Heterodox Academy Offers Suggestions on How to Disagree Civilly

Heterodox Academy was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, Chris Martin, and Nicholas Rosenkranz

in reaction to their observations about the negative impact a lack of ideological diversity has had on the quality of research within their disciplines. What began as a website and a blog in September of 2015 — a venue for social researchers to talk about their work and the challenges facing their disciplines and institutions — soon grew into an international network of peers dedicated to advancing  the values of constructive disagreement and viewpoint diversity as cornerstones of academic and intellectual life.

All members of Heterodox Academy embrace a set of norms and values that they call “The HxA Way.

“I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.”

HxA offers a tipsheet on how to how to approach moral disagreements in constructive ways. HxA encourages us to "engage in open inquiry and constructive disagreement can use these strategies to build mutual understanding and have better conversations on difficult issues."

I highly recommend visiting this entire article, but in this short article I'm setting out the basic ideas:

  • Lower the perceived state of the disagreement or conflict
  • Don’t sling pejorative labels or assign bad motives
  • Agree upon facts first ("Then talk about what to do about it or how best to address it. Start small and build out.")
  • Lower a disagreement’s visibility ("In public environments, including digital forums, there is much more pressure to conform to one’s group and to virtue signal. It is also far more embarrassing to admit you were wrong to the whole world than to a single person. People are generally much more reasonable in more intimate settings.")
  • Don’t demand too much from the conversation ("In cases of deep disagreement, the initial and primary goal should be simply to clearly understand where the other is coming from and to be well-understood oneself.")
  • Appeal to identity, values, narratives,and frames of reference
  • Speak to people in their own language ("people become much more willing to reconsider or even change their views and to accept controversial facts when presented to them in terms of their own values, commitments, and frames of reference")

The final point of this HxA tip sheet is to "Understand that it’s worth the effort." HxA elaborates:

If you do a deep dive into a radically alternative worldview with an open mind – that mind will be blown. The exploration might, at times, be disorienting, frustrating, or triggering – but you will learn a lot. You might not abandon your own commitments, but you’ll definitely come to see things in a dramatically different way. At the very least, you will discover that your rivals have legitimate reasons for holding the positions they hold on many issues. That in itself – really internalizing that – can be huge.

HxA position is that they prize pluralism and value constructive disagreement. They offer these additional five bullet points for accomplishing these goals:

  • Make your case with evidence.
  • Be intellectually charitable ("However, one should always try to engage with the strongest form of a position one disagrees with (that is, ‘steel-man’ opponents rather than ‘straw-manning’ them). One should be able to describe their interlocutor’s position in a manner they would, themselves, agree with (see: ‘Ideological Turing Test’)")
  • Be intellectually humble ("Take seriously the prospect that you may be wrong")
  • Be constructive.("The objective of most intellectual exchanges should not be to “win,” but rather to have all parties come away from an encounter with a deeper understanding of our social, aesthetic and natural worlds.")
  • Be yourself. This is a critically important point. Standing up to outgroups, in-groups and organizations sometimes takes considerable courage:

At Heterodox Academy, we believe that successfully changing unfortunate dynamics in any complex system or institution will require people to stand up — to leverage, and indeed stake, their social capital on holding the line, pushing back against adverse trends and leading by example. This not only has an immediate and local impact, it also helps spread awareness, provides models for others to follow and creates permission for others to stand up as well. This is why Heterodox Academy does not allow for anonymous membership; membership is a meaningful commitment precisely because it is public.

HxA offers many additional Tools and Resources for engaging in Heterodox Conversations. This is an excellent site to visit to prepare for conversations that might turn contentious.

Continue ReadingHeterodox Academy Offers Suggestions on How to Disagree Civilly

ACLU Attorney Joins a Nationwide Effort to Ban Abigail Shrier’s Book: Irreversible Damage

In today's WSJ, Abigail Shrier describes the environment into which she released her book, Irreversible Damage:

Social contagions exist, and teen girls are particularly susceptible to them. The book takes a hard look at whether the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls is yet another social contagion to befall girls who, in another era, might have fallen prey to anorexia or bulimia . . .Many transgender adults, including some I interviewed for the book, agree that teen girls are undergoing medical transition too fast with too little oversight. Others disagree and have written books. Amid a sea of material unskeptically promoting medical transition for teenage girls, there’s one book that investigates this phenomenon and urges caution. That is the book the activists seek to suppress.

The WSJ article is titled:  "Does the ACLU Want to Ban My Book?"

Despite the importance of Shrier's book, it is being treated as though it an attempt to harm teenage girls when it is actually providing critically important information aimed at protecting teenaged girls as well as encouraging a much needed conversation.

