It cannot be a pure coincidence that the current "If books could kill"[1] podcast cover "The Coddling ...". very pleasurable, laugh-out-loud listening.
#1: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” or the idea that exposure to offensive or difficult ideas is traumatic. The problem with this idea is that Haidt and Lukianoff are wrong. Most of the time, harmful things do make you weaker, which is why we try to avoid being harmed.
Isn't it Wilson classifying "offensive or difficult ideas" as "harmful", not Haidt and Lukianoff?
This approach urged by Haidt and Lukianoff is purely emotional reasoning: You’re not being racist unless you feel racist, that is, you intend to be racist. This standard of trusting the offender’s feelings in every case is deeply misguided.
This kind of thing seems emblematic of a problem we have in our culture where "racism" is a umbrella term that covers a lot of things which are related to each other only in their outcome, not in their nature or in the nature of the minds of the people perpetrating them. I think it would be more accurate and more productive if we stopped behaving as if all type of race-adjacent mistakes were the same thing. You hating all black people because you were mugged and an algorithm giving black people inferior loan interest rates are both race-related errors but approaching them as being the same thing seems very counterproductive, just as lumping the ignorant and the malicious into the same category is counterproductive.
there's a bit of confusing triple-negative language going on there, since H&L are offering assertions as "myths".
H&L claim "What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker [is a myth]", that is, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Wilson then argues that of course things that harm people can make them weaker, this is why "harm" is to be avoided. If one argues that "repression" is harmful, and harmful things that dont kill you make you "stronger", why are H&L opposed to "repression" ?
H&L aren't the ones saying harmful things make you stronger, though. They're saying being exposed to ideas and messages which offend you and make you uncomfortable does not harm you. I don't know that I fully agree with them on that, but Wilson's response of "well if being offended doesn't hurt you then they must love the challenge of having their speech repressed, neener neener!" is both inaccurate and childish.
"an algorithm giving black people inferior loan interest rates"
I believe (or rather hope) that research into bias, sometimes unintentional, helps to detangling overt racism from systemic racism (aka "racism without racists").
My hope is that demonstrating empirically that stuff like policies and algorithms are intrinsically unfair somehow avoids triggering defensiveness and system justification.
"Haidt and Lukianoff claim, “If you bump into someone by accident and never meant them any harm, it is not an act of aggression, although the other person may misperceive it as one.”(40) That’s obviously wrong. Consider this example: a guy at a concert physically pushes his way through the crowd to get to the front. Is he being aggressive when he bumps into people? The answer should be easy: Yes. But Haidt and Lukianoff argue that the answer is subjective based on the emotions of the guy. If he intended to be aggressive, then it’s aggressive. But if he’s an oblivious asshole, then it’s not aggressive. And this same standard could apply to other topics. If a man harasses someone, then it can’t be harassment unless it was intended to be harassing. Their subjective “intent” standard relies on the emotions of the offender (“intent”) to be the sole determinant of what has happened. The notion that there is no such thing as unintentional racism or sexism strikes me as shockingly ignorant."
That is an interesting take. The concert example is especially amusing to me: these people pushing through certainly are aggressive, intentionally so, because the whole point is to assert themselves into a position for better proximity to the entertainment at the expense of the people they're pushing through. If that isn't aggression, nothing is.
I feel like the very concept of 'aggression' is being watered down and diluted. In an intellectual sense I can see how it could be considered aggression, but my sense of that word implies some a much more significant amount of force and intent.
I think it's even more egregious how the word "violence" has been co-opted to mean "something I don't like."
Back in my day violence used to mean you caused people physical harm, now it means any sort of distress experienced by another person, for which they hold your responsible.
You don't think being shoved into equipment or other people, or having your feet trampled/legs kicked is aggressive? Because that's what these aggressive pushers do. It's aggressive, and not in the watered down sense.
The problem with this whole thing, both sides on this argument are trying to force all actions onto a moral topology. Good things should be extolled, bad things should be suppressed.
An oblivious asshole pushing through a crowd may have roughly the same effect as an aggressive guy pushing people around, but to handle it in the same way will be met with bewilderment. "I'm just trying to get to this song." As someone who has used my size many a time to protect friends in a crowd, I gotta see whos drunk that I just need to be a wall to, and whos looking for a fight.
The notion that racism and sexism are based on intent doesnt mean they dont exist in unintentional, structural forms, just that if you want to stop unintentional racism and sexism you can't do it in the same way as you go about fighting the klan.
I really like this piece, but think Wilson is wrong on this point, at least as I understand microaggression.
When you cross from real aggression to microaggression, it means that the the intent is the primary source of offense.
