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When Having Friends Is More Alluring Than Being Right

103 points by imartin2k 7y ago

blackflame7000 7y ago
I think oftentimes in human interaction you can either be right or be liked. It might seem like a great injustice but oftentimes, being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong and yet a lot of us still take this very personally. Everyone is wrong until someone tells them what is right.
- ziddoap 7y ago
  >[...]being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong[...] I think this hits the nail on the head, completely. I think a large part of it, for me at least, was that school taught me that wrong is bad. Not knowing an answer is bad. Failure. It took many years after school to correct that belief - and I'm much happier for it. Being wrong is great, in a way. Of course I'd like to be right about everything all the time but I know that's not possible. Being wrong lets me know that I have an opportunity to learn what is right.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    I think that a great many of the world's problems could be ameliorated if teachers felt comfortable saying "I don't know, but we can find out after class".
- clairity 7y ago
  the point is that being wrong once or twice isn't bad, but being wrong all the time leads to hurt and backlash. to compensate, we have elaborate cultural rituals and coded language to avoid such situations (e.g., "giving face").
- daenz 7y ago
  >The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong This says more about you though (in a good way). To many people who lack that kind of intellectual maturity, there is something wrong with being wrong. It's the saw someone can use to cut the rungs off of your ladder as you climb the social hierarchy. Someone can always rub your mistakes in your face, and groups of people will view you as less capable because of it. Look at politics...it's a big reason why politicians are so vague; being wrong is a nail in your coffin. Many politicians are not unintelligent people, but they know how being wrong impacts the public's perception of your competency.
  - blackflame7000 7y ago
    I think if we're all being completely honest with ourselves, we're all wrong a lot. We just don't publicize it because nobody, sometimes including ourselves, ever notices. The thing that should matter most is how well we learn from our mistakes so as not to repeat them.
draw_down 7y ago
The internet allows misfits to find a place where they can feel accepted. This is the other side of the coin. On a different note, being right is overrated anyway. Being wrong is a great way to learn... if you're willing to accept it, of course.
tomkat0789 7y ago
This was a fun read (until the grim conclusion I guess), but what is the word for this phenomena? Tribalism? Religion? Be sure to stop and consider: would YOU give up all your friends in search of the truth?
- chantelles 7y ago
  "I believe too much in truth not to suppose that there are different truths and different ways of speaking the truth." -Foucault
neom 7y ago
As an egocentric self-righteous narcissist who spent their 20s making friends by being "right", I'm slowly starting to learn that isn't a fun way to live. I think it's the same thing as when someone you care about is "complaining", you don't always have to help them solve the problem, sometimes they just want to talk.
- hackits 7y ago
  There is a fine line as most people don't have very good conversation skill's and will use you as a surrogate to a psychologist. You have to pull them in line with eye contact and silence and then giving them the benefit of the doubt, and finally have to say they're in a conversation/discussion. If that all else fails then you leave the conversation.
  - neom 7y ago
    I totally agree. I also think there is a huge selfishness in allowing yourself to be used as a surrogate to a psychologist. Just because you are lonely due to not figuring out the other things yourself, doesn't mean you should play doctor to feel fulfilled.
    - hackits 7y ago
      Do you mean selfishness or low self-wroth? Selfishness is that you're doing it because you only care about yourself and not the other person (In that case you would be talking about yourself). Low self-worth is where you believe you're view point and genuine experiences are lesser than the other person.
- m463 7y ago
  I read this article about oscar wilde from a recent hacker news post, and some details resonated with me in regard to "the art - and artifice - of conversation." - "never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story." - Even for the men of science, mere facts were never allowed to dominate diversion. - "the golden rule of conversation" was "to know nothing accurately." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219628
daenz 7y ago
I think this article indirectly highlights why mob rule and direct democracies are so potentially dangerous: people need to feel accepted, and will take many ideas on faith, even dangerous ones, than to risk having an opinion that causes them to feel the scorn of their peers.
- phil248 7y ago
  That may miss the point slightly. These are people who are on the receiving end of scorn, and their decisions to dive deeper into fringe communities only opens them up to further scorn! The very opposite of the issue you are describing, which is a situation in which people conform en masse in order to avoid scorn.
  - daenz 7y ago
    It's just the other side of the coin. The key is the need for acceptance in what you believe. The groups in the article find it by seeking a communities that align with their beliefs, while the groups I am describing find it by conforming their beliefs to the group. The end result is acceptance in what they believe, and an avoidance of scorn.
Maximus9000 7y ago
