Inheriting their worldview from consensus or comfort, never having to earn it through actual thought.
Seeing as how that describes most of us, it’s an argument against democracy.
But also not every idea is worth listening to. Sometimes they are a waste of time, and people who have argued in bad faith in the past don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Whilst this statement has some merit, its problem is that you’re setting up a precursor to a straw-man argument. This is because who defines “challenging ideas”. This allows anyone to come up with a supposed challenging idea, then call anyone who doesn’t engage in it “an intellectual nepobaby”.
For example, should I engage in the “challenging idea” that the world is run by lizard people?
What about the “challenging idea” that throwing bricks in peoples faces will fix their teeth?
This is the same “good faith” argument that cultists, religious recruiters, libertarians, and racists use.
You don’t have to engage with morally abhorrent arguments out of loyalty to some platonic ideal of intellectualism. You’re allowed to tell people to fuck off.
You tell them to fuck off because you engaged with it and found it completely meritless/abhorrent, not because you’re above engaging with it. If they present new evidence for lizard people, you should skeptically examine the evidence and tell them to fuck off when it doesn’t hold up.
You don’t have to engage with them and waste your time debating them, but you absolutely should be open to challenge your own positions.
You say should, but that’s a judgment; judgments are subjective.
I’m stating my opinion on the matter…
I think you should engage with challenging ideas as the post says, I don’t think it’s an “ideal of intellectualism”, I just think it serves your own interests to be open to realize you’ve been mislead.
Fair.
You just don’t want to engage the challenging idea of defining “challenging ideas.”
I get what you’re saying, but you’re kind of setting up a strawman yourself here here. Not every idea deserves endless debate, sure, it’s about the habit of dismissing things as “stupid” without even considering them. Sure, lizard people and bricks fixing teeth are absurd. But those examples are extreme on purpose, and they don’t really address the core of people rejecting ideas out of hand just because they’re unfamiliar or uncomfortable. If an idea is actually bad, it will fall apart under scrutiny. But if the default response is just “that’s dumb,” we’re not thinking critically, we’re just avoiding the work, and worse, we are participating in a culture where it’s okay to do so. Which is exactly what leads to people getting (and abusing) terrible ideas.
Remedy to stupidity isn’t LESS critical thinking.
But those examples are extreme on purpose
Yes they were! And you’re right, we need to allow ourselves to be challenged, to consider ideas outside of our comfort zone, but we also need to able to reject ideas that are not being posited in good faith.
This is the joy of debate, to question statements and receive nuanced answers in reply.
How do you determine what’s not in good faith?
I would imagine this would tie to values, but do those become the unquestionable object, then?
That’s a great question and I’m not sure I have a definitive answer. For lack of better description, it would be the vibe I got from them:
- Do I feel like they’re being deliberately argumentative.
- Do I feel like they’re trying to twist my words in an unkind way.
- Are they looking for ways to find offence in what I’ve said.
How do you determine what’s not in good faith?
I personally always assume good faith. I can’t read people’s minds. On the Internet, I can’t even see facial expressions or hear how they’re saying it. It’s like that Key and Peele text message sketch.
Even with MAGAts and the wave of red that’s ever-present online?
When one assumes bad faith, one is assuming guilt. That isn’t fair. I have found it better to assume innocence, to adopt Judge Blackstone’s ratio over Judge Dredd’s.
I think it’s fair to assume those when people openly support a movement that visibly takes away the rights of marginalized groups and kills innocent people.
I assume good faith unless clear evidence indicates otherwise. I try to adopt a more general version of WP:AGF in life.
Oh my gosh, thank you for responding this way 😭
I feel like on Lemmy it’s really difficult to ever post anything but total agreement without it immediately becoming an argument. Glad we found common ground!
For example, should I engage in the “challenging idea” that the world is run by lizard people?
As a counterpoint, you likely have. You’re aware of the position, aware of the proposed evidence, and determined the evidence falls short of proof, which means you’ve engaged with their thinking before rejecting it.
Confirmation bias is an incredibly stubborn human trait (and a near universal one at that). The particular issue this post is engaging with is called attitude polarization: two groups of people diverging more and more in their opinions despite being presented with the same evidence.
