Author: Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

Notes:

• Learning & Teaching Environment Today
  • Students are fragile
  • Believe others are in danger and need protection
• Untruths
  1. Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker
     • Eg. Fear of Peanut Allergies cause protection from nuts → Lack of exposure to peanuts creates more peanut allergies
     • Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate
     • Antifragile: Systems and people can survive the inevitable black swans and grow stronger in response
       • Taleb's 3 types
         1. Fragile: Break easily, don't heal
         2. Resilient: Withstand shocks
         3. Antifragile: Grows from shocks → Will become weak if shocks are removed → Overprotection causes harm
     • Safetyism
       • Encourages people to protect one another from experiences needed in order to become strong and healthy
       • Expansion of concept of safety to equate emotional discomfort with physical danger
  2. Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings
     • Sages in many societies have converged on the insight that feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable → Happiness, maturity and enlightenment require questioning out feelings
     • CBT: Examine negative beliefs and feelings, consider counter-evidence
     • "Critical Thinking": Connect one's claims to reliable evidence in a proper way (basis of scholarship and CBT)
     • Microaggressions: Brief verbal, behavioural, environmental indignities whether intentional or unintentional that communicate hostile or derogatory slights
       • "Unintentional" defined in terms of listener's interpretation → Emotional Reasoning to justify feelings
       • Requires assuming the worst of people
       • Shifted Moral change from "intent" to "impact"
  3. Us versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people
     • Reality is always more complicated than the narrative
     • Philosophy Principle of Charity: Interpret others statements in their best, most reasonable form
     • Humans are evolved for living in tribes that are in frequent conflict → in and out group thinking
     • Identity Politics
       1. Common-Humanity Identity Politics: Humanise opponents and appeal to their humanity
       2. Common-Enemy Identity Politics: Unite coalition against a common enemy
     • Combination of common-enemy identity politics and microaggression training → development of "call-out culture" → Anything can be shamed, leads to self-censorship and hurts education and mental health
• Getting here / Reasons / History
  1. Polarisation Cycle
     • Loss of common enemy after collapse of Soviet Union lead to more intratribal conflict
     • More self-segragating homogenous communities in the US
     • Media Environment: Proliferation of different channels, niche media and echo chamber/filter bubble
  2. Anxiety and Depression
     • Increase in adolescent anxiety and depression in 2011
     • Gen Z (1995-2012)
       • Grew up slowly, with less unsupervised time and autonomy
       • Higher rates of anxiety and depression → Due to frequent use of smartphones, social media
  3. Paranoid Parenting
     • Overprotection of antifragile children, leading to less resiliency
     • Less unsupervised play and exploration, challenges, negative experiences, minor risks
     • Led to believe the world is dangerous and we cannot face it alone
     • "Concerted Cultivation" but middle and upper class makes more fragile children
  4. The Decline of Play
     • Children need free play to finish wiring process of neural development → Reduction leads to lower risk tolerance, more prone to anxiety disorders
     • Decline caused by unrealistic fear of strangers and kidnapping, rising competitiveness for university admission, emphasis on testing and preparation, homework
  5. Bureaucracy of Safetyism
     • Campus growth and increase of administrators → good intentions of admin leading to policies bad for students and "corporatisation"
     • Market pressure and consumerist mentality in education → Competition on amenities, students are "customers" to please
     • "Better safe than sorry approach" of regulations → Sense of danger even without real threat, promoting untruth of Fragility and culture of safetyism
  6. The Quest for Justice
     • Students are responding to recent political events with commitment to social justice activism
     • Justice
       1. Distributive → People get what they deserve
          • Commonly thought of through "equity theory"
            • Ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all
       2. Procedural → Process of distribution and rules are fair and trustworthy
     • Social justice that is consistent with procedural and distributive: Proportional-Procedural Social Justice
     • Social Justice that aims to achieve equality of "outcomes": Equal-outcomes Social Justice
• Advice for Universities
  1. Entwine Identity with Freedom of Inquiry
  2. Pick the Best Mix of People for the Mission (Eg. older & independent, intellectual virtue graduates)
  3. Orient and Educate for Productive Disagreement
  4. Draw a Larger Circle Around the Community
• Advice for Societies
  1. Better usage and governing of social media
  2. Increase in free play and child freedom
  3. Better Identity Politics
  4. Universities committing to truth as a process