That Feeling that One Must Inevitably Pass the Torch

Calendars don't lie. I've already used up most of the 1,000 months I'm ever going to have on the planet.

As an older dad, I took quite an interest in Rikki Schlott’s New York Post article about her relationship with her 84-year old dad. Reading this caused me to pause and hope that I’ve helped to give my two daughters (both now in their mid-20's) the tools they need to thrive in this insane world. Rikki, BTW, is, at the age of 22, co-author of a best-selling new book on the scourge of cancel culture: The Canceling of the American Mind. An excerpt:

My dad’s breadth of life experience and wisdom woke me to the transience of today’s fads and fallacies. It’s hard to humor my peers who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings when my best friend remembers the plights of World War II. It’s impossible to flirt with socialist politics when my father recalls the rise and fall of the USSR. It’s hard to spend my days scrolling through TikTok when my dad is a living testament to the wisdom a lifetime of reading can foster.

Having an older father also means it’s difficult to swallow the victim mentality of many of my contemporaries. While Generation Z indulges in identity politics and intersectionality, it’s an attitude my father would never accept from me. He’s a self-made man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Now that he’s provided me with an education and life beyond what he could imagine growing up on a goose farm, I won’t rest until I make the most of all the opportunities I’ve been given and do him proud.

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Jordan Peterson: The Danger of Obsessing About Yourself

Jordan Peterson had a long and intense discussion with writer Helen Joyce about transgender ideology. It is a well-worth listening to the entire episode, including the discussions of social contagion, the reasons girls reject their own bodies, the disrespect shown to older women (by younger women) and the pervasive role of narcisism. Peterson, who has worked as a clinical psychologist, offers this advice for people who suffer from social anxiety. From my personal anecdotal experience, I think this is spot on and important to note:

Helen Joyce: And alongside that, that you must choose your identity off a list of dozens, and sometimes hundreds, that require the most intense, constant rumination and self-examination. I mean, I was talking to somebody just yesterday--who was telling me that who has this check sheet for how do I feel? ... But you were meant to be thinking all the time, like, how am I feeling right now? And it was, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how happy am I? This is all a terribly bad idea.

Jordan Peterson: Well, it's clearly bad. One of the things I learned when I was treating people who were socially anxious, I had a lot of anxious people in my, in my clinical practice, which is hardly surprising because that that's the kind of suffering that requires people to seek clinical intervention. Socially anxious people, when they go into a new social situation, think obsessively about how others are thinking about them. Yes. And so then they become self conscious often about bodily issues. But not only that, they might become self conscious about their lack of conversational ability, and the fact that they're not very interesting, and the fact that they're being evaluated by other people, it's a litany of obsessive thoughts. And you can, you might say, well, you can train people to stop thinking about themselves. But you can't stop people from thinking about something by telling them to stop thinking about something. But what you can train people to do is to think more about other people. And so one of the techniques that I used in my practice was okay, now, when you go into a social situation next time, like we'd go through the niceties of introducing yourself and making sure they knew your name, and get that ritualized, so that it was practiced and expert and therefore not a source of anxiety. But the next thing is, your job is to make the other person that you're talking to as comfortable as possible, to pay as much attention to them. And so we know that the more you think about yourself--this is literally true--there is no difference between thinking about yourself, and being miserable. They load on the same statistical axis. And so these kids that are constantly being tormented by 150 identities, that's a front not of freedom, but of utter chaos. And then asked to constantly reflect on their own state of emotional well being and happiness is the surest route to the kind of misery that's going to open them up to psychogenic epidemics. The clinical data on that are clear.

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The Biggest Dangers of Tribes

What should you make of the fact that you are passionate about your position on an issue?

Is that passion justified by real world facts and a careful and conscious cost/benefit analysis? Or did unconsciously adopt your position as a result of becoming a member of a tribe? Did social pressures and desires nullify your intellectual defenses to bullshit, allowing rickety beliefs to find a welcoming space in your head? Did you aggressively attack your new position, making sure that it is solid? Or did it slip in like the trojan horse after your sentries became completely distracted by their cravings to be liked (and not disliked) by others? After all, because called "inappropriate" "misguided," "a tool for the [bad people]" or "racist" hurts, especially when done in public arenas. Those slings and arrows take a toll and they have put Americas institutions at great risk. It takes a special person to be able to shake off those accusations and stay true your need to hyper-scrutinize all issues, especially your own position on those issues.

It takes courage and strength to constantly attack your own ideas and it needs to be constant because truth-seeking is never-ending work. And it's not enough to try as hard as you can to be skeptical of your own ideas, because we are blind to the problems with our own thought process.

