#book: the coddling of the american mind

[thatwritererinoriordan]

The book: https://amzn.to/3CX9aWM

[petermorwood]

Words change meaning - another example.

@tartapplesauce reblogged my (long) post about Dublin coddle, which mentioned a weird version called "New World Coddle" using chorizo and squash.

TBH, my Mind Palate suggests it would taste quite good, but it's so far from traditional or even well-tweaked-traditional coddle that it's not coddle any more, and should have a different name entirely, possibly in Latin American Spanish.

Also TBH I've already amended the recipe thrice in my head, (1) chipotle powder not smoked paprika; (2) finish with a scatter of toasted pine-nuts; (3) restore the chickpeas mentioned in the Method to the Ingredients where they'd been forgotten.

I've already admitted to breaking the Dublin coddle rules by browning things, so all bets are off. :->

(BTW, this wasn't ours; @dduane's spine and hip have been rather a trial this past couple of days, so we just took things easy and let the Ibuprofen do its thing.)

Re. coffee mornings, what about various tea-breads, fruit sodas, barm brack etc.? Those could be made either trad or tweaked-trad, and though I'm not sure how they could be made "dainty" like petits-fours and so on, I bet it could be done.

*****

As for the changed-meaning word (getting there eventually) it's "notions" and @tartapplesauce added this link.

"To have notions" in Ireland is to think highly of yourself, often without justification - though if the justification is, er, justified, "begrudgery" will often follow. I've encountered "begrudgery" before, but this version of "notions" is a new one.

I have, however, experienced the Northern Ireland - or maybe just my family - version, which is "don't put yourself forward". This is a bad notion to have when thinking about author profile and book publicity and as DD can confirm, it took me far too long to shake it off.

On the flip-side, having notions can mean thinking outside the box, being imaginative, boldly going where no-one has gone before...

Um, got a bit carried away there... Right to the NYT bestseller list, in fact. Twice. ;->

*****

Neither of those are MY usual meaning.

Whenever I use "I have a notion", either said or written in a post, it's either "I have a thought" with the thinking-intensity dialled down a few notches, or "I have a vague memory of", otherwise known as IIRC or AFAIK.

And the other OTHER meaning of "notions", the one I first thought of (maybe with notions of food already in mind) was this:

That book was published in 1890, and the title, translated from Victorian English, is something like "Tips and Tricks" or, in more modern English, "Household Hacks".

There's nothing derogatory about it.

*****

DD and I have both posted about Mrs de Salis in the past; all her books are what's usually referred to as "slim volumes". Here are six of them alongside Mrs Beeton's doorstopper:

I inherited a copy of "Savouries a la Mode" from Mum, who inherited it from Granny, and we've made several things from it, all of which worked - though far and away the best so far are the Parmesan Biscuits, which are...

Well, "more-ish" is a good start, though it doesn't hint at the underlying desire to get in there with both hands...

Here:

All of Mrs de Salis's books are Public Domain, and while we intend eventually to have a full collection of the Slim Volumes, they're also available as PDFs here.

I have a notion that anyone reading this Tumblr will like them... ;->

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jon Haidt

Published: Mar 9, 2023

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression. 

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. 

I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: The Coddling of the American Mind. Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was “Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.” He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title.

After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse. The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career. 

Greg and I decided to expand our original essay into a book in which we delved into the many causes of the sudden change in campus culture. Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker 2. Always trust your feelings 3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

Each of these untruths was the exact opposite of a chapter in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which explored ten Great Truths passed down to us from ancient societies east and west. We published our book in 2018 with the title, once again, of The Coddling of the American Mind. Once again, Greg did not like the title. He wanted the book to be called “Disempowered,” to capture the way that students who embrace the three great untruths lose their sense of agency. He wanted to capture reverse CBT. 

The Discovery of the Gender-by-Politics Interaction

In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the Covid shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.) 

I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret. 

Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition. 

Figure 1.  Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19-24, 2020. Graphed by Jon Haidt.

In recent weeks—since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens—there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction: Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs.” Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major US survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89). 

Figure 2. Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).

The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g., 

Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.

The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data: 

Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.

After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon.”

Journalist Matt Yglesias also took up the puzzle of why liberal girls became more depressed than others, and in a long and self-reflective Substack post, he described what he has learned about depression from his own struggles involving many kinds of treatment. Like Michelle Goldberg, he briefly considered the hypothesis that liberals are depressed because they’re the only ones who see that “we’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” to quote a tweet from the Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz. Yglesias agreed with Goldberg and other writers that the Lorenz explanation—reality makes Gen Z depressed—doesn’t fit the data, and, because of his knowledge of depression, he focused on the reverse path: depression makes reality look terrible. As he put it: “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.”

Yglesias tells us what he has learned from years of therapy, which clearly involved CBT:

It’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control: • Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.” • Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.” And the question you then ask yourself is whether becoming angry made things better? Did it solve the problem? 