> "And if it was just flat-earthers, I’d say fine, it’s harmless. But you’ve got anti-vaxxers and Men’s Rights Advocates and anti-global warming folks and TERFs and incels out there, all fueled by one central pivot point of humanity – namely, that it’s lonely being wrong." It seems quite odd that he lumps "Mens rights advocates" in there. Are they crazy?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- brandonfro 7y ago
  It probably comes from the fact that “Men’s rights activists” are somewhat extreme considering men have dominated every aspect of society (e.g. politics, religion, sports, etc.). The idea of “Men’s rights” seems redundant to most people in my estimation.
  - 1000units 7y ago
    Please take this talk of gender supremacy elsewhere. It is wildly outmoded and unwelcome here, at least by me. Thank you and good day.
  - arkh 7y ago
    > considering men have dominated every aspect of society Some men. And a minority of them.
    - brandonfro 7y ago
      I’d say quite a lot when you consider local municipalities, churches (at least in the south), and small businesses. Historically, high positions in those places have been held by predominantly men. This isn’t news and it’s irrefutable. Why does it feel like people are combatant to historical facts?
      - rubinelli 7y ago
        The frustrating part is the logical leap: You are a man, men have historically occupied privileged positions, therefore you are privileged. A young man trying to find his first job without experience doesn't feel privileged, nor does one that suffers domestic violence. But instead of receiving support, they are told to man up.
baron816 7y ago
I’ve been thinking of starting a cult. Not a real cult. It would explicitly be a fake cult, and it would have rules to prevent all the evil stuff cults do. But there’s a reason that people join and become very committed to them (or religions). They provide a community, a sense of common purpose, and a support network. Artificially replicating that while cutting out the bad stuff, and scaling that to the level of the Catholic Church or Islam would be the biggest thing one could do to improve human happiness in developed countries in my opinion.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has some traction. They've been approved by the New Zealand government to perform marriages. https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/weddings/75107725/ https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/weddings/75107725/
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  A cult is on some level total bullshit. A religion is just when that person who knows it is, dies. Use care when starting things larger than yourself.
haberman 7y ago
[I'm deleting this, I don't think it is spurring constructive conversation]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- draw_down 7y ago
  I thought that lumping together of beliefs was interesting too.
- danharaj 7y ago
  It's not a wicked problem. It takes very little effort to research and conclude that the empirically established standard of medical care for transgender people is to allow them to transition and allow them to integrate into society as the gender they tell you they are. It takes very little effort to discover that gender has not been and is not a binary in every single human culture, either. They are different. For a different reason. Flat earthers don't hurt people by having a very wrong belief. TERFs want to deny transgender people their basic human rights and largely succeeded for a great long time. That's injustice.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
diminoten 7y ago
It wouldn't be such a big deal if these "wrong" communities didn't seem to be so outrage driven, but they tend to be more about the anger than pursuing their "truth". Acts of "proving" oneself to the community gain a person favor, which ends up being the stuff that effects us "normies", rather than their mere existence.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  I wouldn't single out those communities. Take the top 20 subreddits, and you'll see the ones that aren't just meme feeds are driven by outrage.
lopmotr 7y ago
This goes way beyond flat earth and the other beliefs he listed. People will laugh at you if you claim that rocks grow out of dead birds, but almost no-one really convinced themselves of where rocks come from or where dead birds go and that it's not the same place. We trust authorities but we don't think it through or investigate it for ourselves. It's much easier to trust authorities because that's what everyone else is trusting too so you get automatic agreement and friends without having to think for yourself. We also have no idea that the Earth isn't flat except from trust in authorities. What is kind of strange is that even though some wrong beliefs are mocked by people who don't agree (eg flat-earth, Scientology), others are put on a kind of pedestal of respect, such as Islam and native rituals. The justification I can think of is "Let those poor savages have their special beliefs because they're weaker than us and maybe that's all they have to cling onto so we shouldn't hold them to the same high standards that we hold ourselves to." Scientologists and Christians are part of us and have no excuse for being "wrong" so we're more openly critical of them.
RickS 7y ago
I lost my dad to this. So far, nothing helps. I have no idea what the solution is. It only works when THEY want out. But why would they? We're brutally, brutally mean to people like this. Every time somebody dunks on a flat earther or their ilk, puts somebody down to defend the superiority of their own worldview, they've added a brick to the wall that keeps these people from feeling like they can rejoin society. The first time they pop out of the cave, feeble amateurs in the world of normies, they slip up just a tiny bit and get their head bitten off. There is nobody there to to say "if you tried, we'd have you". For most of us, it isn't true. It seems like few people realize that this is part of the residue we unwittingly leave on the world. That the cost of performative intellectual superiority, even if you're actually right, is the burning of rungs on their ladder back up. Needlessly dunking on misguided people worsens a world that we ourselves are stuck with. Be nice.