We know this for sure, based on the work of many scientists who have studied the confirmation bias, including Jonathan Haidt:

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

From The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

You can't cure this problem alone. You need to expose yourself to viewpoints you find distasteful or even odious. That is the only solution because the confirmation bias is that strong. You cannot see the problem as long as you are clinging only to your favorite sources of information. You need quit being a coward and engage with people and ideas that challenge you. You need to visit websites and read books that you would rather not. That is your only chance to test your ideas, identify those that work and don't work. This need to constantly expose your thoughts to the marketplace of ideas was described with precision by John Stuart Mill (and see here). Recently, Jonathan Rauch has taken a deep dive on this challenge in his excellent book, The Constitution of Knowledge.

There will be many who read this who say "I'm not concerned because I am immune to both dumb things and the pressures of tribes." They are wrong to be complacent for two reasons.

Reason One: People think they are immune because they feel certain that they have things right. They feel this way even though ALL OF US change our opinions over time. We are guaranteed to change our views in the future just as we have in the past, but we don't remember how much we change over time.  We simply sit there smug and certain that we've got things figured out at each present moment. What is that feeling of certainty worth? Nothing, as explained by Robert Burton, in his book, On Being Certain.

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How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 26: The Magic of Tuna Acceleration and Workspaces

This is Chapter 26 of my advice to a hypothetical baby. And yes, what I'm really doing is acting out the time-travel fantasy of going back give myself some pointers on how to navigate life. If I only knew what I now know . . .  All of these chapters (soon to be 100) can be found here.

You are only 26 days old, but you will someday escape your crib and your room with the same aplomb with which you escaped your mother's womb. And at some point in your adventures as a bipedal ape, you might be lucky enough to see some fish. One thing that I always found amazing is how fast a fish can go from zero to some absurdly fast speed. It turns out that this was explained in Andy Clark's excellent book, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (1998). I had the opportunity to take four graduate seminars with Andy at Washington University and he excelled at filled our heads with non-stop counter-intuitive observations and explaining them in clear English. Here's how fish can take off like rockets:

The swimming capacities of many fishes, such as dolphins and bluefin tuna, are staggering. These aquatic beings far outperform anything that nautical science has so far produced. Such fish are both mavericks of maneuverability and, it seems, paradoxes of propulsion. It is estimated that the dolphin for example, is simply not strong enough l to propel itself at the speeds it is observed to reach. In attempting to unravel this mystery, two experts in fluid dynamics, the brothers Michael and George Triantafyllou, have been led ro an interesting hypothesis: that the extraordinary swimming efficiency of certain fishes is due to an evolved capacity to exploit and create additional sources of kinetic energy in the watery environment. Such fishes, it seems, exploit aquatic swirls, eddies, and vortices to " rurbocharge" propulsion and aid maneuverability. Such fluid phenomena sometimes occur naturally (e.g., where flowing water hits a rock). But the fish's exploitation of such external aids does not stop there. Instead, the fish actively creates a variety of vortices and pressure gradients (e.g. by flapping its tail) and then uses these to support subsequent speedy, agile behavior. By thus controlling and exploiting local environmental structure, the fish is able to produce fast starts and turns that make our ocean-going vessels look clumsy, ponderous, and laggardly. " Aided by a continuous parade of such vortices," Triantafyllou and Triantafyllou (1995, p. 69) point out," it is even possible for a fish's swimming efficiency to exceed 100 percent." Ships and submarines reap no such benefits: they treat the aquatic environment as an obstacle to be negotiated and do not seek to subvert it to their own ends by monitoring and massaging the fluid dynamics surrounding the hull.

The tale of the tuna reminds us that biological systems profit profoundly from local environmental structure. The environment is not best conceived solely as a problem domain to be negotiated. It is equally, and crucially, a resource to be factored into the solutions. This simple observation has, as we have seen, some far-reaching consequences. First and foremost, we must recognize the brain for what it is. Ours are not the brains of disembodied spirits conveniently glued into ambulant, corporeal shells of flesh and blood. Rather, they are essentially the brains of embodied agents capable of creating and exploiting structure in the world.

This passage brings me to today's advice: Don't just "Do," as Yoda suggests. Prepare your workspace and then "Do" with apparent super powers! Tuna prepare the nearby water by setting up their own currents before tapping into them. Ka-Bang!  Reminds me of the acceleration technique of the cartoon Roadrunner, but tuna acceleration is not fiction.

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