Yglesias wrote that “part of helping people get out of their trap is teaching them not to catastrophize.” He then described an essay by progressive journalist Jill Filipovic that argued, in Yglesias’s words, that “progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.”

Yglesias quoted a passage from Filipovic that expressed exactly the concern that Greg had expressed to me back in 2014: 

I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. 

I have italicized Filipovic’s text about the benefits of feeling like you captain your own ship because it points to a psychological construct with a long history of research and measurement: Locus of control. As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.

How a Phone-Based Childhood Breeds Passivity

There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group. Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations, is full of amazing graphs and insightful explanations of generational differences. In her chapter on Gen Z, she shows that liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media (31% in recent years, compared to 22% for conservative girls, 18% for liberal boys, and just 13% for conservative boys). Being an ultra-heavy user means that you have less time available for everything else, including time “in real life” with your friends. Twenge shows in another graph that from the 1970s through the early 2000s, liberal girls spent more time with friends than conservative girls. But after 2010 their time with friends drops so fast that by 2016 they are spending less time with friends than are conservative girls. So part of the story may be that social media took over the lives of liberal girls more than any other group, and it is now clear that heavy use of social media damages mental health, especially during early puberty. 

But I think there’s more going on here than the quantity of time on social media. Like Filipovic, Yglesias, Goldberg, and Lukianoff, I think there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups. 

The Monitoring the Future dataset happens to have within it an 8-item Locus of Control scale. With Twenge’s permission, I reprint one such graph from Generations showing responses to one of the items: “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” This item is a good proxy for Filipovic’s hypothesis about the disempowering effects of progressive institutions. If you agree with that item, you have a more external locus of control. As you can see in Figure 3, from the 1970s until the mid-2000s, boys were a bit more likely to agree with that item, but then girls rose to match boys, and then both sexes rose continuously throughout the 2010s—the era when teen social life became far more heavily phone-based. 

Figure 3. Percentage of boys and girls (high school seniors) who agree with (or are neutral about) the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Jean Twenge in her forthcoming book Generations.

When the discussion of the gender-by-politics interaction broke out a few weeks ago, I thought back to Twenge’s graph and wondered what would happen if we broke up the sexes by politics. Would it give us the pattern in the Gimbrone et al. graphs, where the liberal girls rise first and most? Twenge sent me her data file (it’s a tricky one to assemble, across the many years), and Zach Rausch and I started looking for the interaction. We found some exciting hints, and I began writing this post on the assumption that we had a major discovery. For example, Figure 4 shows the item that Twenge analyzed. We see something like the Gimbrone et al. pattern in which it’s the liberal girls who depart from everyone else, in the unhealthy (external) direction, starting in the early 2000s. 

Figure 4. Percentage of liberal and conservative high school senior boys (left panel) and girls (right panel) who agree with the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Zach Rausch.

It sure looks like the liberal girls are getting more external while the conservative girls are, if anything, trending slightly more internal in the last decade, and the boys are just bouncing around randomly. But that was just for this one item. We also found a similar pattern for a second item, “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” (You can see graphs of all 8 items here.) 

We were excited to have found such clear evidence of the interaction, but when we plotted responses to the whole scale, we found only a hint of the predicted interaction, and only in the last few years, as you can see in Figure 5. After trying a few different graphing strategies, and after seeing if there was a good statistical justification for dropping any items, we reached the tentative conclusion that the big story about locus of control is not about liberal girls, it’s about Gen Z as a whole. Everyone—boys and girls, left and right—developed a more external locus of control gradually, beginning in the 1990s. I’ll come back to this finding in future posts as I explore the second strand of the After Babel Substack: the loss of “play-based childhood” which happened in the 1990s when American parents (and British, and Canadian) stopped letting their children out to play and explore, unsupervised. (See Frank Furedi’s important book Paranoid Parenting. I believe that the loss of free play and self-supervised risk-taking blocked the development of a healthy, normal, internal locus of control. That is the reason I teamed up with Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, and Daniel Shuchman to found LetGrow.org.) 

Figure 5. Locus of Control has shifted slightly but steadily toward external since the 1990s. Scores are on a 5-point scale from 1 = most internal to 5 = most external. 

We kept looking in the Monitoring the Future dataset and the Gimbrone et al. paper for other items that would allow us to test Filipovic’s hypothesis. We found an ideal second set of variables: The Monitoring the Future dataset has a set of items on “self derogation” which is closely related to disempowerment, as you can see from the four statements that comprise the scale:

I feel I do not have much to be proud of. Sometimes I think I am no good at all. I feel that I can't do anything right. I feel that my life is not very useful.

Gimbrone et al. had graphed the self-derogation scale, as you can see in their appendix (Figure  A.4). But Zach and I re-graphed the original data so that we could show a larger range of years, from 1977 through 2021. As you can see in Figure 6, we find the gender-by-politics interaction. Once again, and as with nearly all of the mental health indicators I examined in a previous post, there’s no sign of trouble before 2010. But right around 2012 the line for liberal girls starts to rise. It rises first, and it rises most, with liberal boys not far behind (as in Gimbrone et al.).

