For a bit of context: I generally consider gender to be the social/cultural angle on males/females and sex to be the chromosome/physical body angle. (I can get into atypical chromosomes later if anyone wants).

General thoughts

I more or less am indifferent about the idea of gender. I think on one hand, some people are very firm about “This is how men should act, and this is how women should act,” in a traditional sense, while others, in a more modern sense can be equally inflexible in a different way. Ex: “If you exhibit these traditionally feminine or masculine behaviours you should change your gender identity to match them.”

I don’t particularly empathize with either outlook as I feel that any person should do what 1) Makes sense in any individual situation, and 2) Should do what makes sense within their personal tendencies and abilities. For me personally, most talk about gender identity feels unrelatable in its entirety.

That said, by default I recognize “male/female” as sex, and will default to that when talking to someone. If they have an ambiguous look about them or specifically request it, I’ll address them differently. Even if it doesn’t particularly mean anything to me, or can be counter-intuitive to my world-view, I will try to be considerate because I realize it means something to them.

Regarding why we have gender stereotypes, and what genuine differences there are between the male and female sex: I think that because of typical physical differences in the sexes (pregnancy, breastfeeding, muscle mass, height, eyesight and so on) we’ve had a pragmatic division of responsibilities and specialization that tended to make sense along those lines in most cultures. (And it’s likely that this has been a two-way evolutionary balance).

While I think some of the most clear-cut " on average" differences in men and women are in their bodies, the least clear are mental. In a very general sense it’s difficult to evaluate even hard physical things like brain shape/patterns and to be able to claim that culture/social upbringing within a society hasn’t affected those things in some ways. While I’m amenable to there being some differences in the mind, it’s difficult to say what adult brains without the influence of culture (and thus concepts of gender) would look like.

Essentially, my view is that there are some inherent average differences between the sexes that lead to some different, on average behaviours, but that those differences aren’t so strong that we should be heavy-handed about telling people, particularly in a modern non-tribal society, how they should act, or how they should identify. We should let individuals do as they please without having to concern themselves about the idea of being a man or a woman in any way.

I understand a lot of people probably don’t emphatize with my views, but that’s more or less what I think.

One thing I would note is that it wasn’t all that uncommon for the women to handle the finances in my family, and it’s a thing I’ve heard is frequently the case. You also get a lot of situations where “officially” the man of the house is “in charge” but everyone knows who is really running the show. I think there was probably a lot more subtlety/nuance/individual variety than we give credit for. Then again my ancestors are largely celtic and if you know anything about celtic women…

I’m going to make a longer comment with some of my more personal thoughts later but the one part that caught my attention initially was the ~15 years part.

Now I’m not going to be a stickler about precise time ranges but certainly in the 90s there were significant discussions about male/female gender roles.

While discussions about trans/gender identity topics only really picked up steam in I would say the last ~7 years these sorts of things were pretty common discussions in feminist academic circles for quite some time even before that, so it’s likely that the discussion would have happened sooner or later, even if in a different way than it did.

Last comment about timing - I suspect politics had something to do with it. More cynical analysis might say it’s been used as a wedge between the American right and left (as passion for fighting over, say, gay marriage has lessened) and there’s a cynical argument to be made that both parties actually want it to be a contentious issue because it helps then to differentiate and appeal to their base in different ways.

Some equally cynical analysis from the left specifically associates the rise of gender as a topic (and several other social issues) as a way to distract the new left from economic issues (ex: occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders-esque stuff). While I don’t think most on the left would claim the aforementioned social issues are unimportant they would claim that they’re of secondary importance when a great number of people are struggling just to get by with the situation only slowly getting worse.

I’ll make a separate post later on my personal feelings more on-topic.

I like to leave these a few days but I’m surprised nobody touched on the concept of play / practice as one of the reasons for fun (basically being able to learn things in a way that feels low-risk and casual - lots of studies on play, which relates to fun, showing such).

Other obvious function would be relief from stress / taking a break from things being serious in life. (Giving the mind a way to unwind and relax). Feels like there’s benefit in that for everyone as well.

Also, how too much of things that are normally fun start to lose their appeal (suggesting there’s a limit to what’s useful fun). And obviously what becomes of people who have no fun at all.

I feel like this covers a significant part of fun, but maybe not all of it completely: Ex hanging out singing songs around a campfire with people you love is fun. (In this case you could even say it’s fun because it’s comfortable and familiar).

I feel like the kind of fun you speak to here is increasingly common and may be the only type of fun some people actually have but I feel like the idea of challenge doesn’t capture all possibilities.

I think the question here would be “Is a dopamine hit both the necessary and sufficient condition of fun?” In other words, even if a dopamine hit is always part of fun, is that all it is? Why does it give us a dopamine hit? What behaviours is it encouraging and why?

I would agree that there were some things people were far too angry about that barely mattered. The excessive fighting over the mask thing was definitely the biggest.

That said, in BC rules were so strict at several points that you couldn’t see anyone outside of family living with you, regardless of how you did it (ex: meet up in a park and stand 2m apart? Not good enough. Realistically? Near-zero risk). Rules regarding parents in old folks homes were so draconian that parents passed away without their children being able to see them. Quite a few people offed themselves too.

Staying in Japan I was able to, short of bigger social events, avoiding travel to major centres (I did once to buy a car) and wearing a mask, live reasonably similarly to how I did pre-Corona (in a city of ~90,000). So the contrast was quite stark when I heard about how things were in the west.

Right, so I think you could push it even further than what I said. Maybe something more qualitative like “What are you willing to give up to help others?”

