The principle in philosophy and rhetoric is that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst way possible. When you think that your feelings are real, you may believe that other people have worse intentions than they really do. This could cause you to see harmful behaviour in places that don’t exist.  A good hack is to try and see why someone said or did something from the most reasonable and well-intentioned point of view that you can.

The charity principle

Parents have become overly concerned with the safety of their children. This has led to less free play, less independence and more fear instilled in children, which may increase the desire for safety provided by third parties for young adults. Keeping children safe is important, yet trying to eliminate all risks in a child’s life can severely stunt their development, sense of independence, and ability to confront adversity.

Paranoid parenting

University professors are generally left leaning in their politics, yet the percentage of professors who lean left has increased in recent years.  A more uniform group of people will cause a decline in the quality of scholarly research. Because they share a similar view, they won’t be as rigorous in potential counterarguments or the review of the quality of the work.

A loss of professorial diversity decreases the quality of scholarly research

The term anti-fragile describes things that have the capacity to not only tolerate stress but to flourish and grow as a result of it. Everybody will face completely unexpected events. When we have limited exposure to unexpected events, we will likely find navigating them difficult. However, when our brain and cognitive processes encounter unexpected events, they learn to adapt and grow, making them more likely to navigate uncertainty successfully. Parents and educators should help children learn and grow by letting them face risks and stressors, not shielding them from them.

Children are “anti-fragile”

Many colleges encourage students to indulge in these cognitive distortions: <ol><li>Emotional reasoning. Confusing feelings with thoughts or reality is a cognitive distortion.</li><li>Catastrophizing imagines a sequence of events. But it's seldom true. </li><li>Overgeneralising. </li><li>Dichotomous thinking. All or nothing thinking.</li><li>Mind reading.</li><li>Labelling. Because someone belongs to a category doesn't mean they embody all the traits of that category.</li><li>Negative filtering. Amplifying negative signals, so it overwhelms the positive.</li><li>Discounting positives. Rationalising away positive evidence as if it doesn't count.</li><li>Blaming.</li></ol>

Nine common cognitive distortions

The “dignity culture” is increasingly giving way to “victimhood culture.” <ul><li>Dignity culture is characterised by assumed dignity and worth regardless of what people think of you. People are expected to have enough self-control to think little of irritations, slights, minor conflicts and even direct insults as threats to their dignity that should be met with a response.</li><li>Victimhood culture: People and groups try to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance. They are highly sensitive to slights and tend to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties.</li></ul>

Dignity culture vs. victimhood culture

“seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).”

The antidote to the increasing fragility

“From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either."

<ul><li>Give people the benefit of the doubt.</li><li>Practice the virtue of intellectual humility.</li></ul>

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being

Encourage potential changes to the local education system. <ul><li>At the elementary level, suggest minimal homework and more recess with minimal supervision. </li><li>At middle and high school levels, cultivate individual virtues such as humility, teach debate and encourage debate clubs, and assign readings that promote critical thinking and reasoned discussion.</li></ul>

Help schools oppose the great untruths

Teach your children Cognitive Behaviour Therapy so they can learn to recognize and moderate the hallmarks of emotional and motivated reasoning.

Your unguarded thoughts can harm you

<ul><li>Encourage children to spend more time outdoors.</li><li>Place clear but reasonable limits on device time. </li><li>Light use of screen time is not harmful, except if it displaces the many other activities children could be doing. </li><li>Chldren should have no social media until high school. From high school, agree on a reasonable time budget for each child.</li></ul>

Limit and refine device time

Three great untruths are spreading throughout college campuses, high schools and many homes. These untruths are rarely taught explicitly. Instead, they are conveyed to people by the rules, practices, and norms imposed on them, often with the best intentions. <ol><li>The untruth of fragility: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker</li><li>The untruth of emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings</li><li>The untruth of us versus them: Life is a battle between good and evil people.</li></ol>

Untruths that spread throughout culture

<ol><li>A good idea is being physically safe on campus, such as not being subjected to sexual harassment, physical abuse, or being targeted personally for hate speech.</li><li>Another really bad view is that we need to be safe ideologically. For example, "I need to be safe emotionally and feel good all the time. If someone says something I don't like, that's a problem for everybody else." This idea is bad because engaging in ideological or emotional safety will make you weak. If you want to become strong, you need to engage,  similar to using weights in a gym. </li></ol>

Two views about safe spaces

Acknowledge that children are anti-fragile. Encourage them to have unstructured and unsupervised time to learn how to judge risks for themselves. They should get the opportunity to learn how to deal with frustration and disagreement.

Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child

How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure

New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction • A New York Times Notable Book • Bloomberg Best Book of 2018 “Their distinctive contribution to the higher-education debate is to meet safetyism on its own, psychological turf . . . Lukianoff and Haidt tell us that safetyism undermines the freedom of inquiry and speech that are indispensable to universities.” —Jonathan Marks, Commentary “The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.

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Learning & Education

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Books

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Society, Arts & Culture

New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction • A New York Times Notable Book • Bloomberg Best Book of 2018 “Their distinctive contribution to the higher-education debate is to meet safetyism on its own, psychological turf . . . Lukianoff and Haidt tell us that safetyism undermines the freedom of inquiry and speech that are indispensable to universities.” —Jonathan Marks, Commentary “The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising—on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures.  Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.