Shoving to the front of a line is not a microagression. It is not all in your head and not just the intent.
If someone smiles at you and you think they are condescending, that is a microaggression. you may be right or you may be wrong, but the intent is what bothers you, not the smile.
I've heard the term both ways. The impression I get is that it's intended to cover a swath of things that harm somebody, either intentionally or unintentionally, but which individually don't seem significant.
It's possible for people to use that intentionally: to deliberately cause offense in a way that they know they can't be called out on. But that wouldn't be significant if it weren't part of a larger pattern where the effect is greater than the sum of the individual events.
Many of those are unintentional, though they might recognize the problem if called out on it. As an example: asking a woman to get coffee for a meeting. In itself, it might be that today you happened to choose a woman; tomorrow it might be a man. She cannot prove that it's sexism without establishing a pattern, which would be an enormous and absurd burden to put on her.
It's even possible that the boss genuinely did choose her at random, but it still echoes with past explicit misogyny and chauvinism in a way that harms her but she can't usefully fight back against it without seeming to blow things out of proportion.
I agree it is a tough problem, specifically because the intention or causality is uncertain. It isn't sensible or desirable to punish good healthy behavior simply because it can not be readily discerned from bad behavior.
What are we to do with your example of the "good boss" who randomly selects a women to have coffee? Never have coffee with women, or all employees because only doing so with men could also be taken as harmful behavior?
At some point, trying to police every behavior on a probabilistic basis has more collateral damage than it is worth. At some point the problem can no longer be productively addressed by punishing behaviors and we have to use other mechanisms for harm reduction.
Slight clarification that doesn't alter anything about your reply: in the "get coffee" scenario I meant it as "go fetch coffee for the meeting". That's a stereotyped role in which women were assumed to be mothers/caretakers to the office in addition to all of their other duties, but which men would think was their primary duty.
He could ask somebody to get coffee without intending to bring up a whole history of chauvinism that you weren't even aware of, but it's also kinda his fault for not thinking it through.
That's just to clarify what I said above, not really a reply to any of the points you bring up. You're right that in the end this is inherently fuzzy. But I do think it's useful for everybody to say "I'm going to do more than just the bare justifiable minimum, because there are real issues out there, deliberate and otherwise."
That's not an injunction; it couldn't be. But it's something to think about, and the people who say "I'm not going to think about it because it's not my problem" are almost certainly the problem.
In the context of a crowded concert, people bumping into each other without malicious intent isn't aggression, it's part of the experience which people choose for themselves. Those that don't consent to such physical contact (like myself) hang out at the back of the venue away from the crowd push. For the people at the front of the crowd, getting jostled around is a desirable part of the experience which they opted-in for.
I thought it was a bad take because it involves repeated behavior that would have clear feedback and differs a lot from singularly bumping someone or even doing it regularly in disconnected social contexts. In general both author and Haidt seem to making overly expansive generalizations. Probably a better example is that misgendering unintentionally is very different from doing it intentionally but this piece seems to be trying to say that Haidt and the Author both think that it always has to be viewed as either a transgression or non-transgression rather than there being a continuum of giving the benefit of the doubt one way or the other. I'm personally more inclined to assume this is the Author's distortion on some level, but may be wrong.
You can be an asshole without being an aggressive asshole. Suppose the concert guy is about to shit is pants, he’s therefore very much in a hurry and communicating that non verbally by bumping into people but also trying to avoid confrontations because that would slow him down.
As to unintentional racism/sexism, it’s impossible to treat thousands of different groups equally with every action. The layout of entrances to a shopping mall is going to disadvantage some group because of where people live. Calling that racism or sexism devalues the meaning of the term into irrelevance. So no, there’s still actual racism and that’s what the term is referring to.
I found that particular paragraph of the article a bit shallow and simplistic. There are reasons why law tend to focus on intent, and it is very difficult to build a moral model around acts if one remove intent. It also start to redefine words which carries intent, rather than using words that implies a lack of intent.
If I know a person was an oblivious asshole moving around in a concert, then I would not describe them as acting aggressive. I would describe them as acting inconsiderate. From a physiological/medical perspective, aggression is associated with fear, anger, stress, and dominance. Inconsideration is the lack of empathy, lack of understanding social norms and etiquette, and lack of higher thought processes. It is only if we remove intent that we can confuse the two concepts.
This is one of the dumbest parts of this critique. He's apparently got a different definition of "aggression" than H+L, which is fine, but he's begging the question and assuming his definition is right and theirs is wrong and therefore their argument is wrong. To be clear, his definition is roughly that words and deeds can be aggressive by themselves, separate from any human intent (he bizarrely calls 'intent' the 'emotions' which is a weird inversion). This idea that the meaning of words and deeds can be separated from the intent of their creator is at the core of post-modernism. And needless to say, this question is not settled. But critiques like this one that pretend to be substantial but are actually just semantic disputes are not very interesting.
