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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Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer Discusses the Importance of Getting Along with Others

Retired Justice Stephen Breyer was interviewed on the October 6, 2022 episode of the "We the People" podcast, hosted by Jeffrey Rosen. Justice Breyer retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in June, 2022. The discussion included the following on the importance of being civil:

[Stephen Breyer]: We discuss these cases, the nine of us around a table. And after we hear the case, within a day or two, we are sitting at the table. ... And we each talk in turn, nobody speaks twice until everybody speaks once. Okay, that's very helpful. Then after everybody has finished saying what they want, which usually takes three or four minutes for each person, we then discuss it back and forth. ... And then we write, we write opinions. And we write our reasons. And that's what we do in our job. So when we're doing our job, we do our job. And then, when we go to lunch, we talk about the latest basketball game, or what we've read in some kind of mystery story or so we're perfectly good friends. No reason not to be. No reason not to be. You don't have to disagree personally with people who disagree with on their ideas about politics. ... What's important is, you can disagree, but don't do it in a disagreeable way. Listen to people, talk to them, find out what they're thinking. And the benefit of that is they're much more likely to come along and understand what you're thinking too. So that's what I really learned, I think in the Senate, and it has stood me in good stead throughout the rest of my career.

[Moderator]: One of our students says that, how is it possible that you on the court, were able to be such good friends with Justice Thomas, when you disagree.

[Stephen Breyer]: I sat next to him for 28 years, and . . . he has a great sense of humor. I think he's a very decent person. I think he's an honest person, I think. And he knew what these cases were about, I promise you. And so we were friends, and we are friends, people who think we shouldn't be friends, in my opinion, are just wrong. Because you can be friends with people you really disagree with politically or professionally or in some other way. It's not just the same. It's true. I remember ... we're all having lunch upstairs. And just before that, we'd been in a conference. And we'd split five, four on two different cases. And I said to Rehnquist, who was the Chief Justice, and I said, you know, it's amazing here, we are actually having a fairly good time talking to each other, it's perfectly pleasant, and so forth. And just half an hour ago . . . He said, "I know, half an hour ago, each half of the court thought the other half was totally out of its mind." That's what it is. People can get along personally, and they do. And . . . deciding cases, we don't have to agree. And very often, we don't. We try to agree.

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America’s Make-Believe Racial Categories

I just finished reading "The Lunacy of U.S. Racial Categories," by Rich Lowry of the National Review.

I completely agree with Lowry, having just heard David Bernstein discuss his new book on Coleman Hughes' podcast: Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. I'm currently reading Bernstein's book and I've already read Bernstein's amicus brief filed in the Harvard affirmative action case, in which he makes a mockery of America's "racial" categories. Here's an excerpt from NR article:

It’s not just that colleges and universities discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin. They do it badly. This is one of the themes that emerged in the oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative-action cases last week.

The racial categories that the schools use are completely bonkers, an arbitrary mess mostly left over from the work of federal bureaucrats in the 1970s that can’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.

The administrators who rely on these categories are beholden to senseless and unscientific distinctions — they aren’t even competent or rational racialists. . ..

As the Bernstein brief notes, the Hispanic category “includes people whose ancestors’ first language was not Spanish and who may have never spoken Spanish. This includes immigrants from Spain and their descendants whose ancestral language is Basque or Catalan. It also includes indigenous immigrants from Latin America whose first language is not Spanish, whose surnames are not Spanish, and whose ethnic and cultural backgrounds are not Spanish.

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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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