People prefer to suppress different perspectives rather then engaging - especially on social media

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?

29 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  You can create a community in PieFed, it has options to allow only community members to down vote:
  
  I could be wrong but I don't think Lemmy has this feature.
- There are pros and cons and some legit use of AI, yet most of Lemmy seem to just blanket hate AI.
  
  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
  
  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.

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.

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.

See a recent discussion here about downvoting on fediverse:
Is this the typical behaviour of fediverse users? Posts in Apple and Nintendo communities immediately get downvoted by people disliking the companies. Can’t they just block the communities?
thinking that they are rightfully decreasing the noise of a dangerous idea and protecting the less aware.
This appears to be exactly what many users of the fediverse do.

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?

I don’t know, but I think I was somehow born without that “feeling of knowing.” I doubt myself constantly. When I speak confidently, I feel like I’m bullshitting, because I don’t have all the data, so I might be getting it wrong.
- 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.

No they don’t you lying liar, shut u—
Oh, whoops

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.

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.

29 comments