Figure 6. Self-derogation scale, averaging four items from the Monitoring the Future study. Graphed by Zach Rausch. The scale runs from 1 (strongly disagree with each statement) to 5 (strongly agree). 

In other words, we have support for Filipovic’s “captain their own ship” concern, and for Lukianoff’s disempowerment concern: Gen Z has become more external in its locus of control, and Gen Z liberals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating. They are more likely to agree that they “can’t do anything right.” Furthermore, most of the young people in the progressive institutions that Filipovic mentioned are women, and that has become even more true since 2014 when, according to Gallup data, young women began to move to the left while young men did not move either way. As Gen Z women became more progressive and more involved in political activism in the 2010s, it seems to have changed them psychologically. It wasn’t just that their locus of control shifted toward external—that happened to all subsets of Gen Z.  Rather, young liberals (including young men) seem to have taken into themselves the specific depressive cognitions and distorted ways of thinking that CBT is designed to expunge.

But where did they learn to think this way? And why did it start so suddenly around 2012 or 2013, as Greg observed, and as Figures 2 and 6 confirm?

Tumblr Was the Petri Dish for Disempowering Beliefs

I recently listened to a brilliant podcast series, The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, created within Bari Weiss’s Free Press. Phelps-Roper interviews Rowling about her difficult years developing the Harry Potter stories in the early 1990s, before the internet; her rollout of the books in the late 90s and early 2000s, during the early years of the internet; and her observations about the Harry Potter superfan communities that the internet fostered. These groups had streaks of cruelty and exclusion in them from the beginning, along with a great deal of love, joy, and community. But in the stunning third episode, Phelps-Roper and Rowling take us through the dizzying events of the early 2010s as the social media site Tumblr exploded in popularity (reaching its peak in early 2014), and also in viciousness. Tumblr was different from Facebook and other sites because it was not based on anyone’s social network; it brought together people from anywhere in the world who shared an interest, and often an obsession.

Phelps-Roper interviewed several experts who all pointed to Tumblr as the main petri dish in which nascent ideas of identity, fragility, language, harm, and victimhood evolved and intermixed. Angela Nagle (author of Kill All Normies) described the culture that emerged among young activists on Tumblr, especially around gender identity, in this way:

There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self… And that’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the snowflake [referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique], the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity. 

Nagle described how on the other side of the political spectrum, there was “the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.” The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic, the experts on the podcast suggest, that today’s cancel culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.

I don’t want to tell that entire story here; please listen to the Witch Trials podcast for yourself. It is among the most enlightening things I’ve read or heard in all my years studying the American culture war (along with Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart). I just want to note that this story fits perfectly with both the timing and the psychology of Greg’s reverse CBT hypothesis. 

Implications and Policy Changes

In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1). 

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).

Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them. 

I welcome challenges to this conclusion from scholars, journalists, and subscribers, and I will address such challenges in future posts. I must also repeat that I don’t blame everything on smartphones and social media; the other strand of my story is the loss of play-based childhood, with its free play and self-governed risk-taking. But if this conclusion stands (along with my conclusions in previous posts), then I think there are two big policy changes that should be implemented as soon as possible: 

1) Universities and other schools should stop performing reverse CBT on their students

As Greg and I showed in The Coddling of the American Mind, most of the programs put in place after the campus protests of 2015 are based on one or more of the three Great Untruths, and these programs have been imported into many K-12 schools. From mandatory diversity training to bias response teams and trigger warnings, there is little evidence that these programs do what they say they do, and there are some findings that they backfire. In any case, there are reasons, as I have shown, to worry that they teach children and adolescents to embrace harmful, depressogenic cognitive distortions.

One initiative that has become popular in the last few years is particularly suspect: efforts to tell college students to avoid common English words and phrases that are said to be “harmful.” Brandeis University took the lead in 2021 with its “oppressive language list.” Brandeis urged its students to stop saying that they would “take a stab at” something because it was unnecessarily violent. For the same reason, they urged that nobody ask for a “trigger warning” because, well, guns. Students should ask for “content warnings” instead, to keep themselves safe from violent words like “stab.” Many universities have followed suit, including Colorado State University, The University of British Columbia, The University of Washington, and Stanford, which eventually withdrew its “harmful language list” because of the adverse publicity. Stanford had urged students to avoid words like “American,” “Immigrant,” and “submit,” as in “submit your homework.” Why? because the word “submit” can “imply allowing others to have power over you.” The irony here is that it may be these very programs that are causing liberal students to feel disempowered, as if they are floating in a sea of harmful words and people when, in reality, they are living in some of the most welcoming and safe environments ever created.

2) The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18

What do you think should be the minimum age at which children can sign a legally binding contract to give away their data and their rights,  and expose themselves to harmful content, without the consent or knowledge of their parents? I asked that question as a Twitter poll, and you can see the results here:

Image: See my original tweet.

