Other People’s Emotions

I periodically need to remind myself of this. Sometimes, the angst gets a bit thick in a confusing way and this is the problem, es explained by Oliver Burkeman:

[Other people’s emotions aren’t ultimately your problem. This phrase winds some people up, because they worry it means carte blanche to be a jerk to others – to treat them like dirt, then saunter away, complacently reassuring yourself that you needn’t take responsibility for the emotions you just triggered. But I don’t think that’s what it means. I think it means that at the end of the day, it’s a fool’s errand to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK. Taken at face value, the information that someone is upset because you’re not doing what they wanted you to do is just that: a report on the state of their emotional weather. It doesn’t inherently implicate you at all. You might have good reason to do whatever you can to improve their weather in this case. But then again, you might not; it might be one of those cases where they’re just going to have to deal with it without you. As a factual matter, all callousness aside, the problem belongs to them. Allow other people to have their own problems!

And of course it turns out, time after time, that the people you thought would be furious with you… aren’t. You take some decision to use your time in a way that seems likely to invite anger or disappointment from someone else – yet the anger or disappointment never materialises. People find some other way to deal with the situation. Or they’re too wrapped up in their own troubles to be thinking of you at all. Whereupon you realise, with a start, that you were always somewhat freer than you believed to do what you wanted with your life. You only ever needed to face the consequences – and half the time, there weren’t even going to be any serious ones.

The above quote is from a mass-emailing - I don't see a link to an article. Here's Oliver Burkeman's postings.

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The Main Function of Formidable Human Brains is Not Truth-Seeking: The Defense of Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism

Notice how Greg Lukianoff distinguishes between the free speech issues and the plagiarism issues in which "smart" people at Harvard, pundits and media are using their formidable intellectual training to generate endless streams of bullshit.

I agree completely with Lukianoff who offers several valuable resources for reforming financially-bloated ideology-permeated elite colleges.

Excerpt:

Once Gay resigned, we then saw people like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and others (including the Associated Press, with its coverage being mocked for its original headline, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism”), pointing the finger at racism and right-wing animus rather than on the real problem: Harvard itself, and our institutions of higher learning as a whole.

In my and Rikki Schlott’s book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” we outline a fourth “Great Untruth” (adding to the first three Jonathan Haidt and I described in “The Coddling of the American Mind”) which is that “bad people only have bad opinions.” This is the foundational assumption of what we call the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, the method by which cancelers on the political Left shut down arguments. By declaring someone a “conservative,” a “right winger,” — or, if you REALLY want them to be ignored, “far right,” “fascist,” or, my new favorite, “Neo-confederate” — whether they actually are conservative or not, they are also declaring that they are evil and therefore incapable of being correct. This form of non-argumentation, which I have dubbed “fasco-casting”, along with the political Right’s Efficient Rhetorical Fortress tactics (which similarly use labels like “liberal” and “woke” to automatically dismiss counterarguments) is a near-ubiquitous anti-intellectual habit these days.

Research has demonstrated that the brain is not primarily a truth-seeking organ. It can seek truth, but that is much more likely to happen in specialized environments where enlightenment principles prevail, for instance the type of environment where disciplined scientists and engineers work together to create things that really work in the real world.

Out in the wild, the real world, where most of us spend most of our time, brains are mostly used as PR departments, generating "reasons" for doing what we want to do based on our emotions.  Lukianoff offers several resources for exploring this counter-intuitive finding:

The biggest problem with smart people is that they’re incredibly good at using their prefrontal cortices to rationalize what they want to believe in the first place. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and one you can observe yourself right now. Are you inclined to agree with me here? If so, you’re already forming rationalizations about why I’m correct. If you’re inclined to disagree, you’re reading this with an eye for poking holes in everything I’m saying.

But it is a serious problem, summarized well by another Substack, The Prism:

“The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies, such as Taber & Lodge (2006), Stanovich et al. (2012), and Joslyn & Haider-Markel (2014). These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle, and since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can’t be a result of greater understanding…

Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Continue ReadingThe Main Function of Formidable Human Brains is Not Truth-Seeking: The Defense of Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism

The Modern Destruction of Romance?

