I've been thinking about this since I read it. I'm about to make this my entire personality
8
Discussion
Loading...
@grimalkina Read nothing but the abstract so far — but immediately thinking of some of my own bits of personal growth in years past that were specifically putting boundaries on my cynicism :-)
@grimalkina will we get a podcast episode? (I was going to say “looking forward to…” but dint want to be presumptuous)
@grimalkina "about to" 😂 😂
I only skimmed the abstract, but if you'd told me you wrote it I wouldn't have doubted you for a moment.
1
@sennoma haha! I had that feeling when I found it
@grimalkina *looks around at work*
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
I mean, at some point, maybe the problem is that we constantly exist in a context where cynicism is a normal, healthy, natural reaction to what we're seeing 🤣 🤣 😭
1
@markdennehy if you read the work you will see there is a distinction between contextual skepticism and cynicism as a non-contextual appraisal strategy, applied against evidence. Competency goes along with applying cynicism based on evidence; cynicism as a default approach goes along with applying it despite evidence against it
@grimalkina This certainly seems to align with my anecdotal experience. I sometimes wonder if people may adopt a cynical posture in order to seem more knowledgeable to peers (sort of to exploit this perception that cynicism correlates to expertise, though maybe not consciously).
In any case, cynicism coupled with ignorance frustrates me greatly, because it often stands in the way of making things better; people are convinced, without evidence, that things can't get better and it's a waste of time to try. I think this is at work in a lot of spheres, including both tech and politics.
1
@internic I believe they make that kind of argument in the paper
1
@grimalkina Ah, okay. I only got to the abstract so far.
@grimalkina I might pull out this article in my work. The joys of being able to actually cite research.
1
@mayintoronto I got this ref while reading Jamil Zaki's Hope for Cynics (https://www.jamil-zaki.com/hope-for-cynics), here's his broader research: https://www.jamil-zaki.com/research-lab
@grimalkina Cynicism bias is SO REAL!The one really terrible review I got of my book was a mansplaining/Dunning-Kruger/cynicism trifecta from someone who, shall we say, had form. As a friend of mine put it, “I don’t think that telling the infrastructure expert and engineering professor that she’s wrong and everything has to be terrible forever is quite the flex you think it is.”
1
@debcha oh my goodness, I can just imagine. So much solidarity with you on this. The nihilism in this type of negative groupthink means they genuinely cannot even evaluate what's in front of them when your work is about making strategic progress on human outcomes!! I have gotten similar comments that essentially boil down to, all human beings are evil, so I reject any aspect of psychological theory that allows for progress
3
@grimalkina As soon as it got published, the journal received a letter to the editor saying, essentially, ‘they’re wrong because they didn’t consider a, b, c’ and I got to write a rebuttal saying, ‘actually, we addressed a and b in the paper and we considered c, ALSO d through q’ and like, what, you thought because it was a null result it’d be an easy way to make yourself look smart by telling us what we did wrong? like I hadn’t spent YEARS engaged with its limitations? lol no
@grimalkina I was recently reminded that my PhD work was an (important!) null result in public health. It was a long, long road to getting it published, because of course the ‘easy’ way to get a null result is just to do a difficult project badly, so I had to make the case during peer and editorial review that not only was the study sound, the null result made sense given what else we knew about the issue, from researchers using a range of different approaches.
@grimalkina A big piece of it does seem to be using cynicism/nihilism/criticism as a ‘shortcut’ to being perceived — including and maybe especially by oneself — as smart. It can even be a self-fulfilling prophecy — if you decide it’s not worth trying, you can’t fail. Then you end up being ‘cynical’ about something like, “incident solar energy is abundant and we can now harness renewables at scale” or taking the position that humans are 100% evil and incapable of being otherwise.
posting the anti cynicism research on this, the cynicism platform 🎁😜
1
@grimalkina you know, Cat, reading what you share here always makes me feel a little better about working in tech.
1
@impermanen_ 🥰 I love to hear that.
bonfire.mavnn.eu
News and community around mavnn.eu projects.
Automatic federation enabled