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>> No. 30729 Anonymous
4th May 2021
Tuesday 2:50 pm
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I think everyone I ever talk to under 50 and above the age of 10 has developed a disease where they are such a pedant they strip the joy out of everything and focus on arguing some minor point. Everything is about technically correct arguing the point, never the concept presented or advancing the conversation in a positive way.

I've seen friends talk their way out of hanging out with each other because they got caught on some minor point of what we were going to do when we met up so the event never got organised. The law of Triviality seems to poison everything, and is probably the reason only egotists seem to make society advance.
I couldn't decide if this was a /101/ or belonged here I felt here suited better.
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>> No. 30791 Anonymous
7th June 2021
Monday 7:37 pm
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I remembered seeing this thread a while ago and really thinking it deserved some replies.

I don't have any grand observations but I can absolutely get where you're coming from, OP. It might be that you move in circles where people are particularly rigid in their views or sensitive to what they perceive as attacks on their beliefs (or even something as basic as their efforts to meet up).

I'm sure you've tried steering the conversation away toward the bigger picture. I assure you there are some people out there that value the overall friendship more than the details [spoiler]though probably not on a site of pedants like .gs.[/spoielr]
>> No. 30792 Anonymous
7th June 2021
Monday 8:30 pm
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>>30729
Broad, generic conversations aren't as interesting. Do you believe war is bad? Yes? Okay then. That wasn't much of a conversation.

But how about, say, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia? Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were starving and torturing and massacring their own people, and the entire world stood by and did nothing until Vietnam, fresh off a war of its own, stepped in to save those poor Cambodians. I consider this to be a "just war".

So you love it, right? Ah, but I bet a lot of innocent people were killed, it being a war and all. I love, love, love to order someone to renounce their opinions, whatever they are. If you truly and genuinely believe something, you haven't considered all the downsides of that opinion which always, always exist. So perhaps I am one of these nitpickers that you hate. If so, here I am and this is why I do what I do.
>> No. 30795 Anonymous
8th June 2021
Tuesday 12:47 am
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>>30791

I'm glad you get it at least. At the very least I feel less alone now and that counts for something. Thank you.

>>30792

You on the other hand lad completely miss the point. And verried wildly into a tangent because of your own lack of comprehension that anything could be any different. You seem to have forgotten that it is possible to have communication with another human being that isn't an endless cunt off. Quite seriously does upping the ante on who can be more right on a topic actually make you happy? Does it make the people who you are talking to happy. Does testing the rigidity of my knowledge of jus bellum justum spark joy. Do you think us having this conversation right now is actually brighten either of our days? Or is it just filling the space before we die at best or activity making us worse people to ourselves and to be around. Have you thought about what conversation that both parties came away feeling better from would actually be like. Where conversation stimulated your imagination.

Pedantry has a place sometimes but the position I'm putting forward is that it is not often and certainly not as constantly as it seems to be applied to the detriment of everything else.
>> No. 30796 Anonymous
8th June 2021
Tuesday 2:38 am
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>>93924

From 2008:

"The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.

Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored.

The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it's not anger that's driving the increase in disagreement, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it's easy to say things you'd never say face to face."


http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Most people don't really have a coherent ideological position and haven't examined their beliefs in any sort of depth. When two of these people get into a disagreement, they can't debate the heart of the matter, because neither of them really understand what that is.

Genuine idiots will just insult each other, but the sort of people who have degrees know that they're supposed to be better than that. Pedantic nit-picking has the veneer of legitimate debate, even if it's just petty point-scoring with no real intention of advancing the conversation.

I'm modestly optimistic about pedantry, because at least pedants pay lip-service to facts. Someone who at least pretends to care about truth is far more open to persuasion (or at least being painted into a corner) than someone who is shameless about making shit up to justify their own prejudices.

It's not terribly difficult to argue against pedants if you know what you're on about, but you really do need to know what you're on about well enough to identify the core point of disagreement, convincingly show that it is in fact the core point of disagreement and relentlessly steer the debate back to it.

On a more personal level, some people like having arguments, but more just end up trapped in a cycle of anticipatory defensiveness - they start every conversation on their guard because they're expecting a big ill-tempered argument to kick off, which inevitably leads to a big ill-tempered argument. I think it's fairly obvious how spending time on the internet might play into that cycle. Transactional Analysis is mostly pseudoscience, but it offers a useful framework for thinking about how to break down those barriers and have more productive conversations.
>> No. 30797 Anonymous
8th June 2021
Tuesday 6:42 am
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>>30796

Even worse, you will all too often get people who only THINK they are knowledgable and clever enough to do the "relentlessly steer the debate back to the core point" thing and instead it just turns into the most infuriating circular tail chasing waste of time, because really all that's happenning is everything you say is being discarded with a flippant attempt at rebuttal.

I rarely come away from an online argument having genuinely advanced anyone's views, or my own; but what it does is provide a backdrop against which to cross examine my own beliefs. if I have to shy away from using a position because it'd be open to an easy counter, I have to comsider wether it is really a valid position at all, and in that way I feel my own views become more rigorous.
>> No. 30798 Anonymous
8th June 2021
Tuesday 8:57 am
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>>30796
>Most people don't really have a coherent ideological position
There is no such thing. Rather, if there are, they're held by fundamentalists or the mentally ill. Or both (see Nick Land). Anyone who maintains an unmalleable belief system, or claims to have a coherent one without also being omniscient, is a moron.
>> No. 30799 Anonymous
8th June 2021
Tuesday 9:07 am
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>>30795
>You on the other hand lad completely miss the point. And verried wildly into a tangent because of your own lack of comprehension that anything could be any different. You seem to have forgotten that it is possible to have communication with another human being that isn't an endless cunt off. Quite seriously does upping the ante on who can be more right on a topic actually make you happy?

OP, I hope you see the irony here. You are being combative, hostile, and reading them in bad faith.

They may have misunderstood, but you pin that entirely as their fault and an example of what you're saying, rather than anything else. You're essentially inviting the behaviour you moan about with this way of talking/approaching.

The pedantry you're talking about is rooted in the trivial, but their comment was about war, which is quite meaty.
>> No. 30801 Anonymous
8th June 2021
Tuesday 10:05 am
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>>30799

>irony

I feel like you quoted only that part because 3 sentences later it would be self evident that I was self aware of my action and therefore you would have no point to drag me into the undertow.

I'm not reading them in bad faith at all I assume them to have forgotten how to have a different sort of conversation, one that is playful. If you want to argue a logic trap about the position of my post you have the rest of the website for that level of debate.

I would much rather we talk about how we could achieve that instead of how I fall short of the ideal.
>> No. 30802 Anonymous
8th June 2021
Tuesday 10:08 am
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>>30801
>therefore you would have no point to drag me into the undertow.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You seem to have a view that everyone is posting simply to attack you. I have no intention of 'dragging you down'...come on dude.
>> No. 30803 Anonymous
8th June 2021
Tuesday 10:57 am
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>>30796

It's an interesting position and one I think is probably true that we self select for argument and debate. I sort of wonder if conversation with strangers could be more helpful. Maybe my approach is wrong. Maybe if I ask people could you help me make x, or how do I go about x I might get somewhere.

Part of what inspired this theead is half this website and half that I have friends who live right round the corner who never seem to suggest to do anything shoot down most of my ideas that aren't perfect and then get a bit passive aggressive that we don't do anything. I've essentially become acutely aware these people are unintentionally toxic but if they are, we probably all are and I am determined to find a solution to this problem that isn't becoming one of those bordering on a cultists types that just talks about positivity.

>>30802

Yes you beat me I am a terrible person, can we move on.

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