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Comment by resource_waste | Hacker News Reader

>just not worth sacrificing life time over.

Yep, ready to alienate 30-50% of your friends, even though you were 'right'.

Do this enough times and you only have a few percentage left. "These are your true friends". There is no correlation. I watched someone rage over chapstick usage, they were right, but it looked like a silly debate.

I like the Stoics and those of virtue that sacrifice themselves for everyone else. Its genuinely appreciated if I can take a 30,000 ft high view. Best of luck doing it when humans live on the ground.

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I'd still say you surround yourself with... mediocre incompatible folks to keep things polite, a friend is a too strong and overused word that should actually mean something.

A lot of people, I'd say most, desperately want friends and will take quantity over quality anytime. Beggars can't be choosers? It works till it doesn't, and life brings SHTF situations from time to time. You can do serious compromises just to keep them, but I wouldn't call that a proper friendship. Freedom of mind and action that certainly isn't.

I'd take 1-2 good friends with similar life views over an army of acquaintances anytime. But that's me. Its extremely hard to find them, most of childhood friends don't qualify since we end up very different and sometimes incompatible people. And nobody is perfect, neither me nor you, so its good to keep it just a bit humble within all that.

> ready to alienate 30-50% of your friends, even though you were 'right'

If your friend is a fraud, that's a separate problem.

I'm not concerned with alienating fraudsters, though the people on their gravy train aren't as easily dismissed. The cost is in collecting the evidence, putting it in the right places, following up, and then continuing to be helpful as someone in a position of authority connects the dots and prepares their response.

The problem isn't friends who are fraudsters. The problem is that a lot of people are automatically and blindly loyal to anything that presents itself as "science", because they perceive it as being ideologically on their side. Such people aren't interested in details. If you attack fraud all they hear is that you're attacking good and noble scientists who are only trying to save the world from {cancer,misinformation,CO2,COVID,whatever} and what sort of monster would do that? Are you a right winger ... friend?

Yep. And, sadly, you can replace "science" with "Roman Catholic Church", or any number of socially-similar human social institutions, and the story is the same. There's a powerful hierarchy invested in the status quo, and a large mob of "little people" at the bottom - who can turn nasty fast if their simplistic worldview seems threatened.

I think it's less about institutions and authority - it's more about you attacking them. People eating up firehose of bullshit from YouTube influencers, or regurgitating nonsense about "chemicals" and processed foods, etc. don't stand on the side of any institutions. But if you try to disabuse them of their false beliefs, most people around you will side with them - not because they're loyal to the same institutions, but because you're the aggressor, the party that is not nice, that rocks the boat. It's that behavior, regardless of target or merits, I believe people have aversion to.

Or put in another way: the first person in a group to get agitated about something has to spend a lot of effort justifying their agitation to the group, because by default, the group won't support or even stay neutral - they'll get weirded out, and/or even shun the agitated person.

”regurgitating nonsense about chemicals and processed foods, etc”

That is not nonsense — you are doing yourself a huge disservice here by ignoring ideas categorically on ideological grounds.

I would like to know what they were right about regarding chapstick usage...

Pretty sure he meant chop.

Damn I really really want to know which.

could be lip balm addiction. It's a thing apparently

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