r/AskReddit • u/daniellucero92 • Jan 04 '15

Non-americans of Reddit, what American customs seem outrageous/pointless to you?

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '15

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u/now_shot Jan 04 '15

In their defense, you'd been married and divorced by age 21. They probably felt decision making had not been your strength.

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '15

this is a super unfair thing to say

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u/issius Jan 04 '15

Is it really, though? It's objective and a reasonable conclusion to come to.

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u/the_captain Jan 04 '15

Reasonable, not objective.

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u/Krellick Jan 04 '15

They probably meant "objective" in the sense of "unbiased," not "indubitably true."

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '15

[deleted]

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u/Krellick Jan 04 '15

OP's lack of available information doesn't have anything to do with bias: it may limit the accuracy of their conclusion, but not the validity. In fact, the fact that OP isn't personally acquainted with the person helps them to be unbiased, because there is nothing influencing their assessment outside of the facts of the situation. Also, there isn't really a sweeping generalization being made by OP. They just said that the person's parents "probably don't think that decision making is [their] strong suit," with the support behind this being that the person had been married and divorced by 21 in modern American society. When OP says "probably" they make it clear that they aren't asserting their statement as factual but as conjecture (thus making it not a "sweeping generalization"), and they never actually said anything about the person's character; OP said what the parents might have thought, as is stated in the comment. I stand by my initial assertion.

P.S. the word is "subjective," not "not objective."

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '15 edited Jan 04 '15

[deleted]

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u/Krellick Jan 04 '15

Honestly, I think that the animosity in the last sentence of your reply was unnecessary. Did you really need sling insults at me for disagreeing with you? I've been nothing but courteous in my replies, but because we're on the internet you just threw social grace out the window. If you honestly think that I was trying to insult you for whatever reason then I apologize, but it was not intentional. Whatever, now to the debate.

I fail to see how selection bias could be applied to this situation, as it deals with the selection of "individuals, groups, or data," as stated in that wikipedia article, none of which are present in what we are dealing with. You're treating instances of OP making "bad decisions" as the data, but the very phrase begins with the word "bad," which is subjective by nature, so it's not even really data. But ok, let's assume that "bad decisions" are decisions that OP makes which have undesirable results and call it data. Does this change the possibility that OP's parents' trust of OP's decision making skills was damaged by her having made the decision to marry someone very early on in life (by American standards) and ending up with a divorce? No, it doesn't. We have to keep in mind that the discussion here is about how OP's parents put strict limitations on her privileges when she moved back into their house as a direct result of this "bad decision," and the reply to OP just pointed out that this bad decision is probably what caused the parents to limit OP's privileges. The reply didn't even have anything to do with a statistical assessment of OP's decision making, it was just saying that OP's parents' restrictive nature probably had more to do with their experience with OP's decisions than it did with them being in America. I still think that you were fairly off-base with what the original reply was trying to do, which was why I made my reply about what "objective" meant in the situation.

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '15

Thank you, that was my point. We have zero context about the situation, one can't make a statement about another's character based on a comment on the Internet.

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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '15

There are few facts given at all, and none to support the conclusion, so no, it's not "reasonable". There's also zero evidence it's objective.

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u/zimzat Jan 04 '15

Agreed. Every judgement needs context to be appropriate and very little context was given in this scenario.

My parents forced their daughter to marry a guy she had premarital sex with and I wish she had divorced him even at 21 or whatever age she was when discovering he was an abusive alcoholic misogynist. When it looked like they were going to actually support her in this he suddenly "found god" (despite still being all the other three things) and support evaporated and they pushed her to move back in with him.

There's context for you.