#cognet

[detournementsmineurs]

"Faucon Pélerin et Thuya" de Roland Cognet (2022) pour l'exposition "Roland Cognet, Après la Tempête" au Château de Trévarez (1893-1907), Bretagne, mai 2024.

[bibliolectors]

Leyendo entre flores: placeres primaverales (ilustración de Virginie Cognet)

[granstromjulius]

Roland Cognet

[guy60660]

Olivia Cognet | Design Milk

[mentalisttraceur]

I think one good snapshot of what kind of person I am and what my values are is that in my early-to-mid-20s I bought Why Does He Do That?; Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men to proactively check myself for unnoticed similarities to abusive men, and to get self-improvement ideas.

[artemlegere]

Books by Solveig Paulson Russell

Books are friends who take you far Wherever you would go, From torrid lands and jungle ways To northern fields of snow.

🐈‍⬛Digital Art • Novel • Virginie Cognet

[dogandcatcomics]

#repost @virginiecognet Virginie Cognet (Sainted, Charente Maritime, France). First image is Petit Dejeuner, gouache on paper, 30 x 40 cm. Second image is "Reading" and third image is "Library".

http://artazart.com/en/artiste/virginie-cognet

[womencreativemusic]

Clémence Cognet, France https://www.lexcentrale.com/la-devorante

[nezadovoljna-bubamara]

Virginie Cognet

https://instagram.com/virginiecognet?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

[detournementsmineurs]

Exposition "Roland Cognet, Après la Tempête" dans les anciennes écuries du Château de Trévarez (1893-1907), Bretagne, mai 2024.

[mentalisttraceur]

You're wrong and I don't like that! But seriously though:

TL;DR heuristic: give every wrongness a presumption of more harmfulness than you can see.

I fully agree with OP as practical on-the-ground advice. This perspective will help you be effective. It also, I suspect, correlates strongly to better mental health.

But the problem I have is that you are severely under-valuing how reliably stochastically harmful being wrong can be, and how much preventative/corrective impact a general opposition to wrongness can have if correctly directed. Though full disclosure, I do err too much the other way, so take the severity/emphaticness of my words with a grain of salt.

You cannot isolate objective errors of facts and reasoning to the point that they stop having significant probability of real harmful consequences.

Sound logic and true beliefs are profoundly interlocking. When you have enough of those two things, you are so thoroughly, game-changingly empowered to make your life better, that the mere absence of that is a serious harm (both to the wrong person, which is already bad enough life damage to be worth fighting for if you care about them, but also to anyone they have sufficiently strong influence on, especially any children who are still taking authoritatively presented statements as True and Right and carving their first moral intuitions with emotional reactions to how others react to them and treat them).

Every confidently held error can only exist by either being isolated to the point of not affecting behavior and externally consequential thought, or by warping your system of beliefs and reasoning to accommodate it (I like to call the generalization of this idea "logic bending", a more neutral term since technically it goes both ways: introducing more true beliefs and sound conclusions, or other psychological rewards for valid reasoning, can bend a warped sense of logic into closer alignment with sound logic).

Meanwhile, the life-improving and empowering benefits of being systematically righter only really start to snowball when your system of beliefs and reasoning has grown very comprehensive, allowing you to start getting those efficiency gains where many seemingly disparate things start to fold into elegantly unifying principles which in turn enables you to cover more ground in more problem spaces with less thought, less special-cases habitualized into the wetware of your brain, and less bits of knowledge... Such systems would struggle to fit much error without losing too much of the unifyingly-simplifying-yet-still-reliably-correct shape they need to stay as effective.

Also, errors are subject to memetic and cognetic evolution. Some errors are best thought of as literal parasites, evolved to virally spread themselves and co-opt their host humans into spreading them (in symbiosis with other errors, because errors cannot avoid noticable contradiction with the real-world without cancelling out their effects in the most obvious cases - which crucially is not the same thing as the most ethically important cases).

Anyway, if your criteria is just "observably ok results", you're necessarily going to underestimate the harm potential, because you'll be limited to just the concrete harms within your ability to see or within the ability of people around you to explain in a way that's compelling to you. When you treat every error as what it is - a reproducing landmine which will blow up into real harm when given the right circumstances - your estimate of harm probability distribution over possibilities in the absence of full comprehensive observation and analysis is going to be more accurate.

