13 thoughts on “Fear kills curiosity and openness”

1. My goodness, how did people ever exchange ideas, debate, teach, and learn before polyvagal theory and pedagogical Lamaze?

   The number of scare quotes needed to write about this topic is particularly high because the key, legal-istic words involved have been purposefully watered down to meaninglessness in Orwellian fashion. Does one really need to point out that you can never actually feel ‘safe’ from a ‘threat’ if the set of terrifying ‘harms’ includes the experiences of being merely upset, anxious, embarrassed, or emotionally frustrated when someone has the nerve to disagree with you?

   There are two kinds of lack of ‘safety’ in our ‘important discussions’ these days, one real but ignored, and the other fake but mainstreamed.

   The first is that there is a whole range of topics and facts which cannot be discussed in public at all under one’s own name without practically guaranteeing the modern equivalent of excommunication and permanent economic disability. Doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, you know the drill. If we’re talking about a ‘chilling effect’ on speech (which, duh, we are), then that’s because it is not ‘safe’ to speak. Besides giving everyone the equivalent of academic or judicial tenure shielding them from the discriminatory consequences of ideological utterances (something worth considering!), this kind of real danger is going to remain an important snuffer of the already fading embers of what’s left of our society’s high-level intellectual engagement.

   The second kind of ‘safety’ is the bogus and completely abusive one in which anytime someone disagrees with some tenet of progressivism, progressives try to permanently silence that person and those kinds of statements by claiming that such claims make them feel ‘unwelcome and unsafe’, so, “Shut Up! They explained.” One of my beefs with Haidt is that he takes the position of assuming these claims are genuine, when there is no actual reason or evidence to believe so, when the incentives to lie and exaggerate are so tremendous. We don’t have to play dumb with this stuff. Even if it was all perfectly true and sincere, it would remain completely incompatible with the norms of engagements and discourse underpinning anything that could even plausibly claim to be a form of free and liberal civilization. But it’s not true, it’s just power playing.

   Look, a basic form of psychological ego defense is to fabricate some kind of narrative of rationalization that shifts blame away from the individual, waves away the sources of poor self-esteem and insecurity, and mitigates the sense of moral culpability for the consequences of one’s own faults, weaknesses, bad decisions, and behaviors. Helping the less clever and creative out with these bogus stories – telling them nothing is really their fault and everything bad that has happened to them is the consequence of dark forces and evil people behind countless systems of oppression – is the standard model and typical doctrine in Social Work courses and even some forms of ‘therapy’. The whole progressive intellectual framework largely relies on trying to sell a version of this absurd story that works for all the members of their coalition whose social status would be lower in the alternative.

   Now, if the “important discussions” we need to have are specifically about the content of these fake, ego-assuaging, status self-perception boosting, rationalizations, then that will necessarily and unavoidably ‘trigger’ one’s instinct for status-anxiety – that the social basis (arising out of the enforced orthodoxy of an ideological consensus from which heresy is not tolerated) is under ‘attack’ and that there is therefore a ‘threat’ to one’s status and one’s worth, and social reputation is being brought into question. Not to mention all the personal, material interests that are at asks in the form of benefits that derive only from that orthodoxy being implemented in law and policy and widespread practices.

   If I challenge your BS excuses that you’ve been using forever as a psychological crutch, well, no way around it, that’s going to hurt your feelings.

   One simply cannot ever feel ‘safe’ (in the distorted, Orwellian version of ‘safe’) or open-minded about any particular topic – for instance about the biological basis of statistical disparities between identity groupings – when those kinds of high stakes are necessarily implicated. That’s why we always observe progressives and members of their coalition’s groups react so irrationally (perhaps meta-rationally in the game-theory strategic sense) and hysterically when these topics come up.

   To recapitulate: if (1) You need to feel safe to talk and learn, and (2) Not feeling safe involves anything that raises your emotional defenses, and (3) the thing that raises your emotional defenses is any discussion whatsoever that ‘threatens’ to undermine the orthodox social consensus rationalization that boosts your status and personal interests, and (4) that’s the most ‘important conversation’ we need to have in a productive and civil manner, then (5) That kind of talking and learning can never happen, so (6) While persuasion may not be possible, coercion always is. QED, and have a nice day.

