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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

Matthew Yglesias wrote about this today as well, and his take was interesting. Paywall though :/

https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depre...

FWIW, it appears it's a free read for those of us who have never visited before.

It's a very thought-provoking article and one that deserves more time than just might lunch break to ponder. In particular, this quote at the end of the article articulates an increasing discomfort I've been feeling around conversations about harm:

> I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.

It is different from saying, "If we teach people to recognize ways they've been harmed, then they feel bad, so we shouldn't teach them how to recognize harm"?

Framed another way, it looks like the language of harm is winning in the marketplace of ideas and the language of "those aren't actually that bad," is losing.

The important language is the language of "actions you can take by yourself and with others to meaningfully address your problems in a variety of ways".

That just doesn't pass the smell test. It sounds like what you want to say is that, "people should spend their effort on fixing things they have control over," but instead it's coming out as, "language that expresses concepts that people can't affect is less important."

It's trivial to find a counter example to the argument expressed literally. I can't change the laws of physics. Therefore the language used to express the laws of physics is less important. The conclusion doesn't make any sense because the argument doesn't make any sense.

When compared to the "language of harm" and the language of "everything's really kind of okay".

This third language is the language of "I don't like the status quo, or a change to the status quo. How do I deal with this?" You can deal with it through:

- Changing your point of view.

- Changing your circumstances.

- Tackling it head on to stop it.

- Team with others to address it.

That's all that I meant. The first two options kind of go with the "it's not so bad" language, and the last three with the "language of harm" (yes, option 2 kind of belongs to both). So it's really not an alternative to either, but the means of moving on from the other two.

> If there were more Republicans working as professors, we’d probably balance out this line of inquiry with papers asking whether rising levels of shootings and homicides also contribute to racial disparities in mental health. But there aren't. So even when all the research being done is good, we primarily see research looking at the questions that progressives think are interesting.

A study was conducted examining exactly this question. It turns out the bias is even worse: Not only are the 'wrong' questions unlikely to be asked, studies get rejected if they get the wrong results:

The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

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