4 ms·

This should be the accepted answer. The issue at hand is that there is often a lot of dishonesty and deception involved in online discussion. People usually ne

This should be the accepted answer. The issue at hand is that there is often a lot of dishonesty and deception involved in online discussion. People usually never reply back on their maybe wrong initial standpoint, and tend to radicalize their answers once they realize that they will lose the argument. "Win the argument at all costs" is what statistically most online people use as a strategy. In online communities, honest curiosity is often punished, especially when you start with programming or other tech-related sciences. I think that indirectly contributed to echo chambers and locality sensitive circle jerks, wherein a sub community accepts only one answer as a solution, either out of fear for downvotes of other proposals, or because those downvotes led to a socially acceptable answer. I really miss the old phpbb web forums internet, where people could have interesting discussions with way longer attention spans than the 24 hours most platforms have nowadays. In my opinion, interesting topics need active debate and cultural and knowledge exchange to make progress, but we somehow totally fucked that up on the internet. Be it missing enforcement of netiquettes, corruption of mods or anarchistic behavior for retalation against an opposing view (may I remind you that we still have 4chan, 8chan, 4plebs, kiwifarms, /pol/ and all the other messed up echo chambers, where hate is used a lot to "silence the enemy") I wanted to give OP a general advice: Hate is a mind infiltration technique. If somebody uses hate in discussions, it means they cannot win by other - rational - means to convince the opposing party. If somebody intentionally uses those techniques, they follow ulterior motives that are motivated by anger, nationalism, religion, etc. Because they usually fear that they have to defend their own world view - otherwise it would shatter to crumbling pieces when it would've been held against their own moral standards. Don't give up hope, OP, there are good and trustworthy people out there. Keep the ones that you find closely, and learn how to emotionally support them in times of need.

6510 2y ago
> I really miss the old phpbb web forums internet, where people could have interesting discussions with way longer attention spans than the 24 hours most platforms have nowadays. > In my opinion, interesting topics need active debate and cultural and knowledge exchange to make progress, but we somehow totally fucked that up on the internet. A professor once complaint about lab politics and I asked why [given his position] he didn't get more involved. He said: I must try to solve it inside my domain of knowledge - even if that wont result in the desired outcome. If I get involved it will distract me and I stop being a scientist. You've nicely reduced the problem to a computer science problem if not a [be it raw] idea for a startup. Among all those daily topics on social media are some worthy of years of debate (if the measure is a productive result) A thousand post forum thread is a workable but crappy solution. Newer thing seem exponentially worse. Wiki's barely keep track of who wrote what and turn into a hard to navigate forest of articles.
- cookiengineer 2y ago
  > A professor once complaint about lab politics and I asked why [given his position] he didn't get more involved. He said: I must try to solve it inside my domain of knowledge - even if that wont result in the desired outcome. If I get involved it will distract me and I stop being a scientist. This is such a nice quote, and really straight to the point. I love it. I think social media and how it is designed as a game bugs me a lot, because the more I try to understand the mechanics behind it, the more I feel like I don't understand anything at all. The human species is a very emotional one, and is ragebaited very easily (myself included), given the right parameters are known from an OSINT perspective. The internet right now is a social system, which kind of implies that it always needs an emotional context, like where the people debating it are coming from, how they've been primed into their opinion with their own experience, and what the context means in a transferred perspective of another area of expertise. And that is somewhat orthogonal to how science works, where the more experience we gain, the more we understand how less we know, which actually means that more experienced people have less intention to do further research, because it's a net negative reward system. And I think this is somewhat a huge problem, because the lack of transparency of these emotional contexts makes things on the internet attackable in the sense that they can be rage baited, frowned upon, derailed into non-mattering discussions etc. The most rational statement can be shat into oblivion over minor wordings mistakes, which doesn't make sense from the perspective of rationality - as if every human on the internet claims to be perfect by default unless proven otherwise. And we all know that a lot of people are constantly in the news for something that they said or did in the past. It's like a witch hunt out there, and I don't understand how we as a society can even tolerate that, let alone embrace it by viewing, sharing or liking it. Social media also does not reflect gains in experience over time, as everything "has to be in the moment", otherwise it would not work as a system. (I wanna point to Chamsky's ideas about propaganda and George Orwell's 1984 here). The optimum social media post is the one with the most ridiculous claims and the least amount of scientific evidence, while also being total hyperbole in an emotional context that's abused for marketing purposes. So yeah, overall I think I am just frustated by the state of things, but I also have no clue how we can collectively solve it in a sustainable and communital (?) manner.
  - 2y ago
WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
> In online communities, honest curiosity is often punished Because "honest curiosity" is so often used as a DDoS vector. This is not the case in real life when people know you and there is real investment in the relationship. > rational - means to convince the opposing party. Most people are not convinced by rational argument. Aristotle covered this more than 2000 years ago and human nature has not changed.

