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?
I don’t have energy to engage presently but it makes me happy to see folks having this conversation here on Lemmy :)
Thanks for taking the time to organize your thoughts and make a discussion post!
I have tried to talk with the anti-ai crowd, but they seem as stubborn as the regular tankie. My takeaway was that fear and anger regulated discussions quite a bit. A shame IMO.
Yeah, the anti-ai people seem to be quite emotional in spreading their hate, even when it makes sense to use algorithms to do something (like identify cancer cells in imaging)
We need a place on lemmy that doesn’t reward the knee jerk emotional takes. Do you think its possible to make such a place here? if not, what would we require?
AI can absolutely be helpful and beneficial, but AI is only as good as the data it’s fed, and the humans programming it. As someone that is anti-AI this is the crux of any argument I make about AI. I don’t hate AI, but I do think adopting it blanket wide in every facet of our lives is dangerous. If you create a community that suppresses opposition to AI, even if you think they are emotional responses, you’re just creating an echo chamber.
The goal is how to create a place for meaningful discussion, so how can we both have sentiment but still room for nuance?
Well it would help if the type if AI you are talking about was the one that the “anti-AI” people were talking about but it’s not. Gen AI is not what is being used to find cancer cells.
A good discussion on a topic should include drawing the line between machine learning, generative models, markov chains, self-weighting matrices, and other general algorithms.
The issue is not that people dislike something, its that they disrupt other conversations on topics in a effort to suppress the discussion or chill participation.
There are lots of people who use generative AI for good things, so what about that? I mean there are lots of bad stuff like IP theft, energy usage etc, but there are also positive sides, that’s why it’d be interesting to hear everyone out IMO. And it’s not like it’s going away just because some are angry about it.
It’s like electric cars, great but uses rare earth minerals, nuclear, plastics, almost nothing is either black or white.
Or so I think.
Its always really interesting how people say this and can list examples of the negatives but never bring up examples of the positives because they know that people will start arguing over wether or not they are really positive. Or if you really need generative AI to accomplish the goal they are using it for.
Also not let’s not ignore that gen AI is reversing the little climate progress we have made in the last few years. Let’s also not ignore that it has caused multiple people to undergo psychosis. Multiple people have killed themselves after being encouraged to do so by AI. The world has been made actively worse by the advent of wide spread gen AI that is being subsidized by the public who has no say in the matter.
That’s all fair points, I like the one about “why can’t you do it without AI?!” Maybe I can but it’s easier with?
Where do you get the “ai has reversed the little climate progress we have made”? If you have a link I’d be very interested because the energy consumption of (generative) AI seems to be all over the place and no one really knows for sure.
But a little critic ; when I was a kid, heavy metal “killed”. Should we stop all medications because sometimes they kill (they do)? What about knives, cars and alcohol (and for the USA, guns :-)?
Everything is good and bad, well there are very few exceptions.
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anti-ai people are mostly objecting to it being shoved down their throats against their will, and the massive negative externalities the AI arms race is producing.
Like jacking people’s power bills who happen to live near data centers.
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I hate the exploitative AI being pushed down our throats. I like how they use AI in exploring space, genetics, and other scientific endeavours, this is where AI shines. Not crammed into each and every device and/or app
or every website with a pop up chat window asking me how their AI assistance can help me.
The problem is the media, and several invested interests, have caused most people to associate any mention of AI with LLMs. And many ignorant people in positions of power keep trying to use LLMs for things that LLMs are not good at or meant to be doing.
This is basically how Reddit is, and many of the mods, especially on some larger subs actively and secretly hide views they do not agree with and perm ban anyone who disagrees with them. Reddit supports this behaviour by allowing removal of content, but in such a way that the user who posted it still sees it, but no one else.
This is why I try to promote Lemmy. Sure you might get some bad instances, obviously, but it removes centralised power.
For all it’s faults transparency does make our society better.
the problem with transparency is we get to see how ugly we are.
and that offends a lot of people. a lot of people would very much rather be ignorant and very much champion such suppression of dissent and difference.
my read on a lot of the ‘controversial’ subreddits is that most people don’t really care if anyone jerks it off to dead bodies, they just don’t want to know that it exists. sort of like the homeless. people generally don’t care about them, and their objection is primary that they have to see them and acknowledge their existence. they want them to ‘go away’ because they serve as a vivid remember of their own fragility and capacity for ‘badness’.
at least on lemmy you usally get to know why someone banned you.
That’s mostly true too.
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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?
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.
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?
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.
Hot take maybe. If you don’t like downvotes just use an instance that has them disabled. I’m not using Lemmy for actual discussion most of the time and neither are probably 99% of other users. I don’t want to see the nazi adjacent comment and don’t think debating with them is really worth anyones time but someone else can try.
