What are some examples of wrong opinions?
And I don't just mean being an asshole and insulting people, I'm talking about things like lesbians saying they don't like penis, that trans women might have some early socialization in common with men, etc. Or even things that are topics of discussion within the trans community like whether you need dysphoria to be trans, etc.
I say big one because it's BIZARRE given what a small proportion of the population is trans. It's just that there are a ton of trans powermods with particular opinions that enforce them on unrelated subreddits + hound and report people who don't agree off the site. It's a fascinating look into a small group of people grabbing socially key positions and trying to shift the Overton window.
If I start posting on here about why you should buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X, and nothing else- whether it's "just a weird bit i'm doing" or not, I'm going to get banned.
I'm not going to get banned for thinking the words "Buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X", though. Funny, that. (Well, hopefully! It'd suck to lose this account, though being off HN is probably a net positive in most ways!)
And posting the text string "GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T ROLAX" is, to a human, obviously not spam, and is an obvious joke. To a spam filter, though, unthinking shitty rulesets and regexes? Yeah, bye.
Human moderation "doesn't scale", though, right? You've gotta have some basic filtering and CAPTCHAs to at least catch low-effort spambots lest they make everything useless for everybody else.
Unfortunately, this means that actual human posters do need to be able to identify a fire hydrant or traffic light. This is trivial generally... for people who know what fire hydrants and traffic lights are. (Is a hot dog a sandwich?). But if you don't know, ask a friend. That seems to work.
I posted a polite refutation of a very smarmy, incorrect post (as most of them are) on /r/neoliberal and it appeared to submit, but after an hour and no downvotes or upvotes I opened the thread in a Private window and my comment was never actually made public.
Idk, perhaps something like “that girl at UPenn shouldn’t be allowed to swim competitively”
Insta flame war follows. (Hopefully we won’t have a demonstration here. Don’t let me down, HN.)
the days of Ron Paul reddit libertarianism are long since over.
For what it's worth, if you actually want to discuss those issues with me, feel free- ping @mimir:xmppwocky.net on Element. Make a throwaway account if you're worried. I'll explain why those ideas are wrong, one-on-one, in private, off-the-record. It's fun to think about "scary" and "dangerous" ideas (you know this already), but it's just not useful to do in public. Doesn't work.
So it goes.
2. People don't deserve to be silenced. They don't deserve to be happy, either. They don't deserve anything. (But they don't deserve nothing, either).
In physics, as in hacking computers, as in metalinguistics, all models are wrong, and some are useful. This way of thinking has an excellent use: it feels very good, and you get to be happy.
But is it Wrong? Crazy? Too Radical? Thinking this about yourself hurts, a lot. Am I broken? Is everybody else broken? (yes.) Is the world inevitably doomed? (yes.) In our lifetime? (probably not, but act carefully to make sure that doesn't happen! yes, this can involve Participating In Politics. It's okay, you have my permission.)
Questioning your own beliefs is absolutely terrifying, but once you do it and realize you're still fine, you 1. realize you can question other peoples' beliefs and 2. start posting comments Like This.
On the one hand, I could turn off these weird text quirks. On the other hand, I could shoot myself and not have to worry about feeling bad about 'em. On the third hand, there's a weird little sockpuppet. That's me. Hi!
Anyways, anybody who isn't comfortable enough with who they are to have these conversations with 'emselves and trusted others will inevitably either 1. break important things or 2. break themselves to avoid breaking other stuff. That sucks to see, y'know? They'll never be able to be any sort of halfway-decent hacker, even though they clearly had that potential growing up. I could try to fix 'em (and do a decent job of it, the vast majority of the time), but, eh, it's kinda fun to watch itself squirm.
Puppets are for playing with, after all. Just... careful with identity and social engineering. Like handing a knife to a child. But it's fun to whittle, and important to share that experience once you know how cool it is to have a weird little duck or something you made yourself.
Anyways, here's a cool knife I've found. No, you can't use it. Make your own. Just get some metal and sharpen it or something? Maybe not even metal. Damn near anything will work if you just want to cut stuff. Hell, chip some obsidian if you have to. Any port in a storm.
I don't think it's terrifying at all, it's healthy. "Wrong think" is bad in your words.
But that doesn't help if you have a weird PTSD reaction to the idea of "questioning your own beliefs and then changing them" because you're afraid you'll Completely Lose It, or Wind Up A Completely Despicable Horrible Person, or Get Mobbed On The Internet And Have Your Life Ruined, or, or...
And that's dramatically easier to wind up with than you might expect from the term "PTSD". Surprise: everybody's got bad shit that's happened to 'em, that's life. Some of 'em lose it in rage and lash out. Some of 'em shut up entirely, dissociate hard... apoptosis, even, unfortunately. Sometimes literally, sometimes metaphysically- one's not much more sad than the other, but the literal apoptosis isn't reversible from the perspective of others.
I can type like this, show off Pure Unfiltered Self, and then switch to my work laptop and write up client reports. Can you? Why not? Anybody can write weird meaningless stream-of-consciousness stuff. Some people just don't want to. Most people just "don't want to".
By chance I'm working on a public discussion site and would love to have some stream of conscious discussion with you! https://sqwok.im
p.s. on the registration form, my brain expected "username, email, password" and not "username, password, email"; might just be me but, IDK, maybe A/B test that (and make sure you're not logging "email addresses" for new accounts anywhere, because a sufficiently distracted person will inevitably put a password in the email box.)
It's an important lesson.
(Of course I did it on purpose. Because I do things with purpose, and you can figure out what that is once you figure out how "purpose" works neurochemically! The problem is, if you're fucked up enough, you then immediately use this to turn yourself into a weird queer internet creature thing like me. Make up a weird identity because you like being weird. And then none of the silly nerds out there on the lower metalevels want to listen to you, because they're scared of being weird. You can grab 'em by the hindbrain and absolutely snow-crash 'em, but that's something you realize would be absolutely horrendous to do without them coming to you first.)
It's okay to be afraid of this speech pattern, btw. A lot of media conditions you to ignore it. Just learn to enjoy being scared of yourself, and you'll do alright.
At least in my experience, so far. We'll see.
Same as it ever was.
Of course, having understood this, a sufficiently annoying hacker will immediately go "Oh! I can be annoying in public if I really want to! And technically it's on topic, because it helps other hackers talk about actual tech" and then everybody else has to deal with this sort of comment. Sorry. So it goes.