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Comment by jim-jim-jim | Hacker News Reader

This is mostly about parenting, but the point about conflict struck me. I've found that lots of people out there seemingly can't handle disagreement at all, and attribute a fundamental moral failure to their conversation partner if they don't see eye to eye. And most of these people are incredibly unhappy. I would be too if I couldn't trust anybody other than my perfect clone.

It's an antiquated idea, but explicit classroom instruction about agreeing to disagree might go a long way for some kids, if only to counter a media environment that only tells you exactly what you already want to hear.

More controversially, I've found that some young people would really benefit from disengaging with the entire concept of "mental health." Their obsessive focus upon medical labels and the dysfunctional communities it brings them in contact with only serve to warp acute distress into chronic misery.

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>I've found that lots of people out there seemingly can't handle disagreement at all...

This is the second time this week I'll have linked this here on HN but I'm exceptionally happy to do so. Jonathan Haidt has a topical discussion[1] about that and hypothesizes it stems from an utter lack of viewpoint diversity as kids grow up. He states that universities have sought to remove all emotional distress, when they're supposed to be the place where you go to have your ideas challenged and feel a little distressed about it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8

Even before universities or higher education, a lot of people are growing up in demographic bubbles where everyone around them, their parents, their classmates, the other people in their hobbies (and they are usually specific hobbies delineated along class lines), are from the same socio-economic class, the same political POV, share the same set of cultural values around things like art, religion, history (self created myths more often), etc. They often simply don't face much disagreement at all and so don't really experience "fundamental" disagreements. This is often exacerbated when they go to higher-ed where certain schools often mirror those same demographic differences and bubbles. Those schools market to those demographics and then it becomes an intensifying spiral.

I grew up on the borderline between the liberal urban part and the more conservative leaning rural part of my city, and I credit simply where I grew up with me having friends from diverse backgrounds up and down the class scale and with different POVS. If you weren't able to handle disagreement, you simply didn't have as many friends or had none.

When I moved to a far more homogenous city for university where I met an intensely cosmopolitan set of friends (all of whom are very nice people) it was fascinating to see how they struggled to occupy a different POV from their own, even more weird: they saw in that inability a paradoxical foundation for the certainty of their beliefs that made them double-down more often! They simply assume something was wrong with the person if they disagreed with them. If they couldn't occupy that different POV, then either they are in the wrong, or that different person is thinking wrong in a fundamental way that is irreconcilable. I'll let you guess which position they are more likely to take.

>I've found that lots of people out there seemingly can't handle disagreement at all, and attribute a fundamental moral failure to their conversation partner if they don't see eye to eye.

This is because we don't let kids fight each other on the playground anymore. No, I'm serious. For a lot of young people the first time they encounter real conflict that isn't adjudicated by some superior is when they're experiencing adulthood for the first time. This is a bit of a self serving comment because I got into a lot of fights as a kid, but I consider it a required experience for boys to get punched in the mouth once or twice (and also throw some punches of your own), less so for girls but imo still important. Not doing so warps people's perceptions of what violence is and we end up with really contrived and bewildering phrases like "silence is violence" and so on. Those people end up unable to determine an appropriate escalation (or deescalation) path, and this leads to your second point.

I strongly suspect the inability to independently resolve conflict can and does lead to mental health issues.

Zero tolerance towards violence was a huge mistake. I know there were legitimate concerns about school bullying, but violence will always be a part of the human condition and we need to develop some familiarity with it. Shielding children from that reality does them no favors.

Your final point is not at all controversial!

The very point of CBT is not to dwell on how you feel. Instead be active and take control of yourself.

For me that meant running/long cardio sessions.

I worked with a Dr who used CBT, and I explored various techniques for dealing with my thoughts.

The mind is a though machine, thats what it does. You just have to learn how to turn it off sometimes!

People should not be fed ideas around satisfaction, success, happiness and so on. Because so often those emotions are mapped to results of our society's ideal of a perfect human.

Walking and talking in a social group is what humans have evolved to do, but yet we've ironed that experience out of lives.

Drive to work, use a Peloton alone at home, come to an office and dont talk when you should be working. Don't say anything online as it'll be used against you and so on...

Our society is just awful.

Simply "disagreement" implies that there are valid opinions and perspectives to engage about. What we have now is a culture so polarized that you are literally evil to the other side if you disagree. We can't afford to have simple disagreements because if the other tribe destroys you, you need your tribe to support you.

