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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a way to get more of those ideas to me, and people in general, and less of the "I drink white male tears".

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You have to do your own curation or have some other people do it for you. Find people who seem to say interesting things (and not merely things you agree with) and see what they have to say. Force yourself into reading those boring long essays instead of the snippets posted on social networks. Flee 24h news coverage and prefer more in-depth analysis after the fact.

The ideas don't get to you, you get to them. The rest is just entertainment. That's the whole problem really, the path of least resistance leads you to stupid one liners. A random Trump tweet reaches more people than the entirety of the works of any philosopher or economist.

We used to recognize "flamewars" and "flamebait" a lot more readily online and encourage people to not get sucked in. To separate their opinions from a shouting match that is destined to go nowhere, even when they have a stake in the topic.

Now... we don't. And I fully cast the blame at the feet of those who have found a way to profit from starting and participating in shouting matches online. This includes 95+% of journo-bloggers.

Part of the problem is that there isn't really a cohesive community on something like Twitter. It's just a mass of people. For a group to be able to deal with bad actors, there needs to be something resembling a group boundary which can be policed and defended. Twitter lets anybody waltz into any conversation they want.

I don't think that there are any garbage people. Everybody has some good in them. (This doesn't imply we shouldn't set some boundaries).

Even Hitler has killed Hitler after all.

He made pretty okay art and cared about the suffering of animals.

Even literal garbage has some good in it. It's just usually not worth the effort of extracting it.

People aren't like resources to be harvested: they are 'ends in themselves', i.e. with their own lives and perspectives. Also, unlike an extractable resource, their goodness is variegated.

I agree, and I think even the "I drink white male tears" people probably have good intentions. I just don't care about hearing them say they drink white male tears.

Perhaps a better wish would be to be able to hear what insights they have that I don't, without it being wrapped in a package that makes me angry.

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