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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

This focuses on colleges' problems, but these nine cognitive deficiencies apply to both the right and the left. Haidt applies them to both in the book, but you don't need his imprimatur to see how perfectly they apply to unthinking sorts of all stripes:

https://medium.com/the-polymath-proj...e-d1cfa81053ea

I read Thinking Fast and Slow, which sounds like it covered similar ground better. Or maybe the problem is with that Medium article, which is good at repeating inventive terminology but does not try to actually explain anything with it.

from that article
Lukianoff and Haidt make the point that many new practices and policies in American classrooms, such as “trigger warnings” and prohibitions on “micro aggression” reinforce cognitive distortions and consequently degrade rather than improve student thinking, based on the medical and moral argument that such practices are meant to prevent students from harm. (As if hurt feelings constituted harm — a different kind of distortion Lukianoff and Haidt call “concept creep”).

Maybe you can explain this to me. What is a prohibition on "micro aggressions"? (BTW, it's delightful to put cant you don't agree with in quotation marks while simultaneously tossing around your own cant. Delightful!) How does a prohibition on micro aggressions reinforce cognitive distortions and degrade student thinking? Is that argument only true if a prohibition on micro aggressions is meant to prevent students from harm? If hurt feelings don't constitute harm, why not?

Haidt would agree with all of that. But that is pretty well known stuff. Where he offers insight is in his dismantling of the demented reasoning inside the minds of people in those silos. He offers a pretty solid description of the pathology at work.

Reading what you just said is a little like going to a wine tasting and not actually having any wine, but just listening to a guy tell me that one is redolent of blackberries while another has a hint of road tar.

Lukianoff compliments him by dismantling the flawed logic of both sides.

Oh good! Earnest both-sidism!

The real point of an argument about what both sides are doing is to signal that the writer is uniquely virtuous.

I conclude both sides are playing an ends-justify-the-means game

Wait, a second ago you were recommending this stuff about cognitive distortions, but now they're all playing a game. Which is it?

because, under his analysis, it becomes clear that neither a majority of the extreme right nor a majority of the extreme left can truly believe their arguments.

"I'm a cynic, and so is everyone else, but at least I recognize it." Compelling virtue signaling there.

Thus, it's not just the silo effect, but four groups at work:

1. Willful liars of the right
2. Deluded people on the right
3. Willful liars of the left
4. Deluded people on the left

This is like reading a bad .ppt slide.

Perhaps the best explanation of this is what I'd coin the "negation effect." On the right, if you offer facts that refute a favored narrative, they will either ignore it or make up a lie to refute it. ("Snopes is a left wing Soros site designed to refute right wing views!", etc.) On the left, if you offer facts that refute a favored narrative, they will respond by attacking the author as racist/sexist/trans-phobic, etc. rather than countering the argument. Lukianoff neatly describes this demented behavior as "insisting on retraction instead of offering rebuttal."

In both cases, engagement is assiduously avoided as it carries a high risk of putting the lie to the favored narrative.

At the risk of departing from both-sidism, you have just described two common tropes of political speech which are very different. One is lying. The other is insisting that there is a broader context that is relevant to what is being discussed. Aren't these quite different?

In these situations, a significant number of intentional actors are at work, playing an ends-justify-means game ("I believe my view is better, and I am on the righteous side, so I am privileged to lie, offer conspiracy theories which shoot the messenger, or use brute force of online shame attacks to shut down anyone who challenges it.")

I believe this is a huge problem in our discourse right now. We (politicians, journalists, people in public life) tend to assume good faith, but you have a significant number of people who are not arguing in good faith. And in the main, this is a conservative thing now. Trump sets the tone. The lying and the conspiracy theories and the gaslighting and the concern trolling and all of it are tools of the right, of conservatives who do it most of all to trigger the libs, and of conservatives who very well understand that they want to do things that are not popular with most of the public, like cut social insurance, cripple health insurance, etc.

If you pretend that both sides are doing it, you are letting conservatives off the hook for this. And if you pretend that the place where this problem is really acute is colleges and universities, you either have a totally warped sense of priorities or you are straining to blame the left for something the right is doing.

I think what we have at the poles of the country right now are two groups who simply want what they want and don't want to hear anyone tell them they can't have it. Hence, I stated at the outset, it's lizard brain stuff. Sure, one can dress it up as effectively and brutally playing out a Machiavellian hand. But I see every little clever behavior among what looks like armies of liars and deluded folks in a war of narratives with each other. It seems more a degradation, a devolution, than anything else.

I think what we have at the poles of the globe right now are two extremely cold places that are snowy and icy and frigid, and no one wants to be there.

ETA: But none of this can or should worry you or any other parent sending a kid to college. Because a smart kid can and should simply ignore this sort of thing and focus on learning something useful.

Exactly. The faux concern about how this stuff is wrecking colleges and universities is exactly that, a conjured up political talking point and not a real thing, since ordinary people can go to college and simply ignore this sort of thing.