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Comment by beefield | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling that it is more like 99% of people are insane 5% of time. Or if not insane, at least forgetting the principle of charity. And given that a typical social media text does not contain all nuances, someone is interpreting the text in an absurd way almost guaranteed. And downhill from there it goes.

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95% of the time I try to be empathetic and patient and open minded when discussing online. 5% I’m in a bad mood, or tired, or sick, or whatever and I don’t try as hard. On those days, I should disengage. But, I’m addicted.

It makes me think though of all those people out there who don’t have a cushy life like many of us and suffer daily. I’m sure they’re in a bad mood a lot of the time, and the internet is their main form of entertainment.

There's both. There's the "I have persistent trouble coping with what we generally accept as 'reality' in a healthy, functional fashion" and "I've just had a moment of completely stupid/delusional/reactionary thinking". (The previous is completely my own wording and not intended to be precise.)

I 100% agree with the overall idea that we aren't able to deal well with the consequences of what we've created with social media.

I’m sure there’s quite a bit of variety here but having crazy ideas in one area seems to correlate with having crazy ideas in another area.

Separating separating fact from fiction is a skill and people don’t all end up making the same number of mistakes. Similarly, people who enjoy trolling flat earth ideas are going to enjoy tweaking people with other bizarre ideas.

The second you decide you're not prone to being irrational is the same second you give up any hope of policing your own rationality.

It's actually pretty common for extremely intelligent, methodical scientists in one field to have somewhat bananas thoughts/opinions in unrelated fields.

Nobody is going to be completely correct across the full breath of human knowledge. However, people can be wrong without their ideas being crazy.

If I was going to pick my most controversial idea it would be something like, humanity was like a ring species going back thousands of years with people somewhat regularly crossing the Baring Sea without realizing anything particularly unusual was going on. That’s a somewhat wacky idea because diseases didn’t make the jump etc. But it’s wildly more reasonable than ancient aliens.

So as long as we are talking crazy rather than simply incorrect, crazy isn’t evenly distributed.

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