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The Righteousness Fix

orionmagazine.org

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Re: The Righteousness Fix

#81

Post by fellowniusmonk »

thinkingemote wrote: post #61
zzzeek wrote: post #32

I would question the author's casual belief that a so-called "righteous" attitude , where one has decided that they have more wisdom on a particular topic than some other particular group of people, necessarily means they therefore lose all their empathy for that group. This is a huge leap and I personally don't believe there is any such necessity: > Viewing ourselves as “good,” in fact we become grievously toxic, li…

Thats sympathy. Empathy is different from sympathy. I can be sympathetic without really empathising with someone, and I can have empathy with someone without being sympathetic. Empathy uses more energy. Ingroups tend to avoid empathy with outgroups because that weakens the separateness between people, and ingroups try to strengthen ingroup sympathy. Pity is a form of sympathy. Sympathy: "I feel bad for you" Empathy:…

As someone who grew up in poverty, had my first heart surgery at 3 and was constantly confronted with dying and then had both parents die while I was young.

I think people greatly overestimate their ability to have/experience empathy.

I think the more divergent someones experience is, the more empathy is not available and the conceit that you can understand a complex issue you haven't experienced is a form of good hearted but self centered foolishness.

Give me sympathy, give me tangible help, give me money perhaps, you should feel bad for me and bad about what's happening and then stop putting sugar in your tea as a tangible effort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce) and then treat me with normalcy and respect and consider me as an equal.

There are parallels in the movie industry as well, one film directors quote (who said it and the exact quote I've long forgotten) I like to paraphrase went something like this: "Making creative movies to your vision was easier when the studio execs were old and would just go 'I dont get it but let the young people give it a shot' than when non-creatives started to meddle in movies because they think they have a knack for it".

This video was popular for while and set a lot of discourse around empathy/sympathy and imo it is harmful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZBTYViDPlQ

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#82

Post by mattbee »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #76
photochemsyn wrote: post #50

The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved. What the autho…

> The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend It’s a subset of a common, but dishonest, technique of using false equivalence to downplay or exaggerate one thing. In this case, the author points out similarities between drug addiction and some behaviors which are very much not in the same league as drug addiction. They may have a point that both are bad, but that does…

> It’s a subset of a common, but dishonest, technique of using false equivalence to downplay or exaggerate one thing.

In the first sentence the author identifies as an "sober addict" - so not without authority, they're claiming a subjective equivalence between drugs and internet outrage.

I'm sure everyone's experiences of those things is going to be different.

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#83

Post by riskable »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #51
sheepdestroyer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't go far as a specie by denying that objective truth exists, and thus that in an argument there's, more often than not, someone who is less wrong. We must aim to be collectively less wrong. But that won't happen without rightly self-righteous people fighting the bad ideas. Doesn't mean they have to lack compassion for the mistaken though.

Usually both sides of arguments both have truth to them and the way to objective truth exists via trying to understand why both sides believe what they do. Athiesm seems like the objective rational truth. But why do billions of people believe in an invisible man in the sky? What is the objective truth that we can learn from that?

> Athiesm seems like the objective rational truth.

> But why do billions of people believe in an invisible man in the sky?

There's no equivalency or even logical basis of comparison between these two statements. You could've said, "Oranges exist... But why do we have apples?" or "Some areas of the ocean have boats. But why do other areas not have boats?" and it would make about as much sense.

> What is the objective truth that we can learn from that?

That atheists exist but not everyone is an atheist? What would we by trying to learn from this sort of search for understanding?

"Why both sides believe what they do" is an enormously open-ended, completely ambiguous realm of thought. To drill down the logic behind this sort of question; "because the universe happened."

I'm pretty sure we understand why anti-vax people exist... The roads that lead there aren't that numerous. We also understand why they think we're wrong and they're right and vice versa. There's no "lack of understanding".

The real question is, "how do we break them free from irrational thought?" Is it even possible (en masse) when so many powerful entities depend on these people to stay irrational?

Could the likes of Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax even exist if everyone suddenly switched over to Vulkan-like logical thinking?

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#84

Post by JackFr »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #51
sheepdestroyer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't go far as a specie by denying that objective truth exists, and thus that in an argument there's, more often than not, someone who is less wrong. We must aim to be collectively less wrong. But that won't happen without rightly self-righteous people fighting the bad ideas. Doesn't mean they have to lack compassion for the mistaken though.

Usually both sides of arguments both have truth to them and the way to objective truth exists via trying to understand why both sides believe what they do. Athiesm seems like the objective rational truth. But why do billions of people believe in an invisible man in the sky? What is the objective truth that we can learn from that?

I suspect you’re making more implicit assumptions than you realize.