P.S. I spent most of my conscious life being able to observe the not-ok results of various ways people were wrong in their heads, but it would take literally 15-20 years for me to gain the ability to translate that shape of wrongness, hurt/harm, and causal relationship between them into words that others reliably understood and which I could at least in principle defend against most dismissals/rationalizations/etc. (Moving countries as a kid probably added a couple years to that 15-20; having access to the internet, English, and the results of modern psychology probably shaved off a decade or four.) At the latest by my mid teens, I even had an intuitive grasp of "cognetic opening" as an abstraction of the commonality between a lot of little wrongs in the mind with material ethical consequences that basically everyone infuriatingly blindly thought harmless. I struggled to put it into words for at least a decade to get anyone else to see it, even though I thought with it fluently. And it is overwhelmingly the pattern in my life that when I react to some cognition as bad, I can't think of a concrete example that the person finds compelling, but inevitably they or someone else eventually has something go worse because of it.

Hmm. Right, ok, so, there's two grounds on which you can evaluate an "ideology".

One ground is like, its abstract correctness. Are its factual claims right? Are its ethical claims agreeable to you?

This is how you should evaluate your own belief system. Being correct is very useful, so it's in your interest to try to be correct.

The other way you can evaluate an ideology is like... does it produce generally ok policies? What are its effects?

This is a lower bar. An ideology which is factually and ethically correct (by your standards) will necessarily produce ok effects (by your standards) when you believe it. Uh actually this probably isn't strictly true but it's true enough.

Anyway, it's the second criterion that you should use to evaluate other people's belief systems, I contend, unless you know them really well and know them to be amenable to certain kinds of rational debate.

Why?

Because asking that everyone be actually correct is far too much. That will never happen. It's a pipe dream. You're going to have to get used to living in a world full of people you think are wrong about shit. On the other hand, asking that everyone (or most people, or everyone in power, or whatever) believe stuff that leads to not-too-heinous consequences is a more reasonable goal. It's something I can get behind.

"This ideology produces observably ok results, but it's Wrong" is not a complaint I find very sympathetic. Ok, it's Wrong. So don't believe it and move on.

I think this follows from my "leave other people be unless you really have to" moral intuition. A guy believing a wrong thing is not enough to make your frustration at him sympathetic to me. I mean in a serious context, not just in terms of shooting the shit and complaining online. It's not enough. The guy needs to actually be doing something problematic. Otherwise "he's wrong and I don't like that" doesn't compel me.

[bauerntanz]

Beschämend wenig

Beschämend wenig! Unter seinem neuen Vorsitzenden schweigt das #Forum_Juden_Christen in #Lingen am #Holocaust-Gedenktag.

  Bundespräsident Roman Herzog erklärte 1996 den 27. Januar zum Tag des Gedenkens für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Seine Proklamation lautete: 1995 jährte sich zum 50. Mal das Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges und der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft. In diesem Jahr haben wir uns in besonderer Weise der Opfer des nationalsozialistischen Rassenwahns und Völkermordes erinnert und der…

[granstromjulius]

Roland Cognet

[mentalisttraceur]

Symbiotic Disorders

We know this idea as a joke: "I'm not healthy, I just have a system of perfectly balanced disorders". But I think this is a useful model to try out, especially for mental stuff. What would happen if at least two disorders can coexist and mask each other?

It could hide or stop dysfunction or the differentiating features so much that the person doesn't fit either diagnosis - but internally there is still all the pain and struggle of the disorder. It's worth remembering that when trying to understand others, and ourselves.

It might help you be more durable, willing, or able in certain roles, in the face of certain pressures and risks - maybe sometimes that's even worth the personal cost?

It would be harder to heal, improve, or even acknowledge problems, because each disorder is now load-bearing. You try to give some advice a fair shake, you work on being healthier, and yet you get worse outcomes which you know your old ways reliably prevent.

[mentalisttraceur]

I think the next step is seeing a good reason for thinking that any instance of some problem in your awareness is an actual problem. Not an impeccably good reason, but something more charitably correct-seeming than just handwaving it off as emotionally immature stupidity (though I'll agree sometimes that's a fair framing of it).

The name will naturally follow, I think, but in any case would be more apt (more self-describing; more accurate; not emphasizing the wrong thing). Because the heart of the problem is the person is missing any strong-enough path from being aware of a problem to letting go of either

fearing it (including indirectly/transitively: fearing it hurting others due to empathy, fearing something else at the end of a prediction tree involving it, etc),

craving the reward of fixing/attacking it (desire for revenge, the monkey-brain satisfaction of someone getting fair comeuppance, moralistic narcissism to nurture/defend/reinforce an injured self-esteem by leaning into being morally good), or

the interpretation of it as a real problem (there are necessarily more possible "this is wrong/bad/evil" perspectives than actually wrong/bad/evil things, and most wrong/bad things are more nuanced and complicated than entirely wrong/bad - but you have to learn to see it that way).

Now, while my ideologies were objectively strictly better than anything anyone has ever come up with more nuanced than what OP has in mind, I had all three of these problems - all three of these were making me attached and viscerally opposed to all instances of [my pet problem(s)] in my awareness.

