're in this thread, probably not a huge issue. But my concern would be people using it outside of this thread, because of it's short and concise nature. Which could very easily lead to a very messy/confusing thread.
But I don't think that context is necessary to agree/disagree with the statement. What context could men's feelings be more important that women's safety?
Sorry, I was expecting something worded like "I feel less safe up high because I am afraid of heights so how can feelings be less important than safety", so I didn't catch your example.
Yeah, I think that someone could interpret it like that. But I feel like you could pretty easily explain that feeling safe and being actually safe are not the same things. Someone who is confused can easily be caught up and someone who is being malicious would have a hard time not looking silly. I feel like this level of confusion would have a pretty low occurrence count. So I feel like this specific confusion would be a reasonable risk.
My issue with this is that depends on the people joining the conversation. Also depends on how malicious they are. Like if someone didn't know what "safety" meant. You can solve this by copy-pasting the dictionary definition of "safety", but then then the next person who joins might not understand the concept of feelings, or not understand some of the words in the definition of "safety". This is a never ending task.
I think a better way is to target a specific audience. You will lose people outside of that target, but that is unavoidable and will happen with any strategy. Hopefully some of them ask questions or for clarifications, so your message can spread to those groups. I think it is important to be as inclusive as you can be. But most people on here (including me) are doing this in their spare time. So it's not like we have much flexibility to improve things.
That all being said, I think this meme was well targeted and effective. Did we solve the problem, no, that was never possible to begin with. But we did provide nice discussion about it. We let the extremists show off how silly they were. We let confused people ask questions and get answers. We gave the general public a good showing so they can decide what is right and wrong.
In my mind this is as vague as the original post when it comes to the truth of the statement. The only difference is adding genders which doesn't affect the meaning of the statement.
there's two primary statements here, i'm talking about the less specific one, the more specific one is generally fine. But to humor you regardless, i think if you don't have context to something, you simply don't have the full understanding of it, or capability to think about it in the same way as the person presenting it, which often causes issues. To humor you in a literal manner, men having the feeling that raping women is a thing that shouldn't happen, is probably more important than womens physical safety.
yeah, but given that in this case, it's basically the difference of two words, i think it's probably fair to assume the more contextual version is better. I would get it if this were like, paragraphs worth of detail, but considering we're at the level of like, 5 words. It's probably hard to convey a message with that so it's generally better to aim for the side of detail rather.
to nit pick a little bit here, technically pasting the definition of safety probably wouldn't help, considering that it's describing physical safety, and we're generally talking about felt safety here.
yeah targeting an audience here will help a lot with that, problem here is that i'm not sure what audience we're supposed to be targeting? because last i checked it was all of men, or at the very least, the ones that rape women. That seems like a pretty broad audience to me, so i feel like if that's the intended target it should probably be more self contained in that respect. Then again this might also be lemmy specific? But even then i'm not really sure how significant that would be. With really short statements intended to make a point you often tend to run into the issue of reach, how do you most effectively reach people, while still functionally explaining the situation at hand. It's why public speaking is a literal career.
yeah the meme in this post is pretty good. The previous threads? Eh, i would describe those as more of a shitshow, than anything else. This really seemed like the tumblrcon of lemmy to me more than anything. Or maybe the most recent CPAC of lemmy? That was a weird conference...
yeah and in a sense i suppose that's kind of my problem with it, i didn't like the original statement because it didn't do a very good job articulating the point it was supposed to articulate, and i liked this one, because it did a pretty solid job of it, and then people immediately proceeded to remove two words from it in order to make it much worse, for some reason.
Wouldn't be the internet otherwise i suppose.