Why are humans like this? I think it’s a survival trait that people conform to the opinions of their in-group and are reluctant to let go of opinions that are most central to their world-view. They’ve already invested a lot in both their in-group and their world-view, so rejecting all that is more costly to them than rejecting the truth about some particular fact (that they may not even care about that much).
When you consider that beliefs and openly held opinions have different costs and different benefits depending on which group you belong to, it becomes a lot less obvious that abandoning a position is the right move.
It’s a good counterpoint. In my first example I definitely have thought about it previously.
In my second example it’s clearly stupid so I’m not going to engage with it. I haven’t thought about it previously (I have now !), but I don’t think that makes me an intellectual nepobaby.
But by your own admittance, you did think about it once the question was posed, so no, you’re not an intellectual nepobaby.
We have all had past experiences with how hard brick-adjacent substances affect teeth, so it’s not discarding it as a knee-jerk reaction. If you went to a dental college, and the professor made the claim before you knew better, I’d assume you’d be interested in finding out how he came to that conclusion, correct?
Yes, you assume correctly. I would be interested in finding out how they came to that conclusion!
I think in a different thread, the question of whether the other person was presenting something in good faith came up. I think my original statement was more geared towards dealing with those types of things. I don’t need to engage with everyone if they’re not willing to engage back.
Yeah, I agree that the attempt to engage is the most important aspect. What actually constitutes “engagement” is up to semantic debate.
I do think that new arguments should be evaluated, even if it’s presented in bad faith. I feel that the bad faith nature of the argument is a factor that counts poorly in my evaluation, but it’s good to have a solid understanding of the nuance in your stance, even when it comes to the ridiculous.
It’s bad because it MIGHT be used as a low-effort defense?
Almost, the two parts that make it problematic to me are:
- It can be used used as a low-effort defence
- The defence is a personal attack
Ah, actually
The defence CAN BE INTERPRETED AS a personal attack.
That gate has 2 locks.
It’s pretty normal.
Maybe there’s a way to present the strange idea as gently and sweetly as possible, to avoid triggering their rejection reflex.
There is but you gotta think on your feet as it were and even then you don’t always succeed. When I was last hospitalized I knew my silicone laces were psych safe but I didn’t bother trying to explain it to the employee; I just asked if they could take them out. They poked at them for a few seconds before realizing and I got to wear my own shoes for the rest of my stay. You gotta give people juuust enough info to sneak the realization in there and it’s a suuuper hard (and moving) target to hit.
Gentle as lambs and subtle as serpents, as they say.
I like your theory.
I was a pretty big believer in inception approach. If they think it is their idea they will be on board.
Now I think people only want to learn/believe things they see from their own personal bubble of “trusted source(s)”. Anything else can’t be correct or I’d have heard about it already.
Yeah “it came from me or my people” means that it is harmless and everything else is Satan. There’s probably a psychological breakdown of that somewhere.
(Flip that assumption and you have the plot for half of all horror movies)
It’s the MAGA slogan: Don’t bother me with facts, my mind is made up.
It’s 99% of Lemmy and everybody else too. It’s how people are.
Yep, whole lot of people echo what they read in they’re social media echo chambers. Feelings and opinions thrown around like they are facts.
Granted this problem has always existed but I believe the overuse of the internet and social media has made it worse.
Prime example, bunch my friends who would definitely be Democrat voters (just bring it up as they are very much not maga supporters), despite me bringing up research showing the very clear negative side effects that Facebook had on people even 10+ years ago… Every last one of them ignored it and each one thought they were the exception.
So, loosely speaking, social media has created a plague of mass insanity.
Made up as in nonexistent, yes?
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
If someone brings evidence, ban them for reasons of wrongspeak.
That’s like 95% of humanity
Yep. It’s especially cringe when people ignore centuries of philosophical discussion. Often smugly.
Great example is when people refer to Richard Dawkins’ books as proof that there is no god. Nothing like a Reddit atheist to make me embarrassed to not believe in god.