You just completely switched from someone accidentally bumping to someone doing it on purpose, aggressively. There is no reason to “consider” this is a real example.
Alternately, defining harassment solely based on the perceptions of the receiver, as many organizations do, creates a comparable problem of subjectivity. Perhaps something like commonly-agreed "community standards" should be the guide.
This counterargument has flaws of its own, like no working definition of "things [that] do make you weaker". It seems like hearsay from both sides. I think the only time-tested truth, backed up by wealth of data, is that censorship of ideas and speech is bad, especially in academic settings. This counterargument needs to have some more rigorous lemmas and data to back them up.
I was somewhat disappointed by this because I think the thesis seems to be going in a reasonable direction. But then the argument veered into a not very exciting deconstrunction of the overarching Haidt bullet points that didn't seem at all compelling so much as oversimplified (smashing through a crowd hardly seems the same as bumping someone, and neither apparently has considered that giving the benefit of the doubt is variable).
I'm quite willing to buy that those with more power than students have a big role: just like with YouTube I'm sure there's a connection between bland banality and corporate money. And that the timeline is suspect.
But it also seems clear that students do have some kind of role in things like the recent Hamline lecture controversy.
So this wasn't really as interesting as I'd hoped it'd be.
I think the onset of Trumpism and COVID denialism has also added some new wrinkles to the whole business, where there are now significant groups of people who are just tired of being subject to relative lunacy.
I think it misses the nature of America Offence Culture, which very much defines both sides rather than just one.
There are some underlying processes which allow both (supposed) progressive academics and conservative critics to advance their careers by covertly agreeing that - for example - the battle is going to be over race and gender issues. When in fact there's a whole lot more going on.
This is very obvious with the Timnit Gebru controversy. We're supposed to agree that the ethical problems with AI come down to race/gender bias in training sets and a lack of diversity among researchers.
This is a very fashionable but also extremely superficial take. The ethical issues around AI are much, much wider than that. Fixing bias in training is like sticking a band-aid on an incoming asteroid.
So IMO both sides have agreed on comfortable terms of debate, and neither is going to dig deeper into the underlying generators of power imbalances and social injustice. And is certainly not going to investigate the problem of consistently self-harming limited-scope decision making in academia, business, politics, technology, and media.
> These “great untruths” denounce straw figures constructed from simplistic attacks that bear little resemblance to the actual concerns and tactics of activists.
Amusing that 'straw figures' a meaningless term, replaces the gendered and thus unacceptable 'straw men' the actual English idiom.
What is a straw figure? Any meaning you put to it is through the implicit association with straw man.
And it is amusing because because it is irony is so plain. The author is telling us there is no coddling, and yet he changes a perfectly harmless English language idiom because it has a reference to gender.
Based on my reading, I don't think that the author would argue that there is no change and censorship on campus.
"blaming a massive generational psychological shift for censorship on campus, instead of the real cause: a political problem of powerful administrative structures promoting repression at colleges"
If they use the word figures instead of men, perhaps it is not because they fear offending some student, but other powerful and repressive groups.
I think its really weird to get bent out of shape about this stuff. I doubt seriously that the author believes that "straw-man" is "harmful." Even if one did feel it was harmful, one would have to be dumb indeed to believe it was important on the grand list of harmful stuff. That said, its also harmless to modernize the idiom. When straw man was coined, women were much less a part of public life, and now they aren't. I don't see the problem updating the idiom to reflect a fundamentally less gendered world. Like clearly if you think "strawman" is harmless then you must also believe that "strawfigure" is just as harmless? Language changes for all kinds of reasons.
Based on recommendations from fellow leftists, I've read three of Haidt's books.
Although his Just So theories don't sound right to me, I'm neither smart or educated enough to argue against them. Fortunately, there are plenty of people smarter and wiser than me who do this yeoman's labor.
"This is a very narrow and small-minded book parading as a big thoughtful one. It says it is about the American Mind, but the data and the theory only support "the coddling" of a very narrow subset of the American mind: upper middle class college kids born after 1995 that got to college in 2013. As far as that group is concerned, this is really good advice. I totally agree with his three untruths--your feelings are not necessarily true, the world is not good and evil, and adversity does not make you weak. I also agree that children need lots of free play and that social media is bad for kids and they are over-protected. There is nothing to disagree with here (even though I sometimes chafe at "when we were kids..." arguments)"
Ouch.
