171–180 of 599 posts
Where I struggle and find my ego self defensively screaming “But…!” is in work relationships. Product managers, where their wrongness makes my downstream life more miserable. Basically any relationship where I have a (self perceived) need for the outcome to be a certain way to protect/enhance my well being. Asymmetric relationships.
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My style of online participation has been shaped by 2 ideas: 1. I rarely fully understand my own positions on minutia 2. Writing is rewriting. I write forum posts to solidify my understanding of my own interests, beliefs, and reasoning. I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter. I can reference them and have to other people who ask my opinion. Sometimes I do respond back…
I do the same, except mostly I delete the responses. The writing was important to me, but the reading is rarely important to someone else. It would be wasting their time. I would guess I post about 40% of the comments I write.
Thanks for sharing
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I may be wrong if I am stating an opinion and I cannot be wrong if I stating a fact. Our society, since it got consumed by “social” media, has lost ability to accept facts, everyone doing their own “research” and all that…
Every "fact" you state really includes the opinion that the "fact" is indeed a fact. Is climate change man-made?
When having the climate change conversation with deniers I roll it back to; is the climate warming? They almost always[0] agree it is and we agree it’s evidenced. So now we’ve agreed on a fact and have common ground to advance the conversation. Then I can make my case that if we know the climate is warming then we have a responsibility/necessity to reduce our contribution to it and should likely invest in finding ways to reverse it. Because even if we are not the cause, we have a lot at stake.
[0] in rare case they can’t agree to this, I usually ask them if they’ve encountered a source for that and then ultimately implore them to at least read something on the topic before forming their opinion about it, there’s plenty of data available I won’t push them down any path that may be seen untrustworthy or politically misaligned with their beliefs, I just leave it alone there because it’s usually quite obvious they’re parroting the talking points of some pundit without doing any research themselves. As the article mentioned, this argument would just become an ego war more than anything.
AI Slop
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Every "fact" you state really includes the opinion that the "fact" is indeed a fact. Is climate change man-made?
Do I need to hold the opinion that water is wet for it to be factual? To answer your question, if by climate change you refer to the dramatic post-industrialisation acceleration of warming and climate disturbances, the correct answer is "the overwhelming majority of existing evidence points to yes".
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Also most things worth arguing over fall somewhere in the middle, and won’t have an absolute right answer. It sounds like the author has learned something important though.
I'm 52, and over my lifetime I felt that there is actually an ever-increasing number of things that used to have an absolute right (scientifically proven) answer that become controversial. Climate change. Vaccines. Whether the earth is round - that kind of stuff. And, while I agree with the author's approach to let people learn from the consequences of their mistakes, what if the consequences of their mistakes (or th…
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I've been reading the writings of stoic philosophers each morning and journaling about what I read and I think this fits in well with that philosophy. We're all here on Earth to enrich ourselves (and I don't mean materially) and those around us. Arguing with strangers online is antithetical to that premise. You don't better yourself by engaging in pointless squabbling, and you don't enrich the other person or those a…
> You don't better yourself by engaging in pointless squabbling Not always, but it is at least always entertainment. If the alternative you would have chosen is watching a mindless movie then you're no worse off. > and you don't enrich the other person or those around you by doing so. It is inherently a solitary activity. You are right that the likelihood of a bystander gaining anything from it is nearly zero, but th…
This applies to myself, too – the supposedly deep rational analysis I have on an issue oftentimes is just as prone to the same perspective problems as anything else. This kind of attitude is really common amongst logical/technical people, unfortunately.
This why Socrates was considered the wisest man in Athens: he knew that he didn’t know everything, unlike the people he talked to, who were confident in their answers.