[darfs]

I think the discussion will occur for ever, if we continue searching for arguments for "why are these men so {dumb,angry,bad}?/ Why are these womans so {plastic, Feminine,dumb}".

I think we should stop thinking in that categories and Start thinking:"this One (Wo)men is so dumb!". Categories for humans(behavior) where never a good idea.

EDIT: It may be easy, but easy isn't good anytime. Just take a look at programming. Writing the good old "jump" was easy. Was it a nice idea?

[laichzeit0]

Are you saying that testosterone and estrogen levels play no part whatsoever in a persons behavior? Because one could argue that there are biological differences between men and woman which might result in behaviors that are to some degree "different". Perhaps it even justifies certain generalizations.

[Radim]

There's no question about it!

If you take OPs argument of "only consider the individual, never groups of people" one step further, there is no such thing as "one woman" either. She's a collection of trillions of cells. And each cell... trillions of jiggling atoms! The horror.

All life evolved to operate by perceiving the world through efficient abstractions. Photons as shapes, chemicals as smells, cells as individuals, individuals as species, people as societies, whatever. These are all leaky and ultimately unfair generalizations!

But the "exact" alternatives are typically outcompeted by more efficient approximations. It's just too tedious to consider everything in its uniqueness.

Internalizing the right abstractions -- concrete enough to be useful but not too raw to be overwhelming -- is a fine energy-balancing act. There's no reason why the abstraction ladder should suddenly stop at the level of "trillions of cells". That would be very suspicious indeed.

To suggest that the (evolved, leaky) abstractions along the line of sex are suddenly not useful IN ANY WAY is... preposterous.

[darfs]

Taking that joke, look at yourself.

Do you take yourself as unique or a general version of a men/woman, that follows only the one path that everyone else takes and you feel in every situation as every other human, and you dont even try to be different in your behavior, and your neurons are trained like everyone else?

Ff you look at my point, I want to stop the generalization about behaviors in sexes context. Everyone can be dumb. That doesn't need an abstraction to the sexes. As you can obviously see, that doesn't say that you have to stop the abstraction at cells. :P

And: I didn't call "ANY WAY". I called the context BEHAVIOR.(EDIT: as you pointed out yourself :-))

[lmm]

There are over seven billion people on this planet. Knowing all of them as humans is simply impossible. To function in the modern world we have to be willing to categorize, to make snap judgements, to, putting it bluntly, be prejudiced. I mean you could pick who you talk to at a conference (say) at random, and there's certainly value in talking to a spread of people. But ultimately there are people you'll gain more or less from talking to, because your interests and theirs align or don't. So you'll look at superficial characteristics like what they're wearing, because that's all the information you have to go on, and you'll try to make the best guess you can about who would be best to talk to. And it's inevitable that you'll sometimes get it wrong. But there is no alternative; making judgements based on incomplete information is just life, all we can do is try and make those judgements as well and as fairly as possible.

[berntb]

You want to stop assigning absolute moral/mental characteristics to people because of their skin color, facial features or other physical specifics?

You modern people with your statistics and correlations, that don't remember the good old days before 1861.

:-)