Ilana Redstone
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Ilana Redstone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And what that means is it's the feeling of moral outrage, righteous indignation, contempt for somebody who disagrees, particularly on a heated or contentious topic.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
The easiest way to understand the certainty trap is to think about how we feel when we're in it. And what that means is it's the feeling of moral outrage, righteous indignation, contempt for somebody who disagrees, particularly on a heated or contentious topic.
And that comes from a couple of different things, including treating our knowledge, sort of what we know as definitive rather than provisional. It can come from treating our preferred, say, policy as having all benefits and no costs, treating complex situations as though they're simple. Any and all of the above are just examples.
I think that's right. I think that there's no reason that we should all be wandering around just in some kind of philosophical stupor all day. And so there are things that are just, they're not worth debating. And so one of the distinctions I think that's important here is the certainty and then the trap. So the trap part is the contempt.
because of the implications that it has for our, particularly for our political conversation. But not all certainty is what I'm treating as a trap, if that makes sense.
I think you're right. I think it is human nature. I think that ultimately I'm asking people to do something that does go against arguably human nature, it feels good to be morally outraged. It feels good to be righteously indignant. I'm trying to help people understand that this has implications for our political conversation, for political polarization, for how we get along, for social trust.
We can then make choices about how we want to move forward. I think we're better off doing that once we understand what those choices imply.
I think it's a great example. And so this is the distinction between the certainty and the trap. So the problem that I'm trying to solve for is really viewing people who disagree with contempt. So if you're, as you're describing with respect to abortion, live and let live, I have my position, you have yours, then that's not necessarily a problem of contempt. I can give you a different example.
Let's say I'm pro-choice and I'm viewing someone who is, depending on how I want to phrase it, they are pro-life or anti-choice. And let's say that instead of kind of thinking, well, I have this opinion, you have that opinion, and we're on different sides of this. I now think that you're a misogynist who is trying to
control my body right that's a different that's a different way of coming at that topic where i'm making assumptions about someone's intent their motives etc rather than sort of the first scenario which you described, which is I have my opinion and you have yours. And the certainty trap, what I'm saying in the certainty trap is not necessarily that our assumptions are wrong.
I don't have a crystal ball that tells me what's going on inside someone's mind, but it's telling me, it should be telling us to be willing to stop and question everything the assumptions that we're making and ask ourselves, could we be wrong and what would it mean if we were?
It is that. It's that as well. And so and I'll give you an example sort of just from where that what that can look like. So when I was having a conversation just a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine who was in an argument with her husband and the argument was about they were it started out about just a difference of opinion and parenting styles.
Anyway, it ended up getting to be a fairly heated argument and to the point where he had he was planning to cancel a guy's weekend trip that was coming up. And he felt that she should cancel a work trip that was the following weekend. Basically, they should focus on the marriage, etc. As she's telling me this, and I'm listening to her, my first thought is, wow, that feels really unfair.
Like his guy weekend is not the same thing as your work trip that she rarely takes work trips. And that feels really, in my head, I was thinking that feels really controlling and manipulative.
this is what i was thinking about him for better or for worse so then a couple of days later she comes back and she they've talked and she said you know what he's he's really concerned about us taking time away from the marriage while things are not while we're not really on solid ground while we're not on solid footing whether that means the increased likelihood of infidelity
or just that it could create distance between the two of them. And suddenly, the assumptions that I had jumped to about him feeling sort of manipulative and controlling, I was stopped in my tracks. And I was sort of like, wow, I can... I can see how he got there.
I can see how he, whatever I originally thought about his decisions about canceling travel and work trips, when she said that, I could see, wow, I see how he could get there in a way that has nothing to do with being manipulative, being controlling, it's just out of concern for their marriage, et cetera. That's the difference between being in the certainty trap and out of it. Does that make sense?
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think that example works too. I think all of those conclusions that we draw about people that allow us to, as you said, I mean, I think the word dismissive is really apt here, to just sort of be dismissive, to look the other way. Another example I can think of would be when I'm, I used to be the person on the plane who would get annoyed at people
children who are crying, particularly babies who are crying, right? This was years ago before I had kids.
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