2. Not a bad point. if you want to root out implicit bias, you have to make people feel safe expressing opinions that they are afraid could be labeled racist. You can’t really have an open and curious dialogue and simultaneously be shaming people for saying what they really think.

   There might be some limits to this. There might be some cases where you want to suppress bad actors who around going to make the other side of the dialogue feel unsafe. For instance, blacks also need to feel safe expressing opinions that whites might find offensive or make them feel uncomfortable for that dialogue to be two-sided.

   There are individuals who aren’t interested in an open and curious dialogue – trolls, you might say, whose goal is actually to increase conflict rather than resolve it. You don’t want the trolls to feel “safe”, but you do want people who are interest in a real conversation to feel safe.

   • SlateStarCodex tried something like this. The results were disappointing.:

     But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.

     Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons.

     Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. Each of these views has, at times, won over entire cultures so completely that disagreeing with them then was as unthinkable as agreeing with them is today. I disagree with most of them but don’t want to be too harsh on any of them.

     • I’m not convinced this is disappointing. Is it so bad if people with heterodox opinions to have places where they can discuss them civilly? The fact that some of these opinions seem clearly reasonable doesn’t help the case (e.g. is it even heterodox to think that men are biologically more likely be prone to violence; or that in a perfectly fair world there’d still be more make mathematicians?) Perhaps the argument is that the suppression of some reasonable positions is worth the benefits of suppressing some unreasonable ones. I tend to see it the opposite way, that the cost of suppressing the reasonable ones outweighs what benefits there may be to suppressing the unreasonable ones. Remember that when people with heterodox ideas don’t cease to exist because they’ve been exclusion from certain fora. And I’m not convinced that they’re even rendered less ‘dangerous’ by their exclusion.

       • I agree with you as far as you go, but read the rest of it. Keeping that forum open had costs that the writer was ultimately unwilling to pay.

         • True. There are some people whose opinions are so taboo and so toxic that you sometimes just have to go along with the taboo and ban those people, or you risk being associated with them. If I had a forum of any sort, I’m pretty sure I would delete posts from pedophilia advocates and avowed neo-Nazis.

           You could argue that the “overton window” serves a functional purpose in that respect. Sometimes there are things that are outside the overton window which you think should be ok, but attempting to enlarge to overton window to allow them becomes disruptive to productive dialogue on other subjects, just because they are so toxic and taboo that they’re going to draw attention away from all the other productive dialogue you could be having on areas that aren’t toxic and taboo. It’s better to make a pragmatic call to ban discussion of those subjects rather than not be able to have any discussions at all.

         • @Hazel- You have a point, but there’s also disagreement about which points of view are too taboo and toxic to allow.

       • > I’m not convinced this is disappointing.

         It’s a little bit ambiguous from context but I think you might be missing a bunch of the inside baseball. It’s disappointing because it _failed_

         The culture war thread very quickly attracted a bunch of intellectually honest people who have socially unacceptable views. It also attracted a bunch of SJWs who are offended about those views. Over time, the SJW faction has been able to, through some combination of entryism and social pressure, dominated the moderation there. This has resulted in extremely capricious and heavy-handed moderation that has driven away a lot of the interesting posters.

         In the mean time, I am aware of at least three subreddits that exist specifically because of people who did not feel welcome. There’s one that is quite literally the place you go when you eat a ban to have the same conversation but without censorship. There’s the one full of SJWs who keep brigading the original culture war thread. And there’ the secret private one where the handful of greybeards who have been alienated from the community bitch privately.

         Additionally, it is unclear if you clicked through to the original article, but it was actually about how he was _killing_ the culture war thread. Because the fact that the culture war thread didn’t immediately ban anyone who was Trumpy caused it to develop a reputation for being alt-right. This in turn prompted a bunch of people to phone up Scott Alexander’s bosses at his San Francisco-based employer to try to get him fired. He has not be fired, but he has had (iirc) at least two visits with HR where he had to convince them that they shouldn’t fire him. He has been getting increasing freaked out over time (and I don’t blame him) that his principled neutrality and intellectual honesty will cause severe negative person and professional repercussions in his life, and he has been biting his tongue over this.

