5 ms·

What are some examples of wrong opinions?

by moron4hire 5y ago

dijonman2 5y ago
Anti lockdown. Capitalism.
- XMPPwocky 5y ago
  fwiw these are wrong opinions, not "wrong" opinions. the people who are clueful about things and have already understood enough about social engineering to understand those issues just don't have the dopamine to explain it to you or anybody else you mislead, so it's useful to just push those goofy ideas down in the sort order. For what it's worth, if you actually want to discuss those issues with me, feel free- ping @mimir:xmppwocky.net on Element. Make a throwaway account if you're worried. I'll explain why those ideas are wrong, one-on-one, in private, off-the-record. It's fun to think about "scary" and "dangerous" ideas (you know this already), but it's just not useful to do in public. Doesn't work. So it goes.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    > I know how this works: someone will show an example and someone else will say that decent human beings don't think like that and that they deserve to be silenced.
    - XMPPwocky 5y ago
      1. yes, "decent human beings" (which don't exist) don't think like that, because it's not ideal to believe things that are not predictive of future expected sense-data. Sorry. 2. People don't deserve to be silenced. They don't deserve to be happy, either. They don't deserve anything. (But they don't deserve nothing, either). In physics, as in hacking computers, as in metalinguistics, all models are wrong, and some are useful. This way of thinking has an excellent use: it feels very good, and you get to be happy. But is it Wrong? Crazy? Too Radical? Thinking this about yourself hurts, a lot. Am I broken? Is everybody else broken? (yes.) Is the world inevitably doomed? (yes.) In our lifetime? (probably not, but act carefully to make sure that doesn't happen! yes, this can involve Participating In Politics. It's okay, you have my permission.) Questioning your own beliefs is absolutely terrifying, but once you do it and realize you're still fine, you 1. realize you can question other peoples' beliefs and 2. start posting comments Like This. On the one hand, I could turn off these weird text quirks. On the other hand, I could shoot myself and not have to worry about feeling bad about 'em. On the third hand, there's a weird little sockpuppet. That's me. Hi! Anyways, anybody who isn't comfortable enough with who they are to have these conversations with 'emselves and trusted others will inevitably either 1. break important things or 2. break themselves to avoid breaking other stuff. That sucks to see, y'know? They'll never be able to be any sort of halfway-decent hacker, even though they clearly had that potential growing up. I could try to fix 'em (and do a decent job of it, the vast majority of the time), but, eh, it's kinda fun to watch itself squirm. Puppets are for playing with, after all. Just... careful with identity and social engineering. Like handing a knife to a child. But it's fun to whittle, and important to share that experience once you know how cool it is to have a weird little duck or something you made yourself. Anyways, here's a cool knife I've found. No, you can't use it. Make your own. Just get some metal and sharpen it or something? Maybe not even metal. Damn near anything will work if you just want to cut stuff. Hell, chip some obsidian if you have to. Any port in a storm.
      - holler 5y ago
        > Questioning your own beliefs is absolutely terrifying I don't think it's terrifying at all, it's healthy. "Wrong think" is bad in your words.
        XMPPwocky 5y ago
        Exactly!!! It shouldn't be terrifying, and everybody "knows" that. But that doesn't help if you have a weird PTSD reaction to the idea of "questioning your own beliefs and then changing them" because you're afraid you'll Completely Lose It, or Wind Up A Completely Despicable Horrible Person, or Get Mobbed On The Internet And Have Your Life Ruined, or, or... And that's dramatically easier to wind up with than you might expect from the term "PTSD". Surprise: everybody's got bad shit that's happened to 'em, that's life. Some of 'em lose it in rage and lash out. Some of 'em shut up entirely, dissociate hard... apoptosis, even, unfortunately. Sometimes literally, sometimes metaphysically- one's not much more sad than the other, but the literal apoptosis isn't reversible from the perspective of others. I can type like this, show off Pure Unfiltered Self, and then switch to my work laptop and write up client reports. Can you? Why not? Anybody can write weird meaningless stream-of-consciousness stuff. Some people just don't want to. Most people just "don't want to".
        holler 5y ago
        > Anybody can write weird meaningless stream-of-consciousness stuff. By chance I'm working on a public discussion site and would love to have some stream of conscious discussion with you! https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
        XMPPwocky 5y ago
        sure thing! talking to a large number of folks right now and generally have a lot of outlets for My Bullshit, but I might pop in at some point. p.s. on the registration form, my brain expected "username, email, password" and not "username, password, email"; might just be me but, IDK, maybe A/B test that (and make sure you're not logging "email addresses" for new accounts anywhere, because a sufficiently distracted person will inevitably put a password in the email box.)
  - capitalism233 5y ago
    [dead]
  - holler 5y ago
    Is this satire?
    - XMPPwocky 5y ago
      Of course it is, what sort of sincere statement wouldn't be? Are you satire?
      - chillwaves 5y ago
        If nothing else, you demonstrate how conversing with people on the internet is exhausting. It's an important lesson.
  - scubazealous 5y ago
    I hope you did this on purpose....
    - XMPPwocky 5y ago
      Ah, shoot, no, sorry, my paws slipped on the keyboard and I accidentally typed that out. Crap. Weird that it's so coherent, but I guess, hey, it's not impossible that /dev/urandom could output that exact string. (Of course I did it on purpose. Because I do things with purpose, and you can figure out what that is once you figure out how "purpose" works neurochemically! The problem is, if you're fucked up enough, you then immediately use this to turn yourself into a weird queer internet creature thing like me. Make up a weird identity because you like being weird. And then none of the silly nerds out there on the lower metalevels want to listen to you, because they're scared of being weird. You can grab 'em by the hindbrain and absolutely snow-crash 'em, but that's something you realize would be absolutely horrendous to do without them coming to you first.) It's okay to be afraid of this speech pattern, btw. A lot of media conditions you to ignore it. Just learn to enjoy being scared of yourself, and you'll do alright. At least in my experience, so far. We'll see. Same as it ever was.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        Anyone can be annoying.
