Why is that the headline when the article contains the much more worrying
"And 20% of those surveyed said women often said “no” to sexual activity when they meant “yes”, and 18% agreed if a woman was raped while affected by alcohol or drugs she was partly responsible."
"partly responsible" is a highly context-dependent weasel word. You can be "partly responsible" for a brick hitting you on the head, since you didn't look up. You can be "partly responsible" for being raped while drunk, because you chose to get wasted in unsafe company. Your parents are also "partly responsible", because they raised you in a neighbourhood with a high number of violent young men. The bar is, indeed, also "partly responsible", for not hiring competent bouncers to prevent this situation. And so on and so forth until we get to the Big Bang, which is also partly responsible, because it set up the initial conditions which evolved to the current predicament. In short, "partly responsible" can mean whatever the hell you want it to mean, and you can get most people to answer whatever you want to that question by first priming them with other questions.
It should also be followed up by: "Would you be okay with your partner tracking you, without your consent?"
The problem with tracking quickly becomes apparent when you're on the wrong side of the fence. If a person honestly believe that it would be okay to track their partner, but not vice-versa that person is an asshole.
Completely agree. My boyfriend and I share all of our passwords. We are completely transparant with each others life and the trust is 100% there. He scrolls through my phone and I his and we're on each others fbk quite a bit to. But here's the difference. When I'm bored, I scroll through my phone to see what's new.. usually nothing. So I do the same on his ... it's simply just another source of entertainment (if you can even call it that, normally when there's jack sht on tv).
If I'm meeting up with him, he'll send me his location on when he's being super lazy just put on his tracker to make him easier to find. Sometimes .. he leaves it on forgetting to switch it off and I tell him to as it'll drain his battery. When you have trust, stuff like this doesn't come up in conversation at all. It's more of a 'what's mine is yours and do whatever...' BUT yes, tracking someone WITHOUT their consent, completely different story ... that's NOT right. Defo needs to be rephrased.
Humans are awful, and we're still in the stone age as far as social advancements go. News at 11. :( (bearing in mind that the article also talks about shockingly high numbers of respondents classifying rape and domestic violence as “acceptable,” for those who haven't read The Fine Article)
“In August the Victorian government announced religious instruction during school hours would be scrapped and replaced with education about building respectful relationships.”
That's about the only positive take-away from the article. All ministers responsible for education everywhere should follow suit.
You sure we're not behind the Stone Age? The mainstream paleoanthropological position is that hunter-gatherers were completely egalitarian socially. Inequality is something that came up (resurfaced actually, because apes have it) only in the last 10-12 thousand years as a result of owning property and land and some people owning more of it than others.
Again, this is not my theory, this is what anthropologists actually believe.
In the interest of giving both sides, there's a recent book, that I haven't read (yet), called Constant Battles, which disputes all of that.
Also: giving classes on this kind of thing solves nothing; see below.
Also: the upside of Religious Education is that it was practically a free period, at least where I'm from.
I think acceptable is the default for most behaviors. Give into whatever urge you have, etc. It's age/experience that eventually labels things as unacceptable.
Pretty much. They've yet to live in the real world, experience things and gain insight into how things work. Unless they've a good reason to believe otherwise most things will be 'acceptable' by default.
I'm sure you could poll a cohort of <21s to tell you that thermonuclear obliteration is 'acceptable', if only because they've never actually thought about it or the consequences.
That result wouldn't tell us the world at large is heading straight for nuclear war, it tells us our respondents are morons.
Competitiveness, for one thing. Then there's the play deprivation, which isn't too good for the social skills in general, and externalises your locus of control.
The topic at hand, paranoia, or at least distrustfulness, is practically defined by having an external locus of control.
While we're on the topic of trust, kids today aren't exactly treated with much trust. Are they even trusted to stay at home unattended without getting themselves in some accident? And then there's the whole system of school, which is specifically founded on not trusting children (to self-educate, which is what they're genetically programmed to do...). The implicit message they're receiving is that people are guilty until proven otherwise.
If there's one thing we've established by now, it's that unsolicited instruction doesn't work:
* Merrel et al, "How effective are school bullying intervention programs?"
* Smith et al, "The effectiveness of whole-school antibullying programs".
Not to mention all those ant-drug classes they have in America that don't work.