Of course, this poll of my own Twitter followers is far from a valid survey, and I phrased my question in a leading way, but my phrasing was an accurate statement of today’s status quo. I think that most people now understand that the age of 13, which was set back in 1998 when we didn’t know what the internet would become, is just too low, and it is not even enforced. When my kids started 6th grade in NYC public schools, they each told me that “everyone” was on Instagram.

We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt. You probably do too, given that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It's time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms. Adults should have wide latitude to make their own choices, but legislators and governors who care about mental health, women’s health, or children’s health need to step up.

It’s not enough to find more money for mental health services, although that is sorely needed. In addition, we must shut down the conveyer belt so that today’s toddlers will not suffer the same fate in twelve years. Congress should set a reasonable minimum age for minors to sign contracts and open accounts without explicit parental consent, and the age needs to be after teens have progressed most of the way through puberty. (The harm caused by social media seems to be greatest during puberty.) If Congress won’t do it then state legislatures should act. There are many ways to rapidly verify people’s ages online, and I’ll discuss age verification processes in a future post. 

In conclusion: All of Gen Z got more anxious and depressed after 2012. But Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis is the best explanation I have found for Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest.

[sexisdisgusting]

Read a book called “the coddling of the American mind” it is such a banger and I think you would love it!

omg thank u for the recommendation, darling i am definitely adding it to my list! i think i recall one of my profs mentioning it before too!!!!!

[erebusvincent]

Neo-atheism, led by many prominent atheists, advocated for a secular, rationalist worldview and the rejection of religious dogma. However, it is essential to recognize that every policy decision or movement has second-order effects that are often overlooked. In the case of neo-atheism, some argue that it has inadvertently contributed to the rise of Atheism+ and “wokeism,” resulting in unintended societal consequences.

Neo-atheism initially arose with noble intentions, seeking to challenge the negative aspects of religious belief and promote reason and critical thinking. However, critics argue that in its zeal to combat religious dogma, neo-atheism may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, discarding the positive aspects of religion and leaving behind a societal vacuum. This vacuum led to the emergence of Atheism+, a movement that aimed to address the perceived shortcomings of traditional atheism.

Atheism+ sought to incorporate social justice, feminism, and other progressive issues into the atheist discourse, departing from traditional atheism’s focus on the nonexistence of deities. As religion often provides a sense of meaning and purpose, some individuals who embraced atheism turned to these progressive issues to find meaning in their lives. By incorporating social justice, feminism, and other progressive issues into its framework, Atheism+ aimed to create a more inclusive and morally engaged atheist community.

The rise of wokeism, a term used to describe an increased awareness of and commitment to social justice issues, can be seen as a by-product of the shift towards Atheism+. Wokeism is a child of neo-atheism, resulting from a one-night stand that produced a new generation of activists seeking meaning in a post-religious world. Social media has played a significant role in the spread of wokeism, providing a platform for activists to share their ideas and connect with like-minded individuals.

Wokeism represents a broader cultural trend that emphasizes social justice and activism. With its roots in the civil rights movement, wokeism has evolved to encompass various issues, from racial and gender equality to LGBTQ+ rights and environmental justice. Some argue that the rise of wokeism can be linked to the decline of traditional religious institutions and the search for new sources of meaning and community in a secular world.

However, this shift in focus has yet to be universally embraced, with some critics arguing that Atheism+ has strayed too far from its original purpose and become overly politicized. As individuals turn away from religion, they may be drawn to secular movements that offer a sense of purpose and moral guidance, such as wokeism and Atheism+.

However, both Atheism+ and wokeism have faced criticism for their perceived dogmatism and intolerance. Opponents argue that these movements can sometimes resemble the religious dogmas they claim to reject, with rigid adherence to certain beliefs and the suppression of dissenting voices. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in their book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure have explained how the culture of safetyism, which prioritizes emotional and psychological safety, can lead to an overemphasis on microaggressions—small, unintentional slights that some individuals can perceive as harmful. They suggest that constantly focusing on microaggressions can create a hostile environment and perpetuate a victim mentality, undermining young people’s resilience and emotional well-being…

[alollinglaughingcat]

@firealder2005 reblogged a bunch of tag games and i wanted to do all of them but i hate long reblogs in multitudes even if read more is an option so i combined them all into one post <3

