I think this is a very well-reasoned post that also makes me recoil in horror at its conclusions.
You don't fire someone for their beliefs. End of. You fire people for sabotaging an organisation. Even their beliefs make them statistically more likely to sabotage the organisation, you don't fire them unless and until that sabotage happens.
It's the same reason we don't use racial profiling. Even if black men are statistically more likely to commit crimes, we don't pre-emptively throw them in jail just to be on the safe side.
We aren't woke; we don't see people as a mishmash of categories, we see them as individuals who fail or succeed on their own merits.
Well, unfortunately we do fire people for their beliefs pretty regularly (where "we" means those of us who have been in executive positions). A sample of beliefs that will quickly get people fired include:
1. Believing that following company security policies is unimportant/optional.
2. That it's OK to do whatever it takes to win a sale (e.g. bribe a government official, sleep with a customer...)
3. That dishonesty is an acceptable way to smooth over relations with colleagues.
And so on. Now, you may object that these are not beliefs but behaviors. I can tell you though that it's not required to act to get fired. Most businesses unless restrained by regulation will fire someone who tells a colleague that they are thinking about doing any of those things, even if there's no evidence they've actually done them.
The reason for that is hopefully obvious - if you wait until an employee has ALREADY acted then it's far too late, the damage to the organization is done. Moreover both law enforcement officials/regulators and customers will hold you accountable for not anticipating the problems if it was known you put risky employees in positions of power. "But we don't fire people for their beliefs" is never accepted as a justification!
This extends beyond stated beliefs to various forms of profiling. For instance, US firms will typically not hire felons into many roles. Schools will not hire people who are on sex offender registers, and many parents expect schools to go further and not hire teachers who do things like express support for "MAP rights". Same reason: people will have expected you to anticipate bad outcomes given prior events and pre-empt any damage. In Europe governments sometimes blind organizations so people can have a second chance, and there are good arguments both for and against doing that which I don't want to enter into here. But suffice it to say that discrimination on such grounds is normal.
Now, it can certainly be debated whether wokeness should be treated the same way as a sales guy who expresses a belief that it's morally OK to sleep with a married customer to win a sale. In my view it clearly is, because events like Bud Light and this week Jaguar keep happening where woke employees completely trash brands that have been built up over decades - this is every bit as damaging as an employee who writes incriminating things in recorded emails, engages in money laundering and so on. The damage to the organization is enormous. The fact that it's predictable means that shareholders will start demanding that employers take risk mitigation measures. That doesn't mean woke people can't be hired, just that they can't be placed in positions where they can cause too much damage.
How would you recommend keeping woke actors or institutions from applying the same strategies that you’re outlining here against their non-/anti-woke counterparts?
Incidentally, rather than Borderline Personality Disorder, a far better analogue for your argument would be phobias. An initial negative experience is globally generalized in a way that allows the fear to persist by preventing future corrective experiences. The most effective form of treatment is exposure - forcing the individual to contact the feared thing in reality in order to adjust the cognitive model and extinguish the misaligned response.
I share that because your assertions regarding Borderline Personality Disorder are quite wrong and substantially undermine the quality of your argument. The defining characteristics of a *personality disorder* are (1) a stable and pervasive pattern that (2) is extremely difficult to change and (3) causes significant distress or impairment in one or more domains of life - I.e., despite repeated painful corrective feedback from reality, the cognitive models that drive their behavior remain highly resistant to alteration. The etiology of any of the personality disorders is multi-factorial and treatment is intensive, long-term, and costly. Anyone with psychological training is going to immediately flag your premise as wrong and that, at least rhetorically, weakens your argument to them.
I think it's harder to use this tactic against the right because the right understand the left much better than the other way around, it's kind of core to the concept.
Interesting point re: phobias. I don't quite understand your point about BPD though. I mostly just describe it. Are you objecting to the description, the claim about the root cause or the comment about how sufferers can grow out of it? The last part comes from here:
which cites Biskin2015 to claim "Alternatively, some people notice a natural reduction in their symptoms over time." However now I check the actual citation I can't find where it says that clearly, so perhaps the Psychology Today article is wrong.
I would avoid any articles written by that particular Psychology Today contributor in the future. From the DSM:
“A personality disorder is an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment.”
Fundamentally, what separates personality disorders from most other mental health diagnoses - a split the DSM-IV previously illustrated as Axis I vs Axis II - is that personality disorders do not get better on their own. Biskin removed some important context from the longitudinal work he cited:
(1) The remission rate in the PD patients studied remained lower than the rate for non-PD patients (their control).
(2) Even after no longer meeting the “clinical threshold”, the point at which there are enough symptoms to diagnose a disorder, the BPD patients “remained persistently more dysfunctional” than controls.
(3) There was a selection bias in these studies - their subjects entered these studies by entering treatment for their disorders at the associated hospital. So these are individuals who are receiving treatment for their PD.
