And what are they?
FYI: Teaching children to live in fear (as you yourself clearly are) and to be afraid of strangers is wrong. You should instead be teaching them how to tell a good stranger from a bad one.
They’re in the rest of that sentence that you abruptly cut off while quoting, for some reason. You’re free to disagree, but leaving them out then acting like they aren’t there doesn’t feel like arguing in good faith.
> FYI: Teaching children to live in fear (as you yourself clearly are)
Furthermore, this is incredibly judgemental to lob at a (presumed) stranger. You shouldn’t assume someone’s life from a snippet on a comment on a random forum.
You whole argument could have been distilled without attacks to:
> Teaching children to live in fear and to be afraid of strangers is wrong. You should instead be teaching them how to tell a good stranger from a bad one.
I think a t least some of the intense polarization, "culture war" acrimony, paranoia, and institutional dysfunction we're seeing today is attributable to the coming of age of people who were raised this way.
I agree that I probably should have clarified (and have in a few sister threads, you can find it if curious), but I don't actually think it's 100% analogous to say that being cautious when talking to famous people is the same as "don't talk to strangers". There's a pretty huge power differential between a kid and someone that they really admire vs some random stranger, and there is probably at least some degree of selection bias of people who pursue positions of power and have the desire to abuse it. I don't have kids, but if I did I probably wouldn't let them hang around a lot of people who actively pursue power completely unsupervised, e.g. basically any politician, religious leaders, etc.
You can call it paranoia if you want, but I think it's just being aware of selection bias; I probably wouldn't let a kid into an Incel Support Group for the same reason, because there's going to be selection biases towards justifying horrible stuff, even if a vast majority of incels are just dorky dudes who probably wouldn't do anything inappropriate to a child.
Most famous people are just average humans, and are perfectly professional and courteous, and I feel like I did at least kind of mention that in my original post when I said that nothing bad happened to me, but I don't think that implies you just throw caution to the wind and just let kids reach out to every stranger they want. I also don't think it's leading to a moral decay to think that parents should supervise very young kids on the internet.
Well I don't (and can no longer) have kids so there's not much risk of me teaching children anything other than computer science at a school, and considering that I was the one sending the emails before, I don't think that I'm "living in fear".
I mostly agree though, I shouldn't fear-monger, most people don't suck. I guess I was just saying that because I've seen enough true-crime and creepy Hollywood casting couch and child exploitation that I just felt the need to put a bit of a disclaimer. Obviously those are generally outliers (that's why they're noteworthy enough to make into a documentary or something), but I do think it's probably a good idea to supervise/monitor kids' outgoing emails, especially very young kids.
I don't think it's "teaching them to live in fear" to give some very basic safety precautions, but I acknowledge that I didn't make that clear in the original post.