Let’s say you think people with Nazi adjacent views can be downvoted/banned. Where is that line drawn then. How nicely do they have to frame eugenics before you shouldn’t downvote it because it’s “thoughtful”. Someone JAQing off in the comments about race statistics?
The line of where people do and don’t downvote is not something that should be decided by instance admins/ community mods because it’s one of the few things a user has total control over. I find it mildly alarming that vote are public but I understand that it’s inherent to the system.
I don’t think this discussion is actually about downvotes, those can be a element, but beyond having or not having downvotes how do we get more collaborative discussions happening here?
I don’t want to see the nazi adjacent comment and don’t think debating with them is really worth anyones time but someone else can try.
Different people have different bars for nazi adjacent. i.e. all meat-eaters are nazis
My bad I backed out of the discussion I was trying to respond in linked in the comments.
Yeah I know I’m going to get downvoted for having a discussion about veganism on Lemmy. I’ve been called a monster before but that doesn’t really bother me ethier. They truly think that what i am doing makes me a horrible person and that’s their perogative.
Yeah I know I’m going to get downvoted for having a discussion about veganism on Lemmy.
As a carnivore on lemmy, I have a similar experience! It’s a really good example you bring up, things people have strong visceral feelings about often get emotional reactions and are very difficult to discuss productively on lemmy with respect for people who have made different choices.
How can we bridge the gap so that we can speak about these sensitive subjects without people feeling like monsters, or being subjected to pejoratives ?
I always hesitate to downvote and have only blocked a small handful of users. Even among the users I’ve blocked the majority are people whose porn I don’t wish to see.
Just because I don’t like someone’s opinion or attitude about a given subject, I don’t feel it’s right to throw them away. Even if they’re being relatively vile, they may just be having a bad day.
Also, I almost always expand downvoted comments. To me that’s a sign saying there may be something interesting there, and there often is. Lemmy isn’t as hive-minded as reddit was/is, but there’s definitely groupthink and while I know that’s human nature, it still bothers me a bit.
It is hard. A comment has to be in a pretty narrow window for me to engage in discussion. If something is adjacent to or just outside of my understanding I may choose to engage in discussions where one or both of us learn something.
There are a few areas where I am an expert and may chime in with corrections or additions to generally good comments and discussions.
If a comment is perfectly in alignment with my thoughts I may say so but that is not a productive conversation, more a symbol of fellowship.
If a comment is too far out of agreement I am not going to engage. From past experience this will never yield fruit. Either it will turn into a flame war, a perpetual chain of disagreements until one of us gives up, or getting downvoted to oblivion by a brigade who disagrees with me.
Productive discourse needs a safe space, and online is NOT a safe space.
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Living life with imposter syndrome?
It’s kind of a fun application of the Dunning Kruger effect, the more thoughtful and educated someone is the less confident become - so on social media you get totally drowned out by the confident hot takes.
I remember teaching classes in grad school and having to tease ANY opinion out of graduate students who were afraid of being wrong! hahahaha.
How do we make lemmy a more thoughtful place? Or how do we create meaningful spaces on lemmy for thoughtful discussion of opposing views?
Years of academic training/education. That show I learned to do it.
It’s not possible to expect the general population to do this, nor is their job really.
It can really be only done among peers too. You can’t expect someone who reads at a sixth grade level and someone who has a PhD to have meaningful discussion. You’d also need them to have the same intent. Bad faith people can come into any discussion and derail the whole thing.
Formal debates usually have accepted limits, rules, and formalities that codify the exchanges such as to eliminating such problems. Of course, that doesn’t necessitate any of that is meaningful, often such debates are done in the context of a sport, as in a winner and a loser.
What one considers thoughtful and illuminating discussion, for another is considered an immoral heresy, against which violence is justified. The latter is much more emotionally gratifying and empowering, and immediate, and relatable to the average person.
No they don’t you lying liar, shut u—
Oh, whoops
that is the problem with voting. some folks treat it as a rare thing to only do in the most extreme case and I was like that. now though its useful for me to upvote everything due to an effect I want in my feed. others downvote almost everything or upvote almost everything. Its would only actually be useful if everyone actually voted on everything genuinly which honestly would be a bit of a chore from my perspective. I really wish I could order by number of comments in the he last X period of time. heck would even get better if it could be more meta and be able to select for most chains with Y number of users. The only thing that would scare me about that is bots or folks knowing people sort by that and gaming the system. Oooh. I would love to be able to filter out for links or images with no body of the person talking about why they like the image or link.