@/gu1lty-as-sin's tag game

nickname: irl none really, online name is just Lolling

zodiac sign: Libra

height: i genuinely don't know but its probably somewhere around 5'6 since that's Alder's height lmao (i have height blindness and also cannot remember if i am taller or shorter or same height as you oopsies)

last thing i googled: uh technically i think it was me adding up the number of animals at the shelter i work at (the answer was 365 or somethin) though i never actually hit "enter" for it lol. otherwise it was "watcher grian ao3" (love me some ANGST)

amount of sleep: okay fun fact! i actually cannot perceive the amount of time i sleep. like if i go to bed at 11:00pm and wake up at 7:00am or if i go to bed at 9:00pm and wake up at 7:00am i think i've slept the same amount of time in my brain. i mean if i really push it to like 1:00am yeah i'll feel it in the morning but i can't do time math so it's all just the same numbers to me, so in my head i think i've always slept the healthy amount of hours. anyway probably 7-8

dream job: my current job is my dream job <3 i love working at an animal shelter. i'm currently going to school to be a vet tech, which I know I'll also enjoy doing since i've basically been a vet tech intern before, but I'll definitely miss getting to do everything i currently do as much as i do now, especially in regards to cleaning kennels, animal handling, and behavior assessments

movie/book that describes me the most: ??? fuck it i'll go random, The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg and Jon. that book is like how my brain works

favorite song: all of them and none of them they're all the same in the end

favorite instrument: minecraft noteblocks

favorite aesthetics: animalcore, cottagecore, vaporwave

favorite author: tui t sutherland!

random fun fact: i hope warrior cats never ends. i want a cat to go to space before it ends

not sure who started this tag game :)

favorite color: greens and pinks!

last song i listened to: damn i WAS gonna say "no clue" but i instinctively pulled up my yt playlist and started playing it RIGHt before i answered this tag game so now it's Flesh & Bone from ZOMBIES 2 (never watched it)

Last film I watched: 100% Wolf series and you can fight me over it its so endearingly mediocre

Currently reading: random fanfics. i guess the one I'm most dedicated to is the Echoes series for Watcher Grian content

Currently craving: nothing. wish i wanted to eat something tho but my appetite is empty

Currently watching: Guess That Build series w/ *takes breath* Impulse, Skizz, Grian, Gem, Jimmy, and Joel (currently halfway through Skizz's vid here)

Coffee or tea: i've never had either <3

Positivity Tag started by an Anon

Five Things I Like About Myself!

My writing skill, and specifically my ability to see things from a readers' perspective and predict the possible ways they will interpret my/others' writing.

My drawing skill, even though it is limited to just cartoon-ish, very stylized animals (mostly just cats tho). I enjoy drawing what I can draw.

My positivity. I've never been more grateful that I managed to somehow train myself into a more actively positive mindset. While I can get stressed, I feel like I can often manage it and remind myself that situational stress is temporary and happiness can always be found if you go looking for it.

My care and ability with animals. I enjoy handling difficult animals, be it spicy cats or reactive dogs, and I love seeing how animals' behaviors change over time with trust and patience. Even though I ironically don't really enjoy playing with animals that much, I enjoy surrounding myself with them and just co-existing with them, y'know?

My maturity. Took me a bit to really think of a something else to compliment myself on that wasn't just a reiteration of the above. But I've been told a lot that I'm always "so mature for my age" (not in a creepy way, but in a surprised, "wait you're X years old?!" way lol). I always thought it was a little silly, because isn't everyone "my age" mature? To my surprise, no. And those older than me aren't either. Which is okay because everyone's different! But it is frustrating sometimes lol

if anyone wants to do all or some of these tags, go ahead! open tag :)

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The jail, like the reformatory, is a stepping stone to the penitentiary. The American people are too prone to see their fellow citizens locked up in jail. The thought uppermost in the minds of most law enforcement officers, justices and policemen, seems to be to get the largest possible number of people behind prison walls. Their efficiency seems to depend only on the number of arrests made and convictions secured. An officer should be promoted for the number of people he succeeded in keeping out of jail instead of the number he puts in, by the number he has kept from crime instead of the number caught in crime. The thing to do is to prevent people from becoming criminals. The chief duty of the policeman, and all law officers, should be to prevent crime. When once the stigma of the prison is upon a man or a woman, self-respect begins to wane and it becomes easier for them to travel the broad highway to crime and to the penitentiary. The first time in jail is the real turning point to many a life of crime. Every possible effort should be made to keep people out of jail instead of putting them in. You can never get rid of the flies by swatting them. To exterminate them it is necessary to get rid of the breeding places.

Everything that could possibly be said about the disreputable conditions of penitentiaries and their mismanagement can also be truthfully said about the average city and county jail. The crooks on the inside are not any worse than the grafters on the outside. Why the ancient practice of allowing a jailor sixty cents a day for feeding prisoners, and then permitting him to supply them with twenty cents worth of grub, and pocket the difference, is tolerated, is hard to explain. This species of graft is a worse offense than the crime committed by the average prisoner.

The laying of traps, and the placing of temptations in order to entice susceptible or potential law-breakers, should be absolutely abolished. The unlawful enforcement of law is never justified. The shop-keeper who displays a tempting bait to induce a youngster to snitch it, and then have him arrested and thrown in jail, is not any better than the speedcop or the public officers who set speed-traps on the public highway, tempt the unsuspecting motorist to “step on it,” and then pinch him for speeding.

...

