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Comment by okreallywtf | Hacker News Reader

While I think that tech tools like this have the potential to be great, so far I think technology has made the problem worse. My conclusion from my recent experiences over the last year or so with the election and before (and volunteering/organizing volunteers therefor) is that people don't just need to communicate, we need to interact, and my observation is that this needs to happen (or at the very least works best) face to face. Talking to someone over the phone or maybe with video chat could work but anything that separates you from the person you are communicating with creates barriers for that communication (I am convinced). Communicating with people face to face (whether they agree with you or not) is one of the most basic and satisfying parts of being human and we're finding more and more ways to not do that.

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I think modern transportation and communication have contributed to our increasingly divided society... by extending our interactions over larger areas, those tools allow us to naively fall into our own physical "filter bubbles".

Modern transportation contributed towards physical obesity. Technology became so efficient and so cheap that we became isolated from physical reality... we have to work out in order to stay physically fit.

I propose that modern communication has had a similar impact. We've been binging on the conflict-free interactions we enjoy, but we haven't been eating our veggies or working out. This is a mental "obesity epidemic".

We drive between similarly minded social gatherings. We keep contact with similarly minded people by calling them. We're in constant communication with our social groups with little time for disruptive ideas to slip in... each of us is deeply connected to our pocket of the world, but many of us are equally disconnected from the rest of the world.

I blame Starbucks.

Say what you want about holiday themed drinks, but the coffee shop, bar, and church are essentially the only mass, small-town American discussion forums. And I'd say only the first tended to really breed in-depth conversations between unlikeminded neighbors.

Coffee chains could give two shits about inspiring conversation. In fact, it's downright bad for business (at best more seating requirement, at worst danger of disagreement). So it's optimized away.

While I'm not disagreeing, the historical record suggests that there's nothing new about an increasingly divided society. Or vociferous exchanges of view for that matter. We are not, and have never been, a tame species.

True, as a species we all but glorify conflicts... but I think democracy does require some degree of social cohesion. I see a lot of danger if our continent-spanning superpower starts to crumble due to internal divisions, especially considering we don't have a clear path to secession.

I wouldn't bet on the US's longevity. Read Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War (discussed here a week or two ago), particularly noting his part about how multiple imperial peoples can't coexist in a single country...

The Fourth Turning -- on the patterns that generations tend to fall into -- might also be interesting.

Thanks for the recommendation, I previewed Turchin's book and it's fascinating... I ordered a physical copy right away.

I agree with these statements. Debate has become an offensive action many will go to great lengths to avoid.

Alas, "debate" on the Internet is anything but. I am happy to debate, even to see my ideas proven wrong by a person who is informed and debates with good intentions.

Instead, most of it is ill-informed, without willingness to learn, and for the last 12 months or so with a good helping of death threats, at least in my interactions.

And so, yes, we start avoiding disagreement, because the pain inflicted upon us is so intense. For better or worse, the Internet is failing miserably at fostering healthy debate. We have inadvertently created the tools that allow bullies to silence on a global level.

Or maybe it's just a regression to the mean - we've been physically disconnected from the rest of the world for most of history.

I don't avoid "debate" because I fear disagreement or attacks. I avoid "debate" because so often when I enter one, the person engaging with me immediately employs ad hominem attacks or strawmen or appeals to emotions or any number of other unconstructive argumentation techniques. I am tired of engaging people who cannot argue using logic or rationality. I avoid it because it will be tedius and draining and there is no hope against someone not using logic. (Obviously this whole statement is merely an anecdote, and I'm not trying to explain trends.)

I know what you mean. Talking to people about things like, say, government surveillance. I have strong opinions on that. Nothing that this crowd wouldn't agree on mostly, but I'm the only IT guy in my life and generally encounter infuriatingly simple minded positions with this topic. Nothing to hide, nothing wrong with ogling your data.

I tried to explain. Edward Snowden said to ask people to give you their phones unlocked for half an hour. I extend the metaphors, I give concrete examples, but emotional bias trumps anything I bring up. I get angry, nobody wins anything.

People aren't good at rationality and logic. They are too abstract, so they wield abstract (read: stereotyping) tools to combat it. To successfully debate people, focus on actions and consequences that are relevant to their life, and back it up with an understanding of what their life is and evidence that these considered actions lead to undesirable consequences for them and/or others.

Debating in the abstract is something you need passion or training for. Our brains aren't built for it. Logic isn't what you need to wage debate, evidence is.

> Logic isn't what you need to wage debate, evidence is.

Depends on your goal and your audience. When talking to people who aren't particularly interested in the logic of a given argument, evidence won't help you.

>To successfully debate people, focus on actions and consequences that are relevant to their life, and back it up with an understanding of what their life is

However, you nailed it with this!

