7 ms·

The Myth of the Campus Coddle Crisis: The Coddling of the American Mind

jmeister 4y ago
(2018)
a2800276 4y ago
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]:https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8yMDQwOTUzLnJzcw/episode/QnV6enNwcm91dC0xMjQwNDYyOQ https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3B...
- specialist 4y ago
  Pure gold. And I just love the format. Hobbes and Sarah Marshall's "You're Wrong About" podcast, also golden, introduced the "moral panic" phenomenon to me. Explains so much.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zzzeek 4y ago
interesting take on microaggressions "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."
- sidlls 4y ago
  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.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    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.
    - kneebonian 4y ago
      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.
    - sidlls 4y ago
      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.
- rhysrhaven 4y ago
  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.
donw 4y ago
“There has been no rapid change on college campuses in the past five years.” We have always been at war with Oceana.
- 4dayworkweek4u 4y ago
  hehe
alexfromapex 4y ago
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.
causi 4y ago
#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.
- zzzeek 4y ago
  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" ?
  - causi 4y ago
    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.
Glyptodon 4y ago
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.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  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.
JackFr 4y ago
> 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.
- lukas099 4y ago
  Not really that amusing, nor is the term meaningless.
  - JackFr 4y ago
    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.
    - lukas099 4y ago
      > Figure: bodily shape or form especially of a person Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/figure https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/figure
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      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.
    - nathan_compton 4y ago
      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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
specialist 4y ago
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. My favorite review comes from another professor: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2520208235 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 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 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1222565 Full text: https://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Jost-book-review-of-Haidt-for-the-Monkey-Cage.pdf https://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Jost-bo...
lacoolj 4y ago
This seems like a good example of "don't believe everything you read on the internet". This entire article is incredibly emotional and there doesn't seem to be any credible information backing his opinions.

(2018)

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]:https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8yMDQwOTUzLnJzcw/episode/QnV6enNwcm91dC0xMjQwNDYyOQ https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3B...

specialist 4y ago
Pure gold. And I just love the format. Hobbes and Sarah Marshall's "You're Wrong About" podcast, also golden, introduced the "moral panic" phenomenon to me. Explains so much.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zzzeek 4y ago

interesting take on microaggressions "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."

sidlls 4y ago
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.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  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.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    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.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    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.
rhysrhaven 4y ago
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.

donw 4y ago

“There has been no rapid change on college campuses in the past five years.” We have always been at war with Oceana.

4dayworkweek4u 4y ago
hehe

alexfromapex 4y ago

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.

causi 4y ago

#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.

zzzeek 4y ago
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" ?
- causi 4y ago
  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.

Glyptodon 4y ago

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.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
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.

JackFr 4y ago

> 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.

lukas099 4y ago
Not really that amusing, nor is the term meaningless.
- JackFr 4y ago
  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.
  - lukas099 4y ago
    > Figure: bodily shape or form especially of a person Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/figure https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/figure
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    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.
  - nathan_compton 4y ago
    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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

specialist 4y ago

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. My favorite review comes from another professor: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2520208235 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 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 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1222565 Full text: https://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Jost-book-review-of-Haidt-for-the-Monkey-Cage.pdf https://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Jost-bo...

lacoolj 4y ago

This seems like a good example of "don't believe everything you read on the internet". This entire article is incredibly emotional and there doesn't seem to be any credible information backing his opinions.