The intolerance of different views is driving the hostile and divisive atmosphere in the social media.
Let's say there's a person who's really anti-climate change. How is that person supposed to change their mind, if they get attacked every time they voice their opinions, instead of being approached in a civil manner? People can't be bullied people into agreement, only silenced and driven further away into their own echo chamber, at which point you lose any chance you had of ever changing their minds.
My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers.
Don't most studies show that fact based arguments only cause people with faulty beliefs to dig in further?
Some percentage of them? Yes. Unfortunately, there's no way to know when that happens, so it's very easy to assume it doesn't.
> My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers.
If what you're saying is true, what's the logic behind censoring people? Nobody is able to convince anyone of anything anyway.
Because at some point, arguing the same topic over and over and over is exhausting. The impact of greenhouse gases and climate change, for example, has been established as 'a thing' for my entire adult life. And yet people still want to argue about it even existing.
Is that, by itself, a good enough reason to censor people?
Nobody is forcing anybody to argue.
I don't want to quash discussion (interesting and informative discussion is the main reason I use HN) but, yeah, it's not a bad thing to differentiate yourself from the climate deniers, if you want people to hear you these days.
Why are you sick of them? That's a fairly strong emotion. Do you hold resentment because they are the ones who are going to bring the apocalypse to the world? Is it annoyance from hearing too many incorrect opinions? Or something else entirely?
Honest question - why are you, personally, sick of them? I'd really like to know.
2. They form an unholy alliance with other anti-empiricist groups (e.g. anti-vaxxers, young earth creationists) to undermine reality-based policies, including in education.
3. Their denialist opinions are typically held in bad faith. That is, they are held because if they were true they would confirm some pre-existing belief (e.g. that scientists are tools of a global elite cabal), not because an independent evaluation of the facts has led them there. This reinforces their hostility towards whatever group they think is lying.
4. Denialists typically engage in a perverse form of virtue signaling. The greater and more well evidence a claim is, the greater the "cred" they get for denying it. This creates a fertile field for sham experts to sell lies to members.
climate change isn't
it could also be a non-belief that turned out to be true, so that kind of shoots down that theory
yep, "belief" is definitely the wrong word to use here, "truth" or "reality" would work since climate change is true & real, and having "different beliefs" is definitely not the same thing as having your own truths and reality, which is why climate change deniers generally get mocked by people
First, I want to make it clear that I don't think of "climate deniers" as a group per se like a race, creed, or nation. There's a lot of detail and nuance in the world and I want to explore that, not abrogate it.
I just want to elucidate on that a little before I get to answering your question.
You have folks like the people in the oil companies who knew about the science of the greenhouse effect and still spent lots of money casting doubt on it in public to protect their profits.
You also have people who have honest doubts and questions. I'm even one of them. I've heard that global warming and climate change might have more to do with changes in the Sun's energy output than human chemical emissions, and I'd like to talk more about that, but ooo yeah not in public, eh? You would have to be all like "but I'm not a climate denial-ist" like OP.
So, just to repeat, I'm not being tribal here. (For instance the Chinese Communist Party creeps me out, but I still give them credit for e.g. fixing the Loess Plateau, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537409 ) I'm not against a group, I'm sick of certain behaviors.
To answer your question "why [am I], personally, sick of [certain behaviors]?" It's simple.
When I was a kid in high school I found my parents' copy of the Next Whole Earth Catalog which was a kind of hippie how-to guide from the 70's. I have no idea what happened to the people who made and bought and read this thing. My parents didn't talk about it or anything like that. But it became, for awhile, something like my bible. I left my textbooks in my locker and carried it around instead (it's like four feet wide and weighs six or seven hundred pounds!)
In it I learned about people like Christopher Alexander, Bucky Fuller, and Bill Mollison, and I began to see, or think that I saw, a better world. A world where humans and nature were in harmony, and "no one had to get nailed to anything."
That was about thirty-five years ago.
So, from my POV, everybody has been running around enacting "Idiocracy" instead and, yeah, I'm sick of it.
I understand you in some manner - I grew up watching Captain Planet and similar eco-oriented shows that have instilled in me some feeling of "importance" of the whole subject. And seeing other people trample upon what are some of our most sacret beliefs, developed for decades, can make us sick of them.
The only criticism of those beliefs I would have is that they come from sentiment, not (only) reason - so, in theory, if instead of eco-literature, you read, say, the Bible, you would most likely have equally strong beliefs towards Christianity, and they would be supported by more-or-less same number of arguments derived from years of studying.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), it's really hard to separate ourselves from our sentiment. I guess that the world is doomed to stay a divisive place, because humans are, in their essence, emotional creatures with reason added.
I like to point out (usually in a different context) that ecology is a science, and it's applications are technology.
I wrote a comment a few months ago about my beliefs and "the similarities and differences to religious apocalyptics as I see them" that you might find interesting? In sum (if I may be so gauche as to quote myself) "Ideally environmental apocalypticism is self-extinguishing." That's the primary (psychological) diiference (IMO) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065654
> I guess that the world is doomed to stay a divisive place, because humans are, in their essence, emotional creatures with reason added.
I dunno. The most powerful emotion is love, eh? And I think the newfangled talking computers will make really good cheap therapists.
But usually that ignore the speed of climate change
Humans are social beings and the spectre that someone could be outcast for sounding like they are from the wrong clan is an innate phobia.
From a US perspective - In the past, social shunning and ostracizing was used as a way to norm the culture for the predominately white, christian culture. Cancel culture was literally being run out of your town, and/or excluded from social and religious events. This had a huge chilling effect.
Now, the power belongs to a previously marginalized group (lgbtq/minority individuals) to 'cancel' people.
It's not new; the only difference is that the people who used to have to power are pissed that their views aren't the popular views anymore. It's a symptom of a massive societal change that has occurred and the subset of people who refuse to let go of their outdated ways.
I think this is an extremely skewed perspective on the whole issue.
It's not us vs. them - cancel culture was, and still is, driven by ignorance and sensationalism. People like the rush of a good story, regardless of whether it's true or not - that's what makes cancel culture so unjust.
Whether it's a gay person being called a Satan's spawn, or Richard Stallman being called a pedophile, or any other case - all cases have one thing in common: exaggeration for the sake of sensationalism, and punishment being completely out of proportion with the crime (note that by "crime" here I strictly mean "the act that is condemned by the group doing the cancellation", regardless of its actual criminality).
If you're a member of the previously-oppressed-now-powerful group, you may rejoice at the thought of retribution on those that caused you (your group) so much injustice in the past, but I hope you realize how hypocritical that makes the whole "tolerance" story that your group has been pushing for the last few decades. But I guess that power corrupts, no matter who's wielding it.
Are you seriously suggesting that could happen before social media?
Perhaps you're quite young and don't realise quite how different the world has become over the past 10 years.
But.
Yes, these things could happen before social media. Like most things, social media has absolutely amped up the effects, but this existed before.
Hell, go all the way back to the Red Scare and the various black books that existed in the, what 1940's and 1950's? Say the wrong thing in the wrong place and you were immediately labeled a commie and shunned.
That's what I'm saying. It has always existed. I just think it's a "bigger problem" for people now and there is more push back on cancel culture today than in the past because it's the previous mainstream that is being cancelled instead of an already at-risk community.