So what we do in practice is this: Pick the issue I care most about, then assume that any group that agrees with me on that position is a safe source to trust for ALL issues. This is our human need to belong (and tribalism). The problem is that the groups pushing these positions leverage this other'ing to create divisiveness for the sole purpose of making more and more money.
People are pleasure-seekers, not truth-seekers. People demand what they can understand and feel good about, even if wrong. There's plenty of supply too. Radical free speech allows anyone to spread lies for huge financial upside, and we don't have any check on this particular type of weapon which is mass-destroying society.
"I want to be a whale psychiatrist" - President of the United States of America Donald Trump, interviewed on The Joe Rogan Experience, October 2024.
And you don't need to be an expert on wind turbine placement to have an opinion on whether putting one in view of Donald Trump's golf course, and then having President Trump scupper them for revenge, is a sensible way to govern the world's most powerful country's energy economy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo
From that article: "Before making the transatlantic crossing for his Scottish summer jaunt, the US president urged the UK to "get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil".". The Conservative government under David Cameron made a change to planning policy in 2015 where a single objection could block a whole wind farm - and those planning changes only applied to wind turbines and no other structures - a situation described as a "de facto ban" of on-shore wind farms in England (not Scotland), which lead to a 96% drop in on-shore wind development compared to previous years 2011 to 2015. It continued until Rishi Sunak eased it in 2023 and Labour removed it in 2024.
You don't need to be an expert on wind farm placement or capacity to have a valid opinion on that.
I don't have to be a wind turbine expert to know that they're overall better than coal plants. Because at a minimum their source is not finite and their output hasn't been linked to increases in cancer and breathing problems.
A takeaway from that: if you think you're right about everything and rarely find yourself in situations where you're forced to doubt your ideas (at least a little), it's possible what's actually going on is you're just too isolated from others.
When I reflect on it, we are in a state of hyper-individualism on every single front. Is it wrong? Well, yes and no. It is a consequence of freedom. What I ultimately see happening is that we solved evolution on a biological level. Now, it is evolution on an ideological level.
What makes me sad is that some people don't have friends that can call them out and argue in good faith. I'm a very disagreeable person, and I have a good friend group that I can argue with without any fear.
1. Infinite supply of people.
2. 90%+ of times before you get anywhere, you find out the person doesn't have "what it takes".
At minimum you have to filter out 90%+ of people that simply don't have the mental faculties to evaluate what is and isn't a valid argument, before you even get started. All this just takes energy and there's just no benifit.
Its like imagine you're trying to playing chess, but
1. Most of the people don't even know rules.
2. Even if they know (some of the) rules. Some people are fundamentally incapable of recognizing and telling a difference between valid or invalid chess move. Some moves - like castling - are fundamentally too challenging for them to grasp. They simply don't have what it takes to participate.
3. And then you find out whole bunch of people aren't there to play chess to begin with, but rather discuss how the moves they use in their house is all different.
It's just such a waste of energy.
I don't think this is true. There are times when I do think it's true, and when I start feeling that way I know it's time to step back because I can no longer engage constructively.
Text is a hard medium to have a back-and-forth in. The features that make it useful for explaining also make it easy to feel ignored and insulted.
I think a lot of people also go online and write things when they feel argumentative, so comment sections self-select for people who want to argue.
Whenever I feel intellectually superior to someone, I try to remind myself that I can barely change the oil filter in my car, and there's a lot of people out there who can't write a line of Python but who save tens of thousands of dollars doing their own maintenance.
There's no such mechanisms in place to ensure logical consistency and coherance of made claims.
Thus the onus is on you to quickly realize that the other party "doesn't have what it takes" and bail out, or you're arguing with a person that doesn't have the mental capacity to recognize syntax errors and subtle bugs, they are simply interested in arriving at their destination and couldn't care less if they arrived there with an unbroken chain of valid chess moves.
> I don't think this is true. There are times when I do think it's true, and when I start feeling that way I know it's time to step back because I can no longer engage constructively.
I love how you don't even care if it's true, merely how you think at any given moment (and this changes with mood) and how those thoughts makes you feel.
If you're unable to entertain the idea significant amount of people don't have "what it takes" (which is a fact, btw), have you ever been able to engage constructively?
One of the hallmarks of a person who isn't interested in playing chess is a person who focuses not on what IS true, but "what they think" or "how they start feeling" about chess moves at any given time, etc. Ie. focus is about vibes.
In person, at work, etc, it makes sense to spend more energy, be more patient to get on the same page, and you get more benefit if you succeed.
Tying a tangible score number to 'vague social approval' hits very hard. There's a sense in which people care about that by default, but have to make themselves care about the inner game. But appearing to have integrity about the inner game is a good move in the meta game, so of course the default move of those who don't care about the game but want to appear to for the sake of the meta game is to put up a front: the trick is that it's not real. If playing the inner game faithfully, it becomes trivial to disassemble their (fronted) position. But it's not really a game, because they're not playing but pretending to play. You're costing them meta-score! How dare you!
Anyway, I digress. This dynamic falls out of the incentive structure of sites like HN/reddit/etc which embed discussion/argumentation into quasi-anonymous social-approval-point-ranked contexts. Moderation can temper the most egregiously obvious of such behavior, but only that.
A reasonable strategy if you're interested in actually playing the inner game is to carefully check if there's any meta game focused cheesing going on before bothering to enter against someone. Do they make mistakes in rule adherence due to inexperience, or do they make mistakes in rule adherence that conspicuously always puts them in a meta game advantage? Do they adhere to rules even when it's _disadvantageous_? That kind of thing.
To return to the chess analogy... Don't play with people who blatantly return their own downed pieces to the board (or similar hijinks). They're just there to look like they're the kind of person who wins at chess, not to play chess.
This site in particular is infested with accounts that seem to have some real intelligence behind them, but they use that intelligence to respond to the most absurd and frustrating interpretation of your comments.
It's also not uncommon for people who are arrogant to think that most people who disagree with them are stupid. They assume they're right so disagreement is a sign of a defect (and helps avoid uncomfortable thoughts like, "could I be wrong?").
> Many are participating with the goal of wasting your energy.
> This site in particular is infested with accounts that seem to have some real intelligence behind them, but they use that intelligence to respond to the most absurd and frustrating interpretation of your comments.
That sounds like software engineers being software engineers. They often think they show off how smart they are by missing the point and nitpicking on some quibble.
Or are you simply dealing with people that "don't have what it takes" to do better?
They simply don't have the faculties to make a better argument or approach from a different angle, it's the best they can do, and the best they can do is just not enough.
Untrue. On the internet there are no people, only computers.
As the great Marshall McLuhan once said: the medium is the message.
> most cancerous developments & the less contentious it becomes
Your comment complains that people cannot articulate their reasons, while making a sweeping, emotionally loaded claim whose reasons are themselves barely articulated.
Are you challenging the idea that echo chambers facilited by modern tech are harmful, or that people get better at expressing themselves as they get older? From here it looks like you're doing neither, just taking a stab at the comment's author.
I only somewhat disagree with the post in the second part, with reasons enough to start the conversation.