George Carlin’s Position on People and Groups

The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don’t belong; it doesn’t include me, and it never has. No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.

George Carlin, Preface to "3 x Carlin" (2008)

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Belief in One’s Victimization: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Classic scar experiment that is highly relevant to modern times, where people who believe that they are victims try to cash in on that purported victimization over and over, classic case of confirmation bias and WYSIATI.

More on the Dartmouth scar experiment at Psychology Today, along with commentary regarding Andy Clark's work on predictive processing, including a link to fascinating rubber hand experiments.

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FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff: Stanford’s Approach to Speech is Like Being in “An Upper Class Finishing School.”

Greg Lukianoff, reflecting on the time he attended Stanford University: Don't confuse "upper class white liberal ways of seeing the world with truth itself.” Excerpt:

And one thing that was so clear when I got to a place like Stanford, was that people had a real tendency to confuse sort of upper class white liberal ways of seeing the world with truth itself and therefore wanted everybody to talk exactly like rich white, over educated people. And there was like this lack of curiosity about whether or not those assumptions were even correct.

And you think about people who are on the spectrum, you think about people from other countries, you think about people who come from different economic classes or different regions or who are a little bit older or a little bit younger than everybody else, and it's just a series of landmines that you're supposed to either know they're there and if you know they're there, you're supposed to pretend you believe the following five things. It's a really messed up way for a place that is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, to teach people to interact with each other.

Continue ReadingFIRE’s Greg Lukianoff: Stanford’s Approach to Speech is Like Being in “An Upper Class Finishing School.”