- hackits 7y ago
  Vast majority of people are ego invested in themselves, and typically love to criticize other people well hating being criticized themselves. You run into a problem is they're easy to manipulate, as you play to their ego and criticize the people they hate.
- s09dfhks 7y ago
  Very well put, and I love your use of "dunking"
- phil248 7y ago
  It can't always just be about being nice, unfortunately. Parents who choose not to vaccinate their children could get us all killed. It's a serious threat. If being nice turns out to be the best strategy for curbing this movement, then I am all for it. If screaming in their faces about it turns out to be more effective, then we have to do that. I would love for everyone to be able to "rejoin society" but at a certain point we also have to defend society against those who reject it in harmful ways. Not every illogical cult-like community is as harmless as flat-Earthers.
  - yters 7y ago
slowhadoken 7y ago
I don’t like this false dichotomy. It’s a truism “you can be right or you can be happy”. You can be right and happy. In my experience yes-men are often sad and keep shallow company. If you’re getting a lot of pushback from the group you’re in you might be in the wrong group.
jdoliner 7y ago
This article gets close to the heart of flat-earthism, bad sadly doesn't quite take the plunge over the edge. The origin of flat-eartherism is people like this author, and his wife's need to convince others that they are wrong in their beliefs and get them in line with the correct beliefs. It's hard to remember at this point, but think back to about 15 years ago, the idea of a flat-earth was held up as the shining example of how clueless people in the past used to be and how far we've come. That story was fake by the way, people have known the earth was round since ancient Greece, in fact they even had a pretty accurate measure of the earth's circumference. In between there were surely less knowledgeable groups of people, but it's hard to find any concrete cases of large scale belief that the earth was flat, rather than people not really understanding what was meant by "the earth" on a planetary scale, vs. their local perception of the earth around them which did indeed appear to be fairly flat. Except for today of course, where each passing year we hit a new watermark of belief in a flat-earth. How did we get here? Like I said, articles like this give you a good insight into that path, when you're constantly barraged with articles whose entire point is to define a group of people and call them dumb it repels people, and some small number of people get caught up in that repelling force, they start to wonder if maybe this barrage of meanness is actually hiding some deeper truth. Over time these people form into their own group and settle into a symbiotic relationship with the first group. As the group gains steam there's more and more evidence that people are dumb, and need to be called out as such, giving the author of this article and others more ammo, which in turn repels more people into joining the group. And around, and around they go, where it stops I have no idea. Edit: I should add, this article is among the most civil and charitable articles of its type. I don't mean to pick on this author in particular.
- xvfz 7y ago
  You might like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc It makes life a lot more pleasant when you realize that most upsetting things you see online are just a meme symbiotic system with a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  I wonder if there is a name for this effect.
kromem 7y ago
How about agree with them? And connect with them? I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat. But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat-earthers. Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be happy. So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common ground. This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back, but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to worry about cancer. And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies). To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not their differences. Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism, which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat-earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that - a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm). In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus. Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable entanglement. So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the detached observations from there.
david38 7y ago
The author appears to lump anyone of opposing views together. Flat earth - trivial to disprove, ok Anti-vacation - not trivial, but a huge amount of work has been done to show anyone who isn’t totally shut down the glaring before/after situation of vaccines, so ok Men’s Rights? Seriously? Is the author saying men have no rights? Some of the things that fall under the men’s rights umbrella are the draft, lack of help for homeless men vs women, biased family court, little recognition when a victim of domestic violence (interestingly the CDC recognizes that), biased prison sentences, vastly higher rates of on the job injuries, etc. So is the author saying anything that happens to a man his own fault? Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s very loud and just goes around saying men never do anything bad? This is like saying “civil rights” people are a bunch of angry people with no reason to be angry.
- happytoexplain 7y ago
  >Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s very loud Yes, and, as usual with loud, antagonistic subgroups, they look from the outside like part of the larger group's definition. But that's not an excuse - I wish people like the author would be more generous when talking about the larger groups. Men's rights are particularly affected by this, because it's a topic with both a lot of legitimate grievances and illegitimate hatred among its ranks.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
