Tony_Tarantula on 30/10/2017 at 12:17

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That's why these things are a catch 22. We had a soldier in my old unit who was sent to prison for 5 years, based on a sexual assault charge AFTER the woman in question had admitted it was completely fabricated as a means to get back at the guy for breaking up with her. An incident like that isn't on parity with something like where have the guy in question (Harvey) caught on tape admitting to nonconsensual groping, or one like Kevin Spacey where he admitted both pedophilia and sexual assault while attempting to deflect it by playing the gay card.

Blanket rules are thinking shortcuts for the stupid. You shouldn't always believe nor disbelieve an accuser: you should weigh the sum of the available evidence in each individual situation and reach a conclusion based off the best information you have. To argue against that is to literally say that you should ignore evidence and reality in favor of dogma.

Tony_Tarantula on 1/11/2017 at 15:35

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I view it the same way I view the reactions to the Google Engineer situation.

"Blanket Rules" exist for situations where reducing complexity is more important than being thorough. Let's take an example from my line of work. If my client is a company that's looking to expand into new territory by merging with someone in a new state, I might screen my results by simply chopping out anyone that has been posting losses during the last three years. Granted some of those might be exceptions or a great turnaround situation but our firm is relatively small and simply doesn't have the time to go through every potential company out there so we need to focus on the ones most likely to have a good result, and save the high levels of due diligence for AFTER we've found some fits that are likely to have a mutually beneficial result for both the acquiring and acquired firms

On the other hand I think it's massively stupid and dangerous to use category-based reductions when you're talking about something like guilt for a heinous crime. Given that we're talking about a topic where if you get it wrong you're either completely ruining someone's life (with a false allegation/conviction) or setting up for more victims (if you let a rapist walk free) there's absolutely no room for any blanket categorizations (e.g. "you should always believe an accuser"/"women who get raped were probably dressed slutty") that could introduce bias into the proceedings.

That's also why I take huge issue with modern identity/gender politics. I was raised in the era of 90's feel good where the dominant message was not to judge people by what they look like. In 2017 that's turned into the idea that we're supposed to completely ignore any individual qualities people might have and instead slot them into pre-assigned gender/race/sexuality/ethnicity boxes and judge them based on where we've slotted them, and as if every single person represents the median and mean of their own group. It's alien to the ethical compass I was imprinted with. As was predicted (correctly) years ago by some of the libertarian leaning podcasts I followed the only natural outcome of this dialectic would be tribalization of American society along the lines of racial identity and part of this would be that some whites would accept their "villain" role, leading to a resurgence of white supremacist groups.

It sound like a tangent, but there's a reason I bring both up. Both that and the previous issue discussed are examples of associative thinking. Associative thinking has it's merits and some situations where you need to be that way, especially when you're in a life and death situation like being in the wilderness or combat. They're considerably less useful in tackling societal problems.


Edit:


Found this since someone had brought up "Gamergate". There was someone who had been running an anti-bullying campaign and well...here's what actually happened to the lady running it as part of gamergate:

[video=youtube;BSAoitd1BTQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSAoitd1BTQ[/video]

Reason for posting: consider that one or both parties in a lot of these online "scandals" might be completely full of shit and/or engineering the controversy for their own ends.

In this instance the lady was running an anti-bullying kickstarter, and because somebody had reached the conclusion that her startup had developed a way to unmask trolls several parties had a panic attack and ran a coordinated hit against her.

Kolya on 3/11/2017 at 23:31

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You can make this about case law vs. legislation, if you want. But T_T and I talked about rules, not law specifically. And I can hardly imagine the paradise you live in where there are no rules, because these are for robots and stupid people only.
And yes, rules miss nuances by definition. That's why I said all rules are blanket rules to a degree. Does that mean rules are for stupid robots only?