Please read the whole review.
--
More generally, John Jost, a social psychologist like Haidt, critiques moral foundations.
My noob TLDR: Haidt's ignores "Justice". "Justice" beats "Authority", meaning "just following orders" is not a defense for failing to "do the right thing". Haidt also glosses over contemporary research which invalidates his thesis.
41 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 98.3 ms ] thread[1]:https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3B...
Hobbes and Sarah Marshall's "You're Wrong About" podcast, also golden, introduced the "moral panic" phenomenon to me. Explains so much.
Isn't it Wilson classifying "offensive or difficult ideas" as "harmful", not Haidt and Lukianoff?
This approach urged by Haidt and Lukianoff is purely emotional reasoning: You’re not being racist unless you feel racist, that is, you intend to be racist. This standard of trusting the offender’s feelings in every case is deeply misguided.
This kind of thing seems emblematic of a problem we have in our culture where "racism" is a umbrella term that covers a lot of things which are related to each other only in their outcome, not in their nature or in the nature of the minds of the people perpetrating them. I think it would be more accurate and more productive if we stopped behaving as if all type of race-adjacent mistakes were the same thing. You hating all black people because you were mugged and an algorithm giving black people inferior loan interest rates are both race-related errors but approaching them as being the same thing seems very counterproductive, just as lumping the ignorant and the malicious into the same category is counterproductive.
H&L claim "What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker [is a myth]", that is, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Wilson then argues that of course things that harm people can make them weaker, this is why "harm" is to be avoided. If one argues that "repression" is harmful, and harmful things that dont kill you make you "stronger", why are H&L opposed to "repression" ?
Half of the problem is the ambiguous nature of the term harm itself. It is a undefined suitcase word and I wish we could use something more specific.
I believe (or rather hope) that research into bias, sometimes unintentional, helps to detangling overt racism from systemic racism (aka "racism without racists").
My hope is that demonstrating empirically that stuff like policies and algorithms are intrinsically unfair somehow avoids triggering defensiveness and system justification.
"Haidt and Lukianoff claim, “If you bump into someone by accident and never meant them any harm, it is not an act of aggression, although the other person may misperceive it as one.”(40) That’s obviously wrong. Consider this example: a guy at a concert physically pushes his way through the crowd to get to the front. Is he being aggressive when he bumps into people? The answer should be easy: Yes. But Haidt and Lukianoff argue that the answer is subjective based on the emotions of the guy. If he intended to be aggressive, then it’s aggressive. But if he’s an oblivious asshole, then it’s not aggressive. And this same standard could apply to other topics. If a man harasses someone, then it can’t be harassment unless it was intended to be harassing. Their subjective “intent” standard relies on the emotions of the offender (“intent”) to be the sole determinant of what has happened. The notion that there is no such thing as unintentional racism or sexism strikes me as shockingly ignorant."
Back in my day violence used to mean you caused people physical harm, now it means any sort of distress experienced by another person, for which they hold your responsible.
An oblivious asshole pushing through a crowd may have roughly the same effect as an aggressive guy pushing people around, but to handle it in the same way will be met with bewilderment. "I'm just trying to get to this song." As someone who has used my size many a time to protect friends in a crowd, I gotta see whos drunk that I just need to be a wall to, and whos looking for a fight.
The notion that racism and sexism are based on intent doesnt mean they dont exist in unintentional, structural forms, just that if you want to stop unintentional racism and sexism you can't do it in the same way as you go about fighting the klan.
When you cross from real aggression to microaggression, it means that the the intent is the primary source of offense. Shoving to the front of a line is not a microagression. It is not all in your head and not just the intent.
If someone smiles at you and you think they are condescending, that is a microaggression. you may be right or you may be wrong, but the intent is what bothers you, not the smile.
It's possible for people to use that intentionally: to deliberately cause offense in a way that they know they can't be called out on. But that wouldn't be significant if it weren't part of a larger pattern where the effect is greater than the sum of the individual events.
Many of those are unintentional, though they might recognize the problem if called out on it. As an example: asking a woman to get coffee for a meeting. In itself, it might be that today you happened to choose a woman; tomorrow it might be a man. She cannot prove that it's sexism without establishing a pattern, which would be an enormous and absurd burden to put on her.
It's even possible that the boss genuinely did choose her at random, but it still echoes with past explicit misogyny and chauvinism in a way that harms her but she can't usefully fight back against it without seeming to blow things out of proportion.
What are we to do with your example of the "good boss" who randomly selects a women to have coffee? Never have coffee with women, or all employees because only doing so with men could also be taken as harmful behavior?