I’ve never witnessed an atheist making such an argument. Usually it’s the theists getting hung up on him because they are used to appealing to authority figures and project.
Lucky you?
I don’t think it’s luck.
It is. Buy a lotto ticket.
I unironically think the braindead atheism online greatly contributed to the rise of Christian nationalism we’ve been seeing in the past decade…
There are also many definitions of god, and Dawkins engages with all of them. Dawkins is much more strongly opposed do theism, than deism for example. He engages with philosophical ideas about god.
Dawkins argues that we don’t need god to explain the universe, life, or anything else. He further goes on to argue that religious belief in god trains people to be irrational fanatics, which damages society, progress, science. In the end Dawkins says, there’s no proof for the existence of god, and that we would all be better off without religion. However IIRC Dawkins recognizes that religious belief can have positive psychological effects.
The new atheists have become their own subculture with its own values. The online new atheist scene also attracts people who love to argue, provoke, and pick fights. Contrarians and skeptics are not the same, but can overlap.
There‘s also a pipeline that goes like this: new atheism > anti religion > anti islam > white nationalism
The issue here is that the left has abandoned its opposition to religion, especially regarding Islam, in the name of anti-racism and intersectional identity politics. So these people are rejected by the left and driven to the right.
I don’t think “the left” needs to abandon religion. I have the left in quotes because most of the time we’re actually talking about progressives. And you can’t be progressive while dictating the beliefs of others. Leftism, however, benefits greatly from being united in belief. Unity is what it’s all about. But they don’t, because leftists are usually more progressives than anything else. Even when it happens, the hive mind mentality is what makes extreme leftism easy to fall apart and easy to slip into dictatorships at high population levels. And yet, we are approaching a post scarcity, post career having society, which demands socialism to some extent. But with a reliance on globalism. And bad foreign policy in place.
I don’t have an ultimate point in this I guess. I don’t know the solution, but it’s not stamping out religion and it’s not the reactionary fascism that America is a part of now.
Isn’t it? I mean I haven’t read his stuff or otherwise cared that much but I thought that was the point.
I really don’t know.
In general I don’t quite understand the point of OP. How do you learn without learning?
Good on you for asking! Dawkins doesn’t prove there’s no God; he argues the idea isn’t necessary to explain reality. The burden of proof isn’t on him to disprove an unfalsifiable claim, it’s on those making the claim to provide testable evidence. That’s how critical thinking works.
https://youtu.be/Qf03U04rqGQ?t=301
As for “How do you learn without learning?” you don’t. But a lot of people confuse rote repetition (parroting Dawkins or the Bible) with understanding (grappling with the arguments themselves). One’s memorization; the other’s understanding.
Great example is when people refer to Richard Dawkins’ books as proof that there is no god
As was said earlier by someone else, that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I’ve found that I generally don’t look down on anyone pretty much ever. I don’t get it when someone lacks intellectual curiosity, but I never look down on them for it since it’s just not everyone’s cup of tea. However, when someone has disdain or actively rejects deeper inquiry, hoo boy, I can’t help but suddenly feel a pretty aggressive anger as if they not only choose to be stupid, but are trying to socially pressure everyone else to choose to be stupid. That’s just not acceptable.
Totally. Especially today people hole up in their tiny bubbles and echo chambers. Any challenges to their worldview and beliefs are rejected as woke, cultural Marxist, far left, fascist, racist, bigotry, etc. Being able to endure and process the emotions that come up, when you’re challenged is a skill people across the political spectrum have less and less. Emotions are endlessly validated regardless of facts, to the detriment of society and everyone’s wellbeing at large. The celebration of victimhood is toxic for everyone and keep them disempowered. It’s not just the left. The right has its whole „white genocide“ myth, and endless conspiracy theories about powerful evil elites.
It’s extremely prevalent here on Lemmy/Piefed as well. Actual discussion between opposing viewpoints is rare, and usually cut short by mods.
People should just talk to and more importantly listen to each other.
It’s extremely prevalent here on Lemmy/Piefed as well. Actual discussion between opposing viewpoints is rare, and usually cut short by lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and rarely lemmy.blahaj.zone/dbzero/niche-non-political-communities-that-don’t-need-political-discussion-anyway mods.