It's not merely "lonely being wrong." It's lonely and you face a wall of open hatred and abuse for merely disagreeing or even wondering out loud if maybe the dominant view isn't 100% right and might have some holes in it. That's completely unnecessary and also often openly breaks a lot of social rules, but people will justify their terrible behavior, the majority will have their back and tell the target of the abuse that they deserve it, it's their fault and the abuse will promptly stop if they will just "stop spouting nonsense." Only it probably won't. Caving to the demand to pretend to agree will probably be permission to continue to be awful perpetually to someone who once openly disagreed. The most abusive people typically claim they are being scientific, only they aren't. Because actual science is founded on the idea that we can't really prove anything. We can only disprove things and our current science is all the stuff we have some degree of confidence in because it has yet to be disproven and overturned by something better. A good example of this is Bigfoot. There are people who believe strongly that Bigfoot absolutely doesn't exist and anyone who allows for the possibility that Bigfoot might be real gets treated like an idiot and a lunatic, never mind that you cannot prove a species absolutely doesn't exist and new species get discovered all the time. Bigfoot Anti-Believers are typically far more fanatical than Bigfoot Believers, far less rational and far more out of line with scientific principles, yet will justify their terrible treatment of Bigfoot Believers -- or even people who say "I dunno. Could be." -- with claims that anti-belief is scientific.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  But anti-belief is scientific if the belief for something requires a complete overturning of scientific principles. It's not just an absence of evidence for something. It isn't "open minded" to say "could be..." to Bigfoot, Nessie, or the like -- it's closed minded because to even consider the idea seriously is to think that ecologists and population geneticists have no idea what the minimum habitat of a large animal is or of the minimum viable population size is.
  - brighter2morrow 7y ago
    >But anti-belief is scientific if the belief for something requires a complete overturning of scientific principles. It's not just an absence of evidence for something. It isn't "open minded" to say "could be..." to Bigfoot, Nessie, or the like -- it's closed minded because to even consider the idea seriously is to think that ecologists and population geneticists have no idea what the minimum habitat of a large animal is or of the minimum viable population size is. That doesn't make sense. What you're saying is that "It's closed minded not to have blind faith in a faceless group of people who get to dictate what you can and cannot say."
adamwong246 7y ago
Sadly, being wrong DOES affect others. My fellow citizens vote and I am compelled by the laws they enact. Every friendly attempt to alter their worldview is ignored and every unfriendly attempt drives them further into a rabbit-hole of unreason. I'm left with only one choice- to isolate myself from the consequences of their actions, either forcing them out of my world, or leaving them in theirs. and that's why I don't speak with my extended family anymore.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  How do you know it's not you who's wrong? Do you have access to secret information that they don't? Do you have superior intellect that enables you to understand what they can't? Or did you just happen to be exposed to different influences during your life that led your beliefs in a different arbitrary direction?
weddpros 7y ago
Are we witnessing the birth of a new idea, something like "there is no right or wrong if it hurts people's feelings"? will "non binary truth" emerge as law? You have the right to say anything that's wrong, and nobody can say it's wrong because that would be discriminatory, but if you say something that's right, nobody should say it's right because it would be binary thinking and discriminating? yet you can say it's wrong, because it's hurting your feelings. Let's try to abolish logic! It will surely lead to immense happiness. We're at the tipping point where Idiocracy becomes real (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)
- weddpros 7y ago
  Special thanks to a down-voter who proved my point: would you have dared to down-vote my comment if I was a flat-earther? Are you looking for truth or do you prefer to not hurt people's feelings?
- antisthenes 7y ago
  If this happens, I'm seriously going to consider suicide. I don't want to live in a world where I have to live in a constant state of doublethink in order to avoid offending some rare snowflake.
  - weddpros 7y ago
    Hint: it's not happening everywhere in the world, it's a western world thing.
bobharris 7y ago
I thought of tweleve step programs reading this article. Things get culty. But what community doesn’t look inclusive and strange to an outsider? Sports? Reps/Dems? Any system not your own? I think its a lovely article. Spurs up alot of thoughts. Especially when being wrong is considered so bad in the US.
gorzynsk 7y ago
That's why education is so important. If as kinds those people would analyze the evidences of both - flat and sphere earth they would be immune to flat-earth nonsense. After kinds lose their natural curiosity and gain political views it's nearly impossible to convince them to something different than they believe.
arisAlexis 7y ago
all of this said can also be true for any kind of community, even extrapolated to religion, leftist ideas, fascism, fad diets. There is nothing inherent in flat earthers, most communities outside of academia (and sometimes inside it) that is not about the feeling of belonging somewhere. It is stronger than truth and facts. Always.

