An oppressed people - the Jews, have become oppressors? This comment doesn't even attempt to draw the distinction between the government of Israel and the Jewish people. How would it feel if we said “The formerly oppressed Hispanic people have become the oppressors”, because one country in Central or South America has an oppressive government at some point?
There isn’t even recognition that the Israeli legislature might not be representative of most Jewish Israelis and instead be a consequence of political incumbents that are hard to unseat from power, like political dynasties in many countries.
Nor does it accept that even if this is the majority will of Jewish Israelis, there are plenty of Jews in Israel who disagree with the law (which is obviously true), and shouldn’t be lumped in as “oppressors”. The same way Trump and his followers actions shouldn’t impugn the moral character of all Americans.
No, this is a wholesale indiscriminate attack on Jewish people, global or Israeli. Purposefully vague and universal in it’s attack of an entire ethnic minority group There is no chance this comment isn’t xenophobic to it’s core.
Israel's government and it's supporters in the US and elsewhere ceaselessly push this equivalence between Judaism and Israel, with the clear intent to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.
he's mad (rightly so) because jews are being conflated with israel. but he should be mad against israel and influent jews around the world for pushing this skewed view of jewishness
> It strikes me as a genuine and reflective post from someone who cares, and I would hate to see others use "you are both legally adults" to avoid doing similar reflection.
However, 7 years is not a significant age gap (even when the younger partner is only 18), that this should even be considered as a concern, even preliminarily. If one speaks of life stages and resources such as jobs and independent housing, that varies as much by socio-economic status as it does by the age range in question. Do we hoist the responsibility for self-reflecting on potential past relationship abuse, a serious charge, on anyone who is of moderately higher wealth and life experience than their partner, even when they are the same age?
It is a dangerous trend in our society of taking tenuous theories about power disparities and using those to put the burden of proof on men that they are not taking advantage of younger women. And, pardon the hyperbole, it won't end with 7 years, and likely not even 5.
> However, 7 years is not a significant age gap (even when the younger partner is only 18)
I'm going to strongly disagree with that, and not sure how you decided that was objectively true. An 18 year old who's finishing off their senior year of high school and going to college the next year dating a 25 year old adult 3 years out of college is a red flag. As a 25 year old myself, I would probably not even date someone that's still an undergrad.
I would very much question any friend my age dating someone under the age of 21. On paper, that would only be 5 years, but I would have far less concerns over 23+33 both working full time despite the age gap being double. Again, context and life stage matters.
> that varies as much by socio-economic status as it does by the age range in question
You're 100% right, people of different socioeconomic statuses can mature at different rates and get to different life stages at different ages. That doesn't magically up the total life experience from a time perspective, though it does make a great point again for nuance, not hard and fast rules on specific ages.
> Do we hoist the responsibility for self-reflecting on potential past relationship abuse, a serious charge, on anyone who is of moderately higher wealth and life experience than their partner, even when they are the same age?
I don't think this gap gets to a point of being a problem often, if ever, but there's no harm in reflecting. I don't see why we wouldn't all want to reflect on the health of our relationships of all sorts. You speak of abuse in a binary, but it's a spectrum where some of that wouldn't even classify as abuse but as maybe mildly taking advantage of someone. There's no harm in trying to ensure fairness in your own relationships, as it is actually one of the few places in the world that is fully in your control when it comes to fairness.
> It is a dangerous trend in our society of taking tenuous theories about power disparities and using those to put the burden of proof on men that they are not taking advantage of younger women. And, pardon the hyperbole, it won't end with 7 years, and likely not even 5.
There's no gender bias here, the same goes with all genders. You see this type of power issue in same sex relationships too, to say nothing of non-binary people. This is not a burden of proof though, there are no accusations floating around. The only claim here that this asks on society is that if you potentially are in a power imbalanced relationship, just take care and examine the details. I don't see the danger here you speak of.
> I'm going to strongly disagree with that, and not sure how you decided that was objectively true.
My argument was to point out a lack of good reason in the first place to have concerns over the age gaps. I agreed life experience can be different, even significantly, I just don't see evidence or reasoning (in any conversation on this topic) it has anything to do with greater potential or likelihood of abuse or any degree of taking advantage of people.
