Curated. I have long wanted a handle for this thing I often feel when engaging with (I think most?) people on Twitter. There’s a sadness I feel that isn’t really about any particular interaction but rather about a general sense that a large portion of the population seems to be uninterested in anything even approaching good-faith public argument. I fear that it’s not just a lack of interest. It’s more like we have lost some critical bit of our culture and are in the process of losing the ability to have good-faith public disagreements at all. Benquo’s handle of “a city beyond shame” will stick with me. I also like the guilt, shame, depravity frame. It’s good that Benquo doesn’t offer a method. A method wouldn’t work, and probably wasn’t really what was up with Socrates’s whole deal becoming a big deal. The diagnosis that reasoning with people who have gone to the side of depravity doesn’t work at all seems pretty legit to me, perhaps a bit overstated; I still think good-faith is a pretty surprisingly good rhetorical move in our civ, but it points to something real.
I have a worry about the post, or rather what I imagine to be the vibe behind the post (and the vibe it will activate in its readers): that it is too easy to use as a weapon against others (those terrible wrongthinkers) and quite hard to use against yourself. That’s the case with most such criticisms of some cognitive/cultural pattern, but I think it’s worth flagging because a reader who nods along to this is likely not imagining themselves, and probably should be more than they are. I get more out of this when I remember that I am sometimes depraved (or at least ashamed) wrt a partner, or a coworker, etc, in that in those cases, I have also sometimes given up on good faith disagreement.
We need better handles for thinking together about what is up with the sad state of our civ’s public conversations, and this post gave me some. I hope the post helps me remember to be alive as I continue to go about making contact with others.
I share your worry, but there’s just no substitute for judging on the merits; there’s no way any number of meta-handles for wrong behavior can force us to behave rightly.
The best incentive I think is that behaving wrongly, being dead to others when there’s any reasonable prospect of doing otherwise, generally leads to bad outcomes. I try to remember how much better I feel at the end of a minute or hour or day in which I face up to fear, pleasure, pain, confusion, etc, instead of dissociating from them, but I need plenty of reminding!
I’m not sure if it actually helps, but, when I’m writing posts about cognitive failures, I often try to open with examples of where I fell in the failure mode, so the thing I’m modeling is focused on more “look at where this applies to you” than “look at how it applies to other people.”
Curated. I have long wanted a handle for this thing I often feel when engaging with (I think most?) people on Twitter. There’s a sadness I feel that isn’t really about any particular interaction but rather about a general sense that a large portion of the population seems to be uninterested in anything even approaching good-faith public argument. I fear that it’s not just a lack of interest. It’s more like we have lost some critical bit of our culture and are in the process of losing the ability to have good-faith public disagreements at all. Benquo’s handle of “a city beyond shame” will stick with me. I also like the guilt, shame, depravity frame. It’s good that Benquo doesn’t offer a method. A method wouldn’t work, and probably wasn’t really what was up with Socrates’s whole deal becoming a big deal. The diagnosis that reasoning with people who have gone to the side of depravity doesn’t work at all seems pretty legit to me, perhaps a bit overstated; I still think good-faith is a pretty surprisingly good rhetorical move in our civ, but it points to something real.
I have a worry about the post, or rather what I imagine to be the vibe behind the post (and the vibe it will activate in its readers): that it is too easy to use as a weapon against others (those terrible wrongthinkers) and quite hard to use against yourself. That’s the case with most such criticisms of some cognitive/cultural pattern, but I think it’s worth flagging because a reader who nods along to this is likely not imagining themselves, and probably should be more than they are. I get more out of this when I remember that I am sometimes depraved (or at least ashamed) wrt a partner, or a coworker, etc, in that in those cases, I have also sometimes given up on good faith disagreement.
We need better handles for thinking together about what is up with the sad state of our civ’s public conversations, and this post gave me some. I hope the post helps me remember to be alive as I continue to go about making contact with others.
I share your worry, but there’s just no substitute for judging on the merits; there’s no way any number of meta-handles for wrong behavior can force us to behave rightly.
The best incentive I think is that behaving wrongly, being dead to others when there’s any reasonable prospect of doing otherwise, generally leads to bad outcomes. I try to remember how much better I feel at the end of a minute or hour or day in which I face up to fear, pleasure, pain, confusion, etc, instead of dissociating from them, but I need plenty of reminding!
I’m not sure if it actually helps, but, when I’m writing posts about cognitive failures, I often try to open with examples of where I fell in the failure mode, so the thing I’m modeling is focused on more “look at where this applies to you” than “look at how it applies to other people.”
For the record, I think this is helpful and will be stealing it for any future advice posts I might write!
It was indeed not very long until the handles in this post became very useful to me.
Do you have (or can you link to) any advice for how to notice one’s own depravity?