There has been a great deal of criticism on account of lax discipline in prisons. I have no sympathy with the practice of babying or coddling prisoners. A convict, in a normal physical and mental state, resents mushing and petting. It does him no good. He should be treated like a grown-up human being, provided with a decent, sanitary place to live, plenty of wholesome food, useful work that he is capable of doing, or can learn to do, paid a small wage to support dependents, and taught to be a self-reliant, useful citizen, and then restored to his family and to society. Long imprisonment is useless. The worst punishment, the greatest suffering, the deepest humiliation, comes right in the beginning. In some cases a few months imprisonment would serve the same purpose as a few years.

The primary object of imprisonment should be the reformation of the wrong-doer. The duration of the imprisonment should depend more on the prisoner than on the offense. Punishment should be for the offender rather than for the offense. No judge or jury is capable of determining in advance the length of the sentence that is necessary and proper in all cases. Neither is a judge thoroughly fitted to understand the men whom he sentences to the penitentiary or to the gallows unless he leaves the bench and goes down into the laboratory and studies physchology and biology like Chief Justice Olson of Chicago did. The microscope, the chemical test tube, the x-ray, and the psychoanalytical chart will reveal much that the prosecutor and the law books will not disclose. The proper training and experience of the officials is very important. No judge should be permitted to sit on the bench of a criminal court, and pass judgment on his fellow citizens, without having spent a term in the penitentiary himself, or so familiarized himself with penal institutions and convicts as to grasp the point of view of the prisoner. This applies also to the prosecuting attorneys. There should be a public defender as well as a public prosecutor in order to protect and safeguard the poor, the innocent, and the victim of circumstances. It should not be forgotten that there are two classes of people, those who sin, and those who are sinned against. If either class is to be envied it is the first rather than the second. Ought not society to be as much concerned about protecting the innocent and keeping them out of jail, as about punishing the guilty and placing them behind prison walls? Competent prison authorities and parole boards should make a careful personal study of each individual accused of crime or sentenced. After a prisoner has served a minimum term, not to exceed one year, he should be eligible for parole. As a rule no imprisonment for more than two years serves any good purpose. When the parole board is satisfied from his previous life and record, his character, his chemical, physical and mental make-up, and his prison record, that a parole is justified, it should be granted, regardless of the length of the sentence. These matters should be in the hands of technologists who have wisdom, and not in the hands of politicians who have power and pull. The good of the public deserves first consideration, the welfare of the individual second. If the prisoner is a menace to society, a danger to the community or to himself, unable to control himself, and beyond a cure, his imprisonment should be continued indefinitely. There are cases, of course, where the heinousness of the offense, or the viciousness of the individual, might justify life imprisonment. It all depends on the individual case. No rule of thumb can be adopted or followed.

In a number of the larger cities, and in the better penitentiaries, psychopathic laboratories have been established for the scientific mental examination of the subjects. This is absolutely essential. A psychopathic laboratory, and also a chemical laboratory, should be established in every prison of the country. The effective cooperation of the psychiatrist, the chemist, and the physician should determine the physical and mental state of the prisoner. The abnormal prisoners should be treated accordingly, whether the abnormality be mental or physical. A thorough examination will reveal the fact that many convicts committed offenses because they were afflicted by physical or mental diseases. Many are cured by proper chemical and mental readjustments. When cured a long step will have been taken in restoring them not only to normalcy, but to good citizenship. The legal concept of punishment will give way to the medical conception of treatment. Many will be found with arrested mentality. They may have the body of an adult, but the mind of a six or eight-year-old child. We tolerate and pamper the innocent idiot in the community, but we are quick to condemn those on the border-line of mental deficiency the moment they become law-breakers. Many mental defectives are experts in crime. By correcting the chemistry of their blood, and their inhibitions and complexes, many of them can be rescued from a life of crime. If this is not possible their place is in the asylum and not in the penitentiary. There is no criminal class except in so far as criminal misconduct has become habitual with certain individuals. Most criminals are selected by force of circumstances from the community at large. If the reader believes in the Lombroso “criminal type,” and has in his mind the features of some “Jack-the-Ripper,” with a shifty, sinister look, a scowl on his face, a cruel glint in his eyes, with a low brow, and a heavy, resolute jaw, or any other description of the supposed criminal, let him carefully observe his neighbor, or the crowd in the court room, or look in the mirror; then perhaps he will change his mind.

If the inmates of a prison could be turned loose in a court room full of curious people, gathered to listen to the sordid details of a murder trial, and all intermingle with the spectators, the court officials, the lawyers, and the expert witnesses, I would defy anyone to pick out the convicts from the rest of the gang. They are unfortunate human beings the same as you and I—not much better, not much worse—and deserve humane treatment and a chance to make good if they have the will and the capacity to do so.

After a prisoner is released, whether by parole or by having served his time, there should be a careful and rational follow-up system; not for the purpose of hounding him, but to help him to earn an honest living. In this the police department should give active and friendly cooperation. We find that at least 92 out of every hundred paroled men make good. With proper assistance the percentage could be made higher. I have seen, as other men have seen, so much of the haphazard system that has been practiced of arresting people, throwing them in jail, humiliating, punishing, and then releasing them, and then arresting them, and repeating this same process, without any good results, that it seems to me the time has come when we should try the noble experiment as outlined by the Wickersham commission, and as herein suggested.

