What have I failed to engage with? I am looking at this from the perspective of ordinary people who live, visit, or do business in that region. While sex tourism is a problem, I believe those ordinary people outnumber the sex tourists. I understand that the context in which you encounter SE Asia may be mostly reports of sex tourism. For me, it is not--it's just another place I've had meetings. I think sex tourism there is around the same level as something like the opiate epidemic in the USA--something most people are aware of, but not something that directly touches most people's lives. There are many poor people, and there's also an educated professional class. There's little "tech" by the standards of California venture capitalists, but lots of manufacturing.
This exchange began when you posted a comment that I suspect caused some pain to a guy who (we have no good reason to doubt) was engaged in a loving relationship with someone from that region. Now, you've just said that your viewpoint is better than mine, by that specific standard. How do you make that consistent?
If I said that it was "entirely reasonable" to suspect that the black shoppers were thieves, on the basis of your Bayesian statistics, then I suspect you would call me a racist. I think you would be right. Where does the analogy fail here? It's wrong even though they really are more likely to be shoplifters, if we do statistics considering nothing but the color of their skin. That correlation by itself is not a reason to act, before considering the size of the correlation, and the social consequences to the group that you're about to harm.
If you see a post like his again, then you could reply "They are probably thinking of sex tourism. That's a bad problem in the region, which then also casts a hurtful shadow on any relationship between a local woman and foreign man. I hope any foreign man who dates there does so with respect for this problem." Why not?
This exchange began when you posted a comment that I suspect caused some pain to a guy who (we have no good reason to doubt) was engaged in a loving relationship with someone from that region. Now, you've just said that your viewpoint is better than mine, by that specific standard. How do you make that consistent?
If I said that it was "entirely reasonable" to suspect that the black shoppers were thieves, on the basis of your Bayesian statistics, then I suspect you would call me a racist. I think you would be right. Where does the analogy fail here? It's wrong even though they really are more likely to be shoplifters, if we do statistics considering nothing but the color of their skin. That correlation by itself is not a reason to act, before considering the size of the correlation, and the social consequences to the group that you're about to harm.
If you see a post like his again, then you could reply "They are probably thinking of sex tourism. That's a bad problem in the region, which then also casts a hurtful shadow on any relationship between a local woman and foreign man. I hope any foreign man who dates there does so with respect for this problem." Why not?