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You don't defeat bad ideas by promoting them either; you defeat them with shame, i.e. consequences for being willfully ignorant or acting like a jackass. But th

You don't defeat bad ideas by promoting them either; you defeat them with shame, i.e. consequences for being willfully ignorant or acting like a jackass. But the internet rarely delivers meaningful feedback to the folks that craft this type of "distasteful, terrible, and repugnant content." Now, you might be the sort of person that would choose to live with a group of sadistic trolls for the edification that might result. I suspect most humans would react badly to that type of environment; our psychology is not well adapted to a constant barrage of persuasive deception and emotional manipulation. Personally, I hope this latest crop of trashtube sites is driven offline and into bankruptcy; the sooner, the better.

vetinari 6y ago
You can't defeat bad ideas with shaming; shaming means you don't have an argument and are approaching the topic as a belief. You cannot persuade others with your beliefs. You can defeat ideas only with better, well argumented ideas.
- gamacodre 6y ago
  I used to believe that as well. But it seems that even a "well argumented" idea can get very little traction unless the circumstances are right, i.e. your interlocutor doesn't care much about the topic. There was some study about this a little bit ago, where pointing out problems with an erroneous but established "fact" just caused people to dig further into their position, even after the "fact" their position was supposedly based on was proved to be completely and irredeemably false. This is the problem with letting idiots and hucksters push out garbage "facts" - they build communities that are uninterested in counter-arguments. It doesn't even matter if the "facts" are somehow eventually refuted, because the attitudes informed by them have already hardened. And, the only way I can think of to prevent those idiots and hucksters from being so effective is to introduce some kind of social restraint - thus, shame.

vetinari 6y ago

You can't defeat bad ideas with shaming; shaming means you don't have an argument and are approaching the topic as a belief. You cannot persuade others with your beliefs. You can defeat ideas only with better, well argumented ideas.

gamacodre 6y ago
I used to believe that as well. But it seems that even a "well argumented" idea can get very little traction unless the circumstances are right, i.e. your interlocutor doesn't care much about the topic. There was some study about this a little bit ago, where pointing out problems with an erroneous but established "fact" just caused people to dig further into their position, even after the "fact" their position was supposedly based on was proved to be completely and irredeemably false. This is the problem with letting idiots and hucksters push out garbage "facts" - they build communities that are uninterested in counter-arguments. It doesn't even matter if the "facts" are somehow eventually refuted, because the attitudes informed by them have already hardened. And, the only way I can think of to prevent those idiots and hucksters from being so effective is to introduce some kind of social restraint - thus, shame.