Like, you mentioned your own signals for red flags, where you would draw the line over age gaps, etc. But, to be frank, is there anything more to it than the ick factor? What happens when an undergrad does date someone in their 30s? I'd argue nothing, or nothing should happen, unless one has specific evidence against that relationship itself.
>The only claim here that this asks on society is that if you potentially are in a power imbalanced relationship, just take care and watch the details. I don't see the danger here you speak of.
In the article, the author claims how she was essentially ostracized from here friend group because of her romantic choice. This is the common pattern. I'm just against the casualness of assuming there's any good reason for this concern, because it just leads to non-defensible and damaging gossip for the supposed offender.
I do agree on the point that there isn't anything wrong with self-reflection of this sort, and relationship mistakes can come all sorts of forms and degrees, I just personally don't see the connection to concerns over age gaps.
> greater potential or likelihood of abuse or any degree of taking advantage of people.
It seems like this is the core of the disagreement. The factors here are complex, but here are some things I would point to as a starting point:
- You often have large financial differences that can start completely accidental power imbalances in otherwise healthy relationships if not managed closely. This can happen regardless of age, but age/life stage will introduce this risk more often. Is it a hard and fast rule? No. Is it a "greater potential or likelihood"? Absolutely. Apply that test to the later things as well as well.
- Housing. What happens when only one person's place is a viable place to stay the night? Again, this happens outside of age related gaps, but happens more often with them. See dorms and roommate situation mismatches. In that 18 year old high schooler situation above, literally parents.
- Brain development. We don't reach full cognitive decision making maturity until we are 25 IIRC. This can literally shape decisions and their framing within the relationship and create a vector for abuse. To be clear, this does not discount people's cognitive ability under 25 at an individual level but is a subtle statistical risk factor.
- I would not be surprised to find statistically that people who date beyond these "considered widely acceptable" boundaries are more prone to these types of manipulations and abuse, and generally more unhealthy relationships + lack of relationship experience. Anecdotally I've certainly found it to be true, but I'm not trying to claim that as data here beyond a single point. It's something that would need research and likely study.
- Whether you think they are fair or not, the social effects are real in today's world. I've seen this personally act as a "multiplier" on existing issues. (There's a better way to approach this as a society, but it's not to ignore the potential risks here entirely.)
- Even when fairly treated socially, social circles can not mix for reasons around age/life stage gaps without any bad assumptions. The lack of mixing friends and circles IMO is a fair place to assume potential power imbalance issues, again when combined with logistics on housing and finances. It's an easy way to harder shift the balance of life sharing in one direction, often the person farther along in life.
If you're reading all these and saying "I know relationships that have all these issues without an age gap" then great, they/caring friends should probably do a self-check on those as well! But it doesn't mean that we should ignore how these gaps can be a statistical risk factor for bad relationship dynamics.
If you think all of these aren't real, I'm sure others can come up with things that fit the bill. Proving the complete lack of statistical likelihood is a tough case to begin with, and there are just so many factors here that I can't imagine any study confirming your argument here.
> But, to be frank, is there anything more to it than the ick factor?
FWIW, ick factor is not a part of it for me at all, or I would have no issue dating a 21 year old college undergrad myself on that test alone.
Even further though, I would argue many people's "ick" is derived from some less reasoned through logic in the same vein as above. It's a subconscious smell test people should absolutely examine, but shouldn't be written off completely as it does come from somewhere. People just need to examine the source better.
> I'm just against the casualness of assuming there's any good reason for this concern
I can totally agree here, but there's a middle ground. Think of it as checking for prostate cancer when you get older. Should a doctor just assume you have cancer? Absolutely not. Should they check regularly for it, more often than with someone younger? Absolutely they should.
I think what may be happening is you're over-applying my original post. I'm not prescribing any ostracization for these red flags, but rather reflection and awareness of potential issues.
PS: At a personal level, I avoid these flags entirely because I have plentiful options without these flags. Why take the risk? But I don't persecribe that in the same way to others, I just pay closer attention if it is someone I am close enough with to care about and the reflection/analysis/opinion is wanted by my friend.
I'm wondering, are you against dating outside one's social class, too? should millionaires date waitresses? or billionaires date millionaires? Doctors dating house cleaners?
>Brain development
How about dating outside one's education, so to say. Is it ok for a college graduate to date a highschool dropout? How about a well-educated, cultured, person dating a trailer park educated person? How much of an IQ difference is ok? 120 IQ dating a 90 IQ?