103 points by imartin2k 7y ago

I think oftentimes in human interaction you can either be right or be liked. It might seem like a great injustice but oftentimes, being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong and yet a lot of us still take this very personally. Everyone is wrong until someone tells them what is right.

ziddoap 7y ago
>[...]being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong[...] I think this hits the nail on the head, completely. I think a large part of it, for me at least, was that school taught me that wrong is bad. Not knowing an answer is bad. Failure. It took many years after school to correct that belief - and I'm much happier for it. Being wrong is great, in a way. Of course I'd like to be right about everything all the time but I know that's not possible. Being wrong lets me know that I have an opportunity to learn what is right.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  I think that a great many of the world's problems could be ameliorated if teachers felt comfortable saying "I don't know, but we can find out after class".
clairity 7y ago
the point is that being wrong once or twice isn't bad, but being wrong all the time leads to hurt and backlash. to compensate, we have elaborate cultural rituals and coded language to avoid such situations (e.g., "giving face").
daenz 7y ago
>The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong This says more about you though (in a good way). To many people who lack that kind of intellectual maturity, there is something wrong with being wrong. It's the saw someone can use to cut the rungs off of your ladder as you climb the social hierarchy. Someone can always rub your mistakes in your face, and groups of people will view you as less capable because of it. Look at politics...it's a big reason why politicians are so vague; being wrong is a nail in your coffin. Many politicians are not unintelligent people, but they know how being wrong impacts the public's perception of your competency.
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  I think if we're all being completely honest with ourselves, we're all wrong a lot. We just don't publicize it because nobody, sometimes including ourselves, ever notices. The thing that should matter most is how well we learn from our mistakes so as not to repeat them.

draw_down 7y ago

The internet allows misfits to find a place where they can feel accepted. This is the other side of the coin. On a different note, being right is overrated anyway. Being wrong is a great way to learn... if you're willing to accept it, of course.

tomkat0789 7y ago

This was a fun read (until the grim conclusion I guess), but what is the word for this phenomena? Tribalism? Religion? Be sure to stop and consider: would YOU give up all your friends in search of the truth?

chantelles 7y ago
"I believe too much in truth not to suppose that there are different truths and different ways of speaking the truth." -Foucault

neom 7y ago

As an egocentric self-righteous narcissist who spent their 20s making friends by being "right", I'm slowly starting to learn that isn't a fun way to live. I think it's the same thing as when someone you care about is "complaining", you don't always have to help them solve the problem, sometimes they just want to talk.

hackits 7y ago
There is a fine line as most people don't have very good conversation skill's and will use you as a surrogate to a psychologist. You have to pull them in line with eye contact and silence and then giving them the benefit of the doubt, and finally have to say they're in a conversation/discussion. If that all else fails then you leave the conversation.
- neom 7y ago
  I totally agree. I also think there is a huge selfishness in allowing yourself to be used as a surrogate to a psychologist. Just because you are lonely due to not figuring out the other things yourself, doesn't mean you should play doctor to feel fulfilled.
  - hackits 7y ago
    Do you mean selfishness or low self-wroth? Selfishness is that you're doing it because you only care about yourself and not the other person (In that case you would be talking about yourself). Low self-worth is where you believe you're view point and genuine experiences are lesser than the other person.
m463 7y ago
I read this article about oscar wilde from a recent hacker news post, and some details resonated with me in regard to "the art - and artifice - of conversation." - "never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story." - Even for the men of science, mere facts were never allowed to dominate diversion. - "the golden rule of conversation" was "to know nothing accurately." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219628

daenz 7y ago

I think this article indirectly highlights why mob rule and direct democracies are so potentially dangerous: people need to feel accepted, and will take many ideas on faith, even dangerous ones, than to risk having an opinion that causes them to feel the scorn of their peers.

phil248 7y ago
That may miss the point slightly. These are people who are on the receiving end of scorn, and their decisions to dive deeper into fringe communities only opens them up to further scorn! The very opposite of the issue you are describing, which is a situation in which people conform en masse in order to avoid scorn.
- daenz 7y ago
  It's just the other side of the coin. The key is the need for acceptance in what you believe. The groups in the article find it by seeking a communities that align with their beliefs, while the groups I am describing find it by conforming their beliefs to the group. The end result is acceptance in what they believe, and an avoidance of scorn.

