Conversation

1/Men tend to be more systems-oriented, women more social-oriented. This is very general, and useful for understanding large populations. While it's fine to make general assumptions about people early on, the issue is when general information supersedes individual information.

442

Aella

@Aella_Girl

Feb 9, 2020

2/If you assume a woman is socially-oriented despite evidence that she's system-oriented, you're letting general information supersede individual information. It's important to use information at the level the information was collected, and not change levels (general to specific)

183

Aella

@Aella_Girl

Feb 9, 2020

3/This is one issue I have with discourse around privilege. Privilege is information about the general level - e.g. white people *tend* to have more money, more opportunities, than black people in the US. This is true. But I very often see people eagerly insist upon using-

116

Aella

@Aella_Girl

4/general information when individual information should be superceding; for example a poor white person addicted to opiates in an old forgotten mining town is as much privileged due to his race as an analytical woman is a social butterfly because of her sex.

3:41 AM · Feb 9, 2020

Replying to

5/The lens of privilege is not a bad lens, it's simply not a very good one for understanding the life of the poor white opiate addict. The lens is a concept designed for large-scale, and using it for individual analysis just warps things and angers everybody.

167

Replying to

I seem to recall that in Thinking Fast & Slow, Kahneman shows evidence that humans are generally pretty fast to update from stereotype -> specific example when presented with specific example data.

Replying to

I don't think that's what "privileged" means though. If I'm less likely to be stopped by police then I have that simple privilege regardless of whatever else is going on in my life. Being rich or poor or a drug addict doesn't change that I can obtain some benefit from my race.