this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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People are not great at nuanced discussion at the best of times, but in real life people are somewhat forced to listen to other people and maintain civil relationships. People also seem to find it harder online to recognise when their behaviour is completely out of line - the sorts of harassment and bullying that is rife on the internet is rarely tolerated in real life groups.
The ability for people to segregate themselves into their own echo chambers and only associate with people who think like them has also worked to both make people's views more extreme and to make people lose their skills in talking to people they don't agree with. People often don't recognise it in themselves though, possibly because they are "engaging" with fake straw-man versions of opposing thought - individual people and articles taken out of context and imaginary scenarios abound, and people love to argue those.
Ok well this response pretty much nails it.
hard agree
and it's the evil facebook and google algorithms ( for clicks, advertising revenue and stock prices ) that put people into echo chambers and made extreme negative views and reactions more acceptable
and like I said, it's hard to resist social pressure, no one wants to be called sexist or racist or unpatriotic or unchristian , etc etc
People don't like being called sexist or racist etc, but they sure do like hurling the accusations around at everyone else. I have also found logical fallacies can be wielded like a weapon instead of a tool - I have been accused of using every possible logical fallacy in a single short post, by a supposedly open-minded group who used it as a way of avoiding instead of engaging with the issues I wanted to talk about.
I think it mostly comes down to an inability to truly listen, and a lack of desire to understand what another person actually means. "Listening" seems to be a matter of listening for a few key terms so you can sort people into an "us" or "them" group, and then assuming you already know everything about what they believe.
They are pretending to have an open discussion but in fact have bad faith. They are not giving good feedback that encourages further discussion. They appear to want to kill discussion.
If you are accused of using logical fallacies ask them what sources and information they would find acceptable . That will expose their true intentions very quickly.
Their true intentions were pretty obvously to kill the discussion. My own opinion was labeled a straw man argument, a Gish Gallop and a couple of other things that made no sense. Plus I was a troll. A lot of effort went in to not engaging with the actual questions. Basically an ad-hominem attack disguised as pointing out logical flaws. It was a bit of a shock coming from a group I mostly agreed with and thought would be open to discussion.