At some point, trying to police every behavior on a probabilistic basis has more collateral damage than it is worth. At some point the problem can no longer be productively addressed by punishing behaviors and we have to use other mechanisms for harm reduction.
He could ask somebody to get coffee without intending to bring up a whole history of chauvinism that you weren't even aware of, but it's also kinda his fault for not thinking it through.
That's just to clarify what I said above, not really a reply to any of the points you bring up. You're right that in the end this is inherently fuzzy. But I do think it's useful for everybody to say "I'm going to do more than just the bare justifiable minimum, because there are real issues out there, deliberate and otherwise."
That's not an injunction; it couldn't be. But it's something to think about, and the people who say "I'm not going to think about it because it's not my problem" are almost certainly the problem.
As to unintentional racism/sexism, it’s impossible to treat thousands of different groups equally with every action. The layout of entrances to a shopping mall is going to disadvantage some group because of where people live. Calling that racism or sexism devalues the meaning of the term into irrelevance. So no, there’s still actual racism and that’s what the term is referring to.
If I know a person was an oblivious asshole moving around in a concert, then I would not describe them as acting aggressive. I would describe them as acting inconsiderate. From a physiological/medical perspective, aggression is associated with fear, anger, stress, and dominance. Inconsideration is the lack of empathy, lack of understanding social norms and etiquette, and lack of higher thought processes. It is only if we remove intent that we can confuse the two concepts.
We have always been at war with Oceana.
I'm quite willing to buy that those with more power than students have a big role: just like with YouTube I'm sure there's a connection between bland banality and corporate money. And that the timeline is suspect.
But it also seems clear that students do have some kind of role in things like the recent Hamline lecture controversy.
So this wasn't really as interesting as I'd hoped it'd be.
I think the onset of Trumpism and COVID denialism has also added some new wrinkles to the whole business, where there are now significant groups of people who are just tired of being subject to relative lunacy.
There are some underlying processes which allow both (supposed) progressive academics and conservative critics to advance their careers by covertly agreeing that - for example - the battle is going to be over race and gender issues. When in fact there's a whole lot more going on.
This is very obvious with the Timnit Gebru controversy. We're supposed to agree that the ethical problems with AI come down to race/gender bias in training sets and a lack of diversity among researchers.
This is a very fashionable but also extremely superficial take. The ethical issues around AI are much, much wider than that. Fixing bias in training is like sticking a band-aid on an incoming asteroid.
So IMO both sides have agreed on comfortable terms of debate, and neither is going to dig deeper into the underlying generators of power imbalances and social injustice. And is certainly not going to investigate the problem of consistently self-harming limited-scope decision making in academia, business, politics, technology, and media.
Amusing that 'straw figures' a meaningless term, replaces the gendered and thus unacceptable 'straw men' the actual English idiom.
And it is amusing because because it is irony is so plain. The author is telling us there is no coddling, and yet he changes a perfectly harmless English language idiom because it has a reference to gender.
"blaming a massive generational psychological shift for censorship on campus, instead of the real cause: a political problem of powerful administrative structures promoting repression at colleges"
If they use the word figures instead of men, perhaps it is not because they fear offending some student, but other powerful and repressive groups.
Hardly bent out of shape. Literally amused. Unintended irony of all sorts is generally amusing.
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/figure
Although his Just So theories don't sound right to me, I'm neither smart or educated enough to argue against them. Fortunately, there are plenty of people smarter and wiser than me who do this yeoman's labor.
My favorite review comes from another professor:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2520208235
Just the first paragraph:
"This is a very narrow and small-minded book parading as a big thoughtful one. It says it is about the American Mind, but the data and the theory only support "the coddling" of a very narrow subset of the American mind: upper middle class college kids born after 1995 that got to college in 2013. As far as that group is concerned, this is really good advice. I totally agree with his three untruths--your feelings are not necessarily true, the world is not good and evil, and adversity does not make you weak. I also agree that children need lots of free play and that social media is bad for kids and they are over-protected. There is nothing to disagree with here (even though I sometimes chafe at "when we were kids..." arguments)"
Ouch.
Please read the whole review.
--
More generally, John Jost, a social psychologist like Haidt, critiques moral foundations.
My noob TLDR: Haidt's ignores "Justice". "Justice" beats "Authority", meaning "just following orders" is not a defense for failing to "do the right thing". Haidt also glosses over contemporary research which invalidates his thesis.
"John Jost on Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory" [2022] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA77JxiQDkA
And prior to that:
"Left and Right, Right and Wrong: The Politics of Morality" [2012] https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1222565
Full text: https://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Jost-bo...
This entire article is incredibly emotional and there doesn't seem to be any credible information backing his opinions.