But the thing is, once you understand that, it's time to ask - did you actually identify anything? Because you (probably) wouldn't use this criticism against, say, murder, torture, rape, and so on. You wouldn't be like "the anti-{murder,torture,rape} ideologies share the commonality of someone immaturely+stupidly treating everything in their awareness as something that directly affects them or that they can affect".

So even though my initial reaction was "oh yeah this seems to be isolating a useful-to-name cognetic opening", on further thought, the real big difference here is just whether or not you think someone has identified a Real Problem, and if they did then it's reasonable to get mad about it and want to fix it even if it's outside of their "immediate environment", but if they didn't you're labeling them as stupid and immature thing there instead.

So now with that said, I think I can see at least three useful ideas to isolate here:

just the problem of a person getting emotionally reactive to things that they can't do anything about;

just the problem of being emotionally reactive to things that can't affect you (this isn't an objective+absolute category - if you care enough about something other than yourself, every instance of a problem can affect you through empathy for others or anguish about the world losing/missing something good... but it's emotionally and socially healthier for people to have a certain level of "not my problem" / "can't be my problem", so it's worth having a term for it);

just the problem of taking a subjective/relative/unlikely problem as objective+absolute+certain (this might be closer to what was originally meant here - taking a problem that is only valid to treat as a problem in a personal immediate-environment sense, and over-generalizing it).

I should come up with a name for this because I think it's the unifying thread I see between communism, and fascism, and censorship / anti-shippers, and homophobia, and a bunch of other shit. some theory that seeks to unify all that really should have an elegant name, shouldn't it? but it doesn't

rambly

I've said that it's impossible to deplatform fascism or communism because their ideas are so fucking childishly simple they can be independently re-derived by anyone who is upset at the world. "I'm upset. This is the fault of someone, who hates me and did it on purpose. Oh, I hate that guy so much. He does all the bad things, and if I kill him, there will be no more bad things." and that's why nobody's able to give a coherent definition of fascism, because you can't peg "emotional immaturity and righteous ignorance" to any specific teaching, you can't keep the concept of being emotionally immature and blaming others secret.

but despite the basis of these ideologies being so simple they don't need language, communism and fascism didn't exist until after the industrial revolution. what i think happened is, there's a personality trait people have that can expand immensely, that wasn't able to expand until the railroad and telegraph shrunk the world.

and that thing I wish I had a good name for is "the belief or assumption that a person's immediate environment includes everything they're aware of."

I think it's a thing people noticed but haven't identified as the causative factor, they just use it as an insult. but people want to be in control of their environment. they want things they don't like to not be there. the ability to control and affect our immediate environment is the basic definition of agency. if it's your house, it's your rules. that's reasonable!

but with the antis, and the homophobes, and the commies, and the fascists, they clearly behave as though their "house" encompasses everything that they are aware of.

the easiest example is the early 2000s homophobia where the refrain was "do what you want in private but don't get in my face about it," used to justify fucking with people who were in nobody's face. back then we all said "that's an agentically laid lie to justify their real opinion!" and guess what with an uncoordinated group of people it's never an agentically concocted lie. they did act only to get the gays out of their faces, but their "faces" encompassed everything they know about. gay dudes are gross, gross things make them upset, the only way to not be upset is to know there's no gay dudes being gross everywhere! and this mindset is something that only happened with the telegraph because before that, the area of your awareness wasn't that big! (the exception is probably Muslims in the Holy Land)

communism and fascism are both the assumption that everything you're aware of is right in your face, it's simple, it can and should be given to you to just Do Right. you can't have this idea that you have figured out everything wrong with the world until the area of your perception is big enough that you can think you're seeing the world. once your zone of perception is wide enough you instantly believe that all of it is directly your business, everything that upsets you is happening right in your face and you have to use your personal agency to control your environment by making the upsetting things go away.

this is why antis act the way they do. it's not an agentically crafted lie to get power. their behavior is compulsive like all political behavior is compulsive. the idea that someone is Doing A Bigotry somewhere makes them very upset, and it's right in their faces, and they want to make the upsetting thing go away, and the only way to do that is to take control of anywhere the upsetting thing might happen and make it not happen. the only way they know how to do this invariably destroys everything they touch but they cannot stop themselves, they have to take control of every environment so they won't be upset by the thought of people doing bad things. the communists have to take control of all economic activity so they won't be upset by the thought of someone getting rich. the fascists have to take control of every life so they won't be upset by the thought of someone not bowing to their supremacy. this mindset cannot conclude something is none of your business, because if you're aware of it, it's your business.

[artemlegere]

A Book Poem

By Emily Dickinson

He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, Nor that his frame was dust. He danced along the dingy days, And this bequest of wings Was but a book. What liberty A loosened spirit brings!

🌸📕Illustration • Reading • Virginie Cognet