Illuminating the Fringe: Bringing Unconventional Research into the Spotlight
The pursuit of knowledge in the scientific community is often perceived as a noble endeavor, driven by curiosity and a passion for understanding the unknown. However, for an astronomer delving into the enigmatic realm of Vanishing Stars and Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)/UFOs, this quest became a perilous journey, fraught with challenges that threatened to upend their career and well-being. This narrative highlights the intricate dynamics at play when science intersects with stigma, skepticism, and personal resilience, underscoring the imperative of fostering a more inclusive and compassionate academic environment.
Operating within a stigmatized field, the astronomer faced a maelstrom of criticism and personal attacks, exposing the deep-seated skepticism towards unconventional research and its human toll. Accusations of participating in “rape culture” due to a collaboration with a colleague embroiled in controversy, though unfounded, demonstrate the dangers of guilt by association and the blurred lines between personal and professional culpability. This incident prompts crucial questions about the limits of accountability and the need for nuanced discourse, separating intent from association in academic and professional settings.
The severe stress the astronomer endured, culminating in a medical emergency, starkly illuminates the mental health implications of pursuing knowledge in the face of overwhelming skepticism and hostility. This aspect of the narrative emphasizes the importance of prioritizing well-being within academic environments, acknowledging the inextricable link between the pursuit of knowledge and the humanity of its practitioners. By recognizing this interdependence, institutions can foster a more supportive ecosystem, encouraging innovation while safeguarding the well-being of researchers.
The gradual legitimization of UAP/UFO research, marked by the emergence of systematic exploration initiatives like the Exoprobe Project, signals a shift towards a more inclusive scientific landscape. As mainstream attention and academic engagement increase, the boundaries of scientific inquiry are expanding, hinting at a future where unconventional research is met with a more open-minded reception. This evolution underscores the dynamic nature of scientific knowledge, where the pursuit of understanding, even in uncharted territories, is gradually being decoupled from stigma.
Ultimately, this narrative offers a multifaceted lesson, emphasizing the need for a scientific community that balances skepticism with empathy, acknowledging the human cost of stigma and the importance of mental health. By embracing this balance, academia can cultivate an environment that values resilience, inclusivity, and compassion, ensuring that the pursuit of knowledge enriches both our understanding of the world and the well-being of those who dare to explore its uncharted territories, fostering a brighter, more inclusive future for scientific inquiry.
My Personal Journey Through the Unknown (Beatriz Villarroel, June 2024)
Dr. Beatriz Villarroel: Civilian Astronomers‘ Guide to UAP Research (The Sol Foundation, November 2024)
New research suggests improving college mental health may be helped by reshaping modern childhood.
By: Holly Korbey
Published: Dec 20, 2022
Assistant professor Brett Mallon begins his evening Zoom session at Kansas State University with a question: When students hear the word “conflict,” what associations do they make?
Many first responses are decidedly negative. “I would say, avoid it at all costs,” one student offers. “Argument, awkward conversations,” says another. The list grows as students make emotional associations they have with conflict: stress, discomfort, war. Only one student suggests that he thinks of conflict as “an opportunity for growth.”
This is Conflict Resolution, a non-credit workshop in an “Adulting 101” series at Kansas State. The cheeky name, created by the campus wellness center, belies its serious purpose: to fill in the gaps of missing life skills for students with classes that range from the practical, like how to make a budget, to the relational, like dealing with imposter syndrome.
“Students talk about conflict like it’s this terrible thing,” Mallon said in an interview. “Is it that they’re afraid of [conflict], or are they lacking in experience? Probably a little bit of both.”
Seminars and classes like “Adulting 101” are becoming more common on college campuses. Though ranging in style and substance — from one-offs on handling stress to full-semester psychology courses on how to be happy — more universities are offering help to students struggling with the stresses of everyday life and mental health challenges like anxiety and depression.
But a growing body of evidence is beginning to suggest that the problems of “adulting” and mental health in college students may be rooted, at least in part, in modern childhood. Research shows that young people are lacking in emotional resilience and independence compared to previous generations. The problem has been growing in tandem with rising rates of anxiety and depression, perhaps exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and has left colleges scrambling to help and adapt.
“Some parents have been parenting differently, they have this value of success at all costs,” said Dori Hutchinson, executive director of the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University. “I like to describe it as some kids are growing up developmentally delayed, today’s 18-year-olds are like 12-year-olds from a decade ago. They have very little tolerance for conflict and discomfort, and COVID just exposed it.”