That said you can also go too far the other way and say that a very rich person who does or doesn’t give away things hadn’t really giving up much, but we certainly would want to say a rich person giving away 90% of their disposable income is still doing something good. (And practically speaking it’s going to have almost as good of an outcome if they gave to the point of diminishing their well-being).

Your angle here is actually getting really close to Peter Singer’s Famine, Affluence and Morality. (Personally I stop a little short of where he’s at, but I think your position more closely resembles his).

I think part of the former may be a matter of culture and translation. In many languages and cultures the common sense interpretation of the former is equivalent to including the latter. (I would read the latter as how you would word a written rule or law people are going to try to get around). Some might suggest that “love others as you would love yourself,” is of such weight that it automatically includes not doing obviously bad things. I tend to favor “laymen’s” interpretations over “letter of the law,” style, particularly since in the original context of the golden rule the people who were the problem themselves (Pharisees) were of the latter type.

I think you might find “evolutionary ethics” to be interesting - it’s probably the biggest new theory in ethics in the last few hundred years. Really interesting stuff.

Not deeply studied but some very early pre-linguistic studies showing babies only a few months old essentially having something resembling a concept of fairness/justice/trust. The idea is essentially that much like language most people have at least some very general moral predispositions. Really fascinating stuff.

I think that’s probably the standard sentiment but I do think a “somewhat less strict approach in some cases,” might have been better.

There’s this sort of thing in leadership/negotiation where if you show that you feel people are untrustworthy and you’re too strict with them, a good portion will essentially tell you where to go and how to get there by completely ignoring your demands. I feel as though there were at least some areas where we could have borrowed at least a little from that idea.

Personally I don’t mind upvotes as much as downvotes. I think if you get rid of the latter it gets rid of a lot of toxic behaviour. (Upvoting your comment for fantasy league points).

I wouldn’t quite go that far, but I would focus more of my efforts where more results are to be had. There are still some genuinely open-minded/genuinely confused adults out there, so you can’t give up on them entirely and you should still make some efforts, but a lot of what people spend a lot of time doing is basically throwing grass in the wind.

Simple but reasonable.

I would want to tease a little more out here - why is it constructed, who constructed it, and does morality in general have merits? (If so, what would you say those are?)

I half understand how you feel but with how a lot of people are with anything even remotely controversial the downvote button really has become “This is an opinion I don’t like intuitively.”

Ex: On that other platform I can say something perfectly reasonable one place, get a ton of upvotes, in another, a ton of downvotes, and that can make for really samethink “only say safe things,” kinds of communities which frankly is extremely boring. I can get why it’s a thing.

Maybe the wording could be tweaked a little if it’s coming off as talking down to…but there are a lot people who could at least use a reminder to think about things a little more charitably even when they disagree with them.

Interesting if you look at the beginning of the pandemic the Democrats and Republican positions were reversed, (ex: on masks) but COVID hit democratic states hardest first (being by the ocean) and that changed pretty quickly.

Had Trump still been president when the vaccine rolled out (he was highly in favour of a “light speed” recovery) I highly suspect that we would have seen a lot of left-wing people suddenly being far more skeptical (if not conspiratorial) - not because of anything to do with the science, but because of the person telling them to get vaccinated.

And because Americans just like to be partisan and contrary (I apologize to reasonable Americans in the audience).

I would actually say I’ve seen this go both ways too - I was in Japan in 2020 and there were very much in denial about COVID likely in part because it happened just before the Olympics were supposed to (economically disastrous for a country already struggling).

Conversely, once they started to actually have public policy on it, their restrictions were significantly more moderate than in most places in Canada - in my prefecture aside from an initial month of lockdown I never stopped working, as a teacher, in-person, teaching hundreds of students a week. I could still go eat food with colleagues most times, and our infection numbers rarely exceeded double digits in the whole prefecture. How did we do it?

Our prefecture took more of a laser-focused approach to things - when infections started upticking they would make rules like “no eating at restaurants open after 8pm” and had 5 levels of very oddly specific rules about things you could and couldn’t do in public. They often targeted shutting remotely resembling nightlife first because a lot of infections would come from anything that looked like that. Looking at some places in Canada which were being far more draconian (and doing worse) from a public policy end it felt that the Japanese “Don’t ask for more than people can do,” was more successful. (Of course this was less the case for places like Osaka, Tokyo, etc but even they were on the whole less strict than, say BC).

Would a more Japanese approach have worked in Canada? Hard to say, but I think there is a case to be made that some restrictions were asking for more than a lot of people were willing to give. Essentially, knowing people and good public policy isn’t necessary the same as understanding science, because you have to consider what people are willing to comply with, and what is asking too much, whether certain things will backfire, what downsides there are to policy, etc. and it’s reasonable for us as citizens to have objections (one way or the other) - I would even go so far as to say that’s part of our civic duty.

I’ll keep it simple and say that I’m in general a fair bit more skeptical about authority, politicians and overreach (particularly during emergency situations) than you are. I don’t think the conclusions that authorities/media come to about science or how they choose to portray it should be accepted without question, nor should those who didn’t be silenced (and this was the case even among some professionals). They have self-interests which don’t necessarily at all times align with the public good.

I think people are right to have felt that some things were off, even if they were wrong to wholesale believe some particularly questionable explanations. I believe the average person has reasonably good intuitions but often gets the details wrong when the underlying factors that need to be understood are more complex and that’s where they end up making themselves look foolish.

Sorry I had to. 😂