Comment by lapinot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lapinot | Hacker News Reader

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You are blindly falling into a trap, just like this whole article. The article is using the so-called "online activists" to dismiss political opinion (not some, really the abstract idea of having social ideals) and once again depict science as an intrinsically unbiased source of knowledge (which is usually even extend to unbiased source of social order, cf the recurring mathematical "justification" of the liberal economy).

Don't get me wrong, i'm a scientist myself (theoretical cs) and i do believe in the value of scientific method. But i do believe that (1) this problem here is about the "online" part, not "activist" and (2) every scientific field gets explored in the context of a society thus its choice, its means and its dominant approach will always be biased (which most of the time isn't any "bad", it's ok french cs community leans towards ocaml/coq but uk is more towards haskell/agda). To expand on (1), it is now long known that twitter and other ad-based plateforms favor stupid/bigot/simplified/aggressive interactions because that's what captures more attention.

So please stop mistaking social-media activism for normal activism and using this to simplistically and superficially discredit non-dominant political opinions (and push dominant propaganda forward like "left and right all extremes are same", everybody even the dominant liberals are stupid and angry on twitter, this is all irrelevant). So i don't know about this chronic fatigue whatever thing, but this argumentative trap comes up over and over, i'm kinda tired, so please folks when someone is talking about "<x> is doing <bad thing> online", the problem most likely isn't with <x> but with "online" because it most likely means "attention hijacking plateform based on control and manipulation".

I didn't read it like that at all. The article was very specifically about online toxicity, not activism.

And you responded loudly and angrily online, through the lens of your own biases. See how it works?

Sure about my tone, maybe it wasn't the best to convey my analysis, but that's how i have fun during my lunch break, and i prefer high variance comments. Joke aside, sure it was specifically about online toxicity, but it didn't mention anything about why this kind of harassment keeps happening more and more on specifically these online media. Also they put the focus on the confrontation between two sets of people, the scientists on one side and the religiously activists on the other. Honestly this is a reuters report, it's a serious newspaper so the reason of this omission (of something well known) isn't just "they forgot", there is meaning to it. They might not have done it consciously or anything, but the fact is that their behavior is exactly the same as the dominant behavior in face of fake news: confront the people that wrote it, not the people that designed (and get money off of) the tools that shaped/spread it. I argue this is a face of the dominant thought which must be recognized for it's non-rationality and bias towards control structures.

>So please stop mistaking social-media activism for normal activism and using this to simplistically and superficially discredit non-dominant political opinions (and push dominant propaganda forward like "left and right all extremes are same"

We should care who is dominant or who wants to be “right”. We should care to cultivate scientific consensus. Misinformed or incomplete science bound by some legal principles cannot be worse than “we feel this is the right and moral thing to do”. They can both be right or wrong and I don’t see why we’d have a preference for the one having less data to back it up. Again, all bound by some legal principles (data says sick people cost too much, herd them like cattle and drive down costs).

I think you misunderstood my point. I wasn't talking about non-dominant scientific opinion (which is probably because it isn't yet really clear, even tho this too is a slippery slope and "scientific consensus" can be easily (said to be) "broken" by the power of money, cf climate change, cigarettes not long ago, cocaine, opioids...). I was talking about non-dominant political opinions like abolishing private property or much less revolutionary getting back budget sovereignty in european countries, regulating the financial sector etc. (but also things like discrimination based on biological criteria, coercive birth control, military government and other, for "far-right/authoritarian"). Like another comment said, science may have some insight on these propositions, but ultimately none can be completely dismissed by scientific method only. So my point was that dominant thought (eg techno-scientifico-liberal) was trying to assert the opposite, posing science and reason as the ultimate mean of organizing society. And in the process conflating far-left's "not only science please" with far-right's "only science we like please" (and also funnily focusing the debate between the two so that the actual dominant position remains apparently moderate and impossible to attack because unnamed). ... got a bit carried away

I guess we need to be sensible. Of course both will promote the method which gives them the best face when posing an argument. A technobureaucracy is not what we want, but we also don’t want things rules on the basis of pure democracy (populism), nor good intentions (many communists/marxists had good intentions).

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