How modern childhood changed, and changed mental health
Research shows that young people who arrive on campus with healthy amounts of resilience and independence do better both academically and emotionally, but today more students of all backgrounds are arriving on campus with significantly less experience in dealing with life’s ups and downs. Many even see normal adult activities as risky or dangerous.
In a new study currently under review, Georgetown University psychologist Yulia Chentsova Dutton looked at whether American college students’ threshold for what is considered risky was comparable to their global peers. Chentsova Dutton and her team interviewed students from Turkey, Russia, Canada and the United States, asking them to describe a risky or dangerous experience they had in the last month. Both Turkish and Russian students described witnessing events that involved actual risk: violent fights on public transportation; hazardous driving conditions caused by drunk drivers; women being aggressively followed on the street.
But American students were far more likely to cite as dangerous things that most adults do every day, like being alone outside or riding alone in an Uber.
The American students’ risk threshold was comparatively “quite low,” according to Chentsova Dutton. Students who reported they gained independence later in childhood — going to the grocery store or riding public transportation alone, for example — viewed their university campus as more dangerous; those same students also had fewer positive emotions when describing risky situations.
Chentsova Dutton hypothesizes that when students have fewer opportunities to practice autonomy, they have less faith in themselves that they can figure out a risky situation. “My suspicion is that low autonomy seems to translate into low efficacy,” she said. “Low efficacy and a combination of stress is associated with distress,” like anxiety and depression.
In recent years, other psychologists have made similar associations. Author and New York University ethical leadership professor Jonathan Haidt has used Nassim Taleb’s theory of anti-fragility to explain how kids’ social and emotional systems act much like our bones and immune systems: Within reason, testing and stressing them doesn’t break them but makes them stronger. But, Haidt and first amendment advocate Greg Lukianoff have argued in their writing, a strong culture of “safetyism” which prizes the safety of children above all else, has prevented young people from putting stress on the bones, so to speak, so “such children are likely to suffer more when exposed later to other unpleasant but ordinary life events.”
Psychologists have directly connected a lack of resilience and independence to the growth of mental health problems and psychiatric disorders in young adults and say that short cycles of stress or conflict are not only not harmful, they are essential to human development. But modern childhood, for a variety of reasons, provides few opportunities for kids to practice those skills.
While it’s hard to point to a single cause, experts say a confluence of factors — including more time spent on smartphones and social media, less time for free play, a culture that prizes safety at the expense of building other characteristics, a fear of child kidnapping, and more adult-directed activities — together have created a culture that keeps kids far away from the kinds of experiences that build resilience.
Chentsova Dutton said America has an international reputation for prizing autonomy, but her study opened her eyes to a more complicated picture. American parents tend to be overprotective when children are young, acting as if kids are going to live at home for a long time, like parents do in Italy. Yet they also expect children to live away from home fairly early for college, like families do in Germany. The result is that American kids end up with drastically fewer years navigating real life than they do in other countries that start much earlier.
“We parent like we are in Italy, then send kids away like we are in Germany,” Chentsova Dutton said with a laugh. “Those things don’t match.”
A movement hopes to change the culture
Seventeen-year-old Megan Miller, a senior at Hudson High School in Hudson, Ohio, recently drove her two siblings, ages 15 and 12, to Cedar Point Amusement Park for an evening of fun. Miller was nervous. She’d never driven an hour and a half away from home by herself before, especially in the dark — but she had to do it; it was homework for school.
The assignment was to try something she’d never done before without her parents’, or anyone else’s, help. Other students figured out how to put air in their tires, cooked a meal for their family from start to finish and drove on the interstate. The point, Miller’s teacher Martin Bach said, was to give these young adults — many of whom would be living away from home in less than a year — experience with trying, failing and figuring something out on their own.
“I was seeing that student stress and anxiety levels were already bad, then COVID supercharged it,” Bach said. But a pattern of parents “swooping in to solve problems that kids could easily solve on their own” made Bach decide to create the unit on resilience and independence. “In my head I’m thinking, these kids are going off to college, how are they going to cope?”
Bach got the idea for the “do something new on your own” assignment from Let Grow, a national nonprofit promoting greater childhood independence. Let Grow offers free curriculum, aimed mostly at elementary and middle school students, that feels like it’s giving 21st century childhood a hard reset — like “play club,” in which children are allowed to play on school playgrounds without adult interference, and the “think for yourself essay contest.”
