Comment by marstomorrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marstomorrow | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have come across this in some friends. It's super interesting but also dangerous. It has taken me sometimes years or a decade to fully come to terms with some past debates. My friends would seemingly hold opinions and cling to them dearly, opinions I felt were so unconscionable I could not imagine holding them. Friendships were strained and maybe some lost. They tell me now that they were doing as you do, and that they did not hold those opinions but were merely testing them and practicing debating, learning about both sides, etc.

But I wonder about the unintended consequences of this. How many 'opinions' are out there in the world purely to cause pain? What portion of opinions that are shared on social media or the news actual opinions from those people, vs crafted statements of trolling themselves?

When you take the 'other side' for practice, is there really a valid [1] other side to take? I find often that the other side is based on logical fallacies and is not, at its base, a valid argument. I wonder if you are creating distance between you and others while you test out the opinions of propagandists? How valid [1 again] really are all these opinions?

[1] Okay here we go with this. I am indeed calling some opinions "invalid". What I mean is, I do not think it is a valid opinion to cause harm to minorities on purpose. I think this is cruel and amounts to a crime in our society. But you will find people advocating it loudly on social media and TV - and their arguments are based on treating humans cruelly for no reason other than the cruelty and other various logical fallacies.

If you are to take stances that you don't agree with, please check them logically first before putting those arguments out there in the world. Some things are better understood without trying to understand 'the other side', simply because it is not going to be based in logic and has no possible outcome of being 'understood'.

For these cases, you have to examine the whole of those friends' character. If that friend repeatedly brings up the same arguments 'just to test or practice', and/or if they reveal the fruits of those arguments in other aspects of their character or thought, you can make the argument to them that you cannot in good faith believe that they are merely holding that position for argument's sake.

However, if they have a known position and they make arguments clearly outside those boundaries, and then /show that they return to their usual position after/, it is much more feasible to believe that they are indeed merely testing their own position thoroughly, as any reasoning person should.

If you are to take stances that you don't agree with, please check them logically first before putting those arguments out there in the world.

You know, some could make the argument that in order to satisfy the second demand of your sentence here, one has to indulge in the first.

I don't know if I would, but maybe that's the point ;)

The irony in this made me chuckle, thanks for that.

My own experience with this tends to arise out of an extreme cognitive dissonance - I want my opinions to be internally consistent, and I've come to realize that a few of them just aren't consistent. When you get into reading the philosophy (or the relevant literature in other cases) you can come to conclusions which are quite far removed from beliefs one holds dear. So there's some tension between what I'd like to be true (security in a belief) and what seems true when I rationally consider the arguments. The second part of my experience shows that when you report your findings to others, they are immediately skeptical to the point of refusing to engage with the established literature. In reality, I try and make others aware of these opinions by arguing for them - partially in the hope that they can offer a counter-argument and that I can be back "home" safe in my original opinions which I thought I couldn't justify.

Secondly is the matter of epistemological framework; some people seem stuck with a particular way of finding information about the world which intentionally or not is constructed to dismiss critical engagement.

The most controversial topics of political philosophy are very interesting to me because it can be hard to find a view which is internally consistent. I'm emotionally upset when I can't arrive at such a view. To hold a view I can't justify is a horrible feeling. The kind of topics I'm talking about are issues of freedom of speech (pornography, hate speech, censorship, debate, the notion of harm and the validity of the harm principle), economics (the labour theory of value, tendency for the rate of profit to fall, objectivity or subjectivity of value, various historical arguments), social psychology (ideology in society and the flattening of culture, totalitarianism of the market, the experience of other sexualities e.g. the adult My Little Pony fan community and the Japanese lolicon phenomenon), and the nature of work (the meaning of consent and coercion, free will, the phenomenon of "bullshit jobs"). In the face of these issues, I find that it's hard to spend any energy on talking about such banalities as vim vs emacs or FOSS.

The trouble with entirely self consistent philosophically positions is they have tended towards extremism. At least according to my reading of the history of philosophy.

As with science, we have to accept that we can simultaneously hold two theories to be "true" even when they don't square with each other. To do otherwise is an exercise in frustration. Or extremism, if you choose to discard all philosophies that do not fit with your preferred one.

Don't take philosophy or economics too seriously. The vast majority of it is bunk.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/a-foolish-consistency-is-t...

This is a really interesting point. Trolling, in my opinion, occurs when the opportunity to question narratives is suppressed or forbidden.

Open any unmoderated comments section on any site and you'll find thousands of trolls.

It's strange that you think trolling is some subversive and venerable reaction to censorship, when anonymously commenting on websites is a nearly effortless act that incurs neither a cost nor risk.

> I find often that the other side is based on logical fallacies and is not, at its base, a valid argument.

Does this mean you are "often" right?

I'd hope so! If anyone keeps getting in arguments and they're not "often" right they're doing something very wrong.

I totally agree that, when adopting a hypothetical opinion, it's a good idea to vet it, and prevent wasting everybody's time in hypotheticals. Though part of that process may be to temporarily adopt an absurd view and work out how it fails.

You almost never have to spend an entire argument to vet a complete garbage opinion. If you do it quickly, or the opinion isn't complete garbage, you're not running afoul of the complaint.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com