Safe Spaces are Real, and You’re In One
When you read that title, you might have had one of three reactions:
- You were intrigued, and want to know what this is about.
- You already know about safe spaces and agree with the title.
- You disagree with the title, so will not believe the rest of the article on principle.
If the first reaction matches your response, congratulations! You are officially out of your safe space, so the title does not apply to you! For categories 2 and 3, however, it does. Why is that? The main reason is that there is more than one type of safe space.
Before we begin, a quick warning: This article might talk about some heavy stuff like sexual assault, alcoholism, and other things that could cause panic attacks. Tread carefully from here on out.
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The first type is what’s typically meant when someone mentions a safe space: a place to bring up stressful or traumatic things without having to be judged for them. Places that are safe spaces are things like support groups, therapy, and others, places where you’re safe to talk about your problems. These sort of safe spaces are absolutely necessary in a world where women at multiple college campuses have as much as a 20% chance to be sexually assaulted, 16.3 million adults had an Alcohol Use Disorder in 2014 in the U.S. alone, and 50% of transgender people may be sexually abused or assaulted in their lives. You might have heard some of these statistics before, and you might not. The reason you might not is because of the social stigma around them. It’s not an easy thing to admit that all these things are such a big problem, so society as a whole tries to avoid talking about it. That’s why society needs safe spaces, spaces where survivors and victims can speak about what they’ve gone through and help each other.
The other type of safe space is something entirely different: a bubble you can sit in, safe from having to confront the outside world. This is the safe space of your own mind. You might know it by a different make: the Dunning-Kruger effect. In summary, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a phenomenon where people who think they know everything about something aren’t looking for new information, so they end up barely knowing anything about it. Quoting Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Dunning-Kruger is why, for example, people believe Donald Trump when the facts don’t support him (actually written by David Dunning himself), or why Carl“I don’t know. I don’t care.” Benjamin (also known as Sargon of Akkad) claims to love having people give him constructive criticism about his work, but then when someone actually does, he suddenly doesn’t have patience for feedback:
The Dunning-Kruger safe space is one of the easiest traps to fall into when studying something. People like assuming they know more than anyone else about something, and so they don’t like being corrected. It can be tough, but getting used to the fact that you know relatively nothing about a subject is one of the most important skills you can have. It’s something everyone has struggles with (hell, even I catch myself acting like a know-it-all a lot), but learning how to be wrong is the first step towards being right.