There is nothing hateful in suggesting that most teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression, or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria. And yet, here we are.

Target removed Irreversible Damage from its shelves this week, until it received an uproar from Twitter supporters of Shrier's right to promote her concerns. This is despite the fact that Robin DiAngelo's blatantly racist book, White Fragility, has been freely available at Target. Amazon has refused to allow Schrier's publisher to advertise her book on its site despite the fact that Irreversible Damage is the #1 book in several categories at Amazon.  Newspapers and magazines are refusing to review Irreversible Damage:

In any case, every major newspaper and legacy magazine summarily turned interested journalists down. Whether they would have reviewed my book favorably or unfavorably, I have no idea—and it doesn’t matter. Kirkus, which reviews 10,000 titles per year, including self-published and obscure works—pretended my book didn’t exist. Its editors, too busy heaping praise on the Trans Teen Survival Guide, When Aiden Became a Brother, Jack (Not Jackie), Rethinking Normal, and of course, Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out.

Two days ago, Chase Strangio of the "free speech" ACLU Tweeted that Shrier's book should be censored.

This is the sort of Tweet on posts when one has not actually read Shrier's book.  I am halfway thru her book (and I had seen her lengthy interview with Joe Rogan). Strangio's Tweet completely mischaracterized Shrier's book, which shows absolute deference to the personal decisions of transgender adults. She urges that they should all receive the full protection under the law.

In response to Strangio's outrageously false Tweet, Glenn Greenwald writes:

It is nothing short of horrifying, but sadly also completely unsurprising, to see an ACLU lawyer proclaim his devotion to “stopping the circulation of [a] book” because he regards its ideas as wrong and dangerous. There are, always have been, and always will be people who want to stop books from being circulated: by banning them, burning them, pressuring publishing houses to rescind publishing contracts or demanding corporations refuse to sell them. But why would someone with such censorious attitudes, with a goal of suppressing ideas with which they disagree, choose to go to work for the ACLU of all places?

As far the claim that Shrier is engaging in "hate speech," consider this excerpt from her recent article at Quillette "Gender Activists Are Trying to Cancel My Book. Why is Silicon Valley Helping Them?"

Sean Scott, a member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), heard of my book in the fall, and shared what he knew with other science writers. He noted that Nature Communications had published a study “to investigate whether autistic traits were elevated in transgender and gender-diverse individuals.” (To no one’s surprise, they are: Autistic children develop all kinds of strongly expressed fixations about the world they perceive.) Then he wrote: “This, along with [Wall Street Journal] columnist [Abigail Shrier’s] recent book on the onset of transgenderism amongst young girls… should hopefully shed some overdue light on a very sensitive, politically charged topic that potentially carries lifelong medical consequences.” Sound like hate speech? I didn’t think so.

This saga will continue with the political Left increasingly embracing its new role as the anti-free-speech party.  The Left is showing an increased willingness cancel good-hearted people based on false pretenses and an exuberant willingness to peddle faux science at least as well as any nut job on the political Right. And perhaps even better than the political Right.

As noted by Shrier in Quillette, she has received much support from parents who are seeing signs of transgender social contagion in their daughters.  The sought to share this information with other concerned parents. GoFundMe quickly shut down these efforts:

Parents who’ve lived through this social contagion—who’d seen it strike daughters who’d never before exhibited signs of gender dysphoria in childhood—became so alarmed at suppression efforts that they dug into their own pockets to promote my work. That’s how I became one of the few authors in the world to have her own billboard in West Hollywood. Other parents started an account on GoFundMe, a website that facilitates fundraising efforts for all sorts of causes. GoFundMe closed the account. The parents started another campaign. GoFundMe closed that account, too. If a mentally fragile 18-year-old wants help removing her healthy breasts, GoFundMe will happily facilitate it. (The site currently hosts over 35,000 campaigns to pay for female “top surgery” alone.) But if you believe your daughter has become caught up in a movement that will leave her angry, regretful, maimed, and sterile, you’re out of luck.

This saga will continue with the political Left increasingly embracing its new role as the anti-free-speech party.  The Left is showing an increased willingness cancel good-hearted people based on false pretenses and an exuberant willingness to peddle faux science at least as well as any nut job on the political Right. And perhaps even better than the political Right.

Where do you draw your line? When are you going muster the courage to speak out against the excesses of Woke culture? Is it when an Attorney for the ACLU actively seeks to ban an important well-researched book by a good-hearted woman? Yes, I'm referring to the ACLU, whose core principle is advocating for free speech. Or is it when there is a concerted nationwide effort (including Amazon, Target and GoFundMe) to refuse to allow discussion of blatantly anti-scientific claims that endanger millions of teenage girls in the U.S.? Not long ago, only 1 in 10,000 people were diagnosed with sexual disphoria. Are we really willing to stand by when 2% of teenagers have now been convinced by activists on social media and disreputable profit-taking healthcare providers that they were born in the wrong bodies?