I am not against dating someone even of a different income level, let alone social class, I think my "I avoid these flags" was taken to mean every one individually when I meant the sum of all when it comes to age gaps, so sorry for the lack of clarity there. But if you do have a strong financial difference, it is something I think people should be aware of as a potential imbalance.
We don't need to get silly with millionaires vs billionaires or reductive stereotyping. Every situation is different and nuanced, and literally all I have said is:
1. Large age/life stage gaps create more statistical vectors for abuse
2. It's worth reflecting on how these factors affect relationships in order to make them as healthy as possible.
The brain development difference is not a valid argument: even at 18 a person has the same right to vote like a 60 years old one. If you let 18 year old people decide the fate of the society, they should be more than fully capable of deciding for themselves or the voting age is terribly wrong.
1. You're applying my statistical factor at the individual level re brain development. It's a risk factor, not any sort of rule.*
2. I didn't say anywhere the 18 year old can't decide for themselves. This is not me saying "all 18 year olds dating 25 year olds should break up". I am saying that those relationships are more ripe for abuse and they warrant more reflecting/examining for the health of all involved.
* I think my "I avoid these flags" was taken to mean every one individually when I meant the sum of all when it comes to age and life stage gaps, so sorry for the lack of clarity there.
Nowhere did I say to apply any of this as a rule. Literally all this is for is the potential for power imbalances. Plenty of relationships have a mix of these factors and can be healthy. I tried to make this clear but to say it plainly, none of this is proscriptive or prohibitive.
Organic and sustainable methods are more efficient, even without GMOs [1]. It is a myth that GMOs or high-tech is the answer to food production/land scarcity concerns, as simply managing a farm properly can lead to yield increases multiple times over conventional, unsustainable methods (annual tillage, broad spectrum pesticides, etc). This is in part because GMOs that are in wide use are little more than ways to deal with pests or herbicides, which high efficiency sustainable farms deal with much more cost-effectively anyway.
No they aren’t. Organic for the most part is a myth. What they do is either spray with a pesticide that can be classified as organic (often nicotine derived) or create an island of organic surrounded by a conventional buffer. Often both.
>> Organic for the most part is a myth. What they do is either spray with a pesticide that can be classified as organic
That's demonstrably untrue. Many organic methods use no pesticides at all because they use things like row covers or greenhouses which replaces them, or crop-timing to avoid source pests. Look at any farm inspired by Eliot Coleman methods, which can produce crops cost-competitively with conventional agriculture.
>But it's no more or less "natural" than ever. "Natural" is probably not that useful a concept in general, it doesn't really mean anything in general, just like it doesn't mean anything on your food label.
The term "Natural" is very useful, it purposely separates phenomena as resulting from human activity/technology from those that are the result of long standing, generally slow moving evolutionary/geological changes. As humans can introduce change rapidly into our environment as a result our ability to design, it makes a lot of sense to have a word to quickly describe the general high level cause of such quick change.
Remember when bacterias suddenly decided to artificially dump oxygen in the atmosphere on a global scale? Once toxic and artificial, now part of the natural air we breathe.
Anyway, Wittgenstein would probably dismiss the relevance of defining what's natural or artificial for the world is made of facts and not of things.
True, but the Great Oxygenation Event took an extremely long time to effect most species though, and there are certainly exceptions, but that's just it, they're exceptions. Humans are pretty much guaranteed to introduce change (we are innovators/technologists to our core.)
>Now, if you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should be that the particle can change.
The crux of the argument seems to be here, and is simply a fallacious equivalency of free will/agency and consciousness. Two different philosophical issues that may have a unifying explanation, but not for now.
Besides, panpsychism seems to almost be tautological in its assertions: if we accept materialism, and we accept consciousness exists in some creatures, then where else would consciousness be "realized" in aggregate except distributed amongst the actual matter of the brain, down reductivly to sub-atomic particles? That doesn't mean it's a fully formalized robust theory, but the concepts underlying it are sound.
No, that’s crazy. It takes lots of atoms of iron and silicon to make a Boeing 747, but that doesn’t mean that a single iron atom has even the slightest amount of “plane-ness”.