Maximus9000 7y ago

> "And if it was just flat-earthers, I’d say fine, it’s harmless. But you’ve got anti-vaxxers and Men’s Rights Advocates and anti-global warming folks and TERFs and incels out there, all fueled by one central pivot point of humanity – namely, that it’s lonely being wrong." It seems quite odd that he lumps "Mens rights advocates" in there. Are they crazy?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
brandonfro 7y ago
It probably comes from the fact that “Men’s rights activists” are somewhat extreme considering men have dominated every aspect of society (e.g. politics, religion, sports, etc.). The idea of “Men’s rights” seems redundant to most people in my estimation.
- 1000units 7y ago
  Please take this talk of gender supremacy elsewhere. It is wildly outmoded and unwelcome here, at least by me. Thank you and good day.
- arkh 7y ago
  > considering men have dominated every aspect of society Some men. And a minority of them.
  - brandonfro 7y ago
    I’d say quite a lot when you consider local municipalities, churches (at least in the south), and small businesses. Historically, high positions in those places have been held by predominantly men. This isn’t news and it’s irrefutable. Why does it feel like people are combatant to historical facts?
    - rubinelli 7y ago
      The frustrating part is the logical leap: You are a man, men have historically occupied privileged positions, therefore you are privileged. A young man trying to find his first job without experience doesn't feel privileged, nor does one that suffers domestic violence. But instead of receiving support, they are told to man up.

baron816 7y ago

I’ve been thinking of starting a cult. Not a real cult. It would explicitly be a fake cult, and it would have rules to prevent all the evil stuff cults do. But there’s a reason that people join and become very committed to them (or religions). They provide a community, a sense of common purpose, and a support network. Artificially replicating that while cutting out the bad stuff, and scaling that to the level of the Catholic Church or Islam would be the biggest thing one could do to improve human happiness in developed countries in my opinion.

jdietrich 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius
lopmotr 7y ago
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has some traction. They've been approved by the New Zealand government to perform marriages. https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/weddings/75107725/ https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/weddings/75107725/
whenchamenia 7y ago
A cult is on some level total bullshit. A religion is just when that person who knows it is, dies. Use care when starting things larger than yourself.

haberman 7y ago

[I'm deleting this, I don't think it is spurring constructive conversation]

deleted 7y ago
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draw_down 7y ago
I thought that lumping together of beliefs was interesting too.
danharaj 7y ago
It's not a wicked problem. It takes very little effort to research and conclude that the empirically established standard of medical care for transgender people is to allow them to transition and allow them to integrate into society as the gender they tell you they are. It takes very little effort to discover that gender has not been and is not a binary in every single human culture, either. They are different. For a different reason. Flat earthers don't hurt people by having a very wrong belief. TERFs want to deny transgender people their basic human rights and largely succeeded for a great long time. That's injustice.
deleted 7y ago
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diminoten 7y ago

It wouldn't be such a big deal if these "wrong" communities didn't seem to be so outrage driven, but they tend to be more about the anger than pursuing their "truth". Acts of "proving" oneself to the community gain a person favor, which ends up being the stuff that effects us "normies", rather than their mere existence.

rubinelli 7y ago
I wouldn't single out those communities. Take the top 20 subreddits, and you'll see the ones that aren't just meme feeds are driven by outrage.

lopmotr 7y ago

This goes way beyond flat earth and the other beliefs he listed. People will laugh at you if you claim that rocks grow out of dead birds, but almost no-one really convinced themselves of where rocks come from or where dead birds go and that it's not the same place. We trust authorities but we don't think it through or investigate it for ourselves. It's much easier to trust authorities because that's what everyone else is trusting too so you get automatic agreement and friends without having to think for yourself. We also have no idea that the Earth isn't flat except from trust in authorities. What is kind of strange is that even though some wrong beliefs are mocked by people who don't agree (eg flat-earth, Scientology), others are put on a kind of pedestal of respect, such as Islam and native rituals. The justification I can think of is "Let those poor savages have their special beliefs because they're weaker than us and maybe that's all they have to cling onto so we shouldn't hold them to the same high standards that we hold ourselves to." Scientologists and Christians are part of us and have no excuse for being "wrong" so we're more openly critical of them.

