Stealth Editing and Moral Purity

Stealth editing is happening on a regular basis. It should NEVER happen. Further, anyone who examines Matt Taibbi's positions on major political issues should immediately notice that he leans to the "Left," lining up well with the positions taken by most "Left" leaning people three years ago. But that is not good enough in this era of required genuflection to the dominant tribe and anal retentive moral purity. We can't have people who fail to line up perfectly with our tribe on ALL issues. If you are not perfectly with us, you are perfectly against us!

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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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The Most Important Thing You’ll Discover in Your Journal

Have you kept a journal for a long time? I wrote a lot in my pen & ink journal for decades. I'm now 66, and looking back, there are two things that are rather stunning:

1. There are some things that seemed very important to me back when I wrote about them, but I don't remember them at all. That amazes me, because I wrote about a person or event in some detail. If you had asked me back then whether I would always remember that person or event I would have quickly responded "yes." It doesn't happen all the time. For most things, my journal revives a memory that is still in my brain intact or it offers me details that I don't remember, even though I have some memory.

2. I have changed a LOT over the years. Some of my observations about the world, the things I believed with certitude, have changed dramatically. In fact, some of my journal writings are cringe-worthy, making me wonder "How could I have been so certain about that when it is clearly so untrue?" If I time travelled back to 1980, for instance, my 1980 self might even bristle about some of the things that I now believe. That is the nature of "truth." It is always evolving, even in ourselves. It is a constant work in progress, even in ourselves, no matter how hard we try to get things right and no matter how sure we are about things. Certitude is only an emotion and it very often misleads us. These observations are critically important to me--they some of the reasons that I am so much opposed to censorship. Truth constantly evolves in all of us and we need each other because all of us, some of the time, fall off the tracks and need course correction. No one has ever had it right all along. In short, no one is equipped to declare the "truth" for the rest of us. To believe that would be supremely ignorant. We need free speech, including wide-open speech that can seem offensive and even odious, to test each other, so that we can make figure things out. And the only option to being for free speech is to be pro-censorship. The only option to free speech is to be authoritarian, to relish in the arrogant and narcissistic exercise of power over others. I trust absolutely no one to be the censor of others, not even myself. Truth-seeking is not possible in the non-stop society-wide churning of ideas over time.

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