It's true for academic subjects too. The declining interest in science as people go through school is well-documented:
* Eccles et al, "Negative effects of traditional middle schools on students' motivation",
* Harter, "A new self-report scale of intrinsic versus extrinsic orientation in the classroom",
* Lepper et al, "Instrinsic and extrinsic motivational orientations in the classroom: Age differences and academic correlates",
which, together with this result:
Vedder-Weiss and Fortus, "Adolescent's declining motivation to learn science: Inevitable or not?",
proves that it's the schooling that's causing it, and not, say, a natural part of growing up: this last paper uses schools that don't teach you anything you don't want to learn (democratic schools).
(I think that compulsory, curriculum-based computer programming stuff should be kept out of schools for this reason, too.)
Since democratic schools are private schools, you could make the argument that there's a socioeconomic status thing involved, where rich people "are just smarter". I'd counter by saying that homeschoolers don't show any significant variation in academics w.r.t. wealth, and that I don't see any reason why it should be different for democratic schooling, which is practically group homeschooling.
> Uneducated about reality, as you would expect at that age
People would know more about the real world if they weren't stuck in a building all day.
> believe tracking their partner by going through their
> computer or phone, or by installing phone and
> computer tracking software
One of those things is not like the others. Many of the married couples I know have "Find My Friends" on their phone for them and their partners, consensually, and it's exceptionally useful for short-term planning. This does not feel anything like going through their emails...
Also, how many couples actually keep their email secret from each other? How many would have no expectation of privacy here, and hence view the subject differently?
Going through anyone's things (digital or physical) without their permission is obviously very wrong. But can I ask you what kinds of things you have on your computer/phone that you don't want you BF to see?
Edit: My girlfriend and I have permission from each other to go through each other's phones/computers etc. and as a result of that we don't feel like the other person has anything to hide, and it brings us closer to each other. I have no interest in going through my girlfriend's phone/laptop, but if she refused to let me do that it would instantly bring up red flags that she doesn't trust me and that she can't be open with me. That's not the kind of relationship I'd like to be in.
Nothing or everything, what is there shouldn't be a/the question.
Humans have a rare trait in being able to develop cyborg transparent interfaces with our tools. A hammer becomes your hand, as far as your brain is concerned, after you've used it long enough.
Phones and other technology do the same thing for our minds. The photos we snap but never review are memories we're trying to collect. Phone calls or IMs a better history of conversations we've had.
Someone else going through this technology w/o permission is like them having a way to psychically read your mind. Both are a violation of your self -- your identity, memories, what have you. It's a violation because just as we learn to use tools as physically indistinct appendages, so to do we use ways to capture our minds as indistinct appendages.
I've had the same email account since the Gmail invite-only days, been on Facebook since 2007. If my GF wanted to look through it all with a fine tooth comb, she could, and there's nothing in there that I wouldn't want her to see. But the very fact that she felt like she had the need to look would suggest a huge failing in our relationship.
Yup. Different couples have different agreements. Some share absolutely everything, others argree on private areas. For instance, I myself feel no problem with leaving my SO my Facebook or GMail session logged in, but sharing passwords with each other is off-limits. Not because of lack of trust, but as a general rule. If I happen to discover her password by accident[0], I forget it and ask her to change it.
[0] - it happens, e.g. it's easy to accidentally mis-TAB when logging in to Facebook and have the password, appended to e-mail, saved in browser's auto-complete for login field.
My wife and I don't share email. We think spouses need some privacy. Our computers and phones are personal and private and only sharable if asked. Our work computers are completely off limits.
I find location checking to be more civilized. The question being asked isn't "where are you?", it's somethings else like "should I pop home for lunch?" If my wife is out, then I don't need to interrupt her with a question. If she is home then I'll check. Similarly, if she is driving, I'll wait until she is someplace appropriate for interruptions before making contact. (Or the ever dicey "should I save the last few bites of my ice cream for you?" I've timed the ice cream so if she arrives at the usual time it works out, but if she is delayed then it will melt. No one wants to know they missed ice cream because they were detained.)
Realistically "are you home?" and "are you driving?" are the only two predicates I care about, but I can answer that from location.
After having location checking, the idea of initiating non-time sensitive communication without checking to see if it is in an appropriate location seems about as rude as asking a question of someone who is in mid sentence on a telephone.
We use 'find my friends' because we don't expect the other person to be able to reply quickly to a text. It's not only polite between us, it's polite to the people we are interacting with IRL. This means I can put my phone in my pocket and focus on the people I'm with and my partner can do the same.
There is no, why didn't you answer my text, I've been trying to figure out if I should eat or wait.
