To Name It Is To Tame It: Recent Episodes
Jeremy E Sherman. Ph.D.
Urban dictionary meets word-of-the-day meets rigorous social science. Every episode a new term with real brain velcro because they apply to your everyday life and decision-making. Terms for making better decisions and feeling better about the decisions you make.
The universally popular, stupifying myth that morality demands that we turn all of the popular named virtues (kindness, honesty, care, etc.) up to infinity and keep them there. No one does it or should but we still talk as though we do and should which breeds hypocrisy.
We humans are multilevel-headed. We've got our unconscious, unexamined instincts and habits, or unexamined stories about our behavior (I'm a good person), and our second-plus guess stories about the tellers of those stories (I like to think I'm a good person). The four I's approach gives you a way to navigate your multi-level-headedness.
Versatility in inverting things, the ability to explore and explain things by looking at them from opposite directions. Inversatility was fundamental to Einstein and Darwin's breakthroughs, and the breakthroughs that gave us a way to measure information (bits and bites) and our understanding of what's going on with whirlpools and chain reactions.
It's also a great way to innoculate yourself against gullible swooning over memes and moral principles.
My research team also suggests that inversatility also affords us a big breakthrough in explaining the difference between living, means-to-ends effort, and nonliving cause-and-effect phenomena. In other words, inversatility may give us a way to explain in strictly chemical terms how life started and what selves and aims really are.
Two approaches to morality
Moral Orgy: Get all horny for whatever moral principle serves you at the moment and drop it for another as needed. Pretend you're more moral because you hop from one to another.
Moral triage: Prioritizing your moral principles since they all take effort to maintain and uphold.
Any loaded or moral term will tend to lose meaning over time getting weaponized in the process. The loading won't get lost, just its reference, the behavior it's pointing. So for example, "Christian" still sounds positive in the US even though what it means to be Christian has become increasingly vague. That happens to all moral terms. They get bleached and thereby exploited.
How scientists overcome fruitless, overheated debate and how you can too. This test is the antidote to false dichotomies or talking out both sides of our mouths.
No matter how confident you are in a bet, be still more confident that it is a bet. That's fallibilism, the recognition that we can never be 100% sure we're right about anything. It's different from saying that nobody knows anything or that all bets are equally likely to be true.
The false assumption that your contempt for a behavior proves you don't engage in it, as in "Moi, a liar?! Impossible! I hate when people lie to me!" Exempt by contempt is how people who are vigilant against being treated unfairly falsely assume that they're fair-minded.
We'd like to live by formulas: Always be loving, always be tough, always be tough-loving. Such formulas don't work. Tough love isn't the answer; it's the question: When to be tough? When to be loving?
ACIDs eat away at our attention because they can't be handled by habit. Ambiguous cues means you can't tell which situation you're dealing with. Incompatible do's means what you'd do in one situation is the opposite of what you'd do in the other situation. So you can't just hedge.
Just as organisms evolve to take in what helps and keep out what harms, humans take in ideas that motivate and keep out ideas that demotivate. That's called confirmation bias. Decent people recognize confirmation bias as a problem to be managed. Total jerks treat confirmation bias as the solution to all of their problems.
To improve, we can pretend we already have or we can admit we haven't. For example, on racism we can fake it, saying "I don't see color," or we can face it, admitting that we still do. Both approaches have their place, but we often talk as though we should always be hopeful and fake it or realistic and face it.
Self-flattery on the assumption that your talk accurately describes your walk, as though you are a neutral accurate observer of your own behavior. Talkiswalkism like "No really, I've got integrity!" is meant to reassure but ends up having the opposite effect.
Science has been weirdly silent about a central topic in morality: Aholes, a lifestyle that's more inclusive than narcissist, psychopath, bully, or criminal. Psychoproctology is a humbly-light name for a serious research subject. In a free society we don't get to tell people how to live but we have to constrain aholes or it won't remain a free society.