I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
Consciously keeping your identity small and thus not identifying with everyone who happens to have the same internal plumbing might be helpful there.
PG is awesome, but his ideas do basically fall into the category of “easier said than done.” This doesn’t mean “not worth doing,” of course, but practical techniques would be way more helpful. It’s easier to replace one group with another (arguably better?) group than to hold yourself above groupthink in general.
My approach is to notice when I want to say/write “we”, as opposed to “I”, and examine why. That’s why I don’t personally identify as a “LWer” (only as a neutral and factual “forum regular”), despite the potential for warm fuzzies resulting from such an identification.
There is an occasional worthy reason to identify with a specific group, but gender/country/language/race/occupation/sports team are probably not good criteria for such a group.
I always think of that in the context of conflict resolution, and refer to it as “telling someone that what they did was idiotic, not that they are an idiot.” Self-identifying is powerful, and people are pretty bad at it because of a confluence of biases.
Consciously keeping your identity small and thus not identifying with everyone who happens to have the same internal plumbing might be helpful there.
PG is awesome, but his ideas do basically fall into the category of “easier said than done.” This doesn’t mean “not worth doing,” of course, but practical techniques would be way more helpful. It’s easier to replace one group with another (arguably better?) group than to hold yourself above groupthink in general.
My approach is to notice when I want to say/write “we”, as opposed to “I”, and examine why. That’s why I don’t personally identify as a “LWer” (only as a neutral and factual “forum regular”), despite the potential for warm fuzzies resulting from such an identification.
There is an occasional worthy reason to identify with a specific group, but gender/country/language/race/occupation/sports team are probably not good criteria for such a group.
Thank you! I’ll look for that.
Here is a typical LW comment that raises the “excessive group identification” red flag for me.
I always think of that in the context of conflict resolution, and refer to it as “telling someone that what they did was idiotic, not that they are an idiot.” Self-identifying is powerful, and people are pretty bad at it because of a confluence of biases.