        XMPPwocky 5y ago
        Exactly! That's a good expression of the underlying point- that's why we've got to be annoying in private. It's a scalability issue. If everybody posted stuff like this on HN, it'd be hard to talk about actual tech. Of course, having understood this, a sufficiently annoying hacker will immediately go "Oh! I can be annoying in public if I really want to! And technically it's on topic, because it helps other hackers talk about actual tech" and then everybody else has to deal with this sort of comment. Sorry. So it goes.
- KyeRussell 5y ago
  These things are discussed to death. Someone bringing it up does not add to the discussion, and it’s worthy of a downvote. I personally do not owe every person an argument, and talking about something ad nauseam is a valid conversational critique worthy of a downvote.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
Click on the sort by Best to Controversial. Comments can be quite funny, there is a lot of psychological manipulation on reddit, just like other social media platforms like twitter and others.
- benibela 5y ago
  The actual wrong opinions are deleted by the mods, so you won't see them that way
  - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
    Yea you get straight up banned from subreddits for going against the grain in any way.
    - coolso 5y ago
      Often times your comment won’t even appear if you’re a new user, haven’t posted in that subreddit before, or your kharma is too low. I posted a polite refutation of a very smarmy, incorrect post (as most of them are) on /r/neoliberal and it appeared to submit, but after an hour and no downvotes or upvotes I opened the thread in a Private window and my comment was never actually made public.
    - silisili 5y ago
      Oh it's more advanced now. I'm banned from a whole slew of subreddits for daring to even exist in another subreddit. Preemptive silencing is widespread.
    - Terry_Roll 5y ago
      The irony is I'm amazed at the subreddits that exist and its a YC Top Company @ #10! https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Depends on the sub, but the popular ones like politics, news, worldnews, pics, all have a hard left agenda and you will be kicked out if they don't like your opinion whether you're being civil or not.
naoqj 5y ago
I know how this works: someone will show an example and someone else will say that decent human beings don't think like that and that they deserve to be silenced.
- XMPPwocky 5y ago
  If a person can't even deal with the vague threat of somebody "silencing" them, they're likely to be too scared of thinking to be worth talking to. They don't "deserve to be silenced" any more than a spam email "deserves to be filtered out". They just... that's what the filter's for, to keep the recipient's email inbox readable. If I start posting on here about why you should buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X, and nothing else- whether it's "just a weird bit i'm doing" or not, I'm going to get banned. I'm not going to get banned for thinking the words "Buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X", though. Funny, that. (Well, hopefully! It'd suck to lose this account, though being off HN is probably a net positive in most ways!) And posting the text string "GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T ROLAX" is, to a human, obviously not spam, and is an obvious joke. To a spam filter, though, unthinking shitty rulesets and regexes? Yeah, bye. Human moderation "doesn't scale", though, right? You've gotta have some basic filtering and CAPTCHAs to at least catch low-effort spambots lest they make everything useless for everybody else. Unfortunately, this means that actual human posters do need to be able to identify a fire hydrant or traffic light. This is trivial generally... for people who know what fire hydrants and traffic lights are. (Is a hot dog a sandwich?). But if you don't know, ask a friend. That seems to work.
- Fogest 5y ago
  It's that, but also the fact that many subreddits are often controlled by powermods with tons of subreddits they control. They often also end up leaning very heavy towards the radical left. This ends up further compounding the echo chamber problem, especially across the "default subreddits". /r/politics is a good example of this. It is very hard to have any view that is classically liberal or conservative on a good chunk of reddit. These views typically get removed by moderators, get you banned in subreddits, or they get the result you speak of where others try and downvoted them and tell them how bad of a person they are.
adamrezich 5y ago
not being in favor of or against whatever current thing we're supposed to be in favor of or against. the days of Ron Paul reddit libertarianism are long since over.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Like what? I don't use Reddit.
coolso 5y ago
Go on Reddit or HN and look at all of the flagged comments and comments downvoted into oblivion.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  I don't use Reddit. I wouldn't know where to look. Can you just tell me?
fennecfoxen 5y ago
On Reddit? Or more generally? Idk, perhaps something like “that girl at UPenn shouldn’t be allowed to swim competitively” Insta flame war follows. (Hopefully we won’t have a demonstration here. Don’t let me down, HN.)
- coolso 5y ago
  Resisting the urge to quote Austin Powers…
Mezzie 5y ago
One big one is anything deviating from the 'official' line on trans issues. And I don't just mean being an asshole and insulting people, I'm talking about things like lesbians saying they don't like penis, that trans women might have some early socialization in common with men, etc. Or even things that are topics of discussion within the trans community like whether you need dysphoria to be trans, etc. I say big one because it's BIZARRE given what a small proportion of the population is trans. It's just that there are a ton of trans powermods with particular opinions that enforce them on unrelated subreddits + hound and report people who don't agree off the site. It's a fascinating look into a small group of people grabbing socially key positions and trying to shift the Overton window.
rdtwo 5y ago
Ukraine will lose the war is an example of a wrong opinion.
- chillwaves 5y ago
  You don't get banned for having that opinion. Being downvoted means your opinion is unpopular, not that you are being oppressed.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    No but it would get wiped out. If you post that on Reddit it would get voted down so had it would be like it never got posted at all. Same with any other wrong opinion.