Also your snarky, facile dismissal of religion makes the idea of constructive engagement with you seem unlikely.

I think you missed the point.

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#85

Post by martincmartin »

photochemsyn wrote: post #50

The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved. What the autho…

Not many people these days dispute the idea that you can become addicted to gambling.

https://www.economist.com/international/2022/01/01/are-video...

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#86

Post by abecedarius »

zzzeek wrote: post #32

I would question the author's casual belief that a so-called "righteous" attitude , where one has decided that they have more wisdom on a particular topic than some other particular group of people, necessarily means they therefore lose all their empathy for that group. This is a huge leap and I personally don't believe there is any such necessity: > Viewing ourselves as “good,” in fact we become grievously toxic, li…

It's very common to have fellow-feeling with a family member while demonizing an outgroup they align with. So it's just not much evidence for your own sanity on its own. If one egregore is infecting millions of minds, why not two? Or more?

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#87

Post by [deleted] »

thinkingemote wrote: post #61
zzzeek wrote: post #32

I would question the author's casual belief that a so-called "righteous" attitude , where one has decided that they have more wisdom on a particular topic than some other particular group of people, necessarily means they therefore lose all their empathy for that group. This is a huge leap and I personally don't believe there is any such necessity: > Viewing ourselves as “good,” in fact we become grievously toxic, li…

Thats sympathy. Empathy is different from sympathy. I can be sympathetic without really empathising with someone, and I can have empathy with someone without being sympathetic. Empathy uses more energy. Ingroups tend to avoid empathy with outgroups because that weakens the separateness between people, and ingroups try to strengthen ingroup sympathy. Pity is a form of sympathy. Sympathy: "I feel bad for you" Empathy:…

[deleted]

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#88

Post by photochemsyn »

leetcrew wrote: post #74
photochemsyn wrote: post #50

The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved. What the autho…

> The tendency to link the 'addiction' tag to every undesirable human behavior is a common trend, but it's worth remembering what actual physical addiction to a substance is: a biochemical response to the introduction of a foreign substance into the body, that results in withdrawal symptoms when said foreign substance is removed. If there are no withdrawal symptoms, there is really no addiction involved. "addiction"…

Opiate addiction results in a higher concentration of opiate receptors on many cell surfaces. Possible down-regulation of endogenous endorphin production may also occur, as I recall. The result of removing the exogenous opiates is thus a very painful experience as the endorphin/receptor ratio is destabilized. This also seems to play a role in alcohol addiction as alcohol use has opiate-like co-effects[1]

[1] https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh313/185-195.htm

Calling this 'dependency' instead of 'addiction' seems like a semantics game. A lot of other behaviors seem to involve dopamine rewards, but in those case withdrawal does seem to be much less of a physical phenomenon. However I'd definitely argue that addiction is a biochemical phenomenon. Whether or not it is 'compulsive' - well, people have free will and some people just want that little boost, even if it means they get led around by the nose by advertisers and opinion influencers and so on. A bit of self-awareness is a good antidote.

Some author - William Burroughs? said something like, "Heroin is the ultimate capitalist product - the consumer will crawl through a sewer of broken glass just for the opportunity to buy". That's why consumer culture promotes addiction in all spheres of life.

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#89

Post by fellowniusmonk »

jiggyjace wrote: post #63

I wonder what the author's thoughts are on "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. It mentions many clear refutes backed up by history to the idea of how bad it is for humans to be "addicted to righteousness". For example, individuals have not and do not live by themselves in a vacuum as only selfish. We are also very group-ish, and it is the righteousness or norm…

Why is "efficient" defined as consuming natural resources to produce children?

Why is that a measure of societal success?

Who gets to determine that this is a rubric that should even be considered?

Seems simplistic in the extreme. I think enlightenment thinking and the concurrent non-successionist/non-miraculous/cessationist protestant reformation that drove the new world clearly overlap heavily in the venn diagram of ideology. Are modern atheists core positions (epistemologically "different" "new atheism" fizzled quite quickly) not of the same ilk as our historical humanist/agnostic/deist societies?

Re: The Righteousness Fix

#90

Post by throwaway0a5e »

dragonwriter wrote: post #58
narag wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Graham's essay What You Can't Say contains a great piece of advice: One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion. The downside i…

> Downside is sometimes people doesn't understand what you meant. But the explicit purpose is to conceal what you actually mean to avoid criticism. So, you need to be more specific about “people”: one downside is that the intended audience sometimes doesn't understand what you mean (another is that the audience you are trying to bypass sometimes does.) PG is referring to the long-recognized practice of political dog-…

At some point a dog whistle is just a whistle though. Every free speech advocate that defends some odious speech is not endorsing that speech.
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