RickS 7y ago

I lost my dad to this. So far, nothing helps. I have no idea what the solution is. It only works when THEY want out. But why would they? We're brutally, brutally mean to people like this. Every time somebody dunks on a flat earther or their ilk, puts somebody down to defend the superiority of their own worldview, they've added a brick to the wall that keeps these people from feeling like they can rejoin society. The first time they pop out of the cave, feeble amateurs in the world of normies, they slip up just a tiny bit and get their head bitten off. There is nobody there to to say "if you tried, we'd have you". For most of us, it isn't true. It seems like few people realize that this is part of the residue we unwittingly leave on the world. That the cost of performative intellectual superiority, even if you're actually right, is the burning of rungs on their ladder back up. Needlessly dunking on misguided people worsens a world that we ourselves are stuck with. Be nice.

hackits 7y ago
Vast majority of people are ego invested in themselves, and typically love to criticize other people well hating being criticized themselves. You run into a problem is they're easy to manipulate, as you play to their ego and criticize the people they hate.
s09dfhks 7y ago
Very well put, and I love your use of "dunking"
phil248 7y ago
It can't always just be about being nice, unfortunately. Parents who choose not to vaccinate their children could get us all killed. It's a serious threat. If being nice turns out to be the best strategy for curbing this movement, then I am all for it. If screaming in their faces about it turns out to be more effective, then we have to do that. I would love for everyone to be able to "rejoin society" but at a certain point we also have to defend society against those who reject it in harmful ways. Not every illogical cult-like community is as harmless as flat-Earthers.
- yters 7y ago

slowhadoken 7y ago

I don’t like this false dichotomy. It’s a truism “you can be right or you can be happy”. You can be right and happy. In my experience yes-men are often sad and keep shallow company. If you’re getting a lot of pushback from the group you’re in you might be in the wrong group.

jdoliner 7y ago

This article gets close to the heart of flat-earthism, bad sadly doesn't quite take the plunge over the edge. The origin of flat-eartherism is people like this author, and his wife's need to convince others that they are wrong in their beliefs and get them in line with the correct beliefs. It's hard to remember at this point, but think back to about 15 years ago, the idea of a flat-earth was held up as the shining example of how clueless people in the past used to be and how far we've come. That story was fake by the way, people have known the earth was round since ancient Greece, in fact they even had a pretty accurate measure of the earth's circumference. In between there were surely less knowledgeable groups of people, but it's hard to find any concrete cases of large scale belief that the earth was flat, rather than people not really understanding what was meant by "the earth" on a planetary scale, vs. their local perception of the earth around them which did indeed appear to be fairly flat. Except for today of course, where each passing year we hit a new watermark of belief in a flat-earth. How did we get here? Like I said, articles like this give you a good insight into that path, when you're constantly barraged with articles whose entire point is to define a group of people and call them dumb it repels people, and some small number of people get caught up in that repelling force, they start to wonder if maybe this barrage of meanness is actually hiding some deeper truth. Over time these people form into their own group and settle into a symbiotic relationship with the first group. As the group gains steam there's more and more evidence that people are dumb, and need to be called out as such, giving the author of this article and others more ammo, which in turn repels more people into joining the group. And around, and around they go, where it stops I have no idea. Edit: I should add, this article is among the most civil and charitable articles of its type. I don't mean to pick on this author in particular.

xvfz 7y ago
You might like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc It makes life a lot more pleasant when you realize that most upsetting things you see online are just a meme symbiotic system with a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
brighter2morrow 7y ago
I wonder if there is a name for this effect.

kromem 7y ago

How about agree with them? And connect with them? I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat. But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat-earthers. Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be happy. So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common ground. This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back, but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to worry about cancer. And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies). To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not their differences. Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism, which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat-earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that - a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm). In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus. Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable entanglement. So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the detached observations from there.

david38 7y ago

The author appears to lump anyone of opposing views together. Flat earth - trivial to disprove, ok Anti-vacation - not trivial, but a huge amount of work has been done to show anyone who isn’t totally shut down the glaring before/after situation of vaccines, so ok Men’s Rights? Seriously? Is the author saying men have no rights? Some of the things that fall under the men’s rights umbrella are the draft, lack of help for homeless men vs women, biased family court, little recognition when a victim of domestic violence (interestingly the CDC recognizes that), biased prison sentences, vastly higher rates of on the job injuries, etc. So is the author saying anything that happens to a man his own fault? Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s very loud and just goes around saying men never do anything bad? This is like saying “civil rights” people are a bunch of angry people with no reason to be angry.

happytoexplain 7y ago
>Is there a specific men’s rights subgroup the author is referring to that’s very loud Yes, and, as usual with loud, antagonistic subgroups, they look from the outside like part of the larger group's definition. But that's not an excuse - I wish people like the author would be more generous when talking about the larger groups. Men's rights are particularly affected by this, because it's a topic with both a lot of legitimate grievances and illegitimate hatred among its ranks.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