         There is widespread consensus that his writing quality has suffered as well, specifically as a consequence of the negative PR he has gotten for being affiliated with that culture war thread. The inflection point is widely agreed to be this article . This is an article about the famous soviet mathematician Kolmogorov and his strategy for resisting soviet insanity: keep a low profile, sing the right tune, look for people worth protecting, and slowly try to start teaching them how it really is and/or protecting them from saying something that gets them gulag’d, without ever actually talking openly about it. Basically, advocating for _not_ standing up against an oppressive society, because if you are gulag’d you can’t do anything, but if you are free, you can make marginal improvements.

         It is widely believed that this article is a coded message about how Scott feels about politics and the culture war. Since he published that article, people think his writing quality has declined and they believe he is self-censoring a lot, which is taking all of the magic out of it.

         All of the above is a really long-winded way of saying: no, the results are actually disappointing. I mean, they were awesome for a long time. But it failed, it was subverted, and it was destroyed, primarily at the hands of the people who wanted to agitate for a safe space where they didn’t have to engage with nutty ideas.

         • That is a tragedy, but not a new tragedy. Communists in the ’50s had similar problems, as did atheists in the late 19th century, abolitionists in the early 19th century, Protestants/Catholics in England before that (alternating according to each ruler’s preferences), and many other people in many eras. There were always judgemental moral censors.

3. Courage and education are discipline of the intellect and control of emotions in the face of fear and uncertainty anchored to well-tested principles.

4. I watched the first video. I learned some new physiological information beyond what I already new about Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and the autonomic nervous system. My overall impression is that the speakers/researchers brought up some interesting information about low-level physiology but they went a bit to far spinning it into a high-level narrative.

   HRV is a good measure of stress, either due to something physical like illness or something psychological such as anxiety. You can measure HRV with some EKG based heart rate monitors such as fitness chest straps or pulse oximeters that fit over your finger tip and use the real-time values to consciously increase HRV, mostly through breathing techniques.

   So one of the new things I learned was that the vagal nerve is connected to this system so that low stress (high HRV which implies maximum parasympathetic response) affects the face and voice so we can subconsciously detect when someone is stress-free and vice versa. The other thing I learned was that nose breathing increases nitric oxide (NO) production in the upper airways (nasal sinuses) which helps oxygen uptake and humming significantly improves NO production (why does he hum like that? …cause he doesn’t know the words!!!).

   I’m skeptical about the high-level narrative that being in a maximum parasympathetic state is key to solving polarization and/or maximizing openness. Athletes use HRV to determine when they have overtrained and need some recovery time. The key for them is not being in a parasympathetic state all the time; it is that when they relax and do all the things that normally result in a high measured HRV for them they still get low HRV values. Researchers have found that low HRV in new-born babies is the best early warning system of something being physically wrong. I think the same rules apply for non-athletes; if we can’t get into a parasympathetic state then something may be wrong. The vagal nerve and nitric oxide info is interesting but I’m skeptical that it can be applied to anything but a very narrow set of scenarios. I’d be very happy if evidence proves me wrong.

5. That was ten wiki links to follow the vega nerve up through that medula thing, where that was, and is terminates in the pons, it seems (I may have lost a link). The pons is responsible for practicing the jump shot, associated closely with bipeds. Doing jump shots came after the vegus in evolutionary terms

   So when we fear, our jump shot goes haywire. That is why athletes do the drills, they want to add ‘muscle’ to the pons. Shich, if I am not mistaken, further shows that consciousness is nothing but self observation of our jump shot during drills. That is why we have the dominate side, because the other side is busy managing the pons.

   • Abstrract throught?
     A side issue was none other than the eye muscles, which are at the heart of tracking and object identification. Our visual knowledge of the world consists of a set of protypical eye movements, which some part of the brain can generate over and over *hwural columns do his I think)

     So, in circumstance where the human had no basketball, a jump shot without the ball would be led by the known muscle movement, leaving the throwing hand pointing directly to the landing spot. That discovery yielded abstract thought, we could measure the world in terms of the typical jump shot distance.

Comments are closed.