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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree with that, but the problem is finding a supply of people to argue with on niche subjects. I have occasionally argued with people on the Haskell IRC and the NixOS Matrix server about some stuff, but since they're humans who selfishly have their own lives to live so I can't argue with them infinitely, and since the topics I argue about are specific there just don't exists a lot of people I can argue with even in the best of times.

ChatGPT (Gemini/Anthropic/etc) have the advantage of never getting sick of arguing with me. I can go back and forth and argue about any weird topic that I want for as long as I want at any time of day and keep learning until I'm bored of it.

Obviously it depends on the person but I really like it.

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> I completely agree with that, but the problem is finding a supply of people to argue with on niche subjects.

Beyond just subject-wise, finding people who argue in good faith seems to be an issue too. There are people I'm friends with almost specifically because we're able to consistently have good-faith arguments about our strongly opposing views. It doesn't seem to be a common skill, but perhaps that has something to do with my sample set or my own behaviors in arguments.

I dunno, for more niche computer science or math subjects, I don't feel like people argue in bad faith most of the time. The people I've argued with on the Haskell IRC years ago genuinely believe in what they're saying, even if I don't agree with them (I have a lot of negative opinions on Haskell as a language).

Politically? Yeah, nearly impossible to find anyone who argues in good faith.

Politics and related stuff is what I had in mind, yeah. To a lesser extent technical topics as well. But, I meant "good faith" in the sense of both believing what they're saying and also approaching the argument open to the possibility of being wrong themselves and/or treating you as capable of understanding their point. I've had arguments where the other person definitely believed what they were saying, but didn't think I was capable of understanding their point or being right myself and approached the discussion thusly.

Arguing is arguably one of humanity's super powers, and that we've yet to bring it to bear in any serious way gives me reason for optimism about sorting out the various major problems we've foolishly gotten ourselves into.

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