Edit: I find it creepy when couples are separated and they spend the whole time texting each other or looking at their phones waiting for a text.
There are some arguments here that go like "oh, how wrong and stupid people are" - but you have to turn it around to understand the situation. These young people are living in a modern surveillance society and they are learning their whole life that surveillance is normal - of course they adapt to their environment.
The "immature" mindset they develop is of course a mirror of the deep misantropic, paranoid and life-disrespecting mindset produced by the Leaders of Your Society (TM), that serves only the war industry, but creates more and more distrust, chaos and destruction everywhere on this planet - for some this might be a welcomed result.
This is an interesting study and our generation can learn a lot from it. It also shows why it is so dangerous to establish surveillance and control technologies everywhere like we do nowadays - kids will always do what their parents did.
I blame this on "Little Data," i.e. modern parenting. Many children grow up having their texts, call detail records, web searches, and GPS locations read by their parents, getting interrogated about them periodically. They learn that this is a normal/expected thing to do to people you care about.
Government surveillance is far removed from most people's realities.
Conversely, you old people grew up in a disconnected, technologically backwards society and you've learned your whole lives that electronic communication is something to be feared.
Sorry, you missed the topic here - it is about surveillance and control and abuse of powers. Nice try to put it "fear of technology" - too obvious and simplistic.
I leave my phone lying around, no security on it whatsoever, leave Facebook, my email, everything logged in on my laptop. My partner of 15 years (lived together for 7) is the same. We're in our early 30s.
I certainly have never had the urge to go through her stuff and I don't believe (although to be fair it's not something we've discussed) she's ever looked at mine either. As well as being a couple we're both individuals with our own lives and dealings and interests, and to be breathing down each others' necks 24/7 would imply a massive lack of trust. I genuinely don't get why being in a relationship should mean giving up privacy and personal space - it seems incredibly unhealthy to me.
Giving up privacy and personal space in a relationship IS unhealthy.
To feel that one has a right to search through one's spouses belongings is a sign of immaturity and insecurity. There's no way to have a healthy meaningful relationship with someone when one feels that way.
Because the people who do it don't think of it as giving up privacy and personal space. If your partner moved in with you, would you call that "giving up half your house"?
It'd be more interesting to ask the inverse question - asking someone if they think it's ok to track their partner could result in a very different answer to asking if they believe it's ok for their partner to track them.
How is this meaningful without knowing the survey questions or their context? If asked in isolation, what percentage would say that it is acceptable for their partner to track them?
43 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 89.4 ms ] thread"And 20% of those surveyed said women often said “no” to sexual activity when they meant “yes”, and 18% agreed if a woman was raped while affected by alcohol or drugs she was partly responsible."
Or because you were in a marked hardhat zone without a hardhat.
Designing properly ambiguous wording for surveys must be a lot of fun.
The problem with tracking quickly becomes apparent when you're on the wrong side of the fence. If a person honestly believe that it would be okay to track their partner, but not vice-versa that person is an asshole.
If I'm meeting up with him, he'll send me his location on when he's being super lazy just put on his tracker to make him easier to find. Sometimes .. he leaves it on forgetting to switch it off and I tell him to as it'll drain his battery. When you have trust, stuff like this doesn't come up in conversation at all. It's more of a 'what's mine is yours and do whatever...' BUT yes, tracking someone WITHOUT their consent, completely different story ... that's NOT right. Defo needs to be rephrased.
“In August the Victorian government announced religious instruction during school hours would be scrapped and replaced with education about building respectful relationships.”
That's about the only positive take-away from the article. All ministers responsible for education everywhere should follow suit.
EDIT: using punctuation is hard, man.
Again, this is not my theory, this is what anthropologists actually believe.
In the interest of giving both sides, there's a recent book, that I haven't read (yet), called Constant Battles, which disputes all of that.
Also: giving classes on this kind of thing solves nothing; see below.
Also: the upside of Religious Education is that it was practically a free period, at least where I'm from.
I don't necessarily "worry" about it as much as hold it up as proof that this stuff needs to be taught in the schools or where ever most effective.
the question I have is, where do they get the idea that this is acceptable? What are they teaching in schools?
I'm sure you could poll a cohort of <21s to tell you that thermonuclear obliteration is 'acceptable', if only because they've never actually thought about it or the consequences. That result wouldn't tell us the world at large is heading straight for nuclear war, it tells us our respondents are morons.
The topic at hand, paranoia, or at least distrustfulness, is practically defined by having an external locus of control.