Let Grow is part of a growing movement of psychologists, therapists and educators advocating for evidence-based practices to help kids gain more independence and improve mental health. Let Grow’s co-founder, Lenore Skenazy, said that after traveling for years speaking to parent and school groups about the problem of shrinking childhood independence, she decided that families needed more than a lecture. “The audience would nod along, everybody gets it. But they wouldn’t let their own kids do it,” she said. Skenazy began to understand that the anxiety around child safety was not necessarily parents’ fault — the culture surrounding families almost fetishized child danger. Many parents felt they would be judged — or arrested — if they let their child walk to the park by themselves, or walk to the store.
Skenazy moved the organization toward behavior and policy change to address the cultural issues. Along with the independence curriculum for schools, Let Grow has helped four states enact “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws aimed at protecting parents from neglect charges. Let Grow also speaks directly to parents and teachers about letting kids try things by themselves — and being surprised by what their kids are able to do.
Like Megan Miller, whose trip to Cedar Point was thrilling yet also had bumps along the way. They got a little lost inside the park, and the siblings had a disagreement over which roller coasters to ride. On the way there, even with navigation on her phone, she took a wrong turn and ended up on an unfamiliar road. But that road wound alongside scenic Lake Erie, which she’d never been on. “It ended up being this beautiful drive that I will definitely do every single time,” Miller said.
Since the trip, Miller’s parents have noticed a change, she said. “I find that I’m much more comfortable driving on highways and for long periods of time. My parents know now that I can do it, which helps a lot.”
A road forward
More researchers, psychologists and educators are looking to find more ways to incorporate independence skills into kids’ daily lives.
Clinical psychologist Camilo Ortiz, a professor at Long Island University-Post, began noticing a few years ago that some of his young patients, mostly children being treated for anxiety, would “fold very quickly” at the first sign of adversity. Ortiz uses what he calls the “four Ds” to explain what was happening: Today’s kids experienced less “discomfort, distress, disappointment and danger” than previous generations did, because their parents, who have the best intentions, deprive them of these opportunities. He began to wonder whether kids who didn’t get much of the four Ds were missing an important opportunity to be uncomfortable and then persist — and whether they might help clinically anxious children.
Beginning last year, Ortiz began a pilot treatment program for childhood clinical anxiety that is based on independence and “getting parents out of their hair.”
“This is not a traditional anxiety treatment,” he said. “My approach is something like: So you’re afraid of the dark? Go to the deli and buy me some salami.” A lot of anxiety is based in fear of the unknown, so the treatment involves having an experience full of uncertainty, like riding the subway alone or going to the grocery alone. If the child can tolerate the discomfort in that situation, Ortiz hypothesized that those lessons might translate to whatever is causing the child anxiety.
Early results are promising: the independence exercises have been successful in quelling anxiety for some children. “The new approach that I have developed is for middle school kids,” he said. “So by the time they’re college students, they’ve gotten a lot more practice with those four Ds.”
Other groups help build resilience in students in academic settings, like the Resilience Builder Program, which aims to help students think more flexibly, be proactive in the face of challenges and learn optimistic thinking. The program’s creator, Mary Alvord, said the protective factors taught to middle schoolers are based on decades of research on childhood resilience. “It’s about being proactive and not feeling like you’re a victim, how you can control some things, but you can’t control everything,” she said. “How can you make the best of it, and if you can’t — how do you ask for help?”
Experts say independence and autonomy are best formed and tested in childhood, but it’s never too late to begin. At the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University, Hutchinson and her team help college students diagnosed with mental illness continue their education and reach their goals, and that often begins with building their resilience and independence skills. The center has developed a curriculum that is focused not just on students, but parents and faculty as well.
“Families are a player at the table,” Hutchinson said. Parents benefit from coaching that shows them how to support their student without “doing for” them. Parents sometimes don’t understand that protecting their child from failure and difficulty can be an obstacle to growth.
“When we are controlling a young adult’s experiences, and they go without that full range of emotional experience,” said the center’s Director for Strategic Initiatives Courtney Joly-Lowdermilk, “we’re actually curbing people’s opportunities to live full lives, and have the full range of human experience.”
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Fredsskadade is a Swedish word meaning "injured by peace."
What would have been a fascinating follow-up would be to have the Canadian and US participants read the answers of the Turkish and Russian participants. And vice versa.
The fact that the peaceful, first world societies have affirmed and reinforced the anxiety in their kids - the psychological equivlent of foot-binding, seemingly because there are fewer legitimate threats than at any time in history - is something these societies will need to reckon with.