6510 2y ago

> I really miss the old phpbb web forums internet, where people could have interesting discussions with way longer attention spans than the 24 hours most platforms have nowadays. > In my opinion, interesting topics need active debate and cultural and knowledge exchange to make progress, but we somehow totally fucked that up on the internet. A professor once complaint about lab politics and I asked why [given his position] he didn't get more involved. He said: I must try to solve it inside my domain of knowledge - even if that wont result in the desired outcome. If I get involved it will distract me and I stop being a scientist. You've nicely reduced the problem to a computer science problem if not a [be it raw] idea for a startup. Among all those daily topics on social media are some worthy of years of debate (if the measure is a productive result) A thousand post forum thread is a workable but crappy solution. Newer thing seem exponentially worse. Wiki's barely keep track of who wrote what and turn into a hard to navigate forest of articles.

cookiengineer 2y ago
> A professor once complaint about lab politics and I asked why [given his position] he didn't get more involved. He said: I must try to solve it inside my domain of knowledge - even if that wont result in the desired outcome. If I get involved it will distract me and I stop being a scientist. This is such a nice quote, and really straight to the point. I love it. I think social media and how it is designed as a game bugs me a lot, because the more I try to understand the mechanics behind it, the more I feel like I don't understand anything at all. The human species is a very emotional one, and is ragebaited very easily (myself included), given the right parameters are known from an OSINT perspective. The internet right now is a social system, which kind of implies that it always needs an emotional context, like where the people debating it are coming from, how they've been primed into their opinion with their own experience, and what the context means in a transferred perspective of another area of expertise. And that is somewhat orthogonal to how science works, where the more experience we gain, the more we understand how less we know, which actually means that more experienced people have less intention to do further research, because it's a net negative reward system. And I think this is somewhat a huge problem, because the lack of transparency of these emotional contexts makes things on the internet attackable in the sense that they can be rage baited, frowned upon, derailed into non-mattering discussions etc. The most rational statement can be shat into oblivion over minor wordings mistakes, which doesn't make sense from the perspective of rationality - as if every human on the internet claims to be perfect by default unless proven otherwise. And we all know that a lot of people are constantly in the news for something that they said or did in the past. It's like a witch hunt out there, and I don't understand how we as a society can even tolerate that, let alone embrace it by viewing, sharing or liking it. Social media also does not reflect gains in experience over time, as everything "has to be in the moment", otherwise it would not work as a system. (I wanna point to Chamsky's ideas about propaganda and George Orwell's 1984 here). The optimum social media post is the one with the most ridiculous claims and the least amount of scientific evidence, while also being total hyperbole in an emotional context that's abused for marketing purposes. So yeah, overall I think I am just frustated by the state of things, but I also have no clue how we can collectively solve it in a sustainable and communital (?) manner.
- 2y ago

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago

> In online communities, honest curiosity is often punished Because "honest curiosity" is so often used as a DDoS vector. This is not the case in real life when people know you and there is real investment in the relationship. > rational - means to convince the opposing party. Most people are not convinced by rational argument. Aristotle covered this more than 2000 years ago and human nature has not changed.