While lack of proper home training and surroundings is the greatest cause of the increase in crime committed by the younger generation, it is by no means the only one. Ignorance, poverty and disease are responsible for much of it"

- Earl Ellicott Dudding, The Trail of the Dead Years. Edited by William Winfred Smith. Huntington, West Virginia: Prisoners Relief Society, 1932. p. 264-270.

[aahsoka]

someone in class was like lauding coddling the american mind as the best book she ever read and i was like girl. how did you fall for that bs

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Your URL is factually incorrect, but if it was, you realize tumblr is the “mentally ill people are still human and aren’t exempt from kindness” website, right?

It's telling that you seem to think that "kindness" is synonymous with lying to people. That I should be silent and not point out how obviously false religions are. Like, obviously.

A god who is both good and inscrutable is self-refuting. A god who knows all and grants free will is self-refuting. A god who is both perfect and needs worship is self-refuting. Such gods not just don't exist, but cannot exist, by definition.

I don't need to facilitate or endorse people's delusions. Any first-year psych course would teach you that affirming people's mental disturbances, that they're true and correct and right for them to believe, is absolute the worst thing of all.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators. But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy. You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s standing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.

You don't tell someone with paranoia that yes, the neighbor's cat really is listening in and reporting to the government how many times a day you open your fridge.

You don't tell someone who believes an invisible man follows them around awarding gold stars ⭐️ and flames 🔥 for every good and bad thing you do, that yes, that man really does exist. Even if that man lives up in the sky and has a 1700 year old book of magic and myth written about him, that changes nothing.

It's not kindness to protect people from figuring out they made a mistake; that's the emotional equivalent of foot-binding - you're protecting them from growing.

It's not kindness to help people live in a false reality, one that doesn't function the way they think it does. And it doesn't help the rest of us to be surrounded by people who don't understand how the world works.

I'm the person who will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. A person who does the latter is called a sycophant. And they probably want something from you. Someone who wants you to believe something that's false has their own agenda. That's basically the definition of a scammer.

The idea that we have to be "kind" rather than truthful belongs in the trash.

If your priority is to be "kind," then you're not being truthful. I do not suffer from that malady.

[luxe-pauvre]

So how might we reduce conflict and find synthesis in the broad and troubled mire of identity politics? The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written extensively on the subject of channelling anger through a ‘transition’ into effective acts of political advocacy. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Haidt and his co-author Lukianoff suggest a means of diffusing unhelpful antagonism to make way for real change and fruitful persuasion. They point us to what they call a politics of Common Humanity rather than a Common Enemy. The former, historically, has been the approach used when communities have most effectively advocated their human rights. The idea is that when we draw attention to the plight of a suffering group, either our own or one that we care about, we resist isolating them by drawing a conceptual circle around them. Instead we can draw a line around all of us, emphasising what we all have in common, and then point out where those among us are suffering. By contrast, Common Enemy identity politics, as employed during the recent post-Obama years, draws a tight circle around a community, points the finger at the bad guy outside it, and unites the community against him. This has of late become the mode of both political extremes. The efficacy of the Common Humanity approach lies in the fact that it engenders the warmth of fellow-feeling, to which we – especially those on the Left – are disposed to respond well. As the authors describe, the recent advocacy for same-sex marriage is a good example of such an approach: gay men and women demanding equal rights was not as effective a campaign as one that appealed on the grounds of the universality of love. This strategy is a good example of the kind of synthesis we seek. It brings people together to dissolve a conflict. It focuses on common standards of fairness and values shared by a nation, rather than an image of irreconcilably splintered factions within it (exaggerated by a narrative of crisis that can leave people on all sides alienated and bemused). It retains an important truth: that within a widely cast net of common humanity, we are not merely divided into the good and the bad but instead amount to a complex, messy, diverse and altogether ambiguous collection of people. It encourages compassion, and a more nuanced understanding of who we are.

Derren Brown, A Book of Secrets: Finding Solace in a Stubborn World

[leviathangourmet]

Nearly a Third of Gen Z Favors the Government Installing Surveillance Cameras in Homes

George Orwell’s 1984 is one of our society’s most frequently referenced illustrations of what life would be like under an authoritarian government. Actual government policies that are viewed as illiberal in varying degrees are often tied to this novel by opponents, an easy and effective way to call out government overreach and control. In the book 1984, citizens of the fictional nation Oceania are under constant government surveillance, including in their own homes. Devices called telescreens display propaganda and record peoples’ actions, allowing the government to monitor people even in what should be the most private place they know—their homes. This type of behavior is meant to be an extreme example of what can happen when a government gains too much power, and opposition to such surveillance has been assumed to be overwhelming and obvious. But is it?

