One thing that helps is to be charitable.
Ideas in general are difficult to express and people struggle with conveying them separately from their private ideas, personal experiences, and personal reasons for believing what they believe.
If you want to be a good interlocutor, you have to deeply absorb what the other person is thinking and sometimes even help them develop their understanding with the hope that others can do the same for you. We are all toddlers at times.
It's why I found platforms like Twitter tended to have such volatility because the platform structure itself takes every opportunity to remove that charitibility.
If you come across an argument, people are writing in a limited space, you're presented with the most engaged with replies first (i.e. either towing the party line best or the most inflammatory opposition), accounts are pseudonymous, and your performance is numerically displayed below the post.
And everyone is strangers, so there's no tit-for-tat and no long-term strategies, just hit and run
Eh...all of this is premised on good faith engagement, which in the current age is a very questionable premise.
You might be surprised to find that, in person, people are quite amenable to good faith discussions. It's the internet where slam dunks reign.
In-person, people surround themselves in echo chambers, or as I like to call them, "friends". They're amendable to good faith discussions because they already mostly agree.
And, clearly, you must not have any insane MAGA family. I've tried to convince some family members that the Covid Vaccine isn't what gave me cancer, and it's like talking to brick wall. In their eyes, my cancer is my own fault because I pray to Fauci or something and this is just retribution.
Okay, some people are legitimately just not aligned with reality. I'm not calling them insane to be mean, I think they are actually, literally, insane. I don't know what happened to them.
Not everybody is from the US, a country which appears to be culturally split in two (in reality it is probably three, with one third that can't be bothered to care).
Where I am from it is totally normal that one of your friends is left of you on the issue of housing while having a greens position on energy and being slightly conservative on migration. So instead of tribal symbolic ideas (party lines) you discuss the actual ideas and their merits.
Ideas can be discussed best when you detach them from those proposing them. It is better to let ideas die than people. If you judge people on how strong they tow the party line the only ones losing are the voters as they throw away their agency.
America is split into far more than two parts. It's thousands of peoples pressed into a single space with the illusion of peace enforced by violence. The entire concept of a unifying culture is preposterous.
The partisan lens doesn't seem to offer any benefit to most people.
I don't have any hope for europe, either. They seem equally divorced from the material.
ok
> It's the internet where slam dunks reign.
The internet is also where most person-to-person interaction is these days.
On the Internet you're not engaging in a discussion, you're putting on a show for others to see.
In person, you have a much more intimate situation.
That is not entirely true.
It seems that many humans live on a "show" perspective of the world. It is hard to separate what is seen from what is in the eyes though.
Being funny is to put up a show, for example. Even if it is in person, for a single individual. It draws from the same essential stuff.
Intimacy can grow on that "acting" ground, in a sense that they're not mutually exclusive. Many things, in fact, can.
The internet does lack many of the social cues that one would expect from the real world. It also has cues the real world don't have, like logs and history. If it can grow animosity, it also can grow other stuff. Hopefully stuff less disruptive than animosity.
Animosity and comedy seem to be very basal, primitive feelings. Probably the ones that require less thinking. They're not bad, sometimes is good to think less. But not always.
I imagine something similar happened in the real world in the past too. But I could never be 100% sure of it.
Different, but analogous in some ways. Difficult to compare, but undeniably related.
Every argument is premised on good faith though. If there isnt good faith you should disengage.
My point is this is naive in the real world, especially online. Many people appear to be engaging in good faith but are actually just baiting, trolling, trying to make a spectacle, etc.
Point of Order: online isn't the real world and drawing conclusions about people's motivations and desires based on online interactions is deeply flawed.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/pir...
“When did you meet [fellow defendant Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?” asked the prosecutor.
“We do not use the expression IRL,” said Peter, “we use AFK.”
“IRL?” questioned the judge.
“In Real Life,” the prosecutor explained to the judge.
“We do not use that expression,” Peter noted. “Everything is in real life. We use AFK—Away From Keyboard.”
Point of order has been raised. However, this is not a valid point of order, as there was no specification in either the comment to which I replied or the original article of real-world interaction as opposed to online interaction. This appears to be based on a conflation of my use of "real world" with "physical interaction" rather than "real world" vs "idealized abstraction". In this case, the point was that the parent is describing the idealized form of argument people should engage in as opposed to how people actually engage in argument.
Therefore, the point of order is not sustained.
The charitable interpretation (see first comment) stands, though. It remains that the motivation on the internet, like the motivation in a comedy club, is not a reflection of the motivation found elsewhere. The venue is significant.
Online is a facet of the real world and a place for a significant amount of information gathering and discourse so dismissing it entirely is a bad mistake as well.
The dynamics are very different, especially the complete lack of consequences for lying, cheating, and uncivil discourse. It used to be that you needed to assume you're talking to a shill/liar at all times but now you can't even believe you're talking to an actual human. Regardless, a lot of people get a lot of influence online; it is impactful and it matters even if we wish it didn't.
One of my favorite quotes is "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog" because of how many different angles it can cover. My bright eyed youth took it as a meritocracy of ideas enabled by anonymity and free access - anyone can talk even if you don't normally talk to them or even think "they" are valid. My jaded cynic side sees the ability for predators to lurk in plain sight with no recourse. A more rounded view simply cautions that not knowing who is "on the other side of the line" means you really can't get a lot out of a conversation there.
I have no idea if it's true but I've heard the folk tale that saying "moshi moshi" to answer the phone was because trickster foxes could pretend to be people but couldn't pronounce moshi moshi so you are least knew you were talking to a person. Everything old is new again.
"Online is a facet of the real world and a place for a significant amount of information gathering and discourse so dismissing it entirely is a bad mistake as well."
Having spent time online since the dawn of home internet it would be impossible for me to disagree with this sentiment more strongly. I've been dragged kicking and screaming over the course of the last 3 and a half decades to the sullen conclusion that the internet may well be the single largest mistake our species has ever or will ever make short of someone freaking out and actually triggering a full scale nuclear exchange. All of the negative dynamics you list are demonstrably bleeding into the larger culture, with expected results, and that's before even factoring in naked propaganda, poorly camouflaged advertising, and ubiquitous surveillance.
I totally agree with you on every point. I think we've done a thing with the internet that our psyches aren't ready to handle.