SaidAchmiz comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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I would say 75-95% of all white, male, fathers in the United States currently have at least some gender biases that they will pass down to their kids.
I would say that people who phrase things in that way are likely to either be "very cool person who will happily take to correcting and clarify their meaning" or else "actually trying to pass down gender biases (whether due to ignorance or active sexism)". The cool people are more likely to phrase it in a way that signals "I am a cool person", and thus avoid phrasing that are prone to give people offense, but obviously no one has a perfect map of what is currently offensive.
Therefor, given this statement, and given that "bias spreader" is the more common group, and given that the "bias spreader" is more likely to say this, I can, with fairly high confidence (call it 95%?) say that if I get offended, I am getting offended at someone who is spreading a gender bias that I strongly disagree with.
The other 5% of the time, as long as I don't go in guns blazing, I'm unlikely to seriously offend the other person.
Therefor, I can fairly safely act as though the person is spreading a gender bias. Since they are a hypothetical person, I obviously can't investigate them further to confirm this, but I CAN model the group of people who say offensive things, and conclude that it is perfectly rational and reasonable to treat them as though they were saying offensive things.
NOW, there's still the open question: given that I am offended, what should I do? You believe my emotions prescribe a specific set of actions, and I'd bet you can even do the same priors I just did to demonstrate that 95% of all people who cry "that's offensive" do something stupid.
BUT, I am not a hypothetical, so you can interact with me and learn what my actual response would be.
Which, as it turns out, boils down to "I'm offended. If I think speaking up will help, I will." If both of them already understood it in the non-offensive context, then I have good evidence that in the future I can interpret both of them as cool, savvy people who are just taking a slightly awkward linguistic shortcut. If one or both of them was stuck in the offensive context, it can help to break them out - if nothing else, it at least makes it clear that there's other viewpoints out there, and I'll often make it clear I'm someone they can talk to in private or right now if they want to learn more about my perspective.
SO... I'm not sure why I'd want to get offended less frequently, given my actual reaction. Emotions have consequences, but consequences can be POSITIVE too! :)
And here's the minor quibble:
Why specify "white"? Your statement is probably true, but there appears to be an implication that it doesn't apply to the non-white population. That has not been my experience (if you construe "white" to mean "as opposed to black/Asian/Hispanic/etc., my experience is by observation and word of mouth; "white" could also be interpreted as more like "WASP", in which case my contrary experience is also personal).
Sorry that wasn't clear - I specified white because I feel I'm ignorant on POC families and lack the necessary data to do an extrapolation with anywhere near the same confidence :)