In a newly released Cato Institute 2023 Central Bank Digital Currency National Survey of 2,000 Americans, we asked respondents whether they “favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.” Not surprisingly, few Americans—only 14 percent—support this idea. Three‐​fourths (75 percent) would oppose government surveillance cameras in homes, including 68 percent who “strongly oppose,” while 10% don’t have an opinion either way.

3 in 4 Americans oppose installing government surveillance cameras in all homes

However, Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐​style in‐​home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor “the government installing surveillance cameras in every household” in order to “reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.” Support declines with age, dropping to 20 percent among 30–44 year olds and dropping considerably to 6 percent among those over the age of 45.

3 in 10 young Americans support government surveillance cameras in every household to reduce abuse and crime

We don’t know how much of this preference for security over privacy or freedom is something unique to this generation (a cohort effect) or simply the result of youth (age effect). However, there is reason to think part of this is generational. Americans over age 45 have vastly different attitudes on in‐​home surveillance cameras than those who are younger. These Americans were born in or before 1978. Thus the very youngest were at least 11 before the Berlin Wall fell. Being raised during the Cold War amidst regular news reports of the Soviet Union surveilling their own people may have demonstrated to Americans the dangers of giving the government too much power to monitor people. Young people today are less exposed to these types of examples and thus less aware of the dangers of expansive government power.

It is also possible that increased support for government surveillance among the young has common roots with what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe in the Coddling of the American Mind: young people seem more willing to prioritize safety (from possible violence or hurtful words) over ensuring robust freedom (from government surveillance or to speak freely).

Younger Americans, minorities, and the center-left are more open to in-home surveillance cameras

Other demographics also differ in their tolerance of government surveillance in their homes. African Americans (33 percent) and Hispanic Americans (25 percent) are more likely than White Americans (9 percent) and Asian Americans (11 percent) to support in‐​home government surveillance. Democrats (17 percent) are also more likely than Republicans (11 percent) to support it but not by a wide margin. This issue divides Democrats between those who identify as “very liberal” in which only 9 percent support and “liberal” who are more than twice as likely to support (19 percent). Notably the issue doesn’t divide men (15 percent) and women (13 percent) who were about equally likely to support.

We asked this question as part of our survey on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) in order to see whether there is a relationship between opinions on the government issuing a central bank digital currency and government installing cameras in homes. It appears that the two opinions are correlated. Interestingly, more than half (53 percent) of those who support the United States adopting a CBDC are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes, while only 2 percent of those who oppose a CBDC feel the same. This suggests there may be a common consideration that is prompted by both issues. Likely, it has to do with willingness to give up privacy in hopes of greater security.

More than half of those who support a CBDC also support in-home government surveillance cameras

It is important to emphasize that the overwhelming majority of Americans across demographic groups oppose the government surveilling people in their homes. Nevertheless, it is relevant to note the higher acceptance among younger generations to trade freedom and privacy for some added security and protection.

If these trends continue, the United States may confront a very different privacy landscape in the future. It is possible that at some point, the American public will be open to extreme government overreach in a world that feels scarier and more dangerous than before, whether or not it is. Thus, it is important to impart the learnings of the past (and present) about what can happen when government amasses too much power. Without explicitly telling younger generations about the risks and dangers of government surveillance they will forget these lessons and may find themselves repeating devastating mistakes of the past.

[remoteteach]

Constructive Disagreement

In 2015, Haidt, with two colleagues, founded Heterodox Academy, a cross-campus group that promotes “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.” In their 2018 book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Haidt and Greg Lukianoff connected the narrowing of campus discourse with broader shifts in American culture that have encouraged students to see themselves as fragile, easily traumatized people who need “safe spaces.”

[6464quincy]

Why Academics Are Annoyed With Jonathan Haidt, Again

POSTED at 3 Quarks Daily on July 8, 2024 by JEROEN VAN BAAR Jonathan Haidt knows how to be a contrarian. In 2015, the NYU Stern social psychology professor founded Heterodox Academy, an organization that aims to bring viewpoint diversity to college campuses. He wrote an Atlantic article and book entitled The coddling of the American mind, in which he claimed that trigger warnings and safe spaces…

[reasonandmeaning]

Why Academics Are Annoyed With Jonathan Haidt, Again

POSTED at 3 Quarks Daily on July 8, 2024 by JEROEN VAN BAAR Jonathan Haidt knows how to be a contrarian. In 2015, the NYU Stern social psychology professor founded Heterodox Academy, an organization that aims to bring viewpoint diversity to college campuses. He wrote an Atlantic article and book entitled The coddling of the American mind, in which he claimed that trigger warnings and safe spaces…

[pwrn51]

The Coddling of The American Mind’ and Campus Woes

  In The Coddling of The American Mind, Jonathan Haidt examines how Helicopter Parenting, along with the pervasive effects of social media and structured education, contributes to the decline of young people’s mental and emotional health. It’s a compelling read. If you share with Dan concerns about today’s youth’s well-being, suggest picking up this book. We provide the audio commentary with…

[thatwritererinoriordan]

The Coddling of the American Mind guy is back again