The trouble with hyper-sensitivity
I first wrote this to send in reply to a post "Society
is too sensitive" but that post got deleted by its author in
between.
Quote of that post:
People have become offended by literally everything
nowadays. Its always criticizing someone who is considered
"different". Whether the person has different viewpoints, way of
living life, or feelings, society has become too sensitive.
Discussion over anything that is considered a touchy subject is
basically impossible because of people fearing judgement of other
people.
How have we evolved into this kind of society? I find it
incredibly sad and wish people would just stop caring so much
about what other people are doing, saying, or acting.
My reply:
I also have this experience when attempting and failing online
discussions on scientific or philosophical issues, which is actually
why I only had little such activity, and rather focus on developing
my own work alone without interactions.
Precisely, I see the world as usually managing more or less well in
concrete works and most scientific fields where validity criteria
are unambiguous (some inescapable verdict of experiments, any
reality feedback or the rigor of mathematical proofs), but otherwise
rather doomed to stay divided into separate religions, reputational
kingdoms and other kinds of closed local groups of orthodoxy which
cannot communicate with other groups, whenever validity criteria are
subject to human assessment. Indeed, the root of the problem as I
see it is that whenever a given community presents a given reference
as the best available thought on a given subject, it becomes
impossible for anyone (from another community, or with any original
thought) to come and criticize the presumed value of that reference,
because such a move is condemned and banned as offensive, breaking
the "community rules". Anyone may proudly claim being open to
criticism... but of course if only the criticism is polite and
constructive. The problem is that this criterion remains subjective,
so that any really different view is likely to be perceived as
offensive even if it was no way intended or structured as such. The
practical result is that people remain open to the criticism... from
peers who basically agree with them, but hardly ever much beyond
this.
The effect of this process is the practical impossibility for any
given community to exchange thought and understanding with a
different community, as well as for any community to make progress
by correcting its errors which may look obvious in the eyes of
another community. The one main exception to this process I could
observe, is the case of people with different ideas but who have in
common some attitude of openly unserious speculation and some kind
of epistemological nihilism, that is, they openly proclaim being
just randomly speculating and somehow unsure of their own thoughts
and arguments, and so they only have weak arguments to exchange with
each other, and are happy with that because it is comfortable. Yet
they'd start being offended as soon as someone would really come up
and dare having any much more solid background and arguments to
offer against them.
That is how the world basically remains unable to make progress in
such intellectual fields, and oppositions stay on the way to worsen
in their silenced sociological reality with the risk of suddenly
becoming much more effectively violent someday, by lack of ability
to express these oppositions and deal with them in quest for
resolution in explicit and intellectually productive manners.
This is also an explanation of the superiority of market economy
over planned economy, as a market economy generates progress by its
internal objective mechanism of competition which can naturally
eject incompetent managers from power, bypassing any argumentative
process, something impossible in a planned economy where criticism
against existing managers or management methods is likely to be
banned as an offense regardless of its actual validity.
Related links:
The
politeness argument
Quotes
on MBTI
The cult of
the violent social paralysis
Scale
Relativity
Why science and spirituality
seem to diverge
The debate on
quantum idealism and science
Lubos Motl
Philosophy
On
the hierarchy between fundamental and applied research