This pyramid is an elegant response to shitstorms of ad hominem attacks.
If your response is "this pyramid sucks," it's especially for you.
Credit for this meme goes to Paul Graham, a computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author.
Janathan Haidt, writing at his new Substack:
In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).
Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them.
See also, this article discussing (among other things) The Coddling of the American Mind, by Haidt and Lukianoff.
I've sometimes written about Hannah Arendt's idea of the "banality of evil," the idea that the lack of thought can be far more dangerous than evil intentions. And see here. BTW, it turns out that Adolf Eichmann, Arendt's Exhibit 1, was not a good example of this alleged lack of evil intentions, based on recent revelations.*
Here's a related idea: the problem with stupidity. I am bit uneasy with that word, because it is often used as a pejorative and connotes willful ignorance, ignorance for which someone has made conscious choices to put themselves into that state of ignorance. I would have preferred to simply use "ignorance" to express the idea that someone lacks the necessary information to make decisions that further human flourishing. Another related idea is the Dunning-Kruger effect:
a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills.But back to "stupidity." As described by Dr. Peter McCullough in a recent article, Dietrich Bonhoeffer discussed individual and social damage caused by stupidity. First, McCullough's description of Bonhoeffer:
In 1943, the Lutheran pastor and member of the German resistance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was arrested and incarcerated in Tegel Prison. There he meditated on the question of why the German people—in spite of their vast education, culture, and intellectual achievements—had fallen so far from reason and morality. He concluded that they, as a people, had been afflicted with collective stupidity (German: Dummheit).
He was not being flippant or sarcastic, and he made it clear that stupidity is not the opposite of native intellect. On the contrary, the events in Germany between 1933 and 1943 had shown him that perfectly intelligent people were, under the pressure of political power and propaganda, rendered stupid—that is, incapable of critical reasoning.
What follows are a few excerpts from Bonhoeffer's writings on stupidity:
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than wickedness. Evil can be protested against, exposed, and, if necessary, it can be prevented by force. Evil always harbors the germ of self-destruction by inducing at least some uneasiness in people. We are defenseless against stupidity. Nothing can be done to oppose it, neither with protests nor with violence. Reasons cannot prevail. Facts that contradict one's prejudice simply don't need to be believed, and when they are inescapable, they can simply be brushed aside as meaningless, isolated cases.
In contrast to evil, the stupid person is completely satisfied with itself. When irritated, he becomes dangerous and may even go on the attack. More caution is therefore required when dealing with the stupid than with the wicked. Never try to convince the stupid with reasons; it's pointless and dangerous.
To understand how to deal with stupidity, we must try to understand its nature. This much is certain: it is not essentially an intellectual, but a human defect. There are people who are intellectually agile who are stupid, while intellectually inept people may be anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in certain situations.
Today I posted the following on my Facebook account:
I often post quotes, article excerpts or videos featuring the writings or conversation of others. I post these because I find them interesting and, sometimes, inspiring. Quite often, people respond in the comments by pointing out that that person once did something they disapprove of. They often write something like "I don't like that person."
I don't understand this way of thinking. There are many brilliant but flawed people out there. In fact, each of us can see one of those significantly flawed people in the mirror every morning. When I share information on FB, it is because I find the information interesting. I am not saying "This is a perfectly well-adjusted person who is always correct and who has never done anything I would ever question." For instance, there are severely flawed artists (e.g., Michael Jackson) whose work I admire greatly. Same thing with writers, podcasters, politicians and activists. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Is this a problem? Hell, yes. Was he also brilliant? Did his genius help establish this amazing (though flawed) country you call home? Absolutely. When I celebrate Jefferson's amazing accomplishments am I trying to say it's OK to own slaves? Some people apparently think so, because they've been renaming schools that bore Jefferson's name. This is performative, not serious thinking.
All of the people I find interesting are flawed. I am flawed, you are flawed. People of prominence often stumble in big public ways. If you've never gone out into the world to attempt something brave and ambitious, you are flawed in that way too. Can we have an understanding, then, that I am already aware that everyone I mention in my posts is a flawed human being, and many of them have fucked up more than once? Sometimes they've fucked up in intensely cringe-worthy ways. Many of them have fucked up, realized they've fucked up and already admitted that they've fucked up. Pot shots are especially strange in those situations. When you watch a movie, do you sit there obsessing that some of the actors are personally flawed human beings? Or do you enjoy the movie on its own merits? Why do you give your favorite actors a pass?
I don't share information about people BECAUSE they are flawed. Rather, I am sharing their work and observations because I have found that work to be interesting or admirable. I work hard to try to make sense of an extremely complex world and my thought process never stops evolving. I often disagree with things I have stated in the past and you have too. We do this all the time and there is no way to stop doing this. That's how people think and that is why we have conversations--to help each other when we fall off the tracks.
It is the easiest, lowest and most ignorant form of criticism to sit back and point out people's imperfections. This insidious pot shot form of ad hominem is ubiquitous on FB. I assure you that I could engage in taking pot shots at others every hour of every day, with very little effort, but it would do nothing to encourage meaningful conversation or human flourishing.
Matt Stoller offers this excellent presentation of the commonly used fallacy of confusing correlation for causation:
For years, we’ve been told that while drinking too much is bad for your health, having just a glass of wine with dinner, as the French do, can be good for your heart. And many studies do indeed show such an association. But what we’re discovering is that this correlation is an illusion. In fact people who drink a small amount of wine every night are healthier, but only because it means they aren’t drinking soda. Even small amounts of alcohol are bad for you, but as academics are coming to understand, if you drink a glass of wine every evening, you also tend to exercise, eat fruits and vegetables, and refrain from smoking. And it is those habits, not the wine, that improve health.
This logical fallacy is known as confusing correlation with causation, or assuming that because A happened and then B happened, that A caused B. The media loves these kinds of associations, because they seem correct, but they are often just coincidence, or a result of a variable that’s not being observed. Sometimes correlations are silly, like saying that “there are more sick people at hospitals, therefore hospitals cause sickness.” They can even be ridiculous; one famous study found that shark attacks are common on beaches with more ice cream sales, the theory being that sharks like to eat people full of ice cream.
Every aspiring law student encounters this fallacy; it’s fundamental in law to understand when something is causal vs coincidental or associative. It’s such a commonly taught error to avoid that it was the basis for one of the first episodes of the famous show The West Wing, an episode named “Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc” after the latin phrase describing this fallacy. Lawyers understand the difference between correlation and causation. So do academics. An entire generation of would-be lawyers who watched the West Wing understand it. It’s not a mystery.