321–330 of 342 posts
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Yep, which in turn contributes to this behavior unfortunately... The social media tools are setup perfectly for this - esp twitter.
Fast pace insult flinging matches between famous people has better engagement rates than slow, well thought out debate. People can consume insults faster and it brings about more emotion.
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To me, in IoB culture nobody ever gives in. In other cultures where there is meaningful conflict, there are concessions.
Do you have any examples of times when people who genuinely and strongly held opposing ideas both made concessions, and weren't coerced into doing so by some third party? I can't think of many.
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When I went to church as a kid I don't remember being anywhere this much beef between the religious vs non-religious. It's way worse. It's not just politics, it's sports, sexual orientation, gaming, and many more domains.
I grew up a strict southern baptist in Wisconsin of all places. And I can tell you that while there was very little "beef" between the religious and the non religious. There was a metric $#!t Ton of "beef" between religious people. Between Baptists and Catholics for instance. Or between jews and muslims. Etc etc etc. Clashes of religious dogmas have been raging just about as long religions have been around. If I reme…
This framework helps me understand why prominent thinkers on Twitter get so much content-free hate in their replies. Most replies aren't even disagreements with the thing they're replying to. They're missiles in a beef war, against some perceived elite group. So it's not necessary to understand the claim and make a detailed refutation. They can just reply with a generic personal attack, and that keeps the culture war…
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> I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted. Many HN users seem to have a strong knee-jerk reaction against criticism of capitalism, however gentle or thoughtful.
Well perhaps the issue is that the comment had no justification to attach it to capitalism? Capitalism has been around much longer than the decline of these social bonds.
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After a significant portion of my life spent online, I have kind of come to the conclusion that typing to other people is, in a lot of ways, a fundamentally different experience than talking to them. It fills the same emotional needs just enough to make it hard to get up off your ass and put the effort into going out and finding people with common interests and making friends with some of them, but it does not provid…
I agree with you, but I also think it's worth pointing out that I feel like the inverse is also true. 'Typing to people' is different to talking to them, but it has its own very real and rich reward, that I feel is different to but overlaps with talking. That overlap means that yes, sometimes my need for connection with other people can be sustained entirely by typing, but not forever. Along the same lines, I do not…
This is an excellent analysis of the state of the modern internet, though I don't entirely agree with his diagnosis of the cause; I think it's more down to two main things: 1. We are all, at heart, covetous xenophobic apes, and we've been doing the same basic thing (arbitrarily define an in-group and an out-group and proceed to wage total war on the out-group) since before we were even human. This is just the latest…
That said, I don't think the author of the article really supported his points adequately. He seems to have a very strange view of the world and society driven by and centered on his own experience rather than research or any kind of science. This paragraph:
"Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs. "
...Is a good example. I don't think many people would agree that "the global culture wars" are a thing, or that continuous conflict as he sees it is a stable condition or endemic.
I get the impression he's a young person who has bought into the snake oil of the Internet being the Thing That Changes Everything and now that he's tired of waiting for the singularity to occur, he's disillusioned and griping about it.
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Explaining yourself is good. That two-paragraph comment explains itself. Get off your strawman horse.
You're doing the thing from the article
So what do you suggest I do instead?
And I am absolutely not fighting for any ideological position.
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Twitter is amazing. I didn't get into it until a couple years ago, I was missing so much. Many of the most influential, intelligent, thoughtful people post what they think or are interested in. In the past, unless they were a journalist, you'd have to wait for someone to write a book, and then buy it. Now you can pick and choose from the most amazing people of the world, and actually interact with them. I kind of can…
Can you recommend 10-20 people to follow?
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You don't have to put trust in a field to do an overview of the existing literature and show how and where it is wrong. Neither philosophy or mathematics, for example, don't follow the "scientific method" (let's assume the Anglophone conception as opposed to Wissenschaft for the sake of arument), yet I would hope that people would rightly call out a post on utilitarianism that doesn't take into account arguments from…
The public doesn’t owe anything to academics; whether or not they decide to pay attention to literature of a certain field, it is their choice. I was merely stating my observation that while many seem to consider it worthwhile to pay some level of respect to physics or mathematics, fewer appear to do so with regards to sociology or media studies. Are such attitudes justified? Perhaps so, perhaps not - but either way…