Monday, August 17, 2015

Trigger warnings are anti-science

They just makes people worse psychologically. Fascinating.
But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

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Planning and parenthood

Parenthood is possibly one of the areas that is most stricken by this mania for planning. In our present culture we generally assume that pregnancies are supposed to be planned and that an unplanned pregnancy is a kind of personal failure, even a catastrophe. I’m not talking here about situations where having a child is a genuine trial – where there are factors like extreme poverty, lack of a stable relationship, serious health risks or rape involved. I’m talking about people in stable families with a stable incomes and reasonable accommodations.
It turns out that, the less helicopter parenting you do, the better everyone is.

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