Fixed that for ya.
I watched a video of a guy complaining about something similar and it ended with a really good phrase: don’t even bother engaging with non-apple rotators
What are non-apple rotators?
People who can’t rotate an apple in their head. In the context of the video - people who don’t interact with abstract arguments and think you’re talking about specific things or people instead
Aha, I gotcha. That’s a pretty apt analogy, I like it. Yeah, it’s pretty frustrating talking philosophy with someone and they’re all like “it’s not that deep, bro”, when in reality, it’s a hotly contested topic in academic philosophy. So I guess it’d be like “bro, it’s just a flat, red surface” when you’re trying to talk about how the stem is attached to the core in a way.
I interact with abstract arguments but can’t rotate an apple in my head because of aphantasia. I can easily handle the concept of rotating an apple though.
Funny enough, my ability to estimate how three dimensional objects fit into real space is really good despite not being able to visualize it.
This is crazy to me. I would have gone insane as a child if I couldn’t have imagined badass scenarios in my head when I was bored.
I drew a lot and made physical things!
Also read a lot, but had concepts and not images. Like a car in a story might remind me of a car I had interacted with even if I couldn’t picture it. Like a sports car feels fast and nimble even if I can’t picture the curves. Maybe it is rounded or has sharp angles on that model, but I can’t picture the actual curves or angles.
Intellectual nepobabies? I don’t know what that means! These words challenge me, and I want no part of that! Nooooope! I will not think about such things! I mean really! What even is “nepobabies”? Did you mean “muppet babies”? Because they stopped making that show a while ago…
Lol, the irony of this being so highly upvoted on Lemmy, of all places.
They’re called realists and they’re everything wrong with society. We need to kill the idea of objective reality and to push everyone to choose their subjective worldview based on their own wants and needs, not society’s.
Yours is the most challenging and interesting reply to this post. Of course it‘s downvoted by the intellectual nepotism babies.
Could you elaborate a bit or share links for some reading?
Not really all that interesting. It’s just the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox wearing the cape of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
Without the fancy jargon, the argument is “All people must be free to do whatever they want (the paradox part they don’t say out loud is: except form a consensus)”
If you resolve the paradox, what you’re left with is exactly the same world we have now: everyone is free to do exactly what they want, including forming a consensus (that may restrict the freedom of the individual)
It’s a philosophical sleight of hand that’s easy to hide in grandiose and virtuous rhetoric. I’ve seen it often from the Libertarian Right, and I suspect so have others on Lemmy.
I recommend you check out analytic idealism instead:
Thank you! And very interesting, from My end it’s showing 4 upvotes and 4 downvotes. From your end is it showing a negative score? If so, I bet those votes come from instances we’ve defederated, because we don’t federate with realist instances like lemmy.ml. Those people over there are really big on objective reality, and we aren’t interested in arguing with them.
Anyway, sure thing! I wrote an antirealist manifesto which you can read at https://soulism.net/. But here’s the elevator pitch: You’re not a body, you’re a mind. You’re made of information, and so are your perceptions. So is the world you inhabit. Your subjective view of the world is a reconstruction, created from raw data by your brain. Babies don’t know how to do that, they have no idea what’s going on, they just see colours and shapes. You had to learn how to see objects, how to see a world. So what if you learned differently? What if you took the time to examine the way your perceptions are formed, and made conscious choices about how to do it? That is a thing that can be done, and the colloquial term for such is… magic. Rewriting reality through belief and perception. I would argue that we have an ethical duty to use magic to ensure we are perceiving the world in a way that is just. We need to be active agents in our subjective universe so that we can’t be manipulated into doing harm.
I was wondering, if you were referring to Soulism. I first encountered it, when a Soulist instance was announced.
What you’re saying jibes well with themes I know from psychology, therapy, and occultism.
Contrary to materialist Marxist victim thinking, soulism seems to empower the individual to change.
