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Suppose I'm a Famous Author and I make the bold assertion that preschool-aged children who are sexually abused end up exhibiting degraded STEM skills in high sc

Suppose I'm a Famous Author and I make the bold assertion that preschool-aged children who are sexually abused end up exhibiting degraded STEM skills in high school. And then someone comes along and debunks my assertion. Guess what? It's STILL better for kids to not be sexually abused! Everyone knows it! Haidt may have been guilty of some motivated reasoning, but it didn't lead him to a bad place.

EMIRELADERO 2y ago
Social media is not self-evidently harmful to mental health, that's why Haidt got so much recognition in the first place. If you take his theories away/discredit them, the whole idea crumbles.
gruez 2y ago
>Haidt may have been guilty of some motivated reasoning, but it didn't lead him to a bad place. Putting the question of whether this analogy is applicable to this case, the underlying attitude is totally toxic. It's not only important to be right, it's important to be right for the right reasons. Otherwise we lose track of what's actually true or not, and discourse succumbs a information cascade, where something is true not because of empirical evidence or anything, but because "it's obviously right, and even if it's wrong, we should pretend it's right because it's for a good cause"