It’s rude and possibly harmful to psychoanalyze someone without love! (No countertransference.) Very lovingly I might say that what’s unsayable in LW revolves around anxieties about being smart.https://twitter.com/suspendedreason/status/1249036753186492416?s=20 …
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Looking over this thread, I’m not clear enough in the distinction between psychoanalyzing an individual, and a group. But the spilt isn’t firm: we *can’t* think without a group—so the phenomenology of thinking mixes levels. The unconscious is both personal and collective.
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Simon DeDeo Retweeted Joshua Grochow
Mathematicians are obviously angels, spilling out onto our land after their spaceship crashed.https://twitter.com/joshuagrochow/status/1249010998842765312?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
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(More seriously, I think mathematicians come off pretty well—nobody tried to cancel us for that explosive proofs paper! There’s a kind of tragic humility to the ones I meet that I really love. Maybe they’re Cordelia!)
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Simon DeDeo Retweeted Sarah Grynpas
Yes! The analogy would be the people who say “we can’t be screwed up—they have taboos, but we don’t. Look at all the messed up things we do.”https://twitter.com/SarahGrynpas/status/1249061750793789442?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
Sarah Grynpas @SarahGrynpasReplying to @SarahGrynpas @SimonDeDeoAnd then isn’t there a metapurpose to the taboo? Community, the feeling of having secret knowledge, of peeking behind the curtain, stays within your group. Believing the taboo can help adherence to achieve ideal behaviours, so its valuable to believe in a taboo that doesn’t exist1 reply 0 retweets 3 likesShow this thread -
Simon DeDeo Retweeted Arbutus Tree
Harvard University, 1996: "We're here on merit". Not true, untrue, or really anything in between—but it was something many people believed or thought, but weren't allowed to say. It was declassé.https://twitter.com/aphercotropist/status/1249088826221432834?s=20 …
Simon DeDeo added,
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo
I am pretty sure we can rustle up both statements of pride in Harvard meritocracy and statements that deeply question it, from within Harvard in 1996?
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Replying to @Plinz
Yes, *but*—very group dependent. Obviously the anti-affirmative action people were very into the meritocracy. And the administration too, in a different way. My memory of the student left back then neither questioned nor affirmed it at that time (changes came quickly.)
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo
The main argument of the anti-affirmative action people seems to have been that it would backfire, because using different measuring sticks for promotion would establish a powerful class of underperforming people that would explain their underperformance by racist discrimination.
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Replying to @Plinz
I think you just produced a summary abstract of the Harvard Salient, 1997—I would agree. PS for a blast from the past, look for the Peter Gomes "I am gay" thing.
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I got confronted with this argument in letters from the late 90ies, writen from folks at Harvard Law to Yale, and discussed in the context of the racist hounding of Nicholas and Erika Christakis by black Yale students in 2015. Of course, the other side had good arguments, too.
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