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July 3 - July 26, 2020
We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We
don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.
He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.
Inverted-U curves are hard to understand. They almost never fail to take us by surprise, and one of the reasons we are so often confused about advantages and disadvantages is that we forget when we are operating in a U-shaped world.2
“Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y.…There is no such thing as an unmitigated good.
The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.”
What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom.
Boies has a particular skill that helps to explain why he is so good at what he does. He’s a superb listener.
That’s “capitalization learning”: we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given.
Most of the learning that we do is capitalization learning. It is easy and obvious. If you have a beautiful voice and perfect pitch, it doesn’t take much to get you to join a choir. “Compensation learning,” on the other hand, is really hard. Memorizing what your mother says while she reads to you and then reproducing the words later in such a way that it sounds convincing to all those around you requires that you confront your limitations.
Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.
Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention. “If you have a new idea, and it’s disruptive and you’re agreeable, then what are you going to do with that?” says Peterson.
As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Be unreasonable .
Actually, there’s an even shorter test. One of the most brilliant modern psychologists was a man named Amos Tversky. Tversky was so smart that his fellow psychologists devised the “Tversky Intelligence Test”: The faster you realized Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were.
The idea of desirable difficulty suggests that not all difficulties are negative.
We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, the contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.
Rebellion and Authority.
Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly.…Consequently, influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual or the group is concerned with, and how they are calculated.
In other words, getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a math problem. If there are riots in the streets of Belfast, it’s because the costs to rioters of burning houses and smashing windows aren’t high enough.
“It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,” Seán MacStiofáin, the provisional IRA’s first chief of staff, said once, looking back on those early years. “Well, you had that to start with in [Northern Ireland], all right.”
disobedience can also be a response to authority.
When
people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.
This is called the “principle of legitimacy,” and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules ...
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When a big Loyalist march had run through Ballymurphy in the Easter before the curfew, British soldiers had stood between the marchers and the residents, ostensibly to act as a buffer. But the troops faced the Catholics on the sidewalk and stood with their backs to the Loyalists—as if they saw their job as to protect the Loyalists from the Catholics but not the Catholics from the Loyalists.
And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.
The Times quoted a Belfast citizen saying: “Anyone who isn’t confused here doesn’t really understand what is going on.”
Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly.
The state of California conducted the greatest penal experiment in American history, and after twenty years and tens of billions of dollars, nobody could ascertain whether that experiment did any good.
They were not convinced of the power of giants.
In its simplest formation, Clear’s thesis is as follows: “Cycling a large number of young men from a particular place through imprisonment, and then returning them to that place, is not healthy for the people who live in that place.”
We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews.
As André Trocmé once said, “How could the Nazis ever get to the end of the resources of such a people?”
force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.
It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.
It was not that the Viet Cong thought they were going to lose. It was that they did not think in terms of winning and losing at all—which was a profoundly different proposition.
‘First of all, tell him he knows nothing at all about his enemy, the Viet Cong. And what he doesn’t know about them is, they cannot be defeated, and they cannot be coerced.’”