For example, name something of real political consequence that it is acceptable to disagree about. It is a struggle to come up with a single example.

It does seem like people take extreme opposing views just to be contrary.

Maybe it's a way for them to take control of their lives.

I don't really know.

The anti-vax movement is an interesting example of divisive positions.

Because “of real political consequence” implies that it’s pretty damn important. You should be able to disagree about political things like tax structures and heath benefits without anyone getting hurt (my friends certainly have such disagreements). But if they get legitimately racist or sexist etc, it’s reasonable to start questioning their sanity and trustworthiness.

> For example, name something of real political consequence that it is acceptable to disagree about.

"What is the most impactful way to ensure that everyone has sufficient clean water and nutritious food to survive? Would approach X or approach Y or approach Z save more lives? What other alternatives should we be considering? What are the tradeoffs and risks here? How can we hedge our bets to protect against those tradeoffs and risks?"

Reasonable people can and should have interesting conversations about how best to solve problems. Those arguments could even get heated, but at the end of the day, the person you're arguing with is aligned on key values with you, and just disagrees on how best to fulfill those values.

> Would approach X or approach Y or approach Z save more lives?

I take it you missed the stories about people being assaulted in public for wearing masks.

Or not wearing them...

Or the people called fascists for not wanting to wear them.

The political talking points are unfortunately not that sophisticated. It’s largely about how twitter is run by a cabal of SJWs silencing the freedom to post Hunter Biden’s dick pics or fantasies about the liberals who will throw a tantrum if you say their pronouns wrong.

>Hunter Biden’s dick pics

This is generally a good tell that someone isn't willing to engage with the other side at all, and instead intentionally reduces a story about powerful organizations communicating strategies with each other (I'm not passing judgement here on if those activities were wise or should be allowed), and instead reduces it to a revenge porn story.

There's a much more interesting story there about how technologists should build systems that inevitably get the Eye of Sauron put upon them. It's not about Hunter's penis unless you want it to be.

I tried reading the twitter files and it seems to be all smoke and mirrors. Twitter has a clear rule about not sharing hacked information, which this falls under. Besides that point, there’s not even really proof this laptop exists. The evidence is mostly claims fabricated by the New York Post. Hunter Biden probably had his iCloud hacked instead of dropping off a sensitive laptop at some random repair shop where the laptop was intercepted by someone close to Tucker Carlson and then magically stolen in transit to Fox HQ.

All of this aside, since when is it a crime for a company to hire someone close to a politically powerful person as a consultant. How can you reasonably write laws against this or prove that this led to Ukraine having any political leverage with Biden. The DNC is also allowed to send requests to have nudes removed from Twitter. They didn’t command Twitter with a gun to their head. They requested just like Trump and friends regularly did for content they didn’t want which was respected as much as the requests by the DNC.

>Twitter has a clear rule about not sharing hacked information, which this falls under.

This sentence tells me you're lying and have not actually read them.

I thought it was about Biden's dealings with foreign powers, and possibly being beholden to them.

Or saying that it’s run by a white supremacist.

Or the woke left insisting on declaring pronouns

Have you ever been outside? I’ve lived in “woke left” cities for years and worked with a lot of “woke left” individuals. Never in my life have I seen someone get angry about pronouns or call someone out for using the wrong pronouns. It’s a fantasy invented to pit the working class against eachother.

You're just proving the point of this thread with the hostile question "Have you ever been outside?".

Your life is not representative of the lives of others.

The burden of proof is on the people making these claims that entire cities/cultures are overrun with SJWs screaming about pronouns. If what they claim is true, it’d be pretty unlikely that my personal experience is what it is.

SJW do get their knickers in a twist about pronouns. Do you disagree or agree?

Now you've introduced the part about entire cities being overrun so I'll leave that to you.

> lots of people out there seemingly can't handle disagreement at all, and attribute a fundamental moral failure to their conversation partner if they don't see eye to eye.

Disagree with a few things said, but fully agree with this bit! Feels more general in population, but I think young ppl grew up in this current distorted media environment, and so it perhaps hits them harder in terms of effect on their character.

I associate this with the way algorithms have distorted the social fabric and moved us all closer to agreeing conversation partners, and further from disagreeing ones. We then fail to engage when we encounter disagreeing partner "in the wild"

You’re right, but you’re going to get a lot of dorks here saying “but my side is right! And the other side is evil! You can’t argue facts!”

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