Thought-Terminating Cliché
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The half time super bowl show is on, if you're really having a _problem_ with Bad Bunny, I agree to disagree ;) "shut the fuck up"
Example:
A: I cant believe they have Bad Bunny doing the half time show!
B: Yeah its crazy... but you know how the lizard people are, they are just trying to distract us from the flat earth.
And keep upping it until they no longer agree.
Because you don't want to think about what they have to say, which is why you choose that approach to ending the conversation.
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychol...
"The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis"
Examples of such phrases might be encountered in political protests by activists. The phrases can be mainly for the members of the group particularly the call and response type.
Lifton's book explains some other factors of such societies which I think can help identify whether a group is more like a cult: Leaders control information, hidden knowledge, demand for purity, confession of "sin", truth deciders, language control, doctrine > persons, only the in group are awakened.
This feels like it's aimed at leftist activism, but the American right has plenty of thought-terminating dogmas: the unitary executive, backing the police and military unequivocally, "if you don't like it here you can leave", the "original intent" of the founders. "Patriotism", the Constitution, and the American conception of Protestant Christianity are cudgels to be employed against wrong-think.
Although also a reasonable criticism of the far left. Orwell has a whole essay on this. "The fascist octopus has sung its swan song". It's especially annoying when it's a slogan that has been clumsily translated from German by Marxists or from Chinese by Maoists (although the rise of Chinese capitalism has rather cut of the supply of the latter).
This is fair. You can't really have a good debate with anyone if you don't agree on first principles. It think that's part of the problem with the worlds polarization these days.
We have this fundamental disconnect between 'the greatest good for the most people' on one side and 'the greatest good for MY people' on the other. It's literally two different answer to the question of life having value. IE - "They all have the same value." vs "Some are more valuable than others."
When you have disagreements that fundamental you will never find common ground. The zero-sum view of the universe is fundamentally incompatible with the other view.
The only way to stop it from becoming a thought terminating cliche when it comes up (in it's many forms) is to explicitly call it out as what it is - A fundamental an insolvable disagreement that can only be met with some level of compromise.
Note well that this may not work to persuade them. But you can at least have the conversation.
It is noble to try. I suspect that you will always fail, unless the other person is uncommonly reasonable. Those views of life are the result of having vastly different experiences and backgrounds, and aren't something that typically changes after reaching adulthood.
You've chosen to charge straight into the minefield there: that's possibly the most controversial thing you could say, it has all sorts of implications in all sorts of contexts as diverse as abortion and Palestine.
It's extremely prevalent on Reddit and similar social media sites (even here, although to a much smaller extent). I have no idea why so many people seem to enjoy this style of speaking, and to be surrounded by others doing the same. Isn't being proven wrong or learning something completely unexpected the best part of the internet?
Being proven wrong and learning something actually hurts. It doesn't harm me when I learn that I'm wrong (just the opposite, it helps me grow) but it very much does hurt! So it makes sense that I tend to avoid things that will hurt me. For some even thinking that they could change and learn leads them to worry and avoidance.
Putting the two together if an individual changes then it weakens their group identity. So a person wants to stay in the group and be safe and not be hurt and the group wants the person to not weaken their membership.
In international peace negotiations a good neutral negotiator seeks to build a common ground between the sides - to show that their groups hold things in common, that change is possible.
On that topic: "No pain no gain." Its a cliche but I dont think thats terminating? "you're not the same person you were five years ago", "change happens", "You don’t have to have it all figured out"
Maybe terminating ones would be "if you don't like the heat get out of the kitchen", "curiosity killed the cat", "Why overthink it?", "That’s above my pay grade", "You can’t teach an old dog new tricks", "leopards cant change their spots"
"If only I was rich"
"If only I was born rich"
"If only I was better looking"
"If only I had the energy"
"If only I was smart"
"If only I had the time"
All of the above are usually excuses we make to not do the things we wish to.
It took me embarrassingly long in my youth to understand that when people said "I don't have time" or "I can't afford to", what they really meant was "I don't want to".
But when we're telling this to ourselves it is also lies almost 100% of the time.
Then it's better to either put those thoughts aside and start making things happen. Or admit to yourself when you don't want to.
And "I don't want to" often means "I don't want to make the effort, but I would like the outcome if I did."
They just don't think it through to the end when they say it. Or maybe they do, and this is just an easier way to say it?
To use an example from the article, if I were to say "Let people enjoy things", and you were to denounce that as a TTC without consideration of my true intent.
In that case you may inadvertently be the one that shuts down the debate prematurely, and I may have actually had a valid perspective.
So I've taken more of your kind of approach. Either both people are willing to understand each other at that time or are not - and heck you may be wrong in thinking the other person wants to engage / thinking they don't want to engage and make the wrong call. But in a controller-feedback system, you'll inevitably be wrong sometimes - the point is to course correct.
But then you even run into edge cases with this - sometimes people want to engage on a physical level, but not really engage and try to understand. But then how do you differentiate that from the possibility that you see that in others unfairly?
Ah, life is complicated.