It's not merely "lonely being wrong." It's lonely and you face a wall of open hatred and abuse for merely disagreeing or even wondering out loud if maybe the dominant view isn't 100% right and might have some holes in it. That's completely unnecessary and also often openly breaks a lot of social rules, but people will justify their terrible behavior, the majority will have their back and tell the target of the abuse that they deserve it, it's their fault and the abuse will promptly stop if they will just "stop spouting nonsense." Only it probably won't. Caving to the demand to pretend to agree will probably be permission to continue to be awful perpetually to someone who once openly disagreed. The most abusive people typically claim they are being scientific, only they aren't. Because actual science is founded on the idea that we can't really prove anything. We can only disprove things and our current science is all the stuff we have some degree of confidence in because it has yet to be disproven and overturned by something better. A good example of this is Bigfoot. There are people who believe strongly that Bigfoot absolutely doesn't exist and anyone who allows for the possibility that Bigfoot might be real gets treated like an idiot and a lunatic, never mind that you cannot prove a species absolutely doesn't exist and new species get discovered all the time. Bigfoot Anti-Believers are typically far more fanatical than Bigfoot Believers, far less rational and far more out of line with scientific principles, yet will justify their terrible treatment of Bigfoot Believers -- or even people who say "I dunno. Could be." -- with claims that anti-belief is scientific.

jhbadger 7y ago
But anti-belief is scientific if the belief for something requires a complete overturning of scientific principles. It's not just an absence of evidence for something. It isn't "open minded" to say "could be..." to Bigfoot, Nessie, or the like -- it's closed minded because to even consider the idea seriously is to think that ecologists and population geneticists have no idea what the minimum habitat of a large animal is or of the minimum viable population size is.
- brighter2morrow 7y ago
  >But anti-belief is scientific if the belief for something requires a complete overturning of scientific principles. It's not just an absence of evidence for something. It isn't "open minded" to say "could be..." to Bigfoot, Nessie, or the like -- it's closed minded because to even consider the idea seriously is to think that ecologists and population geneticists have no idea what the minimum habitat of a large animal is or of the minimum viable population size is. That doesn't make sense. What you're saying is that "It's closed minded not to have blind faith in a faceless group of people who get to dictate what you can and cannot say."

adamwong246 7y ago

Sadly, being wrong DOES affect others. My fellow citizens vote and I am compelled by the laws they enact. Every friendly attempt to alter their worldview is ignored and every unfriendly attempt drives them further into a rabbit-hole of unreason. I'm left with only one choice- to isolate myself from the consequences of their actions, either forcing them out of my world, or leaving them in theirs. and that's why I don't speak with my extended family anymore.

lopmotr 7y ago
How do you know it's not you who's wrong? Do you have access to secret information that they don't? Do you have superior intellect that enables you to understand what they can't? Or did you just happen to be exposed to different influences during your life that led your beliefs in a different arbitrary direction?

weddpros 7y ago

Are we witnessing the birth of a new idea, something like "there is no right or wrong if it hurts people's feelings"? will "non binary truth" emerge as law? You have the right to say anything that's wrong, and nobody can say it's wrong because that would be discriminatory, but if you say something that's right, nobody should say it's right because it would be binary thinking and discriminating? yet you can say it's wrong, because it's hurting your feelings. Let's try to abolish logic! It will surely lead to immense happiness. We're at the tipping point where Idiocracy becomes real (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)

weddpros 7y ago
Special thanks to a down-voter who proved my point: would you have dared to down-vote my comment if I was a flat-earther? Are you looking for truth or do you prefer to not hurt people's feelings?
antisthenes 7y ago
If this happens, I'm seriously going to consider suicide. I don't want to live in a world where I have to live in a constant state of doublethink in order to avoid offending some rare snowflake.
- weddpros 7y ago
  Hint: it's not happening everywhere in the world, it's a western world thing.

bobharris 7y ago

I thought of tweleve step programs reading this article. Things get culty. But what community doesn’t look inclusive and strange to an outsider? Sports? Reps/Dems? Any system not your own? I think its a lovely article. Spurs up alot of thoughts. Especially when being wrong is considered so bad in the US.

gorzynsk 7y ago

That's why education is so important. If as kinds those people would analyze the evidences of both - flat and sphere earth they would be immune to flat-earth nonsense. After kinds lose their natural curiosity and gain political views it's nearly impossible to convince them to something different than they believe.

arisAlexis 7y ago

all of this said can also be true for any kind of community, even extrapolated to religion, leftist ideas, fascism, fad diets. There is nothing inherent in flat earthers, most communities outside of academia (and sometimes inside it) that is not about the feeling of belonging somewhere. It is stronger than truth and facts. Always.