121–125 of 125 posts
I think the key point in this post is actually right at the end where the author states that their goal is always to understand the other person. If that's your goal, I agree it's usually pretty easy to avoid flame wars and get people to talk in respectful ways. For me it often isn't worth it to spend time trying to build understanding of anonymous actors online. But, I think some of these recommendations carry into…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss bash.org so much
irc died and was replaced with nothing
Individual channels are dead, sure. 15 years ago, EFnet's #wow was quite busy and frequently had over 100 people in it. Now, it's down to just 20, with at least 7 of them being bots, the rest are idle. We went two weeks without a single message. I even unbanned the trolls just to get some excitement back, but they went silent (though didn't leave) once they realized the channel is indeed dead.
But EFnet's #geekissues is still very active.
This is a great way to win battles and lose wars. I came to this realization after getting good at climate science arguments. I could take a denialist "did you consider" argument, go to the IPCC reports, find labs, find papers, and return with summaries and citations in relatively short order, and after delivering them with kid gloves I could move people off one denialist argument... and onto another. If I repeated t…
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> It sure would be nice to have a place where you could discuss ideas without it being an argument 100% Arguments result in walking away, the relationship ends before hardly any information is exchanged. If either side wants an argument, it can be difficult to avoid. If both sides are seeking understanding, it becomes very easy to exchange a lot of information and for all to learn a great deal, even as they still dis…
> I would very much like to find (or create) forum(s) for discussions seeking understanding instead of arguments seeking to “win” wars or battles. The users on chatgpt.com are quite good at staying cordial and come off as if they want to seek a genuine understanding. Granted, its UI is a little different from the traditional forum, only occasionally seeing additional users reply but being mostly geared to one-on-one…
I frequent here (and chatgpt.com) because it is the closest I have found to what I am looking for.
I have paid enough people to visit my attempts that I think I have a decent sense of how a large number of people will react to what I have tried.
My intuition is that my language to describe what I am looking for is insufficient to convey the idea to others (including the venerable responder at chatgpt.com).
Lot of good points in there, and I really appreciate the author's aspired outlook on the world. However, I disagree with some of the core tenets involved. > There’s a misconception that good faith discussion only happens in close-knit communities like LessWrong or HackerNews. In my experience, discussions about more controversial topics here are exactly as disgusting as they are on any other forum. Which makes sense,…
> In my experience, discussions about more controversial topics here are exactly as disgusting as they are on any other forum. Which makes sense, because technologically, this place is exactly like any other forum. I don't know - in my experience Hackernews seems most best faith I've seen anywhere. If I have controversial opinions on Reddit I easily get downvoted hard (even though it's against the Reddiquette), but h…