Erec Smith: Redefining "Harm" Infantilizes People of Color
"Harm" has become an almost ubiquitous term in social justice circles. Hear a Mandarin word that sounds like the N-word? You’ve been harmed, according to students and administrators at USC. Famed author of White Fragility Robin DiAngelo’s latest New York Times bestselling book is even subtitled “How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm”; it seems to argue that anything other than full adherence to her worldview perpetrates harm against people of color.
In contemporary social justice parlance, the word harm has broadened from its original meaning of physical and sometimes mental injury to anything that offends, creates discomfort or, through "slippery slope" logic, can eventually lead to physical harm. The word "harm" does not mean what it used to mean.
The standard definition of harm has undergone concept creep—the broadening of a word's meaning to incorporate thoughts and actions formerly considered outside its purview. When you see the definition of “white supremacy” go from the KKK and Nazis to “individualism” and “objectivity”, you’re seeing an example of concept creep.
Where once the potential for harm existed in contact sports, accidents, physical altercations, traumas and so on, one might now find it while reading a reference to a racial slur in a question in a law school exam, or listening to a recorded debate in a classroom, such as when teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd played for her class a debate on transgender pronouns featuring psychologist Jordan Peterson, or encountering any of millions of possible triggering opinions on social media.
The redefinition of harm infantilizes people and I, for one, refuse to be “harmed” so easily. I would never let someone else have so much power over my wellbeing that a "mean tweet" or a mere question—especially one asked out of curiosity or a request for elaboration—would shake me to my core.
Americans of African descent have been resilient through 250 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow apartheid. Now that we have overcome physical oppression and segregation, is now the time to give others so much control over our minds? Our happiness and fulfillment? I don't think a world in which people give their power away so easily is one any self-respecting person would want to see.
As author and lawyer Van Jones so eloquently said, quote, “I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That's different. I'm not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity. I'm not going to take all the weights out of the gym. That's the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.”
My anti-racism is about promoting empowerment. Defining harm as shallowly as many other self-proclaimed anti-racist activists do leads them to mistake symbolic gestures for concrete strategies for change. Complaining about triggering language and hurt feelings directs energy away from ameliorating real suffering in the world: hunger, violence, homelessness, and so much more. Paying Robin DiAngelo’s 5-figure speaking fee enriches her but doesn’t get anyone out of economic deprivation. Encouraging students at Loyola University Chicago to report cases of perceived “emotional harm” to the school does nothing to help the hundreds of Chicagoans literally dying of homicide each year.
I understand that certain words and statements do hold historically disquieting connotations. Being called a racial slur or being associated with a particular negative stereotype never feels good. This take on harm is closer to the original meaning of the word and such actions must be addressed effectively. However, eradicating “harm”—newly redefined—may only amount to performance art, in which the semblance of action is all that is needed.
When you see someone complain about the “harm” imparted by someone else’s words, ask yourself if the complainer’s ideas and tactics will make any real difference in the lives of the truly injured. When harm begins to mean everything, it ceases to mean anything at all.
Join me in building a culture of resilience and optimism at FairForAll.org
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This kind of thing is virtue theater, the type of self-satisfied pretending-to-help that could be called secular prayer.
"If someone tried to take control of your body and make you a slave, you would fight for freedom. Yet how easily you hand over your mind to anyone who insults you. When you dwell on their words and let them dominate your thoughts, you make them your master."
-- Epictetus
The people who like to lecture others on their "fragility" are reliably the most fragile of all.
In 1971, Michael Cole, and a team of his fellow psychologists, travelled to West Africa to settle a question about race and intelligence.
They gave members of the Kpelle tribe various items (food, tools, cooking utensils, clothing) and asked them to sort them into categories. They then compared the results to a group of American students.
The Kpelle failed miserably.
Or rather, instead of grouping the items by type, as the students had, the Kpelle divided the objects into functional pairs. Here’s how Joesph Glick, one of the other researchers, described the experiment:
When the subject had finished sorting, what was present were ten categories composed of two items each — related to each other in a functional, not categorical, manner. Thus, a knife might have been placed with an orange, a potato with a hoe, and so on. When asked, the subject would rationalize the choice with such comments as, “The knife goes with the orange because it cuts it.” When questioned further, the subject would often volunteer that a wise man would do things in this way.
When an exasperated experimenter asked finally, “how would a fool do it,” he was given back sorts of the type that were initially expected — four neat piles with foods in one, tools in another, and so on.
