Astral Codex Ten

Haidt

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Haidt

Article

Haidt is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 24, 2022 and July 15, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Haidt’s moral foundations theory”; “which I think is how Haidt identifies himself”; “Haidt wants you to focus on and take away”. It most often appears alongside 1984, 2012, Acrolectics.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: March 24, 2022
  • Last seen: July 15, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Justice Creep
March 24, 2022 · Original source
Liberals are focused on a notion of equality and fairness as justice (I think Haidt's moral foundations theory is really helpful here). So the idea that wealthy nations create the most CO2 and cause the most global warming, where poorer nations (mostly already hot) will disproportionately experience the worst effects, is inherently unjust.
I am really grateful to Brad for bringing up Haidt’s moral foundations here - if I’d thought about it when writing the original post, I would have been able to do a much better job.
The transition from “help the poor” to “pursue economic justice” is, in Haidtian terms, a shift from the Care/Harm foundation to the Fairness foundation. I worry about this because I find myself much more comfortable with Care/Harm than with Fairness. I am very easily able to answer questions like “Are incels sad because they don’t have sex? Would it improve their lives if you gave it to them?” (yes, definitely), whereas I have no idea how to answer questions like “Is it unfair that incels don’t have sex?” (see discussion above; it seems unfair in some cosmic sense, but not necessarily in the sense where I feel certain that society is mandated to address the unfairness)
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
I had a general feeling that The Righteous Mind sits in the background of a lot of the political or meta-political content that I know and love. It had the aura of a sort of foundational text for the loose family of political views and affiliations I have. I don’t consider myself a centrist, which I think is how Haidt identifies himself, but I do share his disdain for tribal partisan politics and general sense that so much of what passes for political debate is just people yelling foundational definitional disagreements past each other mostly for the benefit of their own fans. I felt like I’d probably picked up most of its insights further downstream, and wouldn’t get much out of reading it.
Most of all, though, it just feels horribly outdated only a decade after it was published, and that’s a real death blow for an attempt to get beyond the ephemera of partisanship and talk about political differences in a more fundamental way. At its core the book is an attempt to go beyond the surface partisanship of R vs D, and dive into the underlying moral psychology that Haidt thinks drives those differences. Unfortunately, just ten years from writing, his underlying structure looks almost as disposable and skin-deep as the latest scandal or wedge policy issue.
For all I thought its argumentation was muddled and unclear, the way the book is structured is very clear and helpful. It’s divided into three sections, each of which has clearly stated main points it sets out to prove. Within those sections, each chapter ends with a brief summary that makes it clear what Haidt wants you to focus on and take away.