Continue ReadingACLU Attorney Joins a Nationwide Effort to Ban Abigail Shrier’s Book: Irreversible Damage

The Importance of Exposing Yourself to the Viewpoints and People that Make You Uncomfortable

In order to avoid peanut allergies, we need to make sure we are exposed to peanuts at a critical window.

[E]arly exposure to peanuts produced an 81% reduction in peanut allergy among high-risk children, deemed so because they had already tested positive for other food allergies and/or had eczema. More than 600 children ages 4 to 11 months either consumed, or strictly avoided, peanuts until age 5. Of the children who avoided peanuts, 17% had a peanut allergy by age 5, compared to only 3% in the peanut-consuming group.

In order to maintain a healthy well-balanced intellect, we need to repeatedly expose ourselves to people and viewpoints we find uncomfortable. We need to do this with an open mind, putting their best foot forward. What uncomfortable people and viewpoints have you intentionally exposed yourself to during the past year?  If you disagree with these people and viewpoints, are you able to give them their best foot forward before convincing others that your position is superior?

Continue ReadingThe Importance of Exposing Yourself to the Viewpoints and People that Make You Uncomfortable

Bill Maher Discusses Dangers Awaiting the Democratic Party Despite Joe Biden’s Victory

IMO, Bill Maher is spot-on here. If the Democrats (and their supporters) don't find the courage to speak out about these excesses of the Woke fringe of the political Left, they won't even be able to win the office of dog catcher next election--we just witnessed how badly Democrats were hurt in lower tier federal and state elections from coast to coast.

xv

In a year Democrats hoped to capture the Senate and bolster their House majority, the loss of so much ground in Congress has touched off an intense volley of finger-pointing, insults and plotting by each feuding faction to keep the other out of party leadership posts. The familiar ideological rift between the left and the center-left is intensifying after an election in which the message sent by voters was so muddled: embracing Joe Biden while spurning so many down-ballot Democrats.

Joe Biden would have lost in a truly massive landslide except that Trump was the worst candidate who has ever run for the office of President. Biden (for whom I voted) should have won by at least 90/10 over such an arrogant proudly-ignorant self-absorbed bully, yet almost half of our country voted against Biden. As it was, had merely 200,000 people in key states swapped their votes, Trump would have been reelected by a "landslide" the equivalent of the "landslide" Biden's supporters are currently proclaiming. We can't depend on the Republicans ever again choosing such a bad candidate. This bodes terribly for 2022 as indicated (in Maher's video) by Abigail Spanberger (U.S House of Rep-VA).

Here's an inconvenient fact: Many Republicans were voting against the Democrats, not for Trump, and not because "they are all racists."  If you don't believe this, it is because you have been unwilling to listen to real life Republicans who live and work in your community. It's time for all of us to do some serious soul searching. We need to confidently reassert evidence-based principles that have largely (though admittedly imperfectly) worked over time: It is a good thing to reward hard work and competence. It's critically important to set aside our feelings and self-critically get the facts correct before we discuss any political issue. It is absurd to loudly proclaim, contrary to strong evidence, that every "white" person is a "racist." It is unhinged to argue that police should be "abolished" or "defunded" in light the inevitable consequences of defunding, especially on poor communities (who largely want more police presence, not less). Here's a recent crime report from Minnesota, which actively defunded its police:

Homicides in Minneapolis are up 50 percent, with nearly 75 people killed across the city so far this year. More than 500 people have been shot, the highest number in more than a decade and twice as many as in 2019. And there have been more than 4,600 violent crimes — including hundreds of carjackings and robberies — a five-year high.
Do the Democrats really want to take back some seats in 2022?  If so, we need to have the courage to speak out against the sanctimonious left fringe, which excels at making cartoons out of complex individual people by jamming them into identity-silos and rigging public speech with dozens of hair-triggers.

Most of us recognize Wokeness to be a terrible foundation for collaborating with each other to run our country, but we are hesitant to speak out because we might be called names by the fringe left. It often feels uncomfortable to speak up because the Woke are so well embedded in many of America's primary sense-making institutions, including universities, media and political entities.  It will all be much easier if we encourage each other to start publicly saying what almost all of us are privately thinking.  It's time to get to work.

Continue ReadingBill Maher Discusses Dangers Awaiting the Democratic Party Despite Joe Biden’s Victory