Emile comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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But my whole point was that if it's an empirical statement, then we shouldn't be offended by it. That position seems fundamental to the whole rationalist project - a minor corollary of the Litany of Tarski is "If X is true, I want people to tell me that X is true [1]". X can be "the sky is blue" or "women who can cook and clean have better marriage prospects", it really shouldn't matter.
Think about the precedent you are setting when you get offended by an empirical statement. First of all, you are attacking the messenger - the fact that potential suitors will evaluate a woman in part based on her domestic skills is perhaps deplorable, but it's hardly the father's fault. Second, you are giving your allies an incentive to hide potentially important social information from you, since you have established the fact that you will sometimes get angry at them for telling you things.
[1] A better statement of this idea would be "If the probability of X is p(X), I want the proportion of people who tell me X is true to be p(X)". The people who advocate the minority positions (i.e. iconoclasts) are actually crucial to forming a well-calibrated picture of the world - without them you will become disastrously overconfident. You should take a moment today to thank your friendly neighborhood iconoclast.
I'm going to sidestep the talk of "offense" because I think it's sufficient to talk about whether a statement is morally right or wrong ("offensive" seems to be "morally wrong" with some extra baggage).
Two cases in which I might judge an empirical statement as morally wrong:
1) the statement is false, and yes, saying false things is usually considered morally wrong
2) the statement is true, but is used in a context where it will have negative repercussions - for example, telling your kid a huge amount of factually true statistics that cast a bad light upon a group you don't like (blacks, jews, women, etc.), or teaching a madman how to make explosives, etc.
In this case we're talking about the value a statement not in the abstract, but as life advice given from a father to his daughter. The important part isn't as much the truth of that particular piece of advice, but of what it allows us to infer about the general quality of the life advice given.