Haidt is in a podcast with Bridget Phetasy. He says that things on Twitter are a thousand times smaller than they seem. But people don’t realize that. The whole podcast is recommended (but speed it up).
Also about minute 54, he says that young people tend to be cut off from history. They are very much into the present. I find I have the urge to give history lessons.
Around minute 60 he starts talking about stoics and how to use challenges to make yourself stronger.
Around minute 76 he goes on a rant against unions, noting that his parents were union organizers. Around minute 80 he credits taking LSD for helping to put him on the path to writing The Righteous Mind.
With respect to “cut off from history”, I was reminded of this recent Federalist article: https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/12/nike-claims-womens-basketball-players-are-superior-to-a-man-who-conquered-the-world/
Key quote: “Nike’s video depicts a black lesbian high schooler complaining about studying history. In her view, it promotes “the patriarchy.” Instead of learning about actual dynasties of the past, she wishes to discuss the athletic “dynasty” of the women’s basketball team.”
Or shorter: “I’d rather watch basketball on TV than study history.”
They’re in the business of selling basketball shoes, after all.
+1
– when I usually disagree with Moo.
My company is making every single employee go through a DEI training that could have come straight off of Twitter. That seems like its very real life.
They are also having employees sitting alone at their desks that are vaccinated have to wear masks all day (luckily doesn’t apply to work from home), which seems like another piece of Twitter nonsense in the real world.
Our school board just voted in a set of transgender rules that could have come straight off Twitter.
As far as I can tell “real life” is just whatever was on Twitter a couple of years ago.
Fact check: true
I unplugged from Twitter a month or so ago because it was just too too good. I got tired of being outraged and it was unhealthy. Our host continues to miss that core point. Twitter isn’t about the smut factor, it’s about being way too close to the sun.
Embrace your inner stoic and move on from there.
Haidt’s first book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” continues to be underrated on this blog.
You can get the transcript from YouTube Subs.
With that Twitter comment, I think he was trying to make an reverse-polarity analogy to the warning on side-view mirrors, “objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”
Here’s the thing: Do you need more than two hands to count the number of influential intellectuals or public figures under 70 you know who are not regular users of Twitter? In such scenes using Twitter is seen, at minimum, as indispensable to being a man of affairs to being ‘a contender’ and participant ‘in the arena’, so to speak. If anything, it’s just as easy to *under*-estimate how important a Twitter gossip circle or fight can be in the scheme of things, if it’s your day to get cancelled.
Uh let’s see … well, there’s David French … no wait he has a twitter account. Scott Siskind/Alexander the intellectual Titan, is he on twitter?
The interesting intellectuals/anons do get purged from twitter with some regularity yet appear to yearn to return. An unstable state.
“young people tend to be cut off from history”
I remember listening to some twentysomethings talk about the TV miniseries “Chernobyl”. It became clear that they were either uncertain or unaware that it was based on an actual historical event. In talking to them further, it also became clear to me that they had only a vague familiarity with the Cold War and the former Soviet Union. These were college-educated professionals. More recently, I have gotten the impression that some twentysomethings are unaware of the connection between the War in Afghanistan and 9/11. I’m not even sure how much they know about 9/11. For many of them, history seems to have started sometime around 2008.
I am too young to remember Vietnam to say nothing of the Civil Rights movement, Korea, and WWII. However, I was very aware of those events and how they connected to current events because, growing up, I received news and information from traditional media, which was populated by older folks who very much remembered all of those events. Today, many young people may be caught in a young adult social media bubble.
There’s at least one person in her twenties, a STEM graduate from some place, who saw Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and had no inkling that Sharon Tate had been a real person who died. She was astonished to find out that Sharon Tate wasn’t just a fictional character.
This is my attempt at a little history lesson about a pandemic that breaks out thirty years from now.
In the future everybody lives a lot longer. And they’re always plugged in to the 2051 equivalent of Twitter. Much like Twitter right now, people experience it directly and immersively. There’s no interruption from conscious deliberation or thought.
Everybody jumps on Amy Cooper’s 2051 equivalent or Ellie Kemper’s 2051 equivalent. The hatred flows this way in the morning and then some other way in the afternoon.
And in the pandemic of 2051 there’s some child who is instantly known by everyone on the planet to be “a murderer” when she’s seen walking outdoors with her cloth mask falling loose. It’s not properly covering her mouth. (Scientists in 2051 aren’t any closer to explaining the magic of cloth masks, which were perfected back in the 20th century and are unchanged in this sci-fi scenario.)
But people live much longer. It’s common for people to live past a hundred or 110. And in fact the average age of mortality is 112 for people in this future pandemic. In the pandemic of 2051 it’s 112, as opposed to 82 years old. But otherwise the future is a lot like today. Because my point is that we are always, and always will be, incapable of seeing things with any historical perspective.
If people in the middle of the 1968 pandemic, or the 1958 pandemic, knew how many octogenarians would be shuffling around nursing homes in the near future, and how much older the population would get, then maybe they’d understand better than we do that the media in 2021 is insane.