Our current consensus reality is heavily shaped by capitalist propaganda. If we achieve a material revolution but not a magical revolution, if we overthrow Capital but don’t destroy Capitalist Reality, then we’re going to reproduce the conditions of capitalism. That was one of the failures of the Soviet Union. The people in charge still thought like capitalists. They still believed that human nature was in conflict with the stateless classless utopia that Marx described as the future. The USSR leadership were believers in capitalist realism, as many Stalinists are today.
Humanity is a social construct and I want to spark a revolution that sees us move beyond it. I don’t think humanity is the “destiny” of our civilisation, I think we have a much greater potential for growth. I’m a transhumanist, and I think the mental is way bigger than the physical in that journey. I don’t think a realist can be a transhumanist in a meaningful way. Elon Musk is not transhumanist in a meaningful way. He’s very human, he’s very interested in continuing the human tradition of domination and exploitation. He’s a monkey that wants a bigger pile of bananas than all the other monkeys. I don’t think that’s the future. I think if we don’t grow beyond that, then we’re all going to die.
Yes, humanity needs a spiritual transformation of thought.
Marxists are materialists necessarily because it stems from a rejection of capitalism and private ownership. The vision of a classless communist society is extremely vague and put off to the far future.
Leftists often stay trapped in criticism, deconstruction, contrarianism. Anti- capitalism becomes an end unto itself. If the revolution is successful, revolution itself becomes a fetish.
Lemmy.ml is real big on objective reality
lol no they aren’t
Really? My perception of them has always been that they have a very strong belief in objective reality and are unwilling to entertain ideas of subjectivity. They often define themselves as materialists in a way that is less how Marx used the term and more how Dawkins would use it.
Wow, that’s… not quite what I meant. The goal isn’t to reject objective reality, it’s to question how we define it and who gets to decide what counts as “real.” Pushing people to explore their own perspectives is one thing, but encouraging pure solipsism just replaces one dogma with another. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, yeah?
There is no compromising with an ideology that is inherently uncompromising in nature. It’s the paradox of tolerance. Realists will never make room for experiences that defy their idea of objective reality. If they did, they wouldn’t be realists. That’s why in order to create room for everyone’s experiences and freedom, we must destroy consensus reality. We need to kill objectivism in order to have a subjective multiverse with free exchange of ideas. Realists violate that social contract.
If objective reality doesn’t exist, then your definition of ‘subjective’ is just a consensus-based hallucination you inherited from your own comfort. How do you know your ‘multiverse’ isn’t just a realist’s cage you haven’t recognized yet? Your own argument destroys the premise upon which it rests. Also, what if my subjective experience includes what I would characterize as objective reality? You would be imposing your own definition on to me, again destroying your own premise.
Do you want to argue so that we can both learn from each other or do you want to argue so you can change My mind?
Neither. I just enjoy picking apart philosophical arguments.
Alright, well I’m happy to engage with that. I know it’s not a realist’s cage because I’m actively maintaining My subjective world and making choices about what to believe on a daily and weekly and yearly basis. I’m being an active agent in a way that realists don’t. They let society tell them what is objectively true. I don’t care about that, I’m asking Myself what is useful to believe.
How do you define what a realist cage is without being informed by objective reality?
Not necessarily. There are discussions in which I dont engage with certain ‘challenging ideas’ or rather walls of statements that need to be evaluated and put into context. If i know already that this discussion is not important enough for me and the points provided are not promising and novel (for me) enough, aka stupid on first glance, to later invest the time to revisit those ideas, research, evaluate and putting them into context, which no one can do for me, than i may not bother with those points to begin with. Afterall one cant be bothered with all stupid ideas about something that exists. Written forms of auch discussions are there more productive since one can do the research etc. in the moment. Allthough that to takes time.
In short no one has the time to truly interlectually and honestly engage all ‘challenging ideas’ there are. One must always make a certain preselections, with very shallow engagement.
One might have to smuggle in an ‘…all [challengin ideas …]’ to make this statement more accurate.
This ist very true. Maybe the proposed challenging Idea ist Not as Genius AS you think or you weren’t able to communicate it’s advantages good enough. Additionally If a Individuum regularly has 9/10 haywire ideas maybe the 1/10 genius Idea gets guilty of association (sry, but people are people).
