Is it possible to teach some ppl that the "average behavior of X" they think about is almost always a thin slice in the middle of the bell curve and most people will be divergent from that? Or that the most loud and visible part of "behavior of some X" only represents a minority of "behaviors of X"?

politicsthrowaway230 · 2022-02-03T12:20:15+00:00

It's not so simple, because this type of thinking is the backbone of literally all bigotry. If you lose the ability to generalise based on an immutable characteristic, there is literally nothing left. Everyone is the main character of their own world, and their experiences shape how they view it. You view everything locally, it is extremely hard to get balanced "global" views. Indeed, your global views are often completely at odds with your local ones.

Generalisations should ideally be no more than fleeting, before you remind yourself of the many people that share that characteristic that do not exhibit that behaviour, but a lot of people don't seem to care enough and some ideologies even encourage this behaviour. (too many "progressive" ones) If you get too absorbed in your own world, you find yourself with very idiosyncratic global views.

Incompatibility of your global views with your local ones doesn't seem to make a difference a lot of the time. Take misandrists for example, they have a very fixed abstract view of men as an oppressive class. But when they meet men that are decent to them, they are the exception and do not change their view of the whole. (particularly if they have some other vulnerability, eg. race, sexuality, GNCness) That is the only permissible answer in their worldview, none others work.

Racists attitudes to individual people is similar. They hold very abstract views of minorities as a whole, but are unable to apply this view in practice as each person they meet fails to meet the caricature, so create many exceptions in their head.

Sorry if this is a bit disjointed, struggling to get words on page.

hi__mynameis__555 · 2022-02-03T15:07:16+00:00

I think this is going to be very difficult solely for the reason that people don't really want to challenge their preexisting notions on what men are like. They think they've got it all figured out already

SpanishM · 2022-02-03T17:41:10+00:00

Not an easy thing to do. There are several biases involved.

Group attribution error:

refers to people's tendency to believe either

1: The characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole, or

2: A group's decision outcome must reflect the preferences of individual group members, even when external information is available suggesting otherwise.

The group attribution error shares an attribution bias analogous to the fundamental attribution error. Rather than focusing on individual's behavior, it relies on group outcomes and attitudes as its main basis for conclusions.

So if one or more men are aggressive, then "all men must be like that".

Fundamental attribution error:

is the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational and environmental explanations for an individual's observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations.

The reason why a man did something bad to a woman "is because he's a misogynist, never for another reason".

I believe the availability bias plays a big role too:

is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled.

[...]

Applications: Media

After seeing news stories about child abductions, people may judge that the likelihood of this event is greater. Media coverage can help fuel a person's example bias with widespread and extensive coverage of unusual events, such as homicide or airline accidents, and less coverage of more routine, less sensational events, such as common diseases or car accidents. For example, when asked to rate the probability of a variety of causes of death, people tend to rate "newsworthy" events as more likely because they can more readily recall an example from memory. Moreover, unusual and vivid events like homicides, shark attacks, or lightning are more often reported in mass media than common and un-sensational causes of death like common diseases.

For example, many people think that the likelihood of dying from shark attacks is greater than that of dying from being hit by falling airplane parts when more people actually die from falling airplane parts. When a shark attack occurs, the deaths are widely reported in the media whereas deaths as a result of being hit by falling airplane parts are rarely reported in the media.

The news about men doing something bad to women is always big news, but not that much when women do bad things to men (or when men do good things). This creates a bias in people.

Bringing awareness to issues is something that must be done in a responsible way. There is a reason why the news media is called "the fourth power".

But keep in mind that big news media is mainly business, and they often publish what they think people want to read. This has a lot of implications. It's a supply and demand model, so both sides -publisher and audience- have influence over what is or is not news.

Of course these biases are fueled by the feminist message that men are -essentially- misogynists.

SUPER_CUCK_BROS · 2022-02-04T12:13:18+00:00

the idea of all men as extremely violent hypersexual machines does not even represent the "middle" of the bell curve. it is not average. it is a tail end.

RockmanXX · 2022-02-03T15:52:18+00:00

How can we teach some ppl not to erase the remaining overwhelming majority of men?

I don't want to be in the same Time Zone as the people who think that Men are impulsive violent animals who's only needs are "sex&food". I don't even want to share the planet with them.

EsraYmssik · 2022-02-03T21:13:59+00:00

Is it possible to teach some ppl that the "average behavior of X" they think about is almost always a thin slice ~~in the middle~~ on the edge of the bell curve

FTFY

BloomingBrains · 2022-02-05T07:44:18+00:00

The problem doesn't have anything to do with a lack of understanding how a bell curve works. Believing that "all men are extremely violent hypersexual machines that want to subjugate everything that moves" isn't a belief that has anything to do with logic, evidence, or rationality. So obviously they won't be able to persuaded to abandon that belief with such forces either.

I think the reason a lot of women who believe this is do so because they themselves have been hurt by such men and are seeking to justify their sense of paranoia. That, or they have been influenced to the same levels of paranoia by someone who has, or someone who was themselves influenced by someone who has, recursion ad nauseam. That's why I like to think of this misandrist paranoia stuff as a kind of memetic hazard, a mind virus of sorts.

As for why it spreads? Well its a neatly self-reinforcing belief. If a woman says all men are like that, and I tell her no, she can respond by saying "well you'd just want me to think that they're not so its easier to take advantage of me" and there is literally nothing I can do to prove I'm not like that. I've been in so many conversation like this.

A metaphor. A dictator asks "are you a dissident?" You answer no. He replies "well that's just what a dissident would say" and orders Boris to throw you in the gulag. Or to put it another way: disproving the idea that all men are like this is an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Its predesigned so that you can't prove it wrong, like trying to prove unicorns definitely don't exist. The only way to escape being treated like a monster is to paradoxically admit that you are one and throw yourself at the mercy of the people who are judging you. Then maybe we can trust you because you're at least admitting it. "The devil I know is better than the one I don't." (And how does this help women exactly? Hell if I know. A devil is still a devil.)

MGTOW does the same thing. Despite the core philosophy of it not being inherently misogynistic, its a misogynistic group in practice because so many of those guys think women are cold, emotionless reptiles that want to devour your soul. And you can't persuade them otherwise because of what happened to them in divorce courts. Which is tragic, of course, but that does not justify treating all women that way. Same thing for rape. Tragic, but we can't overcorrect that by blaming all men.

People readily embrace this logic when it comes to MGTOW but if the same logic is turned against them, suddenly its the greatest tragedy in the world. "You just don't empathize with how scarred women are", "you don't women to be safe", I've heard it all. Its a pure matter of selfish selection bias. "I'll take into account what happened to me and what affects my life but ignore it when its other people's lives".

Of course, a good chunk of the women that act that way don't really believe it to begin with. For them, rape paranoia ends quite reasonably at the six foot mark. But for those who do...I don't know. Maybe there is some hope they could meet the right guy who shows them not all guys are like that, but they have to be open to the experience. That's not something we can control.

EDIT: Of course, logical arguments against this do exist. One can quite easily point out that if all men really were like this, why would we allow women to be anything more than cattle? We would just constantly and openly being doing the evil things they're accusing of instead of being a rare thing that happens in alleyways and is hated by other men.

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