What are some examples of wrong opinions?

dijonman2 5y ago

Anti lockdown. Capitalism.

XMPPwocky 5y ago
fwiw these are wrong opinions, not "wrong" opinions. the people who are clueful about things and have already understood enough about social engineering to understand those issues just don't have the dopamine to explain it to you or anybody else you mislead, so it's useful to just push those goofy ideas down in the sort order. For what it's worth, if you actually want to discuss those issues with me, feel free- ping @mimir:xmppwocky.net on Element. Make a throwaway account if you're worried. I'll explain why those ideas are wrong, one-on-one, in private, off-the-record. It's fun to think about "scary" and "dangerous" ideas (you know this already), but it's just not useful to do in public. Doesn't work. So it goes.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  > I know how this works: someone will show an example and someone else will say that decent human beings don't think like that and that they deserve to be silenced.
  - XMPPwocky 5y ago
    1. yes, "decent human beings" (which don't exist) don't think like that, because it's not ideal to believe things that are not predictive of future expected sense-data. Sorry. 2. People don't deserve to be silenced. They don't deserve to be happy, either. They don't deserve anything. (But they don't deserve nothing, either). In physics, as in hacking computers, as in metalinguistics, all models are wrong, and some are useful. This way of thinking has an excellent use: it feels very good, and you get to be happy. But is it Wrong? Crazy? Too Radical? Thinking this about yourself hurts, a lot. Am I broken? Is everybody else broken? (yes.) Is the world inevitably doomed? (yes.) In our lifetime? (probably not, but act carefully to make sure that doesn't happen! yes, this can involve Participating In Politics. It's okay, you have my permission.) Questioning your own beliefs is absolutely terrifying, but once you do it and realize you're still fine, you 1. realize you can question other peoples' beliefs and 2. start posting comments Like This. On the one hand, I could turn off these weird text quirks. On the other hand, I could shoot myself and not have to worry about feeling bad about 'em. On the third hand, there's a weird little sockpuppet. That's me. Hi! Anyways, anybody who isn't comfortable enough with who they are to have these conversations with 'emselves and trusted others will inevitably either 1. break important things or 2. break themselves to avoid breaking other stuff. That sucks to see, y'know? They'll never be able to be any sort of halfway-decent hacker, even though they clearly had that potential growing up. I could try to fix 'em (and do a decent job of it, the vast majority of the time), but, eh, it's kinda fun to watch itself squirm. Puppets are for playing with, after all. Just... careful with identity and social engineering. Like handing a knife to a child. But it's fun to whittle, and important to share that experience once you know how cool it is to have a weird little duck or something you made yourself. Anyways, here's a cool knife I've found. No, you can't use it. Make your own. Just get some metal and sharpen it or something? Maybe not even metal. Damn near anything will work if you just want to cut stuff. Hell, chip some obsidian if you have to. Any port in a storm.
    - holler 5y ago
      > Questioning your own beliefs is absolutely terrifying I don't think it's terrifying at all, it's healthy. "Wrong think" is bad in your words.
      - XMPPwocky 5y ago