Within Psychology, I recommend being mindful about whether the author is a theorist or a clinician. The group of studies you used were all drawn from the works of practicing clinicians. They are useful and reliable - for practicing clinicians. This is because we operate outside of clean experimental environments and have to make decisions in much muddier waters, and the studies reflect that. For a very specific use case like yours, you want the sterile lab environment of controlled studies where they have maximal control over confounding variables.
I would recommend going to AnnualReviews.org in the future. A large percentage of their review articles are available for free and you can be certain of the quality of the research you’re accessing.
-
If you’re really interested on digging into this topic further, I could recommend a plethora of books or articles on the topic. Since BPD’s role in your argument is the description of a specific cognitive mechanism, your arguments will be stronger if you avoid Abnormal Psychology and draw from Cognitive Psychology, which tries to identify the specific cognitive mechanisms underlying humanity’s observable behaviors generally. As I understand your argument, you’re wanting the research on Cybernetics within Cognitive Psychology. A more interactive example for your audience would be sharing videos of the “Person Swap” experiments highlighting Change Blindness. If you only wanted to illustrate that these Cognitive Models exist, the Selective Attention Test video is my absolute favorite go to. Highly worth a YouTube search and the 2-3 minutes to watch it. Selective Attention is a different problem than the one you actually want to highlight, but it does demonstrate that these schemas exist and are often misaligned with reality.
Behavioral Economics would be another great field to mine. There’s a plethora of work on the cognitive heuristics we use to shortcut decision-making that fail to account for reality as it is instead of how we expect it to be. Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is an excellent account written for a lay audience. While there is some contention over the replicability of certain studies within it, the book is not reliant on them to prove its thesis and - ironically - the fact Kahneman used some shaky studies with low power actually illustrates how error prone of cognitive heuristics are.
OK, interesting, thank you for your perspective. I'll take a look at the person swap experiments (you mean the one where the bear walks across the basketball game?).
I've rewritten that paragraph to no longer claim that BPD sufferers sometimes recover by themselves, and I added a mention of phobias.
The Selective Attention one is where the gorilla walks across as you’re counting the passes. The brain creates its model of what it needs to accomplish, people in dark colors aren’t relevant to the goal, they get tuned out and (a majority of) people don’t notice the gorilla.
The person swap is slightly different but similar experiment. Two people wearing the same clothing switch places with one another mid-conversation. If I remember right, about half of people don’t realize they’re speaking to someone else post-switch. Limited info is needed to complete a conversation with a stranger about directions, so only limited info is stored in working memory, and — for about half of people —their brain didn’t store enough to distinguish person A from person B.
I think this is a very well-reasoned post that also makes me recoil in horror at its conclusions.
You don't fire someone for their beliefs. End of. You fire people for sabotaging an organisation. Even their beliefs make them statistically more likely to sabotage the organisation, you don't fire them unless and until that sabotage happens.
It's the same reason we don't use racial profiling. Even if black men are statistically more likely to commit crimes, we don't pre-emptively throw them in jail just to be on the safe side.
We aren't woke; we don't see people as a mishmash of categories, we see them as individuals who fail or succeed on their own merits.
Well, unfortunately we do fire people for their beliefs pretty regularly (where "we" means those of us who have been in executive positions). A sample of beliefs that will quickly get people fired include:
1. Believing that following company security policies is unimportant/optional.
2. That it's OK to do whatever it takes to win a sale (e.g. bribe a government official, sleep with a customer...)
3. That dishonesty is an acceptable way to smooth over relations with colleagues.
And so on. Now, you may object that these are not beliefs but behaviors. I can tell you though that it's not required to act to get fired. Most businesses unless restrained by regulation will fire someone who tells a colleague that they are thinking about doing any of those things, even if there's no evidence they've actually done them.
The reason for that is hopefully obvious - if you wait until an employee has ALREADY acted then it's far too late, the damage to the organization is done. Moreover both law enforcement officials/regulators and customers will hold you accountable for not anticipating the problems if it was known you put risky employees in positions of power. "But we don't fire people for their beliefs" is never accepted as a justification!
This extends beyond stated beliefs to various forms of profiling. For instance, US firms will typically not hire felons into many roles. Schools will not hire people who are on sex offender registers, and many parents expect schools to go further and not hire teachers who do things like express support for "MAP rights". Same reason: people will have expected you to anticipate bad outcomes given prior events and pre-empt any damage. In Europe governments sometimes blind organizations so people can have a second chance, and there are good arguments both for and against doing that which I don't want to enter into here. But suffice it to say that discrimination on such grounds is normal.
Now, it can certainly be debated whether wokeness should be treated the same way as a sales guy who expresses a belief that it's morally OK to sleep with a married customer to win a sale. In my view it clearly is, because events like Bud Light and this week Jaguar keep happening where woke employees completely trash brands that have been built up over decades - this is every bit as damaging as an employee who writes incriminating things in recorded emails, engages in money laundering and so on. The damage to the organization is enormous. The fact that it's predictable means that shareholders will start demanding that employers take risk mitigation measures. That doesn't mean woke people can't be hired, just that they can't be placed in positions where they can cause too much damage.
