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That's almost every reddit thread I've been involved in. Oratory prowess is way more important than accuracy. If you ever want to "lose a debate" on reddit, pi

That's almost every reddit thread I've been involved in. Oratory prowess is way more important than accuracy. If you ever want to "lose a debate" on reddit, pick something that's counter-intuitive or widely misunderstood and use nuance and citations in your defense. You'll get cyberbullied every time - sometimes even banned from the sub.

smogcutter 4y ago
From those examples, I think you’re maybe also running up against people generally having a low threshold for giving a stranger on the internet the benefit of the doubt. It’s hard to be surprised that “eugenics, but the good kind, just hear me out!” and “state’s rights, but not the disingenuous lost cause kind, just hear me out!” are a tough sell with complete strangers who have no prior reason to trust you or be interested in your opinions.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  correct! Btw, I removed them from my examples, didn't want to "discuss" that here. I'm kind of a history nerd and it's like a fishing hook with delicious bait when I see stuff like that. "Oh wait! You think it was just the south that argued states rights?! Actually (brings up fugitive slave clause jurisprudence)" Or how manner and conduct books of the 1800s, eugenics texts, and jordan peterson's 12 rules for life are basically dots in a straight line. That stuff is just catnip. I just need to stop being distracted and go write actual books or something.
  - pfannkuchen 4y ago
    I’m no fan of Peterson, but I’m curious— how are intentionally altering the gene pool of a group and cleaning your room colinear?
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      Look at the table of contents of this book titled "Eugenics" https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/6/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/6/mo... There were multiple points of interest for the Eugenicists. One of them was for the general public and how to get them to have a proscribed conduct and behavior. Maybe you've seen those diagrams where they have 2 life paths depicted from the Victorian era. That's from Eugenics. Example: https://ia800301.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/16/items/naturessecretsre1919shan/naturessecretsre1919shan_jp2.zip&file=naturessecretsre1919shan_jp2/naturessecretsre1919shan_0020.jp2&id=naturessecretsre1919shan&scale=2&rotate=0 https://ia800301.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.... Here's "The Road to Success" for "The Young Man" https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/244/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/244/... Again, this is part of Eugenics. We focus on the part that was removed (race science) and leave mostly unexamined the parts that were reinvented or repurposed as say, "The Power of Positive Thinking". Eugenics books, for the general public, were a different beast. Probably the best succinct description for how they thought of themselves can be summarized in this 1921 diagram: https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/efc97918-8073-4fc5-95f3-34d75eb286ef_eugenics-tree-1921-tree-only.jpg https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/efc97918-8073-4... It is a dangerous psuedoscientific epistemology - a practice with a bunch of faulty logic and ways of knowing that can lead to disasters and it's alive and well - for instance, assuming a social structure in lobsters applies to humans. That these adherents tend to be revealed as secretly racist and thus subscribe to the part which was removed, should be of no shock. We've mischaracterized Eugenics[1] and allowed it to fester by other names or as Maurice Bardèche, the french neo-fascist observed about fascism in the 60s, "With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn" The point is that if you don't draw the perimeter right around an idea, you can't reign it in. It'll just escape from your hands and re-emerge as something else. So, for instance, the slave plantation becomes the prison farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm). We tend to, for good reason, ignore societal trainwrecks and blights on our past. But trainwrecks are the most important thing to study if we strive to build safer trains and seek to avoid similar disasters in the future. Things have to be accurately tackled with in order to defeat them. --- [1] it's worth noting it's a big topic and some "real" science has also come out of it, such as biosocial theory and biostatistics studies. Peer reviewed journals such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Heredity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Heredity used to be eugenics journals. This is, however, a very small minority.
  - nqrac 4y ago
    Peterson an academic who is clueless about the real world. His best work was discussing politics in connection with liberty, especially the Trucker protests. His biggest flaw is that (like the other Daily Wire pundits) he never goes into economics and has absurd ideas that we live in a competence hierarchy. The whole "intellectual dark web" imploded after the start of the Ukraine war, when they first went full neocon, then realized that their audience does not like that and now start backpedaling massively.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      I'd like to recommend "decoding the gurus" podcast which is probably the best treatment of this material I've seen. It's still lacking but I should "put up or shut up". They're doing a fine job
avgcorrection 4y ago
It’s amazing to me in all my years on the internet how many communities I insert myself into, then in private feel like a pretender, and yet how relatively uncommon it is that people call me an idiot.
- smcl 4y ago
  Good afternoon, fellow Imposter Syndrome Haver :) Just jumping in to say that you are most likely not a pretender or an idiot, you're probably just very self-conscious, hold yourself to high standards and give yourself lofty goals.
jiggawatts 4y ago
I post on both Reddit and YC News regularly, and it is fascinating to see the differences in biases, counter-arguments, or outright rejections of reality. YC News people generally seem to prefer to hear the truth, especially from sources that appear knowledgeable. I've had people here comment in reply to me saying I've "changed their mind". That never happens on Reddit. Reddit has cliques, quasi-religions, and fads. Anything contrary to the group-think is mercilessly voted down. Intelligent, thought-out counter arguments that aren't entertaining are especially likely to garner lots of downvotes. Not only do the readers feel "personally attacked" by contrary opinions, there is also that ever present undercurrent of anti-intellectualism of typical Americans that makes intelligent discourse distasteful to them.
alophawen 4y ago
Can confirm. Was banned from /r/golang for speaking well of Rust. I use both.

