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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

This seems hardly surprising. Publicly fact-checking someone makes them feel vulnerable and potentially stupid, so if they are not a person with integrity or humility, of course they are going to double down and get defensive. This is always been the case.

It doesn't help that we choose to ride these people for years and never let them forget about their mistakes, so much so that some mistakes can be a death sentence for your future career. So what incentive is there to admit that they made a mistake?

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Maybe people presume that corrections represent a political or ideological attack. After all, I've seen people assume that sometimes on HN, which tries not to be a space for political flamewars and dunking.

If you think that someone trying to correct you is likely to be a political opponent trying to score points, it makes sense that you would be vigilant and defensive.

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/arguments-as-soldiers talks about one aspect of this where people might feel like they have to defend anything that "their side" says and dispute anything that the "other side" says.

Sometimes people online actively try to defuse this by adding some context expressing sympathy or a non-judgmental or non-confrontational attitude. (That is, assuming that they merely want to counter mistaken ideas and information, and not people who hold or spread them!) I wonder to what extent that works.

Defensiveness? Possibly, but that's just one. I believe they do it mostly because they want to antagonize. They don't care if the info is false because it's all just a game anyway. If there's fact-checking, it proves that the information is valuable enough to cause someone of importance to waste time debunking it. Therefore, it is high-value material and should go viral even more.

It's the same reason my dog steals socks. If someone is chasing them for a stolen sock, it must be of high value and therefore it must be stolen more frequently, carried away, and buried in the backyard. It's a part of the brain we share with dogs, apes, sheep, and cattle.

Sounds like you interact with a lot of trolls. I know there is some overlap but I think there is a distinction between people who are wrong and trolls. They should be treated differently because of this distinction.

What I would really love is for people to start seeing the act of changing one's opinion based on evidence as something that brings admiration. If attention-seekers started even pretending to change their opinion based on evidence I think that would bring us to a better place.

Well, yes, but, at the same time, telling someone their argument has effectively been "debullshitted" isn't exactly the nicest, least-confrontational way to tell them you have a strong counter-argument either, is it.

>so if they are not a person with integrity or humility<

>we choose to ride these people for years and never let them forget about their mistakes<

Maybe it's the people who refuse to acknowledge they're contributing to that climate of douchebagery while producing no dialogue of productive value who lack integrity. If you're public fact checking someone in 2021 it's because you're either an asshole or unaware that you're being an asshole.

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