Demanding "plane-ness" is the mistake here: you're throwing in a kind of glib idealism. If instead you demand "the possibility of forming lots and lots of electron bonds in a shape capable of performing flight" then the iron atoms did "have an amount" of the property necessary for being a plane.
I suppose if you define "conscious" in that way-- "this atom/electron/whatever has the possibility to be part of a system that thinks/reasons/feels/perceives"-- then yeah, panpsychism is vacuously true. But that's a wild abuse of the word "conscious" that is nothing like the its understood meaning: if nothing is not conscious, then the word is meaningless. When we try to define consciousness, we're obviously looking for the "thing" which we have but rocks and water molecules plainly don't. If you don't want "consciousnesses" to be the word for that thing, fine, but serious people are just going to ignore you, invent a new word for the thing, and carry on the original search.
And when I talk to panpsychists, I get the distinct sense that they know this and they're learning on it, and by doing so they're motte-and-baileying everyone else. They start out by saying that "electrons have consciousness", with the unspoken implication that consciousness means the popularly-understood ability to reason and plan and have subjective experience, even if they won't say so. And then when someone scientifically-minded comes along and points out that that's absurd, they retreat to a new definition of consciousness that is true but pointless. We're trying to really solve the hard problem here, not handwave it away and declare victory.
Maybe I'm not a serious person, but I don't think "consciousness means the popularly-understood ability to reason and plan" is part of the common understanding of this term, and a lot of what you wrote seems like a "no true Scottsman" to me. And actually, really defining well what is meant by "consciousness" seems to be a big part of the challenge.
> We're trying to really solve the hard problem here
This seems to me to be the crux of the misunderstanding. To me, panpsychism essentially presents a perspective that it may not be a well-defined problem in the first place. Like a dog chasing its own tail. Or if you prefer, it's like the question: "why is there something rather than nothing?" who knows if there is an answer to this? I don't want to go into this too much, but to me panpsychism is basically an intuition for why the "problem of consciousness" may belong to this set of fundamental questions that we may not be able to find an answer for, and if that could conceivably be the case, then it is valuable for providing that intuition because that may be the best we can do.
Requiring that it has "plane-ness" seems like an unpackable ambiguous criteria. I am speaking on a simple functional level.
Rather, a given iron atom is one of the atoms that make up a given 747, so it absolutely is (and here's where the tautology comes in) part of the distributed material that makes up the plane. Without such atoms there would be no plane. The same is being said here except with consciousness, no more.
Layman here, are there any serious limitations to your approach, or is it fair to say with the algorithms and hardware you have that motion planning has essentially been "solved"? Thanks.
When I say appropriate I mean "an age range which will likely result in swipes from them too". I'm not what a lot of 23 year olds want but I'm fairly desirable for a 29 year old. On top of that I don't have anything in common with women who are under 25.
So people should ignore a counterargument that makes sense to them because Terry Gross has more experience? We should blindly follow authority in spite of our own reasoning abilities?
I'm always disappointed when these dismissive appeal to authority ad-hominems [1] are not only posted on HN comments but voted to the very top. These types of comments take no effort and don't add any information to the discussion. Isn't HN supposed to be better than that?
Why not instead respond to the actual specific arguments people have put up in objection to Terry Gross's advice? Then the insufficiency of her experience is plain to see: She has 40+ years of experience indeed, but in a relatively narrow form of conversational interview, and commenters here are rightfully pointing out that her advice doesn't generalize.
> "DH1. Ad Hominem. ... Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic is a variant of ad hominem—and a particularly useless sort, because good ideas often come from outsiders. The question is whether the author is correct or not. If his lack of authority caused him to make mistakes, point those out. And if it didn't, it's not a problem."
There isn’t even recognition that the Israeli legislature might not be representative of most Jewish Israelis and instead be a consequence of political incumbents that are hard to unseat from power, like political dynasties in many countries.
Nor does it accept that even if this is the majority will of Jewish Israelis, there are plenty of Jews in Israel who disagree with the law (which is obviously true), and shouldn’t be lumped in as “oppressors”. The same way Trump and his followers actions shouldn’t impugn the moral character of all Americans.
No, this is a wholesale indiscriminate attack on Jewish people, global or Israeli. Purposefully vague and universal in it’s attack of an entire ethnic minority group There is no chance this comment isn’t xenophobic to it’s core.