Have we convinced our young adults to give up on romance? Freya India thinks so and "It’s tragic, all of this. Tragic because it’s putting us on a trajectory to miss out on what’s actually meaningful." Her evidence? See the following excerpt for some and read her entire article for a lot more:

Gen Z are dating less. Having less sex. Settling for situationships that are empty and meaningless. And I think a major part of this is that human connection comes with a high level of risk. Among young men, for example, I’d say this risk-aversion is most obvious in fear of rejection. A recent survey found that almost 45% of men aged 18 to 25 have never approached a woman in person. Another Pew Survey found that half of single men between 18 and 30 are voluntarily single, which some suggest is in part because of fear.

But I think young women are also risk-averse about relationships. We are naturally more risk-averse, for a start, and an even higher number of women are voluntarily single. But our risk-aversion plays out differently. Most obvious to me is the way we talk about relationships, the advice young women give each other, the therapy-speak and feminist clichés that I think often cloak a deep fear of hurt and vulnerability. . . . Social media is full of young women warning each other and listing out red flags and reasons why you should dump him or dodge commitment. He compliments you a lot? Love-bombing. Says I miss you too soon? Run. Approaches you in person? Predator. It’s all so cynical. It’s all about how not to catch feelings; ways not to get attached; how “you’re not gonna get hurt if you have another man waiting”! We blunt romance and passion with this constant calculation of risk, this paranoid scanning for threats, and by holding back to avoid being hurt. We encourage each other to be emotionally absent, unfazed, uncaring. We even call it empowerment! It’s not. It’s neuroticism. I think we are a generation absolutely terrified of getting hurt and doing all we can to avoid it.

Jonathan Haidt is also impressed with India's analysis:

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The Lies that Destroy Institutions

Do you ever wonder what is keeping you from saying the simple, good-hearted and obvious statement: "All Lives Matter"? It's the modern version of woke totalitarianism. Through the use of lies and cancel culture, it is destroying most of America's institutions.

Michael Shellenberger, author of "Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions. It's time for counter-Wokeism."

Investigative reporters have exposed a pattern of plagiarism by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, that directly violates the university’s policy. . . .

The first salient feature of the above episodes is the willingness of institutional leaders to lie about what they are doing. The first response from Harvard’s Board of Directors was to deny that President Gay had committed any instance plagiarism and to threaten the New York Post with a lawsuit if it reported the opposite of that. The New York Times similarly lied about the op-ed piece it had published and effectively asked the oped page editor to lie about his departure. And similarly, the AAA falsely claimed that the anthropologists who wanted to discuss biological sex on a conference panel had not accurately represented their topic.

In each case, the institutional leaders lied in order to cover up unethical behavior. Harvard was covering up both the plagiarism of its president and the unwillingness of Harvard to do anything about it. The New York Times misrepresented the substance of the op-ed in order to disavow it and, perhaps, to justify forcing out the op-ed page editor. And the AAA lied about what the dissident anthropologists did in order to justify its blatant censorship.

And those lies and unethical behaviors all rest upon a set of underlying lies. Harvard lied when it claimed that it had selected its president on the basis of her qualifications, even calling Gay a “scholar’s scholar” despite her having a below-average scholarly record. The New York Times and the Harvard president, when she was still the Dean of Arts and Sciences, had been misrepresenting Black Lives Matter protests as peaceful and driven by a genuine epidemic of police killings. And AAA’s cancelation of the panel was based on the organization’s claim that biological sex is a spectrum rather than dimorphic. All of this lying is characteristic of totalitarian regimes...

Woke totalitarianism advances values that are contrary to the ones it espouses. It claims to be opposed to racism and sexism and yet promotes them through perpetuating the idea that people, by dint of their race or sex, are either victims or oppressors. It claims to be liberatory and empowering of those individuals designated victims while promoting the idea that they cannot escape their victim identity. And Woke totalitarianism promotes the notion that it is wise and truthful despite promoting such monstrous lies."

What is the solution? It's not going to be pleasant or easy, but we need to confront those who are tearing down our institution with their corrupted language.

Once we understand Woke activists and leaders in elite institutions as being in the grip of an anti-social and dehumanizing dogma which uses dishonest esoteric language to manipulate emotions and people, we can know to take them seriously, but not literally. At an interpersonal level, the best way to deal with narcissists is to ignore them, thereby depriving them of the attention they seek; at an institutional level, they must be confronted in a public way.

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About Political Factions

It distresses me that so many educated people embrace tribal politics, regardless of what tribe affiliate with. The Founders of the U.S. rightfully feared that factions would be our undoing as a country. For many people, it's as though the Enlightenment never occurred. Sarah Pruitt offers the historical background:

Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.

This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.

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