How would you recommend keeping woke actors or institutions from applying the same strategies that you’re outlining here against their non-/anti-woke counterparts?
Incidentally, rather than Borderline Personality Disorder, a far better analogue for your argument would be phobias. An initial negative experience is globally generalized in a way that allows the fear to persist by preventing future corrective experiences. The most effective form of treatment is exposure - forcing the individual to contact the feared thing in reality in order to adjust the cognitive model and extinguish the misaligned response.
I share that because your assertions regarding Borderline Personality Disorder are quite wrong and substantially undermine the quality of your argument. The defining characteristics of a *personality disorder* are (1) a stable and pervasive pattern that (2) is extremely difficult to change and (3) causes significant distress or impairment in one or more domains of life - I.e., despite repeated painful corrective feedback from reality, the cognitive models that drive their behavior remain highly resistant to alteration. The etiology of any of the personality disorders is multi-factorial and treatment is intensive, long-term, and costly. Anyone with psychological training is going to immediately flag your premise as wrong and that, at least rhetorically, weakens your argument to them.
I think it's harder to use this tactic against the right because the right understand the left much better than the other way around, it's kind of core to the concept.
Interesting point re: phobias. I don't quite understand your point about BPD though. I mostly just describe it. Are you objecting to the description, the claim about the root cause or the comment about how sufferers can grow out of it? The last part comes from here:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/speaking-in-tongues/202411/people-with-borderline-personality-disorder-cant-change
which cites Biskin2015 to claim "Alternatively, some people notice a natural reduction in their symptoms over time." However now I check the actual citation I can't find where it says that clearly, so perhaps the Psychology Today article is wrong.
I would avoid any articles written by that particular Psychology Today contributor in the future. From the DSM:
“A personality disorder is an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment.”
Fundamentally, what separates personality disorders from most other mental health diagnoses - a split the DSM-IV previously illustrated as Axis I vs Axis II - is that personality disorders do not get better on their own. Biskin removed some important context from the longitudinal work he cited:
(1) The remission rate in the PD patients studied remained lower than the rate for non-PD patients (their control).
(2) Even after no longer meeting the “clinical threshold”, the point at which there are enough symptoms to diagnose a disorder, the BPD patients “remained persistently more dysfunctional” than controls.
(3) There was a selection bias in these studies - their subjects entered these studies by entering treatment for their disorders at the associated hospital. So these are individuals who are receiving treatment for their PD.
Within Psychology, I recommend being mindful about whether the author is a theorist or a clinician. The group of studies you used were all drawn from the works of practicing clinicians. They are useful and reliable - for practicing clinicians. This is because we operate outside of clean experimental environments and have to make decisions in much muddier waters, and the studies reflect that. For a very specific use case like yours, you want the sterile lab environment of controlled studies where they have maximal control over confounding variables.
I would recommend going to AnnualReviews.org in the future. A large percentage of their review articles are available for free and you can be certain of the quality of the research you’re accessing.
-
If you’re really interested on digging into this topic further, I could recommend a plethora of books or articles on the topic. Since BPD’s role in your argument is the description of a specific cognitive mechanism, your arguments will be stronger if you avoid Abnormal Psychology and draw from Cognitive Psychology, which tries to identify the specific cognitive mechanisms underlying humanity’s observable behaviors generally. As I understand your argument, you’re wanting the research on Cybernetics within Cognitive Psychology. A more interactive example for your audience would be sharing videos of the “Person Swap” experiments highlighting Change Blindness. If you only wanted to illustrate that these Cognitive Models exist, the Selective Attention Test video is my absolute favorite go to. Highly worth a YouTube search and the 2-3 minutes to watch it. Selective Attention is a different problem than the one you actually want to highlight, but it does demonstrate that these schemas exist and are often misaligned with reality.
Behavioral Economics would be another great field to mine. There’s a plethora of work on the cognitive heuristics we use to shortcut decision-making that fail to account for reality as it is instead of how we expect it to be. Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is an excellent account written for a lay audience. While there is some contention over the replicability of certain studies within it, the book is not reliant on them to prove its thesis and - ironically - the fact Kahneman used some shaky studies with low power actually illustrates how error prone of cognitive heuristics are.
OK, interesting, thank you for your perspective. I'll take a look at the person swap experiments (you mean the one where the bear walks across the basketball game?).
I've rewritten that paragraph to no longer claim that BPD sufferers sometimes recover by themselves, and I added a mention of phobias.
The Selective Attention one is where the gorilla walks across as you’re counting the passes. The brain creates its model of what it needs to accomplish, people in dark colors aren’t relevant to the goal, they get tuned out and (a majority of) people don’t notice the gorilla.
The person swap is slightly different but similar experiment. Two people wearing the same clothing switch places with one another mid-conversation. If I remember right, about half of people don’t realize they’re speaking to someone else post-switch. Limited info is needed to complete a conversation with a stranger about directions, so only limited info is stored in working memory, and — for about half of people —their brain didn’t store enough to distinguish person A from person B.