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Comment by 0x4d464d48 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you that they matter but there has to be balance. Right now the pendulum is stuck so far to the emotional side that people are willing to eschew facts that would make them challenge their own biases and actively look for material that would only reinforce it.

Emotion is the root of all action and social interaction. It's also why I or anyone else chooses to pursue anything intellectual. But that doesn't justify manipulating the emotions for destructive and self-serving purposes. I consider deliberately flattering people and dealing in overly simplistic platitudes to foresake intellectual honesty and reinforce their bias because they consider it comfortable to qualify as destructive and self-serving.

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I don't know if there's just one pendulum (I would at least say there's a chunk of people who are too emotional, and a chunk of people who are ignoring emotions too much), but none of what you are mentioning sounds new or unusual in regards to human nature.

People are generally fairly reluctant to challenge their own biases. There are some reasons for that, but this doesn't represent some abnormal pendulum swing.

Same for manipulating emotions for self-serving purposes.

This isn't a problem with emotions, it's a problem with incentives, and, well, corruption. Something like this can actually be very, very rational.

If people are acting in self-serving and self-preserving ways that's a fairly clear message that they do not feel terribly safe and do not trust the systems around them to accept their mistakes.

I don't think they're wrong.

I wouldn't think there's just one pendulum that governs how people view an issue either but there's certainly a continuum for how emotional people will get over certain issues. Obviously if you have no emotion over an issue you won't care one way or the other but if anyone gets too emotional they're much more likely to be irrational, cave to bias and tune out altering view points.

Most people on this site are aware that objectivity and not caving to their own bias isn't easy and, more or less, requires constant effort and that is the same kind of effort that should be promoted amongst the public at large. As almost anybody here could tell you, just because something feels true certainly does not make it true but we seem to relish a culture that seems to believe that person's emotions should never be challenged and doing so is merely cruel rather than, at times, necessary.

Just because confronting bias is hard to do, and may hurt someone's feelings, doesn't mean that that bias should be ignored, or worse promoted. I'm not talking about whether or not conservatives, liberals, libertarians or whoever else is right but instead challenging the notion that what we need to promote more civic engagement is to tell people what is going on in the country and the world in a manner they want to hear it. What we should be doing is telling people what is going in the world and country in a manner that actually is and at the same time the public needs to be calling out demagogues for what they are and understanding why they are dangerous.

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