smogcutter 4y ago

From those examples, I think you’re maybe also running up against people generally having a low threshold for giving a stranger on the internet the benefit of the doubt. It’s hard to be surprised that “eugenics, but the good kind, just hear me out!” and “state’s rights, but not the disingenuous lost cause kind, just hear me out!” are a tough sell with complete strangers who have no prior reason to trust you or be interested in your opinions.

kristopolous 4y ago
correct! Btw, I removed them from my examples, didn't want to "discuss" that here. I'm kind of a history nerd and it's like a fishing hook with delicious bait when I see stuff like that. "Oh wait! You think it was just the south that argued states rights?! Actually (brings up fugitive slave clause jurisprudence)" Or how manner and conduct books of the 1800s, eugenics texts, and jordan peterson's 12 rules for life are basically dots in a straight line. That stuff is just catnip. I just need to stop being distracted and go write actual books or something.
- pfannkuchen 4y ago
  I’m no fan of Peterson, but I’m curious— how are intentionally altering the gene pool of a group and cleaning your room colinear?
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    Look at the table of contents of this book titled "Eugenics" https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/6/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/6/mo... There were multiple points of interest for the Eugenicists. One of them was for the general public and how to get them to have a proscribed conduct and behavior. Maybe you've seen those diagrams where they have 2 life paths depicted from the Victorian era. That's from Eugenics. Example: https://ia800301.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/16/items/naturessecretsre1919shan/naturessecretsre1919shan_jp2.zip&file=naturessecretsre1919shan_jp2/naturessecretsre1919shan_0020.jp2&id=naturessecretsre1919shan&scale=2&rotate=0 https://ia800301.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.... Here's "The Road to Success" for "The Young Man" https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/244/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/244/... Again, this is part of Eugenics. We focus on the part that was removed (race science) and leave mostly unexamined the parts that were reinvented or repurposed as say, "The Power of Positive Thinking". Eugenics books, for the general public, were a different beast. Probably the best succinct description for how they thought of themselves can be summarized in this 1921 diagram: https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/efc97918-8073-4fc5-95f3-34d75eb286ef_eugenics-tree-1921-tree-only.jpg https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/efc97918-8073-4... It is a dangerous psuedoscientific epistemology - a practice with a bunch of faulty logic and ways of knowing that can lead to disasters and it's alive and well - for instance, assuming a social structure in lobsters applies to humans. That these adherents tend to be revealed as secretly racist and thus subscribe to the part which was removed, should be of no shock. We've mischaracterized Eugenics[1] and allowed it to fester by other names or as Maurice Bardèche, the french neo-fascist observed about fascism in the 60s, "With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn" The point is that if you don't draw the perimeter right around an idea, you can't reign it in. It'll just escape from your hands and re-emerge as something else. So, for instance, the slave plantation becomes the prison farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm). We tend to, for good reason, ignore societal trainwrecks and blights on our past. But trainwrecks are the most important thing to study if we strive to build safer trains and seek to avoid similar disasters in the future. Things have to be accurately tackled with in order to defeat them. --- [1] it's worth noting it's a big topic and some "real" science has also come out of it, such as biosocial theory and biostatistics studies. Peer reviewed journals such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Heredity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Heredity used to be eugenics journals. This is, however, a very small minority.
- nqrac 4y ago
  Peterson an academic who is clueless about the real world. His best work was discussing politics in connection with liberty, especially the Trucker protests. His biggest flaw is that (like the other Daily Wire pundits) he never goes into economics and has absurd ideas that we live in a competence hierarchy. The whole "intellectual dark web" imploded after the start of the Ukraine war, when they first went full neocon, then realized that their audience does not like that and now start backpedaling massively.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    I'd like to recommend "decoding the gurus" podcast which is probably the best treatment of this material I've seen. It's still lacking but I should "put up or shut up". They're doing a fine job

avgcorrection 4y ago

It’s amazing to me in all my years on the internet how many communities I insert myself into, then in private feel like a pretender, and yet how relatively uncommon it is that people call me an idiot.

smcl 4y ago
Good afternoon, fellow Imposter Syndrome Haver :) Just jumping in to say that you are most likely not a pretender or an idiot, you're probably just very self-conscious, hold yourself to high standards and give yourself lofty goals.

jiggawatts 4y ago

I post on both Reddit and YC News regularly, and it is fascinating to see the differences in biases, counter-arguments, or outright rejections of reality. YC News people generally seem to prefer to hear the truth, especially from sources that appear knowledgeable. I've had people here comment in reply to me saying I've "changed their mind". That never happens on Reddit. Reddit has cliques, quasi-religions, and fads. Anything contrary to the group-think is mercilessly voted down. Intelligent, thought-out counter arguments that aren't entertaining are especially likely to garner lots of downvotes. Not only do the readers feel "personally attacked" by contrary opinions, there is also that ever present undercurrent of anti-intellectualism of typical Americans that makes intelligent discourse distasteful to them.

alophawen 4y ago

Can confirm. Was banned from /r/golang for speaking well of Rust. I use both.