While we're on the topic of trust, kids today aren't exactly treated with much trust. Are they even trusted to stay at home unattended without getting themselves in some accident? And then there's the whole system of school, which is specifically founded on not trusting children (to self-educate, which is what they're genetically programmed to do...). The implicit message they're receiving is that people are guilty until proven otherwise.
* Merrel et al, "How effective are school bullying intervention programs?"
* Smith et al, "The effectiveness of whole-school antibullying programs".
Not to mention all those ant-drug classes they have in America that don't work.
It's true for academic subjects too. The declining interest in science as people go through school is well-documented:
* Eccles et al, "Negative effects of traditional middle schools on students' motivation",
* Harter, "A new self-report scale of intrinsic versus extrinsic orientation in the classroom",
* Lepper et al, "Instrinsic and extrinsic motivational orientations in the classroom: Age differences and academic correlates",
which, together with this result:
Vedder-Weiss and Fortus, "Adolescent's declining motivation to learn science: Inevitable or not?",
proves that it's the schooling that's causing it, and not, say, a natural part of growing up: this last paper uses schools that don't teach you anything you don't want to learn (democratic schools).
(I think that compulsory, curriculum-based computer programming stuff should be kept out of schools for this reason, too.)
Since democratic schools are private schools, you could make the argument that there's a socioeconomic status thing involved, where rich people "are just smarter". I'd counter by saying that homeschoolers don't show any significant variation in academics w.r.t. wealth, and that I don't see any reason why it should be different for democratic schooling, which is practically group homeschooling.
> Uneducated about reality, as you would expect at that age
People would know more about the real world if they weren't stuck in a building all day.
Edit: My girlfriend and I have permission from each other to go through each other's phones/computers etc. and as a result of that we don't feel like the other person has anything to hide, and it brings us closer to each other. I have no interest in going through my girlfriend's phone/laptop, but if she refused to let me do that it would instantly bring up red flags that she doesn't trust me and that she can't be open with me. That's not the kind of relationship I'd like to be in.
Humans have a rare trait in being able to develop cyborg transparent interfaces with our tools. A hammer becomes your hand, as far as your brain is concerned, after you've used it long enough.
Phones and other technology do the same thing for our minds. The photos we snap but never review are memories we're trying to collect. Phone calls or IMs a better history of conversations we've had.
Someone else going through this technology w/o permission is like them having a way to psychically read your mind. Both are a violation of your self -- your identity, memories, what have you. It's a violation because just as we learn to use tools as physically indistinct appendages, so to do we use ways to capture our minds as indistinct appendages.
[0] - it happens, e.g. it's easy to accidentally mis-TAB when logging in to Facebook and have the password, appended to e-mail, saved in browser's auto-complete for login field.
We have friends who do the "Find My Friends" thing and we actually find the whole concept pretty creepy.
Realistically "are you home?" and "are you driving?" are the only two predicates I care about, but I can answer that from location.
After having location checking, the idea of initiating non-time sensitive communication without checking to see if it is in an appropriate location seems about as rude as asking a question of someone who is in mid sentence on a telephone.
There is no, why didn't you answer my text, I've been trying to figure out if I should eat or wait.
Edit: I find it creepy when couples are separated and they spend the whole time texting each other or looking at their phones waiting for a text.
The "immature" mindset they develop is of course a mirror of the deep misantropic, paranoid and life-disrespecting mindset produced by the Leaders of Your Society (TM), that serves only the war industry, but creates more and more distrust, chaos and destruction everywhere on this planet - for some this might be a welcomed result.
This is an interesting study and our generation can learn a lot from it. It also shows why it is so dangerous to establish surveillance and control technologies everywhere like we do nowadays - kids will always do what their parents did.
1968.
Government surveillance is far removed from most people's realities.
The simpsons has a famous quote for people like you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdozkeNqNQk
I certainly have never had the urge to go through her stuff and I don't believe (although to be fair it's not something we've discussed) she's ever looked at mine either. As well as being a couple we're both individuals with our own lives and dealings and interests, and to be breathing down each others' necks 24/7 would imply a massive lack of trust. I genuinely don't get why being in a relationship should mean giving up privacy and personal space - it seems incredibly unhealthy to me.
Giving up privacy and personal space in a relationship IS unhealthy.
To feel that one has a right to search through one's spouses belongings is a sign of immaturity and insecurity. There's no way to have a healthy meaningful relationship with someone when one feels that way.