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Comment by rntz | Hacker News Reader

> As a rule of thumb: if both parties are angry at you, you're on the right track.

No; this is an excuse to pat yourself on the back for being contrary. Don't validate your beliefs by how much they make others angry, any more than you validate them by how much they make others happy.

> the group identity thing

Group identity and culture wars are not new (and are certainly not going away). It's plausible to me that the internet is making this worse - a premise of your post - but I'm not yet convinced. It's possible they're merely coincident. What concrete reasons are there to believe the internet is a primary cause of today's increasingly vitriolic culture wars, rather than merely a new venue in which they are being pursued?

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Not sure how to reply to this, it seems I certainly failed to get the point across here.

> No; this is an excuse to pat yourself on the back for being contrary. Don't validate your beliefs by how much they make others angry

That was absolutely not what I intended to say with this admittedly tongue-in-cheek quip. There is a kernel of (subjective) truth in there though: if you find yourself agreeing with one side of a meme war 100% on everything, it's most likely time to rethink some assumptions. Conversely, if you're not agreeing wholesale, you just have a target on your back, that's a given. So I could have worded that better, it doesn't have anything to do with being contrarian for the sake of causing offense.

> Group identity and culture wars are not new (and are certainly not going away).

I thought I addressed that. Again, I probably worded it too obtusely.

In defense of your quip, if I get called both a misogynist and a radfem for the same opinion, I can fairly reliably expect that over the subsequent few days I'll get a number of people with moderate opinions contacting me privately to thank me for saying what they were thinking but were too scared of internet shitstorms to post publically.

There is danger in the middle ground as well, though. Many middle grounds are factually incorrect, for example between evolutionists and people who believe god put fossils underground to troll archaeologists.

Further, as a strategy it is exploitable: say you have opinion X and I want you at X+1. I can manipulate you by loudly proclaiming X+2.

tl;dr: there are no easy heuristics here. Treat the entire communication environment as hostile and manipulative, form your opinions with great care, and double check all your sources.

I enjoy that you had the courage to bring "factually incorrect" into this conversation.

If someone, anyone, goes looking for the facts, there is only one destination in which they will end up. The facts aren't hard to find. They are all in boring science textbooks. But nobody reads those anymore.

The current culture war is waged by those who profit off ignorance against those who crusade for truth. You may think this is a black and white view of it, but it isn't. One side wishes to obliterate facts, the other wishes to incinerate pretty lies at the expense of hurt feelings.

So yes, there are a great many positions that are factually incorrect. All of them, to be exact, except the factually correct ones.

The problem of course is that facts can be inconvenient to those who seek power.

I find it highly unlikely that Jessica was referring to being unable to say publically that evolution is a real thing.

Additionally, I said that, having already formed my opinion X, if I get that response, I can predict certain things. This is very different from your 'exploit' which requires the reverse process.

I'm afraid you've provided cogent and valid criticisms of a completely different set of statements than I actually made.

> That was absolutely not what I intended to say with this admittedly tongue-in-cheek quip.

Thank you for clarifying.

> There is a kernel of (subjective) truth in there though: if you find yourself agreeing with one side of a meme war 100% on everything, it's most likely time to rethink some assumptions.

Yes. But "you're probably wrong if you agree with anyone completely" and "you're probably right if you disagree with most people" are very different.

> > Group identity and culture wars are not new (and are certainly not going away).

> I thought I addressed that.

I think here it's me who has been unclear. That was just an introductory remark. The substance of that part of my comment was to wonder whether the internet is really what's been exacerbating the current culture wars and factionalism, or if it's just coincidental. I still don't feel confident either way on that question.

The printing press seems to have been a prime cause of the Protestant Reformation with its attendant wars. Years ago a friend predicted to me that social media would increase conflict analogously. I'm not sure he was right, but clearly events have gone in the right direction.

Given that the 20th century is the century of genocide, it seems less than certain that the long term trend is "increasingly vitriolic".

We always have nukes

The 20th century isn't the century of genocide; it's the century of media covered genocide.

This is true. It does seem, however, like that is the short-term trend of the last decade or three. Things don't have to be as bad as the mid 20th century to be worrying.

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