It makes people uncomfortable that their beloved confidence isn't always a good thing.

When they're faced with clear examples - for example, malignant narcissism - they find ways to wiggle out of recognition. They'll say that narcissism isn't confidence at all. They'll even say narcissism is the polar opposite of confidence: it's insecurity and low self-worth, nothing more or less.

That's inaccurate and borders on delusional.

Confidence isn't always good.

Some people seem to - perhaps even congenitally - have too much of it.

We base a surprising amount of morality on confidence, often without realizing what we're doing. Because confidence is taken to be a universal good, we have trouble seeing, acknowledging, and understanding examples where it isn't what's best.

Sometimes confidence is dangerous or catastrophic.

Sometimes doubt is a wonderful thing.

Many people today are no longer religious, but I think many have allowed worship of confidence to replace worship of blind faith in God.

Trusting in oneself at all costs is no more reasonable than trusting in God at all costs.

I'm here to point it out to anyone who hasn't realized it yet.

I generally believe Jesus existed. Most knowledge was carried in the oral tradition - often for centuries or more. A social movement clearly happened around that time; it left a giant impact on history. While the origin story could have been fabricated entirely, ie, patched together from other legends and myths (lots of evidence of this borrowing), it's more likely that a person of some fame and influence was mythologized, pre-existing patterns magnetizing to him in retellings.

There were many rebellious young men at the time claiming to be God fighting the Jewish and Roman establishments in Israel. We know a man called Jesus was crucified, but the others who claimed they were God would also have been crucified, as that was the standard penalty. It was a known crime with a known punishment.

It's quite possible the Jesus story is some sort of averaging of these people (and executions) spanning several decades, with other mythology attached. But it's more likely, in my opinion, that one of these figures stood out as particularly wise.

Someone had to weave those words. That *even he* (if this explanation holds) was crucified in brutal prejudice would have been striking, tragic, and strikingly tragic to his followers.

I see no reason to ignore the historical setting - the fact quite a few young men matched Jesus's broad description as heretic, prophet, and leader claiming to be God or hear from God directly - and insist NO such person existed. And, again, I see little reason to believe that the words of a particularly wise and memorable individual of this kind could not have been remembered for a few decades before they were written down. Oral tradition was the norm, not the exception.

By the time the words were written, it seems there was already a movement and religion. It isn't as if the words were written, sat in a book for some time, and slowly built a following with people who appreciated the book. It's more as if a religious leader created a movement and eventually followers recorded a mixture of fact and legend.

Still, he may be a sort of Everyman character representing a couple generations of rebels and heretics, the voice of the pure Jewish spirit under Roman domination before much (not most but a lot) of the population at the capital was slaughtered (a definitely real event, not long after, that would have been symbolized well by crucifixion, an iconically Roman punishment).

Whether it's true or not, I like the idea that some actual words of one of the rebels were remembered. And I don't find that at all implausible.

All this basically is what Reza Aslan says in his book Zealot, but I find it persuasive.

One thing that can happen when you grow up in an abusive environment is that you develop a sort of allergy to hostility. Even amounts that would be considered normal can set you off, spiking feelings of disgust. You may well end up being kind of a pushover, as you're good at adapting and you have an inner need to stay away from meanness.

You actually see this as a strength, but others will typically see it as a weakness, unless they happen to see the wisdom (or a benefit to them) in that instance. Now, their reception doesn't mean you are a total pushover. In some situations, you may be exactly the opposite. The abusive environment likely taught you survival and defense skills, yet you can navigate others' "drama" - inconveniences, ignorances, or hostilities - with a kind of aikido that makes it look like you aren't doing much, because you aren't doing the things people usually do that make situations worse (often these are attempts to fix things in ways that simply won't work). You may be very capable of holding your own in a fight. It's just that you are considerably less willing to go there even than most normal people raised well. You associate hostility with the badness of your upbringing. You don't want to be the bad guy. You want to be the opposite of the bad guy.

This temperament is, like so many things, a strength and a weakness. People around you often benefit from the strength without realizing it; or they may realize and compliment you on your balance, gentleness, etc. But they may not like it when the other shoe drops and you show some understanding toward someone they feel is their enemy (or in some important way opposing them), or when your matter-of-factness (you are so practiced at not trying to be hurtful that you know you are not trying that, but they may not know that even after knowing you for years) ends up hurting their feelings.

One of the best things you can do to maximize the strength and minimize the weakness is to read about assertiveness and work on that. You already have many of the elements of skillful assertiveness, but you probably aren't putting them quite in the right order. 

I could be mistaken, but I tend to think of "burden of proof" in a statistical sense, like Occam's Razor. Example... your friend says "Look out! There's a car coming!" Now, you could 1) Put the burden of proof on your friend and wait for more information, 2) Put the burden of proof on yourself and turn your head to look, or 3) Fucking jump.

All have their place.

I'm just saying that if you rely too heavily on burden of proof, sometimes you will get hit by a car that demonstrably doesn't exist because the person who claims so hasn't bothered to prove it to your satisfaction yet, while you waited upon their efforts as if they were a slave feeding you grapes in ancient Egypt.

Ya know? ;)

Gaslighting and disagreeing are two different things. Gaslighting is phony and unaccountable. It's playing a game of optics, saying something you don't actually believe in order to manipulate perceptions and suppress a true story. Disagreeing is simply countering because you genuinely believe otherwise. But there is some overlap when the disagreeing is unaccountable. In other words, you disagree, but you won't hear or consider or adapt to new information: that's the root of delusionality.

Now, sometimes a person does hear new information (or they actually heard it or thought it before), but they don't do a good job of making it clear, out loud, that they heard it. This is very common in discussions, but it's also very common that people simply brush information aside intentionally. One way they do the latter is by mockery, shaming, etc. They use emotional tactics to distract from the information they don't know how to respond to. This too is a root of delusionality. But they may actually believe they are arguing well, so in that sense they are not being phony or intentionally manipulative.

What I'm saying is that when you are not accountable in your reasoning - or even just when you aren't clear enough about what you have heard and understood from another person - it can come across as gaslighting, even though it's either garden variety delusionality (groupthink, lack of critical thinking, other biases) or failure to repeat back what's heard.

It's very common for someone to hear a line of argument, say basically nothing about it (or else throw in some words of mockery), and then provide a completely different line of argument to try to one-up the first.

One of the quickest ways to seem illogical - and become illogical - is to ignore other people's reasoning. If you aren't actually addressing someone's argument directly, you very likely are not one-upping it.

In a debate there is an unspoken expectation that you actually respond to what others say, that you don't just ignore it when it's convenient to ignore it. Anyone of course is free not to meet that expectation, but they should be aware that a tendency to ignore others' points strikes some people as very far from subtle and as an indication of incompetence.

I don't trust what someone says because they say it firmly. I trust what they say because they can handle disagreement and respond to it directly without cheap tactics like shaming, ridicule, etc (I'd make an exception for comedians or moments of comic relief, but laughing at a thought, or getting others to laugh at it, is extremely far from a reliable way to address it).

If you show off that your thought process is unreliable in its core strategy, then you give me less reason to trust what you say.

If you show off that your thought process is scrupulously accountable, then you give me reason to trust what you say.

It has nothing to do with how bold or certain someone sounds. And it isn't about gaslighting or not gaslighting, usually - though the former certainly puts someone in the "unreliable thought process" category.