As Cole noted in his report, the Kpelle weren’t less intelligent than the students because they thought oranges should be paired with knives instead of potatoes, they’d just grown up in a different environment with a different set of cognitive and cultural biases.
Or, to put it another way, the Kpelle weren’t wrong, but they weren’t white either.
* * *
Racial intelligence is one of those topics that’s a trainwreck no matter how you approach it.
Virtue-signalling politicians like Kate Brown lower test standards to “help students of colour,” race essentialists like Nicholas Wade publish pseudoscience about racial disparities, sociopaths like Payton Gendron use memes about IQ to justify racist mass shootings, the topic is so radioactive that most people just avoid it.
So let’s get one source of confusion out of the way from the start:
There are obviously going to be IQ differences if you group people by skin colour.
I say, “obviously,” because there will be differences if you group human beings by literally any measure.
If you group people by hair colour, you’ll discover that one shade is statistically more intelligent than the others. If you group people by height, you’ll find that one height has the highest percentage of mathematical savants. Somewhere, if some maverick ever decides to search for it, is the most eloquent penis size.
But when we try to draw meaningful conclusions with this quirk of statistical analysis, we run into a few problems. The first of which is what a black person even is.
According to a 2015 analysis of genetic data, around one in 10 self-identified African Americans have less than 50% African ancestry. And around one in 50 have less than 2%. We’ve become so comfortable with the idea that people whose skin is a roughly similar colour are the same “race” that we forget that a good suntan can throw the whole thing up in the air.
But okay, let’s get all “one drop rule” about this, and say that a black person is anyone whose skin is “milk chocolate or darker,” and who has some African ancestry in the past few generations. Very scientific.
The next problem is figuring out whether IQ differences are genetic.
For example, in support of the idea that “racial” differences are genetic, it’s often pointed out that Kenyans and Ethiopians dominate long-distance running. And they do. But does this mean “black people” are better distance runners than “white people?”
Well, if we take a closer look at these dominant athletes, we notice that they come, almost exclusively, from just three tribes (specifically the Kalenjin, Nandi and Oromo). All of which benefit from low oxygen/high altitude conditions, in a country that has numerous programs designed to identify and nurture long-distance running talent.
So instead of, “black people are genetically better at long-distance running.” We get, “black people who grew up in certain high-altitude regions of Ethiopia and Kenya, and who were encouraged to nurture their long-distance running talents from an early age, are better than everybody, including other black people, at long-distance running.”
I admit this is a bit more of a mouthful.
But none of this addresses the biggest problem with IQ differences; the concept of IQ itself.
I mean, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that IQ is a perfect predictor of culturally-neutral, genetically-predetermined intelligence. And let’s even assume that people with African ancestry have, on average, lower IQs than anybody else.
What do we do about this?
Should black people be shipped off to separate schools if our average grades are a few points lower? Should we be denied access to opportunities or jobs if a slightly smaller percentage of black people turn out to be geniuses? Is a high IQ more valuable than creativity? Or people skills? Or persistence?
Well, it turns out that Dr Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford University and one of the pioneers of IQ research, had similar questions.
In 1921, in one of the longest-running studies on intelligence ever conducted, Terman began tracking the progress of 1521 children who scored highest on his intelligence test, confident that they would all be “at the top of their fields,” as adults.
But almost none of them were. Instead, “willpower, perseverance and desire to excel,” were far better predictors of success. As Terman concluded, “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”
Honestly? I’m surprised his IQ wasn’t high enough to figure that out in advance.
* * *
The controversy over racial IQ differences was born out of a desire to justify slavery and colonialism. But it persists because our obsession with this vague, unscientific concept known as “race” persists. It persists because the delusion that our skin holds some identity-defining significance persists. It persists because the belief that we’re divided by these arbitrary differences persists.
But why are we so focused on skin colour and not eye colour or ear shape or hand size? Why do we define ourselves and each other by the actions of people who died centuries ago? Why are we still talking about genetic racial differences when, thanks to the fact that we’ve decoded the entire human genome, we know there’s more variation within the “races” than between them?
Because instead of wasting time ranking ourselves by our skin or our hair or our other…attributes, maybe we should be fixing the impoverished schools that leave young children functionally illiterate. Maybe we should stop teaching kids that rational thinking and hard work is “whiteness.” Or better yet, maybe we should stop kids to think about the colour of their skin at all.
Maybe we should follow the Kpelle’s example and sort ourselves into more meaningful categories.
