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People prefer to suppress different perspectives rather then engaging - especially on social media (hackertalks.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
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There is a book called “On Being Certain”, by Robert A Burton who’s a neurologist, discussing how we know what we know. He postulates that the sense of “conviction” has less to do with objective reality and far more to do with “a feeling of knowing.” He also suggests that we are far less self-aware than we think we are.

People see a different viewpoint and their body reactively brings up all the conditioning received from popular advice. Instinctively, they hit the downvote button, thinking that they are rightfully decreasing the noise of a dangerous idea and protecting the less aware.

Most people aren’t interested in debate nor challenging the reality they find themselves in, or even the framing and interpretation of that reality.

Is lemmy supposed to be better then other social media?

How do we make lemmy a more thoughtful place? Or how do we create meaningful spaces on lemmy for thoughtful discussion of opposing views?

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I subscribed to this community because of this post. I'm very interested in which rules would actually promote an online forum where people can express their views most effectively. I've recently been reading about the Paradox of Tolerance in online discussion forums and I'm super interested in that phenomenon, but you raise another interesting question. Are down votes useful information? Is there some other voting method that would better encourage actual dialog?

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 1 year ago

    I think you touch upon a great area: There are many ways to express agreement and disagreement, but downvotes being used as a form of suppression are neither.

    In the before times slashdot had a metamoderation system where users were randomly assigned a few votes they could apply, the rarity and distribution made for a reasonable approximation of a fair moderation. However, lemmy differs from slashdot in that there are many different unaligned communities on lemmy where slashdot (and hacker news, and lobsters) are basically a single community with very clear unified interests.

    The keys for high quality discussion (not agreement) in a community would be (best guess):

    • Participation is not chilled, even of unpopular things as long as they follow the community rules
    • No ad-hominem attacks in the discussion
    • People of mutual levels of energy and engagement can find each other. (the people who like to cite papers vs the people who like to cite youtube videos)
    • Little to no grandstanding, not talking past someone just to repeat your point for third party viewers

    I suppose what I'm describing is the framework for a debate society or even toastmasters.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Paradox of Tolerance

    This is a bit of a bug bear with me, I think the concept of the paradox of tolerance is often misapplied as a leaver for broad censorship and not its more nuanced original usage in the book. I actually printed out the book to figure out the full context of the original usage, and in that context it makes perfect sense.

    Modern usage I've seen to justify

    • Paternalistic bad think censorship
    • Denying a moving spectrum of political opponents places to assemble
    • Brigading
    • Federation
    • Vote manipulation
    • Shut down nuanced political conversations about the motives and incentives of real people as indicated in the news.

    What are your thoughts on the modern usage of the Paradox of Tolerance?

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    That you should stop talking about Paradox of Tolerance. Because it's a specific problem in a specific context, and you're generalizing it to internet forums. You're taking it out of context (as does most anyone on the internet when talking about philosophy stuff)

    Which is the issue with a lot of philosophical euristics, and argumentative standards. I taught first year philosophy to undergraduates. The vast majority of them... are terrible at it because they misunderstand the context in which their tools we teach them are to be applied... which is philosophy class. A great example is that in philosophy we don't accept arguments from authority... but in law and legal scholarship arguments from authority are a huge part of the discourse. Two difference fields, two difference standards. Bringing one into the other makes your arguments bad/irrelevant and doing so makes you an asshole if you do it deliberately, and a fool if you do it ignorantly.

    But on the internet lots of people take the 'i have a hammer and everything is my nail' approach. I could tell you a story about my cat, and you might ask me to cite my sources on that, and claim my story about my cat is wrong/bad because it's not sourced. Or you personally attack me and my cat, because you think all grey cats are evil and anyone who has one is evil. etc. etc. You might do this out of malicious bad faith, or you just might be an idiot, or both.

    But to put it another way, any good moderated discussion must be necessarily censored. I'm not going to accept personal stories about cats in my philosophy class, because it's not about that. But if I gointo cat subreddit and start arguing with people about their poor argumentation in talking about their cats, i should probably be booted from the cat subreddit. the cat subreddit isn't a place to philosophically debate other cat owners about the truth of the mental states of their cats that they are discussing. Applying my standards and expectations of philosophical argument would be absurd and ridiculous, just as it would for me to start going around citing local bylaws at them about how they are violating said laws.

    But on internet... people are doing this shit all the time. Maybe out of pettiness, maybe to troll, maybe because they are just morons who don't understand the concept of context or the situational.

    and frankly a lot of stuff happens via the drive by effect. people stumble onto something and all the sudden it gets viral and gets flooded and taken out of context. happened to lots of small niche subs that hit the front page back in the day.

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