In effect, you end up getting them to agree with some otherwise unthinkable positions, just one plateau at a time. There's only so much erosion that can take place before they fall back to their own lines of thought termination (like "all I care about is immigration", or whatever). So you end up with a kind of "anchor" that we can both agree on (ex: corporations are fucking us), which still has the hard edge of politics. At that point, all it takes is for the politics to do enough that the hard edges start to erode. But, there's no accounting for that. Just gotta assume the people who are doing wrong will keep proving it (as they historically have been unable to avoid, no matter how hard they try or how long they are successful at it prior).
As you say: life is complicated. I know people will roll their eyes at this answer as much as any other response I could give you. And I know that a political-focused answer isn't directly analogous to many other situations. But, my answer is as simple as I can think to make it. Just meet people where they're meeting you and don't worry about forcing a point.
“Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.” ― William Hartnell, Doctor Who
I have a similar concept, which is roughly described as "don't extend your own arm onto the chopping block, but make use of other people doing the same". Don't make presumptions, and you will never be wrong. Don't dig holes for yourself. Be kind, respectful, genuine. Don't throw the first punch, but don't let innocent people get hurt. Find common ground. When they extend out their arm, take their hand and guide them towards truth and goodness.
Essentially if you dismiss someone's argument as false just because it may have had a fallacy within it, that reasoning is itself a fallacy.
Some fallacy-seeking people ironically ignore this and just dismiss anything when they have the "gotcha, you made a fallacy therefore everything you said can be concluded as false" moment.
The idea that a single fallacy in a complex chain of reasoning renders the entire chain invalid just makes sense to programmers, who spend most of their time thinking in a step-wise and linear fashion where each output is the input to something else. This sort of "programmer style" thinking has crept into some surprising parts of society these days.
In real life, things are often more nuanced.
The opposite might be true as well, maybe the example you used can be a way to start a conversation and not end one.
It's actually meant to say if someone provides an exception, e.g. "No parking on Wednesdays", then that proves the existence of another rule, e.g. "Parking is allowed". Since an exception, without a rule, makes no sense.
But, in my experience, people do use it to mean "Oh, this one thing is wrong, but that proves everything else is right", which does not track.
Give it a try if you don't believe me. Even categories we take for granted, like trees and fish, are not perfectly crisp, and "obvious" facts like "humans need a heart to live" have surprising exceptions.
> Pointing out that penguins can't fly doesn't make the case that birds can fly stronger in any way.
I disagree. It's such a common rule that there's a long Wikipedia page for the exceptions[1], and the first photo is of penguins, labelled "penguins are a well-known example of flightless birds.".
If I knew nothing else about the topic, I would take it as evidence that it's common for birds to fly, otherwise that fact would have been unremarkable. Not hard proof of a universal quantifier, but a useful rule nonetheless.
Yes, this is why hard and fast rules don't make sense, and why they should have "generally", "normally", or "mostly" attached to them.
If you have two categories of birds, one with those that fly and one that doesn't, having that second list doesn't make the first stronger. At some point that second list dilutes that first one so much that it doesn't make sense anymore.
If my rule is that "white guys are named Dave" does my building a list of every example of a Dave and non-Dave make my rule stronger? When does the "strong" nature of the rule get watered down sufficiently? Honestly, a list of hundreds of birds tells me that it's a weak rule and that the "birds fly" rule is wrong.
I actually think you just engaged in thought-terminating cliche. It doesn't have a stock phraseology, but it's the assumption that the only alternative to modern capitalism is Soviet-style central planning. The cliche has a name, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
Most of them are like "So what? What effect does my action have?" and "It is what it is" which may be "thought-terminating" but seem to be able to serve a positive function of directing attention towards more productive avenues. Similarly, "let's agree to disagree" is a arguably a recognition that thought has already stopped (heels have been dug in) and it's better to move on.
It's not reasonable to expect someone to always engage fully with every topic every time. It's socially necessary to be able to terminate such interactions when one party doesn't want to continue.
There are better examples in this thread like "a rising tide lifts all boats" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945482), which are specific slogans designed to terminate specific thoughts (i.e. critique of specific ideologies).
Edit: Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative is probably an prime example of a thought-terminating cliche, and a pretty potent one at that. It's explicitly meant to naturalize specific neo-liberal policy choices (by naturalize I mean make like natural law, make it a non-debatable fact), eliminating any opportunity to crique or debate them.
How do you parse this sentence? Dismiss, dissent or justify fallacies? The fallacies are being dismissed, dissented (from?) or justified with a thought terminating cliché? So, the fallacy is the thought that's being terminated with the cliché?
The sentence would make grammatical sense if you remove the comma between dismiss and dissent, so that the thought terminating cliche dismisses dissent or justifies fallacies, but that only leads to more fundamental questions: Why do intentions matter? How could a cliche not be inherently thought-terminating? Are there different kinds of clichés, some thought-terminating, others thought-inspiring, or does the intention make the same cliché thought-terminating or thought-inspiring?
> Some such clichés are not inherently terminating, and only become so when intentionally used to dismiss something, to dissent, or to justify fallacies.
The fact that “dissent” is an intransitive verb is an important clue. You can’t dissent fallacies. You can only dissent from something.
