“Judgmentalness” feels scary to some people because a part of our mind isn’t good at the use-mention distinction — “Alice says ‘you are bad’” and “You are bad” don’t feel different.
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This is associational thinking. “If two things are associated, they’re basically the same, right?” It runs on clustering, not grammar; it can’t ask “in what *sense* are these things related?”
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To cluster-mind, words are magic. Enactive. To say a thing is to make it real. Going meta and thinking *about* the words is impossible. So of course criticism hurts if you’re stuck in this mode.
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This is related to the frame of mind where “okay”, “allowed”, “acceptable”, are felt to be primary objects in the world, not reducible to predictions like “these people will treat me this way in this context.”
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That’s a very scary headspace to be in; trying to describe it makes it sound like it’s a very severe mental illness; but it’s actually common among so-called “healthy” people. Heidegger got this.
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You actually feel like social opinions are ontological primaries, and things like atoms, tables, or even sense perceptions are abstractions *over* social judgments. It’s as spooky as it sounds.
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We all use associational cognition constantly; we literally could not see if we didn’t. It’s not a “bad” mode of thought, it’s essential.
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But using *exclusively* associational cognition *for interpreting language* is, I think, a flattened, contracted, degenerate state, relative to what human minds can do in general. Being “insecure” or “easily triggered” is *not* just due to having finite computational power.
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The usual cynical explanation is that being “insecure” is a subconscious self-interested power move — “I precommit to getting upset unless you devote more resources to me.” But I think it’s actually even creepier than that.
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I think it’s a selfish gene thing. A gene for being “triggerable” isn’t there to benefit the organism it’s in, but to benefit its *kin*, who also have the gene, and can benefit from having victims who are easier to abuse and manipulate.
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This is pure speculation on my part, but once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it. The selfish-gene figure-ground inversion applies to behavior too — which means not all your instinctual behaviors were evolved to benefit *you*. Some may be evolved to benefit your kin at your expense.
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The thing that makes “judgment” freighted, makes it “judgmental”, is really hard to explain to people who aren’t as sensitive to it. It really is like your words are magic binding commands, “thou shalt feel bad about thyself.”
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Twitter is especially bad for this because most tweets are commands or evaluative judgments. You just scroll through and get dozens of people telling you what to do and think.
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Ironically, spreading memes that say “think for yourself!” doesn’t help — because those are commands too!
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Making “judgy” pronouncements about how awful insecure people are, isn’t helpful either for making them less insecure.
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But neither is just accommodating people’s insecurities indefinitely going to make them any less insecure. Insecurity is not merely an “unmet need” that goes away once you meet it.
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What conditions promote being more reflective and generative rather than reactive? What gets you away from “judginess” or “being insecure about being judged”?
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1. Truly asocial contemplation. Getting alone and into a nonverbal, feral state; or writing or drawing where definitely nobody will see. Calling it “meditation” is too virtue-signal-y. Just try to do something that doesn’t have social pressure.
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2. Focus attention on something super concrete (like making a physical object) or super impersonal (like math/science); something that prompts you to think about the thing itself, not your image.
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3. Don’t underestimate “merely intellectual” understanding; the literal words and their dictionary meanings and parsing the logical structure. This level of understanding is “shallow” or “mere” because you don’t feel compelled to act on it.
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That “mereness” is bad from the perspective that desires obedience (“you merely comprehend what I say, you don’t *do* it!”) but it’s good if you want to understand what’s going on before acting.
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Getting other people to reflect is hard, but I think it helps to keep the topic on things that lend themselves to “merely abstract geeking out”, because people will naturally have more reflective attitudes about that stuff.
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A certain type of high-integrity person is super resistant to talking about “politics and society” because they correctly note that people including themselves are more enactive/reactive about those topics. They’d rather talk science because those conversations are healthier.
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(Or talk about birdwatching or cooking or woodworking or whatever. “Real” things.)
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If we could get people to think about politics/psychology/society in the same way they think about parts of the physical world they’re curious about, it would be super powerful.
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“Judgment” that is “merely intellectual” — just an assessment or a prediction — is a *good* thing once you get away from all the performative/validating/invalidating baggage.
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Why? If an assessment of a person conveys useful information, you can use it to accomplish goals. Same as all knowledge.
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Of course, when you think about it that way, it’s obvious that often you don’t have enough info to assess people, or your true assessment is kind of boring and moderate.
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True judgments of people allow for relative magnitudes, not just adjectives. Once I was arguing with a friend that I was “not very good at math.” He disagreed. Once we pinned it down we both agreed that there are probably 5000-10,000 living Americans better at math than me.
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True judgments of people allow you to say “this person is better than average in such-and-such a respect, but still not good enough to achieve such-and-such a goal.” Not everything has to be a dichotomy.
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