Comment by triceratops
6 days ago
> The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Try replacing "sexual harassment" with "murder" or "robbery" and see if it still makes sense.
Same principle applies.
Politicians claiming to take murder and robbery more seriously don’t necessarily do anything to actually reduce their prevalence.
Politicians' claims don't do anything about anything because they're words. But actually taking murder more seriously through action - allocating money to investigations, prosecutions, social services, better jobs - I'd be surprised if that had no effect.
The comment I replied to said "taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless, not "talking about taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless. I agree with the latter, not the former.
Yes. All analogies suck to various extents, but, "murder" and "robbery" are pretty apt analogies.
A lot of problems can only addressed systemically.
Murder? Yes, an excellent start to solving this problem is to not murder anybody. That's really the single most important thing you do.
And yet, history shows, other people are going to do murders and simply not murdering people yourself is not sufficient to deal with this problem. You need to intervene or call for help if you see somebody getting murdered, and we need some sort of system to deal with murderers and protect other people from them, etc.
If murder is too extreme a metaphor for the anti-woke crowd, how about pissing on the bathroom floor? It's great if you are not pissing on the floor, but somebody is and we all have to walk on that floor, so we need to have some kind of community standards around it, and also somebody needs to clean up that piss.
How do we take murder or robbery seriously? We say we do that by making and enforcing laws against murder and robbery. But do we actually do what we say?
How many innocent people get convicted of murder because of our desire to "take murder seriously"? (The Innocence Project has found that the answer is "quite a lot".) Note that every time an innocent person gets convicted, it means a guilty person (the actual murderer) goes free.
How many murderers get released back into society to murder again because our desire to take something else "seriously" has somehow overridden proper enforcement of our laws against murder? (I don't know if any specific study has looked at this, but my personal sense is, again, "quite a lot".)
So no, the lesson of experience appears to be that "taking it more seriously" is not a good way to reduce how often some bad thing happens, with murder just as with sexual harassment.
So, there are (at least) two axes here, right?
"How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
In the case of murder in America, I would say the answers are "extremely seriously" and "we are doing a very imperfect job."
We should certainly do a better job of it, but I don't think the answer is to be less serious about murder. And -- clearly, I'd hope -- the point of the analogy is that some (many? most?) problems are societal.
Simply choosing to not murder people yourself is a great start, but it is a society-wide issue that can't be completely addressed by people simply choosing to do the right things on an individual basis.
> "How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
Conceptually, yes, these two things are separate. However, that does not mean these two things are independent of each other.
As you note, we take murder extremely seriously, but we do a poor job of reducing the number of murders. I think that is because we think, hey, we're taking murder really seriously, so we must be reducing the number of murders. In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously" will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing. But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite. Maybe if we paid less attention to how "seriously" we are taking murder, and more attention to actually reducing the number of murders, even if many of the things we ended up doing to accomplish that had no obvious relationship to murder and didn't look at all like "taking murder seriously", we might do a better job.
In the case of sexual harassment, similarly, "taking it seriously" does not seem to have helped in reducing its frequency; it might even have done the opposite (at least one commenter elsewhere in this thread has said they believe things have gotten worse).
> it is a society-wide issue
There is a very general society-wide issue that the things we are discussing are special cases of: how should a society deal with the fact that there will always be some proportion of people who, for a variety of reasons, don't want to behave as good members of society?
Because this issue is very general, it requires very general solutions (or maybe "mitigations" would be a better term--you can't "solve" the issue in the sense of just making such people not exist any more). But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment, does not help in finding a very general solution to the very general issue. It often hinders it, by inducing people to mistake symptoms for the root cause. The root cause is not "too many people like to murder" or "too many people like to sexually harass others". The root cause is the very general one I gave above: some people just don't want to be good members of society. Society's method of dealing with this should be similarly general. Specific applications might vary in the details, but the general principle is still the same.
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Thank you for saying this.