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That’s what popping a filter bubble feels like. I followed Jacobin and a bunch of other accounts of people I disagree with when I started on Twitter. Learning m

That’s what popping a filter bubble feels like. I followed Jacobin and a bunch of other accounts of people I disagree with when I started on Twitter. Learning more about people who hate you, your philosophy, beliefs and identities does not lead to any great improvements in your life so I stopped. Yes, the politically engaged out group really is like that. They really do hate you.

mistermann 6y ago
If just for fun, as a kind of thought experiment I suppose, a person decomposed this comment, unpacking each word or phrase into its pedantically precise meaning in this context, spending several hours on the task to squeeze every last drop of unambiguous meaning out of the the words, and then contemplated a literal reading of the final product in its uncompressed form...might this undertaking yield any interesting results? Maybe it's not clear what I have in mind, so I will give an example: the words "people", "you", "they"...what do these words refer to, precisely and explicitly (what entities do they encompass, and what do they not encompass)?
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  There are many, many people who would happily put you and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your political beliefs if you have any, whatever they are. There are lots of people who believe that achieving their utopia is worth a lot of dead men, women and children. This is true whether you would pick the fascists or the communists given a forced choice between the two.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    I'm not saying it isn't plausible, and history contains many examples of such behavior, but my point is that the mind has this ability to imagine various scenarios of what could be true, but we speak of these neurologically generated virtual scenarios as if they are actually true. In this example, you even literally use the word "true" when referring to these ideas, demonstrating how real these simulated scenarios seem - to the mind, they are often indistinguishable from actual knowledge and first person experiences. This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing, and "most" activities that humans engage in within the economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled imaginations) about the current and potential future states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce high quality and sometimes even amazing results (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the underlying reason most people do all these other things at our place of employment), we seem to not only not apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but most people seem to consider the very idea to be outrageous, often passionately so. I think it's an interesting way to think about the world. Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about the world in different ways, as there has been in the past.
concordDance 6y ago
I think it depends whether you are following more mainstream opposite-position sources or following sites whose entire purpose revolves around hating the outgroup. You allude to this with the reference to "politically engaged". A place like the various incel forums tend to degrade into being about hating womem, coontoon genuinely hated "niggers" and the more extreme social justice places genuinely do hate cis "white" men. But if you can find less extreme places that have another purpose other than hating the outgroup, you'll be able to converse with more reasonable people who aren't caught up in virtue/hate spirals. Find the average incel/racist/sjw and they'll have more nuanced views and can actually be talked to without them just repeating how much they hate you.

mistermann 6y ago

If just for fun, as a kind of thought experiment I suppose, a person decomposed this comment, unpacking each word or phrase into its pedantically precise meaning in this context, spending several hours on the task to squeeze every last drop of unambiguous meaning out of the the words, and then contemplated a literal reading of the final product in its uncompressed form...might this undertaking yield any interesting results? Maybe it's not clear what I have in mind, so I will give an example: the words "people", "you", "they"...what do these words refer to, precisely and explicitly (what entities do they encompass, and what do they not encompass)?

barry-cotter 6y ago
There are many, many people who would happily put you and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your political beliefs if you have any, whatever they are. There are lots of people who believe that achieving their utopia is worth a lot of dead men, women and children. This is true whether you would pick the fascists or the communists given a forced choice between the two.
- mistermann 6y ago
  I'm not saying it isn't plausible, and history contains many examples of such behavior, but my point is that the mind has this ability to imagine various scenarios of what could be true, but we speak of these neurologically generated virtual scenarios as if they are actually true. In this example, you even literally use the word "true" when referring to these ideas, demonstrating how real these simulated scenarios seem - to the mind, they are often indistinguishable from actual knowledge and first person experiences. This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing, and "most" activities that humans engage in within the economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled imaginations) about the current and potential future states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce high quality and sometimes even amazing results (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the underlying reason most people do all these other things at our place of employment), we seem to not only not apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but most people seem to consider the very idea to be outrageous, often passionately so. I think it's an interesting way to think about the world. Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about the world in different ways, as there has been in the past.

concordDance 6y ago

I think it depends whether you are following more mainstream opposite-position sources or following sites whose entire purpose revolves around hating the outgroup. You allude to this with the reference to "politically engaged". A place like the various incel forums tend to degrade into being about hating womem, coontoon genuinely hated "niggers" and the more extreme social justice places genuinely do hate cis "white" men. But if you can find less extreme places that have another purpose other than hating the outgroup, you'll be able to converse with more reasonable people who aren't caught up in virtue/hate spirals. Find the average incel/racist/sjw and they'll have more nuanced views and can actually be talked to without them just repeating how much they hate you.