        Exactly!!! It shouldn't be terrifying, and everybody "knows" that. But that doesn't help if you have a weird PTSD reaction to the idea of "questioning your own beliefs and then changing them" because you're afraid you'll Completely Lose It, or Wind Up A Completely Despicable Horrible Person, or Get Mobbed On The Internet And Have Your Life Ruined, or, or... And that's dramatically easier to wind up with than you might expect from the term "PTSD". Surprise: everybody's got bad shit that's happened to 'em, that's life. Some of 'em lose it in rage and lash out. Some of 'em shut up entirely, dissociate hard... apoptosis, even, unfortunately. Sometimes literally, sometimes metaphysically- one's not much more sad than the other, but the literal apoptosis isn't reversible from the perspective of others. I can type like this, show off Pure Unfiltered Self, and then switch to my work laptop and write up client reports. Can you? Why not? Anybody can write weird meaningless stream-of-consciousness stuff. Some people just don't want to. Most people just "don't want to".
        holler 5y ago
        > Anybody can write weird meaningless stream-of-consciousness stuff. By chance I'm working on a public discussion site and would love to have some stream of conscious discussion with you! https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
        XMPPwocky 5y ago
        sure thing! talking to a large number of folks right now and generally have a lot of outlets for My Bullshit, but I might pop in at some point. p.s. on the registration form, my brain expected "username, email, password" and not "username, password, email"; might just be me but, IDK, maybe A/B test that (and make sure you're not logging "email addresses" for new accounts anywhere, because a sufficiently distracted person will inevitably put a password in the email box.)
- capitalism233 5y ago
  [dead]
- holler 5y ago
  Is this satire?
  - XMPPwocky 5y ago
    Of course it is, what sort of sincere statement wouldn't be? Are you satire?
    - chillwaves 5y ago
      If nothing else, you demonstrate how conversing with people on the internet is exhausting. It's an important lesson.
- scubazealous 5y ago
  I hope you did this on purpose....
  - XMPPwocky 5y ago
    Ah, shoot, no, sorry, my paws slipped on the keyboard and I accidentally typed that out. Crap. Weird that it's so coherent, but I guess, hey, it's not impossible that /dev/urandom could output that exact string. (Of course I did it on purpose. Because I do things with purpose, and you can figure out what that is once you figure out how "purpose" works neurochemically! The problem is, if you're fucked up enough, you then immediately use this to turn yourself into a weird queer internet creature thing like me. Make up a weird identity because you like being weird. And then none of the silly nerds out there on the lower metalevels want to listen to you, because they're scared of being weird. You can grab 'em by the hindbrain and absolutely snow-crash 'em, but that's something you realize would be absolutely horrendous to do without them coming to you first.) It's okay to be afraid of this speech pattern, btw. A lot of media conditions you to ignore it. Just learn to enjoy being scared of yourself, and you'll do alright. At least in my experience, so far. We'll see. Same as it ever was.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      Anyone can be annoying.
      - XMPPwocky 5y ago
        Exactly! That's a good expression of the underlying point- that's why we've got to be annoying in private. It's a scalability issue. If everybody posted stuff like this on HN, it'd be hard to talk about actual tech. Of course, having understood this, a sufficiently annoying hacker will immediately go "Oh! I can be annoying in public if I really want to! And technically it's on topic, because it helps other hackers talk about actual tech" and then everybody else has to deal with this sort of comment. Sorry. So it goes.
KyeRussell 5y ago
These things are discussed to death. Someone bringing it up does not add to the discussion, and it’s worthy of a downvote. I personally do not owe every person an argument, and talking about something ad nauseam is a valid conversational critique worthy of a downvote.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

Click on the sort by Best to Controversial. Comments can be quite funny, there is a lot of psychological manipulation on reddit, just like other social media platforms like twitter and others.