Most people prefer to change their minds on their own terms and schedule. I'm also surprised there's not a 'most people..." thought-terminating cliche on this page
Anyone who has old friends that became politically radical will know the dance.
It conveys disagreement. It conveys that I'm out. But it's still respectful.
“well you and I disagree on this and so that it’s not worth engaging in further let’s switch to a new topic”
I find myself saying stupid things like "ain't that just the way" or "such is life in our times" around those in my life with an endless capacity for political outrage but limited capacity for political action.
It's like the magic "yes." when neither "yes and" nor "no" will do.
Can you explain what the risks of “thinking too deeply” are that a barrier to such is beneficial
TTCs are one way I can politely indicate I am unwilling to think further on this matter right now. Something else is the main thing.
Beyond conserving attention, I think TTCs help empaths and religious people establish their boundaries of thought.
It's not that thinking deeply is _unsafe_, it's that we can't and/or shouldn't do it at any time for anyone that asks.
EDIT oh there you go, most people https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46944903
Edit: Let me elaborate a little, the cliches supplied are one thing but in politics especially there exists particularly potent thought stopping phrases that instantly inhibit one's ability to think. Present in literally every political niche I've seen is "my opponents are <xyz bad thing>", which can be used to dismiss any opposing claim or criticism by "revealing" their "true intentions".
"This is not important for me to think about or discuss right now."
Is there a particular part of the article that notably reads to you as unhelpfully negative or overgeneralising? I'd like to see what you're seeing here for how it might improve the article.
The article suggests that "further discussion" is always good and my argument is that, well actually, no it isn't. Not always. And especially not when the entire discussion takes place inside of one person's brain.
I wouldn't say the article suggests that there should always be further discussion, either, only that these phrases tend to shut it down. I don't see such evaluative statements around the examples of that term at all. Does it seem like I'm missing something?
Quite right.
Iirc when I've first seen someone linking this wiki article on HN I got so angry at it (both the person and the wiki article) that I wrote a ~15-sentence rant how stupid I found it.
This is definitely a tool that I would never use and only get angry when I see it. IMO it's no good.
Poor, and nonsensical paraphrasing aside, I really do enjoy them because challenging them is amusing in a laconic, snippy kind of way.
"It's not that deep.": "Oh good, I won't have to keep going much longer".
"Lies of the Devil.": "Yeah, but you never want to talk about the lies of god, so here we are."
"Stop thinking too much.": "Don't give me orders, you fucking cop."
"You clearly care way too much about this topic.": "Oh dang! My bad. How much caring is just right?"
"There are worse things in life to worry about.": "Oh yeah? More relevant to what we're talking about? What? Sounds like something else I'd like to discuss!"
"Here we go again.": "Rain falls. Fire burns. When the fuel is spent, the discussion will be over, and not until then."
"So what? What effect does my action have?": [contextual; but something along the lines of "the effect that I'm describing to you", or "it depends on your actions? The question is what effect do you want to have, and then we can work backwards to your actions".]
"Let people enjoy things.": "Sorry, which part of my concern makes it impossible to enjoy things?"
I could go on. I did leave out "It's all good.", though. I don't think I've ever had someone try to use that on me as a way to stop me from arguing. Mostly to stop me from trying to do something for them. "Let me get you a pillow!", "Oh, no, it's all good." That doesn't really seem like what we're talking about here. And I left out "Let's agree to disagree.", because it's too direct for me to consider it here? Like...it's not an evasion of an argument to say "I don't want to have an argument". That's just, straight up, holding a firm position. We don't have to agree to disagree, we can just disagree. But, either way, what you're trying to say is "I'm not going to discuss this with you", not "I don't think you should think about this." It's a different thing.
What I'm really getting at, though, is that none of these are particularly thought-terminating. Even though I agree they are annoying for people to try to deflect with, that's really my issue with all deflection. Doesn't really hinge on their poor use of rhetorical device. Almost every use of rhetoric is flawed in some way. The best way I've found to avoid these frustrations and those with other deflections, is to just run them down to their natural conclusion, maintaining the "north star" that we're both earnestly trying to reach a settled position on this discussion/argument. The second that stops seeming to be the case, things are better left unresolved and we SHOULD terminate the discussion. But as long as we can all be cowed back into the goal of mutual satisfaction, there's no reason to let irritating phraseology rattle you.
Well sometimes agreeing on that is the hard part.
Would you have an example of a discussion where you weren't able to determine if both people were working towards the same goal?
An amount equal to the interlocutor's.
I suppose it could be, but the lizard people tell me it's not.
Instantly closes the door to any thoughtful discussion.
I didn't see it as closing down discussion, so I'll be mindful of that in future.
There is a real danger when presented with a problem to discard a partial solution because it fails to tackle a much larger problem.
It's a call for pragmatism over idealism.
And for some of us, with some specific personality traits, using it as a mantra is how we get anything at all done some days.
> Instantly closes the door to any thoughtful discussion.
No, because it's very common here for people use lack of perfection as an excuse for inaction, specifically to shut down thoughtful discussion of a problem or solutions to it
Programmers especially need to be constantly reminded that perfect is the enemy of the good, as do people trying to run successful businesses.