3 ms·
#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 a
by 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 agothere'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 agoH&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.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI'm more sympathetic too h&l's General point, but I think both positions are wrong if treated as absolutes. 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.
- specialist 4y ago"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.