Comment by spangry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spangry | Hacker News Reader

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There are a number of things you could do. You could look for corroborating accounts. For example (note these are a three part series written by the same person):

https://quillette.com/2019/02/17/a-witch-hunt-on-instagram/

https://quillette.com/2019/06/07/instagrams-diversity-wars-r...

https://quillette.com/2019/07/28/knittings-infinity-war-part...

You could gather and directly examine evidence yourself:

https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col...

https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-col...

Ultimately I guess you have to make your own judgement of what kind of ideas and behaviour you deem 'reasonable'. The difficulty, I suppose, is if you yourself are caught up in one of these purity spiralling communities. It's hard to maintain objectivity in such a situation. Delusional people don't know that they're delusional. People caught up in a cult don't think they're in a cult.

I've seen people only come to understand how insane things are when the mob finally turns on them, but by then it's too late to get out unscathed.

> The difficulty, I suppose, is if you yourself are caught up in one of these purity spiralling communities. It's hard to maintain objectivity in such a situation. Delusional people don't know that they're delusional. People caught up in a cult don't think they're in a cult.

Is it possible that some people accuse those who believe Quillette is objective of being caught up in such a community?

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette

It'd seem so. Now who am I to believe? Should I believe Quillette because three different articles corroborate accounts of purity spirals? Or should I believe the editors of this other page when they say Quillette isn't objective.

Should I infer from comments on the internet some social malady that needs a remedy?

Shrug.

Why trust the authors of rationalwiki over the author of those Quillette articles? As you yourself asked: Who is more credible? How are we sure which one is? Perhaps nothing is knowable, and you should never believe anyone about anything ever.

At this point I think I'm going to bow out of this conversation. Good luck on your quest for objectivity!

The journalists of Jacobin Magazine, endorsed by Noam Chomsky, also think Quillette is pretty batshit. I hope you uhhhhhh.... get out of the cult? Or is it not a cult? Hopefully there's some objective evidence that it isn't, somewhere. Maybe deeming things cults is just the objective thing to do these days?

> Perhaps nothing is knowable, and you should never believe anyone about anything ever.

Or maybe I should be sceptical of claims that some social illness is pervading internet communities when that claim is made with only anecdotal evidence.

Your line of conversation was spiraling towards the philosophical underpinning of knowledge. The parent poster cheekily pushed you off the cliff and ran away.

Appealing to the authority of Jacobin and Chomsky won't get you back. Doubly so when the question that started this whole thing is (I hope you don't find this uncharitable paraphrasing): when do claims of foo rise to the level of "genuine foobar"?

> Your line of conversation was spiraling towards the philosophical underpinning of knowledge.

Actually, this is a fundamental flaw of some counter-arguments to my line of argument. I'm pretty clearly undermining the idea that there exists an authority that can identify the social ill of "purity spirals". I'm not making any epistemological claim. But people like the commenter that "pushed me over a cliff" (lol) seem to quite often think "well, you're saying my claim that the left-wing is a cult has no objective basis, therefore you don't believe in any objective basis for anything! HA!"

The point I'm making by saying Quillette is a "cult" is that my claim it is a cult is as credible as Quillette's claim that purity spirals exist and are cults. Shove

> Appealing to the authority of Jacobin and Chomsky won't get you back.

Appealing to authority by linking Quillette articles is just as fruitless. My entire line of argument is that linking to these articles like they somehow identify an objective social malady is an appeal to authority, with no basis in actual authority.

>I'm pretty clearly undermining the idea that there exists an authority that can identify the social ill of "purity spirals".

You can't undermine a point nobody is really making. Maybe someone is making it somewhere, but tracking back up this comment chain I can't find it. 8 levels up probably_wrong explicitly says "No one" is such an authority. And further asserts that the type of claims suggest that the question is of a type where such an authority can not exist.

If I had to guess, what you actually want to do is tell people off for making and sharing personal assessments of social situations to the best of their own abilities and doing it at a lower evidentiary standard than you're comfortable with. If so, have the courage of your convictions to admit you think that either (A) nobody should do that at all, or (B) you're so much more better at it than them that they shouldn't do it. Or maybe (C) tell them to stop because you disagree but don't want to wade into such imprecise debate.

From the outside, you're not articulating your point well enough to avoid looking like epistemological flailing.

> If so, have the courage of your convictions to admit you think

Well that's not "so", so I'm not going to admit something that isn't so.

> From the outside,

How are you simultaneously discussing this with me while being outside the discussion?

> You can't undermine a point nobody is really making.

Excellent! If people are making the point, I'm undermining it, and if they don't think they're accessing objective truth in this discussion, my observations in my comments still stand. shove

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