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Too many people have peed in the pool
241–250 of 555 posts
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even if you do happen to be smarter than the average bear > it's still asshole-ish to assume that everyone else just be completely dismissed... Devil's advocate: If you're above average intelligence, you're smarter than a majority of the populace by definition. Why would you not then dismiss the thoughts and ideas of those less educated? One person's condescension is another person's logic.
The obvious answer: because if you're wise, you realize that raw intelligence is a fairly small part of what makes someone worth listening to on a given question. On most questions of morals or politics, I'd rather listen to someone of average intelligence, but with a humble, good and patient character, than an MIT grad who's convinced they know everything.
Counterpoint: it was pretty common knowledge for the majority of the 19th and 20th centuries that women were categorically inferior and unreliable, that blacks were shiftless and dangerous, and that homosexuals were mentally ill.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I'm not sure I can relate, though. I'd rather listen to Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins talk about evolution and atheism than someone of average intelligence.
Because you really just want reinforcement for ideas you already believe?
Dangerous slope. I want constructive arguments, to be sure, especially with people who hold a different view than my own on different topics.
But your opinion does not carry the same weight as a fact. Quite a few people I've encountered don't understand that.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. On twitter, you signify agreement by retweeting; this takes seconds and permanently adds to the tweet's score. But to disagree, I have to write a message o…
> My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. Well, honestly, I think that effect is largely an outgrowth of how we've designed anti-spam processes to date. Scalable agreement systems where large num…
> We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately.
Agreed. All sharing platforms, HN included, conflate agreement with importance. I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN and Reddit. And I can't congenially disagree on Facebook or Twitter, at least not in a way that transparently affects the various algorithms.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#245I'm a bit monomaniacal about this, but the current online culture wars (and the previous offline culture wars) make me wish that secession didn't have such a bad name. It is obvious that large groups of people have irreconcilable differences of opinion on matters of free speech, sexuality, gun ownership and so on. It is a shame that rather than a firm handshake and friendly wave goodbye, we will end up with a totalit…
I don't know if it will prevail in the end, but I think that Reddit approach by splitting the community in small subgroups/communities has a better chance to last in the long run. Of course, you'll create feuds between communities but at least it is somewhat confined and not always spilling in the common public space. Unfortunately it also greatly increases the echo chamber / filter bubble but it seems you can not ha…
For those of you old enough to have seen the net hey started, but young enough to have been impressionable by its start:
Remember when we wanted EVERYONE to get online? Remember when we thought how great the world would be if everyone was connected and could read all this great information and research?
HA! One thing we did not understand: the tragedy of the commons.
It is now nothing but a tragedy. Best thing to do is stay deep within your select niches and away from general purpose networks like Facebook or Twitter.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an anarchs-capitalist I'd be happy to have a society where anarchs-communists had their communes and lived under their own rules. This may seem off topic but its directly relevant- we regularly have these debates in the anarchist community. But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too. (Yes, the irony…
> But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too. The main difference between the libertarian left and right tends to be whether they see property rights as some sort of special exception from the principle of maximising liberty, or a some form of theft because it limits liberty. I don't know many far left…
> if you see property as theft, then someone wanting to wall off land is not a simple matter of you wanting to live differently, but a matter of you wanting to deprive others of liberty.
Yes, and the problem with this definition of "liberty" is that it makes it impossible for "liberty" to coexist with peaceful cooperation and trade, since peaceful cooperation and trade require property rights. And without peaceful cooperation and trade, you can't create wealth. So "liberty" as defined by the left libertarian is a recipe for poverty and war. As indeed we see wherever such systems have been tried.
> from the left libertarian point of view, there is no irony, but the consequence of following the principle of maximizing personal liberty to the end
Yes, which also means that "maximizing personal liberty" requires, as I said above, poverty and war. You stated the example in terms of land, but it applies just as well to any kind of property. If you have a house, or a car, or a wallet full of money, and I want it, "maximizing personal liberty" means I can just take it, because, hey, I'm just exercising my liberty. Of course you can also exercise your liberty by shooting me when I try. Good luck trying to have a stable society on that basis.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons. It might be derogatory jokes, but this can also include things like spreading urban legends which were debunked four decades ago. Just like Usenet and countless other online communities, what starts a a small group of fairly privileged and elite eventually degrades in to garbage as the reach increases. This is not so much an overall size issue but a rela…
I think the friendly way to say it is that most people(yourself included) only achieve a medium/expert level of competence in one or two areas of their life. In the other areas, most of us are just bumbling through. Unfortunately though, manners require us to speak about various topics, leading to the bumbling side of humanity to be exposed in droves.
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Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons. It might be derogatory jokes, but this can also include things like spreading urban legends which were debunked four decades ago. Just like Usenet and countless other online communities, what starts a a small group of fairly privileged and elite eventually degrades in to garbage as the reach increases. This is not so much an overall size issue but a rela…
> There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons... I hate this super-condescending attitude. Even if you do happen to be smarter than the average bear (which, don't pat yourself on the back yet: there may be things these "morons" know way more about than you do), it's still asshole-ish to assume that everyone else just be completely dismissed...
I despise it as well. It's the very stupidest way to celebrate smartness.
Everybody's got strengths. From the perspective of that strength, everybody else can be seen as hopelessly weak. The politically strong may think everybody else is naive. The socially strong could everybody else is maladroit. The physically strong think everybody else is puny and inconsequential. The artistically strong think everybody else are embarrassingly lowbrow. And so on.
It's irritating regardless, but I find this easier to forgive in people who are not crowing about how smart they are. It somebody is actually smart, they can recognize the limitations of pure IQ, and how embarrassingly self-limiting it is to think you have nothing to learn from anybody else.
It's not like smart people don't also believe wrong things, make mistakes, and generally fuck up. Isaac Newton thought all sorts of things we now recognize as idiocies. America's founders were somehow unable to see the glaring contradiction between practicing chattel slavery and congratulating themselves on how devoted they were to liberty and the equality of man. On a cosmic scale, we are all morons. It's just that, limited by time and our meat-based brains, we are terrible at noticing how little we notice.
Strength, be it physical, intellectual, or any other kind, doesn't justify being arrogant. Smart people should know that.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
We disagree (and I get the impression this is the root of much strife) on the definition of the word "safe" in "safe space". Safe from what? From having your views challenged? From someone calling you an asshat? From people making non-credible threats (Think navy seal copypasta)? From people making legitimate threats? Talk to 10 different people and all will have different definitions as to what the meaning is there.
IMHO, the objectionable part of "safe space" is the idea that everywhere needs to be a "safe space", and especially so when only certain favored groups of people gets to be "safe" in that universal "safe space" in accordance with the demands of a very vocal minority. The right to carve out a space (on the Internet or otherwise) for certain like minded individuals to be "safe" from any of the things you mentioned, as…
Agreed, but only if said "carving out" isn't done platform-wide at everyone's expense.
Changing the rules after people have invested their time and effort into being part of a community with certain norms is generally a crappy thing to do. This is the internet, where anyone can start their own community with their own rules in any number of ways. The rights of the people that were there first should be recognized.
Re: Too many people have peed in the pool
#250What's the big deal? If you don't like how a platform works just leave it, I haven't used either Facebook or Twitter ever (I do have accounts, but I think you can count my posts and tweets combined with fingers of one hand) and it hasn't affected my life at all