Privileged Cluelessness

Interesting discussion about perspective, context, stereotypes and assumptions. Privileged cluelessness on the internet and in the classroom: How context destroys empathy by Rick Hills. I love his phrase, Privileged Cluelessness. A plague-like cognitive virus.

Hills opening definition:

“Privileged cluelessness” is the state of being oblivious about how one’s words or acts might affect others because of some privilege that one enjoys even as one forgets that one enjoys it. At its core, it is one’s loss of social empathy as a result of some advantage enjoyed over one’s audience.

And then his discussion.

As I shall suggest after the jump, both the privilege of being a tenured academic and the privilege of being anonymous commenter on the internet present a similar risk – the danger of loss of empathy (become “clueless”), because the ordinary social consequences of one’s words are removed by one’s social context. Oddly, one form of privileged cluelessness can be an antidote to the other.

[snip]

It is no big surprise that professors are often guilty of privileged cluelessness. We hold the proverbial conch shell for so long in the classroom that we can easily forget that our position of perceived authority and actual power deprives us of useful feedback about the effects of our words and actions. Our “provocative” comments come off as pompous or arrogant; our lectures, riveting in our own minds, are, in reality, an opportunity for our students’ e-mailing checking or web browsing. Students are understandably cowed at providing feedback to such an authority figure, and professors can easily overlook how students’ sense of self-worth can be disrupted by the professors’ questions intended as provocative but coming across as humiliating.

He has several, what seems to me, sensible tactics he has undertaken to mitigate his own potential "privileged cluelessness." At a more abstract level, but still useful I believe, I think the best antidote to "privileged cluelessness" is to constantly remain alert to the objective, means, context, logic, data, consistency, trade-offs and implications of any particular issue or circumstance. It's a mouthful, something of a tautology and less convenient than a check-list but it is pretty robust.

The existence of "privileged cluelessness" is a rally to address the unseen in Frederick Bastiat's What is Seen and What is Not Seen. We all live in a bubble circumscribed by our connections and our experience. We have to make the greatest epistemological hay we can with those connections and experience but we need also to always keep in mind, the much greater realm of the unknown.