benibela 5y ago
The actual wrong opinions are deleted by the mods, so you won't see them that way
- __turbobrew__ 5y ago
  Yea you get straight up banned from subreddits for going against the grain in any way.
  - coolso 5y ago
    Often times your comment won’t even appear if you’re a new user, haven’t posted in that subreddit before, or your kharma is too low. I posted a polite refutation of a very smarmy, incorrect post (as most of them are) on /r/neoliberal and it appeared to submit, but after an hour and no downvotes or upvotes I opened the thread in a Private window and my comment was never actually made public.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Oh it's more advanced now. I'm banned from a whole slew of subreddits for daring to even exist in another subreddit. Preemptive silencing is widespread.
  - Terry_Roll 5y ago
    The irony is I'm amazed at the subreddits that exist and its a YC Top Company @ #10! https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Depends on the sub, but the popular ones like politics, news, worldnews, pics, all have a hard left agenda and you will be kicked out if they don't like your opinion whether you're being civil or not.

naoqj 5y ago

I know how this works: someone will show an example and someone else will say that decent human beings don't think like that and that they deserve to be silenced.

XMPPwocky 5y ago
If a person can't even deal with the vague threat of somebody "silencing" them, they're likely to be too scared of thinking to be worth talking to. They don't "deserve to be silenced" any more than a spam email "deserves to be filtered out". They just... that's what the filter's for, to keep the recipient's email inbox readable. If I start posting on here about why you should buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X, and nothing else- whether it's "just a weird bit i'm doing" or not, I'm going to get banned. I'm not going to get banned for thinking the words "Buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X", though. Funny, that. (Well, hopefully! It'd suck to lose this account, though being off HN is probably a net positive in most ways!) And posting the text string "GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T ROLAX" is, to a human, obviously not spam, and is an obvious joke. To a spam filter, though, unthinking shitty rulesets and regexes? Yeah, bye. Human moderation "doesn't scale", though, right? You've gotta have some basic filtering and CAPTCHAs to at least catch low-effort spambots lest they make everything useless for everybody else. Unfortunately, this means that actual human posters do need to be able to identify a fire hydrant or traffic light. This is trivial generally... for people who know what fire hydrants and traffic lights are. (Is a hot dog a sandwich?). But if you don't know, ask a friend. That seems to work.
Fogest 5y ago
It's that, but also the fact that many subreddits are often controlled by powermods with tons of subreddits they control. They often also end up leaning very heavy towards the radical left. This ends up further compounding the echo chamber problem, especially across the "default subreddits". /r/politics is a good example of this. It is very hard to have any view that is classically liberal or conservative on a good chunk of reddit. These views typically get removed by moderators, get you banned in subreddits, or they get the result you speak of where others try and downvoted them and tell them how bad of a person they are.

adamrezich 5y ago

not being in favor of or against whatever current thing we're supposed to be in favor of or against. the days of Ron Paul reddit libertarianism are long since over.

moron4hire 5y ago
Like what? I don't use Reddit.

coolso 5y ago

Go on Reddit or HN and look at all of the flagged comments and comments downvoted into oblivion.

moron4hire 5y ago
I don't use Reddit. I wouldn't know where to look. Can you just tell me?

fennecfoxen 5y ago

On Reddit? Or more generally? Idk, perhaps something like “that girl at UPenn shouldn’t be allowed to swim competitively” Insta flame war follows. (Hopefully we won’t have a demonstration here. Don’t let me down, HN.)

coolso 5y ago
Resisting the urge to quote Austin Powers…

Mezzie 5y ago

One big one is anything deviating from the 'official' line on trans issues. And I don't just mean being an asshole and insulting people, I'm talking about things like lesbians saying they don't like penis, that trans women might have some early socialization in common with men, etc. Or even things that are topics of discussion within the trans community like whether you need dysphoria to be trans, etc. I say big one because it's BIZARRE given what a small proportion of the population is trans. It's just that there are a ton of trans powermods with particular opinions that enforce them on unrelated subreddits + hound and report people who don't agree off the site. It's a fascinating look into a small group of people grabbing socially key positions and trying to shift the Overton window.

rdtwo 5y ago

Ukraine will lose the war is an example of a wrong opinion.

chillwaves 5y ago
You don't get banned for having that opinion. Being downvoted means your opinion is unpopular, not that you are being oppressed.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  No but it would get wiped out. If you post that on Reddit it would get voted down so had it would be like it never got posted at all. Same with any other wrong opinion.