I think debate is offensive/avoided these days because we have potential access to 'all' the information we could possibly need and therefore feel inadequate in a discussion where we can't look up things on the fly. Back in the good 'ol days you could debate without being interrupted to look up 'facts'

Technology just amplifies human nature. The open-minded minority use technology to broaden their horizons in an unprecedented way.

My guess is that open-mindedness must be cultivated from a young age by exposing kids to a wide-variety of cultures/ideas.

Environment is continuously changing. There are infinite agents in the nature causing that change. Human being is one of them, technology developed by human is another. At the end fittest (not to confuse with physical fitness) survives.

It felt very ironic up-voting you.

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

> My conclusion from my recent experiences over the last year or so with the election and before (and volunteering/organizing volunteers therefor) is that people don't just need to communicate, we need to interact, and my observation is that this needs to happen (or at the very least works best) face to face.

I agree. People are much more civil face to face. It also helps in a disagreement to see body language and facial expressions. If I'm trying to argue a point and see someone getting visibly upset then I may change my tact or soften the moment for a bit. This is so much harder to do over the internet.

I agree. And as someone who works with telemedicine, I can say that even video pales in comparison to in person.

Our body language reading machinery is weak and ignorable when a person is reduced to a small 2 dimensional image, let alone text. And it's the signals that this machinery produces that trigger empathy. Without it, and especially when talking to strangers, it's easy to slip into a mild kind of psychopathy.

Interesting way of putting it!

> so far I think technology has made the problem worse

I think this statement is completely untrue. Compare to how people were divided around the world a hundred years ago.

Technology has gathered people together, but it also makes differences clearer to see.

> Technology has gathered people together, but it also makes differences clearer to see.

Doesn't the last part of your comment contradict your entire comment? Imagine gathering a hundred people together and making the differences between each person clear. Instead of uniting everyone, what will ensue is hatred. Shouldn't the point be to find a common ground and not focus on our differences?

Through technology, groups of people have gathered together virtually. I think this is to the detriment of improved relationships between people physically, geographically closer together. The internet lets would-be community-builders act as if geography doesn't matter. But it does.

Stephen Colbert last night: "Politics used to be something we thought about every 4 years. That's good that we didn't think about it that much, because it left room in our lives for other things and OTHER PEOPLE"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXhFGO8R7aU

I really appreciated Colbert's words that night, but I don't know how true his quote was. There was a great article I read a decade ago that I could never find again about, "How People Talk About Politics," and it matched my own experience.

Standing in long lines at the DMV in Virginia in 2000-something, a man says to me, "See what happens when you let the Democrats run things?"

Watching the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, a woman told me, "My grandmother said this would happen. She said the economy always collapses under Republicans."

Working IT at the Coast Guard for ten years, people talked politics all the time. All of that talk about as informed as the quotes above, but I try not to think less of people who are misinformed. Politics is hard. It's complicated, but we are all expected to participate in it and try to stay informed while most of us are unaware of how much or cognitive biases cause us to misunderstand and misremember the things we learn about the whole complex morass that is almost entirely run by lawyers.

For me, this election is now an exercise in compassion. I overheard two coworkers talking yesterday about how they both voted for Trump because they hated Clinton so much. What surprised me was the tone of fear and uncertainty in their voices at having won. They want what's best for America, just like their political opponents do, and they honestly thought their candidate was the better choice--with strong reservations. My life is great at the moment, so I sincerely hope their candidate delivers what they feel is missing in their own lives.

You're basically saying that there is no hope of fixing the problem since what you're suggesting is never going to happen at any scale. If nothing else this tool, even if imperfect, offers some hope.

I'm not saying that all, but I think that part of the solution will be finding ways to get people interacting with each other directly in more ways either through direct outreach (going door to door or talking to people in public) or civic engagement. You don't have to be exposed to everyone, I had some really positive conversations when stuck at jury duty last time. A lot of people just go find a corner to hole up in but I ended up sharing a corner of the courthouse with a group of people that preferred to chat and it was a really nice way to while away the time (we had a 2 hour discussion about gun control that was very civil and diverse in ideology which the internet would lead you to believe was impossible).

I'm not saying any of this to detract from this tool or any of the other interesting tools linked here, I think its great to try to find as many solutions as possible but its just been my observation recently that humans interact best face to face, hopefully we can find a more scalable solution though.

It's not completely impossible to imagine a tool like this using webrtc to have people video chat/discuss issues together. I'm not sure how we incentive users to actually use the tool and remain respectful - but maybe celebrities or cultural shifts would make people feel obligated to talk with those of differing opinion.

The future of virtual reality (i.e. a holodeck) could enhance peer to peer communication by moving from just text based communication to showing body language, tone of voice, facial expressions etc.

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